Happenings 23: postcards and podcasts

As the week draws to a close, with ever darker nights and chillier Edinburgh winds, we doff our caps to this week’s run of Happenings…

Our latest instalment of pure liquid podcast gold is live and aching for your ears. Featuring Salt poets Julia Bird and Andrew Philip chatting about their poetic adventures, and zooming in for a closer look at the Global Poetry System, it’s well worth a listen. We advise you subscribe to be front of the queue, but you can download if you’d rather… Do email Ryan and Colin with your thoughts!

Ryan would additionally like to thank the email correspondent who offered to share their $78,000 wealth with him. He says his bank details are on their way…

Dave brought chocolate donuts!

Julie’s got her Essence Press hat in London, showcasing her wares at the Poetry Library Special Collections and Artists’ Books Open Day.

We were thrilled to find, via our poet pal Aiko, that the latest McDonald’s advert features poetry. Can you help us help Aiko discover the circumstances of the mature cheese advert currently also featuring poetry?

Robyn has spent a goodly part of the day cooking up March plans, and came across this paragraph while reading on the train: “The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.” – Lots of people will know this quotation, but some may not, and it stakes a high and beautiful claim for poets and their language – it’s from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, ‘The Poet’.

Lorna completed a very successful session of workshops on war poetry with school children at Edinburgh Castle.

Beanbags, the Moustaches of Poets and fabulous Penguin book cover postcards (sadly out of stock, I spy! Horrors!) received from north-dwelling friends called Timothy have been tilting our windmills. What’s been tilting yours?

Till next week!

In praise of bean bags and little chairs

A week or two ago, a delivery man hoved into view bearing a few big boxes.They were very light, and he was carrying them in a comedy fashion. He said, I don’t think there’s anything in here, I think someone has sent you a box full of air. He was disgruntled. The boxes in fact contained our new bean bags and a little green chair for our children’s section. We were very pleased to be able to purchase these thanks to the generosity of the Brownlee Old Town Trust. Now our children’s section is invitingly brighter than ever, and our little folks can burrow in and read away in comfiest fashion. My grandparents had a velvet beanbag with a swirly pattern; I recall being enveloped in it while tackling my first ever novel (George’s Marvellous Medicine). Hopefully our younger visitors will find similar bookish comforts as I.

Poet Moustaches

A friend called Al popped into the library yesterday sporting a moustache in progress. He revealed he is participating in Movember (the month formerly known as November), a moustache growing charity event held during November each year that raises funds and awareness for men’s health issues, specifically prostate cancer.

So this morning I am pondering the moustaches of poets, past and present. Lizzie has been the usual tower of strength in this matter, listing Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Masefield, Rudyard Kipling and Hugh MacDiarmid. We have mentioned here poets ranked by their beard weight before, and we have touched briefly upon moustaches in interview with that owner of a marvellously hirsuted upper lip, Tim Turnbull. But what other poets have moustaches? And why has the moustache slipped from fashion (outwith Movember, of course)?

Latest podcast here!

Our latest podcast is up and at ‘em! In truth, it has been there since Friday: all you subscribers out there will know this – but because I was moonlighting for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, the page wasn’t ready. There’s a reason to subscribe if ever one was needed!

In it, Ryan reveals how Federico García Lorca, his first poetic purchase, poured salve on his first broken heart, discusses the difficulty of the simple line and blackbirds in Glasgow, among other things, with Jen Hadfield, and music is brought to you by Lise Sinclair from the Fair Isle. A little treat from the far north.

As I type, Ryan is upstairs chatting with one of the Edinburgh-based Chemical Poets and Robyn sat down today to reveal what poems she carries with her. All coming tantalisingly, ear-poppingly soon, so keep your lugs to the ground and WATCH THIS SPACE…

The Berlin Wall, 20 Years On…

Back in August, as clouds came and went over the Sound of Jura, a group of poets were focusing their thoughts and translation energies on Robert Burns and on the fall of the Wall: the 250^th anniversary of the birth of one, the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the other. We called the workshop – under the auspices of Literature Across Frontiers and the SPL – ‘Revolutionary Europe’. That title meant very different things to poets from Germany, Romania and Poland, and to us in Scotland. One of the many wonderful works that came out of the pressure-cooker at Crear, where the poets simmered for a week, was a poem by Michael Augustin that began with memories of children playing round the wall: no longer cowboys and Indians but defectors and police. And Scots provided just the right register for its mix of bleakness and humour, in the capable hands of Donny O’Rourke. So we’re marking that very significant anniversary today by featuring Michael’s poem (in the original German) and Donny’s translation on our site, and plan to follow it with more of the excellent poems from that very fruitful workshop – some of you may have heard them read at Crear itself or at the Book Festival in Edinburgh. The SPL is a window on the world as well as a window on  Scotland: these workshops show how we keep that window open, and the breeze blows both ways.

Season of mists

Peggy’s moonlighting at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (if you’re nowhere near Aldeburgh, you can keep up to date with them on Twitter). So in the absence of the usual Friday Happenings, here’s a round-up of all things autumnal and perhaps even poetry-related:

Keats on screen. We’re coming over all mellow, not to say fruitful. The SPL is  planning a cinema excursion very soon…

Loved the SPL Poetry Pub Quiz? This is almost as good. Test your knowledge of bonfire night books, and tell us how you get on!

Why autumn (or ‘fall’) is the best season for poetry.

Feeling SAD? Jeanette Winterson adores the long, dark nights – read this, and you will too.

Till next week!

Magazines: Poetry (November 2009)

I’ve been enjoying the new issue of Poetry magazine, which has a walking theme. It has some translations of the German poet Gottfried Benn by Michael Hofmann, who suggests in his accompanying note that you could imagine Benn as ‘a Larkin less veiled, discreet, conciliatory, half-optimistic, teetering, and somehow more lovable…’. He says that Benn’s poem ‘What’s Bad’ is ‘almost safe to be called a well-known poem’, but it wasn’t known to me, I must admit. And I really like it!

Here’s a taster:

Very bad: being invited out,
when your own room at home is quieter,
the coffee is better,
and you don’t have to make small talk.

~ Robyn

Happenings 22: things we like

Dressing up as poets for Hallowe’en

The Literary Gift Company – who doesn’t want a giant sharpener as a desk tidy?

Podcast 6…!

…and on a related note Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ narrated by Christopher Walken!

Events to look forward to, including Poem in my Pocket tomorrow, with Robyn and Ryan discussing the poems they carry close, part of the Storytelling Festival, and BBC Political Correspondent Brian Taylor discussing his Selected Works on Tuesday 3 November (November? Already!?)

Cake. Always.

Poet Kona Macphee’s words of wisdom and porridgey comfort as the nights draw in

Today being the 70th anniversary of Orson Welles causing widespread panic with his War of the Worlds broadcast

27 poems for Hallowe’en, from the Poetry Foundation…

…and an animated version of Paul Muldoon’s poem ‘Hedgehog’, as read by the man himself.

Toffee apple season! Mind your gnashers!

Till next week! Farewells!

Kona’s column 1: The Nights Are Fairly Drawing In

“April is the cruellest month,” said T.S. Eliot, but for me it’s October, when frost returns to the morning lawn, the leaves begin to thin, and more and more of my waking hours are enacted in the dark of pre-dawn and post-sunset.

I grew up in Melbourne, where winter was a mild event.  The night-time temperature almost never fell below freezing, and the sun rose before 8 and set after 5 even at the solstice.  Perhaps my internal thermostat was calibrated by that Australian childhood, or perhaps it’s just my innate physiology, but I’m always challenged by the onset of the Scottish winter.

It’s not really the cold that gets me down;  after 14 years in the UK, I’m used to that.  I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll spend five months of the year dressed in warm vests, unstylish thermally-lined outdoor trousers and two fleeces (and that’s just for indoors).  I’m accustomed to getting into bed at night with feet that will need half an hour on a hot water bottle to thaw out.  Leaving aside the complexities of staying warm, I actually love the outward signs of really cold weather – hoarfrost, snow on the hills or in the town, frozen puddles that I simply have to prod at with my boots.  The thing that leaves me floundering is the plummeting length of the days, and the insipid light that winter brings.

In my thirties, I became aware that there was something of a pattern to my productivity;  I would have months of hyper-busyness, followed by a long period of stagnation.  It took several years of unexplained January “exhaustion” before I noticed the blindingly-obvious-in-hindsight fact that my changing productivity correlated perfectly with the shifting of the seasons.  I wasn’t tired from overwork; I was simply demonstrating textbook symptoms of the “seasonal affective disorder” that’s so common in northerly latitudes where the winter days are short and dim.  Nowadays, I know what to expect.  In the summertime, I’ll be proactive and self-organised, with lots of projects on the go.  In the winter, I’ll just about manage to keep up the bare essentials.

If there’s one magical ingredient that any poet needs, it’s internal motivation.   Economic imperatives aren’t going to get you to your desk (or armchair, or library nook) in the morning, because you can’t make a living by writing poems.  The prospect of enormous fame isn’t going to get you there either;  can you name a poetry collection, by a living writer, that’s made a splash outside the poetry scene in the past year?  The past decade?  Even the prospect of peer respect doesn’t cut it;  for every person in the poetry world that publicly admires your work, there will be another who just as publicly excoriates it. (Perhaps, as has been said of academic politics, the sniping is so vicious because the stakes are so low…)  Even that small but precious corps of habitual poetry-consumers will mostly fail to hear of your poems, still less read them.

The depressing reality is that most of the time you’re writing into a vacuum, with no guarantee of even a transient readership, let alone a lasting contribution to the literature.  On bad days, when that mysterious internal drive to write is flagging, you fall back to ruminating on the universe’s gentle indifference to poems in general, and to your poems in particular, and wonder why the hell you bother.   You begin to fear that you’re just some deluded witterer pouring self-indulgent nonsense into the void;  that it’s all some big, bad joke of which you’re the gloriously oblivious butt.

The fact is that while you can readily cozen, browbeat or reason yourself into doing some writing, you can’t talk yourself into wanting to write – and it’s that inner drive, fulfilled, that actually makes the process of writing intrinsically rewarding, something worth doing simply for itself.  The cruelty of October, for me, is to watch this internal motivation seeping away;  to have to pick up, yet again, my cudgels for the annual battle with the twin demons of “I can’t be bothered” and “It’s all pointless anyway”.

I have my defences, of course.  I make a concerted effort to keep up my morning runs through the countryside, whatever my mood and whatever the weather, since these bring a double benefit – the endorphins of exercise, plus maximal exposure to whatever paltry sunlight is available. For the past few years, I’ve also had a special “brightlight” that I use each day to compensate for missing sunlight;  it does help, although it’s no substitute for the merchant banker’s alternative of two weeks in the Caribbean.

More recently, I’ve discovered nature’s own remedy – the mighty oat.  In the summer I never eat porridge, but over the winter I crave it, and have a large vat of stove-cooked porridge every morning, and sometimes another bowl for lunch or dinner;  it really seems to clear my head, and get rid of the strange claggy feeling behind my eyes.  I also cling, even more neurotically than usual, to the pragmatic support of a regular daily routine.

Despite such countermeasures, every year I have to resign myself to a muting of my output, both creative and practical, for months on end over the autumn-winter period.  It’s galling and demoralising in equal measure, and sometimes I fantasise about being one of those people who “divide their time” between opposite hemispheres, a kind of anti-ski-bum following the temperate weather around the globe.

At heart, though, I know I couldn’t live happily without some winter in my life. I love the drama of Northern Hemisphere seasons (so unlike their understated Australian equivalents);  the sudden frenzy of spring, the fecund summer, the earth-toned crispiness of autumn, the static sparseness of winter.  Here in Crieff, our view over the Grampian foothills changes dramatically with every variation in season, light and weather; every day brings a new and beautiful aspect, a fresh arraignment of colours and textures.  I couldn’t spend my life flitting between temperate climates in a forever-summer; I would miss winter, both for itself and for the cornucopia of imagery and inspiration it provides.  Winter darkness has its price, of course – that annual forced stare into the abyss of meaninglessness, of pointlessness – but perhaps it’s simply part of the poet’s job to be willing to look there once in a while.

Kona Macphee is a UK-born, Australian-bred poet now living and working in Scotland. This column is the start of a monthly feature. She is facilitating the Poetry Society Poetry Surgeries. There will be a second batch of sessions here in the library on Wednesday 27 January 2010.

Dress as a poet for Hallowe’en…

Why not dress as a poet for Hallowe’en? Maybe you already are a poet. You could just go as yourself. But for those who aren’t, poets.org has come up with this fabulous tip sheet, especially for scary season. For Emily Dickinson, for instance, they advise that you will require:

An old-school nightgown or simple white cotton dress
A ribbon
Hair pulled back in a modest bun
A fascicle (a small bundle of folded poems)

They would award extra credit for handing out plastic flies while reciting ‘I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –’

What poet would you come as, and how?