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

A symptom is a word trapped inside the body.

And I have so many words trapped inside my body.

Each one red and burnished and hasn't aged at all.

Words like...

ruined, fault, crypties, molestation, shame, each one painted so perfectly the colour of a hot coal or a fresh graze, and I have so many symptoms, or the colour of an apple smuggled into Saint-Pelagie prison in 1871 by your sister, numbness,

or the colour of an apple watching from the wooden tabletop of your teacher's desk.

This stillness is a kind of psychic wound as he arranges your body into a still life.

Apples, ceramic dish, a cracked open pomegranate, these repetitive and distressing images, all the glistening and painful reds beginning to move, to run.

Gosh, that's such a good question.

I mean, I guess I think of these poems, the still life poems, as lyric poems.

And there's kind of a group of ideas around the lyric poem and how it might function.

And one of them is this idea of kind of tight lyric focus.

And I think if the speaker or the poet focuses on something external to them and they focus really tightly on something, then something...

can be revealed, can be an illumination, or the lyric wound might be opened.

In some ways, you know, a really good example of this is Rilke's poem, Archaic Torso of Apollo, one of my favourite poems, and he's focusing on this distressed, ruined statue of a Greek god.

He focuses so tightly, and then the last line is, you must change your life.

You're like, yeah, right.

It's so great, right?

And that tight lyric focus on that statue, and he's rewarded with the last line, just the speed of that, like, oh, this work of art is so great.

I have to change something.

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