*Poetry in Edinburgh: an update from Jeremy Beardmore, July 2014

[P, if you’re out there I hope this is OK – I hope you’re OK, I haven’t got your number any more and my emails are bouncing? Am I right in remembering you went skiing somewhere?]

I.

Graeme Smith and Vilma Krivelaite’s reading series Caesura has managed to switch venues many times while definitely, definitely still existing. Go if you can. Lila Matsumoto’s Scree Magazine continues. It is fly. Get it before it gets you.

Colin Herd and Reuben Sutton’s Poetry at the Sutton Gallery is a sort of sequel to the Anything Anymore Anywhere readings Colin used to arrange in a more boring room up an elevator near some coat racks. Now the events take place at the Sutton Gallery on Dundas Street and there’s art everywhere.

II.

What else?

Another gallery, the Fruitmarket Gallery near Waverley station, has also proven a friend of interesting poetry, and plays host to small press and art book festivals. Go with jammy fingers.

The Fruitmarket has a good wee bookshop too. In fact Edinburgh is chocka with independent, second hand, antiquarian and other specialist bookstores, a lot of them clustered around West Port, also known as the Pubic Triangle, still nowhere near the Mound. Big partisan shout-outs to Armchair Books and Main Point Books in West Port, to Word Power near Edinburgh University, to Elvis Shakespeare up in Leith, and to Till’s by the eastern edge of the Meadows. Edinburgh Books, Peter Bell Books, Old Town Bookshop, McNaughtan’s Bookshop, Golden Hare Books, Pulp Fiction(genre), Transreal (SF&F), Deadhead Comics (comics), Analogue (design), Black Lion Games (RPGs), Looking Glass Books, the Edinburgh Bookshop and others also have their zealots.

If it’s just books you want, there are loads of charity shops too – Nicolson Street and Morningside Road are both pretty good for a straight up-and-down scour. Posie tends to lie about where the charity shops are, no one knows why. (There’s also the National Library of Scotland on George IV bridge. It’s a copyright library, so it’s supposed to have basically everything. They say the book-pickers down in the stacks get a special annual allowance for shoe leather. Anyone can apply for a card: bring ID and proof of address).

But that a lot of the independent bookshops host poetry and other events too is the point. Did West Port Book Festival happen last year? I’m not sure. Word Power organises the big Radical Publisher’s Bookfair in the Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Leith. Jennie at Main Point has put wheels on her shelves. Golden Hare have a regular salon.

In some ways Edinburgh is quite a techie city – home of Grand Theft Auto etc. – but you wouldn’t always realise this from cotching with its bards. Syndicate – run by some shambolic local poets under the elegant aegis of Mark Daniels’s and Roween Seuss’s New Media Scotland, and probably all wrapped up now – was a numinously snazzy series throughout 2013/2014, and was the closest thing Edinburgh had to a serious digital poetics event, but it still didn’t totally deliver on its promise of cutting edge text intersecting cutting edge tech, like some sort of zingy duel. Robots and robot-parts from the University of Edinburgh seem to have taken over InSpace, the venue where it was held … a good sign?

III.

Then there are a lot of regular events which I don’t know super-well.

It’s a pity about the closure of the Forest on Bristo Place in August 2011. It was great the way this big weird venue crouched on the tourist trail, an apodictic spillage of anarchists and artists and stoners and vegans and hippies and hereticastors and pipistrels and cannibals and poets and wimps and uncool-hunters and jakies, or whatever, right smack bang between Hogwarts and Greyfriar’s Bobby. The Forest does continue however, mainly as the much smaller Forest Cafe (on Lauriston Place), but also as the ForestCentre+ (in an old JobCentre+ on Castle Terrace: absolutely enormous but with limited hours) and the Forest Fringe (currently at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall off Leith Walk). Inky Fingers do the Inky Fingers Open Mic, and the READeasy and SPEAKeasy writers’/performers’ groups, at the Forest Cafe on Lauriston Place.

Reading series everywhere often seem to get set up under the rubric of inclusivity / hybridity. From an organiser’s perspective, that ecumenical impulse may still end up serving a tight focus, inasmuch as new ventures may feel it impossible not to build onto existing structures. Although Michael Pedersen and Kevin Williamson’s Neu! Reekie! uses the term ‘avant-garde’ pretty prominently, they don’t seem to be any more cariously fixated on confrontational vanguardist cultural experiences, nor any more steeped in the traditions of – say – Dada and Surrealism and Situationism and Oulipou and Pataphysics and Language and Oulipo and Flarf and Conceptualism – and other past and echoing avant-gardes – than most of the other literary vehicles Posie and I are rattling off here; Neu! Reekie!’s version of avant-garde mostly involves a pragmatic and adequately-curious indie diversity. They screen animations; there’s often a heavy music emphasis; and they have also recently budded off a record label.

Like Neu! Reekie!, Rachel McCrum and Jenny Lindsay’s Rally & Broad is another young-ish, cabaret-ish regular event, which always seem to lure large crowds. Here’s what Rachel and Jenny say about Rally & Broad:

‘Rally & Broad was conceived in summer of 2011 when poets Rachel McCrum and Jenny Lindsay started hanging out over a few fine ales. At midnight, they decided to give birth to a troupe of angry Irish leprechauns (Rachel) and a cabal of cranky Scottish pixies (Jenny), and make them have a fight. In the cold hard light of day, a superb new monthly cabaret for Edinburgh seemed a better idea and lo, in autumn 2012, Rally & Broad did appear. It has since evolved into a beautiful bouncing monster, that also appears in Glasgow and other various locations in Scotland. Sometimes there is performance art, sometimes there are superhero gameshows, sometimes there are audience paper airplane competitions. Sometimes there are spontaneous eruptions of dancing. But there are always beautiful words, spiky poetry, dazzling performances, stirring music and many more forms of lyrical delight. And much spraffing from the hosts. Always that.’

Shore Poets is a monthly mix (between September and June) of regular poets, guest poets, open mic slots and music. They’ve been going in one form or another since 1991.

There’s also Blind Poetics at the Blind Poet. Never been to that. Probably brilliant. First Thirty Club, Antihoot, Red Room Poets . . . OK, now I’m just Googling stuff really. I have a hunch that there’s a lot of spoken word and slam-type stuff that I don’t know much about. Bram Gieben AKA @t3xtur3 might know – especially because, in his Black Lantern Music incarnation, he goes right through spoken word into hip-hop. Jamie AKA @J_A_Sutherland was also very active in 2013/2014 surveying the spoken word end of the poetry scene.

LGBT writing is a strong presence in Edinburgh’s literary scene, manifesting more through one-off events, the literary element of some recurring LGBT thing (e.g. Talking Heids in Sofi’s Bar last February part of LGBT History Month Scotland), or vice-versa (e.g. the night of queerness at the Jura Unbound in the Spiegeltent at the last Edinburgh International Book Festival), than through any regular series or dedicated hub.

In many of these hallowed houses you may just find some poets hustling day jobs. Lila Matsumoto, Iain Morrison, Ed Smith, Mike Saunders, Julie Johnstone, J L Williams: find them: Achievement Unlocked.

IV.

OK, I should say more about the Scottish Poetry Library (SPL). It’s a bit of a funny one. The SPL is one of those comparatively large arts institutions, funded by Creative Scotland, City of Edinburgh Council, and various foundations and trusts. (Somewhat in the same superficial thrombophlebitic vein there is the Scottish Book Trust, lurking down a close, summoning innumerable reading events, workshops and residencies from the funding ether, as well as the City of Literature Trust, ‘an independent charity which works to promote literary Edinburgh, champion Scotland’s literature and develop international literary partnerships’ … (and City of Literature alumnus Anna Burkey alias @annanotkarenina is now based in Melbourne, fact) The universities, including the Edinburgh Art College (now part of the University of Edinburgh) are also a large and nebulous shaping force). The structural imperative to squee, to say and do socially cohesive things, and to categorically defend the place of poetry within any actual or possible social order, can make such institutions fairly awkward custodians of poetry’s more radical traditions and aspirations. ‘Isn’t it lovely that this poem demands the abolition of gravity! More cake?’

On the other hand, (a) that’s a caricature which the SPL – throbbing and wobbling with its endless projects projected and its affordances afforded – probably seldom aligns with for more than a split second at a time; (b) cake is fine; and (c) that awkwardness is probably symptomatic of something more general in Scotland – something about how poetry and radical politics tend to intersect, or fail to intersect. Resistance to linguistic experimentation, and/or to engagement with modern avant-garde movements could, more-or-less, be a sign of avowed apoliticism, of quietism or of conservativism … but if this is a problematic shibboleth south of the border, it’s probably even more so up here. Sometimes the boringest of bards really do have the truest of hearts. Even more confusingly, radical politics have a peculiar way of mingling with basic, moderately centre-left social democratic values. I kind of agree with Posie that everyone in Edinburgh is, compared to her, a ‘massive socialist.’ As I write this, we have an independence referendum looming. As you read it, it’s worth checking whether or not we’ve become a socialist paradise or not.

You certainly can’t say that the SPL don’t have a terrible lot of poetry books. Some of them speak for themselves. Check out their events listing too – which include external events, not just SPL-hosted stuff. The SPL also have Colin Waters, who’s just edited a surveyish anthology of youngish Scottish poetry, Be The First To Like This. (The blurb makes another excellent suggestion: ‘Throw a stone in Edinburgh or Glasgow today and you’ll hit a poet’).

V.

Then there’s August.

August is the festival.

The ‘official’ Edinburgh International Festival is big budget music, theatre, opera and dance. It was founded deep in time, that the human spirit should flower. It runs at about the same time as the Edinburgh International Book Festival. But the absolutely enormous festival, the one most people mean when they say ‘the festival,’ is the Fringe.

During August, the aura in Edinburgh is that of a forgotten Zeno paradox. Language comes to resemble mathematics. Cultural production attains such a density and evenness that anything that might be performed is being performed somewhere. But since these actions can be ascribed to mere positionality within the comprehensive arcology of performative possibility, ascribed to that just as easily or more easily than to any intent or will … is anything really being performed?

Many Edinburgh residents leave during the Festival. It is said that they want to profit from renting out their flats – but surely such a cultured cityfolk are impervious to economic imperative. To be clear: we are not forced to go and see shows. It must be the buzz. We must flee the buzz.

The Fringe has its own kind of less-official periphery. There are performances which aren’t included in the brochure (it costs quite a lot to get listed), which take place at funny times, such as last year, or in the more out-of-the-way venues, or in nooks and crannies that aren’t on the official venue list.

Somewhere in Edinburgh in the summer, something extraordinary is happening before an unappreciative audience of two. You will never be able to find out where and when, because the entire city is a gurn. The entire city is a malevolent faery labyrinth seeking to move, provoke, surprise and challenge you in pointless ways.

But … I’d keep a nose out for things happening in the Forest Fringe (currently at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall in Leith) and at Summerhall (AKA @summerhallery, the former Royal Dick School of Veterinary Studies, in Marchmont. Horse-haunted obviously). He doesn’t live in Edinburgh but I would hope Chris Goode AKA @beescope could give me a clue. Perhaps also Lewis Porteous, Jen McGregor, Mark Bolsover, Kieran Hurly – in fact, here’s a Twitter list for you, you could keep an eye on that around festival time. Recommendations are key. This is no time to resist being a hipster. Any of these ‘trusted’ people may still lure you into some inexcusable cud. Ha ha ha.

Finally, outside Edinburgh, there’s Iain Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, half garden, half poem. You’ll need to drive or get a special minibus. Down in Newcastle there is Ed Luker’s RIVET, and through in Glasgow there is Calum Rodger and Sandy Sanderson’s The Verse Hearse. ‘Where poetry goes to die’: often avant-garde, sometimes avant-radge. By rail, Glasgow’s usually an hour and a bit from Edinburgh, and Newcastle about an hour and a half. A bit farther out there’s Australia. What is there?