Faber Poetry Podcast
Season 3, Episode 2 – Transcript

Rachael
Hello, I'm Rachael Allen.

Jack
And I'm Jack Underwood.

Jack and Rachael
And welcome to the Faber Poetry Podcast.

Eve Esfandiari-Denney
Hello, my name is Eve Esfandiari-Denney, and I'm currently in my friend's bedroom, feeling slightly self conscious. They think I'm mumbling to myself while they make dinner, but I'm going to read a poem anyway. This one is from a short collection I've been working on, and most of these poems speak to the subject of white passing. But maybe this poem – I guess, yeah, this poem does too – but it's more specifically about my dad, who is a Romani traveller, who was adopted by the Salvation Army when he was little. 'Joseph in Bird Mask Can Fly' after 'Ode to the 20th Century' by Leksa Manuš, a Latvian Romani poet, who wrote, 'our steps may seem as light as birds, but in reality'. [Eve Esfandiari-Denney reads her poem, 'Joseph in Bird Mask Can Fly’].

Jack
And that was an audio postcard from Eve Esfandiari-Denney. Her debut pamphlet My Bodies This Morning This Evening was published by Bad Betty Press in February 2022. And joining us in the studio today, we have Camille Ralphs. Camille is a poet, critic and editor. Her poems and translations have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Poetry Review, the Spectator and London Magazine. She's the author of three pamphlets, one of which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. She also writes critically for publications, including the Telegraph, the Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well. She's a regular contributor for Poetry London and also conducts an interview series for Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. She's the poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement. And her debut, After You Were, I Am, will be published by Faber in 2024. Welcome, Camille.

Rachael
And joining Camille today is Stephanie Sy-Quia. Stephanie Sy-Quia's debut poetry collection Amnion was published by Granta in 2021 and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award, and was the Poetry Book Society's winter recommendation. It was also longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. So reading for us first today we'll have Stephanie. Stephanie, would you like to read something for us?

Stephanie
Yes, so I've got the kind of opening pages of the second section of Amnion in front of me now, so I'm going to read you some of them. [Stephanie Sy-Quia reads from Amnion]

Rachael
Thank you so much, reading one of my favourite parts of the book but it's hard to choose a favourite because the entire of the thing is my favourite part of the book. Camille, would you like to read for us as well?

Camille
Sure. Just the one, yeah?

Rachael
You can read two.

Camille
Okay, we'll do two then. I'm going to read two from the first section of the Faber volume, which is a sequence of poems that began as rewritings of canonical prayers or religious reflections. This first one is after Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī . [Camille Ralphs reads from her forthcoming collection After You Were, I Am].

Rachael
Thank you so much, Camille. I feel like I've got loads that I want to talk to both of you about, concerning histories and wordplay and how we rewrite myth, how we write into myths, personal mythologies, communal mythologies, universal mythologies. But first, because you've mentioned a woolly talisman already.

Camille
I knew you were going to do that.

Rachael
Oooo naughty. Camille, do you want to talk to us about your talisman? Also, I should probably preface this by saying this is one episode where Jack's not in the studio with us today. He's on zoom. So if it sounds a little different, that's the why.

Jack
Hi, Am I different? Am I so different?

Rachael
You're not so different, you're just the same.

Jack
But I will need you to show me the talisman.

Camille
Yeah, alright. It's a bit heavy, so get ready for this. And I'm afraid you're going to have to get over the immense cringe factor as well, because I'm afraid I have brought with me six copies of the Faber Poetry Diary – starting in 2018, right through to this year – to the Faber Poetry Podcast. And it's not the Faber connection that's the reason these have come with me, it's something else. So I am a consummate over-preparer. I over prepare for everything. And when I was listening to the back catalogue of podcasts before coming in for this, I realised that in a previous episode, somebody had brought in a dictionary and talked a lot about etymology. So my first talisman idea, which would have been my Concise Oxford Etymological Dictionary, has had to be left at home. And then I realised that that was itself very telling, because I am constantly putting things in the diary and obsessing over them and timekeeping, all the time. And I have a very particular way of writing, which is I find an idea or an idea finds me, and then the diary comes out. And over a month or a couple of months, I'm in there every day. Sort of like a training programme, almost. And there have been particular times when I've been very deliberate about that as well. Can I put these somewhere, they're quite heavy?

Rachael
Yeah, put them there. I was just about to say that I think that we couldn't be more opposite. I don't think I've prepared for a thing in my life. And I'm in awe of... I'm in awe of just how wonderfully representative actually, those diaries are, how we can sort of just keep track of things and make notes in that way. And to think that all of your life is in here is quite moving.

Jack
So are those the actual filled diaries, they're not props to represent diaries elsewhere?

Camille
They're real diaries. Jack, look. I mean, they're quite threatening, actually, because they're heavy now and the pile is becoming really quite tall, and every year it gets bigger. And it feels like more of my life is being given to this diary, like it's a sort of vampiric presence on my shelf.

Rachael
Nice. It's a really nice insight into your process, actually. And also will maybe link to some of the things I want to talk to you about in regards to sort of planning and mapping. I feel like in your collection, I see you map certain histories against ideas of the self and ideas of the contemporary, and that sort of planning insight feels very true to your book as I read it, actually. Dear Stephanie, what talismanic beast have you bought for us?

Stephanie
Well, I would love to say that I've brought you my lucky knickers. Although how I would... would that be in the form of wearing them?

Rachael
How will we know?

Jack
Would you suspect that you needed them, really, for the Faber Poetry Podcast? It's a doddle, isn't it?

Stephanie
Well, so this is the terrible thing. I would love to say that I've brought them, because they have served me well, but they got eaten by a dog a couple of years ago. Which is very like, cat ate my homework. But it's true.

Jack
Hang on, hang on. You can't say “so” and then proceed.

Stephanie
There's really no story there.

Jack
A dog ate your knickers. How does that happen?

Stephanie
They weren't on me at the time.

Jack
Right.

Stephanie
Thankfully.

Jack
Good.

Stephanie
No, what was worse was it wasn't my dog, it was somebody else's dog. And then, you know, when somebody – maybe this has happened with friends of yours – and their children or their pets, where pet slash child misbehaves, and then... maybe this is letting people into far too much of my personality?

Jack
Hang on, I'm not sure about this second person that's creeping in here. This isn't about my lucky pants, this is about yours. Okay, continue.

Stephanie
Well, yeah, basically, the dog ate the pants and I was very upset because, as I say, they were my lucky pants and they had served me very well. They'd had an illustrious career, I suppose. I'm going into far too much here. Bigging them up far too much. And the person whose dog it was sort of went, 'oh, sorry.' And that was that.

Rachael
It's like that Sex in the City episode.

Stephanie
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the lucky pants have not been replaced. So, yeah, I was thinking what my backup talisman would be. I suppose I have many talismans at the moment, I'm wearing a lion pendant that my boyfriend gave me, actually. But his rationale when he gave it to me was because of my mane. I have incredibly thick hair, which has been a real battle to deal with all my life. But I'm also kind of fascinated by hair. Almost every culture in the world has some kind of restriction based on hair to do with maturity, and the erotic potential of hair is quite interesting to me. So, yeah, mane, hair is something I think about quite a lot, I would say.

Rachael
That's cool. So you're really leaning into the – what was it – furry talisman?

Camille
Yeah, woolly. Woolly.

Rachael
Woolly talisman!

Stephanie
Almost.

Rachael
I love it.

Jack
Yeah, good. I mean, as a man without much hair these days, the erotic potential of hair. That hurt.

Stephanie
Sorry.

Jack
But yeah, that's interesting. And you mentioned, like, you haven't replaced the lucky pants. I just keep going... I'm not to go back to lucky pants. But I'm interested in where if one were in the market for a new pair, where would one go?

Stephanie
I'm not sure I have the answer to that.

Jack
How do they become lucky? You figure them out?

Stephanie
Well, maybe I think something lucky happened to me when I was wearing them, and then so they were lucky by self decree, I think.

Rachael
Lucky by association.

Jack
Yeah. Okay.

Rachael
Well, this is nice. This was like a good wayward way in to both of your books, which I have in front of me on PDF, which is actually quite nice because I can sort of move through them and draw these networks and connections and bridges between them, which I've been thinking about for a while anyway with both of your work. Because I feel like one of the most not obvious, but I think maybe sort of immediate connections I have between your books is this kind of idea of writing histories, rewriting histories, be those personal, private or public. And both of your books have larger overarching concepts, which I'm sure you'll speak a little bit more about. And I guess I just wanted to pose a kind of conversation opener to you both about this approach towards history and the intention behind a kind of rewriting of a history or a writing of a history, and what does that feel like for you personally, politically, culturally? Is there some kind of corrective, perhaps, that you're offering or some kind of admiration or are you attempting to maybe sort of give your own slant or spin on histories that may feel like they warrant it from you? Camille, maybe you can start.

Camille
Well, one part of the book, definitely the last thing that you said, histories that warrant more attention. The Malkin poems, that certainly applies to them, because in that case, the Pendle witches of the early 17th century. The Pendle witch trials, who were 13 women and men, predominantly women, who were either hanged or punished in horrendous ways for the alleged crime of witchcraft. They haven't really been dealt with much in literature before, certainly not to the same extent as the Salem witches in The Crucible, for instance. And when I came across that story – a long time ago now, when I first heard it – I did think to myself, that's bloody tragic, and somebody should have something to say about that. The other stuff, I think I'm just someone who gets fixated on different personalities and very much enjoys dramatic monologues. I'm very much a dramatic monologue person or an early modern drama fan, and find that the way of getting into poems that appeals to me. I find writing a normal lyric poem very difficult for some reason. I don't seem to have that moment of inspiration that some people talk about. It's more like the diary thing. I come across an idea, a historical thing, a group of people, an interaction that catches my eye or a way of looking at the world, and I think, ah, well, now I can have a way into that and I can represent it in my language and that's my way of being a part of it.

Jack
I think of both of you as having quite distinct voices and I'm interested in this, how history works in relation to that. I mean, mentioning this sort of garden variety lyric poem, I think lyric poetry tends to be slightly more presentist, doesn't it? It sort of seems to be located within a contemporary moment, not just of the speaker speaking, but one that's evoked by the voice and the vernacular and that sort of thing. I wonder if having a sense of place or history or these other voices, what that does to sort of poetic voice and how it not forces, but invites you to sort of corral a different range of references into that kind of manner of speaking.

Rachael
And that comes formally as well, actually, like thinking about Amnion, which I feel is like an epic narrative poem, and that corralling of different voices comes through a form that historically invites that. Right?

Stephanie
Well, I mean, I was going to say, I think that a really big parallel which strikes me between my work and Camille's is actually the religious focus and interest. And I think that religious poetry in the broadest possible sense, in that it is concerned with religion, perhaps not in the sense of being devotional poetry, but that's not really seen as a particularly sexy, hot topic at the moment. But actually I find it extremely interesting and invigorating and can also be extremely sexy in all possible senses of the word. And I think, you know, Camille's emphasis on kind of prayer and looking at the book of Job and stuff is very much in line with a lot of my interests, which are about prayer as, on the one hand, a very metabolised utterance – like you're one voice in many making this utterance together that has been sort of like worn smooth over the ages – but then also it's a highly sanctioned utterance. Like, for instance, a big concern for me is well, especially in the thing I'm working on at the moment, actually, the Catholic Church. And the Catholic Church is actually a genius piece of informational infrastructure. You know, you have a guy in every community who reports to his guy higher up the food chain, and it all goes back to Rome. And actually it's this supremely well organised kind of information distribution mechanism whereby the message gets decided centrally and then distributed and the demographic group that is distributing that message is deliberately kept very small so as to limit the kind of opportunity for mutiny within. Also, you know, Camille kind of picking up on the Book of Job and bits from the Old Testament where at the end of day we think of the Bible as this – I mean it is the sanctioned version of lots of different stories and it has been used to many ends – but at the end of the day it's kind of like a baggy, messy anthology with a lot of funky shit going on. I hope we're allowed to swear.

Jack
Yeah.

Stephanie
Drawing attention to that fact and then also drawing attention to... I mean, one of my huge things that I'm still so interested in is the Gnostic Gospels, which are basically I guess if you were to be cynical, you'd call them Bible fan fiction. But if you were to be very much on the side of the Gnostic Gospels, which I am, you would say that they are like alternative versions of Bible stories or continuations of certain stories in the Bible that didn't get the kind of centralised approval to go into the finished version. And so they have been cast out. I mean, without wanting to rely too heavily on biblical metaphor into the wilderness. I mean, that's the other thing, you find yourself just so suffocated by biblical metaphor, I think, in the tradition we're working with and that's also like its own set of weeds to wade through. And I have reached the end of my rather rambly point.

Camille
Can I add something, though? Because there's something else that struck me that we have in common, very much as an interest and that appears in probably all the poems we're going to read today, and that is an interest in etymology and the history of words. In the bit that you read earlier, you read out your line incendiary as a vernacular and I know that in the written version, corpulent as a pearl or a corpulent pearl, you have that line break after corp which emphasises the root of that word in corpus or body. And I do a lot of that kind of thing as well, a lot of etymological play. And I think that comes from a couple of different desires, one of which is that we understand now that there is no ideal route of language, there is no universalism and we are all going around constantly misunderstanding each other. But also we understand that societies, communities all around the world have contributed to these languages that are considered to be the dominant language in some way. And a lot of the work that people are doing in etymology now, because it's coming up a lot in contemporary poetry, is an attempt to recover histories that have been buried or that just should be better known or to play with the words in a way that's not actually that playful.

Stephanie
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that for me, playing, highlighting, as you say, the buried histories within words and kind of like showing the vessels that they have been previously by cutting them up or emphasising them in certain ways is really important to me. And I mean, there are other languages in Amnion, there's Latin, there's some ancient Coptic, that's the epigraph, there's Greek. But I'm very interested in languages which have been used to create informational monopolies. So like Latin is a good one in the history of religion and sort of like the ends it has been put to, but then also English as a piece of imperial infrastructure as well. The same goes for Spanish. There's a lot of stuff about my Filipino family in there where for them that was the imperializing language.

Jack
I'm interested in this notion of burial, the buried meanings, because immediately Camille, when you're talking about in etymology – there's a nice quote by Simon Dentith which is quite provocative, which is that the dictionary is the graveyard of language and most people sort of tend to take that as a kind of pejorative or diminishing kind of comment. But I think actually it's quite a cool analogy because it's saying that these words are not that they are kind of graveyards. If you like graveyards, then it's a very positive analogy, the way that they kind of record history that they tell you about, they also record power and you look at a pauper's grave or a huge family crypt or dynastic crypt, they're hugely revealing in terms of history. So yeah, I was interested, you like graves as well. So etymologies are kind of a portal into history in the same way that a graveyard could be, is that it?

Camille
Yeah, I suppose so. That idea of dictionary as graveyard, I think insofar as a graveyard is also a garden, maybe because the dictionary is not prescriptive, it's not setting things in stone and burying things necessarily. It's a descriptive thing, isn't it, really? It's a gathering of the usage that we have right now. And if it's a good dictionary, then it'll also include information about how a word has been used in the past. So there are things growing from those roots all the time. And that's what's so fascinating about etymology, is that by following how a word has changed from that buried skeleton under the ground into the tree that now stands over it, you see a huge amount about the process of that and how it happened and what fertilised it or how it became the kind of tree that it now is. This has become quite a tortured metaphor but…

Jack
Yes, yes, it's good. I was thinking about all the sort of the words that have rotted down and the nutrients dispersed into... yeah, yeah.

Rachael
Well, I like the way you talked about prayer as metabolised utterance, which feels related to this.

Stephanie
Well, I was going to say because this is definitely a concern of mine because there's a bit in Amnion which is sort of about the Sutton Hoo site, the ship burial in Suffolk. And when I first learned about Sutton Hoo, I didn't understand what they were talking about when they said they found a ship. But actually the ship couldn't be exhumed because it was gone. So I was like, what do you mean? How do we know there was a ship if it's gone? And basically, of course, it's like compacted sand from the wood of the ship that can't really be disturbed too much, but it reveals the skeleton of what is basically a Viking longboat. And I was completely taken with that idea of you put the ship in the ground, but you don't dig too deeply into the ground because then you cover it over with a mound and then the mound becomes a sort of slightly like noteworthy part of the local landscape, but you don't really know what's inside. And so I love that idea to go back to what Camille was saying about the skeleton that nourishes tree, it's like the landscape hints at what lies beneath. And of course, with the English language, so much of it is obsolete, so we scratch the surface of it every day. And I think I have quite a sort of environmentalist way of thinking about language because I think that if you don't use it, it dies. And so a couple of the reviews of Amnion have picked up on slightly esoteric words and phrases. And I know it's extremely poor form to sort of want to rebut your reviews, but I find that really interesting as a critique because on the one hand, Google exists and we can use it, it's at the reach of your thumb, there's that. And also, I think that there's so much pleasure in finding a funky word. So all the names of the parts of Amnion are just kind of words that I stumbled across in quite a sort of foragy way. Like it was all happenstance that I found them. I mean, the title of the book came from flipping open a biology textbook when I was 15 and thinking, oh, that can be the name for the thing. So, yeah, just sort of like running around and picking fun stuff up.

Rachael
Yeah, I think of it as kind of like a curiosity project, like an author who I am obsessed with and talk about a lot on the podcast, Sylvia Legris is also a kind of master of etymology, and this idea of digging into words, I suppose, uncovering words, histories, playing with the histories of words, also with a kind of ecological or environmental focus, I suppose in a slightly more direct way because she often just writes about landscape. And interestingly that criticism has been levelled at her for this use of a kind of heightened or elitist language. And it's my hugest bugbear because I find that critique often comes from largely middle class spaces who think they're able to deign what is readable or not to an expanse of people. And actually, a poet like Sylvia Legris has no formal education and is fanatic about language and mines different kinds of publications, texts, reaches back through histories to uncover lost or forgotten words. She invents her own vocabulary, which we also talked about when we were working on Amnion like the ways in which a word invented or mined or discovered could have associations built into it. And I really defend that usage of the Esoteric language as a kind of I don't know, it just creates such a texture within the text and a network and a map. It's a whole new way of mapping text. And I think about the kind of sense that you get from more "traditional" or whatever – I'm using quotes right now – poetic forms like rhyme, which build in a kind of meaning. And I think that Camille, you're so right, this move towards etymology has a kind of political background to it wherein people are trying to sort of create new archives or bring in older or lost or being lost ways of speaking to each other and talking through poems.

Camille
Yeah, I think it has two prongs, really. And one of them is that political prong of trying to recover things that have been lost or give attention to things that deserve more than they've had or even reject ideas that we have in the language and say that's no longer fit for purpose. But on the other hand, there is something that you've just said, which is that ecological aspect. I think there's a sort of desire that connects to the religious themes in our work. For instance, to recover an Edenic world, essentially a world in which language is a very different, more flourishing kind of thing that we all shared together. And now through human error and all this chaos and everything, the world is on fire and we've levelled everything and so on. And the poet that I thought of when you were talking about Sylvia Legris and how she uses words is Geoffrey Hill. And he very much had that postlapsarian project at the heart of his work and thought that if only we could get back to a form of language that was comprehensible to everyone, then maybe things would be different.

Rachael
Yeah, it's a total rebuttal to the idea that we need a simplistic rhetoric, which is, in my opinion, one of the reasons that we're in this Brexit mess.

Jack
I think there's something about that objection to the esoteric in poetry or language, which comes from this kind of sense that language should be... that anything too self conscious is kind of like the artifice shows itself. But I think that is probably classist as well, that objection because it suggests that we should use the language that we know and it sort of spills out of us in this sensuous overflow with ourselves and our souls as the origin point, like sort of Plato Socratic notions. But actually there's maybe a perceived snobbery about people who have looked in language and found it. Like the idea that something might be deployed is somehow crasser. Is crasser a word? I've deployed it. I think there's something that one should simply have a large vocabulary, and if one looks for words outside of one's vocabulary and deploys them well, that is the most distasteful and immodest sort of attempt at ascending out of one's class. You know what I mean?

Rachael
Yeah. It's totally that.

Stephanie
Well, for me, as a young woman as well. There are Greek words that form the titles of parts of Amnion and stuff and bits of Latin, and so you're making a bid for this language which has had this very paternalistic implementation, and that is very much by design. At one point, I call it the language of the fathers in the book. And it is this sort of like state building, authoritarian utterance. And so to be like the young woman whose body is as incendiary as a vernacular I mean, I think young women are told that in general. That's a general proposition... Not proposition, suggestion. Is very much the thing and yet feels like that is important work to be doing.

Rachael
It really is. Camille, I wonder whether we could hear a bit more of your vocabulary and whether you'd like to read us maybe an excerpt from either one of your….

Stephanie
Can I fangirl really quickly on well, appreciation of Camille's work. So we've talked about Sylvia Legris and I think both of us are, it would be fair to say both of us are quite preoccupied with texture, textual texture. And it makes me think of sort of early mediaeval objects and the Anglo Saxon tradition of the speaking object and this sort of like, incarnate metaphysical idea of like in a highly material culture, which is not the same thing as a highly materialistic culture, but where objects have prestige because they are made by hand. I actually think that that's something I look to in my writing, perhaps more than writing that's in a book or so I just read Jacob Polley's book, which I love as well.

Camille
Material Properties?

Stephanie
Yeah, which is sort of all about the Exeter Book being a speaking piece of the living word. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.

Rachael
That was lovely.

Camille
That was lovely. Thank you.

Jack
Yeah, I actually was going to say no you can't fangirl.

Stephanie
Well, I was going to do it anyway!

Jack
That really is an unbecoming, immodest act.

Rachael
Fangirls forever.

Jack
No, we're all fangirls here.

Camille
I do think it's a very clever pairing that you've done. I've admired Stephanie's work for a while and we've worked together on TLS stuff before, so it's great to be here talking about this stuff.

Rachael
Shout out to Hannah Marshall, our producer.

Jack
It's like First Dates here, basically.

Rachael
Yeah, Camille, go ahead.

Camille
I'll read one now from the sequence that is at the end of the volume and this is called 'My Word'. It's from the spiritual diary of Dr John Dee, a don mathematician, navigator and revered astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, who between 1582 and 1608 travelled across the continent with his unruly scryer Edward Kelly and his family in search of the word, the divine knowledge or language that had long eluded him. So I'll just read one of the bits from near the end of that sequence. [Camille reads from 'My Word’]

Rachael
Thank you. I hope that I am one day described as an unruly scryer, that's my aim. Stephanie.

Stephanie
So I am going to read a passage of the book that I've actually never read aloud before. And I think yeah, just really quickly, I think, Camille, our ways of thinking about these things tessellate in so many ways, but actually my way of thinking about language is not to be getting back to something Edenic, but more to kind of call out the kitschiness. Call out the kitsch everywhere and celebrate it. But I think there's something about that kind of technicolour vision of full and proper communication, which delights and amuses me, but I don't think it can be attained. So this is again from the same part of Amnion, which is at a cathedral school in England. [Stephanie reads from Amnion]

Rachael
Is just yeah, it's just been a delight. Thank you so much, both. This has been an amazing conversation and it's just been a delight to have you both here.

Jack
Thank you so much. It's been really interesting and it's nice to sort of see that sometimes you have people whose contrasting views sort of create nice energy, but a little bit of simpatico and also highlights distinctions and different characters and yeah, I think it's been really fun to hear that.

Rachael
Yeah, really, really generative.

Camille
Thank you very much for inviting me.

Stephanie
Yeah, thank you.

K Patrick
Hi, I'm K Patrick and this is a poem I wrote called 'Splash'. [K Patrick reads ‘Splash']

Rachael
Love that poem so much by K Patrick.

Jack
Yeah, I love the way that in the poem, the speaker – it's sort of third person-y, right? It's just happening – but the speaker, they come through they're kind of arriving gradually through these little details. And I love that as a sort of like creep. That the intelligence of the poem itself because it's not named, it's not an eye. But I love the way that an intelligent life emerges through the details.

Rachael
I feel like K has this flurry of phrase. That's the way I think about it. Like this quick conspiracy of fruit. Horse fly bites starting to feel personal. Grass frightening the shins. And I think it's this phrase focus, this accumulation of weird phrase that if you kind of separate it out you can see how it accumulates into this larger kind of – yeah, exactly what you were saying – this sort of like landscape and story and narrative.

Jack
Well, they also have they used, like you mentioned, frightening – frightening their shins, the grass and the verbs are great. There's the twitch, I mean, that's obviously being deployed as a noun there, I think, in the twitch before morning. But there was also another one, what was that? The perk of something? Ears perk in the wrong direction. I mean that's just like often when you get like busy verbs the voice can seem kind of overdressed or a little bit baroque but there's something so careful and so honed in on the image. And of course, because the poem is a little bit third person-y you don't have that thing of like oh, somebody's showing off with their busy language. It's just this very exacting, descriptive attentiveness.

Rachael
There's a plainness in the kind of statement making as well, which makes the phrases sing all the more. And something that I love about this poem and other of K Patrick's poems, is the way that nature – or whatever, like in scare quotes – is situated and the kind of merging of a distanced human with a strange humanised nature. The moon after the beaver, the beaver sack in the perfume in the nearly cigarettes. There's such a kind of easy way of acknowledging the intertwining, the contemporary weird intertwining of animal and human. And they even say, isn't it good to be obsessed with animals? And this poem is such a weird takedown of like – or not takedown, it's just like a really, really amazing alternative way to approach the idea of the animal as symbol in poem.

Jack
An antidote.

Rachael
Yeah.

Jack
Under one cherry is another rotting cherry. I don't know, there's something a little bit Dutch-mastery about this kind of the way in which K is drawing here. Maybe that's it like the human observation of nature is like a kind of arrangement. It turns like what's happening into a slightly still life thing.

Rachael
And what's weird is it encroaches life.

Jack
A moving still life, sorry. A moving life.

Rachael
Yeah, totally. Like the horsefly bites start to feel personal. The grass is frightening, the shins. It's like this kind of like this lush green canopied scene is like pressing down. Like the ecology of it is kind of like encroaching on the humanness almost. It feels very like you're being suffocated by green.

Jack
I can imagine the idea forming over perhaps, I don't know, a gin and tonic before the yardarm. Let's get high and go and look at the beaver dam. And then you get there and you're bad high, you know, the beavers, everything's just a bit oh no, there's a rotten cherry and everything's starting to fascinate you but also gross.

Rachael
The fruits conspiring.

Jack
It's grossing you out.

Rachael
Yeah, it's quite a paranoid poem. Like darkness is well maintained, daytime is ramshackle.

Jack
A beaver is a rodent.

Rachael
It's a kind of ecology. It's a kind of like immersed in ecology that's almost craving the cleanness of being outside of that space, which I get actually. When I'm in nature or like I'm in the wild landscape. I'm always like I love it, but I'm like I'm scared and I kind of a bit want to go home. And then when I'm in a city, I'm like, I want to be out in nature. It really wrestles with that tension of like where are you supposed to be?

Jack
Yeah. Or I think of how the bottom of a slug is actually like thousands of tiny teeth and that is just like ugggggh. And also I love a snail, but sometimes you can like if you've got a snail crawling around your hand, you can suddenly be like shocked by its intelligence. Or it might be having a little taste of your salty surface and you're just like ugh, no, actually put it down, get this off me. I remember when I was a kid I had stick insects and I'd love getting the stick insects out and watching them crawl and then suddenly there would be this moment where I was ahhhhhh. Because they were quite large.

Rachael
And they would get big and some of them flew. You could buy rare ones that flew around.

Jack
Ours weren't flying, but they did lay eggs.

Rachael
Oh, yeah. And you can just hatch the eggs.

Jack
We put them in wet cotton wool and you had to be in a warm place. You had, like, an airing cupboard. We put them in an ice cream tub in cotton wool in the airing cupboard.

Rachael
Did they ever escape?

Jack
No. The ice cream tub fell down the back of the airing cupboard and all the eggs. So my mum was just terrified that she'd one day just discover, like…

Rachael
…them living in the walls, as we speak.

Jack
It could be. A host. My brother did take a photo of a stick insect in the wild in Norfolk, like, a couple of years ago. Could be the offspring of my escaped brood. But I feel like this poem is kind of that reaches into... is like when the ice cream tub of eggs falls down the back.

Rachael
Yeah. It's like when the nature has encroached a little bit too much, in ways that we didn't expect or want. Yeah, it's awesome.

Jack
Love it.

Rachael
And now we have an audio postcard from Hannah Sullivan's Was It For This.

Hannah Sullivan
A refrain from 'Was It For This'. [Hannah Sullivan reads an extract from her poem 'Was It For This’].

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

Rachael
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