Blog

Dr Nazand Begikhani in the Erbil Citadel

What better way to start off 2013 than by taking a trip to Erbil, Iraq with the Reel Festivals and a cohort of excellent poets? We’ve been working with Reel Festivals for a number of years now, and this time we’re heading to the city of Erbil in Northern Iraq, home of the Kurdistan Parliament and the Erbil Literature Festival.

We’ve invited four Scottish/Scottish-based poets along: the amazing John Glenday, who needs zero introduction, TS Eliot prizewinner and full-time Shetlander Jen Hadfield, our friend William Letford whose first book “Bevel” should be rocking your reading list immediately, and Krystelle Bamford, proud owner of a New Writers Award.

They’ll be working with Iraqi writers Ghareeb Iskander, author of the 2009 collection Chariot of Illusion, Kurdish poet and women’s rights activist Awezan Nouri, Baghdad based poet and journalist Sabreen Khadhim and emerging poet Zahir Mousa and all will all be joining us on the return journey to the UK to participate in the Reel Iraq Festival from 21-24 March in Dumfries, London, Edinburgh and Glasgow! Wow, that was a long sentance! But please, do keep these dates free in your diaries.

We’re really grateful to Creative Scotland their funding of this project, which couldn’t have happened without their help. Remember to check out Reel Festivals’ Twitter and Facebook profiles to keep up to date on all of our upcoming projects.

This man will teach you many things.

Starting this February, I’ll be reprising my role as wisdom-dispenser/tutor extraordinaire with five weekly poetry classes in association with the Poetry School. The PS gives all the lovely, flattering details:

Read Like a Writer Returns

Day / Time: Thursdays, 6-8pm
Duration: 5 weeks
Start Date: 7 February
Price: £63, £54 (60+), £47 (concs)
Level: open to all.

In this session students will read a selection of contemporary poets with an eye to learn how to take risks with style and form. As Picasso said: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal’. And so, we will practice theft together, to see that no matter who or what you try to sound like – you will always come out sounding like yourself. Therein you may discover your own voice. Plenty of room for discussion and in-class assignments. Sign up now to receive your first assignment! All levels welcome, and you will get on well whether you have taken last term’s course with Ryan or not.
To book: call 0207 582 1679 (£1.50 booking fee) or online at www.poetryschool.com (no booking fee)

Your congenial hosts

Next Friday at the Counting House I’ll be performing at Edinburgh’s finest cabaret of spoken word, song and lyrical delight, Rally & Broad! Super excited to be joining our friends and congenial hosts Jenny Lindsay and Rachel McCrum, PLUS a host of talented writers, songers and performance arters.

NAMELY

Super talented Falkirkian playwright and novelist Alan Bissett; joining me in the poetry corner is the Scottish Poetry Library’s own JL Williams; excellent tunes from Andrew Eaton-Lewis’ solo project Seafieldroad and Edinburgher indie-folk trio Kite and the Crane; and Rebecca Green will be presenting ‘Love’, a spoken word performance that sounds pretty darned intriguing.

It’s going to be a great night, we’ll all get responsibly boozy and check out each other’s literary talents, I can’t wait to get on stage with these guys. Also there’s a very professional raffle. Hope to see you there!

What: Rally & Broad Hangover Special

When: Friday January 18, doors 7.30pm

Where: The Counting House, Edinburgh

How much: £5.

I sat down for a chat with a couple of our good friends SJ Fowler and Tomasz Ró?ycki during the Sofia Poetics Festival with Literature Across Frontiers. They have some really interesting things to say about approaching their writing, how important it is to keep yourself up to date reading other poets, and challenging your assumptions about what can be achieved in your writing.

In this podcast we get a chance to hear them reading from their work, including SJ’s projects addressing anti-semitism and life in prison, Tomasz giving us a crash course on the history of poetry in Poland, and a really insightful discussion of each writer’s individual approach to their work. Check it all out in our podcast, right here:

In other news, SJ’s Enemies project comes kicking and screaming into 2013 with its first event at the Rich Mix Arts Centre in old London Town. It’s on February 9, it’s at 7pm, it has all of these wonderful people, plus yours truly:

your face when you read this list

Chris McCabe & Tom Jenks
George Szirtes & Carol Watts
Peter Jaeger & Tim Atkins
James Wilkes & Christodoulos Makris
Stephen Emmerson & Lucy Harvest Clarke
Alex Niven & Joe Kennedy
Roddy Lumsden & Carrie Etter
Todd Swift & Paul Perry
Marek Kazmierski & Stephen Watts
Sophie Mayer & Astrid Alben
Holly Pester & Daniel Rourke
Kirsty Irving & Ryan Van Winkle
Tamarin Norwood & tba

It’s going to be a wonderfully magical evening of collaboration and exciting new ways of looking at this crazy poetry thing that we do. If you’re in London in early February and want something a little off piste for your Saturday night, look no further than the Enemies project at Rich Mix Arts Centre.

Commiserate

SJ Fowler likes bears

Just because this is Poetry – we shouldn’t take it too seriously. Often, I forget this. Over the years what was once play has, at times, gotten built up in my head enough to make seem like work. I’ve never liked work. So, I found myself avoiding writing as if it were a school assignment. I was very much in this mode when the poet SJ Fowler, without knowing, slapped me in the face and snapped me out of it. Fowler punched with words, loved a weird line, and turned scraps of conversation into poetry and reminded me: it doesn’t matter, all poems mustn’t be understood, and that writing is for the self as much as it is for the audience. Conversations with this avant-garde courter of the dangerous and lover of the extemporaneous was a much needed shot of adrenaline. When we met in September 2012 on a Literature Across Frontierstrip to Sofia, Bulgaria he was deep into his Enemies project – a series of collaborations between himself and other poets – and I was flattered when asked to join in. I was nervous but immediately found freedom in our exchange. I enjoyed the way I could send forward only half a line or force the poem off a cliff or mimic his style or say horrible things noone could attribute to me alone. Our Suburb poems were conversations, arguments, and journalism – as news from our lives, or the world, intruded on the work. I enjoyed it so much that when it ended, I wanted more. And so that is what this is. Every month you’ll find a new collaboration between myself and a poet friend. Consider yourself cc’d.

More about SJ Fowler’s collaborations.

This month:

Dave Coates: Over the past few years Edinburgh has been better for having Dave Coates in it. We met when he was doing his MSC at Edinburgh University and I was struck by his mature voice and his ability to edit and critique wisely with kindness and taste. Over the years, it has been my pleasure to regularly workshop with Dave and his advice on my first collection was invaluable. Over November we worked on a series of haiku while I was in France and he in Edinburgh. It was some of the best email I’d gotten all month. Also, I enjoy Dave’s provocative blog. You should too.

Building on a Lake

Outside is the wind.
Last night’s limitations brought
instantly to mind.

*

The last leaves struggle.
Fog rises from pond, ablaze
in my own head lights.

*

Bowls clean, table clear,
huddled in a corner, cats
spring around YouTube.

*

Seasons change a face
I will move slower than trees
avoid all the screens

*

Should we? Shouldn’t we?
What have we to lose but our
frozen memory?

*

Walking cross a lake with a large branch, my brother empty
red coat and racoon hat. Hearing only our fog breath, cracks.

*

Someone built a bench
on one side of the Great Lake.
I join the sitters.

*

And folks built a bar
on frozen Lake Laida, well
this is what we do.

*

What we do in spring
is what we miss in winter.
Round here? Everything.

*

And what are your hands
thankful for – the shadow cast,
splint of popsicle?

*

The walk home. The wine.
A darkened streetlamp reveals
Venus, Orion.

*

I want new feet, it would be good to rest. An honest man
could read all of Kierkegaard and never guess humans have bodies.

*

Music can be played
everywhere and has no smell.
Hands, peach, flesh, wheel, ice.

*

The leaf in the cup.
The heat in the still café.
You, inside, look out.

—

Usually writing a poem is a soul-searching, teeth-grinding, self-doubting excoriation laced with the kind of head-clutching existential angst reserved for the underemployed and overpriviledged. My commonest thought during the few weeks of this little collab: writing shouldn’t be this much fun… I rather hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Best,

Dave.

<message ends>

In an only slightly festive Culture Laser, I chatted to the awesome Alex and Mo of Little Bulb Theatre down at the Battersea Arts Centre, working on a new show, “Orpheus”, which involves a gypsy jazz band, Django Reinhardt and a big old stage. These guys performed in the Forest Fringe way back when, and it’s fantastic to catch up with them. They are funny and droll and you’ll want to befriend them.

We also caught up with sound artist Daniel Jones, who shares with us a fantastic piece, “Because the Moon”, voiced by The Dude with the Voice, Dave Stewart, and based on the dense volume of spam email received in the past year.

And if that wasn’t enough, our friend Robin Grey shares a couple of yuletide tunes with us to warm your heart and cool your nerves.

Check it all out here:

The Golden Hour returns to the womb. Which sounds just about as painful as this may be.

FREE * BYOB * FREE * BYOB * FREE * BYOB

Words, Music, Cartoons all in a beautiful space.

During this year’s StAnza Poetry Festival we had the privilege of meeting up with Rozalie Hirs, a Dutch composer of chamber and electroacoustic works, poet, vocalist and even chemical engineer. She mixes sound experiments and poetry, just one of the great things that StAnza specialises in; performances that simply cannot be contained by the page.

In the podcast she shares some of her compositions, and talks about her writing habits, discusses the brain’s capacity for interpreting and processing information in poetry and basically blows our minds. We also include snippets from her pieces in LA and Bridging Babel. You can find out more about Rozalie at her website, and her work is available for purchase on the iTunes and for download on her site. We had a really illuminating conversation, you can check out the whole podcast below.

Photo by Peter Dibdin: http://www.peterdibdin.com/

It’s only a matter of days until we pack our bags, hop the turnstiles and take our bedroom down to London. That’s right — the only “one-to-one poetry reading in a makeshift bedsit” at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe is heading to the Battersea Arts Centre for a short run in one of the most cutting-edge theatres in the UK, and I hope you can join us there.

In even more amazing news, the good folks at Creative Scotland have agreed to fund our expedition into the wild Southlands, This would have been a really difficult endeavour without their help, and we’re really grateful for their support. This is absolutely one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever had a chance to get off the ground, and I’d love for you to be a part of it. Which you can do if you…

Book Tickets Here

The BAC’s Christmas Cook Up season is epic and exciting and means my little show will be surrounded by scratches, musicals, cabaret, friends like Little Bulb and Josie Long and two stunning productions from the acclaimed Kneehigh theatre. I expect an anything can happen atmosphere similar to the one at Hidden Door, Edinburgh where our show was lucky enough to kick off.

Anyway, if you are in London between 12-15 and 18-22 December you must come see all the treats on display and, please,  pop in for a twenty-minute holiday in a room full of booze and poems. There’s a mug of tea with your name on it.

Red, Like our Room Used to Feel is a rare, intimate, one-to-one poetry reading. Hide away in a cozy bed-sit, among trinkets, ephemera, artworks and an original score. Select your poems, lay back, make yourself at home, enjoy a snifter of port or a spot of Earl Grey, and drink in the specially created atmosphere.

From 12 – 15, 18 – 22 December.

The installation features music from Gareth Warner’s Ragland, paintings, photographs and objets d’art from a host of Edinburgh-based artists, plus Van Winkle’s award-winning poems read by the author. It is joy, memory and loss condensed into a tea break. It is an ambient audio voyage. It is a red room to lay down in, close your eyes and be where you want to be.

Herald Scotland: ***** “A brief oasis of calm, where being read to is a welcome pleasure not often enjoyed beyond childhood.” — Mary Brennan

What: Red, Like Our Room Used to Feel

Where: Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, London, SW11 5TN

When: 12 – 15 December & 18 – 22 December, 2012; shows from 6:20 pm (every 20 minutes)

How Much: £5 / 3

Box Office:  www.bac.org.uk / 02072232223

Photo by Peter Dibdin: http://www.peterdibdin.com/

This Friday I’ll have the huge privilege of chairing an event with Scottish author Iain Banks at the Strathclyde University as part of the Keith Wright Fellowship Writers Series! It’s on from 5pm in the USSA Debating Theatre, floor 6 of the Student Union building, it is TOTALLY FREE and OPEN TO ALL.

Iain is a really great writer and this is a fab opportunity to come and ask him some questions about his new book and listen to me give him truly probing questions that will reveal his literary secrets to all and sundry. If you’re free in Glasgow and have an early finish from work, I hope to see you there!

What: Iain Banks reading from his new work

Where: USSA Debating Theatre, Student Union Building, Strathclyde University

When: Friday 7 December, 5pm

How Much: Free as a Bird.