Land: An Outlook

Land’s a broad term. Our cities are land, our roads and parks, the coast, canal beds, airports, multistorey car parks. Whether we live in a high-rise, a hut, or a palace, it’s bedrock and earth below. Legally-speaking, those who own land in Scotland also own what lies beneath it. They own the sky above it too. Wet Grain’s new focus on ownership, land-use, & provenance was chosen with this straightforward but ample sense of the word in mind in the belief that it provides firm footing. As both a measurable economic unit and (more importantly for us) a paradigmatic metaphor, how we relate to land shapes us imaginatively at the deepest level.

Although our lens here is conceptual first and foremost, it’d be disingenuous not to admit that the choice was made partly for political reasons. To our minds, a locale for poetry that foregrounds land is important precisely because of how easily the cry to ‘get back to the land’ has been co-opted to justify evil throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Think lebensraum, Zionism, & the green fascism currently gaining traction across Europe and the States. Without pretending to articulate the geo-political facts, poetry is invaluable to our spatial awareness now as ever. As a magazine, our aim from now on will be to open up the field of view here, forwarding a vision of land held in common, literally as well as lyrically.

So we’re after poetry that takes in the history of a landscape along with its beauty; that traces the international trade routes of minerals and fruits, and looks askance at the stainless steel and glass of new property developments. We’ll be reading for a subtext of international solidarity, one of hard truths and of witness in the true sense of the word – how could we not? – but as poets ourselves, whose first responsibility is an aesthetic one, our primary criteria will be those qualities we chase in our own work and elude definition: beauty, subtlety of feeling, originality.

Send us your poems.

Patrick Romero McCafferty