In this episode we talk with writer and academic Serena Trowbridge about the poem that's been a friend to her: 'A Shropshire Lad 31: On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble' by A.E. Housman.

This conversation was recorded in April 2022 at the Birmingham & Midland Institute. It is very special to listen back to this converation now, particularly to hear Fiona with all her usual passion and insights in conversation with Serena.

Dr Serena Trowbridge is a writer and academic specialising in Pre-Raphaelitism in art and literature. She is Reader in Victorian Literature at Birmingham City University.

Serena is Vice-President and Chair of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, and Senior Vice-President at the Birmingham & Midland Institute. You can find her thoughts on art and literature on Substack.

Huge thanks to Serena for joining us for this conversation and allowing us to share it with you.

We are so grateful to you all for listening and for all your continuous support of The Poetry Exchange. This is episode 99 and we are looking forward to sharing our special 100th episode with you soon.

With love,

Michael, John and The Poetry Exchange

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In this episode of The Poetry Exchange, poet Nick Makoha talks with us about the poem that has been a friend to him: 'White Egrets (I)' by Derek Walcott.

Nick actually joined us back in 2017 at Pushkin House, London, and we are delighted to be sharing this conversation with you now. It is very special to hear Fiona in this conversation, with all her usual warmth and brilliance.

Nick Makoha's latest collection 'The New Carthaginians' is published this month from Allen Lane - you can order/buy your copy here.

The event for 'On the Brink of Touch' by Fiona Bennett is on 26th February at The Bedford in Balham, London, and live streamed. We'd love for you to join us, and you can book your places here!

Dr Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet. His new collection is The New Carthaginians published by Penguin UK. Winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize. In 2017, Nick’s debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year. He was the ICA 2023 Writer-in-Residence. He was the 2019 Writer-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust and Wasafiri. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works alumnus. He won the 2015 Brunel African Poetry Prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. His play The Dark—produced by Fuel Theatre and directed by JMK award-winner Roy Alexander—was on a national tour in 2019. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Alfred Fagon Award and won the 2021 Columbia International Play Reading prize. His poems have appeared in the Cambridge Review, the New York Times, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Rialto, Poetry London, TriQuarterly Review, 5 Dials, Boston Review, Callaloo Birmingham Lit Journal and Wasafiri.

*********

White Egrets

By Derek Walcott

I

The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard

as those life-sized terra-cotta warriors whose vows

to their emperor with bridle, shield and sword

were sworn by a chorus that has lost its voice;

no echo in that astonishing excavation.

Each soldier gave an oath, each gave his word

to die for his emperor, his clan, his nation,

to become a chess soldier, breathlessly erect

in shade or crossing sunlight, without hours –

from clay to clay and odourlessly strict.

If vows were visible they might see ours

as changeless chessmen in the changing light

on the lawn outside where bannered breakers toss

and palms gust with music that is time’s

above the chessmen’s silence. Motion brings loss.

A sable blackbird twitters in the limes.

From White Egrets by Derek Walcott, Faber & Faber 2010.

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In this episode, we are joined by acclaimed poet Tamar Yoseloff, who shares with us the poem that has been a friend to her: 'Morning' by Frank O'Hara.

The conversation, like the poem, is full of joy and delight, as well as sadness and loss. Tamar spoke with Michael and Andrea in early May 2024, and the conversation takes on a new light now, as we continue to hold Fiona so closely in our hearts.

Tamar Yoseloff has published seven collections, including The Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems (2015) and most recently, Belief Systems, which was a PBS Summer Recommendation in 2024. She’s also the author of Formerly, a chapbook incorporating photographs by Vici MacDonald (Hercules Editions, 2012) shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. She was a lecturer on the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA in Writing Poetry and continues to teach independently. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.

Tamar Yoseloff was one of Fiona's outstanding poetry mentors, having taught her on the MA in 2022, along with Glyn Maxwell. It is very fitting that Tammy is our guest this month, as we celebrate the arrival of Fiona's own collection of poetry: 'On the Brink of Touch', now available from Live Canon. Tamar Yoseloff and Glyn Maxwell, along with Helen Eastman of Live Canon, were all instrumental in ensuring Fiona's collection was published - something Fiona knew was going to happen, even if she didn't get to see her book its final form. 'On the Brink of Touch' is a work of great beauty and immense humanity, and it is extraordinary that we are all now able to hold it in our hands.

Michael also mentions the memorial we held recently to remember and celebrate Fiona, which you can view anytime here.

•••••••••

Morning

by Frank O'Hara

I’ve got to tell you

how I love you always

I think of it on grey

mornings with death

in my mouth the tea

is never hot enough

then and the cigarette

dry the maroon robe

chills me I need you

and look out the window

at the noiseless snow

At night on the dock

the buses glow like

clouds and I am lonely

thinking of flutes

I miss you always

when I go to the beach

the sand is wet with

tears that seem mine

although I never weep

and hold you in my

heart with a very real

humor you’d be proud of

the parking lot is

crowded and I stand

rattling my keys the car

is empty as a bicycle

what are you doing now

where did you eat your

lunch and were there

lots of anchovies it

is difficult to think

of you without me in

the sentence you depress

me when you are alone

Last night the stars

were numerous and today

snow is their calling

card I’ll not be cordial

there is nothing that

distracts me music is

only a crossword puzzle

do you know how it is

when you are the only

passenger if there is a

place further from me

I beg you do not go

From THE COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK O'HARA © 1971 by Maureen Granville- Smith, renewed 1999 by Maureen O'Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Dear friends

We are mourning and missing our beloved Fiona, whilst also celebrating her extraordinary life and work, and everything she brought to all our lives. We continue to feel her with us in everything we do.

This month, we pay tribute to Fiona by re-relasing the conversation in which Fiona visits The Poetry Exchange for herself, talking about the poem that has been a friend to her: 'A Kite for Aibhín' by Seamus Heaney.

The conversation was originally recorded in France in 2017, and you can also find it as episode 23 of the podcast.

We are incredibly grateful for all the amazing messages of support, gratitude, loss and condolence we have received from so many of you around the world. Your words speak volumes about Fiona and the way she touched and changed your lives, whether you knew her in person or simply through listening to her voice each month. Michael reads a small selection of some of these messages at the beginning of the episode.

Please do continue to write to us with thoughts, feelings and memories of Fiona at [email protected].

Fiona's own collection of poetry - On the Brink of Touch - will be published later this month by Live Canon, and we will let you know more about that very soon. You will hear Fiona's reading of her poem 'Imprint' at the end of this episode.

Thank you so much for all your support, love and friendship,

Michael, John and The Poetry Exchange xx

*********

A Kite for Aibhín

by Seamus Heaney

After "L'Aquilone" by Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912)

Air from another life and time and place,

Pale blue heavenly air is supporting

A white wing beating high against the breeze,

And yes, it is a kite! As when one afternoon

All of us there trooped out

Among the briar hedges and stripped thorn,

I take my stand again, halt opposite

Anahorish Hill to scan the blue,

Back in that field to launch our long-tailed comet.

And now it hovers, tugs, veers, dives askew,

Lifts itself, goes with the wind until

It rises to loud cheers from us below.

Rises, and my hand is like a spindle

Unspooling, the kite a thin-stemmed flower

Climbing and carrying, carrying farther, higher

The longing in the breast and planted feet

And gazing face and heart of the kite flier

Until string breaks and—separate, elate—

The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

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Dearest friends,

We are so sorry to have to share the hardest news with you - something we could never imagine having to say...

Our beautiful friend and the founder, co-host and guiding light of The Poetry Exchange, Fiona Bennett, has died after a short illness.

We are so sorry this will come as a huge shock to you all.

It is hard to begin to express the enormous sense of loss, grief and endless love we are feeling for our most beloved Fiona. We know so many of you will be feeling this with us. FIona touched so many people's lives in such a profound way....whether through you listening in to her voice every month on the podcast, or through meeting and knowing Fiona in person.

As Michael puts it in the introduction to this episode: "Fiona was a real one off. She really was one of the very best."

This episode is a converastion Fiona really wanted us to share. It is an exchange with the wondrous David Lewsey about the poem that has been a friend to him: 'The World as Meditation' by Wallace Stevens. We recorded the conversation just a few months ago, and it is wonderful to hear David share all his passion for this poem and for poetry with Fiona and Michael.

We would love to hear from you with any messages, feelings and reflections about Fiona, and you can get in touch with us on [email protected]. We are going to be taking some time to process and face the loss of our beautiful friend, and to think about ways of lifting up and honouring her extraordinary life and legacy.

For now, we are incredibly grateful for all your friendship, and we are sending so much love to you all.

Michael, John and The Poetry Exchange xx

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In this special episode, we share a recording of our live event at Norfolk and Norwich Festival in June 2024, celebrating our new anthology: Poems as Friends.

Michael Shaeffer is joined by contributors to the anthology Roy McFarlane and Hannah Jane Walker, to read a selection of the poems found within its pages, alongside the stories of the readers who have known them as friends.

We are incredibly grateful to the Norfolk & Norwich Festival and the National Centre for Writing for hosting us for this very special event - part of the City of Literature programme - and for all their passion and support for our work with poems as friends. City of Literature is a Norfolk & Norwich Festival and National Centre for Writing presentation, programmed by the National Centre for Writing.

We hope you enjoy listening in!

Poems as Friends: The Poetry Exchange 10th Anniversary Anthology is available now from all good bookshops in the UK and online. It is co-authored by Fiona Bennett and Michael Shaeffer and published by Quercus Editions.

Hannah Jane Walker is an award-winning writer, performer and poet with a socially engaged practice. Her work deals with emotion, vulnerability and the human experience and has been praised for its humour, sincerity and poetic ambition. She published her first book Sensitive with Octopus Hachette and her poetry has been published by Nasty Little Press, Nine Arches Press and in anthologies with Penned in the Margins and Forest Fringe. Her plays are published by Oberon.

Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and has spent most of his years living in Wolverhampton - and more recently in Brighton. He has held the role of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Birmingham & Midland Institute’s Poet in Residence, and is currently the UK Canal Poet Laureate. He has three collections published by Nine Arches Press: Beginning With Your Last Breath (2016); The Healing Next Time (2018), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and Living By Troubled Waters (2022). In 2023, Roy McFarlane was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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In this episode of our podcast, acclaimed writer Nick Laird talks about the poem that has been a friend to him: 'The Envoy of Mr. Cogito' by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Bogdana Carpenter.

Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, and criticism, and lives in London and New York. His poetry collections (from Faber and Faber) are: To a Fault (2005); On Purpose (2007); Go Giants (2015); Feel Free (2018).

We are so grateful to Nick for joining us for this utterly extrarordinary converastion, and to Oxford University Press Ltd for their permission to share Zbigniew Herbert's poem with you in this way.

You can find out more about our upcoming events with our anthology, Poems as Friends, on our website.

'The Envoy of Mr. Cogito' by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Bogdana Carpenter, is read by Fiona Bennett.

*********

The Envoy of Mr. Cogito

by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Bogdana Carpenter

Go where those others went to the dark boundary

for the golden fleece of nothingness your last prize

go upright among those who are on their knees

among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live

you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous

in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea

whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

let your sister Scorn not leave you

for the informers executioners cowards—they will win

they will go to your funeral and with relief will throw a lump of earth

the woodborer will write your smoothed-over biography

and do not forgive truly it is not in your power

to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn

beware however of unnecessary pride

keep looking at your clown’s face in the mirror

repeat: I was called—weren’t there better ones than I

beware of dryness of heart love the morning spring

the bird with an unknown name the winter oak

light on a wall the splendour of the sky

they don’t need your warm breath

they are there to say: no one will console you

be vigilant—when the light on the mountains gives the sign—arise and go

as long as blood turns in the breast your dark star

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends

because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain

repeat great words repeat them stubbornly

like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

and they will reward you with what they have at hand

with the whip of laughter with murder on a garbage heap

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the company of cold skulls

to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland

the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes

Be faithful Go

Zbigniew Herbert, 'The Envoy of Mr. Cogito' translated by Bogdana and John Carpenter, from Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Ltd.

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In this episode, our hearts are full as we are joined by the glorious poet Imtiaz Dharker, talking about the poem that has been a friend to her: 'Meeting Point' by Louis MacNeice.

We are also thrilled to say that this episode will be with you in the month that Poems as Friends - The Poetry Exchange 10th Anniversary Anthology is published - on 9th May 2024. We are hugely grateful to everyone who has contributed poems and stories to its pages, and to all of you for your support and love for The Poetry Exchange over the last 10 years.

Imtiaz Dharker is one of the leading and most widely respected poets of our age. "Reading her, one feels that were there to be a World Laureate, Imtiaz Dharker would be the only candidate." - Carol Ann Duffy. Imtiaz Dharker grew up a 'Muslim Calvinist' in a Lahori household in Glasgow, was adopted by India and married into Wales. She was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014. Her main themes are drawn from a life of transitions: childhood, exile, journeying, home, displacement, religious strife and terror, and latterly, grief.

On 23rd May 2024, Imtiaz's latest collection Shadow Reader is published by Bloodaxe Books. Shadow Reader is a radiant criss-cross of encounters, messages and Punjabi proverbs, shot through with the dark thread of an unwelcome prophecy.

We are so delighted to share this conversation with you in the month that Shadow Reader - and our anthology of Poems as Friends - join us in the world.

Imtiaz Dharker is in conversation with Fiona Bennett and Roy McFarlane.

*********

Meeting Point

by Louis MacNeice

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with the one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):

Time was away and somewhere else.

And they were neither up nor down;

The stream’s music did not stop

Flowing through heather, limpid brown,

Although they sat in a coffee shop

And they were neither up nor down.

The bell was silent in the air

Holding its inverted poise—

Between the clang and clang a flower,

A brazen calyx of no noise:

The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand

That stretched around the cups and plates;

The desert was their own, they planned

To portion out the stars and dates:

The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.

The waiter did not come, the clock

Forgot them and the radio waltz

Came out like water from a rock:

Time was away and somewhere else.

Her fingers flicked away the ash

That bloomed again in tropic trees:

Not caring if the markets crash

When they had forests such as these,

Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good

Be praised that time can stop like this,

That what the heart has understood

Can verify in the body’s peace

God or whatever means the Good.

Time was away and she was here

And life no longer what it was,

The bell was silent in the air

And all the room one glow because

Time was away and she was here.

© 1967 by Louis MacNeice. Reproduced with permission of David Higham Associates, Ltd.

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In this episode of The Poetry Exchange, we talk with one of poetry's greatest leading lights, Malika Booker, about the poem that has been a friend to her: ‘The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner’ by Lorna Goodison.

Malika Booker, currently based in Leeds, is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022).

Malika has won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem TWICE: in 2020 for 'The Little Miracles' (Magma, 2019), and most recently in 2023 for 'Libation', which you can hear her read in this episode.

'Libation' was first published in The Poetry Review (112:4).

‘The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner’ by Lorna Goodison is published in Turn Thanks by Lorna Goodison, University of Illinois Press, 1999.

You can read the full text of ‘The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner’ on our website.

This episode closes with a reading of the poem 'Su Casa' by Andrea Witzke Slot, published in her collection 'The Ministry of Flowers' (Valley Press, 2020).

P.S. don’t forget you can pre-order your copy of Poems as Friends – The Poetry Exchange 10th Anniversary Anthology – which is published by Quercus Editions on 9th May 2024.

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In this special episode, we honour the poetry legend that is Benjamin Zephaniah by sharing this conversation with poet Roy McFarlane, talking about 'Dis Poetry' and the hugely influential part Benjamin Zephaniah has played in Roy's life.

Roy McFarlane is a poet born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage. He has held the roles of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Starbucks’ Poet in Residence and Birmingham & Midland Institute’s Poet in Residence. He has three collections published by Nine Arches Press: Beginning With Your Last Breath (2016); The Healing Next Time (2018), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and Living By Troubled Waters (2022). In 2023, Roy McFarlane was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah (15 April 1958 – 7 December 2023) was a British writer, dub poet, actor, musician and professor of poetry and creative writing. He was included in The Times’ list of Britain's top 50 post-war writers in 2008 and was probably the most televised poet of his generation in the UK. His down-to-earth mission to take poetry wherever he could – and especially to those who would not normally read it – led him to being known to millions as ‘The People’s Poet. Zephaniah was revolutionary in bringing his Jamaican voice, speech and heritage into poetry – both on the page and in performance – opening up doors for many poets to come. A lifelong activist, Zephaniah’s wrote about his lived experiences of incarceration and racism, and was a radical voice for freedom, equality and humanity around the world.  

The recording of 'Dis Poetry', performed by Benjamin Zephaniah, is taken from To Do Wid Me - a 2013 film portrait of Benjamin Zephaniah by Pamela Robertson-Pearce drawing on both live performances and informal interviews. The film and accompanying Selected Poems are available from Bloodaxe Books: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/to-do-wid-me-dvd-book--1038.

Roy McFarlane's extraordinary poem 'In the city of a hundred tongues' is taken from his collection The Healing Next Time, published by Nine Arches Press in 2018.

Roy McFarlane is in conversation with Fiona Bennett and Michael Shaeffer.

*********

Dis Poetry

by Benjamin Zephaniah

Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops

De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots

Dis poetry is designed fe rantin

Dance hall style, big mouth chanting,

Dis poetry nar put yu to sleep

Preaching follow me

Like yu is blind sheep,

Dis poetry is not Party Political

Not designed fe dose who are critical.

Dis poetry is wid me when I gu to me bed

It gets into me dreadlocks

It lingers around me head

Dis poetry goes wid me as I pedal me bike

I've tried Shakespeare, respect due dere

But did is de stuff I like.

Read the full poem on our website.

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