Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Podcast

Niall Munro
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The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre podcast focusses upon the work of one poet or features discussion about poetry with poets and academics. The theme music for the podcast, entitled ‘Leaving for the North’, was composed by Aneurin Rees, and played by Aneurin Rees (guitar) and Rosalie Tribe (violin). For more information about the Poetry Centre, look up our website or find us on social media @brookespoetry

  1. 04/01/2025

    Episode 27: Maurice Riordan

    This episode features a conversation with Maurice Riordan, whose Selected Poems has just been published by Faber. The poems were selected by the poet Jack Underwood, who also provides an introduction to the book, explaining his choices. Maurice Riordan is an Irish poet, translator, teacher, and editor who was born in County Cork in Ireland. The Selected Poems features work from his first book, A Word from the Loki (published in 1995), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and runs through to his most recent collection from 2021, Shoulder Tap. It includes poems from four other books, as well as a previously uncollected poem. Maurice’s collection Floods, published in 2000, was a Book of the Year in the Sunday Times and Irish Times, whilst The Holy Land (from 2007) won the Michael Hartnett Award. The Water Stealer (2013) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Maurice’s interest with science and the environment, whilst evident in his own writing, is also clear in a number of the anthologies he has edited, such as A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (2000), a book he edited with Jon Turney; an anthology of ecological poems, Wild Reckoning (2004), edited with John Burnside; and Dark Matter (2008), edited with the astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Maurice has taught at Imperial College and Goldsmiths College, and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam. He was the Editor of The Poetry Review from 2013-17. As you might expect, Maurice’s Selected Poems showcases the remarkable range of the poet’s work and interests. He is well known for writing about his growing up in rural Ireland, and you will find numerous examples of that here, such as in the beautifully observed ‘Rural Electrification, 1956’, originally published in A Word from the Loki, or a series of eighteen pieces called ‘The Idylls’ that first appeared in The Holy Land. But we also encounter a great deal of what Maurice calls in one poem ‘inner and outer weather’ and what we might see as an interest in the fate of the human being in the world. This is an interest examined in a philosophical way as in the poem ‘Floods’, or as recognition that we are but organisms in the ‘biochemical soup’, or often in poems laced with irony, such as ‘Time Out’. There are poems here too about the unreliability of memory, involved with classical and mythical subjects, and also deft tributes to the life and work of other writers, such as Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Reading the Selected Poems is a rich and engrossing experience and of course in a conversation like this we can only touch on a few topics, so I recommend you track down a copy of the book yourself. We begin by talking about the form of the book and how Maurice felt about having his poems selected by someone else. We go on to consider one of the repeated images in the poems - the ‘lull’ or held moment and what it might mean, and Maurice then reads ‘The Face’. He discusses the way in which this poem - and others - might be said to deal with the self, scepticism, and uncertainty, and then we contrast this with Maurice’s interest in the rigour and observational approach that might be gleaned from scientific methods and a fascination with process. The conversation concludes with Maurice’s thoughts on the ways in which his poems present local phenomena - from very specific references to objects, to the naming of places in poems that we see in ‘The Idylls’ or ‘Mediums’.

    43 min

  2. 02/17/2025

    Episode 26: Helen Calcutt and Hannah Copley

    In October 2024, the writers Helen Calcutt and Hannah Copley visited Oxford Brookes and gave a terrific reading from their latest poetry collections: Feeling All the Kills and Lapwing. We took advantage of their being here to interview them about their work - an interview that was conducted by our two current Poetry Centre Interns, Ruby McKie and Marie Kennedy, who are both in their second year at Brookes studying English Literature with Creative Writing. So in this episode you’ll first hear Ruby quizzing Helen, then Marie asking Hannah about her collection, and then some general discussion about the two collections’ shared interests. The episode concludes with Ruby and Marie reflecting on their own writing and how their reading of Helen and Hannah’s work has inspired them. Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist, and choreographer. She is the author of collections ‘Somehow’ (Verve Poetry Press) a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet & Poetry School Book of the Year (2020), ‘Unable Mother’ (V. Press, 2018) and ‘Feeling All the Kills’ (Pavilion Poetry, 2024) a verse account of assault and recovery. She is creator and editor of anthology ‘Eighty-Four: Poems on Male Suicide, Vulnerability, Grief and Hope’ (Verve Press, 2019). It was a Saboteur Award shortlist and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year, 2019. Helen is Artistic Director of cross arts theatre company ‘Beyond Words’. Her dance adaptation of Max Porter’s, ‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’ is funded by Arts Council England and supported by One Dance U.K. and the Birmingham REP Theatre. Helen was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Loughborough University for her outstanding contribution to the arts in 2023. You can follow Helen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/helen_calcutt/ Hannah Copley is a poet, editor and researcher. Her second collection, Lapwing was published in 2024 by Pavilion Poetry and explores restlessness, addiction, and ecological and personal grief. It was selected as a 2024 Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation, shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize, and was awarded second prize in the 2024 Laurel Prize. Her first collection, Speculum, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold and other magazines and anthologies and she has previously won the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the York Literature Festival Prize. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster and a poetry editor at Stand magazine. Hannah is on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/hlcopley/

    21 min

  3. 01/27/2025

    Episode 25: Ange Mlinko

    Ange Mlinko has published six collections of poetry, including Starred Wire, published by Coffee House Press in 2005 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; Shoulder Season with Coffee House Press in 2010, which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2010, and a finalist for a PEN Center USA award. Marvelous Things Overheard was selected as one of the best books of the year in the New Yorker and the Boston Globe in 2013. In his review of Ange’s last collection, Venice, in the New York Times, Troy Jollimore noted that her poems are ‘wild, energetic, alive, wantonly catholic in their allusiveness, often downright chatty.’ Ange has won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, the Frederick Bock Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Formerly the poetry editor of The Nation, she is now the poetry editor of the literary journal, Subtropics, which is based at the University of Florida where Ange is a professor of English. Ange has just published two books almost simultaneously: Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, a work of lyrical criticism which came out from Oxford University Press at the end of 2024, and her seventh collection of poetry, Foxglovewise, which was published by Farrar Straus and Giroux in the US and by Faber in the UK. Foxglovewise is Ange’s first - but much overdue - UK publication. As its name suggests, Foxglovewise is a book much concerned with the relationship between place and who and what lives there, flora and fauna - whether it is an encounter with a culinary garden in a Scottish cemetery or the otherworldliness of Florida. It is a book that conjures up very particular spaces, even if the poet herself doesn’t feel located in one place. As in Ange’s other writing, the poems can be read microcosmically - focussed on the specific but also speaking broadly and acutely to issues that affect the world at large - what it’s like to find yourself off the map, being subject to ‘history’s forces’, what being a gardener or being in tune with the land, or, as she puts it, ‘negotiating earth’s curve’, can tell us about the stories we use to make sense of ourselves. Like Ange’s other work, too, the writing is crafted not just with an ear to the possibilities in language but also with a degree of levity that - in spite of moments where the poet ‘mark[s] the edge of the abyss’ - also allows the reader or listener in through humour to the kind of big ideas we should all be confronting, rather than keeping them out. In this conversation Ange talks to Niall Munro about a number of these topics, and Ange reads two poems from the collection, ‘Foxglovewise’ and ‘Voluptuous Provision’. She also offers insights into some of the differences she sees between US and UK poetry and the role of the poet. If you have any thoughts on the episode, feel free to get in touch: you can reach us on social media (@brookespoetry) or e-mail us at poetrycentre@brookes.ac.uk

    58 min

  4. 04/24/2023

    Episode 24: Eric White - bonus material

    In this extra mini-episode, which follows on from a longer interview with Dr Eric White, Eric gives us some insight into the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technologies (or AGAST) project, which draws on his research to consider what kinds of powerful applications these modernist technologies might have today.

    9 min

  5. 04/24/2023

    Episode 24: Eric White

    This is the second instalment in an occasional series to feature research that colleagues are engaged with at Oxford Brookes University. This episode includes an interview with Dr Eric White, who is a Reader in American Literature at Oxford Brookes University. Eric specializes in avant-garde literature and is the author of two books: Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic: Avant-Gardes, Technology and the Everyday (2020) and Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism (2013). He has also prepared critical editions of texts, including Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (2020) and The Early Career of William Carlos Williams (2013). Eric is the principal investigator of the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology (AGAST) Project, a digital humanities collaboration that reimagines modernists’ inventions using XR (Extended Reality, a term that includes virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality). Together with Dr Georgina Colby, he co-edits two Edinburgh University Press Series on avant-garde writing. In this discussion, Niall Munro and Eric begin by talking about Eric’s early research that focussed on the little magazines and magazine culture in North America in the modernist period and eventually became the focus of his first book. We think about some of the ideas that underpin that book, such as localism and localist modernism, and zoom in to look at two highly influential little modernist magazines, Others and Fire!! After this, we move on to consider some of the research that featured in Eric’s second book, Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic, and Eric reflects on the relationship between avant-garde art practice and technology, as he draws attention to the work of modernist writers such as Mina Loy. Eric goes on to outline one of the key arguments in his book - that writers like Loy employed techno-bathetic strategies to propose new ways of thinking about technology, strategies that could often be highly emancipatory. In addition to Loy, Reading Machines in the Modernist Transatlantic includes a number of other intriguing characters, and none is perhaps more intriguing than Bob Brown. Eric explains how Brown, together with his wife Rose sought to bring avant-garde ideas into the mainstream, through projects such as his Reading Machine, a device that was supposed to change the way we read and related to texts. If the cinema had been transformed by the ‘talkies’, Brown reasoned, so too the book could be transformed by his ‘readies’. We close the podcast by thinking about how African American writers like Gwendolyn Bennett, Langston Hughes, and Amiri Baraka used a particular form of technology in their work - the railroad - and how this kind of infrastructure gives voice to African American concerns and communities. Unlike other podcasts in this series, this one features some bonus material! In an extra mini-episode, Eric gives us some insight into the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technologies (or AGAST) project, which draws on his research to consider what kinds of powerful applications these modernist technologies might have today. We hope you enjoy the podcast - do get in touch if you have questions or want to let us know what you think. You can e-mail us via poetrycentre@brookes.ac.uk or find the Poetry Centre on social media - Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram - we’re @brookespoetry And thank you for listening!

    1h 21m

  6. 12/05/2021

    Episode 23: Dinah Roe talks to Niall Munro

    This latest episode marks something of a departure for the Poetry Centre podcast. If you’re a regular or just occasional listener to this podcast, you’ll know that it normally features a poet in conversation about two or three of their poems. This episode is the first of a series in which Niall Munro talks with colleagues at Oxford Brookes University and showcases some of the very exciting research that they have been doing into poets and poetry. In this episode, Niall Munro talks with Dr Dinah Roe, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature here at Oxford Brookes. Dinah is an expert on Christina Rossetti, Victorian poetry, and the Pre-Raphaelites. During this past semester Dinah has run discussion groups and contributed an introduction to a Weekly Poem featuring Rossetti’s work that you can still find on our website, and we’re releasing this podcast on Sunday 5 December - Christina Rossetti’s birthday. In the discussion with Dinah, we focus on three poems by Rossetti: 'The heart knoweth its own bitterness', 'Love understands the mystery', and ‘Goblin Market’ and explore how Dinah came to be interested in Rossetti, the poet’s reputation, and the place of religion in Rossetti’s work. We also consider how Dinah’s view of Rossetti has changed during her time working with her poetry and prose and in the course of writing a book about her family, and how Rossetti’s experience as a carer affected her writing. Dinah received her BA from Vassar College and a PhD in English Literature from University College London. She is the author of Christina Rossetti's Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and The Rossettis in Wonderland: A Victorian Family History (Haus, 2011), and the editor of Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics, 2008) and The Pre-Raphaelites: From Rossetti to Ruskin (Penguin Classics, 2010). Dinah is currently writing a monograph on the interactions of literary and visual arts in Pre-Raphaelite art, taking into account the influence of nineteenth-century literature on book illustration, painting and the decorative arts from 1848 to the turn of the century. She is also editing a three volume edition of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Longman Annotated English Poets), due for publication in 2025. You can find out more about Dinah's work on her profile page on the Brookes website, and follow her on Twitter - find the links on our Podcasts page.

    1h 5m

  7. 11/02/2021

    Episode 22: Leah Umansky talks to Niall Munro

    Leah Umansky is the author of two book-length collections, The Barbarous Century (2018), Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox, 2012), and two chapbooks, Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), and the Mad Men-inspired Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014). Her writing has been widely published in places like The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, Guernica, and American Poetry Review. She has been the host and curator of the New York City-based poetry series COUPLET since 2011, and is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Leah has become well known for her poetry inspired by TV series, such as Mad Men, Westworld, and Mr. Robot. Many of her Game of Thrones-inspired poems have been translated into Norwegian and Bengali. In 2013, Flavorwire named her #7 of 23 People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry, and her chapbook Don Dreams and I Dream was voted one of The Top 10 Chapbooks To Read Now in 2014 by Time Out New York. Leah has been a middle and high school English teacher for fifteen years and has also taught workshops at The Poetry School, Hudson Valley Writers Center, and Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Visible Ink Program. She is also a collage-artist who has designed all of her book covers. In ‘Where are the Stars?’, one of the poems in her collection The Barbarous Century, Leah writes: ‘The self is mapped in certainties. I am certain that I can measure this in words.’ Those kind of certainties are consistent preoccupations of Leah’s work: hers is a poetry that frequently asserts ‘I am…’, ‘I will…’, ‘This is what I mean…’, and there is a self-confidence and ambition in her writing, especially in a poem like the first we look at together, ‘Unleashed’, that makes an interrogation of the self possible, especially the female self. In that poem and elsewhere, Leah explores the way that people change and suggests that such change can be immensely rewarding if we risk embracing it. This is sometimes an idealistic poetry that seeks to celebrate what is good in the world (at one point in our conversation, Leah says that ‘there’s always room for celebration’), but it is also a realistic one. With its desire to show what it’s like to be alive, Leah’s poetry is also happy - and sometimes seems compelled - to call out those things and those people who live meanly and selfishly, such as the ‘tyrant’ in her recent work - a thinly-disguised version of Donald Trump sometimes, but often a much broader figure of someone, usually a man, who has no sense of decency. And often that examination of goodness is bound up with questions of gender and in particular - as is evident in a poem we discuss, ‘[Of Men]’ - in the relationship between men and women. Just as these poems challenge traditional and obsolete notions of gender roles in their subject matter, so too their form bends and sometimes dismantles poetic conventions. Leah brings a tremendous energy and virtuosity to her work and to the way she talks about her work, and I think that comes across clearly in this interview. Please do check out the poems, which you can find on the Poetry Centre website - just look up the Podcast page - and seek out Leah’s work. There are links to her books, her website, and her social media on the Podcasts page too. Thank you for listening!

    49 min

  8. 06/24/2021

    Episode 21: Christopher Kempf talks to Niall Munro

    In this episode Niall Munro talks with Christopher Kempf about his new collection of poetry, What Though The Field Be Lost, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2021. Chris’s first poetry collection, Late in the Empire of Men, won the 2015 Levis Prize from Four Way Books and was reviewed widely, including in The New York Times. His scholarly book, Craft Class: The Workshop in American Culture, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can find out more about Chris on his website: christopherkempf.com What Though The Field Be Lost may be grounded in the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but it doesn't just offer just a fascinating engagement with the soil and statues there. It is also a profound exploration of conflict and memory more broadly in the United States. Indeed, one of the most striking things about the book is the way in which it is so attentive to the complexities of history. Through the discussion of two poems from the book, ‘Remembrance Day’ and ‘After,’ (both of which you can read on the Poetry Centre's Podcasts page), Chris considers first of all what motivated him to write about Gettysburg, ‘the presentness of the past’ that he felt there on what many consider - as he puts it - ‘the most consequential piece of land in the United States’, and how he responded to the ‘tactical beauty’ of the Confederate monuments that dominate the landscape now. We go on to think about how far it is still possible to claim an ‘American we’, something that Chris himself recognises might be an old-fashioned claim, but one that he puts forward with great vigour and skill in the collection, making use of the poetic or rhetorical strategy of the synecdoche - that is having one part of something stand in for the whole thing - to think about the relationship between the human body and the body politic. Chris also discusses his interest in the Civil War re-enactors that he met at Gettysburg and their motivations, and thinks too about art’s capacity to re-imagine the present. What possibilities does poetry provide as a space to think about radical equality in America, and what responsibilities does the poet have to society and to history? If you enjoy the podcast or have any comments, feel free to get in touch: we’re on social media where our handle is @brookespoetry, and you can e-mail me via the Poetry Centre website. Thanks again for listening!

    56 min
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About

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre podcast focusses upon the work of one poet or features discussion about poetry with poets and academics. The theme music for the podcast, entitled ‘Leaving for the North’, was composed by Aneurin Rees, and played by Aneurin Rees (guitar) and Rosalie Tribe (violin). For more information about the Poetry Centre, look up our website or find us on social media @brookespoetry

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