Friday, May 31, 2019

So I'm working on a four-part poem based on Scots Border Ballad 'Mill O' Tifty's Annie', also known as 'Andrew Lammie'.

This is my third reworking of an old Scottish ballad. It looks like the ballads will be an ongoing slow project!

It's a murder ballad and it is about a young woman, Annie, who falls in love with a laird's servant (trumpeter) Andrew Lammie. Her parents, who want her to marry a man of high birth, complain to the laird and he sends Andrew away. Before he goes, Andrew promises Annie he will come back for her and marry her. Annie has a premonition that she will die before he returns. She is then beaten by her father and mother, her brother breaks her back and she dies. When Andrew returns and finds her dead, he commits suicide.

Change a few details and you could read this story, sadly many times over, in contemporary news.
For now, at quite an early stage in my working of the poem, my parts are crudely split into:
Annie falling in love; her experience of love-sickness; locked-up and beaten by her parents; murder by her brother. All of this will be set against the backdrop of Loch Eck (a loch I travel past regularly on my way to work).

Here is a version of the ballad sung beautifully by Jean Redpath. Kate Rusby also does a version which I'd love to hear.


Thursday, May 16, 2019

It is torturous when a poetry submission gets to the 6 months stage with no reply, especially when the website indicates a much quicker reply time!
I'm trying to be more systematic about sending out poems for submission especially now, when more than ever, many mags are happy with simultaneous submissions. Better to have the same poems out at two places even if they both take more than half a year to respond! 

I've been writing steadily occasional poems, short poems. However I'm ready for a bigger project to throw myself into and I have a few seeds of ideas. I'm reading the work of an old favourite at the moment - Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). I bought her book 'Tribute to Freud', a memoir about her time in therapy. It's just arrived so I'm excited to start reading it. The bringing together of two major interests of mine - poetry and therapy. I'm also excited to have been accepted onto a postgraduate course in person-centred counselling which will start in September and take two years part-time, the end of which I will be a fully qualified and accredited counsellor.