split screen

i’ll be at stanza this coming sunday for andy jackson and red squirrel’s launch of split screen. it’s a cracking line up and while i’m not saying it will be one of the events at stanza, it probably will be!

beyond that i don’t think i’ll be much there, abandoning both it and a certain fanboy moment at aye write to see marina warner in order to head north and do a bit of canoeing/cycling. it being scotland tho, this could all change and i might be there every day (most likely in the noodle place stuffing myself. or the cake shop). if you do see me please say hello, bearing in mind that my visual recognition really is rubbish so this may entail actually poking me in the face.

split screen

i’m happy to say that i’m in red squirrel’s split screen, an anthology of poems based on films. as such i’ll be at the college of art in dundee next thursday (16th) at 1800 and at stanza doing the same on march 18th. as far as i’m aware (and these are loose plans!) there’ll be a whole gamut of people reading so it should all be highly entertaining. i’d post more links but i don’t have any!

reading at resonate

so off we went to the resonate arts house in alloa for their international festival and to see how people would respond to distances. i was a tad miffed at the prints as the foam board we’d had for the mounts absorbed the spray mount and bubbled the finish. naturally only me and t noticed this but that’s not the point!

the couple of times i’ve been down to resonate have been great – alloa’s best times, it could be argued, are well past but to have such a space in this wee town id just great and the fact that it manages without any need of grant etc from a central funder is even more amazing. angela and the rest of them do a great job – it’s worth going out of your way to get down and see them just to coast on some of that enthusiasm. other scottish towns should take note.

a great turn out and an abundance of art on the walls. if there wasn’t something there for you could engage with i’d be very surprised. i did a brief bit of speaking and a couple of poems from the prints – they seemed to go down well – watch out for the pictures in the alloa advertiser! i had a gran chat with some of the people and, as with the reading at the festival, a surprise appearance from the past from rachel, who i haven’t seen in what must be the last fifteen years. even back then she was nagging me to get some work out so it was great to finally say here it is!

the only person who wasn’t there was roxana whose presence was limited to my mp3 stuck to the wall. i’m very taken with her versions of the poem so here they all are here

the water brother

the tea drinker’s poem

perfect day

demeter

distances

after what seemed like an eternity in the making i’m delighted to announce that distances, the photobook i’ve done with roxana, finally arrived in four surprisingly heavy cardboard boxes as of this morning. it’s so new i don’t even have a thumbnail of the cover!

if i say so myself, it’s a beautiful looking thing. the poetry is more towards stoneandsea than a lazarus but, despite the poems being older now, i can see both works in them.  expect little in the way of punctuation and long, skinny poems. how to describe the photography? i’d start by looking up something like sumptuous on the thesaurus. i’d hope roxana’s work needs no introduction but if you’re not familiar with it follow the link and have a treat.

i can’t comment on the translation aspect as, no matter that i promised roxana my romanian would be up to it by the time this came out, i haven’t really progressed beyond buying the cds and a firm commitment to the dodgy world of google translate. roxana, i do apologise! but, equally, roxana speaks more than enough languages for the both of us! the brief for the translation was not to do a translation but to produce a version of the original that would make sense romanian. in the end i found this one of the most entertaining aspects of the whole project. aside from layout, syntax and the like there were fundamental questions that you just don’t have to ask (or can avoid) in english. what, for instance, is the gender of the narrator? which leads to a laying out of a different set of poetic cards on the table.

anyway, there’ll be a link on the sidebar in due course once i figure out how to do a paypal thingy. in the meantime i’ll be taking distances out for its first airing at the resonate arts house in alloa on friday night. which, being tomorrow means i should be off working on that. there will be other events in due course so i’ll post them on here.

in the meantime here’s a video of me and roxana mucking about with sound poetry what seems an age ago (we must do more of that!). i still have that childish sense of wonder and potential with technology and the internet and think that distances is very much a product of that. if all it does is encourage others to do something similar (or better, very different!) i’ll be very happy.

and more reading

saw us away up the coast to montrose as part of a calderwood group excursion to rachel fox’s singing and reading do at the links hotel. and a fine trip down memory lane it was. not having been in montrose for some twenty years i managed to negotiate my way down to the beach and just about to our meeting with andy jackson. sometimes the past can seem a very distant place!

and thence to the reading. i could tell you who and what but given my total failure to do the same over the festival i’ll leave it to rachel who’s already done it better than i could. i was further impressed that juliet had got it together to go down to the basin and see the birdlife. mist and rain thoroughly stopped play for myself and t on that front! we were both well impressed by all the singing – there’s far too little of that going on. and tim as ever turned in a fine performance. many thanks to rachel for a great wee night.

the following day i finally got away from work in time to get into the second half of the soutar writers open mike night. just in time to have missed almost everyone so apologies for that. but i got there nonetheless. which saw me starting off on something rachel had said the night before – that it was all very well doing readings for poets and the like minded but doing the links, where the people were out for a night out, was something different again. i missed a song, tho did a couple of lines from it, did a kind of involved poetry joke (which seemed to amuse only me but hey, i’m my best audience!) and we finished up with kenny doing a pixies cover which was a fine thing.

*quote of the day on my ‘slightness’ – ‘is it cos she thinks you’re a fat biffer on your bike?’

those who go out to sea

i finished my festival readings by including a (mis)quote from kenneth white which  went along the lines of – there are three types of people, the living and the dead, and those who go out to sea. i was taken by it when i heard it and used it to illustrate a point i was trying to make about collaborative working and, by extension, my whole festival experience.

the captain’s bar. i ended up doing three readings here, each one different but each one building on the one before. there were definite crowdpleasers and i found myself enjoying them in the repetition, memorizing the material and just generally putting a bit more on the delivery each time. plus we got to meet a bunch of people and, even better, hear a bunch of people we’d never heard before many of whom actually live here and don’t seem to have appeared elsewhere during the year. this was deeply reassuring!

i’m still abuzz with the reading at the church. not only was it a great contrast with the pub, better acoustics, different style of reading but i found the experience of reading in, for me, a unique venue, really quite exciting. again i feel enervated to be doing some more of this. also, i found the presence of some of the local writers really supportive. sometimes the writing can be a bit of an isolating business and their presence gave me a bit of insight into just how much having a gaggle of like minds grounds me, gives me some sort of sense of belonging.

and then there was the weaving. this took place at craig’s close, off cockburn street, a place i’ve walked by many, many times but had nebver realised the robert fergusson connection. the omens were good!

it’s a funny thing with poetry in scotland. sometimes you feel it isn’t such a youthful activity. one of the many things i’ve enjoyed about working with this collection is getting to work with, meet and engage with people younger than me. it’s great to get caught up in all that enthusiasm and potential (so unsullied by job, mortgages and the like!! lol). and finally to meet rocio.

the deal was we were to fill the space with lines of wool, invite passersby to get involved, just to see what happened. we sat on the steps and got to blethering about non-space, skateboarding, three and four dimensionality, all that theory stuff that i never, ever talk about except to t and maybe, rarely, one other human being! i really caught myself at this and was quite taken aback at the level of my self editing! but what a wonderful thing. i can’t remember the last time i came away from a poetry type event full of so much energy. the rain poured down. i sat in a puddle. i got very cold. none of that mattered. everything that i like to think and believe in when it comes to the individual and art was absolutely possible in that one wee space for that one hour. it was sublime….

and so to the banshee labyrinth cinema for short films and more readings. we were both well into simon jackson’s landlocked (the rest of this collection’s films can be seen here with the promise of more to come) but the quality and diversity of the films shone out as usual. simon was away before we could speak to him which was a shame. ten minutes of reading later and it was all done. off we went into the festival night and for the first time in the last ten days i didn’t have to be thinking about what i was going to be doing at the next gig. (a brief shout out for saffrani in south college street. top quality indian food, far surpassing that of other more well know establishments i’ve eaten at in the town)

what did i learn? i focused more on my voice, how i delivered it. i discovered that memorizing my own work wasn’t so difficult. i discovered again that i really like working with other people, embarking on some voyage of discovery, making something new.

there really are three types of people. there are those who just live, who get by and blur the line between living and dying. and there are those who get out, who set out to sea, who go and discover new experience, daft wee things, make memories and stories and bring them back to land. i love that mode of life. what a brilliant thing it would be if more of us adopted that moe of life, set out into those uncharted waters just to see what might happen…

festival so far

so, first two gigs down, three to go.

different sets at each one, tha making up of which has been interesting. haven’t got a list for thursday as yet but i’ll cross that bridge when i get to it. i very much enjoyed the experience of reading in a church today – thanks to tessa ransford for making that happen. it’s been great also, to see some of my writing buddies at both events – i very much appreciate it.

elsewhere i’m making an appearance on qarrtsiluni. i’m always into a browse at qarrtsiluni but i’ve found this last installment particularly varied and well worth a look. thanks for that dave.

like the buses

all the readings come along at once. so, confirmed, what i’ll be doing at the festival is as follows

august 13th

captain’s bar, south college street, edinburgh, kick off at 1930

august 16th

st john’s church, princes street, edinburgh at 1400. as part of tessa ransford’s golden thread programme. it is actually a gig in a church which is a new venue type for me and i’m really looking forward to it. being a church it’s £1 or donation. check out the full listing if you can’t make this day as it’s a nice change of pace of an afternoon and the poets she’s got are really interesting.

august 19th

captain’s bar again. i don;t know quite what the deal is with either of these as the line up is changing at this very moment. by some bizarre coincidence it turns out that violinist kirsty lingard, whose name cropped up just the other day, is doing something (the music?) as part of the same night so it’s more than just the spoken word. best of all it’s free!

august 21st

craig’s close, edinburgh at 1800. this is part of the this collection doings and this time i’m part of some sort of weaving installation. i know no more than that and as a result i’m really intrigued. turn up in the street!

august 22nd

more this collection shenanigans, this time at the banshee labyrinth cinema, starting at 1645. maps, details etc are here

the banshee labyrinth is in niddry street and is, apparently, edinburgh’s most haunted pub, if that’s your thing.

i’ll hoping to get a different spin on each date and that my voice will hold out. come along, banter, shout, whatever you want!

teaching

so i got to go into a school and talk about poetry or, as i put it, the fundamental nature of creative effort and its centrality as a means to better living. it was a bit of a struggle to be honest, wellness not being central to my existence currently but if i have learned anything about this sort of experience it’s how to put on a game face.

the first thing i noticed was how difficult it was to get access to the school. true, i expected to have to sign in but i didn’t expect the levels of polite concern i was shown, nor to be escorted everywhere. i’ve worked in secure facilities where security hasn’t been as good! and given where i work the contrast was quite ridiculous. then the library. true, when i was there the school had a library but nothing like this. a proper palace of books, an entire section of classics, hardbacked in the everyman edition (which i very much like), row upon row of untouched beauty, along with masses of ‘books for younger readers’ as well as a fine collection of modern fiction. the whole school in fact, looked like a palace to me. back in the day the site was a field where i roamed!

i don’t know much of anything about teenagers and i told them as much. their curriculum, even though it was explained to me, remains a bit of a mystery. i told them i’d try not to refer to them as children or young people (i hated that as i recall). what i didn’t tell them was how alien they looked to me, strange unformed human beings, but wonderful. and healthy! i can’t remember the last time i was in a room full of people who so obviously didn’t have the full gamut of alcohol and drug problems, mental health issues, general things you die of. but time enough. i’d been watching something about kids in ghana recently, heart rending stuff where all they wanted was education as a means of escape and here we were, drowning in it. and all these people of a similar age with minds just waiting to be filled up with experiences. i was genuinely spooked by it!

my tack was to tackle the ‘what are you going to write about’ problem and i gave them a range of differently styled poems. i didn’t talk about short story or novel as there wasn’t time which was a pity as i wanted to get across there was more to writing than just poetry. they didn’t talk, they didn’t ask questions but i got that sense, not with every poem, but with a good few of them, that they were getting it, that they were listening. and we did an association exercise so that everyone, whether they knew it or not, was writing and what came out was quirky, funny and sometimes genuinely lovely. i met a guy who wasn’t even in the classes but just came to listen. he loves poetry, i know this because he told me. when i was at school admitting to that would have been like being thrown to wolves! and he had that thing you have when you’re young, that certainty that what he was doing was absolutely right. that made me smile. i salute you brave warrior! i even got one guy to stand up do a couple of line thing about thunderbirds where he used a prop and a sound effect. what a winner!

but although the pupils were interesting, it wasn’t what i really carried away with me. i has a sense, when i was speaking to them, of overwhelming responsibility, that the teachers who do this for a living have to come in and do this many times, every day, every week and that’s before any ‘problems’ surface. still public service but massively different from what i do. and that obama thing about public service being a privilege keeps on coming back to me. in the staff room some of the pre exam people came to speak to their teacher for a psychological lift before their tests! and the teachers – i’d expected something not a million miles away from the health service but it was much further away than that. they seemed genuinely engaged with those they taught, concerned and respectful. they were motivated, got all excited when they got to look at the day’s exam paper, talked enthusiastically about what they were teaching, discussed it with each other, ways they could make it better. i hung about in the staff room far longer than i’d anticipated just to surf that wave!

okay, i’m willing to accept that maybe not all schools are like this one, and maybe i did just get lucky but to be in a sphere of public service and witness this level of commitment was both unexpected and kind of wonderful.

a couple of hours later and i found myself, by a few weird turns of coincidence, in the middle of an air evacuation. you can take them man away from his job but… the job will find him!

portobello

the next installment from alastair cook for this collection is portobello. as in the previous one if you’re linking to the video can you make sure you mention alastair’s site. and this one for that matter. thank you and enjoy!