We’re back for 2018! I’m starting the year off by going way back to 19th Century Japan and Tachibana Akemi’s Poems of Solitary Delights, then following that thread over to Robert Creeley’s ‘Talking’:

Stuart Cooke’s Opera is one of those books that’s changed my understanding of what a poetry collection can do. (It also includes one of my favourite poems, An Overcast Day in Another Part of the World.) In this interview I get the chance to nerd out with Stuart about how he wrote Opera and the poetry that’s been important to him.

Show notes

Talking with Ed Tato reminded me how many rooms there are to discover in the house of poetry. We go from Ulysses to Kansas to a workshop with Mary Karr, wondering about categorisation, why certain writing resonates, and returning to the fact that some poems demand to be spoken aloud.

Show notes

After finally getting up to read at Owl and Cat, I was lucky enough to have Amanda Anastasi around to chat about all things open mic, the highs and lows of being a poetry gig convenor and her own approaches to getting something down on the page (in between gigs).

Show notes

Dave Drayton joins me to chat about his recent book P(oe)Ms, the role of constraint, productive and preventative barriers in writing, and some of the poets who inspired him to try new things when performing his work. We also get into the fraught area of ‘networking’ in the poetry community – is it all just about who you know?

Show notes