One Night Stanzas

Hi Spring! Last time it was York… here’s what I’ve been up to in Edinburgh lately.

The Botanics

Is there a better day out on a fine day in spring in Edinburgh than a stroll around the Royal Botanic Gardens? I am pretty sure there isn’t, and I am super lucky to live less than five minutes away from the Botanics’ East Gate. My sister and I went on the perfect day… within a week, the rhododendrons in pic one had already started to drop their flowers. The Kazakh pear, which is the frothy white blossomed tree in pic three, has since had all its flowers blown off and its now focussed on fruiting. And the big tree with the white buds in the last pic is in full leaf! I love wandering the same paths throughout spring and seeing the rapid growth.

The Secret Herb Garden

Yes, I have written about The Secret Herb Garden (one of Edinburgh’s best-kept secrets!) before, but when I went last time it was October, and a lot of the stock was starting to be taken into the polytunnels for the winter. Going back in spring was always on the cards and it really is very different when all the plants are back outside, beginning to grow and stretch and bud and smell amazing!

I don’t know if I mentioned everything last time… like, they sell garden tools and supplies! I really wanted this vintage chair from the greenhouse! And of course, we returned to scratch the ears of their resident pigs!

The best part was finding a comfy, sunny seat in the greenhouse and settling down with Mark Doty’s brand new collection, Deep Lane. It’s his best yet and that’s coming from someone who thought he literally could not get any better. Buy it, buy it, I command you. It’s especially perfect for garden reading, as many of the poems are about Doty’s own garden.

Lovely local adventures

I keep passing the window of Maison de Moggy and spotting the kitties sunning themselves, which always makes me smile (according to the website, the two cute kitties pictured above are brothers, named Marcel and Phillipe!). Speaking of smiling…

There’s someone in my neighbourhood — Inverleith, Canonmills area — who’s been going around chalking positive, inspiring messages all over the place. I love it. My favourite is “ignore the boos, they come from the cheap seats.” I’ve been carrying that phrase with me. Other things they’ve chalked include “Smile!” and “Be kind to strangers.”

I don’t know what you think about graffiti, but I generally love it… and I love that someone has livened up one of the benches in Inverleith Park by scratching a stanza from this anti-war poem into it. The refrain is, “I am a hero, I am a hero.”

…and the last photo is not from Edinburgh, but it’s also wordy and made me smile. I was in Penrith recently, having a cup of tea in the lovely Wordsworth Bookshop and Coffee House. There was an exhibition of calligraphy going on, and this hand-lettered paper plate was one of the exhibits! This is an expression I associate with my gran and her many pearls of wisdom, and I was so impressed by the handwriting I had to get a photo.

What are YOU loving this week?

Like shiny things? Check out Edinburgh Vintage, a totally unrelated ’sister site’ full of jewels, treasures and trinkets. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!

Most poets don’t write a poem a day. For me it’s a very sporadic activity. Until recently, I thought “occasional poetry” meant that you wrote only occasionally. So there’s a lot of waiting, and there’s a kind of vigilance involved. I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times—and this, I think, is a sense you develop—I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum—the poem finds a reason for continuing. The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme. Now it’s tone that establishes the poet’s authority. The first few lines keep giving birth to more and more lines. Like most poets, I don’t know where I’m going. The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you’re simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with. You’re trying to discover something that you don’t know exists, maybe something of value.

BILLY COLLINS IS MY HERO (thanks Lucy for sending me this)!

Fail Safe: courage and the creative life < - I NEED THIS RIGHT NOW. (Wow. I’m starting out CAPSy this week!)

Give your writer friends gifts that they’ll actually appreciate. They’ll be grateful, trust me!

In 2013 for example The London Review of Books posted reviews for books written by only 72 female authors as opposed to 245 male ones. The New Yorker came in at 253 female to 555 male and the Times Literary Supplement (with far more male reviewers than female) also fared poorly in the equality stakes with male 903 and female 313. This given that over 80% of fiction is bought and read by women.

Get angry about literary gender inequality with the great sense-talker Sara Sheridan.

I’m afraid to say I rather enjoyed Writers You Want To Punch In The Facebook.

Reminder! Scottish Book Trust wants to read YOUR story about an important journey.

Descriptions of my work get more and more diminished until someone at the Library of Congress says that I am “easily understandable.” Actually though, compression is the opposite of what I do: what interests me is so remote and fine that I have to blow it way up cartoonishly just to get it up to visible range. My technique is something like using a hammer to drive a needle through silk.

This interview with Kay Ryan is so good. So, so good. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed reading something so much.

I love this story of one of the most infamous London book thieves of all time!

There’s a poem by Dan Mussett on the Moth Magazine at the moment. Dan was one of my fav Edinburgh poets… then he went wandering and became one of my fav wandering poets.

I remember I hadn’t read very much, but then the school got a library, and I picked up Joyce’s Dubliners. I remember reading it late into the night. By the time I got to ‘Ivy Day’ and ‘Grace’ I didn’t really know what was going on. It was quite disorientating. But I made it to ‘The Dead’, and something happened. I’d never had an experience like it before. The last pages, as the snow comes in… I know it sounds corny, but it was an epiphany. And I thought: ‘I’m having this’.

Here’s Alan Gillis — great poet, great critic, Edinburgh Review editor and my former PhD supervisor (yay!) — talking about why he writes, what he writes about and lots of other interesting stuff.

…and also from the Edinburgh Review, here’s a wonderful poem from Graham Fulton.

Here are two of my favourite male novelists, Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman, talking together about another of my favourites, the great Terry Pratchett. As wonderful as it sounds. (Neil Gaiman also wrote a great blog about TP’s passing.)

These kids are super, super inspiring, and made me smile. I want to make a bottle top mosaic for my garden, now!

This is really very silly, but it also made me LOL, so I thought I would share it with you!

Finally, I love the earnestness and honesty of Edith Zimmerman talking about antique jewellery in this video. A lot of what she said really resonated with me — these kinds of ideas inform my running of Edinburgh Vintage, too.

What have I been up to…? More baking.

These are triple orange vegan cupcakes. Zesty orange sponge, orange fondant filling (and some on the top), not-butter-not-cream icing, made uber-yellow by Lovely Boyfriend’s fancy-ass confectioner’s food colouring. And chocolate ganache. And fresh orange. And sugar stars. I basically decided that when it came to topping these babies, more was more. They were certainly appreciated by the gaggle of hungry board-gamers who sampled them!

Lovely Boyfriend requested these instead of a birthday cake. They’re vegan peanut butter cupcakes with not-butter-not-cream icing, chocolate ganache and a smidge of added peanut butter. We snuck them into the pub and enjoyed them over birthday pints with friends. The best way to spend an evening!

These were another request: my lovely sister wanted DINO CAKES for her birthday. These are classic double chocolate with chocolate ganache filling, not-butter-not-cream icing, and the required dinos. They look like they’re frolicking on tiny, daisy-spotted hills.

And these are espresso cupcakes with espresso icing and dark chocolate flowers. For when you’re really, really tired and you need a caffeine hit AND a sugar high! These were produced, again, for a bunch of ravenous board gamers, and saw them through a particularly epic session of Eclipse!

Aaaand as well as cupcakes, I’ve also got well into baking pies. Yet again, this is thanks to my personal GODDESS, Isa. They’re weirdly difficult to photograph, so my previous efforts (all-American cherry, and blueberry-and-maple) have gone sadly undocumented. This baby is a classic, like-your-gran-used-to-make apple pie, and I think was my best effort yet (BRAG BRAG BRAG). So good with soy whipped cream, which I have just discovered exists… and it’s so good!

Want to see what else I’m eating? I started a Flickr set for all the things that are making my belly happy. PROOF THAT BEING VEGAN IS TASTY.

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You can also visit Read This Press for more poetry (and typewriter paraphernalia!). Alternatively, check out Edinburgh Vintage, our sister site. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!

Since last week’s post was a bit of a heavy one, here’s a bit of TiLT lite: a visual TiLT! Click on each picture for more info. Here’s what I’ve loved this week:

Thrift store bargains! (and getting back into doing Wardrobe Remix — chronicling my dedication to cheap, eco-friendly dressing — again, after two years!)

Hula hooping!

Great new finds for Edinburgh Vintage!

Cinco de Mayo!

New and exciting books!

Finding a statement that you JUST SO AGREE WITH.

Yet more vegan brunch! (How cute is my rainbow mug? Part of a set, nabbed from RustBeltThreads, one of my all-time favourite Etsy stores.)

Lovely Boyfriend!

What are YOU loving this week?

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You can also visit Read This Press for more poetry (and typewriter paraphernalia!). Alternatively, check out Edinburgh Vintage, our sister site. If you want to get in touch you can follow OneNightStanzas on Twitter, or email claire[at]onenightstanzas.com. I reply as swiftly as I can!