In this longer-than-usual podcast from 2013, Jennifer Williams talks to Kay Ryan, American poet, educator and 16th United States Poet Laureate. Kay was a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, among many other awards and accolades.

She was in Edinburgh to read at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as part of a tour including Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Aldeburgh and Dromineer Literature Festival. Before Jennifer and Kay headed out to conquer Arthur’s Seat and to sample Kay’s very first can of Irn-Bru, they read and discussed a number of poems from Kay’s Odd Blocks-Selected and New Poems (Carcanet). They also talked about such varied topics as Buddhism, cycling across America, ‘cool’ poetry, the ticklish delights of rhyme and much more.

Jennifer Williams talks with Griffin Award Winning Canadian poet Ken Babstock about ‘the thingyness of things’, Paul Muldoon, the weather, Canadian garrison mentality’s effect on the work of Canadian writers and much more, including his own extraordinary poems. This interview is from StAnza 2013, and takes place in a tiny attic room at the top of the Town Hall, in the midst of all sorts of weather.

Ken Babstock’s 2011 collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi) won The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for The Trillium Book Award. He lives in Toronto.

Image: Ken Babstock, Toronto by Steve McLaughlin, under a Creative Content licence

In this 2014 podcast Jennifer Williams talks to two Hawthornden Fellows: Lynn Davidson and Alyson Hallett about where they come from, loneliness versus aloneness, and their current and upcoming work.

Lynn Davidson’s fiction and poetry has appeared in journals and her short fiction has been broadcast on national radio. Davidson has received several grants and fellowships to develop her work, including the 2003 Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary from Creative New Zealand. She has published collections of poetry, and her novel Ghost Net was released in 2003. Davidson also works as an educator and tutors short fiction and poetry both online and in the classroom.

Alyson Hallett‘s work spans different continents and art forms. She has a poem carved into Milsom Street pavement in Bath, words etched into glass in a library in Bristol, and she runs the international poetry and public art project The Migration Habits of Stones. She currently works as a Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund. Prior to this, she was a Leverhulme-funded poet-in-residence in the University of Exeter’s Geography Department. In 2010, she completed a practice-based PhD in Poetry and Geographical Intimacy. She lives in Falmouth, Cornwall. Suddenly Everything is her second full volume of poetry.

The Lynne Davidson photo is by Murray Wilson. The Alyson Hallett photo is by Paul Wilkinson.

“I feel poets have saved my life. The poets are our companions. They have found words for states all of us have experienced.” So said Marie Howe on a 2012 visit to Scotland, where she was appearing as a guest of the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Howe’s first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe’s ‘poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots’. Jennifer Williams interviews Howe about the craft of writing poetry, focussing on her poems ‘The Star Market’ and ‘The Snow Storm’.

Image: Untitled by T.Carrigan, under a Creative Commons licence

In this podcast Jennifer Williams talks to Robert Wrigley about his collection and first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe). They also touch on narrative in poetry, the infinite capacity of poetry to talk about love and, wild horses on the southern plains of Idaho. Robert was at the SPL in November 2013 for a reading with John Burnside.

The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems draws on several collections published in the US, including Beautiful Country (2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets.

In this Nothing But The Poem podcast, our usual host Samuel Tongue, with the SPL Friends Group, take a look at two poems from Mick Imlah.

In a Guardian obituary, Alan Hollinghurst wrote that, when he died, Mick Imlah was mourned as one of the outstanding British poets of his time. He was also a particularly Scottish poet of distinction and his final collection The Lost Leader, according to Robert Crawford, came "as a revelation, showing just how much he had accomplished. Running the gamut of Scottish literature and history, the poems confidently yet often elegiacally re-imagine material from Columban Iona to modern times." (Scotsman obituary, 21 January 2009).

The two poems read, enjoyed and analysed are Iona and London Scottish. Both can be found on the SPL website.

We met up with Sean Borodale at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2012, where he was reading from his debut collection Bee Journal, which was subsequently shortlisted for the 2012 T S Eliot prize and Costa Book Awards.

Here Sean reads poems from Bee Journal, a remarkable account of the two years he kept a bee hive. He likens the way in which he jotted his poems down to documentary film-making rather than to traditional methods of poetry composition. Borodale also talks with Jennifer Williams about his interest in time, bees, Virgil and much more.

Image (copyright) Mark Vessey.

In this podcast, Jennifer Williams talks to Polish poet, essayist, editor and critic Tadeusz Dąbrowski. They are joined by Kasia Kokowska of Interaktywny Salon Piszących w Szkocji, who came along to help with translating.

Taseusz has been the winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). In 2013, he was the author of six volumes of poetry, and edited the anthology Poza słowa.

Tadeusz has been widely published and translated into 20 languages, and a collection of his poetry in English, Black Square, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, was published by Zephyr Press in 2011. He lives in Gdańsk and says in this interview, ‘All art is something like self-recognition.’

Photo by Harvard Review.