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The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

The Two-Way Poetry Podcast

Di: Chris Jones
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 In each episode Chris Jones invites a poet to introduce a poem by an author who has influenced his, her or their own approach to writing. The poet discusses the importance of this work, and goes on to talk in depth about a poem they have written in response to this original piece.Copyright 2023 All rights reserved. Arte Storia e critica della letteratura
Episodi
  • Brian Lewis on his memoir 'Last Collection' alongside Chris Jones on his book of poems Little Piece of Harm

    Brian Lewis on his memoir 'Last Collection' alongside Chris Jones on his book of poems Little Piece of Harm
    Jan 9 2026
    Here, in the first of two episodes, I take a slightly different approach and talk to Brian Lewis about his essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’ alongside my own book of poetry Little Piece of Harm. On Friday 26th March 2021 Brian set off on a ‘round’ of Sheffield to deliver copies of my recently published poetry book Little Piece of Harm (Longbarrow Press). He went on to write about this journey, a meditation on city, place, home and art itself in his extended essay/memoir ‘Last Collection’. In our conversation we explore connections between the two pieces of writing - both of which focus on traversing the city of Sheffield in ‘stressed’ times. Firstly, I talk to Brian about his duel role of being both a publisher and a writer, and about how one discipline feeds into the other. Brian reflects on walking as a way of making sense of the city. We examine how each walk taken engenders renewed iterations of Sheffield - we are constantly remaking the city through the act of observing the place. Also, Sheffield is reinventing itself - conceptually and physically, through demolishing older structures and planning new builds, new developments. We touch on Brian’s series of ‘Lockdown Walks’ before concentrating on ‘Last Collection’ for the rest of the podcast. Brian ruminates on the idea of slowness as a philosophical approach. We talk at some length about Lockdown as one response to the COVID epidemic, which leads me to talk about my time in Aldeburgh in the summer of 2020 when I was finishing Little Piece of Harm. Brian goes on to detail how he made notes while following his delivery route on the 26th March - and then how he ‘recalled’ and built up the particulars that are layered through ‘Last Collection’. I relate how I built up Little Piece of Harm as a ‘portrait’ of a city. I begin to pick out and focus on a number of the abiding themes in the sequence. Then Brian examines the notion of 'form', mixing (or not mixing) prose and poetry in 'Last Collection'. We reflect on 'the rhythms and refrains' in our writing that captures the essence of walking - and at the end of the first 'chapter' of this podcast, Brian introduces and reads from a section of 'Last Collection' itself. You can find a full account of Brian’s 'Lockdown Walks' here. You can find extracts from ‘Last Collection’ on the Longbarrow website here: ‘One-Way Mirror’ and ‘Last Collection’ . This is the section from ‘Last Collection’ that Brian reads on the podcast itself: From ‘Last Collection’ (in Local Distribution) The shutters are down on Highfield Post Office. It's a straight left to Andy's house from here, Woodhead Road to Cherry Street, the hard drives stacked in the flooded cellar. Andy was a poet of the city and then its photographer. The switch seemed to happen overnight. It was unexpected but it made sense. The images were striking and inventive and they accumulated quickly, they were fresh with possibility, they captured the city in its moments of transition and looked beyond those moments. There were landscapes without land and portraits without faces. Colour studies and achromatic grids. Found abstractions and literal objects. There was craft in the titling of the photosets, a lightness of touch, Rising River, Island Songs, Test Patterns. I looked forward to each new series. Then it all just went. He abandoned one account and then another. Dead links. The internet hadn't saved any of it. This was intentional. There was no sense in arguing with him. It was no longer what he meant or felt. The work he has made since then is still in the world, or some of it is, you could say that it equals or exceeds the earlier work, it is hard to know, the earlier work has gone, and the city of which it was part has gone, why make comparisons, this is the difference between us, the letting go. I remember descending a stone flight to the cellar at Cherry Street and taking the first few steps in an inch or two of water, the electricity had gone off, again, rolling debts and standing charges burning through the top-ups, the credit and the emergency credit. The batteries in my torch were dead, the terminals corroded. I lit my way with a lighter that I had found in the kitchen, four or five seconds before the flame brushed the tip of my thumb, then four or five seconds of darkness. After a few attempts I managed to turn the top-up card the right side up and the right way round and feed it into the slot of the meter. The cellar light came on, a flickering strip, it showed cobwebs, cracked walls, and a freestanding metal rack with two or three desktop computers veiled in dust. I wondered how much work had died in those machines and then I remembered that it was none of my business, that I was not his archivist. I was still his editor, a handful of last poems yet to be published, his night walks, his laments. The poems come back to me now, as I pass the closed doors of the Highfield ...
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    1 ora e 10 min
  • Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana on Kimiko Hahn's poem 'Compass' and her own poem "Madam Gout'

    Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana on Kimiko Hahn's poem 'Compass' and her own poem "Madam Gout'
    Dec 18 2025

    In this episode, I talk to Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana about Kimiko Hahn’s poem ‘Compass’ and her own poem ‘Madam Gout’.

    We discuss all things zuihitsu - reflecting on Kimiko Hahn’s own approach to the form and Alexandra’s inspired interpretation of this complex Japanese ‘standard’. As well as asking Alexandra about the essential qualities of the zuihitsu we talk about fragmentation, layering information, the public and the private detail. Alexandra also reflects on her own time in Japan, and from this, cogitates on Japanese influences in her own work. In zuihitsu how do we say something without actually stating it? We go on to discuss how the words, phrases, lines are laid out on the page in relation to the 'cartography of the poem.'

    In the podcast, Alexandra mentions a number of times The Pillow-Book by Sei Shõnagon, a version of which can be downloaded for free on Project Gutenberg here.

    Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and author of Sing me down from the dark (Salt, 2022). She has Masters’ degrees in Writing Poetry and in Japanese Language and Culture and she lectured on the Japanese zuihitsu form at the 2024 Japan Writers Conference. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as The North, P.N. Review, Magma, Poetry Wales, The Pomegranate London, Anthropocene and The Madrid Review. This year, she was twice shortlisted for Verve’s Poem of the Month prize and commended in The Buzzword and Artemesia competitions. She is a freelance creative writing tutor, mentor and reviewer who has taught for The Poetry Business, The Poetry School and The Writing School. Alexandra’s second collection, Skinship, is due out with Salt in September 2026.

    You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

    The end music was composed and played by William Jones.
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    1 ora e 30 min
  • Cliff Forshaw on Arthur Rimbaud, both in translation and as an influence on his own book-length sequence RE:VERB

    Cliff Forshaw on Arthur Rimbaud, both in translation and as an influence on his own book-length sequence RE:VERB
    Nov 17 2025

    In this episode, I discuss Arthur Rimbaud with Cliff Forshaw. We focus on Rimbaud's poem 'Vowels', translated by Cliff in his collection French Leave: Versions and Perversions, and Cliff's sequence RE:VERB which retells the life of Rimbaud in verse. Cliff also reflects on his latest book, Elemental, and reads the opening piece 'Remains' in full.

    Cliff relates how he first came to Rimbaud as a school boy. He talks about the long journey he took to come to write a book of translations of (mainly) 19th century French poets. He goes on to discuss, at length, his long narrative poem RE:VERB which illuminates the life of Arthur Rimbaud, from decadent poet to merchant and gun runner in Africa. He reads from, and talks about, the opening poems in the collection ('Hooligan in Hell' and 'Alchemy of the Word'). Why is Rimbaud so interesting as a writer and as an individual? We go on to explore Cliff's interest in art and how that feeds back into his identity as a writer.

    Finally, we discuss the work in his latest book, Elemental, landing on the opening poem - 'Remains' to read and reflect on. I ask him what he is planning to write/publish next.

    From 'Alchemy of the Word' But also...

    A Hermes Trismegistus, unseen unheard, I conjured the Alchemy of the Word; deciphered fragments of the vowels' spectrum, my mind a wand, a bow, a plectrum. I struck the rainbow's neurasthenic strings, plumbed all tenebrous, timbrous things. Then, when sounding out riddles as Gnostic songs, it came to me: I was going wrong.

    Sortilege and Thaumaturgy, Tantra, Sutra, Old Grimoires Hermeneutics, Oneiromancy, Transits of Venus, Mercury, Mars, Almanacs, O Dark Abraxas, Cabbalistic Hierophants, Orphic Devotees, Eleusis, Mumbo-jumbo, Obeah, Cant, Epiphanic Hocus-Pocus, Hoodoo-Voodoo, Occult Muse, Diabolic Psychomancy, Esoteric Marabouts. From such fiendish tomes I busked the Blues, left a hobo chorus of cryptic clues. But my rational derangement of all the senses (shamanically ancient, prophetically new) left me wondering: Who was the densest, Poet or Reader? I got no reviews.

    From 'Remains'

    I

    In Transylvania when I got that call - had been that day to Sighisoara, drawn to that famous undead batman's place of birth. Think: the Saxon cemetery high up the hill. Carved gothically upon one stone, I'd seen Ruhen in fremder Erde! Written it down. Lie still in foreign soil - but you never can: (stone blunts, moss overwrites your name) the earth remains so cold and strange. As do you. Whoever you were, laid low in the lie of the land, you are now (whatever now might mean) your own remains - just let the world, its weather, drain right through your tongue, your ribs, whatever stubbornly persists of you.

    Cliff Forshaw has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, twice a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and held residences in California, France, Kyrgizstan, Romania, and Tasmania. Collections include: Elemental (Templar, 2025); French Leave (Broken Sleep, 2023); RE:VERB ((Broken Sleep, 2022) and Pilgrim Tongues (Wrecking Ball, 2015) https://www.cliff-forshaw.co.uk

    You can follow me on Bluesky - @cwjoneschris.bsky.social for more updates on future episodes. You can find out more about my own writing through my website - chris-jones.org.uk - or on my Substack Swift Diaries.

    The end music was composed and played by William Jones.
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    1 ora e 18 min
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