The Scotland-Canada poetry handshake
 Each time he visits the Montreal home of fellow scribe
Michael Harris and his partner Carolyn O'Neill, Stephen
Heighton, one of Canada's best-known poets, finds himself
staring at one particular wall in their house.
On it, in the form of a one-of-a-kind, homemade broadside,
hangs the poem 'Wedding the Locksmith's Daughter' by
contemporary Scot Robin Robertson. "Every time I visit
the house I read that poem and it keeps getting better,
richer, odder," says Heighton. "I want to see if
Robertson has other poems that good. I suspect he does."
Thus, Heighton didn't hesitate to take up the challenge
of writing on Robinson for the first official 'webbing'
of Canadian and Scottish contemporary poets, a literary
experiment lovingly engineered by Arc Poetry Magazine
and the Scottish Poetry Library.
Herewith, from now till April, 2007, you'll be treated—at
www.arcpoetry.ca and at www.spl.org.uk—to
12 monthly installments featuring, alternately, Scottish
poets providing insightful essays on the work of their
favourite Canadian bards, and Canadian poets presenting,
likewise, the work of their chosen Scots.
Simply, each piece will provide one poet's perspective
on another poet's work, and each will bring together
the creations and ideas of a Scot and a Canadian. Poems
by the featured authors will commingle in the virtual
world alongside these thoughtful essays: to what unpredictable
poetic side-effects we have no idea. But we can hardly
wait to find out.
Throughout the series we'll learn why Newfoundland
poet Mary Dalton is drawn to a particular Scottish
contemporary, what Montrealer Carmine Starnino sees
in another, and which Scottish poets have captured
the poetic hearts of Stephen Scobie, Miranda Pearson
and Aislinn Hunter. Conversely, we'll be treated to
a Scottish perspective on their favourite Canadian
poets—which
will they choose?—by writers such as John
Burnside and Liz
Lochhead.
You might wonder about the aim of such an endeavour.
In part, it's simple curiosity: what might emerge as
the members of two nations and two poetic worlds encounter
and consider one another's work? For they are indeed
two worlds—more separate than you might expect—as
Aislinn Hunter discovered while giving a reading in
the Scottish highlands not so long ago. After her performance,
a member of the audience asked, "Can you name some other
Canadian poets? Because I can't think of any."
After which, according to Hunter herself, she listed—at
great length—a number of great poets she was horrified
to learn hadn't registered across the pond.
After the reading, Hunter spent some time commiserating
with representatives of the Scottish Poetry Library
over drinks at the Ceilidh Place in Ullapool about
the lack of connections between even those poets working
in such historically connected traditions as the Canadian
and the Scottish. Some months later, she cornered some
hapless Arc lackies in a Canadian pub and requested
their participation in a transatlantic poetics exchange.
How could we not take up her cause? How could we resist
an idea that might bring some of the best Canadian poets
to a larger, appreciative audience? And one that could
not only encourage infiltration of our own—sometimes
insular—literary world by the work of talented
poets from elsewhere, but that would give us an opportunity
to see Canadian poetry we know and love viewed from
a slightly different angle—a Highlander, or Glaswegian,
or Isle-Of-Somewhere perspective?
So, indulge us. Indulge Hunter, who dreams of buying
her subject John Burnside a drink—who has wanted
to do so ever since coming across his slim volume The
Light Trap and finding in it a sense of "being
Elsewhere", of seeing another world.
"Who in Canada," she asks, "would write of 'The
classes of jamjars. Subtleties of string'? Or of
'tubers locked in bottles, sprouting wings'?
No one I knew of. But more than that, more than the
specifics of language and place, Burnside was good.
A good philosopher and a good technician; a rigorous
examiner of the common and of the ephemeral, the small
and the large."
Canadian and Scottish contemporary poets go together
like—actually, I can't tell you. Our reviews editor
here at Arc suggests we might each represent what he
cleverly calls "the slant rhyme" of English culture.
Our contributors will undoubtedly offer their own thought-provoking
insights.
Welcome to our humble, devilish attempt at cultural
cross-pollination. We aim to enrich. We aim to contaminate.
Click forward and fall into the words and mist and
fray.
  
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