Adès on Beauty

I like this comment on beauty from composer Thomas Adès (from an article in the Telegraph on his recent piece about the creation):

"Why would anyone be ashamed of beauty? It's a very 20th-century idea that you might be. Thankfully that's gone."

Four Hour Festival

I have a slot on the West Port Book Festival's "Four Hour Festival" event. No time confirmed as yet, but I'll post when it is. You can find the full programme here.

Culinary Gems in Kintyre

No apologies for the silence over the past fortnight or so, as I've quite enjoyed the wee break. We returned a week ago from seven days in Caradale on the Kintyre peninsula and life has been quite busy since. The weather in Kintyre was very mixed, but the scenery was (as the photos below show) fabulous:

Don't you just love the light in this one?

And there was some great food. If you find yourself in the area, drop by the tearoom at the Caradale Network Centre. Everything is freshly made on the premises (apart from the vanilla ice cream but, as there are three other flavours, that's no loss) and delicious. Reasonably priced, too.

Further north, at Skipness, is the Seafood Cabin. The weather was dismal on the morning we were there, so a bowl of moules marineres sounded like a good idea. It wasn't: it was a fantastic idea. Best mussels I've tasted in ages. My only regret was that we didn't make it back to try out the other fare on the menu.

All in all, it was a relaxing week. I managed to read Ciaran Carson's wonderful For All We Know and Hazel Frew's collection Seahorses as well as get stuck into a selection of Van Gogh's letters I've had on my shelf for ages. Now the madness of August is staring us in the face, and I'm counting the pennies to work out how much I can see.

Knucker Launch

Jane McKie's Knucker Press launches what looks like an interesting new pamphlet tonight: Way Out by Victoria Macrae. Here's what the press's website has to say about it:

In early 2008 Victoria Macrae spent 65 days, 19 hours and 37 minutes as an in-patient in Ward 6 of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. During this period the view from her window became very important to her: "I needed to see the outside world and connect somehow to the outdoors. I began noticing the way the light hit the architecture at different times of the day; the way the windows opposite would move in the gales and reflect sunlight temporarily into my room. The effects of the changing sky and weather, and the importance of finding beauty in something that would not be seen as traditionally beautiful, was an important part of my recovery". She created a unique visual record of that time with the camera on her mobile phone. 'Way Out' is a beautiful and affecting folded concertina pamphlet with a selection of Victoria's full colour photos and word poems.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it to the launch, but I'll definitely be keeping my eye on the Knucker publications.

New Fest on the Block

As yesterday's Sunday Herald reports, Edinburgh has a new book festival this year in addition to the established Edinburgh International Book Festival. It's called the West Port Book Festival, and it's all free! You can find out more here. The programme doesn't launch until 11th July, so I can't tell you any more, but from what the Sunday Herald could reveal, it sounds like a good line-up.

This isn't the first time there's been an alternative event to the EIBF. The Edinburgh Book Fringe ran a couple of years, focusing intentionally on Scottish authors who didn't get (much of) a look-in on the festival in Charlotte Square, but those were paying events. The Thirsty Lunch was something more similar to the West Port venture, but I've seen no sign of that continuing this year. Perhaps the West Port festival will stick around a bit longer. I certainly like the idea of holding the events in second-hand book shops.

Artist on a Quest Again

Time once again to highlight the blog of my good friend and sometime collaborator, the painter David Martin. Two years ago, he embarked on an epic tour of the middle east to gather material for his Salvesen award exhibition, following the trail of Hermes Trismegistus. His blog of that adventure proved him to be a distinctive and entertaining writer as well as a fine artist.

Dave is on his travels once again. This year, he's wandering through Ethiopia and Eritrea. As with the previous occasion, his blog is proving to be fascinating, lively reading. Photos and sketches are already appearing.

This is one of my favourite shots so far. I love the way he's just playing table football out the open with a bunch of guys as if he was in the side room of some Edinburgh pub.

Dave also has a new website. Check out his work if you don't already know it. If you do, reacquaint yourself.

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.

The Price of Pomegranates

Why would anyone pay £1.50 for a pomegranate? I like them and all that, but £1.50 for a single piece of fruit? Oh yes, silly me: they're superfoods, a class of comestible scientifically proven to make the marketing managers salivate three times as fast.* We got two for 35p apiece from the reduced-to-clear basket the other day. I mean, if they can flog 'em off for that, what's the original mark-up?

*Did you like that null comparative? Sarcasm's miles better.

Back to Front?

There's an extensive, thoughtful and very positive review of the sampler over at Jim Murdoch's ever stimulating blog The Truth about Lies. Jim comments on each of the poems in turn, as well as on general aspects of the pamphlet as an object and collection. This is the paragraph that most interests me:

As a poet myself I'm inclined to have my meanings at the forefront of my poems, not that I discount feelings but they've always tended to be something of an aside with me. Philip's poetry, to my mind, concentrates on feelings and the meanings are put on the back burner. These are poems you can't read, tick the box – Yeah, I get that one – and then pass onto the next one. ... A star has exploded and these are fragments rippling away, getting further and further apart, remnants; they meant something when they were whole. Now they are not meaningless but they mean less and Philip is desperately trying to cling onto that meaning. The feelings are clear and unambiguous however.

Always fascinating to see how others read your work, isn't it? I'm interested that Jim thinks I put meaning "on the back burner". I'd certainly agree that meaning is not "at the forefront" of my work as it is for him. That's perhaps the fundamental difference in our poetics: I don't discount the skill and craft of writing something with meaning at the forefront--perhaps I even do it occasionally--but that kind of poetry has never interested me as much as more layered, multivalent poetry has. So that's often what I aim for: something that layers meaning; that can access a sense beyond the surface meaning; that will draw the reader back to discover new meaning on subsequent readings.

I wouldn't call that putting meaning "on the back burner". To my ears, that phrase sounds a touch pejorative in this context. However, Jim is anything but negative about the pamphlet, so I guess he didn't mean it that way. In fact, he says the sampler is

a collection of poems by a man trying to make sense out of something that will never make sense, trying to imbue words with meanings they were never intended to hold and, where that fails, creating new words to try and get his point across.

Absolutely spot on. This is perhaps where we come to the emotions in the poetic. The poems in question being largely about grief and bereavement,* it's hardly surprising that emotion should strike a sensitive and intelligent reader as being at the forefront. Nonetheless, Jim acknoweldges the attempt to make sense (ie, meaning) out of it.

What we have here is the collision or collusion of meaning and emotion. Writing poetry has probably always been to me a means of thinking through my emotions, even more vitally so since I began writing about losing my son, Aidan. And I mean thinking through in a double sense: making sense of my emotional life; and using my emotions as a stimulus to thought. That's not the sum of my poetics, but it's probably a central part. After all, we're talking about an important aspect of the way I'm made: a reasonably intelligent/intellectual individual but, at the same time, uncommonly emotional for a man.**

Thinking again about the relative positioning of meaning and emotion in my poetry, I'd like to suggest that I'm not backgrounding meaning but foregrounding possibilities in the language. Fundamentally, poetry is about language: what we can do with it and what we can do to get beyond it.*** The poem's meaning is a function of the poem as an instance of language--a language event, if I can put it like that--with all the complexity of interaction between the text, the writer and the reader(s) that that implies. That too is a central part of what I'm trying to do. I'm not saying I apply this understanding in the most sophisticated way, but it's definitely mixed into the mortar.

Some of these thoughts have been rattling round in my wee heid for a while, but it's taken Jim's appraisal to get them out into the open, slightly random though they are. My thanks to him for providing the impetus and, above all, for taking the time to read and review the pamphlet so thoroughly.

*This holds for "Tonguefire Night" too in ways I didn't know and could never have known when I wrote it, although I understood at some level the cultural grief and bereavement that it touches on.

**Though not especially sensitive to emotional atmosphere, strangely enough. Aren't we humans complicated sometimes?

***"Poetry is only there to frame the silence", as Alice Oswald said in an interview.

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.

Sampler Listed

Andrew Philip: A Sampler is now listed on the HappenStance website. I'll update the sidebar in due course.

[Sidebar updated.]

Making the Most of the Web

Four poems by Matt Merritt, whose fine HappenStance pamphlet Making the Most of the Light came out in 2005 and whose first full collection Troy Town was published by Arrowhead earlier this year, have just been added to Alex Pryce's fantastic PoetCasting website. Well worth a listen.

PoetCasting itself has just had some good very news: it has secured funding from the Arts Council England to continue until mid 2010. It'll allow the site to start collaborating with poetry magazines and live poetry performance events, as well as enable it to continue podcasting an admirably broad range of poets. Gaun yersel, Alex!

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.

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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.

I Had to Pinch Myself

It's been a momentous week in this neck of the woods. As you'll know if you've been following this blog for a while, I've been working on a full collection of poetry, swapping manuscripts with Rob A Mackenzie and submitting to publishers. On Tuesday, the collection--The Ambulance Box--was accepted by Salt, who propose to publish in the spring. I'm delighted. Salt not only have a really strong list, but a positive, 21st century approach to the web, which publishers ignore or downplay at their peril. I'm thoroughly looking forward to working with them.

Poems in the Big City

Sleepers. A fine idea if you can book a berth but a complete misnomer if cash and demand force you into a recliner (read "seat that hardly moves back") for the eight-hour journey. And my seat on the way down to London was the worst possible option: right next to the door to the toilet area and facing another occupied seat. Lots of shuffling and stumbling about next to my head. Ergo, no sleep till berth time (ie, the return journey).

I arrived in London Euston at 7:01 am--godforsaken shed of a place at that hour. I'd left a sunny Sunday in Scotland to come to a sodden Monday in London, with 13 hours to fill before the reading. I had breakfast at chop'd* in St Pancras; found out when the British Library opened; made my way down to Earl's Court to locate the Troubadour and time the journey, picking up a copy of Geoffrey Hill's Canaan for £1.50 en route in a Samaritans book shop; went back up to the British Library, where I sat in the cafe and mulled over a set for the evening before wandering round the exhibition on the Ramayana (fascinating, but a bit much on so little sleep); had lunch in a random noodle bar and observed the terminally damp Africa Day concert in Trafalgar Square.

Then, at 3pm, I was rescued from my wet solitude when I met up with Siriol Troup and Lorraine Mariner for coffee in the National Gallery. Siriol, Lorraine and I also went to the exhibition of new Alison Watt paintings. Beautiful, haunting work, as I've come to expect from Watt. In these, the sense of presence-in-absence is intensified by a new feature: substantial openings in the folds in the fabric that draw the eye, as you can see in this image.

After the gallery, we hopped on the Tube down to Earl's Court and the Troubadour. Helena Nelson and Eleanor Livingstone were already there waiting for the HappenStance band and supporters slowly gathered. Nell had me sign 50 copies of the sampler (sitting in a back room signing books: another sign of being a writer!). I'd not met any of the non-Scottish HappenStancers, but there were so many of us in the party I didn't get much of a chance to talk to them. However, I did have a great natter with Katy Evans-Bush of Baroque in Hackney fame and the chance to catch up with Sinéad Wilson, who I hadn't seen in a few years.

The reading was downstairs in the cellar bar and, when we headed down there, the place was already reasonably full. I was utterly amazed and delighted to see one of my Dutch friends among the audience, another friend I hadn't seen for ages. (He was in the country for an academic conference and had seen the reading trailed here.)

I was first up. At Nell's suggestion, I read the six uncollected poems from the sampler: "Singularity", "Lullaby", "Still" (which is a response to Alison Watt's painting of the same title), "Saxifrage", "Dream Family Holiday" and "Coronach". Not an easy set for the audience, perhaps, but it went down really well. It wasn't an easy set for nor for the other readers to follow either, but the reader who followed me directly was Rob A Mackenzie, whose set was completely different and superb, as I'd expect from him. (For me, his was the best set of the first half.)

There was just time in the break to chat to one or two friends and audience members but, unfortunately, I had to leave shortly after the second half began. However, I managed to hear Tom Duddy, who read quietly from his very fine pamphlet The Small Hours. For a good summary of the whole reading, see Rob's account. It was a shame not to be able to hear Michael Mackmin, whose Twenty-Three Poems is another strong chapbook, or Gregory Leadbetter, who I didn't get the chance to meet either, but at least I managed to sleep a bit on the train home!

All in all, it was a great trip. The reading buzzed with a livelier atmosphere than anything I've been at certainly in Edinburgh, possibly in Scotland full stop, and the audience was obviously attentive. In fact, the dozen copies of the sampler that Nell put out all sold, as did a good number of other pamphlets. Now, that just wouldn't happen in Edinburgh!

*Daft apostrophe but good hot porridge, which is just what a cold, wet traveller needed.

Sampler Review

Sorlil has very kindly reviewed my sampler on her blog. As far as I know, it's the first review of this pamphlet and I'm very pleased with what she has to say about it. She comments:

"These poems are unlike most of the poems I read these days, there is something very different and at times uncomfortable about them which certainly makes them stand out and difficult to forget",

which is the kind of thing any writer would want a reader or reviewer to say about their work. I'll be interested to see whether there are many comments on her post.

Meanwhile, why not contact HappenStance and order a copy?

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.

LBF on Facebook

Linlithgow Book Festival now has a Facebook presence. With the full programme listed there, it's a great way for Facebookers to keep up to date with what's happening with West Lothian's literary festival.

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.

Back from London and, after two less than restful nights on the sleeper (the one on the way down was by far the worse) completely puggelt. Proper reports of Sunday's Shore Poets and last night's reading in due course, but suffice to say it was a cracker of a night.