Poetry Map

We all know poems about Scotland but can the shape and nature of Scotland be drawn entirely in poetry? In 2014 during Scotland’s Year of Homecoming, StAnza set itself the challenge to see if this was the case. We invited submissions of poems which have a specific Scottish location, whether named in the poem or not, and started to pin them to an online map Poetry Map of Scotland.

 

The project continues. We hope eventually to have a map completely covered in pins from coast to coast, from north to south, east to west, highlands, borders, towns, cities, villages, mountains, lochs and rivers, beaches, firths and islands, rocks and reservoirs.

If you’d like to contribute to this project, here are the details. Please email us a copy of your proposed poem with a note of its location and enough detail on that for us to pin it on the map. Don’t send us the Ordinance Survey reference thanks as google will not recognise it. In your email you must confirm it is your own poem and that you grant us permission to post it on this Blog.

Once pinned, the opening words of the poem appear on the map at the pin. The poems pinned to the map are being published in full on the StAnza Blog main page, one at a time, more or less in the order in which they were received. We do have a queue of poems waiting to be pinned and posted, so if you have submitted, please be patient. We will continue to pin and post during 2015.

Send your poems to info@stanzapoetry.org, preferably pasted into the body of your email, and at this stage, no more than one poem per poet/submission, thanks.

And as part of our Archipelago of Poetry theme for StAnza 2015, some of the shorter island poems from the map featured in a free digital installation shown at this year’s festival. Here’s a second chance to see a selection of the poems and images featured in this pdf version of the installation.  Just click on the link below.

An Archipelago of Poems installation at StAnza 2015

Our thanks to the poets and others named who allowed us to use their poems and images in this installation.