Rachel Mann — #TDOR
2/20/202621 min
Rachel Mann’s “#TDOR” manages to turn a depiction of one side of a conversation about marking Trans Day of Remembrance into a poem that is both empathic and uncompromising. Mann captures the verbal stammers and stumbles of the well-meaning but leaves us to reckon whether the words land as mirror, mockery, or cry for action.
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Rachel Mann is a priest, writer, and broadcaster. She is the author of 13 books, including her debut poetry collection, A Kingdom of Love, and the acclaimed nonfiction, Fierce Imaginings: The Great War, Ritual, Memory, and God. She is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at Manchester Writing School and broadcasts regularly, including as a contributor to Thought For The Day.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsPádraig Ó Tuama· Host0:00
[music playing] My name is Pádraig Ó Tuama, and I'm always interested in what a poem says, but also what it says in what it doesn't say. Poems on the page have a line break or stanza breaks, lots of blank space on the page perhaps, and recited poems also can have the intake of breath or a pause, and all of that can allow space for the imagination of anticipation. What's gonna come next? What's the person going to say? You might guess, and then they turn it around in such a way that you're reflecting not only on what you've heard, but also on what was implied and the difference between what you anticipated and what came. And in that way, a poem can have a ghost of itself. The, um, presence of an omission perhaps, and the inference of everything that's coming to you, and I, I love what it is that a poem does in this way. It's like it's got echoes of all of its previous edits, of all of the ways in which the poem is trying to say something new, and all of the language that's present but only implied through all of the unfilled space of the page. #TDOR by Rachel Mann. Will you, would you, would you please, would you please come? We know, we really do know how