#MacDiarmid
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tommyreckless.bsky.social
Obviously Mr Male has never heard Hugh MacDiarmid.
October 5, 2026 at 5:53 PM
glasgowrevbooks.bsky.social
A new essay by Alec Finlay @alecfinlay.bsky.social, reflecting on his personal journey to 'tidal poetics' in the wake of MacDiarmid, Black Mountain, and others. tinyurl.com/4pt25a79
October 5, 2026 at 11:18 AM
universityofotago.bsky.social
A few childhood maths "magic tricks" from her grandad sparked a lifelong passion 🪄✨

Now, Mathematics Master’s tauira Megan Macdiarmid is developing tools that could help solve real-world science challenges, including calculating the speed at which different shapes of ice melt 🧊

Read more ⬇️
One magic granddad equals passion for maths
Mathematics Master’s tauira Megan Macdiarmid does some of her best problem-solving when she’s tramping outdoors.
www.otago.ac.nz
October 5, 2026 at 3:50 AM
six18sfoundry.bsky.social
I feel your plight and have no name for it.
Let us lament together—the broken mirror
And you found naked in your hiding place.

bit of Requiem for a Friend
Rilke tr Macdiarmid
#poetrysunday
October 4, 2026 at 7:30 PM
tommyreckless.bsky.social
Something for the weekend:
Clash Stramash | Daily Reckless
Collection of Reckless Clash related nonsense. Tracks: These Days MacDiarmid Ginsberg Time London Corrie I Don’t Accept The Premise Of Your Question Korea Opportunities Help Yourself Pig Vomit Toxin K...
www.dailyreckless.com
October 3, 2026 at 7:27 AM
tommyreckless.bsky.social
Album of the day in the Daily Reckless #albumoftheday #BandcampFriday
Clash Stramash | Daily Reckless
Collection of Reckless Clash related nonsense. Tracks: These Days MacDiarmid Ginsberg Time London Corrie I Don’t Accept The Premise Of Your Question Korea Opportunities Help Yourself Pig Vomit Toxin K...
www.dailyreckless.com
October 2, 2026 at 12:00 PM
billykayscot.bsky.social
For #NationalPoetryDay an early Hugh MacDiarmid lyric - The Bonnie Broukit Bairn - the beautiful neglected child.
October 1, 2026 at 5:47 PM
johnnysull.bsky.social
johnposullivan.substack.com/p/1-october-...
1 October 2026
Eilis O’Connell at teh Solomon Gallery, Rickie Lee Jones in Copenhagen long ago, Back in the Troy, Jack Smith for Man of the Year and the irascible Hugh MacDiarmid.
johnposullivan.substack.com
October 1, 2026 at 8:48 AM
asls.org.uk
“The use of Scots, apart from the relative ease of working up the right atmosphere, also helps (though dangerously) because of the verbal freedom it confers on a harassed translator”

—Edwin Morgan on translating Mayakovsky
#InternationalTranslationDay #poetry
asls.org.uk/publications...
Book cover: Edwin Morgan IN TOUCH WITH LANGUAGE A New Prose Collection 1950–2005 Edited by John Coyle and James McGonigal The cover image shows a photo of Edwin Morgan in three-quarters profile, taken by Marshall Walker circa 1975. Morgan is in his mid-fifties; he is wearing glasses with thick black frames, and looks pensively down and to the right. The photograph is covered by a riot of semi-transparent multicoloured swirls and shapes. 2: A note to the translation of Mayakovsky’s ‘Fiddle-Ma-Fidgin’ In the triptych by Hieronymus Bosch known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, the ‘Hell’ panel shows a man crucified on a harp, with the strings passing through his body, but his arms free, embracing it, in an extraordinary image of mingled pain, beauty, and yearning. In the same picture, this man is surrounded by much more grotesque images, where figures of desperation are doing things to and with various musical instruments Which even to name wad be unlawfu’. The poetry of Mayakovsky from his futurist period shows a similar conjunction of extreme yearning and coarsely grotesque asseverations, held together in a web of convincing fantasy where animate and inanimate react on one another. In the present poem (actual title The Violin and a Little Nervously, date 1914), written when Mayakovsky was twenty, the poet expresses in miniature the situation of his whole life: loneliness, desire to communicate and ‘contribute’, sympathy towards the outcast and the misunderstood. The potential desperation in this, however, finds voice through fantasy, fun, and caricature. A violin (the word is feminine in Russian) begins to ‘sing’ in such a personal and yearning way that the other instruments in the orchestra get annoyed with it and tell it to shut up until it can control itself; the poet bursts in on the orchestra and despite their ribald laughter embraces the […] […] violin and proposes to this ‘wooden bride’, which he sees as a kindred soul. I wanted in my translation to bring out if I could the distinctive Mayakovskian mixture of grotesque high-jinks and underlying seriousness of purpose. To do this, I used Scots, trying to tap an enduring Scottish tradition of grotesque exaggeration or fantasy which is found in Dunbar and the ballads, Burns and MacDiarmid. They’ll turn me in your arms, lady, Into an esk and adder; But haud me fast, and fear me not, I am your bairn’s father. The use of Scots, apart from the relative ease of working up the right atmosphere, also helps (though dangerously) because of the verbal freedom it confers on a harassed translator. What can only be weakly called ‘expressive’ words tumble from the Caledonian cornucopia: slunkert, daunert, glinkit, sprachlt, crunkelt, yowp and yowl, for which ‘slunk’, ‘wandered’, ‘glanced’, ‘sprawled’, ‘folded’, ‘bawl and howl’ are unimpressive equivalents. The temptation in this is to make the poem look more continuously vivid or ‘strange’ than it really is. Fortunately it is difficult to make Mayakovsky look over-vivid, as his diction employs every liberty the genius of Russian allows, but the method would work only with poets who were similarly inventive and uninhibited in their linguistic texture. I don’t look on Scots as a medium that can now be widely or thoughtlessly used in poetry, but against the argument that we have reached the stage where it should be given up altogether I would offer the evidence of my own experience in translating Mayakovsky (and add to it Sydney Goodsir Smith’s Scottish version of Blok’s The Twelve): Scots gets closer than English to the ‘barbarian lyre’ of the revolutionary spirit. If people can be persuaded to read it, it will give them a sensation they cannot at the moment get from English verse. The Review 1, April/May 1962.
September 30, 2026 at 2:09 PM
dov.bsky.social
Hugh MacDiarmid was wrong to say that everything bad in Scotland stemmed from the Reformation. But in another sense he actually was very much correct
dov.bsky.social Turing Police Andúnië Branch 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @dov.bsky.social · 5d
Remains a demented choice. We could have had bùlangeraichean serving baguettes with square sausage. But no. You wanted to be Protestant.
September 30, 2026 at 1:49 PM
briannicholson.bsky.social
Key Change 2 by Miles MacDiarmid
September 27, 2026 at 1:14 AM
drstevecohen.bsky.social
I had an undergraduate class with Alan MacDiarmid at Penn in inorganic chemistry.
September 14, 2026 at 8:58 PM
luathpress.bsky.social
This collection features nine different stories presenting contemporary Scottish life inspired by folk tales from around the world, Scots ballads and the poetry of Coleridge and Hugh MacDiarmid. Congratulations Gerda 👏
September 14, 2026 at 9:00 AM
michelleksmith.bsky.social
Not so sure about that. Biden signed at the same desk during his official visit in 2023. I think Trump and Biden got a better deal than Barack Obama. Imagine being 6 feet 1.5 inches (187 cm) tall and having to lean over a coffee table.
US First Lady Michelle Obama is seen signing the guestbook during the presidential visit to Ireland in May 2011. President Mary McAleese (left) and President Barack Obama (second from left) look on as First Lady Michelle Obama signs the book, accompanied by Dr. Martin McAleese (right), at Áras an Uachtaráin. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid (c) Getty Images. US President Joe Biden is seen signing the guestbook during the presidential visit to Ireland in April 2023. Irish President Michael D Higgins (left) and President Biden (right), at Áras an Uachtaráin. (c) Reuters.
September 13, 2026 at 9:59 PM
taxidouglas.bsky.social
He looks like Ian ‘Emperor Palpatine’ Macdiarmid though.
September 12, 2026 at 6:00 AM
hermetic.com
Also, the anniversary of the Greater Feast of William the Conqueror, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Hugh MacDiarmid.
September 9, 2026 at 4:11 PM
asls.org.uk
The deid-hole’s a sma-boukit place for you.
You need tae be blawn aboot the cosmos
so’s your live matter mells wi the spaces
and you become the stour starns are made o…

—Alastair Mackie: In Memoriam Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978)

Christopher Murray Grieve – Hugh MacDiarmid – died #OTD, 9 Sept
#poem
In Memoriam Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) Alastair mackie The deid-hole’s a sma-boukit place for you. You need tae be blawn aboot the cosmos so’s your live matter mells wi the spaces and you become the stour starns are made o. Sma spirit, ye couped yoursel oot like an ocean and on it ye sailed tae your odyssey. Your poems set their bows for the infinite. It was a sma bit coble made o Scots. Ahent the muckle brae-face o your brou barmed the thochts. They were like boolders, ram-stam, ramgunshoch, aften wilyart. Polyphemus hurlin craigs at the galleys’ hotterin starns. And aye the sky-line cockit its fore-finger. For fifty years laneliness was your crony. Your spaces were polar anes, the cauld burn o your mind the aixle-tree that iled your world. I think o Pascal’s infinite spaces and Scotland a wee dot in the abyss. You gied it a starn; the muckle hole skinkles yet in the licht. Sic matter never dees. The terror that I feel is for the muckle howe-hole your last sleep leaves ahent. As if a mountain that held up the lyft had sunk intae the mools and suddenly the sky-line’s unfrienly. And oor steps styter and Scotland’s again ‘the bonny broukit bairn’. Lie back in your kist licht bearer. And may the giant back-birn ye cairriet lie lichtly in the earth’s happin.
September 9, 2026 at 1:05 PM
muirneag.bsky.social
Christopher Murray Grieve aka Hugh MacDiarmid died 9th September.
In Memoriam: Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) by Alastair Mackie
September 9, 2026 at 11:21 AM
gaspurves.bsky.social
Christine De Luca on Christopher Murray Grieve's shaky grasp of geomorphology, in 'Ayont the Thistle', a gallimaufry of poetry and prose to mark the centenary of 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle'.🤨
#BookSky💙📚 #ScottishLiterature

www.goodreads.com/quotes/24224...
A quote from Ayont the Thistle
It intrigued me that literary people raved about the poems MacDiarmid wrote while living in Shetland, especially 'On a Raised Beach', while I found them ...
www.goodreads.com
September 7, 2026 at 9:21 AM
chemistryworld.com
Chemist and materials scientist Hideki Shirakawa, who shared the chemistry Nobel prize for the discovery and development of conductive polymers has passed away at 90 years old.

#ChemSky
www.chemistryworld.com/news/hideki-...
Hideki Shirakawa, who shared chemistry Nobel for discovering conductive polymers, passes away at 90
Collaboration with Alan MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger on doped polyacetylenes ushered in new field of electronics
www.chemistryworld.com
September 4, 2026 at 1:44 PM
muirneag.bsky.social
Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)
September 2, 2026 at 10:03 PM
cascaolas.eurosky.social
Hugh MacDiarmid, 1926
September 2, 2026 at 9:16 PM
nicktheinventor.bsky.social
@oldfortunatus.bsky.social amazing King Lear production at Sheffield crucible tonight. Ian MacDiarmid.
September 1, 2026 at 9:50 PM
nicktheinventor.bsky.social
Incredible production of King Lear with the Emperor himself Ian MacDiarmid at the Sheffield Crucible.

If you’re in South Yorkshire and want to see some incredible Shakespeare get yourself down there next couple of weeks
September 1, 2026 at 9:49 PM
azjackson.bsky.social
New from @tippermuirbooks.bsky.social - a weighty volume of essays and poems on MacDiarmid. Well done Jim Mackintosh, Alan Riach and James Robertson for making this happen!
August 31, 2026 at 7:11 PM