Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Podcast

• 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’.

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• 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/

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• 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 [email protected]

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• 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.

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• 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 [email protected] or find the Poetry Centre on social media - Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram - we’re @brookespoetry And thank you for listening!

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