In Conversation With Lesley Benzie

Following months of preparation, sourcing funding, and community engagement, the Wee Gaitherin poetry festival will be returning to the seaside town of Stonehaven, culminating in an outpouring of poetry this weekend.

Despite “running around like the proverbial headless chicken” poet and trustee for The Wee Gaitherin, Lesley Benzie, manages to squeeze in time to meet with me over Zoom to discuss the festival and her practice as a writer.

One of the most striking things about The Wee Gaitherin is the spirit of democracy and inclusivity that permeates all of their activities. A fundamental drive to break down social and cultural barriers to accessing poetry, to open up the poetic canon to a plurality of voices that have been historically excluded or under-represented, and to dismantle the perception that poetry is, and has to be, elusive. “That’s the idea, try to engage, and I suppose, excite people by what poetry can do,” Lesley agrees, “we’re trying to make it much more accessible for folk … a lot more engaging and immediate for folk who might not otherwise think poetry’s for them”.

This strained relationship with poetry is often formed during school, with the enforced dissection of work predominantly written by cis-gendered, middle-class, white men. “I remember when I was at school, a lot of the poetry … really wisnae that relevant … obviously you look at some stuff like Wordsworth and that has got beauty in it, but it didn’t feel like it engaged much with subject matter of a young, working class girl”, recalls Lesley.

It’s unsurprising then, to hear that, “when I was at school, if somebody had said to me I would be writing poetry at a certain point in my life I would have thought they were slightly … unhinged”.

Yet this stands at odds with her current relationship with poetry, “When I don’t do it I feel a less complete person … I feel less steady and grounded in my world … when I’m writing I feel very connected, not just to myself, but to something elemental … bringing forth the sense of, not just a thought, but the sense of what that thought means to me, the emotional relationship to that”.

I’m intrigued then, to know what the catalyst was in changing her relationship with poetry, “I’d been born and brought up in Aberdeen, spoke broad Doric, and when I moved to Glasgow … I had to really modify how I was speaking to be understood … everybody commented on how I spoke … I started second guessing myself how to speak … it was at that point, I think because I was missing the natural flow of the language and the words, that I put pen to paper … it just so happened, when I did that, it allowed me to let the language flow. … it was the missing speaking my normal everyday voice.”

Although Lesley initially started writing exclusively in Doric she has since started writing in English too, but maintains that writing in Doric “it taps into something quite … I suppose there’s a primal, very deep part of me that some stuff that I write about feels like it should be written about in Doric”.

Writing in Doric also allows Lesley to capture not only the language of the north-east, but something of the spirit of the north-east in a way that English can’t. The vocabulary of Doric reflects the lives and histories of the speakers, and the world in which they live. “You can use one word that really describes something, that if you were to try and describe it in English you would maybe have to use four or five different words because there is that thing that is onomatopoeic about the place it comes from and how it relates to the place, like smirr or haar … that captures weather in a way that you wouldn't understand in other parts of the world, or somebody would need to describe what smirry weather looked like” reflects Lesley.

There’s also something about in the lyrical quality of spoken Doric that Lesley enjoys experimenting with. “It gives something to a poem because of the rhythm of the language and the rhythm of the words … something in the musicality of the language … the sounds that add something more poetic… its a real pleasure to be able to do that”. This aural quality to the language lends itself beautifully to poetry readings, something that allows a wider audience to access Doric. “Not being used to seeing the written Scots a lot of people they struggle, but once they hear it they keep the music in their memory when they’re reading it again.”

Although now speaking Scots is recognised by government authorities as an essential element of Scottish culture and heritage, this has not always been the case. During the 1940s the Scottish Education Department argued that Scots was not a “suitable medium of education or culture”, leading to a suppression of Doric in schools. “When I was growing up because you werenae allowed to speak in Doric, that has meant that the language, some of it, is dying oot.”

This eradication of the Scots language seems to have deeper roots. The unification of Scotland and England led to Gaelic being outlawed (which was enforced much more harshly after the Jacobite uprisings in the 1700s). “One of the first things a colonial invader does it start to dismantle the indigenous culture and make its language, its culture dominant” observes Lesley as we discuss the Anglicisation of the Scottish language.

Through her poetry Lesley acts as an advocate for Doric, preserving a dialect that may have otherwise been on the cusp of extinction, as she notes, “this is part of oor soul and part of who we are and it was very much part of my living language growing up so I feel fundamentally I want to try and retain it as much as I can, and celebrate it”.

Yet this long history of suppression has created a perceived dichotomy between speaking Doric and being seen as an intellectual, with work written in Scots often being dismissed in highbrow literary circles. “There's that belief system that its couthie and that you’re … ill-educated if you speak it, and that you’re not worldly … for me its a myth really”, Lesley notes. Often work written in Doric can be tokenistic or a school exercise, yet she argues it is “good and interesting not for it to be seen as a couthie, old style backward language and that’s the thing about keeping it a living language” leading to her to delve into a wide variety of themes that explore her experience and perception of the world.

There’s something of a modern day Robert Burns to Lesley – many of her poems are fiercely political, rich in social commentary, and written in Scots.

This political edge is intrinsic to her identity as a writer. “For me I can’t help but put that into my work, otherwise why am I bothering writing anything at all, if I’m not prepared to say this is something I feel strongly about or that affected me or that has resonated with me,” she muses. “I can’t imagine not writing about how people relate toand treat each-other, how power corrupts ultimately, and how people abuse power”.

This abuse of power often appears in her work through her scrutiny of sexual politics and of our patriarchal society. Critical of her upbringing, “an environment where it was very traditional, the division of labour and the types of jobs that men and women did, and the expectations of whose word was more important” Lesley often addresses power imbalances between men and women in her work, although she acknowledges “we need to not think in purely binary, gender terms”. In our current patriarchal society she asserts “most women will have some experience of being disadvantaged, or being defined by patriarchal expectations, being treated badly because they’re a woman, even if they don’t recognise it as such”. Yet she is also keenly aware of the damage it can have on men, “an institutionalised mentality … that impacts on, not just women, but on men and men’s behaviour … it defines and can confines men into particular ways of being as well”.

Despite dealing with such weighty topics in her poetry, Lesley is keen to avoid coming across as polemic. Rather than “trying to directly tell what certain decisions or ways of being have, the impact they make” Lesley hopes “to show and thereby elicit an emotional response to the poem, that the person will emotionally resonate with what’s being said, and therefore think about the meaning more”. Using poetry as a vehicle for her observations allows her to add a poignancy to her work, something she manages beautifully within Sewn Up (her first collection of poetry) and Norlan Lichts (a collaboration with Sheena Blackhall and Sheila Templeton).

It’s her collaborative work that Lesley will be focusing on later this year. In September she and the other poets who make up the Wanderlust Woman trio (alongside Donna Campbell and Linda Jackson) will be returning to Barga and Pisa in September, before going on to Australia for a series of poetry reading. She is also focusing on the re-issuing of her second collection of poetry, Fessen/Reared (published by Seahorse Publications).

But for now Lesley is keen to ensure the success of the Wee Gatherin poetry festival, then she and the other trustees “can all go and have a curry”.

The Wee Gaitherin Poetry Festival runs from the tenth to the twelfth of August, with a wide range of, free, events across various times and venues in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire.

For more information go to https://www.weegaitherin.com/.

Lesley Benzie has two poetry collections, Sewn Up and Fessen/Reared (Seahorse Publications). She’s involved in three collaborative collections, Wanderlust Women: Three Poets (2022) & Extra Baggage (2023 Seahorse) and Norlan Lichts (Rymour Books). In recent years she was runner-up in the McCash (2020), shortlisted in Wigtown’s Main & Scots poetry competitions (2021) and nominated as Scots Writer of the year in the Scots Language Awards (2022). She is the Scots translator for the graphic novel, Black Oot Here: Dreams O Us (2023) by Francesca Sobande and layla-roxanne hill & Chris Manson.

Follow her on Instagram @lesleybenzie.