A lawyer, an art historian, and a poet walk into a recording studio.
The Radical Writing Podcast brings academics and students from different subjects together to discuss the best in experimental literature. I run it alongside a host of brilliant voices, and you can find out more here.
Participants are sent copies of a text, from iconic radical novels such as B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, to new poetry like Phoebe Power’s Book of Days, and asked to choose a favorite passage, and come up with some questions for their fellow readers.
The results are unpredictable. There’s a medieval literature scholar talking nuclear apocalypse, a historian discussing landscape and rhythm, and a lawyer speaking about morality and language. To guide discussions, there’s always at least one person in the room who specializes in the text, and I (Sam) am on hand to keep us on track.
We take a broad definition of ‘radical’. These are books which bewilder and provoke, frustrate and inspire. Some do weird things on and off the page and others push boundaries in more subtle ways. What they all have in common is that take innovative measures to address some very human problems and questions: loss, violence, sex, beauty, religion, politics, to name just a few.
Sam Kemp Poetry 