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On Saturday I went to the Poetry in Motion event at the Scottish Poetry Library which forms part of the Africa in Motion film festival. Five poets were there, mostly from Zimbabwe, but including Yinka Ekundayo from Nigeria, as well as Mara, a story-teller from Kenya who compered the event and contributed some thought-provoking stories between readings.

It would be easy to be side-tracked by some of the issues raised by these poets. ‘Diaspora’ turns out to be one of the main concerns of the poems in my forth-coming collection (it wasn’t my intention, but that’s what happened), and it was fascinating to see the take of the new generation on the themes of extended family, exile, (“When did soon become a decade?” to quote from Kennedy Madhombiro), and homesickness – “We sleep with eyes open/ we dream in tears” (Emmanuel Sairosi).

I can’t help comparing Luka Bloom’s Chicago
In the city of Chicago
As the evening shadows fall,
there are people dreaming
of the hills of Donegal.

which conveys nothing more than a rather faded nostalgia, compared with the writings of men who live their family lives on the phone or the internet, who remember the smell of roast mealie and long for the sun in a grey country “where colour is like sin” (Emmanuel Sairosi again).

But really I want to introduce the poets. They were excellent, especially Emannuel Sairosi, and Tawone Sithole who co-founded Seeds of Thought in Glasgow (“a non-funded urban poetry group, hosting regular poetry and acoustic music events in Glasgow, and beyond. Not your average kinda fluffy cloud poetry, its a fusion of beat / comedic / urban and Conscious poetry”). This pretty much describes his poetry, which was rhythmic, wittily rhymed, upbeat and confident. Seeds of Thought is a group I’m going to be following up.

Special thanks for this wonderful event should go to Stefanie van der Peer of Africa in Motion and Richie McCaffery, who organised it all.

The brilliant poet Nalini Paul is organising a weekend residential writing retreat on the island of Westray – which sounds like a fabulous combination to me! The cost is £250 all-inclusive, per person, covering accommodation, meals and workshops. See https://www.facebook.com/l/951874IKeACX3FilaFFoyG9VgRQ;www.westmanse.co.uk/whats-on-at-the-manse.php and click on “What’s on at the Manse” for more information.

This lovely book was launched at the Callander Poetry Weekend, one of the Die-Hard Metallic series. It is a collection of the recent poems of the terrifyingly prolific Sheena Blackhall – she produced a whole pamphlet of childrens’ verse on a flight to Vietnam for a wedding – and includes poems in Doric and English, poems written in song and in ballad form as well as in less structured forms, poems about animals, landscape, language and poetry and a lot of poems about death. Death is the big topic this year and almost everyone at Callendar had at least one poem about it.

Sheena’s poetry is both lively and thoughtful, profoundly reflective, lyrical and comic. And sometimes all in the one poem. She is hard to categorise – and would resent the effort to do it, as the witty New Cottage Industry points out. She us popular and accessible; her pamphlet The Win and the Rain which was written for the Tsunami appeal in Aberdeen, sold out completely. But there is nothing superficial or ephemeral about it. A poem from it, The Birth of Death is included in this collection, and still moves even after other catastrophes have pushed the Tsunami out of the headlines.

The picture below shows two of my favourite poems, but it also shows one of the features of the Metallic design – the ‘trip to Jerusalem ‘ binding which allows the book to open flat. The publisher Ian King gave us a demonstration of this process, pointing out that it was cheap and easy, and if you can make your own books, no-one can stop you writing what you like. But I’m afraid the longer he talked, the more convinced I became that it is actually very difficult, highly skilled work requiring a more than the average amount of dexterity, dedication and good judgement, and will not be attempted by me any time soon.

Yesterday’s post was, quite rightly, all about Sally and the other stellar poets at the Callander festival. However, I have some news of my own that I am just busting to tell.

My first collection, working title Wherever We Live Now, has been accepted by Red Squirrel Press and will come out about this time next year. Here you can see what I wrote about the wonder of nature (no, I hadn’t submitted by then!)that is Sheila Wakefield. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be working with her and joining the line-up of marvellous poets she publishes – Eleanor Livingstone, Nalini Paul, Colin Will, Kevin Cadwallender, Colin Donati, Andy Jackson —

I could go on, but even after four days I’m too excited to concentrate. I’d forget someone wonderful and be mortified.

All I can say is, watch this space.

Englyn for Sally

In her cave of books, she guards the words,
Sorts trinkets from treasure.
There is fire in her belly,
And strength in her outspread wings.

I wrote this ages ago, when I first got to know Sally Evans, editor of Poetry Scotland and the Die-Hard Press, (which she runs with her husband, Ian King), and thought that, because of her name, she must be Welsh. She is, but not quite as much as I thought. Although of Welsh heritage, she was actually brought up in Northumbria.But this year she has been learning Welsh, and here she is, reading poems inspired by it.

Never was this englyn more appropriate than this weekend, when, as she does every year, she organises her Callander Poetry Weekend. Originally meant as an extended party for her Edinburgh friends who didn’t drop in quite so much when she and Ian moved to callander, it retains the friendliness, the hospitality and the illusion that it’s all easy and comes without effort. But it’s also an open house for poets of all kinds and types and classifications of poets, to read and meet up and find out what’s going on in poetry in Scotland – and further afield.

There are young poets, just getting started. There are older poets with years of successful publication behind them. There are mystical poets, political poets, love poets, green poets, lyrical poets, satirical and historical poets – some fabulous performance poets – and some really good musicians too. There are poets who write in Gaelic, in Doric or in the many dialects of Britain (and if you think dialect = comic you would be only half wrong as we had some excellent comic poetry written in dialect).

There were really good food, workshops (can’t comment, mine was one of them!) two book launches, (Charlie Gracie’s Good Morning, which I featured back in May and Sheena Blackhall’s Wittins, which I’ll write about later this month), and a tribute to Edwin Morgan, which everyone who was there found moving and appropriate for Scotland’s well loved makar.

Now, as well as organising and programming the many events packed into the weekend, Sally also cooks the food for everyone (and doesn’t charge), puts people up in her flat or in her garden, helps people find lifts home or places to stay, provides stalls for poets and other publishers to sell their books, and shares her lovely home and shop and garden with everyone who comes. It’s a mammoth job. What’s more, this year she did it, as she says, “with one hand tied behind my back”, because of a broken wrist which was in plaster until last Monday.

Sally, we couldn’t possibly tell you how much we loved this year’s festival, or how grateful and appreciative we are for all you do for Scottish poetry. Thank you so much!

The programme for the hospitable and poetically diverse festival of them all, Sally Evans’ Poetry in the Garden weekend,(3rd-5th September, Callander Bookshop, Main Street) is up on her website desktopsallye.com. In spite of having broken a wrist, Sally has put together something very special; if you can get to it at all, I really recommend it.

Of course it doesn’t hurt that I’m reading on the Friday night, and leading a workshop on the Scottish/Irish (and Welsh) poetry connection. But there are too many other excellent poets reading all through the weekend for me to single any out. Go look!

Sometimes you read good poetry that is familiar, that reads like the sort of poem you would write yourself if you were good enough, the sort of poem you want to write when you grow up. And sometimes you come across good poetry of a sort you never even thought of, and that you wouldn’t ever be able to write unless you rewired your brain, that astonishes you with newness and strangeness – and occasionally makes you ask yourself if what you write is poetry at all.

After today’s lot, I began to see myself as a slightly manic four year old, jumping up and down with excitement shouting “Wow, look at that! It’s so pretty!”

Poets of the first sort are easy to find if you like poetry at all. They include, for me, Kathleen Jamie, Gillian Clarke, Seamus Heaney and John Burnside, Eavan Boland (might as well aim high while you’re at it!) Poets of the second sort are rarer, and more tricky. Recently I’ve been reading two such – Geoff Cooper whose Songs the Lightning Sang was brought out by Calderwood Press earlier this year and Tim Atkins, whose Folklore is published by Salt.

Geoff Cooper’s poetry is unashamedly Romantic, obviously influenced by Coleridge, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Neruda, but achieving a voice of his own by tempering the lushness with accurate observation of the natural world and careful control of metre and structure. It is sensual poetry, inspired by landscapes, painting and music, passionate, as becomes a first collection, but also powerful and mature. It depicts a beautiful but fragile world where human behaviour is largely destructive or violent, God absent, nature indifferent. Yet the pervading sense of alienation and despair is not the final word.
I remembered
as a fool remember, that poetry must go beyond
the shining world —
—brave and deep
inside others, and beyond ourselves.
must puzzle out
what’s furthest, hardest,
yes poetry must seek out

All those other human worlds

Tim Atkins’ poetry is not much like that at all. For him the distinction of the individual human worlds much less that between the natural and human world doesn’t seem to exist. It’s even hard to make out what the subjects of his fractured sentences are. The whole landscape,(Atkins is inspired by the Malvern Hills, the setting for The Vision of Piers Plowman) stones, people, flowers, stars, bones, birds, comes together to make one living breathing fertile mortal organism. You know what you are up against when he starts with
Man walks into sky .

It is physical, but not exclusively visual poetry, tactile, auditory, richly textured. Weird and beautiful.

I haven’t had time for a proper look at this book, which I got at the Stirling Writers’ Big Event last week, but you will be able to see one of Charlie’s poems (my favourite, actually)Clyde valley Walkway, late April, with my Father here in July.
This month features Chris Powici, who was tutor of the Stirling Writers Group until recently, when he became editor of Northwords Now.

The point of the post, though, is to show you the first of the new Die-hard hard cover books. Sally and Ian King reckon that the only way to keep ahead of the e-book phenomenon is to make books gorgeous, and they have. The books have board covers, lovely cream paper, and will lie flat when you open them for ease of reading. Brilliant, no?

Two helpful comments from poets on the process of poem:
At a recent meeting of SCoP (the Stirling Centre of Poetry)Kathleen Jamie said, “The hardest thing to teach students is that you have to let the shit fall onto the page”.
true, all too true. We have a tendency to censor what we are writing as we write it so a poem can be mummified before it is even born.

And I’ve just read this from W N Herbert’s book “Writing Poetry”;
“Most people — don’t read it (their draft) closely. What they see tends to be as much what they intended to write as much as what is actually on the page–Simply reading what you have actually written is by no means easy.”

That is probably the most helpful thing I have ever read.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately looking at blogs of quilters, embroiderers, dyers, weavers and all sorts of other people who craft with fabric and thread. I used to embroider myself at one time (and knit, and make clothes, too for that matter) and at times I get the delusion that I still could, if I set my mind to it, if I wasn’t so busy etc, etc.
In fact, last weekend, I succumbed to the temptation and made some cushions for the story chair in my study. (Why story chair? because they used to sit beside the children’s beds so I could read them stories. There are two of them which were passed on from my great-grandmother). Here they are.

But it was enough to convince me I should stick to the poetry.
But here’s the point. Looking at the crafters’ blogs is more than an exercise in nostalgia and fantasy. It is inspiring on many different levels.
First of all, they are often very beautiful. Mousenotebook and Nature’s Whispers come to mind here. Mousenotebook goes in for a very disciplined simplicity, neatness accuracy and restraint, whereas Natures’ Whispers is all about the colour – rich, riotous and intense.
As well as inspiring me in the ordinary way – there’s a poem about dyeing brewing in my notebook just now – thinking about the values they express in their different media helps me to think about the values I want for my poetry.
Some blogs do more than this. Spirit Cloth shows and discusses work in progress, and this is enormously interesting. Images and materials are assembled, laid out, put together, unravelled. Experiments are made with colour and form and stitching and texture. Ideas develop; understanding deepens. To me it feels a bit like watching a flower unfurl on film.

Poetry isn’t often like that for me. I tend to come up with an idea like an untidy tangle of thread. If I pull at the right bit, a good image, an interesting line or two it unfolds into a poem and I look at it with a certain degree of astonishment, almost as if it didn’t have anything to do with me. Then it’s a matter of straightening it out a little, if it’s disorderly, shining up the dull or tarnished bits, occasionally separating out the two poems that somehow got mixed up together. I quite like most of the results so far.

As I go on, however, and write more, I realise that this is not how the best poems come about. Good poetry is much more like good craftsmanship than good ideas. Taking time with your materials, engaging with the process, is as much part of the inspiration as the flash of insight.

And I have also found some poets who feel the same. I’ll talk about them next time.