Description

Matthew McDonald and Alice Miller join the podcast to share poems and ponder music’s curious relationship with the spoken word

Poetry and music take centre stage on this podcast, when musician and poet Matthew McDonald returns to the program to talk about his latest project  – Berlinlit.com – an international online journal for new poetry in English. Regular listeners will remember Matt from an earlier episode of the podcast.  He hails from Canberra, and is the principal double bass player with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and Professor for Double Bass at the Hochschule für Musik ‘Hanns Eisler’. 

Photo Monika Rittershaus

 

“When you read a poem, you are kind of entering, not necessarily someone’s thoughts, but consciousness,  this kind of strange elusive thing that we don’t really understand. And sometimes when you read a poem, you literally won’t understand it, but it is an insight into a mind, and there is something very truthful about the complexity of it ” (Matthew McDonald)

Also joining the podcast is poet Alice Miller, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and The International Institute of Modern Letters. She was born and grew up in New Zealand and is today resident in Berlin. Alice is the author of the novel – More Miracle than Bird –  and has published three collections of poetry entitled What Fire, Nowhere Nearer, and The Limits. Several of Alice’s poems appear in the first edition of BerlinLit.com

Photo: Studio Monbijou

“We do live in a time that privileges the smaller unit through social media, and poetry is that. But it is also the opposite of the traditional way we think about social media. It’s often very dense and complex, and it rewards more time spent on it. We crave more depth, and poetry provides that.” (Alice Miller)