Rachael
Hello, I'm Rachael Allen.

Jack
And I'm Jack Underwood.

Jack and Rachael
And welcome to the Faber Poetry Podcast.

Courtney Bush
Hi, this is Courtney. And what you're hearing back here is a Mets game on TV. It's the top of the ninth innings. The Mets are up 5 to 2, and I'm watching it with my cat. I'm going to mute it now so that I can read this poem. The poem is called Last Night Kyle. [Courtney Bush reads 'Last Night Kyle'].

Courtney Bush
And in this one, the Marlins are down to their final strike. Coming to you from Brooklyn, New York. Let's hope he gets them.

Jack
That was an audio postcard from Courtney Bush. Her book, I Love Information, is coming out from Milkweed Editions in August 2023. Rachael, we're back here in the studio.

Rachael
We're back for season three. And it's going to be a musical podcast now.

Jack
Everything's going to be sung. What the hell has been going on, though? It's been so long. We've had a pandemic. I don't know what else is happening. It's such a strange increment of time. It was a blur.

Rachael
I think it has been three years since we recorded a podcast.

Jack
Oh, my goodness.

Rachael
So it feels really special, actually very moving to be back talking to all these poets who have given us their time. And also to be able to be in person with them has been really nice.

Jack
Yeah. I feel that... I did that Instagram poetry thing in lockdown, and there was a furious activity around poetry in lockdown. I think people felt starved of the social aspects of poetry. But I want to forget about all that now. And I don't know, this seems a relief. And also coming out of lockdown, all that people talked about for the first six months was lockdown. So we're not going to do that. We're going to jump right back.

Rachael
We're marching forward into the future.

Jack
Marching with brand new Faber shoes on, kicking some poems about.

Rachael
Kicking some poets about.

Jack
Lifting up some rocks, putting our bogies on the fence post to demarcate our progress. That's what we're going to do. I've had coffee, you can tell.

Rachael
I've had three cups of tea. And who have we got in the studio today, Jack?

Jack
Today we have Nick Laird. Nick was born in County Tyrone in 1975. He is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and former lawyer. His collections are To a Fault, On Purpose, Go Giants, and Feel Free. His novels are Utterly Monkey, Glovers Mistake, and Modern Gods. His awards include the Betty Trask prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize, a Somerset Maughan Award, the Aldeburgh Poetry prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,

Jack
he is on faculty at New York University and is the Seamus Heaney Professor for Poetry at Queens University Belfast. His new collection, Up Late, is out in June, which is basically now... Hello, Nick, welcome.

Nick
Hello.

Rachael
And we also have Anthony Anaxagorou. Anthony is a British born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher, and poetry educator. His second collection, After the Formalities, which published with Penned in the Margins, was shortlisted for the 2019 T. S. Eliot prize. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics, was published by Granta Books and was the 2023 winner of the Ondaatje Prize.

Jack
Welcome, Anthony.

Anthony
Thanks very much. Lovely to be here. It's freezing.

Rachael
It is cold in here. Little fridge.

Jack
I prefer that, because I flush like a little school boy.

Rachael
I run hot, actually.

Jack
I just look like Just William.

Rachael
Do you guys run hot or cold?

Nick
I'm always cold, yeah.

Speaker 1
Yeah. Anthony?

Anthony
Not too sure.

Jack
Welcome both. Well, we're running on hot, so that's fine. Let's start off with some poems. That's what we normally do. Nick, could we hear something from you?

Nick
Sure. Short or long?

Rachael
Long.

Nick
Long, longish. Okay, so it's like a page and a half.

Jack
Unless you don't mind taking requests.

Nick
I could do requests.

Jack
My favourite, maybe, you don't have to have favourites in a book, but I really liked 'American Poem'.

Nick
Oh, well, that's short. I can see what you're doing there, Jack.

Jack
But there's a particular phrase which I think I started using. I've used a couple of times in conversation and then immediately felt guilty about passing it off as my own.

Rachael
Maybe you could read American Poem and another?

Jack
Yeah, let's do that.

Nick
So this was American Poem. I wrote it for an Extinction Rebellion day. So very hard to write a poem about climate, but this is, I suppose, as close as I could get. [Nick Laird reads 'American Poem' from his collection, Up Late]

Jack
Can we hear... Yeah, let's have another one.

Nick
I was going to do 'Attention', a poem that was just published this week, which is about... Actually, I'll do this one, it's shorter. I don't know if you've ever seen a magpie kill a baby rabbit, but I have. [Nick Laird reads 'The Outing']

Rachael
That's poem's really powerful to hear read, out loud.

Jack
Didn't you send it to me recently?

Rachael
Yeah. Was it in the New Yorker?

Nick
Yeah, a different title. It was called 'Sorrow'.

Rachael
Why did you change the title?

Nick
I quite like the idea of 'the outing' being a double edged word, meaning both a day out and being outed as a violent psychopath in front of your kids. It seemed to do double work. And the word 'sorrow' was maybe a little bit plain and had that echo of 'one for sorrow' from magpie. I don't know, I suddenly went off it.

Rachael
That's a really interesting and quite complicated layering, though, of a presentation of personhood in this poem because it's obviously not being a psychopath to put an animal out of its misery. But it's this introduction of death and pain and necessary pain, I suppose, to children in this movement from innocence to experience, but written in this beautiful measured way that heaps shame, I think, on the person doing the movement or moving the children from innocence to experience, which is so... I don't know, it feels like it's luxuriated in, almost, in a quite, I would say, it's not sinister, but it's definitely sombre and, like, elegiac, I suppose, but towards ecological states.

Jack
I think there's something about killing an animal, though. You have to steel yourself to the task. You do have to inhabit a slight coldness. And you do stand on the edge of something. I remember putting a pigeon out of its misery because my parents cat had caught it. And I was insisting. It was my parents cat and I was like, 'Dad, are you going to just let the cat toy with this...' But the thing was, it was awful, it was on the gravel and I put a flower pot over its head thinking, if I just stamp on the flower pot, that will break its neck. But all I did was smash the pot. So then I did have to do a proper job and I went off and got a spade. But there is the moment when the spade is raised and you're sitting there and you have to think, you don't want to do it. And it's surprising to find yourself go to the all or nothing front of it and think, if I don't do a good job of this I'm prolonging it, so you got to fully commit. And that full commitment to putting the animal down is difficult and dark. I've dispatched a few poor creatures growing up in the countryside, and I thought this poem got to the sickly, oily centre of that moment, really. Although obviously it feels also like you say, Rachael, that there's an analogy there, or that there's a symbolic moment of the spade being raised.

Rachael
Because this is quite obvious realisation, isn't it? And behind it, there's so much more domestic play or sinisterness moving around. And I think I'm always interested in your poems and how they inhabit this incredible lyric address. And I feel like there's such an enjoyment of a lyric mode that seems to create a musicality out of really ragged, difficult subjectmatter. And I think the lyricism that you inhabit allows that ragged, jagged subject matter to be, I don't know, well pulled around in a way that feels very, I suppose, musical. It's like looking at a really difficult but brilliantly done painting or something that makes you feel incredibly moved. But you know that there's something just off with it, like off kilter, maybe. It's like a lyricism but tipped upside down. And I'm interested in the way that you approach form with the things that you write about. And you and I worked together on the poem that is the core of this book, I suppose, 'Up Late', which is about the death of your father. And I was thinking the same thing, these incredibly moving, corrosive, hard, raw feelings that you manage or negotiate into this mode, that on the surface feels neat but actually isn't.

Nick
Yeah, I agree with everything you said. I think part of the thing is negotiate is the word. Negotiate is the word that's used in 'Up Late' as well. You're trying to put feelings into words and trying to put something into shape. You're trying to scrape some kind of pattern out of circumstance. So that seems to me what the work of the poem is in some way. This poetry and philosophy maybe come towards the same thing, this trying to scrape meaning out of circumstance. One of the ways you do that is shape in poetry and you begin with particulars and work up. It's pushing at some questions about patterning and about life. I need to kind of do that. I think I want to have shape in poems. It allows you to have something feel inevitable if it has a shape. At the same point, you can get to be surprising. And when I encounter a poem, I want it to be surprising and inevitable at the same time. And that's why shape is useful to me, or form, or whatever you want to call it, or pattern.

Rachael
Yeah, I love that. I've never really thought about the pattern of the lyric as having an inevitability that we can play with, or take comfort in, or even fear or disrupt, because we know we're working in a state that imposes a certain way of talking to or talking from, and we know we're going to end up somewhere, and to play with that. You really do that in your poems, actually. And I love that patterning idea as well.

Jack
The way that things like that, the pressurisation, certain expectations, or when you have an eye and an event or a feeling and you're having to work into it, eventually you've got to get somewhere. And the further you get into the poem, the closer you are to having to end it or come up with something, right? So you're kind of burrowing.

Rachael
How did the book come together?

Nick
Oh, you know, like all books, slowly and painfully, and you reach a certain stage and think that must be enough poems now for a collection, five years since the last one. But the long poem at the heart of it, the 'Up Late' one, was written, as you know, very quickly after my father had died, and then it seemed that a lot of the poems were kind of moving around in some way, some of the similar things. There's a lot of elegies in the book, people dying. There's stuff about a kind of end of a certain system, stuff about late capitalism and those thoughts, a collapsing systems change. So it seemed like it was the long poem 'Up Late', when it came along, crystallised a lot of the previous stuff and I could see a shape to the thing, which maybe hadn't been there before.

Rachael
I want to talk further about how we approach a kind of contemporary moment in your poems, but it's probably a good time talking of the contemporary moment to loop in our other guest, Anthony. Would you like to read us a poem or two?

Anthony
Yeah, is there requests? I don't really know where to start with this thing.

Rachael
'Mother Myth'. It's hard for me to choose, really.

Anthony
It's interesting about that whole like, poems going towards something, because I think with this one, so much of the poems are like orbital and just circumnavigating, circumambulating an idea without that creating causality, but not leading anywhere, like that inevitability of just having things circle in the way that an emotion circles. Like when we spiral, when we get into our heads, we don't land anywhere. We just go round and round and round.

Jack
But I suppose with the orbiting, what the process of orbiting does lead to is the demarcation of the centre, even if that centre is absent or invisible at the end of it. And I think that definitely that you can go round and round in cycles of self-loathing or fear-joy/joy-fear, grief, hope, and you can keep digging away. And that's obviously never ending. But to do that, and in doing that, you're actually suggesting something else. You're suggesting the reason why. I think one of the things I love about your poems through that orbiting and that digging around in language is that maybe what comes through the most is a certain frustration or a desperation or a need to find the words, even if the poems themselves also have a slightly resonant dissatisfaction. Maybe with themselves, I don't know.

Anthony
Yeah, there's a restlessness there for sure that can't keep still. At first, you're always taught, I think, in writing, to linger on an idea, whereas you're not really taught to dart and move. But in poetry, you can, like choreography, you're allowed to jump around as much as you want.

Speaker 1
Associative logic, I think that's what you have.

Speaker 4
And I'm massively into symbol. Like symbolically semiotics, you can definitely be... I feel symbols are safer than realism, which is sometimes when I read a poem that's entrenched in realism, I feel really uncomfortable, whereas symbolism, I really enjoy it. I feel I can do what I want. I just feel I've got more autonomy in those more expansive, stranger, odd things.

Jack
There's more artifice in realism, isn't there? Because you've got to rig up something, the version of events. It's almost like a witness statement. You're committing to a version of reality, which you're saying is what happened. Whereas with symbolism, you're working into a sense of what happened.

Rachael
There can be a performance of artifice, though, I suppose, can't there? In like things that are purportedly real. I was thinking about the Veronica Forest Thompson, bad naturalisation, good naturalisation, whether something is trying to communicate a certain authenticity and which modes are usually used in poetry to communicate authenticity. And I don't know if we're in a space now where it's like everything is always going to be aware of its artifice, even if it's directly a communicative poem, right?

Jack
Well, there's that term authentocrat, which I think Joe Kennedy came up with, which is this idea, all the politicians who always keep their eye on how much the price of a pint of milk is, and very vocally support a football team and the kind of 'man of the people' routine that you can see, and that's the myth of what ordinary people are, real people.

Speaker 1
We're always going to be aware of the frame now in which we're working. I don't think there's a way, maybe there was never a way, to not be aware of the frame.

Speaker 2
Self consciousness, yeah. Let's hear a poem. Let's rescue us from our own self consciousness.

Anthony
This is called 'Futurist Primer'. [Anthony reads 'Futurist Primer' from Heritage Aesthetics]

Rachael
Thank you. I honestly never thought a poem about landlords fucking would be one of my favourite poems of all time, but here we are.

Anthony
It's 2023, man.

Rachael
I really like that poem. I love it. It's funny because it feels like it encompasses so much of what's going on in the collection. It also feels like one of the more, I don't know, it's like a space where there's comedy in the book as well. But then there is actually quite a bit of dark comedy, I think, throughout, weaving throughout. But one of the things I love that you do in that poem, which I feel like is not a rarity, but I just think something that could be done more and it's done in a really special way in that poem, is involve genre in this really easy, interesting special way. It becomes a sci fi poem or it is a sci fi poem.

Anthony
Yeah, dystopian, sci fi.

Rachael
And I love how I find using the frameworks of fiction really helpful in poetry. And I also think that that's something that you do in your work outside of any playing with genre. There's so many mini fictions and mini narratives that run through the book. And this associative logic that we were talking about is also story. You leap between places and people and characters and families in a way that feels really global, like a critique of the global, but also an understanding of the global and the failure of globalisation and this is more of a comment, not a question.

Anthony
These are great comments, man. I need to stick all this down somewhere.

Rachael
But yeah, maybe you could talk about, I don't know, genre or using fiction or using story in the poems?

Anthony
I think I like cinema. I like finding the cinema of a poem, its filmic element and then not resolving. So opening all these little frames and then just letting my instinct and impulse take me to the next frame without thinking what logically would follow that. And I think working off impulse and instinct was a huge part of this book because that's when I think you're the freest and your subconscious is just at its most active. And I just trust the channel that all of these little frames are coming from because I think they all come from the same place, and that's really it. And I think when you get into a sound, when a poem develops its own voice, its own personality - and I kind of think of poems as little units of personality that are like psychology under pressure – and I think putting a personality with its psychology into one room is how you have poems come about. So yeah, I think that was it. But they are like little characters, little people, worlds within worlds, because I think that's what we live in, isn't it?

Jack
It's like the filmic without necessarily the narrative that we associate with filmic.

Anthony
Or the episodic, because I think so many films are based around frames and episodes, you know.

Jack
You know how when you've watched a film and when you're thinking back to it, it's strange what sticks out. And that's a bit like poems. That long poem 'Hennecker's Ditch', which we've probably talked about on the podcast a few times, that it's like the bits of the film that you remember. And it's confusing. It's like when you watch... You know The Fifth Element? The only thing I can really remember from that film, or the first thing I can remember, is the cigarette with a really long filter.

Rachael
Didn't a woman have three boobies in that film?

Jack
No, that's Total Recall. This is like the cigarette where the proportion of the cigarette that would be cigarette now is reversed. So it's like this tiny little cigarette on the end of a really long filter.

Nick
It's a cigarette holder, isn't it?

Jack
This is like Bruce Willis. He goes to smoke a cigarette and it tells him how many he's had, I think, this little robot. And when he takes out the cigarettes, mainly filter and the tiny little nub of actual cigarette on the end.

Rachael
That's so stressful.

Jack
Yeah. But this is what I mean, the little flashes of the three boobies. You know, whatever.

Anthony
It's how your memory places itself within the bigger landscape of what happened. How memory chooses to isolate certain things. And I think that's what a lot of the time I like thinking about, why do I remember that. The whole day happened and I remember three things.

Jack
I watched the whole film and what my brain takes away from that is this.

Nick
Freud would have something interesting to say about your memory of the three boobies and your memory of the phallic cigarette.

Jack
Yeah, the tiny little cigarette.

Rachael
I can't believe I said boobies on the podcast.

Jack
Yeah. Well, there we go.

Rachael
It's the scan, like the way I think about... because I feel that films and poetry are really close, and it's the scanning of a landscape. And I think because you do so much world building in your collection – alternative worlds, worlds that we recognise, worlds that we don't recognise, whatever, worlds that you recognise or not – it's as though you're just scanning a camera, I suppose. And that idea of filling the frame or fulfilling the frame is really interesting because there's still accidental debris that comes in when that happens in a film. And I feel like that's the same for your poetry. You allow this debris to remain within the frame of the still.

Anthony
Yeah. I think it's trying to identify a central organising principle that is, for me, quite abstract and private and have everything point towards that. And that's really how you build them. Otherwise, it would end up just becoming too baggy and everything just feels like a nonsense, like a bit of a word salad. And so the idea is to try and find something very specific, usually like an abstract feeling, and have everything work or push everything, all the image work towards that. And that's how I keep it together, otherwise it just goes all over the place.

Rachael
I think about somebody like Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who I've talked about in the podcast before, definitely. I was revisiting her A Treaties on Stars, which is a book length poem, basically, on the cosmos. And the way that she just bounces between herself and the stars is so elemental and filmic and focused. And the observation, I suppose, which I think links all poets, but you both approach observation in really different ways.

Jack
So we have ascertained in the run up prior to the recording of this interview that neither of our poets have talismans with them. But Nick has at least got 'the dog ate my homework' shortlist of potential talismans, here's what you could have won.

Rachael
Also, maybe the lack of talisman is like talismanic.

Jack
Oh, well, we've done that before.

Rachael
Have we?

Jack
I think we've come to the conclusion that the absence of a talisman is the talisman itself. The talisman of talisman. What have you got written down then, Nick?

Nick
So, I was sitting at my desk this morning and Hannah said about bringing a talisman and I was looking around the desk and I don't have anything like that. The only talisman I have is my laptop, which I carry everywhere with me and I don't have a smartphone or whatever so I need my laptop to do everything, including write on. But I have my radio which which I normally have night tracks playing from Radio 3, the podcast. I had a little of a wee tea heater, you put a tea light in and you can put your cup of tea on it and it keeps it warm. And then my dictionary, and my dog is usually there at my feet. I couldn't bring my dog in. And there's a peanut feeder outside the window of my shed. That's all I had.

Rachael
That's lovely.

Jack
That's for birds and squirrels and stuff.

Nick
Yeah, birds.

Jack
For a second there, I imagined a sort of gumball machine thing.

Rachael
I thought that at first too.

Jack
Did you?

Nick
That'd be amazing. I've got a stack of quarters and I just put them in.

Jack
It would be bad for your cholesterol, good for your protein.

Rachael
That's a very sweet list.

Jack
And also like, yeah, world building. I can see that. That's nice, isn't it?

Rachael
Yeah. I'm interested that you don't have a smartphone.

Nick
I never had one.

Rachael
Wow.

Jack
But the way that centralises the laptop as the portal.

Nick
Yeah, you can't get Ubers though and you can't learn how to get anywhere, so I still carry around my A to Z.

Jack
Oh, that's nice. Can we see the A to Z? I haven't seen one of them in a while.

Nick
They've stopped making them, you know?

Jack
Yeah, I know, I heard that. They are a sacred object now. I definitely remember on a day like this, very rainy day, trying to find the street that you want to get to at a bus stop or something. That was part of the fun.

Rachael
Do you find it fun, still?

Nick
I don't. It's a nightmare. You can't find anywhere, you can't find anything.

Rachael
They are very handy, though, and small and nice.

Jack
They're nice, but they take what is now a 15 second Google into a 10 minute rooting around.

Nick
Orienteering. A performance art by a bus stop.

Jack
Yeah, you feel as if you should win a little badge.

Rachael
I use my A to Z.

Jack
Yeah, you need your A to Z badge. Tea, that's interesting. You've got a tea warmer. I'm concerned that that might just damage your cup, though. How far away from the cup is it elevated?

Nick
I haven't made it myself, it's made to do it. It's like a wee metal shelf thing, and then you put a candle underneath it and it keeps your tea warm.

Jack
Like a fondue?

Nick
Yeah, kinda.

Rachael
That's better than bunging it in the microwave, isn't it? That's what my nan used to do. Rancid.

Nick
Sometimes I use a thermos.

Jack
Hot liquids, that's good.

Rachael
I know someone in this room who may have a tea interest. I would like to choose your tea set up as your talisman.

Anthony
Actually, that's true. I always have when I'm deep in it, I do have the little Gaiwan and the Gong Dao Bei just sitting to the right, always to the right. And then I sip away on the good tea.

Rachael
Do you have a ceremony, though?

Anthony
Well, it's not really a ceremony, it's just a mode of brewing called Gongfu that originated in 16th century China. But yeah, it's just a method of brewing loose leaf tea. So that's why I can start going off on one, but that becomes a tea podcast.

Rachael
That's what this is.

Anthony
You don't want a tea podcast.

Jack
Yeah, it's spilling the tea. I think if we had our own YouTube channel, we would definitely do some brewing.

Anthony
Niche tea.

Rachael
You actually recommended me some.

Anthony
Yeah, I know.

Anthony
We still haven't had the session.

Rachael
Well, you should have brought it in today.

Jack
But the thing is, I feel like you're quite into... What was that drink you had?

Rachael
Matcha. Oh, Spirulina.

Jack
Spiru what? I just don't know what you're talking about?

Rachael
i have a bit of a Gwyneth Paltrow side to me that is best left in her cage.

Jack
Because you might keep your whatever matcha warm with a vagina smelling candle.

Rachael
I mean, matcha is kind of mainstream now, right?

Jack
Is it?

Rachael
Yeah.

Jack
[to Nick] Do you know what Matcha is? Yeah, he's a man of the world, isn't he.

Rachael
It's bubble tea.

Jack
I feel like Jesse's Diets from the Fast Show [impersonates the character, Jesse] 'This week I have been...' Like a sort of man who appears with his sack trousers held up with twine, sometimes. I haven't heard of any of these things. I still drink like just black coffee, whatever's going.

Rachael
That's classier, I think. I just can't. Anyway, enough about my beverage intake. We should have another poem from both of you. I love those talismans, though. We got there in the end. We just had to dredge them out of you.

Anthony
They're so close to you, they're not talismans.

Rachael
They're not realisable.

Anthony
Yeah, because they're so part of your everyday makeup.

Rachael
Would you like to kick us off with a poem?

Anthony
I'll do 'Endgame'. I just opened it here, so let's do 'Endgame'. [Anthony reads the poem 'Endgame']

Jack
Lovely.

Rachael
Thank you.

Jack
Nick, could we hear another from Up Late?

Nick
This is a poem in memory of my friend Martino, who died. [Nick reads the poem 'Attention']

Jack
Stunning. Thank you.

Rachael
Yeah, amazing.

Nick
It's like those things you're talking about, though, you don't know what the poem is about until you've read it. And then you go back to it afterwards, and then you start to realise why that image at the end, like why the statue that doesn't speak. And you realise the poem, which I'm just realising now, is about the limitations of art. That you cannot bring the dead back. You can't make the dead speak. Sort of interesting that. You just have no idea what the poems were about half the time until you return to them later on.

Anthony
I had a mate of mine once who sent me a message, I think it was in a Frank O'Hara poem, and it was towards the end, and she just said that she read the line, and it was something like, 'and then the sun set' and she was just in bits, like she was crying, she couldn't contain herself. And she was like, I don't get why that last line, it's actually very prosaic and very straightforward, messed me up so much. And I said, it's not the line, it's everything that came before.

Jack
Yeah, the accumulation to that moment.

Anthony
The pressure that builds. And I think it's the same when you get quite strict, which is this whole thing of do we have to make poems these huge climactic endings, or can they just turn the volume down?

Nick
The sun set is such a... I mean, that's one of the deep images that underpin all of literature. You think of vespers, where we would go and say the evening prayers, you think of heading westwards. That's the deep metaphor for everyone going towards their death. It's very hard to get away from that in all of literature. I think of John Donne's poem, 'Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward'. It's always about heading towards where the sun has set.

Speaker 1
I was thinking about the Elizabeth Bishop, 'North Haven' – the sparrows cannot change their song, dear friend – the poem that she wrote for Lowell. We can rearrange, rearrange. I didn't know if you were thinking about that at the end of that poem, but it felt like, yeah. The bird imagery is incredible there, absolutely amazing.

Jack
Are you alright?

Rachael
Yeah, it's just such a good poem. It's really amazing.

Anthony
You should get some tissue or something in here?

Nick
I have tissues in my massive bag.

Rachael
We can just cut this bit out.

Jack
No, keep it rolling. It's gold.

Rachael
It's really amazing. Fucking hell. That's just really, really, really amazing. I'm sad. Thank you.

Anthony
Yeah, it's those poems that build worlds, isn't it? When you get in them. I think that's what I like about longer poems is you got that time to build up, whereas short poems just feel like a quick chat and then you're gone. Whereas the long ones is so much... When I remember spoken word days, you had five minutes on a poem and audiences could really get into the... It felt a lot more like three-dimensional. And when I've written longer poems versus shorter poems, you always get that. You feel there's something to invest in, whereas a short poem I don't know if you can invest in quite the same way.

Rachael
But then when a short poem is done well, it's like whoa.

Jack
Yeah, you have to talk in the room, in what you leave out, don't you? But the long poem, you get to gather more into it into play. Think about a poem like, Creeley's 'I Know a Man'. Have we talked about that already?

Rachael
Oh God, yeah.

Nick
I said to my friend, John that I'm always talking.

Rachael
Let's just get a big ass car and...

Nick
...drive.

Jack
He's just like, although that was not his name, that's my favourite part about that poem.

Nick
That was not his name. For God sake.

Jack
Let's just shut up and drive.

Rachael
There's so much chat.

Jack
And why don't we buy a goddamn big automobile?

Rachael
We're really collaborating on totally bastardising this.

Nick
Destroying this poem.

Rachael
But some of my favourite poems of all time are like tiny, fine lines, you know?

Jack
I think it's a different kind of

Anthony
...investment.

Jack
Yeah.

Anthony
It's what the contract it makes with the reader, I think, is really...

Jack
It takes quite a lot of... You're almost having a bit of a laugh when you write a really short poem.

Rachael
Yeah, I was going to say it has to play with itself.

Anthony
What?

Jack
Well, I think we'd like to say that it is a sensuous overflow of poetic connection. It could also be the several wines...

Rachael
No, I'm a Pisces also, but that poem is absolutely incredible. But yeah, I like this idea of the way that you invest or relate to or receive a poem.

Jack
What's your shortest poem?

Rachael
Mine?

Jack
Yeah. How many lines?

Anthony
A couplet.

Rachael
I don't know.

Jack
You've got a couplet?

Anthony
No, I'm saying Rachael probably has.

Rachael
I was trying to find [on Google] that Michael Earl Craig poem, which is my favourite poem of all time, probably. It's called 'Tomatoes Disrespect Us'. Do you remember that? And it's absolutely ridiculous, but I don't think I'm going to be able to find it.

Jack
Charles Simic has that poem, 'Evening Chess', which is something like, The white king raised in my father's angry hand, or something like that.

Rachael
Oh, that's nice.

Jack
Or maybe the black queen. Maybe it's the black queen.

Rachael
There's one by Selima Hill I love. It's called 'No One'.

Jack
Muldoon has some nice, really short poems. It's either called 'Snow' or 'White'. And it's, My mother showed me a photograph of you got up in lace. White crepe the sheen, white bonnet, white mittens. Once on a street in Moscow, a woman shoved snow into my face when it seemed I was frostbitten. That's paraphrased.

Rachael
Oh, Jack, that's amazing.

Nick
The short, Muldoon one I love is 'Ireland'. Do you know that one?

Jack
No.

Nick
Volkswagen parked in the gap, gently ticking over. You wonder if it's lovers and not men hurrying back across two fields in a river.

Jack
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rachael
You guys have really got it.

Anthony
I can do some 2Pac lyrics.

Jack
Yeah, I mean that poem is like you have to read... You're reading so much into that last... It's incredible, that last image.

Nick
The last 30 years of Northern Ireland.

Jack
And that is extraordinary. I think also it's interesting that there... Does that one rhyme? No? Yes, it does.

Nick
Yeah. River, love, is...

Rachael
Helps to embed it.

Jack
There's something about the connectivity, which it says this plus this plus this.

Rachael
That's what I mean about playing with yourself.

Nick
It's so much easier to remember a poem that rhymes.

Rachael
The circuit, that's the circulation.

Jack
And if it's short as well.

Nick
And if it's short, yeah.

Jack
This is 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', which I have by heart.

Rachael
Thank you both so much for coming in today and sharing your incredible work with us. It's been an honour to chat to you guys.

Jack
Yeah, thank you. Almost the difficulty is where to start and where to stop with such rich collections and such enigmatic turns and how much you get into your poems and allow us to get out of them. So I feel like we could have another hour and another podcast and come out with completely different results.

Rachael
There's so much more I actually wanted to ask you guys about history and characters and everything else, but we'll leave it here.

Jack
Yeah, we must, we can't keep them. Somebody, you can unlock the door now.

Rachael
Thank you.

Jack
Thank you.

Emily Berry
Hello, I'm Emily Berry, and I'm going to be reading a poem from my book, Unexhausted Time, which is a book-length poem made up of individual poems, some of which have titles, some of which don't. This one doesn't. And the poem includes some borrowed lines from the film La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker, and from the letters of Sigmund Freud. [Emily reads a poem from Unexhausted Time]

Rachael
Amazing poem there from Emily Berry. And the bird song in the background was such gorgeous ambient noise colour.

Jack
Little bit of Kentish Town, probably. Open window.

Rachael
If I was my dad, I'd be able to identify those birds, but I'm not.

Jack
The incredible, uncanny sleight of hand that Emily Berry has. That a family could be shocking, and then suddenly you are shocked by the idea of a family, something utterly normal. And the way that she de-normalises with a casualness. It's just the lawn like a sheep, which on the first instance feels like, oh, that's a regular image, but it's laid down or unfurled by the rockery. And I don't know, it's just like, it's an effortless strangeness. Children and their little shed didn't let their business. I don't know.

Rachael
It's like nothing's wrong, but everything's wrong, the way that she's telling it. And the family shocking line, I love it so much because I feel like there is a gentle way in which Emily disrupts the normative, not in a way that feels dogmatic or something, but just in a way that's like, look how silly the usual is, the normative is. And that line always reminds me of when I'd go to the doctor, or if you go to a doctor and they have a picture of their kid on their desk, and you're like... It's always made me feel really weird and alienated and shocked at the concept of family, like the hierarchy of familial bonds. That's what she does, she destablises the hierarchies of things in her poems, but all through this sinister, tickly uncanniness.

Jack
Yeah. And there's so many rich things in that. She's always been a really good poet of inference and tension. And it's like being in one of her poems – and it does feel like you're in one of her poems – you don't feel like you've been dropped in. It's like when you're out and the vibe is just, it's not bad, but it's a bit off. Everyone's lurching towards laughter and people keep mishearing or misunderstanding, or people are like guarded or worried that some offence is about to take place, even though nothing offensive is actually being said. It's just like the vibe is off.

Rachael
It does feel like a hallucinogenic conversation. And I think particularly with those poems in Unexhausted Time, there's a stylistic disintegration that she deploys, to, I don't know, cover you in this miasmic cloud of uncertainty, but in a way that makes you feel like you're being lulled towards certainty. It is hallucinogenic, actually. It's cerebrally hallucinogenic.

Jack
Things like N being a sad letter. She's like, suddenly it is. I think there's a wisdom in this book.

Rachael
No, there's power play in her poems, for sure.

Jack
What about the film La Jetée, was it? 'The Jump'?

Rachael
I've not seen that one.

Jack
Me neither. Got nothing to say about it.

Rachael
But I do like it, when I hear things like that because then I can add it to my watch list because it's been recommended to me via a poem list.

Jack
Yeah, I don't have one of those.

Rachael
Well, now's your chance to start.

Jack
Now's my chance. I'm going to.

Rachael
Amazing poem. An incredible collection.

Jack
And to end the episode, we have an audio postcard from Anthony Joseph from Sonnets for Albert, his T. S. Eliot Prize-winning collection published by Bloomsbury.

Anthony Joseph
My name is Anthony Joseph and I'm currently in South East London. Camberwell, to be exact. I'm going to read a poem from my latest collection Sonnets for Albert. I'm going to read a poem called 'A Gap in Language'. [Anthony Joseph reads 'A Gap in Language' taken from his collection, Sonnets for Albert.]

Jack
That was the Faber Poetry Podcast, presented by Rachael Allen and Jack Underwood and produced by Hannah Marshall, Jack Underwood and Rachael Allen for Faber and Faber.

Rachael
You can listen to our podcast on your favourite audio platform. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and tell your friends about our show.