"I want people to be saying poems out loud as naturally as they would sing a song.” Liz Lochhead is on a mission to de-mystify poetry and promote its accessibility to anyone and everyone. It has been just over a month since Lochhead was appointed as the new Scottish Makar, the equivalent of Britain’s poet laureate, a role which she never intended or expected to achieve.  “It was very scary and I thought about the fact that I didn’t deserve it,” she says.  As modest as she is gifted, Lochhead has been an established poet and playwright for over 30 years, producing poetry which has entered the consciousness of British students and fans alike.

Originally published February 22 2011

The role of Makar is a very modern one, Glasgow-born Edwin Morgan was named the first of the laureates in 2004. In the same year, Morgan wrote a poem to celebrate the opening of the Scottish Parliament which was fittingly read aloud by Lochhead herself. Sadly, Morgan died last year leaving what Lochhead calls “a legacy that is impossible to fill, I think the point is to not even try.”

As well as gaining notoriety for her poetry, Lochhead is also a successful dramatist. Her plays Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and Perfect Days were received with high acclaim. However, there is still only one true love for Lochhead. “There is something very pure about writing a poem as it isn’t for anything - its just for itself and that’s the best pleasure of all.” She continues, “best of all I would like to be a poet in the theatre”.

Becoming laureate comes with the responsibility of being asked to write poems for important occasions, but Lochhead remains insistent that the role will not compromise the quality of her work. “Well, you can ask but I will only do it if I can,” she says. “You can usually write something but whether or not it is a poem is very iffy.” Despite such an attitude, Lochhead regards poetry as a vocation, as she strongly confirms: “I have not made a career out of poetry, being ‘a poet’ is something I needed to do.” Although the role came as “a wonderful surprise”, it is easy to see why Lochhead has gained the accolade of Scottish Makar. She has an established reputation which began to develop when she joined Philip Hosbaum’s writers group in her early twenties. Whilst surrounded by contemporaries such as Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard, Lochhead quickly made a name for herself and released her first collection, Memo for Spring, in 1972. It  won the Scottish Arts Council Award. 

 
Being around such influential men did not deter Lochhead. At this time there was a true need for the female voice, although gender restriction were virtually non-existent. “Being a female writer worked as an advantage for me, I mapped the female life and why wouldn’t I?”, she says.

Lochhead’s style of writing is recognised for its unpretentious yet eloquent style, which often self-consciously mimics and recreates idioms of speech. Not unlike Scotland’s poetic hero Robert Burns, Lochhead is able to adopt many different voices and personas in order to reflect the diversity of the world around her. It seems appropriate then that her first official duty as Makar was to commence the opening of Ayrshire’s new Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. Lochhead acknowledges the importance of Burns to the Scottish identity and to Scottish poets in particular as “he is built in to what our idea of a poet is.” She adds, “I don’t like the idea of making a saint out of him but we can’t get him out of our psyche really. It was essential for him to do what he did, and in turn he is essential for us.”

Despite Burns’ dominating presence in the poetic world, Lochhead recognises that people are still hesitant and reluctant to embrace poetry, perhaps because of the teaching we receive as children with “a lot of teachers becoming very afraid of poems because they don’t know what the right answer is”. Whatever the reason, it is evident that today’s society prefers to read a novel, particularly with the rise of the e-reader, or go and see a play. So is there a future in poetry? For Lochhead the answer is of course and an unequivocal yes. She argues that poetry is integral to society as it “asks us to examine the truth of something”, a skill which we learn as a child in nursery rhymes and carry with us for the rest of our lives. She admits that in the future poems won’t all be completely valuable but it will always remain “a very basic instinct … that is why there is a need for a Laureate role."

In light of this, it may seem odd that Lochhead’s initial intention was never to become a poet. Instead, she attended Glasgow School of Art in the 1970s with all the aspirations and hopes of becoming a successful artist. Yet, despite a deep admiration for the abstract painters of this time, the transition to poetry came out of missing the human in the things she was painting. She is, therefore, no stranger to education. “I loved being a student ,” she says. “You don’t realise at the time how lucky you are.” After Art School, she decided to teach Fine Art for eight years before making the definite transition to becoming a professional writer.

From these direct experiences, Lochhead is very conscious and aware of the recent rise in tuition fees that were announced late last year and she does not shy away from her opinions. “I thinks it’s terrible - we really are entering into a scary time where we don’t know when it will end.” The passion which resonates in her poems becomes very evident as she becomes increasingly agitated by the “short sightedness of government.” Yet, the drastic hike in fees does have one upside for Lochhead, the proud images of students protesting and standing up for their rights, a sight which she feels had been missing for so long. She sincerely claims that "if I had my time again, I would protest against these tuition fees in order to help the next generation be educated."Moreover, the rise in tuition fees is not the only governmental change which has riled Lochhead. The recent announcement to cut one in five British libraries came as a shock and severe disappointment to her. She states confidently “I wouldn’t be a poet if it wasn’t for libraries.” Lochhead argues that going to a library is not simply about borrowing books, what becomes important is the “wandering through open shelves when I was thirteen”. She continues, “I couldn’t wait till I got home to read them so I’d go to a café for a sausage roll and read.” She has no doubt that libraries shaped who she is today and the sadness at seeing them slowly evaporate is strikingly clear.

Lochhead is following in the footsteps of her life-long friend, Carol Ann Duffy (Britian’s poet laureate), in becoming a popular female authority within poetry. By bridging the gap between poetry and real life, it is easy to see how Lochhead is fast becoming Scotland’s new literary icon. She admits that she considered not taking the role of Makar but believed it would have been a waste of an “amazing opportunity”. Whilst in the post, her aim is simple: “ to fly the flag for poetry and for poetry to come in at the centre of everyday life where I think it belongs.” She claims that whilst she  may not have always known what she was doing, but from the age of 18 she knew it would be to do with poetry. She concludes: “It was an excitement that hasn’t happened often enough in my life but when it has, I love doing it.”