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The Golden Hour performs on the ferry to Amsterdam

Exciting news! Part one of the Golden Hour Tour diary by Jason Morton and Ericka Duffy is featured on the music and arts website Drowned in Sound! The article documents our travels through Amsterdam and Berlin as far as the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop in Paris, with the upcoming second part following our journey home. It also features a whole bunch of video footage and music from all the performers.

If you weren’t there — you can pretend you were. And if you were there — you can remember the magic.

The Golden  Hour Tour was supported by The Scottish Arts Council. Thanks!

This month the Golden Hour is proud to play host to the Reel Iraq Festival, featuring some of Iraq’s most prominent authors and poets, with a few local favourites thrown in for good measure. Come along for a chance to hear some of the best work in modern Iraqi literature!

When: Wednesday May 2oth, 8pm

Where: The Forest, 3 Bristo Place

Cost: FREE

Booze: BYOB

Reading:

Sinan Antoon – Poet, Novelist and filmmaker whose novel I’Jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody was hailed as “a novel par excellence.”

Hussain al-Mozany – Short stories from the effervescent novelist and journalist.

Betool Khedairi – Born in Baghdad to an Iraqi father and Scottish mother. Her first novel, A Sky So Close, had been translated into English, Italian, French and Dutch and is worthy of study.

Saadi Youssef – Late 20th century Iraqi literature has been marked by writers such as Saadi Youssef whose poetry has been immensely popular since he started writing at the age of 17. He has published thirty-two collections, a volume of short stories, two novels, several essays, and four volumes of his collected works.

Jane Flett – With her new chapbook!

Music:

Les Enfant Bastard – The brilliant bastard will entertain or destroy you alternating between woeful anti-folk and sonic assault played on home-made noise makers.

The Tuberians – Sounds of distant lands!

Rob Hearne – guitar originals. Sounds you will like to hear.

Nothing But The Poem: A relaxed and informal way to meet and discuss a poem. Moderated by ECL / SPL Reader-in-Residence Ryan van Winkle.

Where: Edinburgh Central Library

When: 6pm on  May 21st.

How Much: Free Free Free!

What is it?
* We read a poem
* We discuss the poem
* Only the poem we’ve read.
* No Jargon
* No experience needed
* Nothing to fear
* Nothing but the poem.

Edinburgh Central Library, George IV Bridge.
There’s a little sample of what a NBTP session is like here.

Just a reminder that the Reel Iraq Festival will be coming to the MacDonald Road Library, where some of Iraq’s best writers will be putting on an amazing free show. This is a fantastic opportunity to hear their work in person, so come on over to MacDonald Road in Leith on May 19th at 5.30pm!

Sinan Antoon – Poet, Novelist and filmmaker whose novel I’Jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody was hailed as “a novel par excellence.”

Hussain al-Mozany – Short stories from the effervescent novelist and journalist.

Betool Khedairi – Born in Baghdad to an Iraqi father and Scottish mother. Her first novel, A Sky So Close, had been translated into English, Italian, French and Dutch and is worthy of study.

Saadi Youssef – Late 20th century Iraqi literature has been marked by writers such as Saadi Youssef whose poetry has been immensely popular since he started writing at the age of 17. He has published thirty-two collections, a volume of short stories, two novels, several essays, and four volumes of his collected works.

Poetry is for Reading pt. 2: Poems for Spring. Clearing by Wendell Berry

Yes, it is Spring time. The sun is out and I have a splinter in my index finger from helping to weed a friend’s garden. With the sun on our necks and the promise of tomatoes, sweet peas, and yellow carrots (yes, yellow carrots!) sprouting in our brains we chatted about this and that, you know, the usual things: The G20, herbs that work with white fish and poetry, specifically about the garden poems of Emily Dickinson.

Now, try to forgive my ignorance, but I’d never realized that Dickinson was an avid gardener and I certainly never figured she might be more known during her life as a gardener than as a poet. However, the internet argues that this is the case and there is even a book about Dickinson and her relationship with her garden from the less argumentative Harvard University Press. If you need some kind of proof, I found this delightful poem called “In the Garden”.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about a book I recently read cover to cover – Clearing by Wendell Berry. “None of us,” says Berry, “can in a true sense own land. We can only hold it in trust.” While I wouldn’t want to quote this line to someone who has gone through a foreclosure, I admit as someone who owns nothing that there’s a simple beauty to this notion.

Indeed, there is a philosophy growing in these poems and they offer a gentle direction for a way we may strive to live our lives. This slim and readable volume even begins with a quote from the I Ching: “what has been spoiled through man’s fault can be made good again through man’s work”. From there Berry describes in a plain-voiced poetic prose the land he and his wife hold and saved from ecological disaster via hard work. Listen:

Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it…
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides…
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it…
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields…
Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

Published by Harcourt, 1977

Find the book, tend the garden you hold dear, taste the dirt under your nails. I’m going to go find a pair of tweezers.

• Wendell Berry’s selected poems are availible at the Scottish Poetry Library
• You can purchase Clearing here
• More Berry Poems
• Berry‘s biography and more poems and an essay on Hayden Carruth here
• Check out Poetry is for Reading Pt. 1.

Poetry Is For Reading Part 1 – An Explanation. Etheridge Knight.

Yes, it is grand to study a poet, to examine the mechanics, to see how the machine works, to admire technical brilliance and the resonance of influence and allusion. Yet I, like many readers, sometimes just want to enjoy poems the way I enjoy TV, a novel, a comic book or a new cd.

Poetry, like all of these mediums, comes with the risk that if you just dive in – you’re going to sink into limitless depths of banality, rubbish, or things you just don’t like. TV is an evil glowing devil box full of people trying to get famous and comic books are for kids. But we, the discerning ones, we know better. We find Mad Men. We know Brian Michael Bendis‘ run on Daredevil. We share these things amongst us as part of, and perhaps as measure of, our enjoyment of them. We pass DVDs of The Wire to each other, make mix tapes. We don’t de-construct or analyse. We get excited.

Many months ago my friend Morgan asked me to recommend some newer books of poetry to him. Books I had gotten excited about. Sure, he’d read what he’d had to read in school and had gone through some classics at his own pace but felt he had no foothold on more current work. Somehow we got side-tracked, however, talking about insane things Mike Tyson has said and I’ve felt guilty ever since for allowing the conversation to degrade and for  not giving him a thorough list of readable books.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHGwN73kCws

The troubling thing is that there is a lot of accessible poetry out there. Poetry that doesn’t require one to be a poet nor a scholar. Poetry that sparks and crackles and is as good as the new Decemberists album. But, there are an awful lot of books in that dusty cannon, ones taken like pills or praised by people who never liked AC/DC, or are simply competent or technically proficient.

In reading a New Yorker article about two of my recent poetic obsessions, Matthew and Micheal Dickman, Joseph Millar said, “They talked about poetry the way that young people used to speak about rock and roll, or surfing, or cars.”

Now, I’m not going to compare poetry to rock and roll or surfing but, in this little series, I intend to gush. I’ll recommend books to sit down and drink a beer with, poets you may or may not have heard of whose work you can ingest like your favourite cd, work you’ll want to share with your friends, books you might want to read all of, borrow or buy.

Of course, these are just my opinions based on my own travels, my interests and peccadilloes. Everything is individual, but please let me know if I switch you onto anything that you like. Similarly, feel free to share your opinions with me.

I’ve already gone on too long talking about the conceit of this concept and now, nervously, recommend a poet:

Etheridge Knight.

Knight found his way onto my love-shelf thanks to Michael Burkard who gave me a cassette of a Knight reading. I  knew nothing of Knight beyond his threadbare voice on that cassette. I learned from his poems that he’d been incarcerated at Indiana State Prison, that he was African-American, and was addicted to heroin. His voice sounded lived in and just about on the right side of cozy. His poems were rhythmic, brutally sensitive, funny, and honest. His poem Hard Rock Returns To Prison From The Hospital For The Criminal Insane had the eerie feel and humour of One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest.

You can hear him read it hear at about 1.30 minutes in:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG6XSLcUcaE

And then he read what is just about one of my favourite poems. It has a vulgarity to it, sure, but it has a cut and beating heart too.

Feeling Fucked Up

by Etheridge Knight

Lord she’s gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare

bright bone white crystal sand glistens

dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs—

Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing

There is a bio and a selection of poems available at poetryfoundation.org

·You can find Etheridge Knights work at the Scottish Poetry Library in The Vintage book of African American Poetry.

·You can buy the Essential Etheridge Knight (University of Pittsburgh Press) here.

·Read about another poet – Hayden Carruth.

·Cartoon by Dan Meth. My voice is in it.

Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter Sam Siggs, the man behind live music act Poor Edward discusses his favourite classic poem, “Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat)” by Arthur Rimbaud!

Check out the tale of his encounter with the wild young writer at the SPL Reading Room here.

Forest Publications presents…

The Golden Hour is a literary cabaret which has played to sold-out audiences at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It is poetry and prose, original eclectic songs and visual amazement. It is physical and mental. It is a reading. It is a gig. It is stunning puppetry. It is a party. It will be in english.

Readers / Writers:

Ryan Van Winkle – poems & stories from the Reader in Residence at the Scottish Poetry Library.

Nick Holdstock – short stories which grow inside you like golden crocuses.

Ericka Duffy – hot new prose from her hot new chapbook called The Succubus!

Benjamin Morris – Poetry and life lessons from the number one gentleman.

Jason Morton – stories that can eat bricks.

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Jane Flett – seamstress of most fetching stories.

Music / Song Writers:

Billy Liar – Acoustic + infectious punk.

Hailey Beavis – subtle guitar, a bed for a voice, both personal and touching.

Jed Milroy – singer songwriter and hunter finally back from the Woods.

Withered Hand – intense, eccentric, bittersweet and very wry original songs.

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Jonny Berliner – Joyus songs about crustacaens, exhaustion, and gluecose.

Visual Amazement:

Paper Cinema and Kora –

A cast of hand-drawn marionettes are magically brought to life. This is what happens at the accidental meeting of inkblots, photocopies, cardboard, angle-poise lamps, the occasional table, video technology, a laptop and a banana box.

Special Guests

Joining us in Berlin will be the amazing all-dancing Exploading DJ & DJ Dirk Markham

Duets: Withered Hand with Hailey Beavis

TOURDATES:

Please tell everyone you know in these cities. We hope to see you there!

29 April – Amsterdam, Cafe Sappho – Vijzelstraat 103 1017 HH (+31 6 17140296). 3 Euros Entry + Free Stolen Stories Book! 8pm – Late

2 May – Berlin – Studio54, Oranienburger 54 at Tacheles – 3 Euros Entry + Free Stolen Stories Book! 9Pm – Late.

4 May – Paris – Shakespeare and Co – 37, Rue Bûcherie, 75005 Paris, France? – 01 43 25 40 93? – Free! 7pm

5 May – London – The Camden Head – 100 Camden High Street, (020 7485 4019) – ? 8pm – £3 Entry + Free Stolen Stories Book! 8pm – 11pm

6 May – Cambridge – CB2 – 5/7, Norfolk St, Cambridge – £3 Entry + Free Stolen Stories Book! 8Pm – 11pm

Nothing But The Poem: A relaxed and informal way to meet and discuss a poem. Moderated by ECL / SPL Reader-in-Residence Ryan van Winkle.

Where: Edinburgh Central Library

When: 6pm on April 23rd, May 21st and June 9th.

How Much: Free Free Free

What is it?
* We read a poem
* We discuss the poem
* Only the poem we’ve read.
* No Jargon
* No experience needed
* Nothing to fear
* Nothing but the poem.

Edinburgh Central Library, George IV Bridge.
There’s a little sample of what a NBTP session is like here.