The LRB Podcast

In the sixth episode of their series, Sarah and Sandeep look at poems that explore the complexities of money and its metaphorical power: Frederick Seidel’s ‘In Late December’ starts with an image of degradation in the symbolic heart of global capitalism but ends with an ambiguous vision of the undead in an apparent appeal to common humanity; in Ella Fears’s Goodlord, an email from an estate agent triggers a stream-of-consciousness tour through a series of barely-habitable rental properties and a reflection on a financial system that traps people in dehumanising accommodation; and Danez Smith’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ provides a satirical exploration of the relationship between race, poverty and systemic exploitation, describing a compressed history of the evolution of oppression from slavery to sharecropping to the modern exploitations of capitalism.

Read Frederick Seidel's 'In Late December' in the LRB:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n24/frederick-seidel/in-late-december

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 Trump-Russia dossier, leaked to the press in 2017, contained multiple allegations of collusion between the US president and Putin, including reports of meetings between Kremlin officials and members of Trump’s campaign team, and the existence of kompromat in the form of the infamous ‘pee tape’. Shortly after the dossier was leaked, Christopher Steele, the head of a private business intelligence firm called Orbis, was named as its author. Steele claimed that his company had access to sources which allowed them to ‘illuminate Vladimir Putin’s autocratic and closed regime’. In a review of Steele’s memoir in the LRB, Vadim Nikitin called the dossier ‘shoddy’ and ‘full of uncorroborated and implausible’ material. None of its claims have been proven.

In this episode, Vadim joins Thomas Jones to discuss the legacy of the dossier, Steele’s career before and after its release and how the internal workings of the business intelligence industry are influencing politics in both the US and the UK.

Archive:

‘The Rachel Maddow Show’/MSNBC

‘Russian oligarch met with Cohen at Trump tower’/CNN

‘This House Prefers Style Over Substance’/Cambridge Union

‘Special Report: Mueller report release’/CBS News

‘Your World’/Fox News

‘Times Radio Breakfast’/Times News

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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

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

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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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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