Whatever ‘wild’ means to you, you could be assured to find it, and many other surprises, in St Andrews and online at the 2023 festival. Environmental and landscape poetries. Unrestrained performances. Poetics which resist or re-wild existing forms. Poetries which challenge cultural and political norms. Wildly out-of-the-box, boundary-defying thinking and writing (because well might we need it…) Work which contests notions of ‘wildness’, ‘wilderness’ and ‘re-wilding’, and how these terms have been used (e.g. postcolonial writings which resist assumptions behind terms like ‘the wild west’). Involving poets and  artists from across Scotland, the UK and overseas, we explored this and more in a wild, long weekend of poetry, which was once again delivered in hybrid form.

The 2023 festival cover image illustrated some of these dynamics in the context of the Harris landscape – a place some might consider wild, but which to the people of Harris is a working and worked landscape (in fact, more broadly in the context of climate change, you might rightly question whether ‘wilderness’ exists anywhere these days). Meanwhile, the interpretation board sought to educate us about the landscape, but in the process tamed it. There’s the wild incongruity of the office chair – resisting our expectations (and the wildly changeable weather!) – and the bus stop symbolizing how language is always a journey in progress… a journey which stopped by St Andrews and the Fife coastline, and our YouTube channel, between 9th and 12th March 2023.