Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

Lights! Camera! Action! Poetry!
 
Nothing But The Film Poem is a new podcast from the Scottish Poetry Library which will be released into the wild 3 times per year. In this first episode Sam Tongue from SPL meets poetry filmmaker Steve Smart. They talk film poems - or poetry films - just what are they? - and discuss some interesting examples.
 
Poetry films mentioned:

 

Do not go gentle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOZjrkfWIlM

 

La Plage by Alastair Cook

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/filmpoem-4-la-plage/

 

Acknowledgements

https://www.arvideriksson.com/acknowledgements

 

Additional Resources

 

Poetry Film Workshop web page (wide variety of many poetry film related resources)
https://artsci.co.uk/poetryfilmworkshop/

 

Charles Olsen’s 2023 essay on ‘How to film a poem’
https://newsroom.co.nz/2023/06/13/how-to-film-a-poem/

 

Helen Dewberry’s book ‘How to make a Poetry Film (a handbook for poets)’

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/helendewbery/how-to-make-a-poetry-film/

Regular podcast host Samuel Tongue, after a meetup with the Friends of the SPL group, rolls up his sleeves and gets thinking about two poems by Nick Makoha from his much acclaimed and award-listed 2025 masterpiece, The New Carthaginians (Penguin).

What they said about The New Carthaginians:

"A dizzying experience... like Dante entering hell through a rip in the universe, Makoha enters history, accompanied not by Virgil but by a Black Icarus with a microchip for a mouth, and the shade of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat" - Philip Terry (Guardian)

"A moving collection of entangled histories. Makoha’s poems break, cut, scratch and sample with heightened language to remake and renew the boundaries of myth. Do not sleep on The New Carthaginians - Raymond Antrobus

"In this book, Nick Makoha has found an otherworldly, visionary voice and diction that arrest you from the first page and never let you go." - Jason Allen-Paisant

"Profound, sheer originality... a tantalising jigsaw puzzle of a book" - Tristram Fane-Saunders (Telegraph)

Winner of all three Forward Prizes for poetry, Robin Robertson has had seven collections of poetry published and holds the distinction of writing the only poem ever nominated for the Booker Prize: his epic 2018 work The Long Take.

"Robertson's emotional terrain is difficulty and guilt; often he writes as if his poems have arisen from a pact with the devil. The poems are clear-lined, sometimes hard-edged, and meticulously worked." - Deryn Rees-Jones

"The genius of this Scots poet is for finding the sensually charged moment ... and depicting it in language that is simultaneously spare and ample, and reminiscent of early Heaney or Hughes." - New Yorker

Regular podcast host Samuel Tongue, with the Friends of the SPL group, rolls up his sleeves and gets under the bonnet of two vintage Robin Robertson poems:

Cat, Failing

Swimming In the Woods

Jane Hirshfield has many admirers worldwide. She is as adored by her legion of fans as she is by her fellow poets. The Polish Nobel Prize winning poet, Wisława Szymborska, called her 'a poet very close to my heart'. Another Polish Nobel Laureate, Czesław Miłosz, commented on her 'profound empathy for the suffering of all beings'. Critics too shower praise on her work. Susan Mansfield writing in The Scotsman spoke of her 'poems of wisdom, steeped in a profound understanding of what it is to be human.'

In this episode of Nothing But The Poem, our regular podcast host Samuel Tongue reads and then discusses two wonderful Jane Hirshfield poems, and reports back from the monthly online meetup of the Friends of the SPL group who had a lively discussion around these poems.

Mathematics from Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001)

For What Binds Us from Of Gravity and Angels (1988)

This edition of Nothing But The Poem features two poems by the American poet Jack Gilbert (1925-2012), both of which are included in Gilbert's penultimate collection 'Refusing Heaven'.

Our regular podcast host, Samuel Tongue, after discussing the poems with the Friends of the SPL group (who meet monthly on Zoom), takes his customary deep dive into the stanzas, lines, words and sounds.

“He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go; from that awful silence and tightening, he returns to us poems of savage compassion.” - James Dickey, on Jack Gilbert

"The unique kernel of Gilbert’s poetry is its fearless exploration of the adult heart. It takes a moment to have a fling or write one good line, but sustaining authentic emotional participation, as Gilbert has in his life as a poet, is terrifying and hard, and is practically a lost art." - Sarah Manguso, The Poetry Foundation

The two poems by Jack Gilbert read and discussed on the podcast are:

1. Failing and Flying

2. How Much of That is Left in Me