You are about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about what goes into making one.

I'm Sadata Sese, an assistant commissioner of podcasts for BBC Sounds.

I pull a lot of levers to support a diverse range of podcasts on all sorts of subjects,

relationships, identity, comedy, even one that mixes poetry, music and inner city life.

So one day I'll be helping host develop their ideas, the next fact-checking, a feature,

and the next looking at how a podcast connects with its audience, and maybe that's you.

So if you like this podcast, check out some others on BBC Sounds.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.

A very crude difference between novels and poetry, wrote Philip Larkin,

is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.

But what happens when you weave the two?

Later on open book,

Anne Enright, one of Ireland's greatest prose stylists, tells me about including her poetry in a new novel The Wren the Wren. First today though, a writer who considers himself a poet

who only occasionally writes novels, but this side hustle of his has produced three hugely acclaimed

works, leaving the Atotcha Station, 1004 and the Topeka School. This month, Ben Lerner returned

to his first love by bringing together prose and poetry written over the last 13 years

in a brand new collection called The Lights. It's a playful, inquiring and invocative investigation into fatherhood

and anxieties in the contemporary moment.

When I spoke to Ben on the line from his home in Brooklyn,

I asked him about the relationship between his poetry and fiction.

I mean, I think for me, each genre is like a laboratory

to kind of test what happens when ideas or motifs

...