This episode features a conversation with Maurice Riordan, whose Selected Poems has just been published by Faber. The poems were selected by the poet Jack Underwood, who also provides an introduction to the book, explaining his choices. Maurice Riordan is an Irish poet, translator, teacher, and editor who was born in County Cork in Ireland. The Selected Poems features work from his first book, A Word from the Loki (published in 1995), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and runs through to his most recent collection from 2021, Shoulder Tap. It includes poems from four other books, as well as a previously uncollected poem. Maurice’s collection Floods, published in 2000, was a Book of the Year in the Sunday Times and Irish Times, whilst The Holy Land (from 2007) won the Michael Hartnett Award. The Water Stealer (2013) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Maurice’s interest with science and the environment, whilst evident in his own writing, is also clear in a number of the anthologies he has edited, such as A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (2000), a book he edited with Jon Turney; an anthology of ecological poems, Wild Reckoning (2004), edited with John Burnside; and Dark Matter (2008), edited with the astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Maurice has taught at Imperial College and Goldsmiths College, and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam. He was the Editor of The Poetry Review from 2013-17. As you might expect, Maurice’s Selected Poems showcases the remarkable range of the poet’s work and interests. He is well known for writing about his growing up in rural Ireland, and you will find numerous examples of that here, such as in the beautifully observed ‘Rural Electrification, 1956’, originally published in A Word from the Loki, or a series of eighteen pieces called ‘The Idylls’ that first appeared in The Holy Land. But we also encounter a great deal of what Maurice calls in one poem ‘inner and outer weather’ and what we might see as an interest in the fate of the human being in the world. This is an interest examined in a philosophical way as in the poem ‘Floods’, or as recognition that we are but organisms in the ‘biochemical soup’, or often in poems laced with irony, such as ‘Time Out’. There are poems here too about the unreliability of memory, involved with classical and mythical subjects, and also deft tributes to the life and work of other writers, such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Reading the Selected Poems is a rich and engrossing experience and of course in a conversation like this we can only touch on a few topics, so I recommend you track down a copy of the book yourself. We begin by talking about the form of the book and how Maurice felt about having his poems selected by someone else. We go on to consider one of the repeated images in the poems - the ‘lull’ or held moment and what it might mean, and Maurice then reads ‘The Face’. He discusses the way in which this poem - and others - might be said to deal with the self, scepticism, and uncertainty, and then we contrast this with Maurice’s interest in the rigour and observational approach that might be gleaned from scientific methods and a fascination with process. The conversation concludes with Maurice’s thoughts on the ways in which his poems present local phenomena - from very specific references to objects, to the naming of places in poems that we see in ‘The Idylls’ or ‘Mediums’.

In October 2024, the writers Helen Calcutt and Hannah Copley visited Oxford Brookes and gave a terrific reading from their latest poetry collections: Feeling All the Kills and Lapwing. We took advantage of their being here to interview them about their work - an interview that was conducted by our two current Poetry Centre Interns, Ruby McKie and Marie Kennedy, who are both in their second year at Brookes studying English Literature with Creative Writing. So in this episode you’ll first hear Ruby quizzing Helen, then Marie asking Hannah about her collection, and then some general discussion about the two collections’ shared interests. The episode concludes with Ruby and Marie reflecting on their own writing and how their reading of Helen and Hannah’s work has inspired them. Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist, and choreographer. She is the author of collections ‘Somehow’ (Verve Poetry Press) a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet & Poetry School Book of the Year (2020), ‘Unable Mother’ (V. Press, 2018) and ‘Feeling All the Kills’ (Pavilion Poetry, 2024) a verse account of assault and recovery. She is creator and editor of anthology ‘Eighty-Four: Poems on Male Suicide, Vulnerability, Grief and Hope’ (Verve Press, 2019). It was a Saboteur Award shortlist and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year, 2019. Helen is Artistic Director of cross arts theatre company ‘Beyond Words’. Her dance adaptation of Max Porter’s, ‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’ is funded by Arts Council England and supported by One Dance U.K. and the Birmingham REP Theatre. Helen was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Loughborough University for her outstanding contribution to the arts in 2023. You can follow Helen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/helen_calcutt/ Hannah Copley is a poet, editor and researcher. Her second collection, Lapwing was published in 2024 by Pavilion Poetry and explores restlessness, addiction, and ecological and personal grief. It was selected as a 2024 Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation, shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize, and was awarded second prize in the 2024 Laurel Prize. Her first collection, Speculum, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold and other magazines and anthologies and she has previously won the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the York Literature Festival Prize. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster and a poetry editor at Stand magazine. Hannah is on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/hlcopley/

Ange Mlinko has published six collections of poetry, including Starred Wire, published by Coffee House Press in 2005 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; Shoulder Season with Coffee House Press in 2010, which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2010, and a finalist for a PEN Center USA award. Marvelous Things Overheard was selected as one of the best books of the year in the New Yorker and the Boston Globe in 2013. In his review of Ange’s last collection, Venice, in the New York Times, Troy Jollimore noted that her poems are ‘wild, energetic, alive, wantonly catholic in their allusiveness, often downright chatty.’ Ange has won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, the Frederick Bock Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Formerly the poetry editor of The Nation, she is now the poetry editor of the literary journal, Subtropics, which is based at the University of Florida where Ange is a professor of English. Ange has just published two books almost simultaneously: Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, a work of lyrical criticism which came out from Oxford University Press at the end of 2024, and her seventh collection of poetry, Foxglovewise, which was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in the US and by Faber in the UK. Foxglovewise is Ange’s first - but much overdue - UK publication. As its name suggests, Foxglovewise is a book much concerned with the relationship between place and who and what lives there, flora and fauna - whether it is an encounter with a culinary garden in a Scottish cemetery or the otherworldliness of Florida. It is a book that conjures up very particular spaces, even if the poet herself doesn’t feel located in one place. As in Ange’s other writing, the poems can be read microcosmically - focussed on the specific but also speaking broadly and acutely to issues that affect the world at large - what it’s like to find yourself off the map, being subject to ‘history’s forces’, what being a gardener or being in tune with the land, or, as she puts it, ‘negotiating earth’s curve’, can tell us about the stories we use to make sense of ourselves. Like Ange’s other work, too, the writing is crafted not just with an ear to the possibilities in language but also with a degree of levity that - in spite of moments where the poet ‘mark[s] the edge of the abyss’ - also allows the reader or listener in through humour to the kind of big ideas we should all be confronting, rather than keeping them out. In this conversation Ange talks to Niall Munro about a number of these topics, and Ange reads two poems from the collection, ‘Foxglovewise’ and ‘Voluptuous Provision’. She also offers insights into some of the differences she sees between US and UK poetry and the role of the poet. If you have any thoughts on the episode, feel free to get in touch: you can reach us on social media (@brookespoetry) or e-mail us at poetrycentre@brookes.ac.uk

In this extra mini-episode, which follows on from a longer interview with Dr Eric White, Eric gives us some insight into the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technologies (or AGAST) project, which draws on his research to consider what kinds of powerful applications these modernist technologies might have today.

This is the second instalment in an occasional series to feature research that colleagues are engaged with at Oxford Brookes University. This episode includes an interview with Dr Eric White, who is a Reader in American Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Eric specializes in avant-garde literature and is the author of two books: Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic: Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday (2020) and Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism (2013). He has also prepared critical editions of texts, including Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (2020) and The Early Career of William Carlos Williams (2013). Eric is the principal investigator of the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology (AGAST) Project, a digital humanities collaboration that reimagines modernists’ inventions using XR (Extended Reality, a term that includes virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality). Together with Dr Georgina Colby, he co-edits two Edinburgh University Press Series on avant-garde writing. In this discussion, Niall Munro and Eric begin by talking about Eric’s early research that focussed on the little magazines and magazine culture in North America in the modernist period and eventually became the focus of his first book. We think about some of the ideas that underpin that book, such as localism and localist modernism, and zoom in to look at two highly influential little modernist magazines, Others and Fire!! After this, we move on to consider some of the research that featured in Eric’s second book, Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic, and Eric reflects on the relationship between avant-garde art practice and technology, as he draws attention to the work of modernist writers such as Mina Loy. Eric goes on to outline one of the key arguments in his book - that writers like Loy employed techno-bathetic strategies to propose new ways of thinking about technology, strategies that could often be highly emancipatory. In addition to Loy, Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic includes a number of other intriguing characters, and none is perhaps more intriguing than Bob Brown. Eric explains how Brown, together with his wife Rose sought to bring avant-garde ideas into the mainstream, through projects such as his Reading Machine, a device that was supposed to change the way we read and related to texts. If the cinema had been transformed by the ‘talkies’, Brown reasoned, so too the book could be transformed by his ‘readies’. We close the podcast by thinking about how African American writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka used a particular form of technology in their work - the railroad - and how this kind of infrastructure gives voice to African American concerns and communities. Unlike other podcasts in this series, this one features some bonus material! In an extra mini-episode, Eric gives us some insight into the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technologies (or AGAST) project, which draws on his research to consider what kinds of powerful applications these modernist technologies might have today. We hope you enjoy the podcast - do get in touch if you have questions or want to let us know what you think. You can e-mail us via poetrycentre@brookes.ac.uk or find the Poetry Centre on social media - Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram - we’re @brookespoetry And thank you for listening!

This latest episode marks something of a departure for the Poetry Centre podcast. If you’re a regular or just occasional listener to this podcast, you’ll know that it normally features a poet in conversation about two or three of their poems. This episode is the first of a series in which Niall Munro talks with colleagues at Oxford Brookes University and showcases some of the very exciting research that they have been doing into poets and poetry. In this episode, Niall Munro talks with Dr Dinah Roe, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature here at Oxford Brookes. Dinah is an expert on Christina Rossetti, Victorian poetry, and the Pre-Raphaelites. During this past semester Dinah has run discussion groups and contributed an introduction to a Weekly Poem featuring Rossetti’s work that you can still find on our website, and we’re releasing this podcast on Sunday 5 December - Christina Rossetti’s birthday. In the discussion with Dinah, we focus on three poems by Rossetti: 'The heart knoweth its own bitterness', 'Love understands the mystery', and ‘Goblin Market’ and explore how Dinah came to be interested in Rossetti, the poet’s reputation, and the place of religion in Rossetti’s work. We also consider how Dinah’s view of Rossetti has changed during her time working with her poetry and prose and in the course of writing a book about her family, and how Rossetti’s experience as a carer affected her writing. Dinah received her BA from Vassar College and a PhD in English Literature from University College London. She is the author of Christina Rossetti's Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and The Rossettis in Wonderland: A Victorian Family History (Haus, 2011), and the editor of Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics, 2008) and The Pre-Raphaelites: From Rossetti to Ruskin (Penguin Classics, 2010). Dinah is currently writing a monograph on the interactions of literary and visual arts in Pre-Raphaelite art, taking into account the influence of nineteenth-century literature on book illustration, painting and the decorative arts from 1848 to the turn of the century. She is also editing a three volume edition of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Longman Annotated English Poets), due for publication in 2025. You can find out more about Dinah's work on her profile page on the Brookes website, and follow her on Twitter - find the links on our Podcasts page.

Leah Umansky is the author of two book-length collections, The Barbarous Century (2018), Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox, 2012), and two chapbooks, Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), and the Mad Men-inspired Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014). Her writing has been widely published in places like The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, Guernica, and American Poetry Review. She has been the host and curator of the New York City-based poetry series COUPLET since 2011, and is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Leah has become well known for her poetry inspired by TV series, such as Mad Men, Westworld, and Mr. Robot. Many of her Game of Thrones-inspired poems have been translated into Norwegian and Bengali. In 2013, Flavorwire named her #7 of 23 People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry, and her chapbook Don Dreams and I Dream was voted one of The Top 10 Chapbooks To Read Now in 2014 by Time Out New York. Leah has been a middle and high school English teacher for fifteen years and has also taught workshops at The Poetry School, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Visible Ink Program. She is also a collage-artist who has designed all of her book covers. In ‘Where are the Stars?’, one of the poems in her collection The Barbarous Century, Leah writes: ‘The self is mapped in certainties. I am certain that I can measure this in words.’ Those kind of certainties are consistent preoccupations of Leah’s work: hers is a poetry that frequently asserts ‘I am…’, ‘I will…’, ‘This is what I mean…’, and there is a self-confidence and ambition in her writing, especially in a poem like the first we look at together, ‘Unleashed’, that makes an interrogation of the self possible, especially the female self. In that poem and elsewhere, Leah explores the way that people change and suggests that such change can be immensely rewarding if we risk embracing it. This is sometimes an idealistic poetry that seeks to celebrate what is good in the world (at one point in our conversation, Leah says that ‘there’s always room for celebration’), but it is also a realistic one. With its desire to show what it’s like to be alive, Leah’s poetry is also happy - and sometimes seems compelled - to call out those things and those people who live meanly and selfishly, such as the ‘tyrant’ in her recent work - a thinly-disguised version of Donald Trump sometimes, but often a much broader figure of someone, usually a man, who has no sense of decency. And often that examination of goodness is bound up with questions of gender and in particular - as is evident in a poem we discuss, ‘[Of Men]’ - in the relationship between men and women. Just as these poems challenge traditional and obsolete notions of gender roles in their subject matter, so too their form bends and sometimes dismantles poetic conventions. Leah brings a tremendous energy and virtuosity to her work and to the way she talks about her work, and I think that comes across clearly in this interview. Please do check out the poems, which you can find on the Poetry Centre website - just look up the Podcast page - and seek out Leah’s work. There are links to her books, her website, and her social media on the Podcasts page too. Thank you for listening!

In this episode Niall Munro talks with Christopher Kempf about his new collection of poetry, What Though The Field Be Lost, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2021. Chris’s first poetry collection, Late in the Empire of Men, won the 2015 Levis Prize from Four Way Books and was reviewed widely, including in The New York Times. His scholarly book, Craft Class: The Workshop in American Culture, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can find out more about Chris on his website: christopherkempf.com What Though The Field Be Lost may be grounded in the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but it doesn't just offer just a fascinating engagement with the soil and statues there. It is also a profound exploration of conflict and memory more broadly in the United States. Indeed, one of the most striking things about the book is the way in which it is so attentive to the complexities of history. Through the discussion of two poems from the book, ‘Remembrance Day’ and ‘After,’ (both of which you can read on the Poetry Centre's Podcasts page), Chris considers first of all what motivated him to write about Gettysburg, ‘the presentness of the past’ that he felt there on what many consider - as he puts it - ‘the most consequential piece of land in the United States’, and how he responded to the ‘tactical beauty’ of the Confederate monuments that dominate the landscape now. We go on to think about how far it is still possible to claim an ‘American we’, something that Chris himself recognises might be an old-fashioned claim, but one that he puts forward with great vigour and skill in the collection, making use of the poetic or rhetorical strategy of the synecdoche - that is having one part of something stand in for the whole thing - to think about the relationship between the human body and the body politic. Chris also discusses his interest in the Civil War re-enactors that he met at Gettysburg and their motivations, and thinks too about art’s capacity to re-imagine the present. What possibilities does poetry provide as a space to think about radical equality in America, and what responsibilities does the poet have to society and to history? If you enjoy the podcast or have any comments, feel free to get in touch: we’re on social media where our handle is @brookespoetry, and you can e-mail me via the Poetry Centre website. Thanks again for listening!

celeste doaks is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields, a collection of poems published in 2015 by Wrecking Ball Press. The book was listed as one of the Ten Best Books of 2015 by Beltway Quarterly Poetry. In 2017, she edited and contributed to the anthology Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Joy, and Sexuality, published by Mason Jar Press. And in 2019 she published American Herstory, which was the winner of Backbone Press’s 2018 chapbook competition. The chapbook, which we talk about in the podcast, was named best chapbook by the Maryland Poet Laureate, Grace Cavalieri, and includes poems about First Lady Michelle Obama. celeste has received numerous awards, such as a 2017 Rubys Grant in Literary Arts, a Lucille Clifton Scholarship, and residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In addition to American Herstory, on the podcast we also discuss celeste’s five forthcoming poems about the nineteenth-century African American entrepreneur Mary Ellen Pleasant and an article that celeste wrote in Ms. Magazine about a recent innovative online concert given by the singer-songwriter Erykah Badu. We also mention celeste’s monthly book recommendation column, which blends together celeste’s thoughts about literature with astrology, Litscope, and her review of the poet Rachel Long’s book My Darling from the Lions, out now in the UK but soon to appear in the US. You can find links to all of these books, articles and poems on the Poetry Centre’s Podcasts page (https://www.brookes.ac.uk/poetry-centre/podcasts/). On the podcast, celeste reads two poems from American Herstory: the title poem and also ‘What the First Lady Found in my Homage’, and we talk about what Michelle Obama’s role as First Lady has meant for American life and politics, the recent election of Kamala Harris to the Vice Presidency, and a number of significant but neglected American women. celeste also explains how she wrote about Michelle Obama through the art work that the First Lady chose for the White House and what these choices can tell us about not just Obama herself, but America more generally. You can find out more about celeste's work on her website (https://doaksgirl.com/) and follow her on Twitter (@thedoaksgirl). It was such a pleasure to hear celeste read these poems and to talk to her about them. I urge you to check out American Herstory; it’s a truly vibrant and exciting collection of poems that explores - through humour, fine detail, and beautifully-imagined situations - Michelle Obama’s experience in the White House and some of the positive and painful challenges that came with that, as well as thinking through black women’s experiences in the United States now. And make sure you look out for celeste’s fascinating and important forthcoming poems about Mary Ellen Pleasant in Volume 33 of the Chicago Quarterly Review. Again, there is a link to the journal on the Poetry Centre’s Podcasts page. If you enjoy the podcast or have any comments, feel free to get in touch: we’re on social media where our handle is @brookespoetry, and you can e-mail me via the Poetry Centre website. Thanks again for listening!

In this episode, Niall Munro talks with the Gaelic poet Niall O’Gallagher. Niall studied and then taught at the University of Glasgow before going on to work as a journalist. As Niall mentions in the podcast, it was in his early days as a journalist that he began writing the poems that went into his first collection, Beatha Ùr (‘New Life’), published by Clàr in 2013. Three years later, he published Suain nan Trì Latha (‘Three Nights Dreaming’) in which - and again you’ll hear Niall discussing this - he made use of classical Gaelic forms to write modern love poems. A third collection, Fo Bhlàth (‘Flourishing’) has just been published. Niall also recently won the Gaelic prize in the Wigtown Poetry Competition in 2020 for his poem, ‘Penelope’. Niall has worked as a translator of poetry from Gaelic, Irish and Catalan, including work by Christopher Whyte (shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year in 2019) and he has also published Scottish Gaelic versions of work by the Irish poet Biddy Jenkinson in the Gaelic journal STEALL, where he acts as poetry editor. In 2019 Niall was named Bàrd Baile Ghlaschu, the City of Glasgow’s first Gaelic Poet Laureate. He is currently editing a selection of poems celebrating Glasgow and Gaelic. In the conversation, Niall talks about how he came to write in Gaelic, links between the Irish language and Scots Gaelic, and the kinds of traditional Gaelic metres and rhymes that Niall employs. He also discusses his decision not to translate his own work, the historical and contemporary Gaelic community of writers and readers in Glasgow, and Niall’s work as Glasgow’s Gaelic Poet Laureate. Niall reads - in Gaelic and in English - three poems, ‘Apologia Poetica’, ‘Scottish National Dictionary’, and ‘The Bird That Never Flew’. You can find the poems that we discuss on the Poetry Centre website - just head to the Podcasts page (https://www.brookes.ac.uk/poetry-centre/podcasts/episode-19--niall-o-gallagher-talks-to-niall-munro/) - and you can find out more about Niall’s work on his website, www.niallogallagher.com or follow him on Twitter, where his address is: @niallogallchoir

In the podcast, Ana discusses how she got into editing anthologies, how she goes about putting her anthologies together and making tough decisions about which poems to keep in and leave out, and why she thinks her most recent anthologies featuring only women poets - She Is Fierce and She Will Soar, both published by Pan Macmillan - are particularly important. You can find out more about Ana's work on her website (anasampson.co.uk) and follow her on Twitter (@AnaBooks). Ana and Niall discuss three poems from She Will Soar: 'The Sea-Shore' by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, and 'Sonnet XXXI' by Edna St. Vincent Millay. To read these poems, we are absolutely delighted to welcome the acclaimed actress-writer-director Romola Garai. Romola has worked extensively in film, television and theatre, and you will very likely have seen her in films such as Atonement or Suffragette, or on television, in shows like The Crimson Petal and the White for which she was nominated for a BAFTA. Her debut directorial feature, a horror film called Amulet, was released earlier this year, and Romola will shortly be appearing in a film with a poetry connection when she plays Dylan Thomas's wife, Caitlin, in a movie about the poet called Last Call. As you'll find out by listening to the podcast, she is also an exceptional reader of poetry.

Maya C. Popa is an American poet, researcher, editor, and teacher who has published two pamphlets: The Bees Have Been Canceled in 2017, and You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave in 2018. Most recently, her first full-length collection, American Faith, was published by Sarabande Books in 2019. The book was the runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and the winner of the 2020 North American Book Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia. She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Oxford Poetry Society, and Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, among others. Maya is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly, an English teacher and director of the Creative Writing Program at the Nightingale-Bamford school in NYC, and is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of wonder in poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London. As you’ll be able to tell from the recording, Niall Munro spoke with Maya in late May whilst the Covid-19 lockdown was still in place in New York City where she lives. They talked about three of the poems from American Faith: 'The Government Has Been Canceled', 'Meditation Having Felt and Forgotten', and 'Knockout Mouse Model'. You can read the poems that Maya discusses on the Poetry Centre’s Podcasts page, and you can order a copy of American Faith from Sarabande Books and the Poetry Book Society, as well as the usual retailers. You can also visit Maya’s own website and follow her on Twitter. Do tell us what you think of the podcast by e-mailing us or getting in touch via social media - we’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thank you for listening!

Jennifer Wong was born and brought up in Hong Kong. She now lives in the UK and works as a writer, translator and teacher. She has published three collections: *Goldfish* (2013), Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl - a pamphlet with Bitter Melon Poetry (2019), and most recently Letters Home 回 家, published by Nine Arches Press in 2020, which was selected as a Wild Card Choice by the Poetry Book Society. In this podcast, Jennifer reads and discusses four poems: ‘of butterflies’, ‘Girls from my class’, ‘My father, who taught me how to fold serviette penguins’, and ‘Truths 2.0’. You can read the poems that Jennifer discusses and find out more about her work on the Podcasts page on the Poetry Centre website – just search for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry’. In our discussion, Jennifer explores topics such as the relationship between her past and present life, how far the Chinese family might be perceived as ‘a perfect state of happiness’, her use of Cantonese and English in the poems, her formal choices, and the challenges of writing about the recent Hong Kong protests. Do tell us what you think of the podcast by e-mailing us or getting in touch via social media - we’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thank you for listening!

This interview was recorded in late November 2019 when Doyali visited the UK, and in it Doyali discusses the tensions in her poetry, how her work deals with chronic illness, the innovative formal choices that she makes for her poems in her Griffin Prize-shortlisted collection heft, the link between poetry, art and healing, and how she represents her family in her writing. She discusses three poems, all of which you can read on the Podcasts page of the Poetry Centre website: ‘sagittarius {the archer}’, ‘bhater mondo’, and ‘flare’.

Mariah is a poet, teacher and interdisciplinary researcher from Oxford. Her debut collection, a novel-in-sonnets called the love i do to you, was published in November 2019 by Eyewear. Poems from the novel were shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, The Melita Hume Prize and the manuscript won the AM Heath Prize. A second collection of poems the rafters are still burning which explores writing, constructions of whiteness and museum archives is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2020.

Peter Bearder may be better known to many as Pete the Temp. A spoken word poet, comic, and musician, Peter has appeared on television and radio, at festivals around the UK, and internationally with the British Council. He has been the National Poetry Slam Champion and in 2018 was awarded the Golden Hammer Award for services to spoken word. His poetry has appeared in a collection called Numbered Boxes (Burning Eye Books, 2017). As well as recordings of Peter’s performances and his terrific selection of interviews with spoken word artists, his website also features his 2015 TEDx talk about why every school should have a spoken word artist. Peter’s new book, Stage Invasion: Poetry and the Spoken Word Renaissance (Out-Spoken Press, 2019), is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the recent history and development of spoken word and will be required reading for anyone studying or fascinated by the art. The book covers a tremendous amount of ground, and in this podcast Peter and Niall discuss a number of the issues raised in Stage Invasion, such as Peter’s own first experience of a poetry slam, how he thinks about the world of spoken word now, and recent well-publicised criticisms of spoken word. They also talk about Peter’s own poetry and how he performs it, and the value of spoken word for society.

In the latest episode of the Poetry Centre Podcast, Niall Munro talks to James Arthur. James was born in Connecticut and grew up in Toronto. His poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and The Walrus. He has been awarded numerous scholarships and fellowships, such as the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a visiting fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. James’s first book of poetry Charms Against Lightning, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012, and his chapbook, Hundred Acre Wood, came out in 2018 with Anstruther Press. His second full collection, The Suicide’s Son, was published in spring of 2019 by Véhicule Press in Montreal. There is more about James and his work on his website. In this podcast, Niall and James discuss knowledge and childhood, living in Canada and the United States, drone warfare, and the experience of being a new parent. In particular, we talk about three of James’s poems: ‘Ode to an Encyclopedia’, ‘Drone’, and ‘Goodnight Moon’, all of which you can read by following the link associated with this episode.

We were delighted to catch up with Canadian poet Richard Harrison recently, who was passing through Oxford en route to Italy where he was to launch a new Italian translation of his poetry. Whilst he was in town, Richard gave an inspiring reading at the Society Cafe, and beforehand sat down with the Director of the Poetry Centre, Niall Munro, to discuss his work. In this interview Niall and Richard talk about the structure of Richard’s award-winning book On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood and the editing process; his relationship with his father who died from dementia; writing about grief; and the capabilities of poetry. You can also read a slightly different version of the interview on the Poetry Centre blog. Richard Harrison is a multiple-award-winning poet, essayist, and editor. His most recent book, On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood, was awarded the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. The book was also shortlisted for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and won the Stephan G. Stephansson Alberta Poetry Prize. His six books of poetry include Big Breath of a Wish, poems about his daughter’s acquisition of language, and Hero of the Play, poems in the language of hockey, launched at the Hockey Hall of Fame.

In this first episode in a new podcast series, Shara Lessley discusses her poem ‘The Clinic Bomber’s Mother’. The poem comes from Shara’s new book, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. In this discussion, Shara first reads her poem and then talks about a number of issues related to it and the book as a whole, such as motherhood, perceptions of the Middle East by Americans and violence in the Middle East and in America, especially domestic terrorism. Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice (with Bruce Snider), she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Shara holds Bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. She was recently awarded Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Oxford. Find out more about Shara’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.

This latest podcast features a dialogue between Terri Mullholland and Siân Thomas, inspired by Siân’s poem, ‘The Abandoned House’. Amongst other venues, Terri and Siân presented their dialogue at the Shifting Territories conference in May 2013. Together with their discussion, they also showed a number of photographs of the particular house in Sussex, which were taken by the photographer Caroline Pooley. These are also presented here. In this recording, Siân reads her poem, and then talks about how she discovered the house. The discussion touches upon various issues related to the poem and to Terri’s own research, including: how a critical-creative dialogue works, the idea of the ruin in literature, the association of memory with place, the presentation of decay in poetry, and the effect of development on the Weald in East Sussex. ‘The Abandoned House’ originally appeared in issue #7, ‘Time and Memory’ of SWAMP: An Online Magazine for Postgraduate Creative Writing.