Arji's Poetry Pickle Jar

This week we travelling to the states to hit you up with Carlos Andrés Gómez. He's a Colombian American poet, speaker, actor, author of Fractures, Hijito, and the memoir Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood. This man has too many awards to fit into this bio, he's star on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and TV One’s Verses and Flows and today he is bringing in a poem by Rachel Eliza Griffiths called Seeing the body.  You can read it here : https://poets.org/poem/seeing-body

In today's Pickle Jar we're joined by Vidyan Ravinthiran. He's a poet who grew up in a mixed area of Leeds (in the North of England), studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and is now an Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard. He's the author of two books of verse. Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014) was shortlisted for several first collection awards, with individual poems appearing in The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019) won a Northern Writers Award, was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes. Harvard, 

Today we talk about this piece by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha

Don’t Talk To Me About Matisse

Don’t talk to me about Matisse, don’t talk to me

about Gauguin, or even

the earless painter van Gogh,

& the woman reclining on a blood-spread . . .

the aboriginal shot by the great white hunter Matisse

with a gun with two nostrils, the aboriginal

crucified by Gauguin—the syphilis-spreader, the yellowed obesity.

Don’t talk to me about Matisse . . .

the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio

where the nude woman reclines forever

on a sheet of blood.

Talk to me instead of the culture generally—

how the murderers were sustained

by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote

villages the painters came, and our white-washed

mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.

On today's show we are joined by Natalie Whittaker poet and secondary school teacher from South East London. Her debut pamphlet Shadow Dogs was published by Ignition press in 2018. And She is one of London Library’s emerging writers for 2020 / 2021. Her poems have been widely published in UK magazines and anthologies. Her latest pamphlet Tree is just OUT on Verve Publishing. It is writing dealing with her personal experience of stillbirth and the mental illness that can follow such a traumatic event.

We look closely at a poem by Jack Underwood. You can read it here https://poetryarchive.org/poem/man-dragging-dead-dog/

Back for series two. This week we are joined by Poet, Mentor and Facilitator Katrina Naomi. She has four collections under her belt. these include Wild Persistence, published by Seren and Typhoon Etiquette, published in 2019 by Verve Poetry Press. She has also had her poetry appear on  on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Poetry Please, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. Today she is bringing Ink-Light by Natalie Diaz. It is a wonderfully magical poem so come have a listen.

For this tenth instalment of the Pickle Jar we invite Cecilia Knapp into the jar. She's a poet, playwright and novelist and the current Young People’s Laureate for London. Her poems have appeared in The White Review, Magma and Bath, She’s a former resident artist at The Roundhouse and a Ted X speaker, and her debut novel is forthcoming from The Borough Press (Harper Collins.) as well as all this she is a great facilitator and advocate for poetry for all people

Today she brings a brilliant poem by Rachel Long called Self-portrait with a baby. 

Today we are joined by poet, performer, playwright, project manager, programmer, producer and former Canal Laureate of the UK, Jo Bell. She devised the immensely successful online poetry group 52 which is a good reflection of her personal mission to use social media as a stimulus to encourage new writers into the fray. She also has a collection called Kitch published with Nine Arches Press.

Today she brings us a sweet little poem about doing a shit in a wood, it's called Giant Puffballs and it's by Neil Rollinson. Have a read of it here:

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/giant-puffballs/?fbclid=IwAR0G6e9h_6WCB1U0S0zm1gshzb76aEc3q7-Wag-va38VUwLcjQSkioxjyl8

In this episode we are joined by artist and amazing human being Abi Palmer. She is an artist and writer exploring the relationship between linguistic and physical communication. her latest book on Penned in the margins is Sanatorium—a fragmented memoir that jumps between a luxury thermal pool and a blue inflatable bathtub.

Today she is taking us on a long poem ride of a life time as we look at this whopper from Matthea Harvey. Come get it.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51614/pity-the-bathtub-its-forced-embrace-of-the-human-form

This week we are joined by Carole Bromley. Carole’s pamphlets (Unscheduled Halt and Skylight) and collections (A Guided Tour of the Ice House, The Stonegate Devil and Blast Off!) are available from Smith/Doorstop Books

Her newest poetry pamphlet about her recent experience of brain surgery is called Sodium 136, by Calder Valley Poetry. 

Today, we discuss the Hugo Williams Dialysis Days. You can read the poem here: 

https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/article/six-poems-hugo-williams/

In today's Pickle Jar we are joined by the brilliant Anthony Anaxagorou. His  recent collection  After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins, 2019) was nominated for a TS Eliot Prize. In today's episode he shall be bringing in a little known poem by Robin Beth Schaer called Holdfast.

check out the poem here : https://poets.org/poem/holdfast

This week we travel to Wales to talk to Poetry Wales Editor and amazing poet Jonathan Edwards. He's a Costa Prize winner for his debut collection and more recently he has brought his second collection Gen to rave reviews. 

He brings with him a poem called 'In the Green Baize' by Alan Perry. A snooker poem guaranteed to get you potting the black. Come have a listen and a learn