Makars tak tent. It�s time for our annual celebration of the Scots language. This year�s James McCash Scots Poetry Competition, run in conjunction with Glasgow University, has homecoming as its theme.
Makars tak tent. It's time for our annual celebration of the Scots language. This year's James McCash Scots Poetry Competition, run in conjunction with Glasgow University, has homecoming as its theme. Generous prizes of £750, £350 and £200 are on offer, and there is a £200 prize for the best poem from an entrant aged 17 or under.
The competition theme reflects the Scottish Government's official Homecoming year (an ongoing event tied to the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns's birth). Thanks to www.theherald.co.uk, readers of Scottish background and sympathies round the world can take part in the competition.
Previous years have seen entries from as far afield as Hong Kong and Alaska, New York and California, Australia and the Caribbean, France and the Czech Republic, as well as Scotland itself.
The range of past prize-winners has been equally wide, from a psychiatric nurse and a North Sea oil worker to teachers and academics. Last year's runner-up came from New England.
The competition is aimed at celebrating the Scots tongue in all its rich diversity. Happily, the language - employed so eloquently by poets ranging from the Renaissance makar William Dunbar to Robert Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid - has retained a distinct identity (or indeed identities) in spite of historic pressures to conform to Standard English and the homogenising effects of the modern mass media.
The language remains resilient. Scots in all its permutations, from Doric to city patois, is used widely and spontaneously in shops and offices, playgrounds and pubs, streets and sports grounds. Devolution has also brought a new interest in our linguistic heritage.
The Scottish vocabulary is rich in words that have no exact English equivalents - such as scunnert, wabbit, glaikit, sair forfochtin and fushionless. There's a whole dictionary of Scots words to relish. Scots should be grateful for this extra dimension in our vocabulary. No hostility to formal English is thereby implied.
The poems submitted for the McCash prize have proved how flexible and effective the language can be, not just in tackling such evergreen themes as love, nature and humour, but in articulating contemporary concerns and issues. One of the first prizewinning poems was about the Tiananmen Square massacre; another entry dwelt with eloquent anger on the death of the first Scottish soldier killed in Iraq.
This year's homecoming theme is an upbeat one and the competition itself should be viewed as an enjoyable challenge. Readers may submit up to three original unpublished poems, of around 20 lines or fewer. And acknowledging that Burns himself could slip unselfconsciously from Scots to English, often within the same poem, the judges won't demand purist exclusiveness in the language but simply an overall sense of Scots.
Edwin Morgan, Scotland's official national poet, has again kindly agreed to be senior judge. His fellow judges are Professor Alan Riach of the department of Scottish literature and Professor Nigel Leask of the department of English Literature at Glasgow University; Liz Lochhead, Glasgow's poet laureate; and myself, in my role as The Herald's poetry editor.
Entries from Scotland or elsewhere in the UK should be sent by post to Lesley Duncan, The Herald, 200 Renfield Street, Glasgow G2 3QB, to arrive by Saturday, August 15. Overseas entries may be sent by email to lesley.duncan@theherald.co.uk to arrive by that date.
As with previous years' entries, the poems will be deposited with the National Library of Scotland, where they will form a valuable snapshot of Scottish creativity and the national mood in 2009.
