It's been a busy month or so with poetry events, kids birthday parties and now the trip of a lifetime to Israel in two weeks time to plan for. When I was talking to Donald S Murray, he said that there are two ways he approaches writing a book: (1) ask a question and then the book aims to answer that question (ie for The Guga Hunters he asked himself why do men from the small community of Ness continue the centuries-old tradition of hunting baby gannets). (2) Use a metaphor or image and keep it in mind whilst writing the book, so for Donald's book about the building of the Italian chapel in Orkney he had in mind the image of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet coming to life.
I thought this was all very interesting.

 I've been reading through my collected Ingeborg Bachmann and she has some gorgeous turns of phrase, though because I'm reading in translation I guess I'll never know how much of my translation is Bachmann or the translator. Either way, it's very good reading, very Celan-like which is to be expected but much more nature-orientated or grounded in which is definitely up my street. Here's a wee taster from 'Borrowed Time':

For the entrails of fish
have grown cold in the wind.
Dimly burns the light of lupines.
Your gaze makes out in fog:
the loan of borrowed time
will be due on the horizon.

There your loved one sinks in sand;
it rises up to her windblowh hair,
it cuts her short,
it commands her to be silent,
it discovers she's mortal
and willing to leave you
after every embrace.

Poems for Pussy Riot

"Both the example set by Pussy Riot — fierce, feminist champions of freedom — and the example being made of them by the Russian judiciary has fired something in writers around the world. The band’s punk prayer, a poem gorgeously translated into English by Carol Rumens and Sasha Dugdale, uses language precisely and powerfully — and it’s inspired the poets who’ve contributed to do the same."

Want to get involved? Check out this page.

Does anyone have any tips on moving from poetry pamphlet collection to a full-length collection?
I said in an earlier post that I'm ready to put my post-Vintage Sea poems behind me and start working towards / focusing on a full-length collection. I feel so ready to work on something bigger than a group of random poems. But working out what theme/subject-matter I want to focus on and how to approach the bigger project of a full-length collection is a different thing entirely! So any experience or wisdom that could enlighten me at all would be much appreciated!

Well that's it all over! Saturday at Callander was great, it was nice to hear Richie McCaffery read again and another Happenstance poet, Margaret Christie. The Filmpoem sequence was excellent, great film and photography work by Alistair Cook with poems by Morgan Downie, Elizabeth Rimmer, Andrew Philip, Jo Bell and many others. Many of the films are available to watch freely on the Filmpoem website, well worth checking out. I really enjoyed readings from the Split Screen poems too, a brilliant anthology of 72 commissioned poems based on film and tv. Sally's appearance with her makeshift Yoda hat as she read Colin Will's Yoda poem The last of the little green men was priceless! I sold enough pamphlets to buy myself a copy of the Split Screen anthology and grab a Burger King on the road home, so that wasn't too shabby either!

Then on the Sunday, Donald S. Murray arrived in town and came to dinner so we had a lovely evening chatting to him. A genuinely really lovely guy, it was such a pleasure to meet him and hear him talk about his writing. And it's such a small world that it turns out that as well as other family connections, Donald used to hang around with one of my uncles when they were young, they even shared a flat together in Glasgow! I tagged along while he read some of his work and talked to the Gaelic and English students at the local secondary school and then had the privilege to read alongside him in the evening to a small but friendly audience. It's the first time I've read my own work in Dunoon so that's a milestone crossed! I've done a write-up of the event for the local paper and I'm hoping, through it to make contact with any other like-minded poetry people in the community and raise interest for possible future poetry events.

I'm banning the word 'blood' and its variants from my poetic language. Going through my poems trying to pick a reading list for tomorrow and I can't believe how much blood is in them. I've got - blood clots, bloods of Christ, blood-rock, blood waves, blood-birds, bloodied skins, Blood, under the blood... and so on! Not quite sure what this says about me but it has to stop!!

Unusually for me I have a week of poetry events coming up... well two events anyway!
Sally Evans' Callander poetry weekend begins this Friday, I'm reading on the Saturday morning alongside Kemal Houghton, Robin Cairns, Juliana Greer, John Coutts, Katy Conrad, A. C. Clarke, Richie McCaffery and Morelle Smith. I'll be staying for the afternoon readings which will be from the Split Screen anthology and the Filmpoem project, so really looking forward to that. And then on the Monday night I'll be introducing Donald S Murray to read in Dunoon and, hopefully, have some music from a Gaelic singer. Hoping it'll be a good turn out. I've been running around town today putting up posters for it!
The photographer whose picture illustrates my poems in the recent Northwords Now has said that she would like to do a collaborative pamphlet witth my poems and her pictures. I really like the idea of this but actually getting it published is looking like it could be pretty tricky, neither of us being famous and photos being costly to print, which is a real shame.

I'm delighted that Donald S. Murray is coming to Dunoon and will be reading from his latest poetry collection, Weaving Songs, at the Dunoon Baptist Church Centre on Monday 10th September at 7pm.

Weaving Songs is a collection of poems and short stories inspired by Donald's childhood growing up in Ness, the northernmost part of the Isle of Lewis. His writing is accompanied by illustratory photographs by Carol Ann Peacock. Donald is the author of the renowned book The Guga Hunters and his poetry, prose and verse has been shortlisted for both the Saltire Award and Callum Macdonald Memorial Award.

I'm pleased to be organising this reading and finally getting a chance to meet Donald. I know Dunoon is out the way for most people but I'd love to meet up with anyone who fancies coming to Dunoon for the day and I've no doubts the reading will be a memorable event.

I've decided to start thinking about putting together another pamphlet collection.

I was originally working towards a full-length collection but I feel I've been writing in a limbo-period over the last year-and-a-half and now I've come back to myself and I want to put the post-Vintage Sea poems behind me into their own wee pamphlet home and start on something new and focused. It's very exciting / exhilarating starting to put a submission together, I already have a provisional title for a collection and I only really decided last night. Of course, there's no guarantee that anyone will publish it but at the start of the process, before all of the rejections, it's all good fun! :)

The Mahmoud Darwish Selected came in yesterday and what started out as a quick flick through, sucked me right into the book. The poems are just amazing. Packed with gorgeous language and imagery. Not sure what forms are at work but there's much mantra style line repetition which works almost hypnotically and suits the themes perfectly. The book is prefaced with a couple of lines from Lorca -

But now I am no longer I,

nor is my house any longer my house

and there is definitely a Lorca feel to the poems - the exotic land imagery for one. But the poems aren't sentimental. Despite the beautiful language and imagery they can be hard-hitting as they deal with difficult themes in opposites - love/hate, being at home/alienation, peace/war, identity/loss of identity, individual/ the people, and of course, life/death. These constant dualities are explored, painfully, in the first person. However the poems aren't political treatises, they are always, and above all, poems.

Some lines from 'Another Road in the Road'

There is yet another road in the road, another chance for migration.
To cross over we will throw many roses in the river.
No widow wants to return to us, there we have to go, north of the neighing horses.
Have we yet forgotten something, both simply and worthy of our new ideas?
When you talk about yesterday, friend, I see my face reflected in the song of doves.
I touch the dove's ring and hear flute-song in the abandoned fig tree.
My longing weeps for everything. My longing shoots back at me, to kill or be killed.

"The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wanderfor a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace" Kate Chopin

I've started reading the first of my recently ordered poetry collections - Into the Deep Street: Seven Modern French Poets 1938-2008 

Also waiting to come in the post is:

Sea Room: An Island Life - a biographical book about a young man, Adam Nicolson, who inherited the Shiants, a group of uninhabited Hebridean islands beween Skye and Harris. I've been wanting to read this book for a long time.

Darkness Spoken - The collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

Unfortunately, it Was Paradise - Selected poems of Mahmoud Darwish

I really enjoy reading European poetry, my favourite poet last year was the wonderful German poet, Durs Grunbein. When I'm going on holiday I like to read up on some poetry from the place I'm going, the last two books should give you a clue about where I'm going in October! :)

I'd like to highlight another couple of poetry blogs I've being enjoying following for a while now.

The first is HG Poetics blog by Henry Gould.
Gould has a particular interest in / affinity with a group of early twentieth century Russian poets called the Acmeists (Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam). He regularly posts sections from his exceptionally long poem Lanthanum and also occasionally posts video recordings of his guitar playing, which I absolutely love. Gould writes occasional essays on his, and Acmeist, poetics which are extremely interesting. You can watch a video of Gould reading a selection of his poems at a recent poetry reading posted on his blog.

Also worth a visit is Clarissa Aykroyd's blog The Stone and the Star. Clarissa writes regularly on poetry and, at times, poetry in relation to film, art, travel and anything else that takes her interest. I think we must have similar poetic tastes as she seems to mostly write about poets I extremely like. She even got to attend a celebration of Transtromer's work with not only Transtromer actually physically present but none other than Wallander star, Krister Henriksson reading the poems in Swedish. I'm still confounded by jealousy over this!!

Less than a week until the holidays are over. It's been a busy but good time with the kids, catching up with friends and general hectic summer holiday life. I'm looking forward to calmness and routine and poetry, all have which have pretty much gone right out of the window over the last couple of months.

Though my poetry reading has been limited I have enjoyed reading Alan Stubbs' poems. There are several on his blog all of which have been published in Poetry Review and a fantastic essay on John Burnside which was originally published  in Agenda. Alan has put together a first poetry collection manuscript which he thinks he'll struggle to get published because of the current publishing climate, though judging by not only the quality of his poems but also his impressive magazine publishing credits, I don't think he'll struggle much at all!! It's definitely worth checking out his blog.

I'm still in shock at the cheque I received this morning for the Northword Now poems, who says poetry doesn't pay!!! I'm making up a nice list of desirable books to purchase, it's been a while since I've had a book splurge! Candidates include The Sea Room by Adam Nicolson, Weaving Songs by Donald S Murray and Contemporary World Poetry - An Anthology. I'm open to suggestion, particularly for current poetry in translation.

Delighted to see the online version of the summer issue of Northwords Now is now available and very much looking forward to the actual magazine arriving in the post!

P12 is a gorgeous photo by the photographer Barbara MacAskill which illustrates my poems on P13. I'm loving the cover pic too which is by painter and fellow Argyllshire resident, Sian MacQueen.
There's a great interview with the wonderful John Burnside and plenty more poems and short stories inside!

And if reading my poems doesn't bore you entirely you can hear me read some of them at the audio section of the Northwords Now website!

Thanks to Jim's excellent review of The Jaguars Dream by John Kinsella, a wide selection of non-english poems chosen and  translated by Kinsella, I followed Jim's link to Kinsella's website and came across a fantastic selection of Kinsella's essays all available to read online.
I've never got around to reading much of Kinsella but now I'd really like to pick up some of his work. You can read the essays here and the one's I've read so far have been varied and very interesting.

I particulary like his essay on Plath. It's common knowledge that admitting to being a fan of Plath can be to one's detriment if you want to be taken seriously as a poet but being a young, and specifically male poet, (when Kinsella recounts his youthful introduction to Plath) and admitting to liking Plath is an altogether further take on this strange phenomenon. Kinsella also writes well, I think,  about Plath's 'problematic' imagery, the representation of the 'other' in her poems.

And because I have no news poetry-wise to update on...

British summertime has begun... in theory that is. We're into the fourth week of the summer holidays and the kids and I are surviving remarkably well considering the crap weather! Jamie has spent most of his holidays so far at the old house getting it reading for selling and now we're just waiting on a home report before we can put it up for sale. So if anyone is interested in buying a newly decorated and carpeted two-bedroom flat in (not so sunny but beautiful nontheless) Dunoon, let me know!!

I struggle to get much writing done when we're all out of routine but I have managed to watch all eight series of Spooks available on good old BT Vision. Shocking waste of time I know, what can I say, when I take a notion to something I get a bit obsessed about it and you can't deny it, Spooks is pretty fantastic! I'm being coerced into reading The Natural Navigator by Tristan Gooley (Jamie reads one of my books I have to read one of his). Quite enjoying most of it, it's not unrelated to the Kenneth White Geopoetics, rediscovering our natural selves in nature. The intense study of the humble puddle did make my eyes glaze over but the book gets better and I'm looking forward to getting to the sea chapter.
Apparently the weather is supposed to improve this week so we're planning our first attempt at family camping: all of one night near Stirling so we can fit in a visit to the safari park and Duncarron Medieval Village which should be fun.

I came across the most fantastic dolls of the world collection the other day when we visited Finlaystone Country Park, just across the Clyde from us. The pics don't even show a quarter of the dolls there. The collection was started by Lady MacMillan (Finlaystone estate is the seat of the Clan MacMillan) at the turn of the 20th century. I didn't get much time there so another visit is definitely on the horizon.
Aside from this, life is the usual - potty training, making princess cakes, Skylanders, swimming. Not sure it'll be of much interest to many readers but I've bought myself a new bible, an American Standard Version with Greek and Hebrew dictionaries for keys words at the back which I'm really enjoying using, being able to check up on the translations of difficult words / passages. I always intended to learn Hebrew and started a few times but never kept it up.

I've just seen the proofs for my Northwords Now poems! They are publishing Tiger Tulips, A Vision of Sula Sgeir,  Orchid, Loch Long and four-section poem called Reflections. On the opposite page to my poems is a gorgeous photograph titled with a line from one of the poems. I love it and can't wait for it to be published!

I'm excited to be reading at the Callander Poetry Weekend in September. It really is one of the best Scottish poetry events and such a friendly atmosphere to read at. Here's the line-up of events and readers here.

Anyone who's been reading my blog for a while knows I'm a fan of the poet/philosopher Kenneth White. He was one of the first poets I ever heard read and no other reading, so far, has come close to that experience. I'm currently reading an exploration of White's life and work, The Radical Field by Tony McManus.

Here are some quotes from the first part of the book:

"Perhaps a mother is like the concentration of a culture. I believe mine was a personification of the conflicts, the contradictions, the problems of Scottish culture." Kenneth White

"I take 'seaboard' (littoral, shore) to be particularly significant space. We are close there to the beginnings of life, we cannot but be aware there of primordial rhythms (tidal, meteorological). In that space, too, we have one foot, as it wew, in humanity (inhabited, inscribed space) the other in the non-human cosmos (chaos-cosmos, chaosmos) - and I think it is vitally important to keep that dialogue alive." Kenneth White

"The Scot is a nomad, like the Scythian, his ancestor. But there is in him also a quietude. It is this twofold delight in movement and tranquility which I feel on the moors...space to move in and tranquility to see in. That is the original ground of poetry." Kenneth White

"Those little words like 'God', 'soul' and 'nation' have done a great deal of harm. That's why I use grotesque words which cannot do any harm to anyone: 'erotocosmology', for example!" Kenneth White

"I have never considered myself as 'an artist', defined either as a producer of pabulum for immediate social consumption, or as a public personage in the cultural limelight. In both cases, the artist is caught up in a complex of individual/public relationships, exactly that outside of which I keep myself. In movement, via a process of deconditioning, towards a transpersonal reality." Kenneth White

"It is not a reality, the state of things which is ours today. It hasn't the body of a reality, it has neither the fibre not the tatchiness of a reality. It is a universe of distance and separation, a world where boredom and catastrophe follow each other, deprived of depth and essential continuity. I want real reality. Everything I write is a move towards a little real reality." Kenneth White

"This is about neither idealism or realism. It is perhaps about allowing deep sensations to reach the highest areas of the brain, where they may be deployed in an emptiness which is a plenitude." Kenneth White

draft poems / first draft

(poems removed)

Plath Profiles, an interdisciplinary journal for Sylvia Plath studies, Volume 5 is now published and can be fully downloaded here.

Some really fantastic essays in this one including an excellent collaborative article by Peter K. Steinberg and Gail Crowther on the experience of researching the extensive Sylvia Plath archive material held at Smith College with particular insight into Plath's correspondence with The New Yorker. Also further interesting essays on textual variations in the British and American versions of The Bell Jar, the intrigue of a postcard which survived Plath's 1962 bonfires, the relationship between Plath's Ariel collection and the tarot system and much more. I think this is the best issue so far.