Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Ep. 33. Oluwaseun Olayiwola, 'Strange Beach'
83 Plays10 days ago
In today's episode I walk to Oluwaseun Olayiwola about his poem 'Strange Beach' (the first one) from the book of the same name.
Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Telegraph, the TLS and elsewhere. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. He’s been commissioned by RSL, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Southwark Council, and Studio 3 Arts. Seun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. His debut collection was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US). Since publication, Strange Beach has won an Eric Gregory Award and was Poetry Book Society Winter 2025 Special Commendation. Seun is an inaugural member of the Rose Choreographic School at Sadlers Wells East. He is a lecturer in dance in the Kingston School of Art and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Episode notes:
- Jorie Graham, 'Le Manteau De Pascal'
- Negative Capability (Keats)
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill
- Christina Sharpe, In the Wake
- Victoria Adukwei Bulley, 'The Ultra-Black Fish'
- Louise Glück
- Robin Coste Lewis, Voyage of the Sable Venus
- Maggie Nelson, Bluets
- Adam Phillips, The Life You Want
Book recs:
- Claudia Rankine, Triage
- Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
- Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
- Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies
Follow the show on Instagramand subscribe to the Substack for transcripts and more links. Please leave feedback here. Follow Seun on Instagram.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Books Up Close'
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close. My name is Chris Lloyd. This is the close reading show for readers, writers and anyone interested in how texts get made. In today's episode, I talked to Oluwashon Olaiwula about his poem Strange Beach, the first one in the book, from the 2025 book of the same name.
Meet Oluwashon Olaiwula
00:00:23
Speaker
Shone is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in the Poetry Review, PN Review, The Telegraph, the TLS and elsewhere. His debut collection was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Soft Skull Press in the US. s Since publication Strange Beach has won an Eric Gregory Award and was a Poetry Book Society Winter 2025 special commendation. Sean, welcome to the show.
00:00:50
Speaker
Thank you. Thanks for having me. That last one is such a mouthful. I think it's the first I've heard it read. It is. it is so many. Yeah, it's a mouthful, that one. Yeah, those words, they don't sound grammatically like they should go together. But anyway, they do. I mean, you can just stack words up together, like generally, I think is a rule I'm figuring out. You can just put like nouns, all nouns are also like adjectives. So you can just put everything you want in front of the final noun. And it is can grammatically like work.
00:01:19
Speaker
It can, whether it should. But should it? Yeah, exactly. Welcome, it's so good to have you. Obviously, you know, I'm deeply interested in this book and your work. So I'm really excited to talk to you.
00:01:31
Speaker
And I had your Fitzgraldo cousin, Sasha, on here recently too. So like these episodes, I feel like can speak to each other in interesting ways. This is just me saying Fitzgraldo, please just get me involved somehow. I don't know. If I get your authors on, will you like give me something like a book contract? don't know. Yeah, it's lovely to
Exploring 'Strange Beach'
00:01:47
Speaker
have you. so today we're talking about the opening poem from your collection, Strange Beach. We'll come back to that in a minute. There's a couple of Strange Beach poems. And what we do with that is interesting.
00:01:57
Speaker
But before we go there, how do you feel about close reading as an activity, a practice? I mean, interesting you talk about Fitzcarraldo because I feel like when we're thinking about close reading, I feel like there some of the... Like when you when you think about particularly maybe their nonfiction work or even sometimes their fiction work because, you know, the the lines between...
00:02:21
Speaker
often and purposefully blur. It feels like one of the presses I think where close reading is really not just critical practice, but a creative practice that is a part of representing lived experience or is part of the text itself and and is meant to be just as vivifying and electric as, you know, kind of action depending action, scenic action or
The Art of Close Reading
00:02:51
Speaker
lyric action. So that's where I'd start with that. And my personal feeling around close reading is, I mean, coming from being a critic or be, you know, coming from being a critic, it's one of my favorite, it's vital. That's what it is. It feels vital to me, particularly
00:03:09
Speaker
Because of, because I don't know. i mean, like, of course, i love when you can read ah a work and you read it once. It's like the first time encountering a work. And then it just feels as if it doesn't merit to rereading because it feels as if the writer has communicated something to you that you perhaps always sensed or felt in your body, but had never put into that sequence of,
00:03:32
Speaker
ah symbols to make sense and kind of click it into something that maybe for you felt true. But I do think, I don't know, I find with close reading, it's it's when you take that that line or two or that sentence or that paragraph and really dig deep, it actually becomes, the work is central, but it becomes the work the work of imagination that happens around that line also feels, I don't know, related related to that experience that you had when you first when you first read it. It's such that you begin, it's not it's not that the quote becomes this static thing, but it's this thing that actually begins to structure your imagination, your life.
00:04:11
Speaker
Like right now I'm doing quite a close reading of Zora Neale Hurston, some of Zora Neale Hurston's short stories. And it's just these, you know, i'm not I've never really been a short story person, but being able to go back to her work and try to, I mean, this is the hard thing about criticism because sometimes you have a thesis you're trying to point and you look for work that confirms that.
00:04:37
Speaker
And then sometimes you have no thesis, you're just looking at work and something emerges and I find her work to be so rich. And it's that close reading that again, just it it allows you to keep living lives with with short, either whole stories or little paragraphs.
00:04:51
Speaker
And I think sometimes that depth can be not confusing, but that depth can be challenging for other people to encounter. if you believe, you know, language is maybe zero sum or there's just one layer. um And i I think sometimes it can be thought that other interpretational faculties on a piece of work that maybe it can often feel like close reading is to recreate the intention of the writer, which is important. And if you can define that, often we can't know and even writers don't know their own intentions of certain things.
00:05:24
Speaker
And so close reading, what's really exciting about it is it goes into
Impact of Close Reading
00:05:28
Speaker
impact. It really lives in the impact. And the impact is quite a generative is quite a generative space. And if you can stay with the impact that, you know, lines as brief as, I don't know, desire goes traveling into the total dark of another's heart looking for where it breaks off.
00:05:48
Speaker
And it's like, that's just one long line, but you can read, you know, I started, that's a, that's a line from Jory Graham's Lamento de Pascal from The Errancy. And I started going into all these kind of, you know, thoughts about desire and darkness, right? Into the total dark. And then I was thinking about her marriages and divorce. And then I was applying that to my life and in in breaking up, but I was also looking at a a line that was next it, next to it about, you know the title provides protection from significance which is somewhere else and it's just like close reading allows the web of literature to reveal itself to you and i find that is such a generative place to be in and if your writing is able to harness that power i don't think it makes writing easy but i definitely think it takes the pressure off you know i think what the novelists have which are just like this amazing kind of they can just pull stuff out of the air like close reading i think is the opposite thing you're generating that perhaps novelistic motion motion of the mind by starting with someone else's text that's fascinating and and i kind of picked the first strange beach poem from the book because it does do some of that stuff to me and i there was maybe some hesitation on my part actually that i was like wait i'm seeing a reference to this person or this idea or this thing in here and i'm always like is that me or is it the text
Understanding Poetry's Evocativeness
00:07:08
Speaker
Right. I always like worry about how much is it just like my little lens that I'm looking on it or what I've read recently or who else I'm like looking at. But I like that way you've just said that, the you know, the text comes alive in that way. Right. If you stay close to it and you stay close to the words, that aliveness is generative of all kinds of conversations that aren't right or wrong.
00:07:26
Speaker
Right. They are. They are what they are. So I'm excited to talk about this poem in particular because I have many thoughts. I also am going to say to listeners and maybe my students listening too, like, poems aren't here to be got, right? Like, it's not like I get this poem or don't get this poem. There parts of it that I'm like, huh, that, like, evokes something to me, but I'm not sure what it means, quote unquote, whatever.
00:07:48
Speaker
But even that sentence, like what does a poem mean? I think it's a redundant question. But it's just worth saying that like I picked this poem even while I don't feel like I've got a full handle on it. And I quite like that. I feel like that's not a bad thing.
00:08:00
Speaker
But I feel like we're in a world of you have to like know, you know, 326 is a bad place. And it's about like knowing and certainty and definitiveness. And I'm like, ah or it's not.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, that I feel it's a lot. I'm writing a lot about this, but this is particularly just at the the center and the core of experiences, the clamoring obsession, clamoring, fiery obsession. Now I'm just doing the thing i was talking about. We're just putting words in front of it. meing Fiery, insistent, reckless obsession to believe that everything can be knowable and the fundamental ontological stasis.
00:08:40
Speaker
of having to, of uncertainty, of the of of of the fact that we connect second to second to second, and we cannot know. And there is this thing in front of us.
00:08:51
Speaker
Well, we don't even know if it's in front of us because it's being shaped by every moment that we are. For every moment we're thinking about that thing, it's actually the moment. The moment of thinking creates the thing we're thinking about. So you just get like, we this is the moment now. The future is occurring, and and then we move into it, and it's no longer the future, and it becomes the past. like this this movement, this kind of tangled web of time is is is is always is always occurring. and And this happens in, I mean, I try to affect this entanglement in
Embracing Uncertainty in Poetry
00:09:22
Speaker
my poems. And and to your point about ah poems needing to mean something,
00:09:27
Speaker
I mean, it must be one of the reasons poetry is is not so always easily received. But I usually get past, you know, being a critic. And this is something I also feel, even being a critic, I want to know what things mean. and And even for someone who has, I think, I have quite an arch propensity. Like, I can kind of hover and kind of stay in the clouds and in the woo-woo and in the abstracts for...
00:09:53
Speaker
a little bit longer than I think the average person and still I'm confronted by people's poems and I want to shut down. and But it really is a practice. I think the practice, um I mean, a lot of the poets I'm really interested in really do investigate and work with this idea of negative capability, which is Keats's I mean, I say dictum, but it's not really a dictum. He talked about it in referencing Shakespeare's work in just a letter to, ah was it his brother or was it to someone else? Which is just the idea that we can hold uncertainty.
00:10:27
Speaker
we can hold uncertainty. We can hold mystery. We can hold doubt um without irritable reaching after fact or reason. It's a difficult place to be in. Yeah. It is a difficult place to be in. That is that is the ending to that. yeah Shall we hear read the poem? And then we can talk about maybe some of this in specific form.
00:10:50
Speaker
e So this is the strange beach of first strange beach of which there are three, which um it just always brings me back to the first time I had, ah for a little bit, I was mentored by Kayo Chingonyi, poet and editor and multidisciplinary artist, actually, in different ways.
00:11:09
Speaker
And one of the first things he told me was like, are you sure you don't want to put like Strange Beach 1, Strange Beach 2, Strange Beach 3? Because people will find it difficult to index this because of course, just the same title.
00:11:20
Speaker
Which, I mean, I'm really into that idea of naming poems the same or naming poems poem. I really like things like that. So yeah, this is Strange Beach, the first one. Strange Beach.
00:11:33
Speaker
Unable to get from the underneath side of the stones that flank the sand. the body, blown from every direction into like a conch shell, where the echo of emotion extremis floods the chamber, where once was a body willing to die inside of, longing.
00:11:58
Speaker
This is the obsession, this transatlantic voyage spread on the page like an oil spill, the blue and black arsenal of water hushing inevitably.
00:12:10
Speaker
Was it worth it? Worth. It circles around you, the increasing gap between the surface of the water and the stillness you entirely inhabit so as to sink to the ocean floor.
00:12:27
Speaker
but properly with no effect on velocity, stingrays, desire, inseparability of light and dark.
00:12:41
Speaker
How beautiful you have been and are giving your whole life to a pointless competition. Gorgeous. Thank you for reading Strange Beach number one. Strange Beach the first.
00:12:59
Speaker
No, but you're right. There's something about titles. And, you know, I talk about this a lot with students. of Like they want to jump straight in. I'm like, let's sit with the title. but If you sit with this title, you're like, OK, it's the title of the book.
00:13:11
Speaker
the title of the first poem, there's three of them with the same title, suddenly you're like, ohh this must mean this is an important poem, right? This is a poem that's telling us the direction of the book or the direction of the work. And I'm like, oh is it?
00:13:24
Speaker
or Or is that like a, you know, a sleight of hand if you like a kind of, a little not a trick on your part, but a kind of like, yeah, look over there is what I think of, right? Drag race reference people as like a, as a redirection. Mm-hmm.
00:13:38
Speaker
And then when you start the poem, the first line begins kind of like in the middle of things, right? You've got this M dash, unable to get from the underneath side of, them we can talk about that. But so it's even like the poem is is not beginning, right? it's It's already in flux, in flow. And I've thought a lot about that, not only because, you know, we now live in a time where M dashes apparently of the sign of ah generative AI, right? But um the the kind of M dash is like leading us into the poem that has already begun without us.
00:14:08
Speaker
he Suddenly kind of pushes up against the idea that like, this is the title poem, right? This is the poem that gives us answers. So I really think there's something interesting there that already the book is kind of resisting some definitiveness, if that makes sense.
00:14:22
Speaker
Yeah, I i mean, It basically think in my choreographic practice, which I tend to do in a lot of my dance works or choreographic works. I tend to start performances before the audience comes in so that the audience feels like they're walking into an experience or an encounter.
00:14:40
Speaker
not that the the effect is that it creates the sense of not needing them, but that there is a world that is existing before they enter. And perhaps the sensation, the images, the action, the arc could continue and begin without them. And so there's this sense that what it does, it create it creates a sense of, I think, a little bit of pressure and a little bit of encounter.
00:15:01
Speaker
For me, that just feels more true, I suppose, to the experience of reading or to the experience of, emotions or to the experience of people. Often the book deals a lot of like different lovers and coming in and out. And that is kind of something I write towards. And so there's a sense of coming in and slipping out that I think is really important that I think you're picking up on in that, in that first M dash. And then exactly right. The, the enable, right.
00:15:31
Speaker
right unable to so write is is an is a kind of cancellation of that first speech there's a paradox right because unable which i think a lot about like that first word i mean of course i think about like the longevity of my writing practice and i just i wonder i was like you know you want to you know i think about it as like what was that first thing you of course you have other things you publish but like if people are looking at like your books over time like that first line that first thing that broke the silence as it were of you know and then you were you know arrived or whatever. And this idea that unable starts with an M dash and starts with unable to get from the underneath side of the stones and then refuses actually to have a kind of strong verb that's not attached to that fragment for for at least a long a long part of the poem.
00:16:20
Speaker
It's an interesting choice. Yeah, I'm really into this idea of cancellation and the ways in which cancellation also, you know, the the paradox of describing, it's almost kind of like apophatic practices of describing, you know, the way to describe God, you know, in the cataphatic religion, would like look at the things that do represent him. Whereas like ah perhaps things like the cross or, or I don't know, prayer, these are things that let us know he's there. Whereas like apophatic would be really looking at things that we know are not him, but that as a way of, as a way of um proving his presence still on. And I'm really into that idea because what it does is highlight this kind of dialectic and this connection. between, i don't know, kind of almost kind of everything. And so I'm really into this idea of when things begin in negative or cancellations, yeah how they still are able to approach or speak of um the action that they are not taking or the image they are not describing or the things that are not happening. It makes me think of Toni Morrison who begins, I forget which text it is. She she begins with describing what is not there
00:17:34
Speaker
There's a there's a one of her opening paragraphs. It just tells, it begins with like this k not or this nor, and it and and she's accumulating force by continuing to say what is not happening. But of course, what happens is the reader imagines these things not happening. So you're asking them to imagine what is happening while also describing what isn't happening. And so the thing that isn't happening is actually happening,
Structure and Meaning in Poetry
00:17:58
Speaker
right? And it creates this one just beautiful sense of dest destabilization that just really feels like a place that's really easy for me to easy for me as ah as a writer to sit in. Now, I know that can be difficult for some people to kind of, they want to know the kind of positive force of the work, what is happening, who's doing what. And i don't know, it' it does come down, I guess, then at that point to taste.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, to taste and also like the desire of what you think the book is in front of you. You know, like what you think it is for, in a way, right? Because unable to get from the underneath side of like two uns, right? Like you're really telling us like, no, no, you're not getting the thing.
00:18:41
Speaker
it but Whatever the thing is you think you're getting, you're not getting it. yeah And not just the underside, which is what you might expect, but the underneath side of, which is like, there's an extra bit in there that you're like the underneath side. And like, you know, it's like when people say is like, ah like, does a tube have two holes or one? And you're like, what? Like, it's this kind of like space time thing, right? The underneath side Yeah. Like what is the underneath?
00:19:06
Speaker
Like underneath already is the underneath, but the underneath side feels like a double negation of break the stones, break that flank the sand, the body, colon, blown, line. There's like another break from every direction. Like the poem is really breaking apart as you're emphasizing this un, right, that the non, the, if not the non, the resistance of the definitive, right? and There's a whole set of, like, theory there that I don't even think I'm clever enough to pass out. But, like, it's not just a rejection of something. It's a kind of refusal of a definitive, if you like. And I like that flank the sand, comma, the body blown, that great um alliteration
00:19:54
Speaker
Like the the flank, the sand, the body blown from every direction. i don't know. the body blown. my first read, I was like, this is sexual now, right? But then then the body blown from every direction, like a conch shell, and you're like, oh okay, well, now it's like the body is sand, it's like the body in pieces, right?
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah. I don't know. Already in what, four lines, you've, you've amassed like lots of inference through the way the lines even just appearing on the page, right? Like they're appearing in this kind of broken up way. You're not letting us have security, I guess, or like definitiveness in the lines.
00:20:30
Speaker
And I wonder like, don't know, you don't have to answer, but like how felt that is as you're writing it how much you were thinking ahead of what that looked like on the page. Did you see it on the page as you were writing, I guess?
00:20:42
Speaker
I mean, I started this poem, it is actually one of the first poems, would that be true? It's one of the earliest poems I wrote actually before I moved to England. And I remember you it was a poem about America.
00:20:59
Speaker
i think I'd written it in 2016 when Trump had just become elected, and which I believe was also the same summer, Philando Castile was murdered.
00:21:11
Speaker
I just remember coming back from the American Dance Festival and i just remember feeling like I wanted to write something and my friend had just gotten, right, yes, so this would be 16 actually, because my friend had just bought me Citizen by Claudia Reinking.
00:21:29
Speaker
And I just remember reading that and feeling like, which is where the epigraph and the title for the book comes from. i remember reading that and thinking i wanted to write something that kind of acknowledged something about the strange beach, something about race and the moment I felt we were in. And this was really before I considered myself a poet. So I was i did i really was just, it was very spontaneous and kind I think everyone kind of goes through a poetry phase where they think that that's what they want to do. And I think this is just that I was lucky to come out with what would become this poem. But by I wrote about like a person who couldn't swim and was thrown into the water and was basically the movement of the poem was sinking down to the bottom. And then like it got to the stingrays and then like the stingray started speaking and... same um And then that poem sucked, but over time it became better and better. And I kept this, the remnants of the stingrays just became stingrays and not like the stingray. Cause I think the original poem, I like, and the stingray opened his mouth. Yeah.
00:22:33
Speaker
ah Oh my God, it was so bad. And then and then um yeah and then over time, and but the beginning, that destabilization, i remember that came, i think, of the in the summer of 2020. This would be 2021, I think, which is the summer I started reading Jory Graham. And I remember being taken over by that sense of,
00:22:55
Speaker
oh, like that sense of density, that sense of fragmentation, that sense of flair and style and punctuation, but also meaning like if you can do that, you you i I mean, it's her work that convinced me you have two or three moves per poem to convince, which is not even lines, but moves of a poem to convince your reader to keep reading.
00:23:20
Speaker
And I learned that from her and I continue to learn that from her. And I continue to explore how those first moves in a poem announce announce you, announce your consciousness, but also announce, as you say, the erotic, the sense of negation, the sense of the body, the sense of the earth. flanking the sand, the sense of action.
00:23:42
Speaker
And so, yeah, I just felt, and to the degree that you're able to pick up on that, I'm really pleased. Of course, this is all intuitive and I can't, I can't, it's not, I didn't go back and say, great, now there's this and this, but I just yeah yeah have to find a way for it to all be able to sit together.
Rhythm and Language in Poetry
00:24:00
Speaker
and And that like blown from every direction. me like in my head, it's not what that words, like blown from every direction is like inward, but like in my head when I read it, it feels like outwardness, right? It feels like the spread. And I think there's like a clever little trick there as well, like a conch shell where the echo of emotion and extremists again, like lovely, like repetition of that e And we start to- ah That was conscious. Thank you. But like there's also a different kind of rhythm, right? Where the echo of emotion extremists floods. like It's much softer and kind of more rhythmic than those earlier, more fragmented ones. Floods the chamber. And like the chamber is like on its own there. And like that conjures up so many things as well, right? Because already... the
00:24:49
Speaker
Here, like, we kind of have a sense of place and maybe time and maybe a speaker, but like the speaker of this poem is definitely not the speaker of all of the poems in this book, necessarily for me.
00:25:02
Speaker
The language, i don't know, conch shell, extremists, chamber, transatlantic voyage, hushing velocity like there are certain kinds of words in here that not all of your speakers have right like they're talking in a particular mode or something or lexus and it feels grand even while it's kind of saying like no you don't get grandness you're having pressure you're having smallness you're having the underside or the underneath side you're having inability so i think there's a really interesting tension that the poem is playing with
00:25:33
Speaker
I mean, I feel like that summer of 2021 and going into 22 is really important because it was the first time I learned how to write a poem that didn't rely on an There's I in this poem.
00:25:44
Speaker
There is a you, but the you isn't necessarily me or isn't sometimes. And I felt like I didn't, I just didn't know how to write a poem. And I think that was why this poem got revisited because the first one was like, and I sink to the bottom and I started speaking to the sun gray. And then I was like, how can I, how can i it's a really powerful moment, especially if you're been writing i lyric poems where you recognize you can keep the lyric without the I.
00:26:16
Speaker
And then it almost gives you freedom to say more than you would have said when you were, when the I was closely based off who you, um like who you are, which is again, the if just cause you say I, it doesn't mean shown, but.
00:26:33
Speaker
get rid of their the need to be an eye and it just becomes a space of text, it feels really empowering. And I remember writing a lot of my poems over because I was like, well, yeah, the I is just too, it's making this too specific or it's making this too...
00:26:50
Speaker
you know, this isn't me, or if people are going to assume it's me anyway because they need there to be a body or someone speaking, then why do I even need to say I? Because they're going to put an I there anyway. Then you see the the craft task of how to avoid using an I actually generates other kinds of language and other kinds of sentences that don't need to satisfy the kind of fundamental structure of I verb um or noun ah verb or you know you don't need this kind of clause that almost it doesn't end but it it it just kind of
00:27:28
Speaker
it it provides certainty. and And I've got, I read a lot of Carl Phillips, who was also super so and important to me. A lot of John Ashbery, Robert Hayden.
00:27:40
Speaker
i mean, i do read James Baldwin, but not his poetry so much. And just this idea of suspension. i mean, I also read Arthur Greenwell. I'm really, which I think, and, you know, I think, I don't know if Robert Hayden was queer. Was Robert Hayden queer?
00:27:54
Speaker
Everyone else I mentioned is queer. um And i think there is also this kind of ah flamboyant style that I'm really really i'm really interested in exploring.
00:28:10
Speaker
which And so trying, getting rid of the eye also allows me to kind of play with non-normative forms of syntax that allow me to have the fragmentation and the kind of grand diction that I think you're picking up on. If I was writing more normative lyric poems, I say normative, not to suggest any shade to them because i there ah they're great and we need them.
00:28:35
Speaker
But I just feel like i feel like that I would lose a little bit of the breath or a little bit of the velocity that I want the poems to have. because you're right because it does force you into different kinds of language different kinds of ways of making sentences and the lines in this poem blown from every direction into comma like where once a body was willing to die inside of comma longing right like you set up things then you're like no you're not having that um like even like the grammar you're it's like the poem is kind of not training
00:29:10
Speaker
helping us read it and read the book maybe i mean I say this about most books like novels as well the first page kind of tells you what to do with the whole thing you know like if you want to read it like these are the terp these are the terms of the setup if you don't want those terms like that's a you problem not a me book problem right and I think that where once was a body willing to die inside of longing you're like does that mean die inside of longing or does it mean die inside of blank longing yeah and those those multiple options open up so much space and also i guess confusion in a way right like like i like i think the first time i was like wait did i miss something right and i kind of like okay slow down chris like this is a slower poem than and i might have thought it was yeah that longing i remember the longing part i feel like the word
00:30:02
Speaker
philosophy used to be in this poem and I feel like it used to be where once was a body willing to die inside of philosophy and then longing or something and because I do remember always having an issue with the of there because I was I feel like I remember thinking oh no this is complete where once there was a body willing to die inside of Or was it always a fragment?
00:30:25
Speaker
i feel like the word philosophy did used to be in this poem. I edited it out somewhere around there. And perhaps that created the fragmentation, but longing was still there. And and exactly as you're saying, like, yeah, it's, it's of course, it's both. It's light inside of stop longing and then and die inside of longing. And I mean, yeah, I think that's the hard thing with poems, at least that I'm always trying to investigate is how can you allow multiplicity to exist not only in the semantic formulation of what you're saying, um but in the syntactic, in the structural or visual. And that felt like one of the parts where i've really I mean, the syntax always felt normal to me, but I felt like, yeah, a reader might be like,
00:31:12
Speaker
I mean, when i learned about synax when I learned about syntax, it felt like a really empowering thing because syntax is really the pulse of thought or the rhythm of thought. And i don't think I have that many interesting thoughts that are so unique.
00:31:27
Speaker
And I don't think most of us do either, but I do think what is cultivatable is how you convey those thoughts. And it's actually not, i don't know if it's cultivatable as it is recognizable. I think we mostly have different rhythms. um which is one of the you know things that AI does is suppress us all into similar rhythms. But I think we all have kind of a unique eclectic kind of rhythm and and the process of writing or whatever craft you do is just kind of about revealing whatever kind of pulse you have inside your body that is a mixture of the speed of electrical firings in your head and your heart and the muscle capacity and
00:32:09
Speaker
the rhythm of your perception, how things come into your into into formation in your head, and and and being able to really understand that that's what syntax is, not that syntax is often confused with grammar, and or that syntax is something that ought to be... If it's smoothed out, that's fine, but because that you're smoothing it out because you're wanting it to almost disappear.
00:32:33
Speaker
um Whereas sometimes if you bring that syntax up, which I think I try to do in my bring up the appearance of syntax or the scenes of it more clearly working with non-normative structures, I think you're really training as you're going back to you're talking about training the reader. We are training and i and that is something.
00:32:53
Speaker
I think about in my in this book, but also in the next stuff I'm writing now is like, yeah, you have a page to teach. That first page has to teach. It's a contract you set up with the reader. And as you're exactly right, they decide whether they whether they can keep going or they want to keep going under those terms.
00:33:11
Speaker
But you do have a responsibility, responsibility I suppose. to and And of course, you can play with those expectations. It's not that you can't break rules. And that honestly is what makes, but you set up expectations on that first page.
00:33:23
Speaker
And I think for the poetry book, I do try to really keep the sense of voice and syntax playful more or less throughout. So it felt like you need to get this, understand this now. But then there are other people who start just kind of very norm, like, you know, I think of the beginning of post-colonial
Setting the Tone in Literature
00:33:40
Speaker
love poem. I was taught bloodstones can cure a snake bite, can stop the bleeding. Like, oh, what a beautiful beginning that is, you know, just...
00:33:48
Speaker
One of my favorite opening poems ever. It starts with the I was taught bloodstones can cure a snake bite. Finish. that is That is a finished fragment. Or that is a fred finished sentence. And then we get the the comma. Can can stop depleting. Most people forgot this when the war ended. The war ended, depending which war you mean. those And it just begins to like unfold into this almost kind of like timpani, tympanic rhythm. And it's just such...
00:34:14
Speaker
So she starts with stability and then unfolds. Whereas I started with i started to have instability and then we moved further into instability. Yeah, yeah I, yeah. yeah yeah I feel like we could talk for five hours and not even get to the end of this poem, by the way, listeners, just ah just to throw that out there. But when you said it earlier, it's kind of taken me back to, you know, your kind of choreographic work where it's kind of started before the audience comes in and you're kind of like, does that mean it doesn't need the audience, right?
00:34:44
Speaker
any kind of way it kind of does. And also there's a, I don't know whether there's another reading in there that you implied or not of, like the audience doesn't have like a full claim on the thing, you know, like it's not yours just because you paid money maybe or not to come see it.
00:34:57
Speaker
Maybe you bought the book, maybe you didn't. Like that there is a kind of, that you don't have ownership it. or like claiming rights over this thing. Like it started without you. Oh, well, like what did like this isn't yours to just consume. And I think there's some kind of like friction there in the same way that you're describing this kind of like showing syntax, like the friction, like when we tell people to like write proper grammar, proper syntax is as you say, to hide it is to make it friction less, right? So that,
00:35:26
Speaker
the reading experience is smooth and everyone is happy. But like, that's the ultimate, you know, falsity of realism, right? Like realism was designed so that you could be like, don't look at the words. Like this is a real thing. This is a real person, right? Believe in the character. And it's like all the while it's constructed through language. That's just like a falsity.
00:35:42
Speaker
So I think adding the friction means that I've got to do something with it, right? Like I can't not do something with it because I don't know if that sentence is a full sentence.
00:35:52
Speaker
us i have to I have to make a decision based on that, right? So when you then say this, sorry, M dash, this line break is the obsession. you're like, wait, what's the this? Like, I don't if i can locate the this in this poem. This is the obsession. this transatlantic voyage spread on the page. you're like, okay, so this is the transatlantic voyage?
00:36:14
Speaker
Maybe, but like that, this could refer in different directions. And that is like this transatlantic voyage spread on the page, like an oil spill, the blue and black arsenal of water hushing inevitably, which is just beautiful language. We should say just and of itself, we don't have to decode it, but it's beautiful.
00:36:33
Speaker
But immediately my brain went, oh, He's referring to Alexis Pauline Gumbs's work, Spill. Oh, he's referring to Christina Sharp. Oh, he's referring to like all of these kind of like the image of like the oil spilled, the blue and black. I then thought of what's the play that Moonlight is based on in Moonlight, All Black Boys Look Blue. Is that the full title? Bye.
00:36:53
Speaker
um cray I think so the arsenal of water hushing inevitably was it worth it worth it circles around you like suddenly like the the poem is beefing up but it's but it's beefing up to me to like history to like meaning to transatlantic voyage i like are we talking about the slave trade I guess we are but like I don't know that for sure right I have a sense that that's what I'm gesturing to in the poem, but maybe not.
00:37:18
Speaker
And that's when all of these other kind of references came in. and I was like, is that just me reading them versus like how much of every text is like the amalgam of what you've read, what you're writing and what the reader is bringing to.
00:37:32
Speaker
and that's suddenly where the poem like takes off me. Like the, this is the obsession. i mean, if we could both agree on what that this is, like that would be great. But the poem is like. the m yeah it is a big,
00:37:44
Speaker
I mean, right, because that M dash is the this is me reading it now and again, not express my intention anymore, but just yeah right now that closes because the beginning, that's the beginning of the poem, right? like It began with the M dash and M dash usually needs another M dash on the other end to almost parenthetical or not.
00:38:05
Speaker
And so it's now this is the obsession. So it's almost like a reassertion of the poem beginning again and this idea of the transatlantic voyage spread on the page like an oil spill.
00:38:16
Speaker
I was trying to invoke Blackness and the transatlantic slave trade and Claudia Rankine's work and a personal history at the same time. And I think the bold the bold kind of thing that I guess I was uncertain about and and still remain uncertain about is like whether...
00:38:37
Speaker
it was the invocation of big history in the personal, which of course is not, that sounds like so normal of a thing to do. and And actually, i don't know if we're ever not doing it.
00:38:49
Speaker
um But it felt like, how can I talk about the transatlantic voids I'm writing this lyric poem that's going to the top of my book, and then I'm bringing it up to this idea of worth circling around me.
00:39:04
Speaker
and then this idea of the pointless competition, which I think there was, now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder, like, there is a kind of, because that that pointless competition for me great. very kind of clearly, like there's kind of, there's an introduction of all these topics, right? As you said, the body, syntax, worth, um I think writing as a whole is brought up in that last part, desire, light and dark as the kind of visual,
00:39:30
Speaker
beauty. And it felt like this poem was like trying to introduce very quickly all these or felt how the capacity to introduce all these topics. But really one of them was like bringing up, can someone like me write about all of these topics? one in one poem, but also over the course of time. And also, do I feel as though, one, I have the right? Do I feel I have the craft? Do I feel I have the chops? But do I also have the right, which is the increasing gap between the surface of the water and the stillness you entirely inhabit. Like that is, it's not just time, it's not just distance, but this sense of being apart from a history that I am not experiencing right now, of course. but also that I feel very connected to and that I understand. Like, can I be both in the now and going back to what you were talking about earlier about being in the future, can I be both embodying that historic, the the presence the the presence of that historicity and also be this person who's just obsessed with grand language and colors and water? Like, can both of those, yeah, can that big history coincide with the moment of the lyric?
00:40:43
Speaker
And the moment of the lyricist, which is me, in a way that doesn't feel, i'm not really into resolution. I'm not really into resolution and I'm not really into uplift. And not that I'm not being uplifted or hopeful, but I mean, like, I don't want something that's like...
00:41:03
Speaker
here's a slave trade happened and everything was horrible. And now i'm going to tell you how I worked my way out of the hole, which is not to say that's not valuable, but it's just to say like, what is the real affect you're trying to get? And I think there's ah there's definitely perhaps ah insistence in the work that these things are ongoing, that I haven't figured out how to hold big history and the personal, how to hold kind of simple things language that needs to be plain to make someone understand something. And then the kind of ambitious kind of obfuscation and beauty and spiral and variegation that I love and that I respond to. Yeah.
00:41:45
Speaker
Okay, well, I think you are holding them. They do hold them, but like hold in in a very psychoanalytic way, right? Like providing space for not definitively making sense of, right? Like holding as in like, they are both there on the page.
00:42:00
Speaker
yeah What we do with them is like beyond you, right? and Beyond, you know, beyond the even the text. But yeah, that that's the bit for me, right? The increasing gap between the surface of the water and the stillness you entirely inhabit.
00:42:15
Speaker
Ooh, that entirely... Without entirely, that line would just be on the in stillness you inhabit. I would write that you inhabit. Like i the entirely is the word that kind of like breathes out and in, right? Like there's something about that word that gives even more space in there or in a space that already exists of this increasing gap.
00:42:36
Speaker
And I think like between the surface of the water, it then takes me back to the underneath side of the stones, right? Like what is below water versus above water, right? As landed creatures, we're like above water is the place to be, right? But like to so many aquatic things, like, no, this that's the wrong way around. i talked to Victoria Adukwebully last season about her poem, The Ultra Blackfish, which is all about the kind of like depths of the ocean and space beyond human reckoning. And that not being negation, but being like full possibility outside of our realms of what possibility means. Right. So like, like a real wild poem that is in very direct language, I think is utterly brilliant. But yeah, there's another kind of element of that here, right. About like this other sideness or the underside or the, the gap, the space between and desire, inseparability of light and dark, how beautiful you have been and are. That how beautiful, both about the inseparability of light and dark and and the you, giving your whole life to a pointless competition, which, and then again, we end on a M dash, right? Like again, this, the poem kind of
00:43:46
Speaker
goes beyond us. But is it it is both a kind of like a, not negative, but there is a kind of edge to that last bit, to a pointless competition. Like there feels like a spike there. But just before we've got like how beautiful you have been in art.
00:44:00
Speaker
Again, it's the holding all of the things at once, right? This is not this is not just ambivalence. It's like holding all of the options. yeah and having And that being okay and useful and productive. like No, life and productive. Just it is what it is. Right. There are there are all the options at once.
00:44:19
Speaker
And I think that's quite a ah kind of radical place to end the poem. I agree. And I think that edge, I was very proud what i thought of that edge because it felt i I mean, the poet who got me into writing was Louise Glick.
00:44:32
Speaker
And that was she was very formative for my early and I'm still in my early years, but my earliest years. And it felt like the poem used to end again with this Stingray speaking and and then,
00:44:46
Speaker
I remember getting that, how beautiful you have been. i think, and are. i remember getting that and are and feeling really excited by the fact that those two words had a or arisen um and giving your whole life to a pointless competition. It felt edgy. And I was like, what do you mean you're giving your whole life to a point? that You've only been writing for like a couple of years. Like, do you feel you can see that? And like the pointless competition, I think it was again, this invoke invocation of,
00:45:15
Speaker
it was a rebuff of the kind of person early in the poem was like, oh yeah, I can hold the
Challenges of Writing
00:45:19
Speaker
transit landing voyage. I can hold the personal. And it's like well, but maybe at the end of the day, it's all pointless because you're putting it in a poem. And, you know, I think I i hear the sounds of point poem and pointless competition. So you can almost hear, it feels like an expanded version of that. But a pointless competition is also just the practice of writing, like either competition with yourself to be better than you were or an actual competition in the kind of,
00:45:44
Speaker
industry as we understand it and trying to be seen. And so I think there was, this goes back to this idea, i was talking about this idea of debuting. I thought a lot about what is that first poem that when when you look back, you're going to say, this was the first thing that like was part of like, if you put my books in the row, this is the first thing.
00:46:00
Speaker
And I think that sense of the pointless competition for me was like, I'll remind, it's a bit edgy. I think it tries to get a bit of the edge i I so admire in Louise Glick's work, even though I don't know if it's naturally the kind of person that I am.
00:46:16
Speaker
i think I wanted to capture that edge, but i I did want to, yeah, I wanted to look back and say, when I look back, will will that sense of it being a pointless competition because you've sustained in the practice of writing over a life?
00:46:28
Speaker
Because in many ways, it becomes more pointless if you begin to just enjoy the writing and you can just you know, like writing and keep, and like that is, so I think there's also a bit of hope in it. It's edgy to say it's pointless, but also to say like the pointlessness of writing and your desire to keep doing it. I think we're over time. And as you keep coming back to it,
00:46:48
Speaker
reveals the pointlessness reveals itself even more because it is just become thing to do. And you don't do it because you're better or smarter or more interesting than other people. You do it because it's something for you to do. um It's something for It's a way for you to spend your time. And I think I really wanted to remember maybe in a couple of years or even now in this conversation that that is the That it is it it is that.
00:47:16
Speaker
and And I don't say that to be like, again, there's no shade to writing. It's just to say like, like the writing is what matters. The competition of the writing doesn't matter. The competition of the personal versus the big history doesn't matter. The competition of instability versus clarity of you versus I doesn't matter.
00:47:34
Speaker
The writing is what matters. And so all of that is pointless competition. Right. Yeah. Okay. Let me, we've been talking for a long time about this poem, which I love. I want to talk about that writing then you've kind of given hints about your writing process. And I kind of do want to see this original draft with the talking. Stingray, but anyway. and um somewhere i So we we've got to find that that version.
00:47:56
Speaker
What is your writing practice, if you have one at all, of course?
Oluwashon's Creative Process
00:48:00
Speaker
Like, do you write on your phone, on paper, on the computer? Is there a specific time of day? Yeah, what is your what is your world of writing I generally write in the morning.
00:48:11
Speaker
um My brain stops working at 12.30 generally, but like I'm someone who can wake up very like seven, eight, sometimes even six and just be like, time to go.
00:48:23
Speaker
But around 12.30, it's over. So I write in the morning, coffee is fine. And usually on like, if not an empty stomach, just like like yogurt, at least the last year it's been yogurt.
00:48:37
Speaker
kind of some kind of granola and like blueberries or some kind of fruit, just so I don't have coffee on an empty stomach. There was a period of time where I was just waking up and doing coffee until then, and I'd go to the gym and then eat around three.
00:48:50
Speaker
i stopped at not because it was unhealthy, but just because i kind of really started liking yogurt and granola. There are some days where I can still do that. um I don't really like eating before I go to the gym.
00:49:03
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the practice part of it. Where do I write? Recently, this month, I've been writing a lot in the library. I got a membership to London Library for free after doing it. Oh, she's bougie now. Okay. No, no, no. It was for free and it was paid for because I did an event there and you could either get paid money or a free membership for a year.
00:49:24
Speaker
So I took that and that has been one of the most, the greatest things because you just go there and everyone is just writing and everyone's just reading and stuff like that. So that has been my practice for the last kind of month, month and a half is like getting up, going and I can actually find that my brain can still function after 1230 in a library.
00:49:44
Speaker
Maybe if it's not generating words, at least it's, it can edit. I can edit maybe after 1230, or I can read. So that's been pretty nice. But generally before that, it's just in my room. i tend to, I try to write by hand big passes of particularly narrative moments. I'm writing um quite a bit of prose right now and narrative moments more easily formed by hand for me. Whereas critical thoughts, I think,
00:50:12
Speaker
Is this true? Critical thoughts can come out by hand or by or by or by keys. Blending the two has been challenging because often I'm taking text, things I've written to to the computer and things I've written on the computer and like, oh, I want to expand this more back to text. And then there's just kind of like this interplay and interface of those two of those two media. um So that is, I answer the question?
00:50:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, is poetry different? You kind of talked about prose and criticism. Poetry, yeah. i That thing we've been talking about for now. That thing we've been talking about. Yeah, um i take I take notes a lot in my... I have ah i have a running list of lines and things from my from on my phone just called notes. so i have I have notes for poetry... notes for prose and notes for, have another one. Oh, notes for raps. Cause there was a year where I got really into freestyling. And so I started writing down like um rhymed bars, but my notes of poetry one has been running since 2018, which is when I moved here.
00:51:23
Speaker
And so I just add often I'll think of lines or words, like for example, the and I'll just write that down. It's like the last couple of entries have been I finger the proximal view of my eye and see him go silent as an anomaly.
00:51:37
Speaker
Fetched up, adjective. The fetched up win syntaxes. You were wrong about what I said I chose, but you cannot ask something simple and human. I want you to ask something simple and human.
00:51:49
Speaker
I was born in the future. I'll die there. Threads of the book rather than chapters. Anyway, so yeah, I take notes um and then what will happen is i'll I'll have a moment. I'm quite an ecstatic writer, which is why going to the library has been good because you kind of need discipline, I think, for prose in a way that poetry does not demand. um But I take notes on my on my phone and then I'll Say I want to write a poem, I feel enough notes have come come to me, and then I'll just write by hand.
00:52:17
Speaker
With line breaks, I revise quite a lot as I'm writing. Or I'll just start a poem with no notes, and then I'll say, okay, I've arrived at a moment of pause or a moment where I feel like I don't know how to keep going. And then I'll go to my notes say, okay, I need to keep going. It's not over yet. And I'll use my notes to turn or insert into the poem And it becomes this kind of iterative process. And what's something that i talk about a lot is often I'll write a poem and I'll write a line that reminds me of a poem I wrote sometimes weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years ago.
00:52:49
Speaker
And because I hope I'm becoming a better writer over time, I will go find that poem and then strip it of its best parts and insert that into the poem. So it can often start with just kind of improv off my head. Then what's in the notes, then the notes trigger memory and I go back and find that poem. I stripped that poem into its parts. There's one poem that this has been happening with for like three years now and like over and over it was edited actually edited out of this manuscript um out of Strange Beach but I don't want it to die because I felt I just feel like it's relevant or I need to keep it and there's one poem that's just basically been latching itself on to the end of this long thing I've been writing for the last three years so yeah that's kind of how my process works
00:53:38
Speaker
I love that. I want ask you, when do you remember first writing or thinking about being a writer or imagining you could be a writer? Any of the options there?
00:53:49
Speaker
I remember thinking I could be a writer. ah i remember thinking be a reader when I was in 2018, before I moved to London.
00:54:00
Speaker
But when I could be a writer... that would Yeah, it would been ah it would have been around the time i moved to London. i got really into reading poetry that first year i moved to London. I was living in East London. i was buying novels and poetry more so than I ever had in my ah life.
00:54:18
Speaker
And had had encounters with some poetry, like the poetry of Robin Coste Lewis and vole the Voyage of the Sable Venus, which Claudia Rankine, as I'd said, and Blueettes by Maggie Nelson.
00:54:30
Speaker
But these were just kind of little dips in the toe of, dips in the pond, of dips of my toe in the pond of literature. um um And think the moment I said, I can do this, what was, what was it? The moment I said, I can do this.
00:54:47
Speaker
Oh, it was after the pandemic. I'd been writing poems seriously. I started sending them out, but I think it was still just kind of a hobby. And I remember i was in a really kind of not great relationship or I was at the end. It started out great, ended poorly in 2020.
00:55:03
Speaker
And I remember writing poems throughout that time and showing them to my partner at the time. He was reading them. he was like, oh my God, this is beautiful. This is amazing. So he was just like validating me. And I remember breaking up with him and then a month couple months later coming back to those poems and just reading the most heartbreaking, depressive, obviously this person needs some kind of pastoral care, like mental health. Like it was just abysmal, the the mindset of the poems.
00:55:32
Speaker
And this was great because i was like oh, right. So if I just write what I'm at, I'm gonna, write I have the capacity to write what I'm feeling. Cause I did not know I was documenting my life through that time.
00:55:44
Speaker
Right. I thought I was just writing poems. These were kind of survival tactics. My ex was seeing, you know, these kinds of very obvious signals of, you know, mental deterioration. It was like, oh my God, that's so wonderful. And and and so I just remember feeling so riveted by, oh right, if I just document what's going on, whatever's happening will make its way onto the page. And that was really a moment. i was like, okay, so now that I know I can do this, let me just try it. And so really it was end of 2020 when i was out of that relationship.
00:56:16
Speaker
I was finally getting my visa to stay here. i was like, okay, this might be something I should pursue. i love that. This is ah yeah like a really interesting like formation where you you see your own writing in a totally different way from how you've seen it before. Last question that I ask everyone.
00:56:33
Speaker
You've given us so many book recommendations already, by the way. so like listeners have them all. But are there any particular books that you want to tell people to go read now? It could be old things, new things, stuff not yet out yet.
00:56:45
Speaker
Mmm, not yet out. I just got this book literally before I got on the call. um Claudia Rankine is back. She published Citizen, i think in 2014, 15.
00:56:56
Speaker
fourteen fifteen She published Just Us in 2020. And she has a new book called Triage coming out this year. It's called Triage, Truth, Art and Fiction.
00:57:09
Speaker
its me extremely jealous because I'm writing something that is kind of trying to hybridize those exact three kind of ah forms, but I'm sure she's done it better.
00:57:20
Speaker
And so I would say look out for that. I think it comes out in like September or October or something, or maybe August, sometime summer end of summer, fall. Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes. It's good book.
00:57:32
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know what there is to say about stuff. I'm just always like, just go read it. I don't know what to tell you. Yeah, like just, I finished that book really quickly and it just teaches you a lot of ways that you can write. Yeah, full stop.
00:57:46
Speaker
In the Dreamhouse by Carmen Maria Ochato. I'm reading that. I think a lot of queers have read that, but I think it bears rereading and, uh, yeah. And, uh, it's powerful. It's formally inventive and great. And then the last thing I'll recommend is maybe like a wild card.
00:58:07
Speaker
Maybe I'll recommend Intimacies by Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips. What a book. I like to remind myself that you can be dense, theoretically dense and still very stylish and very clear. And I think sometimes I i lean towards too much style such that I begin to obfuscate semantics. And I feel like that book, Intimacies, aside from discussing really, i feel, urgent topics as it relates to queer identity, also just finds a way to hold
00:58:41
Speaker
it with such kind of beauty and grace and i think that's more than anything what i want my work to be graceful and i feel like them the the pairing of their works in this in this book uh intimacies is just is just a master class in that grace so even Even when you're talking about stuff that's really, you know, even if you're talking about jeff Jeffrey Dahmer, right? Like how you can do that with Ilan and Grace is, is it's it's very informative.
00:59:15
Speaker
Yeah. You're speaking my language. Those three. But I'm like, yes. In the dream house never leaves my brain. Like, ah yeah. Like how, like how she did it. I don't even know. Like formally, emotionally, all the things like that book.
00:59:28
Speaker
I just I'm like, if you want to learn how to write like that is the thing. Yeah. And Adam Phillips is like one of those people who, you know, he'll just write one sentence. You're like, oh, you've changed my brain chemistry. Fine. Thank you for that. yeah yeah He's just so unassuming. He's just like a very like sweet, quiet man. He's just writing devastating lines about psychoanalysis that you just. I think you just write he just wrote a new book called On on the Good Life or something.
00:59:54
Speaker
wow Is it On the Good Life? Yeah, I think he wrote On Giving Up a couple of years ago. And then yeah he wrote, I think there's a new book out like last month called like On the Good Life something. And I'm looking for you reading it.
01:00:08
Speaker
Yeah, I don't have that one yet. I think I have like almost every Adam Phillips book somewhere behind me here. So like, are we going to get that immediately? Sean, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you massively.
01:00:20
Speaker
Thank you. this has been super fun. And yeah, i I'm still glad that people want to talk about this book because... It's not old and I think so much of my anxious brain wants to be like, this is old now and it's it's just not the case. um And yeah, I'm really grateful for the opportunity for to keep bringing up into the front of my consciousness. So yeah, thank you.
01:00:45
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode. If you want more on amazing poetry, go back to episode 15 with Jane Yeh or episode 26 with Sasha Devivek-McKenny, who is also published with Fitzcarado.
01:00:58
Speaker
Please subscribe if you haven't already, leave review on Apple Podcasts and YouTube, share with people in all the places, follow the show and me on Instagram, tag me in any posts of episodes that you like, and if you can, please fill out the feedback form.
01:01:11
Speaker
You can also get show transcripts and more information by subscribing to the sub stack. I am updating it slowly, I promise. This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Hertfordshire.