Tapsalteerie at the Dundee Literary Festival

The Tapsalteerie stall is coming to a Dundee near you on the 26th of this month. Get yersel down there to get a hold of one of our limited edition copies of "Glasgow Flourishes" by Calum Rodger, which will be launched that day (or just pop by to say hello and hae a news about poetry!).

There's heaps of really inspiring and excellent exhibitors there too, so if you're about in Dundee for the festival we'd really recommend making your way to the Bonar Hall on the Sunday. Find out more on the Ex Libris Wordpress site.

And a tip of the Tapsalteerie hat to the designers of the poster too. Splendid!

Glasgow Flourishes!

We're delighted to announce that our latest publication, "Glasgow Flourishes" by Calum Rodger, will be released at the end of this month. It's our first ever hand-bound publication, trimmed, folded and sewn together by Tapsalteerie's own fair hands.

It's just a short wee pamphlet, coming in at 16 pages and consisting of one poem only. Calum wrote it for his appearance at the recent TedX Glasgow, which you can see here. His performance and the poem itself really is electrifying; we highly recommend you give up five minutes of your time to watch him do his stuff. 

"Glasgow Flourishes" will be published on Sunday 26th October and will be first available through our stall that day at the Dundee Literary Festival's "Ex Libris" book fair. Note that we're only doing a limited edition of 60 copies, each one hand-numbered, so get in there quick if you want one!

We're also currently working with some affa weel-kent writers to produce a compilation of Baudelaire's prose poems in Scots, scheduled for release at the start of next year. The details are only getting finalised at the moment, so we can't say too much more about it just now, but watch this space (as well as our Facebook and Twitter feeds) for more info and sneak previews as they arise.

The latest edition of Northwords Now has some very kind words to say about Tapsalteerie in their review of Tom McGrath's "Sardines", which is described as "an inspired way for a new book producer to break into the Scottish poetry scene". Skip to page 22 if you want to read the review but, of course, we'd encourage you to read the whole magazine if you haven't already.

And finally, we've launched a new YouTube channel, through which you can watch readings from our poets as well as a few other things that tickle Tapsalteerie's fancy. We'll be building up the content as the months go by so do keep checking back. 

Only Three Lines for Mrs Simpson

Brilliant to see some praise for both Tapsalteerie and our pamphlet Sardines in the latest Northwords Now (Summer 2014) magazine. Mandy Haggith says that Sardines is:

"An inspired way for a new book producer to break into the Scottish poetry scene... a collection full of voices you’ll recognise, but won’t read in books from the mainstream poetry publishing houses."

She goes on to quote directly from one of the poems called "Only Three Lines for Mrs Simpson". In celebration of receiving such a nice review in one of the top Scottish literary periodicals we've decided to reproduce the poem in full here. Hope you enjoy it!

Get the full pamphlet here :)

Dug by Tom McGrath

Dug is the opening poem from Sardines by Tom McGrath

Know yr Stuff Review

"Rodger’s investigation into the hedonistic psyche is powerfully desperate and ironic. On my first reading it made me want to join in, get drunk and simply screw it all into oblivion! It is easy at surface level to relate to the frustration and humorous subjects within but on a second or third reading you are able to ponder the textual depths of the existential void portrayed."

Read the excellent full review by Jennifer Edgecombe in Sabotage Reviews.

(and get yr desperate investigations into the hedonistic psyche)

Lift off for Sardines!

Highlights from Neu Reekie #46 via Summerhall TV, which featured the launch of our most recent pamphlet - Sardines by Tom McGrath. Catch the Sardines for yourself through the Tapsalteerie bookshop.


Neu! Reekie! #46 from arts-news on Vimeo.

Sardines by Tom McGrath

Sardines is due for release on 25 April

Tom McGrath – poet, playwright, musician and maverick – was born and grew up in Glasgow. In the early 60s he went to London to take part in the emerging counter culture, and by 1962 his first poems were published. He appeared in 1965 at the first International Poetry Olympics held in the Royal Albert Hall with Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso (amongst others). He was also founder editor of the seminal International Times, first artistic director of the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow (now the CCA), and instrumental in founding the Tron Theatre Club, later to become the Tron Theatre.

Sardines was first published in 1986, and it's with some delight that Tapsalteerie has teamed up with the excellent folk at the Tom McGrath Trust to republish this unique collection. Come along to the launch event at Neu! Reekie! on 25 April to hear Calum Rodger, Ron Butlin and Cora Bissett read from it:

http://www.summerhall.co.uk/2014/neu-reekie-46/

Copies will be available through the Tapsalteerie website from 26th April.

Know yr Stuff

from "Know yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism" by Calum Rodger.
Out Saturday March 08.

Know yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism

Excitement is mounting here at Tapsalteerie for the publication of a first collection by the young Scottish poet Calum Rodger. Called "Know yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism", it's due out on March 8th and will make its first public appearance at the Stanza poet's market in St Andrews.

One thing we particularly love about Calum is his digital poetry, of which "the worst of my faults is a certain impatient gaiety of disposition" is a prime example. This poem will feature in the upcoming pamphlet, alongside poems written in the more traditional (organic?) manner.

"The worst of my faults..." was created by sending pre-existing text through a poetry generator called Gnoetry 0.2 (developed for Linux by Jon Trowbridge and Eric Elshtain). In this case Calum has mashed together Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ with various MDMA experiences as reported on erowid.org.

The basic pattern is that Calum fires the text into Gnoetry, which has a pretty strong grasp of the grammatical structures of the English language, and Gnoetry fires lines of poetry back at him. Calum then puts the text through an editorial process, finally emerging at a completed poem. While it's rare that the generator will produce a perfect stanza, it does often produce some quite exceptional lines. "And I know that this is only a bovine volume" in the above poem is a personal favourite.

Gnoetry 0.2 is free and available for you to play with by the way, as are other excellent programs such as JanusNode (which helped create another poem in "Know yr Stuff").

While the digital poems are excellent, Calum's original poetry is still superior in Tapsalteerie's humble opinion. We'll focus on that in our next brief preview...

"The Quait Cheil" By Bill Thom

We're now getting to the final stages in preparing to launch our first pamphlet, The Quait Cheil by Bill Thom. The illustrations are almost ready, the text is basically complete. All that's left is the final cover design and typesetting. We'll be previewing some parts of the process on the blog here so you can see things as they develop.

Bill's debut pamphlet is well worth a read (of course we would say that!). It consists of one long poem in the old north-eastern ballad style, written entirely in Banffshire Doric. Although Tapsalteerie are well aware that the long poem isn't exactly "in" at the moment, Bill has managed to create a piece that really grabs the attention. He's produced a cracking story, told with a rhythm born out of traditional Scottish folk music. We're very pleased to be able to help him release it.

The Quait Cheil 
[extract from beginning section]

Thi twa o them aye disagreed,

Fit een o them wid takk thi lead,

Fan aye they cum up tae thi wid,

Wi thochts o fit thi darkness hid,

For lang they kent o stories old,

O ghosts an spirits they were told,

Bit through thi wid thi pathie geed,

An intae trouble wis guaranteed.

So huddin in atween thi trees,

Thi lack o licht caased their displease,

Nae moon thi nicht, nae licht wis seen,

Nor even stars oot up abeen.

By Bill Thom

Release date: early July