poetry
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Having lauded Fiona Sampson’s Guardian Unlimited workshop (which I have failed to complete), I thought I should mention her choice of the resulting poems. It forms a nice little compendium of significantly different approaches to the practice of listening–a clear demonstration that the workshop exercise is a good one, I think. There’s much to learn…
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It looks like my dulcet tones will be gracing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the first time ever* this year: I have a 10-minute reading slot in the Postscript show at Diverse Attractions on Monday 20th August and Wednesday 22nd August. The show starts at 7.15pm and lasts roughly an hour and a half, but…
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Here’s the Shore Poets programme from September 2007 to June 2008 (guest poets in bold, Shore poets in italics and new poets in plain text). Don’t forget our special Orkney event on Sunday 29th July. 200730th SeptPolly Clark, Ian McDonough and Gilly Garnett 28th OctGillian Allnutt, Christine De Luca and James W Wood 25th NovDavid…
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Salt has started a blog of coverage, readings etc connected to its Forward shortlisted authors. Can’t help but be chuffed to see they’ve linked to my comments on the shortlist. I’ll add the blog to the sidebar. Keep an eye on it: there seems to be something new every half hour or so! The latest…
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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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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…
Amy Jo Philip 