Research English At Durham

As a poet, if you cooperate with language you end up ‘saying things  you didn’t know you were thinking.’ So claims the multi-award-winning  poet Rachael Boast, in this interview with Suzannah V. Evans.  But although poetry may emerge from somewhere unconscious, the course  of their conversation draws to the surface Rachael’s life and works.  

Read more about this podcast on our blog.

The debate surrounding Britain’s vote to leave the European Union  exposed, among other things, a suspicion of ‘experts.’ How did  intellectuals become alienated figures? And how might citizens and  academics come together in order to better understand the attitudes and  experiences of the other? English lecturer Simon Grimble reflects on why  despite being in the position of an 'intellectual' he failed to engage  with the democratic process and discussion.

This podcast was recorded at a workshop organised by Durham University Department of English Studies, in 2017. For more information visit https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2017/05/16/brexit-and-the-democratic-intellect/

It can seem dauntingly difficult for a young poet to gain a name  and to get published by a respected press or magazine. But that’s  exactly what Will Harris has achieved with his 2017 pamphlet All this is implied, a collection that explores the complexities of being a person of mixed Anglo-Indonesian heritage.

 In this conversation with Suzannah V. Evans,  recorded at StAnza poetry festival in 2018, Will shares some advice for  up-and-coming writers, borne of his own experience as an editor and now  established author. They discuss creative writing degrees, the value of  poetry magazines and the challenges and benefits of reading so much of  the work of other poets when learning to be a writer. They also have a  look at trends in contemporary poetry in the UK and the US. 

 Will reads three poems at the end: ‘Self-Portrait in Front of a Small  Mirror’, ‘Identity’, ‘With Cornflowers’. These come from his collection All This is Implied, published by HappenStance.  

On June 9th of 1865, sitting comfortably on his train home from Paris,  Charles Dickens had a brush with death. Workmen on a bridge had failed  to signal that a section of the track was missing. Several of the  carriages plunged into the river below, with Dickens’ own carriage left  teetering at the top. The following year, Dickens would publish his most  haunting ghost story, ‘The Signalman’. Claire Ashworth shows how this  inspired tale is a representation of repressed trauma, that both looks  back to Dickens’ own experiences but also anticipates the work of later  psychological theorists.

For more information visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7En

In reality death may be a one-way trip, but literature allows us to  travel imaginatively to and from the afterlife, visiting the ghosts of  the past, often encountering them  in that strange meeting room  represented throughout Western culture as the underworld. Dr Madeleine  Scherer (Warwick University) is our guide to spectral depths from  classical Greece to contemporary Ireland.

For more information visit https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/new-podcast-the-classical-underworld-as-a-memoryscape/

Polly Atkin published her first full length poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture, in 2017. Like her two pamphlets before it – bone song (2008) and Shadow Dispatches (2013) – Basic Nest Architecture won critical acclaim, including New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize. Suzannah V. Evans  chatted with Polly about the roots of her poetic life in places like  Cumbria, where she now lives, as well as within the StAnza poetry  festival, where this interview was recorded. 

Read more about this podcast on our blog.

All the world’s a stage – one of Shakespeare’s more famous sayings, and perhaps now almost a cliché. However, Helen Clifford uses the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to cast a new light on how Shakespeare’s stage and language are indeed bounded to coordinates in the world. His metaphors often ask us to imaginatively look up or down to heaven or hell, and to visualise where different symbolic spaces might exist in the actual theatre – something that different venues and theatre companies have exploited over the centuries.

For more details, visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7y0

When she was growing up in rural New Jersey, JL Williams  wrote a play about pirates. Today, Williams is best known as a poet,  but she has continued to sail across various genres, including visual  arts, dance, theatre, and, most recently, opera. Although Williams may  have put pirates long behind her, associations with the sea, and the  dramatic portrayal of a vividly realised world, still run deep in her  poetry, as Suzannah V. Evans discovered when she caught up with her at StAnza poetry festival in 2018.

Read more about this podcast at our blog.

An island nation that wants to be involved in the politics of wider  Europe, but also removed from it. A fractious debate over power,  sovereignty, the rule of law. The experiences of emigrants and  immigrants. Not a potted summary of twenty-first century political  events, but rather of the themes raised by the thirteenth-century  Icelandic poem, Egil’s Saga, and the travels and travails of its eponymous hero. Kate Marlow tells a tale that gives us a tantalising glimpse into identity, place and history.

Find out more at https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7xr

Gillian Allnutt is the author of nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Wake, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Ahead of its publication, Suzannah V. Evans  caught up with Gillian Allnutt at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St  Andrews, to reflect on her career in writing and to hear her read from  some of her earlier work.

For more about this podcast, visit our blog.