Jack
My name's Jack Underwood.

Rachael
And my name is Rachael Allen.

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

Matthew
Hi my name is Matthew Rohrer, and I'm reading you a poem from my new book, Army of Giants, published by Wave Books this year. I'm in my office in Greenwich Village, and this is a poem called 'Yevtushenko was the King'. This poem ends with a line that is the same line that ends Yevtushenko's amazing poem, 'Zima Junction'. [Matthew reads 'Yevtushenko was the King' from his 2024 collection, Army of Giants).

Jack
That was an audio postcard from Matthew Roher. His collection Army of Giants is out now with Wave. Rachael, who do we have in the studio with us today?

Rachael
Isabelle Baafi, who is the Reviews Editor at Poetry London. Her pamphlet, Ripe, published by Ignition Press in 2020, won a Somerset Maughan Award and was a Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice. Her debut collection, Chaotic Good, will be published by Faber & Faber and Wesleyan University Press in 2025.

Jack
Joining Isabelle today, we have Sarah Howe. Sarah is a Hong Kong-born poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade – Chatto & Windus, 2015 – won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. A new collection is forthcoming in 2025. Previous honours include the Hawthornden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, as well as fellowships from Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute and Civitella Ranieri Foundation. I did alright there, didn't I? Not too bad. She is the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. Welcome to you both.

Rachael
We'll start maybe with a reading from you, Sarah, if that sounds good.

Sarah
Yeah, I might read a teeny one and then a slightly longer one. I'll knit a little bit. These are brand new poems, test driving these on you guys.

Jack
Well, I don't mean to say, Sarah, I know you have been busy, but I was looking at that Loop of Jade, 2015.

Sarah
It has been a little while.

Jack
Even longer than I take to write a book.

Sarah
It is not the optimal rate of production, it has to be said.

Jack
Hey, it's nice to be butting against the horrendous productivity narratives of late capitalism in our art form. You are a shining rebel star in that regard. But let's hear some new work. I'm so excited.

Sarah
Okay. (Sarah reads 'Tell all the truth, but' and 'Throwback')

Jack
It's so lovely to hear your voice again, Sarah, in the poems coming through and the careful way that your poems seem to build out of themselves. They start with quite unassuming doorways sometimes, and then they lead to a corridor and another corridor. I think there was that fabulous poem in The Poetry Review, which was the most recent thing of yours I read before today about the laundry.

Sarah
It has a really long title, so everyone comes up to me and says, I liked your laundry poem.

Jack
Yeah, that's right. Which is this sprawling narrative, surreal poem. These feel more careful. Not that that's not careful, you know what I mean? These feel more positioned. Tell us a bit about how you feel like you're writing, the places you're writing from at the moment, and if you feel like there's been any preoccupations or shifts in style since Loop of Jade.

Sarah
Yeah. Oh, gosh, Jack. I think the difference in feel between that rangy prose poem, where every line ends in 'laundry' and these is partly because of the instrument of the line, and that these pick their way down a spiral staircase of very short lines. And I guess that comes of a desire to take things slowly. I definitely had the feeling – that's interesting you say corridors and corridors – when I was writing that poem, 'Throwback', I'd write a few stanzas, and then it was like I fell through a trapdoor in the floor and wrote a few more and then fell through another trapdoor. That was the feeling that I had, like I was moving down through successive, more and more subterranean spaces of the mind. I feel like maybe that little poem I read at the start is me groping towards some sort of poetics or ars poetica that could explain the difference between myself in my late twenties, early thrities, writing Loop of Jade, and myself around 40, now writing this book, and 'Tell It Slant' is a parable of that, that really does come out of the seven or so years I spent teaching creative writing in a university and putting that up on the slide for my seventh lecture of term. And I guess I was very struck when I came across it by that quite famous quotation of Winnicott's, where he says something like, 'It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found' and I feel like Loop of Jade was a very elaborate exercise of camouflage and trying on masks and guises. And I would never assume not to be wearing masks, except that I feel like, why do these poems feel so much more self-exposing in a way when I might expect to have gone in the other direction post that book? But I think the answer is that these poems are trying to be a space in which something more of me can safely appear. Yeah, that's probably the answer. And there's a politics to that.

Jack
Yeah, and a politics of rage in that first.

Sarah
Yeah.

Rachael
It's interesting, though, when you talked about the many doorways that the poems seem to open or move through in then the trapdoors that you're falling through, and I was thinking about the vehicle of teaching and the vehicle of a child and the uncanniness that both of those situations throw up for ourselves. When we teach, there's an element of performative mirroring, which also felt like it was coming through in those poems, a interest in how we show ourselves, how we see ourselves, and then explore that. So the portal of the teaching space the classroom, the slide, the portal of the child, felt to me quite mystical tangents that you're moving through, very grounded in the real-world spaces of being a parent and being a teacher, but utilising those things to reach through into a space of figuring out the self. When you said it was a joy to be hidden and a disaster, not to be found, I was thinking a bit more about that, the way that these new poems, or at least the ones that we're lucky enough to hear, it feels like disclosure and exposure that that's being played with in a really interesting way.

Jack
How do you feel about that new vulnerability of a more... I suppose, because it's strange, isn't it? It's at once less lyric and more lyric. Do you know what I mean?

Sarah
Yeah. And I guess in ways that make me uncomfortable, these feel like poems that I would perhaps more logically have written in a first book. It's peculiar to me that. I don't feel totally comfortable with it, but I suppose I've been writing out of a self-protected space where I've been telling myself, these poems have no audience beyond me. And I think I have made peace with them going out into the world and doing their work. I somewhat haven't quite unpicked the motivations for why this work, why now, why write about racist aggressions that happened in a playground 35 years ago. I think there are perhaps reasons for that that will become clearer to me in the next few months as this book finds its gravity and its final line. But somehow this is what's been swimming up. I suppose maybe in the way that parenting small children makes one think back to one's own small childhood, and becoming a parent, becoming a mother, in my case, has made me reappraise my own sense of my mothering, my being mothered. That's maybe the through line of this book, I think. God, I thought I'd written enough about my mum, but she seems to be coming back with force again. And that's because you re-understand things in a new light when you become a parent there were various things that clicked into place for me that I suddenly understood about my childhood in late-colonial Hong Kong. And the, well, the situation of my home life, shall we call it, which was a political situation, a situation in many ways of white supremacist patriarchy. And I haven't quite worked myself up to writing that situation yet, but I'm finding slants for it. This is me working up to something, I think.

Rachael
I like that chromosoidal riddle of crumbs and the ancestral dark, and then you said you were interested in these subterranean spaces and I feel like these poems feel exploratory, even though they're so crystallised and there is this idea of clarity within them. They do feel like they are exploring or perhaps creating a base for that maybe next stage of the poetics to come within that exploration.

Jack
Also, I think as you do get a bit older, I think you just give less of a shit, don't you, about what people think?

Sarah
Quite possibly!

Jack
And I think there's the idealisation of achieving something in poems or whatever. I certainly realise that whatever you do, somebody's going to hate it. You know what I mean? Or there's always going to be somebody with something to say, and you can't please everyone. So you may as well please who the hell you want to please.

Rachael
And with poetry, it's so in... well, it's not inconsequential, it's of the hugest consequence, but it is the space with the least consequence in regards to, I don't know, because it's not a self necessarily, that's the oldest thing. It's not you. It's a fiction. It's a fictionalised space. It's a space of artifice. And maybe also coming to terms with that at a stage where you feel like, Oh, I'm more able to inhabit that artifice, even if it's embodied by experiences that I have been privy to or been alongside or within, it is an artificial space.

Jack
Yeah, I guess when you think of your various speakers in your poems and the fact that it seems almost absurd to be talking about the speaker when you've been publishing poems for twenty years, do you know what I mean? But in a way, the more poems you write, the more the I becomes trumped up, rigged up, could be anyone.

Rachael
Well, of course. I mean, even just in a psychological sense, unless you're writing and publishing as we speak, it's not what is even an authentic rendering. How we play with that memory and how we play with that artificial space is where the interesting work happens for me, alongside a "life". I'm doing quotes.

Jack
"Life" in air quotes.

Rachael
Yeah. But I'm looking at a material object on the table.

Jack
Oh my God, yeah, we do talismans, don't we? Fantastic. Yeah, I was wondering what that was. A part of me thought are we just allowed to smoke in here now, and this is just a very tasteful ashtray.

Sarah
My show-and-tell offering.

Rachael
It's huge.

Sarah
Can you guess what it is? Is that unfair to put you on the spot?

Rachael
Well, there's a bowl in a bowl.

Jack
It's ceramic.

Sarah
Yeah, it's a bowl in a bowl. It's a porcelain greenish-tinge.

Jack
Is that a mould? Is that the mould for it?

Sarah
This is called a waster, and I picked this up in a town called Jingdezhen in China, which has been the centre of porcelain production in China for thousands of years. And you walk through the streets and the potters have their studios right on the edge of the pavement. And when things go wrong in the firing process, in the kiln, they just chuck them out the back of the door and you can pick up gems like this. So this is a dish that's gone wrong in the firing process. It's become this hybrid-fused creature where the porcelain dish that's sitting inside this shell called a saggar – that's the rough earthenware thing that's supposed to protect the delicate ceramic from the heat – they've ended up melting into each other. And so this dish on the top is flawed and cracked and deformed and melted.

Jack
It's got, I'd say, a poppadom, uncooked poppadom aspect to it. It's beginning to pock there.

Sarah
So normally you would just lift the beautiful moon-like dish out of that vessel at the end of firing, but now they're irrevocably fused.

Rachael
That's so cool.

Sarah
It's amazing, isn't it? And so it's got this armour like a barnacle now, this plate.

Rachael
I think it looks like a fried egg on a plate.

Sarah
I guess I keep this relatively near to my desk, and it feels like a talisman to me in all sorts of ways that I'd probably need psychoanalysis to entirely explain, but there's something about the two faces of it put together, the polished, refined side that's melting, and then this hard, coarse armour and the way that it's become this new hybrid creature that's a failure that gets chucked out onto the scrap heat, but that is also so beautiful.

Jack
Trying so hard not to identify with this.

Sarah
This is so much more fascinating.

Rachael
I'm just like, free ceramics – that's amazing.

Sarah
Isn't it like... I find a magnetism to this failed, broken thing much more than I think if that dish had come out perfect. I guess Kintsugi as a motif has become rather over present in contemporary poetry, but this feels more meaningful as an emblem of poetics and making and striving through failure and mishap.

Rachael
I would have never thought – because I am a scourer of ceramics and I'm really into ceramic artists and I buy a lot of ceramics, I was like, oh, it's obviously some ceramic artist who's developed this way of creating bowls tools or something – I would have not even had a clue that that was a mistake or a broken thing or a hybrid thing. To me, it just looks like a piece of ceramic art, which it is actually.

Sarah
You just go to Jingdezhen, Rachael, and pick some up.

Rachael
I would harvest the ceramics.

Jack
There's little marks there, isn't there? A brush stroke of some kind recorded in it.

Sarah
It's bubbled.

Rachael
Did you pick up many?

Sarah
I picked up two. This is my favourite one, though.

Jack
Lovely. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, I think it's the two surfaces and the...

Rachael
Sci-fi kind of.

Jack
It's quite suggestive, isn't it? I mean, I can't help but think of going back to that conversation of the lyric, and I'm like, which one is the speaker? Which one is the... Am I the barnacle?

Sarah
I really do feel like... Yeah, I think you're on the right track. I feel like in that 'Throwback' poem, there's the light face of the Earth and the dark face of the Earth, and I feel like this object is exemplifying that somehow, that I have certain poems that walk in the light and have this clarity, like you were talking about, like that porcelain. But then there are other poems in this book which work much more like the poem that I might read at the end, which I've been thinking to myself of as under songs, like the rough material dredged up from the dark unconscious that is not formed in the same way, and that somehow the book is a dialogue of the two, like a fusion of the two.

Jack
I'm just going to pass this over to Isabelle, who's looking quizzically.

Isabelle
No, no, it's beautiful. As you were talking, I was just thinking, obviously, there's a beautiful polished interior, and then, as you were saying, the rough, coarse exterior. But ironically, that's what holds the beautiful thing and keeps it protected, keeps it intact. As you're saying, the two are definitely in dialogue.

Jack
Yeah, if you don't love me at my rough, knotty exterior, you –

Isabelle
You don't deserve me more polished.

Jack
Oh hang on, I've got that the wrong way around, have I? I don't know.

Rachael
Because they're both amazing. To me, there's no good one, you know? That's all just in the knowledge of how they are set up to be utilised. It's like one is functional and one isn't, technically, but then actually they both are devoid now of their function, so we can just enjoy them.

Jack
Yeah, and the beautiful one is broken and a failure.

Rachael
Aren't they always.

Jack
I know. I think it's a perfect analogy for me and you, Rachael.

Rachael
Which one am I? I'm the fried egg.

Jack
Don't pretend you don't know.

Isabelle
Isabelle, shall we have you jump in and read a poem?

Jack
Yes, let's hear it.

Isabelle
OK [Isabelle reads 'Watermelon' and 'Path of Least Resilience'.

Rachael
Thank you. I was talking a little bit to you about your book this morning and getting very excited about the sort of strangeness of it and the strange turn of phrase within poems that feel concise and economical and with a narrative at their core. And also within a book that itself has a sustained narrative and is sectioned quite clearly into parts that would follow a life ish. I wondered if maybe you wanted to talk a little bit about that structure, because this is something that really interested me as a way into talking more about the poems minutiae. The strangeness of the language and the up-turned phrases and intentional mistakes and weird skewerings of moments of familiarity that made the work feel so familiar, but also defamiliarized to me.

Isabelle
Yeah, thank you for that. I think with the structure, that came during the editing process. When I initially put together the manuscript, it was not as ordered as it was. It wasn't as clear that this was this section of this stage in life, this stage, this stage. And I think because there's so much that happens, and so much of it is quite dreamlike, I write in response to my dreams quite a lot – 'Watermelon' was a dream and there are elements of so many of the poems which came from dreams – I think the ordering was important to demarcate what stage of existence this is relating to and what we're exploring. Each stage has its own complexities, its own questions. With childhood, as Sarah was reading in her poems and talking so much, it's really a time of discovery, the self, seeing oneself in the mother and in some ways the mother is seeing themselves in the child as well. So there's a lot of strangeness in that stage alone, a lot of discovery and things which don't make sense until much later. The revisitation and the jumping forwards and back through time, it lends itself, I think, to that exploration.

Rachael
Yeah, and just so there's clarity for listeners, it moves through separation, childhood, adolescence, marriage, and rebirth. I found this episodic structure really powerful, actually, that I was able to group the poems in a way. Then I was thinking about reading the poems without those structuring devices and I just think it's such a brilliant affect that it has on the poems that we have this arc running through. It threads them together in a way that I feel makes the book, I don't know... A story is created without you impressing a story upon us and it means that a lot of the that have these abstractions or have these dream-like nebulous qualities, they're then able to be contained within the larger package of the story. Was this something that you intended to have the story of a thing, of a... I guess there's so many different things, like a coming of age, a relationship breakdown, and everything that happens within those pockets of experience?

Isabelle
Essentially, yes. Initially, it was the manuscript was completely chronological. So childhood, adolescence, marriage, and then separation. It was just those four. But the sections weren't called that. They were called something very different. And I think when I showed it to editors, they had the impression that it was looking at, I guess, the formation of identity and coming of age. And then the marriage bit felt a bit tacked on or like it took it in a very different direction, and maybe it felt like different books to them. So I think through that, I realised that, Oh, I need to restructure it and just foreground that this is about a woman walking away from a toxic, abusive relationship and using this as an opportunity to reflect on how she had been in some ways primed for that sort of relationship and how the identity, how the self forms and how the world is structured in a way that normalises certain forms of behaviour and certain ways of thinking. So that structure became quite necessary, I think.

Rachael
And what's so nice about having a structure that feels so firm is that within that, the poems are able to have the destabilising effect that you sew into the fabric of the poems. There's a poem that's entirely made up of misspellings, and I suffer from migraines quite badly, and I was reading the poem and I was coming out of myself as I was reading the poem, going back over each word and the idea of slippage and mistake and correction felt like such a knotty moment within the book that is already about going back over our slippages, our on quote "mistakes". I guess I'm interested in the rub between the tension, the friction of the quirkiness, the difficulty, the strangeness in the poems lexicons, and that structure. It feels like they run up against each other like this in a way that was so just pleasing to read.

Isabelle
Ah, thank you. I hope it didn't trigger any migraines.

Rachael
I always think I'm having one, so I was like, 'It's happening'.

Isabelle
Yeah, I love playing with language. I really loved playing with tenses as well because so much of what I wanted to do was think about time and power and free will and how you make one choice and then it can dictate so much of the rest of your life or change the course of your life forever. And what does it mean to live with that choice and to want to revisit that choice and change it? But obviously, you can't revisit the past or you can't change the past. So yeah, playing with tenses, playing with time, different types of mirroring and doubling, they were all present. Because for a long period of my life, I was constantly experiencing multiple versions of my life that didn't exist and thinking about how to make them possible and who else I could have been. And in some ways, those versions felt like they were co-existing in parallel. So, yeah, thinking about mistakes and errors was all part of it, moving punctuation around, things like that. It was all, yeah.

Jack
And musical things as well. It seems like some of the phrases can only really have come out like feeling your way through a 'cough of pollen' – it's a lovely open. That sounds like one of those nice phrases that arrives because the... I don't know, because it sounds good. And then you're like, oh, this is an interesting... yeah, you trust the music first.

Isabelle
You go and you work out of that sound. You work out of the phrase. You trust the logic of the phrase, almost, maybe.

Isabelle
Yeah, I know what you mean. Musicality is important to me. Rhythm is important. There's a poem called 'The Cottage', which is this strange scenario thing. And basically, I was reading Emily Berry, and I was reading Vievee Francis, who are two poets whose work I really love. And their work is so immersive and dreamlike and gothic in certain ways, especially Vievee Francis. And as I was reading, I just kept hearing the word 'wood', 'would', 'wood'. And it was both W-O-O-D and W-O-U-L-D. And so I was just thinking about different forms of possibility and different timeframes. And so then the poem came out of that, thinking about being in a wood and thinking about what – literally just what sounded right.

Jack
It's funny, I feel like there's lots of ambiguity in the poems, which I just love. How that comes, how things always... your poems feel like they're being constructed and it's leading something and something's being built. But what it leads to is still a resonant absent thing that's not quite said.

Rachael
I was thinking about Louise Gluck, actually, and my favourite line from Louise Gluck, which is, 'Even now this landscape is assembling', which the poem 'All Hallows' starts with that line, especially in regards to 'The Cottage'. 'The memory built me around it'. This idea of the poem almost beginning in medias res. Is that the right term? That's the right term, isn't it? It's starting in the middle of itself, or it's a continuation of an occasion. And the poem line is the articulation of that occasion occurring. But we know that the activeness and the activity is still occurring, still being created, still being decided on. And then that way there's a really nice ambivalence in the work. It destabilises you. It says, don't settle.

Jack
I think, isn't it funny that I always find that ambivalence and ambiguity and that little kind of... when you feel like something has been circumlocuted that you can't quite... That you know is there, but what is it? I always felt that's the most delicious and profound quality of poems, but it's often the one that people are most scared of.

Rachael
It's because it's spooky.

Jack
People are endlessly talking about whether the poems are relatable or accessible and people are worried about whether people understand them in poems. Nobody ever talks about how awful it is when people can understand them. Nobody really talks about the pleasure in not understanding in that way. I feel that's probably true of both your poems. I feel they both lead us up the garden path a bit, don't they? In a very courteous, so I'm tracking this, I'm tracking this, and then we suddenly find ourselves alone on some poetic profound hard shoulder.

Rachael
Well, 'The Cottage' feels like such a perfect encapsulation of that, actually. 'The memory built me around it. An abandoned trail, a forest with no sky. I was both the wood of the axe and the wood of the tree. A cat was dying in my bag.' I cannot have read five lines of poetry that is A. Just amazing I think, but B. more up my street. Do you know what I mean? It's just so...

Isabelle
With the dying cat and everything.

Rachael
It's so strange. I love just living in that word when I think about the work, actually.

Isabelle
I think about in Inception where Leonardo DiCaprio's character says – he's explaining dreams and he's like, the mind creates the world and experiences it at the same time. So as though you don't know what's going to happen. He's like, yeah, obviously, with the work he does, they try to interrupt that. And yeah, I think I was trying to do something similar.

Jack
Dreams have a lot of turns in them. Both your poems have turns. We're not waiting for the turn in line eight. We get it usually in about line three or something, and then maybe about five per poem. That's a good reward. Yeah, I wonder if that's... Sarah, is that something that your poems seem like they're working into an argument and then turn and then turn again and chew.

Sarah
The word that's coming into my mind as you say that, Jack, is a swerve. Lucretius, ancient atomic physics. But yeah, that suddenly wrong-footed and left flat on your back.

Jack
Whether that's dream or memory, actually, because I think memory is probably more the wind that seems to blow you.

Sarah
But I'm I'm also very interested in the unconscious and your fabulous typo poem and the mis-hearings that happen throughout your poems, Isabelle. You're interested in the Freudian slip, aren't you? As a portal into the unconscious. And I'm deeply interested in that as well. The provisional title of this new book is Babel's Drift, which I'm slightly nervous about. It might not stay the title, but it's from a poem about genetics and DNA and codes and the crypticness of that. But it's also about the scrambling that happens, the mishearing that needs to happen from generation to generation. I'm so interested in your mishaps of typography as a way of thinking through that necessary swerve if we're going to stay alive and keep moving, keep changing.

Rachael
Is psychoanalysis something that is of interest to both of you? I mean, I don't really know that much about it, so I always loathe to bring it up. So I'm like, 'Here, here's your thing'.

Isabelle
Yeah, I mean, I'm nowhere near an expert in it, but yeah, I'm very interested in it. I think a lot of... I mean, not necessarily on purpose, but I think the Lacanian concept of the mirror stage and seeing oneself through projections from the external world and especially through the mother. That's definitely something that has run through my work. And you're talking about being a mature woman and still writing about your mother. I have no doubt I'll do that throughout my life as well because it's such a formative relationship. And if there are unhealthy elements to that relationship, it can take the rest of your life to unlearn them or to figure out how to work with them. And so much of you does come from how you experience that relationship. That's just one I'm also thinking about group psychology, thinking about how we behave when we're around other people versus one-on-one, power dynamics, things like that. It's always fascinating to me how people behave and at times which are at odds with how they believe themselves to be.

Rachael
Which also features in the book, the studies or I guess the terminology for studies, the horizon effect, the bystander effect. That's another organising principle of the book, actually, within the larger, more immediate organising principle. I don't know whether you wanted to speak to that as well, those subtitles, almost?

Isabelle
Yeah. I mean, originally, some of those were the section titles. But I think Lavinia Greenlaw, very rightly, she was like, everything that the reader has to go through to get to the first poem is like a door. So you've got the cover and the title, and then you've got the epigraph, and then there was a section title, and then there were section epigraphs, and it was a bit too much. And I think, yeah, like you've said earlier, clarifying the central arc through just stages of life helped with that. So with the effect poems, I started with the Kuleshov Effect, which is this concept in cinematic theory that the meaning of an image is derived through its proximity to other images before, and or after it. So the classic example was given by Alfred Hitchcock, I think. So if you see a picture of a man smiling and then you see a baby, you'll think he's smiling at the baby and, oh, what a sweet old man. And then if you see a man smiling and then a young woman in a bikini, you'll think, oh, he's a leering predatory old man or whatever. And so the meaning changes based on what's around this image. And so similarly in childhood, so much of who we are is shaped by our environment. So that's where I started with that one. And then the Mpemba effect about the fact that hot water freezes faster than cold water. I heard that and I just wanted to write about that and I didn't know how initially, but I just knew it's a fascinating question of transformation and how things change in unexpected ways. And then I had a few others, and at that point I realised I wanted to have one per section. So then it was just a case of assigning others to that. I think these phenomena, which are strange and unexpected, but somehow really fit in our experience of the world and confirm some of the things we understand to be true, they seem to fit with the things I was exploring as well.

Jack
It's so nice to have somebody with all that editorial stuff so fresh. Because some people, anyone ask me why I put a poem in a certain place, I'm like, I don't know. Probably told to. There is that kind of like – particularly when you don't arrive with a huge schema and plan in mind and you're like, it can feel like this is tenuous or rigged up, but then also it's like this makes sense, and you arrive to this finished thing. And then, of course, everyone imagines that that was the plan from the start.

Rachael
I love to talk about the editorial process. But we have another talisman.

Isabelle
We do. So I wanted to bring the doll's house that I had when I was a little girl, but that was way too big. So I decided to just bring the staircase. There were different bits I could have brought and I thought the staircase was pretty cool because it connects different parts of the house. And then I think Jungian psychology, like the basement or the cellar is like the subconscious, the middle part of the house is the ego, and then the attic is supposed to be the superego. So that relates a lot of what I'm trying to connect and explore how different parts of ourselves arise in unexpected ways. The reason why I bought something for my doll's house is that it has a really strange ambivalence and significance for me. So I loved Barbies when I was little, like a lot of girls, but my mother was used to buy me other dolls as well, like porcelain dolls, which I always found quite strange because I couldn't play with it. And whenever I did, they would break, and then she would get upset. And I felt bad, but in the back of my mind, I was like, why would you give me something I can't play with? And then she also bought me this doll's house. That was alright. I don't remember being particularly enthusiastic about it, but it was fine. Flash forward to 2023. So we went to visit my grandma, who we hadn't spoken to in almost 20 years, and in her living room, she had the exact same doll's house as the one I'd had when I was a kid.

Jack
Not the same one, this is a different one?

Isabelle
Not my doll's house, but the exact same toy.

Jack
That's so uncanny.

Isabelle
Which it was... And I couldn't even...

Rachael
Was it her's? What was the story behind it?

Isabelle
So she came to the UK from Jamaica when she was 16, so I doubt it was her doll's house. It may have been my mother's, but for various reasons, I also feel like that may not have been the story as well. So, yeah, it was just weird, this presence and this connection between our generations. And so we still have mine, but I've gotten rid of almost everything from before 2022. Pretty much everything. Nothing from before that date exists. But my mother insists on keeping the doll's house because she says, 'You need to pass it down to your daughter'. And so for me, this encapsulates this thing of inherited trauma and the things that families pass down, and the cycles that repeat themselves, whether you want them to or not, and what it takes to resist that, because I want to get rid of it and she doesn't want to get rid of it.

Jack
The way the objects are like, that's a very real talisman, isn't it? The way that people place these stories or histories into objects. I mean, even to know that you've got rid of everything before a certain date is evidence of your projection onto it… I mean, that's very Lacanian, isn't it, the object?

Isabelle
Probably.

Rachael
Also that you've bought the stairs, you've bought the literal pathway between floors.

Sarah
What happens when you remove this and abstract this from the doll's house. That's incredible. It suddenly takes it into the realm of Escher and Piranesi and these endless mazes you can never escape.

Rachael
I didn't see it as stairs either, when you had it. I thought it might have been some kind of desk tidy, like outside of it.

Isabelle
That's cute.

Jack
Put your pens on it to stop them rolling around.

Rachael
But yeah, have you removed the pathway or are you carrying the pathway with you?

Isabelle
That's a good question.

Rachael
Because when you were talking about the floors, I was like, something about taking the pathway between floors and histories away.

Isabelle
I think the floors between them is very important. I'm all about collapsing the divide between parts of the self and embracing every part, even the parts that we don't like initially because, within reason, I think it's important to be true to our impulses and everything we feel and to live authentically. So, yeah, I'm all about collapsing that divide. But also when it relates to intergenerational things, then you need to tread carefully and be very mindful of what you're traversing.

Maurice
[Maurice Riordan reads The Narcissist].

Jack
So that was The Narcissist by Maurice Riordan. There's so much that's Maurice or Riordan-esque about this poem. The death and the mortal body. There's the things like dozed off between tweets. I don't know why. And the comeuppance of being flash, the old, old girlfriend who trained me to love food and sip cognac, which I suppose is all part of the decadence, as in decay as well, of this poem. And it's the horror of it. And not being able to look. The conceit of the poem being that if you don't look at yourself in the mirror or you can't, then you're the real narcissist because you're scared of your body. You're scared of like...

Rachael
I'm trying to figure out where the real narcissist is, because it feels so upfront and so like it's offering itself up into this position. And so, not professional is the right word, but it's an admittance of something that feels so straight-up that I'm trying to find the reality of the narcissism. Because all of it is... I mean, the very fact of the poem feels narcissistic, because it almost feels sarcastic in a way. I think that's what I'm trying to get to.

Jack
Yeah, I mean, what could be more narcissistic in a way than writing a whole poem about your own narcissism? But I think it does this inversion. It's like, again, there is the moral of the story, which there is often a, not a moral, but a who the hell do we think we are about Maurice's poems. And this is it's like, oh, I couldn't. I don't like looking at myself in the mirror or like to judge someone else for their enjoying their body and to say, oh, no, I couldn't possibly. Because actually what you're avoiding is your own mortality. You imagine that you're not able to look at in the mirror.

Rachael
But it also feels like it feels like talking to a nightmare man, the kind of man who's like, I couldn't be a narcissist, I don't care about looking at myself in the mirror. But there's something more developed happening there. But there is this weird cruelty to its tone or something. Do you sense that?

Jack
Yeah, it is.

Rachael
It feels like there's a a performed judgement. I think that's what it is.

Jack
I think there's... We'd have to ask Maurice about this, but I think there's something really Shakespeareian about some of Maurice's lyrics. I've never been the type for looking in mirrors. I check a mole, I shade. There's something like the...

Rachael
Villany.

Jack
Yeah.

Rachael
It's the girlfriend who trained me to love food, and so I would never engage in such blah, blah, blah.

Jack
There's the preemptive waterproofing of an argument that's then going to be turned on its head. Like, you know.

Rachael
Her props in a little crocodile case. It feels so hilariously...

Jack
But then I'm not made for sportive tricks.

Rachael
I'm also thinking about someone like, who's the villain? Patrick Bateman. It feels like that, kind of.

Jack
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there is that.

Rachael
The too precise conception of yourself. The idea that you have a handle on who you are and how you've come to be you, which is narcissism. Which is narcissism, right?

Jack
It outmanoeuvres itself and it outmanoeuvres...

Rachael
I mean, that final line is just unreal.

Jack
Yeah, it is. Oh, it's a news alert, sorry.

Rachael
It was the final line. It was like, I know, right?

Jack
Yeah, Maurice Riordan discovers his own body in mirror. BBBC News, other networks are available. Anyway, yeah. I think I've harboured this selfie in my head, one that's blurry and soft focus. He admits that it's true.

Rachael
But again, it must have been implanted early on by my mother. There's this weird offsetting of couldn't be a male, preoccupation. I just check a mole every night if I have to, if I'm told to.

Jack
I like, there's also like even... But again, I think this Shakespearean villain, soliloquizing, glass-swilling of language and rhetoric is in there. Things like, do you psychoanalysts have an angle on this? Like the punning. There's another one of those, isn't there? Which one is it? I can't remember.

Rachael
Well, even 'mellifluously dissected in Gallic abstraction'.

Jack
Yeah, that could be cheated of feature by dissembling nature from Richard III.

Rachael
I think that this is my favourite mode of poem. I think about Luke Kennard when I think about poems like this. Poets who have an absolute awareness of their capacity for evil, and they just go, Oh, there you go. There you go. It's there.

Jack
They prise the lid open.

Rachael
But there's this joy. There's a glee in being able to just put an arm in and wriggle it around a bit and then...

Jack
I think that is the... I mean, actually, I should say that I've just been editing are selected of Maurice's work. And that kind of reality check on our behalf. There's a really nice... Patrick Kavanagh talks about majority secrets and blabbing, disclosing something shameful or embarrassing, and how actually that's an enormous relief to everyone that reads it. You think that it's something that you shouldn't do but actually – and I talk about this a lot with students as well – that sometimes to disclose something private and shameful is an enormous kindness to other people who've probably not. And I think they're like, what could be more deliciously difficult to talk about or shameful than what you think about your naked body in front of a mirror. And even if you don't like what you see, what that says about you, and if you like what you see, what that says about you.

Rachael
When the end, I did this double take with it because it almost felt like the beginning of a new poem in which another way of seeing the self was written – I saw what I saw in the mirror was my corpse. I feel like another poem could begin, I understood what I saw in the mirror was my corpse. And then we move away from this self as corpse or self as alive self. It felt like there was something interesting happening there with how the body, how we choose to perceive the body.

Jack
Yeah. Well, I mean, it makes me think of this poem about how in the Middle Ages or whatever, when we saw our bodies a lot more. And you have those aristocrats' graves or whatever, or priests' graves in cathedrals, and they're literally like their dead bodies. They're like, scaletal, laid out their death mask or whatever. Often with a little rat on them or something, I've seen one.

Rachael
A little familiar.

Jack
Yeah, just to remind you of where you're headed. Like the dance of death, that notion, which was very popular, that whether you're the Pope or a pauper, you're all headed in the same direction.

Rachael
And it's interesting that he sees this in the mirror. The speaker sees this in the mirror.

Jack
Yeah.

Rachael
He doesn't look down at himself.

Jack
No. And it's in a mirror in a dream. Yes. Or just in the idea that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you're shocked to be in the presence of another male. I think that's the uncanny, the shock of it. Or a new mirror. I often bemoan the fact that there isn't really a mirror at my height. I can't really... I can never do a fit check, Rachael, because-

Rachael
You sound like a narcissist.

Jack
I do. Because I can never see my shoes. If I have to stand close enough or far away, I don't know.

Rachael
Who can afford a full-length mirror in this economy?

Jack
Well, I mean, Hannah, my partner, who's shorter, she can see herself. So whenever I go to a hotel and it's got a full-length mirror, I'm like, Oh, my God, do I look like that? What an odd-shaped gentleman. Like, oh, and they're... I don't know. There's never a mirror that's true. It only reveals what you see.

Rachael
And they're also haunted, so be careful if you buy another one.

Jack
Oh, in the changing rooms.

Rachael
They're just full of the people who have stood before them.

Jack
In H&M on a Tuesday. Having a little cheeky vape.

Rachael
You could write the... The towards Maurice Riordans, The Narcissist, the poem that made...

Jack
I've already written the introduction, Rach.

Rachael
That's okay. It's fine. You're not going to write a response poem to this. God, no. About looking in H&M.

Jack
No, I never look in the mirrors. I shun the mirrors as far as I can.

Rachael
And I guess that- Do you just check a mole? Do you shave? Do you wear contacts in your 20s?

Jack
No, I just try and avoid the whole issue of looking like anything. If I could be a brain in a jar, I would be.

Rachael
That can be arranged. Seriously.

Jack
Well, I'd like to be sentient. I'd like to be a good looking brain in a nice jar.

Rachael
There are cryogenic facilities in the Midwest that can accommodate that request.

Jack
You sound like someone who might be working.

Rachael
Well, who's to know?

Jack
Anyway, it's a banger, isn't it? I think it's fairly recent, this poem, but I think it's really nice that Maurice's new book is coming out and we get to revisit these. The things like the music and the voice of it and the tone of it. I'm really excited about this book coming out and people who don't know his work being introduced to it and people who do know his work being shocked to rediscover it, actually.

Rachael
Well done on all your work on it. Thanks. So that was from Maurice Riarden's Selected Poems, which is edited and selected and introduced by Jack Underwood, Published by Faber.

Rachael
Maybe now is a good opportunity to hear another poem from you, Isabelle.

Isabelle
Yeah, sure. Okay, this is another poem inspired by a dream in which I was sitting with my ex-husband and someone was asking me his name, and for the life of me, I couldn't remember. This is called 'Janus'. [Isabelle reads her poem 'Janus' from her collection Chaotic Good.]

Rachael
Amazing. Thank you.

Jack
And Sarah, can we have another poem from you?

Sarah
This poem is a tribute to M. NourbeSe Philip's Discourse on the Logic of Language, with that amazing line – so many – but English is a 'foreign anguish'. And also, I guess, the homophonic defamations of Brandon Som, where he's thinking about this string of echoes as a figure for immigrant experience down the generations. [Sarah Howe reads Undersong III]

Jack
Thank you.

Rachael
I was just thinking about sound sense and wordplay and playfulness and ludic permissions and the fact that you are both involving different areas of thinking, different lexicons, psychologies, memories, histories, performances, places, films, et cetera. Just the fact that – from what we've heard of your new work today, Sarah, and thinking about your previous work and reading Chaotic Good, this idea of play, language play, keeps coming up to me as something that maybe you both fall into, or take a solace in, even though there is this narrative that is being communicated. There are stories here that are being communicated. The language play and the fact of the fabric of the language being so enjoyed and the sound sense that comes through from both works feel so strong and hopeful and playful and joyous, actually. I was thinking about ham, strung, tongue, sound in that poem, and then just even thinking about this idea of the loops of mishearings and mistakes that are so pleasurable in the book. I guess I'm just thinking a little bit about the texture of language and humour play. Maybe what is conjured through sound and what is conjured through language play, especially how that maybe links to this idea of approaching memory, re-approaching memory, reversioning memory.

Jack
Also that's slightly, I think that when you do seed control to music a bit, that you're also allowing meaning... you're giving yourself a day off from meaning, and there is something simultaneously provocative, self-provocative, and dissident about that.

Rachael
Disobedient.

Jack
Yeah, that's a better word. Yeah, a naughtiness.

Rachael
There's an ownership. When I think about these works, there's like this – well, this bit of it is going to be wholly mine, even though there are these histories, difficult histories, contested histories – there's this ownership is mine because I am the language master.

Sarah
I think one origin story for my adult self as a poet is my having grown up for my first seven years in Hong Kong, hearing ambiently all around me Cantonese, a language I couldn't understand. The tones I describe in that poem and experiencing that language as a deeply familiar and comforting texture, but one that didn't offer up sense. I'd listen to my mum speaking on the phone and she'd speak a string of Cantonese, and then she'd suddenly say 'lunch' and I'd know what she was talking about.

Jack
Cantonese is that really swishy quality. Somebody I was talking to from Hong Kong the other day and they were talking about the difference between...

Sarah
I think there's a roundness to it that maybe is different from what I think of the angularity of Mandarin. Hong Kong Cantonese, this is a class stratified thing to some extent, but does bring in a lot of English smattered around. So it is already a hybrid, a colonial hybrid, that language. But I think there's a pleasure in that unmooring of sound from sense that I think is definitely carried into my practice and my playfulness as a poet. I've always written poems - there are lots of poems in Loop of Jade - that are really only one step away from nonsense. I guess I've fought hard to keep that as a part of my lexicon as a poet. It might be easy to just say, 'Okay, those are experiments that can go in the draw', but I do feel like they're part of me and part of the face I want to put in the world.

Isabelle
I think 'One Step Away from Nonsense' should be the title. That would be a really fun title. Yeah, thinking about wordplay, I think for me, I'm generally suspicious of the English language, particularly. Then language is just... I think it's just so fun and fascinating how we relate thoughts and ideas to language and how certain things are impossible to comprehend in a certain language or culture because we don't have the word for that. Also, I love puns. Like I said earlier, I love sound and musicality and how those things can make sense in their own way. I think I naturally gravitate towards that experimentation.

Rachael
Jack's really good at puns. I feel like we always end up talking about puns.

Jack
Yeah, I enjoy a terrible... My brain does auto-pun.

Rachael
You're really good at puns, I'm not good at puns at all.

Jack
It just finds its way. I was talking to Eleanor Penny recently and found a very... yeah, my sister in puns – and it's funny... talk about one step away from nonsense. We're in the middle of the road of nonsense just punning at each other.

Rachael
To me, I'm interested in the idea of nonsense actually as well, because puns to me feel like sense. I struggle to get to the sense of the pun. I always say something way off kilter. I've told you about this game before that my friend invented, which was a Beatles-themed restaurant. You would have like... It's called Hey Food, right? That's what the restaurant's called. Then everything in it has to be Beatles-themed like Penne Lane

Jack
Penne Lane, I get it, yeah.

Rachael
And they're just going for it with these things. And I can't even remember any Beatles songs at that point.

Isabelle
You know what's funny? When you said Beatles, because I was thinking of an actual beetle. It took me a minute.

Rachael
It always takes me... I've probably only just realised what he meant at this stage.

Isabelle
So that's the power of puns because I was thinking, this person must be really into beetles. That's quite cute.

Rachael
Yeah, it's like Scarabs...

Jack
Yeah, there's kind of that brain... I don't know.

Rachael
I think some people are good at it and some people aren't. I am interested in those who are good at it.

Sarah
My favourite kind of pun is where you're speaking in one language and someone else is hearing in another. I guess this is the Babel fascination going through. But the first new poet I'm bringing to Chatto, Karen Downs-Barton, her book is called Minx. That was because she used to hear her Romani family speaking about her, so her grandmother used to refer to her as Minx, which is the Anglo-Romani word for a mixed race person. It's pejorative. But Karen was listening in English, so she thought they were calling her a minx, like a little minx. Isn't that great?

Rachael
I love that.

Jack
I love how little things in language are so similar but so far apart. Like, Spoonerisms are really funny. Eleanor was telling me the other day about this, about the difference between a crusty bus station and a busty crustacean.

Rachael
That's not an established thing. I don't even know what that means. What's a crusty bus station?

Jack
Nothing. A bus station... Yeah, come on, you live in Lewisham.

Rachael
But then what's a busty crustacean?

Jack
Well, a busty crustacean is like a lobster with bread.

Rachael
See, this is too far for me. Shut it down.

Jack
My favourite of all time is: How do you titillate an ocelot? You oscillate its tit a lot. Yeah, it's perfect. I think that's just so magical and stupid and brilliant.

Rachael
It's 'Carrollonion'. It's Lewis Carroll. It's like Lewis Carroll, right? Or Edward Lear.

Jack
Cannelloni, delicious.

Rachael
It's Canallonian.

Jack
Canallonian! Canolian? There's something very close between Cannelloni, and...

Rachael
I always say, can I have a cannelloni?

Jack
You're a canna-lonely person, Rachael.

Rachael
I'm not kind of lonely, I've got loads of mates.

Jack
Oh, God, it unravels so quickly.

Rachael
I think, though, what a wonderful place to end. Joyous uplift of pun.

Jack
We've all got crusty bus stations to go to. And maybe a busty crustacean to go home to. Yeah, exactly.

Rachael
Thank you both.

Jack
Thank you.

Sarah
Thank you.

Isabelle
Thank you so much.

Rachael
Thank you for being here, for sharing these extraordinary pieces, poems, books. We're so excited for both of these to be out in 2025. To lead us out of the episode, we will have an audio postcard from Sasha Debevec-McKenney, whose debut collection, Joy is My Middle Name, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

Sasha
Hi, my name is Sasha Debevec-McKenney, and I'm reading this poem in my little kitchen in Decatur, Georgia. It's called 'At 33,'. [Sascha Debevec-McKenney reads her poem 'At 33,' from her collection Joy is My Middle Name].

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.