In 1991, the successful endeavour to create Scotland’s first writer’s haven was bolstered by a 24-hour Poethon which took place one long day during the Edinburgh Festival.

An engorged Illiad of diverse verse, the work of living poets was [largely] recited by weavers & devotees of silken lines in a kind of beating-the-bounds-of-Old-Reekie: every fresh hour, a shiny new location.

One recital sticks in the mind by virtue of its piquancy. Acrobat was … a poem? … recited by a self-confident soul whose humour seemed to mingle with a profound enquiry into the meaning of words.

The poem was the word Acrobat, said/uttered/expelled/ intoned/mysterified/whispered/murmured over and over: mebbie in over Fifty such exclamations.

Comatose with fatigue before its performance at around Three in the morning, Acrobat woke us up ~ woke me up.

Repetition of a word takes those who listen through a kind of dark night of the soul: acidly stripping meaning, corrosively reforming its structure in order that it rises, as Excalibur, from murk of meaningless chaos to tangible clarity of truth.

The ghastly clatterage of letters which coalesce as Brexit makes that rule. In virtue of its exceptional inelegance, repetition only reinforces the immutably grizzled impli-&-ramifications which remain wholly resistant to redemptive transformation.

Would that poets gathered up the debris this process has wrought such as to re-form it into something kind, persuasive, generous, focussed: they may be the only clear-sighted souls able to save us.

Moniack Mhor is a thriving, febrile throb of writerly longings, whence the inspiring nurture the aspiring.