Monday must mean more of The Poems We Made Along The Way.
Today’s episode is with Taz Rahman. We spoke about line endings, poetry libraries, and Plato’s realm of the forms. We have it all.
Find our conversation on your preferred podcast platform. Share, like, and tell me your highlights.
The Poems We Made Along The Way is back!
Series six starts with my interview with Michael Symmons Roberts.
We spoke about his new collection Dogstar, working in collaboration (mainly with composers), and the filmmaker Tarkovsky*.
Find episodes and other info here: linktr.ee/thepoemswemade
Limestone Quarry, Knaresborough It’s not my fault the rocks are insane, I’m just announcing stone-intent. If you were two-hundred-million years old and each century was worth less than a grain of sand if you had been mud and coral in Pangea and saw extinctions and then in the great yawn of tectonic plates became a little spit of something that one day would be England, if humans were the latest news, a misplaced handaxe your first trinket, if you watched Romans introduce gods and rabbits, if you saw Christ carried in a book, if you were a sprawl of caves, a castle, a cliff, a series of shrines, generations of homes, if you wore a vast forest as a cloak, if you buried a prophet, dug up a saint, if you kissed the last boar goodbye, if you became black with soot, if the forest was shorn to a sliver, if the river washed you to sand, if the day and night were a spinning top and your voice was the great echo of grit, if there was no moving through your history but the history was you over and over and over again, wouldn’t you be a mudslide, a haunt, a great unspoken secret?
Blog post: Inspiration behind the poem If you sit me down and ask me to guess the length of a minute, I’ll wander off midway through, come back a half-hour later and ask you what time it is. For someone this thoroughly timeblind, I have a peculiar obsession with it. Deep time, in particular, the way that it passes for a stone or fossil not measured in days, but in the long yawn of epochs. It’s a scale utterly unimaginable for any of us. In Knaresborough (a Yorkshire market town) when I was a teenager, I met a man who kept a vertical garden. A normal garden would stop where it reached the edge of a cliff-face, but his simply went on up, dug into it, occasionally supported on wooden two-by-fours. It was a fantastic endeavour in non-euclidian landscaping complete with fishpond, at least ten feet up. In front of the garden was his bookshop, poky and ancient like himself. One year during a summer squall, he told me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of haunted furniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day. Another year, he claimed his garden, his cliffs and the caves under them as the birthplace of a prophetess. He said to me that he’d had an archaeology student spend a summer with him. When this had happened, I couldn’t guess. This archaeology student spent a summer digging in those caves, looking for the tunnels that supposedly ran from there up to Knaresborough Castle. Instead, he found
stone tools and Roman coins. Proof that there’s been people continuously living in and around these cliffs for almost as long as there’s been people on this island. Time flattens. I see myself returning here at fifteen, at twenty-five and all the years between, slipping between Royalists with their muskets, medieval hermits, Georgians on their way to take the waters at Harrogate, Roman legionaries, and my strange, nimble bookseller. But even that is a short gasp compared to the stones themselves. Knaresborough is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which given that limestone is formed from calcite and that calcite was once ancient sealife, I figure those cliffs to be about 99% ghosts—scientifically speaking. And look at everything those ghosts have seen! The last time I visited my bookseller, the shop was shuttered. He had been elderly the whole time I had known him, and I suppose time must have caught up to him at last. Though, I almost don’t believe it. How can I? When I see him vanishing into those ancient caves, his ghost stories, that green cliff of his own making.
A sample poem from my forthcoming @ninearchespress.bsky.social collection and a blog post. Something about time, booksellers and folklore 💚
05.03.2026 11:59 — 👍 22 🔁 10 💬 1 📌 1Thank you Mat!
02.03.2026 09:36 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
YOU CAN NOW PRE-ORDER MY BOOK 💚🪱
also, look at my babygirl worm on the cover 😭
*a friend kindly bought me the screenplays of Tarkovsky which of course I promptly lost, several years of searching my house high and low I found it fallen behind a bookshelf this weekend. Its reemergence is being treated as an auspicious sign.
02.03.2026 09:00 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The Poems We Made Along The Way is back!
Series six starts with my interview with Michael Symmons Roberts.
We spoke about his new collection Dogstar, working in collaboration (mainly with composers), and the filmmaker Tarkovsky*.
Find episodes and other info here: linktr.ee/thepoemswemade
Mark your calendars!!! The Poems We Made Along the Way is back Monday.
I interviewed poet, librettist, MMU Professor Michael Symmons Roberts about his new collection Dogstar, filmmaker Tarkovsky, faith in poetry, and much more.
Go to the link in my pinned post to subscribe so you don’t miss out.
The pamphlet and CD editions of 'To the End of the Land' by Martin Heslop and Helen Tookey: the blue-grey coastal edge of Nova Scotia, with dilapidated wooden lobster traps in the foreground, sea and distant land beyond, and white clouds and blue sky above.
I hold out my hands to show they are empty
that we’ve come for a while to the end of things
To the End of the Land: a text/audio collaboration between Martin Heslop & Helen Tookey, grounded in the landscapes of Nova Scotia. Order the pamphlet & CD here:
longbarrowpress.com/current-publ...
one thing that sucks about being a tech critic is seeing all the ways people justify tech addition and the use of services that are socially harmful and degrade not just labor rights but the wider society because they’ve personally developed a dependence and can’t see any other way of doing things
15.02.2026 23:06 — 👍 234 🔁 44 💬 3 📌 2Thanks Ian! It was a dream talking to you and I’m looking forward to people getting to hear the conversation.
14.02.2026 17:20 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1Absolute pleasure talking to Ian. You are all in for a treat with the upcoming series of The Poems We Made Along The Way.
14.02.2026 17:17 — 👍 10 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
screenshot from the Subway Takes video of a guy with long hair and a blue shirt holding a subway metro card / microphone “I think we need to destroy the data centers”
me in any conversation about anything lately:
13.02.2026 18:09 — 👍 5755 🔁 1576 💬 8 📌 79
The £750 will be distributed as we see fit.
The amazing Jackie/Jax wanted the cash to support a creative community project that would take place in the north-west (or online).
Please share and like this post. No leaflet this year, so we're relying on social media to get the word out.❤️
The ‘We’ll be Reet’ Jax Hagan Award is back!
£750 AVAILABLE
Tell us about a creative thing and your chosen people/community, and why you’re the right person to do this lovely thing. Keep to one side of A4 and paste into an email, or email a BSL message.
Send to cathnichols@outlook.com by 31st MARCH
gotta agree with this. at some point we all have to contend with what good faith is actually for and extend it accordingly
07.02.2026 15:51 — 👍 2484 🔁 434 💬 36 📌 11
I'm intolerant to gluten, so don't try me guys. Maybe bonedust bread is better than what I've currently got.
In all seriousness, the subs guidelines are pretty simple and I'd love to read your work!
Done! (At least I hope so)
26.01.2026 19:51 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I’ll take three books, dealers choice, if that is okay?
25.01.2026 20:27 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Damaged Braag Books (minor visible scuffs) up for grabs for the cost of postage only! £2.50 for up to three books via paypal (UK).
We've got
5 x Sarah Westcott's Pond
4 x Sarah Royston's Fernseed
1 x Andrew Cartwright's Necrosmologies
1 x Nina Murray's Gannota
Comment to claim 💚
You could buy it and buy a cute charity shop outfit in the charity shop sale.
08.01.2026 16:55 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
The most common and stupid misconceptions are that wages are low because immigration and prices are high due to 'the cost of living'.
When obviously wages are low because your bosses don't want to pay you and prices are high because billionaires are greedy.
Press the A button to continue your quest
02.01.2026 05:23 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
This weeks episode is with the excellent Natalie Shapero. We talked about jokes, line breaks, and how being a lawyer and poet is similar (sort of).
The Poems We Made Along The Way can be found wherever good podcasts can be found.
And of course, have a great Christmas.
Here’s the recording of the online launch of Hôtel Amour — with Olivia McCannon @oliviamcc.bsky.social
Menna Elfyn #mennaelfyn #parch #thelivesofz #hotelamour
m.youtube.com/watch?v=LpXk...
Listen to Catherine-Esther Cowie discuss her T. S. Eliot nominated collection on podcast The Poems We Made Along The Way! 🎧⬇️
open.spotify.com/episode/7JkI...?
Get Heirloom:⬇️
www.carcanet.co.uk/978180017479...
The Catherine-Esther Cowie epsiode along with all previous episodes can be found here
15.12.2025 08:56 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Today’s episode of The Poems We Made Along the Way is with the wonderful Catherine-Esther Cowie.
We spoke about her @tseliotprize.bsky.social shortlisted collection Heirloom, the new Rosalía album Lux, and using persona poetry as a type of mask work.
Listen wherever good podcasts can be found.
In case you’ve missed it you should check out my conversation with Isabelle Baafi.
11.12.2025 11:11 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Isabelle Baafi is my guest on today’s episode of The Poems We Made Along The Way. We spoke about how being a poetry critic informs writing poetry, Dungeons and Dragons, and using poetic forms.
Check it out wherever good podcasts can be found including Apple Podcasts
