StAnza 2013 finale: Paula Meehan, Robin Robertson

The stage at the Town Hall/photo Chris Scott

The final night of StAnza always comes too quickly.  The Sunday night reading is the highlight of the festival, an apogee, and yet the experience is bittersweet, for afterwards there will be no more StAnza 2013 to experience. This year though, the occasion was also touched with a real sense of triumph, for it had become clear that the festival was not just one of our best, but the best, this despite the challenges faced by the closure of our hub venue.

The finale saw the pairing of two supremely evocative poets Paula Meehan and Robin Robertson. The reading took place, as did many of our events, in the Town Hall Auditorium, transformed for the duration of the festival by wonderful lighting (courtesy of the former Byre Theatre staff) by the artwork of Lucilla Sim and, by replicas of two large woven grass works by outsider artist Angus McPhee. These two were hung  above the stage, prompting much speculation about their meaning, and taking on new interpretations thanks to our imaginative audience. You can see them in the picture above and (on the right) is a chandelier made by Lucilla out of used tickets from last year’s festival.

Paula Meehan is one of the most distinguished poets currently writing in Ireland. You can get a sense of the intensity and universality of her writing in one of the poems she read that  also appears on our website: Diamond Faceted, His Breath, which deals with the death of her father. Meehan tackles these  and other experiences with grace, humour and acute observation. Last night she read some new poems, some from her most recent book, Painting Rain and others from her seminal works of the Nineties. True to the theme of Legacy & Place, Meehan’s Dublin strides through her work, as strong a character, almost, as her father and her grandmother – the latter remembered in one poem as a voice whispering warnings about the proclivities of priests. She tackles the legacy of a tough childhood in a working class area of north Dublin. In one moving and strongly rhythmic poem she described the effort involved in remaining sober, day after day. Meehan talked also about the wounding experiences Ireland has undergone during the recent recession, and  of  her own personal journey from a difficult childhood to her achievements through education and literature. Both are somehow connected in the richness and undercurrents of rage in her poems. One of the most memorable images I came away with, however, was of a book hanging high in the branches of a tree, something she saw one day, out walking in the Georgian splendour of Merrion Square. A reminder to keep looking up indeed.

Like Meehan, Robin Robertson is adept at evoking places and universal human experiences, albeit extreme ones. As he himself joked during his reading, his themes are assumed to be ‘drink, sex and death, in that order.’  His dark vision seems to be even darker in the selection of poems from his new book, Hill of Doors. There were preoccupations with Greek mythology, especially Dionysus. There were bears, a cat in the throes of death whose ‘face I see has turned human’,  balladic tragedies of murder and death in bleak landscapes of mountains and lakes. He, like Meehan, like evoked his own childhood – most memorable was the image of  feeding a bonfire with a Salvation Army picture of Jesus. A child of the manse, he linked his own past memories with the hymn tune Crimond, written by a teenage minister’s daughter in the 1850s, and asked ‘what softness brought this tune from your hands?’ Outstanding too was a visceral recollection of undergoing heart surgery. He finished the reading, scarcely marred by his hoarseness, the result he said of a  ‘Strindbergian flu’ with the ever powerful ‘At Roan Head’. For all the darkness in this powerful reading, there was a glimmer of hope, best expressed in ‘Glass of Water and Coffee Pot’ (about a Chardin still life):  ‘happiness of the hand and heart/to keep its sweetness and still pour true.’

And so to the finale party and a farewell to StAnza 2013 – the festival that almost didn’t happen – but it did and what a festival it has been. In her final introduction, Eleanor Livingstone thanked the supporters, funders, partners and friends, the team from the Byre Theatre who helped us enormously, the participants, the StAnza team, and most of all the audience who kept the faith through the recent crisis.

Thanks to all who contributed to this blog before and during StAnza, and to all who have been following it. Keep following – we have more to say and show in the next week or so about the festival.

Annie Kelly

Poetry is like snow, and it isn’t scary: Kirsten McKenzie on StAnza’s Children’s events

 

 When I was a child, I once talked with a friend about the smell of snow.  I thought it smelled like toothpaste.  She thought it smelled like tin.  I remember the conversation, but what I remember more is the feeling of waiting for the snow.  The way our senses were heightened, the tiny hairs of our skin prickling in anticipation.

And oddly enough, the first poetry workshop I ever gave was also about snow.  It had been snowing outside, and we brought some of the snow into the classroom and let the children touch, smell, feel, taste it (sorry parents!).  I remember one girl telling me that it smelled like paper fresh off the printer, and another that the feeling of the snow was ‘claustrophobic’.

Snow, then, in my mind, is very much like poetry.  As a new experience, it forces us to see and feel things differently, and we translate these feelings into words, into patterns on paper, our own unique patterns, like the angel prints we leave in the snow.  For children it can be a liberating experience, an opportunity to express feelings and sensations all too rare in the traditional classroom environment.

But children can also fear poetry, often because of that very idea of pattern, of structure, that idea that if we don’t build it properly it might fall down.

I was one of those children.  At school, poetry seemed to me to be a slightly scary mathematical formula of rhyme and meter, where nothing ever meant what you thought it meant and you were terrified to say what you thought in case it illuminated your ignorance.

So it was refreshing to see poets dispelling this myth when speaking to pupils as part of Stanza 2013.  Poet Andrew Forster told 2^nd years at Madras school that poetry is not a crossword puzzle.  He talked of how he didn’t plan to become a poet and how his first interest in poetry was probably through listening to the lyrics of songs.  He also said that ‘poetry is a personal thing’.  You have permission not to like a poem.  I wish I’d been given that permission at school.

Liz Lochhead said to St Leonard’s sixth formers that she never thought of herself as a poet, but as a writer who wrote ‘poemy things’.  And she said that while poems can have layers of meaning, it’s OK just to say what you mean.  A poem about a little girl and a bull can just be a poem about a little girl and a bull, if you want it to.

At his children’s event yesterday, John Hegley said that he was once asked ‘why don’t you write proper poems?’.  Children have an idea that a poem is a serious thing that must take a serious form.  And if anything could disprove this it was John Hegley’s versatile performance, a combination of interactive drama, music and spoken word.

John Hegley at Saturday’s Children’s Show, Hopscotch!/photoJiye Lee

Thankfully, entries to this year’s children’s poetry competition have proved that not all children see it way.  There were poems about frogs and elephants and water and drought.  Poems serious and funny.  Poems of varying structures.  Poems that use all the senses.

Each year Stanza reaches all over the world to bring internationally renowned poets to St Andrews.  But it’s important to remember that Stanza’s education programme, through children’s poetry events, competitions and sending poets into schools, reaches even further.  As John Hegley said to the children in his audience, ‘we are all poets’.  We can all make patterns with words.  Whether or not these children go on to make poetry that is heard by millions, they take with them the confidence to work with words and use them to make their own unique patterns.  Poems that the impression, the angel print of each individual child.

This morning, on the last day of Stanza 2013, it is snowing.  And just as children everywhere will soon be out leaving their impressions in the snow, lets hope Stanza has inspired at least some to leave their impressions in words.

 

Kirsten McKenzie was part of the team who led the recent StAnza workshops at schools in Fife. She is a writer based in St Monans, Fife. 

Poetry, out of line and by design: Stephanie Green

As I entered the Town Hall a voice reciting poems seemed to come from nowhere – I looked around but saw no one – then traced it to overhead speakers.  This is just one of the weird and wonderful incarnations of poetry outwith the page that one encounters round StAnza this year, as part of one of the festival themes, Designs on Poetry.  The Breakfast event, ‘Out of Line’ was also  appropriately surrounded by digital poetic installations – slides of the Badilisha  Poetry Xchange  projected on the ceiling above us, and on the walls was Jon Stale Ritland’s ‘Body Searches’  slides of biological cells and visual poems inspired by the ‘grammar’ of DNA.  The Q & A at the end of the session was open to Twitter…phew and that’s only the half of it.  There was also the visual minuter, Ariadne Radi Cor, creating an artist’s account of proceedings .

Our panel of George Szirtes, Ken Babstock, Chris Emery (Salt Publishing) and academic Andrew Roberts (replacing Greg Thomas who had to cancel) discussed traditional form v concrete poetry, and ranged through the new poetics and the effect of the internet, creative writing at the universities, self-publishing, the multiplicity and variety of places where poetry appears but issues of diminishing sales, fragmentation of audience, new elites and the rise of artists’ books.

Metaphors to describe the design of poetic structure were banded about such as  chiselling, architecture, sculpturing, embroidery, knitting and sewing, but after the event I went along to an exhibition where this was literally realized.

Farlin  involved pairs of poets and craftmakers from Shetland and Fife. Last week at Inspace in Edinburgh, I heard and saw Jen Hadfield read via Skype from Shetland, whilst Kathleen Jamie performed in the flesh in Edinburgh and was relayed to Shetland, so I am already converted to this amazing live/virtual phenomena (actually, since sons have lost the art of pen and ink, this is how my husband and I communicated with our son whilst he was at uni).  So I was interested to learn that the Farlin  poets and craftmakers had collaborated via Skype as well as snail mail.

From exquisite jewellery of silver leaves  to textile embroidered bags, the craft was varied and impressive. The poets, too. My favourites were the sinister bird-creature made out of silver wire by Shetland artist Helen Robertson paired with Fife poet, Paula Jennings’  ‘Seabird, What has Death Left in your Belly?’:  and the particular line ‘Death steals life but leaves a changeling’ which evoked the bird so well.  Another favourite was the pairing of the concrete poem of a tree by Bruce Eunson, Shetland poet and Fife artist, and Molly Ginnelly’s  installation of tree fragments (twigs, stick etc).

Tipyn Bach of Welsh

Lesson Two:

Dai iawn, diolch

pron Die yown dee-olch (ch as in Scots loch)- Very well, thank you.

Which is what Gillian or one of the other Welsh poets might have answered yesterday to your Shw mae

Photos by Stephanie Green

James T Harding: Only Connect – The StAnza Festival Launch, RiverRun, Twitter & Supper Room

Writer James T Harding on how open discussion is at the heart of what StAnza stands for.

One of the central themes of this year’s festival is ‘Legacy and Place’, and already a lively conversation is growing around the interconnectedness of different places. As well as the more expected linguistic and cultural connections, people have been discussing music, science, and even economics in terms of poetry and poetic interchange.

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, kicked off both the debate and the festival at the packed StAnza Festival Launch on Wednesday night. In medieval times, she said, Welsh was the main language spoken in Fife. This year’s Welsh poetry focus is about the encounter between two poetic traditions (not to mention two rugby teams), but perhaps it’s the similarities rather than the differences that will be the most apparent – and the most inspiring.

Lesley Riddoch (Credit: Chris Scott)

Responding to this, Lesley Riddoch threw away her prepared speech for the launch and instead talked to us about her Welsh surname, about how etymology shows us the huge distances travelled by words, and about how the Medical and Biological Sciences Building of the University of St Andrews has toilets flushed by rainwater. (That last one isn’t relevant to this post really, but interesting nonetheless.) She characterised poets as “custodians of connection”, finding and recording the moments of recognition between people and cultures that give us so much pleasure.

After the launch, we processed across the MBSB into the lovely North Haugh Theatre for The RiverRun Project. Curated by Liam Carson, the project consists of music, photography and poetry evoking a voyage through the city of Dublin past and present. Again, interconnection was the word of the moment, with poet Biddy Jenkinson explaining how Oliver Cromwell accidentally created a cultural melting pot in Dublin, in which writers and thinkers from all over Ireland and the rest of the world converged, festered in the Black Dog Prison, and wrote some stunning poetry. Meanwhile, haiku by Gabriel Rosenstock and portraits of places and people from Máighréad Medbh and Colm Keegan took the audience from Dublin’s society women and gang culture to Japan and back again.

Later that night, Lesley took this idea of the ancient interconnection between Wales and Scotland to Twitter, sparking a debate to which everyone was able to contribute whether they were in StAnza or not.

Alvin Pang (Credit: Chris Scott)

Singaporean poet Alvin Pang, who attended the launch to read an excellent poem about long-haul air travel, took these ideas about interconnectivity away with him and mulled them overnight. I found myself at a table with him, Sean Borodale and Ron Butlin over lunch in the Town Hall’s Supper Room, and we talked about how our economic situations are more tied in with the rest of the world than ever before. In particular, how the bubble of late-capitalist wealth moves on from country to country at a moment’s notice. That sounds a bit dry, but I promise it was a fun conversation at the time! Also, I wanted to show off about the company I keep at lunch: only at StAnza can you have a pint with multiple T.S. Eliot Prize nominees in one day. 😉

As you can see, we’ve all had a lot to enjoy and digest so far at StAnza – and we’ve only started…

Canadian poet Erín Moure, StAnza’s Poet in Residence, also read at the Launch, adding to the international flavour. (Credit: Chris Scott)

The point I want to pull out of all this is that StAnza is a bit of a melting pot in itself. The questions raised by Gillian Clarke and Lesley Riddoch in their opening speeches have been echoed, answers, synthesised and argued over throughout the festival, by people from St Andrews to Singapore. This happens in the official events and in the social spaces like the Supper Room in the Town Hall, but also online, through the boisterous #StAnza13 hashtag, @stanzapoetry, on Facebook and through the live Poetry Breakfast panel webcasts. Everyone is interconnected at StAnza – be that in person or online

James is available for interconnecting online and at @empowermint. Watch out for more StAnza blogs by him as the week winds onwards.

‘What I’m looking forward to at StAnza’: Stephanie Green

In the first of her Festival Blogs for StAnza, poet Stephanie Green gives us us her personal preview of the StAnza line-up. She will be reporting back on her experiences over the next five days, so keep following! 

First of all it will be fascinating to see what the atmosphere will be like without the Byre.  The Keep Calm and Carry on spirit that Eleanor Livingstone and her team have displayed organizing new venues, the rallying around of St Andrew’s,  town and University  have been magnificent: a sort of crisis camaraderie will prevail, I’m sure – with the Town Hall Supper Room as the new social and foodie Hub.  In years to come, there will be reminiscing – ‘You had to be there.’  I for one, intend to be there at as much as one can humanly take. And there’s a lot on.  More than ever it seems.

This year not one, but two all day workshops at the Georgian Balmungo House in its beautiful setting – I hope the daffodils are out. Douglas Dunn and Sean Borodale as the tutors. And there’s plenty of other poetry workshops – you could do almost one a day.

All the headliners go without saying, but having lived in Wales for 13 years, I’m a bit biased, so my favourites will be the Welsh poets who will be there en masse this year.  For the faint-hearted, their poetry is in English, but you might catch a bit of Welsh sprinkled here and there, not least in the cadences of Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales a total MUST paired with Scotland’s Makar, Liz Lochhead.  What a stupendous billing.

There’s also a slew of other Cymry:  Robert Minhinnick, former editor of Poetry Wales and co-founder of Friends of the Earth (Cymru), so there’s bound to be some politically and environmentally charged poems, Zoë Skoulding, the present editor, an academic whose poetry is complex and multi-layered, and she’ll also be talking about an overlooked but recently rediscovered Welsh poet, Lynette Roberts. I’ll be checking out,  young and talented, Eurig Salisbury, the Welsh Children’s Laureate. Eurig and Ifor ap Glyn will be  participants at the Translation workshop (so you might hear a bit more Welsh there). Deryn Rees-Jones whose highly original and deeply moving latest collection was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot prize last year will be a Must and last but not least, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch whose extraordinarily lyrical poetry takes us in her latest volume to the Antarctic.

More bias:  two of my mates will be Must See: Jean Atkin, whose poetry has been produced  in evocative artist’s books by Hugh Bryden of Roncadora Press.  See

http://stephaniegreensblog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/stanza-2011-artists-books-roncadoro.html

And Patricia Ace who launches her first collection.  With a West Indian/Welsh ancestry, she is noted for her moving poems, full of warmth and humanity, often writing about her teenage daughters (and they still speak to her.)

And if you want to spice up your lunch-hour, I recommend the Edinburgh performance stars, Harry Giles, and Rachel McCrum. I’ve seen them both perform with high octane pizzazz– Harry at Inky Fingers, and Rachel at Rally and Broad, a literary cabaret plus other delights such as flame-throwing acrobats. I kid you not.  There won’t be flames at StAnza but I can promise you flair.

Our seventh sense is of place: Colin Will on Zen and the poetry of gardening

Poet and publisher Colin Will has been actively involved in developing Scotland’s poetry organisations, including StAnza, whose Board he used to chair. Based in Dunbar, he runs Calder Wood Press. His poetry reflects his training as a scientist and his wide-ranging travels. But it is the homing instinct which starts this blog, on the theme of Legacy & Place.

I write on lots of subjects, but reflections on places feature very strongly. I have a good visual memory, and it’s relatively easy for me to form pictures in my mind of the places I’ve been, and the things I experienced or imagined in these places. In the preface to my second collection, Seven Senses (diehard, 2000), I said this:

To the accepted senses of sight, touch, taste, smell, hearing we often add a sixth sense of intuition, of knowing without knowing why. There is a seventh sense known to the salmon, to the wild geese, and other migrating and homing creatures. Our lives too are shaped by the places in which we are born and pass our formative years. More than that, these places affect the way we view the world, the surroundings we enjoy, and the things we take comfort in. This seventh sense – a sense of place – carries with it an unstated and unconscious network of associations and feelings. We all sense our landscapes in different ways, navigating by unrecognised beacons. Walking by the sea, or on the Cuillin ridge, will be different experiences for those from East Anglia or Easter Ross.

At a previous StAnza – I forget which year – I had the privilege of introducing Kenneth White’s reading. During the interval, offstage, we had a rare old natter on geopoetics, and I was delighted to find that in many respects we are kindred spirits. His geopoetics and my sense of place are very similar concepts.

Simply put, place is where you are at a moment in time. The meanings and values you assign to that place depend on many things: your personality, your interests, your knowledge and experience of the world. I know, for example, that in some places I am comfortable, in others I feel uneasy. I’m in my own skin when I’m in the hills, in a country landscape, or by the sea. Cities, especially crowded cities, increase my feelings of anxiety. It’s not claustrophobia, it’s just a sense of not belonging, despite being born in Edinburgh’s city centre, and spending my first fifteen years there. And yet I have happy memories of cities like Barcelona, Berlin, Rome, Paris, Beijing, San Francisco and Tokyo.

I’ve long had an interest in geology, and when I studied the subject at the Open University in the 1970s, it gave me a whole new insight into landscapes. Before that I had an eye for the beauty of a mountain scene, and after it I had an understanding of the forces and events that had shaped that scene over millions of years. And knowing how these places came to be served only to increase my sense of joy in their beauty.

Ginkaku-ji garden, Kyoto, Japan

Place and time feature naturally in the Japanese literary aesthetic, and that’s another element of my poetry. The Zen feeling of place, and capturing the Zen moment, are essential to the writing of haiku and other Japanese forms. The Japanese garden is an exercise in representing the essence of natural landscape in a formal space. And gardens are among my favourite places, a thread which runs through my most recent collection, The propriety of weeding (Red Squirrel, 2012).

Website: www.colinwill.co.uk

Blog: http://sunnydunny.wordpress.com

Photo  by Colin Will

Countdown – one week to go!

 

The setback of the Byre’s closure has triggered such an outpouring of goodwill and support for StAnza. We’re riding high on the crest of that, heading straight towards what we’re sure will be our best festival ever, and pleased to announce the final line-up of replacement venues now in place. Check out the updated programme online here for full details, or view our flyer/poster listing the new venues for all the events which had to be moved. Some of them are old favourites and others wonderful new discoveries.

There’s still just time to request a copy of this year’s brochure free by post. Email brochure@stanzapoetry.org or telephone 01334 474610. The brochure is also available via the usual outlets, such as the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh or Visit Scotland at 70 Market Street, St Andrews.

This year’s festival hub will be in The Supper Room at the Town Hall on Queens Gardens. Here you’ll find our festival café and bar, and also the StAnza Box Office and our Festival Desk, where poets from as far away as Canada in one direction and Singapore in the other will be checking in. Be sure to drop in for lunch, dinner or for a coffee between events. The festival hub is always a great place to catch up with old friends and to make new ones, and will be this year’s venue for several late night Poetry Café events.

If you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to book your tickets. You can do this through Visit Scotland in St Andrews (see below), or online at www.dundeerep.co.uk. A number of smaller events are already sold out, but with 101 events, exhibitions, installations and much more – almost half of them free, mostly unticketed – there’s still plenty on offer, so make sure you don’t miss out. Highlights in store include our US headliner, Mark Doty, leading poets from Canada, Scotland’s own Robin Robertson, a focus on Welsh poetry led by the National Poetry of Wales, Gillian Clarke, and our biggest ever spoken word/performance poetry line-up featuring John Hegley centre stage on the Saturday night and the young and talented Luke Wright.

Online ticket sales for StAnza 2013 events via Dundee Rep will stop at the end of this week. However it will still be possible to buy tickets by credit or debit card either in person or by phone or email from Visit Scotland in St Andrews. Contact them on 01334 474609 or standrews@visitscotland.com, or drop in to see them at 70 Market Street, St Andrews. They will continue to sell some tickets for each event for which tickets are still available up until 4.45pm on the day before an event takes place, but main ticket sales during the festival will be at the festival Box Office in the Town Hall from Thursday 7th to Sunday 10th March. There will also be a temporary Box Office at our venue for the Wednesday evening events, at the MBSB. We regret that the StAnza Box Office will only be able to accept payments by cash or cheque supported by bank card, but there are several cash machines/ATMs very close to the Town Hall.

The guest bloggers appearing this week here on the StAnza Blog will lead us up to the festival launch which takes place next Wednesday at the MBSB Theatre on the North Haugh. This is a free event so do come along to see this year’s special guest, Lesley Riddoch, cut the ribbon. It’s just 15 minutes walk from the town and car parking is easy near the MBSB.

And finally, if you haven’t yet booked your accommodation for next week, check out the accommodation page on our website and get yourself a room – before they’re all snapped up!

‘I’m more interested in the edges of a place than the heart’: Harry Giles maps out a Scottish identity

Harry Giles at StAnza’s Edinburgh Preview, January 2013/Chris Scott

Harry Giles is a poet and performer, founder of the Edinburgh spoken word collective, Inky Fingers. Brought up in Orkney, he now is based in Edinburgh, but his mind is on many other places, as his guest blog reveals. He will be performing at StAnza’s lunchtime Poetry Cafe on 8 March.  One of StAnza’s themes this year is Legacy and Place. 

I’m thinking about what Scotland is more or less every day. There’s a referendum coming, after all. I’m trying to work out what the lines on the map mean, or might how we might be choosing to redefine them. I’m trying to work out if it matters more to me to be on this side of the line or that side of the line. For me, place (and the legacy of place) is all about borders.

I grew up in Orkney to English parents – the family moved when I was two years old – so I’ll always be an incomer to my own home. I’ve known no other home but Orkney, but the playground spent a decade reminding me that it still wasn’t really mine, and my voice continues to speak the same reminder. I grew up trying to work out which side of the border I stood on, or whether I could just ignore it. And Orkney, of course, is a strange part of Scotland to start with – sort of Scottish, sort of not, and definitely and justifiably sceptical of them down in Holyrood.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that when I came to put together my first book of poetry – a wee pamphlet called Visa Wedding from Stewed Rhubarb Press – that the poems started to congregate around the borders. I was trying to write my way through my identities, as many poets are. My tongue has grown more Scottish over the years, and my heart has too, though I’ve given a lot of both to America as well. Sometimes writing poetry is less about answering the question,“What do I want to say?” as it is about just asking “How do I speak?”

As I do, the pamphlet jumps between the English that colonised Scotland and the mongrel/magpie Scots that colonised Orkney. The poems’ places are spread between islands and cities in Scotland, England and America. The legacies of one place are written into poems about another. Most of the poems, in some way, are about a border crossing – a roadtrip, a mistranslation, sex, body piercing, the meeting of tongues.

Sometimes, when I read another poets’ nature poetry, or poetry about place, I’m astonished at how secure and assured the language can be. Poems where the writer wholly identifies with a place and gives themselves over to it. I love these poems, but I’m not sure I could ever write one – without one true home to be secure in, I’m not sure I can write unproblematically about anywhere at all.

I think I want to vote to change what the border of this country means. Anti-nationalist and anti-state, I use justifications like “regional governance” and “preserving the vestiges of welfare state socialism”, but I worry that it might be something more personal, more gut. I’d like to live somewhere more definite. I’d like to be able to place a cross in a box that says, definitively, who I am and where I stand. I feel like, to the good, I’m taking part in a huge series of national conversations about what this place is. And while I figure out where the cross goes, while I’m still hopping back and forth across borders, I’m glad that I get to write poems about it, too.

Check out Harry’s website and blog here

Photo by Chris Scott

‘Ideas that make it big start here’: Sally Evans previews StAnza’s Poets Market

The first of this year’s guest bloggers, Sally Evans, looks forward to the StAnza Poets Market. Sally is a poet based in Callander, where she runs a bookshop and both edits and publishes the broadsheet magazine Poetry Scotland

 

Stalls at StAnza’s Poets Market

 

All Saints Hall, North Castle Street is the venue for the Saturday Poets Market at this year’s StAnza. That’s Saturday, 9 March and it isn’t far away!

All poet publishers are saints, as are all those who put on events at which our poets can meet and perform. At a time when recession puts pressure on public funding and mainstream bookshops, and has even closed the Byre Theatre, giving StAnza the biggest challenge of its fifteen years,  poetry is published regardless of the difficulties, by ordinary people who believe in its power for good.

From a bone folder and stapler and a computer and printer, right through to book distribution on a national and international scale, poets and their publishers meet every year at the StAnza Poets Market to show their wares, see each other’s latest productions and ideas, to talk and network, meet readers and writers from elsewhere, enjoy the fun, sell a few items and make contacts that reach into the future.

StAnza’s Poets Market is now a firm institution. For the last six years it’s been managed very effectively and reliably by Alan Gay. There were pamphlet fairs before that. This year, The Poetry Society, Templar Press and other visitors exhibit alongside Scottish publishers of all types, including writers’ groups. Any type of publication is fair game: pamphlets, magazines, postcards, zines, posters –  and books of course. A great place to suss out your markets as well as to pick up freebies and perhaps buy one or two treasures..

It is such a good idea that it is no longer the only such annual market: there ‘s a similar annual event at the National Library at Christmas and one at the Scottish Poetry Library in the autumn. I’ve exhibited at most of the StAnza Poets Markets over the years.

Poetry Scotland’s first issue was out at the very first StAnza, back in the mists of time, when we wandered round the town with Gael Turnbull giving out copies to all and sundry. Having just passed another milestone by distributing Issues 75, 76 and 77 this January, we’ll be doing a retrospective at this year’s Poet’s Market, picking out special issues of Poetry Scotland for display – for instance some single poet issues, including Rody Gorman’s Gaelic and English one, Robert Alan Jamieson’s The Cutting Down of Cutty Sark, and the English Diaspora (English poets settled in Scotland) and Caves of Gold (the Long Poem issue), and our newest Scots only issue In Oor Ain Wurds. Since we have a Welsh theme at StAnza I will also look out those with contributions in Welsh by David Annwn

We’ll have our diehard backlist (more to come later this year so nothing brand new in that line) and some examples of our poetry bookbindings. The books below were our nod to the Kindle: metallic bindings, two tone car spray straight onto the boards, and open flat sewn bindings inside. There were labour intensive and and we had to do the spraying outdoors in fine weather, but they were a huge success and sold out as fast as we could make them.

 photo Murdo Macdonald

I’ll be demonstrating book and pamphlet sewing on this book sewing frame (see the photograph below). Edinburgh, once the city of bookbinding, used to be awash with these frames.

  photo Julie Johnstone

You’ll find much more as you go round the tables. Everyone is there to display and talk about their newest ideas and offerings. People you last met in London or Oxford or Aberdeen or Glasgow. The  Poets market is inclusive and up to the moment, a hotbed of poetic invention. The ideas that make it big start here.

 

 Read more from Sally Evans at desktopsallye.com

StAnza 2013 venue & ticketing update – the good news!

 

Following last week’s shock announcement about the Byre close, StAnza’s Festival Director, Eleanor Livingstone, provides this update about StAnza 2013:

 “The StAnza dust, about which James Harding was recently waxing so lyrical, hasn’t been allowed to settle, following the grim news about the temporary closure of the Byre theatre and the implications of this for StAnza 2013, and the good news is that alternative arrangements for ticketing and venues are almost in place.

 “Early next week StAnza tickets will be on sale once again – and as proof that we don’t do anything by halves, up until the festival week there will be not only one but two outlets for tickets.  Our friends at the Dundee Rep will sell StAnza tickets through their regular online box office, and in town the Visit Scotland  team at 70 Market Street, St Andrews, KY16 9NU, tel. 01334 474609 will be able to sell them in person, and also by phone.  In Dundee and in St Andrews both teams are working flat out and hope to be up and ready by late Monday or sometime on Tuesday next week (4^th or 5^th February). Full details will be available from our online Booking Page  and those of you who haven’t bought tickets yet will still have a chance to snap some up before the end of the Early Bird discount period on 10^th February.  

 “A few of the smaller events are already sold out, but there’s still a handful of tickets left for the ever popular Round Table readings and workshops, so if you were thinking you’d missed the boat on them, get in there fast next week! 

 “The Town Hall in Queens Gardens, which has always been our secondary hub in all its Victorian Gothic grandeur, has risen to the challenge and will become this year’s primary hub. The Supper Room there, a regular StAnza venue, will be so transformed into a lively, bustling festival hub from Thursday 7^th through to Sunday 10^th March, that the Hall Keepers who are working flat out with us on this will hardly recognise it. Lunches, dinners and a bar will be available – including for late night jazz and open mic events – and exhibitions, projections and installations will also relocate there. The Festival Desk and Bookstall too will be found in the Supper Room, as well as this year’s StAnza Box Office. So the Supper Room will be the place to meet friends and make friends, to chill out, rev up and people-watch as poets from around the world arrive to check in at the festival.

 “Upstairs, the main hall will become StAnza’s main stage. It’s not unacquainted with poetry. Though we haven’t used it recently – except for the giant knitted poem in 2011 – in StAnzas past many great poets have taken the mic there, including Roger McGough, Sharon Olds, Mark Strand and Alistair Reid. I sneaked in for a preview yesterday when the relocated Fife Jazz Festival were sound-checking.  With the sun obligingly streaming through the windows and the raked seating all set up, it looked impressive indeed – and sounded wonderful!  This weekend’s Jazz Festival is highly recommended, at least to anyone who doesn’t have a festival to re-arrange.

 “For one night only, Wednesday 6^th March for our opening events – the Festival Launch and RiverRun, a voyage through Dublin in music, visuals and poetry – thanks to support from the University of St Andrews, StAnza will relocate to the state-of-the-art new theatre in the MBSB (Medical and Biological Sciences Building) on the North Haugh. Don’t be put off by the name, it’s a stunning venue. You’ll find it on the corner, facing The Gateway across the roundabout. St Andrews locals will know not only where it is but that parking is no problem there; and we’ll have detailed directions for our audience coming from out of town, plus a guide to lead people from the Town Hall to the North Haugh where pop-ups will proclaim that StAnza has arrived.

 “Just as the show is going on this weekend for the Jazz Festival, likewise the core programme for StAnza 2013 goes ahead as planned. Only one out of the 103 events planned has fallen victim to the Byre closure – the Ian Hamilton Finlay exhibition of silkscreen prints needed a special kind of gallery setting which couldn’t be found elsewhere on short notice. Of course I’m very disappointed about this but plan to bring the exhibition another year once we’re safely back in the Byre.

 “Otherwise, we are still on course with everything else on the programme, albeit with many events in alternative venues. My huge thanks to all the local organisations and bodies who have this week so generously offered to re-home some of our events, even if that involves some re-organisation of their own events, and to their obliging staff who have cheerfully responded to my copious lists of queries and questions. We’ll update our online listings with details of the new venues as and when they are firmed up over the next week or so, and once everything is in place, posters giving the full details of alternative venues will appear all around St Andrews, further afield at the SPL and other places, and be downloadable from our website. However, if in doubt, just enquire during StAnza of the good folk at the Festival Desk in the Supper Room.

 “We don’t have time to reprint this year’s brochure with the new venue listings, but for those who can’t get them online, we’ll have a handout available at the Festival Desk which you can consult in tandem with the brochure.

“My thanks also to my StAnza colleagues, our staff, trustees and committee members, who have responded magnificently to this challenge and provided invaluable support in a million ways. There’s such energy in St Andrews at present, made up of goodwill and constructive action directed at the Byre and at StAnza, so strong you could almost bottle it. Indeed, it’s not just in St Andrews but reaching across Scotland, so I have to be confident that this will prevail and the Byre won’t be dark for long. And meantime, when the whole StAnza extended family – poets, other performers, audience, volunteers – arrives in town next month to join that mix, the effect is going to be tremendous. I look forward to seeing you there.”