Scottish Poetry Library Podcasts

Scottish Poetry Library's Sam Tongue runs a monthly online meet-up, where Friends of the Poetry Library get together to read and discuss a fresh poet and their poems.

In this podcast, Sam introduces us to Daniel Sluman

Have a look at our website to find out about becoming a Friend, and join us for the next Nothing but the Poem meet-up. Or simply enjoy this podcast and the excellent poems therein.

Scottish Poetry Library's Sam Tongue runs a monthly online meet-up, where Friends of the Poetry Library get together to read and discuss a fresh poet and their poems.

In this podcast, Sam introduces us to the general style and format, and enjoys the work of Jay Whittaker

Have a look at our website to find out about becoming a Friend, and join us for the next Nothing but the Poem meet-up. Or simply enjoy this podcast and the excellent poems therein.

A year into the Covid-19 era, the publisher Shearsman Books is putting out a new title, Poetry and Covid 19 – An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry. It's edited by Anthony Caleshu and Rory Waterman, the idea being to pair 19 UK-based poets with poets from around the world to work on poems together. As the blurb puts it: 'The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in all of the world’s permanently populated continents, recognising that the pandemic has truly hit us everywhere.'

We have not one but two podcasts based on the book coming up, this month's and we'll put out another next month. The contributors to this podcast are Rory Waterman, who'll chair proceedings, a poet from Nottingham who has three collections published by Carcanet. Linda Stern Zisquit is an American-born Israeli poet and translator. And finally Declan Ryan, who was born in County Mayo, and who has lived mainly in London. His first pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series.

Muriel Spark’s 100th birthday was celebrated in 2018 in several ways honouring her status as arguably the greatest Scottish novelist of the twentieth century. One of the more imaginative ways came late in the year with the publication of Spark: Poetry and Art Inspired by the Novels of Muriel Spark, which was edited by poets Rob A Mackenzie and Louise Peterkin and published by Blue Diode. With contributors including Tishani Doshi, Vahni Capildeo and Sean O’Brien, the anthology does Spark justice. Mackenzie and Peterkin came into the SPL to talk about Spark and her career as a poet, from her controversial time at the Poetry Society in the 1940s to how poetry informed her novels. Plus a tribute to the late Matthew Sweeney.

Before becoming a poet, Aileen Ballantyne was a journalist, and it's her former profession that informs her poetry, not least in a sequence of poems in her recently published collection Taking Flight that explore the aftermath of 1988's Lockerbie bombing, still the worst terrorist attack to take place on British soil. Ballantyne also reads poems about the moon landing and childhood flights to the USA.

In June 2019, poet, playwright and novelist Alan Spence performed at the Library to mark his first year as the Makar or Poet Laureate of Edinburgh. We recorded the event and present it to you now. During the performance he talks about some initial misgivings about how to make the post work, how he overcame those doubts, he reads many of the Edinburgh-based commissions he’s worked on during that first year and reads an ode to the former international Scottish rugby player Dodie Weir.

A note on the sound – as it’s a recording of a live performance rather than our usual interview, the quality is a little more ragged than usual. So apologies for the odd seagull, car reversing and cough.

Over a decade has passed since Stewart Conn was Edinburgh's Makar or Poet Laureate, yet the city continues to exert its influence upon him. His latest collection Aspects of Edinburgh maps the city as well as his fascination with its buildings, history and people.

Conn was born in 1936, growing up mainly in Kilmarnock, where his father was a minister. He worked at the BBC from 1962, mainly as a radio drama producer, becoming Head of Radio Drama, until he resigned in 1992. Publications include An Ear to the Ground (Poetry Book Society Choice); Stolen Light (shortlisted for the Saltire Prize), The Breakfast Room (2011 Scottish Poetry Book of the Year) and a new and selected volume The Touch of Time (Bloodaxe).

In our latest podcast, Conn discusses his collaboration with illustrator John Knight, and how he was initially wary of writing about the capital because he isn't a native.

Towards the end of 2018, Don Paterson came to the Scottish Poetry Library to discuss his latest book, The Fall at Home: New and Collected Aphorisms, which is published by Faber. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award, Paterson is one of Scotland's most accomplished poets, not to mention a musician, and in recent years has published several volumes of aphorisms, which are brought together in The Fall at Home. During the podcast, he discusses the relationship between poetry and aphorisms, why the English-speaking world doesn't have a strong tradition of aphorisms, and what happened the time he attended an aphorists convention.

In this podcast, the poet Sarah Howe talks to Jennifer Williams about kicking off the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival, writing with multiple languages and alphabets, sense and non-sense in poetry and much more.

http://sarahhowepoetry.com/home.html

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.

Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Ploughshares and Poetry, as well as anthologies such as Ten: The New Wave and four editions of The Best British Poetry. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 & 4. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism.

Previous fellowships include a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry and a Fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. Find out more about her latest academic projects here. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London.

Photo credit: Hayley Madden

In this podcast Jennifer Williams speaks to Jamaican-born, American-based poet Shara McCallum about her new Robert Burns poetry project which brought her to Scotland for a research visit; the lyric self; female and minority voices in poetry and much more.

With thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

SHARA MCCALLUM http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/shara-mccallum

Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry: Madwoman (forthcoming fall 2016, Alice James Books, US; spring 2017, Peepal Tree Press, UK); The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

Recognition for her work includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, a Cave Canem Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, and a poetry prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Her poems have appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies in the US, the Caribbean, Latin America, the UK and other parts of Europe, and Israel; have been reprinted in over thirty textbooks and anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and world literatures; and have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian. McCallum is also an essayist and publishes reviews and essays regularly in print and online at such sites as the Poetry Society of America. She has delivered readings throughout the US and internationally, including at the Library of Congress, Folger Shakespeare Library, Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Miami Book Fair International, Calabash Festival (Jamaica), Bocas Lit Fest (Trinidad), StAnza (Scotland), Poesia en el Laurel (Spain), Incoci di Civilta (Italy), and at numerous colleges and universities.

Since 2003, McCallum has served as Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, where she is a Professor in the Creative Writing Program. She has been a faculty member in the University of Memphis MFA program, Drew University Low-Residency MFA Program, Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA program, and at the University of West Indies in Barbados.

Over 250 years ago, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (Alexander MacDonald) wrote The Birlinn of Clanranald (Kettillonia, £5), an epic poem in Gaelic describing the troubled voyage of a galley from South Uist to Northern Ireland. Scotland itself was going through a stormy period post-Culloden, which the author, as a Jacobite sympathizer, knew fine well.

Poet and Professor of Scottish literature Alan Riach has recently published an English-language version of The Birlinn of Clanranald, and he came into the Library to discuss it. Over 30 minutes he talks about translating from Gaelic when you're not fluent in the language, the author's dangerous times, and why the climatic storm sequence is reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft.

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams talks to Sophie Collins about experimenting with starting points for creating poems, including using online translators and working with the unconscious; feminism and her role as co-editor of Tender (http://www.tenderjournal.co.uk/abouttender), a journal celebrating writing by women and the wide-ranging world of poetry translation from radical to faithful; and much more!

Sophie Collins is co-editor of online quarterly tender, and editor of translation anthology Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016). She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2014. Her first collection will be published by Penguin in 2017.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sophie-collins

In this podcast Jennifer Williams interviews poet William Bonar about the publication of his most recent pamphlet, Offering (Red Squirrel Press, 2015). They also discuss the mythology of memory, Hamish Henderson’s influence on Scots language poetry and a walk through the frozen cradle of Scotland.

William Bonar was born in Greenock and grew up in the neighbouring shipbuilding town of Port Glasgow. He is a graduate of the universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde and he gained a distinction on the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University in 2008. He recently retired after working in education for 30 years and is now a full-time writer. He is a founder member of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, Glasgow’s network of poets and lovers of poetry, and was a participant on Mirrorball’sClydebuilt mentoring scheme (2009-10) under the tutelage of Liz Lochhead. His sequence, Visiting Winter: A Johannesburg Quintet, originally published in Gutter 06, was chosen for the Scottish Poetry Library’s online anthology Best Scottish Poems of 2012 and he was shortlisted for a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2015. Offering won the James Kirkup Memorial Poetry Prize for 2014.

In this podcast guest interviewer and multi-lingual writer and translator Jessica Johannesson Gaitán talks to 3 bilingual poets about what it means to have more than one mother tongue, feeling guilty or not about writing in big languages, translating one’s own poetry and much more!

Featuring:

Juana Adcock is a poet and translator working in English and Spanish. Her work has appeared in publications such as Magma Poetry, Gutter, Glasgow Review of Books,Asymptote and Words Without Borders. Her first book, Manca, explores the anatomy of violence in Mexico and was named by Reforma‘s distinguished critic Sergio González Rodríguez as one of the best poetry books published in 2014. http://jennivora.com/

Ioannis Kalkounos was born in Greece. He works at the Edinburgh City Libraries. In 2012 he read two short stories at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (Story Shop). His first collection of poems, dakryma, was published in 2011 (Athens, Dromon Publications).

Agnes Török is a spoken word performer, poetry workshop leader, poetry event organiser and Loud Poet. She is the winner of multiple Poetry Slams in three different countries and two different languages. Török has been featured as a TED speaker, on The Today Programme and BBC Radio Scotland. At 2014’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, she was a BBC Poetry Slam finalist and her collaborative spoken word show with the Loud Poets received several five-star reviews. Her one-woman spoken word show ‘Sorry I Don’t Speak Culture’ was awarded Best International Spoken Word Show at the Edinburgh Fringe (PBH).

Török is premiering her newest project ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It – Take This Survey’, a one-woman show about the science of happiness, at the Edinburgh Fringe on the 16th – 24th of august. The show is an expansion of her TED talk on studying happiness. http://agnestorok.org/

Jessica Johannesson Gaitán grew up in Sweden and Colombia and currently lives in Bath. Her poems and stories have appeared in Gutter and The Stinging Fly among other publications. She writes about translations at therookeryinthebookery.org

Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to New Zealand poet John Dennison about his new book Otherwise (Carcanet, 2015). They discuss the poem as microeconomy, what it means to be human, where God fits in to modern poetry and much more. This podcast was recorded at and in association with StAnza International Poetry Festival 2015.

http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=995

John Dennison was born in Sydney in 1978. He grew up in Tawa, New Zealand and studied English literature at Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Otago. Having recently completed a PhD at the University of St Andrews, he now lives with his family in Wellington.

Music by James Iremonger (https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/).

Sheena Blackhall is a poet, novelist, short story writer, illustrator, traditional story teller and singer who is the author, as the podcast explores, of over 100 poetry pamphlets. In 2009, she was made Aberdeen’s Makar or poet laureate you might put it. She writes in English, Scots and Doric. As a child and native speaker of Doric she faced the same prejudices and challenges that speakers of minority languages around the world have faced. In this podcast, Sheena talks about her love of Aberdeen, the worse place she’s ever written a poem and why she’s written so many pamphlets.

This month on The Line Break, Ryan re-visits an interview with poet and journalist Kwame Dawes and discusses the challenges of writing poetry about often painful world events, and how to find beauty, happiness and truth in the 'cesspools of experience' that follow. And Ryan sets out more of his 'poetry sparks', including how to write a blues poem.

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com

This episode is produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser with thanks to the Scottish Poetry Library for their support.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats, the extraordinary Irish poet. His work reflects and sometimes opposes changes in the the poetry of his times. His life was large enough to encompass the remarkable changes Ireland underwent during his life and one of literature's most famous unrequited love affairs.

In a podcast marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the SPL invited a number of poets to read and reflect on their favourite Yeats poem. Recorded in March at St Andrews StAnza poetry festival, our podcast features Kei Miller, Ryan Van Winkle, Carolyn Forché, Jim Carruth, Alexander Hutchison, Anne Crowe and many more.

This podcast is a recording of the 2015 StAnza International Poetry Festival Round Table event in which SPL Programme Manager and poet Jennifer (JL) Williams was in conversation with the poet Alice Notley.

Alice Notley has published over thirty books of poetry, including (most recently) Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Negativity’s Kiss, and the chapbookSecret I D. With her sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, she edited both The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin Prize, two NEA Grants, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She lives and writes in Paris, France.

Many thanks to StAnza International Poetry Festival and to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. (https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/)

This podcast was recorded at and in partnership with the 2014 StAnza International Poetry Festival. Jennifer Williams talks to Jacob Polley about meaning and lack thereof, about resisting the idea of ‘home’, about remaining open to possibility when you’re writing and much more.

Jacob Polley is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Brink, Little Gods and, most recently, The Havocs, as well as a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novel, Talk of the Town. Born in Cumbria, he lives in Scotland where he teaches at the University of St Andrews.

http://jacobpolley.com/

Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in the podcast: https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

Image by Mai Lin Li

Ryan Van Winkle talks to the poet Sasha Dugdale, who is also editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. She tells us about how some of her poems come from 'failed translations' and she discusses how sound plays a much more important role in her own writing than other factors. She also discusses the problems involved with being a poet and a poetry translator. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

In this first SPL Podcast of 2015, Jennifer Williams, SPL Programme Manager, speaks to Salma, Indian poet and crusader for women’s rights. They talk about Salma’s strength and bravery in the face of oppression, her commitment to writing and publishing under extremely challenging circumstances and even *gasp* the use of the ‘v’ word in contemporary poetry! We hope this will be an inspiring and entertaining podcast to kick off your poetic new year.
Salma was born in a small village in Southern India, and overcame many obstacles to publish her poetry and fiction, now recognised as an important contribution to Tamil writing.

Salma came to Scotland as part of the Scottish Poetry Library’s Commonwealth Poets United project.

As part of the cultural programme surrounding the XX Commonwealth Games, Commonwealth Poets United was an international exchange project between six Scottish poets and poets from six Commonwealth nations: Canada, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Nigeria and South Africa. It established relationships between artists, organisations and communities through a culturally enriching poetry exchange.

The project was supported by Creative Scotland and the British Council, and partnered by BBC Radio Scotland.
Commonwealth Poets United http://commonwealthpoetsunited.com/about-commonwealth-poets-united/

OR Books: http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/salma/
Music by James Iremonger with many thanks: https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Madeleine Campbell, A C Clarke, Christine De Luca and Haris Psarras about poetry translation in Scotland and about the innovative new book Quaich: An Anthology of Translation in Scotland Today.

Purchase Quaich here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Quaich-Anthology-Translation-Scotland-Today/dp/1782010696

Music by James Iremonger http://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com

In August, our regular podcast host Colin Waters travelled to Faslane, home of the UK's nuclear deterrant, to talk to Gerry Loose. Loose's latest collection fault line is a suite of poems inspired by the area, which is his backyard. The great natural beauty contrasts with the ugliness of the military base, inspiring Loose. He guides Colin around the area, sharing its history and his thoughts on the radical nature of landscape poetry.

Miriam Gamble talks with Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable about her new collection Pirate Music. She reads a number of her poems and tells us about her approach to writing. Miriam also talks about how being a critic impacts on her work and the pressures of being part of the Northern Irish poetic tradition. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Brian Johnstone about his newest book, Dry Stone Work (Arc, 2014), and about upcoming The Fields of War performances (https://www.facebook.com/Fields.of.War) with poet Chrys Salt at the National Library of Scotland and other venues.

Brian Johnstone is a Scottish poet, who was born in Edinburgh in 1950, but who has lived in Fife since 1969. A well-known figure on the Scottish poetry scene, he is a published poet with six collections to his name, a literary event organiser of broad experience and a live performer of his poems both as a solo reader and with various musical collaborators.

Find out more about Trio Verso – Brian’s jazz collaboration project, The Fields of War and more at: http://brianjohnstonepoet.co.uk/

Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. www.jamesiremonger.co.uk