Welcome…
to Poems talking with Irish poet Ciaran O’Driscoll and me, John Davies. After the first pilot episode we put together in November, this session, recorded in December, still feels like another pilot while we hone our approach.
Here you’ll find another discussion of our draft poems recorded on Zoom. I think we still have a way to go in getting the balance right between poems and people, but the audio is generally good quality. And below you’ll find transcripts of both poems and a recording of my draft, before Ciaran’s comments!
We’re planning on publishing Poems talking on a monthly basis, but we’ll see how it goes. Ciaran is taking some time out in January for some hospital treatment so sending him best wishes for a speedy recovery. We have another pilot in the can, so I may send that out before Ciaran returns in February.
In the meantime, sending everyone warmest wishes for 2026 and all success with your writing.
Composition process
At the risk of being accused of liking the sound of my own voice too much, and at an even higher risk of exposing the rather faulty machinery of my own composition process, this episode of Poems talking features the first draft of my long poem, Anaphora, The Crying of Kraków. In writing it, I try to understand the reasons I burst into tears in the Basilica of St Mary in that wonderful Polish city, one Sunday in late September.
We also take a look at Ciaran’s – you’ll be glad to know – much shorter poem entitled Words for a World, which has a Cuban context.
Draft poems
Here’s Ciaran’s draft of Words for the World:
And here’s a draft and a recording of my poem. This is the version Ciaran discusses.
And here’s the recording:
You can also read a brief record of how the poem came about in the note I sent to Ciaran about the context of the poem.
I’ll post a final version of the poem once it has gone through my editing mill, which might be in a year or two! There’s a way to go and there’s no shortage of poetic blunders, faux pas and clangers in my early version.
But that’s the point really. From the start our aim in Poems talking has been to show and discuss our work so that other poets – whether just beginning or justly famous – can see how we make decisions about writing and editing our poems. We hope that pointing out missteps and gaffes may prove helpful to others.
Although still something of a pilot, we hope you enjoy this edition of Poems talking...
PS. Curiously and coincidentally, in the time since we recorded this, President Trump has removed Nicolas Maduro and his wife to New York, making Ciaran’s poem pointedly and rather prophetically relevant.
Some notes
Anaphora: The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses. OED - ‘repetition of a word or phrase in successive clauses,’ 1580s, from Latin, from Greek ‘anaphora’, literally ‘a carrying back,’ from anapherein ‘to carry back, to bring up,’ from ana ‘back’ (see ana-) + pherein ‘to bear’.
Ciaran mentions a phrase ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’, which he attributed to Coleridge but is in fact from a letter written by Keats, who does mention Coleridge immediately after the phrase.
Excerpt from John Keats letter to his ‘dear brothers’
Sunday [21st December 1817]
Hampstead
…Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
Ciaran mentions the line ‘Black milk of morning we drink you’ from Paul Celan’s poem Death Fugue, which you can find here in an English translation by Pierre Joris together with the German original.
You can find the original poem Guantanamera by José Martí here with an English translation - the version sung by Pete Seeger.
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