StAnza: Unlike the Duck

StAnza seems so long ago now that it’s almost hardly worth reporting any more on it, but there are a couple of things don’t want to slide into the dim and distant without comment.

First and foremost of those is Roddy Lumsden’s reading. I’ve known Roddy since I was a student, since before he published his first collection. That book — Yeah Yeah Yeah — was launched upstairs in The Waverley, a quirky wee pub a stone’s throw from the eponymous railway station. At StAnza, Roddy was launching Third Wish Wasted, his fifth collection, accompanied by the munching of some truly tasty pies.*

I’ve no hestitation in declaring Roddy’s reading the best I saw on the festival. The poetry was so good: a gleaming, distinctive sound; an enviable imaginative and formal range; wit, intelligence and fun. Nothing wasted. You can hear an excerpt from his performance on the relevant StAnza podcast. Neil Astley was also there with the Bloodaxe video camera, and you can see the result roughly halfway down this page on their site. Even better, you can read the book. Unlike the duck, it does not disappoint.

Speaking of Bloodaxe and films, I should also mention the extra showing of the taster for In Person. It was put on for those who missed tickets for the much more than sold out Duffy and Agbabi event. That reading wasn’t on my list anyway, and I think very few of the small audience for the film were refugees from it. However, I’m mightily glad to have had the opportunity to see the film, partly because I missed all the other ones on this year’s festival but mainly because it was well worth watching in its own right. I haven’t yet bought the In Person anthology, but it looks to be excellent value.

The main reason I didn’t get to any of the films was probably the fact that Rob A Mackenzie and I had a stall at the poets’ market, touting our and Alexander Hutchison’s Salt collections. That was also the reason I didn’t really get round the other stalls, but I thoroughly enjoyed chatting to James and Marianne of Kettilonia Press, who were beside us, as well as to the folk who came along to the stall. It was also good to meet Rachel Fox, albeit extremely briefly. If you have access to Facebook, you’ll find a shot of me at the stall among Robert Alan Jamieson’s photos.

StAnza was so much more than the sum of all these different parts and the many other meetings and encounters I haven’t mentioned. As Susan Mansfield says in her Scotsman write-up,

someone compared the festival to T in the Park. And while poetry is not quite the new rock'n'roll, year on year StAnza feels more like a festival.

*I now realise the Scotch pie can be a thing of beauty, not simply a dull companion to a bag of chips.

StAnza: Repetition, Surrealism and Hestiation

St Andrews was bathed in glorious sunshine this weekend past for StAnza, even if there was a bit of a chill to the wind. It certainly brought to mind Alastair Reid's "Scotland", famously burnt by the man himself two years ago. Reid was there in spirit, as you can hear in the podcast exerpt of Jay Parini's lecture (recommended). However, this year, Rabbie was doing the burning, what with it being the year of homecoming. Now that inevitably brings to mind Bill Herbert's "Rabbie, Rabbie Burning Bright". But I digress.

Anyway, I had a fantastic time at StAnza, despite the stressful lead-up on Friday trying to get my books to arrive at a time and place convenient for Saturday's poets' market. Somebody at the distributors -- not at Salt, I stress -- had cocked up, and the books I'd ordered in ample time had spent the whole week sitting in a warehouse in Eaglesham, I believe. Frantic Facebooking and phoning eventually sorted it out. Suffice to say that my box of The Ambulance Box made it to the Byre Theatre on Saturday morning after a Herculean effort of persuasion and, I imagine, plenty choice words from Tom and Jen at Salt. A huge thank you to them both.

As if that wasn't enough, when I got home from work I had no wallet. I was pushed for time as it was, but I had to phone up and cancel my cards and report it missing to the police. (I discover now that was in my desk at work. Numptie!) Still, without being a danger to myself or other drivers, I managed to check in to my B&B on the extreme southern edge of St Andrews and make it to the Byre with only moments to spare before Eleanor Livingstone walked onstage to introduce Bill Manhire and Simon Armitage.

I'd never heard Manhire before and the last time I'd heard Armitage was way back when I was a student. I particularly liked Manhire's "Hotel Emergencies" and "The Oral Tradition", which seemed to me to go places the other poems he read didn't touch. With Armitage, nothing stood out quite so strongly. The narrative poems he read sounded quite prosy, but I'd like to see how they read on the page. The more formal pieces came over better for me, though his use of repetition in some of them got too much. Sally Evans lampooned it quite sharply in the open mike. Armitage certainly overdid it, and I say that in full consciousness of how often I use repetition as a structural device.

There was quite a crowd in the Byre bar for the open mike, which followed the Manhire/Armitage event. As is often the case at these things, the bulk of the writing was comic verse, but there was plenty more serious stuff too. The standout readers for me were Allan Gillis, Rob A Mackenzie (whose choice of "Scotlands" was perfect on a number of levels), Kevin Cadwallader (whose line about the surrealist coppers I loved, though every time I saw him the rest of the weekend I forgot to tell him) and Judith Taylor. It was also good to hear Sorlil, who read much better than she seems to think, and Ross Wilson in particular. I read "Pedestrian", which went down well.

After the open mike, Rob, Ross and I headed pubward with Roddy Lumsden, Adam O'Riordan and a friend of Roddy's whose name, shamefully, continues to escape me. I fell into discussion with Adam and Ross about the SNP, devolution, independence, the West Lothian question and the lack of brilliant young left-wing politicians. That among other, more literary things, like. There were dark mutterings from StAnza student volunteers about a party of the fun kind, but the less said about that the better. Not that there is anything to say about it, because it didn't happen, due to misunderstandings, miscommunications and somebody deciding to stay in the student union. Just as well, really: it meant I could roll into bed by 2 am and be relatively compus mentus the next day.

Lithuanian Poets

To the Book Festival yesterday for a reading by three Lithuanian poets: Eugenijus Alisanka, Gintaras Grajauskas and Sigitas Parulskis, representing one half of the anthology Six Lithuanian Poets. It was a fairly small audience, not even filling up the smallest of the festival's performance tents. A pity, really, because the absentees missed themselves: it was a very good reading. The poets read their work in Lithuanian, with the translations read by somebody from Arc whose name I forget but whose face is familiar (though she does look very much like Iseabail McLeod formerly of Scottish Language Dictionaries). I'm utterly unfamiliar with Lithuanian, but it was still fairly easy to hear some of the rhythm and song that was missing from the translations, although the latter weren't bad poems in English either.

Next definite on my festival list is "Jidariyya", by the Palestinian National Theatre. It's based on a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, who died at the weekend, so it ticks the poetry box too. After that, it's my 3pm appearance at the "Four Hour Festival" on Saturday, though I'm hoping I'll get the chance to look in on other West Port Book Festival events too.

Against the Football

Shore Poets on Sunday went head to head with the Euro 2008 finals. That, coupled with the start of the holidays, might well have had something to do with the somewhat reduced numbers. I have to say, it was a cracker of an evening.

The new poet, Simon Pomery, was one of the best we've had for a while. He wasn't the most relaxed in his introductions but, once he got into the poems themselves, he read well. And there were some really strong poems in his set. There's some of his work here. He read "Jeremiah" and several poems from his "Divina Lux" series, but not the ones you can view online. Simon has a pamphlet coming out with Tall Lighthouse in the autumn, if I remember rightly; worth looking out for.

Roddy Lumsden is behind the Tall Lighthouse pamphlets, which provides a link between Simon and the Shore poet for the evening: Angela McSeveney, with whom Roddy overlapped at Edinburgh University. Angela read with her usual skill and aplomb from Slaughtering Beetroot, her fine new Mariscat pamphlet. She's currently poet of the month on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

Richard Price, the main reader, read from his first two books as well as new work. Richard is a fabulous, mesmerising reader. His work is always fascinating, stimulating and strangely beautiful. You can hear him on PoetCasting and the Archive of the Now and I recommend you take a listen. Better still, buy Lucky Day, Greenfields and/or some of his pamphlets.

Interestingly, Richard has been writing a lot of rhyming poetry recently. Although this takes him away from the spare modernism of earlier work to a certain extent, a Richard Price poem in ballad form is still unlike anything else you'll read or hear. Nonetheless, there's an extremely strong song element to these poems, so it's no surprise he's been writing song lyrics too. In fact, her read one song; you'd be hard pushed to distinguish it formally or stylistically from some of the recent poems. And I mean that as a compliment.

That gives us a kind of link to Sunday's music. Stewart Hanratty was excellent, with powerful, jazz-tinged songwriting and guitar playing. After his song about hats, it was inevitable that Angela should read her poem on the same subject. You'll just have to buy the pamphlet to read it, though!

Sunday's event was my last as a Shore poet. I've stepped down from the group after, I think six years, owing partly to a busier family life. It has been great fun to be part of Shore Poets, but it's time to concentrate my energies elsewhere. I still plan to be around the readings, so this won't be the last SP gig report you'll read here. I went out on a high, though: I won the famous Shore Poets lemon cake.

A Beetrooty Launch and a Groggy Reading

A week past Tuesday, I went to the launch of Angela McSeveney's new Mariscat pamphlet Slaughtering Beetroot at the Scottish Poetry Library. I can safely say it's the only launch I've been to where beetroot cake was on offer. Angela had baked it herself, and it was, you may say, delicious. And the poetry was at least as good. I think this could be Angela's best collection yet. Her characteristic "clear-water shine" (Iain Crichton Smith) is, of course, in evidence, but it grows ever stronger mixed with a certain wry determination and a sense that she is perhaps more relaxed in herself and her writing than in previous work. Well worth parting with £5.00 for it.

-----------------------------------------------

Last Sunday was the final Poetry at the Great Grog before the summer break. Jim Carruth was the first reader. His is a distinctive voice, bringing the farming experience to us urban dwellers in unsentimental, inventive poems. No hint of the romanticising of the rural life here, although there is plenty of anger and regret, often below the surface. His love poem to silage (I kid you not) was a tour-de-force of rhyme. I'd quite like to get a hold of it and subject it to my usual "Reasoning Rhyme"-type analysis.

My memory of the order has gone a bit hazy at a week's remove, but I'm reasonably certain it was Mike Stocks next, before Eleanor Livingstone. Mike read very well from his collection of sonnets, Folly. However, I have to say, although there were some fine examples of what you can achieve within those confines, it left me feeling you can have too much of a good form, as do Alan Spence's all-haiku readings. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy such readings at all. Mike can write powerful* and funny sonnets, but sometimes I wanted him to make the form disappear.

Eleanor read well, mostly from new work, including memorable poems about her Fife childhood escapades and her daughter's reading habits.

Kapka Kassabova was the final reader. Kapka is from Bulgaria, via New Zealand, and writes about the experience of exile in a way that communicates strongly to us non-exiles. I say "us non-exiles", but there were other exiles in attendance and, besides, there's something in the Scottish psyche that could almost be described as exiled from itself or from its own history and culture. To me, Kapka's work speaks to that aspect of Scottishness, perhaps not directly, but powerfully.

I also met Julia Rampen, who will be reading at the Great Grog at some point next year. Julia was one of the Foyle Young Poets winners in 2005 and 2006, as well as a runner-up in the Tower Poetry competition in 2006 and one of the winners in The Rialto's fifth young poets competition. To judge by the poems I've linked to, she's obviously talented; I'm looking forward to hearing her read.

Poetry at the Great Grog will be back in September with Michael Schmidt, Helena Nelson, Dorothy Baird and another Foyle Young Poet, Charlotte Runcie.

*Perhaps none more so than the one here, which nearly made me cry when I read it. It wasn't in his set.

The Onslaught of Beauty

The audience for Sunday's Shore Poets was a little thinner than usual, possibly because of the holiday weekend. Music was provided by Just Voices, a four-part acapella group, who treated us to French, Bulgarian, Scots and American songs. Beautiful stuff.

Stephanie Green kicked off the poetry in the newcomer slot. I've seen Stephanie around the scene for quite some time (indeed, she's a regular at Shore Poets) but had never heard her read before. The poem of hers that worked best for me was her first: a well-crafted, interesting mediation on her inheritance--genetic and otherwise--from each of her parents. (Her write-up of the evening is here.)

Honorary Shore poet Ken Cockburn read second. Ken is a former convener of the group, as well as former fieldworker/assistant director of the Scottish Poetry Library and founder, along with Alec Finlay, of platform projects. I enjoyed his set, particularly his take on the myth of Penelope and her suitors, in which Odysseus's wife is signed up to an internet dating site, and his translations from German.

I'd heard good things about the evening's main reader, the Belfast poet Alan Gillis, who is now based in Edinburgh. He did not disappoint: intense, serious, funny poems with striking imagery and a strong sound world. The man has a great ear and he reads well. You can hear him read some poems here, though I haven't had a listen to those files yet.

After the reading, I headed up to Waverley to catch my sleeper to London. There was enough time for a reasonably relaxed pint with Rob A Mackenzie before I found my way to my--ahem--recliner and began my purgatorial progress southwards.

Not having been out in Glasgow for absolutely ages--possibly not since I read at Tchai Ovna west end in 2006, unless you count the Mitchell event Helena Nelson and I did with the Scottish Poetry Library--I really enjoyed heading west to join the audience for the reading at Tchai Ovna southside on Friday night. I met up with AB Jackson and Rob A Mackenzie for a quick drink first. Just as well, because I hadn't clocked it was the Shawlands branch we were going to and would have gone to the wrong place otherwise. Rob had been at the Christian Aid book sale in Edinburgh and come away with a fine haul of books at knock-down, bowl-you-over, irresistible prices, including several doubles of books he already had, which he very generously gave to Andy Jackson and me.

As Rob says, Tchai Ovna southdie is a tottie wee place of a venue. It would be a fantastic place to meet someone for a tea (superb tea, it has to be said), but is was a bit too small for the 14 readers plus musicians and audience. The musicians, Wing and A Prayer, were excellent. The quality of the writing was, well, as you'd expect at an open mic session, variable. Rob and Alexander Hutchison were way the best, to my mind, even if the audience didn't seem to connect with what Rob read. Afterwards, Rob and I joined Sandy Hutchison and Cheryl Follon for a swift drink before we scooted back off to the train in my case and bus in Rob's. Pity we couldn't stay longer, but the last train is the last train. I'm hoping to get back through to Glasgow for a Les Murray reading in June, so it won't be quite as long before I'm back out in the city.

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.

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.

Shore Poets February 2008: Photos

Mark Ogle's family and several Shore Poets past and present.

Alison playing.

The Mark Ogle Memorial Poem trophy.

Hamish Whyte, Jacob Polley and Diana Hendry relax.

Angus Peter Campbell receives the trophy from Lizzie and Deborah.

Angus Peter with Mark Ogle's family.

(These photos, with full tags, are also on the Shore Poets Facebook pages.)

Two by Two

Out last night to Polly Clark's reading at Edinburgh Uni's Office of Lifelong Learning, where she's the Royal Literary Funding writer in residence. Polly was reading along with three OLL students.

Debbie Cannon, who read at last month's Shore Poets, was the only poet of the three. She kicked off with a reduced version of her Shore Poets set, and I have to say I enjoyed hearing the poems again. Of course, hearing poems read isn't like reading them on the page and, if they're any good, they should bear being heard again, which they did. The pleasure changes, of course, from the surprise of discovery to the enjoyment of knowing what's coming--a deeper pleasure in a way.

I'm afraid I can't quite remember the other two readers' names: Sean Morris and Katie something, I think. Sean read an entertaining excerpt from a novel in progress about the "beast girl" (i.e., an animal keeper) in a circus. Katie read from a dark and absorbing mystery set in Victorian London. An interesting contrast to Debbie and Polly's sets.

Polly came after the break, reading from her two published collections--Kiss and Take Me With You--as well as from Farewell My Lovely, a collection to be published next year. Much, if not all, the published work she'd read at the Shore Poets in September but, again, that was no problem for me. The new work she read was mostly about marriage and motherhood, though Polly pointed out that the new book isn't solely about those themes. In the best tradition of contemporary poetry, it was not only celebration but exploration. In fact, it sounded a more interesting and therefore more enlightening approach to writing about motherhood than Kate Clanchy's Newborn, for instance, even if the latter book does contain a couple of beautiful poems.

After the reading, Polly, her husband Julian and I went for a drink before I caught the train back to Lithgae. We ended up in Centraal (where I've been only once before, I think; before a Bruce Cockburn gig at the Queen's Hall a couple or more years back) for one drink and a good, relaxed chat about babies, writing, my day job, vocabulary and where we were on Sept 11th 2001 and the day Diana died.

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.

Skating on Poetry Loch

One of the things I love about Shore Poets is that the format of our events often produces rich and varied evenings of music and poetry. October's reading with James W Wood, Christine De Luca and the wonderful, quietly intense Gillian Allnutt was no exception (the only problem being that Allnutt's quiet reading voice didn't carry well in the Mai Thai acoustic).

The reading this Sunday just gone was another case in point, with Rachael Boast, Nancy Somerville and David Kinloch, plus music from Ben Young. I'd met Rachael Boast before, but didn't know her work, so it was a pleasure to encounter such accomplished writing at Shore Poets in the newcomer slot.

David Kinloch's set consisted entirely of new poems, displaying all his typical richness and imaginative verve. He's working on a sequence of poems about Scottish painters, from which he read, closing with a poem that entertainingly imagines a painterly wager as the source of the recent controversy over whether Raeburn really did paint The Rev. Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch.

David is one of the driving forces behind the Glasgow Poetry Society, otherwise known as Vital Synz, which enjoyed a hugely successful launch early this month (I wasn't able to be there, unfortunately). There's an interesting programme of events coming up next year.

As well as organising the Vital Synz events, the society is running a new competition: the Edwin Morgan international poetry competition. Unlike most competitions, this one has a college of three judges--and an extremely varied one at that--in Colette Bryce, Donny O'Rourke and Richard Price. Given the diversity of poetics represented there, it looks like they're aiming to make it a stylistically broad competition, appropriately enough for a competition celebrating the protean Mr Morgan.

The Marvellous Madness Begins

It's August, there's a downpour a day and Edinburgh has brigadooned into the Radio 4 consciousness once again. Must be festival time. Of course, by "festival" I mean not only the Edinburgh International Festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, but the Festival of Spirituality and Peace, the Edinburgh book fringe (which seems to be so unofficial this year that it lacks any separate publicity), the Edinburgh Art Festival and probably several other festivals I've heard nothing about yet.

I long ago abandoned hope of navigating the seven circles of the Fringe programme* and now tend to focus my attention on the Book Festival first, then the International Festival and the Film Festival with glances at Fringe reviews. However, my first taste of Edinburgh's 2007 festival vibe, courtesy of a tip-off from Rob A Mackenzie, was a chunk of Luke Wright's Poetry Party on Saturday night. I won't repeat what I said here and here about performance poetry. Not all the names on the bill were performance poets as such, but that was the overall style. I heard only a small selection of them: Joe Dunthorne, Tim Turnbull, Tim Wells and Martin Newell, as well as Luke Wright, who performed one piece in between each set. Tim T was the best for my money**--he's always entertaining. I'd expected Dunthorne's stuff to be more interesting than it was, but didn't know what to expect from the others.

Still, it was a great opportunity to chat with Rob and catch up with Roddy Lumsden and Andy Jackson, neither of whom I'd seen in ages. And I managed to make it to the pub for one drink with Rob, Roddy, Andy and co. The pub in question being the Meadows Bar***, there were faint shades of the student hours spent drinking with sundry student and grownup poets.

By sober contrast, I dipped into the Book Festival on Sunday morning for a reading by Nick Laird, launching his second collection, On Purpose, and Daljit Nagra. Despite costing £7.00 and starting at 10.15 am, it was as well attended as the poetry party. Nagra read first. Much of the work he read demands a good performance, which he certainly gave, but it also has a much more interesting linguistic texture, signficantly greater depth and a greater awareness of the literary tradition than the animal known as performance poetry. Laird is a more straightforward lyrical, literary poet, a voice emerging from the Northern Irish tradition in the line of Heaney and Muldoon. Some lovely writing. He had a nice line in self-depricating commentary on his own introductions to the poems. I'm looking forward to reading Nagra's and Laird's collections. I have Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover! and Laird's To A Fault on hold at the Scottish Poetry Library and bought On Purpose.

*Comedy, Music, Events, Comedy, Theatre, Visual Arts and Comedy.

**Not that any money was involved, as the event was free.

***Which served a watery pint of the usually marvellous Caledonian 80 with no head to speak of.

Last Shore Poets of the Year

There was a good crowd in Mai Thai--the new Shore Poets venue--on Sunday night to hear Alan Hill, Jim C Wilson and Matthew Hollis. The readers strained a little bit to make themselves heard at the back, so I think we'll might be using a small PA in future. Nonetheless, it was a good reading.

I particularly enjoyed hearing Matthew Hollis, as I've known him since we were students. When I pitched up at Edinburgh Uni as a fresher 11 (yikes!) years ago, I had the scantest knowledge of contemporary poetry. Matthew--who was in third year at the time, I think--was the president of the Edinburgh University Poetry Society. I learnt a huge amount from hearing leading contemporary poets read their work on the society's programme and from discussing my and other student writers' poems at regular informal workshops.

Sadly, the EUPS has been in abeyance for some time. All enthusiasm, energy and support now seem to be focused on the Uni's MSc in Creative Writing, which strikes me as unfair to any prospective writers outside that programme, especially but not only undergraduates. Neither Matthew nor I did English degrees, and there were plenty other student writers in departments other than English when we were at uni.

Matthew Hollis has gone on to make a name for himself, with a fine first collection from Bloodaxe entitled Ground Water. Last year, he held the Wordsworth Trust residency at Dove Cottage. On Sunday, he read a clutch of new poems, written during that residency. It's a while since I read Ground Water, but I detected a greater maturing, a deepening and enriching of his voice in the new poems. They seemed to display a greater confidence, perhaps a stronger sense of emotional light and shade--not that emotional light and shade are lacking in Ground Water. What was certainly new was the engagement with landscape, specifically the landscape of the Lakes. It looked like he had a fair amount, so I'm hoping he's not far off a second collection.

Temples in our Hearing

Rilke has been a significant figure for me for a while, although there's much of his work I've yet to read. When I lived in Berlin in the early 1990s, a friend gave me his collected poems in German for Chirstmas. The same friend later gave me the Letters to a Young Poet (in English, although I got my hands on a secondhand German edition a few years after that) and, last Christmas, sent me a CD of the Sonnette an Orpheus. So I was delighted to see a "Responding to Rilke" event on the Scottish Poetry Library events programme for Wednesday past.

The SPL's mezzanine floor was pretty packed to hear Don Paterson deliver excerpts from his new book Orpheus (an English version--i.e., not a straight translation--of the Sonnette an Orpheus) and Jo Shapcott read from Tender Taxes, her 2002 collection of responses to and versions of some of Rilke's poems in French. Quite a reading. The narcotic spirit of Rilke was firmly present in Paterson's versions. To judge by the reading, he has managed find a voice that is distinctly his but still recognisably Rilke in a convincing contemporary English. I'm looking forward tremendously to sitting down and digesting the originals and the new version side by side.

In Shapcott's work, the spirit of Rilke was somewhat less direct. I remember hearing her read some of the work in Tender Taxes about eight or nine ago. My French not being much good, I can't really comment on Shapcott's poems as responses and versions, but Tender Taxes looks and sounds like an strong and stimulating book. She calls it "a reader's book", that is, a continuation of the conversation she has with Rilke as a reader of his French poetry.

Some people get prissy about translating v versioning. Personally, I'm quite relaxed about it. Like Don Paterson, I feel both can be legitimate and illuminating exercises. In reality, there are and can be few if any one-to-one correspondences in the translation of poetry, even between closely related languages. This means that a translation is always a version to some extent. The most important factor is whether the translation/version works as a poem in the target language. This is surely part of the reason why each generation revisits great texts of other languages that have already been translated time and again.

After the reading, I wound up in the pub with some folk from the MLitt in creative writing at St Andrews. Ended up missing the train I'd intended to catch, and the next one. It was worth it though.

The Poets were in the Counting House

On Saturday night, the Shore Poets celebrated Stewart Conn's 70th birthday at the Counting House in Edinburgh. The evening, which was open to the public and more or less sold out with various bodies from the poetry world, involved readings from a number of poets whom Stewart admires and counts among his friends, including Anne Stevenson, Anna Crowe, Andrew Greig, Tom Pow and James Robertson and several Shore poets.

It's hard to believe that Stewart (the Shore Poets' honourary president of several years' standing) is as old as 70; his zest for life would be enviable in a man of any age. The celebrations were a fitting reflection of that joie de vivre and Stewart's fundamentally warm, generous character.

The Shore Poets have marked the occasion not only with the birthday bash, but with a pamphlet, There's a Poem to be made. The pamphlet, available in a numbered limited edition of 300, contains poems from Saturday's participants, Shore poets past and present, and a few other fine contempoary Scottish poets. It's not mentioned on the Shore Poets website yet, but I'm sure it will be soon.

A Quieter Fire

Went to hear the fine Gaelic poet, publisher and scholar Derick Thomson (or Ruaraidh MacThomais in Gaelic) read on Wednesday at the usual haunt. The audience was far smaller than that for Sharon Olds. That, I suppose, is predictable, but it's also a poor reflection on the knowledge of the poetry-reading public in Edinburgh.

Gaelic poetry in or after the classical style is difficult to translate well into English, given that its dense sound patternings are lost, leaving a much barer experience, but Thomson writes in a modern free style that works well in English. His poetry is witty, lucid and rich in unexpected turns, such as the idea that people in 2121 will ask why we watched the box in the 20th century "instead of reading Plato", that Princess Diana "still speaks with a Glasgow accent" or that, when the Norsemen went ashore at Ness in Lewis, "they were afraid".

Thomson is a quiet, self-depricating man, which helps to make him an engaging reader. He is somewhat unexpectedly apologetic about reading the oringinal poems (the Gaelic versions), but not at all apologetic about his Scottish nationalism. (Still, perhaps one expects a little Caledonian antisyzygy now and again.) Remarkably, he's 85 and hardly showing his age. Long may he continue in that vein.

"Pure Fire in the Hands"

There was a rare opportunity to hear American poet Sharon Olds read for the Poetry Association of Scotland on Wednseday night at the Scottish Poetry Library, so I took it. In the first half of the evening, she read mostly from her Selected Poems. After the interval, the usual PAS order was reversed, with questions and discussion preceeding Olds reading entirely from unpublished work.

In person, Sharon Olds has a quietly forceful presence, not at odds with but in counterpoint to the rawness and viscerality that characterises her work. The strengths of that work lie in her usually straightforward, almost prosaic language, offset by some striking images and the structural subtleties and repetitions within the open form she uses. The weakness of her style is that it can end up sounding or reading flat and prosaic but, in her best work, she cuts a thrilling figure skating on the line between poetry and prose. And it was a bold move to write in such a plain style with poets such as John Ashberry in the ascendency.

The themes of Sharon Olds's poetry are sex, the body, childbirth and the family, leading her to be classified by some as a confessional poet. She rejects the term, preferring instead to describe herself as "an apparently personal poet", and was eloquent on the tension between loyalty (or silence) and betrayal (or song) that anyone who writes "apparently personal poetry" must necessarily work in. For all the difficult experiences and emotions explored in many of her poems, she came across as having a profound respect for the subjects of such poems.

I must confess I hadn't really read her before Wednesday, although I'd come across some of her work. I bought the Selected and am making my way through it on the train to and from the day job. She's a powerful writer, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to hear her read.

The New Season Kicks Off

No, I've not undergone a road-to-Pittodrie conversion to the Church of Two Halves; the season I'm talking about is the Shore Poets autumn programme, which got off to a superb start last night with Jackie Kay, Christine De Luca, Mandy Maxwell and music from the Linties.

Mandy Maxwell is a graduate of the creative writing programme at Glasgow Uni. Her sharp, tight writing is very much grounded and rooted in Glasgow and she's a good performer. I think last night was her first proper gig in Edinburgh, although she read at the Shore Poets open night back in April. I've no doubt more will be heard from her in future.

Christine De Luca needs no introduction to anyone familiar with Shore Poets. With Shetlandic and English at her disposal, she has a dinstinctive, lyrical voice. Christine read beautifully from her latest book, Parallel Worlds, and new work.

The last time I heard Jackie Kay was at the end of my first year at uni--that's 11 (gulp!) years ago. She's a fantastic reader: warm, engaging, entertaining and endearing. For some reason--I suppose it must be lack of acquaintance with her recent work, to my shame--I was surprised at the amount of Scots in the work she read. Surprised, but delighted: it contributes to a rich and broad voice. Her set consisted of poems from Life Mask, new poems and one short story (cheat!). She read a couple of pieces that she described as children's poems; they lacked none of the sophistication and beauty of her adult work.

The Linties, of course, I have heard before and knew they'd be perfect for a Shore Poets evening, although I can take no credit for booking them for last night. They provided us with a mix of bawdy, bonnie and blythe songs in varying degrees of Scots and English, hugely entertaining and beautifully sung with great harmonies. Bands like the Linties show how much vigour and verve there is in traditional music in Scotland without the paraphernalia of popdom. Not that I'm at all averse to the mixing of traditional and other music forms either.

You can read the Linties' comments on the evening here at their blog. You can keep abreast of their gigs here.

I've also blogged a bit about the evening over at The Skraich.