• The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

  • Written by: Chris Jones
  • Podcast
The Two-Way Poetry Podcast cover art

The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

Written by: Chris Jones
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • In each episode Chris Jones invites a poet to introduce a poem by an author who has influenced his, her or their own approach to writing. The poet discusses the importance of this work, and goes on to talk in depth about a poem they have written in response to this original piece.
    Copyright 2023 All rights reserved.
    Show More Show Less
Episodes
  • Lydia Allison on Tom Phillips' A Humument and on her own Metro Erasure Poems

    Lydia Allison on Tom Phillips' A Humument and on her own Metro Erasure Poems
    Feb 20 2024

    In this episode, Lydia Allison reflects on Tom Phillips' 'treated' book A Humument and how it influenced her own Metro erasure poems.

     

    In the interview, Lydia talks about going to an event where Tom Phillips talked about his practice as an artist - and about A Humument in particular. She relates how the book came about and describes its various iterations - the different ‘river’ poems that Phillips came to write using the original text - an obscure Victorian novel entitled A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Lydia discusses the overall ‘narrative’ of the book, and then focuses on two pages in particular: page 40 and page 305 (which you find and can click on below). 

    Lydia then goes on to explain where, why and how she developed her own Metro Horoscope-page found poems.  She talks about the rules that she follows in the making of these works, how she distributes them on social media, and what sort of reactions she has got from printing these versions. We then go on to explore a series of poems, looking in particular at how she uses punctuation and word choices to create her original pieces. 

     

    Lydia Allison is a poet, writing facilitator, creative mentor, and tutor. She has been involved in a number of projects and collaborations, including Stevie Ronnie’s ‘A Diary of Windows and Small Things’, Doncaster Arts’ activity books for lockdown, and ‘Dancing with Words’, a project that paired poets and dancers. Her writing is often inspired by her working life, which spans from bridal consultancy to teaching overseas. 

    She is interested in approaching writing in an experimental and playful way. This largely takes the form of blackout poems where she tries to unearth poems hidden in other interesting texts.

    She has appeared a number of times in print and online, including The Result Is What You See Today, Introduction X, Surfing the Twilight, Poetry Salzburg Review, PN Review, Feral, and Ink, Sweat & Tears. You can read more at lydiaallison.com, or follow her on twitter/X @lydiarallison 

     

    The Tom Phillips poems that we focus on can be found here:

    Page 40 (slideshow): A Humument Page 40 (slideshow)

    Page 305 (Slideshow) A Humument Page 305 (slideshow)

    You can the book in its entirety here (Tom Phillips also reads one version of the book on the website):

    https://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument

     

    I also mention Nicole Sealey in the podcast. You can find her poem "'Pages 1-4,' An Excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure'" here.

     

    Lydia Allison's Metro Erasure Poems

    grow trees start a home. begin now

    /

    It's time to help others, reorganising The what and when

    The Sun moved to mingle with your life and soul

    /

    come in for now, get your thoughts sizzling with romance

     

    be logical but very illogical . Be physical and creative and perfect , Gemini

    /

    Are other people you? the Moon could be . , time time spent beautiful

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Elizabeth Holloway on Sharon Olds' poem 'The Blue Dress' and her own poem 'Blue Dress'

    Elizabeth Holloway on Sharon Olds' poem 'The Blue Dress' and her own poem 'Blue Dress'
    Feb 5 2024
    In this episode, I talk to the poet Elizabeth Holloway about how Sharon Olds’ poem 'The Blue Dress’ influenced the writing of her own poem ‘Blue Dress’. Liz talks about the impact Sharon Olds had on her when her first British collection - The Sign of Saturn - was published (in 1991). She talks about the idea of confessional poetry, and how closely we can connect the author with the narrator of the poem.  She talks about Sharon Olds’ own version  of free verse and how technically skilful she is in terms how she uses uses run-on lines and punctuation to carry the narrative along. Liz also reflects on the different versions of Olds’ persona that are represented in the poem. She talks about the idea of ‘safety’ and disguise in this work, and goes on to discuss the figure of Electra in relation to Olds’ poem too. Liz talks about how aware she was of Olds’ poem when she was writing her own piece ‘Blue Dress’.  She describes the free verse form she has taken on, then explores the similarities and differences between her poem and Olds’ piece.  Liz talks about the use of blue in other mother-daughter relationships she has written about, then considers the tone of the poem - how both doubt and anxiety play a big part in the making of this work. She goes on to examine the ‘prosy’ quality of her poetry and where she allows herself to tune into more heightened language. She talks about touch and feel, and getting back in touch with someone special who has been missing from the narrator’s own life in the context of Falling Mother. Dr Elizabeth Holloway (formerly Elizabeth Barrett) is an award-winning poet whose work has been published extensively in journals and anthologies. She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry. Her first book Walking on Tiptoe (Staple, 1998) focuses, in part, on the diagnosis of her son as autistic. Elizabeth received an Arts Council of England New Writers’ award to support the completion of her follow-up collection, The Bat Detector (Wrecking Ball Press, 2005), which continues to explore the experience of parenting an autistic child. In the collection, Elizabeth uses the metaphor of detecting bats to understand the process of communicating with a non-verbal child. The collection led to a collaboration with the violist Robin Ireland who composed original music for a sequence of the poems. Subsequent collections include Walking on Tiptoe and Other Poems (Bluechrome Press, 2007) and A Dart of Green and Blue (Arc Publications, 2010). In 2018, Elizabeth received a Northern Writers award to support work on her future collection, Falling Mother. Liz Holloway read Sharon Old’s poem ‘The Blue Dress’ from her collection The Sign of Saturn: Poems 1980 - 1987 (Secker and Warburg, 1991) . A version of the poem can be read here: https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/SharonOlds-Anthology.html.   Blue Dress   The call comes out of the blue.  How else? There is only the blue.  It is what we have lived with.  Afterwards, I am dazed by the day. I replay the phone ringing twice — the way I picked up the second time remembering she used to do this.  “It's alright Mum, it’s me calling”. She names a date and place,  the hours she could be there.  She knows it might sound crazy.  Too far away. Afterwards, I wonder  if she heard the hesitation in my voice.   I want to get something for her.  Perhaps because I don't believe  I am enough. Maybe to make up  for birthdays I’ve missed. Or just  to have something, whether true  or a lie.  Something she can't deny  is a gift from her mother. Something  she can hide from her father if he asks.  I would need to pick out something  not too expensive she could say  she bought for herself. Something  un-extraordinary. A plain gift giving  nothing away. Something to wear perhaps.   I choose Oasis, the airy boutique  with a glass lobby and mirrory gallery  at the top of a silver river of stairs.  Thin men in hoodies and tall girls  with eyeliner and ponytails  peer over a chrome rail.  I flatten myself against the side  like a nun, try to be invisible.  I braved this place for her.  Beyond the lobby, random rails  of fluid clothes. Denim. Sweats.  Coats with fur-edged hoods. I don't know who she’s become.   It’s foolish. Impossible. As I turn  to go, a rack of spare clothes — one-offs, small sizes, shop returns — and suddenly a bolt of blue in my eye like shot silk from Shandong. I run it through my fingers. The grain catches. I trace  the scalloped neck to the waist,  test the lay of its deep V over  an inset panel, across the breasts.   I push my hands inside, try to gauge  the space for her ribs. In the LED light  it turns purple indigo delphinium iris.  
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Angelina D'Roza on Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (translated from Sophocles) and her own poem 'Correspondences: The Credence of Birds'

    Angelina D'Roza on Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (translated from Sophocles) and her own poem 'Correspondences: The Credence of Birds'
    Jan 22 2024
    In this episode, I talk to the poet Angelina D’Roza about how an extract from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a verse translation of Sophocles' play Philoctetes, influenced the writing of her own poem ‘Correspondences: The Credence of Birds’. Angelina talks about how Seamus Heaney’s stage directions from The Cure at Troy grabbed her attention, the ‘right thing at the right time.’ She goes on to discuss how she uses this text (and other corresponding texts) as a way in to explore a subject like colonialism, but it’s as much the delight in language at the beginning of the play, apparent in Heaney’s translation, that drew her in. She talks about how she negotiates appropriation of other writer's work in her poetry. Angelina then goes on to expand on all the different influences, alongside Heaney’s stage notes, including the inciting incident from Damon Albarn’s opera Dr Dee, and a poem by Jane Kenyon (on ‘the presence of an absence’) , that worked their way in to her own piece. Angelina develops at length her own processes as a writer, how she draws on exemplary texts from a wide range of sources, a patchwork approach, as a way of an introduction to her own poem ‘Correspondences: The Credence of Birds’. She talks about the play-like quality of this poem, and where it geographically references in the Peak District. She discusses how she doesn’t want to explain all the levels of ambiguity in the poem - to keep those spaces open for herself and the reader. Angelina reflects on bird-lore, and on notions of time before finishing the conversation by discussing how lyrics and songs have influenced her own approach to writing poems. You hear Angelina read an extract from The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles Philoctetes (Faber, 2018). Angelina D'Roza lives in Sheffield. She was a writing mentor with the Koestler Trust and writer in residence at Bank Street Arts, collaborating with artists, writers, photographers. Most recently her work appears in Blackbox Manifold and Shearsman Press. Her debut collection Envies the Birds was published by Longbarrow Press in 2016. The Blue Hour is Angelina's new collection and was released by Longbarrow at the end of 2023.     Correspondences: The Credence of Birds   A gritstone edge. Boulders higgledy-piggledy with sprouts of purple heather. No sun to speak of but light diffuse and silver, an evenness to it. Maybe rain, if there’s the wherewithal. Or a sort of shimmer to the flattened grass, as though rain has been. An absence left. A man in a red anorak, a bouldering mat folded on his back, walks quickly right to left. If Heaney’s chorus of boulder-still birds beginning to stretch from under their shawls can be made as lovely as he wrote it, do it. Pheasants, falcons. A spray of meadow pipits darting out from their hair and hands. Chip-chip- chip-chip. A woman climbs the rocks toward a platform stage-right, with the silhouette of an ancient fort just about suggested. The birdsong continues – ek-ek-ek-ek – but she is alone. Perhaps she addresses herself. Or perhaps, someone else. Someone absent. No questions, but the fractals in the bracken, their green mathematics transposed as music, the closing cadence that resolves the song.       She:   I might believe that a kingfisher strung up on silk can predict the weather, or that placing the semen of a pigeon on someone’s shirt can make that person love you. You think it’s wild, but you believe time runs as the crow flies. Take the roses replanted to my new house, those roses that know a home before this, my young son, the woman I was, its stems grown long and winding through the pale fuchsia, the fuchsia with its pale pink memory of a previous owner. The latitude of these two recollections mapped in space, in gradients, and tangled into a grammar of now, or here, the woman I am. I would send you their late bloom like a temple tumbling into the sea to keep in your wallet with the present tense and the half built, a botanical representation of time, the ongoing of what’s gone inscribed in the ground underfoot.      Chorus:   sip-sip-sip-sip     A cage in the side of a boulder opens. A Japanese tit flies out and across the water. A stone arch at the back of the stage, where the river runs down to the orchestra pit. Hanging from the stone, an iron hook and a small bell. The bird rings the bell and collects a folded piece of paper that could be your fortune from the hook, flies into the gods. Let it go.   She:   I would send you John Cale’s “Big White Cloud”. After all is said and done / everything is just like it began. But time flows one way, whatever leaves it gathers in its talons, and to predict is to look back, to believe that autumn will cause the trees to redden. Bergson says that what we express is the dead leaves floating on the surface of the water, the various and fugitive reduced to the same handful of words, as though love isn’t ...
    Show More Show Less
    59 mins
Literature & Fiction Art
Show More Show Less

What listeners say about The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

Average Customer Ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.in reviews

Amazon Reviews
No Reviews are Available