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.
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 Mode...
This latest episode marks something of a departure for the Poetry Centre podcast. If you’re a regular or just occasional listener to this podcast, you’ll know that it normally features a poet in conversation about two or three of their poems. This episode is the first of a series in which Niall Munro talks with colleagues at Oxford Brookes University and showcases some of the very exciting research that they have been doing into poets and poetry. In this episode, Niall Munro talks with Dr Dinah ...
Leah Umansky is the author of two book-length collections, The Barbarous Century (2018), Domestic Uncertainties (Blazevox, 2012), and two chapbooks, Straight Away the Emptied World (Kattywompus Press, 2016), and the Mad Men-inspired Don Dreams and I Dream (Kattywompus Press, 2014). Her writing has been widely published in places like The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, POETRY, Guernica, and American Poetry Review. She has been the host and curator of the New...
In this episode Niall Munro talks with Christopher Kempf about his new collection of poetry, What Though The Field Be Lost, published by Louisiana State University Press in 2021. Chris’s first poetry collection, Late in the Empire of Men, won the 2015 Levis Prize from Four Way Books and was reviewed widely, including in The New York Times. His scholarly book, Craft Class: The Workshop in American Culture, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can find out more about Chris on hi...
celeste doaks is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields, a collection of poems published in 2015 by Wrecking Ball Press. The book was listed as one of the Ten Best Books of 2015 by Beltway Quarterly Poetry. In 2017, she edited and contributed to the anthology Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Joy, and Sexuality, published by Mason Jar Press. And in 2019 she published American Herstory, which was the winner of Backbone Press’s 2018 chapbook competition. The ch...
In this episode, Niall Munro talks with the Gaelic poet Niall O’Gallagher. Niall studied and then taught at the University of Glasgow before going on to work as a journalist. As Niall mentions in the podcast, it was in his early days as a journalist that he began writing the poems that went into his first collection, Beatha Ùr (‘New Life’), published by Clàr in 2013. Three years later, he published Suain nan Trì Latha (‘Three Nights Dreaming’) in which - and again you’ll hear Niall discussing th...
In the podcast, Ana discusses how she got into editing anthologies, how she goes about putting her anthologies together and making tough decisions about which poems to keep in and leave out, and why she thinks her most recent anthologies featuring only women poets - She Is Fierce and She Will Soar, both published by Pan Macmillan - are particularly important. You can find out more about Ana's work on her website (anasampson.co.uk) and follow her on Twitter (@AnaBooks). Ana and Niall discuss thre...
In this episode, the poet, editor and translator Chris Beckett talks to Niall Munro about his latest book, "Tenderfoot". Chris discusses growing up in Ethiopia and questions of privilege, perceptions of Ethiopia and a responsibility he feels to write about the place and its people. Chris also talks about how he portrays his nascent sexuality and how he reflects on Ethopia then and now after numerous trips back to the country in recent years. Chris has published two collections with Carcanet, “Et...
Maya C. Popa is an American poet, researcher, editor, and teacher who has published two pamphlets: The Bees Have Been Canceled in 2017, and You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave in 2018. Most recently, her first full-length collection, American Faith, was published by Sarabande Books in 2019. The book was the runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and the winner of the 2020 North American Book Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia. She is the recipient of awards f...
Jennifer Wong was born and brought up in Hong Kong. She now lives in the UK and works as a writer, translator and teacher. She has published three collections: *Goldfish* (2013), Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl - a pamphlet with Bitter Melon Poetry (2019), and most recently Letters Home 回 家, published by Nine Arches Press in 2020, which was selected as a Wild Card Choice by the Poetry Book Society. In this podcast, Jennifer reads and discusses four poems: ‘of butterflies’, ‘Girls from my class’, ‘M...
This interview was recorded in late November 2019 when Doyali visited the UK, and in it Doyali discusses the tensions in her poetry, how her work deals with chronic illness, the innovative formal choices that she makes for her poems in her Griffin Prize-shortlisted collection heft, the link between poetry, art and healing, and how she represents her family in her writing. She discusses three poems, all of which you can read on the Podcasts page of the Poetry Centre website: ‘sagittarius {the arc...
Mariah is a poet, teacher and interdisciplinary researcher from Oxford. Her debut collection, a novel-in-sonnets called the love i do to you, was published in November 2019 by Eyewear. Poems from the novel were shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, The Melita Hume Prize and the manuscript won the AM Heath Prize. A second collection of poems the rafters are still burning which explores writing, constructions of whiteness and museum archives is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2020.
Peter Bearder may be better known to many as Pete the Temp. A spoken word poet, comic, and musician, Peter has appeared on television and radio, at festivals around the UK, and internationally with the British Council. He has been the National Poetry Slam Champion and in 2018 was awarded the Golden Hammer Award for services to spoken word. His poetry has appeared in a collection called Numbered Boxes (Burning Eye Books, 2017). As well as recordings of Peter’s performances and his terrific select...
In the latest episode of the Poetry Centre Podcast, Niall Munro talks to James Arthur. James was born in Connecticut and grew up in Toronto. His poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and The Walrus. He has been awarded numerous scholarships and fellowships, such as the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbrig...
We were delighted to catch up with Canadian poet Richard Harrison recently, who was passing through Oxford en route to Italy where he was to launch a new Italian translation of his poetry. Whilst he was in town, Richard gave an inspiring reading at the Society Cafe, and beforehand sat down with the Director of the Poetry Centre, Niall Munro, to discuss his work. In this interview Niall and Richard talk about the structure of Richard’s award-winning book On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flo...
In this first episode in a new podcast series, Shara Lessley discusses her poem ‘The Clinic Bomber’s Mother’. The poem comes from Shara’s new book, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. In this discussion, Shara first reads her poem and then talks about a number of issues related to it and the book as a whole, such as motherhood, perceptions of the Middle East by Americans and violence in the Middle East and in America, especially domestic terrorism. Shara ...
This latest podcast features a dialogue between Terri Mullholland and Siân Thomas, inspired by Siân’s poem, ‘The Abandoned House’. Amongst other venues, Terri and Siân presented their dialogue at the Shifting Territories conference in May 2013. Together with their discussion, they also showed a number of photographs of the particular house in Sussex, which were taken by the photographer Caroline Pooley. These are also presented here. In this recording, Siân reads her poem, and then talks about h...
In this episode Forward Prize and Costa Book Award-winner Jo Shapcott talks about her work. It was recorded at the Shifting Territories conference on 22 May 2013 at the Institute of English Studies in London. A conference designed to bring together postgraduate students and Early Career Researchers, as well as poets and academics, Shifting Territories considered the recent wave of new nature writing and poetry which has gone beyond traditional representations of landscape to venture into borderl...
Claire Trévien was born in 1985 in Brittany. She is a poet and critic, who completed a PhD on French Revolutionary prints in 2012. Her début collection ‘The Shipwrecked House’ (Penned in the Margins, 2013) was longlisted for a Guardian First Book Award. Her writing has been published in a wide variety of literary magazines including ‘Under The Radar’, ‘Poetry Salzburg Review’, ‘Ink Sweat & Tears’, ‘The Warwick Review’, ‘Nth Position’, and ‘Fuselit’. She has published an e-chapbook of poetry ...
Steven Matthews was born and brought up in Colchester, Essex. Various of his poems have been published in magazines and journals including Stand, Versus, Kunapipi, Oxford Magazine, Poetry and Audience, and Moving Worlds.
In this episode Alan Buckley talks about the nature of poetic influence, the role that breath and the body play in producing poetry, and the responsibilities which a poet has towards the subject of his elegy. You can read the poem on the Podcasts section of the Poetry Centre website.
In this episode, Gill talks about how she writes poetry and what she considers the role of the poet to be within society. You can read her poem ‘The Power of Ice’ on the Podcasts section of the Poetry Centre website.
This episode features the keynote panel discussion from the Sisters in Verse symposium at Oxford University in association with the Poetry Centre, which took place on 9 March 2012. This event is one in a series organized by the Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network (http://pgcwwn.wordpress.com/). The discussion was chaired by Alex Pryce and the panelists were Kate Clanchy, Jane Yeh, and Sophie Mayer. You can read more about the the writers and see photos from the event on the Podcast...
In this first episode of our Oxford Poets series, Claire Cox reads and discusses her prize-winning poem 'Tolstoy at Astapovo Station'.
