Podcasts about mouthful

IT'S MY BOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYToday's episodes:AG010 Taming of the ShroomishAG011 You Said a Mouthful!Welcome to "To Kill A Delibird", the Pokémon anime rewatch podcast that combines a love of literary puns and analytics with pure Pokémania. Join Graham (Pokémon expat/video game and manga fanatic) and Kellan (hard boiled Pokémon die hard) as they discuss the Pokémon anime and hopefully construct some fun sentences along the way.HEY ITS A PATREON patreon.com/tkadpodcastAND A PERPETUAL GOOGLE FORM IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfPAPIUCcnl_PmFXu1OZrIFIIRKogPwWe6gwM2j8J-LCQMWuA/viewform?usp=sharingCheck out the official TKAD spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y40feTKtoUQp5Thk4p1UJipEVRf_78u_qFViwAsVvCk/edit?usp=sharingThanks to Bulbapedia and TVTropes for our ongoing research.Follow the podcast on spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1yQ3EQ2P91mE6Bq0i4I3EYon Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/to-kill-a-delibird/id1667957767Amazon: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b37371a4-331d-4254-999b-e21fc0fdd837/to-kill-a-delibirdfor more half baked content: https://www.twitch.tv/hydraleechTiktok is essential for new creators so: https://www.tiktok.com/@hydraleeches#pokemon #ashketchum #pikachu #misty #brock #anime #indigoleague #teamrocket #existentialism #comedy #pokemonjohto #totodile #cyndaquil #chikorita #charizard #wobbuffet #pokemonanime #podcast #pokemonpodcast #pokemondiscussion #pokemonanalysis #gaming #hoenn #pokemonemerald #pokemonruby #pokemonsapphire #pokemongen3 0:00 Intro24:03 Taming of the Shroomish51:30 You Said a Mouthful!

Evan Buckley stopped by to share a piece of his 'Sol.' He's a rising star in the Mid-Atlantic region, channeling late-60's and 70's blues rock n' roll, in the vein of Cream and Led Zeppelin. Listen until the end to hear his song, "So Fine!"Episode photo by Evan Loveless.Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

Today I sat down for a MOG SHORTS episode with 'Roulette' actor and Mid-Atlantic film enthusiast, Mike Baldwin!Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

“I wonder how many modern bands still do it?”   Maybe the song is named after the band and referenced in the chorus. Maybe the song is named after the band but there's no reference to the band's name anywhere in the lyrics. Or maybe it's a song with a completely different title than the band name BUT the band name IS mentioned somewhere in the lyrics.    “They mostly do it during their early years…”   Whatever the case may be, A METAL BAND'S TITLE TRACK ultimately becomes the cornerstone of a band's sound and their overall mission statement and objective (especially when they're young and just starting out).   “Taylor Swift doesn't have a song called ‘Taylor Swift'…and The Beatles don't have a song called ‘The Beatles'…”   Whether it's about building a mood, declaring some philosophical ethos, or making a proud, self-referential namecheck for fans to latch on and lock in to, A METAL BAND'S TITLE TRACK sets the tone and lets the listener know what can be expected whenever they hear it. Discover what it means to be a “hill jack”, understand why the good people of “Missourah” enjoy sipping on “Kentuckah” bourbon while floating down the “Mississippah” river, and find out how “Three Dudes…” are about to fundamentally transform metal award shows forever when you JOIN US as we investigate the importance of A METAL BAND'S TITLE TRACK. Visit www.metalnerdery.com/podcast for more on this episode Help Support Metal Nerdery https://www.patreon.com/metalnerderypodcast Leave us a Voicemail to be played on a future episode: 980-666-8182 Metal Nerdery Tees and Hoodies – metalnerdery.com/merch and kindly leave us a review and/or rating on your favorite Podcast app Follow us on the Socials: Facebook - Instagram - TikTok Email: metalnerdery@gmail.com Can't be LOUD Enough Playlist on Spotify Metal Nerdery Munchies on YouTube @metalnerderypodcast   Show Notes: (00:01): “Tinkler Widdler?” / “How about some #EvilBean (with the Mean Gene, brother)?”/ #HulkHogan / “Howard Schwanzenstein?” / #AndrewDiceClay / “Have you ever looked at his Instagram?” / ***WARNING: #listenerdiscretionisadvised *** /  “That is bean worthy…”/ “Let's retire that guy and go to this guy…”/ #markthetime / “Let it ring out…”/ ***WELCOME BACK TO THE METAL NERDERY PODCAST!!!*** /  #BunkerpoonCenterForMetalExcellence / #Hotlanta / “Don't say that…”/  “Wait a minute…isn't it ‘Missourah'?” / “Are you trying to throw up the state name?”/  “Yeah, why not? #Skynet knows everything, dude…”/ #Kentuckah / “A warsher…”/  “Alright, so you're a Hill Jack as well, then…”/ “What's a hill jack?” (06:20): ***PATREON US at PATREON.COM/METALNERDERYPODCAST *** /  #instantgasm / “WELCOME, New Patreons!!!” / “No spoilers…but it involves…”/  “Did you literally just spoil #TheHogStory …?”/ #DoomSickle #DoomSicle / “It's gonna be longer than a day…”/ “I've got a bass rig…it's getting no use in my house…”/ #digitaldrums /  “He's a bass player, kind of a drummer, maybe a guitar player…don't forget about singer…and poon magnet…”/ #autotuneddoommetal / “I gotta open up the…”/  “Just know there's a surprise coming…” / #markthetime / “The good news is…I've been in your house…”/ “A little bit of elbow grease and you're good…”/ Crone's Kitchen Cleaning /  “You don't wanna be that roommate…”/ “I've been in appliances for a very long time…this is so fucking metal…”/ #reallifeshit / #wisdomteeth #drysockets #viralaf #TikTok /  “The dishwasher people are gonna love it…all the women, right?”/ “You guys know what I do for a living, right?” / “I know what he's doing…” /  ***GIVE US A CALL AND VOICEMAIL US AT 980-666-8182!!!*** / #AussieDave / #ThanksCunt / “We're learning so much!”/ “His #voicemails are gold!”/ “I think it's ‘shit-hard'…”   (19:00): “Let's get into the Daggone…” / #TheDocket / METAL NERDERY PODCAST PRESENTS:  A BAND'S TITLE TRACK / THE TITLE TRACK OF THE BAND /  “They mostly do it during their early years…”/ “Taylor Swift doesn't have a song called Taylor Swift…and The Beatles don't have a song called The Beatles…”/ “Who's Pink Floyd?”/ “Hats off to Roy Harper, by the way…”/ “Is that the same one from the Led Zeppelin?” “That's what this podcast is about…”/ “Unfortunately, it wasn't on Black Sabbath Records…”/ #Black Sabbath BLACK SABBATH (Black Sabbath – 1970) /  “We gotta hear some weather dude…and the bell…it sets the tone.”/ #PerfectEditing /  “You ever run like this?”/ “What's he doing there?” / “Like an auto-wah…not Canada…”/  “We're learning shit…”/ ***SOCIAL MEDIA US AT #metalnerderypodcast on #YouTube #Facebook #Instagram and #TikTok *** / #ViralAF   (25:08): “You wanna hear the Hawkwind version?” / #Hawkwind MOTORHEAD /  “Prizes of Christmas?”/ “It goes up like prices at Christmas…”/ “Now check out the difference…”/ #Motorhead MOTORHEAD (Motorhead – 1977) #killeropener /  “I got one…”/ “It's always fun when he has a surprise, dude…we all win.”/  #IronMaiden IRON MAIDEN (Iron Maiden – 1980) / “Sing IRON MAIDEN!”/ “That reminds me…”/ “Vinny Dimebag, man…”/ “It's very punk…”/ “I kinda wish he would have kept his cool Samson mustache…”/ “Wait a minute…what were we talking about?”/  “Have you ever met somebody that you think is actually in the CIA?” / “When in doubt…”/  #CIASMR / NOTE: It's Metal Storm/Face The Slayer, NOT Tormentor/Face The Slayer   (34:12): “How about some Metal Church?” / “I still think they should have opened that first album with that song…”/ #MetalChurch METAL CHURCH (Metal Church – 1984) / “He's got Dio vibes in the vocals…” / #Overkill OVERKILL (Feel The Fire – 1985) / NOTE: E.vil N.ever D.ies is apparently Overkill IV / “More creepy wind…love it!”/ “Old School…or Old Skull…if you're from Missourah…”/ “Oh Whiplash, c'mon…”/ “They do have an album called Metallica…”/ “Can we find that one part?” / “Did the song live up to the name?”/  #Metallica WHIPLASH (Kill ‘Em All – 1983) / “I fucking nailed it!”   (41:21): “How about a little Megadeth…?”/ “Dave Mustaine is not a they…he's a dude…”/  #Megadeth SET THE WORLD AFIRE (So Far…So Good…So What! – 1988) / “It's not as…precise.”/ “You're almost there anyway…”/ “That was obviously from the remaster with the weird drums…”/ “Let it ring out…”/ “It's like a flaccid drum set…”/ “It kinda still bothers me that Baloff doesn't do that anywhere else on the record…maybe Rob Dukes will do that sometime…”/ #Exodus EXODUS (Bonded By Blood – 1985) / “We never talked about the band title track…”/ “What would our statue be…?”/ #ThePoonys / “Put this dick on your mantle…”/ “Three dudes…all lickin' ass…”/ #thenewbutton / “There it is…he finally did it!”/  “He doesn't say a lot, folks…but when he does, it's fucking GOLD!”/ “That's called a callback I think…”   (50:15): “How about something that…maybe a lot of people probably don't know?”/  “I love it…aftershocks!”/ “That's the Surprise we were talking about before…”/  “We're getting a lot of lies…” / “How about Electric Wizard?”/ “I told you, I can't smoke weed…”/ “It's not for everybody…” / #ElectricWizard ELECTRIC WIZARD (Electric Wizard – 1994) / #StonerMetal #SmogMountain #SmaugMountain / “Our local boys…”/ #localmetal #AtlantaMetal / #ActusReus ACTUS REUS (2022) / #WitchfinderGeneral WITCHFINDER GENERAL (Death Penalty – 1982) / “Actually, that's a cool loop. We'll keep that for Smaug Mountain…”/ “Dude, she IS nude!”/ “Princess Areola: Queen of the Bra People…it's a fantasy movie…in the style of Heavy Metal.”/ “I wonder how many modern bands still do it?”   (1:01:03): “I don't know why my voice went up so much…” (“I know why…”) /  #Queensryche – QUEEN OF THE REICH (Queensryche – 1982) / “It's Bill's favorite style of singing…”/ “Do you wanna cleanse real quick with Anthrax by Anthrax?”/ “Mouthful of Braces…”/ #NewAnthrax #ItsForTheKids / “Really!?”/ “I guess that's the equivalent now of old 45 singles, right?” / #Anthrax ANTHRAX (Fistful of Metal – 1984) / “It's like sped-up KISS…”/ NOTE: '84 would have been Animalize / “I don't know why my voice is going up…”/ THANK YOU FOR JOINING US!!! / #untilthenext #outrreel  

We return to Nghi Vo's Singing Hills series and discuss the three next most wizlez-adjacent books in it (to date.) Covered in this episode: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, The Brides of High Hill, and A Mouthful of Dust.

The episode where we indulge ourselves. Can our ships really float? In this podcast, we rate aspects OF the podcast. This episode was recorded on 21 March 2026. Email us at thedoctorswatcher@gmail.com. I guess people listen to podcasts on YouTube now? Follow us on Tumblr at the-doctors-watcher. I finally made us a Bluesky account. Check out Circuit 23's music at http://soundcloud.com/circuit23 and email him at circuit.23@gmail.com. Listen to his album “Mens Vermis” at https://circuit23.bandcamp.com/album/mens-vermis. The font “Doctor Who” (https://www.dafont.com/doctor-who.font) by “JJE990” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/).

On the latest episode of the CavsCorner Podcast, we discuss UVa's two transfer commits this week and not only how we see each player fitting in but how those additions impact the overall picture for the upcoming season.   Credits: Brad Franklin (@Cavs_Corner) David Spence (@HooDaves) Justin Ferber (@Justin_Ferber)   Visit CavsCorner now!   Sign up for CavsCorner today – Join for $1, plus a complimentary year of access to The Athletic included: https://www.on3.com/sites/cavs-corner/join/

To celebrate two years of the Mouthful of Graffiti LIVE at REB RECORDS, we were honored to have the epic songbird, Danah Denice, and Baltimore legend, Kelly Bell. Tune in for the interviews, performances and stories behind the music.Special thanks to Jon Maurer for his performance with Kelly Bell. Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

Today on the show I'm sitting down with singer-songwriter, U.S. Army Corp engineer, father and all-around good man, Mr. Stan Graham. On the heels of his new release, ‘About Time,' Stan is out to make-up for lost time and set the record straight; he's a musician, a songwriter and still has a few things to say. He's also the father of another incredible local talent, Mr. Caleb Graham. He's here today to share his story and tell us what the future holds. Join me in welcoming Stan Graham to the Mouthful of Graffiti podcast!  Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

Today I'm sitting down with the poet and partner of the Sanity Lounge, Ms. Rachel Novak. Unless you've been living under a proverbial rock, than you've definitely seen Rachel bringing the sun and support to your favorite local, original event. She's a source of light who does her best to bring out the stars in her very own constellation of back-YardStars. We've been meaning to do this episode for some time, so I'm happy to bring her joy and energy to the show. Join me in welcoming Rachel Novak to the Mouthful of Graffiti podcast. Please be advised, this episode was recorded in my garage and it may sound like it. Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

Today on the show I sat down with poet, singer-songwriter and author of the legendary Christian rock n' roll group, Bride. Dale Thompson has had an expansive career, spanning decades and released countless songs under other project names.  He's as prolific and insightful as he is down-to-earth and kind. While others chose the bright lights of secular, terrestrial rock n' roll, Dale made a difficult decision early on that may have saved his life.  He's done it all from boxing to fronting Stryper and he's here today to share some of his story. Join me in welcoming Dale Thompson to the Mouthful of Graffiti Podcast!Image: Concert Fotos By ChadSponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

How can you improve your self-editing process? How can you find and work with professional editors and beta readers? How do you know when editing is done and the book is finished? With Joanna Penn In the intro, Poetry craft and business [The Indy Author Podcast]; A Mouthful of Air; How to get your book featured in local media without a publicist [Written Word Media]; thoughts on faith and code; Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy; Bones of the Deep – J.F. Penn. Today's show is sponsored by ProWritingAid, writing and editing software that goes way beyond just grammar and typo checking. With its detailed reports on how to improve your writing and integration with writing software, ProWritingAid will help you improve your book before you send it to an editor, agent or publisher. Check it out for free or get 15% off the premium edition at www.ProWritingAid.com/joanna This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Joanna Penn is an award-winning New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, short stories and travel memoir under J.F.Penn and also writes non-fiction for authors. Overview of the editing process Self-editing How to find and work with a professional editor. My list is at www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors Beta readers, specialist readers, and sensitivity readers When is the book finished? These chapters are excerpted from How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book by Joanna Penn, available direct or on all the usual stores. Overview of the editing process “Books aren't written. They're rewritten.” —Michael Crichton Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a classic of English literature. I studied it at school and the scene at Stonehenge still haunts me. Hardy's Jude the Obscure influenced my decision to go to university in Oxford, a city Hardy called Christminster. His novels are still held in great esteem, which is why it's so wonderful to see his hand-edited pages in the British Library in London, displayed in the Treasures collection. You can visit them in person or view them online. Thomas Hardy's edited manuscript of ‘Tess of the D'Urbevilles, one of England's greatest writers While his handwriting is a scrawl, it's evident from the pages just how much editing Hardy did on this version of the manuscript. There are lines struck through, whole paragraphs crossed out, arrows moving sections around, words and sentences rewritten, and comments in the margins. Even the title is changed from A Daughter of the D'Urbervilles to Tess of the D'Urbervilles as we know it today. Those edited pages gave me hope when I saw them for the first time as a new fiction author. Not that I thought I could write a classic of English literature, but that I could learn to edit my way to a better story. There are several stages in the editing process, which I'll outline here and then expand on in subsequent chapters. As you progress in your craft, you won't need every stage every time, so assess with each book what kind of editing you need along the way. Self-editing The self-editing stage is your chance to improve your manuscript before anyone else sees it. For some authors, this stage might mean rewriting the entire draft. For others, it involves restructuring, adding or deleting scenes, doing line edits, and more. Developmental or structural edit An editor reads your manuscript and gives feedback on specific aspects, character, plot, story structure, and anything else pertinent to improving the novel. It is sometimes described as a manuscript critique. You will receive a report, usually ten to fifteen pages, with notes on your novel, which you can then use in another round of self-editing. While this is not always necessary, it can be a valuable step and something I appreciated particularly for my first novel when I had so much to learn. Copyediting and line editing This is the classic ‘red pen' edit where you can expect comments and changes all over your manuscript. This edit focuses on anything that enhances the writing quality, including word choice and phrasing issues, as well as grammar, and more. Some editors split this edit into two, and there are differences between what this edit is called between countries. For some editors, a copyedit includes only attention to grammar and correctness, while a line edit focuses on improving and elevating sentences. Be clear about your expectations and that of your editor upfront. You will usually receive an MS Word document with Track Changes on as well as a style guide or style sheet and other notes, which you can then use to make revisions during another self-edit. This is the most expensive part of the process, as editors usually charge per 1,000 words based on the type of edit you want. If you need to cut your story down by 20K, then do it before you send your manuscript for a line edit! Beta readers, specialist readers, and/or sensitivity readers Some authors use different types of readers as part of their editing process. Beta readers are often part of the author's community and are certainly fans of the genre. They read to help the author pick up any issues pre-publication. Specialist readers are those with knowledge about a topic included in the story. For example, a vulcanologist read specific chapters of Risen Gods to check that the details about volcanic eruptions were correct. Sensitivity readers check for stereotypes, biases, problematic language, and other diversity issues. You will usually receive comments or an email with page numbers or chapter numbers, or sometimes an MS Word document with Track Changes, which you then use to make revisions. Many readers provide services for the love of helping their favorite author with a novel and a mention in the acknowledgments, but there are some paid services for specialist and sensitivity readers. Proofreading Proofreading is the final check of the manuscript pre-publication for any typos or issues that might have been introduced in the editorial process. For print books, this can include a review of the print proof with formatting. You should only fix the last tiny changes at this point. Don't make any major changes this close to publication or you may introduce entirely new errors. Do you need an editor if you intend to get an agent and a traditional publisher? You will go through an editorial process with your agent and publisher. But if you want the best chance of getting to that stage in the first place, it might also be worth working with an editor before you submit your manuscript to an agent. Look for an editor who will help you with your query letter and synopsis as part of their edit. Self-editing I love this part of the process! My self-edit is where I wrangle the chaos of the first draft into something worth reading. I have my block of marble and now I can shape it into my sculpture. The mindset shift from writer to editor, from author to reader In the idea, planning, discovery, and first-draft writing phase, it's all about you, the writer. You turn the ideas in your head into words that you understand, characters that come alive for you, and a plot that you're engaged with. In that first rush of creativity, you can banish critical voice and ignore any nagging doubts. But now you need to switch heads. That's how I prefer to think about it, but you might consider it as changing hats or changing jobs. Anything to help you move from the creative, anything goes, first-draft writer to the more critical editor. There is one overriding consideration in this shift. As Jeffery Deaver says, “The reader is god.” With the editing process, you need to turn your story from something you understand into something a reader will enjoy. Writing is telepathy. It connects minds across time and space. You are reading these words and the meaning flows from my brain into your brain — but only if I craft the book well enough. The same is true of your novel. Yes, of course, you want to double down on your creative choices and make sure you achieve everything you want to with your story. But you also need to keep the reader in mind as you edit because the book is ultimately for them. Will your story have the desired effect on the reader? What might help improve their experience? How can you make sure that they are not bored or confused or jolted out of the story? What will make them read on and, at the end, close the novel with a sigh of satisfaction? My self-editing process At the end of the first draft, I print out my manuscript with two pages to each A4 page, so it looks more like a book. I put it in a folder and leave it to rest. You need fresh eyes for your edit and this ‘resting' gives you some emotional distance. In On Writing, Stephen King suggests leaving a manuscript to rest for at least six weeks. While that is a great idea if you have the time, most authors work to deadline, whether externally set or their own timetable. Many authors — including me — are also impatient! I love this first self-edit, and as I'm still crafting the story as a discovery writer, I usually rest the manuscript for a week or two. I schedule blocks of time for editing in my Google calendar and (when not in pandemic times) I go to a café when it opens first thing in the morning. I put on my BOSE noise-cancelling headphones and edit by hand with a black ballpoint pen from page one to the end. I usually manage ten to twenty pages per editing session of a couple of hours each, but it will depend on the amount of restructuring I need to do. I scribble notes in the margins, draw arrows to move paragraphs around, write extra material on the back of pages, or add where I need to write more later. I change words, rewrite and delete lines, and pick up any issues around lack of sensory detail, character problems, and more. You can see an example of a page below: Some pages end up a mass of black; others are relatively clean. But in this first hand edit, no page goes untouched as I hone my manuscript into something closer to my creative goal. You can edit on a computer or a tablet, or whatever else works for you, but at least change the font or the spacing, or something to make it a different experience to reading the first draft. Most writers have a tendency to either overwrite or underwrite, and so will either need to cut words or add words at this stage. I'm in the latter camp so I usually have to add scenes or deepen characters or theme at this point. Once I have hand-edited the whole manuscript end-to-end, I make the changes in my Scrivener project. I change the color of the flags along the way and, as ever, I back up the session. I also use ProWritingAid at the sentence level to fix up things I missed, because we all miss things! When all the changes have been made, I print the complete manuscript again, and read end-to-end and edit as before. This time, it's usually a lot cleaner and there may only be a few things to fix in each chapter. Once I'm finished, I'll update the Scrivener project once more and then decide whether it needs a third pass. Mostly, two full end-to-end hand edits are enough for me these days, but sometimes I'll do a third or go through specific chapters one more time. This messy editing process is fun for me and it's hugely satisfying to see my story come to life. What to focus on in the self-edit Some authors will go through the manuscript multiple times, focusing on different elements with each pass using the aspects covered in Part 3 and Part 4. For example, they'll do an edit based on character and dialogue, followed by another pass for plot, then theme, and so on. Personally, I try to keep the reader in mind and focus on the story as a coherent whole. That's just how my mind works. I jump from fixing a plot issue to deepening a character to adding foreshadowing and so on as I read and edit. I'm confident that my editor will find a lot of the smaller things that I might miss, so I concentrate on trying to achieve my creative vision with the story. You will find your own way of figuring out your process. It's much better to jump in and have a go at editing rather than trying to work out the best way before you have something to work through. Lost the plot? Try reverse outlining If you're a discovery writer like me and you're struggling with the edit and you feel you have lost the plot (which definitely happens sometimes!) then consider a reverse outline as part of your editorial process. Go through the manuscript and write a few lines per scene. Include character, plot points, conflict, setting, open questions and hooks, and any other notes. This will help you step back and hopefully see the entire story from a high level. Then you can dive back into rewriting each chapter. Read the book out loud or use a text-to-speech reader to do it for you Many authors read their book aloud end-to-end, which is a helpful step once you've been through any major rewrites. There are also plenty of text-to-speech tools that can help, for example, Natural Reader or Speechify, and some are built into devices or applications. MS Word includes a Read Aloud tool in the Review tab. This will also help you edit for audio as you'll hear issues you can't see on the page. Editing for audio Audiobooks are a huge growth market and many readers will listen to your book rather than read it, so it's a good idea to consider editing with audio in mind at this stage. Here are some tips. Watch out for repeated sounds. The editorial process will usually catch repeated written words, but similar sounding words can hit the same audio note in narration. You might not notice them in the text, as they are spelled differently. The words ‘you,' ‘blue,' ‘tattoo,' and ‘interview' all start and end with different letters. They look different on the page, but they strike the same audio note when read aloud. In the same way, repetition can work if you have a point to make, but sometimes it jars the listener if it is overused. A classic recommendation for writing dialogue is to use ‘said' with a character name rather than other words like ‘uttered' or ‘pronounced.' This is because ‘said' disappears for the reader on the written page. But with audio, the repetition of a word is highly noticeable, and repeated sounds can dominate a passage. Rewrite with synonyms for ‘said,' or use action to make it clear who the speaker is without resorting to dialogue tags, as described in chapter 3.5. Contractions — or the lack of them — can also become more obvious in audio. “I am not going to the park,” might be spoken as “I'm not going to the park.” When we type dialogue, it is often more formal than the way someone speaks, so check if you can contract it in your edit. Accents can be an issue with fiction narration. There are plenty of narrators who do a ‘straight read,' but if there are accents within dialogue, make it clear where the character comes from. Make sure the narrator knows about the accent choice upfront, otherwise you might not like it in the finished audio. Remember my friend whose novel had an Irish character narrated like a comedy leprechaun instead of the soft lilt she had in mind? Don't confuse the reader. If you have a lot of characters appearing in a chapter and no clear character tags, you might lose the listener in the detail. When reading on paper or a screen, your reader can quickly flick back and see that George was the butler and Angus was the dog, but that's harder to do when listening to an audiobook. Make sure it's clear who is who. You may have to remind listeners occasionally by adding character tags. For example, ‘Angus ran alongside the canal' could become ‘Angus, the golden cocker spaniel, ran alongside the canal.' For more on audiobooks, check out my book, Audio for Authors: Audiobooks, Podcasting and Voice Technologies. How many drafts do you need? The word ‘draft' means different things to different authors. Some only apply this term to a complete rewrite end-to-end, while others will shift paragraphs around, change some lines, add a new scene, and call that a new draft. Nora Roberts said in a blog post on her writing craft, I work on a three-draft method. This works for me. It's not the right way/wrong way. There is no right or wrong for a process that works for any individual writer. Anyone who claims there is only one way, or that's the wrong way, is a stupid, arrogant bullshitter. That's my considered opinion. I love Nora's no-nonsense approach and she is right that there is no single correct process. You have to find your own. But beware of comparing what you call a draft to what another writer calls a draft. It may be something completely different. Use editing software Once I've finished my hand edits and updated the Scrivener project, I use ProWritingAid on the manuscript. It integrates with Scrivener, so I open my project and go through each chapter. ProWritingAid picks up passive voice, repetitive words, commas and typos, suggests rephrasing, and even picks up culturally problematic language. Yes, these are the type of things that an editor will pick up, but I want to hand over a manuscript that is as clean as possible so my editor can focus on other issues. I don't make all the suggested changes, but it certainly helps improve my writing, and I learn as I go through. You can even create your own style guide so you spell things the same way throughout. This is also a good chance to check typos according to the version of English you want to use (or any other language). I'm English and based in the UK, but when I published my first novel, I received complaints about typos from my readers, who were mainly in the USA. These were not typos, they were just British spelling! I decided to use US English in my books because US readers complain about UK spelling, but non-US readers will rarely complain about US spelling because they are used to it. You can set ProWritingAid to the type of English you want to use, and if you specify this later, your editor can pick up on word usage rather than typos, for example, using the term ‘flashlight' instead of ‘torch.' You can find ProWritingAid at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaid You can find my tutorial on how to use ProWritingAid at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/prowritingaidtutorial When is your self-edit finished? You will be utterly sick of your manuscript by the end of the self-editing process. You have read your words so many times you can't see them clearly anymore. You are so over the whole thing that you want to forget the book altogether. If you don't feel this way, you probably haven't self-edited enough! When you really feel you can't do any more, it's time to work with a professional editor. If you are putting off the end of self-editing, then remember that nothing is ever perfect. You can edit forever if you keep obsessing over changes and going over and over the same material. If your self-edit goes on too long, consider whether perfectionism is holding you back. Set a completion date and hold yourself to it. How to find and work with a professional editor If you want your book to be the best it can be, then working with a professional editor is the next step. An editor's job is to take your manuscript and help you improve it through structural changes and story development, line edits, suggestions for new material or sentence refinement, and so much more. Different kinds of editors can help you in different ways from constructing the overarching story to eliminating the final typo. In my experience, good professional editors are well worth the investment as they help improve your book and your craft, especially in the initial stages of your writing journey. They have read so many early-stage manuscripts that they understand the most common problems and know how to help you fix them. Some experienced authors only use proofreaders for their novels, but personally, I still work with a professional editor on every book and I learn something every time. I am a super-fan of editors! How to find a professional editor Consolidation in the traditional publishing industry over the last decade has resulted in many more editors working as freelancers, so authors have a wealth of professionals available for hire in every genre. You can find lists of approved editors through author organizations. The Alliance of Independent Authors has a list of Partner Members, many of whom are editors. You can also use author marketplace Reedsy. Many editors use content marketing to find clients — for example, blogging about editing tips, writing books on editing, or appearing on podcasts. I have had lots of editors on The Creative Penn Podcast over the years, so you can listen and see if they resonate with you. Most authors credit their editors and proofreaders in the acknowledgments of their books, and many authors happily share recommendations on social media in various author communities. If you enjoy a certain novel, it might be worth reaching out to that editor, as you know they are a specialist in the genre. Check out my list of editors at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors How to assess whether an editor is right for you I frequently get emails from writers asking me to recommend an editor for their book. But finding an editor is like dating. You have to do it for yourself, and it's likely that you will try a few before you find your perfect match. You may also change editors over your writing life as your craft develops and your needs shift, and that's completely normal too. Make sure the editor has experience in and enjoys your genre. You don't want a literary historical fiction editor working on your YA paranormal romance or your hard sci-fi adventure. Ensure that the editor has testimonials from happy clients, and check directly with a named author if you have doubts. Some editors will offer a sample edit for one chapter. This helps both parties decide whether working together is appropriate. The editor can assess what level your manuscript is at, and you can decide whether their editorial style is right for you. How to work with an editor When you engage an editor, you will receive a contract with a timeline and a price for the work. You agree to deliver the manuscript on a particular date and will usually pay a deposit, especially if this is the first time you're working together. The editor agrees to deliver the edits back on a certain date and also to keep your manuscript in confidence. You can avoid issues later by communicating expectations up front, so if you have questions about the editing process, ask before you sign a contract. Many editors are booked months in advance, so once you know your schedule, contact them early and book a slot. Update them if your timings change. Most allow minor slippage, but since editors plan their work around contractual dates, it's important to be timely with delivery. As a discovery writer, I only book my editor when I am sure of my dates. Submit your manuscript and, once the edit is complete, you will receive whatever has been agreed. That might be a structural report, line edit, or proofread manuscript, along with a style sheet. It's usually in the form of an MS Word document by email. Some editors may offer a call to discuss, but I have never spoken to an editor as part of my process. It has never been necessary. It's all about the words on the page. If you want a call and it is not specified, then include it in the contract up front along with anything else you're concerned about. I consider my editors to be an important part of my team. They help me turn my manuscripts into books that readers love, and I rely on them as part of my business. This is a two-way relationship, and you need to behave as professionally as the editor should. If you find an editor you love working with, pay them quickly and respect their time, and you will hopefully have a long-term business relationship that benefits you both. How does it feel to go through an edit? It's probably going to hurt, especially in the beginning, when your craft is in its early stages. You need fresh eyes on your work, especially at the beginning of your author career. You need feedback to improve. When I received notes back on my structural edit for my first novel, I didn't open the email for ten days. I was so scared of what it would say because my novel meant so much to me, and yet I knew it had problems. Of course it did, it was my first novel! So I let the email sit in my inbox until I was ready to face it, and like many things, the fear was worse than the actual event. Even many years and many books later, I still don't open emails from my editor until I am mentally ready to face criticism. Because that's what it feels like. It is not the editor's job to pat you on the back and say, ‘Well done, this is perfect.' Their job is to help you make it the best book it can be. They are experts and have honed their advice over many manuscripts, so they can spot an issue a mile off. When you receive that email from your editor, particularly if it's your first book, make sure you are well rested and in a positive frame of mind. Set aside a good amount of time and read through the comments and the manuscript as a whole. If you have an emotional reaction, do not email back immediately! Let the feedback sit with you for a few days, and you will find it easier to see what might need to change. Once you're ready, go through the manuscript and work through each change. Don't just click Accept All on the Track Changes version for a line edit. This takes time, but it's well worth it because you will learn with every step and you'll be able to spot your common issues in the future, and hopefully fix them next time. You also need to examine every suggestion to see if you want to make the change. Do you need to make every change that an editor suggests? No, you don't. You are the author, so your creative vision is the most important thing. But try to get some distance and assess whether the change truly serves the book, or if you're just having an emotional response. Remember what Jeffery Deaver said: “The reader is god.” Consider each editorial suggestion on its own merit. Does it help take the story in the direction you want it to? Will it improve the reader's experience? What if my editor wants me to change everything? Perhaps they are not the right editor for you. The editor should not fundamentally change your story or alter your creative vision. Their job is to help you shape your manuscript into a better version of itself, and retain your voice and ideas while at the same time improving it for the reader. This is a skillful balancing act, which is why experienced editors are so highly sought after. How long will the editing process take? This will depend on the type of writer you are in terms of the first draft. If you outline in great detail and spend time up front making the first draft the best it can be, then editing might take less time than for a discovery writer who only figures out the book after the first draft. The more books you've written, the more you understand how to shape a novel, the more you can write a clean draft, so editing speeds up. That doesn't mean it gets easier to write a book, but it does mean you know how to find and fix issues. It will also depend on the length of the book. A 50,000-word romance with one protagonist will be a faster edit than a 150,000-word sprawling fantasy with multiple point-of-view characters. It will also depend on your experience, so don't compare your editing time to someone who has written a lot of books. Give editing the time it needs. You want your book to be the best it can be. But also remember Parkinson's Law, which I discussed in chapter 4.7 on writing the first draft: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” This law also applies to editing. Set your deadline and schedule your editing time accordingly. Don't book a professional editor until you've been through at least your self-editing process, as it may take longer than you think. How much does an editor cost? This will depend on the type of edit, your genre and word count, how experienced you are as a writer, and how much experience the editor has. Editors usually quote a range on their website and you can also email and ask for a more detailed quote based on your manuscript length and sample. Every dollar I have spent on editing has been worth it as an investment in my writing craft and the quality of my finished novels. Although my requirements are different now, I continue to use editors and proofreaders for all my books. The more eyes on your novel before publication, the better it will be on launch. What if you have a tight budget? When I started out as a writer, I had a day job and I saved up for the editorial process. It was an investment in my craft and a possible future creative career. If you already have or intend to set up a business as a writer, then you can offset the cost of editors against any profits. But when you're starting out, you can't necessarily see that far ahead. If you're on a tight budget, then find or set up a writer's group with others in your genre and work through one another's manuscripts. You might also have other skills you can barter for editing services, but remember that bartering is subject to tax in many jurisdictions, so don't assume that it is ‘free.' What if my editor steals my ideas or my manuscript? This is a common concern of new writers who think that editors might run away with their book and make millions with their idea. But don't worry, editors are professionals. They work within a contractual framework that protects both parties. So make sure you are happy with the contract before you sign it. If you are really worried, you can register your copyright before you send the manuscript to anyone else. While it is not legally necessary to register copyright — it exists the moment the work is created — there are registration companies in every country that can provide peace of mind. Just search for ‘copyright registration' within your territory. Will I need different editors when I'm further along in my writing journey? Yes, as your craft and experience improves, you will likely work with different editors. You might also choose to use a new editor for a different genre, or work with recommended professionals to take your craft to the next level. Resources: • My list of recommended editors: www.TheCreativePenn.com/editors • Alliance of Independent Authors — www.TheCreativePenn.com/alliance • The following editing associations offer directories and job posting services: The Editorial Freelancers Association (US), the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading (UK), the Institute for Professional Editors (Australia and New Zealand), and Editors Canada. Beta readers, specialist readers, and sensitivity readers Professional editors approach your manuscript with a critical eye based on their knowledge of language, story structure, and genre. But sometimes, it's a good idea to gain perspective from readers who are not experts on sentence structure or grammar, but comment on the story itself, and their experience of reading it as a whole. Beta readers Beta readers are a trusted group of people who evaluate your book from a reader's perspective before publication. The term comes from the software industry, where early versions are tested in beta before being released to the public. While there are some paid beta reader services, many authors find people from their existing readership, or from among genre fans in the writing community. Authors usually thank their beta readers in their acknowledgments. Specialist readers Specialist readers are experts on a particular topic who read with their expertise in mind. This might be a police officer who checks a crime novel, or a physicist who reads for a science-fiction author. Sensitivity readers Sensitivity readers check for cultural and diversity issues, lack of or clichéd representation, and insensitive, inauthentic, or uninformed language, characters, or situations. This type of feedback can help an author before publication, and can be particularly useful if you are tackling more controversial topics. It can also be valuable when reviewing older manuscripts if you want to republish a new edition, as gendered language has changed, as well as the need for representation, diversity, and inclusivity. While some criticize sensitivity reading as a step toward censorship, most authors want to make their books the best they can be, and ensure the reader experience is excellent, whatever the genre. Being a fiction writer is also about empathy — with our characters and with our readers — so improving our ability to write about diverse characters is important. However, authors cannot be experts on what it's like to experience every race or religion, every body type or disability or mental health issue, or understand every country or culture. Feedback from different kinds of readers can help us write better stories, and it is the author's choice whether to implement suggestions in the final manuscript. Do you need all of these types of readers? No. You don't need any of them, or you can choose to use some of them for different books, depending on the need. It's up to you (and your agent or publisher if you choose to go that route). At what stage in the editorial process should you use these types of readers? The book should be as close to the final version as possible. These people are reading with fresh eyes; if they read again later, they can never approach the story with such an open mind. Most authors will send the manuscript to a select group of readers after the main editorial revisions, but before the proofread. Some authors with more developed careers even use their team of beta readers instead of editors at different stages of the process. What should you provide to readers? Provide the manuscript in the format the reader prefers. This could be an MS Word document or PDF. Many established authors use Bookfunnel, which allows you to create a version that can be read on any reading device or phone. Specialist readers and sensitivity readers have their specific expertise, but for more general beta readers, you need to provide some direction as to what you expect. For example: Did you skip over anything? Did anything bore you? Was anything confusing? Did you have to reread any parts? What did you like? Was there anything you hated or objected to or had a problem with? How long should you give them to read? Allow at least two weeks for readers to assess and provide feedback. Be clear on the timeline when you send them the book.. Do you need to make all the changes they suggest? No, and if you try to, you will end up straying from your creative goal, messing up your author voice, and likely pleasing no one! Keep your number of early readers small and specific to what you want to achieve. Assess each comment and suggestion on its own merit and decide whether or not to make the change. Be confident in your creative vision and beware writing by committee, which becomes a problem if you ask too many people for feedback. Only you can decide what you want for your novel. Resources: • The Reedsy marketplace includes different kinds of editors, beta readers, and sensitivity readers — www.TheCreativePenn.com/reedsy • Directory of sensitivity readers — www.writingdiversely.com/directory • Editors of Color — editorsofcolor.com When is the book finished? “I have not yet found words to truly convey the intensity of this remembered rapture—that moment of exquisite joy when necessary words come together and the work is complete, finished, ready to be read.” —bell hooks,Remembered Rapture You can edit a book forever if you want to. Every time you read it, you will find things to change. Every time you hire another editor, they will find more. If you work with beta readers, they will also offer opinions. Your novel will never be finished — until you decide it is. Nothing is ever perfect. Even if you hire three separate editors and use multiple proofreaders, you will still find a typo or an error in the published novel. Pick up any bestselling book from a traditional publisher, and you will still find an issue somewhere. It happens to everyone. Look at any prize-winning or bestselling book on Amazon and check the reviews. The more popular the book, the more issues people will find with it. There will never be a novel that satisfies everyone, and that's fine. Of course, you must make sure your book is the best it can be, but set boundaries for yourself so you do eventually finish. Have you self-edited your manuscript? Have you worked with a professional editor, or at least worked through the manuscript with other writers to improve it? Have you used editing tools and/or a proofreader? Have you set a deadline to move into the publishing process so you are not editing forever? If you have been through this rigorous editorial process and you still feel the itch to edit again, be honest with yourself. Is another round of changes really going to make a substantial difference to this book? Would it be better to work on the next novel instead of constantly reworking this one? Are you struggling with fear of judgment, fear of failure, procrastination, or other mindset issues that you need to work on instead of editing? Check out my book The Successful Author Mindset if you think this might be the case. Strive for excellence, do your best, and then release your book out into the world. “Set a limit on revisions, set a limit on drafts, set a time limit… The book will never be perfect.” —Kristine Kathryn Rusch, The Pursuit of Perfection and How it Harms Writers These chapters are excerpted from How to Write a Novel: From Idea to Book by Joanna Penn, available direct or on all the usual stores. The post Editing a Novel: Self-Editing, And How To Work With A Professional Editor With Joanna Penn first appeared on The Creative Penn.

WATCH THE EPISODE HEREIn this EpisodeHighlights & “Must-Listen” Moments* 0:04 — Another chaotic start: David accidentally goes live 10 minutes early, Amy drops off before we've even begun, and Domenica Marchetti is sitting patiently waiting while the hosts sort themselves out. Welcome to live television, folks, take two.* 5:47 — Big news: SiriusXM signed us!: David announces that SiriusXM has reached out, signed a $2.1 million contract, and created an entire channel called “Culinistas” for them. Amy plays it beautifully straight — until someone notices it's April 1st. David: “Do you realize SiriusXM has no idea who we are? I bought it!” April Fools. Amy: 1, David: 1.* 9:39 — Amy's food week: Providence, Rhode Island food festival: Amy attended a celebration of Providence's dining scene — a city that, like Portland, Maine, punches way above its weight in food culture. She toured Johnson & Wales College of Culinary Arts, did a panel with food writer elyse major, and came away wanting to move there immediately.* 11:41 — This week's bread bake: the Levain: Amy's sourdough rhythm continues — this week a classic nearly-all-white sourdough with a touch of rye flour. A Levain. Beautiful and tangy.* 11:53 — Amy's Passover Seder prep: Amy is getting her brisket going and making chicken stock for matzo ball soup. Her Seder menu also includes crispy glazed sweet potatoes (mandolined, stood up like hassleback, glazed with brown sugar and butter) and roasted asparagus with Parmesan.* 13:02 — David's food week: Portuguese Flourless Almond Cake disaster: David attempted his Portuguese almond flourless cake — a recipe he hadn't made in 25 years — for Passover at Fred and Ginger's house. He forgot the butter. Alan had to drive to the gas station to buy eggs. ADHD: 1, David: 0. He went to an ADHD coach this week, however — and reports it's going well.* 15:01 — Domenica's food week: Domenica's retired husband has been doing all the cooking, which has been wonderful. Highlights: grilled swordfish steaks with asparagus and roasted red pepper, and enchiladas made with a whole rotisserie chicken — left on the counter overnight, tragically.* 17:00 — Crab cake catastrophe: The One was making crab cakes from one-year-old canned crab. The tongue-tingling was histamine poisoning. They tasted it anyway. Don't be like David.* 19:41 — Book spotlight: Pimento Cheese: The Cookbook by Rebecca Lang: David recommends this deep dive into pimento cheese from the author of Around the Southern Table — lemony goat cheese pimento, Tex-Mex pimento, pineapple pimento, and pimento cheese with chili crunch. David riffs on his own deep-fried pimento cheese balls: firmed in the freezer, rolled in panko, fried at 375°F until oozy and golden.* 22:31 — Mrs. Appleyard's Vermont kitchen: Amy goes vintage with Louise Andrews Kent, who wrote under the pen name Mrs. Appleyard — a sort of 1940s–50s Martha Stewart of northern Vermont who wrote seasonal cookbooks chronicling life in the tiny town of Crosbury Common. Charming, funny, and findable in used bookshops.* 24:52 — Food news: Copenhagen's $340 chicken prix-fixe: A restaurant called Kylling (Danish for “chicken”) invites guests to spend the first 90 minutes of their dinner interacting with the chicken that will be served. The bread basket features cardamom buns made with chicken schmaltz. Art, or a lie? David fell for for. Again, April Fools. Amy: 2, David: 1.* 26:03 — Instagram's shadow ban on non-overhead food photos (April Fools, part 2): A “leaked memo” claims Instagram will shadow ban any food not photographed from above — including soup shot from the side. Amy almost sold it. David: “It was believable. I believe everything.” April Fools. Amy: 3, David: 1.* 27:53 — Guest: Domenica Marchetti on Italian Cookies: The main event. Domenica is a prolific food writer and the author of nine acclaimed cookbooks. Her new book, Italian Cookies: Authentic Recipes and Sweet Stories from Every Region, drops April 14th. It covers the genuine, regional Italian cookies — not Italian-American cookies (no rainbow cookies, no iced anise rounds) — organized by the north, central Italy, the south, and the islands.* 29:51 — The cookie that started it all: Canestraletto di Torigna: In 2017, Domenica bit into this crumbly, flower-shaped butter cookie from Liguria (Genoa) and fell down a rabbit hole. She went to the town where it's baked, found it has a history dating to the 15th century, and discovered a town of 2,000 people with eight bakeries dedicated to this one cookie.* 31:16 — Cookie pilgrimage: from Liguria to Saronno: From there it was the amaretti di Gavi (soft almond cookies from Gavi), then Voltaggio, then Saronno — where Domenica interviewed Paolo Lazzaroni, patriarch of the Chiostro di Saronno, the family behind the famous crunchy amaretti. His grandfather purchased a medieval cloister in the early 20th century, where the family has lived and worked ever since.* 34:03 — What's in the book (and what isn't): The book is organized regionally — cookies of the north, central Italy, the south, and the islands. In the islands chapter: Sicilian cucidati (buccellati) — butter pastry filled with fig paste, nuts, and chocolate. Not included: rainbow cookies, Italian-American iced anise rounds. This is Italy, not the neighborhood bakery.* 36:21 — Deep dive on the Serpetti: From the Castelli Romani hill towns outside Rome (where the Pope summers), these S-shaped butter cookies are made by a fifth-generation family in Monteportio Catone. The baker, Paola Rosazza Battore, wouldn't share her recipe — but let Domenica watch. Through pure visual reporting, Domenica reverse-engineered it.* 44:31 — Regional cookie trends from north to south: Butter in the north. Olive oil in the south and Calabria. Lard in some regions. Honey and mostocotto (cooked grape must) in areas where sugar was once scarce. The cookies reflect the landscape, the agriculture, and the history of each place.* 56:54 — Coming back: Domenica hints that this conversation is far from over. David floats the idea of a live “Mouthful” where Domenica bakes a cookie while they talk to her. She's in.* 57:51 — Farewell to Domenica: She's a prolific food writer, author of nine acclaimed cookbooks — from handmade pasta to preserving to traditional Italian cooking — and one of the most trusted voices in regional Italian cuisine. Italian Cookies drops April 14th. Pre-order now on Amazon.Recipes Mentioned* Matzo Ball Soup (with homemade chicken stock)* Brisket* Crispy Glazed Sweet Potatoes (mandolined, hassleback-style, brown sugar and butter glaze)* Roasted Asparagus with Parmesan* Portuguese Flourless Almond Cake* Grilled Swordfish Steaks with Asparagus and Red Pepper (Domenica's husband's)* Enchiladas (with rotisserie chicken — RIP, left on the counter)* Crab Cakes (from very old canned crab — do not recommend)* Deep-Fried Pimento Cheese Balls (David's riff — panko-crusted, fried at 375°F)* Pimento Cheese with Chili Crunch (from Pimento Cheese: The Cookbook)* Canestrelletti di Torigna (Ligurian flower-shaped butter cookie)* Amaretti di Gavi (soft almond cookies from Gavi)* Amaretti di Saronno (the classic crunchy ones from Chiostro di Saronno)* Serpetti (S-shaped butter cookies from the Castelli Romani, outside Rome)* Cucidati / Buccellati (Sicilian fig-filled butter pastry cookies)* Occhi di Bue / Frolini al Burro (jam-filled bullseye butter cookies, northern Italy)Books and Publications* Italian Cookies: Authentic Recipes and Sweet Stories from Every Region by Domenica Marchetti — dropping April 14th; pre-order on Amazon now* Pimento Cheese: The Southern Spread by Rebecca Lang* Mrs. Appleyard's Vermont cookbooks by Louise Andrews Kent — vintage, findable in used bookshopsWhere to Find Us* Amy Traverso* Instagram | Yankee* David Leite* Instagram | Pinterest | Facebook | Youtube This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidleite.substack.com

Episode 90 Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans   Suzannah V. Evans reads ‘Letter to My Mother' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/90_Letter_to_My_Mother_by_Suzannah_V_Evans.mp3 This poem is from: Under the Blue Available from: Under the Blue is available from: The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK   Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans You, pedalling your armsabove your head in bed,that bad arm suddenlymobile and flexible.You, meeting me at school,feeling something stir, sprinting across the grass . . . the two of us laughing, Mr. Tarpin peeringquizzically from the gate.You, with your bright lipstick.You, with your hands like mine.You, with your floppy hat.You, with your easy laugh.You, with the ellipsesof your emails. Your strongfront crawl. Your assertivegestures as you motionthrough talk. Now, when I swim, the movement of my armsis for you. A high arc,fingertips cleaving bright.Shuddering kick of legs.The sea pool in Seixalis for you. Craggy rocksand my head dipped to blue.Grey crabs line the rocks:I think of the limpets that spot McClure's paintingwith the reading woman,sun hat, white paper sheaf.Memory of last summer,absorbed in Woolf outside.A sudden rush of windcaused the parasol to liftand your own hat to spin right up from your head – where it hovered longerthan seemed possible, black ribbon flapping. Porto Moniz   Interview transcript Mark: Suzannah, where did this poem come from? Suzannah: So this poem emerged towards the end of my writing process for writing the poems in Under the Blue which is my first poetry collection. And the first two parts of the book… The book is a triptych of sequences, sort of playing with epistolary forms, so postcards and letters. The first two parts of the book are playing quite specifically with the form of the postcard, and the poems are quite private poems, in some ways. And I was interested in using the postcard form because it is a form which is both private and, in a sense, public in that, when you're writing a postcard, you're writing it to an individual. But a postie can turn that postcard over and read what's on the back. Anyone can read what's on the back. And with this third section in the book, I wanted to directly address some of the earlier figures who had appeared in the first two sections, and I suppose, to address them and to kind of write directly to people. So this poem is written to my mother, and it's in the form of a letter. And I'd say that the writing of this particular poem, this section of the book, was much more deliberate in some ways than the first two sections, which kind of emerged. And then, once I'd written those sections, I had sort of most of a manuscript, and these letters were really kind of, for me, kind of sealing and sending the manuscript off and kind of finishing it in that sense. Mark: Okay. It's really interesting to know that, the postcards come first in the book, and they're all prose poems, aren't they? Suzannah: Yeah. Mark: So they look like postcards on the page. And then, at the end, you've got the sequence of letters, which are kind of long and thin, maybe, to me, suggesting letters are longer than postcards. So, how did you start writing postcards, to begin with? And then we'll move on to the letters. Suzannah: That's a good question. So the postcards, I think I'm always looking for formal inspiration in the things around me. So I am a formal poet in the sense that I've written sonnets. I've written rondels, a lot of rondels. And I'm very interested in traditional form, but I'm also interested in the way that the world can provide forms for the poet. And I was on holiday, visiting my partner's father, when… So this is the first postcard in the book, although it's not sort of titled as a postcard. It's called ‘Under the Blue'. It's the title poem. And that sort of was drawn from a roughly real-life event, where sort of there was this incident with a kayak. My partner was swept off his feet, and it really just brought back to me an earlier experience of actually witnessing a seizure. And that was an experience which had really, really shocked me, and it had come completely out of the blue, really just out of nowhere. And I don't know why, but I had wanted to write about it. Maybe that's a kind of processing thing, or maybe it's just a way to kind of hold close different things that happen in your life. But I'd known for a while that I'd wanted to write about it, and this was years and years later. But seeing this figure being kind of knocked over and sort of just being sort of buffeted in that way really took me back to that night with the seizure. And I felt like these two events were kind of doubled, and I could kind of see both of them at the same time. So it started off with writing about that. And it was, because I was on holiday, a postcard seemed like an apt way to write about that. And so I suppose, kind of, it really started with that first poem. And it's quite subtle, I think, the moment with the seizure. It sort of comes towards the end of the poem. You can sort of read it almost without thinking about the seizure too much. But it does. I think, sort of, that event refracts across the collection. So even though there are moments sort of later in the book where the word seizures is used, someone seizes someone else's wrist in that sort of, a kind of reference back, there's a lot of falling over in the book, a lot of stumbling. And yeah, so I think the impetus for the postcards, kind of, it came from that first section. And actually, they were literal postcards, because I sent some of them. I kind of printed them off and sent them to friends in the post. Because I love…I'm a big letter writer. I send a lot of postcards. Like, postcards are really a big…it sounds weird to say that postcards are a big part of my life, but they kind of are. Like, I really love postcards. I like to collect them from galleries. And so it's partly a homage to my love of the postcard. And I think, also, with postcards, you have the art or the image on the postcard as well. And there's a few kind of ekphrastic moments in the book. So, kind of, all of that is woven in, I think. And the idea of what you can't say in a postcard, I think that's what the middle section of the book, for me, kind of turns the form on its head a little bit more to kind of write about things that maybe you actually wouldn't necessarily write in a postcard. So, to me, I kind of think of them as anti-postcards, almost. Yeah. Mark: So, the form is actually rooted in your life, that you do send postcards. It's not just a conceit for you. Suzannah: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mark: And of course, when a poem is framed as a postcard or a letter, there is a sense of it feels personal. You know, ‘I' and ‘you' are always… Quite often, there can be quite a lot of ambiguity about who the I is and who the you is. But if you signal it as a letter, like last month, I did Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, which was four verse epistles to Viscount Bolingbroke. And so that puts a different frame on it when you know that he's addressing, ‘My Lord,' and we're kind of overhearing that. Suzannah: Yeah. Mark: There's a sense that this is a personal communication, that maybe there's a real relationship underpinning. Suzannah: Yes. And I think that's something that the whole collection kind of plays with in a way. When I teach poetry, I'm always very adamant, or sort of something that I talk about with students is this idea that you never really can conflate the I of the poem with the poet. Even when there is autobiographical kind of crossover, I think there's something that happens. When you write a poem, it becomes an art object. It becomes something that is changed. I almost want to say it's not a photograph, but I think photographs are kind of complex as well in the way that they capture reality. So I think, for me, there is a real distinction between the first and second sections and the third section of the book. But something that I kind of have been thinking about as well is there's a poem that T.S. Eliot wrote to his wife, and he says something, like, ‘These are private words addressed to you in public.' And so I think this idea of what is private and what is public is really…it makes it quite hard for me to talk about the book sometimes, I think, but it's really at the crux of what it is, the sense of sort of letting the reader into some kind of quite private spaces and the importance of doing that as well, how the private is political. Just all of those things are kind of in there. But I think, in particular, the letters are really public declarations of love and trust, and they are very felt poems that are intended to honour particular people. And the collection ends with a letter to my father, who… The father figure is sort of less present in the earlier sections of the book, but it sort of attributes to my dad. That is an autobiographical kind of poem at the end of the book, which is in thanks really for everything that he does to hold up the people who are in earlier parts of the book and to kind of celebrate his role, to celebrate what he does as a carer, but also just to kind of… I think the letters are just…they're like praise poems really. They're just intended to celebrate these people. Mark: That's a nice idea, isn't it? The praise poem. That should maybe be more prominent, shouldn't it? Suzannah: Yeah. Mark: So with this one, specifically, what could you say about your intention in writing the letter to your mother? Suzannah: I think that this was one of the letters that I found more difficult to write, because the figure of the mother…and again, I won't say my mother because I think, for me, there's still this distinction between, even while the book draws on lived experience, it's not a direct reflection of that. But I think because of the earlier sections of the book, which are, at times, quite stark, I really wanted to write a poem that, I don't know, that sort of dwelled on movement and closeness and joy, I guess, just the delight, the sheer kind of delight of someone moving how they want to move. I think that I was kind of looking at this poem again before, thinking that we were going to talk about it. And that movement, to me, there's a shift after all the sort of you, you, you parts of the poem, which sort of have more kind of…the lines sort of go more to the end of the line. And then, when it starts talking about swimming, there are sort of full stops towards the middle of the lines. And I sort of wanted there to be almost like a kind of pull through those lines, as if someone is swimming through those lines, and you feel the arm going down, your strong front crawl, pause, your assertive gestures as you motion through talk. So kind of like having that pulling movement as swimming in the poem. And my mum, who is disabled, she was diagnosed with a neurological illness when I was 12. She used to be a really keen swimmer. And I remember as a child seeing her do front crawl and being, like, ‘Wow.' I actually only learned to do front crawl properly when I was in my late twenties. And I now love… I really love doing front crawl. I absolutely love it. And again, I swim in celebration of my mum. So if I swim front crawl, I'll always do a length for my mum and kind of dedicate that length to her. So all of those things, again, they're kind of these quite private things that are kind of in the poem, but not fully in the poem. But I think that if you have those kind of reverberations of these kind of memories or feelings, even if you don't write about them directly, they're kind of pulled into the poem through the energy of the language that you do decide to use. Mark: And interestingly, as you talk about the relationship between the real person and the person in the poem, I guess another effect, for me, at least, as a reader, is when I read this, it just makes me think, Oh yeah, people do have their different ways of moving and opening a book or eating a salad, or whatever it may be. That's their kind of signature style in life. Or the little quirks in the way they punctuate their emails. Suzannah: Yeah, yeah. Mark: And so there's the thing of it's very specific, but it's also very suggestive, I think, that we easily identify with a relationship like this, even if the circumstances are different. Suzannah: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like what you say about movement, though. And I feel like every person has their own kind of form, like, if we're thinking about form in poetry. It's what I think about when I watch people run a lot of the time. I'm thinking about, ‘Wow.' Really, really, really different form, really different ways of moving, even though that repetitive motion is very… There are only so many ways that you can run, and yet it is so different for everyone. And I think, with this poem as well, something that I was interested in doing was kind of going back to an earlier point, kind of. So, that ‘You, meeting me at school,' kind of thinking about earlier times as well. And again, the ‘sprinting across the grass' kind of goes back in a way to that opening epigraph to the book, which is from Virginia Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf being a modernist writer. And it's… Oh, not Virginia Woolf, sorry, what am I saying? It does go back to that, but I'm actually thinking of Charles Baudelaire, who talks about ‘the ecstasy and horror of life'. Mark: He's great, isn't he? Suzannah: Yeah, really. But this idea of the kind of sprinting across the grass, it was just such a joyful thing, such an incredibly out-of-the-blue, again, to go back to that phrase, sudden burst of energy and motion. And I think we were laughing, but also probably crying, so we probably looked pretty strange. And again, I think the book is really interested in those kind of doubled states where maybe there's sort of deep despair, but also real joy, or anger, but delight. So kind of there's a sense of these cyclical movements through those different states, different emotions, or even a kind of merging of those two things together at the same time. Mark: And can I pick up on the Virginia Woolf reference, because that…I mean, in your writing, there's a lot of summer seaside imagery, and you've got the epigraph from To the Lighthouse. So, I would bet that the person reading Woolf outside was reading To the Lighthouse in this poem. And of course, that's a novel with a mother very much at the centre of it. I mean, it's clearly artfully placed in the poem. So I was curious about, what was your decision to put that in? Suzannah: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a very sort of associative poem. It kind of goes from the reference to Daphne McClure, who is an artist, and she has this wonderful, kind of quite humorous painting of a woman reading. And then it kind of goes to actual reading. Mark: Yes. Suzannah: But then it kind of goes back to McClure as well, because in the painting, this woman is reading, she's got this big sheaf of papers or this big kind of white book paper that she's reading. And then the poem kind of has that in mind. And then, when the hat lifts at the end of the poem, sort of, you've got all of it there. So it's kind of going back to that visual image and making its own kind of different visual image at the end of the poem. And I really love, in Woolf's novel, there's this idea of, like, Lily, the painter, and she's thinking about sort of making her mark. And how do you make a mark? How do you begin? How do you create? How do you have a vision? So I suppose that's part of it. And then the epigraph to the book is really just my favourite sort of thing, and it's this idea that Woolf is writing about that if you're watching, if you're looking at waves from far off, kind of, they look very symmetrical, and they look very regular. But if your perspective changes and you're suddenly the swimmer in those waves, it's completely different. You're having this entirely other experience where, you know, how a painter might paint those waves from far off, these lovely, kind of, they're all the same size, they're kind of coming regularly. And then, to be that swimmer, who is having to kind of arch over each wave or sort of get over each wave, and relentlessly, just wave after wave, and each one is different, you know. So again, there's that kind of repetition idea in there, but also this idea of scale and perspective, and the idea that you might kind of look at something from far away, and it seems very orderly, and it seems very symmetrical, and it seems very easy to deal with, essentially. But if you are the swimmer, that's not the case. And each thing requires a lot of consideration. And that's really what the middle section of the book is interested in, sort of how to write about care and how to write about things, which are just very different, I think, when you're in the midst of them, and every particular thing is something that needs to be negotiated in that way. So the image of waves in the Woolf novel is very important, and also the idea of, in the novel, obviously, the lighthouse is this kind of ever-present, sort of, almost like a character. And I wanted the sea to have that role in this book. So a lot of my earlier writing has been about the sea. And this book is less directly about the sea, but the sea is always present, and I wanted it to be heard and felt, even when it's not kind of being described in detail. Mark: That's a very interesting point about different perspectives, because I think we experience that throughout the book. So some of the postcards are very much about the more difficult aspects of care, caring for a parent. So we read this one in the light of that, and vice versa, and so this is, if you like, the praise poem, the joy, the celebratory. Suzannah: Yes. And I think I'm very, very interested in the relationship between prose… I was going to say prose poetry and line-broken poetry, but also just poetry and prose. And a lot of my influences for writing are quite prose-y, often. I'm interested in prose writers, and I'm interested in where that line is between this idea of what makes a prose poem a poem. And I think if you give a reader a kind of extensive amount of prose, and that sets up a particular kind of rhythm, a particular kind of feel, but then, to follow that with very short-lined poems, line-broken poems, it's a different kind of… I think I wanted it to be almost like a kind of lift at the end of the book, where you've kind of had this kind of, I don't want to say denser, but definitely starker prose. And then there's kind of a much shorter section at the end of the letters, it's very short, but it's kind of just a movement into a different kind of writing. And I wanted that to be a noticeable kind of contrast. Mark: Yeah, definitely. I mean, even visually on the page, the prose looks denser, whereas these, I don't know, it feels like you pick your way a bit more nimbly through these. How did you arrive at that as the solution to how you represent a letter on a page? And was this one of the later ones? So in a sense, the form was predetermined, but it's like you're writing a sonnet sequence, and then you know that there's going to be another one like that. Suzannah: Yeah. So I really do like a sequence. A huge amount of my writing involves sequences, and I think there's something about, if you do something one time and you like it, I think it's worth doing it again. So my first pamphlet is a sequence of poems about the British surrealist artist Eileen Agar. And I often just keep going. If I'm writing something, kind of, I keep going with that. So yes, this was part of an earlier sequence in the sense that the first letter in the book is the first letter that I wrote, and I think, in that sense, the form was kind of set out. And then, in terms of it being kind of, like, a longer shorter-lined poem, I was thinking a little bit about how if you unfold a letter from an envelope, you would have to do that with this poem. Mark: Oh, yes, I remember that. Suzannah: Yeah. And it can be quite tricky, actually. I find it quite tricky to fold letters so they fit correctly in their envelope. But yeah, there's something about that. Whereas the postcard poems, they are, like, poems that you could almost kind of fit to the back of a postcard. But the ones that kind of escape from that or kind of defy that form, I think, are also…that's interesting to me as well, kind of, to flip that. So, for example, I think the most…the postcard that, to me, is the crux of the middle section is the postcard on Christmas night, which is one that I had thought that I would not ever really want to read out loud because it's quite an intense poem. But I did read that one at the London launch for my book at Burley Fisher Books because I was kind of surrounded by people that I knew, and it felt right. But that poem is a much longer postcard. And again, I like the idea of a postcard where you're defying the amount of space that you have to write in. And again, I think that prose poems also do that, because there's a similar kind of sense of overspill in a prose poem, because you're tipping over that line end, and that's quite defiant as well. So I think, if you then tip over the form of the postcard, it's kind of a doubly defiant, formally, kind of way of writing. Mark: Thank you, Suzannah, for sharing such a personal and beautiful poem today and a joyful one. And I would encourage listeners to go and check out the rest of the book and see how it fits into the sequence, because this is really one of those books where the parts really do make up something bigger than the whole. So let's have another lesson to ‘Letter to My Mother'. Suzannah: Thank you.   Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans You, pedalling your armsabove your head in bed,that bad arm suddenlymobile and flexible.You, meeting me at school,feeling something stir, sprinting across the grass . . . the two of us laughing, Mr. Tarpin peeringquizzically from the gate.You, with your bright lipstick.You, with your hands like mine.You, with your floppy hat.You, with your easy laugh.You, with the ellipsesof your emails. Your strongfront crawl. Your assertivegestures as you motionthrough talk. Now, when I swim, the movement of my armsis for you. A high arc,fingertips cleaving bright.Shuddering kick of legs.The sea pool in Seixalis for you. Craggy rocksand my head dipped to blue.Grey crabs line the rocks:I think of the limpets that spot McClure's paintingwith the reading woman,sun hat, white paper sheaf.Memory of last summer,absorbed in Woolf outside.A sudden rush of windcaused the parasol to liftand your own hat to spin right up from your head – where it hovered longerthan seemed possible, black ribbon flapping. Porto Moniz   Under the Blue ‘Letter to My Mother' is from Under the Blue, published by Bloomsbury Poetry. Available from: Under the Blue is available from: The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK   Suzannah V. Evans Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, researcher, and educator. Her debut collection Under the Blue is shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and her work has received the Ivan Juritz Prize and a Northern Writers' Award. Her poetry pamphlets are Brightwork and Marine Objects / Some Language. She teaches poetry in adult education and works with Poetry By Heart. suzannahvevans.com Photograph by Naomi Woddis   A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans Episode 90 Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans  Suzannah V. Evans reads ‘Letter to My Mother' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Under the BlueAvailable from: Under the Blue is available from: The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry... From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope Episode 89 From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope Mark McGuinness reads and discusses an excerpt from Epistle II of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope.Poet Alexander PopeReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom An Essay on Man Epistle II By Alexander Pope Know... Occupied by Tim Rich Episode 88 Occupied by Tim Rich  Tim Rich reads ‘Occupied' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Dark Angels: Three Contemporary PoetsAvailable from: Dark Angels is available from: The publisher: Paekakariki Press Amazon: UK...

Today on the show, I'm sitting down with a father and daughter duo project, appropriately titled “Generations.” They are not only great musicians, but they are also big supporters of the local and regional talent.  I first met Harry at the Shelby Blondell singer-songwriter showcase at Manor Mill and quickly realized his passion for writing original music. Their latest single, “Mess We Leave Behind,” bridges introspection with a life well-lived, knowing a life well-lived often means taking chances and that taking chances can get messy.  The music could be described as adult contemporary married with country, but labels aside, it's just good songwriting. I couldn't be happier to have them both on the program. Join me in welcoming Harry Offutt and Phoenix to the Mouthful of Graffiti podcast.  Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

0:00 - The Nuggets are hosting the Rockets tonight at Ball. Then they immediately hit the road to face the Spurs in San Antonio tomorrow. Oof. That's a tough two nights. But hey, let's go one game at a time. What are the keys to a Nuggets victory tonight against Kevin Durant and his burners?11:05 - The Ravens DEFINITELY backed out of their deal with Maxx Crosby because Trey Hendrickson became available for a cheaper price. That has to be it. That's incredibly shady. But then again, these "physicals" that sports teams conduct during trades are all "sus" as the youths would say. Did MPJ's back pass a physical when the Nuggets wanted him? Did Peyton Manning's neck pass a physical when the Broncos wanted him? Who knows?Also, Bam Adebayo's 83-point game was completely fabricated and is disrespectful to the league. 29:31 - Moser took one for the team. And by "took one," I mean he shoved a cup full of powdered coffee creamer directly into his mouth.

We're going deep today, Slushies. Kathy and Tobi school us on the origin of the word “podcast” with its roots in both early Apple technology and agricultural lingo (think broadcast of seeds). In this episode we're broadcasting our appreciation for poems by Erin Evans. We admire Evans' sound work and her ability to craft powerful lines with plain language. In the first poem, the poet's confrontation of medical jargon reminds Marion of Whitman's poem When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer. An encounter between patient and doctor in Evans' poem underscores the difference between learning and knowing that recalls Leslie Jamison's book of essays, The Empathy Exams.    The second poem's Japanese title evokes the film Rashomon for Jason, who takes issue with the notion that our writerly imaginations are limited only to the words available in our own language. Schadenfreude, anyone? We're digging the close focus on language in these poems. Marion appreciates that the poem elevates a term she initially passed off as one from pop culture wellness. Meanwhile we conflate our Wabi-sabi with our kintsugi and poet Ross Gay with the poet Ross White (who is the actual originator of the gas station sushi theory). But don't let our mistakes keep you from experiencing Evans' powerful endings.   Slushies, if you're attending AWP in March, please stop by and see us at the book fair. We'll be at table 1272. We'd love to see you in person. Thanks, as always, for listening!   At the table: Tobi Kassim, Jason Schneiderman, Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Lisa Zerkle, and Lillie Volpe (sound engineer)  Author Photo:    Author Bio: Erin Evans was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis when she was one year old. Her work is greatly influenced by her experience living with chronic illness. She has had poems published in Defunct, Revel, A Mouthful of Salt, and Nimrod-International Journal, which awarded her its Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. Her work was chosen by Kwame Dawes for his American Life in Poetry column. She lives in Vermont with her beautiful and brilliant kids. Exacerbation She says the word quickly looking down at my file   then back at the x-ray clipped against the glowing box.   My scarred and patchy lungs, and all their flaws  on display, almost make me blush.   Embarrassed that I couldn't do any better, have been better. I focus instead    on the soft ribbons of my ribcage that fan like ghost hands   lit up for Halloween. Again, she says it,   looking at me now  as she sits on the round rolling chair   and reaches for her stethoscope. Exacerbation, which I finally looked up   after years and years of hearing it, simply means a worsening.   But she was taught not to state  the obvious, to disguise the truth   in the language of textbooks, and lectures, years of learning   how best to look right through someone. And I was taught to breathe in when I was told,   to push past that pain in my chest  that has no name, nor chapter in any book.   Komorebi Scott nudges my kayak away from the shore.   The yellow plastic scrapes the sand and seashell bottom  until it glides to the open water, over deep-green seaweed that waves its version of goodbye.    A soft pushing away  a departing of one world, only to enter another,  so vast there are no names for things:   When I die  let it be like this.   Some languages have words for words we never even thought to speak.   In Japanese, for instance, there is a word  for the sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree.   Tell me, why isn't there a name for this: The ocean's soft  pull, the gentle begging it does,      like a child tugging  at the tail of your shirt,    reminding you it's time to go.   Riches  As I cradle my morning tea I watch her from the window.   Crouched down in the yard, with her hand outstretched. Even   from here I see the arthritis knot and bend her fingers   from years of knitting intricate sweaters and working late-night shifts at the hospital.   The chickens come to her  hesitantly, to peck the scratch from her warm hand.   She told me once that even when  she has nothing to give them   they still peck softly at her wedding band.   They surround her now, their bobbing and dipping beaks   and as they take the seeds she offers,  she smooths the long yellow feathers   that in the right light turn golden.   If I could inherit a single thing from her it would be this patience,   this trust that life will come to you even when your body    is leaving this world slowly, one cell at a time.

What if we told you that your weird grade-school hyperfixation could help countless people? Well that was the case for Bessie Blount Griffin who, thanks to some draconian teaching practices, revolutionized care for WWII veterans! Then, Kelley wines about Princess Cecelia of Sweden, a HAWT MESS of a princess who dabbled in saucy sexcapades, royal relations, and just a bit of piracy. Keep your hohos close to your heart and start brainstorming your death tattoo because we're wining about herstory! Join the Funerary Cult: https://www.patreon.com/winingaboutherstorySponsor a Glass of Wine: https://buymeacoffee.com/wahpodGet Merch: https://wining-about-herstory.myspreadshop.com/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Episode 89 From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope  Mark McGuinness reads and discusses an excerpt from Epistle II of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/89_From_An_Essay_on_Man_by_Alexander_Pope.mp3 Poet Alexander Pope Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness From An Essay on Man Epistle II By Alexander Pope Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;The proper study of mankind is man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise, and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little, or too much:Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused, or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule –Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!   Podcast Transcript In the early 18th century, Alexander Pope's poetry was known to every cultured person in England. He was a fashionable, successful, wealthy writer and the preeminent poet of his age. He was also a canny businessman who published his translations of Homer via subscription, an early form of crowdfunding, and they sold so well he built himself, an extravagantly large villa in Twickenham – and its famous subterranean grotto still exists today. His political satires were so sharp and topical that he was rumoured to carry a pair of loaded pistols when going for a walk, in case one of his targets took violent exception. Phrases from his poetry are still proverbial: ‘hope springs eternal', ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread', ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing', ‘To err is human; to forgive divine', ‘What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed', and also the title of the movie, ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind'. But these days, Pope has really fallen out of fashion. He's seen as archaic and artificial. In an age when formal poetry is out of fashion, for many people he represents the worst kind of formal poetry: his very regular metre and full rhymes sound clunky to our ears. His rhyming couplets are undoubtedly clever, but that's part of the problem, because these days we associate poetry with emotions and self-expression, so cleverness is seen as a little suspect and somehow inauthentic. And I'll be honest, for a long time, I had that image of Pope. He represented everything the Romantics rebelled against at the end of the 18th century, and as a young poet I was on the side of the Romantics, so I had no interest in Pope. However, a few years ago, I challenged myself to have another look at his work, and what I discovered was a really sharp and thought-provoking and witty and formidably skilful poet, who in certain moods, is an absolute pleasure to read. And he doesn't fit every mood, but then there aren't many poets who do. So turning to today's poem, An Essay on Man is one of Pope's major works, it's about 1,300 lines long. As the title suggests it's a meditation on the nature of what he called mankind, and we call humankind, we have to make allowance for the historic focus on the male as representative of the species. It's also a didactic poem, he's not just reflecting on the subject, he is telling us what we should think about it. Which again, is a deeply unfashionable stance for poets these days, at least when they are on the side of a conservative or establishment position. And he does this in the form of a series of verse epistles, verse letters, which are addressed to Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. The epistle form also means that the poem addresses the reader in a very direct manner, as you would expect in a letter. His basic stance, which we find in many of his poems, is of a reasonable man writing for a group of like-minded people, trying to establish some sort of common sense, shared ideas and principles, in a world where these need to be debated and defined and defended. This was the world of the coffee house and the salon, where people came together to debate, sometimes in very robust fashion. It came to be known as the Augustan age in English literature, by comparison with the satirical and political poetry of the age of Augustus Caesar. OK looking more closely at the poem itself, the excerpt I just read is from the second Epistle, and one of the first things we notice is what Milton would have called the ‘jingling' rhymes: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, It's pretty unmistakeable isn't it? One pair of rhymes after another. And in case you're wondering, yes, these rhyming couplets do go on all the way through the poem, and indeed all the way through most of Pope's work. And not just in Pope: for over a century, from about 1650 to 1780, this was a hugely popular verse form. They are known as heroic couplets because they are associated with epic narrative poems, such as John Dryden's translations of Virgil and Pope's translations of Homer. Each line is in iambic pentameter, the familiar ti TUM ti TUM ti TUm ti TUM ti TUM, with two lines next to each other forming couplets, and the poem proceeding with one couplet after another. The form can be traced back to Chaucer, who used rhyming couplets for many of his narrative poems. But by the time of Dryden and Pope it had evolved into a tighter couplet form, described as closed couplets, meaning that they were typically self contained, with a sentence, or a discrete part of a sentence, beginning and ending inside the couplet. For instance: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. That stands on its own as a single thought, a unit of sense, ending with a full stop. And the full rhyme of ‘scan' and ‘man' means the couplet snaps shut at the end – this is the closed couplet effect we associate with heroic couplets. In the next couplet he introduces the idea of man as a creature of ‘middle state': Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: And then another couplet elaborates on the sense of being pulled in different directions: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, So the poem proceeds one unit of sense at a time. The couplets are like Lego bricks, and Pope used them to build just about anything he wanted: literary and philosophical discourse here in the Essay on Man and in his Essay on Criticism; mock-heroic social comedy in The Rape of the Lock; actual epic in his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey; and satire in The Dunciad. It's easy to see how this could become monotonous, and in the work of most poets of the time, it did. But Pope's great achievement was to take this established form and perfect it, sticking very strictly to the formal pattern, while varying the syntax, the grammatical patterns, with great subtlety and complexity, to keep the reader on their toes. Let's take another look at the first couplet. Notice the little pause in the middle of the first line, after ‘thyself': Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; This divides the line into two parts, conveying the dramatic tension in Pope's argument: he's saying that humans are ambitious for knowledge, they want to ‘scan' God, to examine him, but they should really focus on self-knowledge. This tension between opposites is known as antithesis, it's a rhetorical pattern we looked at back in episode 58 about one of Sir Philip Sidney's sonnets, and it's very common in Pope. And the tension is resolved in the next line, which is all one phrase, with no pause: The proper study of mankind is man. Have another listen to the couplet, to hear how the tension is established and then released: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. So when all of this comes together, the tension and release, the regular rhythm of the metre and the full rhymes clinching the couplet, it has the effect of making the words sound truer than true. The following couplet picks up on the antithesis, and extends it into paradox: Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: An isthmus is a narrow strip of land between two bodies of water, so standing on it, you could easily feel precarious and threatened. ‘Darkly wise' means ‘dimly wise', possessing a little knowledge, but not enough for full understanding. And ‘rudely great' means ‘powerful but coarse and unfinished'. And I think we can recognise what Pope is saying from our own experience – that sense of knowing enough to know how little we really know; of having great potential, but struggling to fulfil it. And isn't it delightful how Pope compresses all those feelings into these neat little paradoxes: ‘darkly wise and rudely great'. In another famous line, he describes true eloquence as ‘What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed', which is exactly what he achieves here. We can also note that ‘darkly wise' and ‘rudely great' are not only antitheses expressed as paradoxes, they are also an example of another rhetorical pattern: parallelism, where similar structures are repeated with variation. In this case ‘darkly' and ‘rudely' are both adverbs and ‘wise' and ‘great' are both adjectives, so grammatically they are identical, which suggests both similarity and difference in mankind's relationship to knowledge and power. The next couplet uses a more elaborate parallelism: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, So both lines say ‘With too much something for the something else'. It's hard to miss the pattern, isn't it? And notice how the couplet form is perfect for laying out two ideas that seem to counterbalance each other perfectly. So we're only six lines in and Pope has put his finger on a central conundrum in human existence, and conveyed it with at least three rhetorical patterns nested inside each other – antithesis, paradox and parallelism. Not only that, he's handled the metre and rhyme with great skill, wrapping each thought up in the neat little bow of a rhyming couplet. And if your mind is starting to boggle, welcome to the world of Pope's verse: elegant, authoritative and very, very clever. When we look closely, there's a lot going on inside every single couplet. He's like a watchmaker, working at a tiny scale, making an instrument with great precision and balance, that keeps perfect time, and chimes beautifully. And Pope's contemporaries would have found it easier to follow the sense than we do, because they were used to reading this kind of stuff. But I'm sure the poetry would often have given them pause, even if only for a moment, as they read. And my guess is that they would have enjoyed this slight difficulty, and the pleasure of making out the sense, with the little dopamine hit of understanding. Like unwrapping a sweet before you can pop it in your mouth and taste it. So I hope we're starting to see why Pope is the undisputed master of the heroic couplet. Even T. S. Eliot had to admit defeat, when he wrote a passage in this style for The Waste Land, only for Ezra Pound to point out tactfully that he couldn't compete with Pope, and draw the red pencil through it. But the form is more than simply one couplet after another. When he stacks them together, they create verse paragraphs, longer units of thought, that function very like paragraphs in prose. So having established the idea of man caught between opposing forces, he goes on to elaborate on the theme to dazzling effect: He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: The couplets are individually brilliant, and cumulatively overwhelming, both in terms of the mental effort required to tease out their meanings, and the tension between action and inaction, divine and bestial impulses, mind and body, birth and death, reason and error. And I think that's why I find this line so funny: Whether he thinks too little, or too much: It feels like he's throwing his arms up and laughing and admitting that he's overthinking it all. The verse paragraph ends with three more couplets, where he sums up the nature of man: Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused, or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Although Pope is describing a ‘chaos of thought', his own thinking is always sharp, however convoluted his argument becomes. So he sticks to the themes of power and knowledge, undercutting man's pretension by saying he is ‘Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all', and ‘Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled'. And he ends this paragraph with another rhetorical device, the tricolon, which uses three parallel elements to build to a conclusion: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! We're familiar with this pattern in famous quotes from Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered', the US Declaration of Independence, ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', and Shakespeare: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen!' Here, Pope uses it with typical precision, since if someone is both the ‘glory… of the world' and it's ‘jest', i.e. the butt of its jokes, then that makes that person a ‘riddle': The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! So this sums up the nature of man, and sets up the jesting irony of the next verse paragraph: Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old time, and regulate the sun; If this were the start of the poem, we might be forgiven for taking Pope's words at face value, but in the light of what has gone before, it's pretty clear that ‘wondrous creature' is a mocking criticism. He was writing this in an age where Newtonian physics was in the ascendancy and people were full of enthusiasm about the new discoveries in science and the possibility of understanding and mastering the physical world. And given that we are still living in a so-called age of reason, I think his criticisms of scientific overreach are still relevant, and the joke is still funny, when he talks about instructing the planets in what orbits to follow, correcting time and regulating the sun. As if measuring were full understanding, let alone complete power. But Pope doesn't confine his criticism to scientists. He also has philosophers in his sight: Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his followers trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; He clearly doesn't have a lot of time for Plato's first principles. Neither is he impressed by the contemporary vogue for what we would call Orientalism: As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the sun. It's possible that he had in mind the whirling dervishes of Persia, or maybe this is just a caricature of his idea of ‘Eastern priests'. So obviously this is a joke that hasn't aged so well. OK he ends this verse paragraph with a final jab, which restates the idea from the opening couplet in bluntly comic fashion: Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule – Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! It's hard to imagine a more apt image of intellectual presumption than trying to teach Eternal Wisdom a thing or two, but just in case we miss the point, Pope rams it home with relish: Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! And this is another characteristic aspect of Augustan poetry, particularly the satirical kind, that it can be very crude and direct, with a passage of sophisticated argument followed by a line or two where the mask drops and the insult is laid bare. And no, it's not big or clever, but let's face it, sometimes it can be deeply satisfying. One more little detail, which I can't help wondering about: notice how both of these couplets, conveying the same basic idea in very different tones, both hinge on the word ‘thyself': Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule – Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! So that word ‘thyself' could be used to refer to various individuals, and knowing Pope, I wouldn't be surprised if he intended all of them at once. Firstly, the phrasing sounds proverbial, in which case each couplet is an injunction to mankind at large. Secondly, it could refer to the reader, any reader, of the poem, whether Viscount Bolingbroke, an 18th-century wit, or you and me, reading the poem together on this podcast. It could also refer to the specific targets of Pope's criticism, such as the overreaching scientists or philosophers. I think Pope may also have had in mind a target nearer to home: himself. W. B. Yeats wrote in one of his essays, ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry'. And it's entirely possible that Pope is doing both at once: we've seen the brilliance of his rhetoric, in puncturing the pretensions of his fellow men and women. Yet by making poetry as well as rhetoric, he is arguably arguing with himself as well. It was of course be entirely right and proper and expected for a Christian such as Pope to admonish himself as well as others, for the many and various sins he describes in An Essay on Man. So from a moral viewpoint, I think I'm on pretty safe ground in suggesting that ‘thyself' includes Pope. But I would go further, and say that the idea of a brilliant mind that is not quite brilliant enough to fully understand itself may have been a deeply personal subject for Pope. Because what we have here is an extremely clever warning about taking cleverness to extremes. Maybe the irony was not lost on Pope. As he wrote in another poem, An Essay on Criticism, ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing'. So perhaps as we hear this passage again, and enjoy the sparkling wit and scurrilous attacks on others, we can also detect a note of self-reflection, and self-accusation, that makes it a little more poignant than it first appears. From An Essay on Man Epistle II By Alexander Pope Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;The proper study of mankind is man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise, and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little, or too much:Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused, or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule –Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!   Alexander Pope Alexander Pope was an English poet and translator who was born in 1688 and died in 1744. As a Catholic he was barred from university and public office, so he educated himself and forged a brilliant literary career, becoming the leading poet of Augustan England, celebrated for his razor-sharp satire and polished heroic couplets. Early success came with An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock, followed by monumental translations of Homer that made him financially independent. His later works, including The Dunciad, attacked dullness and corruption. In An Essay on Man, he explored human nature, providence, and moral order with epigrammatic clarity. He lived at Twickenham, where he created a famous garden and grotto.   A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope Episode 89 From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope Mark McGuinness reads and discusses an excerpt from Epistle II of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope.Poet Alexander PopeReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom An Essay on Man Epistle II By Alexander Pope Know... Occupied by Tim Rich Episode 88 Occupied by Tim Rich  Tim Rich reads ‘Occupied' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Dark Angels: Three Contemporary PoetsAvailable from: Dark Angels is available from: The publisher: Paekakariki Press Amazon: UK... Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Episode 87 Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold  Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold.Poet Matthew ArnoldReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies...

On FEB 11, Patrick Sesko, Tom Fogarty and Saegin, took the stage on the Mouthful of Graffiti *LIVE* at REB Records podcast. Hear the interviews, performances and stories behind the original songs.Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

Today’s episode is a classic from the archives, a conversation from 2019 with current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets about his debut poetry collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers. Winner of the Whiting Award in poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, there is no better time to revisit this remarkable collection, and this unforgettable conversation with Skeets, as we await his new book Horses coming this March from Milkweed Editions. For the bonus audio archive Jake contributed a reading and analysis of a poem by the first Navajo Nation Poet Laureate, Luci Tapahonso, a poem called “Hills Brothers Coffee.”  He talks about it in relation to his thoughts on Diné or Navajo poetics. This joins supplemental readings by many past guests including Tommy Pico, Layli Long Soldier, Brandon Hobson, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Natalie Diaz, Elissa Washuta, Morgan Talty and many others. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page.

Episode 88 Occupied by Tim Rich   Tim Rich reads ‘Occupied' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/88_Occupied_by_Tim_Rich.mp3 This poem is from: Dark Angels: Three Contemporary Poets Available from: Dark Angels is available from: The publisher: Paekakariki Press Amazon: UK   Occupied by Tim Rich We buttered the cat's pawsand baked bread in borrowed tinsto make the unfamiliar speak of pleasureand our intentions to remain All that first daythe house talked to itselfabout us Later than I expected, light withdrew across our table, unopened cratesback through thin glasstowards tomorrow So the room released its formand we sat among one anothergiving our ears to the conversation:inner doorways muttering behind flat hands; oak floors—masonic in their black treacle gloss—deciding whether to settleunder our presence Later still, in bed, I stared sideways into an unlit universe, absentlymindwalking the bounds,relocking iron door-bolts like an old rifle, drawingdrawn curtains a little closer,charting the evaporating pathbehind that plane's descent In time, each stray thought went to its home, leaving this accommodation to take place: the air held here sighing gently,like contented tortoise breaths; the softening percussion of bodies sleeping; the punctuating crack and hiss as fresh eggs are brokeninto a smoking pan; someoneopening a window   Interview transcript Mark: Tim, where did this poem come from? Tim: So, almost always for me, poems just emerge out of some sort of inner dusk. I'm not someone that can go to their desk with a plan to write about a particular message or topic or piece of content. The poem just presents itself to me. And actually I don't really have any choice in the matter. I'm sort of just forced to be a transcriber in that moment. And I was looking at the sea the other day, and I had this moment when I just thought my poems are a bit like strange sea creatures that live on the seabed. And at a particular point in their life, they decide that they just want to go to the light and they start floating up through the murky water and explode in bubbles on the surface. And, you know, hopefully I'm there sitting in the poet's boat ready to haul them on board. So, that's almost always how poems start for me. And this poem very much began that way. I was at home on a winter's evening, and it just began to come through me, as it were. And the context for that was that after many years of living in the same house, my wife and I were starting to think about the possibility of moving. And, you know, it was a really exciting prospect but also it definitely was stirring up the sediment of my unconscious. I'm someone that really feels the need for a settled home, a settled place, and this unsettled me. So, I think that that was what was giving the raw energy to the content. And there was something else, which is what informed the scenery of the poem, if you like, which is this idea of light withdrawing from a space and what that does within the space. And when I was 11, I was living just with my dad, and he would come home from work later than I would get home from school. So, for the first year or so, he arranged for me to go to some elderly neighbours on the way home from school. So I was, sort of, watched, and we would sit in their front room, and they would load up their coal fire. And through the windows, the sun would set slowly, and they were so calm. They would hardly speak. When they did speak, it was about these, kind of, wonderful domestic details like, you know, what needs to be chopped for dinner, or are there any windfalls in the garden that we can harvest tomorrow? It was very, very calm. And, you know, the coals in the fire were glowing red, but the rest of the room just lost its light. And I remember the shape of their very heavy old furniture, and the picture frames, and the curtains all began to disappear. And that must have just lodged somewhere deep within me, because that's very much, as the poem came out, where I was also taken to in my mind. Mark: So, I like this. So, I mean, to put it bluntly, it's not like you moved into a house and then you wrote this. You were thinking about moving and then a house emerged from your unconscious, from memories of other houses and so on. Tim: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Mark: And I think that's kind of a salutary thing to hear because… And this is a poem that really you read it and you totally believe it. It feels like a first-hand account of, well, we did this and this is what happened. And yet you're, kind of, pulling the rug from under our feet here, which is a nice thing in poetry. I think that you can't necessarily take it literally or face value. Tim: Well, we moved house… Yeah, we moved house about six months after I wrote the poem. So, I went through the experience of living the poem, which seems to be quite a good way around. Mark: Did you conjure the house, Tim? Tim: Actually, it was wonderful because it confirmed to me part of what motivated the poem, which is that I think we can all become a little bit… I don't know. Complacent seems to be too loaded a term, but we get so used to how our houses speak that we stop hearing them. And actually, there's this kind of wonderful symphony going on the whole time, you know, radiators making those strange percussive noises, and the way that the door squeaks, or suddenly, you know, how your staircase gets to a particular temperature in the middle of the night and decides to squeak. And they're constantly making these noises. And when you're living there, you stop hearing them. But when you move to somewhere for the first time, or sometimes if you go and stay in a haunted Airbnb in the woods, that first night particularly, everything's coming to you fresh. So, I think there's a strong sense of what's it like when a person moves into a space for the first time and that space has a character, and an energy, and a being of its own. Mark: So, really it's that state of heightened awareness, isn't it? You know, apparently this is how the mind works. If you've got a constant stimulus, the mind will tune it out. It's that Heaney line, you know, ‘The refrigerator whinnied into silence,' which is just that moment of… You only hear the fridge when it stops. Tim: Yeah. Mark: And what you're describing is the reverse of that. When you're in the house for the first time and everything is new and you're on hyperalert for the voices of the house. Tim: Yeah. And we're listening to our houses right now because there's a 1066 Line train from Hastings that's just gone into the tunnel over there. But we probably can't quite hear it on the microphones, but it's in the air and it's just touching elements of the house. And we're surrounded by this the whole time. And I think it's important to say, as soon as the poem had laid itself out on the page for the first time, it was clear to me that this poem was about people moving into a home for the first time, but it is also quite a vivid description, I think, of what was going through me at the time in terms of that unsettled nature. You know, I was quite surprised by the nature of the metaphors that my unconscious had presented me with. I mean, it's quite a portrait of anxiety to double-check the curtains, to lock a bolt as if it's an old rifle. You know, this is partly a portrait of an unsettled, anxious mind, which is, I think, something that I was going through at the time. Mark: And you've got some great similes, you know, the iron door bolts like an old rifle. And there's this lovely bit where you talk about ‘drawing drawn curtains'. And if you look on the website, then you can see that there's a line break after drawing, so it's drawing, line break, drawn curtains, which really just emphasises it's already drawn. You don't need to do it. This is the OCD kicking in, which really speaks to that anxiety you're describing. And I really love the second section where you say, ‘All that first day, the house talked to itself about us,' which is just a wonderfully unsettling idea that we are the intruders and the house has an opinion. Tim: Yeah, I definitely wasn't being sort of whimsically mystical about infrastructure and materials. It was definitely the feeling that there is an exchange when animals, human and other, come into a space. There's a change in energies and temperatures and sound and smells. And, you know, the dynamism of creatures come into a space that has been unoccupied, which is what generally most houses are, you know, sometimes for days, sometimes for months, and years before the new occupants come in. And I was just really taken with that idea that the house also needs to find its way of settling under these new occupants. And that seemed like a moment of 24 hours of the two parties eyeing each other and listening to each other and wondering about, ‘Who is this that I need to live with for these next years?' Mark: And it's quite a humbling poem, isn't it? Because, you know, when you think of owning the house or occupying the house, it's like you're the one in charge. But this poem just kind of subverts that idea that it's the house that's weighing us up, as in the people in the poem. It made me think of that TV series David Olusoga does, A House Through Time, where he gets an old house, and he goes through the records, and he looks at all the people who lived in the house and tells their story. And there's quite a lot of them, like, much more than I would have expected. You know, each episode goes on and on and on, and you just realise the house is staying there. The house is constant. These people, they're temporary. They might think they're the owners, but we're just passing through. Tim: We are passing through. It is a reminder of our mortality and our houses often way outlive us. Also, in recent years and decades, there's been an increase in the way in which people work from home, but that isn't a new thing. So, I wrote this poem in the house we lived in before, which was built to be a weaver's cottage, a live/work weaver's cottage. And, you know, they would find their living accommodation in quite modest corners of the house because a lot of it, at different times in the process, was given to equipment and storing material and a very intense version of live/work and working from home. And, you know, I think that part of when people suddenly a whole generation through particularly lockdowns but also just this change in working habits are spending much more of their life within the home quite often and what that means in terms of their relationship to the space and how the house relates to that. Tim: I think, just as I'm speaking, it occurs to me that perhaps also part of the influence of the atmosphere in the poem is around some of the fiction that I enjoy. And I haven't thought about this until we were talking now, but I like an M. R. James novel, or, you know, The Haunting of Hill House has just come to mind, and buildings and atmospheres that speak, as sort of some of the atmospheres you get in a Robert Aickman type horror novel. So, some of the classic British horror novels and that type of fiction. And just as we were talking about that, and I was also casting my eyes down the poem, there's some of the dusk that you get with those places, which is in this poem. And it's great, isn't it, coming back to one of your own poems quite a while after you wrote it, and you perhaps see some of the reasons for its being in a slightly different way. Mark: I mean, that's the basic premise of the haunted house is that the house is alive. I mean, you've not gone full Hammer Horror with this one. It's maybe a little more subtle, but you've definitely got some really wonderfully suggestive details. I loved ‘inner doorways muttering behind / flat hands, oak floors – masonic / in their black treacle gloss'. And that's so true. There are so many of these old houses. It's like, what happens to the wood? How does it get to be like treacle? And there's that heaviness and that opacity about it that you convey really well. Tim: Yeah. I was taken with the idea of the house being almost quite an august figure in some ways. It would be wrong to say it's proud of itself, but deciding whether to settle under our presence is quite… Mark: It's not aiming to please, is it? Tim: It's not. It's not easily won over. I mean, you know… Yeah, let's see what these new occupants are like. You know, what do they get up to? What are their tastes? What do we think of the prints that they put up on the wall? Mark: Yeah. Will they get it? Will they behave themselves? So you've got this lovely line in the third paragraph, ‘So the room released its form / and we sat among one another.' Well, thinking about the form of the poem, how close is this to, say, the first draft when you were hauling the sea creature out from the depths over the side of your poetic boat? Tim: Yeah, when the poem came out onto the page, it actually made a demand of me. It said, ‘I don't want you to put me into very organised type measures. I don't want to be sorted into regular stanzas. And also, I want you to be quite careful about any linguistic bells and whistles.' It just was a bit like the house. It had almost a sort of slightly stern feeling to it as a poem. It was very clear, and it was saying each of these stanzas, or scenes maybe, has to be as long as it wants to be. ‘I don't want you to spend time evening things up or creating consistency.' And there are many other poems that I've written where, of course, I'm deliberately very measured, very consistent. At the moment, a lot of the poems I'm writing have a lot of half rhymes but particularly a lot of internal rhymes. And, goodness, audaciously, you know, I even have a rhyming couplet in a poem that I'm working on at the moment. But this poem just said, ‘I don't want any of that.' Now, that's not to say that there aren't some half rhymes or suggestions of rhymes, and certainly some lovely withholding with words at the end of the line that only resolve as you move through into the next line, the enjambment of the word and the meaning falling over into the next line. Definitely that happens. But I tried to edit this into different shapes. I probably tried it five different ways, and each time it just felt wrong quite quickly actually. I tried to give it a consistent number of lines per stanza, and it repulsed me as a poem. It just said, ‘No, I need to be this free form.' And also, I had to accept that it's probably a little bit messier than I normally feel comfortable with. And it was good. I was like, ‘Actually, you know, just stop fighting. Just stop fighting it.' Sometimes your poems can be more irregular, more free, less obviously organised. And I think it has its rhythms that hold it together. It does for me. And listeners will decide, when they hear it, whether those rhythms are actually holding it together. Mark: Well, for me, it feels a bit like one of those old houses where you go in and there's not a right angle in sight. You know, the floors are sloping. The doors have to be a kind of trapezium to open and close, which I think is obviously true to the spirit of the thing. And it's like the house itself. It's not trying too hard. You can read it quite quickly, and it seems quite plain-spoken and spartan. But when you look, you notice the little details. Like, you know, there's the door bolts like a rifle, and the ‘nasonic', a wonderful adjective. And I've just noticed now, as we were talking, in the final verse, ‘In time, each stray thought / went to its home, leaving this / accommodation to take place'. And that's a lovely reframing of ‘accommodation', because the everyday sense is a place where you go and live, but it's an accommodation in the sense of a mutual alignment, almost like a negotiation or getting used to each other, which I think is really delightful. Mark: Okay, Tim, so I have to ask, looking again at the poem, what on earth is going on with buttering the cat's paws at the beginning? Tim: So, buttering the cat's paws is a bit of folk wisdom. And the idea is that when you move to a new house, if you have a cat or cats, that you actually put lovely, creamy butter on their paws and that they, you know, as cats do, will then spend time licking and licking and licking. And it means that more of their scent is put into the floor and the grounds of the place so they feel at home quicker and sooner. So they're sensing the place much more actively sooner. Now, I don't think there's any scientific evidence to suggest it works. But, you know, if anyone has any experience with this, I would love to hear it. But I don't really care, because the whole image of spreading beautiful, creamy butter onto the paws of the cat and that somehow just inviting them to feel that this place is home is more than enough for me. And I'd heard the phrase years and years and years before. And again, I think it was just the very first phrase that came out as the poem emerged. I think it was opening the doorway to the poem, and it felt very natural for it to be the beginning of the poem. I wonder now, looking back, whether there's something to do with the eye opened with an animal spirit. And so much of this poem really has come up from the unconscious. And I'm not starting with a very measured, conscious human, you know, activity or… I'm not saying, you know, ‘we made the decision to move'. It's not a person-led piece in the sense that, okay, we're doing the buttering, but it's the cat that's front and centre in that open line. And that's not something that I particularly thought about consciously at the time. But looking back, I think there's a hint there that we're not just talking about a straightforward human, rational response to living in a place. There are animal spirits too. Mark: Yeah, and it feels like a wonderful piece of folk magic. I mean, cats are magical creatures like witches' familiars. And, you know, maybe there's a magical aspect to that. It's a little ritual, isn't it? Tim: It is. I had a question for you, but it just came out of part of my experience of this poem going out into the world, which is that I've just been surprised, in a wonderful way, by how diverse and often surprising people's responses are to poems, how I can never really tell what it is about a poem someone's going to pick up and come back to you about. You know, for example, someone has given copies of this poem to friends when they move house. Mark: Oh, lovely. Tim: …as a housewarming present, a printed letterpress, which is very, very beautiful. Someone else said that they really loved sort of, what did they say, the soft absurdity around the house being almost this grand piece. And others have responded in different ways. And I think it's one of the wonders of poetry, maybe something that doesn't get talked about quite so much, which is that we interrogate the meaning for ourselves. And if you work with your editor and sometimes reviewers, meaning is discussed. But actually, my experience, when poems go out into the world, is it's just incredible how broad the range of response is and what people pick up on. And I suddenly think, well, is that just my experience? So what's it like for you? Are you constantly surprised by what people pick up and come back to and focus on with your poems? Mark: Yeah, it's a little bit like a Rorschach test, isn't it? People see themselves in it to a degree, or they see something that will resonate for them. And to me, it's the sign of a real poem if it can do that, if different people see different things in it. If it was too obvious and too, you know, two-dimensional, then that's fine, but it's not really a poem. And I think this is part of the magic of why poems can persist over time. Society is shifting all around them. Maybe a few of the houses are constant, but the poem still inhabits the space, and people still relate to it for decades or hundreds or even thousands of years sometimes. Tim: Yeah, I think there's an important point for poets that you have to maintain your confidence in ambiguity and what might feel like potential confusion. Of course, you need to think through how you're writing it and avoid unintended, poor consequences. But there's also a point in which I think you have to protect some of the messiness of meaning and not try to pin things down too much. Of course, there are different types of poets, and some poets need to be very clear and very message-driven. But I'm thinking, for me, there are sometimes moments when I think, ‘Am I just leaving this hanging and ambiguous and a bit dusky in terms of meaning?' And that's the point at which I think, ‘No, quite often just trust that people will find their own way into the poem.' Mark: Yeah, absolutely. And this is something I've seen a lot in classes, and it certainly happened to me very often. You know, the teacher will say you can cut the last line because we already get it. You don't need to underline the message of the poem. Sometimes we feel a bit nervous just leaving it hanging. And you've absolutely had the confidence to do that with the wonderful ending of this, where you talk about ‘the punctuating crack and hiss / as fresh eggs are broken / into a smoking pan. Someone / opening a window' – and that's it. I mean, tell me about that ending. How did you arrive at that? And did you go back and forth? Did you think, ‘Can I leave that window open, that line?' And by the way, listener, there is no full stop either to hang on to at that point! Tim: Yeah. I have to say, I do find myself clearing away more and more of the furniture of the poems. And there is a very deliberate lack of a full stop there. It was all there in the first draft that came out. It wasn't a constructed or reconstructed ending later on. Again, the poem seemed to want to open into something rather than close itself down and make a point. I think that in the action of the poem, we've moved through this dusky night, including a sort of bout of insomnia, of staring into the darkness. And then morning is coming, and it's full of new things. And there is something about that morning of waking up in a new house. What a moment in someone's life that is. Mark: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tim: It's just extraordinary. And there's a natural link there into the egg as a symbol. Something new, something is being born. And yeah, there may be many reasons why that window needed to be open. The smoke from the pan is one thing, which is all about the… Mark: Right, right. Setting the smoke alarm off! Tim: Yeah, it goes off in our kitchen quite often. And of course, the cooking is, again, this thing of humans being in a house and occupying it and all of the energy and dynamics. And how are you most going to make a new home your own? You're going to get out and start cooking and making a mess and eating together and getting things moving. I have no idea who the someone is, and I don't know what their motivation is for opening a window. And I like that. Mark: Okay. Well, let's have another listen to the poem and maybe, you know, each of us, as we listen to this this time, just see what associations come up for you. You know, houses you've lived in, places you've been, memories it conjures up. Thank you very much, Tim. What a lovely space to explore with this poem.   Occupied by Tim Rich We buttered the cat's pawsand baked bread in borrowed tinsto make the unfamiliar speak of pleasureand our intentions to remain All that first daythe house talked to itselfabout us Later than I expected, light withdrew across our table, unopened cratesback through thin glasstowards tomorrow So the room released its formand we sat among one anothergiving our ears to the conversation:inner doorways muttering behind flat hands; oak floors—masonic in their black treacle gloss—deciding whether to settleunder our presence Later still, in bed, I stared sideways into an unlit universe, absentlymindwalking the bounds,relocking iron door-bolts like an old rifle, drawingdrawn curtains a little closer,charting the evaporating pathbehind that plane's descent In time, each stray thought went to its home, leaving this accommodation to take place: the air held here sighing gently,like contented tortoise breaths; the softening percussion of bodies sleeping; the punctuating crack and hiss as fresh eggs are brokeninto a smoking pan; someoneopening a window   Dark Angels: Three Contemporary Poets ‘Occupied' is from Dark Angels: Three Contemporary Poets, published by Paekakariki Press. Available from: Dark Angels is available from: The publisher: Paekakariki Press Amazon: UK     Tim Rich Tim Rich grew up in the woods of Sussex and now lives and writes by the sea in Hastings. His poems have been published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Dark Angels: Three Contemporary Poets (Paekakariki Press) and Poet Town (Moth Light Press). The Landfall series – exhibited at the Bloomsbury Festival, London — brought together his poetry and photography. He has five poems in the anthology Family Matters, a collection of poetry about family, to be published in 2026. Alongside poetry, Tim writes, edits and ghostwrites books.  timrich.com Photograph by Maxine Silver   A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes Occupied by Tim Rich Episode 88 Occupied by Tim Rich  Tim Rich reads ‘Occupied' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Dark Angels: Three Contemporary PoetsAvailable from: Dark Angels is available from: The publisher: Paekakariki Press Amazon: UK... Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Episode 87 Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold  Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold.Poet Matthew ArnoldReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies... Recalling Brigid by Orna Ross Orna Ross reads and discusses ‘Recalling Brigid’ from Poet Town.

Happy new year! This week I'm joined by my Ninth Degree co-host Ianto to discuss the first episode of the latest Doctor Who spinoff, "The War Between the Land and the Sea".About Time:www.linktree.com/AboutTimeCast

Donald chats up “The Boyfriend,” the 17th and 18th episodes of season three. With special guests Tomás Q. Morín & Erin Evans, they discuss handshakes, friendship tiers, and books that inspired Oliver Stone's JFK (1991).Tomás Q. Morín has written so many books that he can't even list them all here. If you know you know. He once swung a dead cat and hit ten new books that are yet to come out. He's got hair that you'll be jealous of, but will never touch. And a laugh so booming you'd think it was god himself. Because it is. You can find him when you look in the mirror and blow yourself a kiss.Award-winning poet Erin Evans received the Francine Ringold Award for New Writers from Nimrod-International Journal. Her work has also appeared in Defunct, Revel, and A Mouthful of Salt. She's at work on a multigenerational novel about women who are out of fucks to give. She lives in Vermont with her two beautiful and brilliant kids. You can find her out with lanterns looking for herself. Here are the texts and authors discussed in this episode:Fernando A. Flores Death of a Salesman by Arthur MillerOn the Trail of the Assassins by Jim GarrisonCrossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim MarrsI'm Keith Hernandez: A Memoir by Keith Hernandez

Kilowatt Holiday Special 2025: Naughty Lists, EV Poems, and AI TunesIn this festive and satirical holiday special, Bodiei mixes electric vehicle news with creative flair. He kicks things off with a witty "EV Naughty and Nice List," calling out range anxiety myths, opportunistic dealers, and software-locked horsepower, while celebrating Rivian, Lucid, and automakers finally chasing affordability. The show features original AI-assisted music tracks like Math Beats Vibes, Prophets and Margins, and A Mouthful of Promises But Nothing to Chew, all written and crafted by Bodhi using tools like Suno and ChatGPT. He also performs a clever EV parody poem, “Twas the Night Before the Write-Down,” skewering Ford's shifting EV strategy. To close, Bodhi roasts himself with a tongue-in-cheek AI-generated song about his podcasting quirks and habits. It's a humorous, heartfelt, and musically inventive end-of-year celebration packed with insight and originality.Support Children's Miracle Network

Episode 87 Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/87_Dover_Beach_by_Matthew_Arnold.mp3 Poet Matthew Arnold Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness Dover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. Podcast Transcript This is a magnificent and haunting poem by Matthew Arnold, an eminent Victorian poet. Written and published at the mid-point of the nineteenth century – it was probably written around 1851 and published in 1867 – it is not only a shining example of Victorian poetry at its best, but it also, and not coincidentally, embodies some of the central preoccupations of the Victorian age. The basic scenario is very simple: a man is looking out at the sea at night and thinking deep thoughts. It's something that we've all done, isn't it? The two tend to go hand-in-hand. When you're looking out into the darkness, listening to the sound of the sea, it's hard not to be thinking deep thoughts. If you've been a long time listener to this podcast, it may remind you of another poet who wrote about standing on the shore thinking deep thoughts, looking at the sea, Shakespeare, in his Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,So do our minutes hasten to their end; Arnold's poem is not a sonnet but a poem in four verse paragraphs. They're not stanzas, because they're not regular, but if you look at the text on the website, you can clearly see it's divided into four sections. The first part is a description of the sea, as seen from Dover Beach, which is on the shore of the narrowest part of the English channel, making it the closest part of England to France: The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; – on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. And as you can hear, the poem has a pretty regular and conventional rhythm, based on iambic metre, ti TUM, with the second syllable taking the stress in every metrical unit. But what's slightly unusual is that the lines have varying lengths. By the time we get to the third line: Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light There are five beats. There's a bit of variation in the middle of the line, but it's very recognisable as classic iambic pentameter, which has a baseline pattern going ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM. But before we get to the pentameter, we get two short lines: The sea is calm tonight.Only three beats; andThe tide is full, the moon lies fair – four beats. We also start to notice the rhymes: ‘tonight' and ‘light'. And we have an absolutely delightful enjambment, where a phrase spills over the end of one line into the next one: On the French coast the light,Gleams and is gone. Isn't that just fantastic? The light flashes out like a little surprise at the start of the line, just as it's a little surprise for the speaker looking out to sea. OK, once he's set the scene, he makes an invitation: Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! So if there's a window, he must be in a room. There's somebody in the room with him, and given that it's night it could well be a bedroom. So this person could be a lover. It's quite likely that this poem was written on Arnold's honeymoon, which would obviously fit this scenario. But anyway, he's inviting this person to come to the window and listen. And what does this person hear? Well, helpfully, the speaker tells us: Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in. Isn't that just great? The iambic metre is continuing with some more variations, which we needn't go into. And the rhyme is coming more and more to the fore. Just about every line in this section rhymes with another line, but it doesn't have a regular pattern. Some of the rhymes are close together, some are further apart. There's only one line in this paragraph that doesn't rhyme, and that's ‘Listen! You hear the grating roar'. If this kind of shifting rhyme pattern reminds you of something you've heard before, you may be thinking all the way back to Episode 34 where we looked at Coleridge's use of floating rhymes in his magical poem ‘Kubla Khan'. And it's pretty evident that Arnold is also casting a spell, in this case to mimic the rhythm of the waves coming in and going out, as they ‘Begin, and cease, and then again begin,'. And then the wonderful last line of the paragraph, as the waves ‘bring / The eternal note of sadness in'. You know, in the heart of the Victorian Age, when the Romantics were still within living memory, poets were still allowed to do that kind of thing. Try it nowadays of course, and the Poetry Police will be round to kick your front door in at 5am and arrest you. Anyway. The next paragraph is a bit of a jump cut: Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; So Arnold, a classical scholar, is letting us know he knows who Sophocles, the ancient Greek playwright was. And he's establishing a continuity across time of people looking out at the sea and thinking these deep thoughts. At this point, Arnold explicitly links the sea and the thinking:                                     weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea. And the thought that we hear when we listen to the waves is what Arnold announces in the next verse paragraph, and he announces it with capital letters: The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. And for a modern reader, I think this is the point of greatest peril for Arnold, where he's most at risk of losing us. We may be okay with ‘the eternal note of sadness', but as soon as he starts giving us the Sea of Faith, we start to brace ourselves. Is this going to turn into a horrible religious allegory, like The Pilgrim's Progress? I mean, it's a short step from the Sea of Faith to the Slough of Despond and the City of Destruction. And it doesn't help that Arnold uses the awkwardly rhyming phrase ‘a bright girdle furled' – that's not going to get past the Poetry Police, is it? But fear not; Arnold doesn't go there. What comes next is, I think, the best bit of the poem. So he says the Sea of Faith ‘was once, too, at the full', and then: But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world. Well, if you thought the eternal note of sadness was great, this tops it! It's absolutely fantastic. That line, ‘Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,' where the ‘it' is faith, the Sea of Faith. And the significance of the line is underlined by the fact that the word ‘roar' is a repetition – remember, that one line in the first section that didn't rhyme? Listen! you hear the grating roar See what Arnold did there? He left that sound hovering at the back of the mind, without a rhyme, until it came back in this section, a subtle but unmistakeable link between the ‘grating roar' of the actual sea at Dover Beach, and the ‘withdrawing roar' of the Sea of Faith: Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Isn't that the most Victorian line ever? It encapsulates the despair that accompanied the crisis of faith in 19th century England. This crisis was triggered by the advance of modern science – including the discoveries of fossils, evidence of mass extinction of previous species, and the theory of evolution, with Darwin's Origin of Species published in 1859, in between the writing and publication of ‘Dover Beach'. Richard Holmes, in his wonderful new biography of the young Tennyson, compares this growing awareness of the nature of life on Earth to the modern anxiety over climate change. For the Victorians, he writes, it created a ‘deep and existential terror'. One thing that makes this passage so effective is that Arnold has already cast the spell in the first verse paragraph, hypnotising us with the rhythm and rhyme, and linking it to the movement of the waves. In the second paragraph, he says, ‘we find also in the sound a thought'. And then in the third paragraph, he tells us the thought. And the thought that he attaches to this movement, which we are by now emotionally invested in, is a thought of such horror and profundity – certainly for his Victorian readers – that the retreat of the sea of faith really does feel devastating. It leaves us gazing down at the naked shingles of the world. The speaker is now imaginatively out of the bedroom and down on the beach. This is very relatable; we've all stood on the beach and watched the waves withdrawing beneath our feet and the shingle being left there. It's an incredibly vivid evocation of a pretty abstract concept. Then, in the fourth and final verse paragraph, comes a bit of a surprise: Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! Well, I for one was not expecting that! From existential despair to an appeal to his beloved. What a delightful, romantic (with a small ‘r') response to the big-picture, existential catastrophe. And for me, it's another little echo of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60, which opens with a poet contemplating the sea and the passing of time and feeling the temptation to despair, yet also ends with an appeal to the consolation of love: And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,blockquotePraising thy worth, despite his cruel hand. Turning back to Arnold. He says ‘let us be true / To one another'. And then he links their situation to the existential catastrophe, and says this is precisely why they should be true to each other: for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; It sounds, on the face of it, a pretty unlikely justification for being true to one another in a romantic sense. But actually, this is a very modern stance towards romantic love. It's like the gleam of light that just flashed across the Channel from France – the idea of you and me against an unfeeling world, of love as redemption, or at least consolation, in a meaningless universe. In a world with ‘neither joy, nor love, nor light,' our love becomes all the more poignant and important. Of course, we could easily object that, regardless of religious faith, the world does have joy and love and light. His very declaration of love is evidence of this. But let's face it, we don't always come to poets for logical consistency, do we? And we don't have to agree with Matthew Arnold to find this passage moving; most of us have felt like this at some time when we've looked at the world in what feels like the cold light of reality. He evokes it so vividly and dramatically that I, for one, am quite prepared to go with him on this. Then we get the final three lines of the poem:We are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. I don't know about you, but I find this a little jarring in the light of what we've just heard. We've had the magnificent description of the sea and its effect on human thought, extending that into the idea of faith receding into illusion, and settling on human love as some kind of consolation for the loss of faith. So why do we need to be transported to a windswept plain where armies are clashing and struggling? It turns out to be another classical reference, to the Greek historian Thucydides' account of the night battle of Epipolae, where the two armies were running around in the dark and some of them ended up fighting their own side in the confusion. I mean, fine, he's a classical scholar. And obviously, it's deeply meaningful to him. But to me, this feels a little bit bolted on. A lot of people love that ending, but to me, it's is not as good as some of the earlier bits, or at least it doesn't quite feel all of a piece with the imagery of the sea. But overall, it is a magnificent poem, and this is a small quibble. Stepping back, I want to have another look at the poem's form, specifically the meter, and even more specifically, the irregularity of the meter, which is quite unusual and actually quite innovative for its time. As I've said, it's in iambic meter, but it's not strictly iambic pentameter. You may recall I did a mini series on the podcast a while ago looking at the evolution of blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, from Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare's dramatic verse, then Milton's Paradise Lost and finally Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. ‘Dover Beach' is rhymed, so it's not blank verse, but most of the techniques Arnold uses here are familiar from those other poets, with variations on the basic rhythm, sometimes switching the beats around, and using enjambment and caesura (a break or pause in the middle of the line). But, and – this is quite a big but – not every line has five beats. The lines get longer and shorter in an irregular pattern, apparently according to Arnold's instinct. And this is pretty unusual, certainly for 1851. It's not unique, we could point to bits of Tennyson or Arthur Hugh Clough for metrical experiments in a similar vein, but it's certainly not common practice. And I looked into this, to see what the critics have said about it. And it turns out the scholars are divided. In one camp, the critics say that what Arnold is doing is firmly in the iambic pentameter tradition – it's just one more variation on the pattern. But in the other camp are people who say, ‘No, this is something new; this is freer verse,' and it is anticipating free verse, the non-metrical poetry with no set line lengths that came to be the dominant verse form of the 20th century. Personally, I think you can look back to Wordsworth and see a continuity with his poetic practice. But you could equally look forward, to a link with T. S. Eliot's innovations in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and The Waste Land. Eliot is often described as an innovator in free verse, which is true up to a point, but a lot of his writing in that early period isn't strictly free verse; it's a kind of broken up metrical verse, where he often uses an iambic metre with long and short lines, which he varies with great intuitive skill – in a similar manner to Arnold's ‘Dover Beach'. Interestingly, when ‘Dover Beach' was first published, the reviews didn't really talk about the metre, which is ammunition for the people who say, ‘Well, this is just a kind of iambic pentameter'. Personally, I think what we have here is something like the well-known Duck-Rabbit illusion, where you can look at the same drawing and either see a duck or a rabbit, depending how you look at it. So from one angle, ‘Dover Beach' is clearly continuing the iambic pentameter tradition; from another angle, it anticipates the innovations of free verse. We can draw a line from the regular iambic pentameter of Wordsworth (writing at the turn of the 18th and 19th century) to the fractured iambic verse of Eliot at the start of the 20th century. ‘Dover Beach' is pretty well halfway between them, historically and poetically. And I don't think this is just a dry technical development. There is something going on here in terms of the poet's sense of order and disorder, faith and doubt. Wordsworth, in the regular unfolding of his blank verse, conveys his basic trust in an ordered and meaningful universe. Matthew Arnold is writing very explicitly about the breakup of faith, and we can start to see it in the breakup of the ordered iambic pentameter. By the time we get to the existential despair of Eliot's Waste Land, the meter is really falling apart, like the Waste Land Eliot describes. So overall, I think we can appreciate what a finely balanced poem Arnold has written. It's hard to categorise. You read it the first time and think, ‘Oh, right, another conventional Victorian melancholy lament'. But just when we think he's about to go overboard with the Sea of Faith, he surprises us and with that magnificent central passage. And just as he's about to give in to despair, we get that glimmering spark of love lighting up, and we think, ‘Well, maybe this is a romantic poem after all'. And maybe Arnold might look at me over his spectacles and patiently explain that actually, this is why that final metaphor of the clashing armies is exactly right. Friend and foe are running in first one direction, then another, inadvertently killing the people on the wrong side. So the simile gives us that sense of being caught in the cross-currents of a larger sweep of history. With all of that hovering in our mind, let's go over to the window once more and heed his call to listen to the sound of the Victorian sea at Dover Beach. Dover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold was a British poet, critic, and public intellectual who was born in 1822 and died in 1888. His father was Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School. Arnold studied Classics at Oxford and first became known for lyrical, melancholic poems such as ‘Dover Beach', ‘The Scholar-Gipsy', and ‘Thyrsis', that explore the loss of faith in the modern world. Appointed an inspector of schools, he travelled widely and developed strong views on culture, education, and society. His critical essays, especially Culture and Anarchy, shaped debates about the role of culture in public life. Arnold remains a central figure bridging Romanticism and early modern thought. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Episode 87 Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold.Poet Matthew ArnoldReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies... Recalling Brigid by Orna Ross Orna Ross reads and discusses ‘Recalling Brigid’ from Poet Town. From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Episode 85 From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Poet Samuel Taylor ColeridgeReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom...

Today on the show, I'm sitting down with a singer-songwriter and musician originally from Washington, D.C., who now calls Baltimore home and is taking the Mid-Atlantic by storm. Saegin does it all—from singing and playing multiple keyboards to guitar and beyond—performing with the mastery of someone who has truly clocked his 10,000 hours. He has an incredible calendar to show for it, too. Saegin is a performer you instantly remember for his talent and his ability to transport you through the decades with ease. I couldn't be happier to have him on the show. Join me in welcoming Saegin to the Mouthful of Graffiti podcast Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

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Episode 86 Recalling Brigid by Orna Ross Orna Ross reads ‘Recalling Brigid' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/86_Recalling_Brigid_by_Orna_Ross.mp3 This poem is from: Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts edited by Richard Newham Sullivan Available from: Poet Town is available from: The publisher: Moth Light Press Amazon: UK | US Recalling Brigid by Orna Ross Queen of queens, they called herin the old books, the Irish Mary.Never washed her hands, nor her headin sight of a man, never lookedinto a man's face. She was goodwith the poor, multiplied food,gave ale to lepers. Among birds,call her dove; among trees, a vine.A sun among stars. Such was the sort of womanpreferred as the takeover was made:consecrated cask, throne to His glory,intercessor. Brigid said nothing to any of this,the reverence, or the upbraidings.Her realm is the lacuna,silence her sceptre,her own way of life its own witness. Out of desire, the lure of lustor the dust of great deeds,she was distorted:to consort, mother-virgin,to victim or whore. I am not as womanlya woman as she.So I say: Let us see.Let us say how she is the one. It is she who conceivesand she who does bear.She who knitted us in the womband who will cradle our tomb-fraying. Daily she offers her arms,clothes us in compassion,smiles as we wrigglefor baubles. Yes, it is she who lifts you aloftto whisper through your ears,to kiss your eyes,to touch her coolingcheek to your cheek. Interview transcript Mark: Orna, where did this poem come from? Orna: Hi Mark. Yeah, so it's one of a collection that I'm working on, around Irish women from history and myth. And these are women that I grew up with, as a young person, receiving a sort of a typical Irish education, if you like. Orna: And so some of them are saints, some of them are mythological people. Well, saints are also mythological people! Some of them are historical figures who've been mythologized. And I just wanted to go back in and do my own exploration of each of these women because everybody else had. So I've been gathering these poems over a long time, but it actually started with this one. It started with Brigid. And Brigid is a figure from ancient Irish mythology. And she was Christianized into a Roman Catholic saint. She is the patron saint of Ireland. One of. You've probably heard of the other one. Patrick. You probably haven't heard of this one: Brigid. And, so many things have been projected on her. And it's interesting to read what, what survives of what is written about her because what's written earlier on in time is quite different to what's written later on. And she continues to be an inspiration. Her feast day is the first day of spring in Ireland, which in Ireland is the first day of February. It's much earlier than it is in England. And she's just an interesting, personification of the female virtues as they've been perceived over time. Mark: So you said she was written about differently in earlier times to more recent times, which I think is pertinent to how you're exploring that in the poem. So maybe you could just give us a brief summary of that. Orna: Yes. So I, the poem refers to ‘the takeover'. And by that, I kind of mean the Christian, but hand in hand with Christian goes the patriarchal, takeover of old images of women in general. And Brigid is part of that. So earlier, renditions about her tend to focus on her as a healer, as a wise woman, as a very compassionate person, ‘ale to lepers' is one of the, images in the poem. Whereas later versions tend to emphasize her holiness and her saintliness and, her goodness and I suppose what we would typically think is a good, religious, icon. So it's interesting just to read how that changes and differs as we go. And she also then had her detractors, which is where we get to the ideas, about women generally that are in the poem – the consort, mother, victim, whore, those kinds of ideas. You see them brushing against Brigid over time, but she comes through intact actually, as a woman in her own right. And these don't tend to stick to her as they have stuck to others. Mark: And sometimes when poets use mythological figures like this, there's a kind of a critique of, ‘Well, that's a little bit old fashioned, it's poetry with a capital P'. But reading this and listening to you, it kind of really underlines to me that mythology and religion are really quite present in Ireland. Orna: Oh, gosh, yes! The past is very present in Ireland still, in lots of ways. And. It's interesting. I suppose it's something to do with being a small island on the very edge of, in inverted commas, civilization. Although the Irish like to think they civilized Europe during the dark ages by sending our saints and our scholarship, our images of people like Brigid, the truth is that old ways lingered on a long time, and particularly the part of Ireland where I grew up. So, I grew up in County Wexford down in the small bottom right-hand corner, the very southeast tip of Ireland. Around it, there is a river and a small hill that kind of cuts that area off. And around County Wexford in general, there are larger hills and a big river that cuts Wexford off. So they tended to travel by sea more than road, people from that part of the world. And it was the first part of Ireland to be conquered the Norman conquest and, Old English lingered there right up until, well, there are still words that are used in Wexford that aren't used elsewhere. Carols and songs as well. So other parts of Ireland and, obviously England, had moved on, it but kind of got stuck there. So I'm just kind of pointing up the fact that yes, things stayed, passed on in an oral kind of culture and an oral tradition. And hedge schools and such like, long after such things had faded away in other parts of Europe. Mark: And you say Old English rather than Irish was lingering? Orna: That's right. And, because they had, well, the Normans came to England first Hastings, actually where I live now. One of the reasons I'm here, I think is that I felt a lot of similarities between here and Wexford and I think the Norman invasion in both places, it was part of that. So yeah, a hundred years after the Normans landed in Hastings, they were brought over to Wexford by an Irish chieftain to help him win one of his battles with another Irish chieftain. So English came with the Normans to Ireland. Mark: Right. And this is another amazing thing about Ireland, is the kind of the different layers, like archaeological layers of language. You've got Irish, you've got Old English, you've got Norman French, you've got Latin from the church, you've got Norse from the Vikings and so on. It's incredibly rich. Orna: Yes. More diverse, I think. And again, because of its cut off nature, these things lasted longer, I think, because that's also true of England, but the overlay is stronger and so they don't make their way through. Mark: Right, right. And the ghosts can peep through. So, okay, that's the historical cultural context. What does Brigid mean to you and why did you choose her as the first figure in this sequence? Orna: She chose me, I think. I very much feel this poem, you know, some poems are made and some arrive and this one arrived. I wanted to do something to celebrate her. That was all I knew because it was the first day of spring, which I always loved, that first day of February. You know, when winter is really beginning to bite and you feel, I mean, there is no sign of spring except some crocuses maybe peeking up and, uh, a few spring flowers making a little promise. But usually the weather is awful, but it's the first day of spring and it's, been a really important day for me from that point of view. And then the fact that it does, you know, the fact that Patrick is such a great big deal everywhere and Brigid isn't known at all. So that's kind of where I started and I just knew I'd like to write a poem. And then it was one of those ones that I, if I had set out to write a poem about Brigid, I don't think this is what I would have written. It just arrived. And I found that I was thinking about lots of things and as the first poem of this sequence, I wanted to say some of the things about womanhood in the poem, and I, well, I realised I did, because that's what emerged. So for me, it's very much about that kind of quiet aspect of, so, you know, we've got feminism, which talks very much about women's rights to do whatever it is they want to do in the outer world. But for me, she, in this poem, represents the inner, the quiet virtues, if you like, always there for us. We're not always there for them, but they're always there and active in our lives all the time, and I wanted to celebrate that in the poem. So that's what, you know, I got, the rough draft just came pouring out, and that's what I found myself wanting to bring out. Mark: And the title, ‘Recalling Brigid', you know, I was thinking about that word ‘recalling', because it could mean ‘remembering', but it could also mean ‘calling' or ‘summoning'. Orna: Yes, deliberately chosen for both of those meanings, yes, very well spotted there, poetry reader. Mark: Well, you know, this is a very ancient function of poetry, isn't it? And it's where it kind of shades into charm or spells, to summon, or invoke a spirit or some kind of otherworldly creature or being. Orna: Absolutely. I think you've got the heart of what the poem is trying to do there. It is about calling forth, something, as I say, that's there, that we're all, you know, is there for all of us in our lives, but that we're not always aware of it. And our culture actively stifles it, and makes it seem like it's less important than it is. And so, yes, very much exactly all the words, the beautiful words you've just used there. I was hoping this poem would tap into that. Mark: Very much. And, you know, the beginning, ‘Queen of Queens, they called her'. So presumably this is in the old pre-Christian days, ‘they called her'. So there's that word ‘calling' again, and you give us the kind of the gloss, ‘in the old books, the Irish Mary'. And then you introduce the takeover: ‘such was the sort of woman / preferred as the takeover was made:' And then you get the other version. And then you've got: ‘Brigid said nothing to any of this,' which I think is really wonderful that she keeps – so you've gone from ‘they' in the past, ‘what they called her'. And then Brigid keeping her own counsel about this. She said nothing to any of this, ‘the reverence, or the upbraidings'. And then we get you where you say, ‘I am not as womanly / a woman as she. / So I say: let us see. / Let us say how she is the one. // It is she who conceives, and she who does bear.' Lovely, beautiful repetitions and shifts in there. So you really, you step forward into the poem at that point. Orna: I really wanted to, to place myself in relation to, to her and to all the women in this collection. Which isn't out yet, by the way, it's not finished. So I've got another three to go. No, I really wanted to place myself in relation to the women in the poems. That was an important part of the project for me. And I do that, you know, lots of different ways. But this poem, the first one is very much about, I suppose, calling out, you know, the ‘recalling' that you were talking about there a few moments ago, calling out the qualities. That we tend to overlook and that are attributed to Brigid as a womanly woman. And so, yeah, that's, that's what I was saying. I'm more of a feminist woman who is regarded by some as less womanly. so there is a, that's an interesting debate for me. That's a very interesting, particularly now at this time, I think, it's very interesting to talk about, you know, what is a feminist and what is feminism. And I personally believe in feminisms, lots of different, you know, it's multiple sort of thing. But these poems are born of a, you know, a feminist poet's sensibility without a doubt. So in this first one, I just wanted to call out, you know, the womanly virtues, if you like. Mark: Yeah. So I get a sense of you kind of starting as a tuning fork for different ideas and voices, calling her different things. And then you shift into, ‘Let us see. / Let us say…' I love the description earlier on where you said it's a celebration because by the end of the poem, it really is. It's all her attributes, isn't it? ‘It is she who conceives / and she who does bear.' And so on. Again, how easy was it for you to let go and, and, and step into that? Because it's kind of a thing that it's a little bit, it's not what we associate with modern poetry, is it? Orna: No, not at all. Not at all. But I had to ages ago, give up on modern poetry. If I wanted to write poetry, I had to drop so much, so much that I learned, you know, English Lit. was my original degree. And, you know, I, I was in love with poetry from a very young age. So, I learned everything I could about everything. And then I had to drop it all because I didn't write, I didn't write any poems between the end of my teens and my early forties when I lost a very dear friend. And then when I went on, shortly afterwards to, develop breast cancer. So those two things together unlocked the poetry gates and poems came again. And the kind of poems that came, very often were not, poems that they're not fashionable in that sense. You know, they're not what poetry tends to be. And from that point, in our time, if you like, some are, some, some do come that way, but an awful lot don't. And, for that reason, I'm just so entirely delighted to be able to self-publish because they speak to readers and say they communicate. And to me, that's what matters. And I don't have to worry about being accepted by a poetry establishment at all. I don't spend any time whatsoever thinking about that. I work at the craft, but I, it's for myself and for the poem and for the reader, but not to please anybody that, you know, would be a gatekeeper of any kind. Mark: Well, some listeners will know this – you are very much known as a champion of opportunity and diversity in publishing for writers and self-publishing, independent publishing, however you call it. But I think what I'd like to focus on here is the fact that, you know, by writing a poem like this, you highlight the conventions that we have in modern poetry. And it's easy to see the conventions of the past, but maybe not so much the ones in the present. And I love the fact that you've just sidestepped that or ignored that and written the poem that came to you. Orna: Yes. Yes, very much did and do. And like I said, I don't spend, I did at one time spend time thinking about this, but I spend absolutely no time now thinking about this at all. Mark: That's so refreshing to hear! [Laughter] Orna: No, it's, it's great. It's certainly a liberation. I think very much about the poem and what the poem needs and wants from me. And I make mistakes. I, you know, I don't do well on some poems. I go back, rewrite, sometimes years later, sometimes after they're published. so yeah. It's not that I don't think about form or structure or, you know, all of the things that poets think about but I only think about the master, you know, is the poem itself or the reader possibly or the communication between the bridge between me and the reader, something like that. But yeah, it's liberating for sure. Mark: And how did that play out in this poem? I mean, how close is this to the original draft that came to you? Orna: It's one of the poems that's closest to the original. It kind of arrived and I didn't want to play with it too much at all. So yeah, it, I just left it be. I let it be what I wanted to be because for me there are echoes in this poem as well of Old Irish poetry and ways of writing. you know, that if you, I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of reading Old Irish poetry in translation? Mark: Yes. Orna: So, you know, that sense of I'm reading something from a completely different mind. It's, it isn't just that the, you know, the structures are different or whatever. It's like the whole mind and sensibility is something else. And that was one of the things I wanted to slightly have to retain in this poem. You know, I felt that it, it carries some of that forward and I wanted to, to leave it there as an echo. Mark: Yeah. Quite a lot of those Old Irish poems have a kind of a litany, a list of attributes of the poet or their beloved or the divine being that they're evoking. And that comes across very strongly here. Orna: Yeah, definitely. That's sort of a list of, which to the modern ear can sound obvious and, you know, just not poetry really. So yeah, I think that's one of the qualities that it carries. Mark: And I love the kind of the incantatory repetitive thing. Like I was saying about the, ‘So I say: let us see. / Let us say', and then ‘It is she… It is she… she who', you know, it just carries you along. It's got a hypnotic quality to it. Orna: Yes. And the she part, you know, the emphasizing the feminine, I suppose, touch of the divine feminine, but very much the physical feminine, and activities as well. So, you know, women held the role of birth and death very much in Irish culture again, up to really quite recently. I remember that, in my own youth and okay, I am getting on a bit, but, it's still, you know, it was quite late in time where, women did the laying out for burial. They did the keening of the, the wake, all of that. I remember very well. so at the beginning and end of life at the thresholds, if you like, that was a woman's job. And, that was lost, I think in the takeover. But I still think all the emotional labour around those thresholds are still very much held by women, you know, silently and quietly. And yeah, Brigid doesn't shout about it, but in this poem, I want to call it. Mark: Yeah. Recall it. Okay. And then let's go back to Hastings, which we touched on earlier, because this, okay. It's, it's going to be in your collection. It's been published in a wonderful anthology poetry from Hastings called Poet Town. Tell us a bit about that book and how you came to be involved. Orna: Yeah. So I heard about it and, Richard [Newham Sullivan] wonderful, poet and, publisher and general literary person. He now lives in New York, but he grew up in Hastings and lived here for many years. And it was a kind of a homesickness project he told me later, for him just. But he carried the idea in his mind for a very long time. He wanted to, he knew that there was an incredible, poetic history in Hastings, which people were not aware of. So Hastings is very well known. Hastings and St. Leonard's, where I live, both are very well known as arty kind of towns. Visual arts are very, very visible here, and all sorts of marvellous things going on, and music as well, there's brilliant Fat Tuesday music festival every year, but there's also, there's classical music, music in the pubs, music coming out your ears, literally. But very little about the literary life that goes on here, and lots of writers living here. And so Richard wanted to just bring forward the poetry side of that. And so he decided it's a passion project for him. He decided to, he worked with the publisher, a small publisher here, in Hastings for it. It's Moth Light Press. And he set out to gather as many living poets into one collection as he could. And this is where I was interested because as, I'm a historical novelist as well, so history is big for me, and I was really interested in the history, you know, the history and the poets who had lived here. There were quite a few. It's not every day you find yourself in an anthology with Lord Byron and Keats, and, two Rossetti's! So that was a joy, discovering all the poets who, had a connection to Hastings back to, I think he went back to the early 1800s with it. So, yeah, it's been a huge success, and, people are loving the book, and it has really brought poetry, brought pride, I think, to the poetry community in the town, which is lovely. Mark: Yeah, I'm really enjoying it, and I love the fact that it's got the old and the new. Because, of course, that's what I do here on A Mouthful of Air. I always think the ghosts of poetry past are always present in the work of the living. I hadn't realized what a deep and rich poetic history Hastings had. So, yeah, Poet Town, a great anthology. Do check that out while you're waiting for Orna's sequence to come to light. And Orna, thank you so much for sharing such a remarkable poem and distinctive take on the poet's craft. And I think this would be a good point to listen to the poem again, and appreciate your praise and celebration once more. Orna: Thanks so much, Mark, for having me. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Recalling Brigid by Orna Ross Queen of queens, they called herin the old books, the Irish Mary.Never washed her hands, nor her headin sight of a man, never lookedinto a man's face. She was goodwith the poor, multiplied food,gave ale to lepers. Among birds,call her dove; among trees, a vine.A sun among stars. Such was the sort of womanpreferred as the takeover was made:consecrated cask, throne to His glory,intercessor. Brigid said nothing to any of this,the reverence, or the upbraidings.Her realm is the lacuna,silence her sceptre,her own way of life its own witness. Out of desire, the lure of lustor the dust of great deeds,she was distorted:to consort, mother-virgin,to victim or whore. I am not as womanlya woman as she.So I say: Let us see.Let us say how she is the one. It is she who conceivesand she who does bear.She who knitted us in the womband who will cradle our tomb-fraying. Daily she offers her arms,clothes us in compassion,smiles as we wrigglefor baubles. Yes, it is she who lifts you aloftto whisper through your ears,to kiss your eyes,to touch her coolingcheek to your cheek. Poet Town: The Poetry of Hastings & Thereabouts ‘Recalling Brigid' is from Poet Town: The Poetry of Hasting & Thereabouts, published by Moth Light Press. Available from: Poet Town is available from: The publisher: Moth Light Press Amazon: UK | US Orna Ross Orna Ross is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her poetry, rooted in Irish heritage and mindfulness practice, explores love, loss, creativity, and spiritual renewal through a female lens. As founder-director of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), she champions creative freedom for poets and writers. Her forthcoming collection, And Then Came the Beginning—Poems of Iconic Irish Women, Ancient and Modern—is available for pre-order at OrnaRoss.com/TheBeginning. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes Recalling Brigid by Orna Ross Orna Ross reads and discusses ‘Recalling Brigid’ from Poet Town. From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Episode 85 From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Mark McGuinness reads and discusses a passage from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Poet Samuel Taylor ColeridgeReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom... Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter Episode 84 Alchemy by Gregory Leadbetter Gregory Leadbetter reads ‘Alchemy' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: The Infernal Garden by Gregory LeadbetterAvailable from: The Infernal Garden is available from: The publisher: Nine Arches...

This week we celebrated Novellavember by discussing some of our favorite recent novellas. Cinder House [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] The Summer War [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] The Memory of the Ogisi [Overdrive/Libby] What Stalks the Deep [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] Making History [Audible] / [Overdrive/Libby] The Adventure of the Demonic Ox: A Penric and Desdemona Novella [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] Previously Discussed: The River Has Roots [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby] / [Episode 302]   Murder by Memory [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby] / [Episode 305]   The Unworthy [Libro.fm] / [Episode 307] Automatic Noodle [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Episode 319] A Mouthful of Dust [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] / [Episode 331] Additional Mentions: The Hungry Gods [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] Lives of Bitter Rain [Libro.fm] The Mountain Crown [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] Red Star Hustle / Apprehension [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] The First Thousand Trees [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby]

A Mouthful of Legs***Written by: EM Otero and Narrated by: Nate DuFort***Content warning: spiders***It Came from the Inner Woods***Written by: Thomas Folske and Narrated by: Jimmy Ferrer***Manpig***Written by: Bikram Mann***Content warnings: bullying, child death***Support the show at patreon.com/creepypod***Sound design by: Pacific Obadiah***Title music by: Alex Aldea Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Send us a textIn today's episode, I interview Tobias Eckerlin, director of the short film "A Sparrow's Song," a story of a widowed air raid warden in the midst of World War II struggles to overcome grief and rediscover joy in her life.Listen to hear about the challenges of creating a consistent look and feel in an animated virtual world, the importance of using sound and music to support and enhance the visual world, and what the experience of the Student Academy Awards was like.Books mentioned in this episode include:Mouthful of Birds: Stories by Samanta SchweblinBurial Rites by Hannah KentFilms and TV shows mentioned in this episode include:"A Sparrow's Song" directed by Tobias EckerlinZodiac directed by David FincherThe Lord of the Rings directed by Peter JacksonStalker directed by Andrei TarkovskyRatatouille directed by Brad BirdSoul directed by Pete DocterAladdin directed by John Musker and Ron ClementsFollow Tobias on Instagram @tobiaseckerlin.visuals.Support the show

:Drum Roll: Because Matt played the drums, too...You're listening to the voice of a generation! For over 35 years, my next guest, Matt Davis, has been a force to be reckoned with. From the airwaves of 98 Rock, The Bay and DC101 to the intriguing world of hypnosis and the stage, he's done all the things. All of them! He's a certified Baltimore legend, and it was an absolute thrill to sit down and talk shop with an industry icon. Get ready, because here he is...the one and only Matt Davis!Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

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This time we discussed A Mouthful of Dust, book 6 of The Singing Hills Cycle, written by Nghi Vo and narrated by Cindy Kay. We also discussed some of our favorite recent short fiction listens in our short fiction spotlight.   A Mouthful of Dust [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby] The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby] The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby] Short Fiction Spotlight: "Wire Mother" written by Isabel J. Kim, narrated by Kate Baker [Clarkesworld] - Issue 229: October 2025 / Short Story "Holding Patterns" written by Jennifer Hudak, narrated by Kat Kourbeti [Escape Pod 989] / Short Story "The Porniest Porn in Porntown" written by Stephen Graham Jones, narrated by Stefen Rudnicki [Lightspeed] - October 2025 (Issue 185) / Short Story "Five Impossible Things" written by Koji A. Dae, narrated by Kate Baker [Clarkesworld] - Issue 228: September 2025 / Short Story "The Garden" written by Emma Törzs, narrated by Erika Ensign [Uncanny Magazine] - Issue Sixty-Five "The Girl Who Came Before" written by David von Allmen, narrated by Pine Gonzalez [Escape Pod 1004] / Short Story  

Today on the show I'm sitting down with two veterans of the Mid-Atlantic, original music scene, Love Nut. Love Nut is a pop punk rock group, based out of Baltimucho!, whose first album, ‘Bastards of Melody' hit hard in 1996.  The band is back, nearly 30 years after its release, for a reunion event at the Recher in Towson, Maryland. I couldn't be happier to have them on the show. Join me in welcoming David Vestpoint and Max Mueller of Love Nut onto the Mouthful of Graffiti podcast. Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

The Mouthful of Graffiti *LIVE* at Reb Records returned on Oct 1 for a punk n' roll episode with Kristin Leschke, Joe Teague & Bryan Dunaway! Settle in for the interviews, performances and stories behind the songs!Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

This episode of Let Us Be Idiots can be summarized as follows: it begins with three different segments featuring Matteo Pascale and John LoCicero, also known as Big Chief. The firsttwo segments are all about roasting and busting President Donald Trump's balls on some of the strangest recent debacles. The third segment orbits around the New York City Mayoral Republican Candidate, Curtis Sliwa. After presenting thecollected segments with John LoCicero, also known as Big Chief, Matteo Pascale provides the full context and additional information for an audio clip taken from a video of a homeless man who loudly and aggressively confronted Mike Kramer and Matteo Pascale. The episode then closes out with a “filthy” dialogue between Mike Recine and the host of Let Us Be Idiots, Matteo Pascale. ***Outro Rap lyrics were written and performed by @jdange23 and the beat was produced by Matteo Pascale.***All other content can be found on the website:https://www.crooklyncomedy.com/⁠Crooklyn Comedy and Let Us Be Idiots Patreon:⁠https://www.patreon.com/user?u=66644629Social media links:Main Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/MatteoPascale⁠Crooklyn Comedy Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/CrooklynComedy⁠Main Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/comedianmatteopascale/⁠Crooklyn Comedy Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/crooklyncomedy/⁠Let Us Be Idiots Podcast Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/letusbeidiots/Matteo Pascale's Website:⁠https://www.crooklyncomedy.com/

Send us a textHannah and Laura are thrilled to have the author of The Singing Hills Cycle, Nghi Vo, on today's episode to discuss the newest addition to the series, A Mouthful of Dust!! Nghi talks about the power of storytelling, inspirations for her series, and the ways that food connects people. **CW for the episode: discussions of violence, famine, death, cannibalism ***This episode contains SPOILERS for A Mouthful of Dust and The Singing Hills Cycle. *Be sure to pick up A Mouthful of Dust at your local indie bookstore or request it at your local library today!! You can find Nghi Vo online at:Website: Home - Nghi VoInstagram: Nghi Vo (@nghivowriting) • Instagram photos and videosBluesky: @nghivo.bsky.social — BlueskyMedia Mentions: A Mouthful of Dust by Nghi VoA Long and Speaking Silence by Nghi VoThe Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi VoThe Scarlet Ball by Nghi VoThe Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi VoThe City in Glass by Nghi VoDon't Sleep with the Dead by Nghi VoSeanan McGuire's Wayward Children seriesThe Forever Desert series by Moses Ose UtomiSupport the showBe sure to follow OWWR Pod!www.owwrpod.com Twitter (updates only): @OwwrPodBlueSky: @OwwrPodTikTok: @OwwrPodInstagram: @owwrpodThreads: @OwwrPodHive: @owwrpodSend us an email at: owwrpod@gmail.comCheck out OWWR Patreon: patreon.com/owwrpodOr join OWWR Discord! We'd love to chat with you!You can follow Hannah at:Instagram: @brews.and.booksThreads: @brews.and.booksTikTok: @brews.and.booksYou can follow Laura at:Instagram: @goodbooksgreatgoatsBlueSky: @myyypod

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#devil #magic #azoresIn the first story, a man befriends the devil in order to get the woman of his dreams. In the second story, a pious man is rewarded for his prayers.In the third story, a woman gets bad advice from tradition.And in the final story, death gives a man a warning, but he fails to see it.Source: The Islands of Magic: Legends, Folk and Fairy Tales from the Azores by EellsNarrator: Dustin SteichmannSounds: Birds by Dustin SteichmannMusic:

Dustin Wade, Deyavah & Jon Maurer dropped by Reb Records in Bel Air, Maryland to give us a hell a Mouthful of Graffiti Podcast *LIVE* event on August 20th, 2025.Tune in for the interviews, performances and stories behind the songs! Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

The guys played the Kirby and the Forgotten Land DLC and Tony Hawk, tried the demos for  Lumines Arise and Lost Soul Aside, Kevin tried KFC's pickle menu and tons more topics on this week's Big Deal! Fine Time on Bluesky: @fineti.me Andre: @pizzadinosaur.fineti.me Steve: @monotonegent.fineti.me Kevin: @kevinflevin89.fineti.me Silent Discographer: @silentdiscographer.com [00:00] Intro - The Silent Discographer [06:55] Andre and Steve played the Star-Crossed Worlds DLC for Kirby and the Forgotten Land [26:37] Kevin played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 [44:10] Shower Hours [46:11] Demo Roundup: Lumines Arise and Lost Soul Aside [58:19] PS6 Handheld?! What?? [01:11:19] Andre's Zelda Prediction [01:18:45] KFC Canada's Pickle Menu [01:28:13] Kevin Defends The Messenger [01:35:21] See Ya!

Isabel Bray, who plays Deloris Van Cartier in Phoenix Festival Theatre's production of Sister Act, and her sister, Mia Bray, who is the musical director for the show, stopped by to talk about the upcoming performances at Harford Community College. The show runs from September 19-21.Get your tickets at HarfordEvents.com!Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

The post Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son appeared first on A Mouthful of Air.

David Ninos is a singer-songwriter, producer and performer from the Mid-Atlantic that hosts the Songwriter Series at Falling Branch. When he's not at The Dragon's Den, recording the tracks of tomorrow, he's enriching the community with the warm sounds of his Skyline acoustic duo, Last Ditch Effort, often covering the Grateful Dead or just himself. He's a dedicated musician with a hunger for music and we're happy to have him here today.  Join me in welcoming David Ninos to the Mouthful of Graffiti podcast! Sponsored by the Harford County Cultural Arts Board.

In this episode Adam speaks with translator Frank Wynne and Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin about the first-ever English edition of Mafalda, the beloved Argentine comic strip by Quino (Archipelago Books). Together, they explore how this precocious, principled six-year-old girl—who challenged everything from soup to capitalism—shaped generations of readers in Argentina and beyond. Frank discusses the joys and puzzles of translating Mafalda's quick wit and political edge, while Samanta recalls how the strip introduced her to feminism, philosophy, and satire as a child. The conversation touches on cartooning as subversion, and why Mafalda's questions still matter today. Whether you're meeting Mafalda for the first time or grew up with her, this episode is a moving celebration of one of the 20th century's most enduring comic heroines.Buy Mafalda: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/mafalda-3*Samanta Schweblin won the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature for her story collection, Seven Empty Houses. Her debut novel, Fever Dream, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, and her novel Little Eyes and story collection Mouthful of Birds have been longlisted for the same prize. Her books have been translated into more than forty languages, and her stories have appeared in English in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, Harper's Magazine and elsewhere. Originally from Buenos Aires, Schweblin lives in Berlin. Good and Evil and Other Stories is her third collection.Frank Wynne is a writer and award-winning literary translator. Born in Ireland he has lived and worked in Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Buenos Aires and currently lives in San José, Costa Rica. He has translated more than a dozen major novels, among them the works of Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Pierre Mérot and the Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma. A journalist and broadcaster, he has written for the Sunday Times, the Independent, the Irish Times, Melody Maker, and Time Out.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.Listen to Alex Freiman's latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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