Jack
My name is Jack Underwood.

Rachael
And my name is Rachael Allen.

Jack
And you're listening to the Faber Poetry Podcast.

Michael Pedersen
Hello, this is Michael Pedersen, and I'm sending you a poetry postcard from my wee writer-in-residence office at Edinburgh University. I've got books bulging out above me, including some from the previous writers that have held this post, going all the way back to Sorley MaClean and Norman MacCaig, and in more recent years, the likes of Liz Lochhead and Jenni Fagan. So it's a humbling seat to sit in. Anyhoo, here's the opening poem from my collection, The Cat Prince, drawn from my earliest memories of a type of masculinity that teaches boys to keep things locked away inside.

Michael Pedersen
[Michael reads from him poem, 'Lines on the Melodies in Men' from his collection The Cat Prince, Corsair, 2023]

Rachael
That was an audio postcard from Michael Pedersen. His most recent collection is The Cat Prince and Other Poems, and his debut novel, Muckle Flugga, is out from Faber in May. Jack, who do we have in the studio today?

Jack
Today, Rachael, we're joined by Edwina Attlee and Ange Mlinko. Edwina is the author of two pamphlets, Roasting Baby (if a leaf falls press, 2016) and the cream (Clinic, 2016). She teaches history to students of architecture in London, and her book, a great shaking, was out with Tenement Press last year. Welcome, Edwina.

Edwina
Thank you.

Rachael
We also have Ange Mlinko here. Ange Mlinko has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award for Criticism. She writes for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books and lives and teaches in Florida. Edwina, would you like to start by reading a few minutes of poems?

Edwina
Sure. I'm going to read 'January' and 'February'. [Edwina reads two poems from her collection, a great shaking]

Rachael
Thank you so much, Edwina. I've been living in this book and reading it and rereading it since I heard you speak from it at the launch. Also, we work together on one of your pamphlets, the cream, maybe 10 years ago now, so it's really special to have you here to talk about this book, which is so extraordinary. I think as a opening question, because the book's form, the book's thrust, the book's preoccupations, and its structure feel like a nice way into thinking about the poems themselves, I wondered if you wanted to talk about how you've chosen to present the book, the ideas around time, the book of hours, the seasonal spread that the poems live in, and maybe just a route into the organising principles that you were engaging in and how that maps onto maybe the writing of the poems themselves. I'm very interested in the construction of this book, I think.

Edwina
Yeah, the book is in three parts. The first is called 'The Book of Days', the second is called 'Nursery Songs', and the third is called 'Archive Songs'. I think only the first section was constructed as a complete sequence. It was written on purpose in that shape and form. The others were more arrived at through a collecting and editing process. But the 'Book of Days' is titled for the medieval projects of books of hours. I was interested in a part of the book of hours, which is the Labour's of the Month, which are paintings which show one scene per month throughout the year. I loved them and I was instantly captured by what they showed, which in the ones I was looking at were either scenes of peasant life or courtly life, or sometimes both together. But whenever peasant life was shown, it would be in the foreground and there would be the castles in the background, and I guess I'm always looking for something to tell me what to do.

Jack
So this is drawn from an original medieval books of hours that you looked at and saw?

Edwina
That's right. So I was looking at each labour of the month in the month I was in and trying to write from it during the month and then move on to the next month.

Jack
Ah, your own little labour.

Edwina
Exactly.

Rachael
And they're in the book?

Edwina
Yes, some of them are in the book.

Jack
Yeah, they have these amazing illuminated leaves. What is that? Like 1250 or something?

Edwina
1400.

Jack
So much later.

Rachael
Incredible demarcations of the day, demarcations of the year that I think about within those kinds of images and also within the book, which are so bound up with care, intellectual care, community care, familial care, parental care. And obviously, the 'Nursery Songs for Impington' creates also this sense of a childlike grasping towards something like organisation or being held. Something I love so much about your work is the way that you live within the tension of something childlike, a kind of naivety, a cartoonish kind of bubbly language.

Jack
Like smoke pooping from a chimney.

Rachael
Like smoke pooping from a chimney into a bleak sky.

Jack
Yeah, or like wet trumpets and coughs being arranged. This like... Yeah, cartoons is a great noun.

Rachael
It's my favourite poetry.

Jack
Because it's both the slapstick, but also the possibility, the way in which anything can be alive.

Rachael
And the sequencing. When I think about something that is comic or comedic in a very historic sense of the word, it has this sense of timing, it has this sense of pace, and I think I'm thinking around the book in a way without much articulated query, but I think that... I don't know if I can just open that to you and have you continued to talk to us about its construction and its sinking and its generative process.

Edwina
Yeah, I think with Nursery Songs, I found a commonality in some of the poems I was writing about, being childish, and I was thinking about childish voices and thinking about how that term is often used as a criticism, like stop being so childish. And I guess I'm interested in living in that space. As you say, it's naive, but it's also willfull and resistant and wishful as well. I'm interested in the tension between the things we tell children and the things we tell children not to do, and they seem to be in complete contravention. We lie all the time and we make big fantasies and we're very cruel and you know. And then the moment we see a child doing these things, we're like, 'stop that'.

Jack
Also, they're so much better at sharing than we are. I wonder if the pejorative use of childish, obviously when you're a child, it feels like that because all you want to do is grow up or feel grown up, but I think it hides the scrutiny that we should be placing on the adult structures. The only use of, like, pejorative use of adult is like, I don't even know if it's pejorative, but if it's like pornographic or something. 'Stop being so grown up'. I feel like we should say that more often.

Rachael
Every single minute of the day.

Jack
Yeah. Because if you just think of all the awful things that happen in the pantheon of adult behaviours. I hate, I hate, hate, hate that phrase, 'the adult in the room' that I've heard. It's often real politic pragmatism. We can't have a politics that includes morality because that's fanciful. The adults in the room will remind you that this is the best we're going to get.

Rachael
The adult's an invented adult, isn't it, almost?

Jack
Yeah.

Rachael
It's like a pseudo God teacher sculled that we are just creating for ourselves.

Jack
Yeah, but it's also highly limited, habitual, unimaginative, lacks the potential for – what's the word – transformation. My God, that's really how uncaffeinated I am. Yeah, that lacks the potential to transform or any the actual necessary things that we probably we need right now. We should all just go around telling people to stop being so bloody grown up and start changing.

Edwina
Grow down.

Jack
Yeah.

Rachael
Maybe something that's so incredible about this book, and I can link this to Ange's work as well, when you come to read, when you're thinking about archives and history and childhood, and I'm thinking about this poem on page 80, 'I'd thought, nursery was a place from history, wolves outside the window, frost on top of the yellow heads and layers. I've seen the records, et cetera – I'm interested in this archival inclusion, this historical inclusion into a passageway or a pathway of childhoods, childishness into adulthood. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the importance of what it felt like to mine from a very bureaucratic and administrative space or thinking.

Edwina
Yeah, I'm researching the history of nurseries in England, and I'm only doing that because I've encountered nurseries with my children. I had only read them in books before, so I access them through fiction and then try to use them and come up against all sorts of things that everyone will be familiar with. But I am looking at the archival records of how people came to think we should have nurseries and then how people tried to get their children into them.

Jack
How recent are they? I think I'm going to be shocked here.

Edwina
Well, Industrial Revolution in terms of organised nurseries that are run by, I guess, people who aren't known to you. Like childminders have happened forever and ever.

Jack
Yeah, like the village raising the children.

Edwina
I guess part of the inclusion of the archival detail is that I can't let go of them. There are some things that you encounter in the archive and you can't let them go. Part of what I want to do is just show them to other people. Like, look and look. and I'm interested in what we think we know. Like knowledge as something that is adult and knowledge is something that the child really wants to have and thinks that once they have it, something will be different. But my experience of learning hasn't quite been like that. You learn in circles, and certainly with children, you're encountering a lack of knowledge that is incredible to be near. Maybe the archive is a bit like that, too. Something that doesn't add up.

Rachael
Well, it's a knowledge that you also have to curate and create meaning for yourself within an archive. It's like, I'm going to choose how I move through this archive or what's going to speak to me. An archive is behind a public collection, perhaps, so there are conversations and interesting maybe tangents around how we choose to curate knowledges and, when we think about children, the knowledges that we believe they have or don't have. You both have children, so I'm not an expert on if they do actually have a knowledge.

Jack
Yeah, they do, but I wouldn't know. Again, I think the epistemic puzzle of a child is incredible because they know things, particularly as soon as they go to school. My daughter knows what happens at school, but that's on a need to know basis. She won't tell me. Like try to get that out of her. It's like a state secret. But you're also like, what are you thinking? I've got an eight-month-old daughter now who's clearly dreaming. She's waking up from dreaming. What does she know? What do her dreams know of the world? That's an incredible... And I'll never get close to that. But then that's also a quandary, isn't it, for all of us, that the knower is always such a feature of the known. I'm always going on about this. That knowledge that exists like some objective rock in the real world between us, that's a myth that we're all entering into this archive.

Rachael
We're hacky-sacking it around.

Jack
Yeah, where it's always a conversation between the archivist and the person having a nose around. And often it's not... the conversation we think we're having is completely different.

Rachael
Ange, because we're talking about histories and knowledges, I wonder if we could bring you in to perhaps read some pieces, poems.

Ange
Sure. Why don't I start with the first poem of Foxglovewise. It's called 'Tarpon Springs, epiphany', and it begins with an epigraph by W. H. Auden. [Ange Mlinko reads 'Tarpon Springs, epiphany' from her new collection, Foxglovewise, published by Faber.]

Jack
I'm fascinated by this – what is this? I'm I'm trying to track it, but a long distance across the desk here.

Ange
It's A, B, C, A, B, C.

Jack
Ah okay, I'm interested in the way that that form was generative in the poem because when you have that schema that's turning over, you've got loads going on these diving motifs and this strange ceremonial thing happening. I always think that the hardest thing to do is to adhere to a form and know where you're going, and that basically one of them has to give for it to be good. And allowing the form to produce the idea and following it and getting lost and then pulling it back again, I had a real sense that you were using and finding the poem through the form this time.

Ange
Right. I would never say that I knew where I was going, beginning with the poem, even though I did, of course, I went to this event and I knew I wanted to write about it, but I didn't know how it was going to turn out, where it was going to go. That's where the form does come in. I think Thom Gunn said it best in an interview where he said that you have to go deeper into your subject if you're going to rhyme. It forces you to depart from your usual cognitive habits and jump into something new, make that leap. James Merrill also said, rhyme makes you smarter because it makes you think of things you wouldn't have thought before. That's my MO, really.

Rachael
Did you play with a few ways of a reproducing this? Experience this story before or how did you fall into the commingling of story and form that feels so tightly put together?

Ange
I think what I try to do is I try to start with something almost conversational and then go from part one to part two, where part one is just me talking, and then part two is, okay, I'm going to match what I just said with some rhymes. And that will tell me where to go, tercet by tercet.

Jack
Yeah. And you've been a little bit accommodating with yourself. You haven't tied both hands behind your back because you've got A, B, C, A, B, C. You've got two lines if you've got to come up with something. Yeah, I love that. But also that giving yourself the room to find the rhyme allows the mind to wander as well, doesn't it? It provokes this... Because you can't get to it too soon. You've got to put some stuff in the way.

Ange
Exactly. Right. So often I will do that particular scheme where it's A, B, C, A, B, C, or A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, because then there's leeway for something meandering in it.

Rachael
You're playing with it so much, actually, within this – the bass, alas – this sort of this pronunciation, preoccupation, I think, that feels so playful and funny.

Ange
That's how it should be. Yes, I don't do a lot of very straight ahead rhymes. Even like an anagram or a sight rhyme is perfectly acceptable to me.

Jack
Is Muldoon somebody that you like for that? There's a slightly Muldoon-y quality.

Ange
Yeah. It really changed the game for me when I read a full book of his, Moy Sand and Gravel. And I really didn't know why more Americans didn't do this kind of thing. I mean, it just seems like the Irish were having all the fun. So I was just like, I would have.

Jack
He was huge over here, I think, at that time, actually. He was producing a book like every year or something, it seemed like. I remember somebody told me once, I shouldn't say who because it's quite a funny story. He told me this was when Muldoon was, when everyone was reading Muldoon, and this influence was very clear, I think, across UK poetry and in Ireland, obviously. He said, 'Oh, yeah, well, MSG'. And I was like, 'What?' He was like, 'Moy Sand and Gravel is MSG'. I was like, 'How could it be about monosodium glutamate?' But I was like, 'Well, it could be. Paul Muldoon, who knows? Who knows what's going on?' And then I met Paul at a reading maybe six years ago, and I asked him about it, and he was just like, 'No. It's an interesting theory, but it's not one of mine.;

Rachael
You could be lying right now. He could have told you that, yeah, that was it. And you're guarding the myth of the truth of that book.

Jack
Yeah, I'm a keeper of secret. No, I don't know. I think the hilarious thing, I think, is that once you've introduced these, not the pretence, the possibility that this is actually encryption, then there's this enticing sense. I think it's always misreading when people think that they've got the key that will crack it. Because, of course, that disavows us from from the real thing here, which is the way that form is not a constraint at all, it's a dynamic little vacuum that sucks us. Anyway, sorry.

Rachael
Encryption is a really nice word, actually, I think, when considering this poem and other works, because there does feel like this adherence to or interest in how we can tell stories in ways that feel like there is a fidelity to poetic form and rhyme schemes and metre and rhythm, in a way that I feel quite – you're much better at this – a way of talking about poetry that is more like...

Jack
A bit of prosody.

Rachael
Yeah.

Jack
I mean I love it, but I can't…I feel like sometimes I could do it, sometimes I couldn't. I don't know why I don't. But what I love is when you can see… I think I encounter, maybe this is what it is, and I don't know if this is your experience, too, but that the myth around formalism is that it's this great act of control and mastery, and that when one is using a form, that they're like an adherence, this world. It's very like Protestant language. But I I think it's actually there's the more like.

Rachael
Well, I was thinking about these terms like an unfolding. It felt there was an idea of form, sometimes a spectre of form that was being written into. And within those formal particulars or I guess hinges, I guess, cornerstones, containers, there is this vast expanse of history and character, public history, personal history, different characters, different lexicons, interests in different languages, artworks and I almost felt like the gestures towards form was a wonderful and necessary idea of a container for these worlds.

Ange
That's nice.

Jack
A gravitational element.

Ange
I would say so, yeah. It holds those things together loosely. I mean I was surprised to hear you say that in your culture, it's considered a mastery form because I thought that that was an American prejudice.

Jack
No, I think it's more that I think free verse is predominant here, as my sense of the US is. But those who do talk about form and formalism or formalists, I think that a lot of the critical discussion around that, or maybe it's when I'm teaching creative writing in particular, maybe it's the rather... Maybe it's the the school of the structure. I get lots of... In a poetry exam, for example, there'll be lots of answers which identify the rhyme scheme as a whole thing. And that's like looking at a suspension bridge. You're missing the entire point, which is that it gets you from somewhere to somewhere else and your view along a certain point on that bridge. I think the people can see the pattern, the form. But what they don't see or what people don't tend to talk about, is what's happening at that one moment when you've had to find something that rhymes with bass.

Ange
That's exactly what we should be talking about.

Jack
Yeah, exactly. That's the fun part. Is there a Bishop-y element – influence – here as well?

Ange
I should hope so.

Jack
Yeah, good. Because I think particularly a communal happening I associate with Bishop.

Ange
Oh, it's nice that you say that. Yeah, she's a social poet. You always have this sense that she's talking to someone or she's talking to you. She's not just talking into air and expecting you to eavesdrop on her. Yeah, I certainly identify with that. And her superfan, James Merrill, also did that.

Jack
He's another poet who you sense if something was going on in the village, he'd want to go and check it out.

Ange
Yeah, right.

Rachael
He has a seance practice. He's all the voices.

Ange
Exactly. So he's not only talking to humans, he's talking to the dead.

Jack
Let's think about how these talisman relate because, Ed, you've brought something in. And Ange, you haven't for a very good reason.

Ange
Right, I couldn't bring my prayer plant with me, but I write next to a prayer plant that will often snap its leaves at me. It usually happens in the morning or evening when the light is changing and the leaves either snap open or they shut and it's like the plant is speaking to me or keeping me company.

Jack
What's it saying? Go to bed. Wake up.

Ange
Stop.

Jack
Yeah, interesting.

Edwina
I don't hold on to things very well, so I don't have a talisman because I think that would be really disastrous. But I've bought this small male head cut out of card. I was making figures out of card for a shadow puppet show. One of the heads I drew, I didn't realise, but it was on the back of something my children had scribbled over, and they made it so much nicer than I ever could have thought possible. I think there is probably some hint there about cutting stuff out that's already been started by someone else, which I really like to do.

Jack
Yeah, I wish my head looked like that.

Edwina
It's a '70s knitting pattern. So there's a quiff. There's a very good head of hair.

Jack
I just meant all the scribbles. I feel like, actually, maybe there's this synaptic chaos in there. Yeah, good.

Rachael
Something else I wanted to talk to you both about is the visual and artworks and thinking through the visual, thinking through image. I was reading a few interviews with you, Ange and in one interview, I think you said you would have liked to have been an art critic.

Ange
Yeah, I remember saying it.

Jack
It's horrible to bring up a previous interview.

Rachael
I'm so sorry.

Jack
You're on the record of saying it. It's when the podcast feels it's most like cross-examination-y.

Jack
You said this in 2019. But I think because there is this wonderful art history in both books, actually, this moving through visual cultures, I hate that phrase, but some image history, hallway of pictures and histories that feel replicated, represented and worked through in the poem. And I wondered if maybe you could talk about your work's relationship to visual in that way, and take that question however you like. You may want to say, I don't want to be an art critic anymore. Strike that from the record, please.

Ange
No, I would love to be an art critic, but I don't live anywhere near art, really, in Florida, where I teach. But I do think that poetry is a thinking through images. I really do. And painting, painting in particular, has helped me to think through philosophical questions without devolving into abstractions. So I'm always grounded in a colour or a narrative figure. In Foxglovewise, I talk about the Titian painting 'Europa'. Because several of the poems in this book deal with immigration and displacement, and talking about that painting was a way of talking about this immigrant being driven to Crete from Phoenicia, for instance.

Jack
What is it about... I mean, I think painting is when the image is out in the world and it's like there's something analytical and the image is already there. It's not a passivity to look at a painting. You're highly active. But it's different to doing the painting in your brain when somebody gives you some words to deal with, and that imaginative participant, you're almost a bit like the the apprentice of the poet, aren't you? Can you do this? Do you think that there's something about figuring out? Yeah, I mean, I feel like figuring out, it's through images and through metaphors and symbols that I'm able to figure out internally. But I don't think I've ever thought of, and it's really struck me actually, now I'm thinking about it, that you can look at an image that's already there and that isn't your own, and that can be a space for puzzling something out. Can you talk a bit more about that?

Ange
I think it's that you don't necessarily want to send the reader scurrying to Google or anything, but the fact that you are talking about a common image or an image you can access communally, or that's part of a long conversation we've already been having for hundreds of years, I think that that is different, that you're engaging in this pre-existing work, and it's not private. Of course, I make all kinds of private images and so forth in my work. But when you go to a painting, you are inserting yourself into a conversation.

Jack
It's funny as well, isn't it, though, of course, the bit of our eye that's in focus is like, apparently, our thumbnail at arm's length. So all our listeners can do that at home. They can extend their arm and their thumbnail is the bit of their eye. So I always think it's fascinating and mean to remind ourselves that we've never actually seen all of our favourite paintings at once. We just moved this tiny little speck around it and journeyed it and narrativised it and come up with a hole. Unless it's like you observe a tiny painting from across the room where you can see all of it at once.

Edwina
But what does it mean to see something all at once?

Jack
I don't know. Again, I think that's probably a casual myth.

Rachael
That's why people revisit the same paintings over and over again. There's the T. J. Clark book where he talks about the activity of what it means to keep revisiting a painting and to have that understanding that the activeness of the painting will also change over time and extend in front of and behind you and your experience of it, which I think when I was thinking about both of your books, this idea of time and history and language, which is wrangled and wrestled so well into different formal states. When I was thinking about something like the gallery space, a curated space, I was thinking about your books in that structural way. And I guess because we are, or there is an idea of writing into or around, about, against paintings. And I guess because I'm interested in, Edwina, how you live with these images now, and are you still writing into them? And maybe when did the first little flurry of response occur?

Edwina
I think I responded first to the term 'book of hours'. I was like, what? What's that? And it is that thing of translating time into words or time into a page that seems so neat and achievable in one sense, and of course, completely impossible in every other way. So I responded to that term, and then I went to look at them online, public domain reviews, my tip, my hot tip, and I suppose I didn't know what I was seeing, and that is very pleasurable, isn't it? When you're looking at something and it's speaking to you, but you don't know what it's saying. I know what those forms are, but I don't know what's happening, really. So I would write and write, and then I would stop, and then I would move on to the next month. But I guess I would then carry those images with me. I think it took about three years in total to keep coming back to the month in the month. And I had an idea that I would publish the poems next to the pictures, and I did a reading with the pictures behind me, but people said, no. It's so distracting and so not what has happened now in the poems. They're not captions of the images. They are responses or they're something else.

Jack
So translations or something.

Edwina
I think translations.

Rachael
Time translations, as well. And when I think about this book, I think about Midwinter Day, probably as one of the kins, cousins, sisters of this book. This idea of when you read parts of this book, it feels important to me. And when I think about Midwinter Day, I think about how that book changes over the course of the year and why it feels so significant to read it.

Jack
Almanac-y.

Rachael
Exactly that. Yeah. Seasonal time-stamping.

Edwina
Yeah. Her book, Bernadette Mayer's book, Works and Days, was very important to me, which does pass through seasonal time as well.

Rachael
So that one's probably closer.

Edwina
I think I just knew it, I wasn't as familiar. I'm getting more and more into her. But yeah, in that book, it's part diary and part poem, and there's a shuttling between things that have happened and things that she's trying to prompt through writing down little words or making up words, and then poems that stream from that. But they're in very different registers, and I loved seeing those together, like that you could have permission to have very different registers in the same book.

Jack
Do you think that the illusion is another way to cheat time? Because you're also... you're actually throwing ahead in time the moment when somebody else will look at something that pre-exists the poem.

Rachael
You're trusting that it will outlive.

Jack
Yeah, it's a little throw into the future, isn't it? It's a little casting of the line out saying, you're going to be looking at this picture by so and so.

Rachael
And you're going to see it like this. You're going to still have the associative capabilities. once we live on a burned planet full of roaches, maybe.

Edwina
Like a trap. You're setting a trap.

Rachael
Or a gift.

Ange
I think it's optimistic, I do. But I always think of Ezra Pound's line that all ages are contemporaneous. He wanted to say that we can read Sappho, or we could read Lippo, or Petrarch, or they all exist on a plane together.

Jack
Should we have another poem?

Rachael
Yeah, I would love another poem. Ange, so shall we start with you reading another?

Ange
Alright. Let's see. Why don't I read one of my Florida poems? This is called 'Flamboyance', and a flamboyance is a flock of flamingos. [Ange reads 'Flamboyance' and 'Mermaids and mangroves in Key West', both from her collection, Foxglovewise]

Rachael
Amazing. I'm champing at the bit to ask you about weather. I wonder if we want to talk about it now.

Jack
Let's talk about it now. Because I think Florida and weather...

Rachael
And ecstatic states of meteorological ephemera.

Jack
...and a little bit of the precipitousness of your poems as well. By the end of that poem, it's like the way you mist and melt things together and keep it… I mean, foggy is a cliché, isn't it? But it has that…

Rachael
That visual field smeared, as with ointment. This idea of meteorological texture, a material texture affecting… I think about humidity and how the atmospheres that we're in affect the way that we're able to be in the world, to speak to people right, et cetera. I felt with your poems, alongside their linguistic formal preoccupations, there's this weather that seems to be guiding a lot of what's happening within them.

Jack
Is that the Floridian humidity?

Ange
It's Floridian humidity. It's this never quite seeing what you went out to see. You literally don't get the flamingo in the poem. The flamingo disappears in this misty marshland. It should be the most conspicuous thing around in this landscape, and you can't find it. That seemed like a metaphor for something, but I wasn't going to pin it down.

Rachael
No, well, the next poem, 'Mermaids and mangroves in Key West', this idea of the co-mingling of the mythic and the material, this way that I think the histories blend into the contemporary in an ecological sense and in a told or received sense, I really like that cumulative. I think when I was thinking about your work, I was thinking about the accumulation of sensation.

Ange
Yeah, it's hard with Florida because it's such a new place. I mean, it's barely 200 years old in terms of its real settlement, even though actually St. Augustine is the oldest city, fort, colonised by Europeans, and that's still there and a very interesting place to visit. But there doesn't feel like a lot of history in Florida. What there is, is very hard scrabble, very... it's not monumental, and there's not a lot of culture. It's a place where pioneers came not very long ago. Even the architecture, there's barely any architecture to speak of. These just one storey cinder block houses. And I tend to do better in places where there is a lot of accumulation, there are a lot of layerings. One of my earlier books was a collection of poems I mostly wrote in Beirut, in the Mediterranean, and where there were archaeological sites that had several layers of civilization beneath them. And I really thrive on that. So coming to a place where there was hardly anything to work with was a real challenge.

Rachael
Edwina, would you like to read a poem for us?

Edwina
Moving, I think, somewhere different. This is a poem written using the National Life Stories Archive at the British Library. It's called 'You've got to turn the tape off while I think.' [Edwina reads the poem].

Rachael
I mean, talk about time travel. That poem just feels like it bounces me around in a conversation happening through time.

Jack
I find it really moving actually.

Rachael
It is really moving. I think one of the things I really like about this book is it's communal hominess or this cosiness that feels like, I'm going to make this sound really frightening, but like loads and loads of living rooms or something stacked back to back. This idea that we're watching everybody's small movements towards living or we're seeing some isolated. In that isolation, the importance of small acts of being in the moment and in time. There was something about domesticity that I wanted to maybe just give you as a word as maybe our last bit of conversation, like what maybe that word means to the book or this idea of small home moments?

Edwina
Yeah, I think that... Google Box is actually really interesting to me. I don't watch it, but I'm obsessed with this archive called Mass Observation, where in the 1930s, a poet and a sociologist and an anthropologist got together and made their own surveys of people, like the English studying the English. And I feel very close to that thing of looking at people and not being able to know everything about them, but taking what I can see. I don't feel like I'm in people's homes, but I am definitely trying to listen to the way they talk and trying to spy on them, but to recognise things, I think. I think all the things that chime with us do chime across lots of those times and places. I guess it is cliché. I am really interested in those things that get to us. She says, 'plain as the light of day', and I love re-hearing something cliched in a way that I'm like, oh, that's what that means, or that's what that meant. I hear them differently. Rehearing the cliché is really pleasurable for me.

Rachael
Cliché is so powerful because it's true, isn't it? Cliché is just truth.

Jack
Yeah, but I think it's been repeated into a generality where you don't even really hear the words anymore.

Rachael
So then to re-hear them...

Jack
Yeah, to suddenly think about like a word, a phrase that's been repeated into idiom, like 'that sets my teeth on edge'.

Rachael
Plain as...

Jack
Plain as day.

Rachael
Which is amazing, actually.

Jack
Yeah. We should all just give up and be just like, 'clichés, let them run the world'.

Rachael
Clichés are great.

Jack
No, they're not.

Rachael
They are.

Jack
They're awful.

Rachael
They kind of are [amazing].

Edwina
If you pay attention to them, they're okay.

Jack
They're fine outside of poems.

Rachael
Clichés for all.

Jack
No. That's not the official line of the Faber Poetry Podcast. I'm not encouraging that behaviour.

Ange
If you were to talk to my students, they would tell you one of the first things I tell them at the beginning of the semester is no clichés.

Jack
Me too. It's tough. Our job is hard enough without upstarts like you, Rachael Allen, coming along...

Rachael
Build new clichés.

Jack
Yeah, good, great.

Rachael
You must know the clichés that came before you.

Jack
Yeah, clichés of the future. Be the cliché you want to see in the world. Sell the poem you want to have the money for in the future. That's my... Anyway, I know, we're unravelling That's it now.

Rachael
We will end here.

Jack
Yeah. Thank you.

Rachael
I was going to try and end on a cliché, but I can't even think about any. I'm just so original.

Jack
So at the end of the day...

Rachael
That was a good one.

Jack
Thanks so much.

Edwina
Thank you.

Rachael
Thank you. It's been so lovely to talk to you both. And so excited for your... is it your first UK publication, Ange?

Ange
Yes.

Jack
Congratulations.

Rachael
It's been really special.

Ange
Thank you. I'm thrilled.

Rachael
It's really wonderful to have your work here in this way.

Jack
Lovely. Thank you.

Ange
Thank you. It was great talking to you.

Richard
Dear Rachel and Jack, I'm so happy to be sending you this audio postcard from Camberwell, in South East London. It's my poem, 'Carnelian', and the poem speaks back to one of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, but it does so through the prism of a crystal. And in this case, it's a carnelian crystal. So If there was a front of this audio postcard, if there was a front picture, it would be a beautiful orange carnelian crystal. And carnelian is an incredibly beautiful mineral or crystal and it has lots of different gradations of orange, and you can see lots of strata and fissures in it.

Jack
We got a 'Dear Rachel and Jack', that's nice, isn't it? To have a postcard. I felt like Richard really totally understood the assignment as the Gen Z say these days, he actually sent us a postcard. But with this picture of the carnelian orange gemstone on it. I loved how the poem, is this meditation on this figure, this orange guy with his carnelian third eye.

Rachael
Who is also being written to, as we are being written to, almost, because the address of the poem is towards the carnelian boy, alongside the mind and the body.

Jack
And it's in that kind of meditational state where things are disappearing or merging, this borderline, this 'rusty throb', he said. I love the blurring, like where are you in the end of the poem? And I love that. And maybe the epistolic 'dear', as well. Once you're disembodied through meditation or even reading a poem, like where are you? And you're writing from that place. This is a postcard within a postcard.

Rachael
Yeah. And I like the idea that this mineral matter is the vibrational force and spiritual force and mystical force and material force in the poem, that the poem seems to accumulate around, or how moss does on a stone – it gathers around the carnelian crystal, this meaning of dear body, dear mind, and the metaphor of the crystal as the boy in the poem who has obviously experienced, as the poem states, some kind of traumatic event that is now being cycled through, lived through, looked through as you would handle the stone.

Jack
Yeah, this disassociated aftermath. Yeah. Dearest body, where is my body? I loved that moment.

Rachael
And the reverberating repetitions of the orange, I found really kaleidoscopic, really hallucinogenic, actually. And when you think about a crystal's property, and Richard mentioned at the beginning, the strata of the crystal, and you think about, and he mentioned the gradations, I think, or the gradations of colour, the levels of colour, the ledges of density within a crystal. There's this idea of power and strength, like how the different colour can communicate a different level of strength. There's so much packed not only into the crystal that's being written about, but the poem that is also about the crystal, which is also about a human body. So it feels like this really peely poem.

Jack
He's an apricot at one point as well, isn't he? This apricot guy. Yeah. Do you know what? When he said that the carnelian has like fissure in it, I heard fishes. But then the poem did have a carp in it.

Rachael
It's multi-materialed, I think.

Jack
I mean that's not an important point. It's a misreading of the poem. But sometimes those things happen.

Rachael
Oh, no. That's so important.

Jack
The mishearings?

Rachael
But also it's not actually a mishearing, probably, because I think a poet will know how something could also be misread, what it would sound like. Fissures sounds like fishes. And we will have an awareness of that, even if it's not an intentional placing, there will be a knowledge that there's a closeness between those two words, which will be... So you're not mishearing, you're probably really hearing.

Jack
I agree.

Rachael
You're hearing very closely.

Jack
Very closely. Do you think that we really are in this very orangeing, like the whole world has been oranged, and we've lost ourselves in our usual embodied, bordered aspect on things. I didn't pick up on the traumatic aftermath thing.

Rachael
I think it was only because there's a moment in the poem where there's a very clear mention of PTSD.

Jack
Oh, yeah.

Rachael
And that, I think within the illusory space and the otherworldly space that was being built. It was like the rock dropped or something. The poem thunded to a reality there that then coloured the rest of the work that was happening. Maybe that is intentional on Rich's part, maybe it's not, but it was definitely a... I like this poem because of its hardness and its softness and the way it moves between hard states of matter and softer states of matter. And that, to me, felt like a intriguing word because it's hard and it's soft and it's clinical, but it's not, it's therapeutic. There's a lot, I think, about therapy and material and colour that feels, not overwhelming, but it's... I don't know... I don't know how to describe it.

Jack
Do you know, when I think about trying to be thoughtless - I don't mean careless, I mean without thought - I think that colour is a good place to go, isn't it? To think on orange. You can lose your thoughts.

Rachael
Orange is actually my favourite colour.

Jack
Is it?

Rachael
Yeah.

Jack
Have you ever been bathed in orange light, fully bathed in it?

Rachael
I don't know.

Jack
I think that would be nice. I think you'd feel like a delicious Barocca descending into the...

Rachael
What colours do you feel? Fizzing up in the grey light of a hangover.

Jack
Into a warm glass.

Rachael
Barocca feels like a hangover thing to me, though.

Jack
Really?

Rachael
Yeah.

Jack
You probably eat more vegetables than I do.

Rachael
Like not cosy.

Jack
Anyway, yes, sorry. I think that the way that this poem – I don't think it effervesces – but I think it does like throb. Like that kind of Rothko-y, I feel like this is a bathing in light.

Rachael
It starts in a forest as well, right? Which is so intriguing because you move from this totally green... When if somebody says something like forest or tree at the beginning of a poem, you're like green, you're bathed in green. So then we almost have a colour-grade gradient that shifts from orange.

Jack
And that poem is from Richard's second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, which will be published by Faber. And to finish the episode, we have an audio postcard from Diane Seuss, whose collections, Frank and Modern Poetry, are published by Fitzcaraldo.

Diane
[Diane Seuss reads 'Romantic Poet' from her collection Modern Poetry]

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

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