All right.
What you've read this evening-- is any of that in the books
you have here?
Yes.
The second poem-- all of it is in The Road North, which is--
That one?
Yeah, the bee stuff, I don't have,
but they have it in the library, and you
can order it be in the library [INAUDIBLE].
It's called Global Oracle.
Great.
And the other thing is, where did you actually grow up?
I grew up on a hillside--
But--
--suckered by wolves.
I grew up in a--
[LAUGHTER]
I grew up at the end of the Penguins,
which are the hills that come out from Edinburgh
into the countryside.
OK.
So in the Scottish borders, near a little town called Biggar.
People from Biggar always say, London is big,
Dublin is Dublin, but Biggar is bigger.
[LAUGHTER]
And so I grew up on that-- on-- really, in a very remote place.
My father was a poet, and my mother
helped him make a famous garden, and it was up a stony track
called Stony Path.
Anyone else?
Landscape forms a big part of your imagination
and informs what you write.
I'm curious about your experience of the landscape
here in Southern Arizona, particularly
in Oracle, which is the town I live in,
and how it compares to some of the landscape
you're familiar with in Scotland.
I was going to--
something I'll say about that is that last poem,
the Inverianvie, and this loch--
so I have a muscular condition that
means I can't walk that far, so my relation to landscape
is partly conditioned by that.
So my poetry is sometimes about trying to reach somewhere I
can't reach.
So that last poem was about failure.
It was about the wish to reach this dark loch
of the [INAUDIBLE],, and we'd gone nowhere near it,
and we gave up.
And that's one of the wonders of poetry,
that you can reclaim an experience
and write about your failures.
And I guess I'm interested in how what we know--
what we see in the landscape comes from our mind.
And so what I understood in Oracle
came very much from being with Gary and Laura
and hearing the names and reading Larry Evers
translations, reading Indigenous peoples' views
of the landscape.
It's very difficult to access a landscape
when you're new to it.
And I think mostly we do it by parallel.
And that's a hard parallel between Scotland and here.
But for instance, you do have a dispossessed Indigenous
population, so you have that kind of tension, which
is very interesting for me.
And I adore the landscape.
Our landscape at home is so green and soft.
And here, it's just so opposite.
But then, mountains are mountains.
We talk about the Blue Hills, here and at home.
They have the sense of--
one of the things I explore would
be color codes between, say, white American
and what I grew up with, and Gaelic people
have a different color code to lowland Scots
or English people.
And Native Americans have different color codes
for those kind of things.
So it's hard for me to say, but the "Bee" poem--
it didn't have an ending until I heard the bees.
We were just here late enough to hear them coming out
for the first blossoms.
And so those kind of moments, when you tune into a season--
but I'm someone that needs names.
It's names that really help me get into a landscape.
And a lot of your names, I think,
have been lost and not given.
If I was here, I would be making more maps
with Native American names on them.
A lot of the work I do in Scotland
has been with Gaelic place names.
And you've seen some of that here.
So I'm a stranger to the names where I grew up.
And I've had to learn that landscape
through the Indigenous culture.
So it's hard for me to sum it up, but just that--
I guess my access was through culture, Larry Evers,
and through wonderful people like Gary and Laura,
who could just show me how the landscape worked.
You know, your seasons are very different to ours.
You grow vegetables at times we don't have any.
And so all of those things.
I think for any poet, it's just a great treat.
But you still have to listen.
I say all knowledge is local.
And you can then-- the poet's gift is to compare knowledge.
But you do not get to come to a place in two months
and think that you can write its poetry.
You cannot do that.
You can access it through your own.
Yeah.
I'll tell you one other story about that.
Scottish people have a terrible, terrible habit,
which is summed up by the film star called Ewan McGregor, who
was one of the Star Wars-- the Star Wars
that no one really likes.
He did a bike-- a motorbike trip from Scotland to Mongolia.
And on-- somewhere on YouTube, there's
a lovely series of clips of Ewan McGregor standing
in a wilderness by his motorbike going,
oh, it's just like Scotland.
[LAUGHTER]
We do have that habit a bit.
But I think that's a really revealing comment
about what we all do.
And my wife Daisy was teasing me, because we say, for a poet,
anything is eternal and forever if it happens twice.
[LAUGHTER]
So you see, oh, we always eat this here.
We always-- because we did it twice.
So those are-- that's the best answer I can give you.
But I do very much treasure your landscape.
But I think, like the Gaelic landscape,
it is a traumatized landscape, and we
have to be honest about that.
Any last questions?
Huh.
Or last two.
If Wendy has a question, I want to hear it.
Out of curiosity, the bookmarks that you have in your exhibit--
I know you said there were barcodes on those.
Yes.
Do those hold any significance?
Yeah.
So one of the things I've installed in the exhibition
here is a hundred bookmarks, which Wendy and her team
will hide in library books.
And they come from a public artwork.
And the public artwork is actually
50,000 bookmarks which are hidden away
in books at Edinburgh University library.
Public artworks are really problematic.
Most people make big metal sculptures,
and I wanted to find a work that suited a library,
so I really like the idea that you would discover the artwork.
And some of those unpopular books
won't be read for a 10 years time.
[LAUGHTER]
My wife actually treasured some of those bookmarks
before she met me.
Didn't put her off.
It happened to be a poem about daisies.
But the barcode is actually the poem.
You can translate words into barcode.
So what I love about them is just that rhythm
is the rhythm of language.
And the reason for it is if you look behind you at your window
here and you have these verticals.
In the library this was done for,
which is Edinburgh University, it
has very particularly beautiful blinds, which are actually
just slats of wood.
They're a little bit like something that Courvisier does.
And I didn't use to even understand what they were.
They were just these beautiful, rhythmic verticals.
And that was what gave me the idea to use barcode.
And the conceptual aspect of the barcode
is that the only way the librarians
commit the library work is barcode.
They don't know where the books are.
The barcode does.
So the barcode is the way the book travels around.
So I was trying to find a way to translate
between human and technology.
Does that make makes sense?
So that-- hopefully there's always a reason.
You should all go and steal a bookmark.
And there are about 300 postcards over there,
which are free to take away.
Wendy?
Would you tell us a little bit about how
you came to do public works in hospitals?
And also, maybe a little bit about some of the installations
we saw in the images that appeared to be
installed in public parks?
Yeah.
I came to do it because I needed to pay my mortgage.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm a poet and an artist, and I often
use poetry to make my art.
Sometimes, the poetry will be the art,
but also sometimes, the poetry might
be a way to describe a project I want to do.
I won that commission in a hospital
without necessarily having experience.
You always have to start.
And then I've done four projects in hospitals.
I've done three with cancer, one with brain tumors, one tumors--
just general cancer.
And I did one which was a memorial for tissue and organ
donation.
I also make work with renewable energy [? in ?] [? lots ?]
of things.
And I always explain that you don't train in these things.
You train to listen, so you train
to be open to a situation.
So what you're trying to do in a hospital
is find a way to make work for people
who are sitting in seats like you are, who are very anxious,
and maybe about to hear that they're not
going to live for long.
So that's your first thing.
Or when you're making a memorial for tissue and organ donation--
I always said, your first audience
is the mother that's grieving for her daughter that
died a year ago, and she's still angry.
And you start with that.
So they're very interesting, context-specific situations.
Very scary, but you meet the nurses and doctors,
and you meet people, and it's a wonderful situation
to make work.
And usually, I have a feeling that simple use of words
can touch people in those situations.
And that tends to be what I gravitate towards.
What's very interesting is that between different hospitals,
that have a very different relationship to language.
I worked in one hospital where they
wouldn't let us do poems that had helicopters, crows,
a scythe, or a knife, and--
because those were apparently scary words.
And in another one I was allowed to talk about death,
and anything I wanted, apart from one poem that
mentioned my chiropodist, because you weren't allowed
to talk about profession.
The nurses and doctors didn't want emotion
connected to their profession.
So you're in a completely different situation as a poet.
You're-- I make those works out of my own illness.
I was very ill that winter.
It was actually why I came to Oracle.
I had been in bed for a few months with a lung condition.
So you just use that, and you try and imagine
that essentially, all illnesses are unique,
and they're all the same.
They all involve strangeness, feeling strange.
They change your map.
They give us new words, new names.
They're-- you know, what's terrifying is some of the names
you're given.
So it's just by being open to that.
And sometimes, I would just sit in a waiting room,
and I didn't feel able to talk to anyone, because I
knew what they were waiting for, and I just watched.
So you-- it's very context-specific work,
which I find very helpful, because I'm not
that interested in myself.
And it's an incredible pleasure to possibly be even 1%
helpful in that situation.
The most recent one I did--
people are getting chemotherapy, so they're
in a waiting room for eight hours.
So I made them a library.
I made some little [? texts ?] on walking sticks.
And the book is actually about--
uses place names, place names as an analogy for journeys,
so journey through light to dark, a mountain to shelter.
Very simple idea.
And I just thought, well, rather than just looking
at their phone screens, books do tend
to help people relate to each other.
They also help people hide.
You know, some people just are reading a book.
So you can work in quite a--
you can be quite modest in yourself in that kind of space.
It's always depressing that you're not
allowed to make the environment itself nicer,
so you have to try and work with that situation.
Parks is about vandalism.
What can you make that won't get stolen, you know?
And how can you--
most of my work is worrying how to share words,
worrying how you get people words in public.
So the beehives and the nest boxes--
stuff I do around that, I like it
because it makes the habitat better.
And people like those objects anyway.
Almost everyone likes a beehive.
So if you add a poem to it, you're
kind of not doing too much harm.
[LAUGHTER]
And that'll do me.
I don't like monumental sculpture so much
in those situations.
I mean, the answer is that every situation is unique.
Every context is unique.
And you bring to it what you can,
but also, you find there are always problems.
You know, what you can't put on the wall,
the limit of the budget, the limit of time.
So you try and evolve an openness that
allows you to solve problems.
Mostly it's problem solving.
And you use-- you're having to think about the fact
that you do work in a park.
Probably, there are people that walk their dog there every day.
So you might want to make a text just that little bit cryptic,
in a general way, that it might take them a year
and go, oh, that's what that's about, for instance.
So you kind of think about, well,
how are people actually experiencing
language in that space?
And in the hospital, it's like that, but different.
You know, we did some embroideries that
are in palliative care rooms.
And you know the person isn't leaving that room.
It's the last thing they see.
So you just think, well, that's going to have
to be a very modest piece.
And well, that's all I can answer, that they're each--
each is their own thing.
And in the best interviews, what they're
looking for is openness, although sometimes
they just want an easy idea.
OK.
Thank you so much--
--Alec [? Finlay. ?]
[APPLAUSE]