New anthology from Lunar Poetry Podcasts

A new poetry anthology compiled by Bristol-based David and Lizzy Turner, the duo behind the very popular Lunar Poetry Podcasts, is published this month. Why Poetry? presents the work of 28 superb poets, all former guests of the podcast series, including Helen Mort, Melissa Lee-Houghton, Rishi Dastidar, Jane Yeh and Joe Dunthorne. David and Lizzy spoke to Joe Melia about the anthology, the podcast series and the Bristol poetry scene.

What inspired you to set up the Lunar Poetry Podcast series?

David: In 2014 I was writing reviews of live poetry events for Lunar Poetry Magazine and having conversations with poets at these events about their writing process and the development of their performance styles. Whilst I really enjoyed trying to communicate my thoughts in print through the magazine I found the (very generous) word count a bit limiting and increasingly what I really wanted to publish was the conversations I was having with the poets themselves.

After talking this through with LPM editor Paul McMenemy we agreed that I would go away and record three interviews and see how they turned out.

It’s a bit difficult to explain but I didn’t really want to start a podcast, what I really wanted was a zine made up of long-form interviews and it just seemed easier to record and publish them rather than sit down and type them out.

Lunar has grown into a really popular, respected series in just four years. Did you expect it to do so well?

David: No! Joking (not joking). I can’t believe that anyone wanted to listen in the first place as I really had no idea what I was doing and the production was often pretty shoddy but even from the beginning at least 150-200 people would listen to each episode. The fact that that number has only continued to grow still baffles me but probably says more about my relationship with the sound of my own voice than the series itself.

Lizzy:  I’m not sure we had any expectations at the beginning, we just enjoyed talking to people and focused on making our range of guests as interesting as possible. We’ve tried our best to do more than ask standard interview questions, and to really provide our audience with insights into the meanings of creative practice, and I think this has contributed naturally to the popularity of the series. We’re still delighted by each positive response to what we do, and glad that people agree with what we find interesting!

Why Poetry? anthology presents the work of 28 brilliant poets, all previous Lunar Poetry Podcast guests

How much influence has producing the podcasts had on your own writing?

David: For the moment it seems to have killed it stone dead! Producing a podcast without a network behind you is all-consuming and often by the time I’ve finished editing an episode (anywhere between 10 and 14 hours) I don’t want to even think about poetry for a few days. It has, though, had an undeniably profound effect on the way I now think about reading, writing and performing poetry and if I ever do return to writing anything more than a poem every six months I’m sure it will have had an enormous effect.

What is absolutely true is that I now think far more than ever about the process of writing, almost to the point that the poem is almost an unpleasant consequence of the act of writing. I spoke about this recently in episode 116 with Ross Sutherland and how his live shows and his own podcast Imaginary Advice are attempts to share the writing process with his audience as he pushes the process to breaking point.

Yup, producing the podcast has made me want to break my own poems.

Why did you decide to publish an anthology?

Lizzy: It felt like a natural step to take. We love the thought that the podcast has begun with poems, our guests have read them aloud on recording, some have been transcribed, then we’ve collected a selection of work into this book and brought the project full circle. It is also great to have a distillation of the project in this brilliant selection of work, it’s a brief but rich summary of the huge amount we’ve brought together.

David: The series is a spoken word project as it’s literally recordings of people speaking but I didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that every guest on the podcast has talked of their work in relation to the act of writing. It was always fundamental to the series that we linked it back to that word ‘poetry’, well that and Stuart Bartholomew at Verve Poetry Press asked us if we wanted to publish a book and we both nearly slipped off our chairs because, yes, we did very much want to publish a book.

How did you approach selecting the writers and poems for the anthology?

Lizzy: We sat down together and made a long list of former guests, then went through it in stages to cut it down to the 28 we have, trying to keep it as varied, representative and balanced as possible. We’ve got a great mix of poets, in many ways. Once the 28 had submitted work to us, we each went through separately and chose our favourite poems. After that we compared lists, found we agreed on most of the choices and then discussed at length the ones we didn’t! We were very lucky that everyone got back to us, and with such high-quality work. It felt lovely that they were so keen to be involved.

https://soundcloud.com/lunar-poetry-podcasts/ep117-andrew-mcmillan-transcript-available

Do you have plans to publish more books?

David: I have a grand plan to edit down the growing list of 80+ episode transcripts we have available to download on our website into a book which examines the links and concurrent themes that run through these conversations. I think compiling the texts together and grouping them thoughtfully could provide an invaluable overview of British poetry and spoken word since 2014. It would, however, be a pretty mammoth task and perhaps impossible while I’m still host/editor/producer of the series.

Having moved to the city from London quite recently, what do you think of the poetry scene in Bristol?

Lizzy: It’s been really fun and fascinating to have the privilege of exploring a second city for the scene it has to offer. For its size, Bristol has a vibrant and busy scene. There are pretty extreme differences between the various factions of the poetry scene here and I think there must be something for almost everyone. For myself, becoming engaged with the prominent experimental side has been really beneficial. My writing has flourished!

There are lots of talented writers here doing excellent work, both in terms of their writing / performing, and also in terms of what they do for other writers. To name a few: Paul Hawkins (founder of Hesterglock Press), Clive Birnie (founder of Burning Eye Books), Caleb Parkin, and Holly Corfield-Carr – they are all incredibly imaginative and delightful poets and facilitators who invest a lot in keeping poetry alive and well. It is also great to be close to Cardiff where people like Hanan Issa and Durre Shahwar (founders of Where I’m Coming From) are doing a lot of work to establish a thriving scene.

Why Poetry? The Lunar Poetry Podcasts Anthology is published on September 27. For more information, visit vervepoetrypress.com/product/why-poetry/

Read more: Interview with Bristol poetry publisher, Burning Eye Books

Main photo: Lizzy and David Turner (credit Thom Bartley)