On the eve of St Andrew’s Day, we are delighted to announce the opening of this year’s McCash Scots Language Poetry Prize. Run jointly by The Herald and Glasgow University, this is a co-operative initiative that has been running successfully since the early 2000s and is the premiere Scots poetry prize.
This year, the generous awards totalling £800 from the University’s McCash fund will be distributed according to the decision of the judges, in recognition of the merit of the poems. This year, instead of suggesting a specific theme, we have decided to invite poets to write on the theme and in the form of your own choice, the only proviso being that any submission must be in the Scots language. All forms of Scots will be considered, from urban city Scots to the voices of the Shetland or Orcadian archipelagos, from “synthetic” literary Scots to speech-based “native” Scots, from the patter of patois to the artifice of the learned and scholarly. Up to three submissions of original poems will be welcome.
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Poems in Scots sometimes were deployed for comic purposes but this is not all. To illustrate the range such work can cover, consider these two short examples. First, Douglas Young’s pithy, wry, ironic maxim, “Last Lauch”:
The Minister said it wad dee,
the cypress buss I plantit.
But the buss grew til a tree,
naething dauntit.
It’s growan stark and heich,
derk and straucht and sinister,
kirkyairdie-like and dreich.
But whaur’s the Minister?
Comic, certainly, but making a deadly serious point as well, and all in only eight lines. Or consider this, Hugh MacDiarmid’s “The Bonnie Broukit Bairn”:
Mars is braw in crammasy,
Venus in a green silk goun,
The auld mune shak’s her gowden feathers,
Their starry talk’s a wheen o’ blethers,
Nane for thee a thochtie sparin’
Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn!
– But greet, an’ in your tears ye’ll drown
The haill clanjamfrie!
Again, only eight lines, but what compression of meaning and power! The planets in the solar system, and earth, the only one cradling life in the inhuman universe. It’s an ecological poem saying, “Look after your planet, pilgrims, it’s the only one we’ve got.” But these planets are also gods: Mars, of War, Venus, of Love, and the Old Moon with a 1920s feather boa scarf around her neck, all wealthy swanky toffs at a bad party, none of them sparing a thought for the neglected, beautiful child outside the window. The poem condemns, in its final exclamation, the vast gulf between the wealthy and the poor, which has not grown less since 1922, when the poem was first published.
The judges’ decisions are final
As well as Lesley Duncan, Poetry Editor at The Herald, Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, the third judge will be Rab Wilson, poet, makar, champion of the Scots language, and recipient of the Saltire Society’s Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun award, who writes as follows: “Gin ye are an established Makar in Scots, or a keen rhymer scrievin awa at hame, this is yer chaunce tae win a puckle o siller an see yer poetry published an receive national recognition! The McCash hus bin fir a lang time the benchmark an springboard that hus led tae mony a makar becomin a recognised household name oan the Scottish poetry scene. This year it micht be you! Sae dinnae be blate! Submit yer best wark an hae a go!”
How to submit your poems
Please write your name, address and email contact details on the reverse side of hard copy paper submissions (printouts welcome) of up to three unpublished, original manuscripts of poems in Scots not more than thirty lines long, and post them to Alan Riach, Scottish Literature, 7 University Gardens, Glasgow University, G12 8QB, to arrive on or before January 25. We’re looking forward to reading them!
Happy writing, douce scrievers!
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