Words That Burn

About Words That Burn

Words That Burn is a poetry podcast about how poems actually work. Each episode takes a single poem and reads it closely, usually in about 20 minutes. That means the lines themselves first: the sound, the shape on the page, the images, the things left out. Then the life behind the poem, the historical moment it came from, and the technical choices that give the work its charge. The aim is never to settle a poem's meaning but to show what it is doing, clearly enough that you can go back to the page and see it for yourself. Poets covered include: Audre Lorde, Raymond Carver, Mary Ruefle, Kaveh Akbar, Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Annemarie Ní Churreáin, alongside contemporary Irish collections as they appear. Host Ben Collopy also talks to poets about their new books and their craft, including Mark Ward on Real Estate and Shannon Kuta Kelly. How a collection takes shape, what gets cut, and the decisions that never show up in the finished poem. No homework required. You do not need to have read the poet, know the form, or have liked poetry at school. Everything a poem assumes you know, the episode explains. The interpretation is one reader's, offered up for argument rather than settled. Full scripts with citations at wordsthatburn.substack.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Publisher

Benjamin Collopy

Category

arts · arts · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

25 Aug 2020

Latest episode

9 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

96 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Sept 2026

   An Interview with Poet Stephen de Búrca

   Poet Stephen de Búrca joins me on Words That Burn to talk through his debut collection Atlantic Fret, published by The Gallery Press; a book where sea mist and anxiety share a single word, and where the Atlantic carries both personal grief and the weight of the climate crisis. Stephen explains how a few lines from Derek Mahon's The Sea in Winter gave him the title, and how a book he never intended to write about his father; a marine biologist who died when Stephen was a teenager, became unavoidable once he started writing about the sea. We talk about erosion as a double image: coastlines and memory both wearing away, and memory used not as autobiography but as a search for emotional truth. The conversation covers the pleasure of withholding, why the speaker in "Seaspray" never has to finish the gesture, and how much a line can bear before it breaks. Stephen walks us through Gerard Manley Hopkins' curtal sonnet, the shrunken eleven-line form Hopkins devised because he thought English couldn't carry a full fourteen, and why a form he theorised passionately about only produced three poems of his own. We also discuss "Scope and Dredge," built from radio programmes Stephen's father made for Connemara Community Radio about oyster fishing in Galway Bay, and the pressure of shaping a poem out of a parent's own recorded work. And we finish with the fourth section of the book, where Stephen translates the Icelandic modernist Jón úr Vör's Þorpið (The Village) word by word, without speaking Icelandic - a slow process that turned into the negative image of everything else in the collection. In this episode we cover: Writing elegy without setting out to write it Memory, erosion and the climate crisis in Irish eco-poetry Ambiguity, inference and the value of the unknown Writing at night, badgers and nocturnal animals Reading: "At the River Mouth"; and playing loose with terza rima Hopkins, Jenny Johnson and the curtal sonnet Reading: "Reading About Rod Stewart's Atlantic Crossing" Inheritance, prayer and poems that speak to each other across a book Translating Jón úr Vör from Icelandic without the language Stephen de Búrca is a writer from Galway. He completed his PhD at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and an MFA from the University of Florida. He received the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award and the inaugural Poetry Ireland Gerald Dawe Poetry Bursary in 2026. Stephen’s work has featured in Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Propel Magazine, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, Atlantic Fret, was published by The Gallery Press and is out now. Purchase the Collection (https://gallerypress.com/product/atlantic-fret/) Follow the Podcast: Read the Script on Substack (https://wordsthatburn.substack.com/p/interview-with-stephen-de-burca?r=th4eb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true) Follow the Podcast On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/wordsthatburnpodcast/) Follow the Podcast on X/Twitter (https://twitter.com/wordsthatburn) Follow the Podcast on Tiktok (https://www.tiktok.com/@wordsthatburn2?lang=en) Follow the podcast on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/wordsthatburn.bsky.social) Keywords: Stephen de Búrca, Atlantic Fret, The Gallery Press, Irish poetry podcast, Galway poet, Derek Mahon, Gerard Manley Hopkins, curtal sonnet, Jón úr Vör, Icelandic poetry translation, eco-poetry, elegy, poetry interview, Words That Burn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

2. 

   20 Aug 2026

   An Interview with Poet Leeanne Quinn

   Poet Leeanne Quinn joins Words That Burn to discuss her third collection, Landscape with Question, published by Carcanet Press. Written between Drogheda and Vienna, the collection holds two conversations at once: one with the Irish modernist painter Nano Reid, whose family bar on James' Street was later run by Quinn's parents, and one with Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina. Quinn explains why the "landscape with" poems move away from the representational towards questions of time and place, and why she took the three birth years Reid gave over her lifetime as the spine for the book's three sections. We talk about writing without a plan and finding the loops and repetitions only after the book is finished, about reading Reid's matter-of-fact titles against her abstraction, and about the eighteenth and nineteenth century visitor reports on Drogheda that Quinn cuts into her lines as springboards. We also discuss the speaker's resistance to being located, the surveillance running under the collection, and the elegy that surfaces in "Landscape with Crows", which adapts a line from H.D.'s Tribute to Freud. Leeanne reads two poems: "First Part of the Night" and the title poem, "Landscape with Question". Leeanne Quinn is from Drogheda, County Louth, and holds a doctorate in American literature from Trinity College Dublin. Her first collection, Before You, was highly commended in the Forward Prize. Her second, Some Lives, was a book of the year for both The Irish Times and The Irish Independent. She has edited two anthologies for Dedalus Press. Landscape with Question is out now from Carcanet Press. Links to Leeanne's work are below. If you enjoy the episode, please leave a review wherever you listen. Follow Leeanne Quinn (https://www.instagram.com/leeanne_quinn_/) Buy Landscape With Question (https://www.carcanet.co.uk/9781800175617/landscape-with-question/) Photo credit for the thumbnail Bríd O'Donovan Follow the Podcast: Read the Script on Substack (https://wordsthatburn.substack.com/p/an-interview-with-poet-leeanne-quinn?r=th4eb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true) Follow the Podcast On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/wordsthatburnpodcast/) Follow the Podcast on X/Twitter (https://twitter.com/wordsthatburn) Follow the Podcast on Tiktok (https://www.tiktok.com/@wordsthatburn2?lang=en) Follow the podcast on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/wordsthatburn.bsky.social) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

3. 

   29 Jul 2026

   Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong by Kaveh Akbar- Poetry Reading and Analysis

   Welcome back to Words That Burn, the poetry podcast taking a closer look at poetry. In this episode, host Benjamin Collopy offers a close reading of Kaveh Akbar's "Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong", from his 2021 collection Pilgrim Bell. The poem runs to seven couplets and moves from a ribbon tied around an oak tree to a wish that somebody forgets you today. Benjamin situates Akbar as a poet formed by prayer and by place, tracing the poet's biography from a boy reciting Arabic he could not translate to a writer preoccupied with what empire does to language. In This Episode, I Explore: The Ribbon and the Hostage Crisis: Why the opening image reads so strangely to a non American audience, and how the yellow ribbon curdled from a welcome into a warning after 1979. We follow the poem discussion through the oak's roots sinking into the dirt and the heart that sinks alongside them, and ask what exactly is seeping into whom. Akbar's Ghazal: A look at the form, its couplets, its refrains, and the strict rules Akbar declines to follow. The ghazal is famous for what Agha Shahid Ali called its formal disunity, and that disunity turns out to be the literary technique doing the heaviest lifting here. We break down how enjambment carries meaning across couplets that seem unrelated on the page, one of several literary devices worth slowing down for. Data at the Centre of a Heart: The sinking library, the architect who forgot the weight of the books, and Akbar's argument that empire uses abstraction to cudgel us into idleness. We look at what the word "data" is doing in a poem that also treats untranslated prayer as a kind of data, and why only one of those is sacred. The Mercy of Being Forgotten: Why a poem about erasure ends by wishing for it. Visibility inside an empire is rarely a gift, and Akbar's closing hope is offered in the grammar of prayer, which is to say with no guarantee anyone is listening. Accessible enough for poetry for beginners and no prior reading required. As always, this poetry interpretation belongs to Benjamin and is very much up for debate. Full script with citations and references on Substack, linked below. Follow the Podcast: Read the Script on Substack (https://open.substack.com/pub/wordsthatburn/p/famous-americans-and-why-they-were?r=th4eb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true) Follow the Podcast On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/wordsthatburnpodcast/) Follow the Podcast on X/Twitter (https://twitter.com/wordsthatburn) Follow the Podcast on Tiktok (https://www.tiktok.com/@wordsthatburn2?lang=en) Follow the podcast on Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/wordsthatburn.bsky.social) The Music In This Week's Episode: 'Hydra' by Huda - released under CC-BY 4.0. Time Stamps: 00:00 Poetry Reading 00:51 Poetry as Prayer 01:43 Kaveh Akbar's Background 03:39 The Iranian Hostage Crisis 05:04 Iranian Identity in America 06:43 Understanding the Title 08:28 Ribbons and Patriotic Symbols 09:50 The Ghazal Form 13:00 Weaponisation of Language 15:25 Data and Dehumanisation 18:52 The Final Couplet 20:58 Empire and Prayer 21:39 Closing Thoughts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

27,735

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.6 / 5

11 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

33 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 72 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

82

Social presence

0

YouTube

76

Engagement

77

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Guest appearances

Books guests

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