PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH KIM ADDONIZIO

Planet Poetry podcast, online 30 September 2021

American poet Kim Addonizio was the sole guest on the first episode of the new season of the Planet Poetry podcast. She was in conversation with poet Robin Houghton.  

 

Kim read her poems ‘White Flowers, Red Flowers’, ‘Blues for Dante Alighieri’ and ‘Florida’ from her 2015 UK retrospective Wild Nights: New & Selected Poems.  She also read ‘Stay’ (from her new US collection Now We’re Getting Somewhere (WW Norton, March 2021) and her re-working of a Shakespeare sonnet 57.  After the interview, Robin and her co-host Peter Kenny discussed Kim’s poetry..

Peter then went on to talk about having come across R S Thomas’ Collected Later Poems (also from Bloodaxe) in the Poetry Bookshop in Hay on Wye, and recounted the extraordinary experience of having heard R S Thomas read in person.  He read the RS Thomas’s ‘devastating’ poem ‘A Marriage’ from Collected Later Poems.

Kim Addonizio interview 1st item.  RS Thomas discussed from 43:37. Listen here.
 

 

New York Times, By the Book, Sunday 24 November 2019

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, of Fleabag and Killing Eve fame, named American poet Kim Addonizio as one of the writers working today that she admired most. This was for the New York Times’ ‘By the Book’ feature. 

‘Kim Addonizio’s poetry gives me physical energy, particularly ‘For Desire’ and 'What Do Women Want?' – Phoebe Waller-Bridge, New York Times

Kim Addonizio was given first publication in the UK and Ireland with her 2015 Bloodaxe retrospective Wild Nights: New & Selected Poems, which includes both of these poems. Her poetry is published in the US by WW Norton, but the Wild Nights selection is only available from Bloodaxe.
 

Click here to read the full feature with Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

~~~~~

 

America’s Kim Addonizio has been called ‘one of the nation’s most provocative and edgy poets’. Her poetry is renowned both for its gritty, street-wise narrators and for a wicked sense of wit.

 

Kim Addonizio's readings from Wild Nights: New & Selected Poems mix poetry with blues harmonica.  Kim gave a UK reading tour in November 2015 to launch Wild Nights.  She gave a sell-out reading at Cork Internationa Poetry Festival in March 2019.

 

 

'If it is possible for a writer’s poetry to be consistently unexpected, Kim Addonizio’s is that. One has the impression, when reading her best poems, of being a passenger in a sports car being driven by an impossibly glamorous woman. Suddenly the car swerves off the motorway and tears over untested, dangerous and utterly exhilarating new terrain. Long may she continue to publish in Britain.' - Leaf Arbuthnot, Oxford Poetry