When the Sun Turns Green in Biggar
Poetry makes use of all the qualities of language, its sounds and rhythms, the shape words make in one's mouth, how they feel and taste. This is why poetry is better heard and spoken than read silently to oneself.
And this was the idea behind the poetry reading that Biggar Writers held in Atkinson-Pryce bookshop last Friday evening. Thirteen folk attended (which was three more than attended the reading at which the Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, unleashed his epochal poem 'Howl' on the world), and this respectable number were treated to an eclectic range of poems from local wordsmiths and special guest Jane McKie.
Biggar Writers were represented by Anne Armstrong, Darren Gray, Andrew McCallum, Rochelle Pitcher and Trish Reith, in whose poems language danced and sparkled and resonated with wit and sensitivity. Andrew also read two of his favourite poems by Alex Laird, who missed the evening due to ill-health.
Jane McKie read from her award-winning debut collection, Morocco Rococo, and treated her listeners to a preview of her forthcoming collection, When the Sun Turns Green, which is due to be published in June by Polygon. Jane's poems are concisely distilled and written with verve and lyrical precision; they are imaginative, poised and invariably arresting. Her second collection is sure to confirm her as one of Britain's most exciting emerging poets.
Spoken word - poetry and storytelling - has always been about 'community’ rather than ‘audience’ to an extent that other media are not. Atkinson-Pryce's intimate and informal space was the ideal venue for this kind of event, where the traditional distance between ‘performer’ and ‘performed to’ is diminished. Chris and Sue proved excellent hostesses and the atmosphere was relaxed and convivial.
Biggar Writers are already planning future reading events; possibly including a return visit to Biggar of the Edinburgh based spoken word performance collective, Writers' Bloc. Watch this space!
"Ceilidh at Brownsbank"
Biggar Writers and the Brownsbank Fellowship
Brownsbank Cottage 20th October 2008
We came out of a night thrawn with a blustering gale that shook the scruff of summer from the trees and drove a swirling spattering rain against our backs and faces. We were glad of the log fire that snapped and crackled in the grate.
Tom welcomed us to the cottage and gathered us around the hearth. Introductions made, we wondered at the serendipity that had brought together this particular convergence of individuals from such scattered beginnings as the Wirral and Ontario, Winnipeg and West Linton.
Tom opened the cèilidh with a story of coincidence, about the unlikelihood of a chance encounter in the Borders of two homecoming Scots who discover in the course of a conversation that as young children they had lived only two blocks apart in the same street in Winnipeg. Tom followed his story with a poem about their tangential life journeys whose divergence had so improbably led to this completion of the circle of their acquaintance.
We then heard poems by Janet Paisley and Kathleen Jamie, George Mackay Brown and Gillian Clarke, which told of birth and death and the ‘lost things’ in between. Trish read a story about a young woman’s awakening. Andrew read some poems that touched upon l’écosse profonde.
Our guest of honour, Jessie, a young poet from Ontario who confesses to a deep-seated fear of clichés, read a clutch of poems that sparkled with fresh inventive metaphors and arresting concrete imagery which disclosed familiar matters in an edifying new light, which is what poetry does. Although still only in her early twenties, Jessie has already found her own distinctive ‘voice’; a voice that is completely devoid of the abstractness and existential self-indulgence from which young poets too often suffer.
Over refreshments, we regaled one another with anecdotes about the great and the good of 20th century Scottish literature, their henchwomen, their eccentricities, their crimes and misdemeanours. We speculated on the contents of Black Aonghas’ sporran and how he came to be married to Mel Gibson’s mother-in-law.
From Ann we heard of Skyemen exiled in Biggar, who were too polite to converse among themselves in Gaelic in the presence of a barbarian like her; Skyemen who unravelled a skein of distant kinship ties, which time had snarled with knots and tangles, to discover in a common ancestry the channels of their genius. These were according to Ann the very same Skyemen who cautioned darkly against making ‘etymological leaps’ in the decoding of our local placenames.
Tom brought the evening to a close with a performance with voice and harmonica that demonstrated the rhythmic affinities between the Middle English of Chaucer and the Chicago blues of Muddy Waters. Serendipity again? Or was Chaucer perhaps the original Hoochie Coochie Man? It is all very intriguing.
It was late when we left. The wind had stilled. The night air felt a little warmer. The rain clouds had slithered away to the east, leaving us to go our separate ways beneath a sky full of constellations.
"Better Read than Dead"
Biggar Writers and Writers' Bloc
Biggar Corn Exchange 27th May 2008
Anne Armstrong
A poetry reading in a stourie auld howf? No way! Writers’ Bloc and Biggar Writers presented an evening of high octane, in-your-face poetry and prose which shattered the popular stereotype of reading events and provided a disappointingly small audience with a night of uproarious entertainment.
Gavin Inglis
Writers’ Bloc, a performance collective based in Edinburgh, are leading lights in Scotland’s strong spoken word performance scene. Alan Campbell, Morag Edward, Andrew Ferguson and comrades delivered with confidence and panache a breenge of fabulous twist-laden tales. Gavin Inglis’s story in particular, Pisces Ya Bas!, about a psychopathic ned-fish in a Glasgow municipal pond, was both energetic and outrageously funny.
Fiona Gibson
Biggar Writers were represented by Anne Armstrong who read from her The I Hate Poetry Wee Book of Poetic Gems, Margaret Dunlop who gave a moving account of the Scottish Hunger March, led from Glasgow to Edinburgh in 1933 by the Red Clydesider Harry McShane, from her book Marching in Scotland, Dancing in New York, Fiona Gibson who recounted a cringingly ill-starred amorous encounter from her hilarious new novel Mummy Said the F Word, and Andrew McCallum who took us on a journey in synthetic Scots Fae Dixie ti Darfur via the vulpine carnality of a chance encounter in the rain outside a nightclub in Dundee.
Andrew Ferguson
Such was the great time being had by performers and audience alike that the evening ran more than an hour over time, and credit is due to Fiona, Iain, Jennifer and Linda of Biggar Theatre Workshop for their patience, wonderful hospitality and all the work they put in behind the scenes to help stage the event.
Hopefully, it won’t be too long before Writers’ Bloc are back in Biggar again.
