In which we make a fresh start. Featuring words, music, projections, snacks, boiler suits and dancing.At 3.30pm, Sunday 28 August a film of my interview with Clive James will be broadcast at the Queensland Poetry Festival, at the Judith Butler Centre of Contemporary Arts.
#QPF2016 #LOSTLANGUAGEFOUND presents a very special filmed sesssion with Clive James.
Clive James: an exclusive in-depth interview and moving reading of new (and some unreleased) work QPF filmed in his Cambridge home in March of this year. Clive discusses his life, his poetry, his view of Australian poetry past & present, plus his mortality and the Japanese maple that keeps living. The interview was conducted by award-winning Scottish poet Ryan Van Winkle.
This is the premiere screening, complimented by The Viola Cloning Project performing a few of Clive’s favourite Desert Island Disc tracks. Hosted by the Courier Mail’s Arts Editor Phil Brown, who will also read his favourite James poem.
Clive James was born in Sydney in 1939 and was educated at the University of Sydney and Pembroke College, Cambridge. A memoirist, poet, translator, critic, novelist, travel writer, lyricist and broadcaster, he has written more than thirty books, the two most recently published being Collected Poems and Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature. He holds honorary doctorates from Sydney University and the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013 an Officer of the Order of Australia. He lives in Cambridge.
Tickets only $15 – on sale now via tickets link.
Presented by Queensland Poetry Festival in association with McCullough Robertson
QPF also acknowledges the assistance of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, as well as the financial support of Australia Council for the Arts and Brisbane City Council for this event.
Starting Monday 19 September, I’ll be teaching an online course with the Blues Studio, an intensive 3-week course riffing on sadness & grief and joy & happiness.
In this Studio course, we’ll be looking at The Blues — that repurposing of sadness & grief into joy and celebration. We’ll find inspiration from blues rhythms and verses, starting with the traditional blues form and then working through a series of exercises that explode the blues in interesting and innovative new ways, while still encompassing all those things that make the blues what it is: melancholy yet soulful, a way of reflecting on emotional pain with heightened heart and music. When poets have radially experimented with the sonnet beyond recognition – why not the blues? From the prison poems of Etheridge Knight, to the Stax-influenced work of Cornelius Eddy, to the surreal and celebratory work of Mary Ruefle we’ll look at how the blues has influenced poetry and will influence yours.
Poetry Studios are three-week long intensive courses. Reading material will be distributed before the course begins. There are no live chats so they are suitable for both UK & International students.
For more information visit our Online Courses page.
My interview with Australian poet and critic Clive James will be screened at the Queensland Poetry Festival on Sunday 28 August, from 3.30-4.30pm, at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts.
#QPF2016 #LOSTLANGUAGEFOUND presents a very special filmed session with Clive James.
Clive James: an exclusive in-depth interview and moving reading of new (and some unreleased) work QPF filmed in his Cambridge home in March of this year. Clive discusses his life, his poetry, his view of Australian poetry past & present, plus his mortality and the Japanese maple that keeps living. The interview was conducted by award-winning Scottish poet Ryan Van Winkle.
This is the premiere screening, complimented by The Viola Cloning Project performing a few of Clive’s favourite Desert Island Disc tracks. Hosted by the Courier Mail’s Arts Editor Phil Brown, who will also read his favourite James poem.
Clive James was born in Sydney in 1939 and was educated at the University of Sydney and Pembroke College, Cambridge. A memoirist, poet, translator, critic, novelist, travel writer, lyricist and broadcaster, he has written more than thirty books, the two most recently published being Collected Poems and Gate of Lilacs: A Verse Commentary on Proust. In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins memorial medal for literature. He holds honorary doctorates from Sydney University and the University of East Anglia. In 2012 he was appointed CBE and in 2013 an Officer of the Order of Australia. He lives in Cambridge.
Tickets only $15 – on sale now via tickets link.
Presented by Queensland Poetry Festival in association with McCullough Robertson
QPF also acknowledges the assistance of the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, as well as the financial support of Australia Council for the Arts and Brisbane City Council for this event.
I’ll be reading at the Centre Pompidou from 6pm on Wednesday 20 July, in a collaboration with Shakespeare & Co. If you’re in Paris, it’d be great to see you.
**This event takes place in the Beat Generation exhibition space and is included in the price of the entry ticket.**
For the third collaboration between Shakespeare and Company and the Centre Pompidou we present one of the most exciting and incendiary young poets at work today, Ryan Van Winkle.
I’ll be giving one-to-one poetry readings in Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel at this year’s Forest Fringe. A new show starts every 20 minutes, eighteen shows every day, from Tuesday 16 – Saturday 20 August. Hope to see you there.
Red, Like Our Room Used To Feel
Tue 16 – Sat 20 August, 12noon-3pm; 4pm-7pm, every 20 minutes.
An intimate one-to-one poetry performance from Ryan Van Winkle. An audio voyage featuring ambient melodies from Ragland. An installation with paintings, photographs and ephemera from a host of artists. A little space to listen. Joy, memory and loss condensed into 15 minutes.
A red room to lay down in with a free cup of port or tea and as many biscuits as you like.
‘Intimate and haunting’ (Lyn Gardner, Guardian)
‘Simple, yearning and effective’ (Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out)
Ryan Van Winkle – is a working poet. His second collection, “The Good Dark”, won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship in 2012 and a residency at The Studios of Key West in 2016. Ragland – is an island of musical adventures where musical adventurist Gareth Warner has found himself shipwrecked.
Saturday July 30th: 7.30pm – 9.00pm: The Bakehouse |44 High Street | Gatehouse of Fleet | DG7 2HP
The ubiquitous RYAN VAN WINKLE has been there, done that and won almost everything!
He’s a feisty, widely published, young American living in Edinburgh who is live artist, podcaster, critic, poet, festival organiser and workshop leader. His second collection The Good Dark, won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award, he has organised and appeared in Festivals in Syria, Pakistan and Iraq, was awarded a coveted Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship in 2012 and a residency at The Studios of Key West in 2016. He gets about! Not only, but also….More about R van W on www.ryanvanwinkle.com
The Bakehouse hosts regular poetry readings featuring internationally acclaimed writers – Australia last month, America this – but it also offers a regular intimate and friendly opportunity for folks to share their work in our popular OPEN MIKE SESSIONS. Aka The Fickle Tupperware Bowl of Fate. Last month we featured The Harpies ( Hilary Hawker and Ruth Sanderson harping on), Geoff Keating giving us a bit of sax, David Hannay squeezing his small pipes, with beautifully performed poems ranging from serious, political, topical and the downright comic. Come and show Ryan Van Winkle ( no relation) what we’re made of.
Tickets £5.00 – available from chrys@chryssalt.com or 01557 814175
As part of the Highlight Arts series this August, the team will be heading to Stornoway and Finsbay for two evenings poetry, music and storytelling, on Tuesday 23 and Wednesday 24 respectively.
In a recent collaborative project organised by Highlight Arts, poets from Pakistan and Scotland came together to create new poetry, stories and music in Glasgow and Lahore. Building on this exchange, the Edinburgh International Book Festival invited illustrators and storytellers from both countries to the Lahore Literary Festival in February of this year. Their tour and creative exchange continues for these special events, in which storytellers Shazea Quraishi and Ian Stephen and illustrators Mehreen Fatima and Kate Leiper are joined by musicians Sara Kasmi and Sarah Hayes to present the results of this collaboration.
The first event will take place at An Lanntair on the 23rd of August with the Mission House Studio in Harris hosting the second event on the 24th. For more details on the Mission House please click here.
These events are presented as part of Edinburgh International Book Festival’s Booked! programme, which takes the energy and excitement of the Book Festival on the road around Scotland, throughout the year. Booked! is supported by players of People’s Postcode Lottery. This event is supported by the British Council.
–
After the overwhelming success of the March’s event, Simmer, a night of poetry and flavour, we are again joined by our host, Ryan Van Winkle, for a night where we pair four poets with dishes carefully selected & prepared to illuminate and echo their work.
This unique collaboration between food & poetry will use flavour, scent, and colour in response to some of Scotland’s most distinct voices. A delicious evening which will touch all of your senses.
Simmer pairs four poets with exquisite dishes carefully selected & prepared to illuminate their work. Readings will be from Krystelle Bamford, Alan Gillis whose work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Colin Herda poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Glasgow University and the versatile weaver of styles Elspeth Murray.
Most recently, Krystelle Bamford’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review. In 2010, she was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and was shortlisted for the 2011 Bridport Prize. Though raised in the US, she has been living in Edinburgh for the past nine years.
Alan Gillis is from Belfast and now lives in Scotland, where he teaches English at The University of Edinburgh. He has published four poetry collections with The Gallery Press: Scapegoat (2014), Here Comes the Night (2010), Hawks and Doves (2007) and Somebody, Somewhere (2004), which won the Strong Award for Best First Collection in Ireland. He has also been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize, and for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. In 2014 he was selected as a ‘Next Generation Poet’ by the Poetry Book Society in the UK. As a critic he is author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s (2005), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012), both published by Oxford University Press, along with many essays on contemporary Irish and British poetry. From 2010-2015 he was editor of Edinburgh Review. A Selected Poems entitled Scapegoat and Other Poems will be published in the USA by Wake Forest Press in 2016.
Colin Herd is a poet and lecturer in creative writing at University of Glasgow. Books include too ok (Blazevox, 2011), Glovebox (KFS, 2013), Oberwildling (with SJ Fowler, ACF, 2015) and Press Back Up Help (forthcoming). He is a co-organiser of the new poetry festival Outside-In/Inside-Out which launches in Glasgow in October 2016.
With over 20 years of collaborative work in education, health, business and the performing arts, Elspeth Murray is a writer who enjoys the unpredictable. Her poetry residencies have taken place in shopping centres, distilleries, international conferences, hospices and schools. Her workplace residencies feature in a 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary Blood, Sweat, Tears and Poetry. Elspeth’s poem Flip Flotsam inspired an award-winning documentary of the same name, while This Is Bad Enough has supported health literacy policy work in several countries. Commissioned work includes poems that have been set to music by Dee Isaacs for a staging of the Sufi classic Conference of The Birds at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh in 2013 and a response to the refugee crisis Postcards From Our World in 2016. Her poem about her local Hungarian lollipop lady for the Edinburgh Unsung anthology features in The Scotsman on 2nd July 2016.
If you would like to join in this evening of thought, lyrics and flavours, please book early to avoid disappointment. If the previous iteration of Simmer is anything to go by, it will be a surefire success, and a joy for all. The dinner costs £35 per person, with an optional drinks pairing of £30 with drinks chosen to match the menu, and of course, the poems.
Mail book@edinburghfoodstudio.co or call 0131 258 0758 to secure your place!
The Skinny has published a preview of the upcoming Highlight Arts event, From Lewis to Lahore, at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. Poets from Scotland and Pakistan will be presenting their collaborations and translations, including Shazea Quraishi, Jim Carruth, Sara Kazmi, Ian Stephen, Mujahid Eshai and myself.
The readings will be in the Unbound Spiegeltent at 9pm, Sunday 21 August, and tickets are free.
In a recent collaborative project organised by Highlight Arts, poets from Pakistan and Scotland came together to create new poetry, stories and music in Glasgow and Lahore. Building on this exchange, the Edinburgh International Book Festival invited illustrators and storytellers from both countries to the Lahore Literary Festival in February of this year. Their tour and creative exchange continues for these special events, in which storytellers Shazea Quraishi and Ian Stephen and illustrators Mehreen Fatima and Kate Leiper are joined by musicians Sara Kasmi and Sarah Hayes to present the results of this collaboration.
