Staccato - a new evening of literature spoken word and music

I enjoyed reading at Staccato last month, a new evening downstairs in Toner's pub on Baggot Street, Dublin, an eclectic but highly enjoyable evening of poetry, fiction and music.

This month sees Mary O'Donnell, Breda Wall Ryan, Paul Bregazzi, Lisa Harding, Stephen James Smith and Aiden O'Reilly. Wednesday 24th February starting at 7.30pm or so. Free in, books for sale, bar. Scintillating company and scintillating words. What more could you want?

The Subject of Language

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie via Kalle at The Brown Bread Mixtape

Etymology and Synonyms

A really interesting video from the Close Reading Cooperative discussing the connotations between similar words of Latin/Norman origin and those of Germanic origin.

Surreptitious or sneaky.

Basically they mean the same but the Latinate word sounds like something a white collar worker/English graduate/bank board member  would do (and get a slap on the wrist) and sneaky, what a ten year old boy, blue collar worker would do (and get locked up)

Think about this when reading your thesaurus.

Fiction Online Workshop

Have a read of these long posts from Sally Zigmond on The Elephant in the Writing Room blog.

Now I've read pretty much all of what she says elsewhere but it does bear reading again, reminders. Knowing something and putting it into practise are two different things.

Poetry Now Festival

The brochure is now available for the reliably lovely Poetry Now festival. 25th to 28th March 2010.

Highlights:

This year they have poets from countries including Albania, the Czech Republic, Spain, Mexico, the UK and the USA.

With his keynote address Go Fish: Six Irish Poets, Paul Muldoon will provide dlr Poetry Now 2010 with a rip-roaring kickoff; two nights later, he's scheduled for a reading of his own poetry, when he will take to the stage along with the major Mexican poet Homero Aridjis and Anne Stevenson..

Derek Mahon returns with the eminent US poet Rosanna Warren on Friday night. Friday will also bring a reading by the superb Irish poet Justin Quinn, by his exciting Albanian contemporary Luljeta Lleshanaku, and by this year’s T.S. Eliot Award winner, Philip Gross, who comes to us from Wales.

The contemporary American poet Kevin Young, will be joined by two writers who are among the very best of their respective generations: Ireland’s Vona Groarke and Catalonia’s Joan Margarit. The final reading on Sunday afternoon promises much with Scotland’s John Burnside, John F. Deane and, from the Czech Republic, Sylva Fischerová.

This year’s festival will honour The Gallery Press, the independent publishing house which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2010. There's public interview with founder and editor of The Gallery Press, Peter Fallon and a special Gallery Press reading.

There are two writing workshops with Vona Groarke and John Burnside, a children’s reading, a conversation on the craft of writing poetry, and the announcement and presentation of The Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2010 for the best collection of poetry in 2009, and of the Rupert & Eithne Strong Award for the year’s best first collection.

Deadline for the workshops: 10th March

Download and view the full programme at www.poetrynow.ie and see you there!

Words from Dr Johnson's Dictionary

Thanks to Ms Baroque in Hackney for pointing out this one.

Dr Samuel Johnson's original dictionary is posting an underused word-a-day for wordlovers (is there a word for that?) so we should all try to use some.

I love words. I could eat them for dinner. How about

Pinfeathered to describe an adolescent?
A pickthank for a politician's sidekick?
Pat as an adjective ( I don't think he liked this word. H e said it should only be used in burlesque writing.)
A Macaroon - I know a few of these.
Demure as a verb.

Annoying, overused phrases

This blog post shows the TOp 10 most annoying phrases:

1 - At the end of the day
2 - Fairly unique
3 - I personally
4 - At this moment in time
5 - With all due respect
6 - Absolutely
7 - It's a nightmare
8 - Shouldn't of
9 - 24/7
10 - It's not rocket science

( I like 'with all due respect.' You can get away with almost anything after that.)

I would like to add:
- to be honest
- we're giving 110 percent
- at this time
- not right for our list

My son would like to add:
- you people
- but seriously
- just want to be friends

You could have some fun putting these phrases in the mouth of an obnoxious character in your writing.

Words and what they really mean

An excerpt from The Offutt Guide to Literary Terms, author Chris Offutt explains what a number of literary words really mean.

Creative nonfiction: prose that is true, except in the case of memoir.

Memoir: from the Latin memoria, meaning "memory," a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer's parents for his current psychological challenges.

Novel: a quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir.

Short story: an essay written to conceal the truth and protect the writer's family.

Plot: a device, the lack of which denotes seriousness on the part of writers.

Chick lit: a patriarchal term of oppression for heterosexual female writing; also, a marketing means to phenomenal readership and prominent bookstore space.

Personal essay:characterized by 51 percent or more of its sentences beginning with the personal pronoun "I"; traditional narrative strategy entails doing one thing while thinking about another.

Literary essay:akin to the personal essay, only with bigger words and more profound content intended to demonstrate that the essayist is smarter than all readers, writers and teachers.

Experimental writing: the result of supreme artistic courage when a writer is willing to sacrifice structure, character, plot, insight, wisdom, social commentary, context, precedent, and punctuation.

Poem: prose scraps.

Prose poem: either a poem with no line breaks or a lyric essay with no indentation. No one knows.

Deconstructionism: A moderately successful attempt by the French to avenge the loss of Paris as the global center of literature.

Jerwood Aldeburgh Seminar

This charitable institution is looking for nominations and applications for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Seminar. This is the third of three annual residential courses.

This will provide a unique opportunity for a select group of talented UK poets of any age to work towards a first collection in an intensive, five-day seminar, led by two excellent poet-tutors with strong editorial experience.

The third seminar will take place at Bruisyard Hall, near Saxmundham, Suffolk from Monday 16 through Friday 20 March 2009. The course will be tutored by Michael Laskey and Peter Sansom.

The Poetry Trust is looking for a maximum of eight poets with a good publishing track record (magazines, anthologies, possibly an individual pamphlet) and evidence of commitment.

Cost: £180
Tutors: Michael Laskey and Peter Sansom
Send:
• A selection of poems (no more than six, published or unpublished)
• Publication history
• A brief biography
• A short statement on suitability for the course and anticipated benefits (no more than 100 words)

Deadline: 31 January 2008

The winner of the £3,000 Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize in 2008 was announced on Saturday 8 November at the 20th Aldeburgh Poetry Festival as 37-year old Irish poet Ciaran Berry for The Sphere of Birds (The Gallery Press).

The 58 entries were judged by poets Helen Dunmore, Michael Laskey (Chair) and Jamie McKendrick.

The shortlist included:
Paul Batchelor The Sinking Road (Bloodaxe Books)
Adam Foulds The Broken Word (Cape Poetry)
Frances Leviston Public Dream (Picador Poetry)
Stephanie Norgate Hidden River (Bloodaxe Books)

Wordle

Ooo this is lovely. Go play with Wordle. Don't you just love words? Luscious. ubiquitous, ransack, awkward, snipe, wormcast, a capella. I could go on. Flabbergasted, myopic, onomatopoeia, hippopotamus, squelch.

And here's something else. If you put in a story, the main words stand out and you can sometimes see what the theme is. Fabulous. Thanks Barbara.