Gregory: Slightly weird that we both gravitated toward the dream sequence in the film. I guess we’ll get back to that in a minute.
Jade: Remind me again, where did you come across the film?
G: Well to cut a convoluted story short, my dad was a vicar in Southend in Essex. I think some member of the congregation had invited my dad to a Chelmsford Short film festival of some kind. I think the director was this congregation member’s nephew or something. Honestly, I can’t remember all that much. I mainly remember the flyover we had to drive across to get into Chelmsford and my dad let me have a sip of some rank wine that was at the event. How about you?
J: Ah, I know that flyover very well! Chelmsford is my hometown and there was a festival called Rize — I think that was in 2018 — that they put on after they shut down V Festival. They had a tent screening films and one of them was a short directed by someone local. It was the second day of the festival so I was very tired and slightly inebriated, which makes my memory of it also unsurprisingly quite iffy.
G: For the sake of the audience (looks down the lens) and maybe myself, do you want to give a synopsis of the film?
J: From what I can remember, the rough gist of it follows a depressed architect who is living two lives in two different families. After the child in one of the families dies, he finds it more and more difficult to maintain and balance the lie. Most of it is shot in a sort of pretentious, montage-y style, including the insane dream sequence.
G: Obviously something about the dream sequence pierced through both of our foggy memories. I’m a massive fan of your Goya poem, I mean I love contrapuntal poems anyway. I know he’s not the only person to write contrapuntal poems but it makes me think of Tyehimba Jess’ book Olio. A contrapuntal captures the omnidirectionality of dreams, the reader can move through the poem in more than one way.
J: Tyehimba Jess is one of my all time favourite poets! I really wanted to capitalise on the duality of the architect’s lives and the different ways he is forced to move through them. The dream sequence leant itself well to this idea because it flows so strangely. The way you’ve delved into the surreal in your brilliant poem is so fascinating to me, particularly also in the types of movement you discuss. I’m so obsessed with this image of tears “skittering”. I know I purposefully referenced Goya in my title, did you have any surreal poetry you were inspired by when writing?
G: Well the poem is a dreamsong so the figure of John Berryman looms over the poem. Though to be honest, it was more of a way of giving me an arbitrary shape to the poem to help get the thing written. In terms of more direct influences, I got a cassette player in 2020 and some time last year a friend of mine picked up a couple of boxes of random cassettes from a car boot sale. Mostly it’s just albums and mixtapes but randomly one of the boxes had a series of recordings from a pub open mic night. I couldn’t work out if she was a poet or a stand up, but there were these amazing surreal monologues about all sorts of crazy stuff. One of them was about all the food in a supermarket staging a rebellion against the staff. Not sure how, but I have been thinking about that a lot, so I feel like that probably influenced me. The recordings aren’t great – I think her name was something like Louise Chapel, maybe Louise Chaplin.
J: Maybe she’s a stand up poet? I find it really interesting that you’ve — perhaps purposefully — avoided the use of ‘I’ in your poem. I know we were talking the other day about the idea of the ‘poet I’, you know, when readers conflate the ‘I’ of the poem to be the ‘I’ of the author and assume the content is therefore the author’s truth. Very clever of you to avoid associating yourself with a cannibal architect.
G: In the first few attempts of writing this poem I’d tried writing in the first person and had played around with different pronouns but it all ended up a bit too explain-y. Now you’ve pointed that out though it makes me think about how people use persona poems to inhabit perspectives they would normally be uncomfortable with. Or actors even who might have to play a role of a character they personally find despicable, though to get there you have to find how you relate to those things that we might consider evil. I’m only remembering this because I saw it the other day but it makes me think of a Nixon quote: “the foundation of a great lie is truth”. Perhaps Dick and I are being a bit self-incriminating there.
J: I can’t believe you just referenced Richard Nixon of all people. In fact, I think I should make that part of your next task just to spite you. I really wanted to give you a lipogramatic form, so why don’t you write a poem only using the letters from that quote (T, H, E, F, O, U, N, D, A, I, G, R, L, S). If you want some inspiration, Sadie Wilkes does some really great work with lipograms.
G: Not going to lie, I’m not super familiar with lipograms, but I’m happy to give it a go. If I’m being hoisted by my own petard, you may as well get hoisted along with me. Watergate was in 1972, so I was thinking that maybe your stanzas can be four lines long with the syllabic pattern of one, nine, seven, two. It would also be cool if there could be some sort of linguistic or visual ‘break in’ in the poem somehow – only as a supplementary constraint.
J: I’m a nightmare at counting syllables so this will be interesting for me. Looking forward to seeing what insanity we both come up with!
Gregory Kearns is a poet and broadcaster based in Liverpool. He was highly commended in the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition 2025, along with winning the Northern Writers Award in 2022. His work has been published in Introduction X, Bath Magg, and The Mersey Review. Gregory hosts The Poems We Made Along The Way, interviews that explore community, friendship and poetry. Previous guests include Sarah Howe, Mark Pajak, Hera Lindsay Bird and many more. Episodes can be found wherever good podcasts can be heard.
Jade Prince hails from Essex, England and currently resides in Leeds. Her work has been published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Poetry & Audience, and PEN Transmissions amongst others, and she is a Writing Squad alum. Her time is currently dedicated to working on her first prose coming of age project.
