A Space for Feeling and Thinking

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Jane Clarke begins
I think the first draft, in a way, is often just full of emotional energy, and then to make it something that's meaningful to others, it's the pulling back, it's the looking, and it's finding the form that will express it so that it isn't just a diary entry, you know?

[Theme music begins]

Seán
Welcome to The Glimpse. I'm your host, Seán Hewitt.

Jane Clarke is the author of three poetry collections, including A Change in the Air, which was shortlisted in 2023 for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She also edited the illustrated anthology Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect. Jane Clarke is our guest today on The Glimpse.

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Jane Clarke writes poems of lyrical beauty and real heart. Rich with the tradition of Irish pastoral or nature poetry, a whole landscape can live inside one of her carefully tuned lines. But from the rich soil of tradition, Jane brings forward a poetry that is subtly changed, alert to political and social issues and fraught as nature writing so often is now with anxieties about the changing climate. In Jane's poems, we can hear echoes of voices past and present, the farmlands of Seamus Heaney, the lyricism of Kerry Hardie. And there's also a melodic sense of nature in all its fine detail, a chorus made by water, growth, diversity, precious and under threat. And if that wasn't enough, there's always a strong emotional core too: love, desire, hurt, and comfort. All of these can be found in her poems. Jane Clarke, welcome to The Glimpse. I'm so happy you could come and speak to us.

Jane Clarke
Thanks very much, Seán. And it's actually wonderful to hear what you have seen and read in my work. I really appreciate that.

Seán
I'm a big fan of your poems, as you probably know by now. (He laughs.) Where are you today?

Jane
I'm in Glenmalure—at home in Glenmalure—and it's actually a beautiful day, stunningly beautiful.

Seán
Okay, that's nice. (They laugh.) Yeah, we have bright blue skies in Dublin as well. It's quite cold, but we have a lovely day. When I was reading your, your bio, reading a bit about you, I learned something that I didn't know, which was that you used to work in community development and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I wanted to kind of begin by asking you about that, because I suppose, you know, we're used to poets having different interests, but often, you know, we talk to them about poetry. But I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about that, and what prompted you to start exploring poetry? Or is poetry something that you always had in the background?

Jane
I didn't really have it in my background at all. I studied in Trinity, I did four years English and philosophy. So obviously I was really interested in literature, but I was also always very interested in social justice and activism. So when I left Trinity, myself and a friend, we traveled in South America for a year and became really interested in community development.

So I came back and got a job in the north inner city in Sean McDermott Street, working in a project there with women's groups, youth groups. And during that time there was a lot of conflict coming up in groups, and I found it really difficult to facilitate the conflict situations. So that's what led me to doing psychotherapy; it was out of a need for my work. And then, I just became fascinated by psychoanalysis, and it actually was psychoanalysis that led me back to literature, in a way, led me particularly to poetry. Because training in psychoanalysis and working in it, a lot is about dealing with grief, and also a lot is about dealing with symbolism and metaphor, and, you know, the words people choose and why they choose that word in particular at that time.

Seán
It is, it is. You know, we often think of poetry as being able to mediate or give a space for thinking. Is that something that, you know, being led in by psychoanalysis, is that something that you think informed the kind of route that your poetry took, or the concerns of your poetry?

Jane
Definitely. I suppose when you say a space for thinking, I also say a space for feeling and thinking. And that's what I learned in psychoanalysis, that you need both. And I think that's what happens in poetry as well, and that it's that kind of combination of tuning into your emotional life and bringing your thought life to that. And they're not separate, really, you can't separate them.

Seán
I wonder if you could tell us a little bit, too, about your work with ecologists and activists and farmers and the stuff that you're doing now. That's, I'm sure, connected to activism that you've done in the past, but it seems to have shifted, perhaps into a different arena.

Jane
Since I began to write in my early 40s, my awareness of what's happening in the environment has increased enormously, and also I realized I wanted to learn more. And so then I sought out people with whom I could learn, and they were interested in what I was doing. So I now have some wonderful naturalists and ecologists amongst my friends.

And then, again, one thing led to another, because I was interested in the climate crisis, and particularly the biodiversity crisis, then I began to work with Burrenbeo, who promote and support farmers who are farming in a different way, in a way with nature—this whole thing of working with nature, rather than exploiting it.

Seán
Right.

Jane
Which is the change all of us have to make, it's not just farmers, you know. So, so that's how, you know, one thing led to another. And over the past year, I visited six farmers. And, you know, I go, I visit, I meet with them, I listen, I walk with them. It's only for a morning. And then that has led to about ten poems, which I hope to be doing something with over the next year.

Seán
And how do you see that working in your poems? How is it shifting the sort of poetry that you write—or are you noticing your attention fall in different places?

Jane
Well, I have to say, when I go to visit the farmers, I'm always sort of scared, and that's always my thing. When I'm required to write a poem, that “Will I be able to do this justice? Will I be able to find a way in?” But, actually, I have, and yeah, so how has it helped? I suppose, in a way, a lot of my earlier work came from the farm where I grew up, then it was coming from Wicklow. And, in a way, this has allowed me to spread my wings, if you like, and work, you know, with all kinds of different settings and all kinds of different aspects of biodiversity. And so that's been really enriching for me.

Seán
When did you move to Wicklow?

Jane
Thirty years ago, we moved to Wicklow and—yeah?

Seán
Yeah, I was gonna ask you about, about “Spalls,” the poem you're gonna read for us. Is this a new house in Wicklow, or is this kind of a historic look back at the first time you moved?

Jane
Yeah, we moved to one house in Wicklow, and that's the same house where we are now. So this poem and this garden is the garden out around us here now. So if I could just say about the background to the poem, yeah.

So how it came about is the summer before, so that was 2022, myself, my wife, were with two friends who were farmers in their kitchen, and I felt in something they said, I felt their discomfort with us as a couple. Now, I knew they really liked us. It wasn't anything, but with our “coupledom,” if you like, it wasn't about us as people, but about something about being uncomfortable. And, of course, that reminded me of my parents. And I came home from that visit, and I started to write this poem. And I think maybe if I hadn't just picked up on that feeling—which, of course, it was difficult for me to feel that, as it was over the years of my parents, but I think the great thing about a poem is you can include different feelings. It's not just one feeling, it's not just discomfort there, there's a love there, there's, you know, there's an awful lot else I hope conveyed.

Seán
And isn't it amazing as well, how long a poem can wait to come. You know, you might have felt something 30 years ago or on different occasions over 30 years, and it takes that long before it catches and suddenly you know what it is. You know how to name it.

Jane
Yes, absolutely.

Seán
Would you do us the honor of reading “Spalls” for us?

Jane
I will. Yeah.

Seán
Thank you.

Jane
And if I could just say that “spalls” comes from the Irish word “spalli,” which means the small stones you put into a wall to hold it together.

Spalls
By Jane Clarke

To help us grow a garden, my mother and father travelled
across the Bog of Allen and over the Wicklow Gap.
They’d have preferred to drive west to Galway or Mayo,
they’d have preferred a husband and children
but their daughter loved a woman. We’d have the table set
for breakfast: rashers, black pudding, fried bread and eggs.
When the soil had warmed, we unloaded shovels
and rakes, buckets of compost and the rusted iron bar
for prising out rocks. The back seat was thronged
with pots of seedlings my mother had nurtured all winter.
We worked to her bidding: loosen tangled roots before planting,
sow marigolds next to beans, sprinkle Epsom salts around roses.
My father took off on his own to spud ragwort or clip a hedge.
One day he spent hours gathering stones of different shapes and sizes.
By evening he’d built us a wall under the holly, held together
by gravity and friction, hearted with handfuls of spalls.

Jane Clarke, A Change in the Air (Bloodaxe Books, 2023).
Reproduced with permission of Bloodaxe Books. www.bloodaxebooks.com @bloodaxebooks (twitter/facebook) #bloodaxebooks

Seán
Thank you very much. I love that poem. I'm really glad that you told us; I hadn't realized that the word “spalls” had an Irish root.

Jane
Yes.

Seán
It was a word that I'll admit I didn't know before I read this poem. Where did you come across it? Or is it a word that's common to you?

Jane
Well, it's funny because it's actually in, in a poem in my first collection. I wrote a poem, “Dry Stone Wall,” in my first collection, and “spalls” was in it. So it was when I was researching the first poem, and I researched it by talking to my mother and father around the kitchen table at home, and asked, I was asking dad all about, “How do you build a dry stone wall?” Because that was one of the things he had always loved doing. And so he gave me vocabulary, basically, and mum did as well. And then—so I wrote that poem. And this poem was first called “Under the Holly.” The spalls weren't in it at all, and I hadn't got a good ending; the ending wasn't right. And you know yourself, you just walk around thinking, “How could I get this better?” And so one day, I was just thinking about the making of a wall and remembering that they use the word “hearted.” That actually is an expression used by wall-makers. And that's when I got the final couplet right, and “spalls” then became the last word.

Seán
Yeah, “hearted” is such a, an incredible choice there; even if the word is given to you, you know, it carries such strength. There's a line in the poem there about the wall being “held together / by gravity and friction.” And it seemed it could almost be a sort of manifesto for poetry, the way a poem could be made. You know, there are certain elements that spark off each other or seem to pull in opposite directions, and then there has to be this kind of gravity that, that centers the whole poem. And perhaps “spalls” is just—there could be no other thing in this problem. The poem covers roughly a day. You know, we begin with breakfast, and then we move towards the evening, but you fold so much life inside it, whether it's just the geography of Ireland, where your parents are coming from, a movement across time. As you said, you know, this is a poem looking back over 30 years; I wonder where that folded into the poem. You know, did the poem begin small and expand, or did it begin big and, and center down into this dry stone wall? What's the relationship between the image and the, and the scope of the poem?

Jane
Yeah, it, it began with that journey across country, and my awareness that my parents, they didn't even like crossing the Shannon, so to come to Wicklow was such a long way for them. But from the beginning, it was one day. I mean, it's very much evoked by a typical day with them. But there were more details in it, so I did cut it back to what seemed most important. And then, I put in those little things that my mother used to say, because I kept a note of, you know, advices mom used to give me for the garden. So I had kept that, and I found that on my desk one day, and I thought, “Oh yeah they’re all, they're so wonderful. They’re what, they all mean in other levels.” So I put those in, you know, a little bit further on in the process.

Seán
Yeah, it was only this year I learned about marigolds and companion planting and sacrificial planting and all these sorts of things. But there's so much secret knowledge in a garden, I think. In some ways that makes the poem—folklore is the wrong word, but, you know, as in the knowledge of people that is passed down through the poem. And there's so much, like you say, that people never write down and becomes lost over time.

This poem, you know, I'm glad you explained that, that it began and in this kitchen and with a feeling of discomfort, because when I was reading it back, I thought that line, “but their daughter loved a woman,” is kind of the detonation point of the poem, or the, the point at which everything around it begins to change in significance. And often, poems have these, these small, little places where you think, “Ah, that is the heart of the poem. That is where everything is hinging on.” It seems to me to be a poem not only about discomfort, but also the love of overcoming, or even trying to overcome, a discomfort, and all the other things that we give to each other. But it seems that your instinct is to extend grace and, and to see the poem as a sort of empathetic place for thinking and feeling.

Jane
Yes, it's funny, I sometimes wonder, because I started writing in my early 40s, I wonder, would it have been very different? Of course, it would have been different if I'd started writing in my early 20s. By that time in my life, I had learned a lot about how, how to process difficult emotions and how to make sense and how to take responsibility myself. Like I always say, it's something about, how do you stay really close to emotion and distance from it? I think we need to do that as poets. Look at it—and again, that's what I learned to do in psychoanalysis, to look at what is happening to one—and I think that's what we do in poetry.

Seán
Do you think that poetic form helps you to do that? Because it, you know, you can start moving things around you. You've got a framework in which the emotion has to be somewhat distanced from you, and you bring in a thinking brain as well as a feeling brain. Do you think that's something about what form is for?

Jane
Yes, I think form does it, and the editing to find a form does it. The editing process really helps that. I mean, I think the first draft, in a way, is often just full of emotional energy, and then to make it something that's meaningful to others, it's the pulling back, it's the looking, and it's finding the form that will express it so that it isn't just a diary entry. I mean, isn't that the big thing, to move the poem from something that's just a personal expression to something that will be meaningful to the other?

Seán
Yeah. I mean, it's such a difficult trick to learn over. It takes a lot of time to be able to distinguish the point at which something becomes meaningful to other people, and sometimes it's trial and error. You're always the first reader of your own poem. And of course, the poem means a lot to you, because you, you made it. And sometimes I think, you know, those early drafts that are full of anger and expression really resonate with you as a writer, because you finally got it out, you've got the feeling out, but that feeling has to be given a form and a shape in order to be felt by other people as well. How do you know when a poem is done for you?


Jane
Well, first of all, to say that I have a wonderful workshop group. So I have, you know, four colleagues who I meet once a month. I can't stress how fortunate I am to have them. Usually we, I bring two poems a month there, and I work as much as I can on them before I go there, and in between times my wife will probably have heard them and given a kind of a “mmmm” or whatever reaction. And so I bring them there, and they give me feedback. And then I go back again to myself. And usually it's in the next iteration where I get a sense of whether it's ready. But, for example, there's a whole life of a poem, isn't there?

Seán
Yeah. I mean, sometimes poems are left in a drawer for months or years, and you have the experience of picking them up. And even if there's a line or an idea, it’s still there, and suddenly, you know, like a meeting in a kitchen, it suddenly locks into place, or something comes of it.

Jane
Yeah, that’s it!

Seán
It's really important never to throw anything away, because you never know when your mind or your life becomes ready to, to make that poem. So it's a waiting game.

You said originally that this poem was called “Under the Holly,” and now “Spalls,” but what, to you, is the, the difference in resonance between those two titles? I'm always amazed by the way that people choose titles and, and what a title can do to a poem.

Jane
Yes, I know that's a good question. Somehow, I just, I know sometimes it’s, there isn't an intellectual answer to that, it just felt like you're “hearted with handfuls of spalls.” That's what's at the heart of the poem, I guess. It had to be that. You know?

Seán
Yeah there's something almost Heaney-esque about the word, or the use of the word in this poem. And, obviously, Ireland has such a strong tradition of pastoral poetry, and I wonder what your relationship to that tradition is. Is it something you're aware of as you're writing? Is it something you're kind of constantly working with or pushing against, or, you know, how do you think about that?

Jane
I think…I think working with, I would say, I mean, for example, Patrick Kavanagh. I am just so lucky that there was a Patrick Kavanagh, that's how I feel. I feel so fortunate. His way of writing, you know, what he does with the ordinary—he makes it extraordinary, how he brings, you know, the small ordinariness and makes it universal. All of that. I learned an awful lot from Patrick Kavanagh. And, you know, I just adore his work as, as with Heaney, you know, we have such a good, strong tradition. And also, I have found that in, in poets in the States, in poets, you know, English poets, UK poets, so I wouldn't like to say that it's just the Irish poet, but I suppose maybe a few of them are very special to me. But I've also found it elsewhere.

Sean
One of the things that is interesting, I don't know if I kind of invented this as a, as my own anxiety when I started writing, but I remember being aware in my own mind that queer poetry, or whatever you'd like to call it, was an urban thing, and, and that the pastoral tradition or, or the nature poem was often not part of the same tradition. And I wonder if that is something that you were aware of, or if it's something that you are trying. You know, even, even just by dint of being who you are where you are, do you feel that you are writing into a tradition, that you're changing in a respectful and positive way, but just by, by the presence of your poems?

Jane
Well, yeah, no, it's a really good question. I'm really glad to have been part of broadening the tradition and making it more inclusive. And that is really important to me. And it's funny because it also comes from having grown up on a farm in Roscommon, and I went to Dublin when I was 19 to study. And it was Dublin where I found the freedom to come out, and, you know, to explore lots of different things, socialism and feminism and you know. So I don't glorify rural Ireland, and I am very aware of the limitations, particularly then. Now it has changed enormously, but still, if I was going into a mart in some town in Ireland, I would presume homophobia, which—I don't think that's right anymore, but that's my instinct. My instinct would be to censor myself. In the last 20 years, as you know, it has opened up remarkably. Civil partnership made a difference to my writing, Seán. You know, marriage equality made a difference to my writing. I really like to tell people that, because people think, “What would legal, you know, change? What would change in the referendum have to do with your creativity?” It has everything to do with that.

Seán
How did it change it?

Jane
Well, it…and I suppose because I and my wife, we felt more able to be open, we felt more part of everything, rather than that bit of being on the outside, and I really think that made a difference to how able and open I felt to express of the most important things in my life, my love for my partner. You know, the poem “Wife,” the poem “June.” All those poems, I wouldn't have been able to write them because I was being cautious. I was doing the censorship. I know, I know young queer people don't necessarily censor the way we did, but we grew up in a time of, you know, self-censorship for protection.

Seán
Yeah, and it's so good to hear that actually, social and political change can, can free writers because, you know, we often think about writers as loving a bit of (They laugh) oppression and difficulty, and that is where art comes from. But the idea that it might also be spurred by freedom and a loss of constraints is, I think, a really positive and quite hopeful way of looking at, of looking at writing.

Jane
Yeah.

Seán
I think it might be a good time to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about an American poet who, who you admire. And it's a really surreal and quite chilling poem. Looking forward to talking to you about it. Thanks, Jane.

Jane
Thanks, Seán.

BREAK
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We hope you’re enjoying this second season of The Glimpse. It’s just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We’re the founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead.

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[Break ends]

Seán
Jane Clarke, welcome back to The Glimpse. You've chosen for us a poem by Natasha Trethewey. Would you tell us a little bit about it?

Jane
Yes, it's, it's a pantoum.

Seán
And I was going to ask you that, so I'm glad you said. (They laugh.) I was here googling the rules of pantoons, just to check that it definitely was. Okay.

Jane
So the, you know, the second and fourth lines repeated as the first and third lines of the following stanza. But it's such a fabulous pantoum; it's a really chilling poem. And it is, you know, about a cross-burning by the KKK on a lawn in Mississippi. Well, I presume in Mississippi, because that's where Natasha Trethewey grew up. And I think what's really striking about the poem is the understatement and the reticence.

Seán
Yeah, it's a really chilling, quite strange poem. I read it a couple of times before I got this picture coalescing of what was, what was happening. Would you read it for us?

Jane
Yes.

Incident
by Natasha Trethewey

We tell the story every year—
how we peered from the windows, shades drawn—
though nothing really happened,
the charred grass now green again.

We peered from the windows, shades drawn,
at the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
the charred grass still green. Then
we darkened our rooms, lit the hurricane lamps.

At the cross trussed like a Christmas tree,
A few men gathered, white as angels in their gowns.
We darkened our rooms and lit hurricane lamps,
the wicks trembling in their fonts of oil.

It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns.
When they were done, they left quietly. No one came.
The wicks trembled all night in their fonts of oil;
by morning the flames had all dimmed.

When they were done, the men left quietly. No one came.
Nothing really happened.
By morning all the flames had dimmed.
We tell the story every year.

"Incident" from Monument by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright (c) 2006 and 2018 by Natasha Trethewey. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Massie & McQuilkin as agents for the author.

Seán
It's such a brilliant poem. I wonder if part of the reason that it's, it's so chilling is, is that actually, if you read it in one way, and you take some of the cues of the language, you have angels, Christmas trees, a sense of almost holiness with the candles and the fonts, and it might read in the back of your mind like an entirely different poem. And there's something about the way in which that scene is being made to sit alongside religious and Christmas-like settings that throws the mind in such a strange and surreal direction that by the time it coalesces in your head what's going on and what the story is actually about, you find yourself very disturbed by, by the set of images that have been chosen for it.

Jane
Yes. And like you say, I think you do have to read it a few times to get a really good sense of actually what's happening here.

Seán
Yeah, yeah. It's, it's really chilling. I think the pantoum as well—it's not a form I've ever tried to write in, because I always run scared of, of kind of received forms, particularly repeating forms. But there's something about the way that these images recur and are subtly changed. You know, we go over the course of a night, but the same ideas keep on returning. It feels like a dream. It feels like a distant memory, the way this, the set of images are just pushing at the back of the consciousness of the poem.

Jane
Yes, and obviously the first line “We tell the story every year,” so doesn't the repetition do that as well? So we keep telling the story through the poem as well. And that's a bit like a family story that, you know, the way it does get told again and again. And there are some details that get repeated. And you sometimes wonder, “Well, what, was it actually like that?” But we get attached to those details as a way of telling it.

Seán
Yeah, and, and even that line seems to be somewhat undone by the poem. “We tell the story every year.” So you're kind of led to expect events and narrative and resolution. And it doesn't, almost doesn't fit the word story at all. It feels like there's a sort of doubt and strangeness in the way that it's made. But it has this secret underneath it that is just slowly boiling away in an unsettling way. And I wonder, if you know, do you think that this is an example of how that restraint in poetry works to good effect? Is that something that, you know, drew you to this poem as well?

Jane
Yeah. I think the, the holding back, the restraint, makes us feel it all the more. That's what it does for me, because she doesn't spill out all the different feelings, and that—for any family to go through that, the horror of that! I mean, surely we go through the trauma every single year. We relive the trauma every year. But she steps back from that. She doesn't allow herself to do that. She doesn't say, “Look at the terrible thing that happened to us.” She just puts it at a distance. And through that, then, we have our reaction, whereas otherwise we'd be just reading her reaction. Do you see what I mean? But I think she, she allows, you know, so much space for the reader to feel it themselves by that distance.

Seán
Yeah, there's something about the poem, and I was looking to see if there was actually a clue to this, or if I’d just assumed it, and I think I've just assumed it. But it feels like the way a child might experience a scene. Perhaps it's putting us in a place where we don't quite know what's going on, but we see these, these men arrive, and why should they be “like angels?” You know, there's no reason that these men, once we know who they are, should be described as being “like angels,” but maybe that's an association in a child's mind.

Jane
Yes!

Seán
Did you read it as a child perspective, or?

Jane
Yeah, yes. I, well, I probably did, actually, when you say that, because it reminded me of a story my mother told, and what happened to my mother was when she was three, so obviously, you know, she was telling the story through a child's eyes. So I think you're right. I think that’s part of what gives it a very particular tone.

Seán
Yeah, and there's something about, you know, that even the way you were speaking before, about how, you know, it might take 30 years for an idea to click into place. And sometimes that's what we do with childhood memories as well. You know, we, we, for some reason, have remembered something someone said to us, or that we saw a certain thing when we were three or four years old, and then maybe 20 or 30 years later, we get the second piece of information that clicks it, and we think, “Ah, that's what that was,” or “That's why I remember it.”

Jane
I think that's a really, really good way of looking at it, the idea of the child and then the adult working with it, because, like you say, like even fonts of oil, there's the religious symbology coming in there. So, so I think it's that mixture of, you know, the child's impression, the family's way of repeating it, and then an adult, I think, realizing what this all is. And I think the poet lets us be the adult, realizing, and almost looking at the child behind the curtains looking out. We can see this family looking out at what's happening.

Seán
Even the reluctance in the title, to name what the incident is. You know, that's another way of holding a secret inside the poem. And, you know, there's something deeply kind of unsettling about these angels kind of appearing at a house. And “the charred grass now green again.” Or “the charred grass still green.” That seems to put me in two different time frames in this poem. You know, it's gone back to being green or, or it was green and then it was charred. You know, it, it's kind of mixing time in a really interesting way.

Jane
And isn't it sort of exploring history in the present, because the charred grass is now green, but actually it was charred. It'll always have been charred by—what happened shapes that lawn today. You know, as, as what happened shapes that family and that community and that society and that country.

Seán
Which is something perhaps, about the, the pantoum that helps there as well, because it's a circular, kind of repeating form. Even if it moves somewhere, you kind of get the sense of pantoums, so I do, that they might just go on after you've finished reading them, you know, like they keep on moving around in circles, even if you're not there to watch them.

I often say to students, you know, you can write it in a form and then dismantle the form around it, but sometimes the form helps you get to, to where you need to go. It doesn't have to end up as a pantoum, it can be unmade in a better way than you might have made it just with your own devices. And what are you working on now?

Jane
Well, I'm working on my fourth collection, which is exciting, and I have a date, September 26th.

Seán
Oh, you do? Oh, that’s exciting, that’s great. (She laughs.)

Jane
I’m very excited. So, no, I'm still, you know, getting it there, you know, but, yeah, that's, that's the plan at the moment. And then I'm also working on a book of my poems, illustrations, and some reflections about making space for nature in Ireland. So they're my two projects at the moment.

Seán
That is plenty to be getting on with. I can’t wait for the new collection. Jane Clarke, it has been such a pleasure to speak to you and hear about all these poems and your thoughts about them. Thank you very much for coming on to The Glimpse.

Jane
Thank you, Sean. I've really enjoyed it.

Seán
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt.

Jane’s poem “Spalls” is from her book A Change in the Air, published in 2023 and aired with the permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Natasha Trethewey’s poem "Incident" is from her book Monument, Copyright (c) 2006 and 2018 by Natasha Trethewey. It was aired with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Massie & McQuilkin as agents for the author.

Make sure to subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org/podcast. We’d also love to hear from you; drop us an email at theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com.

The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I’m your host, Seán Hewitt. Our Senior Producer is Jennifer Wolfe, Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive Director, and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead.

And that’s it for this second season of The Glimpse! It’s been a pleasure to be in conversation with these writers and their words, and to share those conversations with you. I hope you’ll keep it going, keep reading poems, and join us for the next season of The Glimpse. Thanks for listening.