{"id":3537,"date":"2021-03-22T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2021-03-22T08:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/?p=3537"},"modified":"2021-05-23T19:52:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-23T18:52:48","slug":"pbs-spring-choice-jen-hadfield-and-rowan-ricardo-phillips-in-conversation-with-john-challis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/?p=3537","title":{"rendered":"Review: PBS Spring Choice: Jen Hadfield and Rowan Ricardo Phillips in conversation with John Challis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>PBS\u2019s Spring Recommendation Living Weapon (Faber, 2021) is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light homing in on our political moment. Rowan\u2019s poetry reveals the limitations of our vocabulary, showing that our platitudes are inadequate to the brutal times we find ourselves in. And yet, through interrogation of allegory and symbol, names and things, time and musicality, a language of grace and urgency is found. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span class='embed-youtube' style='text-align:center; display: block;'><iframe class='youtube-player' type='text\/html' width='640' height='390' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tFPbFzvW97I?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;fs=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;wmode=transparent' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen='true'><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Rowan delivered a variety of poems from his highlighted release <em>Living Weapon<\/em>, as well as teasing some new poems from his collection <em>Lost<\/em>. Poems from <em>Living Weapon<\/em> included \u2018Prelude\u2019, \u2018History\u2019, \u2018Even Homer Nods\u2019, \u2018The Peacock\u2019 and a brief collection titled \u2018Trinidadian Triptych\u2019. Poems from his newest collection included \u2018Book 1\u2019, \u2018Romanticism\u2019 and \u2018Vespers\u2019. John reflected on how Rowan\u2019s poems worked to reanimate our understanding of the literary canon, challenging traditional attitudes towards poetry.<\/p>\n<p><strong><em>The PBS\u2019s Spring Choice \u2018The Stone Age\u2019 is a timely reminder that our neurodiversity is a gift: we do not all see the world in the same way, and Hadfield\u2019s lyric line and unashamedly high-stakes wordplay provide nothing less than a portal into a different kind of being. The Stone Age is the work of a singular artist at the height of her powers \u2013 one which dramatically extends and enriches the range of our shared experience.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span class='embed-youtube' style='text-align:center; display: block;'><iframe class='youtube-player' type='text\/html' width='640' height='390' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tFPbFzvW97I?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;fs=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;wmode=transparent' frameborder='0' allowfullscreen='true'><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Jen followed Rowan\u2019s roaring triumph of literature with her own impressive collection, starting with poems from her recent release <em>The Stone Age<\/em>, some of which she\u2019d never performed to an audience before. She spoke on the collection&#8217;s emphasis on language, a necessity that, while universal in nature, is contrasting in practice. This included poems such as \u2018Ovea, \u2018Ert-fast\u2019, \u2018Scythe\u2019 (which spoke blatantly on the diverse nature of language) and \u2018Strimmer\u2019. These poems, which were perhaps more serious in their discussion of language, contrasted the following poems, which were more light-hearted in nature.<\/p>\n<p>These poems included \u2018Nudibranch\u2019, \u2018Cliff\u2019 and \u2018Lunar Transmission\u2019 (which boasted a unique structure in her text, posing as a rainbow-like zenith with a steep drop). \u2018Rhubarb\u2019 posed a narrative in which two people that are so comfortable with one another have a unique connection, where often language isn\u2019t the limit. Jen finished her readings with a poem named \u2018Shadows\u2019, the peppy segue towards audience questions.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q: How did you enter into certain dialogues in your respective collections? Did you find these dialogues impossible to avoid?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jen: <\/strong>I spent a lot of time paddling around in rock-pools and looking as closely as I could to the shore. Part of it is that I love the atmosphere, and sometimes when you look closely enough you have this feeling that time is changing. A rock-pool, if this happens, can grow to encompass you and you can lose your sense of past, present and future. You feel very small, and a part of the web of other beings. Sometimes a line or two comes to me through that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rowan:<\/strong> I\u2019ll second Jen! The answer for me would be the latter, they are impossible to avoid. When I have the good fortune to spend time with you all, or drink tea or go for a walk, unquestionably poetry leaks out into my sentences as it\u2019s part of my language. When I write I don\u2019t deny that impulse. Poetry is how I understand the world. My poetry really is a mirror held up to [my] inside engagements.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q: What topics or ideas do you find difficult to write about?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Rowan: <\/strong>A lot of the topics that I find difficult to write about, I actually end up writing about! I was born and raised in New York, and always thought I wouldn\u2019t write about 9\/11, but my first book was a sort of meditation towards that event. In <em>Living Weapon<\/em> one of the final poems is clearly a poem speaking to my daughters, and I always felt I wouldn\u2019t write poems about children. Other than that I can\u2019t think of many others &#8211; I struggle to write poetry in Barcelona, as I see that as a time to relax and read.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Jen: <\/strong>I find writing hard a lot of the time, so I often don\u2019t write for a long time and then feel inspired to [put pen to paper]. Without a doubt anything I intend to write doesn\u2019t fly, I spend my life trying to escape my own intention, but I still keep trying as I think it\u2019s the only way to stay fluent in that language.<\/p>\n<p>You can watch the full event on our YouTube channel <strong><u>here<\/u><\/strong>, and to make sure you don\u2019t miss another NCLA events, you can sign up to our mailing list <strong><u>here.<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Jen Hadfield&#8217;s fourth poetry collection <em>The Stone Age<\/em> (Picador, 2021) explores neurodiversity. Passionately involved with the wild world, she uses poetry, lyrical essay and, occasionally, sculpture in cast porcelain, to try and share her intense experience of the here-and-now.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of three books of poems (Heaven, The Ground and Living Weapon) and two essay collections (The Circuit and When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness).<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>John Challis is the author of The Resurrectionists, due out from Bloodaxe in 2021, and the pamphlet, The Black Cab (Poetry Salzburg, 2017), which was a 2019 New Writing North Read Regional title.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Thomas Moorcroft, the author of this post, is an English Literature and History student currently on placement with the NCLA.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PBS\u2019s Spring Recommendation Living Weapon (Faber, 2021) is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light homing in on our political moment&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[750,353,749,751],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3537"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3565,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3537\/revisions\/3565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.nclacommunity.org\/content\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}