Ep. 129 – Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (Poetry, History, Hope, and Honesty)

February 18, 2021 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

“We are the outcome of our own labour” – listen here

When I think of the living poets today whose work inspires me, who I’m also lucky enough to call friends or peers in the poetry world, I often think of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan. The first time we shared a bill was April 2018 at the Migration Museum, at an event celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Rock Against Racism march and wider movement that mobilised and unified hundreds of thousands of people around live music to oppose rising racism and British fascism in the 70s, at a time where Eric Clapton parroted Enoch Powell, skinheads were loud and proud, and even our sacred Bowie toyed with far-right politics during his coke-fuelled Thin White Duke-phase (both rock stars did eventually apologise). In between our sets, Suhaiymah and I, two twenty-something idealists considerably bringing down the average age of the room, bemoaned how slow the progress of anti-racist movements has been, and how Britain’s institutions were still wedded to the same racial prejudices as the 70s, whether the Islamophobia of the ‘counter-terrorist’ Prevent programme which leads to racial profiling in schools and universities, how the racist Met police force use violence against Black people, or how the Home Office’s enforcing of borders leads to needless death and separation. We even noted how there wasn’t a single dark-skinned Black person on the panel that evening. I can remember the conversation we had vividly because we also spoke about contemporary solutions, we spoke about how poets were part of the building and sharing of new languages and ways of thinking that can effectively show the same contradictions and injustices of the system, and help galvanize people into action. Since then, through her work in theatre, social commentary, lectures and teaching, and poetry, I’ve seen Suhaiymah consistently and in a way that is emotionally affecting every time, show the injustices of white supremacy for exactly what they are; brutally enforced white lies that keep millions in awful conditions to maintain an exploitative status quo. It’s a struggle to keep fighting for what you know to be right and just, even more so during a pandemic that tightens the screw on all our existing inequalities, but through the strength in her speeches, the clarity in her political educating, and the directness of her poetry, I feel like I’ve had a well of radically replenishing and honest art to return to, that has helped nourish and inspire me. It’s a pleasure to share this episode and Suhaiymah’s work with you, please go listen wherever you get your podcasts!

Ep.129 is available wherever you get your podcasts, incl Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Soundcloud. The full transcript will be here soon and the next episode will be with [REDACTED] and we’re continuing with weekly episodes until the end of February at least. Rest assured, lots of great poets coming up, stay with us for the journey!

Hope everyone’s keeping safe, keeping positive and testing negative, and staying hydrated both literally and conceptually.

PJ, The Repeat Beat Poet
linktr.ee/repeatbeatpoet.

Ep. 126 – Katie Ailes (and the first one from me!)

January 20, 2021January 20, 2021 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

‘Guess who’s back, back again, Lunar’s back, tell a friend!’ as Eminem famously almost rapped. I’m proud and pleased as proverbial punch to be taking over Lunar. I’ve been listening since 2015, and as I said in the episode, in that time I gravitated to the spaces for critical discussion around poetry to better understand just why and how poetry holds the power it does. Naturally, after a guest appearance and two guest host appearances here, when David mentioned he was looking for a new but experienced voice to help the podcast grow, to reach new communities within the world of poetry and outside, and to continue his work, I knew I could fill his soft-spoken shoes and take this incredible project off his hands. More time for carpentry. Thank you to David for entrusting me with this treasure trove of knowledge, and in advance, thanks to you the listeners for your time.

In this episode I’m speaking with Katie Ailes. She’s a remarkable poet, and academic whose PhD study on performance & authenticity within spoken word expands deep into the regular conversations that swirl across the smoking areas and train platforms after poetry nights country-wide;

how can we better evaluate our art form?
where is the critical framework for spoken word poetry?
(how) can poets maintain their honesty and authenticity?
what separates modern spoken word poetry from other styles of poetry?

To build a framework for what will doubtlessly form the foundation of *credible* spoken word criticism and study, Katie drew from performance art, audience and authenticity studies, and conducted over 70 hours worth of interviews with leading spoken word artists from across the UK. Alongside her research, Katie’s a longtime LPP supporter and friend, so who better to interview at the beginning of my tenure/stewardship/benevolent reign of joy/time in service to you, the Lunar listeners.

The episode is available wherever you get your podcasts, incl Spotify and Soundcloud. The full transcript will be here soon and the next episode will be with Otis Mensah.

Glad to be back with you, let’s GO!

Peter deGraft-Johnson
@RepeatBeatPoet

Episode 119 – Shagufta K. Iqbal

October 30, 2018 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

Ep119 Shagufta K Iqbal

Episode 119 is available to download now via iTunes, Stitcher Radio, SoundCloud or wherever else you download your podcasts.

David Turner chats to Shagufta K. Iqbal. David met up with Shagufta back in early October 2018 at her home in Bristol, to discuss her writing and the collaborative nature of providing platforms for other writers, focusing on the role she played in founding the YoniVerse collective, a platform and support network for South Asian women writers.

A transcript of this episode (minus poems read during the recording) can be found under this post. For a full transcript including poems download here.

Transcript:

Transcription by Christabel Smith

Host: David Turner – DT

Guest: Shagufta K. Iqbal – SKI

Introduction:

DT: Hello. Welcome to episode 119 of Lunar Poetry Podcasts. My name is David Turner. How are you? We seem to be hurtling towards the end of the year and the trees in the south west of England are now resembling the interior of 1970s’ caravans, but I’m sitting in the blazing sun, which is momentarily nice, but probably signals doom for the world and us.

This month’s guest is Bristol-based poet Shagufta K Iqbal. I met up with Shagufta back in early October 2018 at her home in Bristol, to discuss the many facets of her career, which I won’t go into now as she covers that perfectly herself in her own introduction coming up in just a moment. As well as her writing, we chat a lot about the collaborative nature of providing platforms for other writers, focusing on the role she played in founding the YoniVerse collective, a platform and support network for South Asian women writers.

It’s also been a while since I’ve had a guest on that would define themselves as firstly a spoken-word artist, so it was great to hear another writer’s thoughts and experiences of making the transition from successful stage presence to published author. Before the conversation, a huge thank you to everyone who’s bought a copy of our anthology Why Poetry?, either from a bookshop or direct from the publisher Verve Poetry Press.

Just a quick reminder that our funding from Arts Council England ends this month. After that, we’ll need to look at other ways to fund the various aspects of the series. My main focus at the moment is to secure the money to continue to transcribe the podcast. Each episode currently costs around £80 to transcribe and it’s something I don’t have the skill or time to do myself. All the money we make from the book will be reinvested into making the series as accessible as possible, so if you buy a book, you’ll be directly playing a big part in that accessibility.

Link to the book in the episode description. Side note: if you can’t afford to buy the book, then ask for it at your library. I’m sure they’ll get it in for you. I’ll be back at the end of the episode to share a poem from the book. Speaking of transcripts, you can download a full transcript of this episode over at our website, www.lunarpoetrypodcasts.com

Also, don’t forget to check out our companion podcast, A Poem A Week, in which we bring you, you guessed it, a poem every week, from the likes of Andrew McMillan, Deanna Rodger, Raymond Antrobus, Emily Harrison, Will Harris and Meryl Pugh. All episodes can be found wherever you get your podcasts or over at our website. Something’s flying overhead. That’s probably enough from me. Here’s Shagufta.

Conversation:

SKI: I’m Shagufta K Iqbal. I’m a poet, experimenting with film sometimes and a writer, workshop facilitator, founder of YoniVerse. I’m mostly here to talk about the Jam Is For Girls, Girls Get Jam poetry collection, which is a debut poetry collection and it’s titled after a poem called Jam Is For Girls, Girls Get Jam. It’s probably one of the first spoken-word pieces I wrote. I really like it for that reason because it forced me to go down into another way of writing poetry that wasn’t just page poetry, it was much more conversational, it was about speaking with your audience.

I started writing a poem many, many years before this and I couldn’t finish the poem. I think I was too emotionally caught up in the narrative of that piece and I put it away. It revived itself through this and came and spoke to me in this way. It’s about being Punjabi, about being brought up in the UK as third-generation Punjabi and Punjabi culture is, particularly in rural parts of Pakistan, where we’re from, very farming based and so the men would go out and work the fields and do all the hard labourers’ work and the women also would do all of the hard work, but for some reason, they would get the vegetables and then men would get the meat.

They would get the jam for breakfast, the men would get the eggs and so when we came over here, that mentality stayed, even though the lifestyle and the culture here had changed. So I think one of my biggest reasons for being a feminist, even though I didn’t really like eggs, I was making a very strong point about why we still continued with these gender roles, even though they no longer needed to exist in this society we lived in. So it’s called;

To read this poem please download the full transcript here.

DT: Thank you very much, Shagufta. It’s always amazing to hear people read for the first time away from an audience, because I’ve often seen my guests speak at spoken-word events or more staid readings, it’s always a very different thing when it’s one-to-one and you’re sitting in someone’s very lovely home and they’ve welcomed you in. What do you do after a poem like that? It seems very glib to say ‘Hello, welcome to Lunar Poetry Podcasts, let’s get going’.

Maybe we use that point to start because we were speaking very briefly before I hit ‘record’ about this question of who we’re trying to talk to and why are we choosing the method, or any method, to talk to people. Throughout the archive we’ve had a lot of people who would class themselves first and foremost as spoken-word artists or poetry slammers or performance poets, it’s been a while since we talked directly about how we make the transition from stage to page. I’d like to acknowledge this conversation will go nowhere near discussing any divide between those two things, I just think it’s interesting to talk to someone who started in the way you did, in your initial interaction with poetry, what was the attraction to come to a book? Perhaps we could just talk a bit about how you got started first and we’ll naturally come towards the book.

SKI: I suppose for me, writing is very much about making sense of the world as I know it. For me, it’s a really good way to process my own emotions and feelings and thoughts on a subject matter. I started writing, for me, I think I go between stage and page and at various points of my life, I feel more comfortable in a stage space and other times, I feel more comfortable in a page space.

I think all spoken-word poets should be comfortable with page because I think if you’re going to perform something, you’ve had to have worked on it on that page or on the phone as they do these days. I’ve started doing it myself so I can’t say anything about that. That’s where the writing came from and I studied at Bath Spa University so I was doing a lot of page poetry at the university and exploring my voice through that.

Bristol had a really good spoken-word scene, we had Lucy English and Glenn Carmichael, who were pioneering a lot of the slam that was happening. I started going along to those events as a really good way to hear poets that weren’t dead poets and contemporary poets and poets living in the same communities and societies as me and the issues that were pertinent to their lives and how that interlinked and intertwined with some of the concerns or some of the questions that I had.

That seemed like a really good way to learn about my contemporaries and therefore learn about my own work. So that’s kind of how I got into spoken word. I really like spoken word because I feel it stops you from being a lazy writer, because you are so aware of your audience and not just at the writing stage, but at the stage where you’re engaging with the audiences. I think it’s interesting reading to somebody who’s just a singular person in front of you and then trying to engage with an entire room full of people, a theatre full of people.

I think it forces you to work really hard and forces you to think about the way you’re communicating your work, otherwise you can end up being very much in your own head. I suppose also being a writer who is a woman of colour, sometimes you feel that you’re very aware of your audiences about the nuances they get in your work, whether it’s landed in the same way that you’ve actually spoken out what you think is the truth.

I think I’ve sometimes deliberately tried to seek out audiences who are similar to myself in background, so that I feel the stories I’m telling are maybe authentic or land with somebody else in the same way and actually, I’m not making this all up, it’s not just me who’s kind of saying ‘oh, this is the truth’. It’s a very vague way of saying…

DT: There’s a couple of very important points in that. Let me try and divide them clearly so you can respond or ignore them. Recently, the poet Niall O’Sullivan, who for the last 14 years has hosted Poetry Unplugged in London, a regular open-mic night, has been writing a series of thoughts and ideas about spoken word on Twitter, which he does quite a lot, but more recently, he’s been hitting some really interesting points.

His contention that a lot of spoken-word artists and fans will claim that they like the art form because it links them to a very, very, very old oral tradition and his point is that spoken word is rooted in writing, it’s rooted in the page because unless you’re improvising, most work has been worked on either pen and paper or, like you said, smartphones and tablets.

The second point was that you have that immediate connection with the audience, they’re there, you can’t hide from them, it does force you to acknowledge them in a way you might not do, writing in your traditional poetry garret, all alone, when you’ve isolated yourself from the world because the world doesn’t understand you.

Perhaps what is missing for a lot of people that get into spoken word, and maybe it’s an attraction for getting stuff on a page, is that editorial conversation you might have, of OK, this is how something hits in the moment, this is the emotion it drags out of our audience, but where do you go if you want to talk about the longer-lasting effects of that poem? Through Twitter, you might hear something, but it’s unusual to hear what lasting effect your poetry has had on someone.

SKI: OK, three questions. Let’s start from the beginning with a lot of spoken-word poets saying it’s going back to oral traditions of storytelling, Beowulf for example and other cultures which are rooted in oral traditions. Yeah, I suppose there’s a truth to that. I also think spoken-word is slightly different. I think a lot of that storytelling, that traditional oral storytelling, had not always but mostly had a really nice rhythm, a really nice rhyme, I’m thinking of the Koran, for example, so a lot of people who don’t speak Arabic know the entire Koran off by heart sometimes and that’s quite amazing to me because it’s a big old book.

It’s through the rhythm of it. It was there to be embedded in your mind. A lot of spoken-word poets now don’t use that rhyme and use free verse, so I feel that it’s not so easy to remember. You’ve got to experiment with the page and you’ve got to experiment with seeing it written down. We live in a society where writing is very much part of our culture and our canons. So that’s one thing.

About the audience, speaking directly with the audience, in one respect I think it’s really good because it forces you to engage directly with an audience, but I have also noticed sometimes when I start to go to regular poetry nights, sometimes, the same thing will come up again and again and again and there’s a danger of people performing in silos and working in these spaces where it’s just echoing back the same sentiments and getting a click from an audience for saying something that’s being going round on social media or being politically current in your work and maybe losing the poetry. I think that’s where the danger is

When I say you need to write with it, it’s you need to spend time. Even if you’re somebody who doesn’t particularly need to see your poem on a page, you need to spend time in saying ‘what is it that makes this a poem?’ and not such a series of political statements and there are times I’ve gone to poetry night and thought ‘that person’s brilliant, they got the entire audience up on their feet and really engaged and in agreement with them, but at what point was that poetry? At what point did they make me see the world in a different way or did they just lay witness to what’s happening around them we all agree with?’

I think that’s where sometimes for me, the danger lies, with being in those public spaces of just talking with an audience because you lose the poetry where you sit down and you see a line actually written down on a page and you’ve read that line somewhere else or you’ve seen it on a hashtag, on an Instagram post, it feels like you need to work harder, that’s not good enough. That’s what I feel about the danger sometimes of being too performance-driven.

DT: I’m nodding, I don’t want to take over too much with any of my own opinions, but I do feel there’s a very real danger that spoken-word poetry falls into eliciting only emotions from people because that can be done through rhythm and pace and repetitive action. That is not to take away from the fact that if you are able to do that to an audience of 60 to 1000 people, that’s an amazing thing to be able to do.

SKI: Yes, but does that make you a poet or does that make you a performer?

DT: At what point did you start asking those questions of yourself?

SKI: Probably towards the end of when I wrote the collection and started taking the collection out and started performing it and felt sometimes in performance, the work was lost and I really wanted to say ‘I’ve got a book so if there’s a poem I really like, why don’t you spend some time with this poem?’ I think also because I’ve got a background in literature, there are times when I’ve gone back and read a poem or gone back and read a book and reading it the second, third, fourth time, you pick up something new every time.

There’s something quite nice about spending one-to-one time with a piece of literature or a piece of spoken word that’s moved you because you can listen to something online and it moves you the same way. So I think that’s when I started having those questions about what performance meant and at what stage I needed to attend to being a performer and being a writer.

DT: Before you started asking those questions and considering more the different layers in your work and how different poems may function differently in different settings, do you feel like had you asked that question of yourself earlier, do you feel like you would have got any answers? Do you feel there would have been a support network of people that could have helped you to begin to consider, without physically printing a book?

SKI: I think the lead-up towards a book, so lots of things are happening at the same time. The book is almost 10 years of writing, so there were times when I thought ‘this poem shouldn’t sit in this book’, but actually it’s part of an ongoing journey within the narrative of the book because it’s such a long period of time and that’s the thing with most spoken-word artists who are recently getting books out. Salena Godden, who’s been performing for a very long time, has released her first collection after so many years and so her voice must change within that.

I learnt a lot working with Apples and Snakes, I remember doing a project with Jasmine Gardosi who is a Brummy-based poet, a brilliant performer and a brilliant writer, and I remember she performed a piece of poetry, I was holding my breath the whole time, she really took you on this journey and I remember how powerful she made her words.

Sometimes I think when you are a writer, you just quickly want to get your words out there, just let everybody know ‘this is the story I’m telling, this is what it’s about’, whereas she really played with suspense and how she sometimes dragged a series of events out and stopped and just how in charge she was of her tone, how in charge she was of the way in which she delivered that work. Then I saw Deanna Rodger perform as well, who is now also a Bristol-based poet, but originally from London and she performed a poem, she wrote it originally as a love poem and performed it as a really cynical…

So we were doing this thing with Blahblahblah at the Wardrobe Theatre, which was on Valentine’s Day, so it was Love Vs The Cynics’ team, so we did a slam. I think she didn’t have a cynical poem, but she turned her love poem into a very cynical poem criticising love. The only thing she changed was her tone and the way she delivered it. Everything else is entirely the same, she didn’t change a single word of the poem, but the way she delivered it, I thought it’s just incredible when a performer is able to do something like that, just by using their tone and not changing the words.

DT: Part of the purpose of having the podcast is to include, without any divide and seams between them, people who would be considered purely page poets and people who would be considered purely performance-based, was to create a space where these conversations could be had, rather than having to wait to see a performer who challenges you on stage, because even if you see that on stage, you’re not necessarily going to have the space to talk to the person about what it meant to you, how it might influence you and how many of us have friends that understand our work deeply enough and would understand the questions we’re asking of ourselves as writers and artists.

That leads me to asking how much of the collection is you responding to wanting to produce a book and a collection of work where there was a vacuum and where you felt that conversation should be had? You can take that in any direction you want, but I’m thinking purely as an act of writing and being published and how that feeds into starting up an initiative like YoniVerse, which seems to be about maybe identifying a vacuum and providing a platform to talk through space and ideas?

SKI: OK, so with the writing, I think if you were a spoken-word poet and writing in the 90s and you’re writing in the early 2000s, you are not writing for a poetry collection, because you will never be published. You just never had any inkling you were looking at a poetry scene as it is today, even though poetry has had its ups and downs and spoken word has had revivals, especially when it looks over the Atlantic, there are things we imitate that happen in the States, but I didn’t write for a collection, I wrote because I felt I wanted and needed to write and I enjoy the process of writing.

So when Burning Eye books came up and now you’ve got Verve Poetry Press and quite a few presses publishing spoken-word poets, it’s really exciting for spoken-word poets because you realise you are producing something that’s lasting and it comes together in one book, rather than all these bits of paper you have everywhere or bits of poems on phones. I wasn’t really writing for a vacuum in that sense of filling in a gap, because I was always aware that as a spoken-word poet, there are only particular audiences you would be able to engage with.

I’m not Carol Ann Duffy, I’m not Shakespeare, I’m not going to have access to all the audiences that they had access to, so I was always aware that I am possibly writing for a small community or somebody on my doorstep or literally those small spaces, because literally nobody know who you are or what your work is. Unless you’re very good at knowing your marketing, you’re not going to get out there, so I think the collection really came into fruition when I saw some of my contemporaries being published.

I remember thinking ‘wow, Vanessa Kisuule’s been published, Rebecca Tantony’s been published and Lucy Lepchani’s been published and these are people I know. I drink with them, I’ve had tea with them, so possibly, maybe I could also be published. I started then working on the collection as it is and started to really focus on doing that and put together an application to the Arts Council to get time to write and I think that really made me think about my work as a professional writer.

That’s the other problem with being a writer, you always think ‘oh, it’s something I do on the side’ and it’s not something that’s serious, it’s just I dip into it. When I spoke to a colleague or friend of mine, she said ‘why don’t you get some protected time to write? Submit an application to the Arts Council, that’s what they’re there for.’ I think I hadn’t really thought of myself as a serious writer up until that point, so that’s when the collection came into being. In terms of the, we were talking about finding audiences and finding spaces where we feel there is a gap.

DT: What I do know about the YoniVerse, is it’s not simply an attempt to put events on, it’s not audience-focused, it’s participant and artist-focused and it’s about providing an event, I don’t mean safe space in the way it’s come to be politically charged now, but having a space where people feel comfortable. At what point do we go from this conversation about how we interact with the audience, how do we become community-focused as a producer and collaborative artist?

SKI: OK, so I think for a very long time, for some strange, naïve reason, I thought ‘I’m the only female brown poet who’s writing poetry’ and then I was being booked for gigs, I mean all poets face this, but I think if you come from a disadvantaged background, where you are maybe a minority background or have a disability or from the LGBT community, you’re always wondering at the back of your mind ‘am I being booked to headline this gig because I’m ticking a box or am I actually a good poet?’

It’s something you’re always trying to grapple with and I remember just wondering this and going on Facebook and just Googling other South West poets and I came across a poet called Amani Saeed, who was in Exeter at the time and she was doing a few gigs that I’d also done. Part of me was ‘argh, she’s going to take all of my gigs, she’s the new young brown poet, I’m no longer needed because there’s only ever room for one of us’ and then I thought ‘actually, let me reach out’ because at the time, I was working on a few projects in Bristol with other South Asian women.

They weren’t necessarily creative spaces, but around public engagement and creating communities. I think I realised growing up, particularly watching 90s’ politics, where it was a lot of fighting over the same pots of money and funding and often, people would be brought into an organisation as the mouthpiece for a certain community and then they would become a gatekeeper. You had a real issue around mentorship and a real issue around, sometimes I would go into an organisation and there was an older brown woman who I thought I could reach out to and she would help me and tell me how she got to the stage she’s gotten to and actually, there wasn’t that solidarity there, I think because it was a rivalry.

I know where that comes from and why that’s been set up in that way, so I thought ‘I’m not going to do that, I’m not going to be that person, I’m going to be kind’. So I reached out to Amani and we met up and had a chat and it was amazing. All the qualms, the doubts you have as a writer… our stories really resonated with each other and we started having a conversation about ‘do you think there are more of us? How many do you think there are? Where do you think they’re based? What do you think if we all came together and started writing together?’

Initially, we just started looking out and stalking people on social media and there are now tons of us, but at the time, we found Shareefa Energy who’s based in London, she’s incredible, Afshan Lodhi, who’s based in Manchester, Shruti [Chauhan] who’s based in the Midlands. We had Anjoli who’s also based in London and Sophia Thakur who’s also based in London.

We came together and every time we reached out to one of the poets and said ‘this is what we’re thinking of doing, coming together and collaborating and supporting each other and having a network where we help each other out or if there’s any stage of my journey that can help your stage of your journey, let’s provide that support’. It started off as a Facebook group and now it’s a WhatsApp group. ‘What’s the YoniVerse?’ It’s a WhatsApp group, basically, lots of memes get sent round.

It was an amazing revival of my work and I think writing together with that group of women really changed the way I wrote and being part of the, so what we do is we encourage other writers and emerging poets to come forward and use the spoken word Golden Tongue, which has a house at Rich Mix, and also we do the writers’ group, so we host a writing workshop on a monthly basis. At the moment, it’s on a bit of a break. It’s due to start again in the new year at the Free Word Centre. We encourage people to come together, write together, and provide a space for them to perform, where they feel safe and comfortable to do that.

It has changed the way I write. I think often when I was writing poetry before, if I made any cultural references, I would then within the poem, explain that cultural reference. Actually, that was kind of detrimental to my art because it’s like telling a joke and then explaining your joke within the joke. It stops being funny. It changed my writing in that I started to write much more concisely and expected my audience to get what I was saying because that’s the space I was performing in.

DT: I think it’s really important to bring up ideas like feeling like being the only one. It’s a direct result of the way so many panel-talks and events are put on, that there is only ever one example of anyone that doesn’t fit the societal norm traditionally attached to poetry. My maternal grandfather is from Spain, so all his brothers are Spanish and I grew up around flamenco guitars and singing. On my father’s side is a very, very London, working-class background and family and I couldn’t see any of those voices on either side of my family represented in poetry.

I’ve since found them, but it takes a lot of searching and if you don’t know where to begin looking, you’re never going to find it. What spoken word allowed me to do is to introduce that language I’d grown up with, a way of talking and communicating and to deliver that outright and then develop it into something that’s now more considered, but it has allowed me to write in a way I don’t think I would have learnt without the immediate reaction of an audience.

I wonder how much that then plays into the reason I started the podcast, which is a community idea, it’s a collaborative idea, I feel every interview is a collaboration with a guest. I don’t feel like it’s something I’m producing on my own, because it isn’t, because that would just be a monologue from me. I don’t even know if that’s a question, but if there’s anything you feel rings true…

SKI: What you’re talking about in terms of your maternal grandfather and the flamenco and that element of art seeping through is really interesting. I kind of felt I was between two spaces, maybe you felt that in the same way. I’d go to poetry nights, poetry recitals, for example, I remember being young and going to see Carol Ann Duffey recite poetry, I’m a big fan of Carol Ann Duffy’s work and then going to what would happen in our local community, called mashyras they were poetry nights, people would come together and it was spoken word for me. Somebody would go up on the stage, they would share a poem, it was usually dominated by men, it was a very male-driven space and the audience were so interactive

Like here, we click, the audience there were like ‘stop, stop, stop’ to the poet, ‘start from the beginning, I want to hear it all from the beginning’ and halfway through the poem. The poet would start right from the beginning and it was great because they were like ‘yes, they really like it, they want to hear it again’. There were two different spaces where it was happening and I was in between, not really able to fit in either one, so I think that was where the YoniVerse came in terms of, you’re right, finding a space where there is a balance between the two of them.

I think what’s really interesting is that poetry was perceived as a very academic thing, in both of those spaces. In the South Asian, it was very male-dominated and then you used to have lots of people who wouldn’t book me but would book a spoken-word poet who was male and would usually go and perform at Islamic events or fund-raisers and they were often talking about politics, about Palestine, and my poetry didn’t fit into that space, but also it didn’t fit into particular spaces here. That’s why the YoniVerse really works for a lot of South Asian women, well, female poets, we say ‘womxn’ with an x ,so it’s open to non-binary and trans women

Then I think what we try to do is play with those two spaces, try and bridge that gap and bring one into the other space and realise there are poets, that we don’t know our poets. The amount of times I’ve spoken to a taxi driver who is a poet, has been writing poetry, has told repeated lines of poetry to me, so you find poets in the spaces you don’t even imagine exist. Writing is something we’re all compelled to do in some way, many of us are.

DT: At least communicating with people. With a bit of distance away from someone and a pen and paper, they can communicate much more openly and be honest in a way that’s more representative in their head to how they feel and they can do that in a poem in a way they may not be able to face to face. In case there’s anyone listening and they think they’re the only one, as a reader or writer, how would people get in touch and find out what’s going on?

SKI: So find out through our social media accounts, so we always update events coming on. We run monthly events at the Rich Mix, again it’s all up on our social media, and we’re currently working as a collective on a show we’re looking to tour and we’re also working on a poetry collection.

DT: I’ll put links in the episode description. For anyone that doesn’t know, Rich Mix is a venue in Bethnal Green in East London.

SKI: Sorry, I’m very London-centric.

DT: It’s difficult when you know London intimately, I’m aware of it myself. There would probably be a lot of crossovers if people want to revisit our 100^th episode, which is with Rachel Long, founder of Octavia Collective, and two members, a huge amount of crossovers. I believe with Amani Saeed especially.

SKI: Anjoli goes between Octavia and. We also work with Zara who goes between the two spaces. Octavia very much inspired this, but we felt the need to have a South-Asia-specific space and that goes back, I think, to the fact I grew up in the 90s, I felt 90s’ politics was a little bit lazy and that we all were politically black and by being politically black, we were missing all the nuances and prejudices that the South Asia community have. I felt that we needed to address those things, but Octavia was very much the reason why I thought a collective was the way to go.

DT: The point you just made was very eloquently put and I would have done it quite cumbersomely. We’ll take a second reading if that’s OK.

SKI: I think at this point, it would be appropriate to have a short poem that I’ve written for my daughter. I probably wrote it because I had very much started this conversation with the other collective members, this idea about why we are creating a collective and what the purpose of it is. A huge part of it was when I was working in schools and doing workshops, I noticed South Asian girls were still the ones who, so many years after I left school, were very reserved, even when I would come in and they would see a brown face delivering a workshop.

But at the end they would be full of questions and I wondered why they weren’t taking up spaces in the same way and all the things they’re having to navigate to make sure their voices are heard and how taking up space is very difficult for South Asian women, not just in British society, but in our own communities and how European beauty standards is also something that keeps getting pushed on South Asian women.

So when I was pregnant with my daughter, people kept giving me advice about how to be a mother to a daughter and a lot of the advice was around her skin complexion and I would be told things like ‘drink more milk’, which was supposed to make my child come out lighter skinned. I thought ‘no, I probably shouldn’t be having sex with a darker-skinned man if I was going to have a lighter-skinned daughter’, that’s not how it works. But it was amazing how a lot of the advice I was being given was around how she was going to look and how she needed to be lighter skinned and how that was going to help her in society.

I remember growing up with very much bearing this in mind between me and my sister and how we had inequality. I’ve met many sisters, there will be a lighter-skinned one and a darker one and how that puts a rift between their relationship and so that’s a really long-winded introduction for a short poem, but it’s called Truth and it’s dedicated to my daughter.

To read this poem please download the full transcript here.

DT: Thank you. In the second half of the conversation, let’s focus on the direction your writing is taking now. Jam Is For Girls came out in 2017, so as is the natural order and pace with which poetry collections are written, that probably reflects stuff that is a few years old now, so I wonder if we could talk about how you see yourself as a writer now and how that has been different and also influenced by having your debut book being a collection of poetry.

SKI: I suppose once you have a book, you can say to funding bodies and also your mum ‘I am an official writer, I count for something now’ and it allows you to really work on the ways you write and create art. I’m currently writing a second poetry collection, but I really want to take my time with this one. This one took 10 years to write and I’m saying I want to take my time, but I want to take my time on each poem and work with mentoring.

I want to work through courses, I want to work by getting funding to make it happen and make it exist in a way, you know, you’ve worked to look at it as a collection, rather than ‘I’m just writing because I have the impulse to write’. I think that’s the way the second collection is coming together. My voice has changed very much from when I was writing 12 years ago and the stories that will be reflected in the new collection are reflective of a new generation or a generation of women who are in similar spaces as me, in their 30s.

I really want to pay homage to a lot of the stories from Punjabi culture, which I’ve always grown up knowing, but never felt had a place in my writing because I felt like my writing was very British. Now, I want to mix the two. The first collection was actually broken into the different rivers of Punjab, so Punjab literally means ‘five rivers’, ‘punj’ meaning five, ‘ab’ meaning rivers, so rivers play a really big part in my writing. So almost all the five rivers in Punjab, which is a region that crosses between India and Pakistan, so a lot of people are devastated at the fact that five rivers that flow into the Indus are now so separate from each other.

All of those rivers have their own myths and their own stories and their own love stories, so you have Heer Ranjha, which are kind of Romeo and Juliet stories and I really want to talk about the idea of romantic love and what that means in the world we live in today. So that’s one collection I’m writing as a follow-up from this one, The second piece I’m writing is a coming-of-age novel, which is a very different way of writing. I think with poetry, I really enjoy it and it’s those short bursts of emotion or thought you can get into a small poem, sometimes a longer piece, a three-minute or I’ve worked on poems that are 10 minutes long, but it’s quite contained.

Every word, every line, has to work harder because you’ve got to make sure everything is utilising the space correctly in the poem, but writing for a sustained period of time and meeting other novelists and authors who are pulling their hair out because they are at year number three with their same novel is an interesting area that I’m now discovering in my own writing. This poetry collection is very much the basis for the novel and it’s been something that’s been brewing at the back of my mind for a very long time.

I think I was doing the thing all poets do now, where we all have a solo show, so I started working on a solo show and every time I would sit down to write a script for the solo show, using this poetry collection, it kept writing itself as a novel. I couldn’t get it to write as a script for theatre, so after repeatedly doing that process again and again, I decided actually that if it was writing itself as a novel, let me try and experiment and see if I could write it as a novel.

So I’ve started writing a few pivotal scenes and then said ‘actually, you’re a creative, you’re a professional writer, so see if you can get any support in this’ and then submitted to the Arts Council’s new Developing Your Creative Practice grant, which I love. It is relatively new.

DT: Was it January this year, the first round?

SKI: Yes, so they usually have the grants for the arts, which is very project-driven, very much about creating an end product and this is allowing artists to just experiment with their art, to experiment with their voice, it’s almost like creating art for the sake of art, rather than how many bums in seats or how many audience members.

DT: There’s a critical difference with this funding, isn’t there? You don’t have to imagine an audience because there is no obligation on you.

SKI: Yes, it’s literally you being able to go away and just experiment and try new things and not have to have an end product, which is always the pressure. The amount of times I’m working with creative… Essentially, you’re applying because you want to write, but when you are applying to do a project or get a grant for the arts, what you’re doing is everything except for the writing. So you’re running the workshops, you’re going into schools, doing all the other things, but you’re not doing the writing.

This has been a godsend. I feel really lucky I was selected and offered this fund. I’m working with an amazing author, Sarvat Hasin, who is the author of a novel called This Wide Night and has had a new one come out this year. She’s been mentoring me in making sure that I’m hitting those milestones because I think it’s quite easy to talk about your novel to people all the time, ‘I’m writing a novel’ but not actually writing it, so having somebody who’s been through that process break down some of that process to you has been really useful.

DT: For anyone listening who’s interested in Developing Your Creative Practice and what that might mean to them as an artist, if you go back and listen to episode 114, it’s me in conversation with Gemma Seltzer, then of the Arts Council who instigated that funding. It’s like a half-hour breakdown of the difference between that and the existing project grants and what the difference is and some tips on applying and whether it’s relevant for you, because we’re talking about ideas of community but where do you go for this information?

It was very important for me, as someone who’s had, luckily enough – I say ‘luckily’, it’s actually a huge amount of work – three project grants from the Arts Council to fund this podcast project. It was very difficult to find information the first time I applied. Had I had access to a certain amount of information, I could have shaved five, six months off the initial application process. Anyone wanting to know any more about project grants can go to my website, there’s a page on there called Series Evaluation, where I’ve published the first year’s spending for my project.

It breaks down the costing and gives you an idea of what the Arts Council will actually fund and what you’re able to use the money for. That’s a side note. Again, I’ll put links in the episode description just because it feels relevant to the conversation we’re having.

SKI: I think it’s hugely important. In fact, when I received the funding, one of the things I put together was, if anyone wants to look at my application form, you’re more than welcome to, because it’s such a daunting thing, but once you see what some other artists have submitted for, I think it makes it much more accessible and easier to know there are people who are doing it who are saying ‘look, speak to me if you need advice’. I think it’s so important that people tap into that pot of funding and find out who your literature representative is as well, that really helps if you chat to them.

DT: Definitely. I just want to go back to a quick point you made about how you view the way you’re writing. You said you want to take your time. That is sort of a funny thing to say when the first book took 10 years, but it’s a common thing I hear and something I experienced myself, that almost feverish engagement we have with spoken word when we first start, there’s all these gigs you don’t know about, all these people you don’t know about and the whole thing can feel like a whirlwind.

There was a decade for you, four years for me, even if you took Salena Godden, for whom there’s almost 25 years and if you spoke to Lucy English as well, they would have the same feeling of how quickly that would all pass by and the conscious decision to say ‘no, I need to slow down now’.

SKI: It’s not a slowing down necessarily, it’s about focused time. When I say ironically ‘it took me 10 years to write this collection’, but I was writing on the side of being a student, of having a full-time job, of having a full-time life, so when I say I want to spend more time on individual poems, it’s that I want to dedicate my time as a writer, so it’s got my full attention, rather than me sitting on a bus and scribbling things together and then editing in a café very quickly somewhere.

It’s about me approaching my work in a very informed way, looking at the process of writing and looking at myself as a writer and allowing myself that space to be a writer rather than putting things together where I have possible time.

DT: Also, actively seeking mentoring relationships with other writers and placing yourself in a community because while it seems natural for you and I to say a spoken-word poet is a poet and a poet is a writer and a novelist is a writer so we’re all part of the same thing, in reality that’s not true. Not that anyone is shutting the door on you, but we all go to different events, we go to different types of readings, different panel discussions and it takes time to step out of one scene and get to know people in another.

SKI: Yes, there are lots of things I don’t know about. I don’t know about the world of the novelist. It’s very different. I think I am still at the stage where I’m not rushing to find out about the scene. I’m spending more time to find my own voice as a novelist and does it have a right to exist as a novelist or should I be going back to what I’m used to doing, which is poetry? It’s about finding my own voice and then when I’ve found that, where it sits in a community of other writers who write novels or novellas.

DT: You spoke earlier about developing the bilingual nature of how you communicate. Is that feeding into the ideas around the novel or is that a more lyrical theme within the poetry?

SKI: It’s a more lyrical thing within poetry. I’ve got two heads on at the moment. There is the poetry side, which I’m trying to keep to poetry. Obviously, I will always approach my storytelling as a poet and I love imagery, I love playing with all of those. Sometimes, I’m writing a piece which is for the novel and I think ‘this is a really good poem, actually, I should just use the separate bit as a poem’.

So it’s difficult to do that, but I think what’s really interesting is that I was going through the poetry collection and I’ve got a poem in here which has one or two lines completely written in Punjabi and I had an index at the back and I haven’t included that in the index at all. So there’s no translation and I remember thinking ‘oh, I haven’t translated that for my audiences’ whereas other bits and pieces and other words, I had translated. I think within my poetry, I started to go between the two different languages and because it made sense in my head, didn’t realise that it would not make sense with every single audience member. It’s quite interesting I was thinking in that way.

DT: I find it fascinating. Having come to a second language quite late in life, I learnt Norwegian in my late 20s. It feeds more interestingly into this conversation, again, what is our relationship to our audience? How much are we telling them as a poet? At what point do you feel in your development as a poet and writer that not everyone has to understand everything? Again, your point earlier, do you really want to ruin all your jokes by explaining everything seven times and making it clearer and clearer?

Then in that process, that journey, becoming more confident and knowing perhaps people will Google certain things if they don’t understand them. Actually, as a poem, is it any less for not knowing what certain words mean? A lot of your readers don’t know what a lot of English words mean.

SKI: Also, growing up, I say Punjabi, but we speak Pothwari, which is a kind of Punjabi, an oral language, then being a Muslim meant we learnt a lot of Arabic, but we learnt Arabic with a completely Pothwari accent and Pothwari alphabet, so whenever we speak or say any of the prayers or any of the words to Arabs, they have no idea what we are talking about, even though we think we’re speaking Arabic. Also, whilst we speak it, even though it looks the same as Arabic, we don’t know what we’re saying, so I’m used to praying, used to saying things that I have no idea what the meaning is, but it’s very emotive.

There are times when I’ve heard a prayer or I’ve been in the space where I’m hearing the Arabic language which always has a religious connotation for me, that I don’t understand, but it doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an effect on me or it doesn’t mean anything to me. I think being able to be in that space where I can consume a language without understanding the exact meaning of it has made me feel I can do that with my audiences and it should be fine.

DT: We need to trust readers more, don’t we? And listeners. The times I’ve had people read poems on the podcast in languages other than English are normally the ones where I get most feedback because people get in touch to say it was really nice to reengage as a listener and question why you’re listening to something when you know you’re not going to understand. With the poet Mosab Al Nomairy whose interview was in English, but all his readings were in Arabic, he’s a Syrian poet and I got so much feedback about the way people engaged and the emotion that dragged out of them without any ‘meaning’.

Something I’m thinking about a lot is the limitations of our language. Even though you think by using standard words that you’re getting across meaning to people, often you’re not. We convince ourselves we’re being clear and we’re not.

Before we finish, I want to make sure we mention the recent Burning Eye BAME poetry competition that you judged and the three winners, Hanan Issa, who wrote Where I’m Coming From?, which I really enjoyed, it’s really good, Caroline Teague and Adrian Earle who otherwise goes by the name Think/Write/Fly, he’s based in Birmingham and runs the Verse First podcast.

Can we chat a bit about your experience as a judge, how you were invited and whether there were any criteria placed on you to make your decision or whether it was a free role.

SKI: I’d been working on and off for Burning Eye and have a really good relationship for a long time and I think we had a conversation about how, until I started looking, I wasn’t aware of South Asian poets and you have to look and it’s about your networks. Originally, I was based in Bristol, my networks were Bristol. Then you go and speak to people beyond those networks, beyond those circles and it grows.

I think Burning Eye books are aware they are a spoken-word publisher, but they try to make sure they are, especially if you look at the spoken-word scene, it’s so diverse, you’ve got females forefronting a lot of spoken word as well, you’ve got the Kate Tempests, the Hollie McNishs, you’ve got many people of colour who are amazing writers, I’m thinking in particular the Jerwood winning poet, Raymond Antrobus. So the voices that come out of spoken word, it’s unlike the canon, where you’ve got to have an established literary background. You come in and if your work resonates with an audience and it’s powerful and strong, you can come in and break into that industry. Publishing should reflect that.

Burning Eye are very much aware they are publishing to reflect it. They wanted to make sure as a publisher they are doing that, so when we started having this conversation about the pamphlet, they were very aware they wanted to expand their knowledge of who is a person of colour and a writer out there and look to publish beyond just the South West as well. They do that anyway, but they wanted to look at particularly voices of colour, you’ve got Heaux Noire who run between London and Birmingham as well, and Birmingham’s got a really good poetry scene. Up North, you’ve also got really interesting voices.

It’s something I’m aware of in our collective. We’ve got Midland voices, Northern voices, Amani’s got a New Jersey accent. It’s really brilliant when you hear those new voices come together. In terms of how that was judged, I got the manuscripts, I wasn’t aware of who was submitting what, so there were no names attached. It was a brilliant experience. I spent the entire summer, just myself and Bridget [Hart], reading through poetry. I was like ‘this is the good life. This is my job, I’m reading poetry’. It was so much fun and so exciting.

I think I expanded my knowledge of who is a spoken-word poet and working in that industry, I think there are quite a few emerging voices and I’m really glad to see there are people emerging as poets and looking to push themselves and take up things, whereas before, we would always doubt ourselves. For me, the three who won were very experienced poets and clearly had spent a lot of time with poetry and read a lot of poetry and really thought about what it meant to be published.

That’s why those three were selected. We put together a shortlist and then from the shortlist, we knew who each manuscript belonged to and what their background was and made a decision about the winners. They were all really deserving. We weren’t aware of their backgrounds until that shortlist was in place.

DT: The geographical spread of the three writers is really interesting.

SKI: That was purely by chance. It wasn’t strategic that we wanted to have the Midlands, Wales, London, it was genuinely the works that resonated and spoke out.

DT: I think it’s going to be a really important thing if you are an emerging writer or unpublished because very often, things are London-focused. It seems very positive. Before we take a third reading, I want to thank you very much, I’ve had a great time chatting and there’s so much more we could have talked about. It’s a shame these things can’t go on for three hours. I don’t think the listeners would indulge me on that.

SKI: We’ll have a cup of tea and continue our chat.

DT: And there’s always opportunity to revisit things in future as well because there’s a lot to think about in this conversation. As writers and artists, our ideas change so much as the process goes along. If people want to check you out, where can they do that?

SKI: I’ve got a website, www.shaguftakiqbal.com and I’m on social media as Shagufta K Iqbal Poet. Instagram, I use a fair bit, I tweet occasionally and I’ve also got a Facebook page, but I’m not so on top that.

DT: Me too, the Facebook page for this podcast has gone right downhill. I’m not sure people can even see it with the algorithms the way they are.

SKI: I think you’ve got to keep paying to get people to see it. That’s where you can find me, otherwise you can find me in Bristol or at Golden Tongue in the nights we run in London. I was going to read a particular poem, but I think I’ve changed my mind after the conversations we’ve been having. I’ll stick to the original one, because we’ve talked enough about what language means.

So the poem I’m going to share is called Empire and it’s something it’s taken me a very long time to write, a poem about colonisation and the effects it had on the Indian sub-continent. What that means as a Punjabi as well, where Punjab has been split into so many different sections and the lasting effects of it. I wrote this poem in the only way I knew how to write it, as a relationship.

To read this poem please download the full transcript here.

Outro:

DT: Thanks a bunch for sticking around. If you’re interested in checking out the pamphlets we were chatting about, which were a result of the competition that Shagufta judged, get yourself over to burningeyebooks.wordpress.com for updates about publication dates, about what are sure to be fantastic short collections from Hanan Issa, Adrian Earle and Caroline Teague. For updates from us, find us at Lunar Poetry Podcasts on Facebook or Instagram or @Silent_Tongue on Twitter and go to A Poem A Week on Facebook or Twitter for our companion series.

If you can afford to do so, do please support us by buying our fantastic anthology Why Poetry? I’ll be back, probably at the end of November, with episode 120. I haven’t lined up a guest for that episode yet, so it will be a surprise for everyone. The next episode will be the last before I take a few months off. I haven’t really had a break in the four years the podcast has been going. What with the workload this year and getting the book out, I’m a bit cream crackered, as we say in London.

More details on that break next month. Here’s an idea, why don’t you get in touch via social media and let me know who you’d like me to talk to in 2019? It seems like a long way off, but it’s only 12 weeks away. Here’s that poem from the anthology I promised you. It’s Apparition by Zeina Hashem Beck.

To read this poem please download the full transcript here.

That’s it. Be good to yourselves and others. See you later.

End of transcript.

Publication Day!!

September 27, 2018 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

I’m really happy to tell you all that our brand new anthology ‘Why Poetry?’ has been published today. From today you’ll be able to request it at your local bookshop or order it direct from the publishers VERVE Poetry Press for £9.99 (probably the best deal for us and the publisher. The anthology is being published to celebrate our 4th birthday, 1st October.

The process of putting this book together has been wonderful and made all the more special that I got to work on it together with wife Lizzy (host of our companion podcast a poem a week). To be able to bring together 28 former podcast guests in one publication, pairing poems with quotes from the contributor’s interviews, has been a dream.

Buying this book will not only bring you a fantastic collection of poetry and an interview with me about the history of the project but a significant amount of the proceeds will go towards ensuring that the series remains transcribed throughout 2019. Supporting us by buying the book means supporting us to remain as accessible as possible.

Full list of poets included: Travis Alabanza, 41650085_1891872641121793_686660851385499648_n Sandra Alland, Khairani Barokka, Zeina Hashem Beck, Leo Boix, Mary Jean Chan, Donald Chegwin, Grim Chip, Rishi Dastidar, Susannah Dickey, Nadia Drews, Joe Dunthorne, Harry Josephine Giles, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Keith Jarrett, Anna Kahn, Luke Kennard, Sean Wai Keung, Nick Makoha, Roy McFarlane, Paul McMenemy, Kim Moore, Helen Mort, Abi Palmer, Amerah Saleh, Giles Turnbull, Lizzy Turner, Jane Yeh.

Thank you all so much for listening over the last four years and a huge thank you to anyone that has already bought the book.

David xx

BBC Radio Bristol.

August 13, 2018 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

My wife Lizzy and I were invited onto BBC Radio Bristol to chat about LPP, a poem a week and our upcoming anthology ‘Why Poetry?’ as part of Laura Rawlings’ Monday Book Club. Even though the time always races by when you’re on the radio we had a lot of fun and Laura, who is a fantastic interviewer, made us feel very welcome. Lizzy even managed to squeeze in a poem and I got to mention the episode transcripts that are so important to us. If you’d like to listen you can follow this link… we pop up in the final 15 minutes!

Ep.116 – Ross Sutherland & C.I Marshall

July 26, 2018 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

Ross ep116

Episode 116, featuring Ross Sutherland and C.I Marshall is now available to download/ listen to via all the usual means, including iTunes, Acast, Overcast, Stitcher or here via SoundCloud. Further down this post you will find a transcript of this conversation, minus the poems read by Ross. For a full transcript follow this link. Pre-order our upcoming book, which will celebrate our fourth anniversary, ‘Why Poetry? – The Lunar Poetry Podcasts Anthology’ from Verve Poetry Press for only £9.99, including free shipping.

Episode notes:

This episode is in two parts:

Part one – David Turner is in Peterborough chatting to Ross Sutherland about his podcast ‘Imaginary Advice’ and how it now informs his writing. The pair discuss Ross’ recent British Podcast Award in the ‘Best Fiction’ category, how sound engineering can help with character development and pushing literary ideas and devices to ‘breaking-point’.

Links relating to this section:
www.imaginaryadvice.com/
twitter.com/rossgsutherland

Part two (1:06:54) – David Turner is at Verve Poetry Festival in Birmingham talking to Consuelo Marshall about her Verve Poetry Competition winning poem ‘Myself as a Playboy Bunny’, in front of a live audience. The pair also chat about the influence of San Francisco and long distance running on Consuelo’s writing.

Pre-order ‘Why Poetry? – The Lunar Poetry Podcasts Anthology’ here – vervepoetrypress.com/product/why-po…age-in-the-uk/

For more info about the podcast –
lunarpoetrypodcasts.com/
twitter.com/Silent_Tongue
www.facebook.com/LunarPoetryPodca…s/?ref=bookmarks

Download a full transcript here –
lunarpoetrypodcasts.files.wordpress.com/2018/…t.pdf

Episode music is an original composition by Snazzy Rat. You can find more from Snazzy here –
snazzyrat.bandcamp.com/
www.facebook.com/snazzyrat/

Transcript:

Transcription by Christabel Smith

Part one:

Host: David Turner – DT

Guest: Ross Sutherland – RS

DT: Hello, welcome to episode 116 of Lunar Poetry Podcasts. My name is David Turner. How are you lot? I’ve got a couple of announcements before we get on to the episode. Firstly, I finally added some intro music. You probably noticed. Regular listeners would have heard it on the last episode, but I got hold of it quite late, so I didn’t have time to work it into the chat. The music is taken from a track called Moon Museum, recorded exclusively for us by an artist called Snazzy Rat. If you like what you hear and want to listen to more by old Snazzy, get yourself over to his BandCamp page. See the episode description.

The next piece of news is very exciting. We’re publishing an anthology later this year to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the podcast series. I will return at the end of the episode with a list of the poets involved, but they’ve all appeared on the podcast and they’re all excellent. The majority of the poems are previously unpublished, so there’s lots of new work there. The book titled Why Poetry? will be out September 27^th through Verve Poetry Press for £9.99, which is very reasonable.

There’s also going to be a deal whereby if you pre-order it, you will get free delivery. The bargains never end. As well as through the website, you will obviously be able to buy the book in, I was going to say all good bookshops, hopefully it will be available in the rubbish ones as well. For more information, get yourself over to Verve’s website or click the link in the episode description. It’s going to be a really fantastic book and the level of poetry in it is very high.

So, on to today’s episode. It is in two parts. Coming up later, I chat briefly to C.I Marshall at Verve Poetry Festival in Birmingham. You see? Pieces in the jigsaw. It’s all making sense now. First up though is me in conversation with Ross Sutherland. We met up in Ross’ home in Peterborough, an area of England that is hard to pinpoint. It’s not quite the Midlands, not quite East Anglia, and they really don’t like it if you give up and say it’s near Cambridge.

We met in June this year to talk about his award-winning podcast series Imaginary Advice. If you haven’t listened to Imaginary Advice before, you’re really missing out. It’s an amazing exploration into what can be achieved with music, voice distortion and brilliant story-writing and telling combined. It’s an oasis in the desert of long-form interview podcasts, true-crime stuff and let’s face it, men shouting over each other. It was fascinating hearing how this medium is now shaping the way Ross writes and the way he is now thinking about performing.

His Best Fiction win at this year’s British Podcast Awards was very much deserved. If you enjoy this chat or anything else we do, then do tell people about us. It really is the best way for us to reach new listeners. Here’s Ross.

Conversation:

RS: My name is Ross Sutherland. This poem is called;

Please download the full transcript in order to read this poem.

DT: Thank you very much, Ross. This doesn’t happen to me very often, but I sort of assumed I was going to be biting my lip through whatever you were reading and trying not to laugh. I normally don’t corpse, but I nearly went then. That was really good. I’m going to start off by saying congratulations on your recent British podcast award.

RS: Cheers, thanks, dude.

DT: A win in the Best Fiction category, is that right?

RS: That’s right, yeah. You could argue that my podcast is not a fiction podcast, because it sort of covers a bunch of stuff. I tell stories on it, definitely there’s fiction inside it, but it’s also got essay-writing in it and it’s also got poetry in it as well, but there is never going to be a category which I fit into well, so that was the closest, I think.

DT: How does it feel to be the best UK liar that has a podcast?

RS: Very good, yeah, absolutely, that is how I should introduce myself. I really love being able to increase the quality of a lie with some sound production. I really like the editing part, actually. That’s kind of become my new passion. The amount of stuff you can solve or realise about a bit of writing when you’ve got to listen to yourself saying it, over and over again.

DT: I should say now that your podcast is called Imaginary Advice. I don’t know if you have this, but there are a couple of podcasts that I like and I really hope there is a large crossover between my listeners and their listeners, because I sort of want the same people that like that thing I like to like what I’m doing. I would hate to think the people who were really into Imaginary Advice think that I’m a prick.

RS: They don’t think that, they don’t think that. I can guarantee they don’t think you’re a prick, David.

DT: Do you have that relationship with other podcasts as well? You sort of wonder about their listeners and the life behind the podcast.

RS: Yeah, I do, I’m really obsessed right now with this Twin Peaks podcast from Brighton called Diane. I just love it because it’s so much more than a podcast about Twin Peaks. It’s much more about using some of the elements of Twin Peaks to talk about mythology and psychology and to really explore a whole bunch of different stuff. It’s really, really well researched and also seems to have its core of a big, big following behind it of Twin Peaks fans, both here and over the world.

I suppose with any podcast, after listening to it for a little while, you do build up that intimate relationship with these voices that you’ve never actually met, right? I use podcasts at my most fragile, intimate moments. Yes, walking to work or when I’m stuck on a train or in the bath or going to bed. It’s these quite sensitive moments that I then go ‘argh, I need to shut out the noise, let’s listen to somebody else’. I’ve convinced myself that they’re my mates and I want everyone that listens to my show to listen to theirs and I wish it was the other way around as well.

DT: I have to clarify, I’m from South London and I don’t care if anyone thinks I’m a prick anyway. I was born into that acceptance that people probably do and you sort of have to ride it out, so that’s fine. I tell you what we’ll do, maybe you could give a brief description a bit deeper into what Imaginary Advice is, when it started and why it started.

RS: Yeah, so I started it about four years ago, about the same time as you. I’d been a writer for about 15, 16 years and at least 10 of that has been without a day job, which basically means frantically trying to piece together enough small bits of work to stay afloat. The longer you do that, the harder it is to go back and undo that particular mistake. I had, over the course of those years, created all these very, very small little commissions, which were for a particular project, which had been released, maybe heard by like 30 people, and had never had another purpose for them again.

I was feeling increasingly like the platforms that were available to me as a writer, performer, poet as well, if you want to call it that, were actually quite limited. If you want to stand up and do a poetry reading as part of an ensemble bill then, maybe you’re going to get 20, 25 minutes to read something that fits in that environment. Or maybe an essay commissioned or a poem in a magazine, but the boxes are still quite rigid, so I really wanted to find a place where I could take all those commissions and put them into a new place where they could grow a little bit and connect them to my main body of work.

So it started like that. I had a couple of anecdotes and poems and stories that I then recorded for the podcast and I found it just so, I don’t know what the word is, it opened up so much for me about what I could do as a writer and the idea that I could have something that was basically like an essay, but then, in the middle of that essay, I could drop a poem into it and the poem functions a little bit like a dream sequence. It enables me to tackle the same questions, but in a different type of language and with a different kind of logic, and finding out ways of putting together different styles of writing became really exciting to me.

DT: Obviously, our podcasts are very different in style, but it seems as though they started, not only did they start at the same time, because I had actually remembered the first few episodes going out and Dan Cockrill saying to me ‘have you heard Imaginary Advice?’ because he’s been listening right from the beginning and he mentioned it to me, for those who don’t know, Dan Cockrill is one of the gang that started Bang Said The Gun in London, which was really great.

RS: One of the navigators.

DT: Yeah. So there’s that aspect of you just wanting to find a space to archive some work and just have it there and publicly available, but the reason I started these interviews was I used to write reviews of spoken word events and I was given quite generous word counts, like 1500 words in a review, which is a lot to put down, but I found that limiting and I just wanted my own space where I could decide if I wanted to go on for another 10 minutes, I could because nobody was going to stop me.

People might press stop and stop listening, but at least I had that space. Of course, with all of these projects, there’s a certain amount of ego attached, but at what point did it stop being a place to put old work and a space for you to actually do something new?

RS: I don’t know, I think it has been a gradual, parallel processing thing, but you’re absolutely right, just that freedom to keep going and see what comes out. For me, it is also about this idea that in a podcast, through sound design, yes, you can use music and create audio beds, but you can also do really crazy stuff with time. You can have two scenes happening in two completely different time periods, like overlapping with each other, something that just from listening to Radio LAB, oh my gosh, they’re able to have three different environments which we are moving between in conversations, happening over the top and you can still distinguish them.

Even through having my voice and slightly EQ-ing my voice differently, was able to help weave together different voices. The more I found that I could almost save bits of writing, which I’d done, which didn’t really make sense, and I was able to use that sound design to pull them apart, then that gave me the tools to think more in those terms and to create stuff more bespoke in that format. I think the difference for me also was I fell in love with it because it felt like all the best parts of stage and all the best parts of what I get from the page, so from the stage, it got to be in my voice and you got to hear me come through the writing and to give it that extra vector, I think that was something I really missed on the page.

Simultaneously, what you got from the page I think in radio is that intimacy, that idea of it feeling like a one-to-one conversation with someone else. I think that Ira Glass quote, in relation to telephones, but he talks about telephones, the most intimate form of communication because you’re literally whispering in someone’s ear. He’s really talking about radio there, but I think that level of intimacy, you don’t necessarily get in a gig, unless the gig’s going really badly and there’s just one person in the audience, which happens. I think marrying together those two just made me fall in love with the format.

DT: Even the biggest stage stars when they perform are never going to perform a gig where 100% of people in the room have come purely for them. People are going to be there with their partners or their friends and just giving someone a chance. That doesn’t happen with podcasts. If someone keeps listening to your podcasts, it means they’ve chosen to keep you often, like you’re saying, maybe through earbuds in a public place, they’ve chosen to slide off with you. We’re then whispering in your ear and it’s a completely different thing.

My question about that would be where do you see your natural home? If you had an unlimited budget, would you be trying to do this on stage? How much of it is this is an affordable way of developing these ideas?

RS: Maybe that’s how it started. Simultaneously, I’ve made theatre and the theatre I’ve made was meant to be the same thing, meant to be taking stuff I liked about poetry but expanding it in a different format, but theatre actually has a completely different set of protocols and stuff like that. Everything in theatre is a metaphor for something else. That’s not necessarily the same way I would treat creating a radio story. These days, I would say I think audio is the form for me and I’m doing some live shows of the podcast over the summer, so I’ll be able to tell you better in a couple of months’ time.

I’m going to enjoy that because I’ve missed live audiences and there are definitely things I like doing with video as an element I miss working in, in this format, for the podcast. I kind of feel like finally, when I was 35, I’ve found this style of writing that I really like, so I got there in the end. I couldn’t have found it that much sooner because I wouldn’t have been able to afford the kit or it didn’t exist.

DT: I’m being quite careful with this not to geek out into a podcast chat, but there are very serious considerations here, aren’t there? We were just having a brief chat about which type of editing software we both use and it’s only been very recently, in the last couple of years, that really affordable versions of very, very good editing suites have become available to producers and the artists, because that’s something that’s interesting about podcasting, I think.

The artists become producers, almost exclusively, in a way you can’t do in other mediums, unless you’ve got a huge budget or you’re a stand-up and you don’t need anything other than a microphone in a room and even that, you need to get around the country presumably. You need to publicise it and pay for advertising. But this that we’re both deeply engaged in feels much more egalitarian, as long as you’ve got the initial income to buy some equipment.

RS: Yeah, but you know, if you’ve got a smartphone, my first couple of episodes were recorded on my smartphone, sat in my wardrobe and I edited it on Garage Band, which came free, I suppose I’ve still got the laptop, but yeah, it does feel like we’re in the middle of this huge boom of that and I love live gigs, but touring becomes increasingly hard. It did also come as a result of, I ran a night at Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club for six or so years with a group of poets, which was called Homework, where we set ourselves a new writing exercise every month and it was great for us, it was the reason we kept writing, it gave us new deadlines, it was so important to me.

But as it got harder for everybody for everybody to clear enough space in their diary to be able to do that, even though we knew it was good for us, you know what diaries are like and life in general, we just couldn’t continue, but then radio, well, I call it radio, it’s not even radio, is it? It’s not radio at all. But podcasting basically means I get a gig once a month with about 700 people and I can pay myself a little bit for it.

DT: We might come on to those issues later, but it’s odd how things, the coincidences when I have guests on the podcasts, so I don’t particularly plan which poet should follow which, because it’s all down to people’s diaries and when they can do interviews and I try to keep a mix of guests, but often it’s other factors that dictate that. But I’m going to have to do that weird podcast thing where I say that my latest episode, which hasn’t gone out yet, is with Jane Yeh.

RS: I love The Ninjas. It’s such a great book.

DT: And I’m really excited about the book she’s got coming out in March 2019. She’s working on her third collection and we talked a lot about how she is a fiction writer first and foremost. That aspect of her poetry where she’s assuming characters is really fiction-based, so it’s odd you’re back to back and there was no actual decision there. My guests have gone sort of ‘confessional, confessional, confessional, fiction, fiction’ and it’s a really nice break because I think I mentioned this in the last conversation, but it’s easy as an emerging writer to perhaps think well, if it’s not confessional, it’s not going to get picked up and where’s the space to just play around?

RS: Yeah, in relation to that, I did some teaching not that long ago for a group of young writers, emerging writers probably, like 18 to 21, and all of them in their sets pretty much had a poem about the most traumatic thing that had happened in their life to that point. They were intense, intense things. I’m presuming somewhere along the line in the workshops they run, someone has encouraged them to do that. Towards the end of the week, we were going to have kind of like a show and tell, come read a poem, and there was one poet, she was like ‘I just can’t keep getting on stage and saying this’.

It’s just like yeah, right, if you are a performer, it’s Groundhog Day and you are forcing yourself back there again and again and again. It’s not like ‘oh, it was cathartic to write it, now it goes in a drawer, goes in a book and I’m glad I got it out there’. It’s like no, you have to relive that moment again and again and again. When does that stop being cathartic and liberating and when does it become this kind of repetition compulsion where you’re just stuck with it? I have sympathies for anyone who’s been working in confessional for a long time who then goes ‘I want to change voice here a little bit or do something else’.

DT: I think it’s hard to redirect that mirror, whichever way we’re choosing to shine our creative practice.

RS: Yeah, because it will always be about you. The party can’t start without you. Whatever it’s about, it will still be about you. Absolutely. It’s tricky. These things form really early on about what our entire relationship with writing is. It’s really deep down in the psyche as to what it is about the art form that makes you happy.

DT: With Imaginary Advice, I suppose…Every time I say it, I keep hearing…

RS: My weird robot voice.

DT: Yeah, I couldn’t put it better than that. Your weird robot voice. People go and check out Imaginary Advice and you’ll know what I’ve got stuck in my head, but I suppose what people are tuning in for is there’s a real variety across the type of writing and the ways things are recorded and presented, but there are repeat characters if you like and I presume they are facets of your personality and who you are and your identity.

One thing I find really fascinating, maybe because it reflects something deep in me, is the slightly neurotic writer breaking down throughout the presentation of the piece and the repetition of these things and I was just wondering from that – I’m making an assumption here, you can just say I’m wrong if I am – but that seemingly blending the confessional, not the confessional but the inward-looking with the fictional, and whether you feel that could ever work on stage or whether you feel that’s purely something you can only develop through trust with a listener perhaps.

RS: That’s interesting. I think in terms of combining half-truth with fiction, that is something I feel I do on stage and partly for reason we were just talking about. It’s like if I have to get on stage every day for 24 days of like the Edinburgh Fringe, I’m going to twist to the truth to protect myself. I know the truth when I say it, even if I’m saying the other version of it, but I want to give myself a little bit of distance. I want to be the character.

If you’re a live performer, I don’t know, that level of sheer, complete honesty and fragility, particularly going up in front of a crowd that may not all be there for you, they’re not necessarily your mates. When they come in, some may know your stuff and will be giving you the benefit of the doubt, some people are here almost against their will.

DT: Particularly poetry, solely poetry audiences. Not the most supportive of people.

RS: This is the problem, isn’t it? We’ve got such a broad church, we have a lot of factionalism. There’s not really a huge amount to unite us because it’s this nebulous, grey area in between lots of other art forms, where lots of people are almost passing through or ideas start off as poems then actually crystallise into other stuff, but it’s in that weird grey area. When someone says to me ‘there’s a poetry night on near me, do you think I should go to it?’ Like ‘No!’ You should find out who’s on the bill and Google them and listen to their stuff and decide. The fact there’s a poetry night on near you, that could be anything from avant-garde noise poetry to stand-up in rhyming couplets to I don’t know what, it could be anything. Do more research.

Audiences are an unknown quantity and it’s difficult to put yourself out there like that and I think that’s naturally why poets that spend a lot of time on stage callous over their actual personalities a little bit, sometimes in a bad way, because I think you become weird exaggerations of yourself, and sometimes things become more exaggerated, but I think in every circumstance, it helps to play a part a bit. I feel that does apply. It’s easier in radio, definitely, and I do love the fact that with each new episode of Imaginary Advice, I try to change the format. Now I’ve been doing it for four years, formats are resurfacing, things I’ve liked in the past that I want to go back to, but that freedom is difficult to replicate

DT: I think now would be a good time to take a second reading.

RS: Yeah, absolutely. This is a new thing I’ve only just been working on this week because I’ve had a big break from just writing poetry. I feel poems have come out accidentally in doing other work, but I wanted to sit down and fall in love again with writing for the page, writing poems more in discreet units. So what I’ve been doing is at Christmas, I got a book of family wordsearches and I’ve been taking one wordsearch and reading along the lines and trying to decipher it, almost as if it was a poem that had been encrypted.

So sometimes it’s about adding letters in between or decoding in various ways. It tends to come out as gibberish, then in the next draft, I push it out even more and add more lines to make more sense of it.

DT: Has it gone so far that you’ve developed any rules for yourself or are you just letting it flow?

RS: Yeah, the rules are coming out in that I’ve become much more comfortable with first drafts being utter gibberish, then taking quite a long time with the second draft and allowing myself more rules about moving lines around and adding new lines if necessary. To begin with, the poems were just me trying to enjoy language and I set myself that as the end goal, like ‘don’t worry, Ross, just enjoy the process’. Now, some of the more recent ones have been revised enough times that actually, they’ve turned into stories and feel more like me in conversation with myself, rather than just deciphering. So let me read you this one. It’s called;

Please download the full transcript in order to read this poem.

DT: Thank you very much. You’ve sort of touched on this already and it almost feels like a really naïve question, but just a bit of history, the first question I ever asked was in October 2014 to Pat Cash and it was Why Poetry? That was the fundamental starting point for too many interviews, before I had the confidence to think of more nuanced ways of saying that. I want to change that round a bit. I’d like to know where poetry starts in your writing, if you know.

What do you see in the podcast and in your own writing as being poetry, because it’s quite a broad term with your poetry, isn’t it? I’m not being negative, I think it’s a really pleasant thing, a really wide view of what poetry is.

RS: I think what’s quite nice these days is maybe I don’t have to worry so much about that. I tend to say ‘I write poetry’ rather than ‘I am a poet’. I feel it’s a lot nicer to define myself by the verb as opposed to the noun. It makes it a lot easier to a certain degree. As someone who, not so much these days, but definitely in the past, spent a lot of time doing poetry workshops in schools, sometimes with quite young kids, but really any age in a school, any pupil asked to write poetry, that’s going to come with a lot of anxiety about ‘who am I to do that?’ Part of my role there is basically to try and throw all of poetry under the bus and say ‘you call yourself a poet by writing and that’s it.’

The confidence which comes from sitting down and beginning a thought you don’t know the end of, for me, that I feel is what starts to be the centre of what a poem is. It’s that kind of, if I was going to be all hippy about it, it’s more like a dream space where you don’t know where you’re going and you’re working intuitively into something, which is why I say almost all ideas begin for me as poems and then some move off into different formats and the ones that stay as poems remain crystallised in that original state of exploration.

DT: That’s interesting, the nub or essence of an idea. I think one of my biggest points if anyone ever asks for feedback on their work, especially what would be considered more spoken-word stuff, is that the idea was good, it was just never an idea for a poem and the fact they stopped at a poem was what shackled that idea. It could have gone in many different directions, but trying to be a poet and control that idea was perhaps what let it down.

RS: Yeah, I mean I feel it always helps with a poem to know what the door is, the way into a subject, but I don’t know which poet says, maybe it was like Billy Collins, I don’t know, maybe he was quoting someone else, about how a poem tries to escape its own subject matter, which is why when someone knows the end of a poem before they’ve begun it, then it’s like ‘I don’t think this should have…’

DT: Like the build-up was just to get to that end point.

RS: Yeah, it’s like ‘this should have been something else. That point should have been the start or you should have worked in a medium where I feel like you could have explored that further’. But yeah, it’s a thorny thing, isn’t it? I suppose you probably spend a long time specifically trying not to think about it too much at the risk of then killing any urge to do it in the first place.

DT: Throughout the 116-odd episodes, I’ve tried to stop myself giving caveats of what we’re saying, but I think it’s important in moments like this to say ‘if you don’t agree with these ideas about your own writing, that’s fine, because out of the 200+ guests I’ve had on, every one’s got their own version of what the answers to these are and I think that’s perhaps what stops people answering fully, because they don’t want to sound like they’re dictating to other writers how they should be writing. What I’m asking is how you feel about your own writing and it’s not that I want answers for myself or the listeners, it’s just interesting to see how everyone works in such different ways.

RS: This is it, isn’t it? It’s like I love a very, very open definition of poetry. I feel like it’s just that exploratory space. You could also say that for me, it becomes a poem when it’s outside the flow of capital. That is probably also like a bit of a definition of it. I don’t know whether therefore if a poem was commissioned, whether that means it stops being a poem, but certainly, the less money involved in it, the easier it is for me to tell you if it’s a poem.

DT: Moving on and taking that idea of exploration, I’m thinking definitely about specifically your podcast episodes where repetition is explored. How important is it for you to find and locate a breaking point in a narrative? It almost seems like you’re trying to break the piece in where you’re getting to. I’m thinking specifically about, is it Seven Trips to Spar?

RS: Me Versus The Spar. I think there are seven versions, yeah.

DT: It’s not only a particular highlight of mine of your podcast, but it’s one of the best things I’ve listened to in ages. I really do love that and what draws me to it is that idea that you could just keep doing that until it completely breaks down and it almost does at some point as well.

RS: I’m a huge fan of the OuLiPo, that’s the origins of a lot of that stuff and it really inspired my work, so for anyone listening that’s not familiar with the word, it means ‘Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’, it was a group of French writers who began in the 1960s and they set themselves up as a kind of anti-surrealist movement. They didn’t like the surrealists. Well, the surrealists were saying ‘we’re accessing our unconscious minds, we’re breaking through the bourgeois mindset by painting our dreams and we’re totally free.’

The OuLiPo were interested in the same thing, but they were like ‘no, you’re not free by just removing the rules. You’re just becoming slaves to rules in your subconscious that you don’t understand’. So the OuLiPo flooded their work with rule-based systems and created all these arbitrary rules around it as ways of disrupting their natural thought patterns and therefore avoiding cliché, because they would make it fiendishly hard to write, by putting all these obstacles in the way. Then just in the way the mind has to think around the obstacles, you’ll end up in more interesting parts of your brain.

That’s kind of the OuLiPo thing and I fell in love with various techniques they’ve gone and done. I really love the univocalisms, which are poems that only have one vowel, I find them really fun and interesting ways of thinking about writing. I loved Raymond Queneau’s exercise in style, which is exactly the same as my Spar thing, it’s a very short anecdote which then gets told over and over again in different styles. I think I like loops and retelling the same story over and over again from this way of advancing a story in a kind of lateral way, as opposed to a linear way.

So actually, a very, very small text, but then by revisiting it, either in a different genre or with a slightly different angle over and over again, you get to explore different aspects of that same thing. It is about breaking it eventually. It’s about exhausting…

DT: It’s what Georges Perec said, isn’t it? His book was Exhausting A Place In Paris, where he sat in a square, he was an OuLiPo, part of that movement and tried to describe every single thing he saw, to the point where everything lost all meaning, because if you’re actually seeing everything, you’re not seeing anything. The reason I bring that up is if any listeners are interested, you can go back through the archive to somewhere in the 60s, between 60 and 70 in episodes, there’s an episode about collaboration.

I’m sure you know them both, but Sarah Lester and Nathan Penlington on the 40^th anniversary of that Georges Perec book, they repeated the exercise over a weekend in Hackney Town Square, [An Attempt At] Exhausting A Place In London, which is out through Burning Eye and it’s a really interesting look at how you can just exhaust an idea and eventually, it may loop back on itself. It’s all about loops, isn’t it? You can exhaust an idea and suddenly by continuing with it, you can reenergise it in a lot of ways.

RS: I love working in that kind of way. What actually inspired me to do a lot of that stuff as well does actually come down from this aspect of live performance that an audience doesn’t see, which is repetition. That idea, like when I’ve toured with a bunch of people and we’re doing the same show every single night, and you gain this kind of real, granular interest in other people’s performances, and when someone else does their bit on stage that night, slightly different, that becomes really interesting and I think that idea of how through repetition, things can shift and change, that I absolutely love.

One of the things I like about using repetition is allowing one audience member to experience what that’s like. I did this theatre piece years ago and it was called Comedian Dies In The Middle Of A Joke and it was a seven-minute show. It was set in a working men’s club, a stand-up comedian comes out on stage to do a routine, I’ve already told them in advance this is a reconstruction of a murder, that after seven minutes, someone in the audience stood up and shot the comedian, but before you get to the gunshot, the show stops. There’s a sound like a record being wound back and the entire show resets and then everybody moves one seat along and it starts again.

This time, you’ve got a different person playing the comedian and we’re all in a different space in the room. The thing is, the comedian is actually just an audience member as well and they’re reading the routine off an autocue. There are various points in the script for people to heckle. The only thing that’s unscripted are the heckles. You can’t heckle at any point, you have to heckle when you’re sitting in the right seats and it’s the right time. What you find is over the seven performances in one sitting, with one audience, the heckles get smarter and smarter and funnier and funnier as people try and break the show.

They know what the comedian has to say in response to their heckle, so they can make them sound even more stupid by setting it up. What I really loved about that idea was that level of prescience, is that a word? The fact that the audience feel like gods for that little time. They know everything that’s going to happen and the confidence that comes when you know the structure so well that even they can feel comfortable playing with it.

DT: I wonder how much of that attraction for you comes from, you have a background in fine art, right? Is that what you studied?

RS: No!

DT: Did you used to write in Liverpool?

RS: I briefly taught electronic literature, so a kind of English and Cultural Studies course, that’s when I was doing my PhD, but I studied at UEA, I did Creative Writing.

DT: I might just leave this bit in. Like I said, I don’t mind if people think I’m a prick. That’s interesting actually, because I had made an assumption and it’s interesting how I was wrong, so I was going to say that I’ve found with a lot of writers that have a background in having studied Fine Art is the overlap of what happened in the early 70s with Performance Art when the process was the thing and the final act wasn’t actually part of the artist’s practice, it was just the bit that sold tickets, the public-facing part of it.

It seems to me with the repetition and this idea of you showing your drafts, is that through the podcasts and through your performance work as well, that you’re trying to give the audience the process as well. A book isn’t perhaps enough at the end. The final piece isn’t enough. You’re inviting the audience into the process of making a piece.

RS: That is true. It turns out no, I don’t come from a background of Performance Art, but that is absolutely on the nose and if I was being cynical, I’d say maybe that’s because deep down, I secretly believe that writing poetry is more fun than reading it. On a different day, I might not answer that one, but I love the idea of, I don’t want to meet the audience at the end, I don’t want to sand off all the edges and make the thing perfect and then hand them something which is this completely-made thing.

I think because the journey of exploration I go on when I write, I want them there with me as I’m exploring it. I want them to see the moment that I finally work out what it’s about and that is about opening up the process. That is partly why I like using at least sometimes in my writing career, why I really enjoy using form is because form writes that large, particularly in something like univocalism when you can only write using one vowel. People can see you struggling to tell a story and having to find these workaround solutions to getting through scenes and they’re there with you in your room, writing it, when they see you doing that, but not being presented with this perfect work of art.

I guess because for me, teaching poetry to young people, that’s so much of the uphill struggle, basically trying to expose the wires. One of the exercises I run with students is to get them to take an existing poem and then just write the opposite poem, take every line and reverse it. Some of those would be obvious and some would be really, really hard, like ‘what’s the opposite of February?’ I always feel like through the act of writing, it’s like playing a musical instrument, it’s like what are you going to do to begin with? You’ve got to learn the standards. It’s only through playing and being inside of the music that you can work out how to do it. I always feel writing through learning is the best way to do that and so, as much as I can make my audience also writers, the better.

DT: As you said earlier, on a different day, you may answer these questions slightly differently, so I’m not locking you down in this one way of thinking, but had it not been for Penned In The Margins and your having such a large attraction to the process of things, do you think you would have found it that easy to be published? Because there don’t seem to be many publishers in the UK that are taking those kinds of chances on writers and allowing them to develop those ideas, in that like you’re saying, if you’re interested in what leads up to the book more, you need quite an understanding publisher.

RS: Yeah, you do. I was really lucky that I met Tom at the right time in my life. My first collection was one of the first ones, I don’t think it was the first one that Penned In The Margins put out, but it was at the very, very start of that imprint and so I think we met at the right sort of time. I think Tom also being someone who’s not only interested in being a publisher, but also interested in producing live literature and theatre and who kind of understands this dual process of both finding how page and stage fit together.

I’m really lucky and all the books we’ve made have been experiments, with us trying to locate that voice and trying to find ways of allowing poems to… There’s something very exploratory about how I try and write and experiments, you never usually hit the ball in the middle of the bat, do you? There are going to be mixed results and being able to work with Tom to basically help cast off the bad ones, I feel really grateful. I presume maybe now, I feel slightly out of touch in terms of poetry presses and what small, hip, young presses are doing stuff.

DT: I’m wondering, actually. You’ve definitely got people like Offord Road Books, Test Centre in particular, who are very interested in producing vinyl LPs alongside collections of books.

RS: Their stuff looks beautiful.

DT: Beautifully presented. I’m just wondering whether, because you’ve been involved in writing and publishing poetry for a lot longer than I’ve been in doing this podcast and sort of examining it, I do wonder if perhaps then when you first started working with Tom, whether the scene was more open to experimentation and whether it’s become more unified now. It definitely does feel more like there’s a particular style and I would be happy for people to come on the podcast and prove me wrong, but I do feel like things are becoming restricted for writers.

I’ve always loved what Tom’s doing at Penned and what the guys are doing at Test Centre because it’s nice to know there is something going on and they’re proving you can sell books as well. Not only are they printing them, I hope they’re not running at a huge loss, I’m hoping they’re turning over. I’m rambling.

RS: Not at all. It’s so hard, isn’t it? I don’t really feel, at the end of the day, advice I always give to any sort of young writer who is feeling like the gatekeepers aren’t returning their calls, who feels like the scene is getting smaller and smaller, it’s always like ‘yeah, was ever thus’. Eventually, I think it just comes down to creating your own platform, whether that’s setting up your own imprint or running your own night or setting up your own podcast. As we said, the church of poetry is so broad, so big, and yet, it’s very hard to join existing clubs.

DT: Just because I would like to give people a bit of faith and a bit of confidence, if you are writing experimentally, do also check out Hestorglock Press in Bristol and Dostoyevsky Wannabe in Manchester, especially if you’re looking at crossovers between essays, prose-writing and poetry.

RS: The Dostoyevsky Wannabe stuff is great.

DT: And it’s all affordable, they’re trying to make accessible books by selling at 2% over cost or something. It’s crazy. You can get most of their books for £4 or £5 on Amazon.

RS: Did you say they were based in Manchester?

DT: Yeah. They’re really good. They published something of mine, but that’s not why I mention them. They’re a good publisher despite publishing me. We’re running out of time. I just wonder, because I’m asking these questions of myself as well, with the podcast and the audio stuff, if we move away from it being a podcast and this experimentation of audio and musical bed and voice distortion, have you tried to think of some ways that can return to the page in any way or do you think that’s the limit of it, that has to be where it exists?

RS: I think interesting stuff always happens at the boundaries between art forms and so I think it’s exciting to try. I don’t know what will come out of that, but I’m always interested in taking stuff that worked in one form and seeing exactly what happens when you migrate it across. I don’t know. I think so. It starts to almost blend as art writing and that’s funny because that’s a world I knew absolutely nothing about and yet, I should look at because I should be looking at how art writing could be translated into sound.

I think there are definitely loads and loads of artists grouped around that area on the other side, the page side, who are doing stuff with writing over the top of other writing or are kind of using text in a much more experimental way, using text with image and stuff like that. I know the sort of Poem Brut night which runs at Rich Mix would probably be analogous to that kind of stuff in terms of exploring.

DT: My wife Lizzy and I were part of a Poem Brut night in Bristol and Paul Hawkins and his partner Sarah run Hestorglock Press. Paul has published Steven J. Fowler, who set up Poem Brut, so he put on an event in Bristol and it was a really interesting point at which mainly performers, stage performers, were encouraged to put stuff up on the walls and try and represent their vocal or audio work in image form, because it exists in this fabulous archive online, Poem Brut, the crossover between handwriting and the spoken word and glitches and slang and broken-down text and found text and collages.

It’s an amazing project. I hadn’t thought about that before, but now you bring it up, that perhaps is what led me to think I would like to see some Imaginary Advice try to return to the page, because it seems like ideas that on the face of it seem like they won’t work, there has to be something there, doesn’t there?

RS: Too right. Only when something becomes impossibly hard does interesting stuff come out of it. Exactly. I’d like to give that a whirl because I think it might fail. Just for one year of my life, I would like to commission myself to do a project that I actually knew how to do.

DT: Unfortunately, I think we’re running out of time. Before we take a third and final reading, we’ll just wrap everything up. Listeners, if you want to see or find any of Ross’ writing, the best place to go is to the Penned In the Margins website. All the links I’m about to mention will be in the episode collection so you can go down and click. Do go and check out Imaginary Advice, there’s a website link to that in the episode description. Any podcast app that’s worth its weight has got a link to both Lunar Poetry Podcasts and Imaginary Advice. If they don’t have it, don’t use them, find a new app. Just before we go, Ross, is there anything you’d like to mention coming up?

RS: I’m doing a couple of live versions of the podcast. That’s me taking a similar kind of approach to writing which I do in the podcast and trying to move it to a live space, which means using video and some other stuff as well. I’m doing one at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 14 August and then 13^th September at Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester and then 14^th September at London Podcast Festival.

DT: I have to say, one thing that’s constantly coming up is this Anthony Burgess centre. They seem to be having the best, not just because you mentioned it there, but honestly, I keep hearing it come up and there seems to be a lot happening in Manchester. That Anthony Burgess Foundation seems to be booking the best people.

RS: It’s an awesome space. I’ve only done something there once before, but it was great. Already, even back then, which was years ago, it felt like a really important meeting place for writers in Manchester.

DT: Thank you for joining me, Ross. This has been 18 months in the planning. Well, not much planning, but 18 months since first invitation, but it takes a long time to meet up sometimes. Really enjoyed it.

RS: I really appreciate it, man. This is called Dedication. Sorry, David.

Please download the full transcript in order to read this poem.

DT: Dear listener, try and imagine that being read to you three foot away.

RS: That was more intimate than even I expected.

Part two (1:06:54):

Host: David Turner – DT

Guest: C.I Marshall – CM

Intro:

DT: That was Ross Sutherland. If you get the chance to see him live, then take it. He’s a great performer and I’m sure his live podcast shows are going to be unforgettable. As mentioned, you can check all live dates on his website.

Next up is the last of four short conversations recorded at this year’s Verve Poetry Festival and in this instalment, I chat to the winner of the Verve Poetry Competition, CI Marshall. It was great fun getting to know Consuelo over the couple of days we were in Birmingham together and listening to her talking about marathon running, San Francisco and the Playboy Club in the city was illuminating. Here’s Consuelo. Me again, then Consuelo.

Conversation:

DT: Hello, Verve, how are you doing? Come on, cheer, cheer, cheer! We’re nearly there, we’re nearly free from poetry, but you’ve got one more bit of nonsense from me. This is the fourth and final…I’m wondering if I should mention this because they might not go out in order when I release them… I said fourth and final, so that’s dictated when that has to be released now… the fourth and final short conversation with poets at the wonderful Verve Poetry Festival in Birmingham.

Today, I am joined by the fantastic CI Marshall, originally from Northern California, who has travelled here from Chapel Hill, North Caroline. Consuelo was the winner of the Verve Poetry Competition 2018 and we’re going to begin with a reading of that poem.

CM: Thank you, David. Myself As A Playboy Bunny.

Apologies, we are unable to reproduce this poem at this time.

DT: Thank you very much, Consuelo. I used to always say to people ‘I don’t care about first and last lines, don’t keep telling me poems need to begin and end well if there’s enough meat in the middle of them’, but people keep contradicting me by writing really excellent last lines. I really love that ‘fast, fast as an autumn wind whipping the bay’. Would you mind explaining a bit to the audience and to the listeners how this poem came about?

CM: I’d been wanting to write this poem, I’m trying to think, maybe for 45 years and I didn’t started writing until 20 years ago, so I’ve had this running around in my head, because I actually did interview to be a Playboy Bunny at the San Francisco Playboy Club, which is really hysterical. So the poem is supposed to be funny and people don’t laugh, but maybe that’s because they don’t remember Playboy Club.

An interesting thing I told the audience and those of you who heard me when I read, I just love this, I’m very interested in architecture and the 1966 Playboy Club in London was the final design of the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, which I find to be very, very amusing. He was a very serious man. His work was all concerned with light and space, it’s beautiful if you’ve never seen it, so I thought that was interesting. So what happened was, I had never been able to write this poem, so when I saw the Verve contest on Twitter, I thought ‘cities, I know about cities’ and San Francisco is one of my favourite cities.

If you haven’t been there, it’s very, very beautiful. It’s got beautiful bridges and the bay is beautiful, it’s got the best coffee in the world and it’s got steep hills and great car dealers and of course, now it’s too expensive to live there, but anyway, that’s what happened. I sat down and obviously, they didn’t hire me, for obvious reasons, so I had to put an ending to it and I was a very serious marathon runner. I remember I just had this vivid image, just before the AIDS crisis hit in ’78, I had this vivid memory of Mayor Mesconi placing, it was on a gold ribbon, the medal around my head and then a month later, he and another supervisor Harvey Milk, were shot in their offices. So I guess it was a great thing for me to do so well in the marathon, but it was also tragic and very American that they were shot.

DT: You said this had been germinating in your head for a very long time. Is that usual for your writing practice?

CM: I think someone who’s lived the type of life I’ve had, which has been extremely varied and extremely different from most people’s lives, when you get to a certain age, these things keep coming up in your head. And I teach, so I love to tell the students about things that happened when I was younger, the same age they were, and how different it was then. So yes, I have a lot of food for fodder, I guess we would say in the States. I have a lot of experiences, a lot of really unusual people. Some of those people are quite well-known people.

I just heard a young woman out on the street, you have great music here. She was singing Free Falling. I’m a huge Tom Petty fan. I don’t know what the money means here, I don’t even know what it was, I just threw it in her guitar case and told her ‘Yeah, Tom Petty forever’. I’ll get off on a tangent, but I was on the Strip in the 60s and the Rolling Stones were walking down the sidewalk. I saw Jim Morrison and Whisky A Go Go and there were 25 people there. I’ve written a poem about him and that’s another poem I haven’t completed, I mean, I’ve stuck away some place.

DT: I once saw The Ordinary Boys walking across Clapham Common.

CM: That sounds good to me.

DT: Very self-indulgent of me. I was wondering if there’s a connection between the long-distance running and the germination of ideas, because I’m a middle-distance runner myself and I have a very similar relationship to writing as well, I think, in that I don’t write for a while and things have to sit with me.

CM: When I ran marathons, I didn’t use my mind. The watches weren’t that good, so I would take a Sharpie and write my splits, which would be my times that were supposed to be 10 miles, 20 miles, that whole thing, but I didn’t use my mind. I ran Boston. I ran too many, that’s probably one of the problems in terms of brain cells, but what I learned later in life was I couldn’t run anymore because you deteriorate the vertebrae in your spine from the impact. No one told us that, I found that out.

So I started doing yoga, I got my certificate. I’m very interested in that. The biggest thing yoga taught me was introducing my body to my mind and having them being the best of friends. Because I’ve been able to do that through the practice of yoga and actually, I’m stronger now probably than I was when I was running 125 miles a week. And the breath. I wasn’t really cognisant of my breath when I ran, which sounds absurd, but I wasn’t. So it’s that blending of the mind and the body. Running, I either wasn’t conscious of it or didn’t use it, but now, I use it a lot in my writing. A lot. It makes me sit down. There are a lot of things I use, that balancing of my mind and being able to tell my mind what to do and it will actually do it.

DT: That point you made about writing the split times on your wrist, I often talk about long-distance running to people in terms of it’s not a slog, you’re not running 10k, 20k, 40k, you’re breaking it down in your mind into splits, into kilometres or miles, much in the same way you might break a collection or a manuscript into smaller pieces and break down the points of your life into smaller, manageable parts.

CM: I think one thing I would say when he was saying that, it triggered again, these cells kick in and I think I can actually grow new ones now, anyway, the fact that you can pull these things out and they come back to you and you can actually write them and you can control them much better than you could have before. That’s a major thing. The other thing I was going to say too is the discipline. There’s no way you can run a marathon unless you’re really disciplined and of course that takes some mind control too.

That discipline and that time, like ‘I have to get this poem in the calendar in Poets and Writers’ and I’m always looking at that, I have it on my own calendar and all these ways to make me do it. It’s that sense of time, that big digital clock they invented in the 80s, I always see that, because it’s on the finish line when you’ve run a marathon, so I always see that digital clock and that helps me be able to finish a manuscript, to be able to finish a poem, to meet the deadlines.

DT: Talking of finishing, we’re running quickly out of time. We’re going to take a second and final poem. I’m really annoyed, because I want to keep talking, but we’re going to have to finish. Thank you, Consuelo.

CM: Thank you. This, well, you’ll know who it is, it’s in the title, so I’ll just read it.

Apologies, we are unable to reproduce this poem at this time.

DT: Thank you, CI Marshall, thank you to Verve 2018. I love this festival, it’s brilliant.

Outro:

DT: That was CI Marshall. You stuck around to the very end. Grab a biscuit, etc, etc. This anthology I was telling you about, I’m not going to list all the names of the poets in the book because there are too many, but just as a little taster, we’ve got work from Helen Mort, Travis Alabanza, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Nick Makoha, Luke Kennard, Khairani Barokka, Zeina Hashem Beck, Susie Dickey and Mary-Jean Chan, to name but nine of the 28 poets. If you want to know more about the book or what else is coming up in the series, get over to lunarpoetrypodcasts.com, where you can also find a full transcript of this episode.

You can always find us @Silent_Tongue on Twitter or Lunar Poetry Podcasts on Facebook and Instagram. This episode and the accompanying transcript were made possible with the generous support of Arts Council England, specifically the South West office. As I said earlier, if you like what we do, do tell your friends. It helps a lot. If you want to go even further, why not leave us a review over on iTunes.

Thanks again to Snazzy Rat for the music. I’ll be back at the end of August with episode 117. These episode numbers are so far beyond anything I ever thought I’d achieve, they seem a little bit ridiculous now. In episode 117, I’m going to be chatting to Andrew McMillan about his brilliant second collection, Playtime. Thanks for listening. I still can’t believe anyone does. Much love. Bye.

End of transcript.

Why Poetry? – The Lunar Poetry Podcasts anthology.

July 22, 2018 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2018-07-22 at 12.24.23

I’m delighted to be able to announce that we have an anthology of poems by former podcast guests coming out September 27th through Verve Poetry Press. The book will cost £9.99 and is available for pre-order now here, and includes free shipping. It is edited by myself and my wife Lizzy, editor of our accompanying podcast series, a poem a week.

Poets featured in the anthology, in order of appearance: Helen Mort, Sean Wai Keung, Lizzy Turner, Grim Chip, Paul McMenemy, Donald Chegwin, Abi Palmer, Travis Alabanza, Keith Jarrett, Anna Kahn, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Nadia Drews, Nick Makoha, Harry Josephine Giles, Luke Kennard, Amerah Saleh, Khairani Barokka, Joe Dunthorne, Zeina Hashem Beck, Kim Moore, Rishi Dastidar, Sandra Alland, Giles L. Turnbull, Susannah Dickey, Mary Jean Chan, Leo Boix, Roy McFarlane and Jane Yeh.

Obviously featuring only 28 poets from an archive of over 200 poets and writers is only ever going to give a snapshot of what has been achieved since October 2014 but I hope this snapshot is well-rounded, interesting and, most importantly, representational of what is happening in the current poetry and spoken word scene in the UK.

A huge thank you to Stuart at VPP for the initial invitation to begin compiling so much great work, much of which is being published for the first time. And for all of his hard work so far in trying to make the book a reality.

A big thank you also to Abi Palmer who has not only written the foreword to the book but also interviewed me for what has become an extended ‘introduction’ which now runs throughout the anthology in four sections (hopefully not demanding to much space!).

Below is the ‘official’ blurb about the anthology:

To celebrate their fourth anniversary Lunar Poetry Podcasts has teamed up with their poetry sibling Verve Poetry Press to produce Why Poetry?, a collection of poems by some of the UK’s most exciting and vibrant voices. This anthology highlights the breadth and depth of the series, offering a snapshot of the range of talent contained within the archive.

Since October 2014 Lunar has rejected the usual model of telling the listener what is good and offering hosts an opportunity for self-promotion. It focuses instead on showcasing what is happening now in poetry and spoken word, in the UK and further afield. Lunar is a platform for ideas to be developed and questions to be asked. Round-table discussions of important subjects (ep.105 – ‘Access to Publishing’) sit alongside recordings of live poetry events (ep.84 – ‘20 years of Poetry Unplugged’), though one-to-one long-form conversations remain at the core of the project.

In order to reflect the ranging topics and issues discussed in the podcast, the subjects of the poems within vary widely; from the various facets of identity such as class and gender, as in Nadia Drews’ Punky Sue, I Love You, or Zeina Hashem-Beck’s Apparition, to more surreal depictions of love and loneliness, as in Donald Chegwin’s Waking of Insects. The poems’ subjects and ideas are underpinned and elaborated on by the featured quotations.

By pairing the poems in the book with quotations taken from the 28 featured poets’ Lunar episodes, Why Poetry? highlights the inextricable link between process and final draft. Poets discussing their process throughout include four ‘Next Generation Poets’, major prize nominees and winners, and most importantly a number of writers without pamphlets or collections. Writers who consider themselves ‘page poets’ sit alongside spoken word artists and poets known more for their performances than their journal appearances. Those who teach workshops and attend residencies accompany those whose ‘other jobs’ are in cafes and offices. In true Lunar style the lines here are blurred when it comes to what makes a poet a poet and why.

Why Poetry? is the first public outing for many of the 28 poems contained within the covers of what is a unique book, reflecting a unique archive of poetic ideas, ideals and methods.

David xx

Episode 115 – Jane Yeh & Roy McFarlane.

June 29, 2018 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

LPP Jane Yeh new itunes lpp

Good morning listeners!! Episode 115 is now online… You can download and subscribe via all the major podcast channels including iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Overcast, Acast and SoundCloud.

(My apologies for my slightly ‘glitchy’ voice during the conversation with Jane. I’m working hard to rectify this and will hopefully have an improved version up soon.)

This episode is in two parts:

Part one – David Turner is in London chatting to Jane Yeh about assuming personas and writing characters iton her poetry, why fiction is such a common starting point for her poems and the influence that fine art, particularly ‘old-master paintings’ has on her creative practice.

Some links relating to this section:
www.janeyeh3.com/
twitter.com/JaneYeh3
www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?owner_id=838
tornn.me/

Part two (00:48:07) – David Turner is in Birmingham at this year’s Verve Poetry Festival interviewing Roy McFarlane in front of a live audience. Roy explains how important it is for him to try and convey the sounds of his home city through his poetry and how, often, characters in his poems are a composite of many people.

Some links for this section:
www.roymcfarlane.com/
ninearchespress.com/publications/po…ext%20time.html

At the bottom of this post is a transcript of the conversation – minus the poems – alternatively, download a full transcript here.

The episode music is an original composition by Snazzy Rat. You can find more from Snazzy here:
snazzyrat.bandcamp.com/
www.facebook.com/snazzyrat/

Transcript:

Transcript by Christabel Smith.

Host: David Turner – DT

Guest: Jane Yeh – JY

Introduction:

DT: Hello, welcome to episode 115 of Lunar Poetry Podcasts. My name is David Turner. How are you lot? I recently got some feedback from a very knowledgeable and experienced podcast producer about the series, relating to how it’s hosted, edited and produced. Part of that process involved us agreeing that these intros sound far better when recorded outside, so here I am in Victoria Park in Bristol, South West England, trying to avoid the screams of the kids attending the primary school, which sits at one corner of the park. The reality of trying to record a voiceover whilst birds chirp and sing in the background is that I am now sat on the ground as I talk to myself in a bush.

Today’s episode is in two parts. Coming up later is Roy McFarlane in conversation with me at this year’s Verve Poetry Festival. First though is a conversation recorded April 27^th of this year in central London with Jane Yeh. We met up in Covent Garden to discuss her second collection of poetry, The Ninjas, out through Carcanet Press and her upcoming third collection, which will be out in 2019, also with Carcanet.

There’s a little sausage dog just running past, you may have heard it.

I’ve been looking forward to chatting to Jane on the podcast, as many of my more recent interviews have been with writers who focus on themes rooted in the exploration of their own identity and while this is a vital process for writer sto work through, it is sometimes easy to feel like the only way you will get recognition as a poet in the UK is if your writing practice is very much inward facing. Jane’s style of writing runs contrary to that assumption, as it explores fictional settings with voyeuristic, often lonely, characters at the centre of her poems.

I hope it’s also clear from the conversation that it’s often only through interviews such as this that writers dissect their own writing practice, as they’re usually too busy writing to consider these questions unless prompted. As a listener, it can be common to think ‘I’m not a proper writer like these people because I don’t ask these questions of myself’. The reality is that most people don’t ask themselves these questions. Most poets I know, which is quite a few now, are simply overwhelmed by the fact that they haven’t forgotten how to write a poem, to sit around asking why they’re doing what they’re doing. I hope that makes sense.

As usual, I will use this opportunity to ask that if you like what you hear in this episode or any of the other 114, then please do tell your friends, family, work colleagues about the podcast. Or maybe go and leave us a lovely review on iTunes. I have no marketing budget and word-of-mouth recommendations are invaluable.

Here’s Jane.

Part one (00:03:25):

JY: Hi, I’m Jane Yeh and I’m the author of two collections of poetry, Maribou and The Ninjas. The first poem I’m going to read is;

For a transcript of this poem please see the full transcript over at – https://lunarpoetrypodcasts.com/episode-transcripts/

DT: Thank you very much for joining me, Jane. It’s always a struggle to start these conversations, but I’ve been reading your second collection, The Ninjas, out through Carcanet Press and a couple of things I downloaded online. One poem was up on Poetry London and another on Boston Review fairly recently. It’s made a real change reading the way you write in character so much, compared to a lot of stuff you find at the moment, which is, and understandably so, for a lot of people, an exploration into themselves and their own identities.

So these poems have stood out a lot compared to the stuff I read for pleasure and professionally. Maybe we could start by chatting about why you choose to write as characters.

JY: I know, I guess it’s something I’ve done almost from the beginning of when I started writing, although when I really started, as a teenager, of course like most people I was writing about my own feelings, like having a crush on someone or wishing I had a boyfriend or whatever. I guess to me, because I know my own life and experiences they’re not that interesting for me to rehash or even elaborate on directly, so I guess I’ve always been interested in writing about other characters or imaginary characters.

I read a lot of fiction, I always have, ever since I was little, so I guess in a way I’m a little bit more like a fiction writer than a poet, just because I like to make up fictional worlds and characters. It’s also kind of weird though, because obviously a lot of the poetry I read, like you say, is people writing about themselves and it’s really brilliant and super-interesting, but somehow I don’t feel like trying to do that about myself or my identity.

DT: I think it’s important to point out at the moment, because I was a bit worried about how I would word that question, because it’s difficult to start talking about things like this without making one way seem better than the other and that’s not what I’m trying to do. It’s interesting to see how strikingly someone like Luke Kennard straddles both, what was he saying recently? He has this internal critic, which appears as a fully-formed character in his poems, so that’s an interesting tool as well, but yours is very consistent through all of your poems.

JY: Practically, yeah. I do have a handful of poems which are more autobiographical or personal, but not a lot.

DT: It would also be untrue to talk about your poems as complete fiction as well because things from your life must appear in them. There was definitely a difference between the two more recent poems I read online. In The Ninjas, there seemed to be – it may just be the fact I’m away in London, away from my wife at the moment – an underlying theme of lonely moments within those poems.

JY: Yeah.

DT: These themes that run through which I’m assuming would lead back to the author, rather than the characters themselves.

JY: Again of course, there is always something of the author in the characters and stories they invent, even though they don’t seem to be autobiographical. Especially in The Ninjas, but also in Marabou, I would definitely say one of the main themes is loneliness or being almost an outcast, or being apart from the mainstream of society or the world.

DT: I definitely got that feeling of ‘outcast’, a lot of the characters seem to be voyeurs in themselves. You seem to be observing characters which themselves are observing the world around them. A poem that stood out particularly in The Ninjas was Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward D. Boit, where you imagine what the young girls in the paintings might be thinking. It’s in four parts and then four scenes, in which you elaborate a bit on the characters. Sargent’s paintings come up a little bit more and there are further references to images. How often do you take images as a starting point?

JY: That’s also something I’ve done for a long time and actually at the moment, I’m doing it more deliberately. I’ve always been interested in art history. What I was taught was pretty canonical Western art history, such as painting and Old Master paintings, which I really like and feel really drawn to. When I started writing these poems, again in those first two collections, they’re mostly these Old Master-type white-male artists, so in my new collection, the poems I’ve been writing, I’ve been trying to focus more on contemporary art and also not entirely paintings.

Some of it is installations or videos or films. I’m very drawn to or inspired by visual images. Obviously, you can be inspired by anything that’s a visual image, like an ad or a poster, but something that is already in a sense a work of art, has this extra power in a way that’s attractive.

DT: That process of taking visual art as a starting point, does that happen physically in a gallery space or would you reflect on it afterwards or go through catalogues?

JY: Mostly, it is actually working from reproductions, so jpegs on a computer pretty much. The Sergeant painting, The Daughters of Edward D Boit, I had seen a long time ago in person, in Boston, where it hangs, but only once really, many years before I wrote the poem. So a lot of time it’s working from reproductions or even in a way, like my memory of what something looked like.

Again, with this same poem, I had a little postcard reproduction of it from the museum gift shop, but when I wrote the poem, I actually deliberately didn’t look at it or keep looking at it whilst I was writing the poem because I didn’t want to be influenced by it too closely. So actually, in the finished poem, if you look at it, some of the description doesn’t actually fit the painting because I kind of misremembered. There’s no doorway that one of the girls is standing in, it’s actually just space.

DT: It’s interesting, if I’m stuck for subjects to write about or struggling for inspiration, I spend a lot of time in galleries, looking at paintings. It’s one of my favourite things, to write from paintings, and Leon Kossoff will always strike something in theme it’s really textural, almost sculptural. I think that’s why I need to be in front of the paintings, because I like to see the depth and volume. He painted alongside Frank Albach and they paint in a similar way. They paint portraits and landscapes, mainly of building sites in post-Second World War London, post-Blitz London.

I had a discussion with a friend, who also writes from paintings and they do a similar thing to you, have postcards or jpegs. Their process was needing to remove the scale and the gallery from the image. It was this uniformity of having stuff on screen that allowed them to draw stories out of the images. I wonder how much that plays?

JY: It’s not that so much, it’s more the convenience of having a jpeg or a postcard you can look at when you want to see what it looks like properly. Most of the time, I don’t know what it is really, because when I look at art in real life, especially paintings I love, what you’re saying, what actually interests me in the brushstrokes and texture and everything like that, but when I’m writing a poem about it, that doesn’t really come into it.

DT: It’s interesting to hear that you’re perhaps writing from a memory.

JY: It’s definitely already mediated by my memory. Obviously, I’m not trying to make some exact reproduction of it in words, because what would be the point of that? I’ve only started trying to think about it, or theorise about it, recently, so I don’t really know what my conclusions are. It’s one of these things, in the same way I write these dramatic-monologue poems or poems about characters, I’ve just been doing it for a while or just started doing it for who knows what reason, it’s like you start theorising about it afterwards, if you have to.

DT: It’s only when someone invites you on a podcast and forces you to think about things. This is an important point about these conversations, that quite often, the subjects that come up when you’re talking about things, aren’t part of your process necessarily, are they? You just do things you’re drawn to and hopefully get enjoyment out of as well. I don’t know why I like looking at Leon Kossoff’s paintings while I sit and write about them and I don’t think I would want to think about it too much because it would take some of the enjoyment out of it.

I was born near Tate Britain so it’s quite nice to be in that location, knowing my dad bunked off school when he was a kid and snuck in there to get away from the truant officer.

JY: When it was just an abandoned industrial building?

DT: No, so Tate Britain, the older. So these characters that come up within your writing, I’m wondering whether you’re writing as yourself as another character or are you viewing them? Are you putting yourself into those personas?

JY: I guess there’s a sense when people talk about writing dramatic monologues, like poems, I use this terminology too when I’m critiquing students or something like that, you talk about trying to inhabit the voice of this other character that you’ve created, or speaking in this character’s voice, and in a way that’s true, or the most obvious way of putting it, but when I’m writing, that’s not exactly what I’m doing or trying to do. I write really slowly, line by line or sentence by sentence, and I almost feel some kind of voice is being created by one line and then what the next line is, or what comes up in this one line or statement, what this kind of voice is saying.

But it’s not like oh here’s the voice of this lonely robot, or whatever, and now I’m going to speak in it. Do you know what I mean? It’s almost more that in the process, it turns into the voice of a character or into some kind of character, but it’s not like I have a preconception of it that I’m aiming at. I imagine people in acting classes must have some exercise where it’s ‘oh, here’s the character you are, now speak in their voice’. It’s not like that, it’s more the opposite in a weird way.

DT: That’s interesting because with a lot of people who are doing spoken word stuff or anyone that’s done any improvised stuff, it goes back to that thought of acting, anyone who’s done that would read your work and perhaps assume you had a conceit to begin with and an ending point and you found a way to let your character through that. It seems more that you start from quite a small starting point, then allow the whole thing to develop.

JY: I would say that’s definitely true. I don’t just start out with a whole conceit in mind or any kind of end point at all. Like you say, I guess it’s very improvised, so moment to moment, obviously many moments, because I am such a slow writer, but it’s quite haphazard as well, it leaves a lot to chance. If I think of some strange line that day that might be interesting, the poem is going to turn into that, or some character’s going to come out of that.

DT: Is it the writing process that’s slow or does it also take the ideas a while to germinate?

JY: What I’m trying to say, again it’s sort of weird because I haven’t really thought about it myself until now, I guess it’s that ideas are only coming through each sentence I’m writing. So I guess you could say both of them are slow because they’re coming together at the same time.

DT: What’s the mechanical process of your writing? Do you have a few pieces on the go at once or stick to something until it’s worked through?

JY: Usually, I’m only working on one thing at a time. Occasionally, there will be something and I’ll put it aside and then be doing something else, or if I have a deadline, occasionally I’ll be doing one thing in the morning and one in the afternoon, but in a way, I do just work out one really slowly and worry away at it, which I don’t actually think is the best process. It’s literally the opposite of what I recommend to students because I don’t think it’s that effective, but it’s the way I’ve fallen into working unfortunately, so that’s what I keep doing.

I’m thinking when I finish this current book, and am embarking on a new book, I want to change my process and see if that does anything.

DT: Did you have a pre-decided theme or idea about what the collection should be about or did it just suggest itself as pieces became finished?

JY: Each of these three books, I didn’t have any preconceived theme or project. It’s just like the poems I’ve been writing for the last several years. Obviously, they have their own commonalities and themes that emerge when you see them en masse, but it’s not any kind of project or concept.

DT: I don’t know why I keep asking that question. It seems to, at best, bore people and at worst, annoy them. It always seems that question only comes up when you’re trying to sell a book afterwards, suggesting a unifying theme to a potential buyer or reader.

JY: I think it’s an interesting question. I feel increasingly here, and before that in the US, most of the poets I know are often writing what they see as a collection that has a project or unifying theme. That basic idea, they aren’t just writing a bunch of whatever poems come to their mind. They have more of an arc or some kind of aim, I guess you would say. It’s kind of cool. A lot of these collections with that feel are really strong and interesting. For me, again, it’s just somehow I can’t come up with an idea like that I feel strongly enough about.

DT: Speaking recently to Mary-Jean Chan, reflecting on her daily pamphlet, and is very concerned with her debut collection coming out through Faber, we were chatting about how for a lot of poets, the first collection is the most personal and an exploration of themselves and they can get that out of the way and get on to maybe considering ‘well, I’d like to explore this theme or that theme’. It also might be a consequence of funding opportunities that become available to you once you’ve published the first collection. Someone might come to you and commission an idea or a project.

JY: Yeah or often, if you’re applying for grants or other funding, you have to say you have some idea for a project. Again that probably is part of it with the American poets especially, how many of these contemporary American books have this kind of project.

DT: How much do commissions and projects play in your practice?

JY: In terms of financially, or supporting yourself, the money, at least for the things I’ve been asked to do, there’s either no money or minute amounts of money, so it’s not for that. What I like about it, I actually love it when people are ‘Oh, I’m doing an anthology on this theme, would you be interested in contributing something or writing something for it?’ or other kinds of commissions. I really like having some kind of external suggestion.

Again, the way I don’t write about myself or my feelings or experiences really, so I am always looking for something else to write about, or even just a starting point or jumping-off point. Again, that’s definitely one of the reasons I’m drawn to writing about art or art pieces, because it’s something totally external to me, but I can grip onto as a starting point.

DT: It’s useful, having those prompts external to yourself. It’s something I need to get back to more. I get too bogged down in thinking about myself too much, I don’t find it very healthy, plus I don’t think people particularly want to read about it much. There are two sides to my writing. I have a way that’s very confessional, but also really enjoy writing fiction, which is bordering on short stories.

There’s a huge amount in the way you write that really appeals to me and I would prefer to spend more time exploring that. I think there might be quite a few people listening that feel a pressure to write about themselves because that is the predominant fashion. I think it’s good to talk about ways of looking for prompts externally to yourself. Even if it’s not with a view to being published, it might be healthy for writers to take a break from thinking about themselves, the internal ‘I’.

Are you conscious of when the switch was made to know what led you to start writing more fictionally? Any advice for people that might want to try writing more like that?

JY: One thing I’ve noticed a lot from teaching is when you give people exercises that force them not to be writing about themselves in a confessional way, they often produce really good stuff, that’s really different from the way they were writing before. Always, they will say ‘I really enjoyed that, it was interesting’. That doesn’t mean they’re going to spend the rest of their life writing dramatic monologues, but trying something different is really worth it when you’re working on your craft.

DT: Do you have an example of an exercise you might give?

JY: Yes, there are ones, like every teacher ever has used them, I’m sure, writing from visuals. Every student picks their own image, again it can be a photograph or an image of a painting, or it could be an ad or a poster if they want, totally anything, then go away and write a poem that’s inspired by it in some way. It’s as simple as that really. Again, I think it is probably natural for most people, especially when they’re starting out, to just write in the ‘I’, first-person voice. So even just being directed specifically to not use that as your starting point can be fun or exciting for people.

DT: That’s really interesting. Before we move on to anything else, we might take a second poem.

JY: So the poem I’m going to read is called A Short History of Style. The sub-title is Joey Arias, at Jackie 60, New York 1997. So Joey Arias is a performer and performance artist and in the 1990s especially, in New York when I was living there, he was famous for doing a one-man show where he was singing the songs of Billie Holiday and he could vocally imitate her to a remarkable extent, but he himself wasn’t physically impersonating Billie Holiday, although he was in drag, but his own drag, not trying to look like Billie Holiday. This is kind of a memorial to those performances.

We are unable to provide a transcript of this poem at this time. Apologies.

(00:27:12)

DT: Thank you very much. It was interesting earlier to her you talk about working from sentence to sentence. Another note I made about a few of the poems in The Ninjas and then audibly within that poem, there seemed to be a gathering together of those sentences, not that they’re completely disparate because there’s a lot of work going into the order of them, but there’s something ringing in my mind because I was at an event recently, put on by Toast Poetry, which had Remi Graves, Mary-Jean Chan and Joe Dunthorne reading.

There was a short Q&A afterwards and Joe Dunthorne was talking about going through old notebooks and stuff that doesn’t work and put aside sentences or images he likes. He’s got a folder on his desktop, which will be saved ideas. I wonder whether that’s any part of your process, whether you will hold onto things, or how you feel about discarding ideas.

JY: That’s really cool. One of my friends, this American poet Amy Woolard, for a long time she worked like that. I don’t know if she still does, but like what you said Joe Dunthorne would say, keeping this whole notebook or file of really good lines that you’d had to cut for one reason or another from a poem. I sort of used to keep a list of some good lines that I was hoping to use again, but actually, it never really worked out. I like the idea of that and the idea of collage and these fragments of poems, but again, for whatever reason, it hasn’t actually worked out for me.

I think when I’m writing, especially more recently, so the poems I’m reading today are all going to be in my next collection so they’re more recent, I’m definitely interested in this idea of thinking of the poem as a collage of these lines or sentences or images and trying to be less linear and less logical in terms of the construction of the poem.

DT: That’s fascinating to hear because I was wondering whether I’d just projected that onto some of the poems I’ve been reading in the last couple of days, this idea that things could have been shuffled around. You definitely get a sense of that, but it’s very interesting to hear you talk of working in a very linear fashion and going from line to line, then having this feeling that things could have been reassembled and reorganised.

JY: Actually, I guess recently in all of these new poems, the editing I do or the revising I do, is more about changing the order of the sentences or lines than other kinds of editing that one can do. So sometimes I do literally switch the order of some sentences to see what happens.

DT: Going back to the visual arts, you were saying it’s not just paintings. How much do abstract and collage images play into the way you think about writing? From The Ninjas, it may have just been the painters I was familiar with, but it seemed much more figurative in that respect.

JY: Yeah, in a way it might be partly the kind of art I’m writing about now, the contemporary art, tends to be less figurative, or maybe I’m subconsciously seeking out less figurative work. I’m not really sure, to be honest. I feel I need less figuration to be able to create a story or characters out of than I used to in those earlier poems. For instance, one of my new poems is inspired by this installation in a small, basically a one-room gallery, so there are different pieces arranged around the room and none of them are figurative per se, except a cast of a foot.

There was a wheelchair that was cast in bronze, or painted gold, or something like that. Different objects. But the poem itself is about a man, or a boy, so I guess maybe it was interesting to me to create something that was about a person, even though the visuals I was working from don’t directly represent people.

DT: This ‘cut-up’ or collage aspect of your process of working, how much do you want to communicate that to the reader? Does that play any role?

JY: Actually, only super-recently, I’ve been trying to think a little bit more about the form of the poem on the page or what it looks like on that page. On the one hand I kind of like the fact that most of the poems I’ve been writing, even though they kind of are like this strange collage, they’re almost rigid-looking on the page. They’re set out in stanzas and the first letter of each line is capitalised, which is considered old-fashioned nowadays. I kind of like the sense of order that gives you, but actually, I’m also just starting to be interested in these much more open forms, especially as contemporary poets, who are doing really interesting work, use them so much. The idea is coming into my mind more, so I’m only just starting to experiment with them, where the phrases and words are spread out a little more on the page, not like concrete poetry, where it’s making a little shape.

DT: Giving air and space inside.

JY: Yeah.

DT: Forcing people to pause.

JY: Yeah, yeah.

DT: It’s fine if your process is to get to a traditional-looking poem, but if you want to communicate that to the reader, it’s very hard in a traditional book to express that, because everything’s very defined, it’s printed there and there’s no movement in it necessarily. Have you considered taking your poetry off the printed page in order to express more this feeling of collage?

JY: What do you mean?

DT: More taking it closer to what some of these installations are that you’re taking your inspiration from, allowing some live movement within a text.

JY: I guess I haven’t, to be honest.

DT: It just popped into my head because I’ve been thinking about one particular artist [Ed Atkins].

JY: It’s an interesting idea. I guess if I thought more about performance or maybe were a better performer, I might be trying to do something more radical. To me, the outcome I want is something that is satisfying to me or to other people when you read it on the page. Again, I guess it’s old-fashioned, but to me, the way it’s performed is always going to be secondary really.

DT: I also meant not just in the performance sense, but in the way people are allowed to read the work, whether there is some way of controlling more how people interact with the words, even without your presence.

JY: Actually, I remember just recently I was in a seminar about Oulipo, that movement that started in the 60s or 70s maybe. I hope I have his name right, I want to say it was an academic named Dennis Duncan who had studied a lot about Oulipo and then was giving us a basic summary. He brought in a book and I can’t remember, it might have been by Raymond Aquino, but it might have been one of the other figures, it was actually really amazing, where the book was I think meant to be 100 sonnets, it was all French, but each page of the book was slit, so each line was basically like a flap.

It was like you could be assembling your own sonnet out of 14 lines, but from all different poems in the book, by moving the flaps. It was super-cool and I thought how cool that would be to do as a project. Maybe for someone else, not for me. The idea of that, the way it’s kind of modular, and also has this degree of chance.

The thing it reminded me instantly of was the poet Crispin Best he has this thing online, I assume on his own website, where he literally wrote 1000 lines, they’re quite short, one-sentence lines of poetry and there’s a randomiser. You can put them in a certain order to write, maybe a 12-line poem each time. It was really excellent actually.

DT: There’s a very interesting digital poetry project at the moment called ToRNN, based in Bath. It’s a student [Meghan McKeague] there on their MA course and she’s designed this poetry bot which has taken, I want to say the work of Keats, it may not be Keats, but it’s a very well-known poet and it’s like data entry. You enter the works of this poet and it regenerates poetry. The computer doesn’t know what makes good poetry, there are just certain rules.

Whenever anybody talks about collage now, in terms of poetry, these things come to my mind. It may not be the author themselves that comes up, it may be more of a collaborative process to go through in working with someone else in order to show that cut-up nature of the work, otherwise it’s just hugely laborious.

JY: The thing that was really interesting to me about this randomiser that Crispin made, well obviously he’s a good poet, so all the lines were just interesting and strange separately, but it really was amazing. They were in quatrains, so four-line stanzas, it was pre-set to do that I guess, so you would see these four sentences in this order, then you’d be ‘ah, interesting’. Each one would be about a totally disparate thing, like some thought about pizza or a dog, but then as soon as you put them together in this particular order, it generates this whole other idea or image. I do really like the thought of that.

DT: Yes, my question was definitely more aimed at what you want the relationship to be with the reader, rather than questioning why you haven’t done any of these. It’s interesting to see what writers’ different aims are, how they want that relationship to work. With these changes you’re considering with your upcoming third collection, how has that process been with your publishers? Have they been fine with any changes that have been made? I don’t think I’ve spoken to any poets about the process that goes on between each collection and how easy it is to change direction or suggest new ideas

JY: I guess I’m lucky. They’re pretty laissez-faire. They’ve never seen a manuscript and said ‘we don’t like this’ or ‘this isn’t commercial enough or I don’t know what enough’. They pretty much are happy with what I’ve been doing, I feel really lucky. I sort of assume they must understand implicitly that of course anyone that is writing is going to develop or change their practice from book to book. That’s just natural or par for the course. They haven’t actually seen the final manuscript of this book yet, so we’ll see, but I’ve been assuming and they act as if it will all be fine.

DT: I don’t know whether Carcanet is a team or whether it’s individuals, but have you throughout the three books worked with a single person or does that change over time?

JY: Again, it must be different at every publisher, but at Carcanet, because they’re quite small, at least since I’ve been with them, it seems like there are basically two people that edit things. There’s either Michael Schmidt, who’s also the director and then there’s always a second editor who works there, so it’s always been the second person that was my own editor, but that person has changed over time. In my first book, it was Judith Wilson, in my second book it was Helen Tookey and now the current editor is Luke Allan.

DT: Obviously this is different from writer to writer and publishing house to publishing house, but what do you mean when you say you work with an editor? What role do they have in the final manuscript? Are we talking about changes to poems? Scratching out lines? Or are we talking about fitting them onto pages and the order of the book?

JY: Again, even with the particular people that I’ve mentioned, I know other writers that have worked with them and had different experiences, but this is just my experience personally. With none of the editors I’ve had has there been that much back and forth, they’ve kind of let me do as I please and haven’t really requested many changes or edits to things, so very light touch, I would say.

DT: What is your personal editing process? Do you have people you share work with or do you rely on small readings at poetry events? How do you develop the sound and flow of your work?

JY: I don’t really have people to share work with anymore, since I left the last post-graduate programme I was in. Obviously when you’re doing a degree or course of any kind, you have this in-built set of people you can show your work to, then once you leave that, you’re often on your own and often you have to develop your own network. I have a lot of friends who are poets, but we don’t actually share our work with each other, for whatever reason. I’m kind of just reliant on myself. It would be nice to have people I share work with.

It’s hard at the same time because everyone is so busy. Even people whose work I really like, or who I like personally, if they were asking me to read their work all the time, it would be hard finding the time and the headspace and all that kind of stuff. So when I was writing The Ninjas, which already now is a long time ago, I don’t know how I fell into this, but actually for quite a while, I would write a new poem or finish a poem and send it to an old friend of mine, who’s named Ed Park, he’s a novelist who lives in New York, where I used to live.

It wasn’t to get his feedback or edits or anything at all, it was more like ‘here’s my poem’ and he would basically just send back an email like ‘great’ or ‘this one is really good’. It was just general encouragement, but then after a while, I stopped doing that as well.

DT: My wife and I moved to Bristol last autumn and in January, I started a writing group, so as part of the group, we all share poems and offer feedback. That’s useful in itself, but I tend to use the sessions as a way of reading people’s work and giving feedback because it means I’m thinking about poems, so when I come to interviews, I’m always thinking about writers, so I don’t actually share a lot of work at the sessions. Similarly to you, I also have a couple of friends who I will just send the work to and they will send a ‘red heart emoji’ back or something.

I don’t get any feedback, but what it means is I don’t feel like I’m just doing the writing for myself in a vacuum, I’m actually sharing it with people, regardless of the feedback, so I guess that’s important as well, purely because the process of writing any book is quite drawn out. It would be easy to lose all contact with any reader in that development stage. I suppose it’s important to have that immediate connection.

We’re running out of time, but just to give a proper plug to the upcoming collection, does it have a title yet?

JY: Right now, it’s a working title, but I think it will end up being the actual title because for a few years, while I’ve been working on the manuscript, I still haven’t been able to come up with a title I really, really like. So by default it’s just taking the title of one of the poems, so the title might be Discipline. Again, I’m hoping to come up with something else, just because I hate that pressure of having the title poem in a collection. That’s what it looks like, it is, for now.

DT: That will be available when?

JY: March 2019.

DT: Through Carcanet Press. I’ll put a link to Carcanet on the website and your website in the episode description, rather than reading them. No one ever understands websites when I read them on audio, for some reason. So there will be clickable links in the description so people can just find stuff and it’s a lot easier. To finish off, we’ll take a third and final poem.

JY: This poem is just called A Short History of Destruction. Actually, sorry, I didn’t think this would have much of an intro, but when you hear a poem out loud, it’s easy to miss odd words that people say. In the first stanza, I use the word étagères a French name for a piece of furniture with open shelves that is traditionally used to display ornaments. In the middle of the poem, I use the word ‘ewer’ which means a water jug.

For a transcript of this poem please see the full transcript over at – https://lunarpoetrypodcasts.com/episode-transcripts/

DT: Thank you very much, Jane, for joining me and good luck with the development of your third collection.

JY: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast, it was really fun.

Link (00:48:07):

DT: That was the wonderful Jane Yeh. Next up is Roy McFarlane. We got together to chat in front of an audience at the second Verve Poetry Festival, which was held in Birmingham in February of this year. This is the third of four live interviews I recorded at what I think is the broadest and most inclusive poetry event in the UK. Roy has a real ability to reflect the voices and noises of Birmingham, his city of birth, and I enjoyed chatting to him about characters in his poems being a composite of many different people.

I think about this question a lot with my own writing. One of the foremost questions I put to myself is: Do I have the right so somebody else’s story? I haven’t come anywhere near to answering that. While I ponder, here’s Roy from Verve Poetry Festival.

Host: David Turner – DT

Guest: Roy McFarlane – RM

Part two (00:49:20)

DT: Hello Verve, how are you doing? Louder, louder, keep going. This is day four, is it not, of Verve? It just seems to be wonderfully endless. Today, I am joined by a local legend, Roy McFarlane. Hello Roy, how are you doing?

RM: Hello.

DT: I’m going to read Roy’s bio. I think most of you know who he is, but there’s going to be listeners I have to be held accountable to. Roy Macfarlane was born in Birmingham. Now living in the Black Country, he’s held the role of Birmingham Poet Laureate and Starbucks Poet in Residence. His first collection, Beginning With Your Last Breath, was published by the wonderful Nine Arches in September 2016.

He is the first commissioned writer for this wonderful anthology I’m holding in my hand, It All Radiates Outwards, which was the product of the Verve Poetry competition, which asked for poems about cities. We’re going to begin our chat with an extract from his poem.

RM: Thank you very much.

We are unable to provide a transcript of this poem at this time. Apologies.

DT: Thank you, Roy, I really love that poem. When I attended the reading for this anthology, I worried that too many people’s views and musings on cities were going to be too personal and too inward-looking, but you really captured the noise of the city in your poem, by just focusing on a couple of people. I thought it was an amazing thing to do. How important is the soundscape around you in your poetry?

RM: Specifically in this particular poem, I think the poem came to life in the very essence of Birmingham city. I’m always amazed when I walk through the city, when I see Christians and Muslims having their little stands, talking about the hereafter or religion. All that language. I think that was the thing I wanted to bring out in that poem, the powerful thing about language in this city. I read an article about it. There’s something like 120 or 123 languages abounding in this city and I just wanted to capture that, that din of identities bouncing off each other, it’s still a beautiful thing.

I don’t believe there’s a city that’s monolithic, one language, one identity. That’s the essence of cities, people come, whether it’s from the rural, from other countries or whatever, that’s what cities are about. So much diversity comes into a city to make a city beautiful and grow and evolve. That’s what a city is all about.

DT: I think Birmingham is one of the few places in the country I’ve visited that’s reminded me of what Brixton used to be. Outside Waterstones, that’s what Brixton tube station used to be like. That noise. I interviewed the poet Tim Wells up at Stoke Newington in North London and on the recording, I apologised to listeners that there might be a bit of noise in the background. He corrected me and said ‘it’s sounds’. It’s an important point. It might be something that people that grow up in cities take for granted. A lot of people would consider that noise and not a soundtrack. Is that an important thing to try and communicate in your writing?

RM: Yeah. I’m thinking a lot of poems I’ve read, whether from the Romantics to the present day will capture rural, all that, birds, I mean I couldn’t name half the birds that they talk about and all that rural setting.

DT: A pigeon poem?

RM: But they’ve captured something with all that extra noise that’s going around, that gives their poem an atmosphere. I was thinking, what about us? Equally the sound effects, what’s going on around me in a city. The number-one thing told to a poet when they’re going on a journey and writing poetry is: write what you know. No matter how much I’ll read all these incredible poets of the past, half of the things I don’t know. I’ll understand the craft, the content maybe, but I don’t know that.

This is what I know and I will do everything I can to translate that into that form, that poem, so yes, it’s so important to capture the atmosphere, the environment around me in my poem. I want to catch diverse voices. I’m very much a voice person and I have characters.

DT: When you say write about what you know, it’s a very common piece of advice, but I was going to follow it up with: how do you write about who you know?

RM: I write about people around me. The characters that come up in my collections are usually a combination of individuals I know. So I either pick the best of them or the worst of them and then make a character and that character starts to walk through my collection. In, Beginning With Your Last Breath, there’s a guy called Bevan and you’ll see him crop up in three or four of my poems. Bevan is literally a collection of four or five of my friends. It’s what we lived through the 80s, being black in the Midlands kind of thing and the struggles, but the joys. We loved our basketball. I wanted to talk about that and I showed it in my collection, but we also had police officers following us around. I needed to show that.

The music we grew up on, Motown, soul, R&B, Marvin Gaye. I needed to show that. You’ll find Marvin Gaye going through all my collections.

DT: He should be going through every collection.

Any characters that exist in poems you love or you write yourself, do they have to be composites of different people in order to aim for a form of universality?

RM: That’s an interesting question. Yeah. It’s an interesting question.

DT: Quick-fire!

RM: I’ve always gone for several people to make that individual. There’s Patterson I can think of, that’s about a guy we used to go to, actually that’s a composition, I just realised that’s not Patterson, it’s a composition of two or three guys. So there’s something about me doing composition that comes through these characters. I’m not sure if it’s about getting the best out of them or getting a diverse feel. I guess that’s part of us being poets or storytellers, you pick as many truths as you can, but you make up other parts as well, to make that character exciting.

DT: If you’re really concerned about the people you’re writing about, you perhaps don’t want to write about them as individuals because you don’t want to give too much away about them personally and maybe it’s easier to compose a character out of different elements because you’re protective about them?

RM: That’s interesting. I keep saying interesting, I do apologise. It made me think, I’ve been blessed with one or two relationships with some beautiful women during my journey and one of those ladies when I started my poetry, said she was worried about getting into the book. ‘You always write about people around you and is it safe to be a lover of yours, because we’ll end up in your book?’ The last poem I’ll read is about somebody who’s real. What was the question again?

DT: Is there an element of protecting the person you’re writing about by adding other elements?

RM: Sometimes, I may protect people. Sometimes I just write. Again, it’s important to write the emotional truth. It’s something somebody taught me. If you faff about with it and don’t really write the truth, then people know you’re making it up. So if a character has to be the wife, the partner, somebody I hated or was angry with, it’s going to go in there as well as the composite individuals. It’s quite interesting who I protect and who I don’t. That’s the best way of answering.

DT: What are the differences and similarities between writing a love poem to a city in a love poem to a person?

RM: There are equal metaphors, innit? You’ll see that in my next collection about certain journeys of love. I’ll use landscapes, cities. In the last collection, there was something about Birmingham city and the way I fell in love with a woman, but equally looked at all the different things that were happening in the city, from the busker who’s playing his saxophone to walking around the art gallery, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, all of that was included in this love poem that was talking about love with this woman, but also about the love of the city. I think they’re equally the same. Were you not expecting that?

DT: I try to go to everything with an open mind, Roy. I don’t expect anything in this life anymore. I’m jaded, jaded by poetry. I think I’ll spoil the mood if I go on with another question. Let’s wrap up with a love poem.

RM: The following love poem is something I perform on the circuits all the while. Somebody told me they read this yesterday morning, so I thought let me read it again, from my perspective. It’s often known as ‘The Tights Poem’ as well. As I Did The Night Before.

We are unable to provide a transcript of this poem at this time. Apologies.

DT: Thank you very much.

Outro (01:04:18):

DT: Hello. You stuck around to the very end. You’re part of a very select group of people. Treat yourself to a biscuit. This episode and the accompanying transcript have been made possible through the funding I’ve received from Arts Council England.

You can download that transcript over at our website, lunarpoetrypodcasts.com, where you can also follow the blog I update sporadically. If you want to follow us for updates on social media, you can find us @Silent_Tongue on Twitter and Lunar Poetry Podcasts on Instagram. There is a Facebook group, but I’m probably going to pack that in soon as it’s pretty much a waste of time, what with the evil algorithms and all that.

That’s it for today. Come back and join us for episode 116 – 116, it’s crazy – in which I’ll be talking to the incomparable Ross Sutherland about his poetry and his fantastic podcast series, Imaginary Advice. It will also be the fourth and final interview from Verve, with C.I. Marshall.

But for today, that’s it. Tchüss.

End of transcript.

Ep.114 – Developing Your Creative Practice

June 12, 2018June 12, 2018 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ 2 Comments

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In the latest episode of Lunar Poetry Podcasts I met up with Gemma Seltzer at the London office of Arts Council England (ACE) to discuss their new funding scheme ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ (DYCP). In this blog post I’m going to try and break down some of the points made in the conversation and how this new scheme differs from the more established ‘Project Grants’ (or Grants for the Arts as they used to be known).

As regular listeners will know, since July 2016 I have had three successful ‘Project Grant’ applications, as well as two refused, so I’ll also try and give some personal insights into the process.

Episode 114 can be found through all the usual channels, including here on SoundCloud.

A full transcript of the conversation can be found here.

ACE guidelines for the funding scheme can be found here.

DYCP, which began earlier this year, is a four-year scheme in which individual artists (and regular collectives, though only a single individual can be named on any application) can apply for between £2,000-10,000. The scheme has at its disposal £3.6m per year, which will be distributed across four ‘rounds’ during each of the four years. Applicants must have three years’ ‘practice experience’, though this experience is open to the interpretation of the applicant and no further guidelines are given by ACE.

As always, applicants must have a ‘Grantium Applicant Account’. If you are already registered then you can use your existing account, but if not, bear in mind it can take up to 14 days for a new account to become active, until which time you won’t be able to begin any applications.

Another important factor to remember is that applicants are only allowed two applications in any 12-month period, whether successful or not, so it’s important that your application is as complete and ready as it can be. Throughout your application it will be important for you to express why you need this funding now, and why, if you go head-to-head with another applicant, you need it more than them. Round one of applications has already passed.

Round two of applications opens at 10am on July 12^th and closes at 12pm (noon) on August 16^th 2018.

Round three of applications opens at 10am on October 11th and closes at 12pm (noon) on November 14^th 2018.

So, how is DYCP different from the previous ‘Project Grants’ that so many already know? Well, the first point is, as the name suggests, that the focus is much more on the personal development of the individual and their creative practice. Gone from the application are the questions and demands on the applicants to project (and at times guess) audience and participant engagement within the proposed project. This focus often led many applicants to crowbar in educational workshops and public-facing events in order for their project to qualify for ever-decreasing amounts of public money.

With this burden removed I can already see how much easier it is going to be for writers to get funding to finance research projects, or even time away from other forms of employment to write, concentrating on projects without any certain or even probable audience interaction. This is probably the perfect opportunity to apply for funding to explore the collaborative project with that illustrator you’ve been meaning to get around to that may only yield 50 hand-bound pamphlets, without having to run workshops on hand-stitching book spines.

This new scheme also removes the burden of any potential project being UK-based. ACE have stated that they welcome applications that will use funding from DYCP to explore working relationships/projects outside of the UK. All pretty vital with Brexit looming on the horizon like a visit to the clap clinic (it’s going to happen (it’s got to happen)).

DYCP, unlike ‘Project Grants’, offers 100% funding, removing the applicant’s obligation to find 10% of the overall project cost. (‘Project Grants’ require applicants to source at least 10% match-funding.) I think this is mainly an attempt to aid lower-income applicants in their application. While it’s certainly true that this will help a number of people, it is also true that if applicants come from low-income backgrounds they will also be hindered by a lack of industry connections, knowledge of funding schemes and the language and tools necessary to apply successfully. We will have to wait and see how effective this new condition is in levelling the playing field for applicants from marginalised backgrounds, but it’s a good start.

A very welcome change of direction for ACE and their insistence with Grantium as an application portal is that they’ve made the questions for the application available to download. This means you can take the questions away with you and draft your answers even if you don’t have easy or regular access to a computer. Be aware that the Grantium portal requires answers to questions which adhere to a character count (including all letters, spaces and punctuation), rather than a word count.

If you’re using Word you can easily change the word count to a character count, or if you’re using a tablet or smartphone it’s possible to, as I did with my first application, download simple apps which will count the characters as you type.

You can find and download the list of questions here.

After my first ‘Project Grant’ was finished and evaluated, I published a full breakdown of the costs, including travel, participant fees and equipment costs. If you feel like you’d benefit from taking a look at this breakdown then you can find and download it here.

Finally, if you have any questions, get in touch with ACE – their helplines are very useful. If you don’t feel you can contact ACE then do get in touch with me via the contact form on this website or on Twitter @Silent_Tongue where I’ll also try to instigate some sort of conversation with other artists and producers that have experience of applying for funding.

All the best, David. xxx

Me being interviewed about making a poetry podcast…

March 21, 2018 ~ lunarpoetrypodcasts ~ Leave a comment

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I was interviewed over the weekend by the lovely folk at Nothing in the Rulebook about this here podcast, how it started and why it has developed into what it is. You can read the interview here if you so wish.

In the interview I explain a bit about how the podcast started, how it’s changed and what my motivations are for carrying on with a project that doesn’t always fill me with complete and utter joy 🙂

Oh… and I also talk a little bit about my mental health… surprise!

David xx