THURSDAY APRIL 7TH, 7-9PM at Summerhall We know from how quickly registration for our festival open mic filled that you’ve been longing for the Return of the Open Mic Night. We’ve been waiting too! Safety and responsibility will always be our top priority, and we know that it’s possible to stay safe and responsible at live events. We did it in…
by Samuel Tongue In the life sciences, there is an experimental hypothesis that suggests the following: as an organism suffers the impact of external stressors – disease or drought, perhaps – it may produce an ‘enhanced reproductive effort’, or distress crop, in an attempt to maintain its population levels. For example, when an immune response is generated, male blue-footed boobies…
by Kevin Williamson The intersection of science fiction and poetry only made sense to me in recent years which seems weird as I started delving deep into both forms of literature in my late teens. As I switched back and fore between Asimov / Bradbury / Moorcock, and MacCaig / Plath / Eliot the idea there was a space where…
by Esa Aldegheri “We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” So said Arundhati Roy during her Sydney Peace Prize Lecture in 2004. The literary world – from publishing to festivals, from writing retreats to literary prizes – is often thick with people I would call…
by Julia Sorensen It’s overly romantic to posit art as a cure-all for emotional turmoil—and by art I mean everything from visual art to theatre, poetry to music to dance, the sounds of intentionally weighted microphones swinging back and forth over an amplifier to dreamy, scrap metal giraffes. We’ve curated a panel called ‘Poems to Heal the Soul’, but the…
by Mariachiara Sica As I’m writing this piece in the middle of July 2021, the peak of Edinburgh’s festival season is at our doors. After the mess of last year, it has been a breath of fresh air to see festival programmes being released, tickets being sold, people looking forward to enjoying the arts and culture again, albeit on a…
Just in case you’re unsure what we’re on about with all our boat-themed babble, we wanted to share our namesake with you, courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library. Without further ado, ‘At Eighty’: Push the boat out, compañeros,push the boat out, whatever the sea.Who says we cannot guide ourselvesthrough the boiling reefs, black as they are,the enemy of us all…
by Julia Sorensen I don’t think I’m alone in feeling a lot a bit of anxiety at that first photo courtesy of Edinburgh Live. Especially because parades are in COVID format again this year, everything I’ve seen acknowledging Pride Month has been online. Honestly, the only content I’ve noticed has been either massive corporations changing their logos or constant (and…
We’re thrilled to join Galileo Publishers in announcing the publication of a new poetry collection from the renowned Scottish poet Tom Pow. It’s his first full collection since the thematic explorations of Dear Alice – Narratives of Madness (2009), A Wild Adventure – Thomas Watling, Dumfries Convict Forger (2014) and Concerning the Atlas of Scotland (2014). Like all his work,…
Interview by Julia Sorensen We originally published this March 2021 interview in our April newsletter, but it’s far too good to leave buried in there. The podcast episode he recorded in conjunction with this interview is out now. What drives you as an artist? An irrepressible compulsion to make stuff, which is probably quite universal across people’s reasons for making…
It was World Poetry Day on March 21! To help us celebrate, we got some of our volunteers from the QMU Masters in Arts, Festival & Cultural Management to curate some world poetry to share with you! (You’ll be treated to poetry by one of our volunteers if you read all the way to the end! It’s worth it. Trust us)….
by Kevin Williamson I’ve no idea if Seamus Heaney published his perceptive essay on Robert Burns on the 25th January or thereabouts. Here in Scotland you’d struggle to place an article on Burns outside the allocated few days at the end of January. Such are the ways in which our media puts its toe in the poetry waters. The hale clamjamfry…
The cat’s out the bag guys… 👀👀👀 https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/hopes-poetry-transform-streets-edinburgh-under-plans-dedicated-new-festival-3071081?r=24https://www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/hopes-poetry-transform-streets-edinburgh-under-plans-dedicated-new-festival-3071081?r=24
Turns out we were wrong… this is NOT Edinburgh’s first poetry festival. There was a one off operation c.1999 featuring none other than Eddie Morgan himself. Were you there? Tell us more!
I’ve loved Norman MacCaig since I was at school. His mice, squeaking small hosannahs in the byre, his ‘room size monster with a matchbox brain’ and his tiny, jewel like frogs opening the door to a love of language that has opened every other door for me since. He showed how language could reveal and subvert and celebrate and be…
Today is Norman MacCaig’s birthday. A teenager in ripped jeans and a PiL T-shirt stands curious at the poetry section in Thurso Library. Where to begin. John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson had worked their magic on vinyl but the reading was another thing. He looks at the yellow and white cover of a slim volume, placed at the…
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