Big Lit Day in Gatehouse of Fleet

I've just been to Big Lit Day.  

It was great!  Full marks to The Bakehouse and D&G Arts Festival.  The poetry pamphlet market was friendly and full of marvellous finds, and eventually I had to stop myself buying things.  Although HappenStance were most helpfully selling pamphlets for £1 on the day, thus tempting you to buy lots.  Leonard McDermid was there with Marigold Press, with which I am much taken.  Everyone should buy 'Ten Sad Songs'. Subtlety incarnate, and a thing of beauty too.  I also succumbed to a beautiful pamphlet from Controlled Explosion Press called 'The Ruin of Poltalloch' by Graham Fulton.
Out on the street folk were happily arrested by John Hudson's installation SHED by the public gardens.  It felt very real, very poignant.
Then I went to hear Katrina Porteous read her new work 'Horse'.  It was inspired by the 3000 year old Uffington Horse in Oxfordshire.  Woven into the poem are threads connecting the nearby hill where St. George slew the dragon, and also Weyland's Smithy on the Ridgeway.  The work is intrinsically connected to a soundtrack created by Peter Zinoviev, which is based on the metallic, roaring physicality of a Cornish chain ferry.  The combination sound and voice and poem was absolutely mesmerising.  Katrina was marvellous, making the reading a drama, completely engrossing.  
Picture my disappointment then, it has not yet been published!  Publish it someone - complete with CD! I drove home, remembering too little, but with fire, chalk, hammer and hill still in the bloodstream.

As promised, this is a nanoBOOK™

Here we are, a nanoBOOK™ we made earlier.  Credit to my younger son for idea and artwork.  To join the Science Fiction in a Flash workshop for children aged from about 9 years upwards (but younger if they are keen writers), book places on 07504 649 150. 

Science Fiction in a Flash, where you get to make your own nanoBOOK™, is part of Wild Science Family Mayhem! Day at the Rutherford McCowan Building, Crichton Campus, Dumfries.  The workshop is from 10.30-12 noon.

Writer in Residence at Wild Science Family Mayhem Day

This is going to be terrific fun!  I'm making trial nanoBOOKS, experimenting with copper wire.  More photos shortly.  Wild Science Family Mayhem! Day, held in the Rutherford McCowan Building, Crichton Campus, Bankend Road, Dumfries, is part of Dumfries & Galloway Science Festival 1st to 6th May 2012.  All young writers welcomed.  And everything is free.

Winning Poems

While waiting for my tickets for StAnza I was beguiled (easily) into entering a poetry competition c/o University of St Andrews  in partnership with the StAnza Festival.
And I'm so pleased to report my poem was one of the winners!  There are some wonderful poems by the other winners Pippa Little, Janette Ayachi, Chris Lawrence and Ruth Aylett, which you can see here.
The brief was to write a short poem for display alongside certain artefacts.  Here's the cast of the skull of Bishop James Kennedy, and here's my poem.

He has become his own reliquary,
a mirror image of a prayer.
Put your ear to his shell,
hear it fill with his breath.

It's displayed on a card in the glass case in MUSA, the Museum of the University of St Andrews:

Of poems and canapes

Well, Roncadora and The Green Tea House in Moniaive are a wholly delicious combination. Not often enough are words inadequate to describe canapes, but they were on Saturday.
Hugh's art covered the big wall, the woodburner glowed on the other and all the little tables and rush-seated chairs were filled with poetry lovers. 

Andrew Forster read from 'Territory' and 'Digging' (after he'd reminisced about the lovely food he'd eaten in The Green Tea House when he was D&G's Lit Dev Officer).  Andy's work weighs every word carefully in its beautifully conversational cadences.  A treat.

Rab Wilson read from his recent collection 'A Map for the Blind' and from '1957 Flying Scot'.  All about a bike - and a passion:  'Finely bred racing greyhound of a bike'.  This Roncadora work of art comes with cds of Rab speaking, and saxophonist Ben Bryden playing the music he wrote for Rab's words.  (I'm listening to it now).

Hugh McMillan, widely acknowledged as a brilliant reader.  You brace yourself to laugh till it hurts (the letters excusing attendance at Culloden etc, due to difficulties with Apex tickets and the like. 'My heart bleeds in this Travelodge'.).  But Hugh does much more than funny.  He writes unerringly along some risky brink.  I often find it heartbreaking.  Look out for Hugh's New and Selected - A Thin Slice of Moon, published by Roncadora, and out Very Soon.

Hugh Bryden's listening.  But he did read too, (there's nothing Hugh B can't do).  Everyone liked the seagull poem (one for Dumfries, you see).  It went:
Seagull
Sees gull
Seize gull

Here I am, reading from 'Lost at Sea'.  I do look as if I've just noticed a very large spider approaching across the ceiling, mid-line. 
But it was a lovely chance to try out new poems from 'The Dark Farms'.  I kept noticing how ghostly they are. I do hope they were scary. Here's a few lines from 'Names Spoken in Kirk':

And by the light of elder stars
I know the people of this kirk
have slipped their names.

O constellations hear our prayer.
There's no wood in this kirk any more.
It eyes the sky.  It's purely stones and air.

Roncadora Poets read in The Green Tea House Sat 3 March

I'm looking forward to reading among the talent and bone-dry wit of the Roncadora Poets in what must be one of the most perfect settings for verse - The Green Tea House in Moniaive. We're all published by Dumfries and Galloway’s award-winning Roncadora Press and will endeavour to woo and wow you on Saturday 3 March at 7pm. Tickets are £6, available from 01848 200099.

Here's the infamous team photo (as once captioned by Hugh McMillan: 'Roncadora are a family firm purveying mutton pies, butteries, mince rounds and bread and butter puddings. The present board of directors, photographed here, pride themselves on providing high calorie fare for the most discerning of palates."  Speak for yourself Hugh.).

More truthfully, you, the audience, can expect varied and engaging poetry helpfully complemented by a free glass of wine and canapés created by The Green Tea House. Hot drinks will also be available.

Roncadora Press is owned and managed by Hugh Bryden, renowned artist, teacher, writer – and increasingly well-regarded publisher. Roncadora Press was shortlisted in 2008 for the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for Pamphlet Poetry with Hugh’s own pamphlet ‘If Ah Could Talk tae the Airtists’; then won the prize in 2009 with well- published poet Hugh McMillan’s ‘Postcards from the Hedge’, and was shortlisted again in 2011 with Jean Atkin’s ‘Lost at Sea’.

Roncadora has also been successful in the prestigious Michael Marks Poetry Pamphlet competition, shortlisted in 2010 with ‘Devorgilla’s Bridge’ by Hugh McMillan and again in 2011 with a selection of work by the poets reading at this event.

The reading at the Green Tea House will feature work by Jean Atkin, Hugh Bryden, Andrew Forster, Hugh McMillan and Rab Wilson. We'll read from recently published work, but promise also to provide a taster of new poems on their way to publication, in a conversational evening.

 

Andrew McNeillie’s Late Night Pheasant

Yesterday we had half a dozen of them still scrounging under the bird feeders.  (The shoots don't get very close to us).  Later in the year we see pairs of males sparring in the garden.  Which means I’ve often seen them up close – not to mention the times you disturb one when walking, and they burst from under your feet with that strange panicky honking, wings whirring.

So I went back to Andrew McNeillie’s poem ‘Pheasant’, published as ‘Plato’s Aviary (Puts Out a Wing) in his 2002 collection ‘Now, Then’ from Oxford Poets.

Pheasant

Comes under the wall where it’s broken, onto the road:

Humble not a word for him, though; nor his gait

In his scaly crocodile party shoes walking

Delicately on his toes like an elderly gent with corns.

But so burnished, Oriental in his princely ornament,

So finely beaten, his dark copperware

Laced like damascene, with the black rim tip

Indent of the craftsman’s hammer mottling

His waistcoat-breast.  How well he has worn the night

Down all these years, a thousand and one years exiled,

Out late and looking for the way home, his majesty

In all his finery, still dressed for the banquet, at dawn.

I enjoy this poem both for its sustained joke and its wonderful observation.  The male pheasant is so exotic, ‘so finely beaten’ that none of this is exaggeration.  Even the self-important strut of the bird is captured so neatly ‘Delicately on his toes like an elderly gent with corns.’

Pheasants have been in Britain since the 10^th century, introduced as a game bird.  And are native to Ancient Colchis – now Georgia. So –all dressed up, but lost.  ‘How well he has worn the night’. 

If I’d had this poem before ever I’d seen a male pheasant in the early morning, I’d have recognised him by it.