Watch the event

Supported by National Arts Council of Singapore

Seán Hewitt is a poet, memoirist, novelist and literary critic.  

His debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their ’30 under 30’  artists in Ireland. 

His book  J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism was published with Oxford University Press (2021).  

His memoir,  All Down Darkness Wide, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in non-fiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Polari Prize, the Michel Déon Prize, and for a LAMBDA award. He won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022.  

300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World, illustrated by Luke Edward Hall, was published in 2023. A second collection of poetry,  Rapture’s Road, was published in 2024. His work has been translated into 9 languages. 

His debut novel,  Open, Heaven, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. 

He is Assistant Professor in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Andrew McMillan’s debut collection physical was the only ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, a Poetry Book of the Month in both The Observer and The Telegraph, a Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times and won the inaugural Polari Prize. His third collection, pandemonium, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021, and 100 Queer Poems, the acclaimed anthology he edited with Mary Jean Chan, was published by Vintage in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. Physical has been translated into French, Galician, German and Norwegian editions, with a double-edition of physical & playtime published in Slovak in 2022. He is Professor of Contemporary Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut novel, Pity, was published by Canongate in 2024. Image © Sophie Davidson

Jerrold Yam is a Singaporean lawyer based in London and the author of three poetry collections: Intruder (Ethos Books), Scattered Vertebrae (Math Paper Press) and Chasing Curtained Suns (Math Paper Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ambit, Magma, The London Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Wasafiri, Washington Square Review and The Straits Times. He was recently shortlisted in The London Magazine’s Poetry Prize 2024. He has been a featured author at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, London Book Fair, Poetry Festival Singapore and Singapore Writers Festival. His poems, which are included in the Singapore-Cambridge GCE A-Level and O-Level syllabi, have been translated into Mandarin and Spanish. 

Read the transcript:

Meet the World – The Anatomy of Religion: Poetry on Flesh and Faith

With Seán Hewitt, Jerrold Yam & Andrew McMillan

ANDREW: Welcome, everybody. My name is Andrew McMillan and I’m here to talk with the brilliant Jerrold Yam and Seán Hewitt about one of my favourite topics, the poetry of flesh and faith and we’re going to be discussing ideas around that, thinking about this idea of the anatomy of religion and how that makes itself known in poetry. But I think, as all great religious ceremonies do, we should begin by putting some words out onto the air. So, Jerrold, have you got a poem that we might begin with?

JERROLD: Yes, I do indeed, Andrew. Thanks so much to Andrew and Seán for this dialogue. I’m very excited to hear your insights. Let me start by reading a poem from a sequence entitled Self-Portraits in Singaporean Mandopop. It’s basically poems reflecting on Mandopop songs that I listened to when I was growing up in secondary school in Singapore and this one that I’m reading is written after a Singaporean Mandopop singer’s song, Tanya Chua’s song 雙棲動物, which is translated as Amphibian in English. I just wanted to thank Magma as well for publishing this poem. So, Self-portraits in Singaporean Mandopop.

amphibians pressure gills into lungs for survival

my aunt prescribed conversion therapy over lunch

my aunt prayed therapy into coercion over lunch

her daughter halted coming to church at university

We fought on asphalt when I came out at university

despite weekends scaling keys on the upright piano

if weeks can be scaled like keys into a piano

how will the music of a family’s silence be scored

I scored a family’s silence when I willed my music

having squandered a decade with another man

having a decade with any man is slender

so we only weigh in on work and prayer requests

let me work on sequestering this prayer

the way amphibians pressure gills into lungs for survival

ANDREW: It’s a really brilliant example of that duplex form of poetry that Jericho Brown first developed and there’s so much in there that I won’t get into, that idea of song in the poem and how those two things speak to each other and inspire each other in different ways. Seán, let me come to you. I think you’ve got a poem to read for us as well.

SEÁN: Yes. Thanks very much for having me. It’s lovely to be here. Since we’re on faith and song, I thought I’d read a short poem. I used to live in a place in Dublin with a church opposite, but in the 1980s, the council took everything out of the church, apart from the tower, and relocated it across the country. And then they built a cul-de-sac of semi-detached houses around this one tower. So I was kind of, during lockdown, just staring at this tower for ages. It was the tower of St. Jude’s Church, who, helpfully, is the patron saint of lost causes. So this is St. Jude’s.

The clinked latch woke me

inside the tower. Past midnight,

and outside, voices … the stretch

of headlights across the rafters,

a dozen rooks asleep in a brace

of echoes. Hollow, uninhabited –

all the living parts of me

were flown. But then enough,

enough. My forehead daubed

in ash, the silence folded

around me like a dark wave.

In the ruined spire, in the filth

of life, I made

whatever sound it took

to call each part of myself by name

and return it to the house of song –

ANDREW: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Seán. That was a poem from Seán’s collection, Raptures Road, that came out earlier in 2024 with Jonathan Cape. An incredibly moving collection that really writes into this notion of an ecology of grief and how that’s felt in the body, how it’s felt in the world as the body moves through it. Seán, just to stay with you for a moment and just thinking about that poem, the story that you are telling us about the cul-de-sac that still has the tower and thinking about these ideas of faith and religion, of spirituality and poetry. It’s always struck me that your work, out of our generation of poets, feels to me quite singular in its use of divinity and its interest in spirituality, in its cadence of prayer that often echoes through it. And I just wonder, is that something that you feel is always with you as you’re moving through the world? Is there this kind of lens of faith, in whatever way we might take that to mean, that I guess you feel maybe you’re dipping your pen in as you write some of these poems?

SEÁN: Yeah, I think that’s right. Maybe ‘unfashionable’ is the word. I’m not religious, although I was raised Catholic, and perhaps, in that way, the first poetry I ever heard or the first instance of heightened language was from the Bible or prayer or hymns or whatever. So, maybe the cadences of that stuck in my head as a kind of primal example of what poetry feels like or makes us feel like. So, perhaps that’s in the background. But I think it probably has to do with how I conceive of what poetry is for me, which is more in the way of atmosphere and pushing through into a kind of transcendent place or at least opening a space for whatever we don’t know, which is what, to me, spirituality or the divine or faith rests on – not knowing. I think the best poetry always rests on not knowing or pushes into a space of not knowing. So, it’s probably just the way I’m attuned to thinking about poetry. In many ways, I think every poet has a sort of mythology that they pull into, whether the mythology is a kind of history of the body or a history of the cityscape or the history of a country. We all create this mythology in which our work sits, which gives us the language and gives us the tenor of the poem. And I suppose that religion has given me a useful metaphorical world in which to situate the poetry. So, yeah, that’s probably right.

ANDREW: Thank you so much, Seán. I think there’s so much there. We can come back to this idea of poetry’s atmosphere, as you described there. The idea of the evidence of things unseen, as faith is, that might be contained within the poem. But Jerrold, as someone who’s newer to writing, you read us that brilliant poem from Magma and we’ve been working together on these new poems that you’re developing and I’m just interested – so much of what you write draws on these biblical stories, biblical fables and parables and narratives and folding it back into the self. Is that a natural way that you enter the world, with that kind of language of religion, with that language of faith, somewhere with the back of the throat waiting to be spoken through the poem?

JERROLD: Yeah, I echo Seán’s sentiment. Speaking of what’s ‘unfashionable,’ I am Christian, so I am religious. But perhaps, in relation to certain issues, I’ve got a viewpoint that might deviate, or not, from that of other Christians, whether those views

are institutional or social or rooted in biblical truth. I think, for me, because of that religiosity and lived experience, faith is a lens through which I interpret the world and hopefully, in the poems, try to reclaim a space for myself in that architecture of language, to borrow references from biblical allusions, et cetera, to maybe make and eke out that sense of belonging within the poem. So I think, for me, it’s almost inevitable because when we write, I guess we try to write about something that feels true, something that aspires towards truth, and faith, for me, is an aspect of that personal truth.

ANDREW: It’s interesting, Jerrold, as you’re saying there, these ideas of different aspects of self that might come to bear on us. You read us that poem to start off this conversation, bringing Singaporean Mandopop references and versions of songs into that as well. One of the things that I think is interesting about your work, I wonder if we might think about it for a little bit, is this notion of democracy as opposed to a kind of hierarchy. That faith or these religious stories or the self or personal experience might sit together with that reference to Singaporean Mandopop, might sit together with the deep experience of faith of the self or the emergence of the self into its own kind of sexuality or identity as well. And all those things treated both equally and as potential components of a poem. I just wondered if you could say a little bit about that. There seems to be a great kind of generosity of subject in what you’re interested in.

JERROLD: Thanks, Andrew. I must say, it didn’t come completely intentionally. It was just the impulse to revisit those Mandopop songs last summer and even before, as well, those songs that I used to listen to when I was at secondary school. And I guess when I started listening to them and writing those poems after them, I inescapably vacillated into that sort of architecture of religious language and allusions and metaphors. Mandopop would be more contemporary but, nonetheless, faith and song have got their own sort of musicology, they’ve got a certain internal logic with the melodies, with the narratives that we tell ourselves as Christians, as people trying to find a sense of belonging in the social structures that we’ve been placed into. So I think, for me, there was that mirroring, not necessarily intended as a sort of egalitarianism between Mandopop and faith, but I think when I started exploring those ideas it came across as aspects of identity and none is superior to the other. I think they both have their own way of making meaning out of language.

ANDREW: Seán, I was really interested in what you were saying when you introduced that poem for us at the start of the event. The first encounter, potentially, with quote-unquote poetry was these religious hymns or sermons, the Psalms and things like that. Seamus Heaney talks about the idea of mythmaking and, as you described, these ideas of the foundational stories that we have, that we carry with us. One of the qualities of your poetry, as people who have read it know, is it’s cadence, its kind of music, and I just wonder how much in the back of your mind do you have, not the language, necessarily, of faith but the music of it? So, either in hymn but also in prayer and cadence. Is that the tuning fork that strokes your ear when you’re exploring these ideas?

SEÁN: This is a good question. I think, for me, the music of a poem is part of the energy or emotional urgency that you feel when you’re writing. Sometimes I can feel the push of a poem down the page and I often think if I’ve written a poem and it feels kind of lifeless on the page, it’s because it hasn’t got that rhythm pushing through it or the music of it pushing through it. And usually that’s kind of the unsalvageable poem. If I draft a bad poem or if I force a poem that doesn’t feel like it has some sort of urgency to it, I can’t retroactively engineer the energy of a rhythm back into it without it feeling fake or forced. So, usually, when I’m writing, there’s a kind of internal tuning fork because I will always draft by reading it aloud to myself and hear the false notes or the place where I need what feels like a three-syllable word. I can kind of hear the missing sound and I just need to find the phrase that fits the sound, if that doesn’t sound too airy-fairy.

ANDREW: Is that tuning fork, that idea of being able to feel the sound of it, is that in place of or complementary to these ideas of traditional form or even contemporary forms? We heard Jerrold read a duplex at the start, a really interesting revision of the sonnet and the villanelle in that the lines turn on each other hinge-like as the form moves through, whereas, I guess, we might think of much of your work as quote-unquote free verse but with a kind of sound patterning, with a kind of control. Is that the formal device that you feel, Seán, as though it is within the work?

SEÁN: Yeah, I feel the most important formal aspects to me are the line break and the stanza break. Those are the two things that I work with, or the line itself, if that makes sense. I never, so far as I’m aware, write in traditional forms, although I did write some ballads but those were very rhythmic in the way they work. I think I usually kind of sense it in terms of a tension that the line break gives to a phrase or the way it pulls you through a poem and then a bigger tension or bigger break in a stanza break and I work with those two things as an internal restraint because usually my poems, even if they’re not traditionally formal, tend to have that equal stanza length. So I kind of find the shape of a poem and then I work within it. I make my own constraint and then try and figure out what’s going on from there. I’m not particularly good at working through traditional forms. I think perhaps because it might feel sometimes when I’m writing it as if someone else has given me the constraint rather than me being in control of the constraint I’ve given myself. I don’t know what that says about me psychologically.

ANDREW: We’ll get into that later, we have plenty of time. Jerrold, you’re interested in these ideas of religion, of faith, of flesh, of the self, of experience. We had the duplex at the start but much of your work is quite experimental in terms of form, kind of playing with different shapes on the page but also, as Seán was describing for us there, different ways of constraining the narrative, different ways of kind of putting pressure on it. I just wonder what you feel that allows your work to do, why that feels important for you and is it a way of trying to contain what otherwise, as you’ve already laid out for us, are quite big subjects? So, ideas of kind of religion, of faith, ideas of the self and experience, quite massive, untameable things. Is form, however experimental that form might be, a way for you to impose that kind of control on it, potentially?

JERROLD: That’s a great question. I think the form is the stricture through which I am able to articulate the concerns that I do in a poem. And I think for the poems that are written, say, after biblical stories or verses explicitly, I almost feel like there’s a certain reverence with the subject matter for me that I can’t escape from and the idea of implementing a constraint, or it’s probably a conceit, it’s not like I can freely articulate myself. In fact, like Seán mentioned, a poem itself is constraint. But I think those forms act as a way to elaborate on or provide new dimensions to the idea of faith or identity or aspects of identity being constraints in themselves on the individual speaker and there’s that sort of nice mirroring effect, I think, for that duplex that was read earlier. I was also conscious that the Mandopop song that inspired that is entitled Amphibian, so I wanted a form that reflected that duality. It was in the context of a heterosexual relationship but it talked about the push and pull that lovers might expect, the give and take, the compromises. And so, even though I was taking that as an inspiration and moving it towards a different direction of identity, maybe, I thought that the duplex form worked pretty well in the context of both the inspiration and the execution.

ANDREW: We’ve been thinking about the inspiration that comes from Mandopop or using that as a kind of jumping-off point, these ideas of religion, of faith. But I wonder, bringing it back to poetry, when does a constraint become a conceit? We should definitely have that debate another time, it’s fascinating. The kind of hazy borderline of something. I was wondering, Jerrold, in this blending of the self into faith in religion, this bringing in of pop culture references to explore ideas of identity, who are the poets or writers who you feel are kind of on your shoulder as you do that? Or who – I’m always kind of suspicious of this idea of inspiration, that we’re writing after people – are the people that you would hope your work is in conversation with or might sit on a shelf next to?

JERROLD: I would never imagine myself being in such company, but I might just start with the two of you. I’ve been an avid reader of both your work, particularly on the poetry front. So, Andrew, the way that you implement the gaps and non-capitalised words, everything that’s lowercase, allowing yourself to play with that white space on the page, breath space, almost, and completely devoid of punctuation, getting control of that pace. And for Seán, this was alluded to earlier, it’s free verse but then it’s usually found in quatrains or consistent stanzas, whether it’s three or four lines, tercets or otherwise. I think having that sort of structure through which you articulate what you want has been an inspiration. In terms of reading, I find that writers who deal with the same or similar subjects but in completely different ways are particularly instructive as a benchmark or a sounding board for me to second-guess myself. Ella Frears is a recent favourite. Goodlord, that was phenomenal. Raymond Antrobus, the way that he deploys sound, albeit in a different context, viz-a-viz muteness, and the way that he invokes sound and silence. And Mandopop, I think that was very instructive. I also like the rhythm in the free verse structures in Malika Booker’s work and I think some of the recent Carcanet publications – I would never have any hope of being a Carcanet writer, I don’t think it would have any interest in my work, it’s not good enough and it’s not the type of work that they would expect – but I find that it’s really interesting to hear from the more experimental voices and the ways in which those writers play with what appears on the page. Sometimes they don’t follow a specific beginning to end, it’s quite haphazard but that works very well. Basically, I’m just reading and admiring. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a poem that I hated. I think there’s always so much to learn.

ANDREW: So, Seán, give me the list of poems that you hate. Just kidding. But Jerrold, you absolutely are good enough, by the way. The great thing about this Meet the World is that hopefully your work is going to be meeting the world in more and more ways as you move forward, already being published, already making its way into the world, but there will be books from you in the future, I know that for sure. Seán, to throw that question over to you. And, of course, after you also mention me as a big inspiration for you, the name I wanted to throw at you is Gerard Manley Hopkins. It would seem to me, thinking about these questions of flesh and faith and religion, that he’s a great model for us all but I know he’s been a big inspiration for you in that. And then, how is it that you’ve arrived at this voice that to me seems unique in our generation of poets?

SEÁN: Well, Hopkins is a great man for me. In some ways, I began with very contemporary reference points in my poetry. I remember the arrival of people like Ocean Vuong and Danez Smith and they were supplementing in my head other American poets, like Mark Doherty and Sharon Olds and when I wrote my first book, combining those with the sort of nature poetry that I admired from Alice Oswald and people like that, it became the funnel through which my voice became apparent to me. And then with Raptures Road, Hopkins definitely came in because I love the idea of a music that might make a sense of its own beyond the language always making sense. I was quite interested in dreamscape poems or poems that operated on a level that felt intuitive or that the reader might begin to intuit something as they went through, without me necessarily giving them a solid backing of the fact and information. But it’s taken me a while to find inspiration for my own poetry or to be brave enough to find poetry pre-20th century and to take that as a model, as well as contemporary poetry. I think for good reason we’re often directed to contemporary poets as people from which to take inspiration. But then Hopkins came in. People I really love writing now include Carl Phillips. I think I could spend the rest of my life just reading Carl Phillips if that was permissible, mainly for a sort of elegance that he has and often the poems are just one sentence or a couple of sentences that turn and turn and turn and there’s such syntactical stuff going on that is amazing. I could never write a poem like that and I think usually the people I love are the people who don’t sound like me. I don’t want to spend my life inside a hall of mirrors because that makes me too self-conscious. If you read someone and you can kind of hear something that you might also have done, sometimes I think that makes me too self-conscious about what I am doing, so I tend to like people that are not too like me. So, Carl Phillips would be one and I’ve recently become obsessed with Brigit Pegeen Kelly, I think I’ve spoken to you about her before, Andrew, who only had three collections but they are incredible, strange, otherworldly narrative poems that just start off with a walk through a garden but then suddenly there’s a snake in the garden or a horse and then the horse has four heads. The logic of them is entirely interior but you get this sense of a very dark mythological world coming through them and I love her. So, Carl Phillips and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. If those could be my kind of mum and dad of poetry, I’d be happy. And Hopkins as granddad.

ANDREW: That’s a fantastic family tree that you’re drawing there. I really like that. But I think it’s so true, isn’t it? We both teach and the advice that we often give to students is that we often have one poet who we’re obsessed with, who’s the lodestar, who’s the kind of person we’re really interested in. And the danger is that if you never move beyond them, you only ever write pastiche of them. And that even, as you were both describing, the variety of things that one might read eventually all get put right into the blender of one’s own mind and come out as what we colloquially call the voice, the voice of the poem, the other voice that we found. But it’s really the blend of the reading that only you yourself have done in that particular order. Jerrold, I keep saying that you gave us this brilliant title for our event today, The Anatomy of Religion, Poetry of Flesh and Faith, and I feel like I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about the first half of that, this idea of the anatomy of religion, this idea of spirituality, this idea of the cadence, perhaps, of divinity and how that echoes through both of your work. But I wanted to come on to the flesh, I wanted to come on to the physical reality of that. One of the interesting things Seán was telling us earlier was about this idea of the unknownness of spirituality, the unknownness, the hiddenness of religion, and yet, in both your work and in what we’ve heard today and what is available elsewhere, there’s a real ability to make those things concrete, to make those things visible and real for us on the page, and certainly one of the ways to do that is through the body, through the physical bodies, through the flesh. Jerrold, I just wondered if you wanted to say a little bit about that because in one way they seem antithetical to each other, this idea of the spiritual and the flesh, the bodily and the holy, and yet there’s something really interesting in the way that these two things can be combined.

JERROLD: Thank you, Andrew, I think you’re absolutely spot on. For me, I think I view the flesh as always in tension with faith. You talked about the contrast between faith and flesh. One is extremely tactile and is an experience, a sensory experience, whereas the other is a more normative ideal. It’s a standard by which we judge ourselves and potentially other people around us, for better or worse. And I think, for me, poetry is a way of coming to terms with or exploring the compromises between both flesh and faith to find that common ground, not necessarily to elevate the physical experience to the point of spirituality but to not maybe leave as much room for shame, to allow for some recourse or redemption of the self and an identity, as we know it, in the context of faith. So, staying true to the truths that are employed by faith but also allowing ourselves that freedom and the dignity to choose and hopefully not be judged.

ANDREW: Is it therefore, Jerrold, those two things leant up against each other that give the poem its spark in that sense? So, the tension, as you’re describing there, between the bodily, the actual and the idea of the spiritual, the divine is that somehow a poem of one or the other, potentially, wouldn’t work, it’d fall flat, it would only be the one thing? As you’re constructing these poems, as you’re thinking about them, is it something about the tension of those two things sparking off each other for you that is able to ignite some of the work?

JERROLD: Absolutely, Andrew. What you said just reminded me of an earlier comment that you made about form and strictures and constraints. I think, for me, it’s almost like a mirroring of that tension on the page when I choose to employ an explicit form for a poem. I feel like it’s faith itself that is providing that constraint and then the body of the poem is allowed to express itself, but within the internal logic of that chosen form and constraint. I think you’re right in terms of that tension sparking off new dimensions in the poem because I feel that, for me at least, that road to redemption isn’t as smoothly paved and in order to get to some semblance of reconciliation, that tension itself needs to be addressed and it is that tension that then provides the fire in the poem for me.

ANDREW: So interesting, Jerrold, thank you. Seán, there are moments in All Down Darkness Wide, your brilliant memoir, where faith and flesh literally come into meeting with each other and that’s one of the things that’s explored within that memoir. But thinking about Raptures Road, this recent poetry collection, I think that in that poem and in other poems as well, there are, as you describe, sometimes these dreamscape worlds. Oftentimes, the speaker of the poem, the voice of the poem finds themselves awoken somewhere or has a visitation or moves between these liminal spaces of things in a way that in other hands, in lesser hands, could become really abstract quite quickly or could become a kind of no place. And I wonder, how do you achieve the quality that is the dreamlike space, the imagined world, the spiritual world around these poems? They still feel grounded, they still feel embodied in something, they still pay attention to the flesh as well as the faith, as it were, and I just wonder if that’s something you’re conscious of, just how that effect is so brilliantly achieved in a collection like Raptures Road?

SEÁN: I think if I were to make a claim for Raptures Road to be anything, I would say it’s a book of medieval poetry, but then in 2024. And what I mean by that, I suppose, is that I took a lot of the models for the dreamscape from medieval dream vision poems that I was obsessed with when I was at university and I still pick them up every year or so, the books of the mystics, like Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. I think Hopkins has that, too. For example, those lines in the opening of The Wreck of the Deutschland, something like ‘Thou hast bound me bone and flesh, over again I feel thy finger and find thee’. It’s very like I am bones and flesh and I feel the finger of God going into me or around me. There’s a weird interplay in mystic writing between a very erotic vision of the body and spiritual communion with God. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Robert Glick’s novel, Margery Kempe, which is incredible. All of which is to say, grounding the book itself in the body and allowing or trusting the reader to be able to be disorientated in a dreamlike landscape and to deliberately get rid of the idea that the speaker is always me. That was something that was really important to me in this book. There are places where the speaker changes gender or at least alludes to the idea of it or walks out naked in the middle of the night, which is not me. So I kind of wanted to shake off some of the ideas of reality in the poem. And I think in that way I give myself or I give the poems permission to float off a little bit into a dreamlike world because you’re not expecting it all to cohere into a real physical place. But the grounding in the materiality, I think, is essential. Poems, as I see them, are basically sensory experiences, either for the reader or for the writer of the poem. They’re usually some kind of bodily reaction or response to something outside of us and I think so long as you are putting that bodily, sensory kind of organ at the centre of the poem and treating the poem almost as if it is a kind of body, a sensory organ, it will always be rooted not in the abstract but in the real repercussions of the world. So that was all in there. And in all of those medieval dream poems, they’re absolutely obsessed with the body and what the body can be. I think Christianity is obsessed with the body. I think, as well, with the potential of the body to be spiritual, God becoming flesh or the Eucharist, it’s all about how far you can push materiality and imbue it with the spiritual or what the difference between those things might even be. So I think, playing around that line and engaging with that way of thinking about the material world is just interesting to me and it seems to propel the poems.

ANDREW: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Seán. Jerrold, I just wanted to come back to you on the point Seán was making about the idea of stepping away or out of or to the side of the self within the poems and allowing the poems to be read as other than the writer, as it were, in that sense. You’re obviously working within the work that we’re working on together but I know the kind of wider projects that you’re interested in, exploring ideas of your own experience and identity, how that fits into different things. And I just wondered, where do you see the self and the I of the poems? Are they the same person? Are they kind of interconnected? Are they like Russian nesting dolls and somehow the I of the poem is inside the self or the other way around? What that relationship is for you between the self, the real self that’s here with us on screen now and the self of the poem.

JERROLD: Thank you, Andrew. For me, it’s not always straightforward. Even though I tend to write in the first person, it’s always a fictitious I and I feel like one of the greatest joys of poetry is that we can imagine and make believe and I think in the Mandopop or these other spiritual poems that we’ve discussed separately, it’s really about using the eye as a lens through which to explore issues of identity, faith, the flesh but not necessarily using my self as the I, maybe using the I as a microcosm. But having said that, there’s always this debate about confessional poetry and that sort of label. I was just recently revisiting Jay Bernard’s collection, Surge, and people wouldn’t classify that as confessional poetry because it’s sort of overtly political, but she is writing from an aspect of her identity and revisiting those archives. I think that was particularly powerful for me, to see the way that she’s treated the I. In some poems, she superimposed her own experiences living in London with people in the past, in the history of London itself. And for me, I think I do use that in some of the poems as well, using the I as a more personal standpoint to begin with but then exploring what it would have been like at the time, that particular biblical book that was written and imagining myself maybe as one of the characters, like, for example, in Rahab’s narrative. The other counterpoint to that is there’s also a sequence of poems I’ve been writing in relation to responses to legislation about identity. So, same sex relationships in Singapore. The physical act itself was decriminalised but there’s still a long way to go towards marriage equality because the way that politicians got around to repealing that criminalisation was to strengthen the definition of marriage, i.e. heterosexual marriage, in the Singapore Constitution. So it’s sort of giving you something but then taking it back with the other hand. And I found that when I use the I in those kinds of legal poems, leveraging on my background as a lawyer, it’s not so much the self per se but as a citizen, as a sort of not necessarily representation but just as an unknown recipient of almost like a Hobbesian social contract through which we live our lives. These parliamentary debates on anything and everything, they have a real influence on how we lead our lives. Say, if visitation rights at the hospital for same sex relationships are not necessarily legal, then you can’t visit your partner of like fifty years, even though that person is in dire need of that. I guess legislators don’t necessarily appreciate it all. To them it’s more like an academic, abstract debate. But in the poems, I try to use the I to allow those laws to be made flesh, almost, to speak to the implications and the responses to those particular laws. So I think, just to answer your question directly, it really depends on the structure of the poem. The I itself isn’t necessarily just me or any particular individual.

ANDREW: Absolutely. I wish we had time to get into that idea of being a lawyer and a poet and the kind of intersections of truth that brings up. I think it’s such an interesting thing to think about. But you’re absolutely right, Jerrold. I think that idea of a fictional self, the fictional I in some ways is so important. One of the most interesting things that often happens in workshops is that someone brings in a poem and you go, I’m not sure that line works, and they go, yes, but it really happened, as though the poem cares. Poems are already false things, poems are already invented things and so that idea of truth and the self is already murky no matter what we’re writing. Coming towards the end of our time together, but because I’m a huge fan of Melvyn Bragg and In Our Time, I thought it would be fun to do what he does at the end of all those recordings, if you listen to the podcast, where he goes, ‘This recording of In Our Time gets some extra time now with Melvyn and the guests’ and then he just says, ‘Is there anything else that you’d like to say that you didn’t get a chance to say or an aspect of this topic that we didn’t get a chance to explore?’ And then the producer comes in with a cup of tea, which I’m not sure is going to happen here but we can do the first bit of it anyway just before we finish. So, just as we move into the final bit of it, Seán, first of all, on this big conversation about anatomy, religion, poetry, flesh and faith, is there anything that I’ve not asked or that we’ve not got around to chatting about that you just wanted to mention or bring up for us?

SEÁN: No. Usually this is when Melvyn has been talking over one of the guests relentlessly and she finally gets a chance to speak. But since that didn’t happen – I think I covered a lot of stuff. I suppose what I’m interested in is why poetry turns to religious ideas. You know, it’s not something that I think has fallen away, even as society has secularised. There seems to be a relationship between poetry and prayer that is invoked by a lot of poets who wouldn’t even be religious. I was reading recently Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell and also his book The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse and the sheer variety of ways in which poets approach religion and also what I think is particularly interesting in this case is why should queer poets be turning between these two subjects that have often been posed as antithetical to us, you know, the body or our own body and these religious frameworks that I think a lot of the time have been in the back of our heads, even in the legal system, as ways of constraining us. And I think that has something to do with poetry as a primal response to the world. I think sometimes we find it difficult to articulate why it is that we write but often I think it’s because we feel compelled to speak back to the world. Sometimes it’s to a person but more often than not I feel like I’m addressing some sort of response to an experience or something that I see or something that I feel and I don’t know who I’m addressing but I feel that that is akin to what prayer or a hymn would have been, a kind of primal response to the world. I don’t know if that makes sense but it feels to me that that is what is behind the link between poetry and faith and religion.

ANDREW: Thank you so much, Seán. And just to finish off, Jerrold, that same question to you. You came up with this brilliant title, I’m keen not to take credit for it, The Anatomy of Religion, Poetry on Flesh and Faith. Is there anything else that we’ve not got to that you just want to finish off with?

JERROLD: Well, Andrew, if your university is in need of any sort of marketing roles, let me know. Maybe if law doesn’t work out, I’d gladly apply for some taglines. I think I might plagiarise Seán’s idea, actually, in the same way that when he said, why is it that there’s so much religion in poetry, why is there so much poetry in religion? As a Christian and speaking from a Christian background, the Psalms or even the idea of a parable is a metaphor, an extended metaphor, and I don’t speak for all religions but in general, religions across the world utilise poetry extensively in the ways in which they preach. They reach out, they evangelise. My suspicion is that poetry allows us to personalise faith and almost elucidates these grand ideals, these aspirations into something watered down that we can say it in front of the mirror, almost like a mantra, a song. And that sort of transmutation of an unreachable, unattainable ideal into the personal didactic, the personal song and image gives religion its power and its stay as well. I’m no authority and the PhD students on a course on religion would be shooting me down but that’s my suspicion, at least. I find it fascinating that there’s this huge confluence both ways between poetry and religion.

ANDREW: Absolutely. I think we’ve got about eight or nine other topics there for further conversations that we can all have, which I think would be really brilliant. I just want to say thank you very much to everybody for joining us for this conversation. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to it. Thank you so much to Jerrold Yam and to Seán Hewitt. By the time you’re listening to this, Seán’s new novel, Open, Heaven, will probably be out or almost out in shops, so do go and get a copy of that. And keep looking out for more of Jerrold’s work in magazines and in pamphlets and I’m sure in the future in collections as well. It’s been really brilliant to work with Jerrold over the last few months on our mentorship and looking at his poems. Thank you too, obviously, to the National Centre for Writing and to the Arts Council of Singapore, and looking forward to seeing you all very soon again.