Poetry

An Eye For An Eye For An Eye explores what it means to grow up a girl, and how this experience intersects with disability and visual impairment. These poems concern themselves with looking: looking back over a childhood, looking again at what’s in front of us, and looking forward to possible futures. They visit girlhood and myth, blindness and friendship. They celebrate the freedom, shame, and awkwardness of coming to terms with our own bodies, and they ask what it means to look different and see differently.

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IF YOU’VE SEEN IT YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT is a photography and poetry project developed through the Edwin Morgan Trust and Disability Arts Online Associate Artist programme.

The final exhibition will be held at AGITATE gallery in Edinburgh, from the 17th – 31st of May. Click here for more information about the gallery, and details of the free launch event.

An audio guide leads its listener through a series of images. A character in itself – the guide takes on the role of an unreliable narrator with a shifting tone: at times direct, at points abstractly poetic, and sometimes reflective. These inconsistencies and fluctuations in approach conjure up questions around the ways in which our eyes and our minds often sit at odds with each other – does the audio match up with what our own vision makes of the photographs? How many ways can an image be read? Is seeing really believing or is the old adage flawed?

The work uses as its starting point inspiration taken from Morgan’s instamatic style – the technique of writing poetry about images, both real and imagined – and combines this with ruminations on the art of photography from a visually impaired perspective, cultural understandings of sight, and the lived experience of the failings of unhelpful image description. Together, the images and text pose the question: what does ‘seeing’ really mean?

Part of the process of the associateship has involved writing blogs for Disability Arts Online – read or listen to The Bigger Picture here

The poetry trail, commissioned by Sustrans for Disability History Month, responds to the history of Edinburgh’s blind institutions, and the more general topic of work for blind and visually impaired people.

The trail is located (until the 16th of December 2022) between the Innocent Tunnel and the Innocent Railway Bridge on Edinburgh’s Cycle Route One.

As well as the physical trail, the project also includes two led walks along the route, and a performance film.

Wet Grain is a Scottish poetry journal for new writing.

One Tree Hill, a poem about cinematic frankness, was published in Issue Three.

In March 2021, a group of 29 creative practitioners from across Scotland came together in virtual spaces to think, talk, listen and dream, learning from each other and through the act of dialogue. FIELD Scotland: On Value is a printed product of this dialogue. These writings reflect some of their thinking, on where we are now and some paths forward. Here you will find more questions than answers, and we hope these will nudge you into new thoughts, collective actions, responsibilities and futures.

’What I See When I See This’ is a poetic reflection on competition and rejection within the arts.

Pushing Out The Boat, North-East Scotland’s unique literary and arts journal, publishes high-quality prose, poetry and art selected from a unique blend of the global and the local.

in my best dreams, a poem about long-distance friendship, and Reel, a poem about playing the fiddle, featured in Issue 16 of the magazine.

Not Going Back to Normal is a collective disabled artists manifesto, created in Scotland in 2020. The project comprises 49 artworks and texts responding to a call for ideas for a radically accessible arts world, and was curated by Harry Josephine Giles and Sasha Saben Callaghan.

The Things That Keep Me Tired is a poem about trying to conform with the inaccessible expectations of the arts sector.

Spot on Shorts is a digital storytelling series produced by The Space and Lancashire Libraries, designed to offer some brief respite from the news, or stress of lockdown.

Coulter’s Candy is a story about four strong women who in some way, can teach us about the world. Taking a 19th century sweet-selling jingle as a starting point, learn about Mum, Ruby, Han Lou, and Granny.

Spoonfeed is an online literary magazine publishing creative and experimental food writing, edited by Kat Payne Ware.

BBQ featured in their Pocket Issue which was published in collaboration with New Writing at the University of East Anglia.

Magma 77: Act Your Age is a collection of poems, articles, and interviews that interrogate age and all its connotations. This edition of Magma was edited by Gboyega Odubanjo, Selina Rodrigues and Christine Webb.

Young For My Age is a reflection on the feeling that everything is growing at a pace you can’t keep up with.