On 15 February 2013, Jennifer Williams and poet/author Tracey S. Rosenberg had a chat about that dreaded and unavoidable demon that every publishing writer must do battle with: rejection.  We hope this podcast will be of interest to all writers who have to deal with inevitable rejection, and especially to young and emerging writers who are starting down the challenging path towards publication. 

Music by James Iremonger. Photo by Chris Scott.

The multidimensional Kenyan poet, filmmaker and writer Ngwatilo Mawiyoo is the subject of this month’s Nothing But The Poem podcast.

Keguro Macharia, in The New Inquiry, writes that Ngwatilo’s poetry "draws out my own memories [which] speaks to its generative power: its particularity is generous, opening ways for readers to encounter and inhabit it." Hers is a voice that insists on the personal and political being unified.

Our resident podcast host Sam Tongue selected: Found: Portrait Of Umau’s Early Days, Found: Eulogy For My Father and Night Swim. Find out what Sam – and the Friends Of The SPL group – took from these poems in this Nothing But The Poem podcast.

Who was Eddie Linden (1935-2023)?

A poet, an editor, and a man with an extraordinary range of contacts and friends who ranged from Tom Leonard to Harold Pinter. Linden was a person who achieved much considering his incredibly tough childhood. Born illegitimate, he was passed from pillar to post as a boy in Glasgow. Later, he suffered much anguish when his Roman Catholicism conflicted with his sexuality. In the 1960s, after moving to London, he began an extraordinary literary magazine Aquarius, which-over 30 years-became a veritable Who’s Who of contemporary poets.

In this 2013 podcast, he discussed his life and verse from his home in Maida Vale.

Image by Mazengarb

Born in Budapest and brought up in England after coming to the UK as a refugee in 1956, George Szirtes has remained one of the country’s most interesting poets since his first prize-winning collection, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. That wasn’t the last trophy he was to take home; he won the T S Eliot Prize for his 2005 collection Reel.

The SPL caught up with Szirtes at the StAnza poetry festival in March, 2013. In town to read from his collection Bad Machine (Bloodaxe), he spoke to Colin Waters about memory, photography, Twitter and 1960s garage pop.

Photo by Caroline Forbes.

Good poetry gets beneath the skin of readers. This episode features a poet who, for a short period, literally got ‘under the skin’.

In the autumn of 2008, poet and essayist Marianne Boruch was awarded a ‘Faculty Fellowship in a Second Discipline’, permitting her to study something new for a semester. Her choice? Anatomy classes. ‘Cadaver, Speak’, a long poem, was her response to her time dissecting bodies, and in this 2013 podcast, she talks about her experiences in an interview conducted in the Edinburgh University Medical School’s historical lecture theatre.

In 1972, Liz Lochhead published her debut collection, Memo For Spring, a landmark in Scottish literature. In an extended interview with Colin Waters, the then Scots Makar discusses what the early 1970s poetry scene she emerged into was like, one in which women poets were few and far between. She recalls early meetings with the elder generation – Norman MacCaig, Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch – and with contemporaries such as Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Alasdair Gray. She also speaks about life during the era of the three-day week and compares it with an economically troubled present-day that, in some respects, mirrors 1972. And she reads several poems from Memo For Spring.

Photo by Norman McBeath.

In 2013, Edinburgh-born Ross Sutherland was described as one of the most interesting young poets working in Britain. Inspired by cut-ups and technology, his collection Emergency Window (Penned in the Margins) featured a sequence of classic poems fed through Google Translate many times until they become something else entirely. He wrote a sequence of sonnets about the characters in the video game Street Fighter 2, and yet his work is never gimmicky or unemotional.

Ross talked to the SPL about the hairstyles of millionaires, how John Cooper Clarke inspired him, and about taking part in one of the more unusual poetry readings of the time.

Photo by James Lyndsay.

In this episode of Nothing But The Poem podcast, our usual host Samuel Tongue goes in deep on two weel kent poems by Norman MacCaig, one of Scotland's most loved and influential poets.

Norman MacCaig famously, and self-deprecatingly, described writing his poems as "one fag" poems or "two fag" poems. Nothing could be further from the truth for readers, who can spend hours returning again and again to his best work. The two poems featured here are generally considered among Maccaig's finest.

Rich in observation with similes to die for Aunt Julia is often rated as MacCaig's most popular poem, with it's famous opening lines:

Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic

very loud and very fast.

Stars and Planets is the other poem featured in this podcast. A short cosmic stunner of a poem with more of MacCaig's surprising similes and deft observations. Samuel Tongue and the Friends of the SPL group had fun discussing these two poems as they looked beneath the bonnets of both.

Iain Sinclair is one of the UK’s greatest living writers. Famed for his novels, such as Downriver, and documentary prose, of which London Orbital is perhaps the best known, Sinclair began his career self-publishing his own poetry on his Albion Village Press in the 1970s. 2013 saw the publication of three books – two poetry collections and a longer book on his relationship with the Beats, American Smoke.

Colin Waters travelled to Sinclair’s home in Hackney, where he asked Sinclair about his Scottish roots, John Clare and his lost 1970s collection Red Eye, which was being published by Test Centre.

Picture of Iain Sinclair by Luca Del Baldo.

We have all heard the arguments in favour of Scotland’s best poet or favourite poem, but what about its greatest collection?

In this recording from 2012, the SPL invited two guests – James Robertson, poet, publisher and author of the novels And the Land Lay Still and The Testament of Gideon Mack, and Dorothy McMillan, editor of Modern Scottish Women Poets and former Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow – to join then SPL director Robyn Marsack to discuss what might be Scotland’s best collections of poetry in an extended podcast.

Image: Seaweed by Lucy Burnett