Scottish by inclination

New Writing Scotland publishes works by writers resident in Scotland or Scots by birth, upbringing or inclination.

The deadline for next year's anthology is coming up at the end of the month and you can find full details of how to submit your work here http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/scotlit/asls/NWSsubs.html.

Arizona Poetry Center

Rich pickings awaiting you here and you can while away the start of a long weekend or a slow Friday at work picking through the alphabetised archive.

 "voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center's Audio Video Library, features recordings from the Center's long-running Reading Series and other readings presented under the auspices of the Center."

Nice...

You can find the main archive here http://voca.arizona.edu/ and you might check out Lawrence Ferlinghetti (including a marvellously ponderous schedule by A.N.Other) here http://voca.arizona.edu/index.php?reading_id=142.

Contemporary Bulgarian poets

Ivan Dimitrov and Virginia Zaharieva are included in this excellent overview of writers in Bulgarian - both are poets who also write in other disciplines; Dimitrov has a play open in NewYork currently.


This website is funded by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, who call it "a literary platform which presents up-to-date profiles of living Bulgarian writers of fiction and short stories". Guess what a few poets have crept in there too....

You can find out more and, if you are a Bulgarian poet submit your own work, here http://www.contemporarybulgarianwriters.com/.

Dimtrov's play The Eyes of Others won the Shumen new play contest in Bulgaria and was selected from among hundreds of international plays to be read at the Lark Play Development Center’s 2012 hotINK Festival in New York. In September it becomes the first Bulgarian play to receive a major New York production. You can read more here http://offoffbroadway.broadwayworld.com/article/Photo-Flash-First-Look-at-THE-EYES-OF-OTHERS-at-New-Ohio-Theatre-20120906#ixzz268mGgIMC.

Ted Hughes reads Pike live

...A pond I fished, fifty yards across, 
Whose lilies and muscular tench 
Had outlasted every visible stone 
Of the monastery that planted them- 

Stilled legendary depth: 
It was as deep as England. 

lines from Pike by Ted Hughes

A poem of suggestion and history - the predator we fear hunted by the predator we are.

Listen at the Poetry Archive here http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do;jsessionid=8466765E5C73210549AEB5A01E47C291?poemId=7079. Poem starts about 1m 20s.

Acknowledgements to the Pike Pool for the image.

Poetry Garden Market 15th September London, England

...What wond’rous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass...

lines from the Garden by Andrew Marvell

11am-9pm at Foyles at the sylvan Southbank Centre organised by Inpress Books to mark their 10th birthday.

More information available here http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/news/were-10-come-celebrate-at-our-poetry-garden-market

Be like Wordsworth

...but not too much like him.

Opportunity for a residency at Grasmere, a fantastic stipend and a year of writing in one of the most beautiful places in the English Lake District. There are tourists here - quite a lot of them - and fighter jets practising ridge flight so you may not walk as lonely as you think.

But a good place to write.

More details available here https://www.wordsworth.org.uk/about-the-trust/poets-in-residence/residence2013.html

Standing in the rain

...The busy falling rain increases now
And sopping leaves their dripping moisture pour
And from each loaded bough
Fast falls the double shower

Weed climbing hedges banks and meeds unmown
Where rushy fringed brooklet easy curls
Looks joyous while the rain
Strings their green suit pearls...

John Clare lines from The Summer Shower