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.
Fiona Benson’s astonishing poems, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize are searing in their intensity. Andrew McMillan’s explorations of contemporary masculinity, gay experience, and male bodies in Physical and Playtime have made an indelible impression on UK poetry.
Poetry has been a source of consolation and solace, community and reflection since time immemorial. How does poetry provide healing and recovery? What can poetry do like no other art form? Or does framing poetry in this way suggest saccharine Hallmark nonsense? Four leading poets – Billy Letford, John Glenday, Clare Pollard and Tawona Sithole – dive in, sharing their own work and other poems which have healed their souls.
The world of poetry criticism is often a turbulent place. Who is reviewed, who does the reviewing, the role of prizes and what constitutes ‘quality’, the role of the critic, who is being excluded or amplified – we’ve come a long way from ‘but does it rhyme…’ Naush Sabah (Poetry Birmingham), Gerry Cambridge (Scottish Letters), Colin Herd (University of Glasgow).
Using a multilingual framework, haiku, and concrete poetry, Kevin MacNeil will explore the subtle ways poems build meaning by interacting with sound and, above all, resonant, though sometimes hidden, shape. Feel free to bring your own language backgrounds into the mix to discover how poetry can make meaning quietly but lastingly transcendent.
In honour of the Poetry Mile interactive poem-y app, we bring you a one-off celebration reading, feasting and game of skittles. The venue, of course, Scotland’s oldest inn—The Sheep Heid, situated in the historic Duddingston Village. A short game of skittles will be punctuated by readings from three prize-winning, Edinburgh-based poets and contributors to the app: Michael Pedersen, Janette Ayachi, and Peter McKay, one of the three having being Chief Pin Monkey at this very skittle alley for a period of their youth.
This takeover examining eco-politics and the climate crisis is hosted by Katy Hastie and Calum Rodger of Gutter Magazine. Gutter is an award-winning print journal for fiction and poetry from writers born or living in Scotland, and featuring literature from around the world.
Endlessly inventive, the late great Edwin Morgan published ‘Virtual and Other Realities’ in 2011, challenging convention and pushing the boat out to the last. Join this panel for a more on-the-nose exploration of one of the themes of our festival, with a focus on the ‘other realities’ revealed in the poetry of three very contemporary writers – Sam Riviere, Suzannah Evans and Nicky Melville, chaired by Scott J Lawrie.
Poetry is a space of dissonance and reckoning. In this event presented by the Obsidian Foundation, a retreat for black poets who want to advance their writing practice, Raymond Antrobus does us the unique honour of launching his most recent publication, All the Names Given.
Adult poets are often afraid to experiment with onomatopoeia, alliteration, neologisms or nonsense, thinking they belong in children’s poems. In this session Clare Pollard, poet and author of Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books, will challenge this and delve into poets who draw powerfully on the language of childhood, from Ted Hughes to Rita Dove.
In a moment that is demanding you constantly choose your side, how do you find your humanity, your own voice, when you are being pushed to find safety in numbers? Push the Boat Out is thrilled to be able to support and develop, in partnership with the National Theatre of Scotland, a brand-new live performance commission from one of Scotland’s most exciting and challenging voices. In Blood, Salt, Spring Hannah Lavery (The Drift, Lament for Sheku Bayoh) journeys to discover her authenticity and her ‘tribe’.
What do we revere? Cynthia Miller’s Honorifics, shortlisted for this year’s Forward Prize Best Collection, is experimental and elevating, exploring family, Malaysian-American heritage, and the pull between the everyday and the miraculous. Seán Hewitt, critic for the Irish Times and author of Tongues of Fire, a meditative, clarifying collection which intertwines meditations on family, loss, grief and Irish myth, is as insightful as it is lyrical.
Of all the literary artforms, poetry has perhaps suffered most from the perception of elitism, in terms of both who writes it and who reads it. But has this always been the case? How does Scotland fit into this rubric, both historically and contemporarily?
Director Pablo Larrain discards the standard biopic formulas and depicts a fabulously mythologised version of the great Chilean poet and activist Pablo Neruda. Told from the perspective of Neruda’s police antagonist, played sympathetically by Gael Garcia Bernal, the movie captures the spirit of the poet, his extraordinary influence on Chilean politics of the time, and fuses film noir with poetic fantasy.
