The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

In this episode, I talk to Meg Gripton-Cooper about Anne Carson's prose-poem 'Short Talk on Hedonism' and her own poem 'Excavating the House of Love.'

Meg reflects on how she came to encounter Anne Carson's work through her online reading, scouting a charity shop in Sheffield, and sitting in a festival tent in Leeds. She then goes on discuss where and how she has built up her library of Anne Carson collections through judicious purchasing in locations around the country.  We then begin to 'unpack' the different ways this short piece can be read - its brevity, in certain respects, adding to the proliferation of meanings. Meg considers the idea of hedonism before focusing on the 'intentions' of the narrator.  How does each sentence sit in relation to what has come before and what develops afterwards? How much can we trust this speaker? We discuss the importance of the physical intimacy of reading from a book (as opposed to scanning a digital copy) before we go on to explore Meg's own poem. 

I ask Meg about her use of the word 'excavating' as a way into thinking about her own piece. We talk about the 'holes' at the centre of each of the three stanzas in the poem - what do they represent, and how could they be 'performed'? We discuss the relationship between the speaker and the angel in relation to this idea of 'fear'.  Meg reflects on the processes of water in the piece. I ask her why she ends the work where she does - just as the angel is 'unearthed', and the two figures can observe one another. 

Finally, we discuss Meg's plans for the future - not only in terms of her poetry, but also her prose fiction projects as well.

 

Meg Gripton-Cooper is a writer and library worker living in Nottinghamshire. She is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam’s Creative Writing BA and MA courses where she was awarded the Percy Snowden Writing Prize and the Ictus Poetry Prize. Meg is particularly interested in experimental forms of poetry, gothic house fiction, and beautiful windows.

The first chapter of her novel The Vulture is available in the Northern Gravy Fiction Anthology (Valley Press) and here. Her poem ‘medusa’ appears in the RESISTANCE zine produced by Dead (Women) Poets Society. 

She is currently working on her second novel, alongside a collection of poetry.

 

Excavating the House of Love

 

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website or on my Substack Swift Diaries. 

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

Here, in the second of two episodes, I continue a slightly different approach and talk to Brian Lewis about his essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’ alongside my own book of poetry Little Piece of Harm.

On Friday 26th March 2021 Brian set off on a ‘round’ of Sheffield to deliver copies of my recently published poetry book Little Piece of Harm. He went on to write about his journey, a meditation on city, place, home and art itself in his extended essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’. In our conversation we explore connections between the two pieces of writing - both of which focus on traversing the city of Sheffield in ‘stressed’ times.

We begin where we ended the first programme with Brian reading (the same) extract from ‘Last Collection.’  We then go on to reflect on the care and attention to the object of the book that is central to Brian’s practice as both a writer and a publisher.  We spend some time discussing This is a Picture of Wind by J. R. Carpenter (Longbarrow, 2020) as a way of thinking about publication as part of the ‘journey’ of the book - and how the reader is involved in the ‘construction’ of the artefact. Brian also goes on to explore the evolution of the ‘walking’ anthology The Footing (Longbarrow, 2013) as a pivotal moment in his development as a publisher. I go on to read the introductory poem in Little Piece of Harm, ‘Blue Abandoned Van’ and talk about what it initiates in the light of how the narrative develops over the course of the collection. Is the city itself the central character of the poem? I elaborate on the formal designs of the sequence and dwell on the idea of trauma as one of the main ‘engines’ that drives the trajectory of the book. We then reflect on the rhythms (walking or otherwise) of both Little Piece of Harm and ‘Last Collection’. We end our conversation by thinking about the ending(s) of both ‘Last Collection’ and Little Piece of Harm - and the final touches/drafting that will bring Brian's book Local Distribution to completion. 

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press, a Sheffield-based collective whose activities include interdisciplinary collaborations and poetry walks. His publications include East Wind (Gordian Projects, 2016), an account of a walk across the Holderness peninsula, and White Thorns (Gordian Projects, 2017), based on a series of walks through the Isle of Axholme. A full-length book, Local Distribution, is in preparation.

You can find a full account of Brian’s Lockdown walks here. 

You can find extracts from ‘Last Collection’ on the Longbarrow website here - ‘One-Way Mirror’ and ‘Last Collection’.

You can read my poem 'Blue Abandoned Van' here.

You can find out more about Little Piece of Harm here.

At one point I mention the sequences ‘Sentences’ and ‘Death and the Gallant’, both poems that you can read in my 2015 Longbarrow collection Skin.

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

Here, in the first of two episodes, I take a slightly different approach and talk to Brian Lewis about his essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’ alongside my own book of poetry Little Piece of Harm.

On Friday 26th March 2021 Brian set off on a ‘round’ of Sheffield to deliver copies of my recently published poetry book Little Piece of Harm (Longbarrow Press). He went on to write about this journey, a meditation on city, place, home and art itself in his extended essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’. In our conversation we explore connections between the two pieces of writing - both of which focus on traversing the city of Sheffield in ‘stressed’ times.

Firstly, I talk to Brian about his duel role of being both a publisher and a writer, and about how one discipline feeds into the other.  Brian reflects on walking as a way of making sense of the city.  We examine how each walk taken engenders renewed iterations of Sheffield - we are constantly remaking the city through the act of observing the place. Also, Sheffield is reinventing itself - conceptually and physically, through demolishing older structures and planning new builds, new developments.  

We touch on Brian’s series of ‘Lockdown Walks’ before concentrating on ‘Last Collection’ for the rest of the podcast. Brian ruminates on the idea of slowness as a philosophical approach.  We talk at some length about Lockdown as one response to the COVID epidemic, which leads me to talk about my time in Aldeburgh in the summer of 2020 when I was finishing Little Piece of Harm.  Brian goes on to detail how he made notes while following his delivery route on the 26th March - and then how he ‘recalled’ and built up the particulars that are layered through ‘Last Collection’.  I relate how I built up Little Piece of Harm as a ‘portrait’ of a city. I begin to pick out and focus on a number of the abiding themes in the sequence.  Then Brian examines the notion of 'form', mixing (or not mixing) prose and poetry in 'Last Collection'.  We reflect on 'the rhythms and refrains' in our writing that captures the essence of walking - and at the end of the first 'chapter' of this podcast, Brian introduces and reads from a section of 'Last Collection' itself.

You can find a full account of Brian’s 'Lockdown Walks' here. 

You can find extracts from ‘Last Collection’ on the Longbarrow website here: ‘One-Way Mirror’  and ‘Last Collection’ .

This is the section from ‘Last Collection’ that Brian reads on the podcast itself:

From ‘Last Collection’ (in Local Distribution)

The shutters are down on Highfield Post Office. It's a straight left to Andy's house from here, Woodhead Road to Cherry Street, the hard drives stacked in the flooded cellar. Andy was a poet of the city and then its photographer. The switch seemed to happen overnight. It was unexpected but it made sense. The images were striking and inventive and they accumulated quickly, they were fresh with possibility, they captured the city in its moments of transition and looked beyond those moments. There were landscapes without land and portraits without faces. Colour studies and achromatic grids. Found abstractions and literal objects. There was craft in the titling of the photosets, a lightness of touch, Rising River, Island Songs, Test Patterns. I looked forward to each new series. Then it all just went. He abandoned one account and then another. Dead links. The internet hadn't saved any of it. This was intentional. There was no sense in arguing with him. It was no longer what he meant or felt. The work he has made since then is still in the world, or some of it is, you could say that it equals or exceeds the earlier work, it is hard to know, the earlier work has gone, and the city of which it was part has gone, why make comparisons, this is the difference between us, the letting go. I remember descending a stone flight to the cellar at Cherry Street and taking the first few steps in an inch or two of water, the electricity had gone off, again, rolling debts and standing charges burning through the top-ups, the credit and the emergency credit. The batteries in my torch were dead, the terminals corroded. I lit my way with a lighter that I had found in the kitchen, four or five seconds before the flame brushed the tip of my thumb, then four or five seconds of darkness. After a few attempts I managed to turn the top-up card the right side up and the right way round and feed it into the slot of the meter. The cellar light came on, a flickering strip, it showed cobwebs, cracked walls, and a freestanding metal rack with two or three desktop computers veiled in dust. I wondered how much work had died in those machines and then I remembered that it was none of my business, that I was not his archivist. I was still his editor, a handful of last poems yet to be published, his night walks, his laments. The poems come back to me now, as I pass the closed doors of the Highfield Branch Library, what were they getting at, the fables and parables, what are they saying, just before they break, things that can only be shown or spoken of in lamplight, a life recovered in the moment of its telling, a city caught in the act of disappearing.

 

I’ll give more details about Little Piece of Harm in the second episode - though here is a link to information about the book on the Longbarrow website.

 

Brian Lewis is the editor and publisher of Longbarrow Press, a Sheffield-based collective whose activities include interdisciplinary collaborations and poetry walks. His publications include East Wind (Gordian Projects, 2016), an account of a walk across the Holderness peninsula, and White Thorns (Gordian Projects, 2017), based on a series of walks through the Isle of Axholme. A full-length book, Local Distribution, is in preparation.

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

In this episode, I talk to Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana about Kimiko Hahn’s poem ‘Compass’ and her own poem ‘Madam Gout’.

We discuss all things zuihitsu - reflecting on Kimiko Hahn’s own approach to the form and Alexandra’s inspired interpretation of this complex Japanese ‘standard’. As well as asking Alexandra about the essential qualities of the zuihitsu we talk about fragmentation, layering information, the public and the private detail.  Alexandra also reflects on her own time in Japan, and from this, cogitates on Japanese influences in her own work.  In zuihitsu how do we say something without actually stating it? We go on to discuss how the words, phrases, lines are laid out on the page in relation to the 'cartography of the poem.'

In the podcast, Alexandra mentions a number of times The Pillow-Book by Sei Shõnagon, a version of which can be downloaded for free on Project Gutenberg here.

 

 

 

 

 
Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and author of Sing me down from the dark (Salt, 2022). She has Masters’ degrees in Writing Poetry and in Japanese Language and Culture and she lectured on the Japanese zuihitsu form at the 2024 Japan Writers Conference. 
 
Her poems have appeared in magazines such as The North, P.N. Review, Magma, Poetry Wales, The Pomegranate London, Anthropocene and The Madrid Review. 
 
This year, she was twice shortlisted for Verve’s Poem of the Month prize and commended in The Buzzword and Artemesia competitions. She is a freelance creative writing tutor, mentor and reviewer who has taught for The Poetry Business,  The Poetry School and The Writing School.
 
Alexandra’s second collection, Skinship, is due out with Salt in September 2026.
 

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.

In this episode, I discuss Arthur Rimbaud with Cliff Forshaw. We focus on Rimbaud's poem 'Vowels', translated by Cliff in his collection French Leave: Versions and Perversions, and Cliff's sequence RE:VERB which retells the life of Rimbaud in verse. Cliff also reflects on his latest book, Elemental, and reads the opening piece 'Remains' in full.

Cliff relates how he first came to Rimbaud as a school boy.  He talks about the long journey he took to come to write a book of translations of (mainly) 19th century French poets.  He goes on to discuss, at length, his long narrative poem RE:VERB which illuminates the life of Arthur Rimbaud, from decadent poet to merchant and gun runner in Africa.  He reads from, and talks about, the opening poems in the collection ('Hooligan in Hell' and 'Alchemy of the Word').  Why is Rimbaud so interesting as a writer and as an individual? We go on to explore Cliff's interest in art and how that feeds back into his identity as a writer.

Finally, we discuss the work in his latest book, Elemental, landing on the opening poem - 'Remains' to read and reflect on. I ask him what he is planning to write/publish next.

 

From 'Alchemy of the Word'

But also...

                  A Hermes Trismegistus, unseen unheard,
                                 I conjured the Alchemy of the Word;
                  deciphered fragments of the vowels' spectrum,
                                 my mind a wand, a bow, a plectrum.
                  I struck the rainbow's neurasthenic strings,
                                 plumbed all tenebrous, timbrous things.
                  Then, when sounding out riddles as Gnostic songs,
                                 it came to me: I was going wrong.

Sortilege and Thaumaturgy,        Tantra, Sutra, Old Grimoires
Hermeneutics, Oneiromancy,     Transits of Venus, Mercury, Mars,
Almanacs, O Dark Abraxas,        Cabbalistic Hierophants,
Orphic Devotees, Eleusis,             Mumbo-jumbo, Obeah, Cant,
Epiphanic Hocus-Pocus,               Hoodoo-Voodoo, Occult Muse,
Diabolic Psychomancy,                 Esoteric Marabouts.

                   From such fiendish tomes I busked the Blues,
                                  left a hobo chorus of cryptic clues.
                   But my rational derangement of all the senses
                                  (shamanically ancient, prophetically new)
                   left me wondering: Who was the densest,
                                   Poet or Reader? I got no reviews.

From 'Remains'

                                                  I

In Transylvania when I got that call
- had been that day to Sighisoara, drawn
to that famous undead batman's place of birth.

Think: the Saxon cemetery high up the hill.
Carved gothically upon one stone, I'd seen
Ruhen in fremder Erde!  Written it down.

Lie still in foreign soil - but you never can:
(stone blunts, moss overwrites your name)
the earth remains so cold and strange.

As do you.  Whoever you were, laid low
in the lie of the land, you are now (whatever now might mean)
your own remains - just let the world, its weather,

drain right through your tongue, your ribs,
whatever stubbornly persists of you.

 

Cliff Forshaw has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, twice a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and held residences in California, France, Kyrgizstan, Romania, and Tasmania. Collections include: Elemental (Templar, 2025); French Leave (Broken Sleep, 2023); RE:VERB ((Broken Sleep, 2022) and Pilgrim Tongues (Wrecking Ball, 2015) https://www.cliff-forshaw.co.uk

You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

The end music was composed and played by William Jones.