Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

Erín Moure discusses her recent book The Unmemntioable, an exploration of her complex family history and subsequent travel to western Ukraine. In conversation with Ryan Van Winkle at the StAnza poetry festival, where she was the poet in residence, they discuss "how you can identify who you are and where you come from when your mother says you come from nowhere." And nowhere, she discovered, was western Ukraine. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle http://www.ryanvanwinkle.com @rvwable Produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions htto://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser. Music by Ewen Maclean.

On 15 February 2013, Jennifer Williams, SPL Programme Manager, and poet/author Tracey S. Rosenberg (http://tsrosenberg.wordpress.com/) had a chat about that dreaded and unavoidable demon that every publishing writer must do battle with: rejection. We hope this podcast will be of interest to all writers who have to deal with inevitable rejection, and especially to young and emerging writers who are starting down the challenging path towards publication. We’re grateful to Inky Fingers (http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com/), that marvellous Edinburgh creative writing organisation, for creating the Rejection Workshop that inspired this conversation. Find Tracey’s pamphlet here: Lipstick is Always a Plus http://stewedrhubarb.org/post/34371009207/lipstickisalwaysaplus. Music by James Iremonger www.jamesiremonger.co.uk.

On a dull and rain-soaked day in March of this year, the SPL travelled to St Andrews to interview the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke. Despite the weather, Gillian was in fine form after a magnificent turn at St Andrews poetry festival,StAnza. Then again, Gillian has a way of spinning grey days into poetic gold. Her latest collection Ice (Carcanet) is inspired by the terrible winter of 2009. Here, she explains how the snow took her back to childhood memories, which in turned inspired an entire suite of winter-set poems. Photo courtesy of Poetry Live

Ryan Van Winkle discusses language identity, Singapore literature and poetic practice with Alvin Pang at the StAnza 2013 poetry festival. We get a chance to hear a few of Alvin's poems and a selection from his anthology TUMASIK: Contemporary Writing from Singapore. Alvin talks to Ryan about how Seamus Heaney has influenced his work, his grandmother's deadly Cantonese aphorisms and he reads a poem of his written in the distinctive unofficial language of Singapore, Singlish. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser. Music by Ewen Maclean.

The SPL caught up with George Szirtes at the StAnza poetry festival in March, 2013. In town to read from his new collection Bad Machine (Bloodaxe), George Szirtes spoke to Colin Waters about memory, photography, Twitter and 1960s garage pop. Photo by Caroline Forbes.

Former Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky discusses poems, poetry readers, jazz and his curious family history with Ryan Van Winkle. He talks about his enthusiasm for his Favorite Poem Project - "For me a poem is a work of art that's so intimate and so internal that its medium is any reader's voice." In a wide ranging interview, he speaks about his formative years - "I grew up among very verbal, eloquent, skilful joke tellers and complainers and arguers and liars" - and the way he tries to capture music in language. He also reads a number of his poems and talks about his passion for poetry. "I never defended poetry. I don't believe in commercials for poetry. It is so fundamental, so large, so central... It's an insult to poetry to advocate for it or defend it." Photo by Jared C. Benedict under a Creative Commons on Wikimedia. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Programme Manager Jennifer Williams discusses constructivist poetry and more with award-winning poet, fiction writer, critic and professor Tony Lopez at a rather noisy 2012 Edinburgh International Book Festival. Tony reads from his book ‘Only More So’ (Shearsman) and talks about upcoming projects. Music by James Iremonger.

Aonghas MacNeacail has been a leading voice in Gaelic poetry for decades, as poet, and as a regular literary commentator in print and on Gaelic radio. He celebrated his seventieth birthday last year with a new selected poems, Laughing at the Clock / Déanamh Gáire Ris A' Chloc. MacNeacail came into the SPL to talk about his life and career, from his childhood on the island of Uig to his membership of Philip Hobsbaum's legendary writing group. He also talks about his struggles as a Gaelic speaker in an English language-dominated culture, including an oddly strenuous struggle with the telephone directory people. Image by Roddy Simpson.

Dael Allison takes us on an adventure in this episode as she discusses itinerant painter Ian Fairweather and reads a selection of poems from her collection Fairweather's Raft. Fairweather's story is a fascinating one - he travelled through Asia and Australia in the 30s and 40s and embarked on an epic raft journey at the age of 60 from Darwin to Timor. Recorded in Darwin at the WordStorm Festival. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Fiona Sampson, former editor of Poetry Review and author of several collections including 2010's Rough Music and soon-to-be-published Collehill, took time out during her appearance at 2012's Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk to Jennifer Williams ahead of the publication of her latest collection and Poem, the new magazine she has begun. Music by James Iremonger (www.jamesiremonger.co.uk).

Good poetry gets beneath the skin of readers. This episode features a poet who, for a short period, literally got 'under the skin'. In the autumn of 2008, poet and essayist Marianne Boruch was awarded a 'Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline', permitting her to study something new for a semester. Her choice? Anatomy classes. 'Speak Cadaver', a long poem, was her response to her time dissecting bodies, and in the SPL's latest podcast, she talks about her experiences in an interview conducted in Edinburgh University's Medical School's historical lecture theatre.

Ryan chatted with SJ Fowler and Tomasz Rozycki during the Sofia Poetics Festival with Literature Across Frontiers. We get a chance to hear them reading from their work and they discuss their individual approaches to their work. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean.

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.