Yomi Sode with Derek Owusu
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Penguin Books UK
4.1 • 550 Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2022
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
This week on the Penguin Podcast, Derek Owusu talks to playwright and poet, Yomi Sode.
Yomi joins us to discuss his debut poetry collection, Manorism.
Derek and Yomi also discuss the influence of Caravaggio and the double standards of celebrating the art and the artist, the power of stillness to create reflection, how pop culture influences poetry, and cultural appropriation and the ways in which we perpetuate and endorse it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Brought to you by Penguin. |
| 0:12.9 | Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing. |
| 0:19.3 | I'm Derek Ousu and today I'm going to be talking to British Nigerian poet Yomi Shode. His new poetry collection, mannerisms, has just been released, and it's a profound and powerful debut collection that looks at the lives of black British men and boys. Jackie Kaye has called it, thrilling, once in a generation, which is pretty high praise. I i loved it and i'm so glad to get the |
| 0:39.1 | chance to talk to him today so you're on me shoday welcome my guy how you feeling how you're good |
| 0:44.2 | it's been a while man it's been a while yeah just to be i feel like even it's so weird that this is |
| 0:48.9 | our first conversation in a long time do you know i mean and what better space to be talking about this craft life |
| 0:57.2 | writing yeah exactly so yeah so your new collection your debut poetry collection yeah bro mannerisms yes |
| 1:04.2 | how's it how's it feel how's the writing process being because i know this has been a long time |
| 1:07.6 | coming i remember seeing you perform the early poems in about 2018, |
| 1:13.1 | I think it was. Yeah, yeah. You know, I've long said to myself that, yes, I'm writing this book, |
| 1:20.3 | but it's more than a poetry collection for me. I've always seen it as not only a think piece, |
| 1:25.9 | but I wanted to create a piece of work that can travel and move into different mediums. |
| 1:32.4 | In terms of considerations, whether they're arguments, |
| 1:35.3 | whether it is to be taken in a multidisciplinary way as well. |
| 1:40.2 | And the first one of those was in early 2019 when you was there in the audience where I was |
| 1:47.7 | talking about this process of the research I had done so far in relation to the book. At the time, |
| 1:54.2 | it was titled mannerism, manorism, in terms of the play on, of the kind of like how we all kind of spell |
| 2:02.8 | manner, like manners, mannerism as a whole, and what my arguments are in terms of saying, |
| 2:08.1 | okay, cool, I get that. But these kind of behavioural traits I'm really interested in the |
| 2:12.5 | cold switching that happens within the black body, specifically black men and boys, something that I think |
| 2:18.7 | is innately from the area on which one grows up in, hence the manner as in the area. |
| 2:25.2 | And I feel like those isms are things that innately we carry, depending, everywhere, in spaces |
... |
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