The LRB Podcast

Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material for poetry, starting with a look at Milton’s prose arguments in favour of divorce and the ways in which ‘confessional’ poets such as Lowell and Sexton took on divorce as a subject alongside other taboo subjects and subverted the traditional poetry of romantic failure. They then turn to three more recent examples. In Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’, a picture of a marriage is constructed through defamiliarised domestic objects and the political metaphors of postwar Germany. Anne Carson’s ‘fictional essay’ The Beauty of a Husband draws on different genres and the writings of Keats to make sense of a chaotic, lonely experience with an untruthful husband. And in ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi chooses the palindromic form of the ‘specular’ as a metaphor for the non-linear collapse of a marriage. Read Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’ in the LRB: https://lrb.me/divorcepoem Further listening: Seamus Perry and Mark Ford on Lowell and Carson: https://lrb.me/ldptwpod Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider what happens when poetry, and poets, meet technology, and why a poem itself can, in Paul Valéry’s description, be such a powerful ‘kind of machine’. They explore ambivalent attitudes to technology in three poems: Mina Loy’s ‘Time Bomb’ is a reflection on the extreme destruction of the atomic bomb and the power of scientific discovery; Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘A World Where News Travelled Slowly’ charts a history of technology that involves the gradual removal of the human body from methods of communication; and in Jorie Graham’s ‘Honeycomb’, fragments of technology reveal a divided self sitting at a desk in front of a computer, seen but not known by multiple tools of surveillance. Read Jorie Graham's poem in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/ptwgraham Mina Loy's 'Time Bomb' is published in 'The Lost Lunar Baedeker' (Carcanet, 1997, edited by Roger L Conover) For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day. Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this violent, chaotic world’. On this episode, Erin joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ways that Caravaggio represented his models' bodies on canvas – their muscles, skin, hair, clothing and dirty toenails – and what makes his paintings so unnerving that even the people who commissioned them sometimes got rid of them as soon as they could. Find the article and further reading and listening on the episode page: https://lrb.me/caravaggiopod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices