"Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol" - Steve Martin

Unfortunately the business of life has taken over poetry and blogging recently, plus zero inspiration hasn't helped. Hopefully things will settle down soon.
I'm doing a poetry reading a week on Saturday at the Callender poetry weekend along side Chris Powici, Tom Murray, Kona McPhee, Bridget Khursheed and Andrew P Pullan. So very much looking forward to it, the full programme for the weekend can be found here.

I received my contributor's copy of Gutter Magazine and even got a wee mention in the forward which was nice.
This is the lovely cover of the Cinnamon Press anthology due out next month and which I have three poems in, plus I have a poem in one of the weird and wonderful Sidekick Books micro-anthologies(produced by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving, editors of Fuselit Magazine which is due out next month also.
So hope to get back to blogging better soon! I hope even more that I'll manage to write even one poem, soon!!!!

The great Scottish Makar, Edwin Morgan, has died, aged ninety. A sad day for Scotland, poetry lovers and all those who knew him. I was lucky enough to meet him a number of years ago when I won a poetry competition organised by the RSAMD in honour of him.
An amazingly eclectic poet with a huge output of works. Despite his age and battle with cancer, Morgan published his last collection just three years ago.
Tributes by Carol Ann Duffy amongst others can be found here.

**edit** oops Morgan amazingly published his last collection, Dreams and Other Nightmares, on his 90th birthday!

Exciting news for Plath fans: the academic and literary journal,

Plath Profiles issue 3  is now on-line!

Packed with numerous interesting essays such as 'Plath's Legacy for a Male Poet' and 'Sylvia Plath and Edvard Munch: Mindscape of Chagrin', it includes a range of (some excellent) Plath-inspired poetry and artwork.

Essential reading for any Plath and Hughes fans.

(Right - detail from bedroom wallpaper from 3 Chalcot Square, London, 1960)

Getting back to writing a little about some of the poetry books I've purchased over the last year, here are some thoughts on Colin Will's latest poetry collection, The Floorshow at the Mad Yak Cafe. It's a collection of forty-one poems which range in setting from the Scottish mountains to, as the title suggests, Tibet. The last eight poems in the book are a sequence of Tibet poems.

What I enjoy most about Colin's poetry is his sonic awareness. As readers of this blog will know by now, I love explosions of words, repetitions of sounds, tightly compact syntax. So I love to read a couple of lines such as: "...Felled for fires, / fodder, frames for shelters, sod-clad" in Colin's poem 'The Long Walk In', it makes my tongue tingle! I think this is a lovely poem, it's about the walk in to the base of a mountain before the climb. It ends: "...A bare glen, deserted, / yet full of things that bustle, whistle, rustle, wrestle / with thoughts of getting up, never coming down". 
Another example of the density of language in Colin's poems comes from 'Old Campaigner': "Seasonal fogs drift inland, / tock-tocky beetles genuflect / to tip condensing drops mouthward".
I like the vein of humour in Colin's poems too, the last few lines of his poem 'Hide and Find' made me smile: "Below a grizzled crag I'm checked out / by a falcon, who can see / my inner pigeon".

Colin's background is in science which, I believe, contributes to the sense of precision in his use of language and imagery. My favourite poem in the collection is 'The To-Do List'. Each verse begins with  "I must...", following an interesting sequence of things on the narrator's to-do list from purchasing a supply of Post-It notes, beginning a history of the rice cake, arranging the flowers in an alphabet of colour to "I must start to cut you / out of my life". I love the sequence of the poem from the beautiful imagery in the first verse of the walls covered in post-it notes being likened to tree trunks in Mexico "smothered in a million motionless / Monarch butterflies", the intriguing second and third verses of the narrator beginning his history of the rice cake and flower arranging by letters to the slightly diorientating introduction of  'you' in the fourth stanza which then goes on to state "I'll begin with forgetfulness, those little acts of careless negligence" and ends beautifully with - "sooner or later / I'll introduce the closed door, / the unanswered knock, / the separate wing".
Relationships, landscapes and tightly knit language in abundance, an enjoyable collection.

I was hoping to fit in a lot of writing time this summer with Jamie being on his 6/7 week holidays (teachers eh!). But instead not only do we have a very active and excitable three year old, a fully weaned ten month old but now also a new puppy. So while he's keeping the mutt in a strict routine, my days are filled with endless hoovering, cooking, amusing, feeding!

However I have been reading, and been pleasantly surprised by, Roddy Lumsden's New and Selected book of poems Mischief Night. Having not been particularly excited by poems of his that I've read on-line, I just happened to see it in the local library and picked it up. I've thoroughly enjoyed it, particularly his love poems, of which there are many. Plus last month I purchased Eleanor Ree's brilliant latest collection Eliza and the Bear, I wrote about her previous collection, Andraste's Hair, here.

I've also been re-reading Kate Chopin's short novel The Awakening, which I absolutely love, with its wonderfully exotic (to me!) 19th Century New Orleans setting and Creole culture. The novel is rich with gorgeous description, here's an extract:

"How still it was, with only the voice of the sea whispering through the reed that grew in the salt-water pools! The long line of little gray, weather-beaten houses nestled peacefully among the orange trees. It must always have been God's day on that low, drowsy island, Edna thought. They stopped leaning over a jagged fence made of sea-drift to ask for water. A youth, a mild-faced Acadian, was drawing water from the cistern, which was nothing more than a rusty buoy, with an opening on one side, sunk in the ground. The water which the youth handed to them in a tin pail was not cold to taste, but it was cool to her heated face, and it greatly revived and refreshed her."

I've also got a desire to re-read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, all that sea imagery... Keep meaning to pick up a copy of her diaries to read as well.
Being a big Sherlock Holmes fan I've been loving the new series on BBC1, not to everyone's taste - Sherlock in 21st Century London - but I'm loving it, quite Jeremy Brett, I think. And Jeremy Brett is Sherlock Holmes!

Reading opportunity at The Fringe!

Anyone living near Edinburgh and looking for an opportunity to read their poems: - The Captain's Bar, snuggled between Old College and Bristo Square, is running a daily spoken word event from now until 21st August, check out the webpage here.

I'm pleased to be reading at the Callander Poetry Weekend which runs from Friday 3rd to Sunday 5th of September. It's a yearly festival hosted and organised by Sally Evans, editor of Poetry Scotland. Packed with poetry readings, book launch parties and interesting events such as book collating, sewing and bookbinding demonstrations, a talk on Byron in Albania by Morelle Smith and a presentation of Red Squirrel Press poets. Sounds like it's going to be a great weekend! Checkout the link to Sally's website from Poetry Scotland for more info.

my attempt at a poem in Scots!

Come Awa fir a Daunder

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first draft

We meet by a charm of crossbills,
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Sadly I couldn't make it through to Edinburgh for the launch of Anon 7 last night, but my voice did! Contributors to the magazine were asked to email recordings of our poems and apparently they were played in the "poet's chamber" at the launch.
You can listen to the recordings here. There are roughly 35 mins worth of poetry and you can hear me read my 'Eyewitnesses' poem at around 21 mins 30 secs against a background of bird calls and the like!

first draft -

The Silver Darlings

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Holiday time!

I'm off to the Isle of Lewis for a week. Traveling up through Skye, getting the ferry over to Harris then driving up and across the island to Barvas to stay with my aunt and uncle. I haven't been back 'home' for ten years, since both of my grandparents died.

I spent every summer there as a kid on my gran and seanair's croft, I'm looking forward to reliving this part of my childhood and taking my own children there to experience the long white sandy beaches, the machair, the huge Atlantic waves, the sprawling moors. The photo below is of my seanair and his parents, his mother is my namesake. It's the peat gathering time of year so no doubt we'll all be out chucking the peats onto the back of the tractor just like when I was a child. I'm going to buy a nice, new A5 notepad to take with me to gather plenty poetry material.

The poetry submission headache saga continues.

Remember when idiot me submitted a selection of poems for a poetry pamphlet competition which turned out to be a full-length collection competition instead? And remember how, when realising this, I emailed to withdraw my submission and submitted three of the poems elsewhere?

And then, bizarrely, how I got word that three of the poems that I had submitted to the full-length collection competition are going to be published in the up-coming Autumn anthology so I then had to write to all three editors whom I had submitted my poems to to with drawthem.

And despite this one of the editors emailed some time after to accept my poem for publication so I had to tell them again that I had withdrawn it.

Well today I flicked through facebook to discover that one of the other mags that I had submitted one of the three poems to has published it in their latest issue.

I give up.

If the anthology folk see it I'm sure they'll be well pee'd off.

The only thing that can happen now is for the third editor, whom I still haven't heard back from, to print my third poem in their mag!
Never thought I'd be complaining about getting poems published!

Anyway, I'm excited and super-pleased to have poems in this month's lovely issues of Poetry Scotland, Anon and Gutter Magazine!!!!

I've been reading Jane Holland's excellent series of workshops on redrafting poems at the Mslexia website. She quotes a suggestion from poet Sophie Mayer - "Feed work through Google Translation or Babelfish (sometimes multiple times) and rewrite from the new meanings that arise".
I thought it would be fun to translate and translate back my poem in the previous post through various languages on Babelfish -

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I think I like the Korean version best, or maybe the Russian 'I intrasonic oscillations along sea surface'!
A bit of fun but I think it could certainly be a useful way to get perhaps a slightly different perspective on a poem.

for fun, something a bit different -

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I've bought quite a few poetry books / pamphlets over the last couple of years so I thought it was about time I started reading them through systematically and blogging a little about them. So I'm going to start with Jon Stone's Scarecrow's pamphlet which is published by Happenstance.
Jon was one of the poets I was lucky enough to read with in Edinburgh the other week and I've really enjoyed reading his pamphlet.

Language-wise his poems are sheer pleasure. The first thing I enjoy about reading a poem is the words, regardless of meaning. Just the sound, the syllables, the rhymes, the visual explosions of letters. And, to be honest, I don't really know what half of his poems are about but they are laced with and energised by words and phrases that I wish that I'd thought of.
Some examples:


"Nuggets of Zingiber, fire-packed rhizomes"

"banish hag-rodeo! Bring that curio"

"get me that jake root,
that stick of mouth gelignite, brute tongue number"

"that woodknuckle jump-lead, that sting in a knock"

"the furious ting, with the jaggery,
crystals of dust and the bunch of nodules"

"splinter and splice in my trinket teeth"

Now I tell you that all of these phrases come from just One poem. It's no wonder that it was commended in last year's National Poetry Competition. It's called 'Jake Root' and you can read it here (fourth poem down).

The intensity and playfulness of language makes these poems exciting to read, this is what the blurb at the back of the pamplet says:

"This is a poet who knows precisely what he's doing, even when half-intoxicated by language and illusion: Doctor Who meets Jenny Greenteeth; Perkin Warbeck visits the same pub as Nick Drake. Prophecies, spells and lies begin to take on the nature of truth, as the Scarecrow looks up and walks...".

I admit most of the contemporary culture references of a twenty-something Londoner are lost on me, but the fact that I enjoyed these surreal, word-wild poems so much despite not 'getting' them just shows how good they are. Don't be misled by the weird and out-there subject matter and wordage, these poems are very technically aware and many of them are written in traditional form. I'll be interested to watch how Stone develops his writing in his future collection/s.

Here are some more of my favourite phrases/lines from various poems in the pamphlet:

"Pulse a bird's blink"
"A man whose head's been Morris-danced into bandages"
"His mouth / is a forge and his laugh is ironmongery"
"the night is hot and hot with the breath of Boy"
"beauty that would make a shambles of you!
"how I prefer to be a night operator, / clot of shadow"
"the stony clank of my strides"
"My mother's smile is a set of rubber kitchen knives"
"Egon is 'wolf-handsome', 'young', 'a talent'"
"who is this wastral, hook-spined, puppet-limbed"

I could go on and on  but I might get done for copyright!

I want my old template back!!!!

So the night has come and gone and it feels good to have conquered my first proper poetry reading!
I was sick all day Saturday and really thought I might not make it through to Edinburgh after all my preparation and planning  but thankfully I stopped throwing up by Sunday morning.

I was first up to read which meant I could relax and enjoy all of the other readings. All that practice of reading my poems to the kitchen walls paid off. Once I started the nerves disappeared, I looked out over everybody's heads and read my poems as if I was in my own wee house. I actually really enjoyed it!!

Phillis Levin is a lovely, dainty woman, she and her husband had been staying at St. Andrew's and they kindly said that they enjoyed my St. Andrew's poems. Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving were up from London and they both read very well, plus there was David Kinloch, a very tall and prominant Scottish poet. It was a great variety of readings and lovely just to be there and get a chance to meet and chat to folk. Everyone was very friendly, especially the other poets which was nice because I was slightly afraid of them at first!! I came away with signed copies of Levin's latest collection May Day, Kinloch's Un-Tour-dEcosse and Stone's recently published Happenstance pamphlet Scarecrows. I also won a book of selected poems of Blake Morrison in the raffle! So plenty of reading to enjoy.

Some great and funny advice on writing by the UK-born, Australian-bred and now living in Scotland poet, Kona MacPhee. I need to seriously apply nearly all of these points to myself!

That's my poem and a short bio up at the Poetry At The... blog for the poetry reading next week, can't quite believe we're into June already!
I'm really looking forward to hearing Phillis Levin, I very much like what I've read of her work on-line and she's a wonderful reader of her poems (you can hear her read some of her poems here). Also reading will be David Kinloch who lectures in Creative Writing at Strathclyde uni, and Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving who are both editors of Fuselit magazine. So feeling a little nervous about reading in such good company!
I've read quite a few tips on-line on preparing for readings but I'd like to know your number one tip that you always keep in mind when doing a reading or what especially bugs you about poetry readings.

It'll also be nice just getting to Edinburgh for a change. Might get a chance to pop into the Scottish Poetry Library or a wander around the National Galleries. There's no chance of getting home because of the ferries which means a whole night in Edinburgh, child-free!!

I picked up a copy of Palgrave's famous poetry anthology The Golden Treasury the other week from a local charity shop. It's in brilliant condition too, well it was before I started dog-earing the poems I like! So I'm reading my way through it and pleasantly enjoying Shakespeare's poems in particular, whom I never read enough of. I love this song from The Tempest which is of course an important reference point for Plath -

Full fathom five thy father lies:
of his bones are coral made;
those are pearls that were his eyes:
nothing of him that doth fade,
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
hark! now I hear them, -
ding, dong, bell.

But even better than reading it is hearing it sung, so gorgeously -