Together, we explore Jorie Graham's journey as a poet. Stephen provides a concise biography, and then goes on to explore how her writing-focus has changed over the course of her career.  He spends time, in particular, on Jorie Graham's techniques and approaches as a poet, eschewing linear narrative and the idea of the 'clear' ending, and also concentrates on her attention to climate change, and articulating the consequences of the Anthropocene.   We discuss the poem 'Time Frame' at length, reflecting on the 'instabilities' in the text, on the narrative voice, on time itself, the 'American project' and the disappearance of the fortune teller as the poem progresses.  

We then go on to explore Stephen's poem.  He 'unpacks' his own techniques and how Jorie Graham has influenced his ways of communicating in his own work.  He talks about the idea of why the poem is right justified, for instance - in relation to Graham's own practice. He ruminates on the rise of the notion of 'climate crisis' over the past fifty years - from his childhood experiences on the north-west coast of England to now. He reflects on the role of the poet, and finding an audience.  What moves him to write long poems?

You can read Jorie Graham's poem 'Time Frame' here (with an audio reading by the poet) in the London Review of Books archive. This poem comes from the Collection To 2040 (Carcanet, 2023), which you can read about here. 

You can read about Stephen's book - There Will Be No Miracles Here - following this link.  You can read about (and order a copy of) Carrying a Tree on the Bus to Low Edges here.

What We Did Know We Had        or    Running Thin

                     It’s a shock I know 

the drowning sea, 

 fishes floating 

between sharp stems

in the slowing current 

at the water’s edge,

the disturbance of

our parting. Don’t worry,

it’s still the past, the fast

and furious, furious,

the utter, instant now,

  the later-human voice, 

fishes breaking camp,

unsettled in their skin, 

hastening remorselessly,

as arrows in a free flow

diagram to the zero-

point. Are you the seventh

 generation staring back at me

as me. What we did 

know we had. I remember 

the sea touching the clouds

in the voice of the rain,

net curtains nailed up,

a single yellow daffodil

in the garden next door.

If the worst should befall us.

Aren’t those the garden steps

where Rhianna, your neighbour,

shone her torch? What is it you know 

about me, I don’t.

Which part of the body am I.

Which part of which body am I.

How many self-destructive parts

 of now? To whom am I not listening. 

The wind is a wounded creature.

 The sea is a wounded creature.

I feel so much more

and less than a mental bird

in a mental cage hastening

 to that rip in the fabric

at four hundred and forty parts

per million of atmospheric CO₂.

Companions will be found for you,

a reflexively contrarian shadow text

→Choose Gospel→Cloud Tech

→AI Systems→Species→Menu

and ‘I’ was to think ‘you’

 thinking ‘me.’

Tentacles! Six ‘personal others’

between you and me,  

 a set of suckers, jet propulsive,

high-fiving that bottle-backed

bubble-headed, giant frog.

How much of us have gone.

Remember me, says Sea-roar.                                                                                                                                 

What it was to run

after that orange Trophy football

on Ainsdale village green, bent

double, gasping for laughter,

our one thousand odours

of salt, the boat is lurching  

purple waves claw the sails,

small as grains of rice. Remember,

 the valley of dormant smokestacks, 

the man in Y-fronts on his drive

 way unabashed by your appearance

at the gate, “So beautiful … they

see nothing,” says the failing light.

Who is the ghost,

who is the ghost’s

 ghost? a ghost asks.

 Is this a now.

Am I still in minutes. 

Can all this happen in reverse.

Butterflies were giants once.

Elvis waved rain from the sky

so his friends could play racquet ball,

 before projecting himself to the stars,

wearing trainers and a guru scarf,

The Leaves of Morya’s Garden

Volumes 1 & II tucked under his arm.

You feel it before you know it.

I can’t hear them

screaming, weeping, see 

them doubling down

on Nettleham Road.

 Is that are they drums

drones, tanks? Hurry,

→Hurry, Faster, Faster 

Do you prepare? How

do you prepare

for the Venus effect.

Some people scuba dive, cruise

and fly. I keep looking for left-

over signs, hieroglyphs,

jutting spikes, a human hand finger-

shaking on a red background.

Please, don’t follow me to the right

                                                                                                              hand margin, I am the temporary.

“How’s your portion

of the crisis?” Rhianna would say,

wielding her pruning shears,

bindweed flows mindlessly,

“ What do the readings say?”

Bone and ice density, breaking 

lines, torn cables, loose voices, 

chinos and chunky watches,  

punch-lines like loose stones.

 Are we still here. If you can

read this, time is not late. 

Your guest is waiting for you

 to grunt, drum, click,

use the wrist-plate, sub-pen,

 bridle and saddle a sea horse, 

with a light touch. Hold on.

Before completing an M.A. in creative writing at Manchester University, Stephen Sawyer worked as a naval rating, bartender, painter and decorator, actor, stand-up comic and, most recently, as a university lecturer in the social sciences. His writing reflects the sharp edge of the north where he was born and raised. He lives in Sheffield and teaches creative writing and English skills in the community. Stephen has had poems published in magazines and anthologies. His first collection, There Will Be No Miracles Here, was published by Smokestack Books in 2018. Carrying a Tree on the Bus to Low Edges, was published by Smokestack Books in 2024.

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

.

Meg reflects on how she came to encounter Anne Carson's work through her online reading, scouting a charity shop in Sheffield, and sitting in a festival tent in Leeds. She then goes on discuss where and how she has built up her library of Anne Carson collections through judicious purchasing in locations around the country.  We then begin to 'unpack' the different ways this short piece can be read - its brevity, in certain respects, adding to the proliferation of meanings. Meg considers the idea of hedonism before focusing on the 'intentions' of the narrator.  How does each sentence sit in relation to what has come before and what develops afterwards? How much can we trust this speaker? We discuss the importance of the physical intimacy of reading from a book (as opposed to scanning a digital copy) before we go on to explore Meg's own poem. 

I ask Meg about her use of the word 'excavating' as a way into thinking about her own piece. We talk about the 'holes' at the centre of each of the three stanzas in the poem - what do they represent, and how could they be 'performed'? We discuss the relationship between the speaker and the angel in relation to this idea of 'fear'.  Meg reflects on the processes of water in the piece. I ask her why she ends the work where she does - just as the angel is 'unearthed', and the two figures can observe one another. 

Finally, we discuss Meg's plans for the future - not only in terms of her poetry, but also her prose fiction projects as well.

Meg Gripton-Cooper is a writer and library worker living in Nottinghamshire. She is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam’s Creative Writing BA and MA courses where she was awarded the Percy Snowden Writing Prize and the Ictus Poetry Prize. Meg is particularly interested in experimental forms of poetry, gothic house fiction, and beautiful windows.

The first chapter of her novel The Vulture is available in the Northern Gravy Fiction Anthology (Valley Press) and here. Her poem ‘medusa’ appears in the RESISTANCE zine produced by Dead (Women) Poets Society. 

She is currently working on her second novel, alongside a collection of poetry.

Excavating the House of Love

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website or on my Substack Swift Diaries. 

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

On Friday 26th March 2021 Brian set off on a ‘round’ of Sheffield to deliver copies of my recently published poetry book Little Piece of Harm. He went on to write about his journey, a meditation on city, place, home and art itself in his extended essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’. In our conversation we explore connections between the two pieces of writing - both of which focus on traversing the city of Sheffield in ‘stressed’ times.

We begin where we ended the first programme with Brian reading (the same) extract from ‘Last Collection.’  We then go on to reflect on the care and attention to the object of the book that is central to Brian’s practice as both a writer and a publisher.  We spend some time discussing This is a Picture of Wind by J. R. Carpenter (Longbarrow, 2020) as a way of thinking about publication as part of the ‘journey’ of the book - and how the reader is involved in the ‘construction’ of the artefact. Brian also goes on to explore the evolution of the ‘walking’ anthology The Footing (Longbarrow, 2013) as a pivotal moment in his development as a publisher. I go on to read the introductory poem in Little Piece of Harm, ‘Blue Abandoned Van’ and talk about what it initiates in the light of how the narrative develops over the course of the collection. Is the city itself the central character of the poem? I elaborate on the formal designs of the sequence and dwell on the idea of trauma as one of the main ‘engines’ that drives the trajectory of the book. We then reflect on the rhythms (walking or otherwise) of both Little Piece of Harm and ‘Last Collection’. We end our conversation by thinking about the ending(s) of both ‘Last Collection’ and Little Piece of Harm - and the final touches/drafting that will bring Brian's book Local Distribution to completion. 

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press, a Sheffield-based collective whose activities include interdisciplinary collaborations and poetry walks. His publications include East Wind (Gordian Projects, 2016), an account of a walk across the Holderness peninsula, and White Thorns (Gordian Projects, 2017), based on a series of walks through the Isle of Axholme. A full-length book, Local Distribution, is in preparation.

You can find a full account of Brian’s Lockdown walks here. 

You can find extracts from ‘Last Collection’ on the Longbarrow website here - ‘One-Way Mirror’ and ‘Last Collection’.

You can read my poem 'Blue Abandoned Van' here.

You can find out more about Little Piece of Harm here.

At one point I mention the sequences ‘Sentences’ and ‘Death and the Gallant’, both poems that you can read in my 2015 Longbarrow collection Skin.

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

On Friday 26th March 2021 Brian set off on a ‘round’ of Sheffield to deliver copies of my recently published poetry book Little Piece of Harm (Longbarrow Press). He went on to write about this journey, a meditation on city, place, home and art itself in his extended essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’. In our conversation we explore connections between the two pieces of writing - both of which focus on traversing the city of Sheffield in ‘stressed’ times.

Firstly, I talk to Brian about his duel role of being both a publisher and a writer, and about how one discipline feeds into the other.  Brian reflects on walking as a way of making sense of the city.  We examine how each walk taken engenders renewed iterations of Sheffield - we are constantly remaking the city through the act of observing the place. Also, Sheffield is reinventing itself - conceptually and physically, through demolishing older structures and planning new builds, new developments.   We touch on Brian’s series of ‘Lockdown Walks’ before concentrating on ‘Last Collection’ for the rest of the podcast. Brian ruminates on the idea of slowness as a philosophical approach.  We talk at some length about Lockdown as one response to the COVID epidemic, which leads me to talk about my time in Aldeburgh in the summer of 2020 when I was finishing Little Piece of Harm.  Brian goes on to detail how he made notes while following his delivery route on the 26th March - and then how he ‘recalled’ and built up the particulars that are layered through ‘Last Collection’.  I relate how I built up Little Piece of Harm as a ‘portrait’ of a city. I begin to pick out and focus on a number of the abiding themes in the sequence.  Then Brian examines the notion of 'form', mixing (or not mixing) prose and poetry in 'Last Collection'.  We reflect on 'the rhythms and refrains' in our writing that captures the essence of walking - and at the end of the first 'chapter' of this podcast, Brian introduces and reads from a section of 'Last Collection' itself.

You can find a full account of Brian’s 'Lockdown Walks' here. 

You can find extracts from ‘Last Collection’ on the Longbarrow website here: ‘One-Way Mirror’  and ‘Last Collection’ .

This is the section from ‘Last Collection’ that Brian reads on the podcast itself:

From ‘Last Collection’ (in Local Distribution)

The shutters are down on Highfield Post Office. It's a straight left to Andy's house from here, Woodhead Road to Cherry Street, the hard drives stacked in the flooded cellar. Andy was a poet of the city and then its photographer. The switch seemed to happen overnight. It was unexpected but it made sense. The images were striking and inventive and they accumulated quickly, they were fresh with possibility, they captured the city in its moments of transition and looked beyond those moments. There were landscapes without land and portraits without faces. Colour studies and achromatic grids. Found abstractions and literal objects. There was craft in the titling of the photosets, a lightness of touch, Rising River, Island Songs, Test Patterns. I looked forward to each new series. Then it all just went. He abandoned one account and then another. Dead links. The internet hadn't saved any of it. This was intentional. There was no sense in arguing with him. It was no longer what he meant or felt. The work he has made since then is still in the world, or some of it is, you could say that it equals or exceeds the earlier work, it is hard to know, the earlier work has gone, and the city of which it was part has gone, why make comparisons, this is the difference between us, the letting go. I remember descending a stone flight to the cellar at Cherry Street and taking the first few steps in an inch or two of water, the electricity had gone off, again, rolling debts and standing charges burning through the top-ups, the credit and the emergency credit. The batteries in my torch were dead, the terminals corroded. I lit my way with a lighter that I had found in the kitchen, four or five seconds before the flame brushed the tip of my thumb, then four or five seconds of darkness. After a few attempts I managed to turn the top-up card the right side up and the right way round and feed it into the slot of the meter. The cellar light came on, a flickering strip, it showed cobwebs, cracked walls, and a freestanding metal rack with two or three desktop computers veiled in dust. I wondered how much work had died in those machines and then I remembered that it was none of my business, that I was not his archivist. I was still his editor, a handful of last poems yet to be published, his night walks, his laments. The poems come back to me now, as I pass the closed doors of the Highfield Branch Library, what were they getting at, the fables and parables, what are they saying, just before they break, things that can only be shown or spoken of in lamplight, a life recovered in the moment of its telling, a city caught in the act of disappearing.

I’ll give more details about Little Piece of Harm in the second episode - though here is a link to information about the book on the Longbarrow website.

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press, a Sheffield-based collective whose activities include interdisciplinary collaborations and poetry walks. His publications include East Wind (Gordian Projects, 2016), an account of a walk across the Holderness peninsula, and White Thorns (Gordian Projects, 2017), based on a series of walks through the Isle of Axholme. A full-length book, Local Distribution, is in preparation.

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

We discuss all things zuihitsu - reflecting on Kimiko Hahn’s own approach to the form and Alexandra’s inspired interpretation of this complex Japanese ‘standard’. As well as asking Alexandra about the essential qualities of the zuihitsu we talk about fragmentation, layering information, the public and the private detail.  Alexandra also reflects on her own time in Japan, and from this, cogitates on Japanese influences in her own work.  In zuihitsu how do we say something without actually stating it? We go on to discuss how the words, phrases, lines are laid out on the page in relation to the 'cartography of the poem.'

In the podcast, Alexandra mentions a number of times The Pillow-Book by Sei Shõnagon, a version of which can be downloaded for free on Project Gutenberg here.

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

Cliff relates how he first came to Rimbaud as a school boy.  He talks about the long journey he took to come to write a book of translations of (mainly) 19th century French poets.  He goes on to discuss, at length, his long narrative poem RE:VERB which illuminates the life of Arthur Rimbaud, from decadent poet to merchant and gun runner in Africa.  He reads from, and talks about, the opening poems in the collection ('Hooligan in Hell' and 'Alchemy of the Word').  Why is Rimbaud so interesting as a writer and as an individual? We go on to explore Cliff's interest in art and how that feeds back into his identity as a writer.

Finally, we discuss the work in his latest book, Elemental, landing on the opening poem - 'Remains' to read and reflect on. I ask him what he is planning to write/publish next.

From 'Alchemy of the Word' But also...

                  A Hermes Trismegistus, unseen unheard,                                  I conjured the Alchemy of the Word;                   deciphered fragments of the vowels' spectrum,                                  my mind a wand, a bow, a plectrum.                   I struck the rainbow's neurasthenic strings,                                  plumbed all tenebrous, timbrous things.                   Then, when sounding out riddles as Gnostic songs,                                  it came to me: I was going wrong.

Sortilege and Thaumaturgy,        Tantra, Sutra, Old Grimoires Hermeneutics, Oneiromancy,     Transits of Venus, Mercury, Mars, Almanacs, O Dark Abraxas,        Cabbalistic Hierophants, Orphic Devotees, Eleusis,             Mumbo-jumbo, Obeah, Cant, Epiphanic Hocus-Pocus,               Hoodoo-Voodoo, Occult Muse, Diabolic Psychomancy,                 Esoteric Marabouts.                    From such fiendish tomes I busked the Blues,                                   left a hobo chorus of cryptic clues.                    But my rational derangement of all the senses                                   (shamanically ancient, prophetically new)                    left me wondering: Who was the densest,                                    Poet or Reader? I got no reviews.

From 'Remains'

                                                  I

In Transylvania when I got that call - had been that day to Sighisoara, drawn to that famous undead batman's place of birth. Think: the Saxon cemetery high up the hill. Carved gothically upon one stone, I'd seen Ruhen in fremder Erde!  Written it down. Lie still in foreign soil - but you never can: (stone blunts, moss overwrites your name) the earth remains so cold and strange. As do you.  Whoever you were, laid low in the lie of the land, you are now (whatever now might mean) your own remains - just let the world, its weather, drain right through your tongue, your ribs, whatever stubbornly persists of you.

Cliff Forshaw has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, twice a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and held residences in California, France, Kyrgizstan, Romania, and Tasmania. Collections include: Elemental (Templar, 2025); French Leave (Broken Sleep, 2023); RE:VERB ((Broken Sleep, 2022) and Pilgrim Tongues (Wrecking Ball, 2015) https://www.cliff-forshaw.co.uk

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

Helen discusses where and when she first encountered Eliot's poetry (at Rotherham College) and how much his work has gone on to influence her writing. We talk about the public spaces versus the private rooms in Eliot's poem 'Preludes'.  How does Eliot confront modernity in his poetry, and the psychological forces acting on open and vulnerable minds?

Helen then goes on talk about her travels to Manchester (and other urban environments) with her pen and her camera.  She elaborates on the thing that is the Mancunian Way - how it dominates the sight-lines of the city (and how difficult it is to actually get onto). Helen describes the underbelly of the road, and how this inspired her to write the poem.  She reflects on her position as a lone traveller in possibly edgy environments.  Helen also considers the issues of depicting the street people she encounters. We discuss architectural space (particularly post-war landscapes) and how this might be re-imagined in print.

You can read T S Eliot's poem 'Preludes' here (on the Poetry Foundation website). Mancunian Way The underpass docks in early autumn chill. Its boat’s underbelly faded as worn planks, sooty striations and stone bleachings. A small, late butterfly flitters near the hull, uncertain ivory amongst sown meadow-flowers. Breaking the wall of sound with ocean breath, the A57 washes seawater noises. And in this undersea world of mist and sleeping bags, makeshift tents, a messiah unfurls a scroll beside London Road. It would be easy to be absent here for years. By the closed taco stand and the blue portaloos, skaters fling tied shoes to hook on grey ribs. Soles twisting from the double-knots, above boys who skid, hand-scuffed across the reeling surface. Wishbones hold roof to floor. Things hatch under Oxford Road, yellow containers expand, open doors into other worlds. Hydroponics stretch their roots in white trays. Behind wire fencing, the Mancunian Way’s elephant-legged stride is trapped. Our dreams turn to lullabies, chewed paper spat into an ashtray.

Helen Angell writes poetry and non-fiction often inspired by brutalist architecture and post-war landscapes. She writes about the beauty and transience of urban life as well as its impact on human relationships. Helen has worked creatively with The Hepworth, Manchester School of Architecture, National Railway Museum and Kelham Island Museum as well as in collaboration with a number of visual artists and musicians. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications and anthologies including The North, Strix and The Modernist. She is currently completing a Creative Writing PhD at University of Liverpool based on the work of post-war landscape architect Brenda Colvin.

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

We begin by discussing poets who could have been chosen by Geraldine as exemplars - Gertrude Stein, Harold Munro and Dylan Thomas.  We then focus on Gerard Manley Hopkins - how he spent his time at Stonyhurst College, in the shadow of Pendle Hill (with its Pendle witches association). We reflect on Hopkins’ life as a Jesuit Priest. We discuss Catholicism and poetry which leads us to exploring the poem ‘The Leaden Echo and The Golden Echo’.

Geraldine then goes talk about how she developed the work that went into Interregnum - the collection that focuses on the history of the Pendle witches. We discuss how she built up on section of the book through ‘harvesting’ lines from Hopkins’ poems and putting them into the mouths of the women who were put on trial.  We talk at length about ‘Chattox Sings’ and a couple of other poems that lift phrases from Hopkins oeuvre - including his poem 'The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe.'

You can read ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ on this website here.

CHATTOX SINGS   What we have lighthanded left will have waked and have waxed and have walked  with the wind.   This side, that side hurling while we slumbered. Oh then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, is there  no frowning of these wrinkles ranked wrinkles deep.   Down?   No waving off these most mournful messengers still messengers sad and stealing                                             (Hush there)  - only not within seeing of the sun.   Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath.   Whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us, and swiftly away with, done away with, undone.   So beginning, be beginning to despair.   O there’s none, no no there’s none: with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver. Them:               Beauty-in-the-ghost.

Geraldine Monk was first published in the 1970’s. Since then her poetry has appeared in countless magazines and anthologies and her major collections include Interregnum from Creation Books,  Escafeld Hangings, West House Books, Ghost & Other Sonnets, Salt Publishing. They Who Saw the Deep, was published in the USA by Parlor Press. In 2012 she edited Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition from Shearsman Books.

Together with her late husband, the poet and artist Alan Halsey and the musician Martin Archer she was a founding member of the Sheffield antichoir Juxtavoices for which she wrote many pieces most notably Midsummer Mummeries. She is an affiliated poet at the Centre for Poetry & Poetics, The University of Sheffield.   

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

We discuss ideas of place and time in Armitage's 'views' of Marsden, the village where he grew up, and how these ideas are represented in his work.   We focus on the formal designs of both Simon Armitage's and Al's pieces.  I ask Al about the two different versions of his poem that he is weighing up here.  We talk about horses and the 'form' and how things can balance so precipitously upon an edge between success and failure. How can poetry articulate these kinds of two-way moments? Al goes on to outline his journey toward writing poetry after a career as a lecturer in Health and Social Sciences. Evening

You're twelve. Thirteen at most. 
 You’re leaving the house by the back door. 
There's still time. You've promised 
not to be long, not to go far.  One day you’ll learn the names of the trees. 
You fork left under the ridge, 
pick up the bridleway between two streams. 
Here is Wool Clough. Here is Royd Edge. The peak still lit by sun. But 
evening. Evening overtakes you up the slope. 
Dusk walks its fingers up the knuckles of your spine. 
Turn on your heel. Back home your child sleeps in her bed, too big for a cot. 
Your wife makes and mends under the light. 
You’re sorry. You thought 
it was early. How did it get so late? 

This poem is reproduced from Simon Armitage's collection Magnet Field: The Marsden Poems (Faber, 2020).

Grand National (original version)

I backed a horse at five to one –
it came home at ten past.
 We had a ball tho, it was fun
 but it could never last. The money flew, the good times rolled, 
the future opened wide.
 We thought that we were solid gold
 and jumped on for the ride.

Wot larx, such thrills, our names in lights
 the fizzing, shiny things…


the bubble popped and from what heights
 we lost those fragile wings.  And now the screens are up, the vet
 is walking down the track.
 Is it too late, is there time yet
 to get our money back? Achilles drags the corpse away,
 parades it round the walls.
 All’s fair in love and war, they say.
 Troy crumbles and then falls.

Grand National (published version)

I backed a horse at five to one –
it pulled up at ten past.
 We had a ball tho, it was fun
 but it could never last. The money flew, the good times rolled, 
the sky cracked open wide.
 We thought that we were solid gold
 and jumped on for the ride.

Wot larx, such thrills, our names in lights
 the fizzing, shiny things…


...the bubble popped and from what heights
 we lost those fragile wings.  Now the screens are up, the vet
 is walking down the track.
 Is it too late, is there time yet
 to get our money back? Achilles drags the corpse away,
 parades it round the walls.
 All’s fair in love and war, they say.
 Troy crumbles and then falls.

Other poems mentioned (and read) in this podcast include Robin Robertson's poem 'About Time', from his collection The Wrecking Light (Picador, 2010). W H Auden's 'The Fall of Rome' is also briefly discussed - a piece you can read here.

Al McClimens was born and brought up in Bellshill some time after Matt Busby and just before Teenage Fanclub. He escaped by studying for his first degree at Edinburgh University where he ‘majored’ in sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. During a lull in his study he signed up for the poetry society. Well, duh. He peaked when he was chosen as the warm-up act for new rising star Liz Lochhead. When asked about her co-performer’s act Ms Lochhead later said, Who…?

He later moved to Sheffield in the same year as the miners’ strike where, after a few years, he attended a WEA evening class run by Liz Cashdan who pointed him at the various open mics available in the city. It was also around this time that his university work meant he was getting papers in journals and the two strands, the published academic and the gradually getting more stuff published poet began to coalesce with his enrolment onto the SHU MA Creative Writing degree. Well, we all know how that one ended.

So there it is, the trajectory to international stardom or how a youth from Bellshill became one of the best poets in his own house. Or make that second best if Denise is visiting. You couldn’t make it up. Except I just did. And some of it was true…

Al Mclimens books include Keats on the Moon which was published by Mews Press in 2017, and The Other Infidelities which came out in 2021,  which you can purchase from Pindrop Press here and The Placebo Effect (Dreich, 2024).

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

He then goes on to delve into his own prequel and sequel - grouped together as 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and the Turtles of Fun'. He talks about the triggering incident that led to him taking on such a task (an encounter with a stuffed owl in a museum's store). He reflects on how in the two different versions of 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' he has written the first narrative must lead up to the boat (of the original poem) but the second poem is 'un-moored' from the route-map of the classic work. He can explore all sorts of complicated themes - the break-up of a marriage, infidelity and so on, but still create it within the framework of a 'children's' poem.  He reflects on the qualities of the poetic language itself and the references in the poem to Brid, other animals, and pop references too.  Finally, he talks about performing the work in schools - a 'nonsense poem for a nonsense curriculum'.

Matt Black lives in Leamington Spa. His most recent collection is Fishing Dentures Out of Mashed Potato (Upside Down, 2025) which includes poems on various themes, including getting older, looking after elderly parents, the joys of domesticity, lanyards, dogs and knees. This is a fund-raiser for Myton Hospices - £5 per copy - and he is currently available for entertaining readings from the book.  Since being Derbyshire Poet Laureate (2011-2013), he has successfully completed over 25 commissions, with poems on 15 benches, 20 milestones, a large glass panel and in exhibitions and publications. Other recent works include a collection of poems about dogs, Sniffing Lamp-posts by Moonlight (2017), which became an Edinburgh Fringe show, and the tour of his play about floods in Cumbria, The Storm Officer. He is currently Lillington Poet Laureate, Chair of Cubbington and Lillington Environmental Action Now (CLEAN), and a very proud grand-dad.  www.matt-black.co.uk

Copies of The Owl and the Pussy-Cat and the Turtles of Fun can be purchased here.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. This is the last podcast of series two. Look out for updates about series three later in 2025. Thanks for listening!

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (the Prequel)

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went for tea With a parakeet in the park. Owl said politely, “It doesn’t delight me, This hunting of mice after dark.”    The Cat said “Life in the city is mean; We’re squibbling youth away. Let’s go to the sea. Let’s quit this mad scene.” So they cycled to Brid for the day, The day, The day, So they cycled to Brid for the day.

On arrival in Brid, they met a great squid With a sailor who told them a tale Of a mermaid and man, who had met in Japan, And lived in the mouth of a whale. “I like it here,” said Owl on the pier, While the Cat, with a grin, went “Miao”. They stayed for a week. They played hide and seek, And the Owl jumped over a cow, A cow, A cow, And the Owl jumped over a cow.

The waves, they were lapping, blue butterflies flapping, “O guys, you should stay for a while. We’ve striped candyflosses, and rides on the hosses. It’s wicked whatever your style.” Said Cat, “Life’s absurd. Let us sail, dear Bird, To the land where the Bong-tree gleams.” In his crocodile coat, Sailor lent them a boat,   And said “Steer by the star of your dreams, Your dreams, Your dreams.” He said “Steer by the star of your dreams.”

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea In a beautiful pea green boat, They took some honey, and plenty of money, Wrapped up in a five pound note. The Owl looked up to the stars above, And sang to a small guitar, “O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are, You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl! How charmingly sweet you sing! O let us be married! too long we have tarried: But what shall we do for a ring?” They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the Bong-tree grows And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood With a ring at the end of his nose, His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose.

“Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.” So they took it away, and were married next day By the Turkey who lives on the hill. They dined on mince, and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon.

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat  (the Sequel)

The Owl and the Pussy-cat lived the dream For a year and a half at least. They built a chalet, and pranced in a ballet On the beach with the Jumbly Beast.   Till Pussy-cat met the Turtles of Fun, Left Owl by the frumious foam, Who sat in the sun, cried “What have I done? O and why did I leave my sweet home, Sweet home, Sweet home? O and why did I leave my sweet home?”

Now six months have gone, and Owl’s signing on; Cat lives with a turtle called Ted. In the Bong-tree bazaar, Owl strums his guitar, Singing “Pussy, my marriage is dead.” But Cat, in surprise, says “Owl, do be wise, For love is a runcible fruit.”             In only two years, Owl turned all his tears To tunes with a dog on the flute, The flute, The flute, To tunes with a dog on the flute.

The whiskery walrus and octopus chorus Heard songs, like the Dong’s, on the sand. “Your tunes are so beautiful, groovy and hootable!” Begged Walrus, “O please join our band.” Owl pondered and said, “Yes, but only if Ted Can play drums and the didgeridoo.” They made Number One, with the Turtles of Fun, Singing “Life is a crazy canoe, Canoe, Canoe,” Singing “Life is a crazy canoe.”

Vicky begins the podcast by talking about how she first came across Hannah Lowe’s work and what appealed about to her about the poetry - the voice (plain style), the subject matter and control of the material.  Vicky discusses what she learnt from Hannah after being mentored by the poet as an Arvon/Jerwood mentee. She delves into the ideas of utilising poems for ‘teaching’: why choose a particular piece to show to young poets who are learning the craft?

Vicky talks about the ‘cinematic quality’ of the poem ‘Fist’, how it uses specific details to draw the reader in to the situation at hand. She focuses on Lowe's uses enjambment to create particular effects in the poem. Vicky talks about technique at length - and how the craft in this piece can be used to help students think about writing about their own lived experiences.

Vicky then goes on to explore Georgie Woodhead’s poem ‘When my Uncle Stood at the Top of the Office Block Roof’ - how Georgie took Hannah’s piece as a a starting point for her own portrayal of a high-risk situation. She talks about Georgie’s adoption of metaphors as a means by which to illuminate the Uncle’s (and narrator’s) state of mind.

Finally, Vicky reads and ‘unpacks' her own poem ‘Sea Road’.  She examines the choices she made in the poem around the adoption of a ‘long line’ structure and the use of triplets, how she ramps up the tension through telling details. She spends some time talking about the ending and how she redrafted those final lines until she was happy with the conclusion. She goes on to discuss and illuminate other poems in her pamphlet collection, including the poem ‘Lesley’.

You can find a version of Hannah Lowe’s poem ‘Fist’ here, on the Poetry Archive website (with Hannah reading the poem herself). You can also read the version eventually published in Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) here, on the Poetry International website.

You can read Georgie Woodhead’s poem ‘When my Uncle Stood at the Top of the Office Block Roof’ here. You can find out more about Georgie’s collection Takeaway (Smith/Doorstop, 2020) here.

Vicky Morris is a British/Welsh poet, mentor, editor and creative educator from north Wales. Her debut pamphlet If All This Never Happened (Southword Editions, 2021) was a winner of the Munster Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition and shortlisted for Best Poetry Pamphlet in the Saboteur Awards 2021. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals, including: The Rialto, Poetry Review, Mslexia, Poetry Wales and The North. Vicky has placed in various competitions including first in the Prole Laureate Competition 2019 and the Aurora Prize 2020. She was shortlisted for the Mairtin Crawford Award for Poetry 2022 and highly commended in the Liverpool Poetry Prize 2022.   Vicky mentors poets at all stages and is the editor of seven anthologies of poetry and fiction by emerging young writers. For the last 14 years, she has built development opportunities for writers aged 14 to 30, founding Hive in 2016. Through Hive, she has mentored many emerging young poets who’ve received accolades such as the New Poets Prize and the Foyle Young Poets Award. Vicky received a Sarah Nulty Award in 2019 for her writer development work and was an Arvon/Jerwood mentee 19/20. www.vickymorris.co.uk

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

Sea Road (Summer of ’85)

Remember the night you and Lorn walked back this way, past the jangling cluster of amusement arcades, the bingo caller’s muffled boom on the mic, the slot machine beeps and flashing lights,

then the long quiet stretch of Sea Road. Remember the man who stopped his car, not once but twice, pretended to fiddle behind a torch-lit bonnet, and you saw his open fly,

his hand offering up his cock like a fairground prize to two young girls in beach dresses.  Lorn still chattering, heedless of the whisper in your ten-year-old throat,

and you daren't look back or turn off the road. Then up ahead, you see a shape in the dark, that same car waiting, bonnet raised, headlights off, engine ticking,

the dim glow of torchlight. But this time, he's upped his game. And now you are running, Lorn pulling you down this long, empty road, running like the dark

is closing in behind you, like it's stroking the backs  of your legs, running from the edge of something sharp and faceless, until you burst into the hall, gasping, out of breath. 

Mum shouting — What, what is it!?  Both of you mute, moving along a road somewhere. The dark of a car boot, your mouths gagged shut.

Steve talks about the importance of Hill's work as an 'outlier' poet in the Modernist tradition. He focuses on the form that Mercian Hymns takes - the 'versets' that he himself adopted in his first published book Englaland. He examines three poems in depth - the first and third pieces (that set the tone of the work), and the penultimate poem in the sequence.  He draws out various moments when the history of Offa 'bleeds into' the biography of Hill as it is represented in the sequence. Steve digs deep into the word choices that Hill makes, and the allusive qualities of the text.

He then discusses at length the historical background to his poem 'The Battle of Brunanburh'. He explores the notion that this battle took place in South Yorkshire - and goes on to talk about the various sources that commented on this pivotal moment in history. He reflects on three poems in particular in the sequence - poems I, II and XII.  He describes how he used Mercian Hymns as a template for his own practice of melding historical timelines together. He discusses notions of class and masculinity through the framework of this historical overview. Finally he focuses on the 'dramatic' design of his latest collection Eely - how the book fits together over the course of nearly two-hundred pages.  He goes on to think about the evolution of 'Filth as thou art', touching on the history of the Fens in doing so.  He explores the trajectory of the work - how one idea or reference leads to another thought or image, culminating in his own manifestation as the 'staggeringly-gifted child' which is a nod back to Hill's representation of himself in Mercian Hymns. He ends the conversation by discussing jeans brands from the 1970s - and in particular the desire of owning a pair Falmers.

You can find various printings of Mercian Hymns out there. I first read the sequence in Geoffrey Hill's Collected Poems, published by Penguin Books in 1985.

Steve Ely is a poet, novelist, biographer and teacher of creative writing. He has written several books or pamphlets of poetry, most recently Eely (Longbarrow Press, April 2024), Orasaigh (Broken Sleep Books, August 2024) and an edited anthology, Apocalyptic Landscape (Valley Press, October 2024) . He’s currently working on a critical work, Ted Hughes’s Expressionism, a novel entitled The Quoz, and an infinitely expanding, limitless poetic sequence, Terra Incognito.

'The Battle of Brunanburh' can be found in Steve Ely's second book of poetry Englaland (Smokestack Books, 2015).

'Filth as thou art' features in the final section of Steve's book Eely (Longbarrow Press, 2024) - known as Eelysium -  which you can read more about here.

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

Here Steve's poem:

Filth as thou art

The life-or death prerogative power of Ivan Karamazov's Master of Game, wolfhounds loosed at the slipped boys scut, hauled down in the snow and torn in the jaws of his ululating mother;                                              gold-rush garimpeiros, lopping the heads of the Haxi Yanomami, something about a stolen hammock, their cleansing from the commons;                                                                 shish kebab paedos, pimping and raping unlooked-after AirMax scrubbers - panga wielding paki ninnies, watermelon smiles.                                                      Brit White Chief getting out of hand with his tax-payer funded Brit White Bird. Well, asked Ivan. What does he deserve? Boris stopped spaffing and thought for a sec. To be shot, he muttered. But already his mind was somewhere else

                                     hunt ball interns, indigenous schoolies on cigs and free dinners, wearing Joop and 9 carat Yanomami lip-plates, the stringbulb flat above Booze n News, choc klet starfish dripping with garlic mayo - we're having a gang bang, we're having a ball, Rita, Sue and PetSu too, Leeds Tiffs with Sav and Jayne MacDonald: inner sense doubtful - at that age, from that estate, at that time in the morning, with the eel fishers baiting their creels in the boatyard, eights sweeping the river from Kulmhof to the Wash, Spinnefix spinning his little white house, the black band of Florian Geyer. Shot in the beams of the Rothermere staff car, which he smashed as he fled, a hole in his head, to the lays of Ness Ziona

                                             defacing the fly-leaf Brer Rabbit's a Rascal, 1974: thank God I was born alive, not dead; human, not an animal; a boy, not a girl; English, not foreign; and Yorkshire, South Kirkby, the Wimpeys - RULE OK! - scoring his hat-tricks, wheelying his Chopper, 100% on the test, this Prospero of Osgoldcross, Ariel of Frickley Park: Kirkby rec Caliban, proud as Punch in his catalogue Falmers, boss-eyed, club-footed, man or fish, legged with fins for arms. The meanest, poorest and commonest sort, that serve for the profit of conjurors, and bleed on Dagon's altars.                                                       Beacons ring the changes. Bog-bull thumps the level. Lads rip the pegs on Whelpmore Fen. Commoner's muck.

Abbi talks about the connections between her work as an archaeologist and her creative processes as a poet. She explores the idea of fragments - whether they be finds or fragmentary and non-linear details - as a way in to thinking about associations between her various practices.  She talks about the creative skills that Burnett displays in her fashioning of a poetic voice that can embody other-than-human elements. She then goes on to discuss at length Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s project that evolved into her collection Twelve Words for Moss, and how ‘Little Peach’ fits into the overall design of the book. Abbi highlights the sensory qualities and playfulness of the language in Burnett’s poem, the wonder. Abbi also mentions Clare Shaw's peat bog poems as a way of understanding Burnett's work too. Abbi then goes on to explore the sound and sense of her own poem ‘Cow Low Bowl’ (650 - 700 AD)'. She draws on her development as a writer, pinpointing the Continuing Bonds project (see below) as a starting point for drawing together archeology and poetry. She then goes on to talk about how she gained creative inspiration from the Thomas Bateman antiquarian collection held at Western Park Museum in Sheffield in another cross-disciplinary project she was involved in. She talks about the layered approach she makes in 'Cow Low Bowl' - bringing together different texts and images to create this work.  She draws on the tactile quality of the bowl as a way into thinking about the object.  She talks about writing into the space that 'we will never know', and the archeological imagination. She goes on to discuss the possibility of a first complete collection of creative work, and what texts might be included in the book.

Abbi Flint is a researcher and poet, who works across archaeology, history and the environmental humanities. Her poems have been published in a range of online and print journals, including Under the Radar, Spelt, Atrium, Reliquiae, Popshot Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Interpreters House.

Abbi mentions two projects, led by Professor Melanie Giles (University of Manchester), that she contributed poems to Vestiges and Peat: Past, Present and Future. The webpage for Vestiges contains a link to a recording of Abbi reading Cow Low Bowl, and a link to the pdf of the full Vestiges anthology.

More about the Continuing Bonds project, led by Professor Karina Croucher (University of Bradford), here: https://continuingbonds.live/teaching-materials/

The MossWorlds Project, led by Dr Anke Bernau, Dr Ingrid Hanson and Dr Aurora Fredriksen (University of Manchester), has a website here: https://mossworlds.co.uk/about-mossworlds/

The science poetry/art journal Consilience can be found here: https://www.consilience-journal.com/about

Abbi mentions a portrait of Thomas Bateman and his son sitting alongside the Cow Low Bowl. You can find a version of the image here.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's poem, 'Little Peach', was published in the Willowherb Review and also in her book Twelve Words for Moss. You can hear her read 'Little Peach' here.

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

Cowl Low Bowl (650-700 AD)

Low bowl, sky bowl dish that ran away with the moon underground, understone puddled mud above thirsty old bones that took the sky to bed in cloth and ash, iron and brass Sure bowl, palm bowl cupped by a hand that tipped sky to cold lips cold as a tod-fox tooth blue as a calm sea, tender as tilted hips that swallowed the moon

Whole bowl, restless bowl holds the horizon between soil and where air fell to dust this blue is a window between death and another death brought to light by the spade

In the podcast, Dave talks about meeting Tony Hoagland at a poetry reading in London.  He discusses how he got over balancing his work life and writing life by going on writing courses. He mentions how, on one of these residencies, he met the poet Mimi Khalvati who introduced him to the idea of schwa vowels, and how this made him view his poetry in a different light. He talks about the importance of description, professional noticing, and daydreaming.  He then goes on to discuss Tony Hoagland's 'plate spinning', the technical 'tight-rope act' he enacts from poem to poem. He talks at length about 'The Neglected Art of Description', how it hovers around those different points of describing detail through 'sleights of hand' and rhetorical flourishes (and Zen Buddhism).  How it can only go so far. He goes on a detour - focusing for a while on the descriptive power of Mark Doty's poem 'Two Ruined Boats'.

He then goes on to explore his own poem 'The Last Day of Summer' and the choices of language he made in this piece. What is poetry supposed to do in the world? He talks about sleights of hand in his own poetry, how and why he focuses on the film Paths of Glory, and on the case of a political prisoner (Reyhaneh Jabbari) being executed for her own beliefs. He talks at length about the technical decisions that he makes in the poem.  He explores the idea of being 'bombarded' by news and information, and how as individuals (and writers) we have to negotiate this stream of words in our lives. How do we sift out the words that are important to us? He discusses the importance of poetry in people's lives too. Finally, he explores the different (prose and poetry) collections he is currently writing for publication - including his allotment poems.

Tony Hoagland's poem 'The Neglected Art of Description' can be found in Application for the Release from the Dream (Bloodaxe, 2015).  Dave also reads from 'Two Ruined Boats' from Mark Doty's collection Atlantis (Cape, 1996).

Dave also mentions in the podcast Hoagland's book Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (Graywolf Press, 2006).

David Swann began his writing life as a reporter for the local newspaper in Accrington. After working in nightclubs, warehouses, and magazines in Amsterdam, he became the writer in residence in a prison.  A book based on those experiences, The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2009) was shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award.  Dave's stories and poems have been widely published and won many awards, including eleven successes at the Bridport Prize and two in The National Poetry Competition. His novella Season of Bright Sorrow (also available from Ad Hoc Fiction), won the 2021 Bath Novella-in-Flash Competition.

David's own poem, 'The Last Day of Summer', comes from his last published poetry collection, Gratitude on the Coast of Death (Waterloo Press, 2017).

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

The Last Day of Summer

If the clock-radio wasn't chanting its old lament I'd spend the summer's finale under our duvet

but the year's last light is falling, and, here, it's all war, famine, Ebola.  And Iran has hanged Reyhaneh Jabbari.

There's a better place than this, but I can't find it anywhere in our house, so I carry my tea

into the yard and listen while a neighbour's child calls to her vanished cat.  'Gucci!' she cries,

on the brink of tears. 'Gucci, where are you, dear?' The mallow's crazy bloom has dimmed now

and the sunflowers have lost interest in the sky. I follow their hunched gaze to where indestructible snails

lumber like tanks over the paving stones, and think of that moment in Paths of Glory when cockroaches

scuttle through a cell.  Tomorrow, when's he dead, those things will continue to live, the condemned man

tells his jailers, unable to imagine the world bearing his absence.  Around me: a citadel

of living spiders. They have strung their cables over our tiny lawn.  The grass has gone on growing

and these cobwebs are thicker than I've known. Global warming? Upstairs, the clock-radio

drones while a child's voice rises through its scales. 'Gucci,' she sings.  'Come home now, Gucci!'

Our words have travelled vast distances, that's what I tell the kids I teach.  They have come to us

on journeys and their bags are full of secrets. Rose, for instance. Or musk. Or path.

Or assassin.  These words are from Farsi, words from the land that has hanged

Reyhaneh Jabbari.  For two months she was held alone, beyond reach of lawyers and family,

and she went to her death still protecting the name of the man who saved her

from rape by the government agent. These are not the words of a poem

and that is not the name of a cat.  Let me sit here with my tea and forget this winter. Send us down the old books, containing the old worlds. You know the ones: jasmine, shawl, peach.

In our conversation, Robert talks about how his art teacher introduced to him to the works of Sylvia Plath and John Clare (among others).  He discusses the 'everyday' language he uses in his poetry and how (through this 'political act') he doesn’t want to exclude his readers. He goes on to explore the idea of the sonnet - how can you find your voice inside the given ‘rules’ of the fourteen-line poem - the rhyme scheme, the weight of tradition: ‘a lovely challenge’.  Robert then elaborates on Clare’s background - his prodigious output of poetry (even when he was incarcerated) and from this reflects on how important it is to separate writing from publishing (to see them as two separate activities). Robert then discusses 'The Field Mouse's Nest'. He explores punctuated and unpunctuated versions of this sonnet, and Clare's use of dialect, reading from Seamus Heaney's essay ‘John Clare’s Prog’. He touches on the idea of Clare as an ecopoet.

He then goes on to illuminate the evolution of his memoir A Length of Road: Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare from 1995 onward - and how the poem 'Herb Robert' fits into the larger scheme of the book. He talks about 'Herb Robert' as a queer poem, and from this insight, shows how the relationship between himself and Clare - and his understanding of himself developed as he drafted and redrafted the work. He then goes on to talk at length about the hold the sonnet has had on him over his writing life, and how this poem, in particular, fitted in as one of his 'form-testing' poems.

You can read John Clare's Northborough Sonnets (mentioned in the podcast) in this edition from Carcanet Press.  Seamus Heaney's essay on John Clare comes from his collection of essays The Redress of Poetry (Faber, 2002). Here is a version of 'The Field Mouse's Nest' from the Poetry Archive (with 'cesspools' instead of 'sexpools' in the final line).

Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes, appearing in the Forward Book of Poetry 2020. He won The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023 and has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. His poetry has featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His fifth collection Nude Against A Rock from Waterloo Press was published in October 2024.

You can find Robert Hamberger's website here.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

Herb Robert

What flavour of man is this, whose tips unpeel into flowers? His arrows blossom. Five petals top each blood-line that dips and lifts through the breeze. I've seen him hide by the creaky bridge where lattice-water dabbles a trout's tail while bubbles rise. His leaves mimic ferns, his colour campion.  How can he be less than he is? He lives his name. Two bulbs branch from every stem, until I catch him taking over the wood-side. A hundred buds swarm their messages on the air. If I eat his breath will it heal me? Stroke him across my temples quietly, quietly.

In our conversation, David discusses his connections with Thomas. He explains why ‘Poem in October’ (and ‘late Thomas’) appeals to him in particular. He talks about the shape and feel of the poem, its aural qualities, its preoccupation with birds and the seasons. David follows Thomas from the shore and climbs high up, ending his journey looking out over the water.  He goes on to reflect on what ‘the border’ could mean in the context of this poem. David then goes on to explore the background to his poetry sequence ‘White Peak Histories’.  He thinks about the lines he can draw between his own work and Thomas’s effusive language, Thomas’s verbal ‘swagger’. He delves into the geography of the White Peak and how this feeds into its histories in terms of both leisure and labour.

David Harmer lives in Doncaster and is best known as a children’s writer with publications from McMillans Children’s Books, Frances Lincoln and recently, Small Donkey Press. A lot of his work for the Grown Ups is published in magazines. He also performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Here's a little window into David's writing for children (his book It's Behind You) from the Pan McMillan Site. And here's the details of David's most recent book from Small Donkey Press.

We mention the poetry magazine Tears in the Fence during our conversation. You can find out more about this poetry journal here.

We also mention W S Graham's poem 'The Thermal Stair' (for the painter Peter Lanyon) which you can listen to - and read - on the Poetry Archive.

Owen Sheers discusses Dylan Thomas with Matthew Paris on the BBC Radio 4 programme Great Lives here.

You can read Dylan Thomas's 'Poem in October' at this website.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

White Peak Histories   Rhienster Rock   Once Raenstor Crag, the haunt of ravens hræfn; harbingers of wisdom, of slaughter, guardians of the Duke’s old coach road   that twists beneath this sudden rise of limestone where the Bradford narrows near Hollow Farm a slow drift, thick with sedge and celandine.   The ravens are long-gone, no hoarse ghost cries over burial bones or carrion chatter, no close councils and conspiracies.   Shifted into tricksters and thieves, they left their reef-knoll condemned as vermin, an abrupt unkindness bringing despair.   Two shot in Youlgrave churchyard fetched eight pennies, four birds a shilling, held by their legs, their smashed skulls open.

Trackways   Half-lost, eroded like rumours whispered beneath the skin of maps   the tracks of travellers, pack-horse carters, cattle drovers, cloth merchants, drifts of malt-horses   lie abandoned under new-sprung roads, uprooted farms and tarmac.   But here at Robin Hood’s Stride, the mock-beggar’s hall high above Bradford Dale, jumbled rocks protect the Portway, guide it past the Nine Stones Circle down to Broad Meadow Farm   where Saxon ridges rise like waves to push the causeway straight over the river at Hollow Bridge then up Dark Lane.   The path still beats below our footfall, it flowed before settlers on Castle Hill Ring brewed their iron or buried their dead in the heaped barrows and tumuli and when we walk it their voices clamour through the rain, eager to point out the way ahead.  

Portway flood, 1718   Winter unleashed a deluge of waters, the ford at Alport scoured out by river-force Bradford and Lathkill locked in a tumult of pell-mell, white-flecked land-soak. Monk’s Hall up to its haunches, inundated, thick ropes of stream-melt, cattle pushed up breakneck banking, dams burst foaming like the mouths of dead horses.   A gang of carriers faced the flooded Portway. How to travel to the north of Old Town? How to cross this fury of water? They tried to push through. It hurled them away, ankles tumbled over their heads, mouths gaped, breath failed them, limbs flailing and snatching at quick grasps of rock, branches, horse-gear.   Their bales and bundles, leather goods, baubles dragged to the mill-race, the broken wheel reluctant to offer any hand hold. Instead they drowned crying out for a bridge, found their souls sodden in Derbyshire rain-drench, unprotected by ravens. And as the waters had not yet dried from the earth no dry ground rose to cover the corpses.

In the interview, Katharine explains how she went from being a prose writer to a poet in part from reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. She examines the qualities of Bishop’s writing through an extended reading of ‘Sandpiper’, focusing in particular on line lengths, repetitions and rhymes. Katharine highlights the three things that Bishop strived for in her work — accuracy, spontaneity and mystery which she goes on to reflect on in both 'Sandpiper' and 'Jerónimo's House'.  With regards to ‘Jeronimo’s House’, Katharine delves into her own interest in solitude when looking at this piece. She considers the idea that Jerónimo’s house is a ‘love nest’: unpicking this notion through various ways of reading this phrase. She explores the idea that Bishop (or her subjects) are often looking for a refuge or somewhere to hide away.

Katharine then goes on to illuminate her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph’. She talks about how she was inspired by Bishop’s comment to Robert Lowell about being the loneliest person who ever lived. Katharine sees this work as being a part of a sequence of first-person poems in the voice of various 'alone' women - and the ways in which aloneness was important to them.  She reflects on the poem’s slant, the language of the work, the perspective (and possible feelings) of the narrator.

There are various editions of Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems - the one I have is Complete Poems (Chatto, 1991).  You can read ‘Sandpiper’ here.

As well as the Bishop poems highlighted we also touch on ‘The Moose’, ‘The End of March’, ‘The Bight’ and ‘The Fish’ in our conversation.

Katharine Towers has published three collections with Picador, most recently Oak which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer. A fourth collection is forthcoming from Picador in 2026. A pamphlet 'let him bring a shrubbe' exploring the life and work of the twentieth-century English composer Gerald Finzi was published by The Maker’s Press in 2023. In 2019 HappenStance Press published another pamphlet The Violin Forest.

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

'Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph' by Katharine Towers   In my fairy palace I am as lonely as I could wish.  The ivy has grown up and over, and cosily inside there’s just little me reading or sitting.   I could be on the moon or I could be  in a Hans Christian Andersen story or I could be a girl getting over a love affair.     The first room has two beds, so one will always be empty. The second room has two chairs, so I can see where I will sit tomorrow. The third room has two notebooks, so there will always be blank pages.   At night I listen to flamenco on the radio. As I snap my fingers and click my heels I feel tremendously  Spanish, or I feel a sultry empty weary joy.    Covering the windows are the ivy’s mathematical hands. Daylight pokes through when it can,  making of the worn-out floorboards a map of bright dots.                                             

You can find Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ in his collection Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems by Shinkichi Takahashi - translated by Lucien Stryk (Grove Press, 1986). I picked up a digital copy of the book.

Mark Pullinger lives in the Dearne Valley, walking distance to RSPB Old Moor and its satellite sites, where he walks with his wife daily. The philosophy outlined in this interview was conceived for his PhD thesis, The Speaking World, available on Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository. He has recently completed a poetry collection on Kafka and the natural world, making a style shift from his thesis, but still expressing the same worldview.   The Speaking World is available at https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/The_speaking_world

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

Sparrow in Winter by Shinkichi Takahashi translated by Lucien Stryk   Breastdown fluttering in the breeze, The sparrow’s full of air holes. Let the winds of winter blow, Let them crack a wing, two, The sparrow doesn’t care.   The air streams through him, free, easy, Scattering feathers, bending legs. He hops calmly, from branch to empty branch In an absolutely spaceless world.   I’d catch, skewer, broil you, But my every shot misses: you’re impossible. All at once there’s the sound Of breaking glass, and houses begin To crumple. Rising quickly, An atomic submarine nudges past your belly.  

Untitled by Mark Pullinger   Polar bear smells life kills spreading through her her cubs extending skies earth’s breath expanding sun’s reign

Magus by Mark Pullinger   In a distant desert a lone speck crosses the horizon mumbling, “the desert has dignity moving through it”. Sand drifts across humps, clinging, rolling on.

Heat, like breath, rises, waves reaching skies. Camel’s eyes large distant suns.  

In the interview, we talk about how Fay came to Jones’s poem - a book that follows soldiers' long trajectory toward the Somme battlefield, but has so much more within it than the subject of war itself. For Fay, it’s ‘the fact that one’s part of the earth,’ and that Jones focuses on ‘class, land and nature’ that makes this such an inspiring and important work for her. We discuss the abundant details, images, hauntings contained in the work - and how war plays out like some violent codified ‘sport’ inflicted on these young men.  Fay then goes on to explore the difficulties she encountered trying to write her ‘big river poem’ and how she found ways to embody the Rivelin as it runs through the western Sheffield by giving the river itself a voice and, for a while, the body of a young man. Fay explains why she wanted to make the river a human because she wanted to explore the world of those youthful Rivelin mill-workers. We reflect on the music of her poetry and how important it is to Fay’s project as a poet. The extract that Fay read’s from In Parenthesis covers pp. 165 - 168 from her copy of the book (Faber, 1978).  

There's a recording of an extract of the poem on the Poetry Archive website. It includes an introduction by David Jones himself, and actors playing the many voices in the work. It gives you a good sense of the polyphony in the poem. You can listen to the audio here.

You can read more about, and buy a copy of Fay’s very fine collection Contraflow (Longbarrow Press, 2016) here.

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

From 'Memoir of a Working River’

6

Woken by some beast’s nudge then stunned at the incredible stillness of sky, slips in to bathe where the mill-dam overflow cascades slithers out freshened, rises and shivers watches the mud where new droplets nuzzle.

Donkeys trudge by, pressing on, faces low as if the cinder track hears their moan. Follows their swagger-loads sees motion onward driven by the momentum of raw and wrought iron.

Wavers as they near the spark-shed shy of its screaming grind and gritty guffaws but the torture rack, humped on its back in full watery swing, pricks his learning’s gap. Keen to find why the wheel must turn braves the factory door

steps in and into a gusting blur tastes its metal, feels particulates snag in sweat takes a moment to see where he is.

In geometry against nature’s grace humans are caught in a web each slumped over oak, held by spindle and belt to a stone that spits hot grit.

His feet itch.

He swerves a man dragging iron rods and trying to make his free hand speak.

On the river-run some images stick: flashes of crimson through blackened fur shreds on that donkey’s neck, the clench of combat riddled through men’s backs.

Lying on a weir to rinse metal squeals from his hair on the air a tang enthrals the inner juices —

he paces it downstream, tracks the prey to a tufted cove, a pail propped in rocks a man doubled over racked in rasp-spasms. When coughing releases its grip he sits near the man, asks how life is.

Sunk in the chest, not quite sitting up, the man shares his snap and between pneumatic seizure tells how he offers blunt steel to grit till it’s flayed by resistance to its leanest edge how each day he enters the valley more of it enters him.

The man says he’s seen eighteen summers a grinder for three, and nails in a voice hollow-loud what binds the wheel’s turn to that cheese and bread.

Twice the man says — The mus’ave a name. 
Only once — Come wi’ me, if tha needs a crust.  

In the interview, Lydia talks about going to an event where Tom Phillips talked about his practice as an artist - and about A Humument in particular. She relates how the book came about and describes its various iterations - the different ‘river’ poems that Phillips came to write using the original text - an obscure Victorian novel entitled A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Lydia discusses the overall ‘narrative’ of the book, and then focuses on two pages in particular: page 40 and page 305 (which you find and can click on below). 

Lydia then goes on to explain where, why and how she developed her own Metro Horoscope-page found poems.  She talks about the rules that she follows in the making of these works, how she distributes them on social media, and what sort of reactions she has got from printing these versions. We then go on to explore a series of poems, looking in particular at how she uses punctuation and word choices to create her original pieces. 

Lydia Allison is a poet, writing facilitator, creative mentor, and tutor. She has been involved in a number of projects and collaborations, including Stevie Ronnie’s ‘A Diary of Windows and Small Things’, Doncaster Arts’ activity books for lockdown, and ‘Dancing with Words’, a project that paired poets and dancers. Her writing is often inspired by her working life, which spans from bridal consultancy to teaching overseas. 

She is interested in approaching writing in an experimental and playful way. This largely takes the form of blackout poems where she tries to unearth poems hidden in other interesting texts.

She has appeared a number of times in print and online, including The Result Is What You See Today, Introduction X, Surfing the Twilight, Poetry Salzburg Review, PN Review, Feral, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. You can read more at lydiaallison.com, or follow her on twitter/X @lydiarallison 

The Tom Phillips poems that we focus on can be found here:

Page 40 (slideshow): A Humument Page 40 (slideshow)

Page 305 (Slideshow) A Humument Page 305 (slideshow)

You can the book in its entirety here (Tom Phillips also reads one version of the book on the website):

https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument

I also mention Nicole Sealey in the podcast. You can find her poem "'Pages 1-4,' An Excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure'" here.

Lydia Allison's Metro Erasure Poems

grow trees start a home. begin now

/

It's time to help others, reorganising The what and when

The Sun moved to mingle with your life and soul

/

come in for now, get your thoughts sizzling with romance

be logical but very illogical . Be physical and creative and perfect , Gemini

/

Are other people you? the Moon could be . , time time spent beautiful

Liz talks about the impact Sharon Olds had on her when her first British collection - The Sign of Saturn - was published (in 1991). She talks about the idea of confessional poetry, and how closely we can connect the author with the narrator of the poem.  She talks about Sharon Olds’ own version  of free verse and how technically skilful she is in terms how she uses uses run-on lines and punctuation to carry the narrative along. Liz also reflects on the different versions of Olds’ persona that are represented in the poem. She talks about the idea of ‘safety’ and disguise in this work, and goes on to discuss the figure of Electra in relation to Olds’ poem too.

Liz talks about how aware she was of Olds’ poem when she was writing her own piece ‘Blue Dress’.  She describes the free verse form she has taken on, then explores the similarities and differences between her poem and Olds’ piece.  Liz talks about the use of blue in other mother-daughter relationships she has written about, then considers the tone of the poem - how both doubt and anxiety play a big part in the making of this work. She goes on to examine the ‘prosy’ quality of her poetry and where she allows herself to tune into more heightened language. She talks about touch and feel, and getting back in touch with someone special who has been missing from the narrator’s own life in the context of Falling Mother.

Dr Elizabeth Holloway (formerly Elizabeth Barrett) is an award-winning poet whose work has been published extensively in journals and anthologies. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry. Her first book Walking on Tiptoe (Staple, 1998) focuses, in part, on the diagnosis of her son as autistic. Elizabeth received an Arts Council of England New Writers’ award to support the completion of her follow-up collection, The Bat Detector (Wrecking Ball Press, 2005), which continues to explore the experience of parenting an autistic child. In the collection, Elizabeth uses the metaphor of detecting bats to understand the process of communicating with a non-verbal child. The collection led to a collaboration with the violist Robin Ireland who composed original music for a sequence of the poems. Subsequent collections include Walking on Tiptoe and Other Poems (Bluechrome Press, 2007) and A Dart of Green and Blue (Arc Publications, 2010). In 2018, Elizabeth received a Northern Writers award to support work on her future collection, Falling Mother.

Liz Holloway read Sharon Old’s poem ‘The Blue Dress’ from her collection The Sign of Saturn: Poems 1980 - 1987 (Secker and Warburg, 1991) . A version of the poem can be read here: https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/SharonOlds-Anthology.html.

Blue Dress   The call comes out of the blue.  How else? There is only the blue.  It is what we have lived with.  Afterwards, I am dazed by the day. I replay the phone ringing twice — the way I picked up the second time remembering she used to do this.  “It's alright Mum, it’s me calling”. She names a date and place,  the hours she could be there.  She knows it might sound crazy.  Too far away. Afterwards, I wonder  if she heard the hesitation in my voice.   I want to get something for her.  Perhaps because I don't believe  I am enough. Maybe to make up  for birthdays I’ve missed. Or just  to have something, whether true  or a lie.  Something she can't deny  is a gift from her mother. Something  she can hide from her father if he asks.  I would need to pick out something  not too expensive she could say  she bought for herself. Something  un-extraordinary. A plain gift giving  nothing away. Something to wear perhaps.   I choose Oasis, the airy boutique  with a glass lobby and mirrory gallery  at the top of a silver river of stairs.  Thin men in hoodies and tall girls  with eyeliner and ponytails  peer over a chrome rail.  I flatten myself against the side  like a nun, try to be invisible.  I braved this place for her.  Beyond the lobby, random rails  of fluid clothes. Denim. Sweats.  Coats with fur-edged hoods. I don't know who she’s become.   It’s foolish. Impossible. As I turn  to go, a rack of spare clothes — one-offs, small sizes, shop returns — and suddenly a bolt of blue in my eye like shot silk from Shandong. I run it through my fingers. The grain catches. I trace  the scalloped neck to the waist,  test the lay of its deep V over  an inset panel, across the breasts.   I push my hands inside, try to gauge  the space for her ribs. In the LED light  it turns purple indigo delphinium iris.  

Angelina talks about how Seamus Heaney’s stage directions from The Cure at Troy grabbed her attention, the ‘right thing at the right time.’ She goes on to discuss how she uses this text (and other corresponding texts) as a way in to explore a subject like colonialism, but it’s as much the delight in language at the beginning of the play, apparent in Heaney’s translation, that drew her in. She talks about how she negotiates appropriation of other writer's work in her poetry. Angelina then goes on to expand on all the different influences, alongside Heaney’s stage notes, including the inciting incident from Damon Albarn’s opera Dr Dee, and a poem by Jane Kenyon (on ‘the presence of an absence’) , that worked their way in to her own piece. Angelina develops at length her own processes as a writer, how she draws on exemplary texts from a wide range of sources, a patchwork approach, as a way of an introduction to her own poem ‘Correspondences: The Credence of Birds’. She talks about the play-like quality of this poem, and where it geographically references in the Peak District. She discusses how she doesn’t want to explain all the levels of ambiguity in the poem - to keep those spaces open for herself and the reader. Angelina reflects on bird-lore, and on notions of time before finishing the conversation by discussing how lyrics and songs have influenced her own approach to writing poems.

You hear Angelina read an extract from The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles Philoctetes (Faber, 2018).

Angelina D'Roza lives in Sheffield. She was a writing mentor with the Koestler Trust and writer in residence at Bank Street Arts, collaborating with artists, writers, photographers. Most recently her work appears in Blackbox Manifold and Shearsman Press. Her debut collection Envies the Birds was published by Longbarrow Press in 2016. The Blue Hour is Angelina's new collection and was released by Longbarrow at the end of 2023.

Correspondences: The Credence of Birds   A gritstone edge. Boulders higgledy-piggledy with sprouts of purple heather. No sun to speak of but light diffuse and silver, an evenness to it. Maybe rain, if there’s the wherewithal. Or a sort of shimmer to the flattened grass, as though rain has been. An absence left. A man in a red anorak, a bouldering mat folded on his back, walks quickly right to left. If Heaney’s chorus of boulder-still birds beginning to stretch from under their shawls can be made as lovely as he wrote it, do it. Pheasants, falcons. A spray of meadow pipits darting out from their hair and hands. Chip-chip- chip-chip. A woman climbs the rocks toward a platform stage-right, with the silhouette of an ancient fort just about suggested. The birdsong continues – ek-ek-ek-ek – but she is alone. Perhaps she addresses herself. Or perhaps, someone else. Someone absent. No questions, but the fractals in the bracken, their green mathematics transposed as music, the closing cadence that resolves the song.       She:   I might believe that a kingfisher strung up on silk can predict the weather, or that placing the semen of a pigeon on someone’s shirt can make that person love you. You think it’s wild, but you believe time runs as the crow flies. Take the roses replanted to my new house, those roses that know a home before this, my young son, the woman I was, its stems grown long and winding through the pale fuchsia, the fuchsia with its pale pink memory of a previous owner. The latitude of these two recollections mapped in space, in gradients, and tangled into a grammar of now, or here, the woman I am. I would send you their late bloom like a temple tumbling into the sea to keep in your wallet with the present tense and the half built, a botanical representation of time, the ongoing of what’s gone inscribed in the ground underfoot.      Chorus:   sip-sip-sip-sip     A cage in the side of a boulder opens. A Japanese tit flies out and across the water. A stone arch at the back of the stage, where the river runs down to the orchestra pit. Hanging from the stone, an iron hook and a small bell. The bird rings the bell and collects a folded piece of paper that could be your fortune from the hook, flies into the gods. Let it go.

She:   I would send you John Cale’s “Big White Cloud”. After all is said and done / everything is just like it began. But time flows one way, whatever leaves it gathers in its talons, and to predict is to look back, to believe that autumn will cause the trees to redden. Bergson says that what we express is the dead leaves floating on the surface of the water, the various and fugitive reduced to the same handful of words, as though love isn’t changed by having loved. I don’t know what this means for us. Perhaps, that’s the point. The reds and golds were always there, it’s only that we see them now. Everything’s clear, everything’s bright. To leave this unspoken way of being unspoken, and so unchanged by language that can only approximate how it feels, to dream in birdsong, the water trickling down from the moors.   The chorus boulders huddle against the cold – chee-chee-chee-chee – Light fades to black – ek-ek-ek-ek

Matt talks about how Chinese poetry has come to increasingly influence his approach to writing over the past ten years.  He talks about T’ao Ch’ien’s style - how it conceals depths beneath its apparently simple surface.  He talks about different notions of the idea of the body (and body politic), about the choices T’ao Ch’ien made in this regard - turning away from power and influence to live a more 'stripped-down' life - and how these decisions can speak to our own materialistic, consumer culture. Matt goes on to discuss tone in T’ao Ch'ien’s piece - and about coming to this work as a piece of translation.

Matt then goes on to talk about his own poem in the light of saying what Tzu-Jan means in relation to Taoism.  Matt talks about ‘walking out’ of the city - about different ideas around ‘productivity’, about drifting, moving between the inner world and outer world. He reflects on walking as an 'anonymous' person - and what this state of being allows him access to as an alert observer. He finishes by discussing his latest collaborative writing project.

Matt read and discussed 'Back Home Again Chant' by T'ao Ch'ien from The Selected Poems of T'ao Ch'ien Translated by David Hinton (Copper Canyon Press, 2000).

Matt Clegg teaches creative writing at the University of Derby. His books include Cazique, The Navigators, & West North East, all published by Longbarrow Press. His current project is Have You always Been Here, a haibun sequence inspired by Kobayashi Issa’s The Spring of My Life. Have You Always Been Here will combine haiku & prose poetry by Matt, and illustrations by P.R. Ruby. It explores the impact of Covid lockdowns on the contemplative life; on what we observe & how it affects us; how we care; & how we try [or fail] to take responsibility.

Tzu-Jan as Performance Outcome

Into every account mail is pinging: ‘we will secure

our long-term future by competing on more fronts.’

Let’s find a glade where a thought might grow.

On Penistone Road, fans have assembled a totem pole shrine

out of teddy-bears, Wednesday shirts, and ever-wilting

bouquets. They are taped to a long redundant road sign,

as if to re-construct a universal grammar. Dear

Performance Review, this is what I’d really aspire to.

From Beeley Wood Road, someone has flung a single

ballet shoe over the river. It curls, like a comma

for the mind. A captain of industry exhales

his strawberry vape and dreams of shedding half his

body fat in a fixable world without depression.

His factory remains a nut-free zone. Permit me

to fast-forward half a mile, as I climb the hard yards

towards Birley Edge. One acre of slope is bitumen black

and seeded with beer cans.  An emerald fly dances Morse

on the hot-pan of a broken slate, but heather

knits in from all sides, its purples blossoming bees.

Elsewhere, narcissists and lamplighters are blagging

their way into the goonlight, but here, just under

the Birley Stone, someone has evoked their late mother

in flowers of violet and mildest blue. I’d love to stop,

but have business in the leafways of Wharncliffe Woods.

I find a tree, violently uprooted in some long blown-out

gale. The crater where it once clutched earth is a pool

fermenting mud-water wine. Reflected light minnows

back and forth, close-reading each crevice in the exposed

roots. Elsewhere, there are directives to create

future-facing partnerships, but I want only to collaborate

with pipits that flirt in and out of bracken tips, all day.

Here I sit reading Ta’ Chien to the trees, knowing little more

of strategy than this. Fresh crops of data are being harvested,

and bright careerists kneel to the metrics, but here,

aphids have printed their green bodies between the lines

of ‘Back Home Again Chant’. A golden Labrador lags far

behind its master, and snuffle-blesses my open book.

In the programme, Pete talks about their own long relationship with MacNeice’s poem, how it ‘works’ as a poem, stitching together contemporary ‘pinch points’ of late 1930s history and the author's own autobiography.  In a wide-ranging (roaming) conversation Pete talks about how the form of MacNeice’s poem influenced their own approach to Sheffield Almanac. They also explore how MacNiece brings together high and low culture to discuss notions of privilege, politics, and the state of the nation. Pete goes on to reflect on the first and second editions of Sheffield Almanac, and how their own work as a song writer has informed their own poetry writing skills. Pete talks about conflating the personal and political in Sheffield Almanac, and 'the predicament of the city of Sheffield' that is interrogated in this extended lyrical narrative.

The edition that Pete reads from here is Autumn Journal (Faber, 2012).

Pete Green is a song writer, musician, and poet. They have published two pamphlets with Longbarrow Press - Sheffield Almanac (first edition, 2017 and second edition, 2022), and Hemisphere (2021).  Pete’s first full-length came out with Salt in 2022, entitled The Meanwhile Sites.

from Chapter One of Sheffield Almanac (second edition, Longbarrow 2022):

             And we were timeless
 As the empty afternoons when we would settle    In for desultory shifts at the Fellow & Firkin  Unprepared to take one more step    Toward the millennium’s unmapped plains  Without a pint of cloudy ale and a doorstep    Sandwich loaded with fat chips.  Some seminar on Woolf and Joyce just finished,    We might stay put, we might loose happenstance  With suburban wanderlust undiminished —    Let the current bus us to Cotteridge or West Bromwich,  Let the bondage of deadlines unravel    Free in time and space, at least within the bounds  Of an off-peak pass from West Midlands Travel.     Suede supplanting Blur, Blair succeeding Smith:  Tumbleweed days. None of us paused to cherish     Carefreedom since we never knew — or just  Suppressed the knowledge — that it could perish     While the ink dried on our dissertations.  Weeks were some abundant currency one borrows     At deceptive interest rates, pays back At breakneck terms, in repossessed tomorrows     And when the time came to consolidate  Sheffield was our redemption, our second     Bite at adulthood’s sour cherry;  And when it’s done, when the tallies are reckoned     And we feel the slowing of the birthdays zipping  Past like the exit signs for junction     33, will we have come this far  Only for the settled life itself to seal our dysfunction     Rather than those years of frenzied chasing?  We thought those threadbare rented rooms, curtained    With frost and damp, would be the time the  Low tide turned amid the hurt and
    Searching. What if they prove instead the  High water mark? These kids have 4G, streaming media, wi-fi,     Colossal debt, jobs pre-empted by machines;  We had payphones, typewriters, a dust-strewn, scratchy hi-fi,    Student grants and jobs that worked us like machines  And all of us austerity, austerity and ISIS,
    Seas that go on rising through each summit,  Refugees, and leaders somehow baffled by a crisis     Every bugger else could spot a mile off Just as, this time last year, we watched the occupation     Of Central Office while they pricetagged hope and knowledge, Surprised by the moral pluck and spunk of a generation
    Dismissed as dismal materialist go-getters. Equally  Wrong-footed, the coppers made a kettle,
    Flung kids from wheelchair seats, performed the miracle  Of raising a new cohort to its feet and on its mettle     To pick up where we left the poll tax off.  This time, beyond London’s hall of mirrors, every region      Saw insurgent youth again  And round Coles Corner marched a stoked-up legion
    Of sophomores and schoolkids side by side. We know any  Booming cogwheels will surely crunch and seize up     Should we live to see recovery, we know the rest:  Clegg and the Tories put the fees up —
    But now we know the nature of autumn’s bonus hope:  Despite the cost of learning going treble,
    The spirit that radiates as halls of residence revive  Is the spirit not of the entrepreneur but the rebel.     Let’s go again:  Psychology, Landscape Architecture,     Biotechnology, East Asian Studies:  An occupied theatre hosts a free lecture —     From barricades to trending topics  I followed the movement online while tending     The baby: one feed for the jaded, one  Feed for the pure. While we’re expending     Reproductive energies, a revolution’s spent  And look now: winter extends a brittle hand, calling    Last orders on the year  But I’ll be the obstinate last drinker, stalling
    For time while autumn’s tables are wiped down;  I’ll be the flâneur in the park, passing
    Dead leaves and regrets from hand to hand  While squirrels hunker below the slow massing
    Of polar air at the season’s borders. I’ll see you on the Other side. Perhaps they’re right, perhaps the interweaving     Of our threads into our children will be our Making after all, and soon we’ll be retrieving     Optimism from these lengthened nights as our  Adopted city draws new breath this morning     Like this oblique first light along the streets of Crookes With those unloaded bags of socks and books adorning     Freshman lawns. Let them be young  And daft, let fortune attend their drunken     Stumbling into roads. Let the kids be alright.  The shine will dull on this clutch of conkers, their shrunken    Drying bulk brittle like ageing bone, as blown  And brushed from grates go the last of the old year’s embers    And the season’s first curls of chimney smoke  Stroke the underside of the first chilly sky, while September’s     Evenings graduate from the grey of slate to the black of carbon.  Let the nights not draw in quite yet nor the kids grow sober —     Autumn’s advance and the slants of the Earth  Shade on these vestiges of warmth into October,
    Shade on, prolong, the welcome of this shifted city,  Let its embrace still widen. Now’s no moment for this prudent     Stock-taking, bean-counting, the accountant’s wary eye.  Let this place take in the refugee, the student,
    The one and all who reinvent, renew, regenerate.  Underfoot the leaves accrue like debts for tuition,     Degenerate to mulch: this is the dying season  Yet these guests now unpacking lives make scant imposition     But loan this city life, new blood, new reason.       

In the interview, James discusses the importance of workshopping and writing days. He reflects on ideas of the north in both his and Anne Stevenson’s poetry. He also talks about the significance of landscape and the elements in terms of how it affects the world view of individuals in a community. James goes onto discuss ‘North Sea off Carnoustie’ as a touchstone poem.  He explores different ideas of viewpoint or 'stance' by reflecting on his own poem ‘Coast Road, North Antrim.' He reflects on why his early poems were about leaving, and now why he writes about returning to his homeland.

James Caruth was born in Belfast but has lived in Sheffield for the last 33 years.   His first collection A Stone’s Throw was published by Staple in 2007.   Dark Peak a long sequence appeared from Longbarrow in 2008 followed by Marking The Lambs in 2010 and The Death of Narrative 2014 both published by Smith Doorstop.   His poems have appeared in a number of anthologies including The Footing (Longbarrow Press 2013), The Sheffield Anthology (2012); Cast – The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets (2014) and One For The Road (2017).   His last pamphlet Narrow Water was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2017   A full-length collection Speechless at Inch (Smith Doorstop, 2021) was shortlisted for The Derek Walcott Poetry Prize.  

‘Coast Road, North Antrim’ comes from Speechless at Inch.

Coast Road, North Antrim

It holds a narrow course between abrupt hills and the sea, where a cold sheen off the water tells us this is the north,

our Ocean Drive that skirts the island’s rim, where a Zen Master might sit to watch waves shatter, counting each iridescent fragment as an evening sun flares over Donegal.

Somewhere out there, Rockall hides its face, a storm gathering before its luminous approach.

Strings of fairy-lights dance along deserted promenades in the small seaside towns, streets glinting with rain.

This shore, the edge of all we know. Beyond the horizon we are strangers guarding our small square of earth, faces to the wind, translating a language of clouds, the taste of a breeze,

cautious when the shore birds up and leave but trusting the ocean’s persistence, safe in the consolation of a faith that each year grows closer to extinction.

North Sea Off Carnoustie   You know it by the northern look of the shore, by salt-worried faces, an absence of trees, an abundance of lighthouses. It’s a serious ocean.   Along marram-scarred, sandbitten margins wired roofs straggle out to where a cold little holiday fair has floated in and pitched itself safely near the prairie of a golf course. Coloured lights have sunk deep into the solid wind, but all they’ve caught is a pair of lovers and three silly boys. Everyone else has a dog. Or a room to get to.   The smells are of fish and of sewage and cut grass. Oystercatchers, doubtful of habitation, clamour weep, weep, weep, as they fuss over scummy black rocks the tide leaves for them.   The sea is as near as we come to another world.   But there in your stony and windswept garden a blackbird is confirming the grip of the land. You, you, he murmurs, dark purple in his voice.   And now in far quarters of the horizon lighthouses are awake, sending messages – invitations to the landlocked, warnings to the experienced, but to anyone returning from the planet ocean, candles in the windows of a safe earth.

from The Collected Poems 1955 - 1995 by Anne Stevenson (Oxford University Press, 1996)

In the interview, Pam talks about how Schuyler’s life affected what he focused on in his work, and his approach to writing ‘of-the-moment’ poems. She talks about his influences, his interest in diaries, his peripatetic life; how all of this comes through in ‘Hymn to Life’.  Pam then goes on to describe how she came to write her own piece ‘An Afternoon’ after workshopping in Sheffield and online. She reflects on why she wrote a first second and second person version of the poem.  She talks about the afterlife of the painter Edith Spiller. 

Pam has written a blog piece on James Schuyler's poem 'Hymn to Life' for Antony Wilson's website Lifesaving Poems which you can find here 'The Pure Pleasure of / Simply Looking...'    

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She has been widely published in magazines including Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures, The North, The Rialto, Magma and Mslexia. Pam has been Highly Commended for the Forward Prize and has won the Magma and the Poetry Business competitions and gained second and third prizes respectively in the Ledbury and Poets and Players competitions.  Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Pam’s collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam has a PhD in Creative Writing from De Montfort University and is a Committee Member for Word!, a spoken-word night at Attenborough Arts Centre in  Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow.

Her web-site is https://pamthompsonpoetry.com/author/pamthompsonpoetry/

She is on Twitter as @fierydes.  

You can find a complete version of James Schuyler’s poem ‘Hymn to Life’ here from his collection Hymn to Life (1974, Random House). The text comes with an audio recording of the piece.

 An afternoon

    where adult lads  up from Derby, in shirts and jeans in January, ahead of an on-the-piss evening, walk fast at the side of their reflections in steel;  the fountain near the station,  which, when the sun dips,  will spill onto the pavement and freeze. In the Millennium Gallery,  Madonnas, flanked by fat putti,  vie for my attention  but I want something more subtle,  a painting or drawing that I’ll have to work at knowing. Over there, on the other side, with no-one else looking,  a watercolour under glass,  ‘Biography of a Snowdrop’,  February 20th, 1896, its greyish flower  seeming too heavy for the stem – how slowly she must have painted  while the light was still good.  Barely out of adolescence, its root,  scrotal, with white filaments. For our convenience, she returned on March 14th, prompted, perhaps,  by better weather, to draw exquisite cross-sections of sex organs: stigma and stamens; the segmented  flower like a star on a mosque  or a sliced fig, a tile, the day’s tile.  Picking snowdrops first thing,  inside her own biography, with spring lying in wait. Edith  Spiller. Look her up.

(First person perspective version)

An afternoon      where adult lads  up from Derby, in shirts and jeans in January, ahead of the on-the-piss afternoon,  walk fast at the side of their reflections in steel; the fountain near the station,  which, when the sun dips,  will spill onto the pavement and freeze. In the Millennium Gallery,  Madonnas, flanked by fat putti,  vie for your attention  but you want something more subtle,  a painting or drawing that you’ll have to work at knowing. Over there, on the other side, with no-one else looking,  a watercolour under glass,  ‘Biography of a Snowdrop’,  February 20th, 1896, its greyish flower  seeming too heavy for the stem – how slowly she must have painted  while the light was still good.  Barely out of adolescence, its root,  scrotal, with white filaments. For our convenience, she returned on March 14th, prompted, perhaps,  by better weather, to draw exquisite cross-sections of sex organs: stigma and stamens; the segmented  flower like a star on a mosque  or a sliced fig, a tile, the day’s tile.  Picking snowdrops first thing,  inside her own biography, with spring lying in wait. Edith  Spiller. Look her up.

(Second person perspective version)

In the interview, Suzannah reflects on the use of form, tone, humour, and the notion of objectionable or challenging narrators as she unpicks James Tate’s piece ‘Making the Best of the Holidays’.  She goes on to discuss her own work ‘A Course in Miracles’, in relation to ideas of faith, encountering different kinds of spiritual or transcendental experiences, and absorbing the sustenance that is on offer.

Suzannah Evans is the author of two collections of poetry, Near Future and Space Baby, both published by Nine Arches Press. Her first pamphlet Confusion Species was a winner in the 2012 Poetry Business Competition, and her second, Green, will be published by Little Betty Press next year. She lives in Sheffield and is a creative director of Sheaf Poetry Festival. 

A Course in Miracles Howarden, 2019

I’ve been counting the fly agarics on the library lawn and today there are 31.  At lunch the theology scholar laughs because I’m wearing slippers. I eat a baked avocado, which I’ve never eaten before.  I watch the yews that brush the churchyard wall while he pronounces the Greek Αποκάλυψic and asks me what is being revealed that might not be known otherwise. The avocado has been cooked in its skin with red onion and pepper.  A visiting vicar tells me Christians are unafraid because they know they will be saved and asks if I have a faith like that?  I imagine myself in the ruins of my house, fashioning a fallout shelter from a blown-off door. When John ate the scroll in Revelation it tasted both bitter and sweet and allowed him to speak prophesy, but did he wash it down with anything? The teacher of A Course in Miracles says consuming food is not essential but a human experience we’ve grown used to - while polishing off the last forkfuls of a tuna jacket.  Every day more toadstools rise out of the grass like cartoon thought-bubbles. I have been reading about the expanse of their finely rigged root systems and how they communicate with trees. If I have faith in anything it’s the plants. When the time comes they’ll eat me inside out.

Making the Best of the Holidays by James Tate (Harper Collins, 2004)

Justine called on Christmas Day to say she was thinking of killing herself. I said, ‘We’re in the middle of opening presents, Justine. Could you possibly call back later, that is, if you’re still alive.’  She was furious with me and called me all sorts of names which I refuse to dignify by repeating them. I hung up on her and returned to the joyful task of opening presents. Everyone seemed delighted with what they got, and that definitely included me. I placed a few more logs on the fire, and then the phone range again. This time it was Hugh and he had just taken all of his pills and washed them down with a quart of gin. ‘Sleep it off, Hugh,’ I said, ‘I can barely under- stand you, you’re slurring so badly. Call me tomorrow, Hugh, and Merry Christmas.’ The roast in the oven smelled delicious. The kids were playing with their new toys. Loni was giving me a big Christmas kiss when the phone rang again. It was Debbie. ‘I hate you,’ she said. ‘You’re the most disgusting human being on the planet.’ ‘You’re absolutely right,’ I said, ‘and I’ve always been aware of this. Nonetheless, Merry Christmas, Debbie.’ Halfway through dinner the phone rang again, but this time Loni answered it. When she came back to the table she looked pale. ‘Who was it?’ I  asked. ‘It was my mother,’ she said. ‘And what did she say?’ I asked. ‘She said she wasn’t my mother,’ she said.

You can read a text version of William Blake's (1757-1827) 'The Sick Rose' (with modernized punctuation) here: The Sick Rose (text version).  You can read another version - with accompanying images - here: The Sick Rose (text and image).

You can find out more about Sapo, and buy copies here on The Longbarrow Press website: Sapo (Longbarrow Press)

He reflects on the idea that when poets create poems they are often ‘in conversation’ with other writers’ works.  How do poems talk away to other poems? An intriguing prospect if you are eavesdropping on this communication, but also possibly distancing as well if you don’t share the intimate knowledge that is being passed on. This is what the podcast will look to explore in depth: what poets understand about this process of responding to texts, poems that they have read.

In the first upcoming podcast Chris will talk to the poet Rob Hindle about William Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’ and how it influenced, played a part in the writing of his own piece ‘The Sick Rose’ from his collection Sapo (Longbarrow Press).