Month: February 2026

Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 4 – finding your voice

What is poetic voice? Is it synonymous with style? Or something else? Perhaps the poet’s “take” on the world? Pele Cox and Rich Uridge seek answers from a range of greats including Emily Dickinson, Edna St Vincent Millay and Vernon Watkins who, with a drunken Dylan Thomas, tripped over a feather!

Poets
Further reading
Welsh poet, Vernon Watkins, a contemporary of Dylan Thomas.

You can hear BBC Radio 3’s Sunday Feature on Vernon Watkins here. It was presented by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and first broadcast in March 2012.

The programme was also referenced in this BBC Wales blog post.

Image credit: Tal Jones

Gemini Books Women in Poetry series is available to pre-order or buy here.

Recent episodes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:32 — 33.5MB)

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Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 3 – what is poetry’s purpose?

Pele Cox and I ask: what is the purpose of poetry? With the help of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Thomas Wyatt, we conclude that, in part, poetry’s job is to move readers to virtuous action or “well doing and not well knowing only” as Sidney put it.     

Along the way we notice similarities between 16th century Elizabethan London and 21st century Trump’s America where to speak one’s mind risks losing one’s head – figuratively if not literally these days. But despite the risks poets, we agree, need to be rebellious.

Poems
Recent podcasts

Podcast (peles-poetry-podcast): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:22 — 31.5MB)

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