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Charles Lang:
For this issue of Wet Grain we have been thinking about community and the forms that might take. How important do you think friendship, relationships or communities have been to your writing?
Ellen Renton:
I suppose it feels like it comes from an individual place. Writing poems is a kind of solo act, but it’s never really a solo act, because there’s the community of feedback and editing and things like that, and shaping things as they’re performed and things like that. I came into poetry doing it collaboratively. Performing collaboratively. And now I work a lot across different forms. I work with a musician a lot. I work in theatre quite a lot. I work with film and dancers as well. And think about where that precision of language belongs. There in that space. I just, I’m interested in all of the places where poetry can sit at an intersection with something else, and what it does to that thing when it touches another form. And it’s collaborative in a different way. It’s closer to translation, I suppose, except I’m not doing the translation. It’s like handing it to someone else and then them translating that into another form.
Colin Bramwell:
It’s quite a difficult thing to strike. I feel like I write mainly just for myself – but it has community repercussions. One doesn’t do it ‘for the community’, so to speak. It’s quite rare that I’ll do it just for the good of the community, especially in a translation context, where it’s part of a literary context which overlaps with the academic sphere: I’m more interested in the former, though the latter is still a vital community for that whole activity. And perhaps the same can be said for poetry. It’s quite hard to separate it from the academy, for better or for worse, these days. But outside of these spheres, I think we all look for a community of ideal readers. And on aesthetic matters, sometimes addressing a poem to a specific person can be a route to success. When writing sometimes I’m thinking: which particular pal of mine would like this poem, and which wouldn’t – and how do I choose between them?
CL:
Could you tell us a bit about your practices and how they interact with other artists? Are these interactions – with musicians, visual artists and writers of various languages – acts of collaboration and conversation? And how does your poetry sit in and alongside these?
CB:
I am a poet and also, I suppose, a translator, though I came to translation mainly with the objective of learning how to write poetry. I do translations from Taiwanese writers, and also translations of mainly Spanish and Portuguese into Scots. But if I’m ever writing a new poem for a commission or working with a pal on something they want me to write, it always takes me a good three, four drafts of very different things to get anywhere close to what they want. I struggle with it because I don’t really know what I want most of the time. Often to try and satisfy myself is difficult enough – then you add another person on top… But there are many ways to collaborate. Even in the process of just writing a poem and publishing it somewhere, there’s often collaboration behind it, and then books even more so. Feedback on your stuff from other poets is really indispensable. Few collections these days are the result of just one person’s intelligence.
ER:
I feel like my work falls into separate kinds of categories sometimes, or I work across a lot of different things but it’s always got something similar at the middle of it. And I suppose that thing is poetry, that’s at the middle of what I do. I think I do feel quite particular about that. If I work across different art forms, there can still be poetic sensibility or something that feels important to how I approach my work. I suppose collaboration is always different, and it’s often to do with the relationship. Working with another poet, even though we’re working in the same form, we could have a completely different approach. It’s sometimes easier to find someone with a similar mindset across forms. Sometimes it’s a balance of meeting someone else’s work without changing your own too much, but then also letting your work be influenced by their practice and their approach and the way that they make. I just really like seeing how other people do stuff, especially in art forms that I know way less about. And it’s like anything. If you can’t do it yourself, and you watch someone else do it, it looks incredible. It’s really nice to be in a position to be around people that are inspiring when you see that happen, and see how these different processes might have an influence on how I write or how I approach things.
Hopefully we can avoid daft distinctions between page and stage. Both of you are excellent performers of your work. What is your relationship to performance and how does it shape your writing? Has it helped you develop as writers?
ER:
Definitely so for me. I initially wasn’t sure how else a poem went from me to other people other than an open mic. Open mics were an accessible way for people to hear a poem. Everything else felt quite hidden to me in terms of publishing etc. There’s another element as well, I’m partially blind, and I think nothing can just exist as text for me, really ever, because it’s just not how I operate in the world. And so I think performance, it’s never felt like something separate for me, necessarily. I mean that there are some when I was kind of younger and starting out, there probably would have been poems that I wrote that were very much for performance and ones that weren’t. But I don’t really do that anymore. That would that feel like a false dichotomy to me; the page and stage thing I find quite boring. I’ll always be thinking about how things sound, but I think that is just part of how I write, and I’ll read it aloud to myself as I write. I’m thinking about the vocal presence of it; the audio presence of it. I imagine a lot of people do that. But I’m not now thinking about performance in the sense of like how it would exist on a stage, or how it would be received by an audience in particular settings, or anything like that.
CB:
I think it’s interesting hearing you say that Ellen, just how much of it is an audio phenomenon, as opposed to necessarily a physical one. I’m sure some people do move through their poems physically, but not me. For me the audio is enough. If I was teaching, I would recommend to writers, if you’re halfway through a poem, read out loud what you have and see where else you want to go. That’s how I write. Poetry has a double life, naturally, most of it. Not all of it. There’s some poems of mine that I am happy enough that they exist on the page, and I probably wouldn’t read out in a live setting. I don’t have any that are the opposite way now around now. I used to. These days my favourite poems from my own are the ones which have that kind of double life, that just exists in the ether. Once you have a poem in your memory, I feel like it’s almost complete: it’s a part of you.
ER:
Colin, you made me think in terms of collaboration. It’s like an unwitting collaboration or something who you end up on a line up with, who’s in the audience. You’re viewed as part of it and your work is part of that night and part of everything that’s heard. And I think that’s quite interesting, this kind of collaboration that you’re not in control of, and people might remember bits of your poems with bits of someone else’s. You can never fully be in control of how that’s perceived, and so your work is always going to sit alongside all of these other people.
CB:
There’s an element of chance, almost, that feels relatively true to life. I think, especially early on in your writing life, you’re looking for a bit of validation. And it can be quite dangerous, that thing of the receiving it. Though obviously you’re likely to receive validation if you’re any good, but it’s how you take it, who you take it from. It’s a test of one’s own critical faculties, one’s ego.
Ellen you have previously said that Scottish writing has “a specific flavour”, could elaborate on that? And Colin how do you think this manifests and what are its implications?
ER:
I don’t really know what it is, but it’s funny, because I find it in Irish writing as well. There’s some reason for me why those things feel connected. Anything that comes from where you come from is always going to have a particular flavour that you recognise. It’s like home cooking. It’s there whenever you read something that’s like an anthology of Scottish writers across time. For me I think there is something political underneath a lot of Scottish poetry. I couldn’t say exactly what it is. It’s not to say there’s not variation, because there’s huge variation, but I think there is just something. It’s a tradition that goes very far back here, and I feel like you can trace it very far back. I suppose what’s actually at the heart of this thing is using your language well, in general, feels like it’s prioritised in Scotland, culturally, which encourages this relationship with poetry.
CB:
There might be a social utility, and I think that we’re at quite an interesting time now artistically, because we all grew up at a time in Scotland when there’s a civic function to art. Everything’s kind of interconnected in a way. There’s a very strong connection with theatres and novelists, often writing in vernacular. A kind of Scottish characteristic in writing is multilingualism, or what Robert Crawford calls a polylingualism. And I don’t think that’s the only definition. I think I initially came to performance, not so much from an interest in spoken word as a genre, but in oral culture. I grew up up north, just north of Inverness. There was a pride in poetry and storytelling. It was something that could be on a line up with musicians. Any standard ceilidh would have a poet, or have a few poets as well as singers. And whenever I went and performed, it was never as a poet. It was always as a musician, playing guitar and singing. But poetry was something I felt like I could do. As Ellen says, it goes a long way back. There’s something kind of in the blood with it.
ER:
It comes from being in a small place, and in artistic communities that are kind of woven through each other and intertwined, and where lots of people do more than one thing.
Colin Bramwell’s Scots translations of Fernando Pessoa, Fower Pessoas, was published by Carcanet earlier this year. His translations of Taiwanese poet Yang Mu, with Wenchi Li, won the John Dryden Translation Prize. His debut collection, Fetch, will be published by And Other Stories in 2026.
Ellen Renton’s album with Lord of the Isles, My Noise is Nothing, is available to buy and stream. Her pamphlet An Eye for An Eye for An Eye is published by Stewed Rhubarb Press, and another is forthcoming.