Stephanie Green's Blog/Journal

Burns Window Poems

2012-01-24T20:04:00.010Z

The challenge to think of a new way to celebrate Burns (Burns Night is fast approaching, on 25th January, as you no doubt know) has been wonderfully thought up by Hugh Bryden of Roncadora Press and David Borthwick, a lecturer at Crichton Campus, University of Glasgow, who have asked poets around Scotland and all over the world, local people and schoolchildren in Dumfries to write a Burns-inspired, contemporary poem to fit on a window pane on various houses throughout Dumfries- Burns himself scratched a poem on the Globe, a local pub's window with a diamond. Hugh supplied a transparent plastic sheet and special pen to write our poems on.

My friend Jean Atkin who lives near Dumfries has photos on her blog of some of the resulting poems which are now up. Mine included!
http://thedogdaysofdumfriesshire.blogspot.com/2012/01/poem-of-18th-century-publican-robert.html?showComment=1327435355001#c2919695376840101731
Burns Window Poems. Photo by Jean Atkin.

If you can't read my poem above in the photo, here it is:

My Luve.

O, my luve is like a sleekit beastie
That nibbles on fingers and toes.
O, noo he's crept intae my hert,
He's dearer than ony rose.

Local newspaper article here http://www.dgstandard.co.uk/dumfries-news/local-news-dumfries/local-news-dumfriesshire/2012/01/20/burns-window-art-catches-on-51311-30159021/

John Burnside, winner of the T.S. Eliot prize

2012-01-19T18:50:00.003Z

The newspaper and BBC accounts of the T.S. Eliot Prize are all depressingly, and predictably, about the furore caused by two of the shortlisted poets withdrawing. The Channel 4 coverage of the announcement of the award spent the majority of the time on this, and spoke to John Burnside about his poetry for about a second. So here is a refreshing interview:

http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Interview-John-Burnside

More on T.S. Eliot Prize readings, 2012

2012-01-19T11:15:00.003Z

For the benefit of my trusted and valid followers (!), I've added to my previous post on the T.S. Eliot prize readings, evoking the whole evening, so do please scroll back, if you want a idea of what it was like to be there.

I shall delete this one in a day or two.

T.S.Eliot Prize, 2012

2012-01-16T19:39:00.012Z

Yup I was there. One of the 1,600 members of the audience at the Festival Hall for the T.S. Eliot prize readings. First time I've made it to the South Bank for the event of the poetry year- all the way down from sunny Edinburgh.

But first, London by night was very twinkly - especially as my sister I was staying with lives in the East End and we took a bus past the floodlit , white 'bloody' Tower, with the lit-up glass Shard appearing to rise out of it (do sky-lines matter?), past the glass Cheese-grater and the lit-up glass Gerkhin and finally to a flood-lit St Paul's. We then walked over the Millenium Bridge,- over the Thames, with more buildings illuminated: Tower Bridge, the Globe, the various South Bank halls, lots of blue and white strings of light in the trees as if it was still Christmas and of course, the colourful Wheel and Westminster across the water. So we were pretty excited by the time we reached the Festival Hall.

The only twinkly things about the poetry readings, however, were the specks on the poets' glasses- some who shall be nameless, fumbled around, swopping long- distance glasses for reading glasses, and also perhaps lights reflected on the bottle of water. I'm being unfair. The atmosphere in the (hideous) hall was electric. It was reminiscent, for a moment, of the Last Night of the Proms - only no streamers, flags, hooters or silly hats. Cheers met the M.C. , Ian MacMillan, whose repartee sparkled, with just the right balance between humourous, warm-ups to get the already excited audience notched up a level and then serious intros to each poet - omitting the tedious list of prizes/awards which are usually offered (important as they may be) but little vignettes evoking the particular poet. The most memorable was of John Burnside, whose poems, MacMillan described as constructed like intricate, tiny fishing flies which then, when cast into the water, glint enticingly below the surface.

The audience calmed down and were attentive. It became more like a serious poetry reading and like most readings ranged from the dire to the sublime. I'm talking about performance here. All the poems were stunning. I would not have liked to be a judge. All were breath-taking. But...I'm afraid, as a non-poet friend of mine once said to me 'you're not assured of a good night out at a poetry reading'- some of the poets, who shall be nameless, mumbled, dropped their voices at the last line of each poem, some poets read too quickly so that one couldn't catch what they were saying, one read on a monotone...Am I being cruel? It must have been a terrifying experience for the poets themselves. I mean, even though most of them are academics used to lecturing students, there's a difference between 40 or so students, or the usual small gathering at a poetry reading, and standing as a lone spot-litted waif on a vast, lonely stage in front of 1,6000 people. Yeah, maybe I should take it back? I would probably be a trembling wreck (this is fantasizing that my own poetry readings would ever attract more than 25 people!) But I really do wish poets would take lessons in performance skills. Is it really more authentic to mutter than to give a mesmerizing performance? (I was about to say 'dramatic' but there's lies a controversial pit-fall I shall avoid for now.)

Moan over. The majority of the poets performed well. Dalgit Nagra was brilliant - a lively, dramatic rendering of his very funny poem about Indian girls' names which all seem to rhyme started the evening with a bang. He then followed this with a more serious, but also biting humour, about the colonial history of Britain in India- a good idea to read only two poems, the latter very, very long. As my sister said, with shorter poems, you've hardly got into them and they're over. Leontia Flynn also read a very, very long poem, 'Letter to Friends' which again was humourous, with precise, contemporary, urban detail which leant itself perfectly to public performance. I loved the line: 'Man can't bear too much Reality (TV)'.

The most brilliant, consummately professional performance was by Carol Ann Duffy. Each time I hear her, she is more assured - not a Grand Dame - there is no pretension, but she seemingly effortlessly controls her performance- funny, ironic, biting (the poem banned from the school curriculum) and then intensely moving -a poem going backwards in time, starting at the moment of her mother's death, then remembering her alive. A poem which went straight to the heart.

Talking of which, Bernard O'Donghue's elegy on a friend was intense and moving. Esther Morgan's poems were all elegant, lyrical and beautifully wrought, John Burnside's ranged from his mastery of the fragmentary, elusive evocations of a spiritual or maybe just ghostly world just out of reach to a voodo-inspired series, which are more accessible, (a pleasant change) but for my taste, verging on the melodramatic. David Harsent's spooky garden was definitely melodramatic, sending shivers down your spine, and shockingly taboo mentions of an old lady (the spirit of the garden, maybe)'s flashing her widget-like arse-hole. He also read with actorly flourish and a mellow, melodious voice which I thoroughly enjoyed. Sean O'Brien read two jokey poems as well as more serious poems so that was a clever way of breaking up what might have been a long haul of an evening. The evening as as a whole proved to be mainly enthralling (only some minor irritating blips).

It was also fun to 'spot the poet/publisher' in the audience: I saw Mathew Hollis, Editor of Faber, Robin Robinson, Editor of Cape, I'm told Neil Astley, Bloodaxe's supremo, was there and many other well-known poets. Fun to also bump into a handful of other fellow poet/friends, but the majority of the huge audience were members of the public/poetry lovers. Perhaps the BBC should take note.

Amazing to see how varied and lively poetry is today. All that tired old stuff about Traditional Forms v Modernist/Post-Modernist seems to be irrelevant. Poets and audiences far more accepting of difference, all given equal validity. Poetry is alive and well.
***
OK, there's 5 mins to go before the announcement of the winner tonight at 7.45pm (ish) - so my bet is on Carol Ann Duffy. She's won the TSE before, she's had endless honours and she is the Poet Laureate so perhaps a newcomer should be given a chance - like Dalgit Nagra - who of the younger poets on the shortlist would be my choice, if not for Carol Ann. Dalgit plays with language inventively - especially his Punglish, which unfortunately was not much in evidence in the two poems he read last night - and I haven't read the rest of his short-listed book yet 'Tippo Sultan's Incredible White Man Eating Tiger Toy.'.. to check if it's as exciting as its title and as his first book...

but perhaps it should go to a poet at the height of their career, Sean O'Brien (who has already won the TSE before), Bernard O'Donoghue, David Harsent or John Burnside...any of these would be be worthy winners...but Carol Ann has it, whatever it is. She is the real thing.
So now to telly (Channel 4 I'm told are covering the bash) at the Haberdasher's Hall where they are quaffing and hobnobbing, to see who did win.

8pm...

It's John Burnside's 'Black Cat Bone'. A wonderful, enigmatic collection. Congratulations.
See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/16/john-burnside-wins-ts-eliot-prize?newsfeed=true

Other than Poetry, Best Books Read, 2011

2011-12-17T13:22:00.000Z

Happy Christmas and all the best for 2012, readers.

Still Xmas cards to write, pressies to buy, lights to wind round the fig tree (No Tree for us this year), so
this is my last post now for the Christmas break, returning some time in the New Year, when I hope to have caught up on some reading, and maybe, who knows, redrafted a few poems, even written some new.

My Favourite Books, other than poetry, published in 2011:

Novels
A Summer of Drowning - John Burnside (Cape)- atmospheric, a ghost story in white
nights

Non-Fiction published in 2011:
All Made Up - Janice Galloway (Granta)

Favourite Novels, published prior to 2011, read this year:
Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan (Vintage/Cape, 2007)- devastating;
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch (C & W, 1954)- hurrah for silliness and melodrama mixed
with existential philosophizing (tho not philosphy as philosophers would
write it - obviously she wanted to get away from the day job);
The Travelling Horn-Player - Barbara Trapido(Penguin '99)- hurrah for over-the-top,
more silliness and melodrama but incisive observation of/hatchet jobs on
her characters.

Non-Fiction published prior to 2011:
What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness - Candia McWilliam (Cape, 2010)-
extraordinary, exasperating, devastating and mesmerizing;
The Hare with Amber Eyes- Edmund de Waal (Chatto & Wyndus)- another extraordinary
book, written with elegance and clarity, as much about the historical
turmoil of the times the owners of the netsuke collection lived through,
as an aesthetic obsession;
My Invented Country - Isabelle Allende (Harper, 2004)
Curriculum Vitae - Muriel Spark (Carcanet, 1992)- oh that delicious brevity and wit;
Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia - Orlando Figes (Lane,'02/Penguin 2003)
a glorious book to get lost in and self-indulge.
***

As you can see from above, I've been swivelling from serious and devastating to silly and melodramatic for light relief. A distinct turn towards memoirs - will this prefigure my own writing to come? :)

Libraries: impossible dreams

2011-12-16T17:41:00.008Z

Sparkling Morningside Public Library

As a change from all the gloomy news about libraries, yesterday was a good day for libraries in Edinburgh: the Morningside Library re-opened, after a massive face-lift, and revealed a new, dazzling white self, the opening graced by local author and celebrity, Alexander McCall Smith. The last time I visited the library, water was pouring through the roof and we had to dodge buckets. Luckily, for Morningside the money for the restoration had already had the thumbs up before the present clamp down and threat of closures in the UK.

A wee thank you and hurrah for the staff who manned (though chiefly womaned) the mobile library parked in a nearby street during the months of the main library's closure. It was delightfully warm in there and I don't just mean the heating.

But great to be back in the main building. The children's section has a curving book-shelf and a Wendy House, the teenagers will be delighted by the game consoles (and who knows, perhaps they will find libraries so congenial they will be tempted by the books). Upstairs, there are Conference Rooms for hire.

Scottish Poetry Library Xmas Bash

It was also a good evening for the very special Scottish Poetry Library, lit up with night-lights - (how often is the naked flame allowed in a library?) whose Christmas party I went to along with other volunteers, staff, Friends, friends generally, poets or poetry-lovers. Robyn Marsack, the Director, said in her welcoming speech, that one visitor from abroad had remarked how unusual it is to have a library dedicated only to poetry, to promote 'impossible dreams'. On the whole, I guess we do know how lucky we are. Long may it thrive. Long may we dream impossible dreams.

Poetry Highlights of the Year, 2011

2011-12-12T13:22:00.002Z

It's that time of year again:

My Favourite Poetry Books published in 2011

The New North, anthology of contemporary poetry from Northern Ireland
- ed. Chris Agee (Salt);
Lost at Sea - Jean Atkin (Roncadora Press)- a beautiful artist's book designed by
Hugh Bryden;
Sidereal - Rachel Boast (Picador);
Black Cat Bone - John Burnside (Cape);
Aibisidh - Angus Peter Campbell (Polygon);
Working the Hill - Jim Carruth (Mariscat Press);
The Bees - Carol Ann Duffy (Picador);
Red House - Sasha Dugdale (Oxford Poets/Carcanet);
Profit and Loss - Leontia Flynn (Cape);
Night - David Harsent (Faber);
A Choosing - Selected Poems - Liz Lochhead (Polygon);

Favourite Pamphlets, published in 2011:

Apocrypha - A.B. Jackson (Donut Press) -PBS pamphlet choice.
A Shewing Stone - Sean Martin (Mutus Liber)- Winner of the Wigtown Prize, 2011;
Garden of Bedsteads - Jane McKie (Mariscat Press)

Favourite Poetry Books published prior to 2011:

An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets eds V. Polukhina and D. Weissbort (Carcanet, 2005);
A Nest on the Waves - David Wheatley (Gallery Books, 2010);
On the flyleaf - Ken Cockburn (Luath Press, 2007)

Favourite pamphlets published prior to 2011:

The Thief - Gill Andrews (HappenStance, 2010);
Annie Katchinska: Faber New Poets 6, (FF 2010).

and catching up: Lorca, Cavafy, Ovid, Catullus, Sappho in various translations; Sharon Olds.

Poetry Reading Highlights of 2011:

Peggy Hughes singing Burns' A Man's a Man for a' that', part of the Burns Flash
Mob outside St Giles' Cathedral, Edb, Jan. (View on You-tube);

Ciaran Carson, Douglas Dunne, Paul Farley, Selima Hill, Yang Lian, Fiona Sampson,
Lidija Simkute, Adnan al-Sayegh at StAnza, Scotland's Poetry Festival,
St. Andrews, March;

Robin Cairns and Claudia Daventry at the Poetry Slam on last night of StAnza, March;

August Kleinzahler in St Mary's Hall, St. Andrew's, in May;

Kay Ryan at the Story-telling Centre (The Netherbow), Edinburgh, in Nov.

Don Paterson reading poem inspired by and surrounded by Alison Watt's paintings
in the Ingleby Art Gallery, Edinburgh, Dec.

Alison Watt and Don Paterson Hiding in Full View

2011-12-03T01:07:00.000Z

'Hiding in Full View' is a response to Francesca Woodman's photographs by the painter, Alison Watt currently on show at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. Last night I went to a poetry reading held there to launch a book coming out of a collaboration between the artist and the poet, Don Paterson, who responded to both Watt and Woodman. The result is exquisite.

Alison Watt's self-portraits are conveyed through paintings of folds and holes in white fabric. Don Paterson's sonnet is reproduced in large letters, one line at a time, on the wall by each painting. In the book, a painting and a line of poetry are facing pages.

Don Paterson's reading,standing in the semi-dark, echoing space of the Upper Gallery surrounded by Watt's paintings, was an atmospheric event and comprised a selection of new work and some well-known poems such as 'Rain'. The audience, as far as I could tell, were mostly art lovers, with only a few of the usual members of Edinburgh poetry audiences there. A pity. The new sonnet was stunning. Worth it to have gone just to hear the one poem.

In fact, in a way, I wish Don had just read the one poem and let us meditate on it whilst viewing the paintings. I suppose the organizers and probably Don felt he had to give the usual 20 minute slot that poetry readings consist of. A small cavil. I don't mind how many times I hear the wonderful 'Rain'.

I was aware of Francesa Woodman's photographs before. They speak very strongly to a (particularly) female fragility and lack of a sense of identity. It was devastating to learn that Francesca was only 22 when she committed suicide. The photographs do hint at this sad fate, her psychic distress is so evident.

But after such a quick visit, I don't feel I can write in more depth here. I will revisit the exhibition, meditate on the pictures and the text of the sonnet, in silence when the gallery is emptier. This is what both poem and paintings require: silence.

Both Alison and Don are drawn to a spiritual vision (not religious - as Don at least, I know has said of himself- I don't know of Alison's stance on this though one of her paintings hangs in Edinburgh's Old St Pauls' church in a side chapel and I often stand in front of it to meditate.)

Don and Alison have covered similar territory before such as a response to the painting of 'St Francis in Meditation' by Zurbaran which expresses metaphysical anguish in the face of mortality.
Don's rsponse to Zurbaron is in his latest collection 'Rain' and is the poem called'Phantom'(also i.m. Michael Donaghy) in which the third section is after Alison Watt's 'Breath'.

In this present collaboration 'Hiding in Full View' it is less overtly spiritual, more about existential identity maybe, what can be revealed and what must remain hidden. It is a very evocative title for what both painter and poet do, the power of the suggested, the oblique, what cannot be said, only apprehended.

The exhibition continues until January 2012
See http://www.inglebygallery.com/artists/alison-watt/

Poem a Day for a Year

2011-11-30T21:52:00.000Z

Announcing a new blog, inspired by my grown-up son's request for suggestions of what poems to read, but also possibly of interest to others.

A day by day poem seemed a good way to introduce some favourites, both contemporary and past poets, also a sort of crash course in Eng. Lit.(poetry written in the English language, so not limited to the UK, and possibly a few translations into English from other languages) without the academic analyzing that can kill a love of poetry. (If you want more background, or want to read more poems by that poet, I hope it will encourage you to explore further by yourself.)

The selection varies between contemporary living poets, (or recently deceased) and a random jumping back and forth to poets in 'the canon' (a debatable term, I know), who seem to me, Must Know. No chronological ordering, and no logic, other than that the poem selected might be a complete contrast in style or sensibility to the one preceding it. The selection is random, as they occur to me.

Often my adult students confess to not having read poetry since they were at school since they were put off it by how it was taught, or they have been made to feel that poetry is a crossword puzzle that has to be solved. In particular 'Modern' poetry is loathed, even though unread and shunned, for fear they will not 'get' it, and a disgruntled belief that their love of rhyme and rhythm is somehow out of date and suspect.

What is clear, is that many people I talk to tell me they loved poetry... once upon a time ...and can quote by heart many poems they were forced to learn (and are now happy that they were), before the dreaded teaching for passing exams started, and they were turned off poetry.

So this blog is not about 'analyzing' poetry, but experiencing it. See
http://poemsforayearandforever.blogspot.com/

Body Bags, Simonides, Robert Crawford and Norman MacBeath

2011-11-25T14:00:00.000Z

Definitely the best, most piercing and graphic art/poetry exhibition of the Edinburgh Festival (2011). Great to learn from the StAnza blog that this part installation, part photographs by Norman MacBeath and part poetry by Robert Crawford, responses to fragments of Simonides, on view at ECA during last summer's Edinburgh Festival will again be on show. Catch it at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrew's in March 2012.

This has prompted me to upload my photos and write up my Wandering in Art Galleries blog, so please do have a look. See sidebar and click on the photo.

Bookish sculptures' mysterious appearances around Edinburgh

2011-11-24T12:20:00.001Z

Mysterious and silent, they have fluttered down like gifts from Harry Potter's owl, though the giver has been unseen - I have only seen two of the beautifully intricate paper sculptures, inspired by books, even using slips of text-cuttings as part of their construction, that have been magically appearing round Edinburgh in bookish places: the one (above)in the Scottish Poetry Library and the one in the Central Library's foyer.

There has been a flutter on Twitter. (I'm told, since I don't.) They are fired up about it (if that's possibly a dangerous word to use in libraries)in the SPL and their latest blog announcing the last of the charming gifts, paper gloves of bees' fur and cap of wrens' wings, has prompted me to post the link http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/2011/11/24/gloves-of-bees-fur-cap-of-the-wrens-wings/

I've been meaning to search for the others. Some are only on view privately though. But thanks to Chrisdonia who has been tracking down and photographing each of the 10 gifted by Anon, you can now see them here:

http://community.thisiscentralstation.com/_Mysterious-paper-sculptures/blog/4991767/126249.html

Working the HIll by Jim Carruth

2011-11-23T12:05:00.000Z

The cover of Jim Carruth's latest collection 'Working the Hill' (Mariscat Press)was designed by his son 'for a bag of chips.' That self-deprecating humour and propensity to debunk all pretension is what makes Jim such a great MC at open mics, but also one of the strengths of his own poetry. It would be too easy to say that a spade is a spade in Jim Carruth's poetry. However, his language is direct, spare and all the more moving for that.

It was a real pleasure to see Jim for a change not just as a facilitator of others but to hear him read his own poetry, in his beautifully mellow and modulated Renfrewshire tones at the launch of this latest collection last night at the SPL.

Working part-time on his brother's farm, Jim is, as far as anyone at the SPL launch knew, the only poet in Scotland today writing about the agricultural life: the farm, the animals, the people. Patrick Kavanagh comes to mind in Ireland in the 50s and 60s- the same spareness. Jim explained how he has been 'working the (same) hill' all his life and also for his own poetry: looking at the same hill (and its livestock and people) from different angles, geographically, agriculturally, mythically and poetically, in a sense 'mapping' it, from his first school-boy poems to today, and probably will for ever. (His previous collection 'High Auchensale' (Ludovic Press) does in fact have a map of this farm for its cover.)

Jim's 'concrete' poems exhibited at StAnza may be more familiar - their list-like sparseness and most memorably the tribute to the anguish of the devastation of 'mad cow disease' in communities throughout Britain but the poems in his collections are more narrative-driven, though retaining their economy and precision with an empathy for the lives of the people who 'work the hill'.

Jim's poems particularly spoke to me, as someone who lived in Mid-Wales for 13 years in a rural community, and for five of those years on a former hill-top farm. Surrounded by sheep, and at differing times of year, lambs, bullocks and occasionally, a bull, all belonging to the neighbouring farm, I chatted to its inhabitants almost daily in the fields, or regularly visited, especially the 80 year-old matriarch still ruling the farm from their kitchen. But I don't think you would have to have experienced the farming life to appreciate Jim's poems.

The apparent harshness of a poem about still-born lambs is deceptive:

yin and yang
coughed up dead.

Sling them
in the back

there's the living
to be fed.
(From 'Twins')

That taciturn farmers are not as hard-hearted as they might appear is expressed well in a poem about pigs:

Yes - you can find a use
for every part of the pig

except the squeal.

After the bleeding,
the scaldering,
the butchering,

it's the squeal,
that stays
piercing my summers.
(From 'Uses')

At a reading to his local community in Renfrewshire the previous night, Jim said there were Mmms and nods from many farmers in recognition of Jim's authentic descriptions of 'the cost/of working this harsh land from dark to dark', in particular in 'Stacks', an account of hay baling:

... until bales were jammed against the roof,
careful not to choke the elevator's incessant feed'

the potential disaster well-appreciated by his audience. As one farmer told Jim, he did not hold with poetry 'except for Burns' and now, one hopes, for Jim.

A particularly moving poem describes the death of a farmer's wife in her 80's still working, happy to die 'in harness':

She lay dead in the early morning dew
in a working man's bunnet, worn wellies,
wrapped in a shapeless woollen jumper
its ragged sleeves soaking wet and sticky
from the many mouths of suckling calves'

This precise enumeration of her ragged clothes and the detail of the wet sleeves, expressing her relationship with the calves, moved me almost as much as the description of her dropping down dead whilst carrying the milking pails - yet managing to barely spill a drop so that the hungry calves would still be fed.

Long may Jim continue to write about cows, sheep, pigs and farmers and, as Jim would say 'tick all the boxes'.

http://www.jimcarruth.co.uk/

To find out more about Glasgow poetry events Jim organizes at St Mungo's Mirrorball, see the SPL website for events or http://www.stmungosmirrorball.co.uk/

or catch him at StAnza, MCing the late-night open mics (or even ask him if you can participate.

H is for Mandy Haggith and Hawthorn, Celtic Tree Alphabet

2011-11-20T19:01:00.000Z

Hawthorn in the Royal Botanical Garden, Edinburgh. Find the 'cloots'.

Beware the shade of the Hawthorn tree, where faeries gather and good and bad magic can be made. Despite this warning, today I joined a group of poetry and tree lovers gathered under the tall hawthorn in the Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh (to the side of the Andy Goldworthy drystone sculpture by Inverleith House)and wrote thorny poems inspired by Mandy Haggith's poetry workshop, part of A-B-Tree.

Reading a series of Hawthorn-inspired poems by Jane McKie, Willa Cather and Seigfried Sasoon, Mandy fed us slips of paper with information about its history, medical, folklore, as a springboard for our own work. I learnt that the hawthorn (or May) smells of sex and death, it is unlucky to bring the blossom into the house and it is used in Beltane festivals. It is a associated with Brigit and healing and sometimes known as a 'clootie' tree when people hang little cloths or rags onto it to represent wishes or prayers for health. 'This is still going on here,' said Mandy casually, pointing to tattered rags hanging in our tree. If you peer at the photo above you may make them out with difficulty since they are so green with mould they are almost lost in amongst the leaves.

It was a lovely day with blue haze over the panoramic view of Edinburgh from Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags, panning to the Castle and on to the various cathedral towers and spires. The splendid session ended just as it was getting cold and pink skies followed by the bright ball of the sun as red as the few haws left on our tree.

This event was the penultimate one of Mandy's journey to celebrate the 18 trees figured in the Celtic runic (ogham) Tree Alphabet which took her round Scotland through workshops in schools, community woodland groups and environmental organisations including the other Royal Botanical Gardens in the Borders, Argyll and Dumfries.

As Mandy said on her blog ‘I’ve been delighted so far by all the leafy words sprouting from participants’ pencils!’

To read more about the A-B-Tree project see: Mandy's blog for 24th October, 2011: http://cybercrofter.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html

Fight for Libraries' Campaign

2011-11-18T10:11:00.000Z

A Fight for London Libraries' campaign is planning a day of activity in February, probably on the 4th, National Library Day.

The events are still under discussion but plans mooted are a march, possibly to Downing Street, and a read-in outside the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Maybe you should get your camping gear ready. The anti-greedy bankers sit-in outside St Paul's has started a trend.

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/campaigners-plan-london-libraries-march.html

Libraries' closure ruled illegal

2011-11-17T11:46:00.000Z

At last some good news. Library closures in Somerset and Gloucestershire have been ruled illegal, because of the counties' duty to comply with 'public sector equality duties' towards vulnerable social groups. A hopeful sign that more libraries will be saved across the country?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-15752432

Shore Poets' 20th Anniversary all twinkly in Voodoo Rooms

2011-11-14T10:46:00.000Z

The sound of hip hop greeted me as I mounted the stairs to the Voodoo Rooms above the Cafe Royale and I thought I had perhaps arrived at the wrong venue. But no, upstairs is a bar with glorious Victorian decor, black leather seats and glass-bowled chandeliers, just the place for oysters in the side room, I'm told.

Across the way was a large auditorium where the Shore Poets were celebrating their 20th Anniversary. This room was equally black and gold, with velvet drapes twinkling with leds and the performance space overhung by a black and gold stucco frieze. Wow! Definitely the setting for some voodoo but SP created their own, if not black, a magical evening of poetry and music- in fact, more music than poetry, including Brighde,(pron Breege) Aonghas Phadriag Caimbeul/Angus Peter Campbell's teenage daughter on the bagpipes. SP have always included music in their evenings. As Alison Reeves, organizer of the musicians' spots said, the music is like a palate-cleanser between courses. Un aperitif. I quite agree. It certainly makes for a convivial, jolly event.

So not the usual setting for Shore Poets - there were reminiscences of the cold at the very first venue, at the Shore Art Gallery in Leith - the poetry event the brain child of Brian Johnstone and Ros Brackenbury (who is now a resident of Florida and sent a good will message from Key West) and of the various venues the SPs have graced, from Canongait's pub to the Wee Red bar in ECA (art school) over the years. Former members and present crowded the space - in particular the benign ghost of the late Gael Turnbull in a recording of him reading to an atmospheric piece of music.

Reminiscences, generous supplies of the famed lemon cake, speeches, toasts and far too few poems - rather modestly but strangely, few of the SP present members read - Janie McKie and Ian McDonough were selected to read from the SP's celebratory CD and were both superb, and several Open Mikers (including me) which was typically democratic of SP, but I would have loved to have had a poem read by each of the SPs.

However, lack of SP poetry was compensated for by an electrifying reading by the chief guest, Aonghas Phadraig Caimbeul/Angus Peter Campbell in Gaelic followed by English translations. His latest collection, Aibisidh/ABC (Polygon) will be on my Xmas list. Angus writes in the Gaelic tradition with contemporary twists, his concerns 'the fragmentaion of language and identity in our modern global age' as the Polygon flier puts it.

I loved 'The Prophecies of Coinneach Gobhar and Other Proverbs', with its updated nods to traditional Gaelic ones, especially one of Angus' versions:
'He who is idle
will be at the computer all day.'

Another poem that struck my imagination was 'Judas on an iceberg, as seen by St Brendan' - bringing together the sixth-century saint's voyage in a curragh to America via Iceland and Judas'

'...a chilling reward
for a solitary kindness done once

upon a time, before the thirty pieces
of silver left him here, shivering.'

Angus also read his award poem, commissioned in memory of the late Mark Ogle, (an early member of SP). Angus' poem is a response to Ogle's 'English Rain' written in the heat of Utter Pradesh, in nostalic longing:

'I want trousers soaked to the thighs
From walking through long grass
In fine misty rain that doesn't fall
But fastens glistening droplets to my clothes and skin...'

Angus' poem by contrast mentions rain which if you've been to South Uist, or anywhere in the Hebrides, you will recognize:

'I walked home after school; bent double in the wind;
with the rain pouring horizontal from the north.
In Uist, nothing ever fell down.'
(From 'Gravity'.)

The last line a reference also to why the theory of gravity could never have been discovered there.

As the event drew to a close and I had to leave, I was stopped in my tracks by Anne Connolly singing in Irish Gaelic in response to Campbell's Gaelic. A lovely way to end the evening- for me at least. I gather the event was still going strong with open mikers.
http://www.anguspetercampbell.co.uk/

http://www.shorepoets.org.uk/

Kay Ryan stand-up poet

2011-11-12T10:47:00.000Z

Kay Ryan confessed that half of her wanted to be a stand-up comedian and amazingly, for a literary poetry reading,(as opposed to a poetry slam) laughter did keep bubbling up from her audience in Edinburgh last Wednesday. The New York Times described her poems as like a cocktail, delicious but with a bite:

'You can’t help consuming Kay Ryan’s poems quickly, the way you are supposed to consume freshly made cocktails: while they are still smiling at you. But you immediately double back – what was that? – and their moral and intellectual bite blindsides you.'

The Scottish Poetry Library, where elite readings usually take place, was far too small for the audience expected and so the SPL had combined with the Storytelling Centre to put it on in their lovely, new wood-panelled theatre (inside the 17th c John Knox building). Word must have got around. Almost every poet of note, would-be poets and poetry lovers throughout Scotland were there. THE poetry event of the year, I'd say.

Pulitzer-winning, a recipient of a 'Genius' Fellowship (the MacArthur) and former poet laureate in America no less, Kay Ryan says that she hates readings where everyone sits there all silent and sensitive but instead she likes to hear laughter to know if she has connected with her audience.

She has a charming habit of interrupting her own poems with asides. For instance, reading her poem 'A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Water', which begins

'Who hasn't seen
a plain ordinary
steel needle float serene
on water as if lying on a pillow?'

she broke off to say that perhaps some of us have not seen this? But we needed to know she had had a childhood bereft of electricity, implying they had to make their own amusements...before continuing with the poem.

She also does not like to have her poems described as 'compressed' though, skimming through online reviews, I see they often do. Little 'dioramas' or those shoe-box worlds to be viewed through a pin-hole kids create is how she describes their imaginative worlds - though she likes the 'heft' of facts, they may include invented facts and are definitely not confessional like Lowell and co. The poems are all tight, economic, precise and vivid: (qualities much appreciated in Scottish poetry and perhaps why she is particularly appreciated up here) with a wit, an original, almost eccentric slant on life which often, unfashionably, sounds aphoristic.

Here is a snippet from her latest collection, 'Odd Blocks' (Carcanet, 2011):

A bestiary catalogs
bests......
Best is not to be confused with good -
a different creature altogether,
and treated of in the goodiary -
a text alas lost now for centuries.
(Bestiary)

And an example of humour and a more serious double-take in 'Doubt':

A chick has just so much time
to chip its way out, just so much
egg energy to apply to the weakest spot
or whatever spot it started at.
It can't afford doubt. Who can?
Doubt uses albumen
at twice the rate of work.
One backward look by any of us
can cost what it cost Orpheus.
Neither may you answer
the stranger's knock;
you know it is the Person from Porlock
who eats dreams for dinner,
his napkin stained the most delicate colors.

In Edinburgh, at least, her dark blue calf-hugging wellingtons were very fetching - I see Katy Evans-Bush (Baroque in Hackney blog) commented on those at the Aldeburgh Festival, Kay's previous reading. Very wise, though the weather on her visit not being quite so wet despite our reputation for dreich, nor so pebbly, though the cobbles of the Royal Mile are a challenge.

Here is an inspiring You Tube clip of Kay from an interview by Dana Gioia. I like the implied message : forget the razzmatazz of acclaim and fame. Lead a quiet life. Just get on with it (writing the poems.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOkIySzTZN4

Nowwhatnow dance and Little Match Girl Passion at Traverse

2011-11-08T20:31:00.000Z

One of the delights of being a member of Golden dance group at Dancebase (Edinburgh) is that one never knows what to expect. The surprise treat today was watching a work-in-progress rehearsal performed specially for us by Mathew Hawkins and Steinvor Palsson- moments of comedy and seriousness are mixed in - danced to Handal's Concerto Grosso op 3- modern dance, stately Baroque dance and with comic elements featuring lemons and reins made of ties! Definitely one to go to: it's at the Traverse on 24th November.
Another intriguing offering will be Cryptic's 'The Little Match Girl Passion', showing previously at the Tron, Glasgow, then on 22nd and 23rd November at the Traverse. Emma Snellgrove is the young dancer and co-choreographer with Josh Armstrong of this piece composed by David Lang, inspired by the 'St Matthew's Passion'- (There is no music by Bach). Again, this will be an unusual combination of media. Emma trained at Telford College, Edinburgh and the Scottish Dance School in Dundee, and also acts, touring schools with Wee Stories theatre company. She is sparky, original and full of invention. I can't wait.

Tips On Preparing a First Collection by Helena Nolan who wins the Patrick Kavanagh prize, 2011

2011-11-05T12:56:00.000Z

Some great tips on preparing a first collection by Helena Nolan who has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award with her volume 'Bone House'. This article comes from the Poetry Ireland online magazine. Scroll to page 6:

http://poetryireland.ie/downloads/PIN_MJ_lowres.pdf

Diana Payne Myers, Still Dancing at 83

2011-11-03T19:33:00.000Z

As you'll know, if you follow my blog, I took part as a member of Golden, in Barrowland Ballet's 'A Conversation with Carmel' at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Wearing one of my other hats, as a freelance journalist, I could not resist the opportunity of interviewing the amazing Diana Payne Myers, the star, still dancing at aged 83 and you can now read it on the Skinny magazine online.
http://www.theskinny.co.uk/theatre/features/300260-an_interview_with_carmel

Dewey-eyed at the Scottish Poetry Library

2011-10-31T12:29:00.000Z

The annual 'By Leaves we live' Fair at the Scottish Poetry Library was packed, very jolly and inspiring, with the emphasis this year on publishing. Talks on how to get your first slim pamphlet published or a chance to sell said. And a great chance to network, browse, buy and sport fetching hats. This one is worn by Vanda, one of the SPL's volunteers.

And may I put in a word for that noble but small band of workers, who work unpaid, of course, for the love of poetry, of course. Myself included. Well, if you don't blow your own trumpet...actually, more to say they could do with a few more volunteers. Anyone out there? (Contact SPL, not me.)
It's such fun...checking no Ref books amongst the Lending, no children's books amongst the adults,and rehousing them, marshaling books on the shelves so that all the spines line up... (Yes, I am kidding but think of the Brownie points.) There are other points: reading the story of the catalogue number, like chapters in the book itself by the point system: category, author, editor. Oh, I tell you, the Dewey system gets you dewey-eyed. And as Kay, my 'boss' tells me with a tear in her eye, if a book is replaced in the wrong place, it might as well be dead. You have to have a strong constitution to work there.
And the perks? Isn't the love of poetry enough for you? Oh, alright. You do get to browse and discover poets you'd not have chanced on otherwise. It is very satisfying lining up spines.(Not that I have started doing this at home.) And oh, yes, you do get to eat any left-over pastries after the Saturday morning 'Nothing but the poem' sessions.

Zoe Strachan and Scotland's human sacrifice rituals

2011-10-12T21:22:00.000+01:00

Oh dear, cross-cultural misunderstandings for Zoe Strachan, Scottish writer, on sebaticle from teaching at Glasgow University's Department of Creative Writing, now the British Council's Writer in Residence at the prestigious University of Iowa's creative writing program for 6 weeks.

Asked to recommend a film, she chose 'The Wicker Man'. After the viewing, at the Q and As , one student asked: 'When did human sacrifice become illegal in Scotland? The 1970s?'

I hope that unfortunate student is not under similar illusions about the Burning Man ceremony in Nevada, U.S.A.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/sharon-memis/lost-in-translation-lesso_b_986932.htm

http://www.burningman.com/

West Port Festival, Reading, Riting and R n R (well, the Charleston, actually)

2011-10-02T18:05:00.000+01:00

West Port Book Festival 13th-16th October. Just when you'd have thought Edinburgh festivals, enough already...Oh, yes. Plenty for all tastes. And it's FREE. Not only new books, old books,(many of the events hosted in the secondhand book shops of Grassmarket area) readings, writing and bookbinding workshops and poetry slams (in the Traverse bar). My bets are on the readings by Janice Galloway, and later, Rachel Boast with J.O.Morgan. And what promises to be a fun workshop with Jo Bell, barge-dweller and National Poetry Day organizer.(See her website in my favourites list in the right-hand column of this blog.)

There's also a tea dance which my spies tell me is to include the Charleston taught by my fellow Golden Dance member, Corrie, whom I know from experience is brilliant.

Tea Dance on Sat 15th Oct October 2.30-5pm at Old St Paul's Church (off Royal Mile). Bring your boas (feather not constrictors).

http://westportbookfestival.org/programme

Limited tickets for some of the events, so book early.

Save Craighouse grounds

2011-09-23T15:17:00.001+01:00

Frost Labyrinth

Drawn by heel of boot

in frost round a tree. Walk it

before it's too late.

Save Craighouse grounds (former Napier University, Edinburgh): fantastic open green space, wide views of Edinburgh, Castle and Arthur's Seat, wooded areas and heath-like hill- a rare amenity in a city.
Contact Rosy Barnes who is the campaign organizer if you want to join the protest. Email: friendsofcraighouse@yahoo.com
See http://friendsofcraighouse.com/

Welsh equals gobbledegook to English speakers

2011-09-20T09:01:00.000+01:00

Duw, Duw.
Hilarious if it wasn't so insensitive and philistine - W.H. Smith (Cardiff)'s idea of translating instructions for self-service tills from English into Welsh has gone mind-bogglingly wrong. They obviously used an online literal word for word translation system. As eny fule no,chiz chiz ... Why not employ someone who actually spoke the language? The weird thing is that not even their Welsh makes any sense.

On the other hand, it's rather like an experimental poem.

You can read the whole thing below, and I give the original Welsh, so any Cymraeg speakers out there can have a further laugh at the stupidity but here is one example:

Step 1

WH Smith Welsh: Gwna ‘ch angen at brynu unrhyw chan ‘n ddyrchafiad eitemau?
English translation: Make ‘ou need towards buying any gwith ‘n exaltation items?
Correct Welsh: Hoffech chi brynu unrhyw eitemau am bris gostyngedig?
English translation: Would you like to buy any discounted items?

It gets worse. For further inanities, see

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/2011/09/14/wh-smith-s-self-service-tills-fail-to-saysomethinginwelsh-as-gobbledegook-translation-angers-the-experts-91466-29416928/

The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc

2011-09-18T17:39:00.000+01:00

Fiddle Frenzy festival, Shetland, 2011

Great excitement today when a CD shaped jiffy-bag arrived for me in the post. It was the new CD by The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc which I had ordered when up in Shetland after their concert. I skipped to track 12 straight away for 'Waltz after Lasse In Lyby' which I'd heard in rehearsal and concert - tears in my eyes, and the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up- the test of good poetry too. A strange, haunting sound.

It brought back so many memories of my stay up in Latitude 60 degrees North, this year. OK, if the chips are down, I don't go to Shetland primarily for the fiddle music -it is, after all the week of 'Fiddle Frenzy'- but for the poetry course.

But I was blown away by The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc, Olav Luksengård Mjelva, Anders Hall and Kevin Henderson who come from Norway, Sweden and the Shetland Islands respectively. (Kevin is already well-known in Shetland, of course, but also as one of the founding members of the hugely popular Fiddlers' Bid.)

We, the poets and story-tellers, were treated to an unexpected concert as they rehearsed in the 'Green Room' of the Garrison Theatre the night before their concert. The 'Green Room' you need to know is the space allotted to the late-night Festival Club storytelling sessions with the resident Shetlanders Lawrence Tulloch, Davy Cooper and any one else foolhardy enough to take them on.

So we duly assembled but found that the room was also inhabited by Olav, Anders and Kevin, who not knowing about the storytelling, began fiddling away whilst we just sat there-open-mouthed with wonder at the beauty of the sound. They seemed quite relaxed at the presence of this small, admiring crowd (about 6-7 of us I suppose)whilst they rehearsed. We were first of all, far too polite to tell them about the story-telling but almost immediately, did not want them to stop playing, at any cost, so we said nothing. So a small, private concert for us. And even better, the privilege of hearing them discuss various ways of playing, choices of tunes etc and they were happy to answer questions from us - extremely charming, considering, from their point of view, we must have been invading their rehearsal space.

The extraordinary sound came for a variety of reasons - one is that all three play in harmony (when so much of the traditional fiddle one hears in the week is in unison) and it was an exciting change to hear Swedish and Norwegian tunes as well as Shetland ones but particularly fascinating was the sound of Olav's Hardanger Fiddle which has a haunting sound from the vibrations of its understrings. Olav's fiddle is a modern copy of the traditional Hardanger, beautifully inlaid with mother-of-pearl and we were able to have a close-up look.

Googling Hardanger later, I discovered that it is called Hardingfele in Norwegian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardingfele
Since my married name is Harding I emailed the Hub who was delighted to learn that his ancestors could have been Norwegian fiddle-makers. Interesting that our son is a musician! Incidentally, the Hardingfele was considered the devil's music and banned in Nordic churches until the 20th c: it led to too much drinking, dancing and fighting.

There was a lot of foot stomping as the Nordic Fiddlers Bloc played, enough to make me want to jump up and dance...yeah, plenty of drinking. No fighting, as far as I know.

Order your new CD now. Hurry. Hurry. Before they all sell out.

http://thenordicfiddlersbloc.com/

Wanted Hermit, grotto provided. Must be a writer

2011-09-17T09:47:00.000+01:00

I've always wanted a writer's hut at the bottom of my garden but a grotto in a bookshop's garden, with a hose pipe for showers goes one better. Since the grotto is made of twigs - or actually reclaimed timber, Robert Twigger has a serendipitous surname. He is the lucky man who will be living here as part of his tenure as hermit-writer, during the Wigtown Book Festival starting next week.
Pity it's turned so cold. And is he allowed to use the bookshop's toilet?

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/wigtown-book-festival-hires-resident-hermit-2355280.htmlWigtown Festival starts 23rd September-2nd October, 2011.http://www.wigtownbookfestival.com/

R.B. McDowell, the most eccentric of eccentrics, dies

2011-09-06T17:11:00.000+01:00

I was sorry to learn of the death on 3rd September of RB McDowell, former Professor of History and former Junior Dean of Trinity College Dublin, though at age 97, that's pretty good going.

Although I did not read History, Professor McDowell was a well-known figure in Trinity when I was there (1966-70) The yards of woolen scarf wound round his neck, his shabby hat and coat, flying out behind him were a familiar sight as he strode across Front Square, muttering to himself. He could also be seen climbing the ladders inside the round Reading Room to get at a book, still wearing his hat, coat and scarf.

Tales of his eccentricity were also well-known. The two stories I remember best are of him standing on top of a library ladder and absent-mindedly (thinking he was on the ground, no doubt) he took a step backwards and fell to the floor. It must have been a soft landing in that coat. He just stood up,as if nothing had happened and reclimbed the ladder.

The other story is of a student wondering what McDowell was saying to himself as he strode across Front Square and creeping up behind him overheard him saying: 'I really must stop talking to myself.'

Trinity was known for its eccentrics in my day. Perhaps it still is? McDowell was certainly one of the most memorable.

More tales of his eccentricity and also of his illustrious achievements as a historian of the 18th c to be found in his obituary. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/obituaries/2011/0903/1224303430726.html

Carmel a 'wise' production, Guardian review

2011-09-02T12:19:00.000+01:00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/aug/31/conversation-with-carmel-review

Great appreciation of Natasha's choreography and wise understanding of family life. Matthew Hawkins' performance particularly praised. Congratulations, Matthew!

My Edinburgh Festival Round-up, 2011

2011-09-01T12:26:00.000+01:00

Actually I ran (or more accurately, I sailed) away for the first two weeks - as far as I could get - to St Kilda, the archipelago N/W of Scotland, 52 miles from the Outer Hebrides, next stop the Faroes, followed by a trip to Shetland, but that's another story.

Returning week 3 of the festival, immediately immersed in rehearsals then performing in' A Conversation with Carmel' with my community dance group, Golden (aged 60+) with the professional ballet company, Barrowland q.v. other blogs.

One-woman show at St George's West:
'Orlando' text by Virginia Woolf. Superb acting by Judith Williams, with a deep, resonant voice as her male persona and a lighter one as a female. Woolf's rich language conjured up evocative scenes, in the same way listening to a radio play does. The costume, a grey silken doublet and hose, which later unfolded to become a dress, was stunning, as was the set- merely grey muslin drapes which were manipulated to evoke different scenarios. Despite an energy dip (the play, or maybe me) 3/4 of the way through, 4 stars, I'd say.

World Theatre . International Festival, at the Lyceum:
'One Thousand and One Nights' directed by Tim Supple.
Great to hear Arabic and French language but the screen titles were alienating. The 'and then, and then, and then' structure lacked the dramatic arc we are used to in the west. But still, interesting if not emotionally involving. Not the anodyne Arabian Nights of Ali Baba and Aladdin as we know them: but bawdy, sexually explicit , at times a coarse, invigorating sense of humour and horrific cruelty, mainly to supposedly unfaithful wives. The women do get the upper hand like as not though in many of the tales.

Dance: 'Headsup' at Dance Base, Grassmarket: a smorgsbord of up and coming dancers, ranging in style and culture from contemporary, to classical Indian, to hip hop and breakdancing. Some exciting, some less so - a great chance to sample what's hot, what's not in the dance world.

Free spoken word festival, in the Moulin Rouge spiegeltent in the EIBF Charlotte Sq grounds:
'Unbound'- Writers' Bloc, the Edinburgh collective were in sparkling form, short stories or performance pieces with the theme of music, or even performed to music. Gavin Inglis (in top hat and full dress suit) reading his tale to techno thumps and the singer who started up from the audience, during Helen Jackson's reading, followed by a choir at the back singing what sounded like a traditional Scottish song but was composed by Andrew C. Ferguson, were particularly memorable. Mark Harding (aka the Hub) was in clicking good form - metamorphosing into an insect. Do I detect the influence of Kafka?

Musical Theatre. C Venues, Chambers St (Adam House):
'Sunday in the Park with George' by Stephen Sondheim, performed by students of Glasgow's Royal Academy of Music and Dramatic Art,very impressive, acting and singing, as you would expect. Excellent set using Seurat's famous painting and canvas painted with dots for parasols for the actors were an amusing idea. We went to this as a family group since the Hub, son and I have been variously involved in the festival,(Hub reviewing, son editing, me dancing) and this was the last day of the Fringe so last chance. Son's choice, being a fan of musical theatre.

Late-night drinkies at the C Venues' green room bar for 'celebrities', well, performers and reviewers, by invitation from the editor of Broadway Baby (aka my son). Great fun to brush into some of the reviewers, some already known to me as student colleagues of son and sample the mayhem, the sticky floor and the ersatz glamour: chandeliers hanging from a sultan's tent-like ceiling and viewed from the balcony, the twinkly lights below of the various bars in the burnt-out space left by the disastrous Cowgate fire, now transformed for the duration of the festival. Driving home at mid-night down by Bristo Row and a glimpse of the illuminated giant balloon that is the Underbelly, the crowds of 'young things' thronging the roads made me quite envious. The night was obviously just beginning for them. Home to bed for me.

Opera. International Festival: at Festival Theatre: Die Frau ohne Schatten, conducted by Valery Gergiev with the Marinsky Opera company. Oh Wow! Magnificent, lush, exotic eastern (Genghis Khan-inspired) costumes for the Spirit world, stunning and evocative projections of clouds, birds and the tour de force, a flood on a gauze screen in front of the stage - and that's not to mention the superb orchestra and singers - the music more important than the singing in Strauss' score - my son, (Oxford Music graduate) tells me it's late Romantic - I would say 'Decadent' (not morally) though the message was a little irritating: women are only good as churning out baby-machines. Shades of 'Kirche, kuche, kinder'- not the kirche but a sort of fin de siecle mystical, Masonic, symbolist transcendentalism reminiscent of Mozart's Magic Flute - the spirit world a bit static in the same way. The real life of the 'low' life characters, the Dyer and his wife, was more affecting, with a great set of enormous washing/dying machines and a dyeing pit - and the pile of checked laundry bags (which I have seen used by refugees and Asian immigrants sitting on the floor of a Moscow train station).
Certainly the highlight of the Festival. Expensive, of course but at half price for OAPs, not bad. And cheaper than a trip to St Petersburg (tho now I'm even more tempted)!

Round-up:
So I managed a small one-woman theatre production in the Fringe, a vast foreign theatre production and an opera in the international festival, a student Musical, 2 literary poetry readings - one the poet laureate, the other an up and coming star and a free grassroots spoken word event. A taster of dance and took part in performing in another dance production. A snifter of the press drinkies scene.

No stand-up comedy, no cabaret singers, no performance poetry, no international classical dance.Not through lack of interest but short of energy and funds. Well, there's always next year.

Goldens Behind Stage at A Conversation with Carmel

2011-08-29T12:27:00.000+01:00

Dance releases your inner demon. Beware.
'A Conversation with Carmel' by Barrowland Ballet Company
plus dancers drawn from the community, Golden,(60+ age) Dance Base, Edinburgh.

My Golden Blog: 15-28th Aug, 2011

Monday, 15th Aug 1-5pm, Rehearsal 1:
We Goldens meet below Medusa's Hair in Bread Street. No, this is not some pre-Fringe mythopoeic dark night of the soul experience (though possibly it might be) but a hairdressers.

Golden, I should explain, is a dance group for the over 60s which meets at Dance Base, in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh run by the director, Morag Deyes. Morag is a hoot - her hilarious commentary during the workshops alone is worth going for ('Now we need to get our leg over - oh dear, what made me say that. You know what I mean.')but also the wonderful glow of dopamines or is it endorphins that result from the work-outs. So what has Morag let us in for now?

The below stairs space has a sprung floor and one whole wall of mirror - a perfect dance studio in theory. In practice there is no ventilation, as we discover to our cost as the day goes on, there are pillars in the middle of the space (presumably to keep the ceiling up)which we are in danger of knocking into and a pole.
'Hey,we're not doing pole-dancing, are we?' exclaims one of the Goldens.

The Goldens are up for most things. We've done Bollywood, Flamenco, Russian folk and various types of Contemporary dance but this time, appearing as a cameo in the professional dance 'A Conversation with Carmel' we'll be guests at a surprise party for 83 year old Carmel, danced by the amazing Diana Payne Myers, who is in fact 83. She is small, elegant and modestly sits to the side as we Goldens are put through our paces by Natasha Gilmore - director of Barrowland Ballet company. I recognize her face from the BBC Alba series of programmes which have been running for the last six weeks about dance in Scotland, featuring, amongst other dance groups, Golden, and Natasha's dance work with refugees in Maryhill, Glasgow.

The warm-ups include poses and freezes, as if for a camera, different poses to different counts. I'm already in a muddle. How many to the left? What? Oh the right. Yeah, I've got the legs but what do the arms do? Panic. Am I up for this? My spatial memory seems to have gone. The perils of ageing - inability to do more than two things at the same time and remember sequences.

Thank god, for a break. Others have remembered to bring a plastic bottle of water. Not me. I slip out to the ladies' loo, through a washroom divided by a gold chain screen (this is the Beauty Parlor section) and a refreshing glug of cold water.
Break over. It seems that the warm-ups were only warm-ups and the dance itself won't be so complicated. Perhaps I will cope after all.

So it proves. But at the end of the day, I'm wondering, will I remember it tomorrow.
But two professional dancers, Gemma Williams and Emma-Jayne Park (part of our guest scenes) are sweet and helpful and the other professional main dancers, Matthew Hawkins, Jade Adamson and Vince Virr make us feel welcome and part of the team.
End of day one, laughs and shared fears with the other Goldens. It's a good way to get to know each other. (I'm a newbie, only joining last summer term.) The others bonded during the Glasgow Tramway performance last year, filmed on BBC Alba (or as I learn to say 'Alaba', the Gaelic pronunciation).

But info for the next day: bring passport photo for our pass to the venue (St George's West church);

bring costume for tomorrow (as if for a party: black, white,grey,silver,or twinkly bits);

complimentary tickets only for first and 2nd performance;

fliering: please do some, or take fliers to give friends.

Tues, 16th Aug, 10.30am, Rehearsal 2:
A techie at the venue (St George's W). As I've been to church services here, I'm intrigued to see it transformed. There's a bar in the foyer (well,good for the open-minded minister here) and the cafe, usually staffed only for lunch, now continues into the evenings, and the usual staff, including some Care in the Community, are augmented for the festival. With our venue passes we get a 20% discount at the cafe (Great value) and can get into any other shows for free, as long as there are seats unsold - but you have to wait minutes before the show opens to know. Hurray! Worth a try.

We've all brought our costumes. Oohs and ahs at how glamorous we all look. If Joanna Lumley can do it at 60, I'm thinking, look, so can we. The changing room is a vaulted basement where the vast freezers for the cafe are kept. A bit of a squash: 15 Goldens and other community dancers, plus 5 professionals, two kids aged 6 and 8, and Natasha's 14 month year old toddler, Otis. Ah, bless. Oohing is his skill, an adorable smile and sheer joy at dancing - no guesses what his future will be.

In the 'theatre', the church's gold leaf is now obscured by ranks of overhead scaffolding and lights, the balcony is closed to the public and for sound, lighting engineers etc only, the pews are banished to the wings, hidden by black drapes and in their place, rows of raked seats. Back-stage the near-obscurity of vision means plenty of hazards - bumping into or tripping over other shows' props, scenery etc. The stage manager puts white tape on the edges of metal things sticking out, and lines the steps to the stage.

Upstage, stage left (which? where? My amateur dramatics' days come back and I realize I do know what they mean) this is the nightmare. Getting off stage in particular, since the black drapes at the back are so long they fall in a fold, instead of being swept out of the way, so they are a trip hazard, then the steps go off at an unexpected angle, then there's the danger of banging your head on a low bar (part of the light rigging etc)when the Golden group has to exit pronto after our party scene dancing the Slosh to Beyonce (Oh yeah, I told you we can do anything)and increasingly wild dance movements, including the Highland Fling, Moira's belly-dancing, and 'Monsters'. (Och, you have to be there.)

Rehearsal 3: 1-5pm Afternoon at Dance Base
Lo and behold, I find I've remembered most of it. What I can't, I'm reassured by Matthew who goes through stuff again slowly for anyone who asks. Natasha has a great way of delegating to the other professionals, especially to Matthew- who is becoming the Goldens' organizer, but also the others, Jade, and Vince take part in warm-ups and cheer us on. A cheery smile from Vince and 'Come on, ladies'- what charm. No harm in a bit of transparent flattery to a group of 'mature' ladies (the 'elderly/old' words are banned) by a young man with beautifully toned body. Which doesn't happen every day but I guess you know that.

How swish to be in glorious, state of the art, Dance Base: green glass floors in the passage ways upstairs, sprung floors in the studios, views of the castle or to Grassmarket, the back of the Lot (former church, former arts venue, now for sale), a beautiful meld between modern and old, the architects being Malcolm Fraser Associates.

I notice Gareth K Vile taking a fag break on the balcony outside our studio. Gareth is the editor of 'The Shimmy', the dance inset of 'The Skinny' magazine who works out of an office in Dance Base during the festival. Yikes. Hope he doesn't get a bad impression of the show from our rehearsal. But, Gareth doesn't even glance our way, being the consummate professional.

The high-light is Otis' contribution to the warm-ups. He loves to take part and tries to imitate us. He can bend his knees up and down, but can't quite jump. If he looks up, he falls on his bottom with a bump. Clapping is his favourite and we all cheer (quietly, not to alarm him- many of us are grannys, of course.) He gets passed round all the pros during the rehearsal so if Natasha is busy there's always someone to pick him up, swing him round, or make faces. It reminds me of watching families in restaurants in Italy. He is always the centre of attention from someone, so rarely grumpy. His real granny, Natasha's mum is on hand, if necessary, with bottle which he climbs into his push chair for. But his good-temper is remarkable.

Day 3: Professional rehearsal only.

Day 4, Thursday 18th Aug: Dress Rehearsal 1pm-3.30pm at St G's W:
A run-through-starting at 2.15 at the time the show will be, so we simulate the real thing, how long we have for set-up and strike (hmm, just showing-off I know some technical jargon here)for the shows before and after us. The downside is we Goldens and other community dancers have been told to come in costume and are relegated to the public loos for a changing room. Only the professionals get the vaulted freezer room. Chwarae teg (Fair play), as they say in Wales. The upside is we are allowed to watch the show from the audience seats when we're not on - most of it.

The show is incredibly moving. I'd no idea from the mad, fun bit of the party we take part in. Carmel's life is evoked in cameo flashbacks, with the background of filmed Talking Heads of real interviewees (not actors)with various older people about important stages of their life: childhood, courting, having a baby, motherhood, growing old etc. And this is organized around the build-up to and during Carmel's surprise 80th birthday party (or 83 as the dancer, Diana now is).

Moving moments include the awkward older son, performed by Matthew in a hideous grey diamond-patterned jumper who means well by organizing the party but upsets his mother - it is obviously the last thing she wants; the entwined, duet of young lovers, Vince Virr and Jade Adamson to thudding pulses like a heart-beat of Quee MacArthur's music, is one of the most erotic dances I've seen for ages, interrupted by a pregnant Natasha (who really is pregnant. How often are pregnant woman allowed to continue on stage?) as she carries baby Otis and a plastic laundry basket and hangs up washing on a line - particularly poignant for any women in a similar situation- passion and career ended by motherhood. The most heart-wrenching moment was Diana's solo expressing loneliness and despair of old age, followed by her death and wake.

The show has many positive, hilarious moments though: celebrating and ruefully laughing at family tensions at the party, but also a hilarious dinner at a long table when all the family members, ranging in age from baby to 83 year old, squabble, laugh, peak through their fingers when they should be saying grace, row, all suggested by facial expression and slaps and bangs on the table. The show ends on a positive note too. After Carmel's death, there are the filmed Talking Heads discussing highlights of their lives, in particular dancing in dance-halls whilst Diana/Carmel dances on top of a table to a merry folk-like tune. This widens out to a clip of people street dancing, further widening as The Talking Heads hope there will be dancing in heaven too.

Tears were running down my cheeks, I have to admit. And I feel very privileged and humbled to be part of such a moving show and dancing with such talented professionals.

Opening Show: Friday, 19th August
We get our venue passes! A red ribbon stamped 'Remarkable Arts' (the venue producers)and plastic card adorned with our variously hideous passport photos.

All arrive in costume but last minute changes of outdoor for dancing shoes, and make-up titivating taking place in the loos (in the Ladies at least) proves a nightmare. One of the only 3 loos is out of order. There is a long queue. The public are also queuing - not just for our show but those exiting from the one before or come early for ours. Hilary, Otis' granny is having to change his nappy in the same room. The hand-drier makes a noise like Concorde taking off - Otis, just kicks his legs on his changing table, completely unfazed, thank goodness.

We must be back-stage, as soon as the public from the previous show exit - 3/4 hour before the show starts to have time for a warm-up, keeping out of the wings so that the crew can scene change and sort out the techie stuff, then when they're ready, we must move into the wings out of sight before the audience enters. My throat feels dry. I daren't drink any more from my plastic water bottle since there will be no possibility of a loo visit from now on.

And we're off. 'Break a leg,' someone whispers. Er, maybe not.

The film video of reminiscences of unmarried pregnancy - 'the greatest shame a family can have' is our cue, but is so quiet we miss it. Perhaps the audience doesn't realize we're late. The greetings scene fails to change on the 6th beat but delays till the eighth- there are logjams in the flow- again the audience may not realize but we know. Shelagh and I who enter later with a tray of teacups also fluff our entry - did we count wrong - or did we fail to pick up the shift in musical tone of the 'dream-sequence'? Never mind, we're on. Someone fails to crouch when Diana enters and we're supposed to hide. I fail to reach my group in time for one of the photo poses so I freeze mid-stage. The whole thing seems raggedy to me (our bit- the professionals are superb, of course) and over in a trice.

The profs bow twice, we enter on the second one, we bow twice then off. To cheers, feet stamping and cries of Bravo - they liked it! Of course, they did. The audience is mainly family and friends with all those comps! Ah, but the press are there too. So crossed fingers.

We must grab our coats etc (we had to store them in the wings as no dressing-room, handbags and wallets returned from the security box, and we must pile out - once the audience has cleared, for a welcome cup of tea (hey! at 20% discount, flashing our venue cards) so that the crews can dismantle our show and the new crew take over for the next show- a conveyor belt operation.

Phew! Natasha is smiling. Relief all round.

Revitalized, I take advantage of my free pass to any other show in the venue and slip in at the very last minute - there is a seat free - for a version of Virginia Woolf's 'Orlando'. The actor, Judith Williams, is superb. 4 star overall, I'd say.

Sat 20th Aug
Two delightful children join us - Scottish schools having gone back they can only perform at weekends- boy with glorious golden curls, and his sister, in a striking twinkling top. Being pros, and having done the show in its earlier run, they only need a quick reminder during the warm-ups. Otis' face lights up at their arrival and he rushes to them.

Getting the right amount of food, sleep etc for him must be a juggling act by half but it seems to work. The first day Otis got fractious when taken off stage, (he doesn't want the fun to stop) but Natasha evolves a sequence of amusing things for him to do back-stage - walking him up and down the steps,whilst holding he hands, playing with the row of plastic water bottles, then lifts him into his high-chair and enters for the family feast scene and Otis is beaming with joy again. There is only one day when he's a bit grisly. 'Teething, I fear' Natasha says, but thankfully, probably not, since it never happens again.

The sound for the films is louder; we Goldens are on cue. Not bad. Applause not quite so loud but OK. (Less family/friends in today.) We get only 3 stars from 'Broadway Baby' - a young male critic - a highly intelligent, analytical review but little empathy. What does he know or care about old age and death!

Rest of the run: Sun 21st-Sun 28th Aug (excluding Wed 24th our day off)
The Fest magazine gives us 4 stars! That's more like it. We get better every day. Then disaster. Tues the film sound fails. Jade continues doing Diana's hair to silence. The music for 'Greetings' comes on. Perhaps it's only the film sound that is a problem? But then our music stops too. We continue dancing in silence. Pretty professional, eh! Perhaps the audience will think it's supposed to be like this? But then the stage manager walks on-stage and announces that due to technical failure the show will have to be canceled. Money back or come back another day. A cheery voice shouts from the audience 'I'm sure we'll all come back.'

Morag Deyes,(Director of Dance Base and Goldens' tutor)it seems, was in the audience but left at the first blip. We feel depressed and only hope she'll come back. But she's a busy woman, what with the festival programme at Dance Base. Worse, apparently there were critics and dance promoters in the audience. Natasha looks glum. The techie failure will affect the rest of the shows in the venue too. Oh dear.

Wednesday is our day off.

On Thursday, we return to find the technical problem is sorted. Someone had pulled out a plug which is now taped up to prevent reoccurence. No one has admitted it so no heads have rolled but then, whoever it was won't do it again.

The show goes brilliantly. We Goldens are tighter, more confident as each day goes past. I find I can now look around at the others and enjoy what we're all doing, instead of just feeling terrified like a rabbit in the headlights.

5 stars***** from 'Three Weeks' newspaper. Whoah! Natasha, who is always calm and pleasant, now seems mellower than ever and exudes happiness. 'Well done!' I say to Diana. 'You're part of it too,' she says.

We only get glimpses of the professionals on stage, peering through slits in the black drapes at the side of the stage which get left open when the prof enter from mid-wings- but we stand well back. Heaven protect anyone from Natasha if caught visible to the audience. Vince and Jade's erotic dance, Diana's despair solo become more and more moving, especially as I get to know the music - Quee MacArthur's score. I think if I ever hear that music again I will instantly remember and act out the moves in my head. The profs' entrances and exits for each scenario become so familiar, I know exactly where we are in the dance. I listen to the tales of the Talking Heads more deeply until words, music and movement are part of me. I know when to stand out of the way for the profs to pass by since they must traverse the wings, round the back of the audience, to appear at the opposite side of the stage. Each time Natasha passes with Otis in her arms, we hear his little wondering oohs. I shall miss that.

I shall miss the whole thing.

Thank goodness, for Golden Dance class to look forward to when the autumn term starts.

And now a different community team will join 'Carmel' during Oct-Nov in Glenrothes, Paisley, Stirling, Stornoway and Aberdeen. Good luck to them. I'm sure they'll enjoy it as much as we did.

The Bees- Carol Ann Duffy, Edinburgh Int Book Festival

2011-08-27T11:21:00.000+01:00

The highlight of the EIBF for me this year was Carol Ann Duffy reading from her new collection 'The Bees'. It is not due to be published until October, 2011, so I was one of those lucky to get hold of an advance copy rushed to the festival by the publishers, Picador, specially for the occasion. (The cover is lovely - gold honeycomb design on pale blue.)

Carol Ann was magnificent- all in black with twinkly bits in her long-sleeved, flowing jacket, her hair black curling snakes - high priestess or seer-like -though there was no foaming at the mouth - despite the prophetic warnings of her subject matter. Her performance ranged from witty and biting to moving and mellifluous - the latter not a word I would have used for CA before. The Poet Laureateship has given her a confidence and expansiveness to her stage presence. The new poems also have a gravitas, concerned with the disastrous threat to our bee colonies which reflects the fragile state of so many species globally and our reckless, profligate way of life. But the poems are also celebrations, 'bless' is a word often used, of the natural world but also conscious of mortality, in particular some restrained but even more moving for that, poems about her mother's death.

On a lighter note, I particularly enjoyed the poem 'Orta San Giulio' set by the Italian lake, mainly because this was inspired by one of the Poetry on the Lake festivals which I have also been to. A charming, loving poem about her daughter, Ella.

The musician, John Sampson, flautist, and all pipe-player, particularly 16th c or earlier (including the amazing crumhorn and a cow's horn) played wee, virtuoso tunes in between and even, once, as an accompaniment to CA's poems. 'The Queen gave him to me,' said CA, with a twinkle. 'She did not want him any more.' (Yet more twinkles.)

A star-like performance all round.

Janie McKie wins Edwin Morgan, Edinburgh Int Book Festival

2011-08-27T10:54:00.000+01:00

£5,000 for a poem! Yeah. That'll buy an awful lot of Jimmy Choo shoes...though knowing Janie, perhaps it will be more like nappies, Sudocreme etc. The shortest poem in the shortlist. So if you work out the amount per line? And how long did it take to write a poem this good? as my taxi-driver asked. Of course, the answer is - all her life.

And what an exquisite poem 'The Leper Window' is. And more special for me in that Janie is a friend and I'd read the poem in draft form. All the shortlisted poems were stunning. Watch out for Gillian Andrews (previously shortlisted for the Picador prize), Helen Mort (just ended her residency at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere), Lydia MacPherson and Aileen Ballentyne. The other shortlistsed poet was Jane Yeh, already well-known with several volumes out with Bloodaxe. She of the blonde hair and long red nails...as well as witty, clever poems. I particularly enjoyed the poem about Harry Potter's owl, read during her 15 minute reading.

This blog entry is a week late but that's the Edinburgh Festival for you. Not that I'm doing several shows a day like the Hub and son. But I am performing in a show daily..hint, hint. (A Conversation with Carmel that is.) Two more performanances left. Not poeting but dancing. A friend did not recognize me at first - getting more sylph-like by the day. (Well, that's kinda comparative.)

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Makkin wi Wirds, with Fiddles attached, 2011

2011-08-22T18:45:00.000+01:00

Jen Hadfield (third from left) leads Busta House Renga

This year, the highlight workshop was the communal Renga which we started at Busta House Hotel - a 16th c laird's house with a sad haunted past and now swish present. But the Renga is still in progress, via email, so I'll blog about that when it's finished.

Thanks to Creative Scotland (as the revamped Scottish Arts Council is called) who gave me another grant, the second one running, to attend Makkin wi Wirds (part of Fiddle Frenzy) poetry writing course, I am now amassing enough poems for a pamphlet...and building on my first collection.

But poetry workshops are not the only draw to Fiddle Frenzy (see previous two years' blogs)- there's the fiddle concerts every night with Aly Bain and Phil Cunningham returning as the mega stars. Trips round Shetland, some needed fresh air and more experiences which might result in poems - this year to Ollaberry and an exhibition inspired by 'Extreme Wave Theory' by 'foul weather artist' Janette Kerr in Bonhoga art gallery in Weisdale Mill - dramatic evocations of storms in black and white based on real experiences. It seems the artist has sailed in high seas with fishermen - rather like Turner who had himself tied to a mast to experience a storm. The charcoal sketch books interested me most, but then I always like artists' sketch books rather than finished works.
See http://visit.shetland.org/extreme-wave-theory-exhibition-at-bonhoga

A trip to the Cunningsburgh agricultural shows meant thousands of photos of Shetland ponies for me. I'll just post one to give you an idea of their size.

Shetland pony at Cunningburgh Show

If you like, there is the opportunity to attend taster workshops in the other subjects on offer: Shetland knitting or painting and sketching,apart from fiddling at all levels and guitar, of course.

Early morning rehearsal for last night student concert.

And it's not all work. Here's one of the ceildhes: note walking boots!

Ceildhe at Clickiminn Leisure Centre

You'd think I might be bored by Shetland on my third visit but no. I can see why some of the Frenzied (as in those on the Fiddle course) return year after year - some for 7 of the 8 years it's been running. There is still so much to discover on Shetland, Jen's workshops continue to be special, but this year there was the extra bonus of seeing familiar faces and now getting to know Shetland through the eyes of the locals, visiting some in their homes.

And an unexpected surprise: the apparition of a creature from another world in Aith harbour. S, fellow poet and I were chatting, getting some fresh air not in the least looking for it. A dog otter I'd say, (going by the stuffed one in Hay Dock museum)- big as a small dog- maybe four foot including the tail. His large head (almost as big as a seal's)surfaced and he regarded us curiously for several minutes - not long enough for me to get my camera out) before diving with a flourish, then he was gone. We stared all around for some time, knowing they can swim some way before popping up again, but no, that had been our moment. A gift from the pagan gods - or maybe a pagan god himself. And my second otter sighting this trip.

For my blog on last year's Makkin course, see http://stephaniegreensblog.blogspot.com/2010_09_01_archive.html

Unst, Ultima Thule, part 2

2011-08-16T20:45:00.000+01:00

After St Kilda, I arrived in Shetland a week before Makkin wi Wirds, Jen Hadfield's poetry writing course, part of Fiddle Frenzy, started, to explore areas only touched on before on previous visits. After a helpful fine tuning of my MS in progress by Jen, in a pre-course mentoring session, I drove up to Unst, via road and island-hopping by two ferries, for a week's self-imposed writer's retreat, including writing up notes for poems, and maybe, new ones inspired by Unst: another Ultima Thule. It seems I can't get enough of them.

Unst is the most northerly of the inhabited islands of the UK - though the most northerly land is not Mukkle Flugga (Big Rock) and its lighthouse (built by one of RL Stevenson's relatives) as many people think, but a rock, a bit further on, called Out Stack. My aim was to take a boat trip round the two of them but on arrival in Shetland the fog descended. All I saw of the drive up and Unst for three days was fog. So I haunted the Heritage Museum and Boat Haven museum, both fascinating.

Boat Haven Museum

I also went swimming in the splendid Leisure Centre and warmed up with hot chocolate in the Chocolate Experience cafe which was packed. Every other tourist having had the same idea as me. Life in Unst is not so Ultima Thule as one might suppose.

The Chocolate experience.

Yes, that is a copy of Joanne Harris' 'Chocolat'. What luck for Joanne Harris as a marketing ploy. Perhaps I should give up writing poetry - or maybe write poetry about chocolate.

On the Thursday, a foggy start but there were rumours it might lift and so I drove out to the Herma Ness Bird Reserve and former lighthouse shore station for Mukkle Flugga, now containing a museum,(including delightful bird sketches). Below this is the wee harbour where the boat, if it went, would set off from.

The first boat trip was cancelled but I put my name down for a second mid-morning. By then the harbour was visible but further out to sea down the sea-loch all was fog. 'We'll set off,' said the skipper, 'and see what happens by the headland. If it's still foggy, we'll turn back and you have your money back. How's that?'

Fog, fog, drizzle:
the surprise of blue.

This is my contribution to a communal Renga which I was later to write on Jen's course. More of that later. The surprise blue was the miracle that occurred on this boat trip. By the time we reached the headland of Saxa Vord, its radar were visible (the former RAF station)and we were out in blue, blue seas and clear skies: Lighthouse shining in the sun. Thousands of comical puffins, dipping, shaking their heads, floundered on the surface trying to get airborne (their bones, like guillemots and other divers are heavier than other sea-birds, so that they can dive) and then up into the air in great swirls along the cliffs and down into the sea again. We were lucky. The puffins have usually left by end of July- and we were in the last week of July.

Puffin at Sumburgh Head.

Sad to learn (at a visit to the bird reserve on Sumburgh Head before setting off for Unst) that they did not breed this year - due to a shortage of sand-eels in April and May from the too cold sea then. It is thought that the changing climate due to global warming may be the cause. Now in July there were enough sand-eels for the adults. Let's hope things improve next year or puffins will be in danger of becoming extinct.

At Herma Ness the convoluted cliffs are far more interesting viewed from the sea and one can see caves not visible from above if walking along the top and this way we avoided being attacked on the boggy moors of Herma Ness by the nesting bonxies, (great skuas) or maybe the trolls, lying in wait under bridges, like in the Billy Goat Gruff tale.

Moors of Herma Ness Bird Reserve: is that a troll?

But the bonxies, brown menaces, can be seen hunting in pairs, one harrying and driving a beautiful gannet into the path of a waiting bonxie. Bonxies are known to drag gannets by their wing tips down into the sea to drown them. I am beginning to hate them.

Thousands and thousands of gannets with their six-foot wing span, rather like swans or geese, but with yellow necks, and black tips to their wings, glide above. It is a much better view of the bird life than I had on my St Kildan trip, to be honest. There I let the two teenage lads monopolize the binoculars, and I didn't have a pair myself. Also, I realize, the mast and sail, obscured some of our view of the birds. But I wouldn't have missed that trip for the world (q.v. earlier blog).

Gannets near Mukkle Flugga

Mukkle Flugga, Unst

The wind was southerly. The next day a northerly was due, the skipper said, and it would be too dangerous to round Mukkle Flugga and Out Stack with the great swells that would occur. That must be quite something. They were pretty rough on our trip as we headed north of MF and round Out Stack. But we did it!

After the trip the boatmen invited us to a hut on shore for a cup of tea - most welcome. But when most of the day-trippers had left, the boatmen opened a cupboard in a corner for their 'stress relief'. No prizes for guessing what the cupboard contained.

Another must I was determined to see was an otter. But these are elusive beasts. On previous visits to Shetland, I'd had no luck. On Unst, the remote landscape and continual news of sightings, must surely be the place I would have an encounter. One of the boatmen on the MF trip recommended a certain bay. There was a pool just inland from the shore. I'd been told the otters need to rinse the salt out of their fur and come ashore to bathe in fresh water every evening. I chose early evening and sat for an hour or so, keeping still, writing with occasional glances up. No luck.

'Oh, yes' said a girl I chatted to on another beach as she walked her dog,' I see them almost every evening about 5pm crossing the road here.' Again, nothing.

Finally whilst chatting to the lady (dressed up as a Viking matron)who was showing me round the replica 9th c Viking ship, I asked her advice. I had heard that the loch where the boat is, was a good spot. 'Yes,' she said and pointed out at the loch:'Look'.
And there they were, two bodies, entwining with eachother, over and under, one smaller than the other. The males can attack the young, the woman said knowledgeably, so it had to be mother and baby. One swam to the shore and I even managed a photo - though only of the adult - not a high standard of photography. Still, a memory for me.

Otter sighting

Then down to Lerwick for the start of the Makkin/Fiddle Frenzy course.

St Kilda, July, 2011

2011-08-16T20:44:00.001+01:00

Much has been written about the St Kildans, the 'bird' people- they ate the gannets and used their carcases for slippers, ate fulmars and used the fulmar oil to light their lamps, drank as an expectorant,or to rub on bruises. The feathers they exported via the Factor, sent by their Laird (Lord Dunvegan in the Isle of Skye), to stuff mattresses. When synthetic fabrics killed this trade, the villagers' days were numbered and they finally asked to be evacuated in 1930.

52 miles from the nearest landfall of the Outer Hebrides, St Kilda is an archipelago N/W of Scotland, out in the middle of nowhere (or on the way to the Faroes, depending on how you look at it). A remote community, first inhabited in the Bronze Age, then later by Irish hermits: it is on the edge of the world, an Ultima Thule, even perhaps a myth, like Atlantis.

I had been reading up about St Kilda for the last two years, and have already written a few poems inspired by the place and its history. Last winter, I attended a film showing organized by the National Trust for Scotland and learnt about the Puffin Club for those who have stayed a night on the main island, Hiorta, or at least moored in the bay. A friend of mine, K visited with her late husband when they learnt he had a cancer and this is where they chose to go as a special, last trip together. But more and more, the desire to visit a place I was obsessed with seemed an imperative. Yet who was to say that poems from the imagination might not be better than those which came out of the experience?

I wasn't sure if I'd get to St Kilda though. The yacht company I was hoping to sail with, 'Beyond the Blue Horizon', won't guarantee it. The weather is so unpredictable - it's the wind that matters, it seems, not so much the rain. If it's an easterly the yacht won't even attempt it as it's impossible to anchor in the bay. I had hoped to go late May or June but unseasonable gales put paid to that. And the Met Office website only gives 5 days' weather forecast in advance. So I waited till the last minute - a gamble since there might have been no vacancies left on the flight to Stornoway, let alone the yacht.

But luck was with me. I even got a double bunk to myself since there were 7 guests in the 4 double bunk guest cabins. A 5 day, 4 night trip on a 67 foot steel cutter, the Elinca, which I highly recommend. We were in experienced, steady hands with Angus Smith and son, Innes, our skipper and crew, who were charming hosts- our first day down Lewis in the Minches, via the Shiants, whose name means 'Enchanted Isles' in Gaelic, (owned by Adam Nicholson who wrote 'Sea Room' about them) blue skies, calm seas but no wind. We motored the whole way to anchor round the tip of Harris at Leverburgh. Drinks on deck watching the sunset and delicious organic, local food: poached salmon. What's not to like?

Angus, the Skipper, drinks, sun over the yard arm, on board the Elinca at Leverbugh, Harris.

The next morning was a Force 4 and choppy, 'short' waves, i.e. the distance between each wave so short a rolling, up and down, side to side, corkscrew motion which resulted in two of our members retching for the 7 and a half hour sailing. Luckily I was OK, wearing wrist bands which work on acupuncture pressure points and Traveleeze to make sure (two tricks learnt on the Fair Isle crossing last year). But the fog came down. On a clear day, Angus told me, St Kilda is visible from at least half way across the 52 mile trip from Leverburgh. So, just a little boring, 7 and a half hours of staring at fog, and looking out where the horizon might be(not down, or queasiness would follow)so no reading possible. However, I fell into a trance-like, meditative torpor and it's amazing what thoughts come in that state. I know I solved the world's problems. Pity I can't remember now what great wisdom was revealed to me.

On arrival at St Kilda (Hiorta, the main island) all we saw was a shadow and the base of Oisebhal (pron.Oisheval), to the east of Village Bay. Anchored for the night in Village Bay, the boat rocked from side to side (not up and down as well, luckily), with gurgles and bumps all night, and I had disturbing dreams.

The morning was brilliant though: blue skies and seas.

Me, Dun in background.

First view climbing up on deck was of the jagged silhouette of Dun (pronounced Dune), like two prehistoric monsters, one mounting the other, round to the open sea and a solitary island in the distance, Levenish, back round in a semi-circle to Hiorta - this semi-circle all that remains of a volcanic crater. Village Bay itself was a bit of an anticlimax - perhaps I have seen so many photos of it, there was no shock of the new.

Nor is it pretty, with the clutter of 'cleits'- 1400 of them (the stone 'fridges' as a Stornoway fisherman put it), where the villagers air-dried the gannets and fulmars to eat over the winter. Mankind seems to have a propensity to litter the landscape with excrescences, however practical they might have been. Then the mountains of Conachair and Oiseabhal did not look that high - though I knew that Conachair is the highest sea-cliff in Britain at 1400 feet (430 m), somehow they were not imposing.

Village from Bay

First, we sailed, luckily there was enough wind, to the stacks which are four miles to the east of the main island. The villagers (Hiortaich) made this journey to catch the gannets and I could imagine what an achievement that was in row boats, and to see the almost inaccessible sides - no ledges to act as jettys, and it made me realize their courage as the great swell would have thrust the boats perilously close to being smashed against the base of the rock as they leapt onto the rock.

Stac Li, Stac an Armin and some of Borerey

Stac Li (pronounced Lee) 564 feet/172 m high

The sheer scale of the stacks themselves, Stac Li, like a shield and Stac an Armin, more of a triangle from one view, and rugged, larger Boreray, bursting vertically straight out of the sea, did look more impressive than the cliffs of Hiorta, but even so, it was hard to appreciate that they are higher than the Empire State Building. Nothing to give a sense of perspective.

Stac an Armin

Thousands and thousands of gannets, fulmars, puffins, is an awesome sight though. On approach, white dots filled the skies, like motes before your eyes. Swathes of puffins flew by,or scooted over the surface of the water, fulmars glided by the halyards, and high above our mast the stately, outstretched wings of the gannets, like a pattern of white crosses, not quite touching, patterned the blue.

As we sailed between the two outer stacks and Boreray the swell grew, with the backswash in an alarming way and the jagged rock seemed to rise and fall. We were lucky it was relatively calm - easy to see why this trip would be too dangerous in rougher waters. Surprisingly I could not smell the guano and only hear a faint cacophony of birds - this must have been because of the direction of the wind, or the noise our sails made? I had read in Martin Martin's 17th c account of his voyage that the sea was white with guano - again I did not see this.

Circumnavigating Boreray

The rocks themselves are white from the birds (and guano) on the ledges, organized in distinct levels (rather like the tenements of 16th c Edinburgh's Royal Mile where the rich had the top apartments, ranging down to the poorest at the bottom.) Here gannets ruled the top ledges, then fulmars in the middle, puffins nesting in burrows in the grassy ledges(on Boreray) with the black, snake-headed cormorants on the rocks at the base.

The Stacks, Li, An Armin and Boreray

In the afternoon, we went ashore to the village - in a motor-powered inflatable dinghy since boats are not allowed to moor by the jetty, for fear of rats jumping ship. (I'm pretty sure there were none on Elinca but the NTS make no exceptions.) The indigenous species must be protected at all costs: we saw the wonderful, enormous wrens, big as sparrows, which hopped about unconcernedly on the ruined cottages instead of hiding between stones as they do elsewhere (Troglodites, their Latin name means cave-dwellers)and there's the famous St Kildan large field mouse (which I did not see.).);the ubiquitous, many coloured Soay sheep have been there since the Bronze Age and their genes never mixed with other breeds. Their wool peels off naturally, so the Hiortach had no need to shear them, only 'pluck' them - and a few wandered around in this semi-dressed state.

Soay dreadlocks

I talked to Jill who was there from a university (I forget which) studying the Soay but was sad to learn that she is briefed not to help in any way if the sheep are in difficulty. The academics are there to observe the sheep in their natural state. If they overbreed, many lambs die in harsh winters, and so a natural balance is maintained, it seems.

We explored the chapel and school room - part of the same building connected by a door - quite clear how the Minister ruled over everyone. The row of books on the shelf all Bibles. No getting away here. Even the view from the school room window was claustrophobic - of the steep sided mountain covered in cleits -no sky.

View from School-room window.

We then walked down the 'Street' - the one and only one, with 6 of the cottages now re-roofed and conserved by the National Trust for Scotland, lived in by the volunteers in the summer, then down past the ruined more modern Victorian ones, next door to the earlier bothy-like ones (actually more practical, the rounded sides deflecting the winds)which the villagers put their cattle in when they moved out to the newer houses.

The Street

I pondered on the hard life they led - the same as any other village in the Highlands, no doubt, except that the men, at least, had the excitement of abseiling the cliffs to catch the gannets. The women were literally beasts of burden, carrying all the heavy loads, as well as looking after the cattle (when they still had them) and the domestic chores. Strangely, the men sewed all the clothes.

Dun from ruined cottage

I felt claustrophobic imagining living in this tight, little community. People imagine they were 'away from it all'- but they were remote only geographically. Here, they were very much, part of the community with all its stresses and strains, however egalitarian it was in the early days, when everything was shared between them and debated between them (the famous St Kildan 'Parliament'- of men only, but the women had their own group too, led by a 'Queen'.)

Small-pox and tetanus (the latter causing the 'eight-day' death amongst infants), decimated their numbers, until only women, mainly old and a few childen, and a handful of old men were left- many of the young men having emigrated, lured by the glamour of Glasgow. Latterly, a too strict minister who imposed hours of services on them and prevented their crofting and time to look after their livestock, and the corrupting influence of tourists on Victorian steamers...there are many reasons for the decline of their society. It makes fascinating reading and there are many parallels with the fate of ethnic tribes in the so-called undeveloped world.

Stone of house number and family who lived here.

There is much debate nowadays between those who want to keep Hiorta (St Kilda) pure, untrammelled by man, and deplore the ugly buildings of the army and MOD barracks and who romanticize the previous inhabitants' way of life. On the otherhand, there are those who say St Kilda must adapt -there are interesting comments on the Ranger's website, c/o the National Trust for Scotland, on all these issues.

Personally, as I queued in the former Factor's House, now Ranger's house and shop with a crowd of visitors who had suddenly arrived on the motorboat day-trip, to buy a St Kildan drying-up cloth, I asked myself what the hell I was doing? Hadn't I come to St Kilda to get away from commercialism? Still, the NTS must raise funds, one way or another. The Ranger looked as if he'd far rather be out on a cliff counting the birds.

Myself and others in our group climbed up to the 'gap' between Conachair and Oisebhal to view the stacks from the top of the cliffs. There was no need to climb to the top of either mountain for the view, thank goodness, since I was not up to it. We were there about 5-6 hours - but not long enough to walk over to Gleann Mor -full of bonxies nesting, so probably a blessing.

On the way to the 'gap', cleit and Dun beyond.

Another night in Village Bay- then back to the mainland. This time, St Kilda and the stacks on view behind us for half the journey and then Harris ahead. No wonder the early Irish monks could navigate - not sailing into the unknown, so much as island-hopping.

On the way back, we saw the floppy dorsal fin of a sunfish (drifted over on the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean), and in the Minches, porpoises, even the elusive Minke whale which surfaces and sinks so quickly it is easy to miss, and above the cliffs two sea-eagles with their white rumps. Our last night, dinner on deck was in a remote, gneiss sea-loch, with dark green water, no sound except water lapping somewhere in Lewis - I'm not telling you where, and as we ate oat cakes with Stornoway smoked salmon on cream cheese sprinkled with black pepper, and even more special, we saw two golden eagles.

The trip of a life-time. I feel very privileged, especially when Angus tells me some of his guests have booked Elinca several consecutive years before actually reaching St Kilda. Yes, the voyage across was ghastly. But worth it to see this special, mystical archipelago. (There I go.) Somehow more enticing in anticipation and in recollection than in reality. Isn't that the way with dreams?

Leaving St Kilda. View of the Stacks.

As we sailed away in calmer waters, St Kilda was visible until half way across, as Angus had said. I watched till it was no more than a shadow, then a blur then so indistinct that you would not see it unless you knew it had been there, all the time thinking of those last emigrants and what they must have felt. Some only too glad to get away. Others filled with grief. We noticed in the grave-yard, some more recent graves. Emigrants who had asked to have their remains brought back and interred there.

Lots and lots of memories which will result in poetry, I hope- inspired not so much by the mystical aspect, I suspect, but the lives of the people...but the awe-inspiring experience of thousands, and thousands of gannets and fulmars on the stacks will surely be in there somewhere.

www.beyondthebluehorizon.co.uk/ for info and photos but book through co-organization: www.wildernessscotland.com/
www.kilda.org.uk for the NTS site and Ranger's journal

Edwin Morgan Poetry prize shortlist, 2011

2011-07-10T09:52:00.000+01:00

Wonderful poems, all and even more exciting, I know three of the shortlisted: Jane McKie, Gill Andrews and Lydia MacPherson, and two of the commended Aileen Ballantyne and Helen Mort.

Some visceral, unusual and vivid poems. In particular, I love Gill's victim's increasingly stony disintegration and 'my tears were opals' with its echoes of The Tempest's 'his eyes were pearls'; also Janie's lip of sandstone 'purled' with fissures- and Lydia's dinosaur 'dripping its trail'.

So congratulations to them all. Find out who wins on 17 Aug.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/08/shortlist-edwin-morgan-prize

Perfection for Kona Mcphee

2011-06-26T10:30:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Kona Mcphee for winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize for her poetry collection 'Perfect Blue.'
See http://www.faber.co.uk/article/2011/6/geoffrey-faber-prize-2010/

Kona, an Australian settled in Scotland, is getting well-known for her poetry surgeries based at the Scottish Poetry Library and her readings at the GRV and the Shore Poets. She has several, multifarious blogs of great interest and wit too. Her background in computors and astronomy, a former life as a violinist and an interest in motorbike mechanics lead to some unusual poems.
She's a lovely lady, kind, modest and helpful with a precise attention to detail in her surgeries (I've had the benefit of one and can vouch for them!). I'm so pleased for her and recommend 'Perfect Blue'. It is indeed 'perfect.'

http://www.konamacphee.com/

http://www.thatelusiveclarity.com/2011/06/21/panicking/

Bach's Jesu's Joy to cheer one up during flu

2011-06-23T10:19:00.000+01:00

Since I have flu, I'm surfing my blogs and this cheered me up.

Bach on the longest xylophone in the world- self-played by wooden ball on a slope inside a cedar wood in Japan. Magic. Watch as well as listen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_CDLBTJD4M

Actually, the video showing the making of the xylophone and the advert is almost more interesting. And it was only then that I realized the first video was an advert - if you don't know what for, I'll leave you to guess what the objects at the end are! Reading the comments after the video, I also discover it's also promoting 'thinning' of forests (rather than heavy logging) so is all about saving ancient forests. Wow. The Japanese are wonderful. Just love the director's expression at the end of the filming too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD44QhKuG1U

Courtesy of Through the Sapphire Sky blog

Better than Prozac: Golden Dance

2011-06-16T09:47:00.000+01:00

An incisive article by Mark Brown today in the Guardian about the Lost Arts website launched by various arts unions where you can record your own cuts. See http://www.lost-arts.org/
To read Mark Brown's whole article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/culture-cuts-blog/2011/jun/15/arts-funding-public-sector-cuts?CMP=EMCGT_160611&

For every £1 spent on the Arts, there's a £2 return. Some pundits even claim for every £1, there's a £6 return. Subsidizing the Arts is therefore an investment and the Arts Cuts of 25% throughout the UK don't make sense.

I have my doubts concerning this utilitarian argument for supporting the Arts, since if this led to having to quantify £ for £ generated, this rather militates against slim volumes of poetry! However, Mark Brown goes on to develop the argument that there's the money saved by improving mental health. I guess that's unquantifiable: but think of the millions saved if we could apply this to mental health, prisons, old people, youth clubs, the marginalized in sink housing estates. Cutting the numbers in prisons, the NHS bill for anti-depressives etc.

Which brings me to my own life saver: Golden, a dance group for over 60+ at Dancebase, in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh run by Morag Deyes, the Director. It's fun, keeps us active and flexible and gets the dopamines flowing i.e. natural happy drugs. You go in a bit down, thinking of the aches and pains that come with age, and leave walking on air. We've done contemporary, flamenco and (my favourite) Bollywood so far. Morag is fun, energetic, bursting with ideas and can-do: already several spin-offs have resulted. One is a group called 24ct Gold which is run by members of Golden themselves, to explore choreography and expertise by members of the group: Then there's the social spin-off.Golden are a feisty group of mainly ladies (2 males)with a wicked sense of humour and get up and go. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. It's a hoot.
Far more fun than prozac.

And because of present funding, it's FREE. I can only hope that will last.

You can watch Golden as part of 6 programmes about dance groups in Scotland on BBC Alba on Mondays at 10pm or currently on iplayer. It follows the progress of 6 dance different groups with different dance styles all round the country: The Heavy Smokers, a breakdancing group from Livingston; a group for refugees in Glasgow; Fusion, an Aberdonian young people's dance class; a dance college in Dundee; Ballet West, a ballet school in rural Highlands near Taynuilt, and Golden. They eventually all came together at the Tramway, Glasgow for a massive event co-ordinated by the choreographer, Andy Howitt. Wish I'd been a member then!
Dannsa:Scotland is dancing http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011x1tr/Dannsa_(Scotland_Is_Dancing)_Episode_1/

Sense of Place Renga at Botanics

2011-05-29T12:44:00.000+01:00

Being the end of term session of my Sense of Place course, why not a sociable, collaborative Renga - linked haiku-like stanzas and since rain might not be far away, we took shelter in the Temperate Palm House, a 19th c magnificent conservatory in the Royal Botanical Gardens. Some even ventured out into the gardens, braving potential fall-out of volcanic ash.

I can't say we followed a very strict interpretation of Renga - we kept to the spring/early summer season we are in and used the direct experience of the place. And I ducked out of the role of Renga Master - much more interesting for the students to take it in turns to organize and reorganize the resulting sequences and savour the differing results.

It was fun and maybe we reached a zen place. The soup and rolls in the cafe were good too.

Save our Libraries protest rumbles on

2011-05-25T07:59:00.000+01:00

Over in Moy, Northern Ireland, visiting relatives, the first thing I noticed driving into the town was this depressing appeal to 'Save our Library' in letters blocking the window panes.
A typical scenario - small town with much loved library catering to those without cars who cannot drive miles away to the big library they intend to save in Dungannon, and in fact, which the council has spent a fortune revamping. Great. But now it seems, this is at the cost of all the little surrounding satellite town libraries.

http://www.tyronecourier.uk.com/articles/news/19377/new-chapter-in-fight-to-keep-moy-library-open/

Brendan Kennelly's 75th

2011-05-17T12:31:00.000+01:00

Happy birthday to Brendan Kennelly who is 75 this year.

My favourite poet, former lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and first mentor. The force be with him for many more years of beautiful, sometimes controversial and moving poetry and his naughty sense of humour.

Listen to his melodious voice on the poetry archive http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=202

Tree Books and a Matsuri in the Hidden Gardens, Glasgow

2011-05-16T09:05:00.005+01:00

Xylotheque, a library of trees, attached by wire, rather like the books in the Bodleian attached by chains. Each book contains a sliver of wood from one of the native Scottish trees. This charming installation is to be found under the seats of a special shelter in the Hidden Gardens, Glasgow - a shelter especially created for poetry recitals, in particular Japanese haiku.

Hidden Gardens, the Tramway, Glasgow

It rained. Of course, it rained. It was Glasgow in spring. But it was only a light pattering in the birch, branches swaying. The sound of an occasional train hooting and swooshing by and the jingle of an ice-cream van now and then to remind us we were not in the Highlands hidden in a birch forest with waterfalls and perhaps a loch glimpsed through the leaves but in a transformed area beside the converted Tramway.

We stood by the wooden xylotheque structure, mentioned above. Enough room for a few people to shelter whilst the rest of us dripped under umbrellas or hoods. We were there to hear a series of haiku composed by Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn on a commemorative trip they made around Scotland last year, to honour the trip Basho made many centuries ago in his 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' in Japan. Fuji might be represented by a similarly iconic Scottish mountain, a famous view in Japan represented by another here, or personal incidents echoed here such as a poem about glimpsing Boreray, one of the St Kildan archipelago which they never visited to parallel an island similarly glimpsed but never reached by Basho.

Larry Butler, Angus Reid, Colin Will and others had also contributed haiku from their visits throughout the year and the results were read along with Ken and Alec's, the whole event started atmospherically by the lilting Eriskay Love Song sung beautifully in Gaelic by Margaret Bennett.

Margaret Bennett

Alec Finlay, Mr Masataka Tarahara, Consul General for Japan, and his wife and Ken Cockburn(reading)

One of the highlights for me was the contribution made by the Consul General for Japan in Edinburgh, Mr Masataka Tarahara, who came over for the event. He explained how there are many affinities between Scotland and Japan: love of mountains and lakes/lochs, also both countires have four seasons and many, many ruined castles. He then proceeded to sing a haunting song in Japanese. The theme was that castles have their day of splendour and then fall into decay - as do humans! Ah, that old theme.

After the reading, people were encouraged to compose their own haiku inspired by the setting, write them on labels and tie them to the tree. Ken told me often the ink fades and only the labels are left, then they too eventually deteriorate and return to nature. Biodegradable, so not litter then.

To read the poems, see http://theroad-north.blogspot.com
and Ken's blog: http://www.kencockburn.co.uk

Linda Chase

2011-05-02T09:51:00.000+01:00

The poet Linda Chase has died. An American who settled in Manchester, obituaries mention her 'generosity' as a poet and as a tutor. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/01/linda-chase-obituary

Some time ago, I noticed there were workshops in a Tai Chi Hall in Manchester and was intrigued. It seems it was Linda's- formerly a Tai Chi tutor turned poet. This video of a project on Manchester people with poems by Linda and the photographs by Len Grant, shows her humanity, and sense of humour. Now I'm sorry I never went to one of her poetry workshops in the Tai Chi Hall.

http://www.lindachase.co.uk/index.htm Then click on the video 'Shooting the Breeze'.

Boggart's Breakfast on May Morning

2011-05-01T19:47:00.000+01:00

Grace and Elmo with Giant Boggart, from Boggart's Breakfast.

Morris dancers are not normally something you encounter in Scotland (or possibly I've got that wrong?)so the sound of clashing sticks and tinkling bells, was a jolly start to my May morning: weird creatures like ragged chimney sweeps in black and silver sequinned jackets, in Goth-type boots and wearing top hats with blue feathers stomping round the paved courtyard to the side of St John's Church, (Princes St) Edinburgh to melodeon and assorted percussion.

My morning was not as early as Boggart's Breakfast though. They'd come up (from Sheffield) for the Beltane Festival on Calton Hill, caught a few hours' sleep and then woke at 3.30am to catch the sun rising above the sea viewed from half-way up Salisbury Crags. So by mid-day, outside St J's, they danced with zest and energy but did admit perhaps this was the last gig of the day.

After the dancing, I got chatting to two of them -
Grace (originally from Vermont, USA) and the Boggart, aka her husband, Elmo.

Have a look at their web-site for some splendidly spooky photos of the group looming through the mist on Higgor Tor on last year's May Day (luckily for them the haar we've had in Edinburgh over the last week had cleared up) and find out why they (sometimes) paint their faces blue and the relevance of black and silver.(This I can tell you is a reference to the soot and steel of Sheffield). There's also a spooky video of them dancing 'Hell's Bells' in the Devil's Arse in the Peak District. Did I say 'spooky' before? Yes, something very pagan and frightening, despite the jolly music, about them - and despite their assurances that Morris has nothing to do with pagan religion and no one's sacrificed. Only a few bruised fingers now and then from those sticks. As it says on their website:

Beware the peakland spooklights.
Beware the lights of blue.
Make sure your night-time wanderings
are not the death of you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP-e7EoEuLk
http://boggartsbreakfast.dreamhosters.com/ee/index.php/site/pictures/

Googling, I've found one Morris group in Scotland, the Banchory Ternan Morris men in Aberdeenshire- it seems they are all English incomers and all male. Morris dancing was known in Scotland until the 17th c when it was banned (as it was in Puritan England) on pain of being 'hangit' in Edinburgh. http://banchorymorris.webs.com/aboutus.htm

Manic gleams , guility after-pub snacks and warts

2011-04-25T12:23:00.000+01:00

It's Bank Holiday Monday which means we will definitely keep off the roads. Sitting in a tail-back is not our idea of fun.

So, a sedentary treat, in between weeding my wee patio garden, is scrolling through my favourite bloggers. The current one from the Scottish Poetry Library has got me going on a literary favourites' list -a bit self-indulgent so soon after a New Year list but hey.

http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/robyn_on_reading/

1. When do you get to read? Not in the mornings, if working on my novel. As a kick-start, before writing my own, if working on poetry.

I read at the bus-stop, on the bus to and fro wherever and in the afternoons after a walk -early eve inbetween making supper, which is why there are so many burnt offerings; also after supper if not out or something good on TV (increasingly rare) and last thing at night.

2. What was the last book you pressed on a friend, with a manic gleam in your eye?

'The Hare with the Amber Eyes' by Edmund de Waal (Catto & Windus, 2010).

3. If poems were food, name one Heston Blumenthal-style starter, one hearty breakfast favourite and one guilty after-pub snack.

Blumenthal starter: The sequence of Bee poems by Jo Shapcott in the current Poetry Review (Spring, 2011)for daring, reworking a theme so originally, with her characteristic sense of fun, the mimetic, kinaesethetic evocation of bee flight, heart-rending honey and a sting;

Hearty breakfast: Ciaran Carson's 'For All We Know',(Gallery Press,2008) so many variations, and layers to get your teeth into. The spy theme makes this a pacy read like a Film Noir, but you can re-read more slowly and savour the multi-textures of physical detail and philosophical meditations;

Guilty, after-pub snack: To her ex-Lover? (Will check exact title)-Rosemary Tonks for being so utterly over-the-top and outrageous.

4. What's in your current reading pile, warts and all?
Poetry:
'Summer' by Jenny Bornholt (VUP, 2003) not just because Robyn Marsack recommends her - but because I came across her work at StAnza last year, 2010 and love it; 'Common Prayer' and 'Rough Magic' by Fiona Sampson (Carcanet 2007 and 2010); 'A Light Song of Light' by Kei Miller (Carcanet, 2010); Edinburgh Review 131' edited by Alan Gillis;
Novel:
'On Chesil Beach' by Ian McEwan (Cape/Vintage 2008)- I have just finished this and it was so devastating, I am having a breather before I embark on another novel. Hence following:
Non-fiction:
'Natasha's Dance: a Cultural History of Russia' by Orlando Figes (Penguin, 2002);
'Souvenir brochure of Scottish Ballet's current production, 'Alice';
'The Sign of the Fish' by Peter Quennell (Collins, 1960): going through my shelves, trying to decided what to take down to Oxfam, I came across this given to me as a Prize in 1966 for passing my A levels, by my English teacher, Mrs. Bainbridge (not Beryl the novelist), but Ivy.

I glanced at the first page then and never read on since it is written in an indigestible, now out-dated style but I am determined to read it now to see what my inspiring teacher thought might inspire me: a roll-call of post-Georgian, Modernist names, with a biographical approach, personal encounters, writers met on travels abroad and touches of an individualistic literary critic's taste, ranging from Laforgue to Evelyn Waugh, Lady Ottoline Morrell to Japanese Hokusai to Byron. All this with meditations on the writer's life.

This is a book written by an enthusiast. It looks fascinating and I only wish I'd read it back in 1966- though, to be honest, since my reading was rather limited then (to mainly A level set texts), perhaps I'll get more out of it now. The biographical approach was certainly frowned on during my BA and MA (and still is, alas.) More fun than structuralist analysis though!

5. And finally, you already have Shakespeare and the Bible on the desert island. You can keep one poem and one luxury. What'll they be?

Um...all of Keats (but only one poem? One could get tired, heaven forfend, of 'St Agnes' Eve'.)Maybe all of Yeats (but again, one poem? Maybe 'Prayer for My Daughter'.)OK, I'll plump for 'Squarings' in Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney because that's pretty long, xlviii stanzas whatever that is, and complex and would bear 100s of re-readings.

On the otherhand, I have yet to read Dante's 'La Vita Nuova' but surely length is not the issue? Maybe it should be a poem that meant something special at one time, or still does. This is getting ridiculous. There is no one poem that could last weeks, maybe years, of isolation. (I've always thought this is stupid question on Desert Island discs.)

The answer might be to LEARN lots of poems now, as I had to do at school, so that I would have more than what I learnt then in my head. ('Is there anybody there? asked the traveller' - Walter de la Mare; G.K. Chesterton's 'The Donkey' 'When fishes flew and forests walked etc'; snippets of Yeats 'If I had the cloths of heaven etc' and 'Down by the Salley Gardens' are going to be poor fare.) This is cheating, of course.

The luxury - pen/s and paper. My memory isn't good enough to memorize my poems, unlike Ratushinskaya and other political prisoners. Ah, memory, again...what was the question again?

Celebration

2011-04-18T20:46:00.000+01:00

I've just undergone a colonoscopy and been given the all clear. Here's a jolly video to celebrate.
Bottoms up!

http://www.villa-ephrussi.com/en/ephrussi/776-videos/19-musical_fontains/

Oxford Blackwells: book-banging horse-scaring

2011-04-07T12:12:00.000+01:00

Paul, the Blackwell's guide in Mr Blackwell's 19th c. office.

No visit to Oxford is complete without a visit to Blackwells, truly the best bookshop I have ever been in - especially the fact that they have the latest poetry books as soon as they're published and even on display at the till desk. As Dickens said, Blackwells is 'the literary man's house of call.'

So Hub and I, having spent rather a lot of time there already on previous days, had just popped in, yet again, as you do, to fill in the last half-hour before we had to dash to catch the train back home, when we were inveigled by the charming Paul, guide to the Blackwells' tour. Why not? (We'd only buy more books if left unsupervised for half an hour.)
The very spot we were standing in (the few feet at the entrance) used to be the original bookshop, at 50, Broad Street,founded in 1879. Considering the massive operation Blackwells is today, it was amusing to contemplate the 14 square feet which was the available floor space between the piles of books of those early beginnings. If more than one or two customers entered at one time, the apprentice had to exit by the back door and hover there.
The apprentice had 'to undertake not to contract marriage, gamble with cards, haunt taverns or playhouses'. So the White Horse pub next door was out of bounds. Fred Hanks, one of the earliest apprentices was presented to Mr Blackwell by his mother: 'I hope he'll be a good boy,' she said. He stayed for twenty years. One of his duties, incidentally, was babysitting Basil Blackwell.
Then as today, 'university students in the afternoons did Athletics, took a walk, or went to Mr Blackwell's in the Broad.' Its philosophy, as today, is summed up in: 'We browsed at leisure and no one came to disturb you.' The only disturbances in the early days might be the book-banging on the pavements outside, where books were cleared of dust, thus frightening the hansom cab horses.
Blackwells went on to publish poetry by Robert Graves, Auden, C.S. Lewis and Spender, children's books by A.A.Milne and Walter de la Mare. Later Blackwell founded the Shakespeare Head Press.
Upstairs, Paul took us to the first-floor office of Mr Blackwell, and explained that his editorial assistant was one L. Sayers. He 'admired her witty mind, with reservations', which indicates she was better suited to her career as Dorothy L. Sayers, the crime writer. Her office is now part of the cafe.(The bit that has a fire-place and has the feel of a 19th c room.)
I won't spoil Paul's tour by recounting all his stories. You'll have to go for yourself. Highly recommended.
And a P.S. from Paul - he also does tours of Oxford in the summer months.

Oxford, Addison's Walk, Magdalen College, March 2011

2011-04-06T10:26:00.000+01:00

Enough blogging about StAnza...and the reason for such late blogging was a few days' trip down to Oxford for a clan gathering; the American contingent wanted to 'do' Oxford so we did. Thoroughly done in, what better to get away from yellow stone, however beautiful and wander along Addison's Walk. I'd never been here in March before - so it was lovely to see the daffoldils, and other wild flowers, including the rare snake's-head frittillary. And there they were, masses of them, at the beginning of the path in full view. No necessity to search.

Son and bankrupter (no, that's not fair, he's very frugal), J, tells me this is where C.S.Lewis decided to become a Christian. No Damascene moments for us, but it was good to have a quiet walk away from the tourists.

StAnza 2011: Artist's Books, Roncadoro Press

2011-04-06T10:18:00.000+01:00

One of the highlights of the StAnza festival this year for me was discovering the wonderful Roncadoro Press. Initially I was attracted to their stall at the pamphlet fair, as I wanted to buy my friend, Jean Atkin's latest book. And what a find! This is a lovely book, with moving poems, full of the sound of the wind and sea, by Jean, inspired by her Shetlandic ancestry, of sailors and shipwrecks, hardship and emigration, with evocative, atmospheric illustrations by Hugh Bryden, who runs Roncadoro Press.

Jean's book, 'Lost at Sea', is available in three editions: a paperback printed version, a hard-back printed version and a case-bound edition, of the original artwork, a collage with Japanese hand-made paper scrunched to suggest the wild Shetland seas. Above is a single, framed page from this book, part of an exhibition of the Press's other Artist's Books in the Preservation Trust Museum.

As you'll see, each book is different but Hugh's interest is in graphic design, whether woodcuts (reminiscent of Masreel) or fine pencil. All 'Black and White', as the exhibition was called. Not all are 'books'. Some are fold-out one poem paper concertinas.

So far, the poets in his 'stable' are Andrew Forster, Hugh McMillan, Rab Wilson, as well as Jean Atkin.

For further info on Roncadora Press, see www.hughbryden.com

StAnza 2011 Photo Journal: Catriona Taylor's tribute to Sorley MacLean

2011-04-06T10:12:00.000+01:00

This tribute to the Gaelic poet, Sorley MacLean by Catriona Taylor was inspired by a visit to Raasay (an island near Skye)where Sorley came from and to a deserted village, where the villagers were evicted at the time of the Clearances in the 19th century. Many of the inhabitants left for Australia. Some of Sorley's verses from 'Woods of Raasay' in his own handwriting are screen printed onto the slates. She says in her blurb 'I used the broken slates to suggest rooflessness and therefore homelessness.'

I found this particularly moving as the slates on the grass did indeed evoke the idea of their scattering as the cottages fell to ruin. Also it was maybe because the garden behind the Preservation Trust Museum was such a tranquil spot, with nothing but the sound of the wind and a few birds in the sharp light of March.

StAnza 2011 Photo Journal: books great and small

2011-04-06T10:09:00.000+01:00

Delightful indeed, a wee exhibition of wee books 'Small' curated by Julie Johnstone of the Scottish Poetry Library:

'In small things' by Thomas A. Clark and Laurie Clark.

'Untitled' by Jenny Smith (the letters are cut-outs)

Ciaran Carson at StAnza: Hauntings

2011-04-04T12:02:00.000+01:00

Ciaran Carson at St Mary's College, University of St Andrew's, StAnza, 20th March, 2011

At the intimate Round Table session in an oak-panelled room overlooking the beautiful quad of St Mary's College- a view of 16th c grey stone architecture, and pools of mauve, yellow and white croci under a vast, old tree in the centre of lawns, the poet, and I now realize, musician, Ciaran Carson played a tune on his tin whistle to start proceedings.

It was charming and rather unexpected, though it seems completely natural once you know he used to be the Arts Officer for Traditional Music and Culture in Northern Ireland and has spent many years 'in the field' (which sounds more fresh air, sporty and sober than the smoke-filled, whiskey nights of crack probably were) playing and listening all round Ireland, and has written 'Last Night's Fun' a book on Irish traditional music. He continues to write for a music magazine, Journal of Music and you can catch a flavour of his writings in the link below.

Now the Professor of Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast and founder of The Seamus Heaney Centre, the influence of Irish traditional music is also apparent in his poetry - the 'refrains' which are repeated with improvised variations, returning hauntings of theme and image. Reared in an Irish-speaking household, his English is haunted by the Irish language, by Belfast past and present, by etymological associations and by allusions to other Irish poets, Louis MacNeice in particular, even in 'Catmint' a version of the Irish language 'Pangur Ban'.

He started his StAnza session by talking about Aisling (pron. ashling), the Irish for 'dream' or 'vision'. The author is asleep and a speirbhean (pron. spare van)or 'sky woman' appears to him in a dream. 'I'm from another world,' she says. 'I am Ireland (the Irish language)and you write in English and that won't do.' Carson explains how he's gone against his own language, but, in another sense, Carson is still true to the aisling. 'An aisling is a zone from which you spring, or spring into, or are sprung on by language, so when you write, what you thought you knew, is not so. If you know in advance, why say it? So it is best to be searching, going out in a zone (on a limb) in which you are not sure of yourself.'

'...But when a poem is written, you find it's a thought you had not thought before and it changes you. But, of course,it was in there, half-formed, half-thought... as we go round in a fog. You write ... not to express yourself as such, more to find out what is going on in language, in your mind, in the world, like a haunting.'

He went on to discuss his collection 'For All We Know' (The Gallery Press, 2008- shortlisted for both the T.S.Eliot and Costa prizes)- He wanted to write a love poem - 'the usual nonsense' but 'the 'I' and 'you' are invented, or the 'he' and 'she'. A fictional way of exploring how one feels if one is in love. A dialogue of sorts. 'It kept coming, night after night but he didn't know what he would be saying and each night, he'd say 'Now what?' and something came: 'Here's how it goes.' '

In 'For All We Know', is 'haunted by what you might have done or been. Every step could change your life.' There are allusions to the Troubles in Belfast, the 60s' riots in Paris and the Stasi (possibly in Berlin), asking 'how far do we understand others? We may have a 'file', but how much do we know about others or ourselves?'

But in the end the Fetch will come for us. The Fetch is a doppelganger - a superstition that if you see your double, you are going to die. 'But the Fetch will only come when your time's up.'

Carson ended by playing the tune 'Down the Back Lane': which suggested for him, 'whom I might meet or who's along with me, I don't know.'

I leave you with a You Tube clip of Carson on the tin whistle (at the Kilkenny Festival) to play you out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qo-Wffz0QY
www.contemporarywriters.com

www.poetryarchives.org

journalofmusic.com/article/1189 The Raw Bar

StAnza 2011 Photo Journal: Tagore Poetry Boat

2011-04-03T20:32:00.000+01:00

The 6 metre Poetry Boat, is decorated with verses from Rabindranath Tagore and inspired by Tagore's 'Sonar Tari'/Golden Boat.

Kenny Munro is behind the project, since 2002, to create links between Bengal artists and rural schools in Aberdeenshire. The boat was on show during StAnza Poetry Festival, 16-20th March, 2011.

More info can be found on www.kennymunrosculpture.com

StAnza 2011: Hats off to one-man Fringe

2011-04-02T22:18:00.000+01:00

StAnza now has a Fringe. Wow. As Brian Johnstone, former Director of StAnza is reported to have said, if StAnza has a Fringe, then it must be entering the Big Time.

The un-official 1-man fringe event was The Poem-catcher, aka Andrew Newan, an Afro-Scots (as in South African with a Scots mother)and at the drop of a hat, he'd perform a poem he'd caught in his net. To be fair, they were not by himself, but by anyone who kindly dropped a poem into said net. The theme had to be the Royal Wedding though. Natch, being St Andrews, and you know who met there. He also had his own show- so his walk-about was a great way to net an audience.
And he publishes most of the poems donated, with titles such as 'Quake', 'Balls', 'Fungus Poems', 'Salty.' Watch out for him at a poetry festival near you.
Oh, yes, he wears a hat, in keeping with the StAnza zeitgeist this year. Hats off, Andrew.
(Enough hats already, Ed.)
And the prize for sartorial elegance goes to the Poet Catcher this year:

See www.poemcatcher.com

For other winners of awards for sartorial elegance, see my StAnza Photo Journal for previous years in the right-hand side column of this blog.

StAnza 2011: Hats and tin whistles

2011-04-02T20:24:00.000+01:00

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.

The Problem with StAnza

2011-03-14T18:02:00.000Z

Scotland's Poetry Festival in St Andrews is of course what I am referring to. Problem? Well, what I mean is I want to go to everything.
With a show on the hour, every hour more or less from 10am to the small hours...it's just not humanly possible. Unless I do what various actor friends of mine used to do in London's West End- watch the first act of one play, then rush across the road and watch the second act of another - much easier now there's the South Bank and it doesn't involve getting run over going from theatre to theatre.

I guess you'd have to be one of the volunteers and get in free to afford it at StAnza - though having got wonderful discounts for booking in advance with the added advantage of my advancing years (the only bonus)I also got an OAP discount, so the tickets are a fantastic bargain.

However, what to choose? The headline poets goes without saying. But then, broaden my horizons by going to hear the foreign poets? They are from Iraq, Belgium, Italy, Australia, Germany, Iran, China, the USA and Georgia - which if the poets are as good as Georgian plainchant (of which I am an afficionado having had the privilege of being taught to sing this in Edinburgh by Nana Mzhavanadze in a workshop and concert to raise money for the Datuna Appeal (www.ecologia.org.uk) will be spine-tingling, unfamiliar harmonies to the Western ear.
Or..
what about the various readings, tributes to Sorley MacLean, and a concert inspired by his Gaelic poems? About time I immersed myself in one of Scotland's other languages and culture, especially since I am struggling to learn the language.

Or the various masterclasses by Ciaran Carson and Penelope Shuttle?
Or drop into Poetry Cafes and/or slams to enjoy the performance poets?
Or take in a serious lecture by Robert Crawford
Or support the various new poets whom I either know already from Edinburgh readings, or are graduates of the Masters' programmes and surely to be encouraged - if not to say, you heard them before they were famous
Or watch the poetry film-reels
Or have a nosey round the various poetry-related exhibitions
or (if you have small kids) catch the delightful Julia Donaldson
or
blimey, I might just sit in the Byre Bar and watch the wonderful world of poets go by
and when it all gets too much, sneak off for a bracing walk on the west sands or the well-hidden Botanical Gardens to see if the snowdrops are still out (or possibly the croci are out). Whoops, no longer a secret now.

So watch this space, to see what I did in fact manage.

Libraries or incubators for the newborn? Have we come to this?

2011-02-03T11:47:00.000Z

Public Libraries. Ahh. Saturday mornings,
when our Dad took us down to change our books - and we always came away laden with the full quota. Once I'd grown out of the(at that time in the 50s and 60s)limited children's section, I was unsure what to read. Green/e seemed a good place to start, being my own surname and so in this rather haphazard way I worked my way through the entire canon of Graham Greene and Henry Green. How they coloured my (green) world view for years: a mixture of Greene's Catholic guilt in exotic Third World countries with Green's exotic, louche , world-weary cocktail party society. As a 13 year old with no experience of any world other than a convent-school, it was certainly a revelation. (Not that I had any understanding that affaires amoureuses were going on in the latter.) But I had entered a grown-up world of sensibilities, complicated half-inarticulate emotions,that spoke to my own adolescent loneliness - perhaps I was not so alone. And what an introduction to style: Greene's page-turning pace and Green's elliptical, minimalist dialogue.

With my father in the forces, and a new posting every three years, there was no way he was going to transport boxfulls of books every move. So Dad's shelves were limited to mainly factual books -a leather-bound Encyclopaedia was prominent. I am aware this itself is a luxury to many working-class homes where no books at all is the norm. In these days of the internet, perhaps homes no longer need encyclopaedias in book form? But facts are not enough.

How about the awakening of the imagination, fostering of understanding and empathy with other people? (If you want to understand emotional relationships, read novels). But in our Dad's defence, I must add that having married a French woman (after divorce from my Mum) he developped his knowledge of French by reading the sort of novel he might have read in English -mostly war novels such as by Ernest Hemingway. (He was a military man but a sentimentalist.) So, of course, I read them too. To this day if you mention 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' I go a bit blank until I realize, ah, you mean 'Pour Qui Sonne le Glas.' But a handful of books was not going to last the summer hols. Thank G for the public library.

At Mum's she had a collection of books she had hauled around with her from move to move so I was fortunate - I worked through one or two novels by Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, Rosamund Lehmann at just the right age of 15/16: but even Mum could only transport her very favourite books at each move (another story). Thank G for the public library...
without which I doubt I'd have made it to university.
And so on..
I'm told our house is known as 'the second hand book store' by our son's school mates when they visited - since you have to squeeze sideways down the corridors inbetween the bookshelves, and every room has that slightly musty smell of old paperbacks...but even in a house of writers like ourselves, there are more books we want to read, far more than we can possibly afford to buy, or have space to store...so it's back to the public library.

And what about people who were not fortunate enough to be born into a home full of books? Or cannot afford any books, let alone more books?

I can't help noticing that the libraries proposed for closure seem to be those in rural areas with a scattered, scant population (not many votes there then) or in socially deprived urban areas (they don't need 'culture' then/probably don't use their vote?)

What are public libraries for? To make money, to be self-funding, to create a work-force that will accept the lowest pay and longest hours for the highest profits for their capitalist masters? I think not. OK. So I've set my stall out and need go no further.

I think the most appalling justifications I've read this week about the proposed library closures are those of one Oxfordshire councillor in responses to Philip Pullman's brilliant and incisive protest against the closures. The Oxfordshire chappie allegedly (put that in to save legal costs - Ed)said, or allegedly words to that effect : Ok Hands up. But it's not my fault. It's the LibCons (cons in that they managed to fool you all -Ed)who have cut our budget to such a measly pittance that we are forced to choose between libraries and education/hospitals/old people/the disabled/the homeless/the insert anyone else who is needy. And of course, you wouldn't want me to sacrifice any of those would you? Pass the buck.

And we call ourselves a civilized society that could even imagine that this choice was a necessity?

See Phillip Pullman
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/28/market-fanatics-kill-libraries#start-of-comments

Louise Welsh Literary Agony Aunt

2011-01-29T11:34:00.000Z

What a great idea - a literary Agony Aunt. Louise Welsh will be listening to students' (literary) problems and giving practical advice on Glasgow University C/W MLitt's online magazine 'From Glasgow to Saturn'
http://glasgowtosaturn.com/ask-louise/

Hurrah for Poetry

2011-01-29T09:50:00.000Z

Let's hear it for poets. A wonderful, celebratory paeon from Jackie Kay in her Guardian blog today, asking if there is a Poetry Renaissance going on, or if perhaps it's been building for 30 years: a great summary of the state of poetry today, from tiny pub readings to South Bank audiences of 2,000 for the T.S.Eliot prize, school Poetry Outloud events to cheering Slams throughout the country..and a round-up of the current prize-winners and laureates to the new voices.

Jackie Kay can always be counted on to be positive with her warmth and humanity and great enthusiasm in her own poetry too.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jan/29/poets-poetry-stage-roar-renaissance

Burns' Auld Lang Syne, My Luve is like a red, red rose, wee sleekit beestie etc

2011-01-27T09:22:00.000Z

So if Auld Lang Syne, is the only Burns song you know (or at least the first few lines and can mouth the rest) you can now find out the rest of the words and hear actors and poets read other poems, and hear audios of the songs on this new site prepared by BBC Scotland. A chance to find out why Rabbie is so well loved.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/robertburns/

Writers' Retreat with Ian Fleming's ghost in Jamaica

2011-01-26T12:41:00.000Z

Scrolling through my online blogs - (always a sign I'm skiving)and in this case, The Spectator's Arts Blog,I find this:

c.£2,500.00 -plus your travel will buy you a writer's retreat in Jamaica, butler's service, white beach, for a week and oh, and did I forget, three writers to look over your MS.

Sunset Margherita with a parasol and pineapples on a stick anyone?

http://www.spectator.co.uk/shop/events/6627023/the-spectators-writers-retreat.thtml

Jo Shapcott's 'Of Mutability' wins Costa

2011-01-26T12:14:00.000Z

Congratulations to Jo Shapcott for winning the Costa prize for her poetry book 'Of Mutability.' A complex and deeply moving series of meditations but also including touches of Jo's down-to-earth sense of humour- uplifting when the subject matter is mortality.

One usually thinks of the Costa going to a novelist- even tho' Christopher Reid won it last year for 'Scatterings'-a book written out of grief for his wife's death (and I know, that Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney have won it in the past.) There's something about mortality...(birth, sex/love and death, being the immortal subjects for poetry)that makes people turn to poetry - witness sales of Auden after his poem was read at the funeral of the character played by Simon Callow in the film 'Four Wedding and a Funeral.'

What a week for poetry announcements: Liz Lochhead as Scotland's Makar, The Picador prize for a new, emerging poet, to Richard Meier, the T.S. Eliot prize awarded to Derek Walcott and now this news of Jo Shapcott's success.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/25/jo-shapcott-costa-prize-poetry">

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/25/jo-shapcott-costa-prize-poetry

Richard Meier wins Picador Prize

2011-01-25T22:40:00.000Z

All young and not so young hopefuls (which for someone over 30 like me is a welcome change) have been awaiting the announcement of the new emerging poet to be awarded The Picador prize for a first collection. And poetry being the small world it is, I knew three of the candidates: Helen Mort(who is currently poet in residence at the Grasmere Trust (Wordsworth country); Alan Buckley (winner of the Wigtown Poetry Prize) and Gill Andrews who has recently completed am M.Lit at St Andrew's university. In a way (divided loyalties) it was a relief to me that it was someone I do not know who won: Richard Meier, who, on the evidence of Don Paterson's praise and four poems quoted in the Guardian, sounds quietly subtle and original - well worth waiting for his finished book when it eventually comes out.

I'm sure the other three above and the rest of the shortlist will have no difficulty in finding another publisher.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/20/poems-richard-meier?intcmp=239

Flash Mob for Burns

2011-01-22T13:50:00.000Z

Flash Mob for Burns.
Ipm Tuesday, 25th Jan outside St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh.
See you there.
Here's a preview of Peggy Hughes from Scottish Poetry Library of the Burns' song chosen. Atta girl/lass.

http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/

and here they are http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-12279466

Liz Lochhead is new Makar, National Poet for Scotland

2011-01-19T20:20:00.000Z

Congratulations to Liz Lochhead on becoming the new Makar. It couldn't be anyone else. She is so obviously the right choice: witty, feisty, a wicked but humane eye for character both in her poetry and plays and an ear for lively, playful speech, particularly her use of Glasgwegian demotic.

On a personal note, I have been a fan of Liz's work since 1972 when her first pamphlet 'A Memo for Spring' came out. I was working (on a temporary basis during my holidays as a teacher) at the famous Turret Bookshop in Holland Walk, Kensington owned by Bernard Stone. Frequently poets would come in for a glass of wine and many of the books had red rings on the covers: Brian Patten, Derek Mahon and Gerald Scarfe (the cartoonist, not poet) amongst them. Not Liz, at least when I was there. But I discovered her pamphlet and was electrified. A very soulful photo of her sitting on a hill with one of Edinburgh's mountains, Arthur's Seat in the background was the cover. She later told me that was the photographer's idea and never a true depiction of her character. The poems made a witty play with cliche, in the language of now, and made me realize that the lives of women could be poetry. Women could be poets too.

Many years later, I came up to the Edinburgh Festival in the late 1980s (probably 1987 or 1988?) and was thrilled to have front row seats at a cabaret-stye poetry performance by Liz. There was no stage, just a darkened room with Liz spot-lit, standing only yards from where I was sitting. I don't remember the venue - possibly the old Traverse site in the Grassmarket? nor the exact poems but they were feminist, hard-hitting, funny and I totally identified with them.

Scroll on a few years, when my husband and I unexpectedly moved to Edinburgh (for job reasons), and when I was accepted on the MPhil at Glasgow University Creative Writing programme, I was thrilled to have Liz as my tutor. Very privileged since she only stayed a year before pressure of play commissions etc meant she was forced to resign as university tutor. The first day I met her I gushed praises for her work and how much it meant to me and she quickly turned the subject. Liz does not court praise.

Liz said today at the National Library of Scotland where she was announced the Makar, shown on TV, that she wants kids to 'enjoy poetry not see it as a penance'. She wants to encourage 'the speaking of it and learning of it by heart as well as reading and writing it.'

Great. Poetry as fun. Not a hated, academic exercize of identifying and ticking off tropes as my son had to do at school. (Rather like identifying all the ingredients of a cake but never making it or eating it, I've always thought.)
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/news/Liz-Lochhead-What-she-read.6696278.jp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/19/liz-lochhead-makar-scotland-national-poet

Snow-capped Suilven, up in Assynt again, Jan 2011

2011-01-19T19:13:00.000Z

A last minute vacancy and invitation to go on a writing retreat up in Glencanisp Lodge was too good to miss. Though it meant a leap of faith to get there. Icy roads, fog/mist/more snow forecast in the Grampians meant I did not dare take my car as usual but took the train from Edinburgh to Inverness (blissfully relaxing, and allowing reading, writing and snoozing in the warmth looking out smugly at icy rivers and snow-bound roads, tho traffic seemed to be moving on the main roads, if not the minor ones. The bus from Inverness to Ullapool was fine.

The trouble started when I had to change to another bus from Ullapool to Lochinver -by this time it was dark, swirls of snow, icy roads, bus wheels sliding from under us but all hail to the intrepid driver. The only passengers were myself and a mother and small boy. The mother was listening to her small boy reading a graphic novel (wot I used to call a comic?) of some monster and superhero's exploits, she and I exchanging worried glances every time a clunk came from below the bus as if some vital crank shaft or something was about to fall off. The reading was a welcome distraction. I hope Traveline buses have repaired it now?!

Still, a welcome deep, hot Victorian bath was awaiting me and the convivial company of others on 'creative retreat': some writers and some photographers. Each morning, Mandy Haggith provided creative warm-up writing sessions for those who wanted them. Others preferred to hole up in their rooms and GET DOWN TO IT- the great novel of the 21st c, a short story, a play or in my case a new project of linked poems - having finished a novel, it's great to turn to something else. And being the start of a new year, what better than something completely new (and I hope, different, at least for me).

Mandy left a list in the kitchen for requests from the 'kitchen fairy'. One guest asked for a dog to take for a walk and M duly managed to find a friend to provide one for her. As a break from the grind of one's project, Mandy would ask 'What is your creative treat for today?' I took up the offer of a few hours' art lesson given by local artist Mary in pastels. I don't know if it fed into my poetry but I'm sure it did, if only to give renewed energy. (A way of legitimizing displacement activity? Hmm.)

Walks in the snow up the glen were also a great way to get thoughts about possible poems or ideas going. Three of us went as far as a bothy below Canisp and Suilven - a great base camp in bad weather or to stay overnight if stranded. Everyone leaves something - candles, coal or beer. Best not to leave biscuits because of the mice I was told. There is a coal/wood shed and two inhabitable rooms with raised wooden shelves to sleep on (out of the way of any mice), and fireplaces. Apparently it is the same bothy Griff Rhys Jones visited on one of his TV programmes. We had a cup of tea, our sandwiches then left as sitting still (and not having lit a fire) we were getting cold. Best to warm up again with a march back to Glencanisp Lodge and the Victorian baths.

We did not see much of the photographers as they got up before dawn, returned briefly in the afternoons for Adobe Photoshop sessions then set off again for sunset : their subjects were, of course, mountain scapes of Stac Polly, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beg, and isolated beaches of Achnaheard and Achmelvich. Suilven right outside our front door. If you're into photography, or if you just want to see some beautiful photos, have a look at the group leaders' work onand see what other courses visiting the beauty spots of the world he offers. With the proviso, you do have to not mind getting up at dawn. (Only 7.30 start for 8 am in January.) Not so relaxed in summer.
http://www.brucepercy.co.uk/index2.html

A great week, writing, thinking, walking, eating and chatting in eves and occasional forays to kitchen for a coffee with like-minded people. Some passable drafts for poems and lots of notes for future ones.
No food shopping, cooking, laundry, mobile phones. Bliss. Back to real life now.

For Gloencanisp retreats see http://www.topleftcorner.org

Gillian Clarke, Ceridwen of Wales

2010-12-26T13:22:00.000Z

Congratulations to Gillian Clarke, who has been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Long overdue. Selected by a committee recommended by Carol Ann Duffy, this is another example of Duffy's generous drawing of attention to poets other than herself. The plethora of wonderful modern carols (poems to be set to music) published in the Guardian pre-Christmas,is another example and her invitation to poets for war poems, also published by the Guardian, which marked the beginning of her poet laureateship. But back to Wales' poet laureate or Welsh National Poet as they call it there.

You can read Gillian's biography, about her tireless work visiting schools promoting poetry writing, her work for Ty Newydd, the Welsh residential writing school, her public work as Welsh National Poet and listen to her mellifluous voice on the Poetry Archive or read some poems online via her website. (See links below.) The full story via the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/24/gillian-clarke-queens-gold-medal/

I want to add some personal memories here in my journal/blog.

Gillian was the first poetry tutor who taught me how to pare down my poems. From a scrambled, rambling mess of notes, I spent several days drafting and redrafting the one poem until a tight, tiny version of itself emerged. It was during a long weekend in Southern Snowdonia in a former hunting lodge owned by the National Trust, built entirely of wood, with no electricity, cooking on gas and lit by candlelight, the day spent in poetry workshops or sitting in the window-seat with one to ones with the tutors or redrafting looking out over the solitary landscape of upland moors below Cadair Idris and the cloud shadows trailing over the mountains and lake, Llyn Cregennen.

They say about Cadair Idris that if you spend the night on it, you will come down mad or a poet.
Cadair means 'chair' and Idris was a giant. We were full of the Welsh myths and legends and the Tales of the Mabinogi (which I learnt is more correct Welsh since 'The Mabinogion' is a nonsense, an anglicization by Charlotte Guest who translated these epic poems in the 19th c.) I had already read Guest's versions and was fired up by the myth of Ceridwen, the witch or alternatively the goddess of poetic inspiration who left her servant, Gwion in charge of the cauldron where she was brewing a magic potion which would give the gift of wisdom to whoever drunk it. Intended for her ugly son, Bran (which means 'raven'), it is, of course Gwion who, being spattered by a drop as he stirs the cauldron, licks his finger and so gains the knowledge. ..after a long story he is eventually reborn as Taliesin (which means 'He of the shining brow) and became the first known Welsh poet. No wonder my idea of Ceridwen and Gillian with her long flowing silver hair got mixed up in my poem!

Amongst other writers there were Helen Simpson (the short story writer), and poets now making their mark: Angela Morton and Gwyn Parry who has now moved to Ireland and is published by Salmon Press.

This was back in the 80's, before Gillian was as well-known as she is today. My friend and colleague at Pimlico comprehensive, Barry Simner, (now poet and TV script writer) who was then Deputy Head of the English Department, asked me if I would like to spend the Easter break in the wilds of Gwynedd, Wales on a residential poetry writing course to be run by Gillian Clarke, Gerard Benson and himself. Gerard and Barry had run similar courses together before but they had decided they needed a third. A poet with mud on her wellies was the obvious candidate, since Barry who was a keen outdoor type, and mountaineer, wanted to incorporate walks and visits to beauty spots or places of historical interest to inspire poetry writing.

To get to the isolated hunting lodge (which to the shame of the National Trust has now been pulled down) we were met at Fairbourne Station by a landrover which would transport our luggage. We then walked several miles to the lodge over the upland moor and via a tunnel through rock which led to 'the blue lake'. Emerging into day light and the gem-like blue of that water (some kind of chemical - I can't remember what) was an extraordinary experience. (A bit of drama foreshadowing Barry's career as a TV drama scriptwriter?)

I went on a second course run by Barry and Gillian at Celmi (Welsh for 'sheltered place'), a 16th century manor house overlooking Cadair Idris from the other side of the mountain but from a valley floor, the Dyfi valley near Llanegryn, Tywyn (Gwynedd, Mid-Wales). This time we went on more walks including Llewellyn's castle in that valley. Hearing Gillian recite her first draft of her poem about that visit was a salutory lesson in itself - comparing hers to my paltry efforts. One of the most memorable of her poems was about a peregrine falcon swooping for the kill. I had not been on that particular walk but I heard everyone talking about it and so it was magic to read the poem later when it was published. The fact that you could start a poem on the spot about what happened to you, a direct experience, was new to me.

My third experience of Barry and Gillian's residential course was at Llanthony (near the Breckon Beacons) in South Wales. We stayed in the former smithy and visited the abbey. A very different setting from the open skies of the upland moor below Cadair Idris. This is a narrow enclosed valley overshadowed by woods and also with the mystical feel of an ancient holy place, but the shadow of violence: the destruction of the abbey, the burning of Walter Savage Landor's house by the locals (he was seen as an English colonial upperclass interloper) and the weird enclosed artists' community founded by Eric Gill with incestuous goings-on. The poet, David Jones was also a visitor here.

Again, a workshop assignment meant we were all writing about the same experience - details I also included in my poem, also appeared in Gillian's but again with what a contrast! I was not silenced by this experience, though possibly humbled - on the contrary, I had experience of early drafts, what was left out, what was developped and so this was enabling. OK. So how is it done, has always been my reaction to others' wonderful poems. That is a credit to Gillian (and Barry) as tutors. The idea of going out in the landscape, writing poetry almost as a journal experience, the physical, sensuous image capturing the felt experience but also harking back to memories or history, this is something I learnt on these trips and which I try to recapture still in my own poetry and when running my own courses.

On an even more personal note, I have Barry and Gillian to thank for introducing me to the area surrounding Cadair Idris, for this experience is the reason why my then partner (husband yet to be) and I when debating where to live together, decided to settle in a nearby valley- and thereby hangs a tale (13 and a half years in Wales).

http://www.gillianclarke.co.uk/home.htm

Gillian Clarke reciting some poems:
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1507#

Seven Words for Winter in Greenlandic (Kalaallisut)

2010-12-15T15:47:00.000Z

The most original, fantastic Christmas card I have received this year has been from my friend, Nancy Campbell which is in the form of a poem using Kalaallisut, the Greenlandic language, (a language facing extinction). With her permission, I quote it here for you:

Seven Words for Winter

ukiigatta last winter.
ukioq the winter; the whole year.
ukiukkut in winter; during the year.
ukiuuppaa the winter came upon her before she
reached home, or finished building her house.
ukiorippoq she has a good winter; it is a good winter.
ukiorpoq the winter has come.
ukiortaak the new year.

Nancy Campbell
Nancy was writer in residence in Greenland last year and you can read a fascinating account on her blog. More about her poetry and artist books www.nancycampbell.co.uk/

Happy Birthday Dave Brubeck

2010-12-05T17:30:00.000Z

Brubeck is 90 on Monday (tomorrow).

Great documentarylast Friday on Arena BBC4 which is on playback until 10th Dec
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00wbp64/Arena_Dave_Brubeck_In_His_Own_Sweet_Way/

Apart from loving his music, my husband and I have great memories of listening to Brubeck and his band playing on board a ferry plying back and forth betwen Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty all evening in 1989 - part of our honeymoon. Unforgettable.

My Poetry Highlights in 2010

2010-11-30T16:16:00.001Z

The snow is thick, and crisp etc and still falling in Edinburgh, so my thoughts are wending towards Christmas/New Year. So here are my highlights posted early:

Favourite Poetry Books published in 2010

Of Mutability - Jo Shapcott, (Faber and Faber)
Human Chain - Seamus Heaney, (FF)
The Wrecking Light - Robin Robertson, (Picador)
What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo- Pascale Petit, (Seren)
The Floating Man - Katherine Tower (Picador)
There is an Anger that Moves - Kei Miller, (Carcanet)
Sandgrain and Hourglass - Penelope Shuttle (Bloodaxe)

Memorable Poetry Readings attended in 2010:

StAnza Festival, St. Andrew's in March:
Seamus Heaney, Vicki Feaver and Don Paterson at the Byre Theatre;

Int. Edinburgh Book Festival, August:
Jo Shapcot reading 'Of Mutability' in the Spiegeltent,

Poetry on the Lake Festival, Orta San Giulio, Italy, October:
Victoria Wood in the former refectory of the conventino on Sacre Monte;
Ella Duffy in one of the chapels on Sacre Monte;
Emma Harding reading her winning poem in the Salle Tallone, 17th c pallazza on Isola San Giulio, Orta Lake.

Norman MacCaig Festival, Assynt, November:
Rody Gorman reading his Gaelic translations of Norman MacCaig in Lochinver village hall;

Colin Will reading Norman MacCaig on the Assynt poetry walk around Druim Sudarlein loch and 'A Man in Assynt' at Glencanisp Lodge whilst we could see Suilven through the raindrops on the window pane.

Memorable Poetry-related Talks attended in 2010:

Douglas Dunn talking about and reading from his collaborative book 'A Line in Water' illustrated by the artist, Norman Ackroyd, held at an 'Intimate Reading', the StAnza Poetry Festival, March;

Dennis O'Driscoll interviewing Seamus Heaney on his life and in particular his interest in Scottish poetry, held at the Byre Theatre, StAnza Poetry Festival, March;

Don Paterson elucidating c 13 Shakespeare sonnets - maintaining that S was a misogynist who slept with the Dark Lady,(so even more amazing that he is able to write female characters so sympathetically in the plays) and a gay man in love with the male WH but unable to consummate this love, hence the tortured sonnets. Held at the Scottish Poetry Library, in March. A taster for his book on S's Sonnets published later in the year;

James Harpur's 'The Poetic Journey' given in the Pallazino, Giulio San Orta, Poetry on the Lake Festival, October;

Liz Lochhead reminiscing about Norman MacCaig, reading her favourite poems by him and some of her own that related to him. Held in Lochinver village hall, Norman MacCaig Centenary Festival, Assynt, November;

Vicki Feaver talking about poetry on childhood, from Blake to Sharon Olds and readings from her own poems, P.E.N./Naomi Mitchelson Memorial Lecture, Anatomy Theatre, Glasgow University, November;

Poetry-related non-fiction, 2010

Shakespeare's Sonnets: a commentary - Don Paterson (FF)

Favourite poetry published prior to 2010 read/reread:

Selected Poems - Eugene Montale, (Penguin European Poets);
Ovid's Metamorphoses translated by Ted Hughes;
Horse Latitudes and Moy, Sand and Gravel- Paul Muldoon, (FF)
The Eyes, after Machado, versions by Don Paterson (FF)
Snow Leopard - Ruth Padel (Chatto and Windus, 2004);
Alias Isobel - an Orkney Narrative by Morag MacInnes (Handsel Cooperative Press, Orkney, 2008), pamphlet;
Collected Poems- Norman MacCaig (Polygon, 2005) and The Many Days, Selected Poems - Norman MacCaig ed by Roderick Watson (Polygon, 2010)
Collected Poems - Michael Donaghy (Picador, 2009).

A Man in Assynt - video re the MacCaig Festival

2010-11-19T18:33:00.001Z

Charming video on the Norman MacCaig festival up in Assynt, featuring the poet, the competition winning poem, and inspired by MacCaig the work of local artists and the poetry and illustrations by local school children. Some great shots of Suilven too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEXqwJ709xM

Aldeburgh Festival 2010

2010-11-15T19:59:00.001Z

I did not make the Aldeburgh Festival but recommend Hugh Thomson's 'official' festival blog. As travel writer and poet, he also gave a talk on the link between the two, with Harry Clifton.
http://www.thewhiterock.co.uk/

Norman MacCaig Festival, Assynt, 2010

2010-11-14T10:22:00.000Z

On the Alchmelvich road from Lochinver.

*

What a nice bit of serendipity. As you know, Norman MacCaig wrote lots and lots of frog poems,
so it was magic to find this sign by the road whilst up for the NMcC festival. (The sign above is a toad, not a frog, but never mind.) Here is one of his frog poems posted on his birthday centenary day:

Frogs

Frogs sit more solid

than anything sits. In mid-leap they are

parachutists falling

in a free fall. They die on roads

with arms across their chests and

heads high.

I love frogs that sit

like Buddha, that fall without

parachutes, that die

like Italian tenors.

Above all, I love them because,

pursued in water, they never

panic so much that they fail

to make stylish triangles

with their ballet dancer's

legs.

At the festival main reading in Lochinver, Liz Lochhead read this poem amongst other MacCaig poems and as she said, ever after hearing this poem, you will never see a frog without thinking of Italian tenors and an Italian tenor without thinking of frogs. These were interspersed with some of her own including the poem (about a bull) she had read, with great nervousness at being on the same platform with him when she was starting out as a young poet. Liz recounted how as she writes mainly urban-inspired poems, MacCaig once said to her 'The trouble with you, Liz, is you were born in a laundrette.'

From Alan Taylor, we had reminiscences of MacCaig the 'two cigarette' poet, (how long it took him to write a poem), and MacCaig the man, the school teacher, the poet in residence at Stirling University (not quite fitting in with the academics), his love of whisky, holding forth in Edinburgh bars , his acerbic comments about other poets, but quiet and a listener up in Assynt in the company of fishermen and locals and further reminiscences from locals who had known him, ( a propos MacCaig acerbity, Wilma quoted 'a silver dirk' - mentioned in George Mackay Brown's poem re the poet), all this bandied about in bars, or up at the Lodge, or on poetic walks to the places MacCaig had written about, the vast tome of the Collected Poems passed round by Mandy Haggith for each of the walkers to read at strategic spots - all interspersed with ruminations about MacCaig's poetry and poetry writing in general.

For instance, how 'zen' like his poetry is - MacCaig's son, Ewan, apparently thinks not. I asked Colin Will, who is much inspired by zen poetry in his own work, to explain on the Glencanisp walk what zen poetry tries to do: write about Nature as itself, directly, not through anthropomorophism or through the poet's eye, he said. Much debate amongst us walkers as to how this applied to MacCaig and whether it is possible not to write through your own perception.
Rody Gorman, who is poet in residence at Sabhal Mor Ostaig, the Gaelic college on the isle of Skye, strode around the room at the main reading, musing about whether there was a MacCaig link with Gaelic culture - his mother was from Scalpay, and tho MacCaig did not speak Gaelic, he had tried to learn it and must have had some knowledge - but the mother's inheritance was justification enough, he said to claim some influence. Rody read some of his own translations into Gaelic of MacCaig poems. Apparently, this has started a trend and others, such as Aonghais MacNeacail are busy writing translations now.

We also heard the first prize winner of the competition, Pippa Little's complex poem about the female perspective on Border Reivers (Scottish/Northumbria borders) and the second prize winner, Nancy Campbell's superb poem inspired by her writing residency up in Greenland.

I was privileged to get to read my commended poem too, inspired by my visits to Shetland. So what with Rody's Gaelic, Liz's Glaswegian, Northumbria, Greenland and Shetland, quite a variety of Scottish and Northern culture was celebrated. (The poems can be read on Top Left corner's website eventually - when they've recovered from clearing the hall, packing tables away, washing up from preparation of sandwiches, late nights, and maybe (no!) surfeit of poetry readings.)

Winning and commended poems can be read here: The winning poems are all at http://www.topleftcorner.org/competition.asp?pageid=237483

So a wonderfully inspiring festival - with lots of other aspects - local involvement with school children writing MacCaig inspired poems and a wee booklet, 'Assynt's Casket' printed of their poems, illustrated by the children and the title poem read at the ceilidhe. An exhibition of local artists' work inspired by MacCaig and also an exhibition at 'An talladh solas' gallery in Ullapool. Great outreach - locals and visitors from all over involved. Well done, Mandy and all the other locals who worked tirelessly back stage.

Now, let's see, I've experienced Assynt in brilliant sunshine, autumn colours and mists in October, snow in January and now in November with gales and rain one day and the next snow-topped mountains, brilliant blue lochs, with snow falling on one mountain and the other graced by a rainbow simultaneously...hmm, let's look in the diary...Glencanisp Lodge/Top Left Corner has some writers' retreats coming up. And now they've put in central heating and double glazing, it's extremely cosy and beautifully redecorated, there's no excuse.

See Great blog from Nancy Campbell re MacCaig Festival but also about the itinerant librarian. ...and fascinating older posts re her residency in Greenland and Greenlandic words for snow, leaning on one elbow (fishing I presume) etc

http://nancycampbelle.blogspot.com/

http://www.topleftcorner.org/

Postscript: And if one can take yet more Norman MacCaig celebrations in Edinburgh tonight at the GRV, organized by Rob Mackenzie: many poets reading their favourite MacCaig poem and then one of their own MacCaig inspired. http://poetryatthe.wordpress.com/

A Hoolie in Assynt: Norman MacCaig week

2010-11-07T15:56:00.000Z

Suilven from Glencanisp, near Lochinver, Assynt. (Photo)

Summer Farm by Norman MacCaig

Straw like tame lightnings lie about the grass

And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass

The water in the horse trough shines.

Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.

A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.

I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me - as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his leg and finds himself in space.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

To celebrate the centenary anniversary of the birth of Norman MacCaig this week, I post my favourite poem of his above. He is one of Scotland's most famous poets, along with his other contemporaries, Hugh McDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, George Mackay Brown and MacCaig's influence has been widespread amongst contemporary Scottish poets.

As you can see from the example above, MacCaig's poetry is lyrical, acutely observed, paired down but emotionally affecting. Known to school-children throughout Scotland are his poems about frogs and the 'slounge' of a monster (a basking shark) he encountered- there is a sort of zen philosphy informing his Nature poems but also an intense socialist vision of a fair community - the buy-out by the Assynt community of the land and several mountains, including Suilven, would have pleased him.

The place to be this week is Assynt (North West Scotland or as Mandy Haggith puts it 'top left corner') this week: where there'll be a MacCaig poetry fest, celebrating his work with walks to places which inspired his poetry, beautiful white beaches like Achmelvich and the isolated rocky landscape round Glencanisp, readings of his work and by visiting poets such as Alan Riach, Roddy Gorman and Liz Lochhead and by the winners and commended poets of the poetry competition organized by Top Left Corner, (that is run by Mandy Haggith, John Bolland and others). The local school children have been involved, writing poems and illustrating MacCaig with their own artwork. The whole week will be a hoolie, with plenty of good craic, and, no doubt, whisky. To round it all off will be a ceilidhe.

I cannot recommend it highly enough. I have been lucky enough to have already experienced some of the walks and views on three different trips I've made to Assynt. The first visit was a holiday with my son, the other two, staying at the former hunting lodge, Glencansip Lodge, now owned by the Assynt community: the second visit, on a writing retreat, where I did, co-incidentally, spend a lot of time studying MacCaig's Collected Poems (Polygon, 2005) which had recently been published and trying to write poems in a similar manner. (Maybe not such a good idea. NmC said to Andrew Greig on being shown his poems when G was 19, that he like them very much. 'But then I would. They're quite like mine. Perhaps you should write some quite like your own' . My third visit was co-tutoring with Mandy a poetry course for OLL students where we took the students to the aforementioned MacCaig places, to inspire their poetry too.

God willing and the creek don't rise, (as they say in the MidWest) I shall be there.

See the week's programme here http://www.topleftcorner.org/maccaigcentenary.asp

But if you can't make it to Assynt, today,(Sunday) there's a programme on MacCaig on BBC Scotland Radio which can be heard on playback for a week. http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/vrwvn/

Andrew Greig can be heard talking about his pilgrimage to the Loch of the Green Corrie (MacC's favourite spot) at the Scottish Poetry Library on Wednesday - and if you miss that, there is also a podcast of Greig on the same topic, on the SPL website 'Reading Room' interviewed by Ryan van Winkle.

Monday, there is also a TV film, 'Fishing for Poetry' charting a similar pilgrimage by Aly Bain, (the internationally known Shetland fiddler)Billy Connolly (no blurb needed) and poet/novelist, Andrew Greig at 9pm on BBC 2 (Scotland only.) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vtxh2

Poetry on the Lake Festival, 2010

2010-10-05T18:59:00.000+01:00

Photo near Omegna taken from the ferry on 'the Poetry Cruise', part of the Poetry on the Lake festival : poets reading poems in the anthology 'Reflections on Lake Orta' published to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the festival. A local singer and accordianist also regaled us on the journey.

A rather misty festival this year but all the more atmospheric for it. Main stars were Carol Ann Duffy and James Harpur.

I couldn't resist going as I had the chance to read my poem in the anthology and a commended one in the competition so got to read on the cruise and in the pallazo, Salle Tallone on the island - and then again on the Sunday on Sacro Monte two more poems. Phew.

James Harpur is an Irish poet, whom I had met before at Strokestown and it was a great pleasure to meet him again. He had had a 4-week writer's residency in Monaco and came over to Orta to give a talk, 'The Poetic Journey' which wore its erudition lightly and was illuminating and very engaging. He compared the via negativa and the via affirmata of the mystics with poets' journeys: in love with words (like Dylan Thomas) or spare and minimalist. Poets tend to fall into one or other category mainly. He did clarify ideas I have had in the back of my mind - mainly about what inspires poets - 'Identity' (your roots) and the 'Other' (what takes you beyond yourself). The latter became a buzzword over the weekend for all those who heard the talk - semi-humourously but of course, something we took seriously too.

Unfortunately James did not give a poetry reading, apart from his lovely 'Roscommon Rain' which he chose because it was raining on the last day when everybody gets a chance to read one poem in one of the chapels, part of the 20 chapels on Monte Sacro above Orta - another journey (the chapels were built as a way of prayer in honour of St Francis and became popular for pilgrims.)

On Saturday we ferried across the lake to the island of San Guilio to hear the winners and commended poets and for the prize-giving. This year, the first prize of the Silver Wyvern was given to Emma Harding, whose poem was about a slave who is thrown over a cliff for some minor transgression displeasing the Emperor Tiberius. The poem is the last thoughts of the slave as he 'reflects on inevitability' and finally 'the blue.' His watery death summed up in one word - masterly! (I'd say that was a wonderful example of the 'via negativa' .) You can read the full text of her poem, and that of the other winners in Orbis magazine, Summer 2010 edition (152)

Carol Ann Duffy also read four poems, followed by readings in Italian by her translators. One of the poems was 'Valentine' and she had brought along a real onion which she presented to Gabriel Griffin, the organizer of the festival, as a mock present to mark the 10th anniversary.

On the Sunday, (when James read his poem) we were in for a surprise as the owners of one of the apartments in the converted Conventino, next to the main church on Sacro Monte, invited us in to what had once been the monks' refectory. Now filled with ornate carpets, frescoes and Venetian pale blue and pink chandeliers, the only reminder of its holy past were scrolls on the wall saying 'Obediencia' and 'Silencio' , the benches round the walls and the wooden border where the monks' feet would have rested as they worked on their manuscripts. (Wood being warmer through their sandals than the tiles of the central area.) Several poets, including myself, gave readings here in these splendid surroundings before we set off for the chapel readings which, this year, were held in only one, due to the rain. It was so misty it was impossible to see the view of the lake and its jewel, the island but never mind...

I was fortunate that I had been before in 2008 when mist was followed by blue skies and shining red berries and ivy. This year the colours were muted, the ivy was still green, the frescoes in the village faded, the atmosphere melancholic but in some ways, it is good to see a place in all its moods and it was certainly almost more romantic.

It was great to meet and hear fine poets I met last time: Caroline Carver (who won the Silvern Wyvern in 2008, and incidentally has won the National Poetry Prize)and Elizabeth Rowe (whom I'm delighted has found a publisher for her new MS (her former publisher Peterloo having become defunct). She is now with Oversteps. Also to meet and hear new, to me, poets, especially the urbane and witty poetry and person of Christopher North (who runs the well-respected and delightful sounding Alamassera writing courses in Spain).

A special pleasure was discovering the poetry of Victoria Field, who with Penelope Shuttle and Caroline Carver (all three Falmouth-based) had toured N.Y. and Canada reading their poetry together and produced a pamphlet to celebrate the trip. Victoria's poetry is intelligent, and accomplished and I hope she'll soon have a new collection out. Her first one is sold out. You can hear her read (and/or read the text) in the link below .(Also Caroline Carver).

Pat Borthwick is a poet whose name keeps cropping up in all the prize winning lists of competitions, so it was good to meet and hear her at last. A new, for me, Italian poet of interest was Tiziano (I discovered the anglicized form of his name is Titian!)Fratus whose work is translated into English and who has toured the States. A trip to Britain is surely in order.

http://www.jamesharpur.com/

Victoria Field: http://poetryvlog.com/vfield.html

Caroline Carver: http://www.poetryvlog.com/ccarver.html

http://www.poetryonthelake.org/

Alamassera writing courses http://www.oldolivepress.com/

You can see more photos of Orta SG following the Photos link on my Home page, http://sites.google.com/site/stephgreen1/
and read about the 2008 festival on my blog for 21st Oct, 2008. Stephanie Green's Blog/Journal: Poetry on the Lake Festival, 2008

Poetry on the Lake Festival, 2010

2010-09-23T10:19:00.000+01:00

Off to Italy for the Poetry on the Lake Festival, Oct 1st-3rd, 2010

Isola San Giulio, on Lake Orta.

It must be something to do with the autumn chill waiting for a bus on the corner of my road, but one last jaunt before I hibernate for winter has become hugely enticing. Especially to Orta San Gulio and its enchanting small poetry festival of three days held in various venues in OSG and on the island, Isola San Guilio. Think terracotta, yellow and rose coloured stucco walls, the arcaded piazza with one side open to the lake framed by forested mountains and a glimpse of snow-capped Alps peering over.

It may not be warm. Last time I went (2008) mist swirled down from the mountains over the lake for several days. In the market braziers roasting chestnuts did a good trade. Then the sun came out and we had blue skies and vibrant colours, bright red berries and ivy and the poetry, of course.

This year, along with the winners of the competition, the fine Irish poet, James Harpur and the splendid Carol Ann Duffy will give the last night reading in a 17th pallazzo on the island.

I'm thrilled that I will also be getting a chance to read - a poem selected for the 10th Anniversary of the festival's anthology 'Reflections on Lake Orta' and the poems will be read whilst sailing round the lake! I also had a poem commended in the competition and will be reading that at some point during the festival, possibly when everyone climbs the nearby mountain, Sacro Monte and readings are held at various chapels on the way up.

Festival website: http://www.poetryonthelake.org/
For more photos, see:
http://sites.google.com/site/stephgreen1/biography%C2%A0
and for an account of the 2008 festival see:
Stephanie Green's Blog/Journal: Poetry on the Lake Festival, 2008

Iona Sense of Place 2010

2010-09-19T17:59:00.000+01:00

The Sense of Place poetry writing course on the Hebridean island of Iona tutored by myself and Mary Gladstone was a great success, as ever.

Blue skies, white sands, turquoise seas. Some on the boat trip to Staffa even saw a basking shark and an acrobatic display by dolphins.
Photo taken by Shirley Blacoe

For more info see https://sites.google.com/site/stephgreen1/ionasenseofplace2

Makkin wi Wirds, Shetland and Fair Isle

2010-09-06T17:43:00.000+01:00

Jen Hadfield 'makkin' at the St Magnus Hotel, Hillswick.

This is the second year running I have attended 'Makkin wi Wirds' the poetry writing course tutored by Jen Hadfield up in Shetland in August. As well as being a wonderful poet, Jen is an inspiring tutor and not only that, the week combined an experience of Shetland that I would never have managed by myself and provided subject-matter for more poems. Enough to blow you away (and it's windy up there). I can't recommend it highly enough. This year a special long weekend on Fair Isle staying at the world-famous Bird Observatory was added on for the poets.
Wow. Not that I am a bird-watcher sort of person with binoculars and passion for ticking off rarities but if a bonxie happened by, well.

I was particularly lucky in that the Scottish Arts Council gave me a grant to cover my trip and the course towards developing my poetry for my collection in progress. And having just had a hip operation a few months ago, it gave me the incentive to do my physio exercizes to ensure I would be strong enough to cope with it. Without that carrot, I don't think I would have been so disciplined.

It was an amazing week. It is part of the 'Fiddle Frenzy' run by Shetland Arts which runs classes in traditional fiddle-playing but also includes a course for painters and in Shetland knitting. Everyone has their separate classes in the enormous, baronial castle-like Isleburgh Centre in Lerwick but on two mornings the workshops are held in different parts of Shetland, involving an early start for a coach and/or ferry trip to various islands or remote areas of Shetland where the workshops are held on arrival. Village halls, kirks, primary schools etc are commandeered for the workshops.

But the week is not just workshops. Afternoons are free to dabble in one of the other subjects on offer if you want or go on coach trips with story-tellers as guides to places of historical, geological or other interest in the areas (a croft house museum, a water-mill, a seal sanctury, a mussel farm, lighthouse built by Robert Louis Stevenson's relatives, and Shetland ponies of course).

Evenings are spent listening to concerts by the fiddlers, both students, locals and professional groups. Last year I heard the incomparable Aly Bain. There are also ceilidhes, all ages dancing together from 4 to 90 year olds. There's a late night Club for more fiddle-playing, a wee dram or two and a quiet room for more story-telling: Davy Cooper, Lawrence Tulloch and Elma Johnson are the residents, hotly contested in late-night competitive sessions by visitors from New York to Penicuik.

Last year we went to Whalsay (which the locals pronounce Whalsaa) and visited Christopher Grieve, (better known as the poet Hugh Mc Diarmid)'s basic cottage where he lived in dire poverty with his wife and several small children for 7 years before WWI ; it is now let as a rather basic hostel and the current occupants let us in to have a look round.

On another trip last year, involving two ferry trips, we visited remote Fetlar, the second northernmost island (after Unst). This year it was to Yell and Hillswick, workshops at the atmospheric wood-pannelled rooms of the St Magnus Hotel (a wooden structure brought over from Norway). Both years incorporated visits to the dramatic wild cliffs with their blow-holes and geos of North Mavine at Eshness. A must.

It is a great way to experience the varied landscapes of Shetland and also frustrating, as it is just a taster and made me long to go back and experience it for longer - or to see yet more areas we
did not cover.

View from Yell in the early morning haar.

But I have some wonderful memories: driving through the haar (sea-drift) rising off the sea between islands and taings (tongues) of land appearing through them in the morning, the silvery light on the voes and sea when the mist cleared, and standing on the open deck of the Hendra ferry on the way to Whalsay having my head brushed by a squadron of gannets flying past with their six-foot wing-span.

And the add-on weekend in Fair Isle was the most exciting trip I have had for years! The ferry crossing from Grutness in Shetland to Fair Island is notorious: vast tides down from Iceland and from Norway either side of Shetland meet due south, just where the ferry crosses, then there's the 'Roost' of local riptides round Fair Isle itself. I met a F.I. local who warned me that even on a calm crossing it can be bad. Total panic. We rushed off to Boots and bought Traveleze and acupunture bands. Well, all was fine. But the return crossing which was rough, well, nuff said.
All I can say is, fly if you can afford it - also if the plane flies. On the day I left it was too misty for the plane to land and people were stranded for 3 days. Not so good if you have a connection to New York to catch....though actually I would miss the chat with the Skipper, Neil, if I did not take the ferry.

Ah, but the isle itself. I see why the Vikings called it Fridarey - island of peace. After that crossing it did indeed seem like heaven. Life in an isolated island (it is actually the most remote inhabited island in the UK) is fascinating - I met everyone in the first few hours - the skipper (or Master) of the ferry, the Good Shepherd, having invited us to a ceilidhe (the non-dancing kind) that night - so we met all the locals and heard a few of the members of the folk group, also called Fridarey, playing in the Puffin House (a bothy owned by the National Trust) - the whole group are members of the same family, but that night we heard only the skipper, uncle Neil Thomson, Lise Sinclair (fiddle-player and singer) and Lise's father. Fridarey are well-known at folk festivals. A special treat to hear them on their own patch with a small group of locals, N.T. volunteers and us listening, whilst the children played football outside in the still half-light of simmer dim at 10pm below the South Lighthouse (one of RL Stevenson's relatives of course).

South Lighthouse football at 10pm.

Members of Fridarey: Neil Thomson, Lise's dad and Lise Sinclair.
Hear some tracks of Fridarey's album 'Across the Waters'.
http://www.scotloads.co.uk/album.php/802/

As for that bonxie (the Shetlandic name for a Great Skua) - I had heard tales of this brown menace, the pirate of the north, the size of a buzzard (probably bigger) that eats other birds such as kittiwakes, or by forcing other birds to drop or regurgitate their meals. It lives out at sea except when breeding when it nests on the moors. The B52 bombers of the bird world, if you approach too near they will attack. And yes, I was shadowed by one. Out walking on the moors on the way to the North Lighthouse (yes, RSL's dad) it felt like being in a Film Noir, stalked by a secret agent. Every time I looked round it sank out of view but there it was again out of the corner of my eye. I was lucky. My friend Jean was attacked as she crossed a field - 10 different strikes. Luckily she had a hat with a deep brim on and kept her head down.

Staying at the splendid new Bird Observatory was an interesting collection of individualistic people - not all bird-watchers (because as you'll know if you are a twitcher that August is not the best month - puffins have left, and the autumn migrations have not started) but a Danish writer researching his next novel, 3 yachts-people who were sailing from Norway to Cornwall (to Rick Stein's Padstow restaurant to be precise), several PhD students working as volunteers for the bird-ringing, Americans and Norwegians. Tales of the Faroes, Iceland and Norway. Hmm.
Once you're up in Latitude 60 degrees North, those places feel so close, your neighbours in fact, only a Viking long-ship journey away.

The coast of Fair Isle from the North lighthouse - showing pretty obvious reasons for the need for the lighthouse.

Oh, as for the hip. Yes, it did hold out. Despite falling down a rabbit-hole - I was too busy looking through my camera. And I have a pocket-full of new poems!

Edwin Morgan

2010-08-20T07:08:00.000+01:00

Edwin Morgan dies aged 90, 19th August, 2010

I was sad to hear of the death of Edwin Morgan. One of Scotland's greatest poets and after Burns, probably the most loved by Scottish people. Made the Scottish Makar,( i.e. poet laureate) his poems studied in the schools' curriculum , commissioned to write a poem (read by Liz Lochhead as he was too ill) for the opening of the first devolved Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, a special Edwin Morgan Collection of his MSS, including his writing desk archived at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh recently, he was recognized in his home country during his lifetime, which is an honour to Scotland. I hope that his poetry will become as well-known in other parts of Britain now.

Many poets, people in the literary world, Scottish politicians and others round the world will be praising him and I just wanted to add my own wee tribute.

Incredibly inventive, witty, humane, he kept writing to the end. Even in his last battle with cancer in a care home, he wrote a poem about an argument between a cancerous and a normal cell. His range of subjects and the variety of poetic form and multiplicity of voices are astonishing. He was a conscientous objector in WWII, a gay man unable to be open about this because of the law, but bravely 'coming out' in his 70s. Most people will probably remember best the much loved Glasgow sonnets, (which tackle the poverty but indomitable spirit of Glasgow) and the silly nonsense sound poem, the song of the Loch Ness monster, known to all Scottish school children and used in creative writing classes (including my own).

I was delighted that I was able to speak to him briefly and tell him how much I loved his poems at the launch of his poetry book 'Beyond the Sun' , individualistic and irreverent responses to a selection of paintings in the National Galleries of Scotland. Held at Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow to just a small group of Glasgow literati, students and poetry lovers on 27th April, 2007, it was also Morgan's 87th birthday. His poems were read by Liz Lochhead and Alan Riach, Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University who included Morgan's 'The Computor's First Birthday Card' , a concrete poem as a birthday salute.

It was not known whether Morgan would be able to attend as he was already so ill and living in a care home. However, he did come, sitting in a wheel chair, his hair a shock of white and his face haggard but with sparkling, humourous eyes as he listened to Liz and Alan reading his poems and graciously talked to a few people afterwards, before he became too tired.

His poetry reminds us to have fun with words and to write about anything: a line from his poem 'Cathures' (2003) is a wonderful credo: 'I think we must just be ourselves at last.'

http://news.stv.tv/scotland/west-central/192731-scotlands-national-poet-edwin-morgan-dies-aged-90/

Poetry on the Lake, 2010

2010-07-15T10:28:00.001+01:00

My poem 'Imago Mundi' has been commended in the Poetry on the Lake competition, part of
a festival on and around the Italian Lake Orta and the atmospheric and romantic Isola Guilio San Orta 1st-3rd October.
See my blog on the 2008 festival.

Loose Tongues at Edinburgh Festival Forest Fringe

2010-06-21T10:50:00.000+01:00

From L to R: Stephanie Green, Patricia Ace, Janie McKie and Mandy Haggith

Loose Tongues,
4-5pm, Friday 27th August
at Forest Fringe
Forest Cafe, 3, Bristo Place, (nr George IV Bridge), Edinburgh EH1

Loose Tongues: Mandy Haggith, Janie McKie, Patricia Ace and myself (Stephanie Green) will be performing at the Forest Cafe. Free. What better way to have a break from the Festival whirl, a cup of tea/coffee, or refreshing fruit juice and a wee spot of poetry to set you up for the onslaught of the rest of your festival evening?

http://sites.google.com/site/stephgreen1/loosetongues

http://www.theforest.org.uk/index.php

Brigid Collins, StAnza 2010

2010-05-06T20:42:00.001+01:00

Photo Below: Brigid Collins

One of the many pleasures at StAnza are the art exhibitions inspired by poetry. This year the one that entranced me was that of Brigid Collins. I knew her work already as a few years ago I bought the wee black pamphlet illustrated with gold ink, 'A Place Where Thought Happens', by the poet Larry Butler with Brigid's art work, on show at the One Eye gallery, Edinburgh in 2006, along with other work by Brigid in collaboration with jewellery designer, Teena Ramsay.

The StAnza exhibition included some of those art works and many others also inspired by various poets including Kathleen Jamie, John Burnside, Kirsty Gunn, Raymond Carver, Billy Collins, Gerald Manley Hopkins, John Donne and Seamus Heaney amongst many others.

As Heaney was appearing at the festival this year he was able to visit the exhibition which was a nice bit of serendipity - no doubt planned. Collins has collaborated with Heaney previously and a lovely book of her art work illustrating his poems was on show 'Room to Rhymne' published by Dundee University Press, 2004.

Inspired by 'In the Blue Boat' - Kathleen Jamie

'Pied Beauty' inspired by G.M. Hopkins

I love the intricacy and delicacy of the work, incorporating wire, gauze, goldleaf, fine threads and metal embossed with fragments of poems, a 3 D response to a poem which she calls 'a poem house.' A 'stanza' is a room, of course and a poem has many rooms or spaces. Perhaps I shall think about inhabiting spaces when I next write.

http://www.brigidcollins.co.uk/

StAnza, St. Andrew's Poetry Festival, 2010

2010-05-06T20:29:00.001+01:00

Like everybody else, my StAnza's highlights this year were, of course, Seamus Heaney's two events - a reading and a discussion where he was interviewed by Dennis O'Driscoll. I hadn't realized before that Heaney is such a raconteur, but being Irish might have been a clue. He gave a wonderful impersonation of his former tutor at Queen's University, Belfast, puffing on his pipe while interrogating the young student Heaney on King Lear. At his reading, he mixed well-known and more recent pieces, my favourite being the sonnet about the miraclous ship that appeared in the nave of the monks' church in Clonmacnoise, probably the most famous and stunning of his 'wonder tale' poems.

Colette Bryce, Emma Jones, Jacob Polley, Jen Hadfield, Vicki Feaver and Don Paterson were also part of a bonanza programme this year and not least the charming Kei Miller, whom I managed to chat to in the foyer where he was sitting on one of the sofas happy to talk to anyone who was there. The by chance encounters at StAnza are one of its great pleasures.

Other highlights were 'An Intimate Reading' given by Douglas Dunn about the genesis of his coffee-table size book of poems, 'A Line in Water' illustrated by the artist, Norman Ackroyd. He talked about the differing approaches of artist and poet with many humourous and self-depreciatory asides on his own slowness of composition of 15 poems compared to Ackroyd's faster output of illustrations.

I also attended the 'Intimate Readings' given by both Jen Hadfield and Don Paterson, where co-incidentally both talked about 'authenticity' in poetry. I love these 'Intimate Readings' or one could call them 'Round Tables' where a maximum of twelve people can sit and listen to the poet give a reading, a chat about the poems in between or answer questions. Each poet uses the sessions differently so there is something personal about it and a chance to ask the poet questions about their craft. I may be wrong, but I think Eleanor Livingstone (the Artistic Director) told me StAnza is the only festival that offers thse sort of readings. Perhaps they will take on.

Assynt Writers' Retreats

2010-03-14T16:48:00.000Z

The Assynt Foundation has put up a list of Writing Retreat dates on their blog http://www.top-left-corner.blogspot.com/
I've been there twice and highly recommend it: isolation, beautiful views, delicious food and other writers to share writing or chat about writing in the evenings.

My Poetry Highlights in 2009

2009-12-18T12:14:00.000Z

My Favourite Poetry Books published in 2009:

'Rain' by Don Paterson (Faber)
'Weeds and Wild Flowers' by Alice Oswald (Faber)
'Through the Square Window' by Sinead Morrisey (Carcanet)
'The Ambulance Box' by Andrew Phillip (Salt)

Favourite Poetry Readings attended in 2009:

Carol Ann Duffy's 'Intimate Reading' in the Preservation Trust Museum and Eliza Biagini and Bianca Tarozzi at StAnza (St. Andrew's) Festival, in March

Penelope Shuttle, Jo Shapcott and John Hartley Williams reading at Falmouth Castle, Cornwall(Orta Friends) Festival, April

Penelope Shuttle, James Harpur, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paddy Bushe, Celia de Freine and John F. Deane reading at the Strokestown Festival, Ireland in May;

Gillian Clarke, Lorna Crozier and Emma Jones reading in the Spiegeltent, Charlotte Square, Edinburgh International Book Festival in August;

Emma Jones and Jacob Polley reading at a Wordsworth Trust Poetry course in Grasmere, in November;

Jen Hadfield reading at the Scottish Poetry Library in the summer and again at Glasgow University in November;

Favourite Poetry Books read during the year (published prior to 2009):

'The Dark Age' by James Harpur (Anvil Press, 2007)
'Scarecrows at Newtownards' by Celia de Freine (Ireland)
'A Colour for Solitude' by Sujata Bhatt (Carcanet, 2002)
'Collected Poems' by Lynette Roberts (Carcanet, 2005)
'The Striped World' by Emma Jones (Faber)
'Summer' by Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria U.P., New Zealand, 2003)
'La Casa di Carta' by Bianca Tarozzi
'Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw' by Chris Wallace-Crabbe (Carcanet, 2008)
'The Huntress' by Pascale Petit
'The Blue Hour of the Day' by Lorna Crozier (Canada)
'Nort Atlantic Drift' by Robert Alan Jamieson (Luath Press, Scotland) (Poems in Shaetlan/Shetlandic)
Lorca translated into Shaetlan by Christie Williamson
'Morroco Roccoco' by Jane McKie (Cinnamon Press, 2008) and 'When the Sun Turns Green' (Polygon).

Favourite Poetry-related book read in 2009:

Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet

Tanera Mhor, Summer Isles Sense of Place

2009-12-08T09:26:00.000Z

Yet another fantastic atmospheric and remote island to inspire your poetry. Mandy Haggith and myself will be tutoring a residential course there this May, 2010. If you want somewhere really remote, 50 years behind the times, no TV, no shops, no streets, only seals, porpoises, stunning views of mountains or the night sky, this is the place for you. But you have to really want to come here. It is difficult to get to. See

http://steph.green1.googlepages.com/summerislessenseofplace

Edinburgh Sense of Place

2009-12-07T16:14:00.000Z

Well, my novel, 'Anna's Ghost' (working title) is more or less finished. So I'll be returning to tutoring Creative Writing - mainly poetry in 2010. One can get so tired of the sight of a screen! It will be nice to meet up with former and new students again.

So here's advance publicity:

Edinburgh Sense of Place: Creative Writing course.

From 27th Jan for 10 sessions. Wednesdays from 10.30am-12.30pm (No session on 10th Feb) Visits round Edinburgh to places of historical, or cultural interest as springboards for poetry or short prose writing, alternating with workshop sessions (venue tbc) to read out work produced.

This term visits will be to mostly new venues including the Scottish National Museum, Chambers St., the Writers Museum (special reference to R.L. Stevenson), The Royal College of Surgeons' Museum, the Temperance Palm House, Royal Botanical Gardens and the Traquair Mansfield Centre (to see the murals by Phoebe Traquair).

We usually have an optional lunch together after. All very convivial and friendly.

Do check out my webpage, for further details, if you're interested http://steph.green1.googlepages.com/home

Iona Sense of Place 2010

2009-11-02T20:13:00.000Z

Following on a fantastic, atmospheric week this year, Sense of Place, a residential poetry writing course on Iona will again be offered in 2010, dates Tuesday 31st August-4th September. Please see my web-link for further details: http://steph.green1.googlepages.com/ionasenseofplace2
(Note the 2). It will be tutored by myself and Mary Gladstone, a poet, dramatist, literary critic and journalist well known as a sympathetic tutor to her students at the OLL, University of Edinburgh.

ConFAB Glasgow Hidden City 5 on Youtube

2009-10-24T21:56:00.001+01:00

Extracts from Hidden City 5 performances, part of the Hidden City 5, Merchant City Festival, 27th September, 2009.

Site 1: The Ramsthorn Kirkyard
Poets: Viv Gee, Sean McBride, Allan Radcliffe, Mary Smith, Gerry Stewart http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iji-J6tKIAU

Site 2: Tontine Lane
Poets : Martin O'Connor, Derek Read, Rowena M. Love, Anita Govan, Larry Butler, Tracy Patrick, myself (Stephanie Green) Lorna Callery and Larry Butler (again). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j3R6v30jfQ

Site 3: New Wynd Poets: A.C. Clarke, Bashabi Fraser, Mandy Haggith, Michael McGill, Nalini Paul, Kate Robinson, Marc R. Sherland
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E4zlBgAZno&feature=related

Site 4: Paddy's Market
Poets: Jo Clifford, Alex Frew, Ashby McGowan, Wendy Miller, John Savage, Daryl Tayar, Sheila Templeton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UHNcRq6Ss4&feature=related

Glasgow Hidden City 5, Merchant City Festival, 27th September, 2009

2009-10-10T10:28:00.000+01:00

4 different sites and 27 poets performed poetry in (and inspired by) hidden, unknown nooks of the Merchant City, Glasgow It was great fun to be asked to take part. We had been shown the secret sites earlier in the summer to inspire the poems and sworn to secrecy. On the performance day, the audience were asked to meet outside the Ramsthorn Theatre (a converted church )in Ingram Street at hourly intervals (4 different times - so over the day that was a fair number of folk - 30-50 each group, so c. 150-200 in total - not bad for a poetry event).

Each group were then taken to the mystery sites - the graveyard behind the Ramsthorn church, a quiet, unknown oasis of peace where 18th c grandees are buried ; Tontine Close - formerly an 18th c piazza where the Tobacco Lords read papers and made deals in the coffee houses - now a car-park and refuse bin area, enclosed by the backs of the surrounding white-tiled shops and offices - a short cut used after-hours as a pissoir; the back of the Pantechnicon, decorated by fluorescent lights and overlooking the metal fence of another car-park and finally outside the locked steel gates of the former Paddy's Market.

Being part of the Merchant City Festival we poets were given two security men (both called Brian) complete with fluorescent stripes on their jackets to accompany us, stopping the traffic to marshal the audience across the road on their journey from site to site and protect us poets from them (or them from us.) Those poets. Trouble-makers all.

As you might suspect, dog shit, litter, broken bottles etc featured heavily in the poems - but also 18th and modern ghosts, and surprisingly animal and bird life - twilight owls and a bear, ( the Pantechnicon had had a performing bear in one of their acts in the past); the poetic styles ranged from rap, elegy to polemic. (Maybe the security guards were necessary.)

Incidentally, I bumped into one of the Brians outside another event later in the evening. More poets/trouble-makers? No, this time a 3D art video by Billy Cowie which you watched in the dark lying on the floor looking up through red and blue glasses at a screen suspended from the ceiling. I was the only one there. Very mesmeric. I almost fell asleep (not out of boredom, out of sheer relaxation).

Tough job you've got, I said to Brian after. 'I enjoyed your poetry event,' he said. 'I might well go to a few other poetry events now.'

All hail and thanks to Rachel Jury for organizing this event and for having the vision that it could work. (The result of 4 other previous events over the last 4 years and the grand finale.)

Oh, and there's a wee book for sale of the poems plus atmospheric photos of the sites. See CONfab.com and you can read my poem on http://steph.green1.googlepages.com/tontineghosts

There will be a video with short extracts of each poet's performance up on Youtube in due course.

Iona Sense of Place poetry writing course

2009-09-29T08:41:00.000+01:00

More photos up for our Sense of Place poetry writing course on Iona (tutored by Mandy Haggith and myself.) on link below.
Blissful weather, blue skies, sun and only grey on the last day. We even managed to land on Staffa and got inside Fingal's Cave. That's the third time I've taken the boat trip and only the first time I've actually managed to land. So great excitement.
It was quite choppy and getting on and off the ferry at Staffa was just a wee bit heart-stopping. One slip and...churning seas smashing the boat against the pier and you in between. And then there is a narrow channel between Staffa and a baby island (also of hexagonal basalt blocks) through which the waves pour and hurl themselves ferociously into the air just where you need to pass, holding onto a very fragile handrail...so before you even get to the cave you're fully psyched up.
Our skipper told us we would not get the full orchestra that day as it was not quite rough enough. Do they have an orchestra in there, someone asked. No, it's the sound effects of wind and waves, he said. So we went one by one down the slippy steps to the roped off viewing/hearing area and were amazed to hear not just the smash of waves on rocks and booming echoes, but after the waves subside and before the next onrush there is a pause and then it happens: long musical notes like an organ, or even a brass instrument followed by booms and a deep drum roll ending with the tinny shh of cymbals. Well, that's what I heard. Others heard other music.
Mandy's writing exercize for the trip produced some very rhythmic sound poems, appropriately. In the evening we listened to Mendelssohn's Hebridean Overture. (Well, you have to, don't you.) I was very chuffed that it worked: downloaded (by my son for me) from the internet and played on my computor plus using mini-loud-speakers. Not sure the sound quality was up to the standards of one of our students, however, who is a viola player in a national orchestra!

On other days we visited the Abbey and environs and Heritage Museum for workshops and afternoons were free for the group to walk to the many isolated white beaches. There's a very spooky atmosphere on Iona and many poems came out of its history as the Isle of the Dead, the ancient burial place of the Lords of the Isles and Kings of Scotland.

However, the delicious food kept us cheerful - fresh crayfish caught that day to be had at the Martyrs' Bay restaurant and chocolate fondue desert, kept warm with nightlights, at the Argyll Hotel was another highlight.
Atmospheric island, plenty of history and stories, remote landscapes and time to write with like-minded souls, or wander off on your own to isolated white beaches. Can't all be bad, despite the soaking one student got on the ferry home! A rogue wave and no time to move out of the way.

We are already planning next year's course...possibly a trip to Iona for a new group of students...and a different location for those who want somewhere different. Keep watching this blog.
http://steph.green1.googlepages.com/ionasenseofplace2
See side-bar for Photo Gallery: 1) Iona and 2) Past courses (for students and trips)

Underword 5 star rating

2009-08-26T16:17:00.000+01:00

http://edinburgh.threeweeks.co.uk/review/6950

Well, I guess Loose Tongues can take a share in the 5 stars.

Loose Tongues at Underword, Edinburgh Fringe

2009-08-13T20:38:00.001+01:00

Front row: Lynsey Calderwood, Irene Brown, Janie McKie, Elaine Feeney and Mandy Haggith.
Back row: Stephanie Green and Tricia (Patricia) Ace.

A great performance Tuesday night of Loose Tongues and guests at Fingers' Piano Bar(Edinburgh). Quite a crowd, even a heckler (A LT first). But fun had by all and everyone said they enjoyed the variety - some literary poems, some pure performance, all performed with pazzazz. We had a last minute addition to our line up with Irene Brown. Great to have her on board.
Requests for us to perform again soon.....

http://steph.green1.googlepages.com/loosetongues

Loose Tongues at Edinburgh Fringe

2009-07-13T21:32:00.000+01:00

Loose Tongues, will be reading at Underword, a Spoken Word festival, part of the Edinburgh Fringe on 11th August, 7.50pm-8.40pm at Fingers Piano Bar, Frederick St. No piano.

Loose Tongues started as a group of poets who all met on the Glasgow MPhil (now called MLitt) in Creative Writing back in 2004. We have often invited musicians and other poets to perform alongside us, and I'm very pleased to have got a terrific line-up of fellow poets to join forces with us this Fringe.
So far, the line up is Patricia Ace, (her pamphlet 'First Blood' is published by Happenstance,) Lynsey Calderwood,(her autobiographical novel 'Cracked' about brain damage aged 14 and having to learn to talk again), Elaine Feeney, (Winner of the Galway Cuirt Slam recently), Jane McKie (her first collection published by Cinnamon was winner of the Scottish First Poetry Book Award and she has a new collection out with Polygon shortly), and original LT member, Mandy Haggith (poetry collection 'Castings' published by Two Ravens Press,) and myself.
(Eunice Buchanan, former LT member, has since emigrated to Australia following her grand-children but who knows she may perform with us again one day.)

This is part of a 'free' Fringe - a reaction to the staggering prices venues charge and overpriced tickets, militating against new talent, either hiring a venue or being able to go to much. There will be a bucket handed round after the event for 'Donations'...so not totally free but up to people's inclination, purse, good will etc. For further info see

http://www.underword.co.uk/

Strokestown Poetry Festival, County Roscommon, Ireland, May 2009

2009-06-04T09:24:00.000+01:00

It was a tremendous festival, a privilege and terrific opportunity to read with Big Names and meet fellow short-listed poets in such a friendly and welcoming atmosphere in the beautiful but homely Strokestown House. The gold on the wall paper glinting behind the poets reading in the evenings, the lambs peering in during the day-time readings (now I know why actors prefer not perform with children or animals), everyone sitting on the sofas, flipping through Country House magazines in the breaks (I overheard a local say that previously they would not have been allowed in the grounds, let alone the house and wasn't it amazing we were all making ourselves at home in the sitting-room), the lovely garden tour and the last night Hoolie in the Victorian kitchen are some happy memories. I loved the way the whole community was involved with the schools' competition readings, the late night pub readings and the satirical verse competition - a great balance to the more literary readings.

It was good to catch up with the Irish poetry scene too - although I do subscribe to the Poetry Ireland online newsletter and read the various literary magazines it's not the same as actually going to hear the poets read. John F. Deane (who founded Poetry Ireland and others) came late on the Sunday as he had previously been reading at the Heinrich Boll Festival on Achill Island (where Deane comes from), Paddy Bushe, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, (Editor of Cyphers literary magazine), Celia de Freine, James Harpur, Penelope Shuttle,(from Cornwall, of course, not Ireland), Joseph Woods (Director of Poetry Ireland) were the major poets who read.

Deane, Bushe and Harpur's poems had similar themes concerned with spirituality, Deane and Bushe springing from Gaelic culture. Paddy Bushe who lives in Waterville, has a sequence inspired by Skellig Michael - that remote, craggy offshore island where the early Celtic monks were hermits and I was particularly impressed by the scathing edge of his political sequence on Spenser, referring to the massacre at Dun an Oir (Smerwick) perpetrated by Lord Grey, (Spencer was his Secretary and wrote an account for Elizabeth) and Sir Walter Raleigh, who figured out a quota for each soldier:
'That body count worked out at five per man
That tidy mind would make a sonnet scan.'

( From 'Poets at Smerwick' in To Ring in Silence (The Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2008)

James Harpur's The Dark Age (Anvil Press, 2007) is poetry of a fine musicality and precision. I discovered the truth of his poem 'Roscommon Rain' in the days following the festival when the heavens opened. You can read the whole poem on the Poetry Ireland online newsletter but this will give you a taster, a few lines from the middle:

'Swept, soft again, like a haze of locusts
Across the ridge, then shifted shape in sudden wind
Drifting, finer than chimney smoke,
Like a passing pang of some great loss
Away from where more rain was coming in
From somewhere else beyond the world's rim....'

Celia de Freine (who writes in Irish Gaelic as well as English) introduced her reading by congratulating Carol Ann Duffy on her Poet Laureateship, just announced. Her own poems were a refreshing burst of felt experience (mainly female but not all,) mostly as dramatic monologues - some resonances of Carol Ann here, reaching out to a wider politics, beyond Ireland to Belarus, the world of soldiers and refugees.

Her voice is direct, colloquial, a voice speaking to you, the opening lines straight in, grabbing your attention:

'Emilia says that for all the world

she'd sleep with another man. How quickly

love turns sour.'

(From 'On my bed my wedding sheets')

'It's a strange thing this poetry, the way

It can take over our lives, dictate how

we eat, drink, sleep...'
(From 'Never defter nor smarter')

Both above poems in Scarecrows at Newtownards (Scotus Press, Dublin, 2005)

Not surprising to learn that she is also a playwright and screen-writer. It's hard to quote just a few lines, since the poem has to be read as a whole to appreciate their qualities as story.

A special pleasure to hear Penelope Shuttle read - expecially as I had heard her read at the Falmouth Fesitval only the week before - she read the same programme but as I love them all, it was a double pleasure to hear them again and begin to get to know them. She also reads with great clarity, giving her words a serious weight without over-stressing, beautifully modulated, so that it is an extremely moving performance. Many of her poems are litanies, and work by the juxtaposition of the unlikely, or quirkily humourous with the deeply felt:

'A poem stays awake long after midnight

taking you from room to room,

does not care that walls have ears,.....

Every year

a poem tosses a young woman from the cliffs

to the rocky sea below

A poem acidentally sends the entire letter f

off to Florence

but keeps the letter t

in a matchbox, like a tiny contraband tortoise

Sometimes

a poem is your only daughter...'

(From 'Poem' in 'Redgrove's Wife')

Many other poets, too numerous to quote, were memorable, especially hearing poems read in Irish Gaelic. I couldn't understand much of the Irish but pleased to note that when written down, my Scottish Gaelic helped me pick out quite a bit. Great to put a face to a name in Jo(seph) Woods' case - as Director of Poetry Ireland - and experience his ironical sense of humour .

I had not expected to win the competition - just delighted to be chosen as one of the short-listed. The first prize (of the English language section) went to Padraig (which I discover is pronounced Poric) Rooney - well deserved. He has several collections out but as he lives in Switzerland has been rather over-looked. I'm sure all that will change now. He will be reading at the Troubador, Earl's Court, London soon. Incidentally, Angela France, another shortlistee, will be reading at the Ledbury Festival in July.

More personal connections for me: nerve-wracking experience of my own reading , when Eilean Ni Chuilleanain was in the audience, whose lectures I attended when a student at Trinity back in the mid-60s. Also meeting Margaret Hickey and Merrily Harpur (organizer of the Festival) and learning that we were all contemporaries at Trinity - tho we didn't known eachother then. So a few reminiscences about people we knew in common.

On a more particular, personal note: It was quite a surprise to realize how much Percy French still means in Ireland and what a crowd the satirical verse event drew, from all over Ireland. Even more of a surprise to be invited to present the prizes, as a PF kinswoman. (*See below)Nice to be connected with one of the Anglo-Irish who was loved in Ireland - a pleasant change, to balance the grim but necessary task of going round the Famine Museum.

I stayed for a week in Strokestown after the Festival ended as I was invited to the Percy French Society AGM in Roscommon town - I joined them once the 'business' side of the meeting was over and had great fun listening to all the stories - their sense of humour exactly the same as that of Percy French himself. I also stayed on to visit the sites (mainly Ch. of Ireland churches) my Percy ancestors were connected with: one now a Heritage Centre, another a ruin, another a public library. So it goes.

*Note: the Percy French connection: through the maternal line -PF's mother and my maternal great grandmother were sisters, Susan Emma and Jane Caroline Percy, daughters of the Rev William Alexander Percy, Rector of St. George's Church (Kiltoghert parish), in Carrick-on-Shannon (Co. Leitrim, just over the Roscommon county border.) So I am PF's second cousin, twice removed. Thanks to my friend, Caroline, who studied Anthropology and has worked this out for me!

More photos: I shall be putting up more photos on my Facebook page and also on my main webpage in due course http://steph.green1.googlepages.com/strokestownfestival

http://www.strokestownpoetry.org/

http://www.jamesharpur.com/

StAnza 2009, St. Andrew's Poetry Festival

2009-04-01T14:19:00.000+01:00

This year I took few photos of St Andrew's itself as taken so many in previous years. (See link below, for photos of St A ).

But did get this very characterful portrait of Carol Ann Duffy, taken outside the Trust Museum after the 'Round Table' intimate reading. I was very lucky to get a ticket - only 12 places. So like the Apostles we gathered round and had a chance to meet CA as a person, rather than a spotlit dot on a stage which is the usual experience of her readings that one gets. A different selection from the reading she had given on the Byre stage the night before too and some little personal introductions and asides.

Two bits of info were of particular interest to me - that 'Standing Female Nude' (in Mean Time)was the first poem CA wrote where she felt she was writing as herself. (Something which, as all poets know, is as hard as it is essential.) 'This should be read naked in a French accent but even though this is an intimate reading, it's not going to happen,' she said.

The other interesting aside was a game she told us she likes to play with an hour to spare and a glass of wine- thinking up Moon similies: mirrors, windows etc and how many poets write poems to the moon from Sappho to Alice Oswald.

I think this event was the highlight of the festival for me - though CA's reading along with Patience Agbabi on the main Byre stage was mesmerizing. CA read from The World's Wife, 'Mrs Midas' and one other from WW (I forget right now which) with her usual consumate skill of irony and use of dramatic pauses and then a selection of her love poems from Rapture. I have read this sequence many times, and admire the range of tone, and also extraordinary variety of poetic form (though all versions of sonnets) and yet some of the poems still hit one in the solar plexus with their emotional force. So hearing her read them was a moving experience. She punctuated the evening with excerpts from the poem about the girls' laughter sabotaging a school which was an inspired device. She also read 'Prayer' which was the third time I have heard her read it in one year - but I can never hear it too many times. As I've said in previous blog, one of my most favourite poems.
It does have to be heard for the music of its cadences.

Incidentally Patience Agbabi was an inspired pairing. I've heard PA read or 'perform' before at a festival in North Wales many years ago and that was a memorable experience in an old fashioned, draughty hotel in Criccieth. I have to confess that this second hearing was not so striking for me this time - the 'performance' poems - with their strong images and beat were still as successful as ever but her new foray into writing sonnets seemed rather thin.

PA exemplifed how a dramatic performance can lift a poem only so much and was a living example of issues raised in the Breakfast Discussion later on the Sunday, the event entitled 'Poetry Breakfast: Actors or Poets?' I've gone on many times in my blog about my own preference for hearing poets read loud and clear. I can't bear mumblers (which seems to me a false modesty and inconsiderate of your audience.) The multi-layered page poem, justifying several readings to tease everything out, may not be totally appreciated on stage but sometimes (as in the case of CA) it can hold its own as performance too.

Hearing the actor Crispin Bonham Carter read out a poem by Ros Brackenbury followed by Ros herself was interesting. BC brought out one interpretation - strong, audible, dramatically effective. He engaged the audience in eye contact for a moment at the end, re-enforcing the effect of the last line. In comparison, Ros' own reading was poor. (But not many poets could match an actor for drama, so I don't mean to dismiss her performance.) The discussion centred on how an actor, must inevitably focus on one interpretation - and inevitably failed to bring out the poet's many shifts of tone, nuances, subtly suggested several interpretations - which only became apparent on several readings. George Szirtes, co-incidentally, muses on this topic in his blog where he says no two readings are ever the same - even that of the poet themselves, depending on their mood that day etc. http://georgeszirtes.blogspot.com/ entry for 29 March .

I enjoyed a variation on this theme at the Poetry Breakfast: Poems and Song Lyrics, chaired very intelligently and professionally by Roddy Lumsden leading a discussion with Ian Rankin, Simon Armitage, Martin Newell, Stephen Scobie, and Marco Fazzini.

Stephen Scobie had brought along two audio excerpts which really helped. I wish the others had thought to do this too. However, some interesting points were raised about the way in which a poem is like or not like a song.

Multi-levels, as SA, pointed out seemed to be the main issue - necessary in a poem - but death in a song! He also said writing songs is not just a matter of handing it over as a poem. 'Song writing is an art too.' ...'It is a question of intent and integrity.' And how you can't control the pace (of delivery) of a song as you might in a reading. SA's poems 'have their own cadence' and if put to pop music, with its insistent beat, just don't work.

Most of the panel commented on how music can lift the words of a song - 'Music is magic,'as SA put it. Ian Rankin was amusing and self-deprecatory, as ever, acting out his teenage reaction to some words by Bob Dylan 'Wow!!! then ten minutes later 'Oh, that's crap.' He also confessed to his own band as a teenager, the Amoebas - which existed only in his own head but how he had designed the cover of the vinyl discs, the t-shirts etc.

As someone who has tried to write songs - words and music (and I must confess with not much success with the musical side of things)I would have liked more musicians invited - even though Martin Newell was amusing and played us a song - there was no serious discussion or examples of how a musician goes about putting words to song (or v.v.). A workshop might be an idea for a future StAnza, Eleanor? There must be hundreds of singer/songwriters who would be interested in such an event.

I also enjoyed the 'Round Table' with Simon Armitage, where he introduced his reading with the genesis and background to his translation of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. I had heard some of the stories in an interview on the Radio but enjoyed hearing him tell again of his treatment by the British Library - who did not know who he was and would not initially let him see the MS. 'It does not have any pictures' said the librarian! (Actually, it does as SA explained.)

At his main stage Byre reading, he read some rather prosey new poems (one about a sperm whale was memorable). He said that it was a reaction to spending several years writing the alliterative verse of Sir G . I quizzed him on the use of prose in poetry and he explained that 'prose' in a poem was acceptable as long as it was not 'prosaic.' A helpful tip!

In his Byre reading, the poem that stood out most was the poem about the 9/11 bombing of the Twin Towers used to accompany some film footage showing a man using his shirt to wave from one of the towers before he tires, just as the arm of whoever is holding the camera tires. A heart-stopping poem. How to convey, without spelling it out, the unimaginable horror of what must happen next.

Very briefly, I also enjoyed a New Zealand poet, new to me, Jenny Bornholdt. Not knowing which of her many books to buy, (since buying so many other poets, I thought I better ration myself)so Iplumped for 'Summer' which is about her father's death but also about living in Katherine Mansfield's house in Menton (as part of a writers' residency) - mainly because Katherine Mansfield was one of my mother's favourite writers and she introduced her short stories to me when I was 15 or so - partly because my mother also had T.B. as a child and spent time in a Swiss sanitorium - a terribly, lonely experience for a 12 year old, though luckily, unlike KM, my mother recovered ( and also, unlike my aunt, Georgina, my mother's sister, who died as a child.) This sadness apart, the stories were and are wonderful and so are Jenny Bornholdt's poems. I think I may well have to buy all her other books too!

I was sorry to miss the 'Past and Present' events - where two poets discuss a poet who has influenced them, in particular Jay Parini talking about Robert Frost. These are always fascinating events but I could not make it till the Friday evening this year and also I would have liked to hear more of the foreign poets. There is so much on in StAnza, it is impossible to go to everything one would like.

I managed the Italians however - both interesting in their different ways: Elisa Biagini - an art historian as well as poet: short, not surprisingly imagistic poems. with punch (influenced by characters from European Fairy Tales) and Bianca Tarozzi, who introduced her poems about her house with charming and wry remarks. I bought her book that illustrates the poems with photos of her 'house' or rather the shelves crammed with books, mementoes and memories.

Lastly, I enjoyed the cartoons by Tim Cockburn, (drawn during StAnza 2007) exhibited round the Byre bar foyer . H/w one example to show Tim's humour and eye for line.

and also Jim Carruth's visual poems, 'Cowpit Yowe.' Some with a sense of humour, but one here tinged with sadness concerning the foot and mouth tragedy.

For my photos of St Andrews, See http://steph.green1.googlepages.com/ and click on link to Photos.

Strokestown Poetry Festival, Co. Roscommon, Ireland and Percy French

2009-03-16T13:26:00.000Z

Just heard today that I am one of the short-listed poets for this festival competition and will get a chance to read with the other short-listed poets. So am delighted to be going over to Ireland for it...especially as County Roscommon has links with the singer/composer Percy French who is one of my ancestors and I have been meaning to explore these ancestral roots for ages. (His mother was my great-great aunt or something, on my mother's side.) A pity I was not also short-listed for the Percy French prize for satirical verse but never mind. Obviously those genes were not passed down.

Percy French, if you don't already know, composed 'The Mountains of Mourne', 'Phil the Fluter's Ball' and other songs often thought of as by Anon (Traditional). He lived in Edwardian times, was part of the Anglo-Irish but was not interested in politics. He was well-loved by everyone and his songs were inspired by his days as Inspector of Drains cycling round Cavan and the 'characters' he met - at whom he pokes fun with great affection and with great compassion. I believe there has been a revival of interest in Ireland in his work - and particularly in his water-colours, often sunsets on the bog, or the breaking wave (sure fire best sellers. His 'pot boilers' as Ettie and Joan, his daughters (my cousins) used to say.

I shall find a chance to explore the site of Cloonyquin, the house where he grew up - now pulled down - shame - not in the Troubles, I hasten to add (though I gather it was not of great architectural merit, more of a former shooting lodge.) The Frenches were apparently good to their tenants, provided soup and work during the Famine etc. The house was sold and pulled down by the new owner - along with it the avenue of copper beeches, to provide more farming land. Ettie and Joan had a magnificent copper beech in their garden in Suffolk which was grown from a Cloonyquin seedling and I remember having tea with them sitting on a rug below this tree when I presented my baby son to them back in the 1990's when he was one and they were in their 80s. I am sorry they are not still alive to learn of my trip to their father's birthplace.

There is a wonderful collection of his paintings and other memorabilia in Bangor, County Down, many of which I saw in my cousins' cottage many times before they died.

http://www.strokestownpoetry.org/

http://www.percyfrench.org/

Stephanie Green's Blog/Journal

Burns Window Poems

John Burnside, winner of the T.S. Eliot prize

More on T.S. Eliot Prize readings, 2012

T.S.Eliot Prize, 2012

Other than Poetry, Best Books Read, 2011

Libraries: impossible dreams

Poetry Highlights of the Year, 2011

Alison Watt and Don Paterson Hiding in Full View

Poem a Day for a Year

Body Bags, Simonides, Robert Crawford and Norman MacBeath

Bookish sculptures' mysterious appearances around Edinburgh

Working the HIll by Jim Carruth

H is for Mandy Haggith and Hawthorn, Celtic Tree Alphabet

Fight for Libraries' Campaign

Libraries' closure ruled illegal

Shore Poets' 20th Anniversary all twinkly in Voodoo Rooms

Kay Ryan stand-up poet

Nowwhatnow dance and Little Match Girl Passion at Traverse

Tips On Preparing a First Collection by Helena Nolan who wins the Patrick Kavanagh prize, 2011

Diana Payne Myers, Still Dancing at 83

Dewey-eyed at the Scottish Poetry Library

Zoe Strachan and Scotland's human sacrifice rituals

West Port Festival, Reading, Riting and R n R (well, the Charleston, actually)

Save Craighouse grounds

Welsh equals gobbledegook to English speakers

The Nordic Fiddlers Bloc

Wanted Hermit, grotto provided. Must be a writer

R.B. McDowell, the most eccentric of eccentrics, dies

Carmel a 'wise' production, Guardian review

My Edinburgh Festival Round-up, 2011

Goldens Behind Stage at A Conversation with Carmel

The Bees- Carol Ann Duffy, Edinburgh Int Book Festival

Janie McKie wins Edwin Morgan, Edinburgh Int Book Festival

Makkin wi Wirds, with Fiddles attached, 2011

Unst, Ultima Thule, part 2

St Kilda, July, 2011

Edwin Morgan Poetry prize shortlist, 2011

Perfection for Kona Mcphee

Bach's Jesu's Joy to cheer one up during flu

Better than Prozac: Golden Dance

Sense of Place Renga at Botanics

Save our Libraries protest rumbles on

Brendan Kennelly's 75th

Tree Books and a Matsuri in the Hidden Gardens, Glasgow

Linda Chase

Boggart's Breakfast on May Morning

Manic gleams , guility after-pub snacks and warts

Celebration

Oxford Blackwells: book-banging horse-scaring

Oxford, Addison's Walk, Magdalen College, March 2011

StAnza 2011: Artist's Books, Roncadoro Press

StAnza 2011 Photo Journal: Catriona Taylor's tribute to Sorley MacLean

StAnza 2011 Photo Journal: books great and small

Ciaran Carson at StAnza: Hauntings

StAnza 2011 Photo Journal: Tagore Poetry Boat

StAnza 2011: Hats off to one-man Fringe

StAnza 2011: Hats and tin whistles

The Problem with StAnza

Libraries or incubators for the newborn? Have we come to this?

Louise Welsh Literary Agony Aunt

Hurrah for Poetry

Burns' Auld Lang Syne, My Luve is like a red, red rose, wee sleekit beestie etc

Writers' Retreat with Ian Fleming's ghost in Jamaica

Jo Shapcott's 'Of Mutability' wins Costa

Richard Meier wins Picador Prize

Flash Mob for Burns

Liz Lochhead is new Makar, National Poet for Scotland

Snow-capped Suilven, up in Assynt again, Jan 2011

Gillian Clarke, Ceridwen of Wales

Seven Words for Winter in Greenlandic (Kalaallisut)

Happy Birthday Dave Brubeck

Other than Poetry Highlights Read in 2010

My Poetry Highlights in 2010

A Man in Assynt - video re the MacCaig Festival

Aldeburgh Festival 2010

Norman MacCaig Festival, Assynt, 2010

A Hoolie in Assynt: Norman MacCaig week

Poetry on the Lake Festival, 2010

Poetry on the Lake Festival, 2010