In-depth interviews of poets by poets from the world's best poetry quarterly.

The Poetry Review Podcasts

In a searching, wide-ranging and often very funny exchange, Selima Hill talks to Review editor Emily Berry about being both a prolific writer and a private person, about secrecy and rebellion, embodiedness and encodedness. Her writing process is, she says, less about cutting (“which sounds so violent”) and rather like “lifting your hair – loosen, loosen, then tighten, tighten, tighten – spread it as far as you can, then tighten”. They discuss relationships with family, men, audiences, Eastern European literature and animals, including Hill’s pet giant land snail. She also describes how her diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, her experiences in psychiatric hospital, and periods of muteness have affected her writing. Hill gives vivid readings of all of her poems published in the winter 2020 issue of The Poetry Review, including ‘Standing on his doorstep’, ‘Jelly’ and ‘Berries’, which will appear in Men Who Feed Pigeons, published by Bloodaxe this September.

Selima Hill talks to Emily Berry

In the latest Poetry Review podcast, Gail McConnell talks to Emily Berry about loss, parenthood and the resource of language in her debut collection The Sun is Open. Published this September, the book works with archival material related to the life and death of McConnell's father, who was murdered by the IRA outside their home in Belfast in 1984. “Language does the work if you let it,” she observes of this "fraught undertaking". Together they discuss poetry form and performance – typography, breath, sound and “the event of the poem” – and the poets and thinkers who have influenced McConnell’s thinking: Bob Scanlan of The Poets’ Theatre, Jay Bernard, Raymond Antrobus, Denise Riley, Ciaran Carson, D.W. Winnicott and others. McConnell gives astonishing readings of her poems published in the Review: excerpts from ‘The Sun is Open’ and ‘Untitled / Villanelle’.

Gail McConnell talks to Emily Berry

In their funny and thought-provoking conversation by telephone, celebrated American poet Mary Ruefle and Review editor Emily Berry discuss starting poems and first lines; working to commission and no longer facing the blank page; writing letters, writing prose, humour and sadness and not being afraid of the latter; pins, paper clips, swimming and getting comfortable with what we don't know... Poetry is to be experienced as a phenomenon on earth, Ruefle says, “[it] is not be understood… it’s a little scary but it’s a matter of letting go”. She gives wonderful readings of her poems in the Review summer 2021 issue: ‘Lament’, ‘Conflict’, ‘My Life as a Scholar’ and ‘Empathy of Cod’.

Mary Ruefle talks to Emily Berry

Spend 30 engrossing minutes in the company of the award-winning US poet Shane McCrae and Review editor Emily Berry as they discuss Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ as the trigger, when he was just 15, of McCrae’s poetry career; John Keats and the Gothic; George Herbert; and McCrae's conversion from free verse to metrical verse. ‘I can only recommend that everyone abandon the way they’ve been writing and see what happens if they write in a different way,’ he says. Fascinating on the ‘productive panic’ of building a collection, McCrae also gives wonderful readings of his poems published in the autumn 2021 issue of The Poetry Review: 'Explaining My Appearance in Certain Pictures', 'The Fungus Called Dead Man’s Fingers' and 'The Dead Negro in the Modernist Long Poem'.

Shane McCrae talks to Emily Berry

The prize-wining American poet Jane Yeh, author of Marabou and The Ninjas (both Carcanet) talks to Sarah Howe, co-editor of the winter issue of The Poetry Review. They discuss Yeh’s use of dramatic monologue and the often fantastical personas she adopts (ninjas, rabbits, androids) to hilarious effect. “I think of Oscar Wilde’s phrase, ‘the truth of masks’ – how when you wear a mask it reveals your identity in a way,” Yeh explains. They also discuss contemporary art, installations and film and influences such as Amy Woolard, Stephen Burt, Lucie Brock-Broido and the work of fellow-writers Safiya Sinclair, Ocean Vuong and Timothy Donnelly. Yeh reads her poems ‘Rabbit Empire’ and ‘A Short History of Patience’, first published in The Poetry Review. To connect with more poetry, visit poetrysociety.org.uk

Jane Yeh talks to Sarah Howe

‘You listen for the poem to say itself’
Emily Berry talks to Gillian Allnutt about meditation, fragmentation and the ‘hinterland’ of the poem. To connect with more poetry, visit poetrysociety.org.uk

Gillian Allnutt talks to Emily Berry

“Poetry is an inner armour available to anyone,” says the celebrated Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson in this latest in The Poetry Review podcast series. In conversation with Review Editor Emily Berry, Hutchinson talks about his influences (citing Donne, Eliot and George Seferis) and his poetics; about homesickness, travel and "returning responsibly". Hutchinson also reads his poems, ‘West Ride Out’ and ‘Travel Axe’, both first published in The Poetry Review. To connect with more poetry, visit poetrysociety.org.uk

Emily Berry talks to Ishion Hutchinson

In our most festive podcast yet, Julian Stannard reads his poems ‘Boxing Day’, ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Pigs in Suffolk’, and talks about the strange theatre of the dining room: Italy, his mother, Christmas and trifle; bleak poems that end up being humorous; poets Giorgio Caproni, Ezra Pound, Christopher Reid and Selima Hill; of a sense of the absurd as a coping mechanism; and of Donald Davies’s idea of fending off at least some of the stuff trying to get into a poem. To connect with more poetry, visit poetrysociety.org.uk

Julian Stannard talks to Emily Berry

“I think shame is very unhelpful, that taboos can be very unhelpful – maybe we should try and be as brave as our poems.” Fiona Benson, author of the prize-winning collection Bright Travellers, talks to Review Editor Emily Berry, about her new collection Vertigo & Ghost, forthcoming from Cape in 2019. They consider questions of shame, permission and catharsis, the challenges of working with difficult material and ‘breaking through’ – the ways in which writing works to bring the inside outside, and the influence of writers such as Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds and Lucille Clifton. Benson also reflects on the sublime and its possibilities in contemporary poetry, with reference to Whitman, Rilke and Ginsberg. She reads her astonishing poems ‘Fly’ and ‘[Zeus] Anatomical Dolls’, both first published in The Poetry Review. To connect with more poetry, visit poetrysociety.org.uk

Fiona Benson talks to Emily Berry

“I have so many anecdotes and stories [about] how d/Deaf people are excluded from cultural events and how much harder they/we/I have had to work to access culture. I am trying to write into those disconnections and create new bridges.” Raymond Antrobus, Review contributor and winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, talks to Emily Berry about his forthcoming debut collection The Perseverance, his work as a poet-teacher in d/Deaf and hearing schools, literacy, elegy and the influence of cinema on his work. Poems in The Perseverance challenge and rework the canon as part of a process he describes as “developing a language to explain myself”, of “writing through trauma and coming to different conclusions that I can apply to new bodies of work”. He gives powerful readings of his poems ‘Sound Machine’  and ‘After Reading Ted Hughes’s “Deaf School” by the Mississippi River’.

Raymond Antrobus talks to Emily Berry

Listen in on influential US poet Chelsey Minnis, author of Poemland, Zirconia, Foxina, Bad Bad and the just-published Baby, I Don’t Care, in a highly entertaining interview with Poetry Review editor Emily Berry. Their conversation ranges across Chelsey’s obsession with Turner Classic Movies TV channel, the usefulness of screenplay structures, being influenced and being an influencer, reading and rereading Plath, Whitman, Chekhov’s plays and Patricia Highsmith’s novels, and the relationships between poetry, play and money.

Chelsey Minnis talks to Emily Berry

Will Harris, Poetry Review contributor and the most recent winner of the Arts Foundation poetry fellowship, started writing poetry when it wasn't cool. Here, he talks to Review Editor Emily Berry about discovering dreams as inspiration, Emily Bronte, the meanings – problematic and otherwise – of 'white', video games and putting together his first full collection. He also reads from his wonderful sequence 'The White Jumper' (which he has also written about in the Review section of poetrysociety.org.uk).

Will Harris talks to Emily Berry

In a brilliant, wide-ranging discussion with Emily Berry, Editor of The Poetry Review, the celebrated poet Denise Riley talks about the art of composition – of indifferent mechanicals and of jigsaws pieced into sense from the edge pieces, confessional literature, lyric shame and strategies for repair. She also reads two poems just published in The Poetry Review: ‘How does anyone get over these things’ and ‘Another Agony in the Garden’.

Denise Riley talks to Emily Berry

In the latest Poetry Review podcast, Emily Berry talks to Ilya Kaminsky, author of the astonishing and internationally acclaimed collection Deaf Republic. Their conversation ranges across political poetry (only in English do people try to divide poetry that is political and not political, everywhere else poetry is political, says Kaminsky), of matching your method to show what it is you see as a writer, about the need to witness the good as well as the bad, and the poet as a private person. Kaminsky, born in the former Soviet Union but now an American citizen, describes his unrequited love for English: “sometimes a stranger can make love to the language a little better than the native person... of course it can also be very awkward too”.

Ilya Kaminsky talks to Emily Berry

In a conversation that will lighten spirits and fire up brain cells, Emily Berry talks to Mark Waldron in the latest Poetry Review podcast. They discuss children’s books, the theatre and performance, Beckett, Ashbery and “meant silliness”. “I like mixing up childhood and adulthood,” says Waldron, “things from childhood I want to resolve – or look at anyway.” His interest is in the separation between inside and outside – “letting the inside out and seeing if people will accept that.” He also offers two wonderful readings of his poems ‘Contingency’ and ‘To Dig’, first published in The Poetry Review, 109:3, Autumn 2019.

Mark Waldron talks to Emily Berry

Don Paterson talks to Colette Bryce, poet and guest editor of the winter 2019 issue of the Review, about the “dark comedy” of his forthcoming collection Zonal – the inspiration he took from watching old episodes of The Twilight Zone, the freedom of a long line and a looser, narrative form, and the possibilities of confessionalism. “I like the confessional tone,” Don says, “I don’t like that within the confessional tone you’re obliged to confess.” He and Colette also discuss writing routines and the drafting process – “It’s not about getting it right – it’s all about giving yourself to something changing because you’re discovering what you want to say,” he says. Don also gives exclusive readings of ‘The Way We Were’, first published in the winter issue of the Review, and two other poems from Zonal: ‘You Guys’ and ‘Death’.

Don Paterson talks to Colette Bryce

Will Harris and Nick Makoha, prizewinning poets both, talk about Nick’s poems in the spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review and how these poems exemplify his interest in song, story and myth, the parameters of self, reconfiguring the problem of the white lens, and how the act of writing poems produces unlooked-for discoveries. Nick gives electrifying readings of his poems ‘Codex 1’ and Codex 2, both published in the Review, and ‘Bird In Flames’ from his Forward-shortlisted debut Kingdom of Gravity.

Nick Makoha talks to Will Harris

Review contributor Sandeep Parmar talks to Mary Jean Chan, guest co-editor with Will Harris of the spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review. Sandeep reads her poem, ‘The Nineties’, and reflects on its origins – growing up in California at the time of the L.A. riots, which followed the arrest and beating of Rodney King, the trial of O.J. Simpson and the 1994 Northridge earthquake – and their relevance now, following the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement as a catalyst for change. In an exhilarating conversation Sandeep and Mary Jean discuss race and contemporary literature, the lyric 'I' and, post-Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, the fluidities and opportunities of the second-person ‘you’, and changing the critical context of BAME writing with the Ledbury Emerging Critics scheme, which Sandeep co-founded with Sarah Howe.

Sandeep Parmar talks to Mary Jean Chan

Rachel Long, whose brilliant debut My Darling from the Lions (Picador) has been shortlisted for the Forward, Costa and Rathbones Folio prizes, talks to Review editor Emily Berry about dreams and the usefulness of the non-material world to poetry. They also discuss influences on Rachel’s writing including Selima Hill, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze and the Bible, humour, ‘little-black-dress’ titles, trauma and power. Rachel reads her poems first published in the Review: ‘The Red Hoover’ and 'Mum's Snake', an excerpt from her sequence 'A Lineage of Wigs'. (Rachel Long photo: Amaal Said)

Rachel Long talks to Emily Berry

Join Review editor Emily Berry and poet and novelist Luke Kennard, for an exhilarating unravelling of the prophetic voice and its uses for poetry, the liberating restriction of the poem sequence, and prose poetry as “a space in which to be convolutedly honest” – with passing references to Baudelaire, Chekhov, Ted Hughes, James Tait, Anne Carson and Maggie Nelson, contemporary morality, and anger as a motivating force. Luke also reads his three poems in the autumn 2020 issue of The Poetry Review, from his future project inspired by the Book of Jonah.

Luke Kennard talks to Emily Berry

The Poetry Society was founded in 1909 to promote "a more general recognition and appreciation of poetry". Since then, it has grown into one of Britain's most dynamic arts organisations, representing British poetry both nationally and internationally. Today it has more than 4000 members worldwide and publishes the leading poetry magazine, The Poetry Review.

With innovative education and commissioning programmes and a packed calendar of performances, readings and competitions, the Poetry Society champions poetry for all ages. 

"The Poetry Society is the heart and hands of poetry in the UK – a centre which pours out energy to all parts of the poetry-body, and a dexterous set of operations which arrange and organise poetry's various manifestations. It has a long distinguished history, and has never been so vital, or so vitalizing as it is now." Sir Andrew Motion