The Book Club: poetry with Don Paterson

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Sam's guest in this episode is the poet Don Paterson — whose new book Zonal finds him accessing a new, confessional mode, a longer line and a childhood interest in the spooky TV show The Twilight Zone. Don talks about the relationship between poetry and jazz, the split between 'page poetry' and spoken-word material, the shortcomings of Rupi Kaur, whether poems should include 'spoiler alerts', and lifts the lid on his vicious feud with the man he calls 'Alan Jacket'.

The Book Club is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before you start listening to this podcast, we've got a special subscription offer. You can get 12
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0:24.1	Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books Podcast.
0:27.0	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.
0:29.4	And this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Don Patterson,
0:32.5	who's a poet and poetry editor and teacher and writer about poetry
0:36.3	and one of our foremost national authorities on the subject.
0:40.0	His new book is called Zonal, and it's a collection of poems which kicks off in some ways from the Twilight Zone of all things.
0:50.2	Don, well, can you tell me a bit to start with what was it that made you think that the first season of the Twilight Zone was a kind of good point on which to hang poetry?
1:00.6	A very good question and I really should have a better answer.
1:04.4	Sort of good to go.
1:05.6	It's partly desperation.
1:07.1	I think it was I was trying to do something a little bit different, first of I mean I had an instinct that I'm wanting to write stuff that was a little less formal than the kinds of things I've written before because I had different kinds of points to write and you know and these little kind of formal sonnets that I've been bashing out these last few years aren't very good for kind of narrative or associative stuff or maybe more free-ranging kind of imaginative stuff.
1:34.3	So I had an instinct I needed to do something different, but it turned out to be a bit stranger than that and it was more to do with content.
1:40.3	I mean, I don't really have a confessional mode, but I had to find one
1:45.5	because there were things happening in my life that I had to write about directly. And I'm
1:49.2	incapable of writing about things directly. So I found the first season of the Twilight Zone just a good
1:54.3	lens to look at that stuff through, mainly because when something happens in your life that comes at you out of the blue,
2:02.9	whether it's a death or a big deception or, you know, some kind of, you know, sudden change,
2:09.4	it hits you with a force of a supernatural occurrence.
	...

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