On Sunday 22 August we'll be hosting the Book Festival Open University event. On Sunday morning the Party Pavilion will be open to all, free of charge, for OU information, opportunities and course sign-ups. Drop by at any time between 10.30 and 16.00.
Everyone’s invited along to this one-off Book Festival event. Chat to OU staff about new developments, enjoy complimentary refreshments in OU’s café area, and take full advantage of this excellent opportunity to get updated about
Don admitted it was ‘a relief to be able to stop talking about John as poetry’s best kept secret’, in light of his recent brilliantly received collection Grain(Picador), 14 years after Undark (1995) which succeeded his first, The Apple Ghost (1989) (both Peterloo). Don, John’s editor at Picador, spoke warmly of John, saying his fastidiousness is legendary, and laughed about emails bearing the subject line ‘Glenday writes new poem shocker!’. He commended the skill and imaginative daring that went into these poems that were ‘so well-made’.
John read mostly from Grain, though sprinkled a few oldies from his previous collections in there (‘finding an old poem in the middle of the reading like one of those old tired jokes from a Christmas cracker’, though certainly not for the audience). He read the delightful ‘Tin’, a love poem, inspired by the fact that “the can opener was invented/ forty-eight years after the tin can”. He read about Orkney in ‘A Westray Prayer’, about giving things a name, about ugly fishes – because ‘ugly fishes have more depth’ – "I love you as I love the Hatchetfish,/ the Allmouth, the Angler". He spoke about a self-confessed lack of imagination, it being a "terrible burden for a poet because it means you actually have to start looking at things." Then he read us the fruits of his lookings – those ‘overlooked saints’ of ‘St Orage’, ‘St Eadfast and St Alwart’, "St Agger of the drunken brawling praise", life seen backwards in ‘A Fairy Tale’ his parents re-seen in his poetry. On the topic of his parents he said, ‘My mother put the words in the poem, my father put the silences. She’s the clockwork. He’s the spring.’ We are glad that in ‘the matter of life and death’ that it was to not let anyone know that you are writing poetry in Monifieth in 1963, that John prevailed.
You can hear more from John on the Scottish Poetry Library podcast.
With a throbbing heart and bated breath (can the two co-exist?!) we’re all eagerly anticipating Unbound, our series of experimental performance evenings from 9pm in the Highland Park Spiegeltent. Glasgow-based Gutter magazine kicks us off on Sunday 15 August with A Night in the Gutter: McSex, all on the theme of Scottish erotic writing, and dubbed the “smuttiest” night of them all by Gutter editor Adrian Searle.
