5PX2

Despite holidaying in Eyemouth, on Thursday last week, I joined most of the other contributors* (inlcuding one of the translators) at the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh to launch 5PX2: Five Italian Poets and Five Scottish Poets. The evening was slightly chaotic but enormous fun. A good-sized audience, too, for a Thursday in holiday time with competition from the Science Festival.

Everybody’s work was performed in the original and translation. I don’t speak Italian, but hearing the contributors from Italy — Dome Bulfaro, Tiziana Cera Rosco, Tiziano Fratus, Federico Italiano and Eliana Deborah Langiu — enriched my appreciation of the translations considerably. At the last minute, I was asked to read the English translations for Dome Bulfaro, which was fun. It felt a bit like playing by ear, as I tried to follow his pauses as much as possible. Of my own five in the book (which are all new), I read “The White Dot” and “Breathing is the Place to Start”. For me, the highlights of the other performances were Matthew Fitt and his translator alternating the pages of “Kate O’Shanter’s Tale” between Scots and Italian; Tiziana Cera Rosco’s reading, which electrified her poems; and Tiziano Fratus’s translation of my “Breathing is the Place to Start”, which sounded truly beautiful.

These things are always about meeting people as much as about the poems. Some good friendships were made and others strengthened — I hadn't sat down with Matthew Fitt for a long time, for instance. The Italians were great craic; I only wish we could have spent more time together, but thanks are due to the Institute for the meal that enabled us to spend the time together that we did.

With all the conversation we’re having around here about younger Scottish poets, it was particularly refreshing to connect with a bunch poets under 40 from outside the Scottish and British bubbles. For some reason, the sheer volume of good will and admiration that exists abroad for Scotland and Scottish writing always takes me by surprise. Perhaps there’s more of the Scottish cringe left in me than I thought. Let's hope the evening helped to kill that vestige off.

*Unfortunately, Claire Askew couldn’t make it.

StAnza: Absence, Presence and Accuracy

An oddity of this year's StAnza is that one of the most defining events for me was something I wasn't at. I refer, of course, to the poetry breakfast on the Friday, on the topic "Where are all the Scottish poets under 40?" I was dying to hear about it and asked one or two people on the Friday -- Colin Donati and Claire Askew, to be precise -- what had been said and what they'd thought of it.

However, it was Bill Manhire who really turned it into to the defining event. Towards the end of his masterclass on the Saturday morning, he referred to having been at an event "where people were saying there were no Scottish poets under 40". Ahem, 'scuse me. This is a Scottish poet under 40*.

After the masterclass, Rob A Mackenzie, Ross Wilson and I asked Manhire about his comment. He said that everyone on the panel for the breakfast seemed to be in agreement that there were no Scottish poets under 40. I was, as you can imagine, pretty exercised by this. However, I was also sure the poetry breakfast discussion was more nuanced than his memory of it. It was about the dearth but not absence of Scottish poets in my generation. In fact, the panel included a Scottish poet under 40: Christie Williamson (although Christie, being a Shetlander, would hesitate to define himself as Scottish). And I already knew from my conversations the previous night that Cheryl Follon and I had been mentioned in the discussion.

But if what came over to Bill Manhire was that we don't exist at all, what did others hear? You can hear a bit of the discussion for yourself on the Friday podcast, but all it does for me is leave me itching to hear the whole thing, which will be possible at some point in the coming weeks. I don't want to rehash the recent discussion on Rob's blog, but if anyone has anything to add to that, comment here by all means.

I'm particularly interested in where we go from here, and am glad to see that Colin Will is taking that tack on his blog. Maybe we need to start by making a greater effort to celebrate and encourage the poets we do have in my generation and below, whatever stage they're at, and Colin W's suggestion of a pamphlet series akin to the tall-lighthouse Pilot one is good in that respect.

I reckon we also need urgently to bolster and co-ordinate the opportunities for learning (and, therefore, teaching) poetry writing outside the university creative writing MScs. These courses are, of course, good in themselves, but they seem to have had the unintended consequence of narrowing opportunities beyond the academy. They simply aren't affordable to everybody, for one thing. Informal networks can be great, but have they shrunk too? It's great for individual writers to start independent workshops, but perhaps we can do more for one another by working together. Maybe we need to see whether a Scottish Poetry School or a Scottish curriculum for the Poetry School is possible.

Much as it might satisfy the dour and dreich side of our national character, let's not have our visitors going back to their countries telling everyone that Scottish poetry is doomed by a lack of young(er) blood**.

I'll post separately about the masterclass and other events from the Saturday at StAnza.

*The grey hair, folks, has been gradually colonising my scalp since I was 12.
**Happily, our friends in Turin obviously don't think that.

Hadfield on Today

The Today programme's interview with Jen Hadfield is here, along with all the recordings they've done of the other shortlisted writers. Worth a listen. She sounds a touch tired. Good on her!

Seeing the shortlist again just emphasises how stunning a success this is for her. Not just for her, but for the younger poetry generation(s). Somehow having the faces there gives it all the more impact. There's almost something of a Dr Who moment to it, not only because Jen Hadfield is the youngest TS Eliot prizewinner ever, but because of how young she looks next to everyone else. (She's only three or so years younger than me, but somehow it feels like she younger still.)

There's certainly a sense of excitement around the UK poetry world -- or at least the corners I frequent, virtual and otherwise -- about this award. A sense of something genuinely fresh happening. Todd Swift says it's the next best thing to an Obama moment, which feels accurate, overblown and very slightly churlish all in one to me.

Here are some links to other bloggers' perspectives: Katy Evans-Bush, Rob Mackenzie, Matt Merritt (I'll add to this if and as I spot any more).

Mick Imlah 1956-2009

Mick Imlah, whose second book of poems, The Lost Leader, won the 2008 Forward prize for best collection and is shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, has died. He was only 52.

Timor mortis conturbat me.

Me, Themselves and I

Rob Mackenzie has blogged about using personas and characters in his poetry. One of the points he discusses is the degree to which a reader is likely to equate the I of a poem written in the first person with the writer. Anyone who writes in a persona -- anyone who writes, I suspect -- knows that the poem can go places and say things its writer doesn't necessarily think or agree with. One way round that is to use the second person, but I don't really like that. I've tried to explore the reasons for that dislike here.

Is it, I wonder, more common for people to equate the first person with the writer when they're reading poetry than when they're reading fiction? I have to say I was once guilty of making that lazy assumption more often than not, but that time is long gone! Certainly, anyone properly familiar with the techniques and approaches of contemporary poetry is unlikely to assume automatically that, just because a poem is written in the first person, it directly reflects the experiences and/or opinions of its writer.

Of course, the reverse is also true: just because a poem obviously employs a persona doesn't mean it is no reflection of the writer's life. "The Apple's Song" by Edwin Morgan strikes me as a good instance: it is very much like his love poetry in tone and language -- so much so that I want to say, "his other love poetry" -- but is written in the voice of an apple in a fruitbowl. I don't know whether Morgan felt that affinity as he wrote the poem, whether it was intentional or one of those wonderful creative accidents, but the connection is undeniable. And there are several reasons why that love-lyric impulse might have been pushed through the monologue form, consciously or (more likely) unconsciously.

As readers, we have to make the judgment writer by writer and poem by poem. But we also have a responsibility to take into account the rest of the writer's work, as far as we can know it. For writers, the problem is perhaps less to do with the use of the first person for a (semi-)fictional persona and more to do with the publishing of individual poems here and there in magazines and, perhaps, anthologies, divorced from the context of the rest of their work. That's one reason why the poetry collection is such a good thing.

(Did I mention Rob's collection is also coming out from Salt? 1 March: it's this year's day, people!)

The Essay and Much More

It's a good season for poetry on Radio 3. The Essay last week was deeply under the influence: five contemporary poets each on a poet who influenced them. I'd recommend in particular Michael Symmons Roberts on David Jones; WN Herbert on Edwin Morgan (don't ask me what the picture of Eilean Donan castle is about!); and Menna Elfyn on T Gwynn Jones. But hurry up and listen before they fall off the end of the iPlayer, which starts happening tomorrow.

But that's just the canape in comparison to the cornucopia of programmes on and/or involving work by Milton up till the end of the year. His shorter poems are being dropped into Breakfast and Afternoon on 3. They started in earnest with the Sunday Feature tonight, to which I'm listening as I write this, and continue with the Essay this week.

Small is Beautiful!

That's got to have been the best wee festival in the world we had the weekend before last. What a cracker LBF 08 was! Fiona Hyslop, the Scottish Government education secretary and a Lithgae resident, launched the festival and christened our new participants autograph book. She stayed around for Christopher Brookmyre's sell-out event. There was such a fantastic buzz about the hall as the crowd piled in. Brookmyre, whom I'd never heard before, was an entertaining speaker and reader. There was a fantastic buzz as the crowd piled out too. We couldn't have got off to a better start.

The poetry workshop I ran occupied me for the first chunk of the Saturday. It went swimmingly, if I do say so myself. I had four participants, a comfortable number for discussion and reading round. They were a good group--gelled well, very ready to talk about the poems I used as models--and I was impressed with what they produced in the 20 or so minutes they had to write at the end. We chatted on afterwards for a good half hour, so I missed Timothy Neat on Hamish Henderson and the first Saturday event I sat in on was James Kelman's reading. First time I'd seen him too. I'd heard say he wasn't such a great speaker, but I was impressed. He read from Kieron Smith, Boy; I was struck how well he'd seemed to capture not only the language of the boy but the grammar of his thought processes and how he turned them to poetry without losing any authenticity. He was forceful and articulate too in what he said about Scotland, Scottish culture, Scots language and cultural amnesia.

After Kelman, I took a break, getting back to the festival in time to help out for Alex Gray's event. I didn't hear her, as I manned the front desk partly to keep an eye on any early arrivals for the open mike, but her reading seemed to go down well with the audience (which, incidentally, included Rob A Mackenzie).

The open mike was a triumph. We had a good mix of poetry and prose; a good mix of styles. Usually, such events are hit and miss, sometimes terribly hit and miss. This one was hit after hit: good performances all round and lots of strong writing. Rob read, as did Mandy Maxwell (who came all the way up from Newcastle). Mandy's "Michaelangelo Takes a Sickie" was a highlight of the evening. We also had Fiona Lindsay and Gavin Inglis from Edinburgh and a good local, West Lothian contingent: Grace Cleary, Ellie Stewart, Emma Mooney and a man whose name I've forgotten (sorry!). A handful of us ended up in Platform 3 pub for a bit afterwards-- right next to the band!--and I got home about midnight, I think.

Clear skies and sun helped bring the families out for the children's events on the Sunday. Catherine Rayner showed us some gorgeous original drawings and paintings for her books and shared with us the prototype of a new one, about a moose who couldn't fit in the book. Lynne McGeachie enthralled the audience with The Tail o Peter Kinnen, her fine Scots translation of The Tail of Peter Rabbit, drawing out the children's knowledge of Scots and building it subtly.

The festival ended with Alistair Findlay. Readers of this blog will know how highly I think of his The Love Songs of John Knox in particular, so it was a pleasure to introduce him to the shall we say select audience. It's a pity he didn't have a bigger crowd, because he's a superb reader and brought the festival to a close with virr, wit, intelligence and great fun. Still, he had a book-buying audience, which is always a bonus for the writer.

A huge thank you to everyone who participated in making it such a great weekend. See you in 2009!

Success for Rob

Fantastic news: my friend, fellow HappenStancer and fine poetry blogger Rob A Mackenzie has had his manuscript accepted by Salt to be published some time next year. The book (provisionally entitled The Opposite of Cabbage after a line in one of the poems--can't accuse him of having a dull title!), is really strong and will make a great addition to that list. It'll be a must for anyone interested in lively, intelligent, distinctive contemporary poetry, and I'm so pleased we'll have our first collections out from the same press in the same year. Well done and many congratulations to Rob!

Duncan Glen 1933-2008

I was saddened to hear yesterday that the poet, publisher, critic, designer and typographer Duncan Glen had died. He was not someone I knew well, although I did meet him once or twice. My contact with him came through the Scottish Poetry Library, with which he was closely involved. Indeed, he designed many SPL publications, including the first gathering of poems I ever worked on, Variations on a new song: Poems from the Holyrood Poetry Link Scheme. He was the founder of Akros Publications and the magazine Zed2O, which is celebrated in WN Herbert's poem "Talking Water Blues". Duncan was a significant force in Scottish and Scots language letters and will be sorely missed. Colin Will, who knew him well, and Rob Mackenzie have both posted tributes. There is a full biography of Duncan on the Akros web pages.

Pax? Pax?

Here's all I have to say about this story:

The Pax can belt a Mac at Night
xxMiscaw wir Bard and aw that
But critic's care's abuin his might;
xxGuid faith, he mauna faw that!
For aw that and aw that,
xxHis sarky sneers and aw that,
The pith o sense and pride o worth
xxAre higher ranks than aw that.

Meanwhile, in less carnaptious news, Burns's words are to be inscribed on the transport system in the west of Scotland. At a cost of £15,000, the scheme seems pretty cheap. Perhaps we can afford to do something similar for more of Scotland's great poets. (Maybe a sequence of topiary somewhere to commemorate MacDiarmid.)

More Laurels for Morgan

Somehow, I had missed until the middle of this week the news that Edwin Morgan has won this year's Sundial Scottish Arts Council book of the year award for A Book of Lives. Shame on me!

Not having read the collection--or any of the other finalists, for that matter--I can't comment on its merits, but there's no doubt that Morgan is and always has been a remarkable writer. He's perhaps the most widely known of that significant seam of writers who have demonstrated how possible it is to combine experimental and mainstream poetics in one career, even in one poem. Above all, his work--serious, subtle and craftful as it is--teams with imagination, verve and wit. He is a poet for the variousness of today. Incidentally, he's the first poet I ever saw read live and probably the first living poet I read extensively off my own bat, unprompted by any course syllabus.

It's always encouraging to see poetry winning when it goes head to head with other genres in awards like this one. The poetry shortlist was strong; Carcanet dominated with three titles, while Cape and Edinburgh's Luath had one apiece. But Morgan wasn't the only poet among the finalists: the winner of the first book category was fellow Linlithgow resident Jane McKie, whose first collection, Morocco Rococo, is published by Wales's Cinnamon Press. She was up against a Cape chicklit title and a non-fiction book from Scotland's Sandstone Press so, all in all, it was a good showing for small presses too.

Angus Calder

As other bloggers have already noted, Angus Calder has died. I can't claim to have known him well, but he was a kenspeckle character on the Edinburgh poetry scene and a fine writer. I have clear memories of him reading "Deer on the High Hills" at an event to celebrate Iain Crichton Smith and of an energetic reading from his own Horace in Tollcross he gave for the Shore Poets. But my strongest memory is from the launch party for Tonguefire: before proceedings began--before there was more than the merest handful of folk there, in fact--Angus marched up to me with a copy of the pamphlet and slapped it down for me to sign: the first person ever to ask me to sign my work. He will be missed.

Great Grog Again

Last night, though tired out after a busy day that included helping our neighbour to rebuild the fence along our boundary, I headed into Edinburgh for the third Poetry at the Great Grog event.

Elizabeth Gold kicked off. The work she read jumped off from anecdotes, snatches of overheard conversation and tabloid headlines, but took us to unexpected places. She had a cat poem, but please do not run for cover: it was a poem inspired by seeing a cat posing for a portrait of a dog (where else but Hollywood?), written very wittily in the voice of the cat. Really, it was about celebrity, dreams and reality.

Second up was fellow HappenStancer, Margaret Christie. Margaret's wonderfully quirky and individual work is laden with musical references and metaphors and often shifts from serious to hilarious and back again without missing a beat. The poem that impressed itself on me the most was her "Eurydice on Skye", a take on the Orpheus myth from Eurydice's point of view and a sharp observation of the relationship tensions that can arise on a lengthy walk!

Joy Hendry of Chapman fame followed Margaret. Joy is rarely to be heard reading her own work -- I think I've heard her only once before, at some Scottish Poetry Library event or other -- and, indeed, the editor's passion that obviously drives her led her to read not only her own work but a few poems from this book. However, it's her work and performance I want to talk about. Joy has suffered very ill health over the past several years, so it was great to see her looking vibrant and well. She treated us to a lively and varied set of poems in Scots and English, including a Scots translation of the quartet "In a contemplative fashion" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers and a memorable defence of women priests in the Episcopal church.

The last and main reader of the evening was Tom Pow. More than anyone else, Tom had to contend with the music and noise from the bar area -- not a problem on previous Great Grog evenings -- but he made a great job of it, reading mostly from his new Salt collection, Dear Alice--Narratives of Madness. The book is based on case notes from the 19th century Crichton lunatic asylum near Dumfries; it looks an interesting read. The asylum is now the university campus where Tom teaches; he quipped that the only problem encountered in converting a lunatic asylum into a university was the lack of parking. (One of the New Voices events I did for the SPL took place there; there's a report here.)

All in all, it was another fine night at the Great Grog, a unique combination of voices I don't think we'd have heard anywhere else. The audience was a healthier size than in February, perhaps partly because the weather was better, but maybe also because the events are establishing themselves. I spent most of the breaks chatting to artist and pamphlet poet Dorothy Lawrenson, who was along for the first time, as well as to Rob himself, and ended up getting a lift home from Sally Evans. Rob has done an incredible job in sustaining the momentum across the three events so far, and June's gig -- with Kapka Kassabova, Mike Stocks, Eleanor Livingstone and Jim Carruth -- looks to continue the quality and distinctive mix.

LBF 2008 Takes Shape

The programme for Linlithgow Book Festival 2008 is beginning to take shape. It's looking good, not least with our first Booker Prize-winning author on the festival in James Kelman. Keep an eye the website for further announcements in coming weeks.

Stanza 2008: What Andy Did

I jumped into the car first thing yesterday morning and zipped up the road to St Andrew's for my fix of StAnza 2008, listening to The Guardian CD of great 20th century poets on the way to get me in the mood. My first event was the masterclass in translation with Helmut Haberkamm and Fitzgerald Kusz, who both write in the Franconian dialect of German, and, from the Scottish side, Robert Alan Jamieson and Sandy Hutchison. I was irritated with myself that I hadn't managed to do or submit translations of any of the masterclass poems, but it was an extremely worthwhile event for the discussion of dialect writing and translation*. It also gave me the chance to catch up a wee bit with Donal McLaughlin, Jim McGonigal and Chloe Morrish. And I came away with some free back issues of the Berlin-based poetry and fiction periodical lauter niemand and it's English-language adjunct, no man's land.

After a somewhat hurried lunch, I was back in the Town Hall for the French-language translated poets reading. French isn't really one of my languages, but I've complained in the past about translated poets only being during the week when there isn't a hope of my getting to StAnza so, having missed the Frisian and Franconian poets' readings because I was unable to be there on the Saturday, I felt I ought to go to this one. It was a fascinating reading. Neither of the poets--Heather Dohollau and Soleïman Adel Guémar--was actually French. Heather Dohollau is Welsh but has made her home in Brittany and writes in French, translating her own work into English. Soleïman Adel Guémar is Algerian and writes in French but is now living in ... where else? ... Wales!

I have to confess that the exhaustion of the previous day's 1st birthday party was beginning to tell by that point and I didn't get as much out of the reading as I should have done. But I'd certainly look out for their work again. To combat the tiredness, I headed to the Byre for a cuppa before Wholly Communion, a film of a massive reading at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965. To judge by this, poetry--or at least the Beatier end of it--was so much part of the counter culture it could fill an establishment venue like that to the rafters in those heady days. It's a mad, mad film. Some of the camera work made me feel sea-sick (I'm serious; O for a steadycam!), some of the poetry was equally shaky (but some was still good) and some of the audience likewise. (Well, probably most of the audience and writers were under the influence of something. These days, you wouldn't even be able to smoke a cigarette in there, never mind what was probably in the majority of the roll-ups visible on screen.) Adrian Mitchell's "To Whom it May Concern" was one of the best bits of the film and here it is:

After the film, Rob Mackenzie and I had a coffee in the Byre before heading to the pamphlet fair. By the time we got there, it was really winding down, and there wasn't much doing. We browsed what there was and chatted with Jim Carruth and Tessa Ransford, the force behind so much of the promotion of poetry pamphlets in Scotland over the past number of years.

Back at the Byre, I bought myself a ticket for the 5:00pm performance by Belfast poet Gearóid MacLochlainn with guitarist Dave Burnett, on the recommendation of Donal McLaughlin. And I'm glad I did. His billing as a performance poet doesn't tell you the half of it. Readers of this blog will know I'm sceptical of the animal performance poetry, generally thinking the bulk of it is better less spotted and spouted, but MacLochlainn is the real deal. He writes in, across, over and under Irish and English. There's a very strong flavour of the elaborate soundscapes of the great canonical Gaelic poetry and song, such as Duncan Ban MacIntyre to use a notable Scottish example, but it's deeply contemporary in feel and content and--get this--he does it successfully in English too, perhaps not least because he brings this tradition into collision with elements of rap. I was, shall we say, hugely impressed and bought his CD, Rakish Paddy Blues II, my travelling companion on the way home.

The comparison with Duncan Ban is, by the way, not random: one of the pieces MacLochlainn performed was a poem in praise of an Irish travelling piper, Johnny Doran. MacLochlainn's poem emulates the rhythms of Irish "open" pipe music and then slips into those of "closed", dance music (hope I got those terms the right way round!). The distinction sounds not unlike that in Scotland between ceòl mòr (or piobaireachd) and ceòl beag and, of course, Duncan Ban's great poem "Moladh Beinn Dòbhrainn" ("In Praise of Ben Doran") is written in the form and rhythm of a piobaireachd.

Gerry Cambridge mentioned to me that Iain Crichton Smith had translated "Ben Doran" and that the version was in his Collected Poems. I hadn't realised that, despite having the book on my shelf. After a quick look this morning, I'm impressed with the degree to which Smith successfully renders the rhythm, meaning and some of the rhyme (he ignores some of it, presumably because it's just so elaborate it would be nigh on impossible to do in English). Julie Johnstone said she thought one of the films showing on the day's loop was partly about the poem, so I went up to have a look: she was right and, luckily for me, Moladh Da Bheinn (In Praise of Two Mountains) was the last one to show in the loop.

For me, the last event of the day was the Adrian Mitchell and James Fenton reading. Mitchell was a likeable chap with a very loose, relaxed style of presentation but, while I liked some of the poems, much of it did nothing or as near as for me. Probably the best was his slightly updated rendition of "To Whom It May Concern". However, I wish there were more poets as passionately pacifist as he is.

Fenton's work I don't really know at all, I must confess. However, from the extracts of his book on metrics that appeared in The Guardian a good few years back, I do know that he's quite conservative in many of his aesthetic views and that came across in the work he read. At times I found myself wondering whether Modernism had ever happened. That might well be an uncharitable, uninformed view, but it was my reaction. He read some beautiful, powerful, hugely accomplished and intriguing poems--and read them extremely well--but, but ... I don't know, something didn't quite engage me at the level and in the way I really wanted. One of the most interesting and powerful pieces he read was "Jerusalem", certainly worth hearing and reading.

Still, it was an extremely good day, full of good, interesting poetry and conversations with friends and strangers, many of whom I've not mentioned here. That's one of the things I love about StAnza. I overheard somebody say he preferred it to the Edinburgh Book Festival. I know what he means: even people you don't know talk to you, which doesn't happen so much in Charlotte Square. There's a sense of community and everyone seems glad to be part of that community.

*Of course, the term "dialect" is not one I'm comfortable applying to Scots as a whole, but the fact is that, because there is no standardised form of the language, everyone who writes in Scots writes in or out of a particular dialect of Scots, regardless of whether they confine their Scots vocabulary to that dialect.

Whaur Extremes Meet?

I know this is a bit behind the times, but there's an interesting post on "official verse culture" over at Eyewear, on the back of the result of the TS Eliot Prize. One wonders whether Edwin Morgan--one of those whom Todd Swift and other bloggers (well, Rob Mackenzie at least) hoped would win those laurels--didn't get the prize partly because he's always sat slightly athwart that culture. I've said this kind of thing before, but it seems to me that ability to straddle the mainstream and experimental is something that Scottish poets are particularly good at. I have no idea whether the proportion of poets from Scotland to whom that applies is any greater than that among the ranks of our English and other Anglophone brother and sister poets but, if it isn't, we certainly seem more readily able to recognise and celebrate them. Perhaps it's a function of size: oh, we can be a gey carnaptious lot, but sometimes we just stick together.

The Great Grog: Where were you all?

If you're one of those people who thought about going to the reading at the Great Grog last night but decided to stay in and watch, oh I don't know, the Antiques Roadshow, kick yourself. No: harder. Colin Will and Rob Mackenzie have already blogged on the night, so I won't go on at length, but I can't help adding my enthusiasm. It was an excellent reading, even though the audience was meagre. If Rob keeps up this standard of event (and I see no reason to doubt he will), the Great Grog will establish itself as one of the places to read and be read to in Scotland.

It's invidious to single anyone out on such an evening, but it was particularly good to hear and meet Cheryl Follon. She was a Scottish Poetry Library new voice at the same time as me but our paths had never actually crossed because I missed her reading at the Shore Poets a couple of years back. She's a tremendous reader--strong, feisty, dramatic but not overly performancy--and a fun, energetic individual.

I bought Cheryl's book All Your Talk and Alexander Hutchinson's Scales Dog. Given that I'm on a tight budget, that says something. Sandy is one of those Scottish poets who, like the late Gael Turnbull, can step from something experimental into something deftly formal with delightful ease. Plus he sings.

The Scottish Book Trust has remodelled its entire website, including its online writers register. My page in the register is here. There are a few links to be inserted here and there, but overall the site looks pretty good. The register entries give a lot more information than previously. That makes them considerably more work for us writers, but I'm hoping its worth it in the long run.

Vital Event

David Kinloch is certainly a busy man this weather: besides being involved in the bid to establish a writers centre in Glasgow's Merchant City, he's the main force behind Vital Synz, a new Glasgow poetry society, which launches on Tuesday 6 November at Òran Mór with a reading by Liz Lochhead and Carol Ann Duffy. A high-profile line-up, and it's rare to hear Lochhead reading at all these days, since she began to concentrate on theatre. Unfortunately, I won't make it, but a society like this is overdue in Glasgow, so all credit and more power to David.

Writing Among the Merchants?

Maggie Graham, David Kinloch and Robyn Marsack are sending out a questionnaire about the possibility of establishing a Scottish Writers Centre in Glasgow, probably the Merchant City. An e-mail about it arrived in my inbox just the other day. The centre would offer services to writers at all stages of their careers, and to readers groups as well. Sounds a good idea. The survey takes less than ten minutes, so why not fill it out?