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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Liz Lochhead
Hon FRSE
Makar
In office
19 January 2011 – 31 January 2016
Preceded by Edwin Morgan
Succeeded by Jackie Kay
Personal details
Born Elizabeth Anne Lochhead
26 December 1947 (age 76)
Craigneuk, Lanarkshire, Scotland
Alma mater Glasgow School of Art
Occupation Teacher, poet, playwright, Makar
Liz Lochhead Hon FRSE (born 26 December 1947) is a Scottish poet, playwright, translator and broadcaster.[1][2] Between 2011 and 2016 she was the Makar, or National Poet of Scotland,[3] and served as Poet Laureate for Glasgow between 2005 and 2011.

Early life
Elizabeth Anne Lochhead was born in Craigneuk,[4] a "little ex-mining village just outside Motherwell",[5] Lanarkshire. Her mother and father had both served in the army during the Second World War, and later, her father was a local government clerk. In 1952, the family moved into a new council house in the mining village of Newarthill, where her sister was born in 1957.[6] Though she was encouraged by her teachers to study English,[6] Lochhead was determined to go to Glasgow School of Art where she studied between 1965 and 1970.[2] After graduation Lochhead taught art at high schools in Glasgow and Bristol,[7] a career at which she says she was "terrible"[2]

Career
Having written poetry as a child and whilst studying at Art School, Lochhead won a BBC Scotland Poetry Competition in 1971,[8] and Gordon Wright published her first collection of Poetry, Memo For Spring in 1972 under his Reprographia imprint.[5]

It is often claimed that at this time Lochhead was part of a Philip Hobsbaum writers' group, a crucible of creative activity – with other members including Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington,[9] Liz Lochhead has repeatedly claimed this to be an invention.[5] She has however recalled the support and inspiration she drew from the Scottish poetry scene of the early 1970s and meetings with the elder generation - Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch – and with contemporaries such as Leonard, Kelman and Gray.[10] Lochhead went on to produce revue shows with Leonard and Gray, including Tickly Mince,[11] and The Pie of Damocles.[12] Other the following years Lochhead published further collections Islands (1978) and The Grimm Sisters (1979) and moved first to Toronto as part of the first Scottish/Canadian writers exchange and later made her home in New York.[8] In 1986 she returned permanently to Glasgow.[8]

Lochhead's success in poetry was rivalled by her writing for the theatre.[8] Her plays include Blood and Ice (1982), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), Perfect Days (2000) and a highly acclaimed adaptation into Scots of Molière's Tartuffe (1985). She adapted the medieval texts of the York Mystery Plays, performed by a largely amateur cast at York Theatre Royal in 1992 and 1996.[13] Her adaptation of Euripides' Medea won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001. Her plays have been performed on BBC Radio 4: Blood and Ice (11 June 1990), The Perfect Days (16 May 1999), Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (11 February 2001) and The Stanley Baxter Playhouse: Mortal Memories (26 June 2006). Her adaptation of Helen Simpson's short story Burns and the Bankers was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Burns Night, 25 January 2012.[14] Her plays Educating Agnes and Thebans premiered in the early 2000s,[15] and in 2011 as part of the Glasgay Festival, Liz Lochhead's play Edwin Morgan's Dreams and Other Nightmares premiered at the Tron[16] and it was revived three years later as part of the cultural celebrations for the commonwealth games.[17] She has produced many new works for the Oran Mor in Glasgow, including Mortal Memories (2012) and Between the Thinks Bubble and the Speech Balloon (2014) with Tom Leonard, William Letford, Grace Cleary, and Henry Bell.

Like her work for theatre, her poetry is alive with vigorous speech idioms; later collections include True Confessions and New Clichés (1985), Bagpipe Muzak (1991), Dreaming Frankenstein: and Collected Poems (1984), The Colour of Black and White (2003) and A Choosing (2011). Liz Lochhead also enjoys writing songs and combining poetry with music and she has collaborated with Dundee singer-songwriter Michael Marra to whom she dedicated the poem 'Ira and George'.[18] as well as providing guest vocals on the track 'Trouble is Not a Place' from the 2014 EP The Bird That Never Flew by Glaswegian experimental hip hop group Hector Bizerk.[19] She has also collaborated extensively with saxophonist Steve Kettley and Dundonian band The Hazey Janes.[20]

Lochhead performs internationally in theatres and literary festivals, as well as appearing regularly at nights around Glasgow and Edinburgh.[citation needed]

Politics
Lochhead is a republican and vocal supporter of Scottish independence, having performed with pro-independence group National Collective,[21] and opined in The Guardian that Robert Burns would have voted for independence.[22]

Lochhead is also well known as a feminist, both from her writing and public appearances;[23] she has said in the past, 'feminism is like the hoovering, you just have to keep doing it.'[24]

In 2012, Lochhead travelled to Palestine, and was deeply affected by what she saw in the West Bank.[25] She has been a firm opponent of the Israeli occupation, and a supporter of the call for a cultural boycott of Israel.[26] In 2014, she was involved in preparing A Bird is Not a Stone, an anthology of contemporary Palestinian poetry translated into the languages of Scotland.[27]

Lochhead is openly critical of Scottish arts funding body Creative Scotland.[28]

Honours and awards
In 2005,[29] Lochhead became the Poet Laureate for Glasgow, a position she held until stepping down in 2011,[30] when she was named as the second Scots Makar,[31] or national poet of Scotland, succeeding Edwin Morgan who had died the previous year.[32] She stepped down from this role in February 2016,[33] and was succeeded by Jackie Kay in March 2016.[34]

She is currently the Honorary President of the Caledonian Cultural Fellows at Glasgow Caledonian University.[35] and holds honorary doctorates from ten of Scotland's universities.[36]

She was writer in residence at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 1980[37] and later at Glasgow University, The University of Edinburgh, Glasgow School of Art, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Eton.[38][39]

In 2014 she was elected a Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[40]

In 2015 Liz Lochhead was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.[5] Lochhead is only the 11th woman to have been awarded the prize since its inception in 1933, and the eighth Scot.[5]

A statue of her face was erected at Edinburgh Park, along with those of other famous Scottish poets. The statue contains engravings of her poems. [41]

Personal life
In 1986, Liz Lochhead married the architect Tom Logan.[42] The couple lived together in Glasgow until his death in 2010.[43] After his death she wrote the poem Favourite Place about their caravan on the West Coast of Scotland.[44] It ends:

But tonight you are three months dead
and I must pull down the bed and lie in it alone.
Tomorrow, and every day in this place
these words of Sorley MacLean’s will echo through me:
The world is still beautiful, though you are not in it.
And this will not be a consolation
but a further desolation.
Published works
1972: Memo For Spring. Reprographia.
1978: Islands. Print Studio Press.
1979: The Grimm Sisters. Coach House Press.
1999: Bagpipe Muzak. Penguin Books.
1999: Perfect Days. Nick Hern Books.
2000: Medea. Nick Hern Books.
2001: Cuba (with Gina Moxley). Faber & Faber.
2002: Misery Guts. Nick Hern Books.
2003: The Colour of Black and White. Polygon.
2003: Dreaming Frankenstein and Collected Poems, 1967–84. Polygon.
2003: Thebans. Nick Hern Books.
2003: True Confessions: And New Cliches. Polygon.
2006: Good Things. Nick Hern Books.
2009: Educating Agnes. Nick Hern Books.
2009: Blood and Ice. Nick Hern Books.
2010: Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. Nick Hern Books.
2011: A Choosing. Polygon
2012: Liz Lochhead: Five Plays. Nick Hern Books.
Radio plays
Radio Plays adapted by Liz Lochhead
Date first broadcast Play Director Cast Synopsis
Awards Station
Series
25 January 2012 Burns and the Bankers[14] Amber Barnfather Sophie Thompson, John Sessions, Greg Wise, Peter Forbes, David McKay, Angela Darcy, Siobhan Redmond, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Maynard Eziashi Helen Simpson's satirical and poignant short story, dramatised for radio by Liz Lochhead. Nicola Beaumont (English, partner in a law firm, mother of four) reluctantly sits down to a long-winded corporate Burns Supper. At first impatient with the whisky-fuelled pomposity around her, Nicola finds herself surprisingly moved as the traditional rituals of a Burns Night unfold. What she comes to learn about the eighteenth-century Scots poet brings new self-knowledge and helps her through the night's violent emotions and climactic events. BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Drama
Reviews
Mills, Paul (1982), The Individual Voice, which includes a review of The Grimm Sisters, in Murray, Glen (ed.), Cencrastus No. 8, Spring 1982, pp. 45 & 46, ISSN 0264-0856

Elizabeth Anne Lochhead was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire on 26 December 1947; her parents , John Lochhead and Margaret Forrest, had both served in the army during the war and married in 1944. Her father was a local government clerk. In 1952 the family moved into a new council house in the mining village of Newarthill, where her sister was born in 1957. The primary school there is vividly conjured in Lochhead’s poem ‘A Protestant Girlhood’. She moved on to Dalziel High School in Motherwell, and by the time she was 15 had decided to go to art school, although teachers were encouraging her to study English at university.

She wrote her first poem, ‘The Visit’, after she entered the Glasgow School of Art in 1965, and attended an informal creative writing group there run by Stephen Mulrine. After graduating from GSA in 1970, she went a few times to the extra-mural writers’ workshop run by Philip Hobsbaum, who had a gift for identifying and encouraging talent. In 1971 she won a Radio Scotland poetry competition, in 1972 she read with Norman MacCaig at a poetry festival in Edinburgh, and her first collection, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972 by Gordon Wright. She met Alasdair Gray, Jim Kelman and Tom Leonard in this period, and later in the decade Tom McGrath and Alan Spence; in this group of talented young Scottish writers, she stands out as a rare female presence and this has been enabling and inspiring for the generation that followed.

Lochhead earned her living at this time by teaching art in secondary schools in Bristol, Glasgow and Cumbernauld. In 1978 her second collection, Islands, was published and she wrote and performed in Sugar and Spite at the Traverse, Edinburgh. She was awarded the first Scottish/Canadian Writers’ Exchange Fellowship the same year, and went to Toronto, then lived in the USA after the fellowship ended, and over the next couple of years returned to New York for lengthy periods.

The 1980s was an immensely productive decade in both work for the theatre and poetry; Lochhead also married the architect Tom Logan in 1986, and they made their home in Glasgow. Notable successes included her adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe for the Lyceum (1986) and Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, performed by Communicado (1987). These two plays derive much of their energy from the way Lochhead uses Scots, admiringly characterised by Robert Crawford in Identifying Poets (1993) as ‘a diction of kaleidoscopic pace and liveliness, a Scots which manages to bring Tartuffe in touch with Holy Willie while preserving an alertness to the polyphonies of [her] contemporary Scottish homeland’ .

The elements of voice and performance are vital to both genres, but Lochhead considers them to be quite different, and marked this visually by publishing Dreaming Frankenstein & Collected Poems (1984) with a white cover, while her monologues and performance pieces True Confessions and New Clichés (1985) had a black cover. While she allowed, in a 1992 interview for Verse, that ‘certain speeches in, say, Mary Queen of Scots…, felt like writing poems to me while I was doing them’, there was nevertheless a basic distinction to be made:

A play is something that doesn’t exist when you have written it. It only exists when it begins to be performed. Whereas a poem is something that even before you’ve tightened it up properly, once you’ve got it finished, even if it’s lying under the bed, there it is: it’s a thing. So I think that’s what satisfies me the most about poetry, that it is not for anything whatsoever and that you don’t really do it to order.

This was before her laureateships, which inevitably involve poems commissioned for occasions, but the distinction probably stands as such poems often involve a degree of performance.

Lochhead’s sixth collection, The Colour of Black and White – poems 1984-2003, includes ‘Kidspoem/Bairnsang’, which has become one of her signature poems and a touchstone for the decade. It is cleverly but also appealingly bilingual, perfect for illustrating to those who don’t know Scots how the language marches beside English; and for those who do know Scots, it serves as a reminder of its riches and legitimacy in the public sphere. Many generations had Scots bred out of them at school, and that this is changing is in no small part driven by Scotland’s writers. Moreover, Lochhead articulates more than her generation’s worth of weary anger over the literature accepted into the canon: ‘the way it had to be said / was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead.’

While the blurb for this collection quotes The Scotsman as saying ‘Her pulse [is] the racing, faltering pulse of a nation obsessed with identity and self-analysis. For 25 years, Lochhead has been the distinctive female voice of Scotland. Gallus, inquisitive, accusing and playful. Angry and tender by turns’ – this description is of limited truth. Her voice is not always that of a woman, or always that of a Scot. Following her friend Edwin Morgan, first as Poet Laureate of Glasgow (2005) and then as Scots Makar (2011-16), she strove to be confined by neither her gender nor her nationality, and went on to be awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2015.

Nevertheless, the female voices that Lochhead has deployed in her monologues and many of her poems undoubtedly draw on a Scottish oral tradition that is subverted by the music-hall, and takes pleasure in a distinctive West of Scotland tradition of gossipy storytelling and humour. If the latter has been – on stage at least – a predominantly male preserve, she has been instrumental in making space for women. Lochhead has spoken of the difficulty for female poets in particular of the long shadow cast by Hugh MacDiarmid, and of the liberation provided by American examples – again typical of many West of Scotland writers’ experience. In Lochhead’s case, this was not only the lure of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, but also of the sophisticated lyrics of Broadway, to which she pays affectionate homage in ‘Ira and George’. The poem is dedicated to her friend and co-performer Michael Marra, and reminds us that Lochhead’s love of music and the visual arts is an essential part of her work.

The radio as much as the theatre has been an impetus to creation for Lochhead, and it is her ability to speak with conversational intimacy within a public space that is one of the hallmarks of her work. The sound of her own voice is immediately engaging. Her relish of a whole variety of language registers and rhythms, her sensuality and humour, her loving descriptions – ‘the decency of good coats roundshouldered’ – and her outspokenness have made Lochhead an enormously popular poet.

Liz Lochhead
Drama Poetry Translation
Born:Motherwell, Scotland
Publishers:Nick Hern Books Ltd

Biography
Scottish poet and playwright Liz Lochhead was born in 1947, in Motherwell, Lanarkshire. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and taught art at schools in Glasgow and Bristol. She was Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University (1986-7) and Writer in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988.

Her first collection of poems, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her poetry has been published in a number of collections including Penguin Modern Poets 4 (1995). A performer as well as a poet, her revue Sugar and Spite was staged in 1978 with Marcella Evaristi. Liz Lochhead travelled to Canada in the same year, after being selected for a Scottish Writers Exchange Fellowship, and she became a full-time writer, performance poet and broadcaster.

Her plays include Blood and Ice (1982), first performed at the Edinburgh Traverse in 1982; Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989), first performed by Communicado Theatre Company at the 1987 Edinburgh festival; Dracula (1989); Cuba (1997), a play for young people commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for the BT National Connections Scheme; and Perfect Days (1998), a romantic comedy, first performed at the Edinburgh festival in 1998. She translated and adapted Molière's Tartuffe (1985) into Scots, premiered at the Edinburgh Royal Lyceum in 1987, and the script of her adaptation of Euripides' Medea (2000) for Theatre Babel in 2000 won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. In her play Misery Guts (2002), based on Molière's The Misanthrope, the action is updated to the modern-day Scottish Parliament.

Her work for television includes Latin for a Dark Room, a short film, screened as part of the BBC Tartan Shorts season at the 1994 Edinburgh International Film Festival, and The Story of Frankenstein for Yorkshire Television.

Her collection of poetry, The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003, was published in 2003 and a romantic comedy for the stage, Good Things, in 2006.

Liz Lochhead lives in Glasgow. She was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Edinburgh in 2000. In 2005, she was made Poet Laureate of Glasgow, and in 2011, became Scots Makar. Her latest book is A Choosing: The Selected Poetry of Liz Lochhead, published in 2011.

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Critical perspective Bibliography Awards
Critical perspective
Liz Lochhead’s work frequently focuses on girlhood, motherhood, the female side of a relationship. She is also fascinated by interstices, and points of connection between past and present. She is very much a Scottish writer, and Scotland is not an infrequent presence in her work, in one way or another. A good place to start this critical analysis, then, is her punchy play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989), which brings all three together. In 2011, the play was given a fresh run by the Royal Lyceum and Dundee Rep, directed by Tony Cownie. And (alas) it continues to have prescient echoes: the main protagonist, Mary Stuart, is, after all, a Catholic queen in a Protestant land, and a woman in a man’s world.
Mary is a historical play of paranoia, love, lust, loathing, but it is more than this, shooting finally into the present context of a schoolyard, and revealing a sectarian and social continuum which the audience is compelled to acknowledge. In a sense this is comparable to one of Lochhead’s more recent plays, Misery Guts (2002), which also pulls the past into the present, by transferring the action of Molière's The Misanthrope into the 21st-century Scottish Parliament.

Lochhead, then, is an inventive and imaginative playwright, perennially contemporary, because of (rather than in spite of) her propensity to delve into a literary or historic heritage. In her poetry, too, we might sense parallels everywhere – between the poet and ourselves (Lochhead’s poems tend to focus on identifiable realities), past and present, ourselves and others.

In the nearly-title poem of her 2011 selected poems, ‘The Choosing’, the speaker recalls her similarity to a best friend – another Mary – at primary school. I say similarity, but really they seem almost identical, ‘with same-coloured ribbons in mouse-coloured hair’ and ‘a common bond in being cleverest (equal)’. But the friend’s father ‘didn’t believe in high-school education, / especially for girls’. The end of the poem finds the adult speaker ‘coming from the library / with my arms full of books’, symbolically embracing the solitary pursuit of learning, and suddenly confronted with the surprise of her old friend (and the friend’s devoted husband) on the bus, her arms ‘round the full-shaped vase that is her body’. And as so often in Lochhead’s most ambitious poems, an anecdote turns to a meditation:'I think of those prizes that were ours for the taking and wonder when the choices got made we don’t remember making.'

Both women seem to have reached one sort of fulfilment at the expense of another; neither women had dominion over their fate. The old friend is more than an old friend, she is an alter ego. The definite article in the title pulls its weight, emphasising the lack of agency the young girls had over their destiny as they came of age. Remarkably, Lochhead was still a teenager when she wrote this poem.

Lochhead’s is a perspicacious and often fast-paced poetry rooted in commonplace realities, whether these are the ‘gospel halls, chapels, Orange halls, / doctors’ surgeries’ of the edges of Glasgow, or childhood memories, or love, or dreaming, or drinking. Her poems are naturally streetwise; she is interested, to borrow Hardy’s sentiment, in touching our hearts by revealing her own. It is largely for this that she has generated widespread – and widening – acclaim. A very recent poem, ‘Poets Need Not’, begins with the assertion that ‘Poets need not be garlanded’, for ‘The pursuit’s its own reward’. Nonetheless, shortly after the publication of this poem in The Times in January 2011, Lochhead was made the second Scots Makar, a title previously held by Edwin Morgan. She is a natural successor, insofar as she is a poet of genuine vitality and personality, with a distinctive – and distinctively native – voice.

Morgan is undoubtedly an influence, though his work is often far more ostensibly experimental. For his 70th birthday, Lochhead composed a deferential poem in his honour, ‘5th April 1990’. A visit to the newly undivided city of Berlin leaves the poet wondering:

'Who could make sense of it?
Morgan could, yes Eddie could, he would.
And that makes me want to try.'

In fact, a number of Lochhead’s poems consider a world beyond Scottish, or British, shores, filtered through the conscience of a stranger who is very much aware of her strangeness and keen to make sense of it. In ‘Ontario October Going West’ she exalts in this strangeness:

the single drowned birch shrieks fingerbone.
the lake says frankly this is a very old trick
it’s all done with mirrors.'
And the prairie ‘when you get to it / says keep going’.

The intrinsic chill and wonder might remind us of the superb travel poems of Charles Causley. ‘Fourth of July Fireworks’ is also a poem of chill and wonder, in slightly different proportions. The poem takes us to manicured Cape Cod, in New England, on America’s national day. It is familiar yet alien, unheimlich despite being (in the voice of an American addressing the speaker) ‘so English’. There is something metaphorical and portentous in the poem’s closing tercet:

'Raindrops big as bullets dent the roof we all stand under,
watching Canute’s fireworks out-rage the storm, try to steal its thunder.'

For a poet with a reputation for fizz, though, Lochhead’s voice can be disarmingly quiet. She is often a tender love poet, or a tender poet of love. Love certainly seems to be her overriding theme, one way or another. ‘Epithalamium’ is what its title professes it to be – at least up to a point:

'Delight’s infectious – your quotidian friends
Put on, with gladrag finery today, your joy,
Renew in themselves the right true ends
They won’t let old griefs, old lives destroy.|
When at our lover’s feet our open selves we’ve laid
We find ourselves, and all the world, remade.'

Philip Larkin once suggested that his task as a poet was to make true ideas into beautiful poems and beautiful ideas into true ones. To a conscience such as Larkin’s, of course, ‘Epithalamium’ would fit squarely into the beautiful-only camp, but to many it will be both. It is gutsy, too: the syntactic inversion in the penultimate line could have been avoided and isn’t exactly fashionable, but it lends the poem a stately grace and fitting air of timelessness. We might be reminded of Rupert Brooke’s metaphor for war, ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’. But here, as elsewhere, Lochhead has captured something that will never be unanimously refuted, and which will always stand to make life richer.

Rory Waterman, 2012

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Bibliography
2011A Choosing: The Selected Poetry of Liz Lochhead
2006Good Things
2003The Colour of Black and White: Poems 1984-2003
2003Thebans
2002Misery Guts
2000Medea
1998Perfect Days
1997Cuba / Dog House
1996Three Scottish Poets
1995Penguin Modern Poets 4
1991Bagpipe Muzak
1989Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off: and Dracula
1986For Bram Stoker: A Sequence of Poems
1985Pinball
1985Tartuffe: A translation into Scots from the original by Molière
1985True Confessions and New Clichés
1984Dreaming Frankenstein
1982Blood and Ice
1981The Grimm Sisters
1978Liz Lochhead
1978Islands
1974Alasdair Gray: Retrospective Exhibition
1972Memo for Spring
1970Riddle-Me-Ree
Awards
2001Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award
1972Scottish Arts Council Book Award

Interview
Liz Lochhead, poet – portrait of the artist
This article is more than 10 years old
Interview by Laura Barnett
'The Birmingham Post said they'd rather go to the dentist than sit through my first play again. I actually agreed with them'
Laura Barnett
Wed 21 Aug 2013 02.00 EDT
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When did you start writing poetry?

At art school in the late 1960s. When I was at school, and was supposed to be studying for my highers, I was always drawing. And then when I got to art school, and was supposed to be drawing, I started writing.

What was your big breakthrough?

A poetry event at Edinburgh University in 1972, called Poem 72: I was on as a support act to Norman MacCaig (1) and, as everybody was there to listen to him, they all heard me, too. One of them was Gordon Wright, who became my first publisher: a few months later, he got a small grant to put out my first collection, which sold 5,000 copies.

Did you always set out to perform your poems?

Yes – for me, writing poetry has always been about putting sounds down in black and white. I refuse to make a distinction between "page poetry" and "spoken-word poetry". If it's good spoken-word poetry, I want to read it on the page as well. And if it's a proper poem, it should be performable.

What does being the Scots Makar actually involve?

All kinds of things: writing poems for official occasions; doing a lot of readings. "Makar" just means "maker", and I like the title: it reflects the fact that just as you can make a good pot of soup, you can make a poem.

Do you see yourself as heir to a particularly Scottish oral tradition?

Not really. I grew up being taught Burns and the border ballads – but then John Keats grew up on those ballads as well (2). My sensibilities are fairly Scottish, but I'm also very keen on American poetry, and on the Liverpool poets Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough.

What drew you to playwriting?

Going along to the Citizens theatre (3) as a student in Glasgow. It was a very international, unparochial, European theatre – with very cheap tickets. I went a lot with my late husband (4).

Would independence be a good thing for the arts in Scotland?

We'll find out. A lot of artists I know are going to vote yes. I'm not so sure the union has benefited Scotland culturally: Irish playwriting, for instance, is taken more seriously than Scottish playwriting, because Ireland is an independent country. When my play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off was a hit in London (5), my agent sent it to the National Theatre. They said: "We love this piece, but it's far too Scottish for us."

What's the worst thing anyone ever said about you?

The Birmingham Post wrote of my first play, Blood and Ice, that they would rather go to the dentist than sit through it again (6). I actually agreed, but it made me think: "Do better next time."

Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?

Gosh, nothing: I've been very lucky. I've had a lot of attention I probably don't deserve.

In short
Born: Motherwell, 1947.

Career: Began performing poetry in the 1970s; was appointed the Scots Makar, or poet laureate, in 2011. Plays include Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, and Scots adaptations of Molière's Tartuffe and The Misanthrope. She performs her show Apple Says Aaah at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, until 25 August (edfringe.com).

High point: "The opening nights of Mary Queen of Scots, Perfect Days and Medea. They were all stormers."

Low point: "Working on the play Jock Tamson's Bairns. I found I didn't like improvised theatre."

Footnotes
(1) The late, Edinburgh-based poet and former primary school teacher.

(2) The ballads of Thomas Rhymer and Tam Lin are said to have been sources for Keats's poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

(3) Based in the Gorbals, the theatre has been a vital part of the UK theatre scene since the 19th century, and once hosted a riot after an elephant panicked on stage.

(4) Architect Tom Logan, who died in 2010.

(5) Ran at the Donmar for a week in 1987.

(6) The play was directed by a young Michael Boyd, who has also recalled this review as a career low.

Liz Lochhead wins Lifetime Achievement Award
JULY 14, 2017 | BY KRISTIAN KERR
The second annual Sunday Herald Scottish Culture awards were held on Thursday, July 13 in Glasgow. Nominees from across the arts gathered for a glittering evening of celebration at the SWG3 Studio Warehouse in Finnieston. BBC Radio Scotland’s Janice Forsyth hosted the evening, with welcomes from sponsors Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald and Iain McIntosh of Napier University.

Scottish writing was recognised in the Author of the Year category and literature was represented across other categories with The Scottish Storytelling Centre nominated for Best Performing Arts Venue and Aye Write, Glasgow’s literary festival, nominated for Cultural Event of the Year. The judging panel included broadcaster and author Stuart Cosgrove and Ruth Wishart.

Poet and playwright Liz Lochhead was honoured in the night’s grand finale, receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award. 2016-17 was a bumper year for Lochhead, who finished her term as Scotland’s Makar, received the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, and premiered a new play Thon Man Moliere at the Royal Lyceum Theatre. Her Makar collection of new poems, Fugitive Colours was published by Polygon (£12.99, hardback). The award was a testament to Lochhead’s dazzling and always popular contribution to Scottish cultural life. Her career clearly defies easy description, but she says herself, ‘when somebody asks me what I do, I usually say writer.. The most precious thing to me is to be a poet. As a playwright, I’d like to be known as a poet in the theatre.’

Lochhead numbered amongst the nominees for Author of the Year along with Man Booker short-listed Graeme Macrae Burnet; Kevin MacNeil, whose novel The Brilliant and Forever (Polygon) was published to critical acclaim and shortlisted for a Saltire Society Literary Award; and Malachy Tallack, whose non-fiction The Un-Discovered Islands (illustrated by Katie Scott, published by Polygon) won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award for Illustrated Travel Book of the Year. Tallack and MacNeil were also part of the Edinburgh Book Festival’s Outriders programme in 2017 and will be appearing at Charlotte Square in August. Graeme Macrae Burnet was the category’s winner for the international success of His Bloody Project (Saraband). He sent a video-message of thanks from Russia, where his current book tour had just brought him to Tolstoy’s doorstep.

‘Fugitive Colours’ By Liz Lochhead
Review By Richie McCaffery
Fugitive Colours follows Lochhead’s 2011 publication of selected poems A Choosing, but it is really her first full collection since 2003’s The Colour of Black & White. Coming, as it does, at the tail-end of her time as Scots Makar, the book could be seen as a celebratory swansong for her public role but also a chronicle of an eventful decade in her private life. The book begins with what I feel are the strongest poems by a long way — elegies written in the aftermath of her husband’s (Tom Logan) early death at fifty-five from cancer in 2010. Lochhead had married Logan in 1986 and they had been together since that point. It may seem an unusual move to begin a collection with your strongest work but the only alternative here would have been to work up towards some sort of devastating denouement, leaving any reader’s memory of the book a largely elegiac one. Instead, Fugitive Colours begins on a timor mortis conturbat me note and then builds itself up, as if mirroring the grieving process as a recuperation towards re-joining an active public life. As such we being with elegies, then the ‘light comes back’ and Lochhead turns to art (in ‘Ekphrasis, Etcetera’) for solace, before celebrating youth in ‘Kidspoems and Bairnsangs’ and finally returning to the public eye with her poems of occasion — written during her time as Makar (2011–2016), which began only a year after Logan’s death.

While the collection ends on a rumbustious and nostalgic note with ‘In Praise of Old Vinyl’ and the fabulously bawdy couple of songs for a ‘Dirty Diva’, I was brought back full circle to the poignancy of the beginning because it was only after finishing the book that I took notice of the cover image — a painting by Lochhead entitled Fugitive Colours at the Favourite Place. We are introduced to the ‘favourite place’ in the first poem of the same name — a caravan somewhere in the environs of Lochailort where Lochhead and Logan loved spending their free time together. The poem is long and meandering, reflecting the long, twisty journey they had to make from Glasgow, but the journey is made special by Lochhead’s eye for small details. I’m reminded of a striking phrase Naomi Mitchison once used for poetry — she said that for her, of all the written arts, poetry came closest to her ‘hurting core’. Poetry here gives us glimpses into Lochhead’s ‘hurting core’ — after having made the trip alone for the first time, Lochhead concludes:

But tonight you are three months dead
And I must pull down the bed and lie in it alone.
Tomorrow, and every day in this place
These words of Sorley MacLean’s will echo through me:
The world is still beautiful, though you are not in it.
And this will not be a consolation
But a further desolation.

The collection is well structured, because it moves from this opening journey to a journey through poems towards some sort of (incomplete) recovery from loss. In the later poems we get an almost palpable sense of Lochhead relishing the composition and reading aloud some of these poems. Indeed, my first contact with ‘In Praise of Old Vinyl’, a poem (rather like a cento) made from lines taken (or ‘sampled’) from classic songs, was at The Tolbooth in Stirling in 2015, where Lochhead read the poem to saxophone accompaniment by Steve Kettley.

Clearly Lochhead will always suffer her loss, but this book proves that the end of her husband’s life does not mean the end of hers. To return briefly to the grief that opens this book, I was struck by how many lines or poems had within them echoes of other dead poets. ‘Persimmons’ is about Lochhead and her husband eating this ‘strange fruit’ together and Logan making a drawing of these fruit. Lochhead repeats the phrase ‘still life’ twice, thus unlocking all of the possible meanings: a still-life painting; a life that has been stilled and a life that is still hers to enjoy. The final line — ‘Now, looking, I can taste again’ reminds me of Morgan’s most tender love poem ‘Strawberries’. In ‘A Handselling, 2006’ the line ‘the always eventful nothing happening’ is such a MacCaig line I can’t believe he didn’t write it. The closing stanza to ‘Anniversaries’ (an epithalamium) comes on the back of Lochhead’s loss and her advice comes across powerfully:

May that be dailiness — and delight in it,
Sunsets sometimes, full moons,
Music, moments, meals, long sleeps curled like spoons
Together, your children, hard work, holidays,
Home, laughter, friends and family,
Love always.

This reminds me of a poet I miss deeply, as many others do, the late Alexander Hutchison who had a poem called ‘Everything’ in which he attempts to give out similar advice against the prospect of an atheistic death: ‘Love each other, love each other / everything is hosted / everything is vanishing’. This is not to suggest that I think Lochhead’s poems, style or ideas are unoriginal — anything but — I mean to say that her work is alive to what is going on around her and attuned to other voices and ghostly presences.

Yet this collection is not entirely serious or mournful. Fugitive Colours is so various it covers many moods and modes (from salacious through satirical through to serious) and it vitally captures a sense of the poet regaining a spring in her step. I might say that poems in the last grouping — those written by Lochhead in the capacity of Makar sometimes show the burden of expectation and occasion over that of inspiration, but that does not at all mean that I wish them excised from the collection. Most poetry collections are a conglomeration of the best poems a poet had at a particular time, but this book reads more as a journey. It is a suite of movements and everything has its place — it is a collection that needs to be read cover to cover, not randomly dipped into now and then. The loss that begins the book could have easily overwhelmed it, but Lochhead, through immense control, does not allow it to do so. Instead she makes room for others in her work and vision: schoolchildren, retired actors, old collaborators, old friends like Adrian Mitchell and Michael Marra (who are both apportioned a fine elegy each). In doing this she shows that she works with a democratic muse, a muse that has enabled her to come back round to poetry and public life. To use a line from ‘Epistle to David’ (David MacLennan, 1948–2014 — a late, lamented friend in the dramatic arts) Lochhead has resolved, despite all else, ‘To tell the story in the present tense’.

Fugitive Colours by Liz Lochhead is published by Birlinn, 2016.

Book review: Fugitive Colours by Liz Lochhead
The wit and swagger of our former national poet's latest collection belie a skill as a technician that she shares with the greats, writes Stuart Kelly
By The Newsroom
Published 29th May 2016, 12:00 BST
Liz Lochhead
Liz Lochhead
Fugitive Colours by Liz Lochhead | Polygon £9.99

In her new volume of poems, Liz Lochhead, Scotland’s second national Makar, lauds the “gallus gallimaufry” of the Kelvingrove gallery in a piece on its re-opening in 2006. That phrase seems apposite for her work as a whole: this is a book replete with generosity, with a dash of cheek to boot.

The central section, “Ekphrasis, Etcetera”, is full of moments where Lochhead, discussing other artists, and even the whole evolution of art, seems to be describing her own aesthetic. In “Three Stanzas for Charles Rennie Mackintosh”, she describes his work – and hers – as “decorated construction, never constructed decoration”. In one of the finest pieces, “Way Back In The Paleolithic”, she writes of the earliest of all arts as having its “truest impulse” being to “capture something”, so that “wild on the walls” are “hordes of realer than real creatures / The torches in the firelight / Flickering into the first motion pictures”. There is a pun on reel and real here, and although the poems often read like scripts for performance, there is a subtlety and sophistication here as well.

Many of the works here constitute a kind of ars poetica. “In Gaia’s Poetry” begins “Gaia does not care to rhyme”, but as it progresses, Lochhead skilfully subverts and challenges the insistence on vers libre: “And Gaia’s got a point – except / There’s the fun of what you don’t expect – / The half-rhymes, echoes, chimes, / … / Where the sense doesn’t end on the rhyme-word with a clunk. / There’s the fun too of the thought you never would’ve thunk / Were it not for the rhyme that took you there”.

In a strange way these poems are very reminiscent of a poet whom one might not automatically associate with Lochhead – the great Augustan satirist Alexander Pope. His wonderful Essay On Criticism played the same game of asserting something about poetry in a line that simultaneously refutes it: “And ten low words oft creep in one dull line” or “A needless Alexandrine ends the song / That like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along”.

The poems written during her tenure as Makar have an interesting swerve away from asserting the virtues of poetry. “Open”, written for the opening of the fourth session of the Parliament, ends “But close the gap between what we say and what we do”; in “Connecting Cultures” she concludes “All that matters is what we do”. It is one of the paradoxes of political poetry that it urges an action beyond itself. Where Lochhead is more interestingly political is in a poem like “Nick Dowp, Feeling Miscast In A Very English Production, Rehearses Bottom’s Dream”. The work rewrites the famous speech of Bottom in Act IV 
Scene I – so “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” becomes “Man’s een havena heard, man’s lugs havena seen, his fummlin, fouterin hauns havena the gumption to taste, nor his tongue to make heid not tail o – naw, nor yet his hammerin hert to let dab aboot! – whitlike ma dream wis”. There’s a swaggering elegance to this, and an affirmation that some Scots words have no equivalent in English RP.

The most memorable section of the book is the opening, which comprises a series of elegies, including a very affecting one for Lochhead’s late husband, Tom. They are moving without being sentimental, and have a directness that undercuts convention. At the end of “Favourite Place”, Lochhead quotes Sorley MacLean – “The world is still beautiful, though you are not in it” – but starkly opposes it – “And this will not be a consolation / But a further desolation”. In these poems, the political is put in the background. I particularly admired the fourth section of “A Handselling” with its worry over an “intricacy of thistles / far too intent on being emblematic”.

There are one or two infelicities, which tend to come with the territory of such vehemently vocalised poetry. “The Theatre Maker’s Credo” is predominantly in four-line ballad stanzas, sometimes disguised as sestets, but with a 16-line section which could as easily have been in quatrains. Some of the line breaks seem a little arbitrary – and I have a particular aversion for lines that end on the definite article. But that may just be personal taste. One quote – “Happiness writes white” – is attributed to Philip Larkin when it is in fact by Henry de Montherlant; but such hastiness is forgivable.

At its heights though – in poems like the big-hearted “Listen”, written for the Children’s Panel; the quietly sinister “A Man Nearly Falling In Love” or the cleverly parodic “From A Mouse”, written in a robust Standard Habbie – this is a collection equally balancing wit and wisdom, empathy and intelligence.