Despite being really tired yesterday evening, I decided to make the effort to check out Voxbox, a new performance poetry venue in Edinburgh, run by Anita Govan and Kevin Cadwallender.
The Mercat Bar was a good, atmospheric venue for poetry. The performances varied from quite good to disturbingly inexplicable.
It was great to meet up again with Mike Stocks (editor of Anon Magazine, poet, and award-winning novelist) and the Andrea whose surname I didn’t know the previous evening at the Scottish Poetry Library (report, a couple of posts ago). Well, now I do know it. Andrea Dobson is from New Zealand, but lives in Edinburgh, and is an talented visual artist (you can see some of her work at the link) and highly accomplished tango-dancer.
There is a subterranean tango scene in Edinburgh that I previously didn’t know existed. Mike is involved. Kapka Kassabova too. They are all at it! Perhaps all poets and artists go to these tango events and only I didn’t know about them. I am a useless dancer. I can do Scottish Country Dancing, but only because it was drummed into me when I was at primary school. I remember lining up in the gym, the boys at one wall and the girls at the other. The boys had to walk forwards and choose a girl. There were always one or two who were never chosen and had to dance with each other or with the teacher. Ugh…horrible.
I bought two raffle tickets, gave one to Andrea, and - guess what! - she won a 5-CD set of Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
