Amy Jo Philip
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It’s worth taking 10 minutes to listen to the interview with Fiona Sampson from Woman’s Hour last week, helpfully drawn to my attention by my wife. She has quite a few interesting nuggets to share about poetry and editing Poetry Review. It’s encouraging to hear that she reads all the roughly 60,000 unsolicited submissions that…
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One of the perks of my day job is the flexitime system, of which I take advantage by taking long lunches with friends in the summer recess. Yesterday, I had lunch with Rob A Mackenzie. Rob and I swapped the still Protean manuscripts of our putative first full collections, so publication was much on our…
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I’ve been meaning to post a link to this marvellous, sensitive article all week. As a bereaved parent, I relate deeply to the experiences that Alice Jolly describes. I can’t recommend her piece highly enough to anyone. If you’ve lost a child, you’ll hear your own voice in her story. If you’ve never been through…
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The shortleet for this year’s Forward prizes is out and I haven’t read a single book on it. No surprise there, as I don’t ever seem to keep well abreast of these lists. I don’t own any of the titles yet either, although John Burnside‘s Gift Songs should already be in the post from the…
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The publication in which the translation I mentioned the other week appeared came through the door nearly a fortnight ago. You might be surprised to learn that it’s “The Language of Equality”: The Mayor’s Annual Equalities Report 2006/07, the mayor in question being one Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London. You wouldn’t be the only one:…
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I’ve been trying out the exercise in Fiona Sampson‘s Guardian poetry workshop. For various reasons, I’ve stopped halfway through and will have to do the rest another day but, to my surprise, step 2 was such fun it re-enlivened my sheer, giggling delight in language. That Heinekening was particularly welcome after a drudgy morning of…
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I can’t help but think that last night’s Shore Poets event could have shown some of Thursday night‘s slammers a thing or two about how imaginative and contentful something that might be described as a performance poem can be. Nowhere was that more the case than in the closing set, from the night’s main reader,…
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Went to the Big Word Slam for the first time in my life last night. Does it surprise you that I was a slam virgin? Well, in the general run of things, Thursdays are not convenient evenings for me. And although I love poetry readings, I’ve never been convinced by performance poetry as a genre*.…
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I want to respond in more detail to a couple of the comments on my post about the first part of Yang-May Ooi‘s interview with Rob Mackenzie (the second part of which is now available). Ms Baroque (aka Katy Evans–Bush) commented: “the idea of nationalist poetry sounds disturbingly stalinist these days.” Three things bother me…
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Three things came my way this week that set me to thinking how the odd fee structures are in the poetry world: the £40 cheque accompanying my contributor copy of Lallans 70, the £100 fee for a poetry translation I did back in March and a £150 commission for a short poem. So, I get…
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My latest publication is four poems in issue 70 of Lallans magazine, “the journal o Scots airts an letters”, published by the Scots Language Society. To be exact, it’s three original poems–“Coronach”, “A Muckle Music” and “Waukrife”–plus “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.”, which is a translation of Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.” As you will have guessed, all…
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As veteran readers of this blog will know, contrary to The Sunday Herald‘s belief, Linlithgow already has a book festival. Last year’s inaugural festival was a one-day affair, but the two-year-old LBF has done with doukin its taes in the watter and is splashing into a whole weekend of bookish blether from Friday 2 November…
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Just finished reading Alistair Findlay’s The Love Songs of John Knox, a sophisticated but hugely entertaining collection. It’s not often a book of poems has me chuckling aloud to myself almost every page. Even rarer is the collection I pass round colleagues at my day job to watch them chuckle and giggle aloud. Findlay takes…
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The Sunday Herald has launched a campaign for a new Scottish Constitutional Convention. Is it just me, or has the result of the Scottish election breathed new life into Scottish politics, not only in itself but in how it relates to British politics?
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My post on the back of part 1 of Yang-May Ooi’s interview with Rob Mackenzie is generating the most discussion yet on Tonguefire (still piddling by other blogs’ standards, I know). Katy Evans-Bush has reminded me that she addressed the same issues with Rob in an earlier interview for the e-zine Umbrella. Here’s the relevant…
Amy Jo Philip 