The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

Abbi Flint on Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's poem 'Little Peach' and her own poem 'Cow Low Bowl (650 - 700 AD)'

In this episode, I talk to Abbi Flint about Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s poem ‘Little Peach’ and her own poem ‘Cow Low Bowl (650 - 700 AD)’.

Abbi talks about the connections between her work as an archaeologist and her creative processes as a poet. She explores the idea of fragments - whether they be finds or fragmentary and non-linear details - as a way in to thinking about associations between her various practices.  She talks about the creative skills that Burnett displays in her fashioning of a poetic voice that can embody other-than-human elements. She then goes on to discuss at length Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s project that evolved into her collection Twelve Words for Moss, and how ‘Little Peach’ fits into the overall design of the book. Abbi highlights the sensory qualities and playfulness of the language in Burnett’s poem, the wonder. Abbi also mentions Clare Shaw's peat bog poems as a way of understanding Burnett's work too. Abbi then goes on to explore the sound and sense of her own poem ‘Cow Low Bowl’ (650 - 700 AD)'. She draws on her development as a writer, pinpointing the Continuing Bonds project (see below) as a starting point for drawing together archeology and poetry. She then goes on to talk about how she gained creative inspiration from the Thomas Bateman antiquarian collection held at Western Park Museum in Sheffield in another cross-disciplinary project she was involved in. She talks about the layered approach she makes in 'Cow Low Bowl' - bringing together different texts and images to create this work.  She draws on the tactile quality of the bowl as a way into thinking about the object.  She talks about writing into the space that 'we will never know', and the archeological imagination. She goes on to discuss the possibility of a first complete collection of creative work, and what texts might be included in the book.

Abbi Flint is a researcher and poet, who works across archaeology, history and the environmental humanities. Her poems have been published in a range of online and print journals, including Under the Radar, Spelt, Atrium, Reliquiae, Popshot Quarterly, The Ekphrastic Review, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Interpreters House.

Abbi mentions two projects, led by Professor Melanie Giles (University of Manchester), that she contributed poems to Vestiges and Peat: Past, Present and Future. The webpage for Vestiges contains a link to a recording of Abbi reading Cow Low Bowl, and a link to the pdf of the full Vestiges anthology.

More about the Continuing Bonds project, led by Professor Karina Croucher (University of Bradford), here: https://continuingbonds.live/teaching-materials/

The MossWorlds Project, led by Dr Anke Bernau, Dr Ingrid Hanson and Dr Aurora Fredriksen (University of Manchester), has a website here: https://mossworlds.co.uk/about-mossworlds/

The science poetry/art journal Consilience can be found here: https://www.consilience-journal.com/about

Abbi mentions a portrait of Thomas Bateman and his son sitting alongside the Cow Low Bowl. You can find a version of the image here.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett's poem, 'Little Peach', was published in the Willowherb Review and also in her book Twelve Words for Moss. You can hear her read 'Little Peach' here.

 

Cowl Low Bowl (650-700 AD)

Low bowl, sky bowl
dish that ran away with the moon
underground, understone
puddled mud above thirsty old bones
that took the sky to bed
in cloth and ash, iron and brass

Sure bowl, palm bowl
cupped by a hand
that tipped sky to cold lips
cold as a tod-fox tooth
blue as a calm sea, tender
as tilted hips that swallowed the moon

Whole bowl, restless bowl
holds the horizon between soil
and where air fell to dust
this blue is a window
between death and another death
brought to light by the spade

 

 

 

David Swann on Tony Hoagland's poem 'The Neglected Art of Description' and his own poem 'The Last Day of Summer'

In this episode, I spend time with Dave Swann (on his, and his wife, Ange's allotment) as we reflect on Tony Hoagland's poem 'The Neglected Art of Description' and his own poem 'The Last Day of Summer'.

In the podcast, Dave talks about meeting Tony Hoagland at a poetry reading in London.  He discusses how he got over balancing his work life and writing life by going on writing courses. He mentions how, on one of these residencies, he met the poet Mimi Khalvati who introduced him to the idea of schwa vowels, and how this made him view his poetry in a different light. He talks about the importance of description, professional noticing, and daydreaming.  He then goes on to discuss Tony Hoagland's 'plate spinning', the technical 'tight-rope act' he enacts from poem to poem. He talks at length about 'The Neglected Art of Description', how it hovers around those different points of describing detail through 'sleights of hand' and rhetorical flourishes (and Zen Buddhism).  How it can only go so far. He goes on a detour - focusing for a while on the descriptive power of Mark Doty's poem 'Two Ruined Boats'.

He then goes on to explore his own poem 'The Last Day of Summer' and the choices of language he made in this piece. What is poetry supposed to do in the world? He talks about sleights of hand in his own poetry, how and why he focuses on the film Paths of Glory, and on the case of a political prisoner (Reyhaneh Jabbari) being executed for her own beliefs. He talks at length about the technical decisions that he makes in the poem.  He explores the idea of being 'bombarded' by news and information, and how as individuals (and writers) we have to negotiate this stream of words in our lives. How do we sift out the words that are important to us? He discusses the importance of poetry in people's lives too. Finally, he explores the different (prose and poetry) collections he is currently writing for publication - including his allotment poems.

 

Tony Hoagland's poem 'The Neglected Art of Description' can be found in Application for the Release from the Dream (Bloodaxe, 2015).  Dave also reads from 'Two Ruined Boats' from Mark Doty's collection Atlantis (Cape, 1996).

Dave also mentions in the podcast Hoagland's book Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (Graywolf Press, 2006).

David Swann began his writing life as a reporter for the local newspaper in Accrington. After working in nightclubs, warehouses, and magazines in Amsterdam, he became the writer in residence in a prison.  A book based on those experiences, The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2009) was shortlisted for The Ted Hughes Award.  Dave's stories and poems have been widely published and won many awards, including eleven successes at the Bridport Prize and two in The National Poetry Competition. His novella Season of Bright Sorrow (also available from Ad Hoc Fiction), won the 2021 Bath Novella-in-Flash Competition.

David's own poem, 'The Last Day of Summer', comes from his last published poetry collection, Gratitude on the Coast of Death (Waterloo Press, 2017).

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

The Last Day of Summer

If the clock-radio wasn't chanting its old lament
I'd spend the summer's finale under our duvet

but the year's last light is falling, and, here, it's all war,
famine, Ebola.  And Iran has hanged Reyhaneh Jabbari.

There's a better place than this, but I can't find it
anywhere in our house, so I carry my tea

into the yard and listen while a neighbour's child
calls to her vanished cat.  'Gucci!' she cries,

on the brink of tears. 'Gucci, where are you, dear?'
The mallow's crazy bloom has dimmed now

and the sunflowers have lost interest in the sky.
I follow their hunched gaze to where indestructible snails

lumber like tanks over the paving stones, and think
of that moment in Paths of Glory when cockroaches

scuttle through a cell.  Tomorrow, when's he dead,
those things will continue to live, the condemned man

tells his jailers, unable to imagine the world
bearing his absence.  Around me: a citadel

of living spiders. They have strung their cables
over our tiny lawn.  The grass has gone on growing

and these cobwebs are thicker than I've known.
Global warming? Upstairs, the clock-radio

drones while a child's voice rises through its scales.
'Gucci,' she sings.  'Come home now, Gucci!'

Our words have travelled vast distances,
that's what I tell the kids I teach.  They have come to us

on journeys and their bags are full of secrets.
Rose, for instance. Or musk. Or path.

Or assassin.  These words are from Farsi,
words from the land that has hanged

Reyhaneh Jabbari.  For two months she was held
alone, beyond reach of lawyers and family,

and she went to her death still protecting
the name of the man who saved her

from rape by the government agent.
These are not the words of a poem

and that is not the name of a cat.  Let me sit here
with my tea and forget this winter. Send us down

the old books, containing the old worlds.
You know the ones: jasmine, shawl, peach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Hamberger on John Clare's poem 'The Field Mouse's Nest' and his own poem 'Herb Robert'

In this episode, I talk to Robert Hamberger about John Clare’s poem 'The Field Mouse’s Nest' and his own poem 'Herb Robert'.

In our conversation, Robert talks about how his art teacher introduced to him to the works of Sylvia Plath and John Clare (among others).  He discusses the 'everyday' language he uses in his poetry and how (through this 'political act') he doesn’t want to exclude his readers. He goes on to explore the idea of the sonnet - how can you find your voice inside the given ‘rules’ of the fourteen-line poem - the rhyme scheme, the weight of tradition: ‘a lovely challenge’.  Robert then elaborates on Clare’s background - his prodigious output of poetry (even when he was incarcerated) and from this reflects on how important it is to separate writing from publishing (to see them as two separate activities). Robert then discusses 'The Field Mouse's Nest'. He explores punctuated and unpunctuated versions of this sonnet, and Clare's use of dialect, reading from Seamus Heaney's essay ‘John Clare’s Prog’. He touches on the idea of Clare as an ecopoet.

He then goes on to illuminate the evolution of his memoir A Length of Road: Finding Myself in the Footsteps of John Clare from 1995 onward - and how the poem 'Herb Robert' fits into the larger scheme of the book. He talks about 'Herb Robert' as a queer poem, and from this insight, shows how the relationship between himself and Clare - and his understanding of himself developed as he drafted and redrafted the work. He then goes on to talk at length about the hold the sonnet has had on him over his writing life, and how this poem, in particular, fitted in as one of his 'form-testing' poems.

You can read John Clare's Northborough Sonnets (mentioned in the podcast) in this edition from Carcanet Press.  Seamus Heaney's essay on John Clare comes from his collection of essays The Redress of Poetry (Faber, 2002). Here is a version of 'The Field Mouse's Nest' from the Poetry Archive (with 'cesspools' instead of 'sexpools' in the final line).

Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes, appearing in the Forward Book of Poetry 2020. He won The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023 and has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. His poetry has featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets and four full-length collections. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road: finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His fifth collection Nude Against A Rock from Waterloo Press was published in October 2024.

You can find Robert Hamberger's website here.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

Herb Robert

What flavour of man is this, whose tips
unpeel into flowers? His arrows blossom.
Five petals top each blood-line that dips
and lifts through the breeze. I've seen him
hide by the creaky bridge where lattice-water
dabbles a trout's tail while bubbles rise.
His leaves mimic ferns, his colour
campion.  How can he be less than he is?
He lives his name. Two bulbs branch from every stem,
until I catch him taking over
the wood-side. A hundred buds swarm
their messages on the air.
If I eat his breath will it heal me?
Stroke him across my temples quietly, quietly.

 

 

 

 

 

David Harmer on Dylan Thomas's 'Poem in October' and his own poetry sequence 'White Peak Histories'

In this episode, I talk to the poet David Harmer about Dylan Thomas’s ‘Poem in October’ and his own sequence ‘White Peak Histories.’

In our conversation, David discusses his connections with Thomas. He explains why ‘Poem in October’ (and ‘late Thomas’) appeals to him in particular. He talks about the shape and feel of the poem, its aural qualities, its preoccupation with birds and the seasons. David follows Thomas from the shore and climbs high up, ending his journey looking out over the water.  He goes on to reflect on what ‘the border’ could mean in the context of this poem. David then goes on to explore the background to his poetry sequence ‘White Peak Histories’.  He thinks about the lines he can draw between his own work and Thomas’s effusive language, Thomas’s verbal ‘swagger’. He delves into the geography of the White Peak and how this feeds into its histories in terms of both leisure and labour.

David Harmer lives in Doncaster and is best known as a children’s writer with publications from McMillans Children’s Books, Frances Lincoln and recently, Small Donkey Press. A lot of his work for the Grown Ups is published in magazines. He also performs with Ray Globe as The Glummer Twins, often at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Here's a little window into David's writing for children (his book It's Behind You) from the Pan McMillan Site. And here's the details of David's most recent book from Small Donkey Press.

We mention the poetry magazine Tears in the Fence during our conversation. You can find out more about this poetry journal here.

We also mention W S Graham's poem 'The Thermal Stair' (for the painter Peter Lanyon) which you can listen to - and read - on the Poetry Archive.

Owen Sheers discusses Dylan Thomas with Matthew Paris on the BBC Radio 4 programme Great Lives here.

You can read Dylan Thomas's 'Poem in October' at this website.

You can follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

White Peak Histories
 
Rhienster Rock
 
Once Raenstor Crag, the haunt of ravens
hræfn; harbingers of wisdom, of slaughter,
guardians of the Duke’s old coach road
 
that twists beneath this sudden rise of limestone
where the Bradford narrows near Hollow Farm
a slow drift, thick with sedge and celandine.
 
The ravens are long-gone, no hoarse
ghost cries over burial bones or carrion chatter,
no close councils and conspiracies.
 
Shifted into tricksters and thieves,
they left their reef-knoll condemned as vermin,
an abrupt unkindness bringing despair.
 
Two shot in Youlgrave churchyard
fetched eight pennies, four birds a shilling,
held by their legs, their smashed skulls open.

 

Trackways
 
Half-lost, eroded like rumours
whispered beneath the skin of maps
 
the tracks of travellers,
pack-horse carters, cattle drovers,
cloth merchants, drifts of malt-horses
 
lie abandoned under new-sprung roads,
uprooted farms and tarmac.
 
But here at Robin Hood’s Stride, the mock-beggar’s hall
high above Bradford Dale, jumbled rocks protect
the Portway, guide it past the Nine Stones Circle
down to Broad Meadow Farm
 
where Saxon ridges rise like waves
to push the causeway
straight over the river at Hollow Bridge
then up Dark Lane.
 
The path still beats below our footfall,
it flowed before settlers on Castle Hill Ring
brewed their iron or buried their dead
in the heaped barrows and tumuli
and when we walk it
their voices clamour through the rain, eager
to point out the way ahead.
 

Portway flood, 1718
 
Winter unleashed a deluge of waters,
the ford at Alport scoured out by river-force
Bradford and Lathkill locked in a tumult
of pell-mell, white-flecked land-soak.
Monk’s Hall up to its haunches, inundated,
thick ropes of stream-melt, cattle pushed
up breakneck banking, dams burst
foaming like the mouths of dead horses.
 
A gang of carriers faced the flooded Portway.
How to travel to the north of Old Town?
How to cross this fury of water?
They tried to push through. It hurled them away,
ankles tumbled over their heads, mouths gaped,
breath failed them, limbs flailing and snatching
at quick grasps of rock, branches, horse-gear.
 
Their bales and bundles, leather goods, baubles
dragged to the mill-race, the broken wheel
reluctant to offer any hand hold. Instead they drowned
crying out for a bridge, found their souls sodden
in Derbyshire rain-drench, unprotected by ravens.
And as the waters had not yet dried from the earth
no dry ground rose to cover the corpses.

 

 

Katharine Towers on Elizabeth Bishop's poems 'Sandpiper' and 'Jerónimo's House' and her own poem 'Elizabeth Bishop's Sad Epitaph'

In this episode, poet Katharine Towers discusses Elizabeth Bishop’s poems ‘Sandpiper’ and ‘Jerónimo’s House’ and her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph.’

In the interview, Katharine explains how she went from being a prose writer to a poet in part from reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. She examines the qualities of Bishop’s writing through an extended reading of ‘Sandpiper’, focusing in particular on line lengths, repetitions and rhymes. Katharine highlights the three things that Bishop strived for in her work — accuracy, spontaneity and mystery which she goes on to reflect on in both 'Sandpiper' and 'Jerónimo's House'.  With regards to ‘Jeronimo’s House’, Katharine delves into her own interest in solitude when looking at this piece. She considers the idea that Jerónimo’s house is a ‘love nest’: unpicking this notion through various ways of reading this phrase. She explores the idea that Bishop (or her subjects) are often looking for a refuge or somewhere to hide away.

Katharine then goes on to illuminate her own poem ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph’. She talks about how she was inspired by Bishop’s comment to Robert Lowell about being the loneliest person who ever lived. Katharine sees this work as being a part of a sequence of first-person poems in the voice of various 'alone' women - and the ways in which aloneness was important to them.  She reflects on the poem’s slant, the language of the work, the perspective (and possible feelings) of the narrator.

There are various editions of Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems - the one I have is Complete Poems (Chatto, 1991).  You can read ‘Sandpiper’ here.

As well as the Bishop poems highlighted we also touch on ‘The Moose’, ‘The End of March’, ‘The Bight’ and ‘The Fish’ in our conversation.

 

Katharine Towers has published three collections with Picador, most recently Oak which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Observer. A fourth collection is forthcoming from Picador in 2026.
A pamphlet 'let him bring a shrubbe' exploring the life and work of the twentieth-century English composer Gerald Finzi was published by The Maker’s Press in 2023. In 2019 HappenStance Press published another pamphlet The Violin Forest.

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

'Elizabeth Bishop’s Sad Epitaph' by Katharine Towers
 
In my fairy palace I am as lonely as I could wish. 
The ivy has grown up and over, and cosily inside
there’s just little me reading or sitting.
 
I could be on the moon or I could be 
in a Hans Christian Andersen story
or I could be a girl getting over a love affair.  
 
The first room has two beds, so one will always be empty.
The second room has two chairs, so I can see where I will sit tomorrow.
The third room has two notebooks, so there will always be blank pages.
 
At night I listen to flamenco on the radio.
As I snap my fingers and click my heels I feel tremendously 
Spanish, or I feel a sultry empty weary joy. 
 
Covering the windows are the ivy’s mathematical hands.
Daylight pokes through when it can, 
making of the worn-out floorboards a map of bright dots.                  
                        
 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Pullinger on Shinkichi Takahashi's poem 'Sparrow in Winter' and his own work 'Magus' and 'Untitled'

In this episode, poet Mark Pullinger discusses Shinkichi Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ (translated by Lucien Stryk) and two of Mark’s poems: ‘Magus' and ‘Untitled’.
 
In the interview, we talk about Mark’s introduction to Zen poetry - and Zen haiku in particular - through his discovery of Shinkichi Takahashi’s work. We examine the multifaceted qualities of Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’, which adopts simple language to create nuanced and complex associations around consciousness, the void, how the narrator and sparrow ‘mesh' with each other.   We then go on to explore Mark’s approaches to writing through focusing on ‘Magus’ and ‘Untitled’.  Mark talks in some depth - drawing on the specifics of these two pieces - about how his poetry has evolved over the past decade since the publication of his thesis.

You can find Takahashi’s poem ‘Sparrow in Winter’ in his collection Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems by Shinkichi Takahashi - translated by Lucien Stryk (Grove Press, 1986). I picked up a digital copy of the book.

 

Mark Pullinger lives in the Dearne Valley, walking distance to RSPB Old Moor and its satellite sites, where he walks with his wife daily. The philosophy outlined in this interview was conceived for his PhD thesis, The Speaking World, available on Loughborough University’s Institutional Repository. He has recently completed a poetry collection on Kafka and the natural world, making a style shift from his thesis, but still expressing the same worldview.
 
The Speaking World is available at https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/thesis/The_speaking_world

 

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

Sparrow in Winter
by Shinkichi Takahashi
translated by Lucien Stryk
 
Breastdown fluttering in the breeze,
The sparrow’s full of air holes.
Let the winds of winter blow,
Let them crack a wing, two,
The sparrow doesn’t care.
 
The air streams through him, free, easy,
Scattering feathers, bending legs.
He hops calmly, from branch to empty branch
In an absolutely spaceless world.
 
I’d catch, skewer, broil you,
But my every shot misses: you’re impossible.
All at once there’s the sound
Of breaking glass, and houses begin
To crumple. Rising quickly,
An atomic submarine nudges past your belly.
 

Untitled
by Mark Pullinger
 
Polar bear
smells life
kills
spreading
through her
her cubs
extending skies
earth’s breath
expanding
sun’s reign

 

Magus
by Mark Pullinger
 
In a distant desert
a lone speck crosses
the horizon
mumbling,
“the desert
has dignity
moving through it”.
Sand drifts
across humps,
clinging,
rolling on.

Heat, like breath,
rises, waves
reaching skies.
Camel’s eyes
large distant
suns.
 

 

Fay Musselwhite on David Jones's book-length poem In Parenthesis and her own sequence Memoir of a Working River

In this episode, poet Fay Musselwhite discusses David Jones’s book-length poem In Parenthesis and her own sequence ‘Memoir of a Working River’ from her collection Contraflow.

In the interview, we talk about how Fay came to Jones’s poem - a book that follows soldiers' long trajectory toward the Somme battlefield, but has so much more within it than the subject of war itself. For Fay, it’s ‘the fact that one’s part of the earth,’ and that Jones focuses on ‘class, land and nature’ that makes this such an inspiring and important work for her. We discuss the abundant details, images, hauntings contained in the work - and how war plays out like some violent codified ‘sport’ inflicted on these young men.  Fay then goes on to explore the difficulties she encountered trying to write her ‘big river poem’ and how she found ways to embody the Rivelin as it runs through the western Sheffield by giving the river itself a voice and, for a while, the body of a young man. Fay explains why she wanted to make the river a human because she wanted to explore the world of those youthful Rivelin mill-workers. We reflect on the music of her poetry and how important it is to Fay’s project as a poet.

The extract that Fay read’s from In Parenthesis covers pp. 165 - 168 from her copy of the book (Faber, 1978).  

There's a recording of an extract of the poem on the Poetry Archive website. It includes an introduction by David Jones himself, and actors playing the many voices in the work. It gives you a good sense of the polyphony in the poem. You can listen to the audio here.

You can read more about, and buy a copy of Fay’s very fine collection Contraflow (Longbarrow Press, 2016) here.

 

You can also follow me on X - @cwjoneschris or on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes.

 

From 'Memoir of a Working River’

6

Woken by some beast’s nudge then stunned
at the incredible stillness of sky, slips in
to bathe where the mill-dam overflow cascades
slithers out freshened, rises and shivers
watches the mud where new droplets nuzzle.

Donkeys trudge by, pressing on, faces low
as if the cinder track hears their moan.
Follows their swagger-loads
sees motion onward driven
by the momentum of raw and wrought iron.

Wavers as they near the spark-shed
shy of its screaming grind and gritty guffaws
but the torture rack, humped on its back
in full watery swing, pricks his learning’s gap.
Keen to find why the wheel must turn
braves the factory door

steps in and into a gusting blur
tastes its metal, feels particulates snag in sweat
takes a moment to see where he is.

In geometry against nature’s grace
humans are caught in a web
each slumped over oak, held by spindle and belt
to a stone that spits hot grit.

His feet itch.

He swerves a man dragging iron rods
and trying to make his free hand speak.

On the river-run some images stick:
flashes of crimson through blackened fur shreds
on that donkey’s neck, the clench of combat
riddled through men’s backs.

Lying on a weir
to rinse metal squeals from his hair
on the air a tang
enthrals the inner juices —

he paces it downstream, tracks the prey
to a tufted cove, a pail propped in rocks
a man doubled over racked in rasp-spasms.
When coughing releases its grip
he sits near the man, asks how life is.

Sunk in the chest, not quite
sitting up, the man shares his snap
and between pneumatic seizure
tells how he offers blunt steel to grit
till it’s flayed by resistance to its leanest edge
how each day he enters the valley
more of it enters him.

The man says he’s seen eighteen summers
a grinder for three, and nails in a voice hollow-loud
what binds the wheel’s turn to that cheese and bread.

Twice the man says — The mus’ave a name.

Only once — Come wi’ me, if tha needs a crust.  

 

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

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