(I’m very unlikely to be blogging much this August, so this will be an updated front page holder.)

Monday 1st August: Blind Poetics (8 – 11.30pm)

Free night of spoken word / performance at The Blind Poet in Edinburgh, on the second Monday of every month. Join your host Texture (Chemical Poets) for a night of poetry, short stories and performance from the cream of Edinburgh’s spoken word scene and beyond. 30 mins open mic – slots limited – email blindpoetics@gmail.com to reserve a space.

6th August: Catherine Brogan’s Poetry Hitch (2.50 – 4.00pm)

Hit the road as Catherine takes you on a hitchikers guide to poetry, squatting, internet dating and N.Ireland with a few special guests hitching a ride along the way! She’ll be featuring poets from different towns that she’s meet along the way and get in touch if you’d like to squat her stage.

8th – 13th August: Inky Fingers Minifest

A six-day 30-event celebration of everything amazing to do with words and performance. It’s a bit special. I organised it! Well, I suggested it and then a whole team helped make it happen. I’ll be around a lot, but MCing the open mics and performing my own words on the 9th, 11th and 13th around 9pm.

9th August: The Howling Trinity (1.40pm)

In de zomer van 2011 gaat Daan Doesborgh op tournee door Europa. Samen met Sergio Garau vormt hij The Howling Trinity, een poëziedriemanschap met een wisselende bezetting.Op een reis die hen van Berlijn, via Groningen, Amsterdam en Venlo uiteindelijk naar het Schotse Fringe festival voert gaan zij samenwerkingen aan met internationaal gerenommeerde dichters als Ana Reis, Paula Varjack, Young Dawkins, Sebastian 23, Harry Giles en Ellen Deckwitz.

Tuesday 16th August: BBC Poetry Slam (7pm)

The BBC rolled into town and decided to have a slam! More info coming soon. I hope.

Sunday 21st: Conscious Collective @ Henry’s Cellar Bar (7.30pm – 1am)

Conscious Collective bringing you the another evening of diversity of arts culture from in and around the city of Edinburgh. This event we have Spoken word Poetry, Rap Battles, Roots music, Ska, Rock, funk and Hip Hop fusion

I’ve been doing performance poetry for about five years now, and I’ve got enough credits and slam titles to my name to feel I can call myself a professional poet. But until this year I haven’t sought to be published. When I was a student I got my words in print, and I like putting work online for commentary, but I never actively pursued publishing — or indeed the art of putting poetry on the page. My words were part of the oral culture, not the upstart artform that is the printed word. Somewhere in the middle of last year I started thinking seriously about what the page meant and what it was worth, and this year I began tentatively sending off poems to suitable seeming homes. I’ve had a fair few rejections, but the acceptances are starting to come through — and I get to feel like a débutante all over again.

It’s a totally different thing, getting accepted to a poetry magazine. When I perform, I know how good I was. Not because I either win or lose a slam, but because I have a direct relationship with the audience — I can feel their attention focussing or drifting, hear the earnestness or politeness in the applause, ride on the cheers when they come. I’m sharing the room with them, and I know whether or not I’ve done well. I feel secure — though of course I’ll only ever be as good as my last performance. But this getting published thing — all it means is that one enterprising person (or, if I’m lucky, a committee) has decided my work is good, or well-suited to this particular edition. I have no idea what my audience thinks! — and they’re who I’m writing for. I have to trust the editor’s judgement, and get my gratification solely from them. Receiving e-mails about poems is a rarity — it hasn’t happened to me yet. So my poems are officially out there in the world with the ISBN seal of approval on them — and I’m very scared for them.

Still, I’m also very happy.

I hope you like them:

A sequence of haiku about being on the dole at the end of winter in Haiku Scotland 29

Two poems involving involving bicycles in PANK Magazine’s “London Calling” Issue

“An Experiment Was Carried Out” in Drey Magazine Issue 2 (available for purchase soon)

Hey, if I can’t write a poem this week, I can at least think hard about how a form works!

–

The boy was so frantically busy,
Steam whizzed from his ears, sparks from his knee!
So — when he started to glow
All the folk said, “Uh-oh,
He’s not gonna explode on us, is he?”

Discovered Haibun and fell in love. (http://haibuntoday.com/) Thought I’d recycle ideas from two old pieces and give haibun a shot. Attempting here to tell a story and explore what it is I love about bikes and haiku.

* * *

Bike, Ooh.

I wrote haiku on my bicyle. The rhytmic effort of pedalling pushed the words out of me; heavy breathing brought simplicity. Or the synergy of cycling — that balance of organic effort and mechanic grace — lends itself to haiku, small machines of words that try to process the natural world. Or it’s how cyclists know the elements: the texture of earth, the temperature, the strength of wind, the creak of metal, rainfall.

inside, windows sharp
with sun — through doors, hard water
and rolling backwards

And then I was surprised to find myself asleep across the bonnet of an Audi, a haiku punctuated too soon. It was a hot metal day. My bike crumpled, as did my bank account. The car’s owner worried about me first and her windscreen second, for which I can only give thanks. To me, there was no lasting damage. I bought a new second-hand bike two weeks later, and try now to cut off syllable-counts before they begin.

When you love someone, you are prone to talking about them a lot, or talking about the peculiar specifics of how you love them. This can get very dull. If you want others to love as you do, you don’t describe the fascinating way his earlobe turns in the sunlight, you don’t talk about the in-joke you and she shared the other night (that no one else will ever understand which is why you love each other), you don’t try and explain the way their synapses fire — you just say that you love, and then talk about other things in a loving way. Then others will wonder, what is this thing that can fill you with such earnest love!

The problem is, love is selfish, and you don’t often want others to love as you do, do you, in case they take the thing you love away from you.

II.

My friend runs a free life drawing class. She says life drawing is not taught much in art colleges any more. She thinks this might be because life drawing is a process and a discipline, rather than something which ever produces results in itself. This makes it more boring to teach or learn, maybe, than teaching exciting ideas or learning interesting concepts. There might be a connection here to the way art has moved away from long-term practise and towards finding the one great idea, moved from discipline to concept, moved from starting at the beginning to starting at the end.

III.

There are two dominant schools of acting, two contesting theories about what acting should be. One says that acting should be representational: we should show emotions and mental processes and at the same time initiate and invite detached criticism of them. The other says that actors should live through the experiences of their characters somehow, so that the audience is immersed in what seems like real action, or is observing excitedly as through a peephole.

Actors in both schools, whether they’re naive beginners or complacent experts, have a tendency to fall into two traps: they forget what kind of acting they’re supposed to be doing in any given performance, and they enjoy performing the idea of their acting so much that they forget to exercise and develop their ability to do it well.

IV.

As any neurotic like me can tell you, the really obnoxious aspect of neurosis is its reflexivity: anxiety isn’t so much a vicious cycle as a vicious mobius strip — you’re wandering down a particularly wrenching mental path, and you think you’ve tortured yourself into some newly horrible pattern of thought that’s the reverse or  reaction to where you’ve started, but you end up exactly where you started again without knowing how you could possibly have got there. Anyway: neurotics get neurotic about their neurosis; we beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up; we get anxious that we’re being too anxious; and, above all, we talk endlessly and boringly about the precise details of these processes.

When I come to seek help from someone else, if I try and explain this whole thing, this whole cycle/spiral/strip, I’m screwed, because they won’t know where to begin. I don’t need to describe everything I’ve thought or experienced. I just need to describe that pain I’m feeling right now, the confusion I’m currently suffering. That can be communicated clearly.

V.

Poetry is a lover, a drawing, a performance, an anxiety.

* * *

* * *

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13523366

til now it was thought –
dogs messily scoop, but cats
elegantly lap

domestic rivals:
intertia & gravity,
same subtle balance

-

high-speed cameras,
scientists / Cutta Cutta,
the cat as she drank

she drew her tongue back,
created water columns.
thanks to intertia.

liquid’s tendency:
continue moving just as
it is being pulled

column at its peak,
she snapped her jaw — capturing
gravity’s liquid

-

authors’ suggestion:
thirsty dogs simply scooped up
water with ladles

scientist reveals:
dogs are sophisticated
when having a drink

high-speed & X-ray
discover precise details:
his dog Matilda

& just as water
fell to bowl — she snapped her jaw
shut to get her drink

-

only difference:
cats, surface left unbroken;
dogs, deep into bowl

all down to grooming:
tidy up? or unworry
& exuberance?

Last Monday at Rio
30 May · 20:00 – 22:30
Rio Cafe, 27 Hyndland Street, Glasgow G11
Hosted by Robin Cairns

“Top man at the Rio this month is Harry Giles, slam winner, poetry activist and sparky young purveyor of the spoken word. First hour of the evening is open mic. Grabble a five spot by reply.”

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=226049274074664&ref=ts

Demented Eloquence
Sat 11th Jun · 20:00 – 23:00
£4 if you’ve got it, £3 if you haven’t.
Cellar 35, 35 Rosemount Viaduct, Aberdeen

Featuring top names in spoken word performance, hosted by anarcho-comic poet Rapunzel Wizard. Verses and rhymes that will make you laugh, make you cry, and say something to you about your life.

Plus open mic spots for…
Freestylers, Stand up poets, Ranters, M.C.s, Performance Poets, Rhymesters, Rappers, or any other spoken word ne’er-do-wells
Email : dementedeloquence@yahoo.co.uk
to book your three minutes of fame, prize for best performer.

Anger Management

Get some
exercise. Punch
a pillow.
Push it
down. One.
Breathe. You
look pretty
ridiculous. Two.
The world
won’t wind
you up
to see
the snap.
Four. It’s
not playtime
now. Don’t
take it
out on
me. Six.
Seven. You
grind your
teeth when
you’re asleep
(nine) – did
you know
that? Laugh
once in
a while.
Ten. One.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman: A Labour of Moles [How a Poem Happens] (freaky historical-fantastical narrative of birth. like the unusual voice and metaphorical weight of the subject.)

Wayne Miller: Post-Elegy [Poetry Daily] (extended metaphor ftw. sparse, accurate language.)

Rachel McKibbens: Seducing the Magician [La Petite Zine] (scary + sexy = yum. last line knocked me out.)

Scott Hammer: 9 [La Petite Zine] (don’t fully grasp it, but it made me nearly cry)

Dave Lucas: Lexicon [Poetry Daily] (absolute treasure trove of linguistic figures and images. want to plunder but can’t.)

Mike White: Love [Poetry Daily] (am of course a fan of minimal forms. very clear but also with astonishing depth, like a blue hole, like love.)

Leslie Seldin: Reading the Tells [Sixth Finch] (not actually keen on that zine issue: overdose of self-conscious non-sequiteur and American glibness. but this one a winner despite that.)

Kim Addonizio: Onset [Poetry] (a complicated feeling expressed beautifully. = what poetry is (often).)

Jim Daniels: Ode to the Reel Mower [Poetry Daily] (funny and magical. reminded me of Japanese comic verse sequences.)

Tom Daley: My Mother Speaks to Me on the Morning of her Cremation [poemelon] (again something missing overall from this journal issue. but this poem packed too much punch and hurt to ignore.)

Matt Shoard: Pret a Manger [3am] (find 3am poems a bit loose and undercooked generally, but this grabbed me with a laugh and held me with a mystery)

Leslie Seldin: Don’t go right away [failbetter] (o my a prose poem! absurd fable with gorgeous tones.)

Kerrin McCadden: The Domino’s Pizza Gorilla [failbetter] (am a sucker for a good story in a poem. and a funny one! and a sad one.)

Zach Buscher: Pillow Talk [la petite zine] (someone is sexing my ear! makes its subject lucid and alive, like all the best “nonsense” poetry.)

Sherman Alexie: Hey, Universe[Front Porch] (great rhymes. lots of impact for something so short and simple.)

James Valvis: Poem Composed Entirely with Last Lines in David Lehman Poems [Front Porch] (i do not know this david lehman should i? either way neat concept neatly executed)

Jessica Abrego: They are Trying to Tell Us About the American Womb: To the Beats [Pank] (sums up how i feel about the beats too and must be great in performance)

Heather Phillipson: German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London [Magma](yup been there.)