A Double Bill at StAnza this week …

Two lots of good news so read on, a chance for you to help StAnza with the click of a mouse – see below – and news of our November event in St Andrews.

It’s going to be a busy week ahead leading up to St Andrews Day. Book Week Scotland starts tomorrow with StAnza’s own event for this, Double Bill on Thursday 26th November at Zest, 95 South Street, St Andrews at 6.30pm. For Book Week 2015 we invited Andy Jackson, editor of the Red Squirrel Press’s Double Bill anthology, the popular sequel to Split Screen, to bring his road show to St Andrews for a StAnza special.

The live Double Bill show which he tours around the UK is a fast-moving sixty-minute mix of poetry, visuals, sounds and ideas from some of the UK’s best-loved poets with poems taking their influences from movies, television, music and popular culture. A stellar cast of over 100 writers contributed poems on a range of themes ranging from Morecambe & Wise and The Italian Job to The Archers and Van Morrison and next week a fine gathering of them, including Ruth Aylett, Tracey Herd, Brian Johnstone, Colin Will, Dawn Wood, Nikki Robson and Sally Evans, will read their own and other poems, while Zest will have some tasty surprises of their own to offer.

It’s a free event but limited by the capacity of Zest, so if you’d like to come, please email stanza@stanzapoetry.org to book a place. There are still a few left. And you can find out about other Book Week Scotland events online at http://scottishbooktrust.com/reading/book-week-scotland/book-week-scotland-2015.

And as if Book Week wasn’t enough, it’s also the St Andrews Food and Drink Festival this month, so our event falls into that as well, and additionally takes place just as a weekend of activities gets under way in the run up to St Andrews Day on Monday 30th November, when we’ll have a double launch, our new website and our core programme for StAnza 2016, 2-6 March. We’re all working flat out at present towards this and look forward to the grand online unveiling then. We’ll be announcing this with a fanfare and another newsletter to let you know once the programme is online, so be sure to check your inbox for that.

Meantime we have exciting news about funding. StAnza has been shortlisted for the Coop Membership Local Fund for the St Andrews/Tayport area. The winner is decided by public vote so if you live in that area, (it works by postcode, you can only vote for us if you live in the St Andrews/Tayport ‘constituency’) do please go online and vote for us. You have to be a Coop member but it’s easy to register online. Here are the links you’ll need. It has been a difficult year for StAnza as we cope with the impact of funding cuts and rising costs, so this is extremely welcome, and a way for our local supporters to help us, so please do if you can. Here are those links:

To vote go to: Vote!

Just StAnza in Edinburgh this month

StAnza photograph by Jacqueline Skelton

We’re delighted that the Just Festival asked us to curate three poetry events for them this month in Edinburgh. The three events will be on Tuesdays 11th, 18th and 25th August, all 4pm to 5pm.

Eighteen years ago several Scottish poets got together to create annual StAnza festival, now a major annual international event. This series of three events at the Just Festival turns the spotlight 180° to focus on StAnza itself and some of the poets behind the festival’s success, as well as featuring short tasters of some poetry projects. Full details of each of the events are below. They take place in Edinburgh Fringe Venue 127, St John’s Church Hall, Princes Street, Edinburgh EH2 4BJ. Tickets are £5 and can be bought online at online here.

Tuesday 11th August, 4pm-5pm:  The current chair of StAnza’s Board of Trustees and himself a well-known and well published Scottish poet Colin Will will read with Jenny Elliott whose poetry pamphlets have been shortlisted for the Callum Macdonald Award in both 2014 and 2015, and Peter Jarvis whose first collection was published by HappenStance Press earlier this year. We’re also delighted that they’ll be joined by several poets who have contributed to StAnza’s Poetry Map of Scotland who will each read their poem from the map, including Charlotte Stirling, Elspeth Brown, Julie Hogg, Donald Adamson and Alwyn Marriage. This is an ongoing project but you can view the current version of the map at https://stanzapoetry.wordpress.com/poetry-map-of-scotland/.

Tuesday 18th August, 4pm-5pm: The Co-Founder of StAnza and our first Festival Director, Brian Johnstone heads the list of poets reading at this event, where he’ll be joined by two StAnza colleagues, Julia Prescott and Robin MacKenzie. We’re also delighted that they’ll be joined by several poets who have contributed to StAnza’s Poetry Map of Scotland who will each read their poem from the map, including Adam V. Cheshire, Colin Bartie, Peter Kerr, Keith Parker and  Elizabeth Rimmer. This is an ongoing project but you can view the current version of the map at https://stanzapoetry.wordpress.com/poetry-map-of-scotland/.

Tuesday 25th August, 4pm-5pm: Anna Crowe, one of the StAnza founders and now an Honorary President, is an internationally renowned poet and translator. She reads with the prize winning poet Claudia Daventry and Andy Jackson, poet and editor of the successful anthologies of poems about popular culture, Split Screen and Double Bill. And joining them, Carolyn Richardson, Matthew Macdonald, Nancy Somerville, Morgan Downie, Ruth Aylett and Michael Scott, contributors to the Double Bill anthology to read a selection of poems from it.

So if you are in Edinburgh this month, do come along to one of our events, we’ll be delighted to see you.

Poetry Map Poem 20: North Berwick Law

 

North Berwick Law

Climbing the volcano’s
constipated gut, a basalt core
that still resists the everyday
seduction of the rain,
smoothing and dissolving.

Half-way up asking:
Why are we doing this?

Our feet slide on
liquorish-drop rabbit turds,
the path decays into
Featureless grass.

As if from the top
we could see our lives.
Whole.

Ruth Aylett

To view our Map of Scotland in Poems as it grows, see https://stanzapoetry.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/the-map-revealed/ . For more information on this project, and on how to submit a poem, see https://stanzapoetry.wordpress.com/2014/07/04/mapping-scotland-in-poetry/.

All poems on our poetry map of Scotland and on the StAnza Blog are subject to copyright and should not be reproduced otherwise without the poet’s permission.