Scottish folk songs and traditional ballads are a vital and consistent inspiration to your writings, their voice, lyricism and musicality. How did your relationship with ballads begin?

In my family. As a child I heard recordings by Jeannie Robertson and Belle Stewart, two of the greatest traditional singers of the 20th century, along with field recordings of other singers from Scotland and England. We also had recordings of Appalachian and cowboy music that derived from the Scots, English, and Irish traditions. Later on, I discovered singers of my own generation — Dick Gaughan, especially — whose love of (and apprenticeship to) the tradition included a keen political awareness and a social sense close to my own.

…my sense of how collage and quotation tie a poem (materially, sonically, rhythmically) to collective experience is directly influenced by ballad form.

Much is said about the politics of content in folk song, but I am also interested in ballad form as a mediating device between the individual and the collective. For me, the permeability of a ballad text by other texts means not only the presence of formulaic phrases and stanzas (which show up in multiple ballads, and signal similar plot situations when they do) but also the presence of singers as co-creators, along with all the cultural and historical contexts these phrases, stanzas, stories and melodies have passed through. It’s not quotation, because there’s no urtext to say a line came from. Nor can you call it collage — an artistic term not invented till the 20th century. Even so, my sense of how collage and quotation tie a poem (materially, sonically, rhythmically) to collective experience is directly influenced by ballad form. The ballads’ implacability has also shaped my perception of experience: the sense of a world where a murderous and chaotic Otherworld — the terrible Fate or the big Lie — is always near-to-hand, ready to swallow us whole, and it’s just a few words that protect us, or take us down. Is it “Six king’s daughters have I drowned here / And the seventh shall surely be thee” or “Six king’s daughters have you drowned here / And the seventh has drownèd thee”? Here’s another version, derived from my husband’s war stories:

One quiet night on the Mekong River, a guy goes out to piss off the fantail of a gunboat. Fire opens up from the bank, and a rocket-propelled grenade goes through his neck. Another quiet night on the Mekong River, a guy goes out to piss off the fantail of a gunboat. The boat hits a mine. The guy is thrown clear by the explosion, and lives.