University of Stirling

‘Aa My Mindin’* – Time & Timelessness in Scottish Island Poetry *Aa My Mindin: A Shetlandic idiom, meaning 'For as long as I can remember'

Academic History:

2014-current Doctor of Philosophy English/Film

2013-2014 MLitt (Distinction) Creative Writing

2009-2013 BA (Hons) 1st Class Film and Media & English Studies

Supervisors:

Professor Kathleen Jamie

Dr Sarah Neely

Research Interests:

Creative Writing (Poetry) & Filmmaking (Film Portraiture)

The aim of this research degree is to creatively examine the importance of time & interconnection within the poetry of the Scottish Isles. This will be achieved through the completion of 30 original poems, a 15,000 word scholarly essay, & the creation of an online archive of film portraits.

Exploring the fragility & plasticity of cultural memory, I will film various Shetland tradition-bearers telling their stories of the Isles. Once edited, these film portraits will be uploaded to an online video-sharing platform & made freely available as a digital homage to, & re-mediation of, Shetland’s oral traditions. This process will involve multiple layers & methods of evoking, recovering, re-making & transmitting cultural memory – the intended thematic focus of the 30 poems. I intend for the resulting films & poems to to serve more than an elegiac or conservationist function, inviting users/readers to conceive the ‘archive’ of Island identity as vital and dynamic.

My scholarly essay will comprise a 10,000-word critical analysis of a selection of contemporary Scottish island poetry, & their varying reflections on time, history, tradition & identity. The final 5,000 words of the essay will document & critically situate my own filmmaking & writing processes.

Tradition & history are crucial topics of debate in Scottish literary studies. Cairns Craig argues in The Modern Scottish Novel that Scottish literary tradition is vexed by contradictory impulses to chart, yet also defy, the primacy of historical consciousness. Unable to construct a national imaginary that bridges past identity & present agency, it is only in the return to the ‘cyclic world of myth, to a world of truths untouchable by history’s passage’ that Scottish island poets seem able to locate themselves in relation to meaningful narrative structures which transcend the community of lived experience. My interest in the mythic follows Orcadian poet Edwin Muir’s (subsequently, George Mackay Brown’s) mystic & sacramental conception of ‘the story & the fable’, in which ritual & tradition have the power to surpass, partly in imagination, history as material progress (& destruction). Cultural memory is here understood as a re-inscription and re-mediation of (partly imagined, partly idealised) traditional values anchored ‘beyond’ the tides of national-historical time. I will examine & celebrate the means by which island poetry & oral tradition have defied ‘loss’ on these terms, & (on a modest scale) will re-constitute, in poetry & film-portraiture, a digital narrative archive for Shetland cultural memory

Previous Research Projects:

• Maps & Alignment: a creative MLitt dissertation on the connection of self & place and the poetry of the Scottish Isles
• Saat i da Blöd: a creative undergraduate dissertation about island identity & the poems of Robert Alan Jamieson
• Carnegie Vacation Research Project: can Shetland literary identity be classed within an overarching Scottish one?

Scholarships/ Awards/ Publications:

2014 – Published in The Harlequin (Issue 5)

2014 – AHRC Doctoral Training Programme Studentship

2013 – Published in Northwords Now (Issue 25)

2013 – AHRC Professional Preparation Masters Studentship

2013 – Certificate of Distinction for Best Dissertation

2012 – Carnegie Vacation Sholarship

2011 – Published in These Islands, We Sing ed by Kevin MacNeil (Polygon)

Contact details:

Email: r.k.watt@stir.ac.uk

First published: 1 October 2014