Only a fortnight to StAnza. I’m going, after being tempted for several
years – by the programme, the location and the stories people bring back about
having a thoroughly good time. Soon
after I committed myself to co-renting a cottage in St Andrews, festival
director Eleanor Livingstone asked me to be blogger-in-residence. So you can follow StAnza here, or at least
one newcomer’s path through it.
I’ve only ever been to poetry
festivals in small places – Aldeburgh, Ledbury.
The StAnza programme’s map of St Andrews shows a cathedral and a castle;
the venue list includes the town hall, a theatre, a church undercroft, a
museum, the public library, the university library and two university quad(rangle)s. So the festival becomes part of the fabric of
the town. It’s clearly very welcome
there: when the theatre, the Byre, collapsed (financially) a couple of years
ago just before StAnza, locals rallied round to offer alternative venues.
All of StAnza takes place, I think,
within sound of the sea – and some maybe within sight.
It’s hard to map a path through the five-day
programme (4-8 March) without wanting to go in several directions at once. One of the 2015 festival themes has been
helpful. An Archipelago of Poetry: that could be archipelago as collective
noun for a poets’ gathering; the poetry collection as archipelago; festival
venues dotted around the map; no man is an island; Britain and Ireland as the
two giants among thousands…
Taking the theme literally and with
a narrow definition of ‘island’, there will be an archipelago of island-born poets
at StAnza, including several from Scottish islands. From Jamaica (Kei Miller, Shara McCallum) to Shetland (Christine de
Luca and Sheenagh Pugh) and the Faroes (Kim Simonsen); from New Zealand (Bill
Manhire) to Sardinia (Anna Cristina Serra) to Lewis (Peter Mackay) and Skye (Ian Stephen). That’s just some of them.
For anyone fascinated by islands: there’s
a Poetry Café Breakfast on the Saturday where Simonsen, de Luca, Miller and
Manhire “will discuss islands and writing over coffee and pastries”.
Christine de Luca, currently
Edinburgh Makar, writes in both English and Shetlandic which she describes as “a
blend of Old Scots with much Norse influence”.
The language itself (to regular English ears) is slant and perhaps it’s this
that allows her Shetlandic poems an immediacy and directness of approach. Here’s the beginning of ‘Nae Aesy Mizzer’,
from North End of Eden:
A polar projection changes foo we
figure oot
wir world. Shetland isna banished
tae a box
I da Moray Firt or left oot aa
tagidder
– ta scale up da rest – but centre
stage
‘mizzer’ = measure;
‘foo’ = how; ‘wir’ = our.
This sent me straight back to
another perspective on islands, English and maps – Kei Miller’s The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion,
one of the books I most enjoyed last year.
Perspectives, rather, in the
dialogue between cartographer and rastaman. [Here’s a 15-minute gap while I looked
through for a quote, wanting to stop on every page.] This
is part iv of that dialogue:
The rastaman thinks, draw me a map
of what you see
then I will draw a map of what you
never see
and guess me whose map will be
bigger than whose?
Guess me whose map will tell the
larger truth?
The book won the Forward main prize
last year. Liz Berry whose Black Country won the first collection
prize will also be at StAnza. They are
both exceptionally good readers.
The archipelago theme spills over
from readings to music, film and art. For
example there’ll be an archipelago / installation of island poems “actual and
virtual” at the Byre Theatre and around town, and a film about Shetlandic poet
Robert Alan Jamieson. Claire Trévien
will perform her piece ‘The Shipwrecked House’ at the Byre. Having read her collection of the same title,
I’ll be intrigued to see what this is like.
Trévien is Anglo-Breton and the book is full of breached or subverted
boundaries between land and sea. From
‘The Shipwrecked House II’:
Now your voice falls like a coin to
the ocean’s floor
and the house is dragged apart by
the fractures
of your smiles – the thought of its
absence echoes
unbelievably – our breath opens like
a stiff drawer.
Every British poetry festival needs
an American glamour factor to draw us in and StAnza is lining up Alice Notley,
Ilya Kaminsky and Carolyn Forché. Each
of these gets a main reading spot plus something else. Forché and Kaminsky are meeting for an
unmissable Past & Present discussion on Mark Strand and Paul Celan. Notley has been writing in a wide variety of
forms and styles both experimental and traditional since the 1960’s. I first came across her in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets but
am counting on StAnza to do that festival thing of helping readers find their
way to unfamiliar work. I’ve just got Grave of Light, her selected poems, out
of the Poetry Library; leafing through, I found this.
The chair you sit in an
illusion that a person can matter.
No person matters
unless humans choose a mattering
style
so we choose it in various ways all
over creation…
Alice Notley is being interviewed in
the festival’s Round Table series, part of the point of which is that the
audiences are very small so it’s sold out.
I’m hoping StAnza will podcast this.
I’ve also got hold of Ilya
Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa
(published by Arc in the UK). He lived
in Odessa until his teens: different English again, then, and a reputation,
easily confirmed on YouTube, as an amazing reader. From ‘Praise’:
I was born in the city named after
Odysseus
and I praise no nation –
to the rhythm of snow
an immigrant’s clumsy phrases fall
into speech.
As for Carolyn Forché, she may be better
known in the UK but she’s rarely seen – I was lucky enough to go to her Poetry
Society lecture last year when she thrilled the already excited hall by reading
us ‘The Colonel’.
I haven’t even mentioned Sinéad
Morrissey, Paul Durcan, Anne Stevenson, Kathryn Maris, Glyn Maxwell, Simon
Armitage, Helen Mort, Ian Duhig, Heather Phillipson, Mark Waldron, Allison McVety and many others.
And anyone for The Forth
Plinth? 5-minute slots can be booked…
Around half the festival events are
free. Yes, around half. There’s a list
of them here on the StAnza blog. Prices
are anyway very reasonable – many more things cost less than £5.
Information is accessible too. The online programme, here, is searchable, useful when
it contains so much. The StAnza website has
extra details of events and performers.
It also has travel and accommodation pages. A Dundee University website is posting
reviews of some festival poets’ books.
There’s still time to book – tickets
are selling well but still available for most events, and of course the free
events can just be walked into…
See you in Scotland.
