Amy Jo Philip

  • We kick off the poems from the 16 August Fruitmarket readers with Chris McCabe celebrating in the Honest Toun: 30th Birthday, Musselburgh And sat under the papier-mache mermaid, the table an afterlife of seafood – like your first memory: starfish along the railway tracks. Purple flints in the emptied wineglass – for so long pregnant,

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  • Following the success of last year’s August reading at the Fruitmarket Gallery, we’ve decided to repeat the format with a slightly different line-up of poets. Funnily enough, we’ve ended up going for the same date, which allows me to revive the 06 | 16 tag. Here are the details: When: 16 August 2012, 7:30 for

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  • Wow! There’s been some truly amazing news for my hard-working, tireless, dedicated publishers, Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery: one of Salt’s novels has been longlisted for the Booker prize! The book in question is Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse, which is out next month. Chris’s Facebook and Twitter feeds have been full of the frenzy (print runs, rights

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  • Circumstances have kept me from doing anything with this blog lately, but things seem to be settling down a bit, so I’m back to some degree of blogging at least — though don’t expect too much from me for a whilie! Anyway, the purpose of this post is to say that one of my abnominals,

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  • Well, you make your little noises in your own wee virtual glen and then, before you know it, there’s a rumble of snow elsewhere. I’m delighted to see that not only has Mark Burnhope’s blog been picked out as the featured blog for today on the NaPoWriMo site, but his growing number of abnominals is

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  • Well, when I dreamt up the abnominal, I had no idea it would have taken on a life of its own already by now. I’ve been pleased with how productive a form it is — seven poems in three weeks is a pretty good rate! — but it has pleased me tremendously that others have

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  • It’s National Poetry Month in the UK and, to celebrate the fact, I’m doing a reading tomorrow (Tuesday 17 April) with fellow Linlithgow poet Jane McKie — winner of last year’s Edwin Morgan poetry competition — and Bathgate poet Alistair Findlay. The reading will be held at Far from the Madding Crowd, 20 High Street, Linlithgow.

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  • Today is the anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer‘s execution in 1945 and the day that he is commemorated in the Northumbria Community‘s calendar of saints, so I’ve decided to break with my normal practice of not posting new poems on this blog and put up a piece in memory of him: X Cheer Friend of Both

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  • I wish you all the blessings of the Easter season — and none of the abdominal complaints that may accompany it! As has become all too customary on this blog, I also apologise for my absence. After celebrating being back in the saddle, I was knocked out of commission by a bout of tonsillitis, which

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  • Ah, it’s good to be back! Sorry I’ve neglected the blog over the past while, but my Poetry School online course swallowed up all blogging time over the past couple of months. It was also good to be back to reading at 10Red in Edinburgh on Wednesday last week. (I apologise to all, especially Kevin

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  • I’ve mentioned SANDS, the stillbirth and neonatal death society, on this blog in the past. SANDS Lothians, which supports those in the Lothians who have suffered a stillbirth or a neonatal death, has been chosen as one of the five finalists in the Netmums competition to receive a share of a £200,000 money pot from Sport Relief but

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  • For a long time, the Reasoning Rhyme section of this site has simply directed readers back to my old blog, but I’ve now consolidated all those previous posts into a proper section of this site. I’ve not added anything new, but I do have good intentions — and we all know where they lead —

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  • Merry Christmas! I hope you’ve had a Christmas full of light, blessings and peace. I trust you haven’t eaten too much turkey (or whatever you dined on for Christmas day — some rather delicious pork in our case*). Equally well, I hope you’re not staring at a fridge full of leftovers for the next three

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  • Sold Out Again!

    My next course for the Poetry School Online, which focuses on surprise as an engine of poetry and starts very soon indeed, is sold out. None of my students seems to have enrolled yet, but I hope they do soon, not least because I plan to post the first assignment in the next day or

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  • Little did I know when I stepped on to the stage in Wigtown that it would lead to my appearing on Radio Scotland’s main Christmas morning broadcast. It just so happened that the producer of “Christmas Morning with Cathy MacDonald and Ricky Ross” was in the audience, not that I knew that until an e-mail

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