During the Edinburgh International Festival of August 2012 twenty two talks were given at Leith on the Fringe at the Out of the Blue venue.  They were free and open to everyone

Name of speaker and subject:

David Greig

Title Of Talk:

The Poetry Of W.S. Graham;
Knocking From The Other Side Of The Page

Bullet points of what you would like to cover:

• Introduction To Graham’s Poetry With Examples
• WS Graham’s Life And Background To His Work
• The Context – How Graham Was Seen, And Is Seen Now
• Why I Believe Graham Is Important
• Why I Love Graham’s Poems

Suggested you-tube links, websites and / or texts where
further information may be found:

THE NEW COLLECTED POEMS OF WS GRAHAM – FABER AND FABER

The Poetry Archive – www.poetryarchive.org

A few words about you and your passion:

I first came across the poetry of WS Graham some 10 years ago. It;s force and beauty hit me immediately. It spoke to me as a writer and it captured – as almost nothing else I had read captured – the physical, plastic, stuff of language the way I experienced it as a writer. I could not believe that I had not heard of him before.
WS Graham was a self taught poet from Greenock who left Scotland in his twenties to live in Cornwall where he spent the rest of his life. I became passionate to discover more about him and why he had been neglected both in his lifetime and to a degree still now. The neglect of his work is particularly painful in Scotland where Hugh Macdiarmid’s school of politics and scots language work sidelined Graham.