Push the Boat Out is a brand new poetry festival, showcasing fresh, provocative, radical, audacious, and inspiring poetry, hip hop and spoken word, bringing people together to enjoy, experience and interrogate it. Featuring 60 of the UK’s leading poets in three days of events including performances, discussion, installations, film, audio, walks and workshops. Get in the boat, companeros.
In this bespoke iteration of Newspeak for Push the Boat Out, Pip calculates the value of the work presented by our participating festival poets, asking What are words worth in a digital age? Join us as the artist discusses her practice and the interrogation - and co-opting - of language in turbulent times.
In this two-part workshop, Scotland's Makar Kathleen Jamie will guide participants through writing poetry, and bookbinding wizard Rachel Hazell will help participants to ‘bind’ their new work as book art. Kathleen Jamie will focus on the process of translating thoughts into words on a page and Rachel Hazell will help participants make that page into something beautifully, uniquely, and vulnerably personal.
Open Book groups write together in community settings across Scotland – from Ullapool to Eyemouth, and from the islands off Shetland to Dumfries and Galloway - with groups running in English, Gaelic, Scots and Arabic. Push the Boat Out has partnered with Open Book to help run workshops and engage participants in not only collaborative multilingual writing, but collaborative multilingual performance.
Commissioned by Push the Boat Out, Alec Finlay has composed a poetic manifesto on the importance of urban green space during the pandemic. With specific reference to the urban croft in Leith, it discusses how green space is integral to addressing pandemic politics, culture, and healing.
A selection of short films inspired by poetry, including: What’s Wrong With Raymond. Ashes To Fire, 50 Ways To Wank, and Image Of Here and Now.
The Poetry Food Exchange is an installation which simultaneously challenges perceptions of transaction in both food and literature and encourages collaborative sharing. Sean Wai Keung, a Glasgow-based poetry, performance and food-maker, is in charge of the Exchange. Patrons will write down a memory or experience to do with food, and in return they will receive a fortune cookie with a line of poetry inside as well as a cup of warm broth.
Selection of Poetry Shorts, including: The Man with Beautiful Eyes. Blood Grandad, and When Among Trees.
The untapped poetry in the lives of ordinary people, leading seemingly ordinary lives, is expressed as high art in this gentle story of an aging woman who discovers the poetry within herself. Heartbreaking and inspiring but without an ounce of sentimentality, Yun Junghee’s memorable performance as Mija, whose life becomes ever more complicated by circumstances out-with her control, is as understated as it is powerful.
And what a year (and a bit) it has been! Push the Boat Out seeks to celebrate and interrogate the role that poetry plays in helping us reflect on, challenge, and make sense of the world around us. In Poems from a Dangerous Year, some of our finest poets will do just that, selecting and presenting work that considers the past tumultuous 18 months.
In 1990s Scotland, a group of Catholic school girls get an opportunity to go into Edinburgh for a choir competition, but they’re more interested in drinking, partying and hooking up than winning. An affectionate, hilarious and honest exploration of sexuality, pregnancy, class difference and the tumultuous path of true friendship.
