The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

In this final episode of Season Three, Stephen Sawyer discusses Jorie Graham's poem 'Time Frame' in relation to his own poem 'What We Did Know We Had or Running Thin'.

Together, we explore Jorie Graham's journey as a poet. Stephen provides a concise biography, and then goes on to explore how her writing-focus has changed over the course of her career.  He spends time, in particular, on Jorie Graham's techniques and approaches as a poet, eschewing linear narrative and the idea of the 'clear' ending, and also concentrates on her attention to climate change, and articulating the consequences of the Anthropocene.   We discuss the poem 'Time Frame' at length, reflecting on the 'instabilities' in the text, on the narrative voice, on time itself, the 'American project' and the disappearance of the fortune teller as the poem progresses.  

We then go on to explore Stephen's poem.  He 'unpacks' his own techniques and how Jorie Graham has influenced his ways of communicating in his own work.  He talks about the idea of why the poem is right justified, for instance - in relation to Graham's own practice. He ruminates on the rise of the notion of 'climate crisis' over the past fifty years - from his childhood experiences on the north-west coast of England to now. He reflects on the role of the poet, and finding an audience.  What moves him to write long poems?

 

You can read Jorie Graham's poem 'Time Frame' here (with an audio reading by the poet) in the London Review of Books archive. This poem comes from the Collection To 2040 (Carcanet, 2023), which you can read about here. 

You can read about Stephen's book - There Will Be No Miracles Here - following this link.  You can read about (and order a copy of) Carrying a Tree on the Bus to Low Edges here.

 

What We Did Know We Had        or    Running Thin

 

                     It’s a shock I know 

the drowning sea, 

 fishes floating 

between sharp stems

in the slowing current 

at the water’s edge,

the disturbance of

our parting. Don’t worry,

it’s still the past, the fast

and furious, furious,

the utter, instant now,

  the later-human voice, 

fishes breaking camp,

unsettled in their skin, 

hastening remorselessly,

as arrows in a free flow

diagram to the zero-

point. Are you the seventh

 generation staring back at me

as me. What we did 

know we had. I remember 

the sea touching the clouds

in the voice of the rain,

net curtains nailed up,

a single yellow daffodil

in the garden next door.

If the worst should befall us.

Aren’t those the garden steps

where Rhianna, your neighbour,

shone her torch? What is it you know 

about me, I don’t.

Which part of the body am I.

Which part of which body am I.

How many self-destructive parts

 of now? To whom am I not listening. 

The wind is a wounded creature.

 The sea is a wounded creature.

I feel so much more

and less than a mental bird

in a mental cage hastening

 to that rip in the fabric

at four hundred and forty parts

per million of atmospheric CO₂.

Companions will be found for you,

a reflexively contrarian shadow text

→Choose Gospel→Cloud Tech

→AI Systems→Species→Menu

and ‘I’ was to think ‘you’

 thinking ‘me.’

Tentacles! Six ‘personal others’

between you and me,  

 a set of suckers, jet propulsive,

high-fiving that bottle-backed

bubble-headed, giant frog.

How much of us have gone.

Remember me, says Sea-roar.                                                                                                                                 

What it was to run

after that orange Trophy football

on Ainsdale village green, bent

double, gasping for laughter,

our one thousand odours

of salt, the boat is lurching  

purple waves claw the sails,

small as grains of rice. Remember,

 the valley of dormant smokestacks, 

the man in Y-fronts on his drive

 way unabashed by your appearance

at the gate, “So beautiful … they

see nothing,” says the failing light.

Who is the ghost,

who is the ghost’s

 ghost? a ghost asks.

 Is this a now.

Am I still in minutes. 

Can all this happen in reverse.

Butterflies were giants once.

Elvis waved rain from the sky

so his friends could play racquet ball,

 before projecting himself to the stars,

wearing trainers and a guru scarf,

The Leaves of Morya’s Garden

Volumes 1 & II tucked under his arm.

You feel it before you know it.

I can’t hear them

screaming, weeping, see 

them doubling down

on Nettleham Road.

 Is that are they drums

drones, tanks? Hurry,

→Hurry, Faster, Faster 

Do you prepare? How

do you prepare

for the Venus effect.

Some people scuba dive, cruise

and fly. I keep looking for left-

over signs, hieroglyphs,

jutting spikes, a human hand finger-

shaking on a red background.

Please, don’t follow me to the right

                                                                                                              hand margin, I am the temporary.

“How’s your portion

of the crisis?” Rhianna would say,

wielding her pruning shears,

bindweed flows mindlessly,

“ What do the readings say?”

Bone and ice density, breaking 

lines, torn cables, loose voices, 

chinos and chunky watches,  

punch-lines like loose stones.

 Are we still here. If you can

read this, time is not late. 

Your guest is waiting for you

 to grunt, drum, click,

use the wrist-plate, sub-pen,

 bridle and saddle a sea horse, 

with a light touch. Hold on.

 

Before completing an M.A. in creative writing at Manchester University, Stephen Sawyer worked as a naval rating, bartender, painter and decorator, actor, stand-up comic and, most recently, as a university lecturer in the social sciences. His writing reflects the sharp edge of the north where he was born and raised. He lives in Sheffield and teaches creative writing and English skills in the community. Stephen has had poems published in magazines and anthologies. His first collection, There Will Be No Miracles Here, was published by Smokestack Books in 2018. Carrying a Tree on the Bus to Low Edges, was published by Smokestack Books in 2024.

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 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.