Over the next few months I’m giving my website over to The Two-Way Poetry Podcast, a series of interviews that I made where I speak to poets about their own creative inspirations and practice.
In each episode, I invite a writer to talk about a poem that has influenced his or her or their own writing. We discuss the work and, in return, my guest reads a poem they have written as a response, however overtly or indirectly connected, to this original piece.
The poets who will feature on the show in Series One are Rob Hindle, Jim Caruth, Suzannah Evans, Pam Thompson, Pete Green, Matt Clegg, Elizabeth Holloway, Lydia Allison and Angelina D’Roza. I’ve got a Podbean platform, and the broadcasts can also be downloaded from various players and apps. On my website I’m going to provide extra material associated with each interview – the Footnote Edition.
In this first episode, I reflect on the idea that when poets create poems they are often ‘in conversation’ with other writers’ works. How do poems talk away to other poems? An intriguing prospect if you are eavesdropping on this communication, but also possibly distancing as well if you don’t share the intimate knowledge that is being passed on. This is what the podcast will look to explore in depth: what poets understand about this process of responding to texts, poems that they have read.
Footnotes
The interview with Thom Gunn that I mention in the podcast can be found here: 'A Transit of Thom: An Interview with Thom Gunn' Poetry Review, vol. 86, no. 3 (Autumn 1996), pp. 52-7.