StAnza 2011: Hats and tin whistles

Of course, St Andrew's is famous not only for its poetry festival but I was there for StAnza.
16th-20th March,2011.
Rather late in posting - but here are some of my highlights.

The festival was surprising in lots of (nice) ways: Ciaron Carson opening and ending both his headline event and the intimate round table reading, with a tune on a tin whistle. He also entered wearing a hat and scarf - both of which he removed before reading. Selima Hill sported a headscarf. The legendary New York performance poet, Bob Holman also sported a hat. Tin whistles or head gear could be the new big thing in the poetry world.

Arriving with minutes to spare on the second day, I caught a 'Sound' poetry event given by Krikri, a Belgian-based group. Of the three performers, the first one was the most interesting to me. Throat noises, hums, squeals, whispers, cries and occasional yells. I loved it. 'Just let the whole thing wash over you', the female performer suggested. So I did. Very relaxing, opening up intriguing soundscapes that you could interpret or just listen to like the abstract sounds of modern classical music. A fun experience to plunge into as my first event at StAnza this year. I have to admit, this is not the first time I have heard such voice experiments, having heard the Swedish Marie Selander (I recommend her CD 'Voicings' Twin Music) and I attended a workshop she ran where participants were also encouraged to perform their own soundscapes back in Aberystwyth many years ago. Still, I'm sure Krikri was a new experience for many. Looking round the auditorium, the grins suggested many people enjoyed her performance too.

It was a very different StAnza this year for me in two ways - over the years, I have got to know more and more poets who live in Scotland, and it's great to bump into them, and this year, others whom I've met at various workshops round the UK, or at festivals abroad. It is a sort of clan gathering of poets and would-be poets. So from that point of view StAnza was the most social one I've attended as yet.

The other difference was that most of the headline poets I had read but not heard perform before: Fiona Sampson, Yang Lian, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Farley, Selima Hill, Philip Gross and Ciaran Carson. The only one I had heard before was Douglas Dunn, former Professor at St. Andrews, now retired. He was the last headline event of the whole festival and when he walked on stage, cheers broke out from the audience. That he is much admired and held in great affection not only by students but by fellow poets and StAnza audiences over the years was evident. But that is to rush ahead.

The first headline event was Yang Lian who gave the most dramatic performance in a foreign language of the festival. His Mandarin sounded muscular, at times warm and melodious as a cello and at other times extraordinary sounds (to English ears) involving explosive s,z, x, ch or szx all at once. I enjoyed the original language as music - almost more than the translations! However, it was, of course, good to hear the English version translated and performed by Brian Holman. Yang's charming introductions to his poems in English made ancient classical Chinese poetry seem less remote - though I also realized how little I know and his poems made me want to find out more. (Incidentally there is an illuminating article by Yang Lian I discovered afterwards in Poetry London, Spring, 2005.) His father used to make him learn the T'ang dynasty poems by heart. At the time he hated them but later he realized that their rhythms became part of him and helped him become a poet. He tries to echo Chinese classical poetry in his work but also to transform it. I particularly liked the sequence of poems about Australia, featuring sharks and jelly fish, but in the classical Chinese imagistic style.

Incidentally, though Holman's translations were what we mainly heard at this event, Holman also read a version by W.H. Herbert. 'I can hear the Scots voice in that,' said Yang. It did sound very different from Holman. I am also aware of Pascale Petit's versions of Yang, Ghost Sonatas in her collection 'The Treekeeper's Tale' which reflect her own painterly, vivid and precise imagery. ('Versions' rather than translations is something that came up later in the Poetry Breakfast discussion - of which, more anon.)

The flow of parallel imagery in Yang's work was echoed in the second poet that evening, Fiona Sampson. Remembering that she started as a professional violin performer, her poetry seemed to me reminiscent of fugue. Their musicality is paramount.

'Setting off
into the invisible, beyond music,
you strain at something
glimpsed -

but the retina's
all fog and shine,
light curtained by water.'
(From Fogbound in 'Common Prayer' (Carcanet, 2007).

Her concern with spirituality as 'something glimpsed' and the fragmented verse structures and play of imagery has parallels with John Burnside.

Later I was fortunate to meet Yang Lian and Fiona Sampson in person. Chatting in the foyer, Fiona and I were reminiscing about Wales and their tradition of awarding crowns to the best free verse poet or a throne to the best bard (poet writing in the strict metres), and how in England we have poet laureates who get a 'butt of sack' (fortified wine) anyway...what were poets awarded in China, I asked Yang. 'In China,' he said,' we throw poets into jail.' This reminded me that there would be a P.E.N. reading during the festival of some poems by Liu Xiaobo. The event was in solidarity with other readings across the world in protest against his house arrest.

The next headliners were Marilyn Hacker and Paul Farley - an inspired pairing to have a New Yorker, a feminist and proponent of the 60s' counter-culture with the Liverpudlian Paul Farley, whose sense of humour and of course, his accent, instantly made me think of the Beatles (my heroes). His laid-back, witty introductions were disarming, especially when followed by poems which were complex architectures and pyrotechnic in effect.

The next headliner, the T.S. Eliot Prize winner for 'The Water Table',(Bloodaxe, 2009) Philip Gross was equally charming with introductions like a benevolent English teacher inspiring his 6th form (and even an invitation to us to write our own water garden poem), followed by imagistic, multi-layered verse. Selima Hill was emotionally devastating. Her first poem, about post-natal depression, was like a mini-explosion. Afterwards, she said 'Of course, I love children. The 'I' in the poem is not me.' Thank goodness for that. I think there was probably a collective sigh of relief. Selima has 'come out' as being on the spectrum of Asperger's Syndrome and it was evident that she finds public performances difficult. At the same time, she says exactly what she thinks and this leads to her extraordinarily honest, uncomfortable poetry.


Ciaran Carson

The last night headliner was the Northern Irish Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast and founder of the Seamus Heaney Centre, Ciaran Carson, whose complex work came alive in performance and I found it much easier to appreciate. A thoroughly enjoyable event (plus the bonus of the tin whistle, as mentioned.) and finally Douglas Dunn, who interspersed his reading with self-depreciatory jokes. He read a variety of work including the well-known description of the Tay bridge as 'humped dinosaurs' to a poem about one of Columba's monks on Iona illuminating a manuscript - Dunne's verse equally vivid in imagery and detail. The latter was from his latest poetry book 'A Line in Water', a collaboration with the artist, Norman Ackroyd.

I was fortunate to get one of the 12 coveted places on Ciaran Carsons's intimate Round Table session and I will blog about the session separately.

As for the rest of the festival, there were also many poets that were completely new to me: the most interesting being the intellectual but affecting, Durs Grunbein from East Germany, the English versions translated by Michael Hoffman and read by Don Paterson. Hoffman says in his introduction of 'Ashes for Breakfast' (Faber and Faber, 2005): 'We share a derisive melancholia.' Grunbein's poetry is grave and concerned with moral issues (I don't mean moralistic)in a way we tend to shy away from in Britain. So he is someone whose latest book I bought and I will read and reread to get my head around.

Other firsts for me were Rab Wilson whom I heard singing, with melodious voice, a song in Scots at an open mic. I attended my second only Slam ever- the first at StAnza, chiefly to support my friend, Claudia Daventry, who is witty, feisty and generally brilliant - only she forgot her words! Och the shame. However, it is pretty impressive the way performance poets learn their words by heart. Not many literary poets can manage this. So hats off (More hats.) She grinned and shrugged. As former Champion, winner of the Strokestown ash-plant and part of the winning team against the Ozzies online, she will bounce back. It was the first time I saw the famed, Glasgow-based, Robin Cairns- very slick, especially the almost balletic leaps. I can't tell you who won. I snuck off once Claudia was out. Old age, don't you know. Too many late nights do me in.

It was a joy to hear so many poets in their original language. I heard German, Lithuanian, Italian, Iraqi Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin),and Scottish Gaelic.


Lidija Simkute


There were the delightful, elegant poems, tiny, musical fragments of Lydija Simkute,(pron. Shimkooteh), who now lives in Australia, and who writes in both Lithuanian and English - some poems she says start in one language, others in the other:

'...thinking is a walk
on ground
less
ness'
Note: each line should be indented so that the whole makes a diagonal line. Unfortunately, my google-blogger doesn't allow me fancy lay-outs.
(From 'The Empty Page' in Thought and Rock (Urmas, Australian Lithuanian Foundation, 2008);

Also the atmospheric, painterly poems of the Italian Antonella Anedda. Born in Rome where she now lives, it is interesting to learn that she studied the History of Painting in Rome and Venice. Her ancestry is from one of the islands off Sardinia and she read a poem about a visit there. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of this so will quote a few lines from another poem 'For my Daughter':

I love her fierceness when she fights me,
shouting "Not fair!" Her eyes slitting
like shutters in cities by the sea.
Her life is rife with bonfires - seen and unseen-
fires that burn through the turning years
bringing her to life again, and again, in a miracle of smoke.'
(Translated by Sarah Arvio, and found on the website www.poetryfoundation.org )



The stark despair of the exiled Adnan al-Sayegh was moving- his reading voice in Arabic is deeply dramatic and musical:

'you who are a man,
consider
how you talk with your Lord & the devil
is it then too much to hope you'd learn
how to talk with your fellow men...
bell or
minaret
-O Servant
of God-
why
won't you
hear your
Lord
in a
flute?'
(From 'Night Prayers' in The Deleted Part (Exiled Writers Ink, 2009)

I was disappointed, as I had been looking forward to hearing them, that the two Georgian poets, David Robakidze and George Nakhutsrishvili were unable to attend as, at the last minute, there was problem with their visas their end (not ours).

I missed the Scottish Gaelic events - exhaustion meant something had to go, but at least I heard Kevin MacNeil's Gaelic version of one of Lidija Simkute's Lithuanian poems as part of the Poetry Breakfast discussion on Translation (Kevin MacNeil, Don Paterson, Tom Petsinis, Lidija Simkute). This was one of the most interesting events of the whole festival. 'Versions' versus translation, as I mentioned above, was the main issue and 'What gets lost in translation' but also what gets added.

Finally, I attended a workshop given by Penelope Shuttle on the theme of 'Clocks and Calendars'- well-attended by beginners through to more experienced poets. Imaginative strategies generated some lovely poems from the group. She is well-known as a wonderful poet and enabler of others as tutor (Her latest collection is 'Sandgrain and Hourglass' (Bloodaxe, 2010).

Congratulations to Eleanor Livingstone in her first year as Director of StAnza for such a varied, amusing, interesting, involving, eye-opening to so many cultures and occasionally surprising festival. Hats off to you too.

Those are the literary highlights but I also loved the poetry-related art exhibitions- but I'll put up a Photo Journal of these in another blog.





One of the Festival's themes was 'Time' this year, so here are some sundials to be found in the gardens of the Preservation Trust Museum.