Amy Jo Philip
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Happy new year, everyone! Sorry I’m a week behind the time in spreading the good wishes, but a felicitation is certainly better late than never. Anyway, on the writing front, the new year has certainly been well hanselled for me. I was surprised and delighted last week to see that Robert Peake had chosen me
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Next week is Book Week Scotland, our first ever official national celebration of books and reading. I’m very pleased to be joining Edinburgh-based poets Rob A Mackenzie and Elspeth Murray and visiting Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama for a reading on the Thursday that week (29 November). I first met Pádraig when he led a retreat in
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I had a whale of a time at Linlithgow Book Festival this past weekend. The Saturday was particularly busy but hugely rewarding. I worked out that I must have done almost a 13-hour day, starting with the final prep for my poetry workshop through to leaving the Masonic Hall after the open mic at nearly
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Ruth Padel’s Radio 4 programme “Poetry Workshop” is back for another series. I missed the first one in its entirety, and only noticed this evening when I wandered to the iplayer for “The Verb” that it was back for a second round. So I listened and enjoyed. I listened even more closely when I heard
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Tonight, one of my children asked me what poetry is. I answered poorly, talking vaguely about lines. (Well, how do you explain it to a five-year-old?!) But it got me thinking again about that imponderable. Does the difference between prose and poetry, perhaps, boil down to this: in poetry, the focus is on the relationships
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November is almost upon us already, which means that — aside from all the ghoulish goodies in the supermarkets, the building of bonfires and the buying of fireworks — Linlithgow Book Festival is just around the corner. This year’s LBF runs from Friday, 2 November to Sunday, 4 November. As in previous years, I’m running
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This post is just a quickie to say that I’ll be appearing at the Callander Poetry Weekend (7 to 8 September) this year as part of the Split Screen and filmpoem events on the Saturday afternoon. The weekend is free, and there is a lot going on. The full programme can be found here. Despite
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… lend us your ears tonight! If you’ve been visiting this blog of late, you will know the drill: six poets for £5 — a bargain, if I do say so myself — in the wonderful surroundings of the Fruitmarket Gallery. Doors open at 7:30 pm and we kick off at 8 pm. There will
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Having been caught up with the publicity for the 06 | 16 — The Fruitmachine reading at the Fruitmarket Gallery, I’ve almost neglected to tell you anything about another reading I’m involved this festival season. It’s at the Banshee Labyrinth a week today — Tuesday 21st of August — and also involves six poets, namely:
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Money makes the world go wrong in this poem from Rob A Mackenzie, the last from the other 06 | 16 readers: The Packs Something is wrong: the wolves drag their spectral bodies through spritely towns, which have never known the burial of bones in back gardens. The sound of snapping plastic echoes between fenceposts:
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It’s only a week until the 06 | 16 — The Fruitmachine extravaganza at the Fruitmarket Gallery! To entice you even more, here is Isobel Dixon, with a poem inspired by Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild — based on Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name — about the life, and death in Alaska,
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Kapka Kassabova goes travelling in her own life for the next poem from the 16 August Fruitmarket readers: I want to be a tourist I imagine my life as a city somewhere in the third world, or the second. And I want to be a tourist in the city of my life. I want to
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Gutter 07 arrived in the post this afternoon. As I mentioned previously, I have one poem in this issue, the first of my abnominals to be published anywhere. I’m particularly pleased it’s the abnominal I wrote for my wife. It’s a month or two since I last looked at it, and I’m happy to see
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For the second of our poems from the 16 August Fruitmarket readers, Tony Williams is and isn’t in a listening mood: Listening I didn’t mean to overhear the scrape of chair legs on the floor and sour breath of the bored, enshadowed janitor nor how he conflabbed on the stairs (it echoed in the squarish
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A boring bit of admin for you: there is now a Facebook event for the reading at the Fruitmarket Gallery on 16 August. If you’re on FB and coming — or even just thinking of coming — you can sign up here. Looking forward to seeing some of you there!
Amy Jo Philip 