Richard Scott

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296 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Richard Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Poetry Unbound · Poetry Unbound in Conversation — Richard Scott · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

So lovely to be here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, of course.

Well, I guess I've always been really interested in still life paintings.

I've always been really fascinated in the beauty of that world and the kind of symbols that the artists are working with.

And I think writing this sequence of poems kind of

brought me closer to understanding why I was so fascinated in still life paintings.

And I think it has a lot to do with how the still life painting, this kind of startling, varnished preservation, evokes for me in a way how the brain freezes trauma.

So trauma or hurt can be frozen in the brain and then recalled, albeit unwittingly, in kind of absolute clarity.

But I think, you know, I'm also really interested in language and the book for me is an exploration into language.

And the speaker in the poems, they can't say directly what's happened to them because speaking...

directly is too painful and so they turn to different types of language and the first type of language they turn to is ekphrasis or the language of the still life painting and they focus on these symbols like a rose an oyster or a grape and in response to that uh kind of tight lyric focus something is revealed to them again and again i wonder if you could read one of those for us um still life with apple it's got a longer title but the one on page 22

I should just say that this poem utilizes a quote from Lacan, and the quote is, a symptom is a word trapped inside the body.

Still life with apple, ceramic dish of apples and a pomegranate.

I survived by being still.

still as this red apple on a wooden tabletop.

And each time afterwards, after he had done what he wanted with my body, I packed all the little red apples of myself, each one slightly bruised, bumpy, pockmarked, worm-scarred, spored, mouldering, deep down into the ceramic dish of my body.

Disassociative, I now know it's called.

And didn't tell anyone who loved me.

Compartmentalisation, maybe.

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