readings
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A quick post to remind anyone withing striking distance of Newcastle that I’m reading from The North End of the Possible at the Lit & Phil on Monday evening. The event is free — which leaves you free to spend your pennies on a sparkling, hot-of-the-press copy of the book — and starts at 7:00pm.
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This week, I’m busy preparing for a poetry retreat I’m leading at Nether Springs, the mother house of the Northumbria Community, this weekend coming (12 to 14 April). I’m excited about this because it’s the first extended opportunity I’ve had to put together poetry and spirituality. My previous visits to Nether Springs — always as
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Oh, is it really more than a month since I last posted?! How time flies when you’re preparing the next book and an online course for the Poetry School! Still, it’s good, thoroughly enjoyable, rewarding busyness, that. Anyway, if anyone is still here — perhaps you’re appreciating the contents of the cupboards; I hope so
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Next week is Book Week Scotland, our first ever official national celebration of books and reading. I’m very pleased to be joining Edinburgh-based poets Rob A Mackenzie and Elspeth Murray and visiting Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama for a reading on the Thursday that week (29 November). I first met Pádraig when he led a retreat in
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November is almost upon us already, which means that — aside from all the ghoulish goodies in the supermarkets, the building of bonfires and the buying of fireworks — Linlithgow Book Festival is just around the corner. This year’s LBF runs from Friday, 2 November to Sunday, 4 November. As in previous years, I’m running
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This post is just a quickie to say that I’ll be appearing at the Callander Poetry Weekend (7 to 8 September) this year as part of the Split Screen and filmpoem events on the Saturday afternoon. The weekend is free, and there is a lot going on. The full programme can be found here. Despite
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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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Having been caught up with the publicity for the 06 | 16 — The Fruitmachine reading at the Fruitmarket Gallery, I’ve almost neglected to tell you anything about another reading I’m involved this festival season. It’s at the Banshee Labyrinth a week today — Tuesday 21st of August — and also involves six poets, namely:
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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
Amy Jo Philip 