Poetry News – Scotland, November 2016

The evenings are drawing in, and with them poetry retreats indoors again. Top of the must-see list this month is Flint and Pitch’s first ever Variety Night at The Lyceum on 6 November, a melange of spoken word, song, poetry and music hosted by Sian Bevan and creator Jenny Lindsay. When we spoke to Jenny about these new nights, she was absolutely buzzing with excitement – a good indicator of the treat we’re in for. This month’s debut features a splendid line-up, including Emma Pollock, Luke Wright, Christopher Brookmyre, A New International, Rachel Amey, Jenna Watt, Andrew Greig and Leo Glaister.

A little further on in the calendar is an evening with Blind Poetics, who run regular, free spoken word events at The Blind Poet, West Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, hosted by Alec Beattie and Roddy Shippin. This month’s shindig takes place on 14 November and features Ellen Renton, a young poet with a heap of accolades already up her sleeve. A regular at various Scottish spoken word nights such as Loud Poets and Rally & Broad, Ellen took part in Words First run by BBC1Xtra and the Roundhouse, and is the winner of The Time Is Now Prize 2015 and the Blind Poetics Slam 2016. As it happens, she is not too far from the bard side of things, having released Beginnings in September 2016 – a CD which combines poetry and music, supported by the Young Scot Nurturing Talent Fund.

Speaking of poetry and music combined, Salena Godden has also just pulled a real treat out of the bag; her new album LIVEwire is a compilation of various performance tracks, sometimes accompanied, sometimes leaving her husky, bounce-filled voice to play its own music unadulterated. Topics range from the Paris attacks to lighter fare such as coupledom and snooker – she can make you giggle just by riffing on one carefully-chosen phrase. If you’ve never heard her before, pour a drink, pop it on and let yourself be carried away…One for rainy afternoons and quiet nights.

In Print:

The big news this month is obviously the announcement of the Saltire Society Literary Awards shortlist. The poetry prize features Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson, John Glenday, Pàdraig MacAoidh / Peter Mackay, J.O. Morgan and Vicki Husband are all down for best poetry book, and Claire Askew is contesting the first book catagory with her collection This Changes Things. The final decision will be revealed on 24 November – free tickets may still be available by the time you read this.

November seems to make the melancholic side in everyone bubble up in a half-pleasurable, half-agonising way, and two recent collections fit that bill frighteningly well. The first is No Art (Granta Books, 2016) by Ben Lerner, a work described on the blurb as ‘an argument both with America and with poetry itself.’ The sensation on opening the book is akin to overhearing an extremely intense phone conversation on one side of the line; certain words and phrases blaze a fiery trail, but you’re always missing something crucial. Then again, maybe that’s the point – we’re probably not meant to be clear on anything here.

As it is, the tone switches back constantly between light and lead heavy, so we’re never even sure how to feel. Sometimes, the poet plays Aeolian harp to the voice of what seems to be the American media and public, and at others the timbre manages to be both jagged and tissue thin at the same time, as if a voice torn in two is trying to get a hold of what it might be in a world of extremes: 'Poems about dreams / like moths about street lights / until the clichés / come off on our hands, / blue prints on the windows. / How pretentious/ to be alive now'. We look forward to untangling him further.

On, then, to another American poet and another first – I Must be Living Twice by Eileen Myles. While Lerner is a tangle of pale threads, she is a massive day-glo mural on a brick wall. There's a colourful honesty to her poems, the way her own brand of mingled melancholy and joy expresses itself in warm colours, and her nail-on-head imagery that stays with you for hours afterwards. This collection is also a conglomeration of older and more recent. Of her new works, What Tree Am I Waiting is the one which most stands out ('I’ll fly to another island…already I know / it will hurt / this is the hurt country / I came here / to hold the hurt like a bird…'); however most of them lack the sharp definition of many of the older poems, of which The Irony of the Leash is particularly strong: 'Life is a plot to make me move. / I fill its forms, an unwitting / crayon.'