Episode 67 / 17 January 2021
Theatres, museums, clubs, cinemas, the whole cultural sphere is under lockdown in many places all over Europe and beyond. Yet culture still has a key role in many peoples lives, watching movies, making music or fine art, reading novels, playing complex games – and reading poetry. Poetry, so it seemed in more than one of this podcast’s past conversations, has even gained attention in the pandemic, as a number of people have turned to poems to find focus, solace, entertainment and inspiration, to name but a few ways to appreciate poetry.
So it is high time that we have a poet as a guest in this podcast – and we are honoured and delighted that Wendy Cope has agreed to join in for today’s episode.
Kapitel
- 0:06 Welcome and introducing Wendy Cope
- 4:05 „To My Husband“ and why not „Que Sera Sera“
- 6:25 No more poetry, and no worry about it
- 8:36 Lockdown projects: Babbel, diary, old photographs
- 12:22 Poetry needs strong emotion, prose does not
- 14:51 „Happiness writes white“ is not true
- 16:45 What a poet actually does for a living
- 20:36 Readings abroad and learning German
- 23:14 Performance poets in the crisis, new books
- 26:06 Poems written in code for other poets
- 28:21 How to start reading poetry: anthologies
- 31:51 Heine, Housman and translating rhyme
- 33:33 Trends: ethnic minority and performance poets
- 34:55 Inspiration: Hilary Mantel and crime fiction
- 37:17 Closing poem „Every“ and farewell
Shownotes
In Conversation with Martin Zierold
Wendy Cope has worked for fifteen years as a primary-school teacher in London. Her first collection of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986 and became an immediate bestseller. Her 2011 collection of poems Family Values has been chosen amongst the Telegraph’s „15 Best Poetry Books of All Times“, and her most recent collection Anecdotal Evidence was published in 2018. She has received numerous awards and edited a number of wonderful collections of poetry, amongst them a collection Funny Side of 101 humorous poems. A great entry point into her work is provided by the collection: Two Cures for Love with selected poems of hers from 1979-2006.
Wendy Cope has kindly agreed to read two poems from her book Anecdotal Evidence in this podcast episode:
To My Husband – by Wendy Cope
published in Anecdotal Evidence, Faber & Faber, 2018
(reproduced with kind permission by the author)
Every – by Wendy Cope
published in Anecdotal Evidence, Faber & Faber, 2018
(reproduced with kind permission by the author)
Weblinks
Wendy Cope author’s page at Faber & Faber
„Staying Human“, edited by Neil Astley
Anthology of contemporary poetry – recommended by Wendy Cope