Rachael Hi, everybody. Thank you for being here with us tonight for the live recording of the Faber Poetry Podcast. If you're all avid and dedicated listeners, you'll know that we always really deeply prepare for these podcasts. We've got lots of really amazing surprises and guests and poems and chat for you this evening. And maybe we need to, well, kick off by introducing ourselves. My name is Rachael Allen.

Jack I'm Jack Underwood, and you're listening to the Faber Poetry Podcast.

Rachael Are you playing the tune?

Jack I haven't got the tune.

Rachael Oh, usually there's a tune that goes dum dum dum [hums the opening of the podcast theme tune]. So I'll just not do the rest of it but yeah.

Jack We'll keep that in.

Rachael Okay.

Jack So normally we start with a poetry, what are they called?

Rachael Postcard.

Jack Audio postcard. But we thought, because we're actually out of the studio and we're live, we should do a live postcard from here to the podcast that makes sense?

Rachael And to everyone.

Jack And to everyone. And one of the groups of people that I realised were a little underrepresented on the podcast, audio postcard bits— was dead people. Faber published loads of dead people, and we had not really tapped into this resource. If you are a dead person listening to the podcast, I'm just going to say it's not too late, maybe shoot your shot. But wanting a dead person on the podcast does obviously involve some material barriers, some logistical problems.

Rachael Unless you're doing a seance.

Jack Yes, unless you're doing a seance. In fact, we have the, I think we've mentioned before that the ghost of Elizabeth Bishop is like-

Rachael Oh, she haunts the podcast.

Jack Haunts the podcast. But what can you do when you want a dead poet to be here, well you get somebody to read their work for them. And we are very lucky, like it's an outrageous luxury, really, to have a special guest to read it. So, a clue, okay. Our special guest has fought a terminator, whizzed through the fabric of space time, defeated an army of the dead, and also, I googled this, also holds the status of Super Scroll, making her the most powerful character in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Her electric West End debut as Nina in Jamie Lloyd's production of Chekov's The Seagull, was lauded as hypnotic and irresistible. And she's also the founder of SameYou, an amazing charity which supports people recovering from brain injury. And tonight she's going to be reading Charlotte Mew's poem, 'The Trees Are Down'. So please welcome our special guest, Emilia Clarke.

Jack Hello. Welcome.

Emilia Thank you for having me. Thank you, everyone.

Jack Now, I saw on the internet that you do a really good Californian accent, but I'm not going to insist...

Emilia No, don't make me do that. I mean, I could. It would just sound very different.

Jack Maybe we'll do an outtakes at the end or something. But yeah, so Charlotte Mew, 'The Trees Are Down'. Do you want to go for it?

Emilia Yeah, shall I crack on?

Jack Yeah.

Emilia Do you want me to do it into the microphone?

Jack Oh, yeah, you need to do it in the microphone.

Emilia It's a podcast, innit.

Jack I know, so professional.

Emilia [Reads the poem, 'The Trees Are Down' by Charlotte Mew]

Jack Thank you. [Applause.] So Charlotte Mew, late 19th century, I think. The first thing that struck me about this poem, was that it's a rhymer. It's a really sneaky rhyming poem. You don't notice it because of the long lines, so the longer the line, the more you can smuggle the rhymes in. I just thought that was like... I like how subtle that is, that it's not really, it's not like landing heavily.

Rachael Yeah, the rhyme feels built in. Can I be heard? I'm so loud, so maybe I can just scream my head off, but I can be heard, can't I?

Jack I think so. You can be heard on my mic.

Rachael I feel like so much of a tree hugger that this poem... And I hadn't actually even read this poem before, and I don't know if it's quite famous, 'The Trees Are Down'?

Emilia I'd never heard of it.

Rachael Really?

Jack I don't think it's that famous. I suppose, Mew is now famously underrated or not talked about.

Rachael I feel like it's so prophetic, when she says something like, 'unmake the spring'. I was saying to Jack that I feel like we're living through this period of time where the seasons are making us feel so dislocated from what we have historically experienced, and to have this proto eco poem position that dislocation from this very material sense of losing an ecological space that makes someone feel so grounded and so rooted and so normalised, just feels really sad and really moving. I was thinking about Rachel Carson as well, Silent Spring, and these very visionary female thinkers who were able to perceive what was happening ecologically and be so lucid in presenting that long before our contemporary language of the anthropocene and ecological loss.

Jack But it's also a very, I think, as much as it speaks to that, like a wider predicament or problem, it's also like a very personal, situated poem, isn't it? About that tragic thing of watching trees coming down.

Rachael How does it feel to read?

Emilia Beautiful. It feels so mournful. It feels like, as I was telling you guys before, I'm a country girl and near me, where my mum lives at the moment where I grew up from the age of 13, there's this incredible walk that we go on and it's lined with all of these really old, really beautiful trees, and they all recently just got cut down. The estate deemed it necessary. And we just howled. It was visceral, seeing these things. I mean, my mum was just mouthing off at all of these poor guys who were just doing their job. We were like, 'What are you doing?!' But I felt so close to this poem and these words because I was raised with these trees. And I think when you've got something... When your landscape is constant and yet unseen because you're so used to it, as soon as that thing is removed, be it a building or nature, it feels huge. It feels like such a monumental shift in your world, and it makes you see everything differently and the transformation of landscapes, I just think it's really… For me anyway, it feels primal when you see it.

Rachael It's really visceral, isn't it?

Emilia It's really visceral. And she's done such a beautiful job within her choice of language and the way that the – I'm sure I read it wrong – but the way that it sounds when you're saying it out loud, you feel that loss and you feel that jagged, like the different thoughts of this lovely rat that you love so much, Jack.

Jack I do love the rat. Yeah, the rat really steals the show for me.

Emilia Really? Well, it's a very clear image.

Jack Yeah. Well, I sort of like that there is just finding a big rat, a big dead rat.

Rachael That's very country as well, isn't it?

Jack Yeah.

Emilia Very London as well.

Rachael And very London. Brings us together.

Emilia It does. It really does.

Jack I love the description of 'a large rat'.

Emilia Yeah, not a small one, because it could be a mouse.

Jack Yeah, it's a big fat rat in the mud of the drive. 'And I remember thinking alive or dead, a rat was a God-forsaken thing.' And they're bigger. I think what I love about this poem is actually how the things are bigger than they are when they're dead or different. We had a massive eucalyptus tree fall over in our garden, and what shocked me was actually the size of it. You get used to seeing things standing up and suddenly a tree is on the floor and like, oh, my God, this is massive. It's like a beast, like a dinosaur. It felt like a dinosaur had been felled, had been killed. Yeah, like a whale. And it's the same with like, I don't know, when you see a dead rat, because you get to have a look at it and you're like, do you know what, they're quite big, aren't they?

Emilia They move quite fast, don't they?

Jack They do.

Emilia You're not conscious of the size of them.

Jack Their tails are as thick as your finger, and they're muscular.

Emilia They get a bad rap, though, rats.

Jack Well, this one gets somewhat of...

Emilia She's not a fan, I'd say.

Jack What does she say? 'But even in May, at least a rat should be alive. Oh, the God-forsaken thing.' And then it comes back, and if it wasn't for the rat dying, she might never have thought of him again. So maybe, I don't know.

Rachael Well, size and realisation seems to factor quite a lot into this because there's the men laughing and whooping above the trees as they're being cut down. And then there's that zooming into the minutiae or the not so minutiae shape of the dead rat, and then it comes back out of it and it feels global with spring being unmade. And I feel like there's this zooming in and out, which I think the best eco-minded, eco-critical work does. It encapsulates the minutiae and the intimate and the interior with something larger, global, more epic. Well, it complicates or problematises how we perceive things, which is what I feel like she's doing here with size and mastery and humans and animals and landscape. It feels very zoomy.

Jack I think the zooming is also time as well as space because it starts in medias res. Is that the term? They are cutting down, present tense, they're cutting down the great plane trees.

Rachael Which is interesting with the title, because the trees are down, they are cutting down. There's like a movement between what has been definitively, what has definitively happened back to the occasion of the happening.

Jack And then she hones in on one evening. 'I remember one evening of last spring', and that's where the rat belongs. The rat's not really actually in the poem at all. He's a memory of a rat. 'And then the week's work here, as good as done.' So suddenly it shifted, and then at the end, 'it's going now. And my heart has been struck with the hearts of the plains. Half my life.' It's just constantly dilating time.

Rachael Here's the book, for anybody who'd like to buy the beautiful collected poetry and prose. Because I'm keeping an eye on the time, and as much as I'd like to carry on talking about Mew and trees, we've got a couple of other guests.

Jack We do. What I love about the poem as well is that, as much as the rat is the thing I think about now, as you may have gathered it's my preoccupation. But I think it's rewarding. Every time you read it, there's a different thing you notice. Just the fact they're plane trees and stuff like that, you have to look them up. They're the ones that make everybody really allergic here aren't they?

Jack They've got dangly, bauble frond-y bits and the camo design bark.

Emilia Aren't all trees camo designed?

Jack Yeah!

Rachael Camouflage is inherently an ecological concept.

Jack I know. I've really Anthropocened myself, haven't I? I have. I have. Yeah, great. And also we're talking about that movement of time and space, I'm thinking around this time it's written, we're getting the beginnings of general theory of relativity, I think, or getting to that stage, proto modernism. Proto eco poem. Very interesting.

Rachael Thank you so much for reading it.

Jack Thank you so much.

Emilia So welcome. It was a joy. Thank you.

Jack And you get to take this away with you. Lucky.

Emilia Thank you so much.

Rachael We have more guests... I feel like I'm on a game show with this.

Jack With the mic.

Rachael I just keep bringing people out. Who's next? Well, we actually know who's next.

Jack Yeah, we do know who's next.

Rachael Would you like to join us?

Jack In total silence. They don't exist until we've introduced them formally.

Rachael That's the way of it.

Rachael Hello.

Oluwaseun Hello.

Rachael How did you enjoy that poem?

Oluwaseun Very much so. I wanted to sit in this [Emilia's] chair.

Ishion You want to sit here?

Oluwaseun No, but you have it.

Ishion But sure, you want to?

Oluwaseun No, no. Should we perform switching? No.

Rachael You can do what you want.

Oluwaseun Yeah, you can. This is your show.

Rachael We will introduce you then.

Jack I think they've introduced themselves.

Rachael If you introduce Ishion?

Jack I will. I don't need your mic. I keep thinking that you feel like I want to steal it off you, but I don't. I'm already mic'd up. Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critic Circle Award in poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among others. Ishion also has the greatest honour of all, I think, really, which is to be the very first poet to be back on the podcast, having been a previous guest. So surely that's the summit of anyone's career. Please welcome Ishion.

Ishion Thank you.

Rachael We also have Oluwaseun Olayiwola, who is a poet and a critic who is a part of the Ledbury critic scheme. I am his editor, so I'm going to talk a little bit about his incredible forthcoming collection called Strange Beach, which will be here in 2025. Strange Beach is a lyrically accumulative, internationally-reaching, globally-minded document that reaches inside bodies, minds, relationships, language, to culminate in a deeply feeling, deeply felt book of dynamic, moving work. It's coming in 2025 and we're going to hear some poems from it this evening, which I'm really happy about. But first Ishion is going to read a few poems for us from his new collection, School of Instructions, which is absolutely phenomenal. I think it was published yesterday. Was it yesterday? Thursday.

Ishion Today in the States.

Rachael Oh, today in the States. Okay, congratulations. That's amazing. Yeah, it's an extraordinary book, and I was lucky enough to hear you read some poems from the collection last night, and I've been thinking a little bit about the commingling narratives within the I guess it's a long poem, actually, more than a selection of poems and the sound sense that you bring through, the characters that emerge throughout the book. And I wondered if you wanted to read us a few poems that might exemplify the narrative that runs through and also the incredible, dextrous stuff you do with language and sound and play.

Ishion OK. Thanks for that, Rachael. It's really nice to be back and to see you both and to be here with you. I didn't plan what to read. I think, Rachael, I was hoping you would have specific ideas, and I would just follow through. What I'll do then is probably just open the book randomly and read this page, these two pages.

Oluwaseun 56 and 57 for those of you with the book.

Ishion Okay. But I'm just going to switch. Um. No, OK, pages 56 and 57. You will hear a few things. One of which is the name of a boy, a name, Godspeed, which is the name of a boy who is the central character in this book. Godspeed is just his nickname. We don't know his real name. He's a 12-year-old boy. He becomes 13 later in the book. He lives in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. He lives mostly with his grandmother, who appears in this part of the book. But you'll also hear other names, names of places, place names, which are place names in rural Jamaica, but also place names in the Middle East. Because this book concerns West Indian soldiers who were volunteers in British regiments in World War I, mostly in the Middle East. They fought all over or were… They also were in Europe doing the things that we know all World War I soldiers did in the trenches and so on. But they saw combat mostly in the Middle East. So the book is concerned with their experience in that region. [Ishion Hutchinson reads from School of Instructions].

Ishion Should I just read one more? One more page? Here is page 71. And maybe I could explain one word that you'll hear, which is a Jamaicanism. I'm not too sure you might recognise it. When somebody cuts school, in Jamaica you say skull school, meaning you don't show up. That word has been used in that context in the opening part of this poem. [Ishion reads from School of Ins

Rachael This book is just so extraordinary. I feel like it's one of the best, definitely one of the best books of poetry I've read this year, if not for a long time.

Ishion Thank you.

Rachael As you introduced it earlier, you talked briefly about the, I suppose, intersecting, interlocking, interweaving narratives or modes that make up the book. The experiences of West Indian volunteers in British regiments during the First World War and this incredibly irreverent, very almost cute and strange narrative of Godspeed, the schoolboy who's living in Jamaica in the 90s. I feel like with the commingling of these two narrative forces or narrative trains, you build this allegorical mythological feeling of a world that feels quite recognisable, but then is also something that is particular to the histories that you're speaking through and speaking to. And just from a practical sense, I was wondering how you brought these modes together because there is archival work, there are statistics that weave their way through the book, and there is this very secure narrative that runs through, not from Godspeed's perspective, but definitely we move with him and follow him in his orbit as he navigates and negotiates family and landscape and people and putting all of this into such a cohesive and gripping long poem, actually such a masterful long poem. I was just in awe of how you managed to bring these things together and I wanted to talk to you about that, the commingling of narratives and the framework of the book as a whole.

Ishion Yeah. Thanks for that question, for framing it that way. I'm pleased it came across as such to you. It's a big question, and I'm trying to think of the best way to tackle it and not go on and on. I think the first thing I would say is the poems that I love, that I returned to inspired me and taught me a lot, pointed me into ways that I could think about creating this poem. One such poem is David Jones In Parenthesis, which is a book-length poem about one day in the Battle of the Somme. 1915, I think it is set. Just one day, but it's I don't know, maybe 200 pages long. And it's a mixture of different styles of writing: short, lyric passages; long prose passages. There's a jarring effect in which these things are combined. But there are several characters and many voices that stream through. It's a difficult poem to read, and at first reading it's very confusing because it's very difficult to make sense of what is happening. But I don't think Jones was concerned too much, if I may presume, about our understanding of the narrative as such. I think he was interested in communicating a texture of what an experience might have felt like and wanted to make a reader, a listener, a hearer relive such an experience. For me, a poem begins in its rhythmic textural formation. And that's a very mysterious place, because where does rhythm come from? I grew up in a landscape overlooking, on a hill overlooking the sea. I feel that is part of my own rhythmic shape, in the vantage of that perspective and then watching the water and its movement. Once you, in the context of a Caribbean person, looking at their landscape, it's innocent, it's beautiful, but if you think for a moment about the history and your own place in that history, it becomes very complex. The beauty is then complicated. That's what this poem tries to do. It tries to hold on to the double experience of trying to communicate as much of the archival work that I did with the natural landscape of the Jamaica that I know, collapsing those two things into one. So a lyric is simultaneity.

Jack That thing of when you're reckoning with history and geography and experience, I think that so often, at least when we think about history, we tend to think about the facts of the matter or to present a linear version of events, and it's almost like why would anyone try to write a poem that would compete with precisely that mode of thinking? Whereas the real strength of a poetic enterprise is the fact that it can hold dissonance and it can hold contradiction, or it can be in the 1990s and in the early 20th century at the same time. I suppose it's like, yeah, I can only imagine that you have to start somewhere and then get lost in it.

Ishion Exactly. You begin somewhere and, again, it's a pre-verbal beginning because you hear it, you try to figure out what the words might be to fill that vacuum of rhythmic pressure because you have to resort to words and so on. But I want to say something very practical in response, that the poem came as a commission to respond to the archival material in 2018 because of the centenary of the war. So I had a beginning place to just think about this and try to write movingly about it.

Jack Do you think you would have got there without that commission? Because I always feel like when you're commissioned to do something, often it's out of need, financial necessity or just like… And sometimes you can feel like, Oh, God, the last thing I want to write a poem about is this.

Ishion I've been forced to write a poem.

Jack Yeah, but then it can actually, in order to accommodate it in your own poetic, you have to get busy and think differently.

Ishion That's why it took seven years.

Jack Oh, wow. How did they feel about that from the commission point of view? Did you make the deadline?

Ishion Yes. I wrote something, and then but I was so… It's maybe a little bit overused word, but I was very haunted by what I had discovered in the archives, and I felt I had to do justice to that material. And so I kept... Or the poem didn't want to release me, so I had to live with it for a couple of years.

Rachael David Jones makes so much sense to me, actually, thinking about In Parenthesis because it's so ephemeral. There's so much different kinds of material, pictorial matter, textual play and the format and formatting of this book is so stunning and its pseudo, chaptered nature, which makes the mythological fable feeling propel even further. Your language play in the book is just so fantastic. There's this repetitious mode that you fall into and a tonal irreverence that feels very specific to the histories that you're writing into and about and these fantastic nicknames and references that you have woven through.

Jack And the music, the singing.

Rachael Yeah, the singing, yeah, which I heard quite a bit of last night, and yeah, it's just such a fantastic bringing together of all these different forms and ephemeras.

Oluwaseun Does it feel playful to you?

Ishion I hope it feels playful to someone who encounters it. I had fun at some point, after… you know. Because I think that once you're in the mire of the poem, you're uncertain about where it's going to get. Because you work on several drafts, you destroy them, you salvage what you can. But then the characters start to become really funny, in their own voice. For instance, my own personal – the best fun I had was creating these puns. There are a lot of veiled puns. Some friends who read drafts didn't discover them, which is painful because I realised that my friends aren't that smart.

Jack I always find that a delightful revelation myself.

Rachael Jack is really good at puns. He'll get them.

Ishion Oh, really? Well, we should have a pun-off.

Rachael He'd do that.

Jack Maybe.

Rachael I'm not good at puns.

Jack We have to set it up properly. I'm not just going to launch into it now.

Rachael Go.

Ishion No. But yes, the playfulness, I think, and not just in the bits of when characters speak, but the way that – because it's mostly not in lines, it's short prose forms throughout, which is difficult to actually to emulate upon with that style so I had to figure out how to get the texture again in a punning way, but maintaining the integrity of the elegiac feel that the poem is, the mood of that elegising, eulogising frame that the poem is mostly trying to put forward.

Oluwaseun I think the reason I asked was because I actually, when I'm reading your so luscious language, I actually feel it's dead serious. Not as dead serious as in without pleasure, but there are words, especially adjectives particularly that I've never seen in my life here and with another poet I might feel like, Oh, well, you're just showing off. Whereas when I read you, there are just so many good adjectives in this that it doesn't feel like a game because this is the only way in which this can be described to you. That's why I asked if it was playful because I was like, even though there is a linguistic play, it feels as if it just feels that the expanses, the edges of language you go to are the only way in which this could come, you know transmit, to us. There's something very serious about these almost words that feel as if they're from a completely different time.

Rachael It feels like it has its own dictionary. That's what I was thinking. And within that there's a theatrical aspect to it as well.

Oluwaseun There's the encyclopaedic as well, which keeps on… It feels encyclopaedic by these words, as if you like, which I'm just assuming these are words you have off the dome, but there's this encyclopaedic feel to it that just doesn't feel like it was for fun or just to say you need a… It doesn't feel like pizzazz.

Jack Or nerdery.

Ishion What?

Speaker 5 Nerdery, like nerdy. Something that's just like...

Rachael God forbid. We're up here talking about poems [laughs].

Jack Within the schema of nerdiness.

Ishion Well, I want to defend the nerds and the nerdy readers of poetry, who read against the grain of what you're told to read, you know you're given certain poets and you're told that those are the poets you should read. I think, yes, do it, but also become an autodidact who reads widely, who reads in ways that would surprise others like, Oh, you read that. Sometimes I actually read just for that reason. And someone says, because they have certain presumptions about you, you read this and then I'm like, 'Well, you know what? I'm into so and so' and it's always a blank stare, which I relish.

Rachael Oluwaseun, would you like to do a little reading for us? Bring you in.

Oluwaseun Can you hear me? Clunkily, bring my laptop out. Thanks for being here and thanks for thinking of me to read with Ishion. I love this podcast, which I got into about three months ago, but now I've listened to every single episode that there is.

Rachael I can't listen back to them.

Oluwaseun Really?

Rachael Yeah, because I'm so emotional and flirty and all over the place.

Jack When you're listening back to them?

Oluwaseun As you're listening back to them?

Jack Or just permanently. Well, what I do like is the unpredictable chemistry of it, as you've seen so far. It's just nice to... I, too, cannot listen back to them.

Oluwaseun Well, I'm very grateful for the very deep reading of Simulacrum you did, two podcast episodes ago. And in that vein, I'm actually thought I'm going to read a substitute one because I'll say it when I get there. But yeah, thank you for coming. I'm just going to read three poems from Strange Beach. I won't say much before the first two, and then a little bit before the last one because it's a bit disconnected. This one is called 'Fate'. A lot of my titles are just words that hopefully the poem is almost like a field in which – the language of the poem is a field, moves inside the field of the title. [Oluwaseun reads 'Fate' from Strange Beach, forthcoming in 2025].

Oluwaseun The second part I'm going to read is from Simulacrum, there's a character, a man, an imagined other, which happens a lot in this collection. It's just a he who is an amalgam of all the he's that have existed in a way. But the same he from Simulacrum is the same he that I'm going to read. This is the same he who brought up this poem. It's originally called 'Siren'. I considered re-titling it to 'Greek Lesson After Anal', but I think 'Siren' is a little more mysterious.

Jack I disagree. I think the other one carries a certain mystery.

Oluwaseun The book is still in flux, I guess we can think about that.

Rachael I'm on Jack's side.

Oluwaseun We'll try it out. 'Greek Lesson After Anal'

Ishion I'm neutral.

Oluwaseun You're neutral. OK, afterwards, please come let me know which one you liked more. 'Greek Lesson After Anal' slash 'Siren'. [Oluwaseun reads from 'Siren', taken from Strange Beach]

Oluwaseun And then the last one I'm going to read is just this end of a five-part poem that is about dying on a ski slope – which I've never been, which I've never done – or on a mountain – which I've never been to. But it's a five-part poem about a skier who falls into the snow and his life flashes before him. And the part I'm going to read for you is when the people… Who are the people who help you in a tragedy?

Rachael Paramedics?

Oluwaseun The paramedics! Yes, the paramedics. This is the moment after there's been this flash, and then he gets consciousness back. [Oluwaseun reads a poem].

Rachael Thank you so much. As you were reading, I was like, oh, okay, there are so many things now that I want to ask you both about textures and ambience and histories and male histories and also religion and bodies. But first, I think you've both bought talismans for us to have a look at. So usually on the podcast we ask our readers to bring in a small object that exemplifies their writing process or means something to their writing process. And we've had a whole range of things before, brought to us and sometimes we've forgotten to tell the readers and we pretend that they've bought it to us. But this time, maybe we have real ones. You've already had to do this once. Have you managed to cough up a new talisman?

Ishion I've not managed to cough up a new one. But on the way here, I was going to cut a sprig of rosemary from the entrance of the hotel. I noticed it, because my writing desk at home is full of clutter and amongst the stuff on the desk there are lots of branches and leaves and so on. But I forgot to do that so I don't have the rosemary with me.

Rachael We often pretend. We often just say, Oh, it's here, but it's not so rosemary.

Jack This is really behind the curtain.

Rachael Oh, sorry.

Jack We shouldn't say that.

Rachael No, it's always there.

Jack I think, yeah, if you say that, then people could feel like you could just bring anything, and we'll have like a Friesian cow one series.

Oluwaseun What's a Friesian cow?

Jack It's like a big milk cow, isn't it?

Rachael It's a normal cow.

Jack A regular cow. No, Friesian. Anyway, I think it's better to pretend at least, to set some physical parameters. But anyway, you wouldn't want to bring a Friesian cow into the LRB Bookshop. So what have you bought for us?

Oluwaseun What I've brought, I've worn. I've brought these two rings that I have for the podcast people, I suppose, who will hear this in the future. One of them is a ring with skulls on it, with black jewels. And the other one, I think this is like a normal... It's a very common sign. There's a name for it.

Jack A fleur-de-lis, is that?

Oluwaseun Fleur-de-lis?

Jack I believe so.

Oluwaseun It has a fleur-de-lis on it, and I guess their relation to my writing practise is, I got them at a time. I got them two months before the pandemic began in a country on the Iberian Peninsula, and of which there are only two. I guess this is to be anonymous. I don't know. Anyway, I got them on one of the countries on the Iberian Peninsula. Basically, I had been cheated on at that time, and I'd gone to visit my man at the time who was on the Iberian Penisular, and I thought he was going to get me a gift to repair. It's not really my love language, but I thought like, okay, well, he'll give me… It'll be a gesture that will make everything OK, which is obviously just the structure that you need to believe, which is not true. Anyway, so we get to the ring shop, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to get these rings. I started looking. And he's like, choose which one you want. I start looking and I get them. I get these two. Then I go to the counter and I start to do the thing where you look away and you're like, Oh, this is so… Then I'm turning around and there's nothing happening. I'm turning away and they're not being paid for. Then I got really upset. I was like, wait, I thought this was your… You were meant to show me you love me through this.

Jack He gave you the gift of going to a shop?

Oluwaseun He gave me... yeah, essentially. We had a nice South African cuisine later that was fine. But at that moment, he did say – and I'm going to bring this back because there's writing in this – he said, 'You're going to be so happy that you bought these for yourself'. And in that moment… Yeah, okay. We could talk about this a little bit after. But in that moment, I was so upset. But obviously, I had spent – it wasn't a crazy amount of money, but it was like a lot of money for me at the time. And then we broke up over it years ago. But now, actually, with that time, I am really glad that I bought them for myself. And the way this comes into my writing practice is that need of time to have the perspective. Of feeling that there was meant to be this like third skin that was going to heal us because he bought it for me, which in that moment it could have been, it wasn't, but it could have been, and then also the after, of that perspective that happens. I think this comes back to writing because that's often how I work with my poems as well, because I'm not really a good tinkerer. I'm quite an ecstatic person, and I'm just going to get it all out on the page, and then I'll forget about it, usually for months, and then I'll change or another thing will happen, and then with that time in between, I'll be able to see whether it needs to be aborted, whether it needs to be cut, whether maybe it is finished and I'm just done with that, or if it needs to be slashed for parts and absorbed into the new poem I'm writing at that time.

Rachael Well, I wanted to talk to you about bodies and male bodies and your work as a choreographer and a dancer and the dynamics and the dynamism of your work that feels like it travels through and in and out of bodies and spaces and erotics in a way that feels so external and so internal, so domestic and so mapped onto landscape and ecologies. I guess this is more of a comment, not a question.

Jack It's our podcast, we can do what we like.

Rachael I feel like when I'm reading your poems and when you read them, I feel like there's such physicality and there's such movement. I love speaking to people who have various disciplines and those disciplines feed into each other, and I wondered about that cerebral, semantic, physical relationship that you bring into the work.

Oluwaseun Well, I think it's rhythm. I think like what Ishion was saying, rhythm is a really big part of my work. I think when I was starting to write, which I still am starting to write, I think I only started writing five years ago, but really started thinking about really poetry as a way of existing, like three years ago so I'm still very much at the beginning. But I remember I felt like I had… I think there was a long time where I thought to be a poet of the body and a dancer meant I just have to list the body in the poem, and that would make it a poem of the body, which I'm only now coming out of… The word thorax happens a lot, torso, hands, generally happen a lot in poetry, but there is a lot of descriptions of anatomy, but I don't necessarily know if that makes it a physiological thing. I think a lot about Gregory Orr's The Four Temperaments, where he talks about how music is that thing that goes straight to the heart. That, for me, now when I'm conceptualising a poetry of the body, if you can get inside someone else's… almost like you're disrupting their circadian rhythm with the rhythm that you're transmitting from your poems, you're essentially trying to send this vibration into them. And if you can get them on your wavelength, essentially, then that, for me, is a physiological endeavour. I think there's a lot of poetry that mentions the body, but it doesn't actually go inside it. I think rhythm for me, as I'm going through my poems and I say rhythm and I don't have a super big experience doing prosodic analysis of my poems, it really is just what sounds true. Like the beginning of 'Greek Lessons After Anal'. He had the characters accurate, but it's all that jostling around in rhetoric until you land somewhere else and that pushing and pulling.

Jack Do you think that a lot of the time when poets also do something else, whether they're a musician or an actor, or people are always keen to have that analogy? What's the difference or what's the same? I feel like… I'm not going to do that now, don't worry. But I do think that in the imaginary world of your poems, there is this intuitive sense that, oh, maybe I could be doing this thing over here. And fighting against, as you're saying, with the almost like the comforting cliché or completion of the ex buying the ring, resisting that. And the way in which dance is also like a resisting of the mannerism in favour of something more intuitive and spontaneous, and that constant back and forth. Oh, no, did I just do a dance poetry analogy? Yeah, I did. Oh, well.

Rachael It worked.

Jack It was okay.

Rachael I like bringing the idea of the body back to sound. And I think about one of my favourite pamphlets by Sylvia Legris, called Pneumatic Antiphonal, where she's writing about birdsong, but using the biological processes of the human throat and lungs and the bird body to indicate the processes that go towards making noise from the body. And it does link me to, I think, what you're doing, Ishion, in School of Instructions as well, which is, you know the mud poem is just so evocative and so bodily. And there is a, we do have sound systems within us that we aren't necessarily privy to and that are just occurring in us and grumbling away and beating away. Before I carry on, I have to do a time check because we are running over. Would you like to read us a poem to finish? Because I think we're probably at the end, right?

Jack Could we hear the mud poem?

Rachael Maybe.

Jack Ishion, could you do a request?

Ishion Sure. I mean, do people have the stamina?

Jack Yeah.

Ishion Do I have it? [Ishion reads an extract from School of Instructions]

Rachael Maybe we'll finish with a poem.

Oluwaseun I'm going to read a poem called 'Routine'. It's about being an American in a country where you have health care, just by virtue of being here, which seems like a crazy concept. [Oluwaseun reads 'Routine'.]

Rachael Thank you so much to our incredible guests Ishion and Oluwaseun. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you and hear you read. Thank you, everybody, so much for staying over time. You are now free to go. And thank you to all our listeners who will be listening to this in the future or your present.