By Hugh McMillan, Poet

DH Lawrence said poetry was “a tiny core of stillness in the heart” but in the pub that doesn’t go down well.

Nowadays there are worries that it’s being lost from mainstream Scottish society, is insufficiently nurtured and has declined into an inaccessible preserve of the few. True?

In the pub they ask me for poems for birthdays or weddings. None of your fancy stuff, Rabbie, they warn gravely. It shows the regard people have for poetry and its weird ancient power to entertain and record the things that matter.

There is a gap between what people think poetry is and what some poets and academics think it should be. I remember listening to the poems shortlisted for a major prize and being shocked that I couldn’t understand them. If poetry needs a codebook it has failed in its primary task – to communicate to people who aren’t poets.

Universities maintain a grip on creative writing, churning out more creative writers in the same image who proceed to teach writing, run courses, publish and review each other’s books. Yet at the same time Scotland is a bastion of spoken word or performance poets who connect poetry to issues of gender and politics of real relevance to people’s lives. They make poetry vital and comprehensible. It doesn’t mean dumbing down. Some, like Harry Giles, are both intellectual and accessible.

There are other forms of democratisation. The brilliant Scottish Poetry Library (SPL) supports regional writing as well as Gaelic and Scots. My pub regulars greatly appreciated Stuart Paterson’s appearance as a weatherman predicting a blowsy, dreich outlook. As BBC writer in residence – an initiative supported by the SPL – he produced Scots poetry of and for real people.

Then there are festivals. Apart from Stanza, Scotland’s excellent bespoke poetry fest, others have sprung up in all sorts of places I would love to go but am never invited, a legacy (I tell myself) of living far from the centres of poetry among various types of sheep.

Fine contemporary poets like Jackie Kay, William Letford and John Burnside are often on these guest lists, a reminder that Scotland still has a literary elite, mainly published outside Scotland, a fact which many gauge an indicator of excellence.

Looking at these festivals you would think there were only 10 poets in Scotland. There are thousands: enough to fill a stadium. Some, like Tracey Herd, Gordon Meade, George Gunn, Nuala Watt you may not have heard of but rank with the best.

A worthy exception to the rule of excluding me from events is the Wigtown Book Festival. There’s an intimacy and attention to locale at Wigtown that’s absent elsewhere. It’s a showcase not just for authors parachuted in but for indigenous writers and even the landscape itself. And it has a major poetry competition – one that welcomes entries in Scots and Gaelic as well as English.

A poetry competition gave me my start. You might think there’s more chance of getting hit between the eyes by a golf ball than winning one, but the results often throw up unknowns, those dreamers without a degree who turn out to have a bucket of talent.

Have a pop at the Wigtown Poetry Competition, entries are open right now. Everyone has an equal chance. The fact is that under the crust there are opportunities. New magazines? Try the rollicking Poets Republic. Want to read? No more mumbling to an old bloke and a babrador, poetry reading is hip. From Dumfries’s Brave New Words to Glasgow’s St Mungo’s Mirrorball. All in all it’s enough to drown out the tiny core of stillness once and for all.

See www.wigtownbookfestival.com/poetry-competition.