Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

Podcasts from the Scottish Poetry Library435398

Episodes

Episode 301: Nothing But The Poem - Daniel Sluman

July 18, 2022 • 20 mins
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. 
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Episode 300: Nothing But the Poem - Jay Whittaker

June 23, 2022 • 11 mins
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...
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Episode 298: Poetry and Covid-19 (part one)

March 4, 2021 • 19 mins
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 th...
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Episode 297: Happy 100th Birthday, Muriel Spark! With Rob A Mackenzie and Louise Peterkin

December 11, 2020 • 34 mins
 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 Tishan...
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Aileen Ballantyne

January 24, 2020 • 29 mins
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.
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Alan Spence: Edinburgh Makar

December 20, 2019 • 29 mins
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 ...
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Stewart Conn

December 4, 2019 • 31 mins
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, beco...
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Don Paterson on Aphorisms

January 31, 2019 • 20 mins
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 H...
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Helen Mort

October 11, 2016 • 34 mins
Helen Mort is one of the UK's most exciting young voices. She came into the SPL to talk about her second book No Maps Could Show Them (Chatto & Windus) and to read poems from the collection. During the course of the interview, she talks about female pioneers of mountaineering, the strange health risks men believed running posed women, and the historical characters she's drawn to writing about.
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Sarah Howe

September 22, 2016 • 41 mins
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 / P...
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Shara McCallum

June 30, 2016 • 47 mins
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...
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Alan Riach

June 7, 2016 • 36 mins
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 pu...
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Sophie Collins

April 27, 2016 • 64 mins
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...
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William Bonar

February 29, 2016 • 41 mins
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 ...
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Speaking in Tongues: Bilingual Poetry

August 27, 2015 • 36 mins
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 ...
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John Dennison

July 23, 2015 • 36 mins
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 Sydn...
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Sheena Blackhall

July 8, 2015 • 32 mins
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 ...
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[LineBreak] Kwame Dawes: This Is Our Heart

June 30, 2015 • 26 mins
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 CAM...
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[SPL] June 2015: Yeats - A Celebration

June 9, 2015 • 60 mins
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 numbe...
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[SPL] May 2015: Alice Notley

May 26, 2015 • 50 mins
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 b...
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