Charlie reading @ The Muse @ St Louis Cafe Glasgow

LinMuse 15 Juneda Jackson is hosting another night of spoken word at the St Louis Cafe Bar in Partick next Wednesday night, 15th June. Come along to The Summer Speak Out @ The Muse @ St Louis to hear me read alongside Stephen Watt, Frances Corr, Finola Scott and others. There’ll be music from Linda Jackson and Marc Mooney and  all!

Linda is well kown as a blues singer, poet, performer and teacher of creative writiing.

Sait Louis Cafe Bar is a vibrant place with lots of live music, great food and a magic atmosphere.

Come along and give it your support… and have a good time with great words and music.

 

Scotia Extremis Week 18

This project has been going for a few months now and pulls out some wonderful poetry. Scotia Extremis Week 18 is no different, with a beautiful juxtaposition of poetic and artistic styles from Tariq Latif and Dawn Wood.

They have written about two artists who are very much at extremes: Edwin Landseer and Joan Eardley. The first, from Tariq Latif, captures so much of the political, social and economic history in Landseer’s world as well as his work. The second, from Dawn Wood, refelcts the sensitive powere of Eardley’s work, here eye.

More lovely sfuff from Scotia Extremis.

 

WEEK EIGHTEEN -Edwin Landseer/Joan Eardley

Pefkin performs ‘Jackdaws’

Pefkin and Tom
Tom and Gayle in rehearsal for The Old Hairdressers

Gayle Brogan as Pefkin will put on a great show on Friday with Jazzhandstemazzepamman. Gayle will be doing lots of superb stuff, including a piece based on my poem ‘Jackdaws’.

Pefkin has played live in lots of places, including the Xposed Club-MVI 0143 in Cheltenham, 2015 and HillGigs in 2016.

Jazzhandstemazepamman

Jazzhandstemazepamman (Tom Dalzell) will be doing lots of lovely stuff too. He, of course, objects to the ‘lovely stuff’ description  and I’m not sure he’s wrong. Grief Porn will feature. Everything wil be an aural and emotional challenge. Brilliant!

Charlie Gracie reading poetry out loud

cg at SWC
Charlie reading poetry out loud in October 2015

I’ll be reading poetry in the Scottish Writers’ Centre Speakeasy on Tuesday 24th May in the CCA in Glasgow. These nights are great fun, with a range of writers sharing some of their ongoing projects.

On Wednesday 15th June, I’ll be taking part in a night run by Linda Jackson at the St. Louis Cafe Bar in Partick. I’ve never been there before, but I’ve heard that they are pretty groovy things, these nights.

Look out for more stuff happening in the near future.

Hector Bizerk at Stirling Tolbooth

Poetry in action big style when Hector Bizerk, the Glasgow Hip Hop band, came to the Tolbooth in Stirling on 27 February.

Hector Bizerk by Claire Brunton
photo by Claire Brunton

The poetry of Louie and the beats of Audrey Tait and the rest of the band wove in out of each other like a tsunami of sound. From the first moments of “They Made a Porno on a Mobile Phone and Everybody Laughed” through to “Festival Boy”, it was mad, stamping chaos; a joyful, sometimes angry chaos. “Empty Jackets”, with Be Charlotte making a colourful appearance, is a manifesto for artistic integrity.

The place was jumping, and that’s something you hardly ever see in the Tolbooth, a venue that is all too often under-supported by the folks of Stirling.

 

The support band was Other Humans, also good to hear. They have a strong 80’s vibe going on which appeals to my auld heid.

Louie had two young MCs from Stirling on stage with Hector Bizerk: a great hand out to young artists from a band that seem to understand the way things really are.

After, I listened to my new copy of “The Tree That Never Grew”. Fantastic production values in there (that’s that Audrey Tait again).

 

Dartry Mountains and the Scottish Writers’ Centre

I’ve beeback of Arroon particularly focussed recently on developing my sequence of Donegal and Leitrim poems (currently known as “Tales from the Dartry Mountains” in my head). They have been bubbling away for years as family stories, myths, beautiful landscape and the politics of an area full of ferment.

For 2016, to help my focus, I am also resolved to go more often to the Scottish Writers’ Centre. First up is Jane Archer on short story writing on Tuesday night, 5th January. Should be a blast, so get yourself along.

Scottish Book Trust: Performance and Presentation

What a great day on Saturday there! A challenging Performance and Presentation Workshop run by the Scottish Book Trust. It’s a good thing to be pushed to improve and this was one of those days.

All the better for it, of course… I’d highly recommend the course for anyone. Alex Gillon was the tutor: a highly experienced and able coach.

Among the participants were some of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardees and the excellent Stirling-based poet Elizabeth Rimmer.

 

Bashabi Fraser at the Bakehouse, Gatehouse of Fleet

What a lovely night on Saturday, 28 November at the Bakehouse, run by Chrys Salt and her husband Richard. Bashabi Fraser read from her excellent new book, ‘Letters to my Mother and other Mothers’ (Luath 2015).

Bashabi Fraser and Chrys Salt by Charlie Gracie
Bashabi Fraser and Chrys Salt by Charlie Gracie

 

After, members of the audience, including Charlie Gracie, were invited to read poetry and prose, mainly on the broad theme of motherhood. A great night, followed by Bashabi’s focussed and creative workshop the following morning. A treat all round.

Scottish Writers’ Centre Speakeasy

speakeasy-with-text-iiWhat a great night on 24 November at the Scottish Writers’ Centre for the regular Speakeasy session – a place where every Scottish poet and writer can be heard. Charlie Gracie finished the evening off with a selection new and old poems.

There was a wonderful range of writers, some of whom were new to the Scottish Writers’ Centre. Among the new faces, watch out for Rebecca Gault in future: a fantastic Scottish poet who wraps her work in great rhythms. Edward Brosckett’s untitled piece was delivered wonderfully and really enjoyable.

Frances Corr, too (not a new writer, of course), was amazing and her poetry, so strongly delivered, had us laughing one minute and stunned the next. Ruby McCann described Frances as the Glaswegian Bukowski.

Great organisation of the night from Maxine, Scott and Ruby, so thanks you all.

Charlie Gracie at the Scottish Writers’ Centre

IMG_4889 Charlie Gracie begins his talk by showing us the notes he’s made for it. A curious mix of detail and rhapsody, he holds up two sheets on which precise timings lie next to vaguer indications of possible thoughts and suggestive spirals of colour. This, we’ll realise an hour or two later, is an act curiously redolent of both the evening as whole – which is a humble, humorous look at what it’s like being ‘an emergent, rather than an established, poet’ – and the poetry itself, which alternates similarly between complexity and clarity, often finding profundity inhabiting the same space as practicality, and moments of wonder in quotidian surroundings.

These surroundings are frequently the varied landscapes of nature, as reflected in the evening’s title, a line taken from ‘Good Morning’, the eponymous poem from Charlie’s published collection of verse. However, while the careful natural observations that comprise this and many of the other poems Charlie shares over the course of the evening convey a deep and abiding love of nature, their real subjects are more often the response they produced in their speaker, what he brought to them, or how he later wandered more freely in memory having followed with obedient footsteps their literal, linear paths.

The path to publication has always been important for Charlie, but it wasn’t always linear. Though he was first printed at the age of seven in the Sunday Mail (under the wrong name thanks to a printing error) and then again in the Donegal Democrat as ‘a sanctimonious eleven year old’, Charlie’s route to publication as an adult has always been accompanied by setbacks and rejections. With a characteristic effusion, however, Charlie tells us that he treats publication much in the same way that he used to treat the hitchhiking he enjoyed so much – ‘every rejection just brings you one step closer to the lift that will take you where you want to be going’.

Writing will always be part of life of Charlie, no matter where he’s headed. ‘Poetry is like breathing, for me,’ he tells us, and he speaks frequently of the subject with a similar intensity, telling us that while he delivers presentations and talks with ease in the course of his work as a social worker, for him ‘reading my poetry is like spilling my guts’; furthering this later by saying that if the effect of a successful image is like being stabbed, what makes it magic is the twist of the knife – although maybe that’s just his Baillieston boyhood coming out again.

Aged sixteen Charlie began work as an auxiliary nurse in a hospital in the East End of Glasgow, and a poem he reads about his time there – called ‘Hospital Tea Break’ – finds him recounting the salacious details of his colleagues’ smokefilled break room chatter – ‘You don’t get fucked when you’re over fifty’ – with a similar intensity, but it’s from these moments of unflinchingly observing the imperfections around us that many of the most compelling details of his poetry emerge. From disagreements over stale croissants and snatches of Billie Holliday, to his aged neighbour greeting him in Gaelic or washing her windows in winter, come moments of penetrating insight, seemingly disparate details coalescing into something more lasting, something more able to touch at the eternal.

Despite an interest in eternity, mortality is perhaps the other surrounding in which Charlie’s work most frequently resides, something he attributes not only to the deaths he has experienced in his personal life, but also to his Catholic youth as an altar boy, where he often encountered death and the practicalities that surround it. Death, for Charlie, is intrinsically connected to writing: not only do the bright moments of his poetry take much of their lustre from the proximity of its darkness, he has also personally benefitted from the act of recording them. ‘I couldn’t have dealt with the death of my parents and friends without writing,’ Charlie tells us, and we glimpse again how essential and natural the production of poetry is for him.

That’s not to say it’s always easy however: while some poems occasionally come to him fully formed, jotted unchangingly onto scraps of paper or envelopes after a period of unconscious gestation, it also frequently involves hard work, conscious effort, and craft. Charlie praises writers groups and mentoring wholeheartedly for contributing to his understanding of the latter, but he also shares the kind of personal efforts he still goes to in order to produce his work and get it out there. ‘Good Morning’ was originally published by Sally Evans in a run of 105 metallic hardbacks: hand bound, embossed, and painted. Charlie confesses that he prefers the paperback however, because ‘you could love the hardback without loving the poetry inside’.

Charlie was involved more intimately with the design of the paperback himself, contributing the photograph to its cover, and having a hand in its typography and layout. He has since personally financed a second run of copies – ‘you don’t make money on poetry, but who cares when you’re getting it out there’ – by selling them himself to independent book shops and even once, he admits, cheekily rearranging a display without permission so that his book would have a more central position in its space. These kinds of details – rare insights into the little-discussed practicalities of improving Google listings and selling copies of your own work on the road – shine as brightly as the polished poems he shares, enjoyable as much for the rareness and humanity of these surroundings as the clear beauty of their content.

Charlie concludes the evening with details of the collaborations he has been involved in, from the translation of his poem ‘right’ into Arabic by award-winning Palestinian poet Ghazi Hussein, to the improvised sound and dance piece by electronic quartet the Red Ensemble this inspired, to the project he’s currently involved in with artist Graham Tristram and musician Tom Dalzell. Multi-disciplinary, this new project sees the artists charting points of interest along the road between Glasgow and Callander, examining the human impact on the landscape through a combination of poetry, visual art, and field recordings. The last poem Charlie reads is a product of this project entitled ‘Hut’, describing a ruined munitions store high in the Campsie hills. There may be ‘the smell of pish’ in its corners, but it is also a place, the speaker tells us, where young people come to ‘giggle and snog / and fashion dreams that might not be impossible’.

IMG_4884

By the end of the evening, then, after readings of his works, details of their conceptions, and speculation as to their future, this is the sense we ultimately receive: for Charlie, poetry allows a down to earth man to record and celebrate the moments in which he can take his feet off the ground – and float.