Brian Taylor’s Big Debate: tomorrow!

Do you love a good debate, or have big questions to ask?

Brian Taylor’s Big Debate - a weekly BBC Radio Scotland radio show will be broadcast live from  The Hub, Royal Mile,  Edinburgh, chaired by  BBC Scotland’s  Political Correspondent Raymond Buchanan, focussing on  the  week’s biggest news stories.   The programme broadcasts with a panel in front of an audience, and takes a similar format to the BBC’s Question Time.

You are invited to come along and participate in the debate, as part of the audience for news, views and discussion. Please arrive 11:30 for 11:45 (the broadcast is from 12:15 -13:00). You are welcome to bring friends/family members too.

The panel will consist of four people, so far including:
Jonathan Mills             Director of the Edinburgh International Festival
Dr Richard Holloway      Former Bishop of Edinburgh and Doctor of
Stirling University
Joyce McMillan           Theatre Critic and Columnist for The Scotsman
Fourth panellist                TBC

So if you’d like to join in the debate with Brian’s lively panel, then please book your place in the audience by emailing brian@bbc.co.uk

QUESTIONS
The audience is at the heart of this programme. Please submit questions relating to news stories which have appeared in the news during the week of the debate.  You can also send topical questions which you feel are relevant to you.  They should be brief and to the point – the more succinct the more chance of being picked. Please email your question to brian@bbc.co.uk by Thursday 26th of August, with your mobile phone number too, please.

Here are some recent examples of programme questions:

-Does the panel believe that free personal care for older people should be continued and should not be subject to cuts?

- Is Curriculum for Excellence a good deal for our children and teachers?
- Is it right that MPs should not be allowed to employ members of their families?
Summary
Brian Taylor’s Big Debate
The Hub, Castlehill, Royal Mile,  Edinburgh, EH1 2NE

Friday 27^th August, 12:15-13:00 (Arrive 11:30 for 11:45)

Parking
There’s a car park on Castle Terrace and including disabled parking spaces on Johnston Terrace

Brian Taylor took part in our Selected Works season in November 2009. You can read more about his selections in our Reading Room.

Edwin Morgan’s funeral

Edwin Morgan’s funeral will take place on Thursday 26 August 2010 at 1.30pm in the Bute Hall of the University of Glasgow.

All welcome.

The coffin will lie in the University Chapel from 9am until 12 noon, on Thursday 26 August, for those wishing to pay their respects.

Family flowers only, but donations in lieu may be made to Shelter (http://scotland.shelter.org.uk/)

Seamus Heaney pays tribute to Edwin Morgan

“For all that we knew Eddie had been nearing the end, it’s still a shock and sadness to hear that he has died.  His courage as a man and his constancy as a poet only seemed to increase with age.  I think the whole poetry community took a kind of pride in his ongoing fecundity, and it was good that he lived to know the honour and regard he was held in by his city and his country.  A solitary spirit who breathed solidarity, an experimentalist who did not disdain ‘accessibility’, his subject was the big one Patrick Kavanagh identified as ‘the parish and the universe’.  What I liked greatly about him was the way he combined a low key personal presence with a high level of poetic endeavour.”

Edwin Morgan 1920 – 2010

We are all immensely saddened by the news of Edwin Morgan’s death this morning. Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, paid tribute:

“A great, generous, gentle genius has gone. He was poetry’s true son and blessed by her. He is quite simply irreplaceable. I’m certain that everyone who performs or attends at the Edinburgh International Book Festival will be thinking of him with love and gratitude.”

Radio 4 event at Scottish Poetry Library

Sorry to disappoint but this event is already fully booked.

You’d be very welcome at an event Radio 4 are recording this Wednesday lunchtime at 1.15pm at the Scottish Poetry Library.

The event will last an hour and a half and consists of a short series of talks.
Martin Bell, the man in the white suit, will ask whether standing as MP for Tatton was worth it.  The writer Candia McWilliam will speak about losing her sight and her love of the Edinburgh cityscape. We’ll also hear from painter Alison Watt and satirist Alistair Beaton.

The event is free and starts at 1.15pm – each speaker speaks for 15 minutes.

There are a limited number of places available, so if you’d like to come, please RSVP to Kay on reception@spl.org.uk

Please ensure you are able to be seated in the Scottish Poetry Library by 1.15pm sharp.

Hope to see some of you here!

John Glenday at #edbookfest

This morning, we partook of coffee, croissant and an hour in the splendid company of John Glenday at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. This event is part of the strand we assisted Don Paterson in programming, and the afore-mentioned was on hand to introduce the event and lob a few well aimed questions John’s way at the end.

Don admitted it was ‘a relief to be able to stop talking about John as poetry’s best kept secret’, in light of his recent brilliantly received collection Grain (Picador), 14 years after Undark (1995) which succeeded his first, The Apple Ghost (1989) (both Peterloo). Don, John’s editor at Picador, spoke warmly of John, saying his fastidiousness is legendary, and laughed about emails bearing the subject line ‘Glenday writes new poem shocker!’. He commended the skill and imaginative daring that went into these poems that were ‘so well-made’.

John read mostly from Grain, though sprinkled a few oldies from his previous collections in there (‘finding an old poem in the middle of the reading like one of those old tired jokes from a Christmas cracker’, though certainly not for the audience). He read the delightful ‘Tin’, a love poem, inspired by the fact that “the can opener was invented/ forty-eight years after the tin can”. He read about Orkney in ‘A Westray Prayer’, about giving things a name, about ugly fishes – because ‘ugly fishes have more depth’ – ‘I love you as I love the Hatchetfish,/ the Allmouth, the Angler’. He spoke about a self-confessed lack of imagination, it being a ‘terrible burden for a poet because it means you actually have to start looking at things.’ Then he read us the fruits of his lookings – those ‘overlooked saints’ of ‘St Orage’, ‘St Eadfast and St Alwart’, ‘St Agger of the drunken brawling praise’, life seen backwards in ‘A Fairy Tale’ his parents re-seen in his poetry. On the topic of his parents he said, ‘My mother put the words in the poem, my father put the silences. She’s the clockwork. He’s the spring.’ We are glad that in ‘the matter of life and death’ that it was to not let anyone know that you are writing poetry in Monifieth in 1963, that John prevailed.

You can hear more from John on our podcast.

Renderings and remembrances of Norman MacCaig

Hens at work. By Flickr user Escarião under a Creative Commons license

One event that we’re really looking forward to at the Edinburgh International Book Festival is on Tuesday 17 August at 3:30pm, when Douglas Dunn and Mandy Haggith will remember Norman MacCaig.

2010 is the year of MacCaig’s centenary, so we’re taking more than usual pleasure in celebrating him and his unique contribution to Scottish literature. Douglas Dunn, poet and friend, will be joined by Mandy Haggith, poet and founder of Top Left Corner – acknowledging MacCaig’s love of Assynt – for readings and fond reminiscence. It’s also chaired by our own Lilias Fraser.

Here’s a wee mouth-watering snippet from our Poetry Reader issue 7 (originally from Alan Taylor’s interview with him in the Sunday Herald), as Seamus Heaney (another of this year’s participants) remembers his first encounter with MacCaig’s work:

As (Heaney) has recalled, his first encounter with MacCaig’s work was his poem ‘Summer Farm’ (“Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass/And hang zigzag on hedges”). Such images, he thought, were simply brilliant. “A unique continuum of wiliness and sensuousness. The minimal and the dotty (‘A hen stares at nothing with one eye,/Then picks it up’) transposed into a metaphysical key.”

ScottishPower Studio Theatre | £10 / £8

What i did when the internet was down

by Lizzie MacGregor

A lengthy downtime of our internet connection set me to clearing out old folders and papers, and I was fascinated to read through again the search history of an enquiry I first received by letter in 1996.

A lady from Perthshire doing a spot of family history had heard of a poem connected with her great-grandfather, who was dispatch rider to Queen Victoria, and who took the news of the fall of Sevastopol to Balmoral: ‘A horseman rides at dead of night / through the forest braes of Mar…’. We failed to find the poem in 1996.

In 2000 we were asked for it again, by a library in Northern Ireland, and though shaking off confusion with the rather more famous lines ‘The standard on the braes o’ Mar / is up and streaming rarely’, still failed to find it.

In 2006 we heard from Northern Ireland again, from a gentleman whose family had some lines of it as handed down by a grandmother who had first learned the lines at school in Antrim in the early 1900s. This time we first contacted the Royal libraries, and then called in Aberdeenshire Libraries, where the local history department came up with several mentions of the poem, and at last, an author. I was able to rush up to the National Library of Scotland, find the book, copy the poem, and send it off with a flourish to our enquirer. (For your edification, the title is ‘The Bonfire at Craig-gowan’, and it’s by William Shand Daniel.)

I was laying bets with myself that the whole rigmarole would be unnecessary in 2010, as the thing could possibly be found on Google, so as soon as our internet connection went live again I was on it, and sure enough, eventually scored a hit. And why would someone at school in Antrim in 1903 be learning a (not incredibly good) Scottish poem about the ride to take Queen Victoria news of the progress of the Crimean War? I had guessed it would be because it had been included in a school reader of ‘improving’ verse, and I was right – there it is, now digitised by – well, you know who.

And although one question was solved in 2006 with the finding of the poem, another had been thrown up: in the copy of the local newspaper report of the event that Aberdeenshire libraries kindly sent us, the person named as the  conveyor of the news to Her Majesty was the manager of the Deeside Railway and Telegraph – not the dispatch-rider whose glorious deed has gone down in the family history of our very first enquirer. But that, thankfully, is not a problem for us to solve. Enough to know that the beacon was lit, the bells were rung, people gathered and joyfully sang the national anthem at midnight as the Queen stood in the doorway of her palace listening, and Prince Albert ordered the crowd to be ‘handsomely regaled with refreshments’.

Are Friends Electric?

On Sunday 15th August, Peggy of SPL communications officerdom (speaking, m’lud!) will be chairing an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The event is called Are Friends Electric? and the blurb runs thus:

Biologists have claimed we can only deal with a certain number of close friendships. Facebook’s 400 million active users average 130 friends each. Twitter averages 50 million tweets a day. With this much information and this many people, are we emotionally and personally connected, or just sharing information? Join Jason Bradbury, Gadget Show host and one of the world’s most influential Twitterati, and Mariann Hardey, social media researcher and blogger extraordinaire, for interactive chat. #mustsee.

Supported by ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum, in association with The Skinny, this event is an exciting chance to discuss and debate the impact of social media. Here at the SPL, in the last few years, we have whole heartedly embraced social media developments available to us, so perhaps we are biased about the positive results it can have; we’re able to bring people and poetry together on a global scale, and that has to be a good thing!

But what do you think. Are friends electric? Do you feel that you have more than one online persona? Can you really be friends with someone you’ve only met online? We’d love to have your feedback before the event, electric friends! You can comment here, or join in on Twitter: please make sure you speak to us by using the hashtag #electricfriends.

Watching Poets Work: Crear

Robyn is in Crear this week for her annual translation workshop, so it seemed an ideal time to revisit her piece in our Poetry Reader, issue 6.

Once a year, in partnership with Literature Across Frontiers, I facilitate a translation workshop in Scotland.

We began in 2002 at Moniack Mhor, went to Shetland in 2005 and to Crear in Argyll in 2006, to which we’ve been returning. It’s a beautiful, isolated place where the intensity of the workshop process is countered by the surrounding space, and the ever-changing view across the Sound of Jura to the Inner Hebrides. You know the islands are there, although sometimes the land is indistinguishable from the clouds. Such a blurring of boundaries, and sudden illumination, is an apt metaphor for the work.

Literature Across Frontiers (LAF) encourages literary translations between lesser-known languages, in these workshops using English as the bridge (elsewhere it might be French or German). This year we brought together poets from Poland, Romania and Germany, and added Donny O’Rourke to the mix. Over several days, I have the privilege of watching the poets work – occasionally acting as sheepdog at their heels. Translation is the closest form of reading, and it is not an entirely comfortable process to have your poems minutely scrutinised by your peers. Sometimes this involves physical demonstration – ‘How do you mean, hold hands in the air?’ – sometimes a back-story (‘Well, I’m using two Indian folk-tales here’); often a cultural reference: ‘In Poland we say “Love does not rust”.’ (This saying inspired a lovely new poem.) We learnt that there was no Romanian equivalent of ‘nightcap’, that Scots gave a good edge to German memories of childhood in the shadow of the Wall – ‘we played “people’s polis” an defektur cheils’.

The process requires hard work, intense concentration, immense generosity, and a good seasoning of humour. Working, eating and reading together is a rare opportunity for these writers. Although they give a performance at the end, they don’t simply parachute into a festival and then go their own ways; some lasting associations are formed. They try on other voices, learn new ways of working, have their own poems carried into different cultures over the bridge of mutual trust.

‘I find it hard to make the transition back to a world of buildings and commerce, talking to people who aren’t concerned how the crow flies into another language as the raven.’

Once I see the relationships being established, the exchanges starting, then I am both part of and apart from that community of endeavour. It’s an inspiring experience, and like the poets, I find it hard to make the transition back to a world of buildings and commerce, talking to people who aren’t concerned about the difference between ‘golden dust’ and ‘gold dust’, or how the crow flies into another language as the raven.

When I see the SPL’s name in a Czech literary weekly, or in a collection of Icelandic translations, I’m proud that the Library has this international presence, and that the encounters between Scottish and European poets are memorable, sustained and sustaining.