poetry
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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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Goodness, it’s been a ghost town in this here corner of the blogosphere lately, hasn’t it? Things have been rather exhausting over the past wee while, hence the radio silence. I’m afraid I won’t manage to give you a report on everything past, but I am back to give you a bit more news. Those…
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At Rob A Mackenzie‘s instigation, poets Dorothy Baird and I, children’s author Lari Don, novelists Stephanie Taylor and Craig Sterling, and storyteller/entertainer/author Peter Snow will be reading at the Edinburgh Rudolf Steiner School Christmas market on Saturday 19 November. The market runs from 11 am to 4 pm. Dorothy and I are reading at 12:30 pm;…
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My contributor’s copy of Magma Poetry issue 51 arrived in the post today. It’s my Magma debut, with one new poem, “Fallen Icons of the Angel Barbie”, and I’m rather stunned to be named on the front cover alongside Selima Hill, Gillian Clarke, Penelope Shuttle and Pascale Petit. Rob A Mackenzie and Polly Clark also…
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Was it Wigtown the last time I blogged? Good heavens! A month is far too long in blog land, isn’t it? Well, I suppose that gives me a neat little link to this post, which is mainly to say that, if you’re anywhere near the National Library of Scotland on Thursday, you should come down…
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I had an amazing weekend at Wigtown Book Festival. My previous experience of the town, described here, could not have been any more of a contrast. There was a real buzz about the place and, unsurprisingly, I kept bumping into people I know from the literary scene. The town seemed to have come into its…
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On Saturday, I had the unusual experience of simultaneously receiving a rejection and my latest publication. I won’t say which magazine the rejection was from, but the publication was in Silk Road, an American magazine whose poetry editor was, until recently, Robert Peake. It’s a well produced magazine, full of completely unfamiliar names to me,…
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Regular readers of this blog will recall that, last year, I tutored an online course for the Poetry School. It was a thoroughly rewarding experience (not least, but certainly not solely, because one of my students was Mark Burnhope, a highly talented poet in his 20s; as regular readers of this blog will also recall,…
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I mentioned previously that one of the pleasures of Greenbelt Festival was meeting people I’ve known online for a while but not met in the flesh before. One such person is journalist and science writer Suzanne Elvidge, who interviewed me for the Surefish website. You can read her piece here.
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Fear not, dear friends: this is not me fessing up to an alcohol problem. No, in fact, it is simply to say that I’m taking part in Gutter magazine‘s “A Night in the Gutter” cabaret evening at Wigtown Book Festival. The other readers will be Rodge Glass — whom I met for the first time…
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Greenbelt 2011 was only my second experience of the festival and my first as a contributor but that’s easily enough to make me hanker more than ever after becoming a regular Greenbelter. I can think of nothing I wouldn’t classify as a highlight, although I know that sounds rather contradictory. The only possible exception is…
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So, today is my last day of the bursary time. It has gone pretty well, I think, although I’ll only get a proper sense of that when I sit back and look at everything I’ve produced over the period. I’m quite looking forward to that task. And even though I haven’t produced anything new today,…
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Feels like it’s ages since I’ve blogged. It certainly feels like I’ve done quite a bit since I last posted anything, so here’s a wee roundup of what I’ve been up to: A Knife Fight in a Telephone Box Our madcap poetry competition, in which the competition had little really to do with the poetry,…
Amy Jo Philip 