StAnza: In Conversation with Professor Nicholas Roe

The beginnings of StAnza Poetry Festival

The StAnza Poetry Festival was founded by Professor Nicholas Roe FBA, FRSE, FEA in 1987, shortly after he joined the School of English at St Andrews. He details how the festival began, how it was initially conducted, how it has changed since, and the inspirations behind his establishing the StAnza poetry festival, the only festival dedicated exclusively to poetry in Scotland.

A: “What exactly prompted you to establish the StAnza poetry festival?”

NR: “That's a good question. I'd been teaching at the Queen's University in Belfast, and had been involved in a minor way with the Belfast festival and the English society, in the Department of English at Queen's University, which hosted a succession of major writers, British, Irish and American. So when I arrived here, I thought it would be a good idea to try and do something on a smaller scale, but on similar lines. It was really organised by students, particularly a brilliant undergraduate called Ken Muir and some other students, and we put together a program that ran over several days. It was largely run and organised by students.

And the poets who came? Norman McCraig, the wonderful Liverpool poet Adrian Henri, and the guitarist Andy Roberts. And I think we had Edwin Muir at one point. People like Cieran Carson, who's dead unfortunately. Liz Lochhead. Gillian Clarke, the very good Welsh poet, Gillian Clarke. Kathleen Jamie, who's still very much in touch, and worked in the department here for many years. The poet from the north of Ireland, Michael Longley. Grevel Lindop, he was very good. He was an academic. He came up from Manchester University. These are the very, very first ones. Douglas Dunn and Sorley MacLean, great Gaelic poet, came along with his wife twice. He was the real thing, that man. He was writing in his native Gaelic, about his native place, and he was already quite elderly, so we were very fortunate to get him to come. He was a tremendous presence. 

There was a local school teacher, and you should get this into the article, a guy called David Poole, who wrote his own poetry. He was a tremendous energizer, unfortunately died long ago, but he was part of the original set, as it were, of organisers.”

A: “I find it interesting that a guitarist was part of a poetry festival — what would you say is the importance of having music in such a festival?”

NR: “Well, I think music is probably the start of poetry. That's what I'd say. Singing is the original form of poetry.”

A: “Does poetry therefore aspire to music?”

NR: “Yes, I would, actually. I think it is, obviously, in terms of poetic language, but definitely in terms of form.”

A: “The idea of poetry as a multidisciplinary art has been taken to another level recently with spoken word and slam poetry. Do you think there’s any sense of loss in making poetry performative, or making it resemble theatre more than literature?”

NR: “No. Shakespeare is a poet and a playwright and his plays enact poetry. I mean, what is a poetry slam? You go to a bar? The original poetry festival used to have an evening in the bar in Bell Street, what's the basement bar? Is it Bell Street?”

A: “Aikman's?”

NR: “Aikman's basement. Yes, we used to do a thing, which eventually became an open microphone evening, which is more or less what you're describing. So people could come along and bring their poems with them and read them out.”

A: “Were they good?”

NR: “Well, the evenings were enjoyable, I don’t know about the poetry. That's the sort of thing I assume has now become known as a poetry slam. So that there was an evening where anyone can come along and recite their own work, which people enjoyed I think.”

A: “In establishing a poetry festival, was the aim for you to make poetry enjoyable or more accessible also, or celebrated?”

NR: “All three. It was to bring something new, in this case to St Andrews, definitely. And also to try and I suppose encourage creativity in some way.”

A: “About poetry, is there anything that endears you to it as a literary form above prose?”

NR: “Well, I enjoy it. One can say that. It always renews itself. I was giving a lecture to the first years yesterday on Lyrical Ballads. And I pulled out a sequence of lines or phrases from the poetry, which had just struck me as extraordinarily strange. This is poetry I've known for years — but what on earth does Wordsworth mean when he says, ‘I would believe’? So it's that sense that one can read this kind of poetry, and always discover new things in it.”

A: “And would you say there's an intrinsic quality about poetry that's more exalting than prose?”

NR: “There's no difference between the language of poetry and the language of prose. It's what you do with the language that makes a difference. Good writers, whether in prose or verse, make language work hard.”

A: “What made you dedicate the festival to poetry, and not literature as a whole?”

NR: “I suppose again, that that is down to my experiences with my first acquaintance with poets in Belfast. So that's the background to the Poetry Festival. And before that, because I heard Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes read in Oxford. Seamus Heaney had published ‘North’, and they read it in a place called the Aldate rooms. And I remember them reading, and they both wore heavy black leather jackets.”

A: “So your inclination towards poetry was mainly shaped by the people you encountered?”

NR: “Yes, at Oxford. Then I was really fortunate to get a temporary job at the centre of it all in Belfast where all these people were around. Yes. I remember walking up to a place called the Botanic Inn with Seamus Heaney, and I was the most junior of junior lecturers. And this brilliant and affable man was just walking beside me. It's astonishing.”

A: “Is there anything that endears you to Northern Irish poets in particular at that time?”

NR: “That's a very good question. There were powerful, powerful writers like Philip Larkin, but he wasn't really publishing any more. And the voices from the north of Ireland were the ones that seemed to most demand to be heard and read at the time.”

A: “And how come your area of research differs from your enthusiasm for contemporary Northern Irish poets?”

NR: “It doesn't really because modern poets are by and large, romantic poets.”

A: “On the topic of the Romantic poets and the political message that was behind a lot of their poetry; is that present in contemporary poetry?”

NR: “I'm sure it is. As much an issue as it was, then. Yes. But I don't read much contemporary poetry.”

A: “Is there a reason for that?”

NR: “I've got too many other things to do at the moment. Actually, do you read contemporary? You don't?”

A: “I don't much enjoy it.”

NR: “Maybe there's too much of it.  It's interesting, isn't it? Poetry festivals are about a kind of democracy of writers, aren't they? There are dozens of them in StAnza, from the program I've just looked at. And it's difficult to know where one's attention should be focused. It's as if there are too many voices to attend to.”

A: “And this democratisation of poetry, would you say that it allows for worse poetry to be featured?”

NR: “Well I would put all of these poems on a level. I don't think there is a worse. I think everybody has a voice. I don't think I'd want to judge these poems. For better or worse, I like to think everything can be heard. And each voice should have a chance.”

A: “Poetry has for a long time been quite political. Would you say that it still is?”

NR: “Yes. Well, it certainly was when I was in Belfast in the 1980s. There were a lot of writers of various kinds. There were the leading poets of the day who were around people like Seamus Heaney. There was a tremendous kind of ferment in Belfast at the time. You couldn't avoid the political situation in Ireland in, nor can you now in the 1980s. So that poetry at that time was inevitably caught up in various ways with the political situation.”

A: “And would you say poetry is predominantly political, or artistic?”

NR: “I think inevitably. Inevitably, poetry is political, whether it’s a writer directly addressing the situation or looking away from it. “

A: “Coming back to StAnza Poetry Festival—”

NR: “It wasn't called StAnza. It was originally called the St Andrews Poetry Festival. The original poetry festival stopped, because the university wouldn't back it. Put that in.”

A: “OK. Is there a reason?”

NR: “I suppose at the time they, the administration of the university, couldn't see far enough ahead. Or something like that. So there was a break of two or three years, and then it was reinvented as StAnza.”

A: “Do you think it's the ingenuity of poets that makes poetry festivals work? Is it that or is it the appreciation of those who read?”

NR: “It's a good question. I think there's a certain mystique about listening to a well-known writer, don't you? Actually, to hear the words coming from the mouth of the person who wrote them? This is an interesting topic; poetry festivals are a relatively modern phenomenon. When the St Andrews Poetry Festival started, I'm pretty sure that you could have counted the literary festivals being held in Britain on one hand. There was the famous Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival, there was the Cheltenham Literary Festival. Probably something in London. There was, of course, the Edinburgh Festival running. And there was a full scale festival in Belfast, as well, which had a literary dimension. But nowadays there's hardly a town in the country that doesn't have a literary festival of some kind. So where did that come from, do you think?”

A: “I'm not sure. It seems a bit antithetical at first, because you'd think that interest in books and reading is on the decline. But I think it comes from a need to sensationalise and commercialise.”

NR: “Yes — publishers do drive them. But there's a kind of magic that still attaches to the notion of a bard of some kind that you think which goes back through people like Burns to and other writers to more traditional ideas of the poet as a kind of figurehead and spokesperson for a community. So I think it's linked with that kind of mystique and magic about words.”

A: “Would you say there's a certain value in reading poetry out loud? Does that add a dimension to it?”

NR: “Yes, definitely. Poetry is meant to be read. It can be read silently, but it should be read out loud. I think that is the whole point of the St Andrews Poetry Festival, which I had nearly completely forgotten about. Until you asked me to remember it. I couldn't remember all the poets we had, but the names you've got. We're certainly all there.”