06 | 16 poems

  • In the last of our posts for the Six Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Isobel Dixon pays tribute to Syd Barrett: Astronomy Sonnetry “This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,” whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ from The Wind in

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  • Richard Price, the fourth of our Six Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery, turns our gaze towards the heavens: The Mutual Satellite Assurance Company Limited A double-planet system – the Earth and the Moon. Stability, maybe stability. And maybe the moon – you know – an equal – once. Sisters – (a little big-sister, a big little-sister)

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  • In this poem from the third of the Six Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Hannah Lowe takes us into the darkness of the heart of a family: Say Say that your mother took in a lodger. An old man say, down on his luck, mostly out of the house or asleep, no bother. Say they grew

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  • In the second of our posts for the Six Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Jasmine Donahaye has a brush with a dark angel: An angel is passing And the silence which falls suddenly on a group, at a party, a silence that elongates, extends, becomes something unbreakable, camaraderie disintegrating, returning each of you to your awkward

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  • Six Poets at the Fruitmarket Gallery is back! This year, we’re on at 7:30 pm for 8:00 pm on 15 August 2013, with Isobel Dixon, Hannah Lowe, Rob A. Mackenzie, Richard Price, Jasmine Donahaye and me. Tickets are £5 from the gallery or on the door. As in previous years, I’ll be posting a poem from

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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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  • 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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  • 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!

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  • 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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  • Last on the 06 | 16 front, here’s a poem from me, first published in 5PX2: The Melody at Night, With You Snow bound and determined to break out of the silence enforced by chronic fatigue Jarrett is at his piano again (the first time in let’s not contemplate how long for a man as

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  • Helen Mort strikes an arborial note for the fifth poem from the 16 August Fruitmarket readers: Grasmere Oak Since there’s no blind, the tree outside’s a curtain on your room, the yolk-bright mornings breaking through. Last night, its shadow seemed the only thing between you and the leaking dark, the rain set loose and needling

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