The LRB Podcast

The most popular modern food poem is probably William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’, in which the speaker confesses to eating the plums his wife was saving for breakfast. Food has often been a means for poetry to represent intimate relationships, but, as Sarah and Sandeep explore in this episode, it has also provided ways of thinking about alienation, societal change, survival and displacement. In Tony Harrison’s 'V.', supermarkets and food providers become central motifs in a discussion of Britain’s changing landscapes; Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart uses the memory of a grandfather planting yogurt under a tree as a means of understanding the aftermath of Partition; and in Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s ‘Communion’, set in the Beddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, lentils become part of a living archive through which experiences are transmitted across generations.

Read Tony Harrison's 'V.' in the LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v

Book tickets to a live recording of this series: https://lrb.me/ptwtickets

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
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Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak economy. To dissect the collapse of the Starmer project and the prospects for a Burnham administration, James is joined by Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for the Times, and William Davies, a political economist at Goldsmiths.

Patrick Maguire is the author of 'Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer',.

William Davies is a regular contributor to the LRB and the author of 'This is Not Normal: The collapse of liberal Britain' among other books.

Read William Davies on Burnham: https://lrb.me/opburnham01

From the LRB

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In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between internal and external experiences. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep look at the ways in which weather has functioned as a poetic tool, and consider three recent poems which describe the intimate and communal effects of atmospheric events: Maureen McLane's ‘Rocks’, with its ‘rain/when I’d just told her it would hold off’; ‘Surface Mapping’ by Jake Skeets, describing the death of 191 horses on Navajo land during a drought; and Ishion Hutchinson's ‘After the Hurricane’, in which the silence after a violent storm becomes a space to assess different forms of aftermath.

Read Maureen McLane's 'Rocks' in the LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/maureen-n.-mclane/rocks

Book tickets to a live recording of this series: https://lrb.me/ptwtickets

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
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‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is that a nostalgic illusion? The second competition, held in Italy in 1934, was a podium for Mussolini and, as Skinner puts it, ‘an early advertisement of the tournament’s potential service to politically repressive hosts’ that has continued through the years to Russia 2018, Qatar 2022 and the ‘Fifa-MAGA pageant’ of 2026.

In this episode Simon Skinner and Natasha Chahal join Tom to talk about the long relationship between football and politics and why Roberto Baggio can offer us no consolation.

Read more:

Simon Skinner: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod1

Natasha Chahal: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod4

John Lanchester on Qatar: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod2

Thomas Jones on Maradonna: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod3

More from the LRB:

Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠

Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material for poetry, starting with a look at Milton’s prose arguments in favour of divorce and the ways in which ‘confessional’ poets such as Lowell and Sexton took on divorce as a subject alongside other taboo subjects and subverted the traditional poetry of romantic failure.

They then turn to three more recent examples. In Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’, a picture of a marriage is constructed through defamiliarised domestic objects and the political metaphors of postwar Germany. Anne Carson’s ‘fictional essay’ The Beauty of a Husband draws on different genres and the writings of Keats to make sense of a chaotic, lonely experience with an untruthful husband. And in ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi chooses the palindromic form of the ‘specular’ as a metaphor for the non-linear collapse of a marriage.

Read Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’ in the LRB: https://lrb.me/divorcepoem

Further listening:

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford on Lowell and Carson: https://lrb.me/ldptwpod

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
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