StAnza 2012 – Food for Thought

Photos: Annie Harrison

Most of the SPL staff decamped to StAnza at the weekend, and what a beautiful spring weekend it was: blue skies, blue seas, bluebells – daffodils too, more daffodils even than poets. I understand that Keston Sutherland had some very interesting observations to make about Wordsworth and said flowers, in his ‘Past Poets’ session. A packed room for the two Irish poets on the eve of St Patrick’s Day: Tony Curtis gave us among other things a memorable evocation of the flight of Alcock and Brown. Who knew that Arthur Brown was born in Glasgow? As Curtis pointed out, flying over the Atlantic in fog in their old crate was much less terrifying  than being shot out of the sky, which happened to both men during WWI. On Saturday morning, a discussion of imagery in photography and poetry veered off into a poetry and science conversation, producing much that was fascinating along the way, not least Michael Symons-Roberts on Byzantine icons and Lavinia Greenlaw on the absence of self in the poem. (A different credo from Young Dawkins’s personal odyssey over a pie and a pint that lunchtime.) The breakfast session, as well as pastries, offered poetry on fruit: Herbert on a banana, Bunting on grapes. If anything would make me eat my five a day – no, not pastries – that would! Thanks to Annie Harrison for her photos.