As you can see from the photos, we were blessed with (at least partially) blue skies, and what I’d expected to be a cold wind coming in from the sea turned out to be no more than a gentle breeze.
I called the walk ‘Waves as Blue as Air’, a line taken from the poem / song ‘We’ll Go to Sea No More’:
It was written by one, or perhaps both of the Misses Corbett, the sisters Walterina Cunningham and Grace Corbett who lived in Edinburgh, by the sea at Portobello. They were wrote a number of books in the early nineteenth century, most notably two editions called The Odd Volume (1826–1827). This poem features in the second of these. (The text above is taken from Poems of Places, Volume 2 (1876).)
Our first issue (#82) appeared at the end of July, and we’re currently open for submissions for #83 – until the end of September, with the magazine due out towards the end of November.
We’ve changed a few things, but kept a lot the same, including the sequence of the contents – starting with tanka, having the haiku in seasonal sections (concluding with a no-season section) and interspersing these with haibun. The magazine closes with an essay and a substantial Reviews section, and we’re grateful for the continuing work of Judy Kendall and Julie Mellor in commissioning and compiling these.
Matthew Paul continues to manage the website.
As for the changes, we’re delighted that Barrie Tullett has brought his designer’s eye to bear on the parts and the whole. We’ve reduced the number of poems we publish too, so that those we do select are given more room on the page.
And Sean O’Connor will join us from #83 as Haibun Editor.
You can buy individual copies or take out an annual subscription (which buys you three copies) here.
I’ve been out taking photos of lines and stanzas from poems I read on the poetry walks, at the places where I read them.
I’ve been posting these on my Facebook and instagram pages, but thought I’d gather a few of them here.
S.T. Coleridge at the Black Bull, Grassmarket
Gavin Douglas at Gladstone’s Land, Lawnmarket. The ‘soir gled’ is the red kite; the surname of the man after whom Gladstone’s Land refers to a ‘gled stane’, or kite’s stone, hence the golden raptor on the building’s front.
Ken Cockburn at Deacon Brodie’s pub, Lawnmarket
Angus Reid at The Scottish parliament building, Holyrood Road
Robert Fergusson at the Palace of Holyroodhouse
RLS at the High Kirk of St Giles, Parliament Square
I’m aware I haven’t posted here for quite a while, the main reason being that I’ve got into the habit of putting out my news in other ways, mainly regular posts on instagram, and an occasional newsletter sent out via Mailchimp.
You can find the last newsletter, which I sent out at the start of May, here. This is the introduction:
I’ll be leading poetry walks on the Edinburgh Fringe again this year, for the first time since 2019. – Along with Rod Burns and Becky Dwyer, I’ve become co-editor of Presence Haiku Journal, established by the late Martin Lucas and edited since 2014 by Ian Storr. – I have work in a forthcoming exhibition at MOCA Dunoon, paying tribute to Ian Hamilton Finlay whose centenary falls this year. – I’m leading a walking renga at Glasgow Botanic Gardens on Sunday 25th May, i.m Gerry Loose. – Plus a short poem published recently in Poetry Scotland.
If you want to read more about any of these, you can find the mailing here.
And if you want to sign up to receive future mailings, you can do so below.
If instagram is your thing, there I’m @kencockburnedinburgh Last year I took a different theme each month, which turned out to be a lot of work, and this year I’m posting on a more ad hoc basis.
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I’m running more poetry walks in Edinburgh over the next few months, from 21 June to 12 October.
The June, July, September and October walks start outside St Giles Cathedral; the August walks by the Robert Fergusson statue outside the Canongate Kirk.
Thanks to Billy Mills for reviewing my Edinburgh: poems & translations and Christmas Poems, both designed by Barrie Tullett and published by The Caseroom Press.
I’ve been posting regularly on instagram this year, with a different theme each month.
January was objects from my parents’ house, cleared and sold last year; above, Cadbury’s tin, folding ruler, THOR mallet, stud box, small bowl, Polish-English Dictionary.
February was small books; the first one is Burns, and the rest are self-explanatory.
March is postcards of places; above, Copenhagen, Berlin (Ost), Lübeck, Rome, Kirkcaldy, Florida.
If you’d like to see more of these, and what’s to come – April will be Paris, which I visited recently for the first time in a dozen years, and May may be Edinburgh – follow @kencockburnedinburgh at instagram.
There are two prints of individual poems, both published but uncollected.
I wrote ‘Hands’ in 2014, when I was working for the first time in care homes; it’s based partly on what residents told me they’d used their hands for, and partly on my own experiences and memories.
‘Close’ dates from 1996; it’s a poem I put aside, but I rediscovered it when I used it for a poetry walk a few years ago, and now I’m very fond of it. It’s a moment that’s long passed – my daughter has grown up, the ‘newspapermen’ have gone and buses no longer run along that stretch of the Mile – so in it’s way it’s become a historical document.
There are also two books – a single-poem artist’s book, and a little Edinburgh anthology.
Позже / Später / Later features a single poem by Wassily Kandinsky from his 1913 book Klänge. It’s the second in an ongoing series from The Caseroom Press – the first was Гимн / Hymnus / Hymn, published in 2022. This post from the time shows that book, and gives some background about Kandinsky’s book and the current project.
Wale comprises my selection of quotes about Edinburgh from over the centuries. The title is from Robert Fergusson – ‘Auld Reikie, wale o ika toun / That Scotland kens beneath the moon!’, ‘wale’ meaning the choice, the pick, the best. The cover image shows a detail from the paving outside the Scottish parliament building.
If you’d like copies of any of these, please get in touch via the Contact page.
‘Hands’, A3, £10 ‘Close’, A4, £5 Wale, 107x107mm, £5 Позже / Später / Later, 220x220mm, £20 P&P will be added to the above prices.
This year is the Goethe-Institut Glasgow’s 50th anniversary, and they have organised a poetry trail of poems by German, French and Scottish poets (they share their splendid building in Park Circus with the Alliance Française, itself 40 years here). The trail runs through the building itself into the garden and through the gardens outside.
The idea was that every poet (there are 12 involved, four from each country) provides an idiom from their own language, explaining both the literal as well as the idiomatic meaning, and this was then passed on to a poet writing in a different language. The commission was write a poem responding to or re-imagining that idiom.
I was given the French idiom ‘être Gros-Jean comme devant’, which came with these comments: “it’s quite archaic, and means to have had high hopes and yet to find yourself back in the same position as before. ‘Gros-Jean’ gets used to mean a common man, a boor, and literally the expression means ‘to be a common man like before’ (and of course in the French it rhymes!).”
A little online searching showed it concludes one of La Fontaine’s Fables, ‘La Laitière et le Pot au lait’, or ‘The Milkmaid and her Pail’, which also includes the memorable line about building castles in Spain. The fable – poetry, not prose – is in two parts, the first a narrative describing the milkmaid and her increasingly extravagant visions of success before she drops the milk she was going to sell and ends up with nothing, while the second part is a reflection on the narrative. I ended up writing a very loose (and expanded, 19 lines to the original 14) translation of that second part. The opening couplet,
Quel esprit ne bat la campagne? Qui ne fait chasteaux en Espagne?
Englished as
Many this fond delusion share And build such castles in the air… (trans. Thomson, 1884)
and
For, who never dreams of riches like rain, Who never builds castles in Spain? (trans. Ponsot, 1957)
becomes
Aren’t we all a little unhinged? Who hasn’t heard themself banging on about buying a little place in the country, or dreaming of louche retirement on some shady sunsoaked Costa?
And the last line, where Gros-Jean lumbers in, becomes
the same sack of blubber and bone I always was.
When I went to the Goethe Institut for the 50th anniversary celebrations it was displayed on the railings outside the gallery, where the photo above was taken, and I think it’ll remain in place for the rest of November.
My thanks to Annie Rutherford and Susanne Graaf of the Goethe Institut, and here’s to the next fifty years of a cultured German presence in Scotland.
(It was just getting dark as I arrived and took the photo…)
Poems on the page and in the world 