Opening

Yesterday's opening of illuminate went well. Just about the right number of people came to make it feel busy without being crowded. The mulled wine, mince pies and lebkuchen went down a treat and everyone enjoyed the exhibts (some of the children who came particularly enjoyed standing in front of the video projector). Photographs were taken, so I'll have to see whether I can grab any of them to post here.

Switching on the Lights

We spent most of today setting up the illuminate exhibition I plugged in the previous post. Tiring work, but it's looking good. There are still a couple of things to install before tomorrow's opening, but I think everyone involved is very pleased with how it looks and hangs together.

illuminate

This Christmas exhibition will include three poems of mine presented as a triptych. Readers of Tonguefire will be familiar with two of them--"His Wading Light" and "A Voice is Heard in Ramah"--but the third, which is called "Down Darkness Wide", is new and takes a different view of the story.

Interestingly, although the word triptych is usually applied to paintings, the first sense given in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is "A set of three writing-tablets hinged or tied together." So it seems I'm taking it back to an earlier usage.

illuminate will also include, among other pieces: a video installation, paintings, stained glass work, a hanging photo-montage, a shadowbox/calligraphy installation and a sound recording of some of Douglas Briton's poems. You can view the details of where and when by clicking on the poster to the left.

If you pop by, post a comment on the blog and let me know what you thought of the show.

Next Reading: PAS in February

Wednesday 7th February 2007, 7.30pm, Scottish Poetry Library with Gerrie Fellows for the Poetry Association of Scotland. Entry: £3 (£2 concessions)

I'm very excited about this. I've been attending PAS readings since I was a student and have seen numerous fine poets read for the Association, so it's a privilege to be booked by them.

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.

SHOpped!

I've just had a poem accepted by The SHOp, a beautifully produced Irish magazine. The poem, "In Praise of Dust", should be published sometime in the next 12 months.

I've also been meaning to mention that Lallans recently accepted four poems in Scots, one of which is a translation of Rilke's "Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes." I'm told they should be in Lallans 70, which is due in out in March 2007.

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.

David Kinloch's Website

David Kinloch now has a website. It's pretty easy to navigate and contains poems, essays, an interview with David, reviews, translations, news and other information. Worth looking at if you're interested in his work.

Arvon Successes and Failures

The shortlist for this year's Arvon poetry competition is out. I entered, but didn't get anywhere. However, Siriol Troup, who read alongside me at StAnza this year, is on the shortlist. Gaun yersel, Siriol!

New Voices: The Crichton Crowd

I headed to Dumfries yesterday for the second of my two New Voice events with the Scottish Poetry Library. Lilias Fraser from the Library and I took the train to Lockerbie--a very civilised Virgin conveyance--where we were picked by Andrew Forster, who took us to the venue at Crichton Campus via a pretty decent coffee shop in Dumfries.

We arrived at the Crichton just as Helena Nelson was coming out to meet the AA man she'd had to call because she'd locked herself out of her car (with the materials for the workshop still in the car). Not a good start, but the AA van pulled in just behind us, sparing us what could have been a more than nervous wait.

Despite that inauspicious mishap, the workshop went really well. The participants were quite a different bunch to those in Glasgow. The age profile was significantly older for a start, but they also responded much more. That might have had something to do with its being an afternoon event (although the real low point of my energy is often around 3pm) or to do with the fact that most of them belonged to the same writers group. Certainly, the geography of Dumfries and Galloway seems to make for a stronger sense of creative community. Whatever it was that made them livelier than the Mitchell crowd, it made for an thoroughly enjoyable afternoon for us! Plus they almost all bought a pamphlet, in contrast to the two we sold in Glasgow (although to be fair at least one person at the Mitchell already had a copy).

So, that's the practical side of my New Voice involvement over. Even virtually it is passing, as I relinquish the front page of the SPL website to the other New Voice, Cheryl Follon (whom I've yet to meet, not having been able to make it to her reading at the Shore Poets last year). I've enjoyed working on the events with Lilias and Helena. It was good too to meet Andrew Forster--who mentioned in dispatches right next to me after StAnza this year--more properly than I have before.

I look forward to doing more of this sort of thing in future. I'll post something soon about my next readings, which are in the new year.

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.

The Last to Know, But Hey!

I've only just discovered that "A Rough Guide to Monday Morning", the first piece in Tonguefire, was poem of the week in Saturday's Scotsman. If I'd known on Saturday I'd have bought the paper!

Irritatingly, they have the title slightly wrong. I wonder whether that was a sub trying to shoehorn it into a preconceived notion of what fits the weekend.

Vocal in the Mitchell

Thursday's New Voice session went very well. For the first half of the evening, Helena Nelson gave a short workshop on how to raise your profile as a poet. In the second half, she interviewed me as a live case study. Poems were interspersed with the interview in roughly chronological order. Out of the 17 people booked to come, 11 turned up, but we anticipated some drop-off, and 11 was a good size for the group. It was a real mix of people at very different stages in their poetry writing and publishing histories.

One of the participants, Stephen Nelson, happens to a friend of a friend and had been in touch with me earlier in the week. He has just published, under his own imprint called Afterlight Press, The Faithful City, a beautifully produced pamphlet of what he describes as visual poems. They might be more usually described as concrete poems, but his use of colour and shade in the text takes the genre a step further. (I believe the pamphlet will be reviewed in the next issue of Sphinx.) It was a pleasure to meet and chat briefly with him.

Another notable participant was George Philp, one of the originators of Scotsoun, a company that has amassed a remarkable recorded archive of Scottish writing, song and music. Scotsoun's focus is on Scots, but there are also recordings of Gaelic and English-language writing in the catalogue. George is now retired from the work, but he's writing its story. Should be a fascinating read, given all the luminaries with whom the folk at Scotsoun have worked.

I was also encouraged to see someone who had heard me read at Reading the Leaves in Tchai-Ovna early in the year. Nothing better than people coming back for more!

Fully Booked!

I spent a chunk of today preparing for the New Voices event in Glasgow on Thursday. It's shaping up to be an interesting event from both sides of the podium, I think.

I see from the Scottish Poetry Library's events pages that it's fully booked! Not that I can remember quite how many people that means--it is a workshop so it won't be an enormous number--but it's kindae exciting/scary/flattering.

The Lithgae Gig

Friday's reading went really well. It was held in the lounge of Bryerton House, aka St John's Christian Centre, in Linlithgow High Street. The lounge set-up lent a cosy, intimate atmosphere to the evening, but it was bittie cramped for some of the 20 or so folk who came!

Guitarist Phil Melstrom kicked us off with three tunes, including those that are probably my favourites from Miles Davis's classic Kind of Blue and Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage--"All Blues" and "Dolphin Dance". He's a fine musician, as at home with bluesy and funky, spiky playing as with the smoother, more fluid side of jazz. Phil also played between each of the poetry sets and at the end. In fact, he even improvised an accompaniment to one of Douglas Briton's pieces. Unfortunately, the poem finished just as Phil (and, I suspect, the audience) was getting into it.

Rob A Mackenzie braved the opening spot with a set of new poems, a couple of older poems and pieces from his HappenStance pamphlet, The Clown of Natural Sorrow. I particularly enjoyed the new work he read, including his opening poem, a strong piece bit of surrealism-at-home, in which the Apocalypse comes the Barnton roundabout. Rob is a good reader, and I'm very pleased to see he's on the bill for StAnza 2007. You can read his report of the gig here.

Douglas Briton went second. His is a very different approach to either Rob's or mine, much more performance poetry or light verse in the way that Wendy Cope writes light verse: sometimes witty and amusing, sometimes addressing difficult subjects head on, but always employing a disarmingly straightforward style. I was really impressed with how smoothly Douglas read, as it was the first time he'd performed anything more than individual pieces in public.

I was the last poet on, with a mixture of new work and poems from Tonguefire. It was a good audience to read to. I knew most of the people there to varying degrees, but there were a couple of unfamiliar faces in the gathering. Rumour is that the experiment might be repeated again in future, possibly on the Linlithgow Folk Festival.

"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.

Wilfred Owen Week

Although it irritates me somewhat that the BBC uses the entertainment section of its news website to trail some of its programmes, pretending that the reports are real news, I was interested to see this report of Radio 3's plans for a Wilfred Owen week following rememberance day. I vividly remember reading some of his war poetry at school--"Dulce Et Decorum Est" most vividly--and hearing Britten's War Requiem, which uses some of Owen's work, in Edinburgh's Usher Hall when I was a first year student at university. Should be worth while tuning in to.

Next Reading on Friday!

My next reading is the Celebrate Linlithgow! one on Friday this week (27 October). There has been a slight change to the programme, as the line-up will now consist of me, Douglas Briton and my fellow HappenStance* poet Rob A Mackenzie, all bookended by jazz from Phil Melstrom.

The event kicks off at 8pm in Bryerton House on Linlithgow High Street. There will be soft drinks and what are generally known as "nibbles". Tickets are free and can be reserved by calling the St John's church office on 01506 517031.

*Does that make us both Chancers?

Apologies for Silence

Apologies for the length of time it has been since I added anything to the blog. I blame the cumulative tiredness I was suffering from before our week near Criccieth on the Lleyn peninusula in North Wales. It's RS Thomas country that is, but my main reading matter for the week was The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Welsh Poetry, a fantastic anthology of translations from 20th century Welsh-language poets. I can recommend it highly.