Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Podcast 9: Louise C.Callaghan - an interview and reading

We're delighted to present an extended interview with the poet Louise C. Callaghan, who discusses her poetry, and reads several poems. Included is 'The Binder's Notes', the poem for which Louise was shortlisted at the recent Strokestown International Poetry Festival, and which you can read here on their website.

Louise also reads poems such as 'The Palatine Daughter Marries a Catholic', 'Fragments', 'The Trader's Magneto Dynamo Company' and 'The Trick Is', and discusses the origins of her writing, and the methods she uses to encourage children to write. She will be visiting the College for workshops with I form pupils over the next week or so.

Below is her poem 'Colophon', which is a companion piece to 'The Binder's Notes', and which she read at Strokestown; this illuminates the chief damage to the Binder's manuscript, that of the guide-letters which have been cut out.

In her interview Louise kindly says how much enjoys visiting St Columba's, 'this place which is so friendly to poetry' (pictured, she reads in the Cadogan Building to pupils last year).


Colophon

A scholar in the Priory Library
cut right through the skin
of the
Selected Saint Augustine,
removed two zoomorphic initials.

Centuries before, this one monk
when he'd finished copying
the Latin text, wrote
the following as his end-note:

If anyone deface this book let him die

the death. Let the falling sickness
take him, let him be broken
on the wheel, then hanged, Amen.


Listen to the podcast via the player below:-

You can also listen to our podcasts via the 'widget' on the sidebar to the right, or by visiting our podcast page here (if you have iTunes on your computer you can also subscribe by clicking here, and so download our episodes to your MP3 player, or by searching for 'SCC English' in the iTunes Store).

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