Blog

Delighted to be performing alongside the 2014 Costa Prizewinner Jonathan Edwards at this year’s EIBF. We’ll be reading in the Bailie Gifford Corner Theatre on Friday 21 August at 8.45pm. Hope you can join us for good poems and good cheer, and some very politely broken rules.

POETS WHO BREAK THE RULES

Sophia Loren, Marty McFly and a bicycling nun are just three of the characters who populate Jonathan Edwards’ poems in My Family and Other Superheroes, a collection that won the Welsh poet the Costa Prize for Poetry in 2014. Ryan Van Winkle, the US-born, Edinburgh-based poet’s second collection The Good Dark includes some of the poems he performed in a much-admired one-on-one Fringe show in 2012.

Delighted to announce I’ll be reading at the launch of a new science fiction magazine from Scotland, Shoreline of Infinity, edited by friend and poet Russell Jones. It will feature new fiction, art, articles and reviews, and will have both a digital and old timey paper edition. It’s on Thursday 2 July from 7.30pm, at Paradise Palms, 41 Lothian Street, near the Edinburgh University campus. Hope to see you there!

It’s a night of science fiction performances, with music from Painted Ocean, poetry from Claire Askew and Ryan Van Winkle, story reading from the magazine performed by Debbie Cannon, plus SF inspired artwork, cocktails, books, fun, frivolity and photon cannons.

Free entry. Costumes welcomed. Live long and preposterously.

2nd July 2015 at the wonderful Paradise Palms, Edinburgh, starts 7.30pm

For all our fans in sunny Germany, the Fort Gorgast Festival is on this July, from Thursday 23 to Sunday 26, and I’ll be reading at 2pm on Friday 24. If you’re in town, if you like big fields, camping, sunshine, music and poems and general partytimes, do come along. It’ll be a blast.

Myself and Dan Gorman are taking Viewmaster on the road again, this time for the closing evening of the 46th Poetry International Rotterdam Festival. Get your fix of intimate, nostalgic, private-space poetry in one of the most beautiful poetry festivals on the planet.

Really delighted and honoured to be on one heck of a show for the final Rally & Broad of Season 3, next Friday 19 June. I’ll be joining the incredibly talented poets Ross Sutherland and Hannah Silva, the heartbreaking tunes of Dan Willson aka Withered Hand and Caro Bridges, and of course your congenial hosts Jenny Lindsay and Rachel McCrum. It’s going to be one hell of a night, it’s as ever a bargaintastic £5, really hope to see all of you at the Bongo Club, Cowgate, Friday 19 June, doors at 7pm.

Delighted to be chairing Tomasz Różycki this Sunday 7 June at Word Power Books.

Word Power Books and Interaktywny Salon Piszących w Szkocji (Interactive Writing Salon in Scotland) are pleased to present an event with one of the most remarkable Polish poets Tomasz Różycki about his work and its translations into English.

Różycki, 45, is the author of seven poetry volumes which have been very well received in his native country and abroad. He was given the Kościelski Award for Dwanaście stacji /Twelve Stations and was shortlisted for the Nike Award (Polish Booker prize) for Kolonie /Colonies. The latter volume translated into English by Mira Rosenthal was shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize last year and won the Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation.

Różycki is also a translator in his own right, bringing French authors to the Polish audience.

The event will include readings in both Polish and English as well as conversation with the author. Chaired by Ryan van Winkle.

The event is supported by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Edinburgh and the Polish Cultural Institute in London.

Very excited to announce an IRL book tour to go with the virtual tour being made by poems across the internet. If you live in London, Cardiff, Glasgow or Edinburgh, I will soon be in your cities, reading some poems. Here’s the itinerary:

– London — Waterstones Piccadilly, 7pm, Monday 1 June

w/ Penned in the Margins poet Naomi Booth

– Cardiff — Waterloo Tea – Wyndham Arcade, 7pm, Tuesday 2 June

w/ Nia Davies & surprise special guests!!

– Glasgow — Tell It Slant Bookshop, 7pm, Wednesday 3 June

w/ Matthew Siegel: (Matthew Siegel’s Blood Work is out from CB Editions. The deceptive directness of Matthew Siegel’s debut is remarkable’ – Mark Doty)

– Edinburgh — Blackwell’s Bookshop, 6.30pm, Thursday 4 June

w/ Matthew Siegel

– PLUS FREE AFTERPARTY at The Forest Café from 8pm, featuring Supermoon, Hailey Beavis & more!

Hope to see you there.

Tomorrow night, May 15 at 23:55, join me on Periscope (@rvwable) for a reading from The Good Dark, my second collection, published by Penned in the Margins. Hope to see you then.

Delighted to announce that my second collection, The Good Dark, published by the good folks at Penned in the Margins, will be going on a virtual book tour through poetry magazines and blogs over the next several weeks. My sincere thanks to those who are giving it room and board.

Also, if you’re on Periscope, please join me on my feed (@rvwable) at 23:55, 15 May, when I will be reading from The Good Dark in the good dark.

Here’s where you can find poems and fine things:

– Penned in the Margins — 16 May

– Scottish Poetry Library — 19 May

– Inpress Books — 20 May

– The Poetry School — 21 May

– 3am Magazine — 25 May

– Sabotage Reviews — 29 May

– Shakespeare & Company — 1 June

– Scottish Book Trust — 2 June

– The Ofi Press — 4 June

– Missing Slate — 7 June

– B O D Y Literature — 10 June