The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre podcast focusses upon the work of one poet or features discussion about poetry with poets and academics. The theme music for podcast episodes 1-24 is entitled Leaving for the North, and was composed by Aneurin Rees, and played by Aneurin Rees (guitar) and Rosalie Tribe (violin). The theme music for episode 25 onwards is Sun Over Water by Ketsa. For more information about the Poetry Centre, look up our website or find us on social media @brookespoetry
This episode features a conversation with Maurice Riordan, whose Selected Poems has just been published by Faber. The poems were chosen by the poet Jack Underwood, who also provides an introduction to the book, explaining his choices. Maurice Riordan is an Irish poet, translator, teacher, and editor who was born in County Cork in Ireland. The Selected Poems features work from his first book, A Word from the Loki (published in 1995), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and runs through to his most recent collection from 2021, Shoulder Tap. It includes poems from four other books, as well as a previously uncollected poem. Maurice’s collection Floods, published in 2000, was a Book of the Year in the Sunday Times and Irish Times, whilst The Holy Land (from 2007) won the Michael Hartnett Award. The Water Stealer (2013) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Maurice’s interest in science and the environment, whilst evident in his own writing, is also clear in a number of the anthologies he h…
In October 2024, the writers Helen Calcutt and Hannah Copley visited Oxford Brookes and gave a terrific reading from their latest poetry collections: Feeling All the Kills and Lapwing. We took advantage of their being here to interview them about their work - an interview that was conducted by our two current Poetry Centre Interns, Ruby McKie and Marie Kennedy, who are both in their second year at Brookes studying English Literature with Creative Writing. So in this episode you’ll first hear Ruby quizzing Helen, then Marie asking Hannah about her collection, and then some general discussion about the two collections’ shared interests. The episode concludes with Ruby and Marie reflecting on their own writing and how their reading of Helen and Hannah’s work has inspired them. Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist, and choreographer. She is the author of collections ‘Somehow’ (Verve Poetry Press) a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet & Poetry School Book of the Year (2020), ‘Unable Mother’ (V. Press, 2018) and ‘Feeli…
Ange Mlinko has published six collections of poetry, including Starred Wire, published by Coffee House Press in 2005 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; Shoulder Season with Coffee House Press in 2010, which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2010, and a finalist for a PEN Center USA award. Marvelous Things Overheard was selected as one of the best books of the year in the New Yorker and the Boston Globe in 2013. In his review of Ange’s last collection, Venice, in the New York Times, Troy Jollimore noted that her poems are ‘wild, energetic, alive, wantonly catholic in their allusiveness, often downright chatty.’ Ange has won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, the Frederick Bock Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Formerly the poetry editor of The Nation, she is now the poetry editor of the literary journal, Subtropics, which is based at the University of Florida where Ange is a professor of English. Ange has just published two books al…
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 Modernism (2013). He has also prepared critical editions of texts, including Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (2020) and The Early Career of William Carlos Williams (2013). Eric is the principal investigator of the Avant-Gardes and Speculative Technology (AGAST) Project, a digital humanities collaboration that reimagines modernists’ inventions using XR (Extended Reality, a term that includes virtual reality, mixed reality, and augmented reality). Together with Dr Georgina Colby, he co-edits two Edinburgh University Pr…
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 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 Roe, Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature here at Oxford Brookes. Dinah is an expert on Christina Rossetti, Victorian poetry, and the Pre-Raphaelites. During this past semester Dinah has run discussion groups and contributed an introduction to a Weekly Poem featuring Rossetti’s work that you can still find on our website, and we’re releasing this podcast on Sunday 5 December - Christina Rossetti’s birthday. In the discussion with Dinah, we focus on three poems by Rossetti: 'The heart knoweth its own bitterness', '…
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 York City-based poetry series COUPLET since 2011, and is a graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Leah has become well known for her poetry inspired by TV series, such as Mad Men, Westworld, and Mr. Robot. Many of her Game of Thrones-inspired poems have been translated into Norwegian and Bengali. In 2013, Flavorwire named her #7 of 23 People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry, and her chapbook Don Dreams and I Dream was voted one of The Top 10 Chapbooks To Read Now in 2014 by Time Out 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 his website: christopherkempf.com What Though The Field Be Lost may be grounded in the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but it doesn't just offer just a fascinating engagement with the soil and statues there. It is also a profound exploration of conflict and memory more broadly in the United States. Indeed, one of the most striking things about the book is the way in which it is so attentive to the complexities of history. Through the discussion of two poems from the book, ‘Remembrance Day’ and ‘Afte…
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 chapbook, which we talk about in the podcast, was named best chapbook by the Maryland Poet Laureate, Grace Cavalieri, and includes poems about First Lady Michelle Obama. celeste has received numerous awards, such as a 2017 Rubys Grant in Literary Arts, a Lucille Clifton Scholarship, and residencies at Atlantic Center of the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In addition to American Herstory, on the podcast we also discuss celeste’s five forthcoming poems about the nineteenth-century African American en…