Amy Jo Philip
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A quick reminder about the Chinese Whispers event at the Scottish Poetry Library on Wednesday this week. It’s part of the Poetry Beyond Text season, which I blogged about here. It’s free and it starts at 6 pm. E-mail reception@spl.org.uk if you’re planning on going. Various artists and poets involved will discuss the process of…
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Just read on Todd Swift’s Eyewear blog that James McGonigal won the Michael Marks pamphlet award for his new chapbook Cloud Pibroch. Huge congratulations to him and to Hamish Whyte of Mariscat Press — himself a poet. I confess I haven’t read Jim’s pamphlet yet, but to judge from the last time I heard him…
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While song may share 99% of poetry’s DNA, it isn’t poetry, any more than, say, a chimpanzee is a bonobo. This, from Adam Newey reviewing Hard Ground, poems by Tom Waits, photographs by Michael O’Brien, in yesterday’s Guardian Review, strikes me as a shrewd snippet on the difference between song and poetry. (Newey has a…
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… to the person who came here searching for “Scottish poet + labyrinth” and variations thereon, the poet you’re looking for is most probably Edwin Muir.
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I’ve been thinking today about whether my experiences at Cove Park just before Easter have had an effect not only on the way I present my poetry but directly on my writing, and I believe the answer is yes. On my Facebook page , I commented recently that, at the moment, I seem to be…
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It really is time I blogged about the Reel Festivals reading at the Scottish Poetry Library on Friday 20 May. But how to sum it up? As I said on Twitter, http://twitter.com/#!/ambulancebox/status/71809397503967232 and I can think of no more apposite description. Among all the anxiety about why poetry is marginalised in our culture, against all…
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So, while everyone — well, everyone in the media more or less — goes on about how the Arab Spring has been brought about by Facebook and Twitter, Sinan Antoon corrects the perspective somewhat in this very short interview from the Kenyon Review. Here are a couple of exerpts. First, on the role of poetry…
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It has been a deeply unproductive day, so I thought I’d catch up with a little blogging and, simultaneously, remind myself of some recent productivity. The current exhibition at the good ole SPL features a selection of work created as part of Poetry Beyond Text, an extensive, exciting interdisciplinary research programme run jointly by the…
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Thought I’d draw a couple of competitions to your attention. First, on these shores, the National Poetry Competition is open for entries (actually, it has been since last month; I’ve been slow off the mark on this one). Now in its 34th year, the competition is one of the world’s biggest. This year’s judges are…
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It seems that the rapture will come, according to some people, on Saturday. So I thought I’d share with you all my predictions for the end of the world: It Comes to the Crunch When the people heard this was the last day of the world some headed home to pack their cameras and feed…
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A while back, reporting on Perth Writers’ Day, I said this: I came away from the workshop with a fresh idea — well, fresh for me at least — for getting myself writing regularly again. For two of the exercises, I used a list of 10 random words provided by this random word generator. I…
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I love the way that visual artists see light. My good friend, the photographer, filmmaker and — although he frequently denies it — poet Alastair Cook has a beautiful photography exhibition, Analogue Decay, at the Howden Park Centre in Livingston. Unfortunately, it finishes today but, if you possibly can, I recommend you get along and…
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The second leg of our Out of the Veg Box mini tour was the Birdcage in Norwich. We arrived there in good time and met Joshua Jones in the Waterstones by the castle, a meeting point chosen largely by our meanderings through the town to find the Birdcage. Josh took us to the pub, which…
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I count myself highly fortunate that, with the Out of the Veg Box mini-tour last week, I had an almost immediate opportunity to put into practice what I’d learned at Cove Park the previous week (see here and here for that). Rob A Mackenzie and I put together the tour way before the opportunity at…
Amy Jo Philip 