Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

Good poetry gets beneath the skin of readers. This episode features a poet who, for a short period, literally got ‘under the skin’.

In the autumn of 2008, poet and essayist Marianne Boruch was awarded a ‘Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline’, permitting her to study something new for a semester. Her choice? Anatomy classes. ‘Cadaver, Speak’, a long poem, was her response to her time dissecting bodies, and in this 2013 podcast,...

In 1972, Liz Lochhead published her debut collection, Memo For Spring, a landmark in Scottish literature. In an extended interview with Colin Waters, the then Scots Makar discusses what the early 1970s poetry scene she emerged into was like, one in which women poets were few and far between. She recalls early meetings with the elder generation – Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch – and with contemporaries such as Tom Leon...

In 2013, Edinburgh-born Ross Sutherland was described as one of the most interesting young poets working in Britain. Inspired by cut-ups and technology, his collection Emergency Window (Penned in the Margins) featured a sequence of classic poems fed through Google Translate many times until they become something else entirely. He wrote a sequence of sonnets about the characters in the video game Street Fighter 2, and yet his work i...

In this episode of Nothing But The Poem podcast, our usual host Samuel Tongue goes in deep on two weel kent poems by Norman MacCaig, one of Scotland's most loved and influential poets.

Norman MacCaig famously, and self-deprecatingly, described writing his poems as "one fag" poems or "two fag" poems. Nothing could be further from the truth for readers, who can spend hours returning again and again to his best work. The two poems fe...

Iain Sinclair is one of the UK’s greatest living writers. Famed for his novels, such as Downriver, and documentary prose, of which London Orbital is perhaps the best known, Sinclair began his career self-publishing his own poetry on his Albion Village Press in the 1970s. 2013 saw the publication of three books – two poetry collections and a longer book on his relationship with the Beats, American Smoke.

Colin Waters travelled to Si...

We have all heard the arguments in favour of Scotland’s best poet or favourite poem, but what about its greatest collection?

In this recording from 2012, the SPL invited two guests – James Robertson, poet, publisher and author of the novels And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, and Dorothy McMillan, editor of Modern Scottish Women Poets and former Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow...

Anita Govan has been involved in performance poetry for many years, long before it became as widespread as it is today, both as a performer and an organiser of events. Sceptical of the competitive aspects of slams, she still takes part in them and organises them for young people as she recognises their part in giving people a forum in which to share their experiences. In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Govan about her time ...

The Written World was the Scottish Poetry Library’s London 2012 project. To mark the Olympics, we launched a scheme to find a poem for each of the 204 countries taking part, which were then broadcast on BBC Radio. In October 2012, with the project over, we took the chance to look back on The Written World with its project manager Sarah Stewart.

We also talked to Richard Price, whose poem ‘Hedge Sparrows’ was chosen to represent Tea...

Aonghas MacNeacail (1942-2022) was a leading voice in Gaelic poetry for decades, as poet, and as a regular literary commentator in print and on Gaelic radio. To celebrate his seventieth birthday in 2012 he published a new selected poems, Laughing at the Clock / Déanamh Gáire Ris A’ Chloc. MacNeacail came into the SPL in 2013 to talk about his life and career, from his childhood in Uig on the Isle of Skye to his membership of Philip...

Bob Dylan has played many roles in his life: voice of a generation, rock ‘n’ roll Judas, Christian convert, even Victoria’s Secret salesman. The one that concerned the SPL podcast in 2013 was ‘poet’.

Across two biographies – Once Upon A Time and Time Out of Mind (both Mainstream) – Ian Bell (1956-2015) considered Dylan in a more literary context than any other biographer of His Bobness. Over the course of this podcast, we discussed...

Lorna French and Anna Gray lead small groups of (mostly) women to let loose their wild side, to dive in to their unconscious and find their buried treasure. Wild Writers are creatives, public sector workers, teenagers, or any other type of human who is boldly, and often messily, transforming on their hero’s or heroine’s journey.

Ahead of their workshops at the SPL in April and May 2025, Kevin Williamson chats to Lorna and Anna abou...

Best Scottish Poems is the Scottish Poetry Library’s annual online anthology of the 20 Best Scottish Poems, edited each year by a different editor. Bookshops and libraries – with honourable exceptions – often provide a very narrow range of poetry, and Scottish poetry in particular. Best Scottish Poems offers readers in Scotland and abroad a way of sampling the range and achievement of our poets, their languages, forms, concerns.

It...

In this podcast the poet and artist MacGillivray reads from and discusses her book, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Pighog).

The collection is an exploration of connections between Scotland and the American Frontier whose form brilliantly reflects the subject matter of the poems. MacGillivray joins Jennifer Williams in a conversation that maps the rich web of influences from which her poetry emerges, taking in Doors front-man Jim Morris...

In this 2013 podcast, Jennifer Williams talks to poet, playwright and recording artist Kate Tempest* about hip hop, poetry, their play Brand New Ancients, mythology, world peace and much more. Kate has written plays for Paines Plough and the Battersea Arts Centre, written poetry for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Channel 4 and the BBC, worked in schools and won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2012, for Brand New Ancient...

The famous Welsh poet RS Thomas is the subject of this month's Nothing But The Poem podcast.

Anne Stevenson of the Listener describes Thomas as a religious poet who 'sees tragedy, not pathos, in the human condition' ... 'He is one of the rare poets writing today who never asks for pity.'

'Like the Welsh countryside he writes about, Thomas's...

Brian Johnstone (1950 - 2021) was a poet and former director of the StAnza poetry festival. In this archive podcast he discusses the highlights of his StAnza career, what he thinks makes a good poetry festival, his own work and his creative improvisations as part of jazz-poetry combo Trio Verso. Featuring the tracks ‘Storm Chaser’ and ‘The Sound of Breaking Glass’.

Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental ...

Alexander Hutchison (1942-2015) was a poet and translator in Scots and English. His first book Deep-Tap Tree (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978) is still in print. Other collections include The Moon Calf (Galliard, 1990) and Carbon Atom (Link-Light, 2006). Melodic Cells, an interview with Hutchison conducted by Andrew Duncan appears in Don’t Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (Salt: Cambridge, 2006). Salt al...