Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

It's the end of the year. Time to put your feet up and reflect on what has been - and what is to come. The last SPL podcast of the year talks to the members of staff who keep the SPL going and asks them what their poetic highlights of the year are. We also broadcast clips from events held at the SPL over the year, including our explosive What I Love - What I Hate About Poetry debate! The show features Aonghas MacNeacail, John Burnside, Ryan Van Winkle, Allison Funk and Gerry Cambridge. Image: christmas bells tockholes 2009 by jack berry, under a Creative Commons licence

In November 2012, we staged the first in a new series of My Life in Poetry events at the Scottish Poetry Library. My Life in Poetry invites guests to reflect upon their lives through the lens of their favourite poems. Award-wnning novelist Candia McWilliam did the SPL the great honour of accepting its invitation to take part in My Life in Poetry. For 30 minutes, she discusses with enviable lucidity her favourite poems, which includes verse by Shakespeare, George Herbert, Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson.

We’ve all heard the arguments in favour of Scotland’s best poet or favourite poem, but what about its greatest collection?

The SPL invited two guests - James Robertson, poet, publisher and author of the novels And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, and Dorothy McMillan, editor of Modern Scottish Women Poets and former Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow - to join SPL director Robyn Marsack to discuss what might be Scotland’s best collections of poetry in an extended podcast.

Rozalie Hirs, poet and composer of chamber, vocal and electroacoustic works, discusses her work with Ryan at the StAnza poetry festival. We also include snippets from her pieces In LA and Bridging Babel. Find out more about Rozalie and her work at http://www.rozalie.com/ Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

We met up with Sean Borodale at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2012, where he was reading from his debut collection Bee Journal.

Bee Journal has since been shortlisted for the 2012 T S Eliot prize.

Here Sean reads poems from Bee Journal and talks about his interests in time, bees, Virgil and much more with our Programme Manager, Jennifer Williams.

Music by James Iremonger (www.jamesiremonger.co.uk).

Possessing a friendship that spans the Atlantic, Scotland's John Burnside and America's Allison Funk are captured in conversation, speaking about what they enjoy about each other's country, from poetry and music to the mutability of the landscape and people.

Allison Funk is the author of four volumes of verse, the most recent of which is The Tumbling Box (2009). John Burnside's latest, Black Cat Bone (2011), is one of only two titles to have won both the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry.

In a conversation that runs from delta blues to Virginia Woolf, Funk and Allison explain the way in which they've influenced each other's work while still being 'opposite sides of the same coin'.

Ryan Van Winkle chats to poets Ken Arkind and Jon Sands during their recent UK tour. They discuss their poetry workshops, what they think about slam poetry and we get a chance to hear them read.

Ken is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and full time touring artist who has performed across the US, been published in numerous anthologies. Jon is a full-time teaching & performing artist. His first full collection of poems, The New Clean, was released in 2011 from Write Bloody Publishing. He is currently the Director of Poetry Education at the Positive Health Project. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean.

“I feel poets have saved my life. The poets are our companions. They have found words for states all of us have experienced.” So says Marie Howe on a recent visit to Scotland, where she was appearing as a guest of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Howe’s first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe’s ‘poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots’. Jennifer Williams, Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry Library, interviews Howe about the craft of writing poetry, focussing on her poems ‘The Star Market’ and ‘The Snow Storm’.

Music by James Iremonger.

The Written World is the Scottish Poetry Library's London 2012 project. To mark the Olympics, we launched a scheme to find a poem for each of the 204 countries taking part, which were then broadcast on BBC Radio. With the project over now, we take the chance to look back on The Written World with its project manager Sarah Stewart. We also talk to Richard Price, whose poem 'Hedge Sparrows' was chosen to represent Team GB, and William Letford, who the SPL asked to write a poem marking the end of the tournament. A trio of poets is rounded out by Mariama Khan, a poet representing Gambia at Poetry Parnassus, another international event linked to the Olympics.

Photo of Richard Price performing at the Written World closing party courtesy of Chris Scott.

Music by William Campbell.

Ryan chats with Ghanian-born, Jamaican-raised Kwame Dawes. He is a poet of great strength, generosity and kindness, and takes the reader to places very few writers in English are capable of going. His work on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica (http://livehopelove.com/) won him an Emmy award for New Approaches to News and Documentary Programming, and drew much needed attention to a situation that had yet to be fully articulated to a large audience. In this podcast Kwame talks about his life in Jamaica, the country's transition away from its socialist years and its slow struggle to cope with its sufferers of HIV/AIDS, the responsibility of poets in times of political and social difficulty, and his experiences as a self-assessed 'bad journalist'.Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths