How useful are differing viewpoints in what might be called collaborative creative endeavour? Or maybe just making stuff together?

The Poetry Pause is a podcast which we record in the old book store at Chapter One Bookshop at Narberth Museum. It features three of us with differing viewpoints, poet and curator Mark Lewis, bookseller and writer Lorna Lee, and me, from a psychologist’s perspective.

We take it in turns to choose what we consider to be a great poem, discuss its greatness from our different viewpoints and what the poem’s themes makes us think about – other writers and other works.

In our most recent episode, I was slightly taken aback to hear the neither Mark nor Lorna particularly liked The Tyger by William Blake and felt its over exposure may have been to its detriment. But then both of them went on to describe other poets and writers who have awe and awesomeness at the heart of their work, Mark citing David Jones, Mary Oliver and Bob Dylan, and Lorna declaring herself a huge fan of Kashuo Ishiguro’s Remains Of The Day.

The small discomfort I felt at picking a small turkey of a poem was worth it to have such rich and constructive chat as a result. We have a main theme and agreed questions ready before we record, but absolutely no idea what any of us might say. It’s exciting and fun.

So just as postcript to this little homily, William Blake himself was fascinated by opposites and how we live with them….the person we love and hate, how we can reason and also imagine, how something might inspire us but also repulse us. In psychology, this idea translates into something called Personal Construct Psychology, useful to identify what ambivalence we can live with, and what we cannot.

Thanks to our listeners and to my co-podcasters Lorna and Mark for their enthusiasm, intelligence and articulacy in this project. In the old book store, surrounded by books – the borrowings of others brains – we could not have a better place to make these chats.