poetry
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Less than a week now till Rob A Mackenzie and I hit Stoke Newington! I’m hugely excited about this opportunity for us to read with Katy Evans-Bush and Yang Lian. Katy read a great set at the Jekyll and Hyde a week past Sunday. I first came across Yang Lian when I did some Chinese…
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April, may be the cruelest month, but June is shaping up to be the busiest. This Sunday coming (14th), I’ll be doing not one but two readings. First of all, you can join me and a variety of other Linlithgow-based authors in the marquee at the Rugby Club for “Take Tea With an Author”, a…
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On Friday this week, I’ll be through in Glasgow to read at Tchai Ovna, Otago Lane. The reading starts at 8 pm. Also appearing are poets Colin Donati and Jim Carruth, crime fiction writer Alex Gray and writer/poet Stewart Ennis.
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The Just One Book campaign has hit the Guardian books blog here! And that’s not all folks: Chris Hamilton-Emery will be on Newsnight Review this Friday. The campaign is working — 800 orders in the first four days, bringing in £17,000, which is six weeks’ cash for Salt — but Chris, Jen and their stalwart…
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Next week, I’ll be returning to the Golden Hour with The Ambulance Box. I can’t help but be flattered by what Ryan Van Winkle has put on the poster: Click on the pic to see the details. It looks like a really good night. Hope to see some of you there. The next gig after…
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Sales of poetry books are down screamed the BBC news website on Wednesday last week, before exhorting us all: but one way to reinvigorate this traditional art form could be to make it functional and going on to suggest that we could re-engage the public with the art of poetry by turning the instructions on…
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StAnza seems so long ago now that it’s almost hardly worth reporting any more on it, but there are a couple of things don’t want to slide into the dim and distant without comment. First and foremost of those is Roddy Lumsden’s reading. I’ve known Roddy since I was a student, since before he published…
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Despite holidaying in Eyemouth, on Thursday last week, I joined most of the other contributors* (inlcuding one of the translators) at the Italian Cultural Institute in Edinburgh to launch 5PX2: Five Italian Poets and Five Scottish Poets. The evening was slightly chaotic but enormous fun. A good-sized audience, too, for a Thursday in holiday time…
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This weekend’s* Saturday poem in The Scotsman was the title poem from The Ambulance Box**. Great publicity for the collection! I’d heard several weeks ago that it was happening and knew the date but it only occurred to me in the middle of the week that it would be the Holy Saturday poem. An appropriate…
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My first event on the Saturday at StAnza was Bill Manhire’s masterclass: a one-off workshop with six writers selected from among a batch of submissions plus an audience. I was in the audience, not having submitted anything. Manhire was warm and engaging while still being quite thorough. As he pointed out, there was no time…
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Summertime (officially), and the temperature’s freezing. That’s Scotland’s wind chill for you. Otherwise, it’s a glorious morning; a fitting follow-up to a good night at the Black Bitch, with Herbie Hancock‘s Maiden Voyage playing in the background. I lost count, but I think there were close to 30 people there. It was mostly Linlithgow folk,…
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Tomorrow night, I’m on home turf to launch The Ambulance Box in Linlithgow’s Black Bitch Inn*. I’m expecting a smaller crowd than at the SPL, but looking forward to it just as much. The event kicks off at 8 pm. There’s a bar and I’ll be reading two 15-minute sets, though I’ve yet to decide…
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An oddity of this year’s StAnza is that one of the most defining events for me was something I wasn’t at. I refer, of course, to the poetry breakfast on the Friday, on the topic “Where are all the Scottish poets under 40?” I was dying to hear about it and asked one or two…
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St Andrews was bathed in glorious sunshine this weekend past for StAnza, even if there was a bit of a chill to the wind. It certainly brought to mind Alastair Reid’s “Scotland”, famously burnt by the man himself two years ago. Reid was there in spirit, as you can hear in the podcast exerpt of…
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A brief note on my plans for StAnza this year. I’ll not manage to get through until the Friday evening. That means I’ll miss the poetry breakfast on the relative absence of young Scottish poets. I have a ticket for the Bill Manhire and Simon Armitage reading, but I’m not certain I’ll make it through…
Amy Jo Philip 