Scottish Poetry Library Podcast: Recent Episodes

Scottish Poetry Library

Monthly podcasts from the Scottish Poetry Library

Almost a year and a half into the Covid-19 era, the publisher Shearsman Books has published Poetry and Covid 19 – An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry. It’s edited by Anthony Caleshu and Rory Waterman, the idea being to pair 19 UK-based poets with poets from around the world to work on poems together. As the blurb puts it: ‘The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in all of the world’s permanently populated continents, recognising that the pandemic has truly hit us everywhere.’

Anthony Caleshu chairs a lively chat about pandemic poetry with two poets who collaborated for the anthology: from India, Sharmistha Mohanty, and from England, David Herd.

A year into the Covid-19 era, the publisher Shearsman Books is putting out a new title, Poetry and Covid 19 – An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry. It's edited by Anthony Caleshu and Rory Waterman, the idea being to pair 19 UK-based poets with poets from around the world to work on poems together. As the blurb puts it: 'The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in all of the world’s permanently populated continents, recognising that the pandemic has truly hit us everywhere.'

We have not one but two podcasts based on the book coming up, this month's and we'll put out another next month. The contributors to this podcast are Rory Waterman, who'll chair proceedings, a poet from Nottingham who has three collections published by Carcanet. Linda Stern Zisquit is an American-born Israeli poet and translator. And finally Declan Ryan, who was born in County Mayo, and who has lived mainly in London. His first pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series.

Rob A. Mackenzie's latest collection of poetry, which is published by Salt, is called The Book of Revelation. The first half of the book pairs chapters from the Biblical Book of Revelation with poems inspired by them.

Mackenzie was born in Glasgow. He studied law and then switched to theology then spent a year in Seoul, eight years in Lanarkshire, five years in Turin, and now lives in Leith. He is reviews editor of Magma poetry magazine and until the pandemic struck he co-organised the monthly Edinburgh live poetry event, Vespers.

During the interview Mackenzie discusses why prophets usually come to bad ends, the genius of Mark E Smith, why twitter might not be good for poets and contemporary religious poetry.

Image: Ryan McGoverne

Louise Peterkin's debut collection The Night Jar (published by Salt) adds new twists on fairy tales, Bond henchmen, Hitchcock and HP Lovecraft to its devil's brew. Based in Edinburgh, Peterkin discusses how her love of classic horror films inspired poems, how to approach the work of great artists whose personal life and views are troubling, and her recurring character, a nun called Sister Agnieszka.

Index of Haunted Houses, the debut collection by Adam O. Davis, uses ghosts and hauntings to talk about the perilous economic and social moment the United States finds itself in currently.

During this podcast, released in time for Halloween, Davis discusses how we've come to use the language of the uncanny to describe the world we live in today, why hauntings are, counter-intuitively, a great metaphors for the nature of life, and what capitalism has in common with Bruce Willis' character in The Sixth Sense.

Adam O. Davis is a poet, teacher and photographer, and his haunting photos appear throughout Index of Haunted Houses. He was in born in Tucson, Arizona and raised in various places including Utah, France, New Jersey, California, and Scotland. His work has appeared in many journals, including The believer, the Paris review, and the Poetry Review.

Beverley Bie Brahic is a Canadian poet and translator who lives in Paris, France and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the Forward Prize and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her translations include Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. Suzannah V. Evans spoke with her at StAnza 2020, where she discussed how translating poetry inspires her own work, owning a secret shelf of erotic literature, and being a 'selfish translator'.

The SPL is pleased to be able to share a treasure from our audio archives: from 2008, a talk by poet and novelist John Burnside on fellow Scottish poet W.S. Graham. During the talk, recorded at the National Library of Scotland before an audience, Burnside talks about poetry and visual art, the poet as nomad and 'feeding the dead'.

Volha or Volya Hapeyeva is a Belarusian poet and translator.Her new pamphlet In My Garden of Mutants, which will be published by Arc early next year, was translated by Annie Richardson, a translator based in Edinburgh.In the first podcast recorded during the lockdown, Annie talks from Scotland's capital and Volya from Austria about the joys of translation, Britain's lamentable record on learning foreign languages and whether now is the right time to be writing poems about the pandemic.

Image taken by Zhanna Gladko.

Nancy Campbell is a writer of poetry, essays and non-fiction. A series of residencies with Arctic research institutions between 2010 and 2017 has resulted in many projects responding to the environment, most recently The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019. Campbell’s first poetry collection Disko Bay was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016 and the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. In 2018/19 she was appointed the UK’s Canal Laureate by the Canal & River Trust and The Poetry Society.

In our latest podcast, Nancy Campbell talks to Suzannah V. Evans at StAnza, Scotland's poetry festival.

Christopher Whyte is a poet and translator whose last collection, Step by Step, which is published by Acair, was runner-up in the 2019 Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Prize. Whyte stopped off at the SPL towards the end of last year accompanied by his translator Petra Poncarova.

Since Christopher Whyte’s Gaelic poetry first appeared in the 1980s, he has been an influential and sometimes controversial figure in the world of Gaelic writing. In Whyte’s work, poetry and language are inescapably political, bound up with questions of belonging, enfranchisement and equality. But he is also an intensely personal poet.

During the course of our interview, he discusses how he came to learn Gaelic, why it is a language of resistance, and his relationships with several Scottish poetry greats such as Derrick Thomson, Sorley macLean and Edwin Morgan, with who he conducted a groundbreaking interview.

Ella Frears is a poet and visual artist based in south-east London. She has had poetry published in the LRB, Poetry London, Ambit, The Rialto, Poetry Daily, POEM, and the Moth among others. Her pamphlet Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity was published by Goldsmiths Press 2018. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling is published by Offord Road Books, and came out in April, 2020.

Suzanna V Evans spoke with Ella Frears at the StAnza Poetry Festival in 2019. Frears reads her poems and discusses sand, vintage porn and the interplay between her roles as a writer and visual artist.

Photo credit: Cat Goryn

This week's podcast features not one but two poets, both published by Blue Diode: Juana Adcock and Tessa Berring.

Juana Adcock is a Mexican-born Scotland-based poet and translator who works in both English and Spanish. In her first book Manca, she explored her native country’s violence. Her translations have been published in Asymptote and Words Without Borders, and she has worked on translations for the British Council and Conaculta, Mexico’s council for culture and the arts.

Tessa Berring is an Edinburgh-based artist and writer. Her poetry has recently appeared in Gutter Magazine, Magma, and The Rialto. In 2017 her poetry sequence Cut Glass and No Flowers was published by Chicago-based Dancing Girl Press. She is also 1/12 of '12', a women's poetry collective based in Scotland.

Before becoming a poet, Aileen Ballantyne was a journalist, and it's her former profession that informs her poetry, not least in a sequence of poems in her recently published collection Taking Flight that explore the aftermath of 1988's Lockerbie bombing, still the worst terrorist attack to take place on British soil. Ballantyne also reads poems about the moon landing and childhood flights to the USA.

In June 2019, poet, playwright and novelist Alan Spence performed at the Library to mark his first year as the Makar or Poet Laureate of Edinburgh. We recorded the event and present it to you now. During the performance he talks about some initial misgivings about how to make the post work, how he overcame those doubts, he reads many of the Edinburgh-based commissions he’s worked on during that first year and reads an ode to the former international Scottish rugby player Dodie Weir.

A note on the sound – as it’s a recording of a live performance rather than our usual interview, the quality is a little more ragged than usual. So apologies for the odd seagull, car reversing and cough.

Over a decade has passed since Stewart Conn was Edinburgh's Makar or Poet Laureate, yet the city continues to exert its influence upon him. His latest collection Aspects of Edinburgh maps the city as well as his fascination with its buildings, history and people.

Conn was born in 1936, growing up mainly in Kilmarnock, where his father was a minister. He worked at the BBC from 1962, mainly as a radio drama producer, becoming Head of Radio Drama, until he resigned in 1992. Publications include An Ear to the Ground (Poetry Book Society Choice); Stolen Light (shortlisted for the Saltire Prize), The Breakfast Room (2011 Scottish Poetry Book of the Year) and a new and selected volume The Touch of Time (Bloodaxe).

In our latest podcast, Conn discusses his collaboration with illustrator John Knight, and how he was initially wary of writing about the capital because he isn't a native.

Tolu Agbelusi is a Nigerian British, poet, playwright, performer, educator and lawyer, with compelling story telling skills. Her work 'addresses the unperformed self, womanhood and the art of living. For our latest podcast Suzannah V. Evans interviewed Agbelusi at Stanza, Scotland's poetry festival, earlier this year. Agbelusi talks about building communities and empowering people through literature; she is the founder of Home Sessions, a development program and community for Black poets under 30.

To mark the centenary of Hamish Henderson's birth, we're joined by Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, poet and Gaelic language advocate. He talks about Henderson's legacy as a writer and activist. He also discusses the Poets Republic, which has recently published a tribute volume in honour of Henderson, to which Mac an Tuairneir has contributed. He also talks about his own poetry and how he came to write in Gaelic.

Penny Boxall is the winner of the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the 2018 Mslexia / Poetry Book Society Poetry Competition. She's the author of two collections, Ship of the Line and Who Goes There?, both published by Valley Press. She was born in 1987 and grew up in Aberdeenshire and Yorkshire. We spoke earlier this year and at the time of the interview she was Development Manager at Shandy Hall, Laurence Sterne’s house in the North York Moors. Jackie Kay, who was one of the judges the year Boxall won, said of her poetry: ‘Penny Boxall runs a tight ship. Her poems are beautifully crafted. Reading her is to go on an interesting journey of exploration—stopping at fascinating places along the way. She has a curator’s mind and is always putting one thing beside another in an unexpected way.’

To coincide with Niall O'Gallagher's appointment as Bàrd Baile Ghlaschu, Glasgow's Gaelic poet laureate, we present an interview with O'Gallagher.

Niall O’Gallagher’s first book of poems, Beatha Ùr (Clàr), was published in 2013. Beatha Ùr continued Gaelic poetry’s long-running engagement with Scotland’s largest city. His second collection, Suain nan Trì Latha (2016), made this explicit in a series of poems, many addressed to the poet’s infant son, echoing classical Gaelic love lyrics.

Although he's translated other's poetry from Gaelic to English, O’Gallagher has declined to translate his own poetry, preferring to rely on others, like Deborah Moffat and Peter Mackay, to produce English versions of his poems. During the podcast he talks about why he refuses to translate his own work, why Glasgow has always been a linguistic hub for Gaelic poetry, and what he plans to do as Bàrd Baile Ghlaschu.

This month Suzannah V Evans takes over as host; she's in conversation with Mary Jean Chan in an interview recorded at StAnza, Scotland's poetry festival, earlier this year.

Chan was born in 1990 and raised in Hong Kong before continuing her education at the Universities of Oxford and London. She's already been nominated for the Forward Prize for Poetry's Best Single Poem category twice and earlier this year she was given an Eric Gregory Award. Her first full-length collection Flèche has just been published by Faber.

During the podcast, Chan discusses fencing (where the term 'flèche' comes from), how learning English at a young age made her realise some languages are more valued than others, and queerness.

Our latest podcast departs from our usual interview format. It's a recording of a reading held in the Scottish Poetry Library in March. The poets featured are Nina Bogin, Eoghan Walls and Beverley Bie Brahic.

Nina Bogin (pictured) was born in New York City and grew up on the north shore of Long Island. She attended Kirkland College and received a B.A. degree from New York University. She has lived in France since 1976. She taught English and literature at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard inFrance, until her retirement in 2017. She was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1989 and Graywolf Press published her first book of poems, In the North, that same year. Two books of poems followed, The Winter Orchards in 2001 and The Lost Hare in 2012, both published by Anvil Press. Her latest collection, Thousandfold, is published by Carcanet.

Eoghan Walls was born in Derry in Northern Ireland. He attended Atlantic College on the coast of South Wales and has lived and taught in Germany, Rwanda, Scotland and presently, northern England. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, an Irish Art's Council Bursary in 2009, and his work has been published widely in journals and anthologies throughout the UK and Ireland. His first collection of poems, The Salt Harvest, was published by Seren in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Strong Award for Best First Collection. He teaches creative writing at Lancaster University. His latest collection is Pigeon Songs, which is published by Seren.

Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet and translator. A Canadian, she lives in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her second poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize. Brahic’s translations include Guillaume Apollinaire's The Little Auto, winner of the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize; and books by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva.

Liz Berry was born in the Black Country which gave her first collection its title. Black Country won a chorus of praise, not to mention a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The collection is characterised by poems written in the Black Country dialect.

Her recent pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award, while its title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018.

Recorded at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, Berry talks about the lack of poetry that tells the truth about the experience of childbirth and rearing, the Black Country accent and pigeons.

Fiona Moore works today as a full-time writer but, as you’ll hear in this podcast, she joined the Foreign Office after graduating from university, and it was through this job that she lived for periods in the 1980s in Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain. Her insights into totalitarianism inspired several poems which are all too timely. She reviews poetry, having served as an assistant editor for The Rialto. In 2014, she was Saboteur Best Reviewer. Her debut pamphlet, The Only Reason for Time, was a Guardian poetry book of the year and her second, Night Letter, was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets. Her first full collection, The Distal Point was published by HappenStance last year, and was described by her publisher as a book ‘in which she confronts personal loss and irretrievable change, as well as wider, more public themes—recent European history and the politics of power.’ In this podcast, Moore discusses grief, dictators and Brexit.

The Library was saddened when we heard the American poet Ilyse Kusnetz had died in 2016; two years before her death, she'd recorded a podcast with the Library.

A new collection of work, Angel Bones, written while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, is about to be published by Alice James Books.

The book has been overseen into publication by Kusnetz's husband Brian Turner, a poet, editor and memoirist himself. He’s the author of the collections Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise and the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country.

We spoke to Turner about Kusnetz and Angel Bones via Skype as he is living in Florida. He talks about her love of Scotland and its poetry, the anger contemporary politics caused her, and how her poems take you inside the process of treatment for cancer.

Towards the end of 2018, Don Paterson came to the Scottish Poetry Library to discuss his latest book, The Fall at Home: New and Collected Aphorisms, which is published by Faber. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award, Paterson is one of Scotland's most accomplished poets, not to mention a musician, and in recent years has published several volumes of aphorisms, which are brought together in The Fall at Home. During the podcast, he discusses the relationship between poetry and aphorisms, why the English-speaking world doesn't have a strong tradition of aphorisms, and what happened the time he attended an aphorists convention.

Muriel Spark's 100th birthday was celebrated in 2018 in several ways honouring her status as arguably the greatest Scottish novelist of the twentieth century. One of the more imaginative ways came late in the year with the publication of Spark: Poetry and Art Inspired by the Novels of Muriel Spark, which was edited by poets Rob A Mackenzie and Louise Peterkin and published by Blue Diode. With contributors including Tishani Doshi, Vahni Capildeo and Sean O'Brien, the anthology does Spark justice. Mackenzie and Peterkin came into the SPL to talk about Spark and her career as a poet, from her controversial time at the Poetry Society in the 1940s to how poetry informed her novels. Plus a tribute to the late Matthew Sweeney.

To mark the publication of Barefoot: The Collected Poems of Alastair Reid (Galileo), this episode is dedicated to the late poet. Alastair Reid was a poet, an essayist, translator and traveller. Born in 1926 in Galloway, he served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War before moving to the US in the early 1950s, where he was published in The New Yorker, the start of a long association with that magazine. In the decades that followed he travelled the world, establishing friendships with two South African poets he translated, Neruda and Borges. Tom Pow, Barefoot's editor, discusses Reid's life and work: what Reid thought of his homeland, his relationships with Borges and Neruda, and how Pow came to know Reid the man and Reid the poet.

The SPL wishes to thank The Poetry Archive for granting us permission to feature a performance of Reid reading 'Weathering'.

Tishani Doshi's third collection Girls are Coming Out of the Woods is one of the great collections of 2018. In August, while appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Doshi visited the SPL where she spoke about the new collection. On the podcast, she discusses writing poems that address violence against women during the MeToo era, how comfortable she is to describe herself as a poet, and why Patrick Swayze is worthy of an ode.

Guest interviewer Suzannah V. Evans sits down with Mark Ford in an interview recorded at the StAnza Poetry Festival. Ford discusses the influence of Ashbery and O'Hara, Walt Whitman's 'children', and how he puts a set together for a reading.

Our latest episode has not one but two poets: Sarah Stewart and Russell Jones, emerging voices on the Scottish poetry scene. Both are writers and editors based in Edinburgh who have new pamphlets published by Tapsalteerie: Glisk by Stewart, Dark Matters by Jones.

Jones has published several pamphlets and a full-length collection in 2015 on Freight Books, The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping. He was also co-editor of the anthology Umbrellas of Edinburgh (Freight).

Glisk is Stewart's first pamphlet. She is also known as Sarah Forbes, author of the Elspeth Hart series of books for children. Together, the poets discuss sexism, apocalypses and Daleks.

As the age of Brexit continues to bear down on Britain, Sean O'Brien returns with a collection called Europa (Picador). One of only two poets to win the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for the same collection (The Drowned Book in 2007), O'Brien talks to the SPL about fascism, leaving Europe (and whether it's actually even possible) and liking bands long after they've passed they sell-by date.

Poet, novelist, and essayist Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work 'set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match' (New York Review of Books). In March, they performed at the Scottish Poetry Library, reading from a new memoir Afterglow (A Dog Memoir). While here, we sat down with Eileen to talk about how to be an artist during the Trump era, anthropomorphism and the linguistic legacy of growing up working class. As well as pondering whether George W Bush was a space snake alien thing.

Rory Waterman is the author of Tonight the Summer's Over and Sarajevo Roses, both published by Carcanet. Rory was born in Belfast in 1981 before moving at an early age to Lincolnshire. Today, he's senior lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University and co-edits the poetry pamphlet series New Walk Editions. In our latest podcast, Rory Waterman discusses writing poems about Trump and Brexit, growing up the child of divorce, and running a poetry magazine.

Elaine Feinstein is a poet, translator, novelist, playwright and biographer. Her last collection, The Clinic, Memory (Carcanet) combines new poems with a 'best of', bringing together over half a century’s worth of work. During the podcast, Feinstein discusses anti-semitism, Donald Trump, Don Quixote and translating poetry.

Image by V. Carew Hunt

Our first podcast of 2018 features an interview with new Edinburgh Makar Alan Spence. Novelist, short-story writer, dramatist and, of course, poet, Spence is one of the leading lights of the Scottish literary scene. With his work informed by his Buddhism, Spence imbues his poetry with both a cosmic perspective and a Scottish sensibility to comic and enlightening effect. During the course of the interview, Spence discusses Zen and the art of poetry, working with visual artists, and the rivalry between Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Pàdraig MacAoidh / Peter Mackay is a native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis. He is an academic, writer and broadcaster whose work is influenced by the diverse linguistic heritage of his birthplace. His debut collection, Gu Leòr / Galore, was published by Acair. In our latest podcast, Mackay discusses repressed Scots, journalism versus poetry, and growing up bilingual.

Hera Lindsay Bird is a poet from New Zealand. Her first poetry collection, also called Hera Lindsay Bird, was published in July 2016 by Victoria University Press and quickly sold out its first print run. A UK edition was published in November 2017. In August, when Bird was in Edinburgh to take part in the Edinburgh International Book Festival, she found time to come down to the Scottish Poetry Library. While in the Library, she argued in favour of hating wisely, what it's like when a poem goes viral, and why sentiment is nothing to be scared of.

Henry Marsh is a Scottish poet who divides his time writing about the natural world and Scotland's troubled history. In the past, he's written about Mary Queen of Scots, John Knox and the Covenanters. In his latest collection, Under Winter Skies (Birlinn), Marsh focuses on James Graham, the first Marquess of Montrose, a brilliant soldier and poet who changed sides during the War of the Three Kingdoms. Marsh explains why he wanted to write an entire collection about this tragic figure in the SPL's latest podcast.

Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize, Sinéad Morrissey visited the Scottish Poetry Library to talk about her latest collection, On Balance (Carcanet).

Morrissey grew up in Northern Ireland. At the age of 18, she won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, an early indicator of future success. She’s worked with schools, charities, prisoners, and while Laureate of Belfast, she met the Queen. Currently, she’s living in Northumberland and working in the creative writing department at the University of Newcastle.

During the course of the podcast, Morrissey talks about her fascination with engineering, her grandfather's communism, and why writing is a spooky art.

Joni Wallace grew up in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atom bomb. Her latest collection Kingdom Come Radio Hour (Barrow Street Press), which is inspired by her childhood, focuses on the extraordinary life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb. Wallace discusses her personal connection to Oppenheimer, 'documentary poetics', Hank Williams, and why deer appear so often in her work.

Last year, the publisher Freight put out an anthology called Umbrellas of Edinburgh. This collection of new work brought together poems all about Scotland’s capital. Co-edited by Claire Askew and Russell Jones, Umbrellas of Edinburgh is a poetic map of the city, from the centre and Princess Street, to the rim of the city and areas like Wester Hailes. There are also, as you’ll hear, poems about Edinburgh’s monuments and landmarks. Many of the poets you’ll hear have appeared on previous SPL podcasts, writers such as Harry Giles, Christine De Luca and Ryan Van Winkle. Many may be new to you. There’s even a poem about the Scottish Poetry Library waiting for you at the end of the podcast.

Image: Umbrellas Near London Bridge by C., under a Creative Commons licence

JL Williams (also known as one of our former podcast hosts, Jennifer WIlliams) recently published a new collection After Economy (Shearsman), inspired by nanotechnology and a vision of a post-capitalist society. In May, she launched the book at Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery, accompanied by cellist Atzi Muramatsu. In the latest episode of the SPL's podcast series, we include excerpts of Williams' and Muramatsu's performance, plus Williams talks about the inspiration behind After Economy.

With warm words on the back of his latest collection from Douglas Dunn and Les Murray, Jim Carruth comes highly recommended. Scotland's leading living poet of its rural experience, Carruth grew up on a family farm near Kilbarchan.

His first collection Bovine Pastoral was published in 2004, since when he has brought out a further five collections, the latest of which is Black Cart (Freight, 2016). In 2010 he was chosen as one of the poets showcased in Oxford Poets 2010.

In 2014 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Glasgow. He's also one of the founders of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, which is responsible for one of Glasgow's best poetry nights and for pairing emerging poets with experienced poets for a year's mentorship.

In our latest podcast, Carruth discusses Scotland and the rural experience, mental health in the countryside, and not taking over the family farm.

Nicholas Lezard called William Letford 'the new Scottish genius', a judgement the SPL is not inclined to disagree with. With a new collection, Dirt (Carcanet), in the shops, we thought it was a good time to catch up with him. We discussed how India changed his life and poetry, whether he's funnier in Scots and the influence of work.

In September 2016, the SPL, the British Council and Edwin Morgan Trust, took three Scottish poets – Stewart Sanderson, Christine De Luca and Jen Hadfield – to Russia as part of celebrations of the the UK-Russia Year of Language and Literature 2016 and the global Shakespeare Lives programme commemorating the 400th anniversary of his death. While there, they worked with three Russian poets – Marina Boroditskaya, Grigorii Kruzhkov and Lev Oborin – on translations of each other’s work.

In March 2017, the second leg of the exchange took the Russian poets to Scotland for a series of readings across the country. While in Edinburgh they spoke with their Scottish counterparts about translation, Shakespeare, living in a capital city.

Vicki Husband is one of the most interesting Scottish poets to have emerged in the past year. 2016 saw the publication of her debut This Far Back Everything Shimmers (Vagabond Voices), which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society's Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award, where she found herself shortlisted alongside Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson. Her poems mix science and the everyday, finding the cosmic in the quotidian and vice versa. She talks to the SPL about using bees to diagnose illness, her mentor, the late Alexander Hutchison, and why there are so many animals in her poems.

‘I write because I must,’ says Vahni Capildeo, winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Collection for Measures of Expatriation (published by Carcanet).
‘I think poetry,’ she says, ‘is a natural expression of humanity that has not been brutalized – which is able to take time and concentrate.’

In this podcast, Capildeo discusses the impact studying Old Norse at university had on her poetry, how women's voices are silenced, and why she objects to the word 'migrant'.

Andrew McMillan is the author of Physical (published by Jonathan Cape), which won the Guardian First Book Award, the first time a collection of poetry won the prize. He was born in 1988 and grew up in a small village outside Barnsley in south Yorkshire, studying English at Lancaster and University College London before becoming a lecturer in creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University.

He visited the SPL in August of 2016 while up in Edinburgh for the EIBF. During the course of the interview he talks about the one thing he tries to instill in his creative writing students, the criminal neglect of poet Thom Gunn, and why there are so few poems about going to the gym.

Image: Urszula Sołtys

In this goodbye podcast from Jennifer Williams, she shares her very first SPL interview with the American poet Eleanor Wilner. Jennifer first met Eleanor at the Scottish Poetry Library soon after she started, and Eleanor continues to be a friend and mentor for Jennifer in her life as a poet (www.jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk) and person who believes that art can do good work in the world. Jennifer would like to say a huge thank you to all the listeners out there who have tuned in all these years.

Eleanor Wilner: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/eleanor-wilner

With many thanks, always, to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast: https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

Since forming in 2014, the Loud Poets have been wowing festival audiences from Edinburgh to Prague with their live shows. Comprised of Kevin Mclean, Catherine Wilson, Doug Garry, and Katie Ailes, plus musicians, plus a large number of 'reserve members', the Loud Poets have attracted a lively and loyal following.

In the SPL's latest podcast, we ask the loud Poets about their 'origin story', making space for their brand of spoken word, and what they plan to do at the special Christmas show they're putting on here at the SPL.

That's right. The Loud Poets will be performing at the SPL on Wednesday 7 December, 6pm (with tickets £7 pr £5 concessions). Figgy pudding not supplied. Tickets can be bought here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/loud-poets-xmas-special-tickets-27026741712

In this podcast Jennifer Williams speaks to our New Voices from Europe Literary Europe Live SPL Poets in Residence Juana Adcock and Árpád Kollár about writing poetry while listening to Hungarian punk music, the definition of Spanglish, how to write multi-lingual poems and much more. This project was made possible by Literary Europe Live, Literature Across Frontiers and the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

http://www.lit-across-frontiers.org/profiles/arpad-kollar/

http://www.lit-across-frontiers.org/profiles/juana-adcock/

With many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast: https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to the poet Isobel Dixon about the universal and the particular, collaboration and making space in a busy schedule to write, how to bring in the personal in poetry and much more.

Please note: unfortunately there is a buzz from a mobile signal through some short sections of this podcast. We have edited it out where possible, but could not take it out altogether, and we didn’t want to lose too much of Isobel’s interview. We hope it won’t detract from your enjoyment in listening. Many thanks.

Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast.

Helen Mort is one of the UK's most exciting young voices. She came into the SPL to talk about her second book No Maps Could Show Them (Chatto & Windus) and to read poems from the collection. During the course of the interview, she talks about female pioneers of mountaineering, the strange health risks men believed running posed women, and the historical characters she's drawn to writing about.

In this podcast, the poet Sarah Howe talks to Jennifer Williams about kicking off the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival, writing with multiple languages and alphabets, sense and non-sense in poetry and much more.

http://sarahhowepoetry.com/home.html

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors.

Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Ploughshares and Poetry, as well as anthologies such as Ten: The New Wave and four editions of The Best British Poetry. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 & 4. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism.

Previous fellowships include a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry and a Fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. Find out more about her latest academic projects here. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London.

Photo credit: Hayley Madden

Two poets, one podcast. Krystelle Bamford and Don Paterson are reading together at the Scottish Poetry Library at an event we’re holding on Wednesday 23 November, 6pm. Tickets are £7 (£5).

Bamford was born in the US but has been living in Edinburgh for over five years now. She completed an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews and has been published in The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review, and she has also won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award.

Two-time winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, Don Paterson more than deserves his reputation as one of Britain's foremost poets. His latest collection is 40 Sonnets (Faber). He hails from Dundee, and is living in Edinburgh these days.

Both poets came into the SPL in July where we spoke about translations, sonnets and what sort of a character makes for a good poem.

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams speaks to Iain Morrison about poetry and art, being able to write about sex and identity, the influence of Emily Dickinson and much more.

https://permanentpositions.wordpress.com/tag/iain-morrison-poetry/

Claire Askew is the author of an acclaimed debut, This Changes Things (Bloodaxe), and has been shortlisted for the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Her poetry challenges its readers to consider the position from which they interpret it. She isn't content to merely point the finger; her work proceeds from an ongoing questioning of her own background and what it might blind her to. In our latest podcast, Askew discusses privilege, the danger of appropriating the experience of others, and why she's so drawn to writing poems about her grandparents.

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Illinois-born, Bath-based poet Carrie Etter about her newest collection, Scar (Shearsman 2016), a sequence exploring the impact of climate change on her home state of Illinois which speaks to problems faced by all of us as we enter this period of environmental catastrophe. They also discuss the importance of introducing students to a diverse range of poetic styles and voices, trends in American and UK poetry, and much more.

http://carrieetter.blogspot.co.uk/

http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/category/1096-etter-carrie

https://www.serenbooks.com/author/carrie-etter

Carrie Etter is an American poet resident in England since 2001. Previously she lived in Normal, Illinois (until age 19) and southern California (from age 19 to 32). In the UK, her poems have appeared in, amongst others, New Welsh Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, PN Review, Shearsman, Stand and TLS, while in the US her poems have appeared in magazines such as Aufgabe, Columbia, Court Green, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Seneca Review. Her first collection, The Tethers, was published by Seren in June 2009, and her second, Divining for Starters, containing more experimental work, was published by Shearsman in 2011. Her third collection, Imagined Sons, was published by Seren in 2014. Scar, her newest book, was published by Shearsman in 2016. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing for Bath Spa University and has been a tutor for The Poetry School since 2005.

Among the younger generation of Scottish poets, Harry Giles stands out. Shortlisted for the Edward Morgan Poetry Award and the Forward Prize for Best Debut Collection, Giles is clearly going places. Last year saw the publication of the narrative verse sequence Drone in Our Real Red Selves (Vagabond Voices) and his full collection Tonguit (Freight Books). It seemed a good time to catch up with the poet and activist. We spoke to him about politics, a messy take on the Scots language, and the time the Daily Mail called him 'vile'.

In this podcast Jennifer Williams speaks to Jamaican-born, American-based poet Shara McCallum about her new Robert Burns poetry project which brought her to Scotland for a research visit; the lyric self; female and minority voices in poetry and much more.

With thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

SHARA MCCALLUM http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/shara-mccallum

Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books of poetry: Madwoman (forthcoming fall 2016, Alice James Books, US; spring 2017, Peepal Tree Press, UK); The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK, 2011); This Strange Land (Alice James Books, US, 2011), a finalist for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature; Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 2003); and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, US, 1999), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry.

Recognition for her work includes a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant, a Cave Canem Fellowship, inclusion in the Best American Poetry series, and a poetry prize from the Academy of American Poets.

Her poems have appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies in the US, the Caribbean, Latin America, the UK and other parts of Europe, and Israel; have been reprinted in over thirty textbooks and anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and world literatures; and have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian. McCallum is also an essayist and publishes reviews and essays regularly in print and online at such sites as the Poetry Society of America. She has delivered readings throughout the US and internationally, including at the Library of Congress, Folger Shakespeare Library, Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Miami Book Fair International, Calabash Festival (Jamaica), Bocas Lit Fest (Trinidad), StAnza (Scotland), Poesia en el Laurel (Spain), Incoci di Civilta (Italy), and at numerous colleges and universities.

Since 2003, McCallum has served as Director of the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, where she is a Professor in the Creative Writing Program. She has been a faculty member in the University of Memphis MFA program, Drew University Low-Residency MFA Program, Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA program, and at the University of West Indies in Barbados.

Over 250 years ago, Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (Alexander MacDonald) wrote The Birlinn of Clanranald (Kettillonia, £5), an epic poem in Gaelic describing the troubled voyage of a galley from South Uist to Northern Ireland. Scotland itself was going through a stormy period post-Culloden, which the author, as a Jacobite sympathizer, knew fine well.

Poet and Professor of Scottish literature Alan Riach has recently published an English-language version of The Birlinn of Clanranald, and he came into the Library to discuss it. Over 30 minutes he talks about translating from Gaelic when you're not fluent in the language, the author's dangerous times, and why the climatic storm sequence is reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft.

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams meets Nora Gomringer just after her Poetry Centre Stage reading at Scotland’s International Poetry Festival StAnza 2016. They talk about poetry on TV, how poetry can and should include a multiplicity tones and registers, the joy of bringing poetry alive through the body and much more.

This podcast was recorded in cooperation with Scotland’s International Poetry Festival StAnza 2016 and with Literature Across Frontiers as part of the Literary Europe Live project supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.

Nora Gomringer was born in 1980. Her background is in page-related poetry and spoken word, her present is the vast variety of poetry and recitation. For her work, she has received numerous bursaries and awards. Recently, she and the musician Philipp Scholz received the renowned Villa Kowagama Residency bursary in Kyoto for the autumn of 2016. In 2015 she was awarded the prestigious German literary award, the Ingeborg Bachmann prize. Since 2010 she has worked as the director of the International Artist Residency Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany.

http://stanzapoetry.org/festival/poets-artists/gomringer

http://nora-gomringer.de/

Best Scottish Poems is an online selection of twenty of the best poems by Scottish authors to appear in books, pamphlets and literary magazines during 2015. The latest edition was guest edited by novelist and poet Ken MacLeod. Our latest podcast features the poets who appear in the anthology reading their work. Includes Kathleen Jamie, Ryan Van Winkle, Ron Butlin, Christine De Luca, JL Williams and many, many more. Image by Helen Douglas.

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams talks to Sophie Collins about experimenting with starting points for creating poems, including using online translators and working with the unconscious; feminism and her role as co-editor of Tender (http://www.tenderjournal.co.uk/abouttender), a journal celebrating writing by women and the wide-ranging world of poetry translation from radical to faithful; and much more!

Sophie Collins is co-editor of online quarterly tender, and editor of translation anthology Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016). She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2014. Her first collection will be published by Penguin in 2017.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sophie-collins

In our latest podcast, the editors of The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence 1950 - 2010 talk about how they put together a volume of Edwin Morgan's letters. James McGonigal and John Coyle discuss the variety of letters the Makar or National Poet for Scotland wrote. As a bonus, James McGonigal talks about and reads from his new collection The Camphill Wrens (Red Squirrel).

Season 1 of The Link Break comes to an end and our special guest is Paula Meehan, an Irish poet and playwright. Paula’s work is much translated and celebrated; among the prizes she has won are The Martin Toonder Award (1995), the Butler Literary Award (1998) and the Denis Devlin Award (2002). In this episode Paula speaks generously about her childhood, her Catholic upbringing, witnessing ‘living’ history in Ireland, and the role of private speech in the public domain. There’s more poetry sparks too, as Ryan considers all the beds he’s ever slept in (and so will you).

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams speaks to American poet Linda Russo about the complexities of writing a poetry of place, the challenges and rewards of creating with empathy, and the question, ‘why aren’t we giving up hope?’.

Linda Russo is the author of two books of poetry, Mirth(Chax Press) and Meaning to Go to the Origin in Some Way, and a collection of literary-geographical essays, To Think of her Writing Awash in Light, selected by John D’Agata as winner of the Subito Press lyric essay prize.Participant, winner of the Bessmilr Brigham Poets Prize (Lost Roads Press), is forthcoming. Scholarly essays have appeared in Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press) and other edited collections, and as the preface of Joanne Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems (National Poetry Foundation). She lives in the Columbia River Watershed (eastern Washington State, U.S.A.) and teaches at Washington State University.

Ken MacLeod is a novelist, poet and the editor of the SPL's online anthology Best Scottish Poems 2015. We caught up with Ken last year to talk about the slim volume he'd just published, Poems, a collaboration with his friend, fellow Scot and poet/novelist Iain Banks. Banks, who died in 2013, has suggested co-publishing their poetry before his death, but the book's appearance took on a new significance when it became clear it was going to be his last one. Ken discusses Poems' genesis, the poets who turned him and the young Banks onto poetry, and the limericks that gave him the courage to take on T.S. Eliot with a poem that talks back to The Waste Land.

This month, Ryan talks to the Australian poet, Ouyang Yu. Born in China, Yu is a controversial figure within Australian literature, often exploring the dilemmas of transnational artists caught between different literary, cultural and linguistic traditions in a raw, uncompromising style that he has made his own (Yu himself refers to the ‘polished’ poem as “an arse wiped clean”). In this interview, Ryan and Ouyang discuss language barriers, mis-prints and the importance of making 'creative mistakes'. Plus, more poetry sparks!

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com

Produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

In this podcast Jennifer Williams interviews poet William Bonar about the publication of his most recent pamphlet, Offering (Red Squirrel Press, 2015). They also discuss the mythology of memory, Hamish Henderson’s influence on Scots language poetry and a walk through the frozen cradle of Scotland.

William Bonar was born in Greenock and grew up in the neighbouring shipbuilding town of Port Glasgow. He is a graduate of the universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde and he gained a distinction on the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University in 2008. He recently retired after working in education for 30 years and is now a full-time writer. He is a founder member of St Mungo’s Mirrorball, Glasgow’s network of poets and lovers of poetry, and was a participant on Mirrorball’sClydebuilt mentoring scheme (2009-10) under the tutelage of Liz Lochhead. His sequence, Visiting Winter: A Johannesburg Quintet, originally published in Gutter 06, was chosen for the Scottish Poetry Library’s online anthology Best Scottish Poems of 2012 and he was shortlisted for a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2015. Offering won the James Kirkup Memorial Poetry Prize for 2014.

With poems about the internet, the suburbs and boxing, Angela Cleland is a poet whose subject matter is pleasingly diverse. A resident of London now, sh, e was born in Inverness in 1977 and grew up in Dingwall by the Cromarty Firth. Approachable but deeply accomplished, her poems are witty, smart and distinctive. When she visited the SPL, we had to grab her for a chat, not least because her second collection Room of Thieves (Salt, 2013) is a favourite of the staff. In our latest podcast, we talk to her about writing from an early age, moving down south and writing science fiction.

Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is our guest this week. Jane reads from her work, and shares the body, heart and mind that informs her deceptively clear, attentive poetry, asking why 'how happy we are, how unhappy we are, doesn't matter'. And Ryan offers some more 'poetry sparks' to nourish your own ideas.

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com

Produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

In this podcast, which was recorded in 2014, Kevin Cadwallender talks to Jennifer Williams about the performance poetry/page poetry debate, his religious beliefs (or lack thereof), how family and architecture inform his poetry and fast writing-slow thinking.

http://cadwallenderkevin.blogspot.co.uk/

Kevin Cadwallender lives in Edinburgh. He has published nine full collections of poetry and 24 pamphlets including; Baz Poems (Rebel Inc), Public (Iron Press), Rewiring Houdini (Bee Books), Dances With Vowels : New and Selected poems (Smokestack Books), Dog Latin (Calderwood Press) andColouring in Guernica (RSP) He is a Commissioning Editor for Red Squirrel Press, Lectures in Modern Poetry and was Scottish National Slam Champion 2012-2013. His BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Voyages’ was shortlisted for a Sony Radio Award and the book of that programme for a Raymond Williams Community Publishing Award. Kevin Cadwallender's latest collection is Making Buildings out of Gods & Glue (RSP, 2013). He runs '10RED', an eclectic spoken word night in Leith.

We're starting the New Year on a high. This month, The Line Break listens in on the wonderful Mark Doty, poet and author of Deep Lane, recently nominated for the T S Eliot Prize. And back with two more poetry sparks, Ryan has you writing transcendentally about the mundane, and exploring the things you shouldn't say.

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com

Produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

Our former podcaster Ryan Van Winkle returns to talk about his award-winning second collection The Good Dark (Penned in the Margins). A collection that has its origins in heartbreak, Ryan talks about his struggle to rise above an adolescent tone. He explains why despite his extensive travels abroad, his poetry never touches on his destinations. And why Snoopy is an unexpected literary influence.

Is there joy in sorrow? Can tragedy ever be funny? This month, our guest is Caroline Bird, a poet who delights in troubling sensibilities and leading her audience down the garden path before swiftly turning the hose on them. Where other poets might tell it like it is, Ryan and Caroline explore how the most meaningful poems can often be found at the far corners of things, and how poetry finds truth in a world of ‘no facts’ and ‘not saying’. Plus, more poetry sparks from Ryan! So lean in, listener, but be careful – there’s a fist aimed at your heart.

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com

Produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

It has been some time since this podcast was recorded with one of our Commonwealth Poets United visitors, Tolu Ogunlesi, however it feels like just the right time to release it as Tolu speaks so beautifully about how poetry platforms on the internet and new technologies such as email allowed him to become part of a global community of poets. In a time when the world feels fragile and where notions of borders and ownership seem fraught with complexities and power struggle, it is a relief to hear a poet speaking of poetry as a connecting force in his life, as a passport to new landscapes and ideas.

Tolu Ogunlesi is a journalist, poet, fiction-writer and photographer who lives in Lagos, Nigeria. His poetry collection Listen to the geckos singing from a balcony was published in 2004, and his work has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. https://toluogunlesi.wordpress.com/

Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast: https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

Come with us to the merry month of August, when all is bright, light and carnivalesque in Edinburgh. Yes, it's Festival time, and poetry is at the heart of the Scottish capital's various festivals. The SPL podcast team were there to capture the best of the fests, and they're all here in this podcast: Alan Spence, Loud Poets, Rachel McCrum, Juana Adcock, McGuire, Andy Jackson, Harry Giles and Sam Small.

The power of poetry comes partly from its ability to explode a language when it no longer feels adequate enough to explain the extraordinary times we live in. This month on The Line Break, Ryan talks to the Singapore-born poet, editor and translator - Alvin Pang - about multiculturalism and poetry as a force of resistance: against public expectations, political oppression and cultural efficiencies, as well as our own longings, ambivalences, lost hopes, fears and anxieties. Alvin recites a few of his extraordinary poems, and Ryan sets two more poetry sparks for you all to try out: writing family, and lashing out against bullies, bosses, and dictators.

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com

Produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

This month's guest is Hilary Menos, farmer, poet and winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010 for 'Berg'. Her most recent collection is 'Red Devon', which draws from her experience living in the Devonshire Domesday Manor which is now her home. In this interview, Hilary shares some of the crowdpleasing 'bankers' from her poetry set, writing poems in a slaughterhouse, and Ryan grills Hilary on her Superman knowledge. Plus - more sparks from Ryan. Produced by Culture Laser productions @culturelaser.

In this podcast guest interviewer and multi-lingual writer and translator Jessica Johannesson Gaitán talks to 3 bilingual poets about what it means to have more than one mother tongue, feeling guilty or not about writing in big languages, translating one’s own poetry and much more!

Featuring:

Juana Adcock is a poet and translator working in English and Spanish. Her work has appeared in publications such as Magma Poetry, Gutter, Glasgow Review of Books,Asymptote and Words Without Borders. Her first book, Manca, explores the anatomy of violence in Mexico and was named by Reforma‘s distinguished critic Sergio González Rodríguez as one of the best poetry books published in 2014. http://jennivora.com/

Ioannis Kalkounos was born in Greece. He works at the Edinburgh City Libraries. In 2012 he read two short stories at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (Story Shop). His first collection of poems, dakryma, was published in 2011 (Athens, Dromon Publications).

Agnes Török is a spoken word performer, poetry workshop leader, poetry event organiser and Loud Poet. She is the winner of multiple Poetry Slams in three different countries and two different languages. Török has been featured as a TED speaker, on The Today Programme and BBC Radio Scotland. At 2014’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, she was a BBC Poetry Slam finalist and her collaborative spoken word show with the Loud Poets received several five-star reviews. Her one-woman spoken word show ‘Sorry I Don’t Speak Culture’ was awarded Best International Spoken Word Show at the Edinburgh Fringe (PBH).

Török is premiering her newest project ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It – Take This Survey’, a one-woman show about the science of happiness, at the Edinburgh Fringe on the 16th – 24th of august. The show is an expansion of her TED talk on studying happiness. http://agnestorok.org/

Jessica Johannesson Gaitán grew up in Sweden and Colombia and currently lives in Bath. Her poems and stories have appeared in Gutter and The Stinging Fly among other publications. She writes about translations at therookeryinthebookery.org

Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

Edinburgh's Makar, or poet laureate, Christine De Luca wasn't born in the capital. In our latest podcast, she tells us about her childhood in Shetland, and how she's taken her native dialect around the world. She recalls the unexpected impact her poem about the Scottish Referendum 'The Morning After' had, and she talks about translating the Finnish epic The Kalevala.

For our third episode, Ryan talks to the American poet Mary Ruefle about finding the joy in the solitary act of writing poetry, the need to talk to yourself, and we hear Mary read from a selection of her incredibly distinctive work. And there’s more poetry sparks for you to try out, re-working found text with Tippex, and getting lost in language.

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets.

This episode is produced by Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser with thanks to the Scottish Poetry Library for their support.

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to New Zealand poet John Dennison about his new book Otherwise (Carcanet, 2015). They discuss the poem as microeconomy, what it means to be human, where God fits in to modern poetry and much more. This podcast was recorded at and in association with StAnza International Poetry Festival 2015.

http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=995

John Dennison was born in Sydney in 1978. He grew up in Tawa, New Zealand and studied English literature at Victoria University of Wellington and the University of Otago. Having recently completed a PhD at the University of St Andrews, he now lives with his family in Wellington.

Music by James Iremonger (https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/).

Sheena Blackhall is a poet, novelist, short story writer, illustrator, traditional story teller and singer who is the author, as the podcast explores, of over 100 poetry pamphlets. In 2009, she was made Aberdeen’s Makar or poet laureate you might put it. She writes in English, Scots and Doric. As a child and native speaker of Doric she faced the same prejudices and challenges that speakers of minority languages around the world have faced. In this podcast, Sheena talks about her love of Aberdeen, the worse place she’s ever written a poem and why she’s written so many pamphlets.

This month on The Line Break, Ryan re-visits an interview with poet and journalist Kwame Dawes and discusses the challenges of writing poetry about often painful world events, and how to find beauty, happiness and truth in the 'cesspools of experience' that follow. And Ryan sets out more of his 'poetry sparks', including how to write a blues poem.

Listeners to The Line Break can also join the The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets. http://campus.poetryschool.com

This episode is produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser with thanks to the Scottish Poetry Library for their support.

Our programme manager, Jennifer Williams – aka poet JL Williams (www.jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk) – had a fabulous adventure recently when she was invited to read at the 5th International Eskişehir Poetry Festival ((http://www.tepebasi.bel.tr/siir/)) in Turkey. In this podcast she shares an interview with the poet Nurduran Duman, as well as a soundscape of readings, interviews and music recorded along the way. We hope it will give you a taste of not only the extraordinary festival organised by Haydar Ergülen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haydar_Erg%C3%BClen) which featured international guests and Turkish poets, but also some of the delights of the very vibrant contemporary poetry scene in Turkey.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats, the extraordinary Irish poet. His work reflects and sometimes opposes changes in the the poetry of his times. His life was large enough to encompass the remarkable changes Ireland underwent during his life and one of literature's most famous unrequited love affairs.

In a podcast marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the SPL invited a number of poets to read and reflect on their favourite Yeats poem. Recorded in March at St Andrews StAnza poetry festival, our podcast features Kei Miller, Ryan Van Winkle, Carolyn Forché, Jim Carruth, Alexander Hutchison, Anne Crowe and many more.

The Poetry School welcomes you to a new poetry podcast, our very first (be gentle). For our pilot outing, host Ryan Van Winkle re-visits his 2013 Scottish Poetry Library podcast interview with TS Eliot-prize winner, Philip Gross, ranging across making up names for colours, comparing the similarities of poetry and making scones, and asking what happens in the thought vortex of ‘What if? And then?’

Listeners can also join The Line Break group on CAMPUS, the Poetry School’s free online community for poets http://campus.poetryschool.com.

This episode is produced by Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com with thanks to the Scottish Poetry Library for their support.

This podcast is a recording of the 2015 StAnza International Poetry Festival Round Table event in which SPL Programme Manager and poet Jennifer (JL) Williams was in conversation with the poet Alice Notley.

Alice Notley has published over thirty books of poetry, including (most recently) Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Negativity’s Kiss, and the chapbookSecret I D. With her sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, she edited both The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin Prize, two NEA Grants, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She lives and writes in Paris, France.

Many thanks to StAnza International Poetry Festival and to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. (https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/)

Poet, novelist and essayist Blake Morrison published a pamphlet last year, This Poem. A sequence of poems that take as their theme current events, the pamphlet tackles Jimmy Saville, phone hacking and the coalition government. But are the poems not only about recent headlines, but also about poetry itself? We met Blake Morrison at last year's Edinburgh International Book Festival where we asked him whether poems about current events risk quickly becoming dated and what a poet can bring to a news story that a journalist can't.

Poet Chrys Salt talks about who has the right to write about certain subjects, about writing war poetry when you have a son who is a soldier, and how poetry can benefit from a good performance.

Thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/

Image of Chrys Salt by Claire Newman-Williams.

In the last regular podcast to feature the founder host of the Scottish Poetry Library podcast, Ryan Van Winkle looks back at some of his favourite interviews since he started the podcast in 2008 as part of his Reader in Residence position at the SPL. Featuring Robert Pinsky, Caroline Bird, Sarah Broom, Owen Sheers, Jed Milroy, Matthew Zapruder, Jane Hirshfield, Golan Haji, Sabreen Khadim, Krystelle Bamford, John Glenday, Mark Doty, Paula Meehan, Adam Zagajewski and Mary Ruefle. This podcast was produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm and presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

Marion McCready is at the forefront of the new wave of Scottish poets. A writer who succeeds in making nature sound unnatural, she has a unique vision of the landscape we inhabit which she captures in an intense, sometimes sinister, lyricism. In conversation with the SPL, she talks about how Christianity influences her work, and what she has against rhubarb.

This podcast was recorded at and in partnership with the 2014 StAnza International Poetry Festival. Jennifer Williams talks to Jacob Polley about meaning and lack thereof, about resisting the idea of ‘home’, about remaining open to possibility when you’re writing and much more.

Jacob Polley is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Brink, Little Gods and, most recently, The Havocs, as well as a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novel, Talk of the Town. Born in Cumbria, he lives in Scotland where he teaches at the University of St Andrews.

http://jacobpolley.com/

Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in the podcast: https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

Image by Mai Lin Li

David Harsent is one of the UK's leading poets, as his recent T.S. Eliot Prize-win for his collection Fire Songs (Faber) re-affirmed. In August 2014, while up in Edinburgh for Book Festival, Harsent took some time to speak to the SPL. In a wide-ranging conversation, Harsent spoke about harrier hens, the heat death of the universe and the time he met Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadžić.

Image: David Harsent by Writers Centre Norwich, under a Creative Commons licence.

Ryan Van Winkle talks with poet Thomas Lux on this week's episode. Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim fellowship as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Thomas was at the SPL for our Sympoetry event last year. We get the opportunity to hear some of Thomas's work and he discusses his approach to writing and his inspiring thoughts on teaching creative writing. His recently published Selected Poems is available now from Bloodaxe Books. This episode is presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

Ryan Van Winkle talks to the poet Sasha Dugdale, who is also editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. She tells us about how some of her poems come from 'failed translations' and she discusses how sound plays a much more important role in her own writing than other factors. She also discusses the problems involved with being a poet and a poetry translator. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

Performance poet Jem Rolls tells all about the page/stage debate, what it takes to make a living from performing poetry and how rhyme helps you remember.

In this first SPL Podcast of 2015, Jennifer Williams, SPL Programme Manager, speaks to Salma, Indian poet and crusader for women’s rights. They talk about Salma’s strength and bravery in the face of oppression, her commitment to writing and publishing under extremely challenging circumstances and even gasp the use of the ‘v’ word in contemporary poetry! We hope this will be an inspiring and entertaining podcast to kick off your poetic new year.
Salma was born in a small village in Southern India, and overcame many obstacles to publish her poetry and fiction, now recognised as an important contribution to Tamil writing.

Salma came to Scotland as part of the Scottish Poetry Library’s Commonwealth Poets United project.

As part of the cultural programme surrounding the XX Commonwealth Games, Commonwealth Poets United was an international exchange project between six Scottish poets and poets from six Commonwealth nations: Canada, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Nigeria and South Africa. It established relationships between artists, organisations and communities through a culturally enriching poetry exchange.

The project was supported by Creative Scotland and the British Council, and partnered by BBC Radio Scotland.
Commonwealth Poets United http://commonwealthpoetsunited.com/about-commonwealth-poets-united/

OR Books: http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/salma/
Music by James Iremonger with many thanks: https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/

Ryan Van Winkle caught up with poet Donna Stonecipher in Berlin. They discuss her fascination with Model Cities and how the changing nature of Berlin has affected her poetry. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of the Russian novelist and poet Mikhail Lermontov. A new book, After Lermontov, features a number of the Russian's poems translated into English. Many of the poets involved are Scottish because Lermontov traced his ancestry back to Scotland and was a great admirer of Ossian and Walter Scott. Our latest podcast looks at After Lermontov in the company of its editor and contributors: Peter France, Robert Crawford, Sasha Dugdale and Alexander Hutchison. We also take a look at the short, turbulent life of the poet, a controversial figure in his day who may have been the victim of a fatal conspiracy at the age of 27.

Image: lino_Lermontov by Andrey under a Creative Commons licence

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Madeleine Campbell, A C Clarke, Christine De Luca and Haris Psarras about poetry translation in Scotland and about the innovative new book Quaich: An Anthology of Translation in Scotland Today.

Purchase Quaich here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Quaich-Anthology-Translation-Scotland-Today/dp/1782010696

Music by James Iremonger http://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com

Quaich: An Anthology of Translation in Scotland Today

Anita Govan has been involved in performance poetry for many years, long before it became as widespread as it is today, both as a performer and an organiser of events. Sceptical of the competitive aspects of slams, she still takes part in them and organises them for young people as she recognises their part in giving people a forum in which to share their experiences. In this podcast, SPL Programme Manager Jennifer Williams talks to Govan about her time as the Stirling Makar, coping with dyslexia, and standing up for young people.

It's been 15 years since Hugo Williams won the TS Eliot Prize for Billy's Rain, a collection that captured a certain amount of journalistic interest for its unvarnished depiction of an affair. His latest collection, I Knew The Bride, has also been nominated for the TS Eliot Prize (as well as the Forward), although it's subject matter is a little darker, taking in the death of his sister and his own kidney failure, which requires him to spend a significant amount of time every week on dialysis. We were lucky to spend time with the poet when he was up for the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August. He talks about the influence of popular music on his work, mortality, and what Hardy was doing with Shelley's heart.

This episode was recorded as part of the VERSschmuggel project at the Poesie festival in Berlin this year. The aim of this cross-cultural collaboration was to pair Scottish and German language poets together to produce "cover versions" of each other's poems, where you can hear the original but you also appreciate the new voice too. As organiser Aurelie Maurin says of the process it shows how "it's possible to have two tongues in the mouth of one poem." Featuring Don Paterson, J.O. Morgan, Katharina Schultens, Peter Mackay, Dagmara Kraus, Björn Kuhligk, Odile Kennel, Michael Donhauser, Anna Crowe and Ryan Van Winkle. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com

We chat to two of the editors of the magazine Far Off Places, a young literary journal with a brave outlook and far-reaching collaborations. Far Off Places is our Magazine Showcase guest at the SPL on 30 October 2014.

We talk with the critically acclaimed American poet August Kleinzahler on this week's episode. In a robust interview, he reads some poems from his latest collection The Hotel Oneira as well as discussing his views on poetry as an art form and the modern poetry world. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com

In August, our regular podcast host Colin Waters travelled to Faslane, home of the UK's nuclear deterrant, to talk to Gerry Loose. Loose's latest collection fault line is a suite of poems inspired by the area, which is his backyard. The great natural beauty contrasts with the ugliness of the military base, inspiring Loose. He guides Colin around the area, sharing its history and his thoughts on the radical nature of landscape poetry.

Miriam Gamble talks with Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable about her new collection Pirate Music. She reads a number of her poems and tells us about her approach to writing. Miriam also talks about how being a critic impacts on her work and the pressures of being part of the Northern Irish poetic tradition. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com

Robert Crawford' latest collection Testament (Jonathan Cape) tries out a number of unfashionale styles of poetry, chiefly political and religious, both of which the title alludes to. In our latest podcast, he talks about tackling the subject of Scottish indepedence in poetry, his friend and collaborator, the late Mick Imlah, and translating Cavafy into Scots.

This year saw the publication of Bill Manhire's Selected Poems (Carcanet), a good moment to look back over the New Zealand poet's career. Fellow poet Gregory O'Brien caught up with Manhire in his homeland to ask him about his Scottish ancestry, his influences, and the time he ended up in Private Eye's Pseud's Corner.

Jenny Lindsay is co-creator of the popular 'poetry cabaret' Rally and Broad, a hit originally in Edinburgh that has spread its wings recently to Glasgow. In our latest podcast, we talk to Jenny about her poetry and the lively spoken word scene in Scotland today. Image by Alex Aitchison.

We features two Korean poets on this episode - Sim Bo-Seon & Kim So-Yeon - with interpretation from Brother Anthony and Jonathan Cameron. They discuss the genesis of their work, how poets are perceived in Korean and read a few of their poems for us. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com

Commonwealth Poets United is an international exchange between six Scottish poets and poets from six Commonwealth nations. Glenn Colquhoun represented New Zealand for the project. Glenn is not only a poet, but a doctor, his poems a lyrical exploration of the doctor's role. His job, as he sees it, is to encourage more, not less, doubt in doctors, and so provoke greater contemplation. In conversation with SPL Director Robyn Marsack, he talks about visiting Shetland, his Scottish ancestry, and a song of remembrance for his grandmother.

In an episode recorded at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, we speak with the organiser of The Great Bloody Border Ballad Project, Lorne Campbell, and two of its six participants, the poet Chris Thorpe and theatre practitioner Lucy Ellinson, about their involvement in what was a fascinating exploration of the artistic potential of borders and a reimagining of the modern ballad. We also speak with Catalan poets Josep Lluís Aguiló and Carles Torner who appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival together with Gaelic poets Padraig MacAoidh and Niall O'Gallagher. They discuss writing in their respective minority languages and how the situation with Gaelic publishing is almost the opposite of that enjoyed by Catalan. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser.

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Brian Johnstone about his newest book, Dry Stone Work (Arc, 2014), and about upcoming The Fields of War performances (https://www.facebook.com/Fields.of.War) with poet Chrys Salt at the National Library of Scotland and other venues.

Brian Johnstone is a Scottish poet, who was born in Edinburgh in 1950, but who has lived in Fife since 1969. A well-known figure on the Scottish poetry scene, he is a published poet with six collections to his name, a literary event organiser of broad experience and a live performer of his poems both as a solo reader and with various musical collaborators.

Find out more about Trio Verso – Brian’s jazz collaboration project, The Fields of War and more at: http://brianjohnstonepoet.co.uk/

Many thanks to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. www.jamesiremonger.co.uk

This podcast with author Christian McEwen was recorded in the summer of 2013. Christian talks about her book World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, and about a life built around making the spaces to write and create. Christian works as a freelance writer and workshop leader. For many years, she taught poetry to teachers through the Creative Arts in Learning Program at Lesley University. A collection of her poems, In the Wake of Home, was published by Meadowlark Press in 2004

Odysseys of one sort or another theme the latest SPL podcast. Our guide, the poet Alasdair Paterson, takes us on a journey from a wry take on Homer's Greece through the Livepool music scene of the 1970s, onwards to post-Soviet Russia, ending in Arcadia. Little wonder Paterson's latest collection is called Elsewhere or Thereabouts (Shearsman). Along the way we welcome guests such as the geologist James Hutton and Paterson's fellow librarian-poet Philip Larkin.

We talk with two poet editors on this episode: Michael Schmidt, founder, editor and director of Carcanet Books and editor of the PN Review, and Peter Rose, editor of the Australian Book Review. Both read us a selection of their poems and discuss their approach to editing and to writing. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser. Photo: Ben Schmidt

Commonwealth Poets United is an international exchange between six Scottish poets and poets from six Commonwealth nations. Toni Stuart is a South African poet named in the Mail and Guardian’s list of 200 Inspiring Young South Africans for her work in co-founding I Am Somebody! – an NGO that uses storytelling and youth development to build integrated communities. Rachel McCrum, originally from Northern Ireland, is an Edinburgh resident today, a poet and the co-creator of popular spoken word event Rally and Broad. Both poets visited each other's countries to draw inspiration from a different culture. When Toni was visiting Scotland, she came into the Scottish Poetry Library with Rachel to talk about their exchange trips, how food united them, and how 'when you learn a new language, you gain a new soul'.

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Ilyse Kusnetz who was visiting Scotland during the StAnza Festival 2014. They talk about when to put the poem in the closet, feminism and politics in poetry and what the Scottish Referendum looks like from across the Atlantic.

Ilyse Kusnetz received her MA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University and her Ph.D. in Feminist and Postcolonial British Fiction from the University of Edinburgh. Her poetry has been published in journals such as Rattle, Crazyhorse, the Atlanta Review, Stone Canoe, Poetry Review, the Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, and MiPOesias, and her book reviews and interviews have appeared in The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, The New Statesman, the Orlando Sentinel, and The Florida Review. She is the author of a chapbook, The Gravity of Falling. Currently, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Valencia College in Orlando, where she lives with her husband, the poet Brian Turner.

Ilyse Kusnetz is the winner of the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for her collection, “Small Hours.”

Music by James Iremonger www.jamesiremonger.co.uk

This podcast was recorded in association with StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival at StAnza 2014.

When we think of World War One, our images of the conflict is largely shaped by those of the Western Front or perhaps Gallipoli. It was a truly global conflict, however, and one less remarked upon campaign was that of an Anglo-Indian force despatched to what is southern Iraq today, to secure oli supplies. Perhaps because the campaign turned into something of a disaster. Poet, playwright and songwriter Jenny Lewis' father fought as part of that force. Her new collection Taking Mesopotamia (Carcanet) reimagines the campaign using her father's diaries. It also takes in more recent wars in the region as well as the story of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian warrior king, to create a vision of mankind that repeatedly fails to learn the lessons of war. Lewis took time out from the StAnza poetry festival, where she was appearing in March 2014,to talk to us about war, oil, myth, and the gods.

We talked with Caroline Bird after her recent reading at The Sutton Gallery in Edinburgh. She discusses her latest collection The Hat-Stand Union and reads a couple of her poems. She also talks about the importance of reading for a poet and how an Arvon course she attended when she was 13 persuaded her to transform her readings habits. It obviously worked as she published her first collection at just 15 years of age. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://culturelaser.com

In this podcast poet Brian Turner talks to Jennifer Williams about the poetry that came out of his own experience as a solider, and how poetry can be a line thrown out by the breath or a question planted inside a reader.

Recorded in association with StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival at StAnza 2014.

Niall Campbell is one of the most promising poets of the younger generation of Scottish writers. Hailing from the island of South Uist in the Western Isles, Campbell is a poet whose work is as lyrical as it is intriguing. With his debut collection Moontide just published by Bloodaxe, Campbell took time to talk to the SPL about growing up on an island, his interest in spirituality without God, and the similarities between sculpture and poetry.

On this episode we talk with Korean poet Lee Si-Young and his translator, Brother Anthony of Taize. He reads some of his poems and reflects on how his work has evolved since the military dictatorship in South Korea when it was dangerous and extremely difficult to publish poetry. It 'was a responsibility that young poets had to take to stand up and dare take the risk to oppose and indicate there was another way ahead.' He also discusses his views on political poetry - 'without something that emerges from the human heart you cannot have a poem... If I am simply angry then nothing will come out in terms of poetry. It has to be transformed.' You may find more information about Lee Si-Young and other Korean poets on Brother Anthony's website http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/ We also feature one of the collaborations from SJ Fowler's Camerade project with Marcus Slease and Claire Potter. Listen to more of the collaborations at http://bit.ly/LaserCam and find out more at: http://sjfowlerpoetry.com. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com

Alexander Hutchison, a poet and translator in Scots and English, was born in 1943 in Buckie in the north-east of Scotland, and currently lives in Glasgow. His first book Deep-Tap Tree (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978) is still in print. Other collections include The Moon Calf (Galliard, 1990) and Carbon Atom (Link-Light, 2006). Melodic Cells, an interview with Hutchison conducted by Andrew Duncan appears in Don't Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets. (Salt: Cambridge, 2006). Salt also published Scales Dog: New and Selected Poems in 2007. In this podcast SPL Programme Manager Jennifer Williams talks to Alexander about his most recent collection, Bones & Breath (Salt), tardigrades, ancient spears, the poet’s voice and much more!

J.L Williams is a poet fascinated by the possiblility of metamorphoses, whether it be witnessed in the natural world or experienced in one's own life. Her first collection Condition of Fire (Shearsman) was inspired by Ovid, and in her new collection Locust and Marlin (Shearsman) she returns to the theme of change, albeit from a fresh perspective. In our latest podcast, she talks to us about the nature of stone, the poetry of locusts, and just how spiritual she is.

Commonwealth Poets United is an international exchange between six Scottish poets and poets from six Commonwealth nations: Canada, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Nigeria and South Africa. It will establish relationships between artists, organisations and communities through a culturally enriching poetry exchange. You can read more about Commonwealth Poets United at commonwealthpoetsunited.com/

Tanya Shirley, who lives in Jamaica, came to Scotland as part of the exchange trip. She visited the Scottish Poetry Library in early March 2014. While visiting, she spent time discussing her work with SPL programme manager and fellow poet JL Williams. Tanya read poems about her great-grandmother's funeral and her gun-toting grandfather. The poems, like Tanya's conversation, are full of life and laughter. The poetry opens the door on facets of Jamaican life.

Mark Doty speaks with Ryan Van Winkle about daring to do the things in poems that others are scared to do and bringing aspects of your own personality into your writing and your readings. In this wide ranging discussion we cover such topics as Alec Baldwin, dogs, celebration and the importance of reading widely to develop as a writer. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser.

In this podcast the poet and artist MacGillivray (http://www.macgillivray.org.uk/) reads from and discusses her new book, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Pighog http://www.pighog.co.uk/authors/MacGillivray.html). The collection is an exploration of connections between Scotland and the American Frontier whose form brilliantly reflects the subject matter of the poems. MacGillivray joins SPL Programme Manager Jennifer Williams in a conversation that maps the rich web of influences from which her poetry emerges, taking in Doors frontman Jim Morrison, mock ancient Scottish bard Ossian, and the mysterious ‘Man with Fourteen Lives’. Plus a debate about whether poetry works better on the page or read aloud, or memorised and recited. Image courtesy of Christian Thompson.

Actor-writer-director-singer-songwriter, Gerda Stevenson recently added another string to her bow with the publication of her first book of poetry If This Were Real, which came out on Smokestack Books last year. In interview with the SPL, Gerda discusses how her other life as an actor has influenced her poetry, performing Edwin Morgan’s words on stage, and her rhythmical inheritance from her composer father. She also gives poets tips on how to get the best out of their live performances.

Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable talks with Luke Wright @lukewrightpoet about his first collection Mondeo Man in this interview recorded just after his sell out event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Luke reads a couple of his poems and discusses how he has evolved as a poet, why he felt the need to publish a collection now and how becoming a parent changed his attitude to his own work. http://www.lukewright.co.uk We also feature the track 'Gospel According to the Purple Cotton Dress' by C.R. Avery. http://www.cravery.com Produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com Photo: Steve Ullathorne

In this podcast SPL Programme Manager Jennifer Williams talks to two Hawthornden Fellows Lynn Davidson and Alyson Hallett about where they come from, loneliness versus aloneness, and their current and upcoming work.

Lynn Davidson’s fiction and poetry has appeared in journals and her short fiction has been broadcast on national radio. Davidson has received several grants and fellowships to develop her work, including the 2003 Louis Johnson New Writers' Bursary from Creative New Zealand.

Alyson Hallett's work spans different continents and art forms. She has a poem carved into Milsom Street pavement in Bath, words etched into glass in a library in Bristol, and she runs the international poetry and public art project The Migration Habits of Stones. She currently works as a Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund. Suddenly Everything is her second full volume of poetry.

Best Scottish Poems is the Scottish Poetry Library's annual online anthology of the 20 Best Scottish Poems, edited each year by a different editor. Bookshops and libraries – with honourable exceptions – often provide a very narrow range of poetry, and Scottish poetry in particular. Best Scottish Poems offers readers in Scotland and abroad a way of sampling the range and achievement of our poets, their languages, forms, concerns.

It is in no sense a competition but a personal choice, and this year's editors, the novelists Louise Welsh and Zoë Strachan, checked and balanced each other’s predilections. Their introduction demonstrates how widely they read, and how intensely. The preceding years’ selections are still available on this site. This special podcast features readings by established voices and emerging talent. With readings by Kathleen Jamie, Liz Lochhead, Robin Robertson, John Burnside, and many more. Image: Seaweed by Lucy Burnett

Sweden based poet Ghayath Almadhoun talks to Ryan Van Winkle about being a Palestinian refuge and his Damascus club The House of Poetry that was a very special kind of open mic poetry event that challenged the authorities prior to the outbreak of the current Syrian conflict. He also reads excerpts from his long poem The City, which is about Damascus - for him, "the only city." Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser

In this podcast our Programme Manager, Jennifer Williams, talks to Robert Wrigley about his new collection and first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013). They also touch on narrative in poetry, the infinite capacity of poetry to talk about love and wild horses on the southern plains of Idaho. Robert was at the SPL in November 2013 for a reading with John Burnside.

From Bloodaxe (http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/personpage.asp?author=Robert+Wrigley) - His first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), draws on several collections published in the US, including Beautiful Country (2010);Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins(1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wrigley has also won the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Celia B. Wagner Award, Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Award, and six Pushcart Prizes.

Read more about Robert: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-wrigley

Music by James Iremonger: www.jamesiremonger.co.uk

Bob Dylan has played many roles in his life: voice of a generation, rock 'n' roll Judas, Christian convert, even Victoria's Secret salesman. The one that concerns the SPL podcast this week is 'poet'. Across two biographies - Once Upon A Time and Time Out of Mind (both published by Mainstream) - Ian Bell has considered Dylan in a more literary context than any other biographer of His Bobness. Over the course of this podcast, we discuss whether Dylan can really be considered a poet, the writers who influenced him, the Scottish connection, and his encounters with poets such as Carl Sandburg, Archibald McLeish and Allen Ginsberg. Image: 020 Azkena Rock Festival 2010 Bob Dylan 26VI10 by Dena Flows, under a Creative Commons

We discuss translation, identity, the value of mistakes and the virtues of bad poetry with the prolific novelist, translator and poet Ouyang Yu, who Ryan interviewed in Darwin, Australia earlier this year. Ouyang reads a number of his poems and discusses the experience of being a Chinese poet who has been living and working in Australia for the past 20 years and how this affects his practice. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://www.culturelaser.com

This summer's major SPL project was Walking With Poets. What was it? It looked at an old subject, one of the oldest, nature, using new media. It provided poets, readers and visitors to Scotland’s botanic gardens with a fresh way to engage with the environment and writing about it. We put four poets - Sue Butler, Mandy Haggith, Jean Atkin and Gerry Loose - in Scotland's botanic gardens. For this special podcast, we interviewed each of the poets in their garden and asked them to read poems inspired by their residencies.

McGuire is a young Scottish poet, sometimes described as a performance poet, who is pushing the boundaries of what poetry has to say with hilarious and uncompromising material about masculinity and pornography. The SPL met up with him to discuss 'making it new', situationism and the page versus the stage.

Ryan Van Winkle recently visited Prague with Literature Across Frontiers and chatted to a selection of poets he met there. We begin with Tomáš Míka, a poet, hip-hop artist and translator of many works including James Hogg and Samuel Beckett, who reads his poem 'If we do not entertain ourselves, they will entertain us' and discusses his chaotic 'maximalist' approach to poetry performance. Translator, poet and episodic essayist Ondřej Buddeus‎ reads his poem 'bit-poetics', tells us why Google is both a poetic and hilarious word and how he is exploring how language adapts to new technology. Playwright and poet Kerry Shawn Keys reads one of his poems and tells us about how he used to experiment with 'trance' states. Glasgow born and Prague based writer Christopher Crawford, the editor of online magazine Body http://bodyliterature.com reads one of his poems and talks about his approach to editing. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable and produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://culturelaser.com

In this podcast, recorded in August during the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Glyn Maxwell (http://www.glynmaxwell.com/) reads poems from his most recent collection Pluto (Picador) and talks with our Programme Manager, Jennifer Williams, about the breath and blood of poetry, how actors are the best first readers, why Auden is so important to his work and much more.

Photo by David Shankbone.

Edinburgh-born Ross Sutherland is one of the most interesting young poets working in Britain today. Inspired by cut-ups and new technology, his latest collection Emergency Window (Penned in the Margins) features a sequence of classic poems fed through Google Translate many times until they become something else entirely. He wrote a sequence of sonnets about the characters in video game Street Fighter 2, and yet his work is never gimmicky or unemotional. Ross talks to the SPL about the hairstyles of millionaires, how John Cooper Clarke inspired him, and about taking part in one of the more unusual poetry readings of recent times.

Published on 15 October, 2013.

Photo by Will Ireland.

Ryan Van Winkle interviews J.O. Morgan at his home in the Scottish Borders. His latest book, At Maldon by CB Editions, will be launched on 8 October at Looking Glass Books in Edinburgh. They discuss his approach to writing and talk in detail about his first book length narrative poem, the award-winning Natural Mechanical. He also discusses the intriguing story of how At Maldon started out as a translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem and how he was fascinated by the fact that it is a form of historical document written by the losers rather then the winners of the battle. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser, both of Culture Laser Productions http://culturelaser.com @culturelaser. Music by Ragland.

In this podcast, Programme Manager Jennifer Williams talks to poet, playwright and recording artist Kate Tempest about hip hop, poetry, her play Brand New Ancients, mythology, world peace and much more.

Kate has written plays for Paines Plough and the Battersea Arts Centre, written poetry for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Channel 4 and the BBC, worked in schools and won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2012, for Brand New Ancients.

Her band, Sound of Rum, has performed at myriad venues and festivals and she has a collection of poetry coming out with Picador in 2014.

Find out more about Kate at www.katetempest.co.uk

Image © Melanieflash.co.uk

Omnesia is a very modern condition, whereby our ability to store unprecedented amounts of information is combined with ever-shortening memories and attention spans. Omnesia is also the name of not one but two new collections by W.N. Herbert, both published earlier this year by Bloodaxe Books. During the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Herbert stopped off at the Scottish Poetry Library to explain his concept of omnesia and to read poems from his latest collections. He also talks about being a bad traveller, education minister Michael Gove’s take on poetry, and why Robert Burns is an omnesiac.

Image by David Williams

Irish poet Paula Meehan has been called "that rare and precious thing – a vocational poet of courage and integrity" by Carol Ann Duffy, and in this wide ranging interview with Ryan Van Winkle you will see why. "I think poetry acts as lightning rod to earth the energies of the Zeitgeist that you are living through... Often to get real, true peace you have to actually nearly reopen the wound to clean it." They discuss the troubles in Ireland, issues with the priesthood, witchcraft, abuse and suicide, but at all times Paula remains sparklingly eloquent, thoughtful and maintains a sense of intense wonder and joy with the world. Her many accolades include the Irish American Cultural Institute’s Butler Award, the Denis Devlin Award and the Marten Toonder Award. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions http://culturelaser.com Recorded at the StAnza poetry festival. Photo by user Copynoir on Wikipedia.

In this longer-than-usual podcast SPL Programme Manager Jennifer Williams talks to Kay Ryan (http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=975), American poet and educator and 16th United States Poet Laureate. Kay was a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, among many other awards and accolades. She was in Edinburgh to read at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as part of a tour (http://carcanetblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/kay-ryan-goes-transatlantic.html) including Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Aldeburgh and Dromineer Literature Festival. Before Jennifer and Kay headed out to conquer Arthur’s Seat and to sample Kay’s very first can of Irn-Bru, they read and discussed a number of poems from Kay’s Selected and New Poems Odd Blocks (http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847771308) published by Carcanet in the UK. They also talked about such varied topics as Buddhism, cycling across America, ‘cool’ poetry, the ticklish delights of rhyme and much more. We hope you enjoy!

Music by James Iremonger www.jamesiremonger.co.uk.

One of the more heartening developments of recent years as far as Scottish literature is concerned is the development of Edinburgh’s thriving spoken word scene. Throw a stone in Edinburgh and you’ll hit someone involved at some level. At the forefront of the scene is Neu! Reekie!, a night mixing poetry, film and music, and the brainchild of two poets, Kevin Williamson and Michael Pedersen. Pedersen’s debut collection Play With Me (Polygon) has just been published so it seemed a good time to ask him about the Edinburgh scene, and his poetry.

We travel around the world in this episode of the podcast. First up, from merry Cornwall, we have performance artist and poet Sally Crabtree, aka the Poetry Postie, who we caught up with at the StAnza poetry festival. Also at StAnza we recorded three poems from the Romanian poet and TV presenter Robert Serban. And we speak with Persis Karim from the Bay Area in San Francisco about Iranian poetry and the importance of translation. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser http://culturelaser.com Music by Ragland.

In this podcast SPL Programme Manager talks to poet, teacher and editor Antonio Ochoa about living and working with, translating and editing the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Milan (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Selected-Poems-Eduardo-Milan/dp/1848612001). Antonio reads some of Eduardo’s poems as well as his own, in both Spanish and English.

Find some of Antonio’s poetry here: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/15367479/ecopoetics-no-67.aspx
Find out more about Antonio here: http://www.mobius.org/events/cut-time

Music by James Iremonger: http://jamesiremonger.co.uk/

Selected Poems

Iain Sinclair is one of the UK's greatest living writers. Famed for his novels, such as Downriver, and documentary prose, most famously perhaps London Orbital, Sinclair began his career self-publishing his own poetry on his Albion Village Press in the 1970s. This year sees the publication of three books, 2 poetry collections and a longer book on his relationship with the Beats. Colin Waters travelled to Sinclair's home in Hackney in May 2012, where he asked Sinclair about his Scottish roots, John Clare and his lost 1970s collection Red Eye, which is being published this year by Test Centre.

Picture of Iain Sinclair by Luca Del Baldo.

In January this year Reel Festivals http://reelfestivals.org organised a series of events and translation workshops in Erbil, Iraq with Scottish and Iraqi poets. They then came over to Scotland in March (with one exception) and gave readings of the translations they had worked on earlier in the year. This podcast features all of the participants talking about their experience and reading from a selection of the translations and includes the following poets: John Glenday, Jen Hadfield, Ghareeb Iskander, William Letford, Krystelle Bamford, Awezan Nouri, Sabreen Kadhim, Zaher Mousa with support from Dina Mousawi and Lauren Pyott. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @kailworm of Culture Laser Productions http://culturelaser.com @culturelaser. Music by Khyam Allami.

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams, SPL Programme Manager, talks to Polish poet, essayist, editor and critic Tadeusz Dąbrowski. They are joined by Kasia Kokowska of Interaktywny Salon Piszących w Szkocji, who came along to help with translating. He has also been the winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). He is the author of six volumes of poetry, and edited the anthology Poza słowa.

Tadeusz has been widely published and translated into 20 languages, and a collection of his poetry in English, Black Square, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, was published by Zephyr Press (http://www.polishculture.org.uk/literature/books/news/article/black-square-by-tadeusz-dabrowski-1625.html) in 2011. He lives in Gdańsk and says in this interview, “All art is something like self-recognition.”

Kona Macphee has been many things in her lifetime, from waitress to motorcycle mechanic to computer scientist. Poetry lovers will know her as a poet, although the word she uses to describe herself is 'thingwright'. Colin Waters interviewed her earlier this year about her new collection What Long Miles (Bloodstone). During the interview, Kona discusses reality and the media, being inspired by history and how her garden is her R and D lab, as well as reading poems from her new collection.

Tusiata Avia is a poet and performer from New Zealand and a recent Fulbright Pacific Writer at the University of Hawai’i. She performs her poems and talks with Ryan Van Winkle about her work and influences, including how she rediscovered poetry in her 30s. Her two collections of poetry are Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004) and Bloodclot (2009).

David Stavanger aka Ghostboy is a poet and one of Australia’s premier young adult and children’s spoken word presenters. As well as reading a few of his poems, David also talks about his love of poetry, how he is developing his voice and the way he plays with genre and audience expectations. We also include one of his music tracks with the Golden Virtues, 'The Woman Who Is All Heart'. http://www.ghostboy.net

Presented by Ryan Van Winkle http://www.ryanvanwinkle.com. Produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions http://www.culturelaser.com. Music by Ewen Maclean.

SPL Programme Manager Jennifer Williams talks with Griffin Award Winning Canadian poet Ken Babstock about 'the thingyness of things', Paul Muldoon, the weather, Canadian garrison mentality's effect on the work of Canadian writers and much more, including his own extraordinary poems. This interview is from StAnza 2013, and takes place in a tiny attic room at the top of the Town Hall, in the midst of all sorts of weather.

Ken Babstock’s most recent collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi, 2011), won The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for The Trillium Book Award. He lives in Toronto.

Music by James Iremonger www.jamesiremonger.co.uk

Image: Ken Babstock, Toronto by Steve McLaughlin, under a Creative Content licence

Who is Eddie Linden? A poet, an editor, and a man with an extraordinary range of contacts, friends who ranged from Tom Leonard to Harold Pinter. Linden is a person who has achieved much considering his incredibly tough childhood. Born illegitimate, he was passed from pillar to post as a boy in Glasgow. Later, he suffered much anguish when his Roman Catholicism conflicted with his sexuality. In the 1960s, after moving to London, he began an extraordinary literary magazine Aquarius, which over 30 years became a veritable Who’s Who of contemporary poets. In the SPL's latest podcast, he discusses his life and verse from his home in Maida Vale.

Image by Mazengarb

Erín Moure discusses her recent book The Unmemntioable, an exploration of her complex family history and subsequent travel to western Ukraine. In conversation with Ryan Van Winkle at the StAnza poetry festival, where she was the poet in residence, they discuss "how you can identify who you are and where you come from when your mother says you come from nowhere." And nowhere, she discovered, was western Ukraine.

Presented by Ryan Van Winkle http://www.ryanvanwinkle.com @rvwable Produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions htto://www.culturelaser.com @culturelaser. Music by Ewen Maclean.

On 15 February 2013, Jennifer Williams, SPL Programme Manager, and poet/author Tracey S. Rosenberg (http://tsrosenberg.wordpress.com/) had a chat about that dreaded and unavoidable demon that every publishing writer must do battle with: rejection. We hope this podcast will be of interest to all writers who have to deal with inevitable rejection, and especially to young and emerging writers who are starting down the challenging path towards publication. We’re grateful to Inky Fingers (http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com/), that marvellous Edinburgh creative writing organisation, for creating the Rejection Workshop that inspired this conversation.

Find Tracey’s pamphlet here: Lipstick is Always a Plus http://stewedrhubarb.org/post/34371009207/lipstickisalwaysaplus.

Music by James Iremonger www.jamesiremonger.co.uk.

On a dull and rain-soaked day in March of this year, the SPL travelled to St Andrews to interview the National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke. Despite the weather, Gillian was in fine form after a magnificent turn at St Andrews poetry festival,StAnza. Then again, Gillian has a way of spinning grey days into poetic gold. Her latest collection Ice (Carcanet) is inspired by the terrible winter of 2009. Here, she explains how the snow took her back to childhood memories, which in turned inspired an entire suite of winter-set poems. Photo courtesy of Poetry Live

Ryan Van Winkle discusses language identity, Singapore literature and poetic practice with Alvin Pang at the StAnza 2013 poetry festival. We get a chance to hear a few of Alvin's poems and a selection from his anthology TUMASIK: Contemporary Writing from Singapore. Alvin talks to Ryan about how Seamus Heaney has influenced his work, his grandmother's deadly Cantonese aphorisms and he reads a poem of his written in the distinctive unofficial language of Singapore, Singlish. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions @culturelaser. Music by Ewen Maclean.

The SPL caught up with George Szirtes at the StAnza poetry festival in March, 2013. In town to read from his new collection Bad Machine (Bloodaxe), George Szirtes spoke to Colin Waters about memory, photography, Twitter and 1960s garage pop. Photo by Caroline Forbes.

Former Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky discusses poems, poetry readers, jazz and his curious family history with Ryan Van Winkle. He talks about his enthusiasm for his Favorite Poem Project - "For me a poem is a work of art that's so intimate and so internal that its medium is any reader's voice." In a wide ranging interview, he speaks about his formative years - "I grew up among very verbal, eloquent, skilful joke tellers and complainers and arguers and liars" - and the way he tries to capture music in language. He also reads a number of his poems and talks about his passion for poetry. "I never defended poetry. I don't believe in commercials for poetry. It is so fundamental, so large, so central... It's an insult to poetry to advocate for it or defend it." Photo by Jared C. Benedict under a Creative Commons on Wikimedia. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Programme Manager Jennifer Williams discusses constructivist poetry and more with award-winning poet, fiction writer, critic and professor Tony Lopez at a rather noisy 2012 Edinburgh International Book Festival. Tony reads from his book ‘Only More So’ (Shearsman) and talks about upcoming projects.

Music by James Iremonger.

Aonghas MacNeacail has been a leading voice in Gaelic poetry for decades, as poet, and as a regular literary commentator in print and on Gaelic radio. He celebrated his seventieth birthday last year with a new selected poems, Laughing at the Clock / Déanamh Gáire Ris A' Chloc. MacNeacail came into the SPL to talk about his life and career, from his childhood on the island of Uig to his membership of Philip Hobsbaum's legendary writing group. He also talks about his struggles as a Gaelic speaker in an English language-dominated culture, including an oddly strenuous struggle with the telephone directory people. Image by Roddy Simpson.

Dael Allison takes us on an adventure in this episode as she discusses itinerant painter Ian Fairweather and reads a selection of poems from her collection Fairweather's Raft. Fairweather's story is a fascinating one - he travelled through Asia and Australia in the 30s and 40s and embarked on an epic raft journey at the age of 60 from Darwin to Timor. Recorded in Darwin at the WordStorm Festival. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Fiona Sampson, former editor of Poetry Review and author of several collections including 2010's Rough Music and soon-to-be-published Collehill, took time out during her appearance at 2012's Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk to Jennifer Williams ahead of the publication of her latest collection and Poem, the new magazine she has begun.

Music by James Iremonger (www.jamesiremonger.co.uk).

Good poetry gets beneath the skin of readers. This episode features a poet who, for a short period, literally got 'under the skin'. In the autumn of 2008, poet and essayist Marianne Boruch was awarded a 'Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline', permitting her to study something new for a semester. Her choice? Anatomy classes. 'Speak Cadaver', a long poem, was her response to her time dissecting bodies, and in the SPL's latest podcast, she talks about her experiences in an interview conducted in Edinburgh University's Medical School's historical lecture theatre.

Ryan chatted with SJ Fowler and Tomasz Rozycki during the Sofia Poetics Festival with Literature Across Frontiers. We get a chance to hear them reading from their work and they discuss their individual approaches to their work. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean.

It's the end of the year. Time to put your feet up and reflect on what has been - and what is to come. The last SPL podcast of the year talks to the members of staff who keep the SPL going and asks them what their poetic highlights of the year are. We also broadcast clips from events held at the SPL over the year, including our explosive What I Love - What I Hate About Poetry debate! The show features Aonghas MacNeacail, John Burnside, Ryan Van Winkle, Allison Funk and Gerry Cambridge. Image: christmas bells tockholes 2009 by jack berry, under a Creative Commons licence

In November 2012, we staged the first in a new series of My Life in Poetry events at the Scottish Poetry Library. My Life in Poetry invites guests to reflect upon their lives through the lens of their favourite poems. Award-wnning novelist Candia McWilliam did the SPL the great honour of accepting its invitation to take part in My Life in Poetry. For 30 minutes, she discusses with enviable lucidity her favourite poems, which includes verse by Shakespeare, George Herbert, Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson.

We’ve all heard the arguments in favour of Scotland’s best poet or favourite poem, but what about its greatest collection?

The SPL invited two guests - James Robertson, poet, publisher and author of the novels And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, and Dorothy McMillan, editor of Modern Scottish Women Poets and former Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow - to join SPL director Robyn Marsack to discuss what might be Scotland’s best collections of poetry in an extended podcast.

Rozalie Hirs, poet and composer of chamber, vocal and electroacoustic works, discusses her work with Ryan at the StAnza poetry festival. We also include snippets from her pieces In LA and Bridging Babel. Find out more about Rozalie and her work at http://www.rozalie.com/ Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

We met up with Sean Borodale at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2012, where he was reading from his debut collection Bee Journal.

Bee Journal has since been shortlisted for the 2012 T S Eliot prize.

Here Sean reads poems from Bee Journal and talks about his interests in time, bees, Virgil and much more with our Programme Manager, Jennifer Williams.

Music by James Iremonger (www.jamesiremonger.co.uk).

Possessing a friendship that spans the Atlantic, Scotland's John Burnside and America's Allison Funk are captured in conversation, speaking about what they enjoy about each other's country, from poetry and music to the mutability of the landscape and people.

Allison Funk is the author of four volumes of verse, the most recent of which is The Tumbling Box (2009). John Burnside's latest, Black Cat Bone (2011), is one of only two titles to have won both the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry.

In a conversation that runs from delta blues to Virginia Woolf, Funk and Allison explain the way in which they've influenced each other's work while still being 'opposite sides of the same coin'.

Ryan Van Winkle chats to poets Ken Arkind and Jon Sands during their recent UK tour. They discuss their poetry workshops, what they think about slam poetry and we get a chance to hear them read.
Ken is a National Poetry Slam Champion, and full time touring artist who has performed across the US, been published in numerous anthologies. Jon is a full-time teaching & performing artist. His first full collection of poems, The New Clean, was released in 2011 from Write Bloody Publishing. He is currently the Director of Poetry Education at the Positive Health Project. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean.

“I feel poets have saved my life. The poets are our companions. They have found words for states all of us have experienced.” So says Marie Howe on a recent visit to Scotland, where she was appearing as a guest of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Howe’s first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe’s ‘poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots’. Jennifer Williams, Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry Library, interviews Howe about the craft of writing poetry, focussing on her poems ‘The Star Market’ and ‘The Snow Storm’.

Music by James Iremonger.

The Written World is the Scottish Poetry Library's London 2012 project. To mark the Olympics, we launched a scheme to find a poem for each of the 204 countries taking part, which were then broadcast on BBC Radio. With the project over now, we take the chance to look back on The Written World with its project manager Sarah Stewart. We also talk to Richard Price, whose poem 'Hedge Sparrows' was chosen to represent Team GB, and William Letford, who the SPL asked to write a poem marking the end of the tournament. A trio of poets is rounded out by Mariama Khan, a poet representing Gambia at Poetry Parnassus, another international event linked to the Olympics.

Photo of Richard Price performing at the Written World closing party courtesy of Chris Scott.

Music by William Campbell.

Ryan chats with Ghanian-born, Jamaican-raised Kwame Dawes. He is a poet of great strength, generosity and kindness, and takes the reader to places very few writers in English are capable of going. His work on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica (http://livehopelove.com/) won him an Emmy award for New Approaches to News and Documentary Programming, and drew much needed attention to a situation that had yet to be fully articulated to a large audience. In this podcast Kwame talks about his life in Jamaica, the country's transition away from its socialist years and its slow struggle to cope with its sufferers of HIV/AIDS, the responsibility of poets in times of political and social difficulty, and his experiences as a self-assessed 'bad journalist'.Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Photo: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Judy Brown's first book, Loudness (Seren, 2011) was shortlisted for the 2011 Forward Felix Dennis prize for best first collection. Jennifer Williams meets her to discuss how she approaches poetry, using her poem 'Spontaneous Combustion' as a way into her work and methods of composition.

The image of Judy Brown was taken by Chloe Barter.

In 1972, Liz Lochhead published her debut collection, Memo For Spring, a landmark in Scottish literature. In an extended interview with Colin Waters, the National Poet of Scotland discusses what the early 1970s poetry scene she emerged into was like, one in which women poets were few and far between. She recalls early meetings with the elder generation - Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch - and with contemporaries such as Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Alasdair Gray. The future Makar also speaks about life during the era of the three-day week and compares it with an economically troubled present-day that, in some respects, mirrors 1972. And she reads several poems from Memo For Spring. The image of Liz Lochhead is provided by Norman McBeath.

Exciting news! The SPL is changing the way it does its podcasts. Join regular host Ryan Van Winkle and new SPL podcasters, poet JL (Jennifer) Williams and Colin Waters, as they talk you through the new set-up. Plus Ryan and Jennifer read their own work.

Ryan chats with Vermont poet Mary Ruefle about craft, visual poetry and her approach to writing. She also reads a number of her poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle @rvwable. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Ryan recently visited the Clunes Booktown Festival in Australia, where he met multitalented poet, novelist, screenwriter, librettist, songwriter and doctor Peter Goldsworthy. They discuss his thoughts on narrative compression and his preferred modes of writing, his love of eastern European poetry, inventing translations, achieving your voice through imitation, Australian identity and why he doesn't want to work full time as a writer. Peter also reads a number of his poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Gregory O'Brien recently visited the Scottish Poetry Library and we took the opportunity to have a chat about his remarkable journey to the Kermadec islands. He talks about how he got involved in the project, which was organised by PEW Environment Group and reads some of the work which came out of his involvement. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Links: http://www.thekermadecs.org/ and http://vimeo.com/33871056

In the last of our StAnza 2012 triptych we sit down with Michael Symmons Roberts. In a wide ranging discussion, he talks about poetry as a process of discovery and connection making, poetic license, genomics, the ethics of drugs companies, collaboration, hotels, civil war and being asked to write a poem for a 9/11 anniversary. Michael also reads from a number of his poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Photo: Martin Bence

We chatted with Hilary Menos, winner of the Forward Prize for First Collection, at the StAnza 2012 poetry festival in St Andrews. She discusses, among other things, people reading personal things into poems, farming, her editing process and the gestation process of her poems. She also reads a number of her poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan talks with Lavinia Greenlaw at the StAnza 2012 festival in St Andrews. They discuss landscape, distance, fruitful misreading, the relationship of image and self, being labelled a particular kind of writer, finding the right fit for a collection and the long gestation involved in writing some poems. She reads a selection of poems including some from her recent Casual Perfect. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In the last of our podcasts recorded in San Francisco, we meet up with Greg Wrenn, winner of Brittingham Prize in Poetry and Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Greg talks about how his method of writing relies very much on not being prescriptive and talks us through how he approaches his work. A refreshing insight into the work of a young poet, Greg also reads a selection of his poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Matthew Siegel, a poet and essay writer from New York living in San Francisco, chats with Ryan Van Winkle. They discuss how his poetry is informed by the body and how, for him, "real life is poems". He discusses how drawing from his own life informs his work and reads a number of poems from a forthcoming collection. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Photo: Karl Orvik. Visit Matthew's website: http://www.matthewsiegel.us/

Martin Figura's Whistle, which centres on his mother’s death at the hands of his father when he was nine years old, is a remarkable fusion of theatre and spoken word. We caught up with Martin at the StAnza 2012 festival in St Andrews. He reads some of his poems and discusses his approach to the show with Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan talks with Robyn Creswell, poetry editor of The Paris Review. They discuss his interest in modernism in Arabic poetry, his thoughts on editing and how rap songs were his nursery rhymes. Robyn also reads some poems from recent issues of The Paris Review. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

CD Wright - recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award - talks with Ryan about her award winning One With Others, which explores the civil rights movement in the US. As well as reading excerpts from One With Others and other work, Ryan chats with CD about poetry and politics, her method of working and the influence of her Arkansas upbringing. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Photograph: David Shankbone http://blog.shankbone.org/about/

Adam Zagajewski - recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature - talks to Ryan at the 2011 Edinburgh International Book Festival about poetry and success, including how long you can feel pleased about prizes and reviews. According to Adam, it is a surprisingly short period of time. We also get the chance to hear a few of his poems and his thoughts on creative writing, melancholy and craft. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com Photo from Wikimedia user Slawek's http://www.flickr.com/photos/znani/

Ryan seeks out the peace and quiet of Cecilia Woloch's pick-up truck in LA. They discuss how travel affects her work and how her attitude to insects changed after living in the Carpathian mountains with the author of The Worm Eater's Handbook: A Guide to the Edible Insects of Poland. As well as reading a number of her poems, Cecilia also talks about the novel which inspired her to become a poet, her community work and the writers which have inspired her. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Jane Hirshfield reads some of her poems and chats with Ryan at her home in California, where she has often been influenced by whatever is at hand. In a wide ranging discussion, Jane discusses what inspires her to write, her thoughts on occupy writers, politics, solitude, spirituality, strangeness in poetry and translation, among other things. Jane will appear at the Scottish Poetry Library on 13th April. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Find our more about Jane on the SPL website http://bit.ly/I4OTdo Photo: Nick Rosza

Gabrielle Calvocoressi reads from and discusses poems from her first collection The Last Time I saw Amelia Earhart which includes a series of persona poems, as well as her response to a rejection letter which formed the impetus for excluding pronouns from her second collection Apocalyptic Swing. She also talks about, among other things, her interest in small towns and how poems can function like small communities and how this this affects the ethics and politics of poetry. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

We talk with San Francisco based writer Joseph Lease who reads and talks about a number of his poems. He chats to Ryan about elegy, his rediscovery of the Beat poets in his 30s, his interest in Renaissance poetry and how one of his poems was written with the aid of a tape recorder. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

In the second of our podcasts from poets who took part in the Creer translation workshop, we chat with Isle of Lewis born poet Ian Stephen about the sea, translation, narrative and the challenge of working in different mediums. We also get to hear a few of Ian's poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Every year the SPL teams up with Literature Across Frontiers to bring poets from different countries together to participate in a week of translation workshops in Crear. We chat with one of the 2011 participants, Maltese poet Adrian Grima, who is co-ordinator of Mediterranean cultural organisation Inizjamed which he co-founded in 1998 and which organises the annual Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival. We get to hear him reading poems in Maltese with translations from Miriam Gamble (read by Ryan) and Ian Stephen and he discusses poetry, language and place. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Young Dawkins, winner of the 2011 Scottish Slam Championship, chats with Ryan about the trajectory of his work, his views on the Beat poets, love, life and his approach to writing. We also get to hear a few of Young's poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Collaborative projects involving poetry with other art forms provides the focus of this week's episode. We chat with filmmaker and artist Alastair Cook about his fascinating filmpoem project, which produces beautiful films that arise out of a unique meditation between film, poetry and music. Check out his http://www.filmpoem.com. We also chat with Ken Cockburn who discusses his artistic collaboration with Alec 'Eck' Finlay, The Road North, which exhibited at the library last year. For more information head to: http://www.theroadnorth.co.uk/ Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Poet, musician, editor and broadcaster Donny O'Rourke talks about Scottish poetry, Scottish identity and Scottish nationalism with Ryan Van Winkle. Editor of the prominent 1994 Scottish poetry anthology Dream State, Donny discusses it and his views on politics, poetry and how the 1970s referendum on devolution influenced his generation of poets and what he thinks of the contemporary poetry scene. Including poems and songs read and sung by Donny. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats with the Poet Laureate of New Zealand, Ian Wedde. They discuss his book, Commonplace Odes, inspired by Horace and he reads a couple of poems from it as well as a few from other collections. He also talks about why he gave up writing for a prolonged period and his plan as Poet Laureate to offer a platform for writers to explore collective memory based on material in the National Library of New Zealand. Find out more on the Poet Laureate website, http://nzpoetlaureate.natlib.govt.nz/ We also include a new track from Small Feet Little Toes called 'I Like You'. Check out her Soundcloud http://soundcloud.com/small-feet/ Presented by Ryan Van Winkle from the Poets House in New York City. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

In May this year the Scottish Poetry Library teamed up with Reel Festivals to produce a series of events centred around writers and artists from Lebanon, Syria and Scotland. This podcast features snippets in Arabic and English from readings, interviews and panels that took place in Edinburgh and Beirut during the festival. You'll hear Golan Haji and Rasha Omran from Syria, Yehya Jaber and Mazen Maarouf from Lebanon and Scottish writers Tom Pow, Emily Ballou, William (Billy) Letford and Ryan Van Winkle. A free eBook in English and Arabic is available of all the poems read on this podcast from http://www.reelfestivals.org Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com. SPL Twitter: @byleaveswelive

We chatted with the editor of Anything, Anymore, Anywhere and author of too ok, Colin Herd. He tells us what he looks for in submissions and how his own changing aesthetic preferences influence his choices and how the process of editing affects him as a writer. Colin also reads a number of his poems and tells us a little about his own poetry influences. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @byleaveswelive

The poet and translator Matthew Zapruder reads a few of his poems and discusses his views on poetry, including his own response to the Occupy Wall Street movement, 'Poem for Plutocrats'. Find the updated version here: http://occupywriters.com/works/by-matthew-zapruder They discuss Matthew's editorial work with Wave Books, including his anthology of political poetry and muse poets writing about being poets. We also get to find out the story behind his deceptively non-haiku poem, 'Haiku'. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk Twitter: @anonpoetry and @byleaveswelive. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Ryan caught up with New Zealand poet Sarah Broom in Auckland recently. She reads from and discusses her first collection, Tigers at Awhitu, including how it was put together and how her diagnosis with lung cancer affected the tone of the last part of the collection. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com. Twitter @anonpoetry and @byleaveswelive.

We bring you three interviews on this bumper episode, recorded at the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews in March 2011. We chat with Durs Grünbein, one of Don Paterson's favourite living poets, the Melbourne Mathematics professor, novelist and poet Tom Petsinis and sound poetry troupe Krikri from Belgium. Presented and produced by Colin Fraser with interviews by Ryan Van Winkle. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com. Twitter: @anonpoetry & @byleaveswelive. Photo by @jo_bell

Ryan chats to the author of All American Poem, Matthew Dickman, in a noisy cafe across the road from the New York Public Library. They discuss pop culture and poetry, love, favourite poets and Dickman's development as a writer, among other things. Ryan also gives a short preview of who to expect from on the podcast in the next few months. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle from Flagstaff, Arizona. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean.

Ryan Van Winkle chats with the author of Banana Me Beautiful, a 3 part collection by local Edinburgh writer Emily Dodd. They discuss the genesis of the project, its unique construction and we also get the chance to hear Emily reading from the book. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine. Twitter: @anonpoetry & @byleaveswelive. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com Music by Ewen Maclean. Photograph by Chris Scott @chrisdonia.

Ryan chats with Rachael Boast at the Edinburgh International Book Festival just before the two of them were due to read. Rachael talks through some of the ideas behind her Forward Best First Collection prize winning Sidereal, discusses her interest in time, why astrology shouldn't really be used to predict things and how writing poetry is like playing a piano with your eyes shut. Interview by Ryan Van Winkle. Presented and Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @anonpoetry and @byleaveswelive

Ryan chats with the wonderful Degna Stone at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. They discuss feminism, rejecting poetry, rediscovering poetry, the relationship between a poet and her poetry, performance and developing as a writer. We also get the chance to hear a number of Degna's poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @anonpoetry

Ryan chats with translator and poet Anna Crowe about her award winning pamphlet 'Figure in Landscape'. Anna reads from the collection, discusses the need for distance in writing about place, the influence of art in poetry (especially Catalan artist Andreu Maimó) and the process of self-translation. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @anonpoetry

We feature two upcoming poets on this week's podcast. The first is Richie McCaffery, whose first pamphlet will be published by Happenstance Press next year. The second is Henk Rossouw, who featured on our Emily Dickinson podcast - this time we have the opportunity to listen to him read his own work. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Award winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker talks to Ryan about her love of and fascination for formal verse and how it can often be a stimulus for creativity. She chats about Muriel Rukeyser, how poets change over the years and how she believes poetry is a dialogue between other readers and writers. We also get the chance to hear her reading a few of her poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

We chat with the illuminating Brian Holton at the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews. He gives us the chance to hear some of his superb translations into English and Scots of the Chinese poet Yang Lian and he discusses translation, ideas of exile and the evolution of modern Chinese poetry with Reader in Residence Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk @anonpoetry Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats to Bristol based poet David Briggs about selling his blood, new age travellers, owning his own bar and the intricacies of assembling a poetry collection. Featuring readings from David's book The Method Men published by Salt. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Syrian poet Golan Haji joins Ryan in Beirut as part of the cultural collaboration festival of poetry, film and music Reel Festivals. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. mail: splpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @anonpoetry and @reelfestivals

Ryan chats with Dumfries poet Hugh McMillan, history teacher, National Trust for Scotland agitator and master of the entertaining poetry reading. We get the chance to hear Hugh read a number of his poems, which range from the hilarious to the touching. Ryan also previews Reel Festivals, the film and poetry festival he has been organising in Lebanon and Scotland - check out http://www.reelfestivals.org. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats with multi-talented American poet Kevin Young about fatherhood, the blues, his most recent poetry collection, Ardency, and his role as the curator of a very special poetry library in Atlanta, Georgia. Featuring a number of great readings from Kevin. Recorded at the StAnza 2011 International Poetry Festival in St Andrews. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @anonpoetry Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

To celebrate the Genomics Forum Poetry Prize event at the Scottish Poetry Library, we chat with Sophie Cooke, novelist, poet and winner of the ESRC Genomics Poetry Prize. We get the chance to hear her read her poem and she muses with Ryan about why she is drawn to science fiction as a literary form. We also chat with the runner-up of the Genomics Prize, Russell Jones, who chats about his own fascination with the sci-fi poetry of Edwin Morgan. We also get to hear a few of Russell's poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk @anonpoetry. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

To celebrate the Edinburgh International Science Festival, we chat with two Edinburgh based writers who both talk about their involvement with the ESRC Genomics Forum. We start off with lovely science fiction novelist Ken MacLeod who chats about his Human Genre Project and Scottish science fiction poetry and finish with the amazing Tracey S Rosenberg, a novelist and poet currently concerned with medicine and poetry. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats with the playful TS Eliot Prize award winning Philip Gross. They discuss poet's notebooks, the writing process, what it is like to write for all ages and pepper their discussion with great poems from Philip's recent collections. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

At this year's StAnza poetry festival we caught up with "ringmaster of the spoken word", Bob Holman, founder of the legendary Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. Bob talks about his latest project on endangered languages as well as sharing his thoughts on sound poetry, hip hop and we get the chance to hear one of his poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Music by Ewen Maclean. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk @anonpoetry Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Andy reads from his first collection The Assassination Museum (Red Squirrel Press), which he read from at the SPL on Wednesday. Peppered in between the poems Andy discusses giving advice, political poetry, disco, writers groups and much more with our Reader in Residence, Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk Twitter: @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In our final lyrically themed podcast, we feature excerpts from our amazing event for Let's Get Lyrical with multi award winning poet Robin Robertson and the splendid musician Alasdair Roberts who is currently working with Robin on a new collection of songs. We also hear Ryan's poem 'Gasoline' turned into a song by novelist and musician Rodge Glass. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

This is a recording from our event on Art Song with novelist Janice Galloway and music writer and academic Simon Firth. We also feature a track from White Heath which is their own interpretation of a well known Art Song. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan Van Winkle chats with novelist, biographer, creative writing teacher, editor and musician Rodge Glass about lyrics, songwriting and how music is different from writing novels. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser.

As part of our month long celebration of song lyrics, we've been chatting to some exciting musicians and songwriters about their lyrics, poetry and songwriting. Folk punk musician Billy Liar is an excellent example of the breed - smart, thoughtful and a connoisseur of fine words in music. He chats with Ryan about what he looks for in good music and we get a chance to listen to some of his latest tracks. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle of the Scottish Poetry Library. Produced by Colin Fraser for Lets Get Lyrical, http://www.letsgetlyrical.com and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature.

We present a bonus podcast featuring a great friend of the podcast, singer songwriter Hailey Beavis whose track 'Snow' was on our Holiday Season episode. We chat to her about lyrics, songwriting and you'll get the opportunity to hear her new track 'Jennifer' with the band Wax featuring Jed Milroy, Jenny Hill and Cammy Sinclair. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle of the Scottish Poetry Library. Produced by Colin Fraser for Lets Get Lyrical, http://www.letsgetlyrical.com and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature.

We speak with the amazing Dan Willson aka Withered Hand about song lyrics, poetry, songwriting and how his writing is informed by his own life. Including numerous tracks by one of music's brightest new talents. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle of the Scottish Poetry Library. Produced by Colin Fraser for Lets Get Lyrical, http://www.letsgetlyrical.com and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature.

Ryan chats with writer, musician and former nuclear physicist Doug Johnstone about lyrics, writing, poetry and the art of being creative. Part of the Let's Get Lyrical campaign, a celebration of words in music running all through February. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle of the Scottish Poetry Library. Produced by Colin Fraser for Lets Get Lyrical, http://www.letsgetlyrical.com and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature.

Mike Scott of The Waterboys chats song lyrics and poetry with Ryan Van Winkle. They discuss Mike's new project, An Appointment With Mr Yeats, where he has created rock songs from the work of WB Yeats and muse on the relationship lyrics and words have to music. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle of the Scottish Poetry Library. Produced by Colin Fraser for Let's Get Lyrical, http://www.letsgetlyrical.com and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature.

We visit Amherst, Massachusetts, home of Emily Dickinson, where Ryan talks with Dickinson experts Tevis Kimball, curator of special collections at the Jones Library, Emily Dickinson House director Jane Wald as well as the charming poet and tour guide Henk Rossouw. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

In a bumper packed edition of the podcast, we present the wonderful Elizabeth Burns reading from her recent collection Held which was launched at the SPL last year. We also chat to legendary publisher, poet, cosmologist, editor Kevin Williamson and poet, script doctor, ex-exile Michael Pedersen, organisers of new Edinburgh poetry night, Neu Reekie. Also featuring a track from Michael Pedersen and Craig Finnie. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Award winning Scottish poet Tom Pow takes us on a tour of his remarkable Dying Villages poetry project which was exhibited at the Scottish Poetry Library last year. The project is aimed at responding in poetry and prose to the social, ecological and cultural effects of demographic changes on villages in Europe. Check out http://www.dyingvillages.com or Tom's own site http://www.tompow.co.uk Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

In our holiday season podcast we have a bumper stocking of poetry goodies for you. We start off with the marvellous Hailey Beavis and Jed Milroy with their track "Snow". For mains we present Paul Muldoon and Norman McBeath talking about their poetry and photography project Plan B. And there might be a special something at the end. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

We chat with Rob A Mackenzie, author of The Opposite Of Cabbage, associate editor at Magma magazine and organiser of the monthly Poetry At... series. Rob discusses what he's working on at the moment, his views on criticism and the poetry industry and we get to hear a few of his recent poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

In part two of our interview with Scottish Poetry Library founder Tessa Ransford about the early days of the library, she discusses the opening event in 1984 and its role in the invention of Vegetarian Haggis, the Iain Crichton Smith poem which inspired the new building and we get to hear a few of her poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats with the founder of the Scottish Poetry Library, Tessa Ransford, and they discuss the founding of the Library and Tessa's own memories of the Edinburgh poetry scene including Norman MacCaig. Part two follows next week. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Presenter Ryan Van Winkle turns the spotlight on himself for a change and recreates the reading he gave in Edinburgh this week for the launch of his first book, Tomorrow We Will Live Here. Includes themes and language of an adult nature. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

In the second of our Norman MacCaig themed podcasts, we chat with Mandy Haggith about her relationship with the Assynt loving poet and how his concerns about land ownership and respect for the landscape inform her own work and activism. Recorded at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

As part of the centenary celebrations for Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, Ryan chats to poet and novelist Andrew Greig about his recent book, At the Loch of the Green Corrie, which is about his quest to find MacCaig's favourite fishing spot. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

In our anniversary edition we look back on the podcasts we've produced over 52 episodes. Featuring a few excerpts from the past year including the Itinerant Poetry Librarian at StAnza, Kim Edgar's musical response to John Glenday, Owen Sheers, Kei Miller, Kapka Kassabova and David O'Docherty. We also feature a brand new Halloween track - the Erlking - by a great friend of the Forest and the podcast, White Heath. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

This week we feature a special treat in the guise of storyteller Judy Paterson who Ryan chatted to at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival. She chats about the relationship between storytelling and poetry, her own experiences as a child with Shakespeare and lets you know where you can find storytellers in Edinburgh. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

On this week's podcast, we have the great pleasure to chat with acclaimed poet Vicki Feaver. She delights Ryan with her refreshing outlook on the poetry world, her fantastic work and her very infectious sense of humour. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle aka @forpub. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk aka @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In the final part of our Black Isle trilogy we feature storyteller and poet Margot Henderson who works in Findhorn. She chats to Ryan about her preoccupation with nature, traditional folk stories from the area and dialect. We also get to hear a few poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

In the second of our Black Isle trilogy, Chris Powici, editor of Northwards Now, discusses his magazine with our intrepid Ryan in Residence while they were both up in the Black Isle last month. We get to hear a poem from the latest issue and hear Chris's views on the literary magazine culture in Scotland as well as get an insight into his editorial musings. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

We're up in the Black Isle this week with poet, novelist and short-story writer Angus Dunn, one of the founders of the Black Isle Words Festival. He talks about how his work comes from a sense of feeling at home in the Black Isle, why he eschews publishing a poetry collection and we also get to hear a few of his poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In another podcast recorded at this year's Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ryan speaks with poet Kate Fox about her Fringe show Kate Fox News, the trials of standup comedy and her literary work in the North East of England including the marvellous Durham book festival. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats to Donald S Murray while he was at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. They discuss his non-fiction book on St Kilda, The Guga Hunters, the importance of place in poetry, the difference between island and mainland poetry and Donald's new book which focuses on the Italian Chapel in Orkney. We also get to hear a few of Donald's poems. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Music by Ewen Maclean. Contact: @byleaveswelive or mail splpodcast@gmail.com

Scottish literary powerhouse Ewan Morrison - filmmaker, novelist and short-story writer - talks to Ryan at the Edinburgh International Book Festival about the poetry of the shopping mall, his latest multimedia project. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle at @forpub. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk and @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com and tweet @byleaveswelive

We've been at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this past week, and caught up with two very different poets who have been involved with the events strand the SPL has curated together with Don Paterson. The first is Lorraine Mariner, who we caught up with after her event in the Spiegeltent. The second is award winning poet Kathleen Jamie, who reads some of her remarkable new work. We also mark the passing of Scotland's Makar, Edwin Morgan, and his former editor at Carcanet, SPL director Robyn Marsack, shares a few words about Eddie. Edwin Morgan was the top trend on Twitter last Thursday - something we think he'd have been very chuffed by. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @anonpoetry & @byleaveswelive. Email: splpodcast@gmail.com

Musician and journalist Chris King, co-ordinator of the amazing Poetry Scores project - http://poetryscores.blogspot.com - was kind enough to chat with Ryan over Skype to talk about his inspirational music and poetry project. They discuss his work popularising Turkish poetry, working with Australian poet Les Murray and the difficulties of producing large creative projects. We also include the track "The City Standing on its Haze" from the poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variation by Les Murray with Three Fried Men. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry Mail: @splpodcast@gmail.com

Mario Petrucci - scientist, thinker and poet - unravels an engaging discussion with Ryan on poetry, poetics, science, the challenges of pushing the boundaries in poetry and much else. They discuss Mario's fantastic Heavy Water collection as well as his most recent, i tulips, and we pepper things with a few choice readings. Produced by Colin Fraser of Anon Poetry Magazine http://www.anonpoetry.co.uk Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @anonpoetry and @byleaveswelive.

Brian Johnstone, poet and former director of the StAnza poetry festival, discusses the highlights of his StAnza career, what he thinks makes a good poetry festival, his own work and his creative improvisations as part of jazz-poetry combo Trio Verso. Featuring the tracks "Storm Chaser" and "The Sound of Breaking Glass". Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Author and comedian David O'Doherty, past winner of the Edinburgh Comedy Award, chinwags with Ryan about jazz, literature, comedy, the pressures of working in the creative industries, good stand-up, his favourite poetry and much else. Including comedy excerpts from David's new CD, "Let's David O'Doherty". Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Poet, playwright, bicyclist and novelist Kevin MacNeil chats to Ryan about why he's glad he started off life as a poet, the challenges of performance and why he describes himself as a "writer" rather than a "poet turned novelist". He also tells the amazing tale of his journey cycling along the Danube on possibly the first fixed gear bike trek in that part of the world. Including a track from Kevin's band and some readings from his excellent "Love and Zen in the Outer Hebrides". Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

A few months ago we travelled to Glasgow to interview The Dark Horse magazine editor and poet Gerry Cambridge. In an interview that focuses more on Gerry's role as editor rather than as poet, Ryan and Gerry talk about how the magazine got started, whether it is possible to say what an editor is looking for in a magazine and muse the general state of literary magazine culture in the UK and the US. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

This week our producer Colin Fraser comes from behind the microphone and takes the podcast reigns to introduce the SPL poet of month, Kei Miller, who appeared at last week's West Port Book Festival. We took a recording of his special event in Edinburgh Books where a captive audience was dazzled by Kei's breathtaking performance of his work. Kei is reading from his astounding new book "A Light Song of Light" which will be available to buy sometime later this month. Produced and presented by Colin Fraser. Special Guest Star: Ryan Van Winkle. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

As Ryan is away in Italy at the moment, our very own Peggy Hughes takes over the podcast reins for this week. She selects her poetry picks from last year's West Port Book Festival - Jack Underwood, Robert Alan Jamieson and Mike Stocks - and previews this year's poetry line-up at the West Port, which features some top quality free events from 24th - 27th June. More info at http://www.westportbookfestival.org Presented by Peggy Hughes. Special Guest Star: Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats with American poet and publisher Chase Twichell during her recent visit to the SPL. They discuss her ecological views, the intricacies of the poetry publishing world in the US and what it's like to release a collected works. We also get a chance to hear Chase read a few of her poems. Look out for a special telephoned-in easter egg from Paris with living legend Jim Haynes. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats with Scots poet Rab Wilson. They discuss mining, Pablo Neruda, Scots poetry, Arabic translation and we get to hear a few poems from Rab himself. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In a slight change to our usual programme, we include a simulcast from WSPL Radio: Real Poetry Radio featuring their presenter Ryan "the Wolf" van Winkle interviewing Scottish folk music sensation Jed Milroy. Jed has recently become involved with creating memorable tracks from classic and modern poetry and we include three of his excellent poetry tracks - "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", inspired by the Yeats' poem, "Love Never Dies" inspired by the poem by Portobello poet Don Huggins and "The Storm Cone" from the poem by Rudyard Kipling. Presented by Ryan "the Wolf" van Winkle. Produced by Colin "Copter" Fraser. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats to poet, editor, publisher and beekeeper Sally Evans about her work with magazine Poetry Scotland, the exciting poetry festival in Callander which Sally organises and we get a chance to hear a few poems from Sally herself. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In a special podcast from the Ullapool Book Festival, we have the great pleasure to include a reading from celebrated Guatemalan Maya Indian poet Humberto Ak’abal together with his Scots translator James Robertson and English translator Rosemary Burnett. Their new book "Drum of Stone" is now out from Kettillonia. Website for this remarkable trilingual book is: http://www.drumofstone.co.uk/ Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In an eclectic episode, we talk to exciting new poet William Letford, recent winner of the Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary, about memorising your work and the art of roofing. We also catch up with SPL podcast favourite Jim Carruth, who tells us about his 1959 jazz project. And we speak to My Kappa Roots and discuss poetry and music, as well as get the chance to listen to his track "Fleeting Like Etain". Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Scotland's Poet Laureate, Edwin Morgan, turned 90 this week and we headed over to Glasgow's Mitchell Library to celebrate his birthday with friends in the poetry world, as well as launch his latest collection of poems "Dreams and Other Nightmares". We include a few poems from this collection and chat to Alasdair Gray, Gerry Cambridge, Hamish Whyte, James McGonigal, Valerie Thornton, Gerda Stevenson, Aonghas MacNeacail, Donnie O'Rourke, JL Williams, David Kinloch and Robyn Marsack. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan visits the Southbank Centre in London for a meeting of the Global Poetry System. He chats with GPS co-ordinator and folk musician Chris Kreinczes, librarian Chris McCabe, writer Dzifa Benson, radio co-ordinator Claire McDermott and Southbank participation producer Lucy Macnab. We've got music from folk outfit Dear Winesburg and an excerpt of the amazing Bellowhead's folk opera version of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner featuring Lemn Sissay as the Mariner. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Poetry's answer to Clark Gable- Tim Turnbull- muses with our Ryan in Residence on performance poetry, comic books and the highlights of his previous career in music. As well as getting to hear some of Tim's poetry, we have a world exclusive in having the pleasure to include the 1993 track "Family" from Tim's former band The Dog Conspiracy. Thanks to Dave, Keith, Kelly, Kerry, Paul and Mick for permission to use this recording. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In our second podcast from the vibrant StAnza 2010 festival we talk to two outstanding poets- Dennis O'Driscoll and Penelope Shuttle - who tell us about their experience of StAnza and poetry festivals, how poetry has reacted to the increased popularity of readings, Cornish ice-cream and what it's like to publish a first collection. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

Award winning Scottish poet Tom Pow discusses his richly evocative Dying Villages project as well as his various other projects, including the recent Dear Alice, and we get the opportunity to hear a few Scottish Chastushkas. Tom will be bringing the project to the Library from 22nd - 24th April during a unique residency, unpacking the suitcase of poems, stories, images and sounds he has gathered while exploring the dying villages of Europe, from Spain to Russia. He will also be presenting a range of artefacts from the Dying Villages Museum. For more info, http://www.dyingvillages.com

Ryan heads to Scotland's International Poetry Festival StAnza to lap up the atmosphere and managed to grab poets Jim Carruth, Karen Solie and Jay Bernard to share their thoughts and feelings on poetry in general and StAnza in particular. We also have the very great pleasure to include the wonderful Itinerant Librarian who has been travelling the world for the past four years with her portable poetry library.

Poets Guide to Britain presenter Owen Sheers visited the Scottish Poetry Library recently to talk about his critically acclaimed TV series and its accompanying book. In the first of our two acts we feature an excerpt from the event where Owen discusses landscape poetry, verse on film and the problems of the poetic persona. In act two, Ryan manages to extract some unusual facts from Owen's past. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Follow us on Twitter: @anonpoetry & @byleaveswelive. Mail us: splpodcast@gmail.com

Recent creative writing poetry graduates Aiko Harman and Dave Coates (who also moonlights as the SPL's occasional receptionist) talk with the ever effervescent Ryan about poetry, the challenges of getting into the poetry scene and what it means to be "a Poet". We're also very happy to include the track "Two Inches Tall" from Sheila K Cameron featuring the voice of Scottish acting legend Tom Conti. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Follow us on Twitter: @anonpoetry & @byleaveswelive. Mail us: splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan chats with editor and author Stuart Kelly about the poet John Berryman and they muse the current state of modern poetry, its future, the purpose of the critic and chew the literary cud. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Follow us on Twitter: @anonpoetry & @byleaveswelive. Mail us: splpodcast@gmail.com

Alastair White and Sean Watson from Edinburgh based band White Heath chat music, metal, poetry and their Carry A Poem picks with our very own Ryan and we get a chance to hear their track "Election Day". And if that's not enough, we treat you to a sample of this week's Poetry Pub Quiz and offer a special prize - email splpodcast@gmail.com to enter. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Follow us on Twitter: @byleaveswelive, @carryapoem & @anonpoetry

Ryan sits down with Edinburgh's Makar (poet laureate), Ron Butlin, during a recent visit to a slightly noiser than usual Library (apologies for the melody of the office stapler) and discusses where his poems come from and what it's like to write for musicians - of the popular and operatic variety. We also get the chance to hear a few poems from Ron and listen to an excerpt from the short opera "The Voice Inside" by composer Lyell Cresswell for which Ron wrote the libretto. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @byleaveswelive, @anonpoetry and @carryapoem

Colin heads down to the launch of the 2010 One City One Edinburgh literature campaign, which this year is focusing on the poems we carry with us and includes a free collection of poems given out all across the city called "Carry A Poem". Including snippets from Ken Cockburn, Ron Butlin, Stuart Kelly, Sara Grady and charming couple Mark and Elena Fraser. Ryan also asks Colin what his Carry A Poem choices would be. Find out more at http://www.carryapoem.com and follow them on Twitter @carryapoem Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean.

In the final part of our Highland trilogy, Ryan chats with John Glenday about what it's like to be a drug counsellor and a poet, which poem he carries with him and we get an opportunity to hear John read from new collection, "Grain", from Picador. We also have the track "Nothing to Hold Onto" by Kim Edgar, which was a response to a work by John during the 7 Short Sails project- more info on that may found at http://tinyurl.com/johnglenday and Kim's website is http://kimedgar.com Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

In the second of our Scottish Highland trilogy of podcasts, Ryan is up in Portree chatting to Gaelic poet Maoilios Caimbeul (Myles Campbell) and English poet Mark O. Goodwin about their new book, "The Two Sides of the Pass", a conversation in poems across two languages and the landscape of the Isle of Skye. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean.

In our first podcast of the year Ryan presents the first of his interviews from a recent trip to the Scottish Highlands, and he starts the ball rolling with poet, novelist and playwright Hamish MacDonald, director of the beautiful creative writing centre Moniack Mhor. We also have a haunting track from Shelia K Cameron, "Last NIght I Dreamed About Doris Lessing". Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean.

In this Festivus podcast we feature a specially commissioned interpretation of the classic Christmas poem "A Visit from St Nicholas" aka "Twas the Night Before Christmas" from the amazing Toby Mottershead and some of Black Diamond Express. And as home is something many of us return to at this time of year, we've also a discussion on poetry and homecoming between New Zealand born Robyn Marsack, Director of the Scottish Poetry Library, and Connecticut bred Ryan van Winkle, Reader in Residence at the SPL and Edinburgh City Libraries. They talk about their respective journeys to Scotland from their native lands and explore the influence of the poems they have brought with them from their homes and a few they have picked up along the way.

We ask the fine people of the Scottish Poetry Library which poetry books they'd recommend for seasonal gifts, and Ryan catches up with multi-talented writer Kapka Kassabova for an scintillating interview. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean.

Ryan chats with Francis Bickmore, senior editor at Canongate Books, and Toby Mottershead of Black Diamond Express about their favourite poem, Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Their discussion covers Nick Cave, Iron Maiden, what we expect from literature and how poetry can fit neatly into a busy schedule, among other things. Also features the track "Jack" by Black Diamond Express. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. For feedback, mail splpodcast@gmail.com

In this bumper packed edition of the SPL Podcast, Ryan chats with actors Gilchrist Muir and Jamie Gordon about reciting poetry to all and sundry at the Poetry Garden in St Andrews Square. He also discusses poetry and hip-hop with multi-talented poet and performer Alasdair Maloney whose track "Thunder and Sun" with his band Sileni rounds off this week's episode. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. For feedback, mail splpodcast@gmail.com

Ryan catches up with American/Australian poet Emily Ballou just before her event at the SPL. They discuss what it's like to be a poet abroad, the influences on her work and her recent collection, "The Darwin Poems". We're also treated to "Bluegrass", a poem by Ryan, with musical accompaniment by Jed Milroy. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. For feedback, mail splpodcast@gmail.com

In this week's episode Ryan tells us about the Global Poetry System project he's been helping organise and how you can take part in it. He also catches up with poet Andrew Philip who discusses the poem that he carries with him, his views on poetry and reads us a poem from his recent collection "The Ambulance Box." Making his debut in front of the microphone, Colin speaks with another Salt Publishing poet, Julia Bird who discusses her live literature tour "You Are Here" that takes poetry into theatres in England. Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. For feedback, mail splpodcast@gmail.com

In this episode, we feature an interview with TS Eliot award winning poet, Jen Hadfield, as well as a track from Fair Isle/Shetland musician Lise Sinclair. Our Reader in Residence Ryan van Winkle also discusses the new SPL campaign, Carry A Poem, and invites you to submit your's to splpodcast@gmail.com Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Produced by Colin Fraser.

Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Featuring an interview with poet Kona MacPhee, who discusses her Poem of the Week project and reads a Halloween themed poem from her new collection "Perfect Blue", which is out in February from Bloodaxe. We've also got a scary treat from Kim Tebble, who performs his "The Raven, the Knight and the Queen of the Birds". If you'd like to send us your favourite scary poem and why you like it, mail splpodcast@gmail.com Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Produced by Colin Fraser.

Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Featuring an interview with Iraqi-born poet Sinaan Antoon and a track from Mammoth. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean.

Reader in Residence Ryan van Winkle discusses Blake's The Sick Rose with sculptor Michael Bowdidge, musing on the relationship of poetry to art and how this informs his practice, and touches upon what it means to be a donkey. Poet Robert Alan Jamieson reflects on his recent collection of poems and photographs, Nort Atlantik Drift, and shares an audio excerpt from his DVD of the same name. And Edinburgh band Saint Jude's Infirmary share their views on poetry, music and Scotland, as well as the track 'Tacoma Radar' from their recently released album This Has Been The Death Of Us. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Produced by Colin Fraser.

The third Scottish Poetry Library Podcast is full to bursting with the multitude of events which happen at the Scottish Poetry Library. Starting off with two interviews with young people in Edinburgh about the poems they love. The first is with the multitalented Ishbel McFarlane and her love of Burns and the second involves the up-and-coming poet Claire Askew discussing "Jabberwocky". We also include some snippets from our second noisy day and you'll have the chance to hear selected highlights from the event "Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect" featuring Robyn Marsack, Robert Crawford and Douglas Dunn. Presented by Ryan van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser.

In a music and poetry themed podcast, Scottish Poetry Library Reader in Residence Ryan van Winkle discusses some memorable lines from poems which he loves; an interview with Edinburgh based poet and musician JL Williams; a track from Laertes Why Are You Crying; followed by Canadian spoken word artist Myra Davies and a track from the Berlin-based Moabit label - "Goodbye Belfast". Presented by Ryan van Winkle and produced by Colin Fraser.

The first podcast from the Scottish Poetry Library, with Reader in Residence Ryan Van Winkle. Ryan’s talking to songwriter Billy Liar about Stevenson, recommending books by Sam Meekings and Sharon Olds, and reading some Hart Crane. Find out more at The Reading Room - http://www.readingroom.spl.org.uk/