Rachael
Hello, I'm Rachael Allen.

Jack
And I'm Jack Underwood.

Rachael
And welcome to the Faber Poetry Podcast.

Rachael
To start us off today, we have a poem from Susannah Dickey, from her debut collection, ISDAL.

Susannah Dickey
Hello, I'm Susannah Dickey, and I'm sending in my poetry dispatch from the sunny, sunny fields of St Albans. I'm sitting next to my open bedroom window and I can hear the birds confabbing, which perhaps you also just heard. And I can also hear a dog sneezing. There was a football match earlier at the Mozzarella Fellas Stadium, which is nearby, so perhaps the dog is allergic to the result. I am going to share a poem. For a bit of context, the Isdal woman is a woman whose body was found in 1970 by a young girl. This poem tries to think about how a discovery like that could linger and recur and reiterate over the course of a life. This is, 'Whenever you feel sad you enjoy the smooth refreshing taste of Diet Coke with Lemon'. [Susannah Dickey reads 'Whenever you feel sad you enjoy the smooth refreshing taste of Diet Coke with Lemon' from her debut collection, ISDAL.]

Jack
In the studio with us today, we have Lucy Mercer, whose debut collection, Emblem, is out with Prototype and was the Poetry Book Society Summer Choice 2022. Lucy is also the winner of the White Review Poetry Prize. It's just so lovely to have you here, Lucy. Welcome.

Rachael
We also have Maggie Millner. Maggie Millner is a poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyan Review, Bomb, and The Nation, among other publications. She's a lecturer at Yale and a senior editor at the Yale Review and her incredible, erotic, moving debut Couplets is out now with Faber. We're going to hear first a few poems from Lucy Mercer, if you'd like to take it away.

Lucy
Thanks. These are from Emblem, which was published in April of last year. [Lucy Mercer reads 'WestWorld' from her collection Emblem.]

Jack
Lovely. Thanks, Lucy. I love that image of sleeping like a peach stone. Like thinking about how children sleep and what they look like, poets have done that for hundreds of years, and I think to come across such a accurate and striking image for that is really... Well, I just go back to that line all the time and go hmmmm. But rather than just some words of mild admiration, we should talk about this book, Emblem. Could you tell us a bit about the general, well there is a sort of conceit for the book, although the poems don't always immediately connect to that conceit, or it's not kind of... Well, you tell me, actually. Tell me about that.

Lucy
Well, I suppose it's always like what you think your book is doing, especially what poets think their books are doing and then other people are like, 'no, that's not what it's actually doing'. This book was inspired, as it were, by a book of 16th century emblems. And emblems were an early modern form where there is a picture, a moralising motto, like the title of a poem, and a poem underneath. It was a kind of text-image form. And I came across this book of emblems, but I couldn't read them because I can't read Latin and they're in Latin, but I felt that that was actually better because when I started to read the translations of them, I didn't really like them. So at the time, I had a very young son and in my head, these two things, motherhood and these emblems merged in an odd way. I was quite interested when I was writing this book as writing as a form of image. And actually, there's lots of it that I struggle to read out loud. I'm thinking about introducing moments of visual sense that are perhaps verbal nonsense within the poems.

Jack
So you mean that when you're looking at something or you're configuring an image out of the text, that feels like an indoor process that's more exacting. And somehow when you read it out loud, it seems like a fumbling towards?

Lucy
Yeah, definitely. Or I think the way that when you... This is one of the things that interested me with emblems that they say that your eyes are always drawn back to the image, that it's a centre. And I'm quite interested in the way that when we read how we assimilate a kind of multiplicity, as it were, which is more difficult to do when you're speaking.

Rachael
And it is, I think, something that always strikes me about your text - and the book as a whole - is just how much reference and intertextual play and other people's work and other people's words are woven into this really lyric movement alongside the emblem text, and it feels very networked and meshed in that way. I feel like when I'm reading it, there's this callback to publications that would have marginalia scribbled in or footnotes, but it feels much more subtle in that way. It feels like those intertextual moments are more embedded, perhaps, which also feels closer to the idea of the emblem itself, which is an embedded way of communicating meaning, I suppose. I was reading the essay that you published in Granta, which is an accompanying non-fiction text called 'Self Replicating Textual Worms'. There's a really beautiful part in this where you talk about the word emblem derived from the word 'inlay', as in a mosaic or an ornament, a detachable ornament, the insole of a shoe or a cultivated branch graft onto a wild tree. It is so interesting how you manage to combine all these various portals of meaning into this book. That made me think of motherhood as well. I was like, okay, so the emblem is also the child and the way that you intellectualise that idea of motherhood, but also don't shy away in your language and thematically from the loneliness, as you put it, of early motherhood. And I'm interested, I suppose, in how you personally aligned that very emotional and individual sense of early motherhood with this quite intellectual, I suppose, pursuit of reinterpreting or refashioning the emblem.

Lucy
Thank you. That's really nice to hear. All these things I hope are really relevant to the book. It's one of these things, I suppose, when you look back at what you've done and you can narrativise it or make more sense of it, like in the Granta article. But at the time, I didn't really see a similarity between the emblems and what I was doing in my day to day life, mothering. I think that is one of the nice things - when poems surprise you or what you didn't expect comes out of it.

Jack
There's that very authentic sense of accumulation. We're talking about 'Where's Wally' or a torch that's like a cat's mouth. These are real things that you... But then also words or things that occur. I love the way that those things are corralled into the thinking of the poems, rather than the poems being like, 'This is who I am', trying to root out some authentic self-origin point. It's much more messy than that. I think that's really what I find so exciting about this kind of form of lyricism
Lucy
Thank you. I think, yeah, the authenticity thing, that's good to hear. I think if you're referring to a very old text, in this case, a 400-year-old book, you do quickly realise that it's built... the book it's referring to is essentially built from junk, like found stuff that may have never existed or existed in a different form. There's really no, even for that book, an authentic source. I think to me, domestic objects like torches or plastic toys my son has or whatever, to me, that's equivalent value junk to be put together.

Jack
Tell us a bit more about not reading Latin and writing about a book in a language that you don't understand, because I love that just as a... I don't think it's remotely like a flex or anything. I think that's just like, Oh, you encounter the object, it's interesting. And again, that doesn't seem like a bullying or a grandiose thing, it feels just very humble and interested.

Rachael
And fanatical as well, in a way. It's like, oh, I'm just enjoying the materiality of a language that informs something that I'm doing, but that I can't interact with in a representational way necessarily.

Jack
I think it also totally talks to the history of the actual book itself, though, because most people wouldn't have been able to read. Most people didn't speak Latin. That was a particular elite skill. There's that wonderful thing in St. Augustine, where he's having a go at this bishop for reading in his head. There's a big debate, well, not a huge debate, there's a debate. This is not like taking up…

Rachael
It's going viral right now, this debate.

Jack
About whether or not.... That's because reading in your head was a much later invention and everyone just bellowed all the time, or if, in fact... Anyway, I'm digressing. But yeah, tell us a bit more about writing about a book that you can't read. And while writing your own book, which also you can't... you just said you can't read.

Lucy
Yeah, I mean, in a way, I can't. Well, I think part of it was, to me, it was also like having a baby and not being able to understand what a baby is saying to you. I was in two situations where I couldn't interpret what was in front of me, really. But also, I think, and this is going back to images, if you can't read a language, I don't know, I think this is every language I can't read, which, is like all of them. How it draws back to writing as a form of picture and the sense of possibility that that can give you, in a way, it's sometimes nice not to know what something's saying or what people are saying to each other and you can speculate. I've recently been drawn a bit to medieval notation before notes became notes and they had a different form. It's the same thing of something like if you see a music manuscript in this early way, antiphonal manuscript, it looks like it's got a message within it. But what that message could be, it remains obscure. I think it goes into that liminal space where you're not entirely sure. And it can be quite suggestive or useful in some ways for thinking about whatever you want to think about.

Rachael
Yeah, it's nice because I often feel like there has to be some fidelity or something to understanding wholly or like approaching something with a knowledge of it already established. It's so much more interesting to see that sight of unknowing as the site where you can generate work and meaning of your own.

Jack
But that's also acknowledging the fundamentals of just language, isn't it? There's that classic linguists' example, probably post-structural, I think, of a rock in the desert and it's got these scratchings on it, and you're like, Did a worm make these? Was it the wind? And all you can really define with any certainty is that or if language begins when you can speculate that something intended to mean something, like maybe a worm or the wind wanted us to mean something. But the meaning is just like the discernible intention to mean. And beyond that, we're all just scrabbling around.Having a bash.

Rachael
We're just worms on rocks.

Jack
Yeah, and being troubled by the wind.

Rachael
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about image in the book because the emblems appear and drawings crop up as well and book plates. And I'm interested in the visual, the actually, I suppose, straight visual aspect that you wanted to include as almost section breaks and as a photograph as well. I'm interested in how you chose what to represent of the emblem book visually and how.

Lucy
At the end, I repeat some of the original images from the original emblem book, and I wanted to repeat them because I didn't want them to have a fixed meaning and I wanted to show that they could keep changing and be reused in a recycling or a form of composting, really. And then, yeah, like you say, there's a photograph that was of a flat that I lived in, and I was thinking about Ian Hamilton Finlay's 'Proposal for a Sundial to be Placed on Marat’s House in Paris', and it has got this time, but I felt like at the time I wasn't living in a linear time, so I drew a non-linear nonsense sundial on the glass with some chalk markers.

Jack
Yeah, because when you're up every two hours feeding, it may as well be four in the morning, but it's five.

Lucy
Right. Then I wanted to keep the images in the book quite loose. What I didn't want above anything was for them to be illustrations, where it's just describing what's happening in the image. I wanted to think of them to cause some complication and tension. And in a way, they're arbitrary, but I think that arbitrariness is quite important to the emblem form and maybe also to poems as well. I don't know if you read a poem and it's like, 'Here's my title, this poem is about this,' and then the poem is about that, then it also doesn't quite necessarily work as well.

Jack
It's not the clear convention of saying, This is for this and you process this in this way. I feel like actually, generally, your poetic voice is a bit like that. You ask the reader to do quite a bit of work or just imaginative, associative, intuitive thinking through and feeling through. That seems quite central to your poeming.

Lucy
Yeah, I hope so. I like this associationism and thinking about thinking that isn't hopefully too literal or that we want to make connections between things. I mean, I suppose, isn't that just metaphor or simile, really?

Jack
But they're essential to poetic thinking and this rooting out of poetic truths rather than the habitual ones that we... particularly around subjects like motherhood.

Rachael
I think because there can be a really interesting ambivalence in the poems where you're not settling on a certain way to show or perform or commit to an idea. There's also questions and there's lots of broken statements, I suppose, and broken assertions that almost make you feel as though... There's a really interesting reading experience when I come to Emblem because it almost feels as though you're scanning something that has been intentionally... There's intentional erasure, but there's stuff put into it. It feels like a very, I think, Jack, your word of like an accumulation of different thoughts and feelings and associations. It's just a very graceful way of putting forward feelings about things and ideas about history and ideas about research and lived research. That's what I think it feels like, the idea of motherhood, you've made motherhood feel like this space of accumulating knowledge and you're presenting that process of accumulating.

Jack
Yeah, and arranging it in a way that allows the complexity of those various aspects of that experience. I don't know that I've spectated it. I think, yeah, that rather than resisting those reductive writing about poems about motherhood, this book is about Motherhood, that anecdotalism or literalism or realism, I think I love the way that the poetic leaves things, arranges things.

Lucy
I'm really glad about that. I think one of the things I do feel about, like you say, that there's a tendency to write this anecdotal - understandable anecdotal writing about Motherhood, and I'm sure my book hasn't escaped that either. But I feel like the maternal imaginary, as it were, and this is something that I felt very strongly behind writing this book, is so limited in this country in terms of what mothers are expected to think and to feel about and be interested in. I think it's actively harmful. I don't know or think that my book has managed to fill that space, but that's one of the motivations behind writing in that way, that it's like we've got to expand that space that's hopefully away from Mumsnet forums and Instagram crafting or whatever it is. You know what I mean?

Jack
Yeah, yeah.

Rachael
And it's nice you do talk about the emblems having a quite basic communicative or moralising that feels Instagrammy or something, but then you elaborate on their meaning outside of their moralising or their easy way of being interpreted, which links to motherhood again in that way, how we perceive motherhood and what we expect of mothering, parenting.

Lucy
And mothering poems, which are often like: I went to the park. I mean, it can be a good poem, don't want to you know... But it's like a very narrow band of what is talked about, I think, sometimes.

Jack
Yeah, it's often very direct and just literally about the wiping up and the pushing around. Maggie, we should talk to you. You're here, hello.

Maggie
Hello. I want to listen to Lucy speak forever.

Jack
Well, I'm afraid we're going to force you to talk now. But then we will open up because we want to hear what you guys have brought in to show us today for the show and tell aspect. But yeah, maybe you'd like to read from Couplets?

Maggie
Sure.

Jack
I'm very excited to have the uncorrected proof here in front of me. So I'm keen to…

Maggie
Yes, and I have the American uncorrected proof here, which is almost the evil twin or something. The parallel universe version. It is a same colour scheme.

Jack
Glossy. Yours is glossy, though, isn't it?

Maggie
Mine is glossy for some reason, and the typeface is very seventies.

Jack
It's bigger and glossier, which is, I think, a workable trans-Atlantic metaphor, maybe, I don't know.

Maggie
Unfortunately. Yours is, I think, a more aesthetic object. I will read from the first three sections of the book. The three poems that launch the narrative. These poems are more or less in rhyming couplets, which you may or may not hear. I'll just delineate the sections with the numbers. [Maggie Millner reads the first three poems from Couplets.]

Jack
Thank you. I'm a real nerd for lineation so I think I'm going to jump in and ask you about couplets, which is a fairly obvious place to start, I suppose, given the title of the book. I was thinking about how when you're writing within a form or within couplets, that the way in which you've got a quite short space of time to turn around that little unit, that little measure... And the way that I think in the hands of novices, couplets or form or rhyme becomes like this overburdening constraint and not this source of dynamism, not this little challenge which can throw you elsewhere. I wondered about that tension. It's a narrative mode like lots of couplet writers before you, like Pope or the big epics and I think that tension between narrative where you know where you've got to go because you've got the story to tell, but you've got that little obstacle of you've got a house so now you've got to find a mouse from somewhere or a spouse or whatever.

Maggie
Or a louse.

Jack
Or a louse. Yeah, great. Or I guess you can have lose or loose. I mean, I like the kind of half rhymes. Do you think that the way that that both inhibits and excites a narrative, was that your experience? Or did you find it mainly like a pain in the ass to puzzle through? Or was it like the puzzling was the pleasure?

Maggie
That's beautifully said. I think the puzzling was absolutely the pleasure. I think I'm not necessarily a poet who historically has written in form, and I'm not a poet who has primarily been interested in narrative poetry, at least not in the monomaniacal way that this book perhaps suggests. But I was writing, I think, from a place of real urgency in this particular project, where it really felt like there was an anarchy to the experience that the book is describing, a sluffing off of received ideas of role or form or the shape that a life can take. And I think in the absence of knowing what the hell to do with my life, and these are concerns very much shared and reflected by the speaker, who is not exactly me, of course. I think there was this reaching or this grasping for a shape or a container or a structure in the absence of previously taken for granted structures by which to orient my life and my thinking. This is a book, to be explicit, that explores exiting a straight relationship and a monogamous relationship a a very happy and stable life that is based in that relationship for a really amorphous and experimental life of queer romance and sex, and non-monogamy, and this experience of being quite unmoored from structures that were really, in some ways, very guiding and very helpful. And so I think the reaching for formal constraint does reflect a desire for a control that perhaps is elsewhere absent. And also to your question, was this source of pleasure and play and delight in having to find the louse that follows the house? There's a real sense of satisfaction, I think, in those moments of knowing that you've completed the form in some sense. There's a fleeting sense of control or of gratification or of mastery. Of course, it's a very ephemeral sense of mastery that is predicated on ideas of virtuousity and inherited forms that I mostly reject, actually, as a person. But there is something very satisfying about feeling that one has a formula to complete, and the completion of that formula is a delight in certain ways.

Jack
Yeah, I think with rhyme in particular, I like the fact that you both discussed there that the book is reckoning with these moral questions about potentially hurting people that the speaker is in love with and cares about, and also the psychological effects and philosophical and psychosexual questions, which are serious themes. But the rhyme is inherently slightly silly thing, right?

Rachael
Yeah, I was thinking of rhyme as like a subversive act here because it's like a tying up or completing every two lines of something that is endlessly opening up as you move through the text. So you've got this constant push and pull of things looking like within the story, they're spiralling out of control or becoming this open and unknown plain. But that's contained within the most sensical, formal device that you can find. And it feels like something that is such a clever device for this because when you talk about the urgency of writing it, I feel like rhyme is... It feels like maybe that use of rhyme was quite an urgent thing in and of itself. It's like you needed to bring this story back to some formal refrain that would allow the story to be told in the open way that you otherwise tell it in the narrative.

Maggie
Yeah, reading it is an interesting experience too, because the rhymes, and maybe this is relevant, the rhymes are very often... The majority of the rhymes are not perfect rhymes, and they're not end-stopped rhymes. They're jammed and they're slightly slant or they're some other rhyme that's not perfect rhyme. They're assonant rhyme or they're I rhyme, in some cases. There's all different ways that once you get into this arcane world of rhyme, you find that there's a million ways to find a rhyme or define a rhyme. And when I began writing this was... I loved what Lucy said about the ways that after the thing is composed, we project all these narratives and meanings on why we made the choices we made, when, of course, the experience of writing is largely unconscious of these resonances. But there's a lot of harmony, perhaps, or there's an interesting rhyme, as it were, between these questions of homoerotic desire and of partnerships and romance and the couplet form as well too, in a obvious, maybe even kitschy way. But that was also second. That was something that occurred to me maybe halfway through the writing of the book, which sounds absurd because, of course, that's very much on the surface. But once that occurred to me, it became really fun and ramifying to think about the imperfectness of each rhyme as having some commentary perhaps on the perfectness or imperfectness or harmony or disharmony of the kinds of pairing that were occurring between the characters and the poem as well.

Rachael
I was actually amazed by the amount of perfect rhyme, though, as well. I think you feel like you really hit that.

Jack
I have to have it. I also think there's Auden, when I think about somebody who's a big rhymer in some of his poems, and I think Auden's queerness and the camp of Auden and rhyme. I'm just scanning through. I mean, even just like, 'which meant she could keep seeing me, provided I agreed to polyamory.' There's like, When you hear a rhyme like that, or there was one earlier, what was it?

Rachael
My favourite is 'Barbara' and 'bank robber', because I feel like they're such a cool... I love thinking about rhyme and sound sense and the chiming things that rhyme indicates, the associations that rhyme creates. I'm going to start rhyme now.

Jack
It does things the tone and syntax. Like all those like... I like love songs from the 50s, like Neil Sedaka singing, 'Oh, Carol'. Is that Neil Sedaka? Yeah. 'I am but a fool, darling, I love you though you treat me cruel.' That weird wonky Shakespearean syntax that creeps in, which is not like... And Shakespeare didn't speak like that. He did it for the rhyme. And I feel like the way that the rhyme, or particularly the couplet, which is the noisiest rhyme, the way that that changes the tone. In 1.2, which you read, 'She found me in the winter at a bar, one of those places in Bed-Stuy, not far.' I don't know, just something almost like Raymond Chandler-y about the 'She found me'. I suppose that's part of the campiness. Were you aware of the like... I used the word silly earlier, but maybe it's campiness more…

Maggie
I love that. Yeah. And also the campiness of the gay canon, the gay literary canon or queer literature is maybe the epicenter of camp in a certain way, right? That there's this very self-conscious performance of gender or of high-fem or sexual stereotypes. There's a real... It's such a performative subgenre.

Jack
And drama, you know?

Maggie
Drama, exactly.

Rachael
I think it makes the sections that are in prose and the sections that have that different address as well - because it does move from the speaker's 'I' to an addressed 'you' - it makes those you sections really quite moving and dark when they do occur, because they do seem to occur in spaces where maybe that performance falls away and there's like a glitch almost in the form that you've taken so much solace in performing this story in. Those prose sections feel very sinister or something emotionally sinister when they do appear.

Maggie
I love that. Yeah, the dropping of the facade for a moment, maybe.

Jack
Yeah, like in those fifties songs when they're like, 'Oh, Carol, I am but a fool'. When they did the talky verse and it's a little bit like that. Or like Elvis, when he says, 'All the world's a stage' and you're like, Yeah, that was Shakespeare, Elvis. Anyway.

Rachael
And there's a plainness, I suppose, to those sections that couldn't have been written from the 'I' and the protective device within those plain sections is the 'you'. It feels like for a text that's so open, it's so guarded formally. I think the boundaries that you're creating are form and you're giving us this incredibly open story within those formal constraints as guarded boundaries. Maggie, do you want to talk about the talisman that you brought in that represents in some way your poetic practice?

Maggie
Well, I'm so glad you asked because I've chosen this kind of disgusting and very large jar of peanut butter.

Jack
Oh, peanut butter. That could have been anything, you know.

Rachael
I love how stuff in America is just so much bigger. I don't know what I mean? I'm just like, God, I would love that. Yeah.

Maggie
I do think it probably weighs more than my skull. So there's that. I go through one of these every couple of weeks, I would say.

Jack
What do you do with it? To get through one of those in a week?

Rachael
Are you vegan?

Maggie
I'm not vegan. Okay, so I have a whole treatise, if you'd like to hear it, to deliver on why I chose this as my talismanic object. Well, I eat it with a spoon a lot. So when I was composing this, when I was writing this book, I think I was eating more peanut butter than any other... That was my caloric intake was mostly in the form of peanut butter. It's a real comfort food for me.

Jack
Were you about to say, because I hope you were, that you were eating more peanut butter than any other human on Earth at that time? I feel like that's a claim.

Maggie
I would wager that. I would challenge any listener of this podcast to come for me for that title, because I eat a tremendous amount of peanut butter. And I was having this fun, biological, slash, also metaphysical thought about the pathway by which this substance becomes this substance. It's the caloric energy. The caloric energy with which I wrote this book was derived almost entirely of this. What is the molecular... What is the transubstantiation that's happening between this disgusting jar of peanut butter and this very put-together bound book object. But I was also thinking, independent maybe of my just love of peanut butter and just the gustatory pleasures of this particular talisman, I was thinking also about form as I'm want to do, and I was thinking about the relationship between the gooey, sticky, delicious, unwieldy thing and the structure of the container. A peanut, for example, is its own... Hear me out. A peanut is its own container. But when it becomes this totally disorderly substance, we need a structuring device. We need a form to contain it.

Jack
Do all peanuts have two kernels per, like husk?

Maggie
I think they ought to. But I think I have certainly experienced peanuts that are one-offs.

Jack
Tercets. Yeah, got it.

Maggie
Tercets. Mono stitches, yeah.

Jack
But there are most peanuts, or at least some peanuts are couplets.

Rachael
They're a couplet. Twins.

Jack
Nutlets.

Maggie (51:24)
It's a really good point. Maybe that's where it all comes from.

Jack
That's why you wrote the book.

Maggie
It was the peanut through me trying to return to some atavistic form of itself.

Jack
I'm buying it. Yeah.

Maggie
Getting expressed through language. So yeah, but I was thinking a little bit about just the way that the more unwieldy the material, perhaps the greater the need for a container. And that was maybe true of my experience of writing this book, especially as someone who hadn't worked in form in particular before and didn't think that my first book would be formally motivated really at all.

Jack
That is a very satisfying, talisman.

Maggie
Isn't that lovely?

Jack
Yeah, it is. It's neat. Not suspiciously neat. There was a little bit of like, artifice, visible contritements there.

Rachael
Have you been asked this before?

Jack
But I liked it. Lucy, what have you got?

Lucy
I've brought in a mawkish paper weight of a cat looking into a mirror in the style of a…

Jack
I'm going to hold this up.

Lucy
It's been in the sun and it's faded, which I think adds to it.

Rachael
It looks like the thing you would find on your Gran's VHS player. Very pseudo Victorian. It's like a glass paper weight with this picture of a cat looking at the cat looking at itself. That's also a couplet. A cat looking at itself in the mirror.

Jack
Well, I noticed - actually, Lucy did show me a picture via text of this - and I did notice that there was some, what was the line? Oh, yeah. Something, the mirror, it's only witness. It's a last line of one of her poems.

Rachael
It's melancholic. It's animal melancholy.

Jack
It's very strange.

Lucy
It looks a bit Beatrice Potter-y, and I think it's printed out on A4. I found it at a charity shop. I've actually got two of these cat paper weights, and I can't really say why, except that I think there's something about it that makes me think of Mary Ruefle writing about sentimentality and poetry and how you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. I thought I wasn't really writing a sentimental book when I wrote my book, but actually looking back, maybe bits of it were quite sentimental. And I love how she says that we have this active movement, like the red blood moving away from the arterial blood. And it's like yeah, we're going forward. And then we've got the blue blood that returns. It's like sluggish and lonely and wanting. And I can, yeah, something about the paper weight that relates this to me and also something about wanting to preserve things in this very odd medium and a very pointless artefact. When would you ever use a paper weight? Unless you worked outside on a desk with paper.

Jack
I'm trying to read the cat's expression.

Rachael
It's like obscurely sentimental as well, something like that. And it's almost like I feel like when we write a book or the book object itself is sentimental enough that we probably spend so much time battling away from sentimentality. When actually when you get the thing, you're like, Oh, shit, it's just one big. And then when you look at that paperweight, it's like they probably tried to not make it as like kitsch or sentimental as it is, which is like a cat looking at itself forlornly in the mirror in a paper weight.

Jack
The mirror itself is oval that the cat is looking into, and the paper weight is also oval. So there's a dual mirror effect. You are also a cat looking into a mirror, maybe. I don't know, but the cat's also got both his paws on this desk, this dresser before the mirror, quite deliberately, as if he's gone up to look into the mirror at himself. So it's this weird Lucanian... I don't know. I just feel like there's depth here and the cat's expression is not entirely forlorn. It's quizzical, but it's like he's been... It's a genuine cessation. He's been interrupted and paused. Pawsed! But it's paws, you see?

Rachael
I love that idiosyncrasy, though, that you map onto your own work. I find that it really is, again, a very suitable object, I think.

Lucy
I'm glad.

Rachael
Irreverent.

Jack
It is, yeah. But do you think like... do you identify with the cat? That kind of looking into this mirror quite deliberately, but also the reflections staring back at you is the silly cat face, I don't know.

Rachael
Or maybe you could read us a poem that might make us reflect more on the cat's reflection because we will have a poem by both of you.

Jack
We got to wrap it up now, yeah.

Lucy
I've got a very short poem about cats in the book.

Jack
Perfect.

Lucy
Yeah, there's quite a few cat poems in the book, and I brought this in. But I actually, I mean, I used to have cats. I don't have a cat, which makes it more tragic.

Rachael
This is your cat now.

Lucy
Yeah, this is the cat. [Lucy Mercer reads 'Cat Song' from Emblem].

Rachael
I love it. It's so amazing.

Jack
Beautiful.

Rachael
I want to frame that.

Jack
Yeah, God.

Rachael
Make me that poem so I can frame it.

Maggie
We should put it in a paper weight, I think.

Rachael
That would be my dream.

Jack
Yeah. Or you could, instead of having - what is it? Black felt - you could put that poem on the flip side of the paper weight.

Lucy
Maybe this is a new project for us all?

Jack
I think, exactly. Cat paper weights, a workshop. Any of you who listen to the podcast regularly, we will have links to the YouTube tutorial of making a cat paper weight with Lucy Mercer. We'll get that up real soon, I promise. Maggie, would you like to close us out by reading another poem?

Maggie
Sure. I was very moved by that poem, Lucy, and I'll read the poem in my book that's about also not having a cat anymore and graduating from being a cat owner to sadly not being a cat owner. Although owner is such a weird word, maybe a cat companion. Although I'm afraid the just wildness and wonderfulness of Lucy's poem will overshadow, but that's okay. This is addressed to the missing cat, and we'll go that with this. [Maggie Millner reads poem 3.5 from Couplets]

Rachael
It's nice to end the podcast with cat loving. Cat praise.

Jack
I think we'll due another cat. I promised my daughter another cat. So I think…

Rachael
Get yourself up that bloody Lewisham place.

Jack
The Celia Hammond Animal Trust. A brilliant charity. Do donate if you're listening.

Rachael
Yeah, this podcast is not sponsored by Celia Hammond, but we would sponsor them.

Jack
We would, yeah. Thank you so much Lucy, and Maggie for beaming in.

Rachael
That was such a special conversation. And have a lovely rest of your day.

[Oluwaseun Olayiwola reads ‘Simulacrum’ - link in show notes]

Rachael
That was 'Simulacrum' by Oluwaseun Olayiwola, or maybe a part of 'Simulacrum', because I think it's from a longer poem. I love this poem so much. I love its stop, start, long line, but also juddery, parenthetical inclusions, the end dashes, the short sentences, the long sentences. It feels like the formal stuff that Oluwaseun is doing really matches the thematic concern of bodies coming together in this way and the awkwardness and sincerity of sex and just the beautiful ephemera of it as well, like these rattle of wooden slats, the indentations.

Jack
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it gets quite quickly beyond the conventional framing of sex and looks in the marginalia both in the body and around the body. And, of course, central to this poem is also this, I think, wilful, obliging, it says, the power play of it, the submissiveness.

Rachael
And power is everywhere in this poem. It's like the sky is a masculinity, a puddle is made out of need. There are various kinds of intentions.

Jack
Yeah, like 'us, what our separateness will not allow'. And the moulded into the cushion's canvas, it's like... Yeah, there's almost sculptural, muscularity, a viscerality. And I love the kind that it's very erotic and quite explicit, but coy at the same time. I mean, even that's to do with the withholding and the giving over, even the voice and what it tells you has a power play. He's not a perfect fit and that is perfect. I mean, perfect fit as in, perfect fit in my life? Or are we talking about sex here? Are we talking about orifice and penis?

Rachael
And it's mannered. I think the coyness comes from a manneredness of the tone and the address. It feels very methodical or something, like an idea of materiality, an idea of the body is being methodically addressed or not dissected, but, like anatomized maybe? But then the anatomizing feels very lyrically done. I think about when I read Oluwaseun's poems, I think about Jorie Graham and I think about Sylvia Legris, and I think about this interrogation of how the language is dissecting a certain scene and what that does to the scene and what that does to the language. I think your point about marginalia and ephemera here is really interesting because I think what he does is fold in the marginalia and the ephemera into the body of the lyric poem. What you end up with is this scriptury, and I think he talks... Well, the final line is like a prayer. Oh, yeah, 'leaking out of the body like scripture', right? That's the line.

Jack
Yeah, and the things that seem peripheral but stacked up draw what's within them. Like, 'no fine point, needle stars, the sky is a masculinity. He starts the car.' The jump from the sky is a masculinity to he starts the car. Even just like that, that suddenly means that the starting of the car has something to do with masculinity, and then he likes to be called daddy, but then he needs to be called something. There's something in the way in which the queerness and masculinity, their awkward dance and the need to obliterate or be obliterated, the violence of masculinity within this obliging role play or power play. It's all in there and it's like hot this poem, but it's also like worrying.

Rachael
I feel like it's negotiating in real time. It's navigating and negotiating spaces, like bedroom spaces, bodily spaces, and that negotiation and that navigating is shown in these incredible little asides, parenthetical moments, the recorded moment, parenthetical aside, he likes to record, parental aside to remember within another parentheses, not true. This is layering of speech and this layering of narrative that feels like it's removing us and placing us at the same time. It's like oscillating Yeah, it's navigating.

Jack
I can't tell whether the speaker wants it or... where obligation or ends and trust begin or the kind of the brokering of this intimacy and the permissiveness. It's difficult, I think. I find it a little bit difficult to read just because I don't know.

Rachael
That's what the poem figuring out.

Jack
Yeah, I worry for the speaker, you know? But at the same time, if they want that, then I don't know, where the pleasure in that, it's just really clever. I'm outmaneuvered.

Rachael
And the time thing is really - like talking about that - the time thing, it's like bloodless 'for now’.

Jack
For now, yeah.

Rachael
It feels both retrospective and looking forward and in the present in a way that speaks to, I suppose, endlessly repeated sorts of behaviours or expectations.

Jack
And there is freedom. There is intention to break your back in half and call it what you asked for.

Rachael
It’s really powerful.

Jack
Yeah, very powerful. I just think the way in which the poem builds up this complexity and brings this complexity and difficulty within reach is... Yeah, like that's... lyric poetry doesn't always do that. That's a real feat to get into the knotty, difficult, and even ambiguous space, but in a way that feels controlled and uncertain. It's just really good. There's something holding this dissonant, conflicting, conflicted puzzle together. Real high wire stuff.

Rachael
Yeah, it's incredible.

Jack
And to end the episode today, we have an audio postcard from Rowan Ricardo Phillips, whose new collection, Silver, is coming out with Faber in April 2024.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips
I'm Rowan Riccardo Phillips, and this poem is called 'El Pintor’.[Rowan Ricardo Phillips reads his poem ‘El Pintor’ - link in show notes]

Jack
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.