Rachael
Hello, I'm Rachael Allen.

Jack
And I'm Jack Underwood.

Rachael
And welcome to the Faber Poetry Podcast.

Declan Ryan
This is a poem about one of those places you end up at and could probably never find again. Well, I couldn't anyway. I've got no sense of direction. It's for Will Burns, who probably could. [ Declan reads the poem 'Mayfly'].

Rachael
That was 'Mayfly' by Declan Ryan from his debut collection, Crisis Actor.

Jack
Who have we got today in the studio, Rachael?

Rachael
We have the wonderful Victoria Adukwei Bulley, who is a poet, writer and artist, an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets, a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, who has held residencies in the US, Brazil, and the V&A Museum in London. She's currently a doctoral student at Royal Holloway University of London, supported by a TECHNĒ award for practise based research and creative writing. And her debut collection, Quiet, is published by Faber in the UK and Knopf in the US.

Jack
And joining Victoria today, we have Raymond Antrobus, Jamaican British-born poet, writer and performance poet, Ray is the author of Shapes and Disfigurements (Burning Eye, 2012), To Sweeten Bitter (Outspoken Press, 2017), The Perseverance (Tin House, 2021) and All The Names Given (Picador in the UK and Tin House in the US). He's the winner of the Ted Hughes Prize, the Rathbone-Folio Prize, and the Somerset Maugham Award, as well as being a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and a shortlistee for the Forward Prize and T. S. Elliot Prize. Raymond is also the author of the children's book, Can Bear's Ski, which is fantastic, and he's the winner of numerous poetry slams, too many to mention here. We are absolutely delighted to have Raymond here and Victoria. Hello, guys!

Raymond
Hello.

Victoria
Hey.

Rachael
Victoria, would you like to kick us off with some poems?

Victoria
Yes, of course. I'm going to start by reading a short one and let's read... OK, I'm going to read, 'Dreaming Is a Form of Knowledge Production'. [Victoria reads the poems 'Dreaming Is a Form of Knowledge Production' and 'Epigenetic' from her collection, Quiet.]

Rachael
Thank you so much. You read, I think, probably my favourite poem from the book, 'Dreaming Is a Form of Knowledge Production', with my favourite line, which is 'Shut up about Freud'. I feel like I have my own interpretations of that line, but there's a part of me that just wants to launch right in and be like, 'OK, talk to me about that line and that poem and what it means to the book?'

Victoria
Yeah, let's start with that line. I guess I really do feel that I've had dreams that maybe I was in a funk, I was really sad or in a heavy place. And then it's happened that I've had a dream and I would wake up and I would feel great, and I wouldn't even remember the dream, I wouldn't wake up thinking, 'Oh, yeah, I did this and I did that'. I'd probably be on the bus or in Sainsbury's, wherever, and then I would have something trigger a memory that I had a dream. And then I would realise that's why I'm happy now. And that to me is just such a powerful thing. It's crazy to me that there can be a film that played in my head and it changed the level of oxytocin that was in me that day. And I guess also to say knowledge production, I don't necessarily have to be meaning like, oh, like book knowledge, but I just mean some knowledge of the body that the body carries, that changes it, which I also think is politically relevant. That type of knowledge too. So I guess the poem is made up of so many lines. I wrote that poem in a workshop with... Wait, my brain, sorry, baby brain. I wrote this poem in a workshop with... Comic Timing by Holly Pester. And Ed Luca. Yeah, it was with Poetry School. And I wrote this poem in that workshop and I used different things that had happened in the week or different things I'd said in that week. So that the line 'it's not something our relationship will be able to survive' is something I've actually said to someone. And in the poem, there is also a dream, where I had a dream that police were knocking on the door next door. Things in that poem were just like a mixture of actual, real things that had happened that I just mashed together. But the 'Shut up about Freud' line, I guess people ask me about that line, and I'm like, I'm not knocking Freud,I guess I just feel like that's not the only place or that's not the only way I care to talk about dreams. And also I feel like there's a very Western fascination with Freud, and it's so hypersexual and just like, I'm like, cool, nice, but there's more.

Rachael
I love that. Thinking about embodies knowledges and just alt... not even alternative, just ways that have their own way of being interpreted or thought about, that doesn't have to be pinned to some dominant way of theorising or intellectualising something.

Victoria
Yeah.

Rachael
Which makes me think about the book as a whole. This incredible… you know, you're talking about moving from the biological outwards into more nebulous, dreamy states. Domestic states. And Quiet, the book, is set up almost like a really surreal painting of a floor plan or something. That's how I think about it. It's in these sections, A Door, A Key, you move to Room of Conditions and Refusels, A Seal, A Key, Interiors, A Seal, A Door, Night Garden of Yes & Dreaming, and you're negotiated through this incredible palette of thinking and feeling within a domestic space that feels reclaimed in quite an intellectual way, actually. I'm just so into the structure and would love to hear you talk about that structure as well because it feels so unique.

Victoria
Thank you. The structure, I think, was for me, as much as the reader, because at the time of this book getting picked up by Faber, it wasn't a complete thing yet. So I had the challenge of really wanting to deliver something that wasn't finished yet. And I had to, therefore, make myself, as you said, a floor plan or roadmap to just get myself to the way I wanted to feel by the end of the book. So I really just had to design that architecture as a way of helping myself know the spaces that I wanted to write into. And it was very helpful. I didn't know that it was going to work, but I actually do feel that there's a chronology to the book. A lot of the newer poems, bar a few, are towards the end. But having that floor plan was helpful because it also meant that in thinking of it as a book – I always thought of it as a book, and that's not me saying that I couldn't just put a collection of miscellaneous poems together – I wanted to have a book and it meant that with that structure, I could then go to the front and be like, what's missing here? What's between this poem and that poem? What needs to happen? And then write into that space. And then I guess thinking of the titles and stuff, I wanted to have space to write about the personal, to reminisce on girlhood and stuff. But I also wanted to have these doorways and like, sealages – as if that's a word – you know, ways of putting things behind and saying we're going forward now, and so having these interlude functioning poems. So yeah, it was very much for me. It worked, I would say, for me, and I wanted to leave my working in there. And that's why there's so many sections. Because I could have taken them out, I could have also not included them.

Rachael
I love it. It's really like, because they're really immersive poems, but then that artifice almost is put up in a way that feels very like you're also recognising that you're in a poem at the same time, as well as feeling all the poemey things.

Jack
I'm interested in this idea of quietness because obviously a book is a kind of speaking, a kind of interruption of quiet. But at the same time, I think that a poem can also be a space that through talking demarcates a kind of absence or a quiet centre. It makes the space, it lays the space before the quiet. And, of course, at the end of a poem, we return the reader to that quiet space. I'm interested in why – there's lots of really good titles in the book – so when we think about how we come up with our titles maybe we steal one from a poem or we have a line or something, but why that word? A big abstract noun? I suppose maybe it's a concrete noun, is it 'quiet'? I guess it's a thing.

Raymond
It's an abstract. It's an abstract noun.

Jack
It would be, yeah.

Victoria
Yeah, because you can't hold it.

Jack
But I guess you can encounter it with your senses?

Victoria
Yes, I guess so.

Jack
I don't know. It definitely is an abstract now.

Victoria
Yes, it's definitely abstract.

Raymond
You're getting philosophical now.

Jack
Yeah, I know.

Rachael
The OED definition of 'quiet' now, please, Victoria.

Victoria
Yeah. So why 'Quiet'?

Jack
Yeah, why that, of all the other words in the book?

Victoria
Because I am... Why 'Quiet'? Because it's a quiet word. This is a book in which I wanted to take some risks with what would be expected of me. I think that if you walk into a bookshop and you see a book called Quiet, it's not asking a lot of you, really. It could even be telling you to be quiet.

Jack
That's it, you see. I wondered if there was an imperative in there, like 'shush'.

Victoria
Yeah, and that's not my meaning, but I think it's a word that it asks you to... It's quiet. It has an effect in the sense of: are you telling me to be quiet? Are you telling me to shut up? It's ambiguous in a way. Because the other option, for example, was to – and I never even mentioned this to the publisher or to Matthew Hollis, the editor, it never even came up like that – but the other option was to call the book something like Black Noise, which is a poem in the book. As a term, as a sonic term, black noise still actually means something very much like quiet. But I just thought, look, I want people to lean in to listen to the book and quiet and all its different meanings is what this book is very much about. I want to be brave enough to put that small, tiny little wallflower word on the front cover and see if people... see if the expectations of others are mirrored back to them once they actually open the book and read it. I think I wanted to be a little bit subversive by just saying: I'm just going to be quiet. It's going to be a quiet title. Then you open it up and then straight out the gate like, 'if sickness begins in the gut, if I live in the belly...' It's not quiet opening.

Jack
No, no.

Victoria
So I guess I wanted to just be a little bit sneaky like that.

Jack
Yeah. No, that's what I thought. I remember when you were writing a book talking to you about a cover and stuff like that as well. That seems to be like a little... If you get, you get it.

Victoria
Yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Rachael
And I think there's like a minutiae thing going on in your book as well, like this zooming from the very tiny particulars and aspects of a thing outwards into how things are seen from an overview or a bird's eye view or something. And Quiet, I'd never thought of it as an imperative or an instruction before, and that's such an opposite way to think about it. I almost saw quiet as the ring around the book. It was quiet space that's created for the sound within.

Victoria
Exactly.

Jack
But even as an imperative, it can be 'quiet' like a school teacher, but it can also be quiet like 'hush'. And it's not like an imposition often. I mean gosh, I'd wish somebody could just say, 'Jack, quiet'. I need somebody, possibly Rachael.

Rachael
I need to be told that. No, we've got to tell each other.

Jack
So I think in terms of something to be evoked or as an instruction or as a thing, I think it's a real puzzle that word. And I really like the different tensions that it throws up and how those are teased out, like you say, in the individual poems.

Victoria
Thank you.

Raymond
Yeah, I think for me, when I even just saw the title, there were two things that were happening that I thought were at play. One being quiet being a door into an internal space, right? So I like this idea of titles being doors. I see that. And then there's this other subversive thing, which is around... Over my years on the quote "literary scene" in the UK, I can't tell you how many times I've been told to be quiet. In the Poetry Cafe, the LRB – quiet. Just because I'll be there, I might see someone I know and I can get quite animated. Even when I saw Rachael once in a coffee shop, we were like... and people were like, gravitating. So there's, again, a bit like what Jack was saying, there's also a mirroring of that like: OK, interesting, this is a public space, why are you asking... I'm just having a conversation.

Rachael
It's like a reclamation of the word, I guess, in that way.

Victoria
I think so. And I think your point, Ray, is so important because having spent a little bit of time in the countryside, I don't like it when it's too quiet. And I'm not saying I want ambulance sounds and sirens and all sorts of stuff. I'm not talking about that. But just, for example, when I visit Ghana, where my grandparents were, sitting outside is such a thing because of the weather and you can always hear children playing. You can always hear people having a laugh or a joke. You can hear people selling stuff. You can hear people having a fight. And it's like everything feels like a commons. It all feels shared. And so here in this culture in the UK, it does feel like you're being told to be quiet all the time. Many different ways as a woman, as a black person, as a child, all sorts of ways you're being told to be quiet all the time. So I think, Rachael, your point is a good one because my relationship to the word is not singular, but there is a reclamation happening in that here are the ways that this word... Here are the things it brings up for me in the wake of all of those different impositional usages of it. And here are the spaces of quiet that are comfortable and on my terms, but also here are the ways that it can be a violence or a interruption or a suppression as well.

Raymond
Yeah, and that's how it's like for me, as Rachael said, it is quite an intellectual feast, but at the same time, it's also a very intimate book. You've got poems in there for your friends. You're almost showing who you are as a poet, but also who you are as a comrade, a listener, and a speaker. It's really such a rich book for that.

Victoria
Thank you.

Rachael
Ray, I wonder if we could hear some poems.

Raymond
I'm going to read a poem from All The Names Given, and I'm reading this poem in a way because I think there's certain elements of it that it shares with some of the philosophy of Victoria's book, Quiet. This is a monologue poem, but it's an internal monologue at the same time. It's the internal, noisy kind of poem. And I wrote this during the pandemic when I was having some real spirals. And I checked in with my therapist and I've done years of CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and it's about tracking the language you use to talk to yourself and about yourself, understanding that those are choices. This is one of those poems where I wrote right after the therapy session, just to see what choices I was making in the language for myself during the pandemic. It's called, 'I Ran Away from Home to see how long it’d take my Mother to Notice'. [Raymond Antrobus reads his poem 'I Ran Away from Home to see how long it’d take my Mother to Notice' from his collection, All The Names Given].

Raymond
I'll read one shorter one. This poem is called Language Signs, and it speaks to my grandfather, who was a preacher, and I have boxes of his sermons, which I look to and read sometimes, and I've never really managed to get any of the language of his sermons into a poem, but some of it, some of it, or an osmosis of it appears in this poem. [Raymond Antrobus reads his poem 'Lanuage Science' from his collection, All The Names Given].

Rachael
Thank you, so much.

Jack
Ray, I feel like with All The Names Given, there's a deeper level of introspection than in your earlier work, and it's a rooting out. It's like getting into the proteins, the different nutrients, and some of that's like in childhood and some of that's in familial history. And it feels like... I'm interested, you talked about lockdown and that crisis and it's interesting how that's also brought out quite a lot more humour and irony in the work. And maybe that's when you do a level of introspection, as much as it throws up horror and shame also there's a certain embarrassment about oneself, and I don't know, I just feel like it's a slightly newer tone in there a little bit. Is that something that you sense?

Raymond
Yeah. Funnily enough, 'Horror and Shame' was a working title.

Jack
Really? [everyone laughs]

Raymond
Almost [laughs]. I think The Perseverance, in particular, was a book, which I was conscious that it was a spoken, voice-led book. And I think with this book... and also I had different people. Don [Paterson] was my editor for All The Names Given, and he, I think, steered towards a more slender poem and at times a more maybe, I don't know, philosophical or just other ideas were invited into the poem, I think. But at the same time, my ambition was different with this poem. I think I did want it to be a more... How can I say?

Rachael
Interior? It feels like there's an interiority.

Raymond
Yeah, for the most part, it is a very interior book. And then in a similar, I can't really say, I'd just say from my perspective, but one of the things I think that All The Names Given has in common with Quiet, with Victoria's book, is that I think that there's that interior happening, the voice, the interior voice. But then there's also this consciousness of how one sees the body and the ways that that has been read or assumed. And then there's a resistance to that. I think All The Names Given I wrote with a real need to subvert, really, some of those projections, reflections, ideas. To be honest, it was a really... It was a painful book to write. I had a lot of breakdowns when I was writing it for numerous reasons, the pandemic was a tough thing to get through. I was entering marriage and had all these ideas of like, I don't know what the hell? My parents were never married. How is this happening? How is this going to work? I was on the way to living in America as well, and there's a part of me that's a little bit Americanised now, and then that also can show up in the work. I don't know...

Jack
But there's a reckoning. It feels like a self-reckoning. And maybe The Perseverance was like you were writing poems with a sense of what a poem does and in that writing, I suppose, the first book of poems, it felt like. Whereas this felt more like the poems were being written because you write poems. They were arriving through some other process. I think that's a different lyric attitude, and I think that it makes them... It means that you have to be more grabby and complex and like that little awards ceremony for yourself. Just hilarious. But even just finding that device, which is both silly and ironic, but it also gives you the opportunity to hop around. And I feel like that is like when one is more introspective, the complexity of who we are outside of the usual categories and classes falls away and we have to have a bit of that and we have to have that part of ourself as well. I feel like there's a breadth to some of the poems.

Rachael
And you're checking yourself in a really funny way as well. Like, I can't remember the line, it's like, 'most self-centred in the global pandemic' or something, or 'most concerned about'. And there's a sending up of, I guess, that interiority as well, which adds to the tensions, I suppose, that the poems are being written out of. That pulling Simone de Beauvoir off the shelf – we were just talking about learning through reading – well, I used to sit outside Morrison's when I worked at Morrison's and read it feeling really grown up and pretentious in my hometown. You have a way of zooming people right into the action of a poem in this book and a story and then flinging them somewhere else and upsetting expectations again, as Victoria was talking about. It's amazing to hear about, actually, the context that the book was written in. Was the majority of it written in the pandemic?

Raymond
At least half of it was, yeah, because like Victoria, I had almost like a different book before the pandemic, and then the pandemic happened and it just changed the work. Because the book opens with me going to Antrobus, this place in Cheshire called Antrobus village, which is my namesake village. So in a way, I think having a literal physical place with your name is such a gift to any artist because we have all of these ideas of homeland and returning to this great mythic place. I literally have that, and it's in England. And even in that place, I can't walk through the UK borders customs without that question: 'Where does this come from? Your name? What is that?' As soon as I say it was an English name, it's like, 'No, it's not' and have to defend it. So I'm like, 'It is. You can look it up. It's in Cheshire.'

Jack
There!

Raymond
Here you go, mate.

Jack
As if the border guard is going to know where Cheshire is. No shade to Cheshire.

Raymond
But that very tone, I think, informs the journey or the mode of the book. Because I think one thing that all the way through All The Names Given does is that it doesn't quite know where it is, where it's treading. So there's this. And I was aware that in The Perseverance, there was almost like a certainty in it. It was like: this is who I am. It was like very much I was affirming something in that book. And this book is like: oh, actually, I don't really know. Sorry, everyone, don't know.

Victoria
I feel like that is so generous, though, because I also think that The Perseverance is a very making a statement type of book, really drawing some lines around things and saying this is how this works and this is how it is. And the second book is, All The Names Given, it's like, you didn't need to share that with us. It feels really generous because it feels like the first book, I feel as a person who knows you on a personal level, the first book is Raymond Antrobus, but the second book is the book you wrote for Ray. Do you know what what I mean? I just feel that there's such a richness that you chose to make that a book because the process that's happening feels really different.

Raymond
Yeah, that's sure. I appreciate that.

Jack
We were talking about humour and irony a little bit just in the way that that creeps in. I think the common mistake is that the poetry of emotion is this earnest, flat, direct... But actually, that's vulnerability. We laugh when we're anxious. We laugh when we're nervous. We laugh when we recognise how silly we've been, how stupid we've been. And I feel like the way that the poly tonality of that comes through, like you say, it's not...

Rachael
And it's brave to be funny. That's the hardest thing to actually be. Like, well, that was ridiculous that I thought I knew.

Victoria
Yeah.

Raymond
The thing that I learnt through, I'd say, performance is that you can't bullshit an audience because you feel it when they're not with you. And then the thing that I learned through the page is that you can't bullshit an audience. Because you feel it. I'm like, oh, there's something really incredible about the idea that you can write something and someone hasn't even heard your voice and they just read it and they're like: bullshit. I don't believe you.

Victoria
I don't believe you. You're lying.

Raymond
You know what I mean?

Jack
Yeah, or like you're sharing this thing that's supposed to be difficult, but it's like you're not finding this difficult to share. Do you know what I mean? And I feel like a proper bastard for saying that. But sometimes I am just like: what is that? I mean, this is obsessed philosophers and artists, like authenticity, that big question. Whether it's the Frankfurt School or In the Night Garden, you're like, whatever you're watching. And pop music, as well. Why when I hear somebody sing, am I like, 'mmm, yeah, feeling it'. And sometimes I'm just like, hollow.

Victoria
Yeah. I don't know what that is. I don't know. I think there's no word for it, but I just think that we do, as humans, have a sense of something being real or not.

Rachael
I think when you're truly embarrassing yourself, that's when it's real, and when you see the embarrassment in other people's writing.

Victoria
Yeah, you can hear the writer checking themselves as they write.

Jack
That's a risk. That's real risk, isn't it.

Victoria
Yeah. I feel like Nuar Alsadir is probably the person to talk about this, but yeah, you can, in the poem you read where you ran away from home. I loved hearing that because it's just so interesting. And it's not just, 'Oh, it's so relatable', it's just interesting. Do you know what I mean? It's interesting. It's fascinating. And it's not pretending to be something other than what it is. And that makes you really want to be in a relationship with those parts of yourself that feel like that.

Raymond
Right, right.

Jack
It's empathetic rather than sympathetic, right? You're not just going like, 'Oh, I feel for you'. You're like, 'Ouch, yes. I feel for you.' But I think it comes through complexity. I think when somebody presents something neat, we're like, That's not emotion.

Rachael
And not knowing as well. As you said, with your first book, you felt like maybe with this book, there's a dismantling of the certainty that you felt before. I think the introduction of ambivalence, that's the thing I always look for when I think about the truest or best poetry. I always go back to Elizabeth Bishop, she's like my queen. But she's like the queen of ambivalence. She's like, 'Was it this colour? I don't know. Was it this colour? Was I sad? I don't know if I was sad. Maybe I'm just sad in this poem.' That's what I feel like that poem and the book does.

Jack
When we were talking earlier about Victoria's Quite, about knowledge and knowing and epistemology, that is a much broader subject and school of philosophical thinking than just like positivism, just like what we can prove, which is like there's wonderful philosophies of gossip as a form of knowledge. Of course, there's like the somatic, what the body knows and the unconscious. If we do know things unconsciously, but we don't know that we know them, what can we say? All these really knotty things. And I think when we get into poems, we're able to bring the complexity of knowing back within reach in a way that can be shared.

Raymond
Yeah, and I guess another cousin, I suppose – in terms of a cousin of the idea or some relation with an idea – one place where I don't think All The Names Given and The Perseverance departs, was in its sound, in the way that it engages with sound. For this book, All The Names Given, I've got this punctuated captions throughout, and that's all about showing this sense that you'll think of as sound and the captioning. I interviewed a bunch of people who work as captioners, and they were fascinating interviews because they all had this very, actually, industry certainty about how to articulate a sound, about how to describe it. But then when I introduced this idea as well – I'm deaf, this is my relationship with sound – it was then like, 'Oh, yeah. Oh, that is interesting. Oh, yeah.' So it was like, I got to introduce that as a poetic into the book and a dismantling of what people's... a certain idea of what sound is. And I suppose the way that the pandemic came in is because I'm not a big TV watcher or film watcher until the pandemic, when I just watched everything. I watched everything. And I was like: Oh, my God, TV is amazing. Oh my God.

Jack
Have you heard about this thing we've got, the television?

Raymond
I watched all of Breaking Bad, all of The Office, the American version and... loads of it, but I'm watching all of it with subtitles and I'm always looking at how they're describing a sound. And I'm like: Oh, I didn't hear that. And when I realised how philosophical sound was because there were so many sounds that would be in captions, like a glass falling in the background. I'm like, I didn't hear that. So for me, that's a philosophical idea because it doesn't exist to me. So then through the page of the book, and one good thing about Picador is that the shape of their poetry books is almost like a screen. So I almost thought of the book as a screen that you open up into. And then I'm like, Oh, yeah, the captions and these ideas are also transitions into, I don't know, like you say, it's a very internal thing, but I'm trying to curate a journey. I think what Victoria was saying about the structure, I think I am interested in making books rather than just collections. It's like here is some sustained experience, idea, that I'm trying to write through. And hopefully by the end of the book, you too, as a reader, have gone through it or experienced that, you know.

Rachael
You have both brought in some knowable items today.

Raymond
Oh, yeah.

Jack
Let's see. What have we got? The talismans, it's come to that point.

Victoria
I had to just go and look for one because I don't really have one. Have I lost it? Anyway, for the listeners, I don't really have a writing talisman, but I thought, OK, what could I bring in today? And I'm holding a tarot deck and the card that I have taken out and evidently misplaced is...

Rachael
You've pulled on air. That's so cool.

Victoria
I did. The card that I took out and have misplaced is the magician card. Here it is.

Jack
Oh, up your sleeve.

Victoria
Yeah. What number is it? Number eight? Have I remember it? Oh, number one. Yeah, this is the first card. But yeah, I guess I chose this card because I feel like I do think that when you write, you are trying to do something magical. It's like a transmutation happening. But also, I just think that when I try and put something into words, it's not that I want it to stay in words. Sometimes I'm thinking in an image or I'm thinking in an installation or I want to build something. I've got ideas of things I actually want to make physically. I guess I relate to this card because you've got a person standing before a table that has a cup, a coin, a sword, and a staff on it. You don't know which one he's going to use or they're going to use.

Jack
What's he holding there?

Victoria
Some sort of... there's a word for it, it's an old word.

Jack
Is it a wand, basically?

Raymond
It could also be a candle.

Victoria
There's a word for it, right?

Rachael
I think I have a rolling pin like that.

Victoria
Yeah, it looks a little bit like a rolling pin.

Rachael
Whatever site of production you want this stick to be.

Victoria
Yeah, but yeah, it could be...

Rachael
Do you get the magician a lot?

Victoria
I haven't pulled it in so long, but it's one of my favourite ones. Are you into the magician?

Rachael
I have a lot of friends who are really into it, so I'm absorbing for them tarot stuff.

Jack
My daughter is just getting into magic tricks, and I learnt to do the French Drop.

Victoria
What's the French Drop?

Jack
Which is where you're going to like pick a coin up, but in actual fact, you drop it into the palm of your hand. So you do this and take it away. But it's in that hand and you can do just like click your fingers.

Raymond
Wait a minute. The magician just revealed his secrets. That's the first rule.

Victoria
I didn't know how that worked.

Jack
Yeah, it's nifty.

Victoria
Now I know.

Raymond
You just killed the magic.

Jack
Well, if you buy a magic set for 12.99...

Victoria
The Magic Circle are going to come for you. Don't they do that? The magicians, they come for you...

Jack
It's called the French Drop, guys. You can find it in a £12.99 magic set. I think if my five-year-old can do it.

Victoria
Jack Underwood disappeared after the recording of this podcast.

Jack
Made himself disappear. He bought it on himself.

Rachael
This is a really beautiful symbol for thinking about writing and all the different tools that you need. And the support. And the magician feels like they have a very, very strong posture here.

Victoria
Absolutely.

Raymond
I appreciate the floral work going on here as well.

Jack
Yeah. Foreground.

Rachael
All these little flowers.

Raymond
Tulips and roses.

Jack
Ray, what have you brought in?

Raymond
So something seemingly different, but I'm bringing this in as an idea of poems as gifts. I was so moved by this idea that when I wrote To Sweeten Bitter, which is a pamphlet of poems, I hadn't shared the book with my family, and I wrote it while... my dad had passed and there was all kinds of dynamics in my family that I'd isolated myself from to write through. But the day that the book was published, my sister gave me this. This is, for listeners, a silver box, and it looks like it could be like a watch box of some sort. In gold lettering on the front it says 'To Sweeten Bitter', which is the name of the book. And my sister gave me pencils.

Jack
This is a big reveal.

Raymond
And she had shown me, because I didn't know that she had read the book, and to show me that she had read the book, she had lines from the poems put onto the pencils. And this idea of the poem is a gift, I think this is the most literal, but also significant gift I have received for something I've done.

Rachael
It's like never settle. Never settle. This is what you want when you know that people have read your book, like printed lines onto stationary that you can then... Yeah, that's so touching.

Raymond
I can't look at this without feeling seen, encouraged, loved. And it's also a way to... sometimes you need something to keep you going. And I like to have ideas about who I'm writing for as well. I didn't even think about it before, but I was so, I don't know, enamoured or moved by this idea that my sister read my work. I was like, Of course, you've read it. I really hope you liked it.

Jack
I noticed, Ray, that some of the tips of the pencils were not sharp. And I'm not suggesting that you've been shoddy. I'm just like do you use them? Because that one looks...

Raymond
I have used some of them.

Jack
Yeah, and what do you use them for?

Raymond
I've been writing things. Which one is it that's not sharp? There was one that was...

Rachael
I think To Sweeten Bitter.

Raymond
Yeah, To Sweeten Bitter, that's the one. There's only one that I've been using.

Jack
And what do you use it for? Not like grocery lists.

Raymond
So I do a thing of my first drafts are often all in pencil. There's something I need... there's something that comforts me about the impermanence of it, and I don't feel any way about just writing something really fast in a pencil. Right now I have a poem in front of me of that's written in pencil, and it's just like... I don't know, it's probably all terrible, but I don't care because...

Victoria
...it's pencil.

Raymond
It's pencil.

Jack
Yeah. It's your workings out, right?

Raymond
It's my workings out, right.

Victoria
I'm the same.

Raymond
And I love what Victoria said earlier about putting the workings out in the poems.

Jack
Show your workings.

Raymond
Because in a way, that's how you trust it. It's like, oh, I see how you've arrived at this. I see how only you could have said this, only you could have written that. And that's what I suppose people are often looking for, maybe, in the art that they consume. What is something that is so authentically, almost this person.

Rachael
Processy.

Raymond
Right.

Jack
There's actually quite a lot of common experiences that one goes through. It's the specifics, isn't it? And the one thing that I think stops a love poem just being a love poem is the particularity of the person and the mind working through that. I mean, it's often not the situation, which you never really find out. It's not like, 'And then Debbie said to me this, and then...' You don't get the drama, you just get the feeling. And it's the mind at work on that subject and the particularities of that mind, not another mind, that particular one.

Raymond
So a poet and a book that really inspired me, I guess, in that sense – actually, you might appreciate this chat, but I was obsessed with the Spanish 19th century poets like [Juan Ramón] Jiménez literally has the epigraph at the front of All the Names Given. And he wrote this book, very high-lyric book called Diary of a Newlywed Poet is how it translates into the English from Spanish. And all these poems, basically they're like love poems to the sea, because he went on a boat – he leaves Cadez in Spain and he's going to New York and in that whole journey on the boat, he's just writing about how much he loves the sea. But actually what's happening is he's about to marry the woman that he's wanting to marry. He's feeling love, and he's so infused with the love and the way in which he's anticipating entering this marriage is that he channels all of that energy of love to the sea.

Jack
Yeah, yeah. I mena if he was stuck on the M25.

Rachael
You could be in love, stuck on the M25.

Raymond
Oh, baby.

Rachael
I've been there.

Jack
Yeah, when Hannah changes lanes, me as a very anxious driver, I'm like, Oh, my God.

Rachael
Poems from a newlywed coming from...

Jack
'Changing Lanes', the third collection.

Rachael
It would be so lovely to hear another poem from you both to close us out of the podcast this afternoon. Raymond, would you like to read?

Raymond
Sweet, yeah. So this is a new poem. It's called 'Fit and Moral', and I wrote a series of poems while my wife was pregnant, about to become a dad. And I wrote a lot in this quite state of delirium, you know, all of that. Yeah. So this poem, I think, also fits into some of the stuff we've been talking about, the internal space, external space. [Raymond Antrobus reads the poem, 'Fit and Moral']

Rachael
Thank you so much.

Jack
That's a really good New Year's poem as well, isn't it?

Rachael
Victoria?

Victoria
I'll read a poem from the book called 'dear little b'. [Victoria Adukwei Bulley reads 'dear little b', a poem from her debut collection, Quiet.]

Rachael
Thank you so much both. This has been such a beautiful conversation and it's just been an honour to have you guys here and to chat through your books.

Raymond
Thank you. I really appreciate it. This is great.

Victoria
It's been really fun. Thank you.

Holly Isemonger
Hi. I'm recording this on the north end headland at Werri Beach in Gerringong, New South Wales, Australia. You can probably hear the waves in the background. The swell's like maybe 1.5 metres and the poem I'm about to read is called 'My Life as an Artist'.

Holly Isemonger
[Reads her poem 'My Life as an Artist' from her collection Greatest Hit]

Holly Isemonger
And that poem was written using a constraint. Each stanza was one set of words, and then to create a new stanza, I rearranged the exact same words, just in a different order. And each set of words has three variations. And... yeah, bye from Australia.

Rachael
That was so cool, Jack. I love that so much. I love it when we're told where the poets are, as well.

Jack
Yeah. Do you remember back when Natalie Shapero was like a truck nearly reversed into my building just now? But like, yeah, Holly is standing there. I should say that's Holly Isemonger, and the poem, 'My Life as an Artist' from her amazing debut collection, Greatest Hit, that's published by Vagabond Press in Australia. It's quite tricky to get hold of in the UK because of the postage situation. But this is what you want to do. You want to get the...

Rachael
Yeah, I mean, that poem is so amazing. And I was interested in the constraint. Is this like a known constraint? Has she invented it?

Jack
No, I know that Holly likes the strange tension between the lyric and constraint and the way in which certain operations, or predetermined operations, inform and constrain, force the lyrics to bend and do weird things.

Rachael
I didn't know it was like a... I knew that there was some rhythmic play and some repetition with...

Jack
Potatoes.

Rachael
Potato, artwork, dirt.

Jack
Life.

Rachael
Yeah. I quite like how it starts to replicate itself quite weirdly. You have these repetition of words and then there's like 'tuber' and then there's like 'labour' and then there's underground and there are these growths that come out of the original constraint, which feels really subterranean.

Jack
Yeah, like tuberous. I think the nouns 'head', 'potato', like my head is a potato, tired head. 'I lost my art last night'. 'Sleep is a lost art'. The way that these different kind of... I mean, it's interesting that she's reading the poem at the beach near the surf because it's almost like something being turned over by the surf. And of course, My Life as an Artist is just funny.

Rachael
It's quite grandiose. It's like you would expect or like, yeah, she's undoing that idea of it to be some grandiose, I'm going to paint for three hours a day and then have sex with my wife.

Jack
Yeah, it's more depressed and anxious.

Speaker 4
And machinic. It's very machinic. It's like, I do this thing, I do this thing, I become this thing, and then there's a kink and I do this thing and duh duh duh duh duh. It feels very authentically about the repetition of work, work and making art, the difference between work and art and labour, all things being labour.

Jack
In that turning over, often when you're working with constraint, the benefits of it is that it forces you to do things that you wouldn't ordinarily come up with yourself because it forces a new logic. And there's just so many lovely, strange constructions that do come up. 'Growth is spoiled and what of labour?' 'I don't do work. I hold the hands. Help me in my harvest.' That's gorgeous.

Rachael
Yeah, it feels like a poem that you would expect, but heard in a dream almost, like the lines are really queered and the lines are really altered by... There's an expectation of them that's turned in on itself via the constraint, like the form turns the expectation around.

Jack
I like that it appears, I'm not sure, but it appears to also just sack off the constraint. 'There's that my depression is a much thickened underground part, bearing buds from which new plants arise.' There's that part. And also 'my part is in', you know the different... And I love those strange, like my, my!

Rachael
I love that, yeah. But it starts to degenerate. She gets to 'please help me' at the end. I got to that and I was like, Oh, yeah, that makes so much sense. I feel like everything has been written to come to this conclusion or this statement, this appeal.

Jack
Well, yeah, I'm trapped. I'm trapped in this strange potato, neurotic need to make art against the absurdity of my labour and my labouring. I don't know what to do and I don't know what to do. I don't know how to live with it.

Rachael
Yeah, it's amazing. The title as well, I was thinking it could even be something like, 'My potato as a life' or 'My artist as potato'. You know those things where you move the head and the body and the legs and the shoes, like the people and you move their body parts around?

Jack
Yes, like a maquette. What are they called? A mannequin.

Rachael
Yeah, that's what it feels like you're moving these parts, which is like working.

Jack
It is like dragging your sorry meat shell and little brain pudding back to the practise of thinking and feeling. I'm writing again for the first time in ages and I'd just forgotten – actually, it was blissful not writing because when you're just like: oh, that's no good, oh, that's good, oh, that's awful. And it is work, it's tiring.

Rachael
You do have to write the shit to get to the...

Jack
Yeah, and you do feel like sleep is a lost art and my head is a potato. And you are tired. Then you think, God, I have to do this. I do this whether I want to or not, and I don't know how to live with it.

Rachael
Cyclical.

Jack
Beautiful.

Rachael
Like the poem.

Jack
Yeah, it's a smashing poem. It's not remotely gimmicky that.

Rachael
Not at all.

Jack
Because sometimes you get a thing and you're like, particularly if there's like, 'This is a sequence of 14 poems, taken from a dictionary of harvesting written in 1842', and you're just like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah'. This is like work that is using that beautiful marriage of form and subject, using those repetitions to churn and broil. Boil your head.

Rachael
Cook your potatoes.

Jack
Exactly. And to put us on a horse and ride us beyond the horizon where the sunset breaks like an egg, we have an audio postcard from Dawn Watson.

Dawn Watson
This is an extract from 'We, Ghost Tigers', which is the fourth and final poem sequence in We Play Here. [Dawn Watson reads from the poem, 'We, Ghost Tigers' taken from her collection We Play Here, published by Granta].

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. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and tell your friends about our show.