Shearsman Books events are back!

Shearsman Books readings are back in their familiar and lovely Bloomsbury venue in London! Bridget Khursheed will be joining Josephine Balmer this April reading from The Last Days of Petrol and Ghost Passage. Tony Frazer is hosting the event.

The event takes place at the Swedenborg Hall on 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH on Tuesday 12 April 2022 at 7:30pm. Entry is free!

More information and more event news here 

Roar stage Stowed Out Festival 14th August 2021

Feel the power of the spoken word Roar stage! Our Stowed Out Festival line up for 2021 includes Harry Josephine Giles, Imogen Stirling and poet&geek. Nothing is going to stop the action! Join us for live poetry and live music. And it is free. 

Streaming from here 14th August 2021 more on schedule coming soon 

Roar Stage opportunity available August 14th 2021

Do you want to appear on the Roar Stage? Seeking spoken word poet for a short set paid opportunity 14th August at the amazing boutique Stowed Out Festival. 

This year acts will be performing at MacArts and streamed. Acts appearing in previous years include Iona Lee, Harry Josephine Giles, Katie Ailes, Sally Evans, Colin Will, Solareye, Rab Wilson, Saz Clark, Jules Horne, Stuart Jones, Calum Bannerman, Anita John, Thomas Clark and Bridget Khursheed.

We are prerecording at MacArts so flexible on time and date to do that.

Send us your vids ideally by the end of June please but the sooner the better. Get in touch the usual way - see details here - or via our social. Cheers! Cannot wait now!

Loaded Words spoken word 25th November 2020 nearly here

p&g are putting the last finishing touches to our amazing & unique event with Joolz Denby, Gregory McCartney, Gael Curran, Bee Asha Singh and Imogen Stirling.

Spoken word and poetry for your delight and a bit of magic and...a closer look at what spoken word and poetry mean to audiences and performers in 2020; how do you get started? how do you get published? and do you need to?

There are still a few tickets on Eventbrite here where else do you want to be tomorrow night?!

Also a very big thank you to the Scottish Poetry Library for lending us their Zoom account and to MacArts for sound and tech advice from inimitable Chris Wemyss - our event is free but if you want a great t-shirt take a look at their Bandcamp crowdfunder and give this great venue & the musicians who use it some support.

Loaded words welcomes Imogen Stirling

Our Loaded Words event on the 25th November just got even better as we are now joined by our final performer - poet, theatre-maker and musician Imogen Stirling.

Imogen who has been newly revealed as the Poet-in-Residence at Paisley Book Festival is another stunning edition to our roster of rich spoken word, writing and poetry talent at the event. 

The event is less than two weeks away, it is a virtual event on Zoom and it is free - so get your limited edition ticket at Eventbrite here: 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/loaded-words-tickets-125721942715

You can find out more about the event and all the acts here.

You can find out more about Imogen on insta @imogenstirlingpoetry

Loaded words opportunity

You have just a little longer to get in touch - we realised we can't review and make a decision until the weekend. So 3 more days left if you want to join us at Loaded Words!

Thanks to everyone who has already got in touch with us.

We would like to invite you to be part of a unique virtual event on the 25th November. p&g are seeking a stunning new or emerging #poet or #spokenword performer to open the evening. Paid opportunity. Send us your links through the usual contact details - we look forward to seeing your work.

Deadline 06.11.20

Loaded words 25.11.20

Enjoy a fabulous p&g spoken word and poetry virtual event with poet Joolz Denby and - from Scottish rap group The Honey Farm - Bee Asha Singh and Gael Curran, alongside eclectic editor and curator Gregory McCartney of Abridged (one of p&g's best-loved publications) and HU.

Are our words loaded against us? Do we think of and react to spoken word differently to poems in books? And how does online fit in? This debate has been going on a long time but do poets today even want or need to get published on paper - and what extra does that offer them?

This event celebrates both (and a few more methods for getting your word out besides), looks at differences to access between spoken word and book and magazine publishing, and how that might affect poets from less well-represented groups. Hear spoken word at its finest plus a chance to discuss in articulate and inspirational company why and how our words can be loaded to be heard and shared.

Faciliated by p&g's own Bridget Khursheed.

This event is free. Yes that's right! We are available worldwide on Zoom. And don't forget that we are still looking for one more performer/poet - send us your links the usual way.

Learn more about the event and find out how to register here. Limited tickets available.

*****

More on Joolz Denby - if you need it - here.

More on The Honey Farm -"potentially the first and only and by default greatest Scottish female rap group of all time" - here and insta here.

More on Abridged here and HU here.

Seeking you?

We would like to invite you to be part of a unique virtual event on the 25th November. p&g are seeking a stunning new or emerging #poet or #spokenword performer to open the evening.

Paid opportunity. Send us your links through the usual contact details - we look forward to seeing your work.

Deadline 31.10.20

Plums etc

 A time to harvest. Plums and a few other juicy morsels.

Check out some stuff from p&g collaborator Bridget Khursheed online:

• Dead Loss a poem as part of the Vision 2020 project from the Scottish Poetry Library
• Stowed Out Locked In set 

Making spoken word videos

Over the past few months due to Covid-19 I have been asked for a few spoken word videos. The results can be seen on Hugh Macmillan's Poems from the backroom #plagueopoets, as part of the upcoming Scottish Poetry Library's Vision 2020 project and Stowed Out 2020 [Locked In].

It is a very different thing making a video of yourself, as opposed to being filmed performing live. 

First and foremost for someone who has been living in the Borders (with for a considerable part of that time only access to local opportunities due to caring responsibilities), it is a liberation to do it yourself. Breathtaking. And share it yourself too! And the feel of a lot of doors opening. The viewing of other people's work has been astonishing also at events I never would have been able to get to like the Poetry Wales lockdown edition launch and Nine Arches Press Peter Kahn Little Kings launch: these events allowed me to effectively meet in person writers that I had only read before; private to well not exactly to the public but better as an online reading is intimate and powerful and feels personal.

Technically however my first thoughts on how to do this were quite basic. This was after all not going to be a multishot feature film  but quick and dirty engineering. So sitting in one place to read with a single static shot seemed wisest. I used Microsoft Teams and set up a meeting and recorded myself that way. The result was ok but felt a bit clunky requiring some tweaking in a video editor to remove the meeting name at the beginning. It also felt like I was speaking at a meeting which in my case was ok but might be a downer for some people. Subsequently I have converted to using my phone - still with me sitting at my desk to record so far - and I think I get a better result. Easy to move the phone around to get some simple effects but try them to see what they look like first. But also easy to knock the phone though if you wave your hands around a lot as I do and have it propped up against the laptop screen. You can sneak a cheatsheat on your screen too with nobody the wiser. Quality overall was better in my opinion and easy to stop and start. If you have no access to editing software don't start recording until you are ready (ideally with everything you need close by) and maybe even plan what you are going to say, read and how you will finish - to avoid long pauses. I just write some keywords on a bit of paper if I want to remind myself - the same kind of notes I would make for a live reading in person. One more tip is make sure to video landscape. You can see the dangers of filming portrait in the screenshot showing short films in my channel screengrab below. For those particular videos of water, it wasn't much of an issue but if your film is being spliced in with a lot of others - landscape may be a requirement.

For the Vision 2020 project I was tasked to make a video to accompany my commissioned poem. This one I wanted to be more experimental. I decided almost immediately to absent my person entirely from proceedings which works well with the poem but also usefully opened up a few more possibilities as to how it could be shot. For this project I used a full on video editing piece of software Adobe Premier Pro. It's not cheap so find someone or an organisation, school or college who can let you use their copy or use a free video editing utility and face the fact you may have to show their logo (not the end of the world). I wanted to weave together several short video source films I had made locally to where I lived - this stage of making the films on my phone was step one and involved an image walk around the settings of the poem. My poem has several times in it all in the same place - so I had to use diffferent nearby landscape to recreate the before and after. It ended up getting a bit drizzly once I reached the site itself (where the trees were cut down) but I think that added to the end product atmosphere - in fact I added some scratches and dust to grain the image further using effects. So make the most of unexpected changes in conditions and don't chuck stuff away just because it isn't exactly as you planned. I then made a voice recording - separately using the voice recorder again free on my phone. Once added, the video elements were quick to put together but there was quite a lot of sound tweaking to be done. This was because my source videos had sound which I liked; so it was kept in places and subdued in others. The voice track needed to be enhanced too. I really enjoyed experimenting with the editing software. 

My latest experiment has been with a video export of a Microsoft PowerPoint animation - you can watch it here. So no tool is too simple to integrate into your video.  You'll have this piece of software if you have Microsoft Office and you can export a ppt file as video - simple as that. Students can get Office for free btw!

Work in progress using this technique though: timings are the key issue for experimentation at this point - e.g. the first shot of titles lingers! Next time I will also record a voice track and add it using Premiere Pro again. 

There's plenty to include and explore - video, art, animation, voice, sound poems, editing all of which I pursue in my practice - along with what is effectively publishing to voice mechanism via YouTube. Not least the ability to quickly get poems out (not to mention building a bit of an archive). Experimenting with video certainly fills the performance gap enforced by lockdown and more. Try it! Let me know about your experiments with video in the usual way - happy to review and link to my favourites.

***

My channel is here: perhaps of most interest to trainspotters and lovers of the very short unitheme film. If you have already checked out my insta @poetandgeek you will know the stuff I like.

Stowed Out 2020 [Locked In]

Holiday feeling here at p&q hq. But plenty in the pipeline including performing at the splendid Stowed Out 2020 [Locked In] on the 15th August online. 

Enjoy - you can find full details here and it is free. But do think about donating via JustGiving here. All money raised goes to Tiny Changes. A community of tiny change makers working together to help young minds feel better- it is a great charity. More here.

Impressions of Poetry Wales Stay at Home special issue launch

A great pleasure attending the Poetry Wales virtual launch; a full crowd with familiar faces and poets new to me, not to mention audience members joining from Shetland, Norway and perhaps even more distant places. I had wondered how an event like this would work but I was won over by the banter before we started immediately "off to milk the cat"! The atmosphere was very welcoming and, once the readings began, it was joyful too to be able to hear live poetry again.

I made some notes as we went along and apologies if I misquote or misname - as everything was necessarily done by ear. Jonathan Edwards the editor at Poetry Wales was a deft and informative host who mc-ed the readings with great ease and clear structure. I have been facilitating online group calls for many years and that task in itself is harder than you might think; Jonathan made it look easy. 

The evening started with Rae Howells reading Wood thinking - we went in the order of the magazine; this was a beautiful contemplation on trees and growth born out of a railway journey view; a re-imagining that dug out "dark fists of roots...a long ear horned into the ground" coming to a resonant conclusion "the world scrabbling and wormy". I can only quote fragments here and throughout as couldn't make notes any faster.

The lack of visuals meant we missed the shape on the page of Alan Kellerman's sound poem Ornithology; an added bonus for which you need to buy Poetry Wales. Alan won me over by saying he would have to sit still to avoid his chair creaking; the sound world of Zoom didn't intervene however. The opening line "A single thrush an obsession developed into the resonant and playful; I wrote down "a franchise of finches" but I was enjoying it too much to try and write it! Neetha Kunaratnam's forensic romp through Rotten fruit and veg made an elegant paring, its humour shone darkly in current times and I noted sparked an audience member to pick out the exact line that especially delighted me "jazz apples excessive scat".

Irish poet John McAuliffe's poem Green made me think of the links course in Newcastle with my grandad  - myself exploring the gorse while he played and, in my case, hardly understanding how a golf course could be there by the sea. John described the golf lesson, with self-deprecating humour, as so unsuccessful it took him thirty years to make something of it but what a thing he made; in the poem his attention wanders and strays through the landscape "No one's beach, nun's beach - concentrate or it could be anywhere". The final line confirms an endless re-vision "Now swing, follow through, try again."

Further readings followed by Suzannah Evans who shares my love of robots but contemplated it at a whole new level - "a robot for every kind of loneliness"; and the treat of two poems from Sheenagh Pugh contrasting in her first poem Definitions of Absence, the things that aren't there "the meaning that lodges between words" and in the Aldgate Potter, the things that are - "not every epitaph or monument belongs to mastery". A  fascinating collaborative pairing of subjects from Mari Dunning and Natalie Holborrow came up next which I am glad to say is being developed into a longer sequence - the re-seeing of Rapunzel "when she shouts I drop it...a full grown woman swinging my hair like an ape...not once does she ask if it hurts" was contrasted with the darker Gothel; and the theme continued with Matthew Francis reading his mesmeric retelling of Aschenputtel again a taste of a fascinating series. Briony Collins brought proceedings to a close with great effect with her first published poem. Only Roddy Williams was missing from the line-up.

On this showing I would really recommend you download this issue FREE (wow!) or as Jonathan Edwards put it if you subscribe here and Poetry Wales can print more pages. And go to all virtual poetry! It's great.

Scottish Book Trust Live Literature

Back from holiday and work commitments and MSc dissertation preparations to find the wonderful Scottish Book Trust have updated the Live Literature Author Directory database with a snazzy new frontend. Lots of fantastic, surprising and inspiring authors and poets and so much more available to come to your writing group, school, college etc.

Fascinating for writers to check out the range and heft of Scottish writing talent too.

You can play with it here:

https://www.scottishbooktrust.com/authors/

The profile itself was fun to write - here is my quote:

"Some people describe me as a nature writer. This is fine with me as I think nature makes sense of the world. Disruptive text, sound art, art poetry, spoken word, scraps, recipes, contextual poetry, peripatetic writing, engineering, hacking, online text. That's more like it."

Seeking poetry, poets & spoken word

Early call for a performance opportunity in the Scottish Borders. Interested - ideas - ready to slam?

Get in touch in the usual way and let's talk; and we can also add you to the mailing list for more information about this event.

Picture is a view from the San Cipriano mirador in Zamora and yes it doesn't really have a lot to do with anything but laundry drying

Gutter launch night out, Edinburgh 13th August 2018

It's always a treat to get some poems in Gutter and to make it even better there is also a big night out on 13th August at the very wonderful Lighthouse books to launch Issue 18 and the Freedom Papers.

It's free too. All good.

More about Gutter here http://www.guttermag.co.uk/gutter-18-announced/ and Lighthouse books here http://lighthousebookshop.com/

#Hawickfest review

Our friend from the west poet Rab Wilson has written a fine review of #Hawickfest spokenword in the National which you can find here:

http://www.thenational.scot/news/15463860.Rab_Wilson__Airts_festival_an_eclectic_mix_o_kenspeckle_ingine/

All we need to add is: good times were had.

More photos are available on our Facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/poetandgeek.ezine

p&g is already looking forward to next year. Thanks Thomas Clark for organising the clamjamfry and Julie Witford and the Cornucopia Magazine for hosting in their lovely venue.

Tickets for StAnza on sale now

I have been buying my tickets.

Looking forward very much to seeing Lemn Sissay and Don Patterson on Friday night but I am also loving the German strand with events like Anna Crowe, Michael Donhauser, Odile Kennel, and Don Paterson again in a VERSschmuggel (verse smuggling) reading. I thought this would be the time I would get to hear Sean O'Brien but I have a very strong commitment to being in a forest on Sunday so that is not to be. Excellent line-up all through the festival and that is not to mention the open mics and of course just rubbing shoulders with everyone in St Andrews.

I will be reading myself alongside the fabulous Lindsay Macgregor, Em Strang and Samuel Tongue http://stanzapoetry.org/festival/events/new-writers-showcase.

Tickets available and all the interesting stuff you could possibly need here http://stanzapoetry.org/

Top tip: Oxfam on South Street do a fabulous spread of all their poetry books. Impossible to resist....

Big Syria Gig 30th January Stow, Scotland

Come along and help support Unicef's work in Syria. Acts giving their time for free. 100% of the profits will go to Unicef.

Tickets now on sale and full details here https://www.facebook.com/stowedoutfestival/?fref=ts

SpokenWord Paris, France

A little taste of poetry when you are in Paris for the price of one small Euro. This claims to the city's biggest and longest-running English open mic night, started in 2006. However all langues welcome.

You will need  to sign up 8pm to 9.30pm in the bar if you want to read. Every Monday Au Chat Noir, 76 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud 75011. Métro Parmentier/Couronnes.

Find out more here http://spokenwordparis.org/

The Big Syria Gig needs you

Are you a spoken word artist and available to do a short set in Stow, Scottish Borders on Saturday 30th January 2016 to raise money for children in Syria via Unicef?

Get in touch with us at Stowed Out at info@soundout.org.uk. Thanks.