Poetry fairy cakes at StAnza (or try a biscuit…)

It’s become almost expected that we make afternoon tea a poetic experience. We always distribute our coasters and the delightful sma buiks, from Poems for All in San Francisco, in participating local cafes. Last year’s Poetry Digest’s poem cum Iced Double Biscuits were supremely popular and led to the age-old question from festival goers, ‘will there be no more cakes’? This year we just had to have similar, toothsome variations on theme of edible  poetry.

Literary Paparazzo Chris Scott caught up Sally Crabtree, our Poetry Postie,  as she did the rounds delivering delicious fairy cakes as poems. She topped the butterfly winged cakes with tiny scrolls, as you can see in the close-up below.

Sally (in pink wig and Postie hat) delivers some poem-cakes)/Chris Scott

And if you were feeling creative, it was possible to make an iced poem-biscuit: 

Live Poetry Breakfast Webcasts this Friday, Saturday and Sunday

This year all three Poetry Breakfasts will be broadcast live on the Internet for those not fortunate enough to be here to enjoy them in person. You can watch the discussion panels on the StAnza USTREAM channel at 10am-11am on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of this week, where you can also post your questions to be put to the panellists.

On Friday, Salt Publishing’s editor Chris Emery will discuss how poetry is designed with poets Greg Thomas, Ken Babstock and George Szirtes. Poets Mandy Haggith and Andrew Forster join academic David Borthwick and artist Carry Akroyd to discuss how poetry engages with nature on Saturday; while Sunday’s Breakfast will focus on the issues and art of poetry translation, featuring poets Alvin Pang, Erín Moure, and Eurig Salisbury alongside publisher Angela Jarman.

If you would like to pose a question to the panellists during one of the Breakfasts, you can post it on the right hand side of the video view window on USTREAM. You can also send us questions via Twitter to @stanzapoetry and join the conversation at #StAnza13 and #StAnza13webcast

Friday’s Poetry Breakfast is supported by StAnza’s media partner, The List

Photo of Poetry Breakfast, StAnza 2012, by John Starr

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!

‘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 – tickets go on sale!

StAnza 2013 pages in the new Byre brochure just out

For those who like their StAnza listings on paper, you’ll have to wait just a little while longer for the full brochure, but the Byre Theatre’s own new brochure is just out with their usual spread of StAnza’s Byre events, so allows a little paper browsing.

Of course the full details are available online (with a few last events just being added) at www.stanzapoetry.org, and tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday 14th January.  Details are as follows:

StAnza Box Office:
The Byre Theatre,
Abbey Street, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9LA, Scotland
tel: 01334 475000 fax: 01334 475370

Booking: tickets on sale on Monday 14th January 2013

Box Office open
Before festival: from Monday to Saturday, 10am–5pm (or 7pm on theatre show nights).
During festival: daily 10am–8pm from 6-10 March 2013

Purchase online: (Link from StAnza website or go direct to the Byre’s own website at www.byretheatre.com)
By phone, in person or on line: payment by Visa or MasterCard.
By post: cheques made out to The Byre Theatre.
Concession prices: available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, disabled & unemployed.
Families: family tickets for children’s events admit up to four people (must include at least 1 child & no more than 2 adults)
Early bird discount: 30% off all tickets (full price or concession) purchased on or before 4 February 2013.
Bulk purchase: 30% off tickets bought for 8 or more events.
Disclaimer: please note, bulk purchase and special discounts are not applicable along with any other discount offer.
Free events: for free events, just turn up; all exhibitions are free.

We know from the laments of those who were unsuccessful that there’s always a push to obtain tickets for the more intimate events with limited seating, so this year we’ve added a second all day workshop at Balmungo, to give some more people a chance at getting tickets, and there are also three morning workshops, and six Round Table events.  So good luck at getting all the tickets you want. Most of our headliners, including this year Mark Doty, Paula Meehan, John Hegley, Robin Robertson, Gillian Clarke, Liz Lochhead and Luke Wright, are performing in our larger venues, where there should be no difficulty getting tickets at this time. And of course there are as many free events as well, making StAnza the festival you can enjoy without breaking the bank.

StAnza 2013 is here!

Mark Doty (photo by Starr Black)

It has been quite a week for StAnza. Our Poetry Café night at our favourite Coffee and Juicing Bar, Zest in South Street, was the opening event for the St Andrews Festival currently taking place. Rab Wilson was supported by an international line-up of local poets taking to the open mic, all dished up with complimentary haggis stovies. And stovies were a support act again yesterday when Robin Cairns featured in our lunchtime event for St Andrews Day in partnership with Food from Fife, all as part of the St Andrews Food Fair.  

Meantime, while all this has been happening, we’ve been working hard to get the feast of poetry which is the core programme for StAnza 2013 prepared, cooked, garnished and served up for St Andrews Day. So, if you’ve been eager to hear what’s in store for next March, all is now revealed. Just click here or go to our website at www.stanzapoetry.org to view more than 200 pages about the events and the poets, visual artists, musicians, writers and others taking part.

 Tickets don’t go on sale until early January so you have a whole month to browse and make decisions about which events you want to see. And the programme isn’t complete yet. We’ll be adding a few more events and names over the next month so keep checking the online programme for the latest update.