Cake, architecture, Edinburgh World Heritage site, poems.

The Scottish Poetry Library,  Edinburgh: Malcolm Fraser Architects

OK maybe you will disagree with the order of importance in the heading,  but Thursday 7th October 2010 is National Poetry Day.

@PoetryDayUK

http://www.nationalpoetryday.co.uk/

To mark the occasion, the Scottish Poetry Library  @ByLeavesWeLive on Twitter, which I think (well actually I know!) is my favourite post-war building, is hosting a tea party (cake!!!) at 3pm.

Tea, cake, and poetry (theme of Home) in one of Edinburgh World Heritage Site's  most iconic 20th century buildings (for the cognoscenti dahlings...) is my idea of bliss.

Cake, photo my copyright not to be reproduced without permission


I hope to be there, I hope you will be there also.

Right, the links.

Scottish Poetry Library

http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/bookish-blog-2/

Thursday 7th October, we’ll be stopping for tea at 3pm. Although we are keen tea-drinkers, this particular tea party will be for a Higher Purpose (oh yes!) and we invite you all to join us in celebrating National Poetry Day with a cup of warming tea and a poem about our theme, ‘home.’ You can join in by coming along to our tea party at the library at 3pm, by stopping to read a poem about home wherever you are, or by tweeting @PoetryDayUK or @ByLeavesWeLive.


Postcards will be available by post from the SPL (send us a self-addressed ordinary letter size envelope with 1st or 2nd class stamp marked NPD 2010), to pick up at the SPL, and online as e-cards from 7th October. Postcards will be available from lots of other places around the country: email us at reception@spl.org.uk to find yours.

It’s been all hands on deck this week in the build up to National Poetry Day, particularly for our Reader Development Officer, Lilias Fraser, and our Education Officer, Lorna Irvine. Postcard orders for schools have now closed, resources for teachers and education professionals are up on GLOW (look for a national group called ‘poetry’) and everyone at the library would like to thank them for their hard work with a cup of tea, coffee or Earl Grey… how’s 3pm, Thursday 7th October?

Malcolm Fraser Architects

http://www.spl.org.uk/about/building.html

I look on this building as a poem that we've made together, composed from light, view, rhythm, embrace, movement, gathering, colour, texture and metaphor to express the joy of poetry, and optimism for its future within our culture.

Malcolm Fraser

Designed by Malcolm Fraser Architects, the building was financed principally by a grant from the Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund. The Scottish Poetry Library has won several awards, and was shortlisted for Channel 4's Building of the Year 2000.


As well as general reading and study sections, it has facilities for listening and performing, and special children's and members' areas.

http://www.malcolmfraser.co.uk/projects/?contentid=257&parentid=248


Edinburgh World Heritage

http://www.ewht.org.uk/

A national celebration of poetry in a fantastic building in one of the most wonderful of cities. All this and cake too. How much more bliss can life hold?

Nem

A selection of past posts on similar subect matter:

http://nemesisrepublic.blogspot.com/2010/02/hug-for-poetry-and-unesco.htmlunesco.html

http://nemesisrepublic.blogspot.com/2010/02/edinburgh-old-and-new.html

This is just to say...

I am working on a slightly longer blog, honest, one about buildings, but thought I'd bring more Festive Cheer in the meanwhile.

So: here's @fatcharlesh latest blog on er... bogs:

http://fantasticjournal.blogspot.com/2009/12/trumpet-blowing.html

But it's the RIBA ones so that's OK.

Here's the best Advent calendar of the year:

http://www.framleyexaminer.com/advertcalendar/

I like the idea of a game of family Squabble after the stuffing and roasties.

And I'm not sure how I lived without an executive plum warmer...

although of course here's a cue for

a) a favourite poem

b) a ref to architecture

Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. Williams has a theatre named after him in his hometown Rutherford, called “The Williams Center”

This is just to say...

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.


Which reminds me to tell you to add @byleaveswelive to your Twitter lists (The Scottish Poetry Library Embra http://www.spl.org.uk/)

Malcolm Fraser's small but beautifully formed, a haiku of a building in fact, Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh World Heritage Site, (it's an outbreak of Christmas peace... ) courtesy of Geograph and is © Copyright Brian D Osborne and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/51023  for larger version and for more pictures and writing and stuff http://www.malcolmfraser.co.uk/projects/?contentID=257&parentID=248

Here's the website of the Williams Centre, a rather fetching historic theatre and cinema once called the Rivoli:

http://www.williamscenter.org/

Do read the history, even if you turn off the 'soothing' muzak, although for the fraught in need of soothing it's just the thing.

All that remains of communities and civilizations, all that remains of their worth and dignity exists in the arts they leave William Carlos Williams

More Christmas lights, Disney's Hollywood Studios. Fab.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_8oET4WWcI

Just don't think of the carbon emissions...

and here's all the latest news from the North Pole:

http://santaupdate.com/

Nem  

A poem for National Poetry Day 2009

By Leaves We Live - Patrick Geddes 1854 -1932



Today is National Poetry Day, and I share with you the blog today from the Independent Republic of the Canongate (see blogs list), a campaigning group begun by concerned local people who love their city, the World Heritage Site of Edinburgh.

http://independentrepublicofthecanongate.blogspot.com/2009/10/national-poetry-day-by-leave-we-live.html

The blogging members of SOOT have decided to repeat the piece by Patrick Geddes, Scottish genius, a line from which is in the entrance to the Scottish Poetry Library:


This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent on the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. Whereas the world is mainly a vast leaf colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests - Patrick Geddes

More on Geddes:

http://www.ballaterscotland.com/geddes/

His biography:

http://www.answers.com/topic/patrick-geddes

Geddes' ideas on good civic planning, and especially 'conservative surgery' rather than wholesale destruction, are ones which are still relevant today.

The website of Save Our Old Town is at http://www.eh8.org.uk/ and details the long campaign to try to stop the Mountgrange 'Caltongate' development, which would have seen the demolition of listed buildings and a vast new 'mixed use' development of dubious architectural and social merit.

Such was the furore, first local, then national, and finally international, the campaigners created that UNESCO eventually called and said it didn't like what was planned either, and Mountgrange went bust. The two things may or may not be related. Let's hope what is now a major gap site (with several empty handsome historic buildings going to waste on the perimeter) finds a new buyer with more on their minds than simply maximum profit; someone who will help the World Heritage Site remain a wonderful place for those who keep it alive and authentic by choosing to live in it, not simply for those who wish to profit from it.

Two previous blogs which include a great deal more on this

http://nemesisrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/05/boldly-going.html

http://nemesisrepublic.blogspot.com/2009/06/unesco-slams-caltongate-and-demands.html

The war is far from over, although at least a few battles have been won. It shows, however, what can be done if you have enough determination and the cause is just.

Each social formation, through each of its material activities, exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each of its ideas and ideals wins also its place and power - Patrick Geddes

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time -Patrick Geddes

Geddes and his ideas and ideals need to be more widely known and read.

To all those campaigners fighting to save something precious to them, whatever it may be, that will bring greater good, I say - don't give in or give up. A world without ideals and idealists would be an impoverished place.

Nem