Poets Need Not: Liz Lochhead & Noreen Bissland
This blog explores a collaboration between former Scottish Makar and Poet Laureate for Glasgow, and her friend, artist Noreen Bissland.
They worked together on a fine art pamphlet, illustrating Liz's 2011 poem, "Poets Need Not".
The poet: Liz Lochhead
People are always asking me whether I want to illustrate my poems - some of them know I went to Glasgow School of Art. I graduated from the department of drawing and painting in 1970, and I do still love to draw!
My answer is absolutely not. Never.
All the imagery has to be created by the words.
A couple of years ago I was invited to read in Italy at a book festival in a town called Pordenonne. After I had finished I was approached by a Belgian woman resident in the Veneto called Janine Raedts who told me about Blue Print Press, her small fine-art press, and about the few letterpress editions that she had done of a few single poems by contemporary poets I admire.
She wanted to make an edition of 30: ten for the visual image maker, ten for her and her Press— ten for me.
I knew the artist should be my friend Noreen Bissland, who was becoming an obsessive etcher at the time — but I had no idea if she’d say yes — or that she is a genius illustrator.
Noreen knows what is the dramatic turning point, incident and image.
She said yes. I’ll always be so grateful!
We chose my poem, "Poets Need Not".
The Poem
Poets need not
be garlanded;
the poet’s head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry.
And poets need no laurels. Why be lauded
for the love of trying to nail the disembodied
image with that one plain word to make it palpable;
for listening in to silence for the rhythm capable
of carrying the thought that’s not thought yet?
The pursuit’s its own reward. So you have to let
the poem come to voice by footering
late in the dark at home, by muttering
syllables of scribbled lines — or what might
be lines, eventually, if you can get it right.
And this, perhaps, in public? The daytime train,
the biro, the back of an envelope, and again
the fun of the wildgoose chase
that goes beyond all this fuss.
Inspiration? Bell rings, penny drops,
the light-bulb goes on and tops
the not-good-enough idea that went before?
No, that’s not how it goes. You write, you score
it out, you write it in again the same
but somehow with a different stress. This is a game
you very seldom win
and most of your efforts end up in the bin.
There’s one hunched and gloomy heron
haunts that nearby stretch of River Kelvin
and it wouldn’t if there were no fish.
If it never in all that greyness passing caught a flash,
a gleam of something, made that quick stab.
That’s how a poem is after a long nothingness, you grab
at that anything and this is food to you.
It comes through, as leaves do.
All praise to poetry, the way it has
of attaching itself to a familiar phrase
in a new way, insisting it be heard and seen.
Poets need no laurels, surely?
their poems, when they can make them happen — even rarely —
crown them with green.
By Liz Lochhead
from A Choosing (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2011)
Reproduced by permission of the author.
The illustrator: Noreen Bissland
A graduate of Glasgow School of Art (BA Hons Design Textiles, 2005), Noreen Bissland initially worked as an art facilitator before discovering the world of etching in 2022.
I used the idea of words we want to read but can’t – they can be seen in the background of the etching, behind the heron. The heron reaches for “a gleam of something”, depicted in gold leaf in the river.
The image comes from the second last stanza of the poem, the "hunched and gloomy heron", which I depicted in dark blue/black ink - the River Kelvin is frequently gunmetal grey and I wanted the Heron to stand strong on the page.