The LRB Podcast

Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material for poetry, starting with a look at Milton’s prose arguments in favour of divorce and the ways in which ‘confessional’ poets such as Lowell and Sexton took on divorce as a subject alongside other taboo subjects and subverted the traditional poetry of romantic failure.

They then turn to three more recent examples. In Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’, a picture of a marriage is constructed through defamiliarised domestic objects and the political metaphors of postwar Germany. Anne Carson’s ‘fictional essay’ The Beauty of a Husband draws on different genres and the writings of Keats to make sense of a chaotic, lonely experience with an untruthful husband. And in ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi chooses the palindromic form of the ‘specular’ as a metaphor for the non-linear collapse of a marriage.

Read Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’ in the LRB: https://lrb.me/divorcepoem

Further listening:

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford on Lowell and Carson: https://lrb.me/ldptwpod

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
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HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projected cost of more than £100 billion, and perhaps won’t even be ‘high speed’. To discuss what this failure tells us about Britain’s capacity to build things and the consequences for our everyday lives, James is joined by Gill Plimmer, the FT's infrastructure correspondent, and Matthew Lawrence, director of Common Wealth. They discuss the unique features of the UK’s ‘outsourcing state’, beset by bloated projects weighed down by the increasing costs of private capital, and the long, corrosive impact of the failure of David Cameron’s government to invest in infrastructure when borrowing was cheap.

Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠

From the LRB

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When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider what happens when poetry, and poets, meet technology, and why a poem itself can, in Paul Valéry’s description, be such a powerful ‘kind of machine’. They explore ambivalent attitudes to technology in three poems: Mina Loy’s ‘Time Bomb’ is a reflection on the extreme destruction of the atomic bomb and the power of scientific discovery; Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘A World Where News Travelled Slowly’ charts a history of technology that involves the gradual removal of the human body from methods of communication; and in Jorie Graham’s ‘Honeycomb’, fragments of technology reveal a divided self sitting at a desk in front of a computer, seen but not known by multiple tools of surveillance.

Read Jorie Graham's poem in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/ptwgraham

Mina Loy's 'Time Bomb' is published in 'The Lost Lunar Baedeker' (Carcanet, 1997, edited by Roger L Conover)

For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day.

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry

Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets
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Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering the concepts of both work and play in the writing process. They then look at three poems that address workplace experiences. Valzhyna Mort’s ‘Factory of Tears’ and Robert Crawford’s ‘Jesus Christ endorses the new Hillman Imp’ both deploy technocratic, management speak to expose the emotional labour of manual work, in one case for someone trapped in a relentless system, in the other for someone cast out by redundancy. In 'During the Pandemic', Romalyn Ante describes the experience of being an NHS nurse at the start of the Covid pandemic and the role of language in carework.

For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day.

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry

Read Robert Crawford's poem in the LRB: https://lrb.me/crawfordtwep1

Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets

Watch this episode our YouTube channel: https://lrb.me/twep1yt
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The transformations of European politics over the past twenty years, including Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the rise of post-Soviet strongmen, are often explained as part of a ‘wave’ of populism. But as Jan-Werner Müller argues, populism is best understood as a form of politics that claims to represent the ‘real’ people and delegitimise its opponents, rather than a catch-all way to describe far-right and left-wing movements.

In this episode, Müller talks to James Butler about why misleading interpretations of populism have proved so dangerous for traditional parties, and the role of technocracy and digital platforms in the rise of anti-democratic politics.

From the LRB

Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

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