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The Scotsman
  • 26/07/2023
Scotsman Session #372: Ellen Renton
Transcript
00:00 Hello, my name is Ellen Renton and I am going to read a few poems, the first of which is
00:14 taken from a project called 'And Who's She When She's At Home' which I am working on
00:19 with visual artist Megan Ruddin. It'll be open to the public for the first time this
00:26 August at Craigmillar Castle and one of the central things that runs through the project
00:33 is a sequence of letter poems that I have addressed to my great-great-granny Janet and
00:41 this is the final poem from that sequence.
00:47 Dear Janet, please don't think me daft. But yesterday I thought I owned something. Was
00:57 a brief glory. Crescents and vennels were no longer necklace chains knotted hopeless.
01:08 My friends and I eked out the summer, drinking opposite your wedding church. I like the image.
01:17 Us both happy and metres apart. I stopped to walk home for a jobsworth moon that bridged
01:28 the tenements. Chimney to chimney, a new route through the sky. We could debate the size
01:39 of such liberties. It depends on the land you live on. The city was never mine to crack
01:48 open but now I've seen clear its sender and our names are written all over it.
01:59 This next poem was from a separate project called 'If You've Seen It, You Haven't
02:08 Seen It' which I created in collaboration with the Edwin Morgan Trust and Disability
02:15 Arts Online. It's an exhibition of poetry and photography which asks questions about
02:22 seeing and image and truth and acknowledges the fact that we all will see different things
02:29 when we look at a photograph.
02:33 This is a description I wrote for a photograph that I took.
02:40 Northumberland July 2022 or June or the last time skies got enough night or the summer
02:53 before that or two weeks north of it or south of the coast or somewhere circular like a
03:04 churchyard or scrap heap or a house a hill a tree or a film set that never saw thus grow
03:18 good or an animal unbuttoning its shirt as it once did in a myth head mudwards to scope
03:29 a route or a cloud that crossed the boundary or a warning a flag with its bones blown out
03:42 screaming from a hype or the summer before that or the countryside with its mouth wide
03:52 open waiting to neck the rain.
03:56 I'm going to read one final poem which is a happy grief poem of sorts if such a thing
04:07 exists. Three months.
04:15 The sky was indie cinema and the basketball court was loud beyond its hedge leather on
04:23 concrete a point was squandered laughter sunk the stakes.
04:33 Hope's a bit easier from a height all that living wriggled the scene like a shriek that
04:42 can't be kept like come on move yourself like the best bit of lemon in your eyes like a
04:53 kind foot to the back.
04:58 Grief that my chosen song for the downhill tied ribbon round the moment.
05:06 If no day is fully good again then this would do an hour rolling over for me.
05:17 Gold fizzed the windows like a hand stuck up like welcome home.
05:26 Thank you for listening.
05:27 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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