Four-Hour Festival Report

I enjoyed the Four-Hour Festival yesterday at the inaugural West Port Book festival. The venue was relaxed, and filled with natural sunlight beaming through the huge windows (and clouds). There was a mixture of poetry and prose, good stuff and not so good, but most of the readings were entertaining. Poets I’d heard before like Nancy Somerville, Ryan van Winkle and Andy Philip all read well (and it was good to hear the title poem from Andy's forthcoming collection on Salt, 'The Ambulance Box', which hadn't been included in the draft manuscripts I'd read previously) and I enjoyed some of the short stories. The size of the audience varied throughout the afternoon. It was never big but it never petered out either. I felt it was a decent number considering the number of literary events in Edinburgh at the moment.

My own set went fine. I read a few new-ish poems after a couple from the old guard. For the purists and set-collectors, here’s my setlist:

1. The Kingdom
2. IKEA
3. Spliced and Fading Out
4. Edinburgh in Summer
5. Hot Shit
6. Visiting Hour