Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

Actor-writer-director-singer-songwriter, Gerda Stevenson recently added another string to her bow with the publication of her first book of poetry If This Were Real, which came out on Smokestack Books last year. In interview with the SPL, Gerda discusses how her other life as an actor has influenced her poetry, performing Edwin Morgan’s words on stage, and her rhythmical inheritance from her composer father. She also gives poets tips on how to get the best out of their live performances.

Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable talks with Luke Wright @lukewrightpoet about his first collection Mondeo Man in this interview recorded just after his sell out event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Luke reads a couple of his poems and discusses how he has evolved as a poet, why he felt the need to publish a collection now and how becoming a parent changed his attitude to his own work. http://www.lukewright.co.uk We also feature the track 'Gospel According to the Purple Cotton Dress' by C.R. Avery. http://www.cravery.com Produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com Photo: Steve Ullathorne

In this podcast SPL Programme Manager Jennifer Williams talks to two Hawthornden Fellows Lynn Davidson and Alyson Hallett about where they come from, loneliness versus aloneness, and their current and upcoming work.

Lynn Davidson’s fiction and poetry has appeared in journals and her short fiction has been broadcast on national radio. Davidson has received several grants and fellowships to develop her work, including the 2003 Louis Johnson New Writers' Bursary from Creative New Zealand.

Alyson Hallett's work spans different continents and art forms. She has a poem carved into Milsom Street pavement in Bath, words etched into glass in a library in Bristol, and she runs the international poetry and public art project The Migration Habits of Stones. She currently works as a Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund. Suddenly Everything is her second full volume of poetry.

Best Scottish Poems is the Scottish Poetry Library's annual online anthology of the 20 Best Scottish Poems, edited each year by a different editor. Bookshops and libraries – with honourable exceptions – often provide a very narrow range of poetry, and Scottish poetry in particular. Best Scottish Poems offers readers in Scotland and abroad a way of sampling the range and achievement of our poets, their languages, forms, concerns.

It is in no sense a competition but a personal choice, and this year's editors, the novelists Louise Welsh and Zoë Strachan, checked and balanced each other’s predilections. Their introduction demonstrates how widely they read, and how intensely. The preceding years’ selections are still available on this site. This special podcast features readings by established voices and emerging talent. With readings by Kathleen Jamie, Liz Lochhead, Robin Robertson, John Burnside, and many more. Image: Seaweed by Lucy Burnett

Sweden based poet Ghayath Almadhoun talks to Ryan Van Winkle about being a Palestinian refuge and his Damascus club The House of Poetry that was a very special kind of open mic poetry event that challenged the authorities prior to the outbreak of the current Syrian conflict. He also reads excerpts from his long poem The City, which is about Damascus - for him, "the only city." Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

In this podcast our Programme Manager, Jennifer Williams, talks to Robert Wrigley about his new collection and first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013). They also touch on narrative in poetry, the infinite capacity of poetry to talk about love and wild horses on the southern plains of Idaho. Robert was at the SPL in November 2013 for a reading with John Burnside.

From Bloodaxe (http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/personpage.asp?author=Robert+Wrigley) - His first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), draws on several collections published in the US, including Beautiful Country (2010);Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins(1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wrigley has also won the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Celia B. Wagner Award, Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Award, and six Pushcart Prizes.

Read more about Robert: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-wrigley

Music by James Iremonger: www.jamesiremonger.co.uk

Bob Dylan has played many roles in his life: voice of a generation, rock 'n' roll Judas, Christian convert, even Victoria's Secret salesman. The one that concerns the SPL podcast this week is 'poet'. Across two biographies - Once Upon A Time and Time Out of Mind (both published by Mainstream) - Ian Bell has considered Dylan in a more literary context than any other biographer of His Bobness. Over the course of this podcast, we discuss whether Dylan can really be considered a poet, the writers who influenced him, the Scottish connection, and his encounters with poets such as Carl Sandburg, Archibald McLeish and Allen Ginsberg. Image: 020 Azkena Rock Festival 2010 Bob Dylan 26VI10 by Dena Flows, under a Creative Commons

We discuss translation, identity, the value of mistakes and the virtues of bad poetry with the prolific novelist, translator and poet Ouyang Yu, who Ryan interviewed in Darwin, Australia earlier this year. Ouyang reads a number of his poems and discusses the experience of being a Chinese poet who has been living and working in Australia for the past 20 years and how this affects his practice. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com

This summer's major SPL project was Walking With Poets. What was it? It looked at an old subject, one of the oldest, nature, using new media. It provided poets, readers and visitors to Scotland’s botanic gardens with a fresh way to engage with the environment and writing about it. We put four poets - Sue Butler, Mandy Haggith, Jean Atkin and Gerry Loose - in Scotland's botanic gardens. For this special podcast, we interviewed each of the poets in their garden and asked them to read poems inspired by their residencies.

McGuire is a young Scottish poet, sometimes described as a performance poet, who is pushing the boundaries of what poetry has to say with hilarious and uncompromising material about masculinity and pornography. The SPL met up with him to discuss 'making it new', situationism and the page versus the stage.