The Frank Skinner Show - Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast: Richard Brautigan

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

The lead singer of Frank’s favourite band introduced him to the poetry of Richard Brautigan, and it is a gift that keeps on giving. TW: mention of suicide The novel referenced is “Trout Fishing in America”. The collection of poems referenced is “The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster”. The poems referenced are “Widow’s Lament”, “Love Poem”, “Kafka’s Hat”, “I Cannot Answer You Tonight in Small Portions” and “The Winos on Potrero Hill”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. Listen, my favourite band are called The Lovely X, and I went on tour with The Lovely X as their support act. I did three gigs around the contrary. And I love them. It's a husband and wife team, Holly and David, and they're brilliant. This is not Frank Skinner's popular music podcast,

so there is a reason. to this. Holly, the lead singer and guitarist of the lovely eggs, is a massive, massive fan of the American writer Richard Broughtigan. Now, there is actually a lovely egg song, which is called Have You Ever heard a Digital Accordian? And that question is asked several times in a tuneful and interesting way. And then in the second verse, Have You Ever Heard? Have You Ever heard a digital accordion changes to, have you ever read Richard Broughtigan? And at this point, Holly will not stop the show, but ask the audience if there is anyone, to her horror, I have to say, who might not have read Richard Broughtigan.

And if any hands go up, then she will throw a Richard Broughton paperback, depending what she has that night, into the audience as part of her. evangelical spreading of the Broughtigan good news. Now, I personally discovered Richard Broughtigan the novelist, or probably 25 years ago, when a comedian you'll know called Rich Hall recommended a book called Trout Fishing in America to me. And Trout Fishing in America is fabulous. I don't recommend novels as a rule, but this is, it will probably be like no other novel you've read. I'd like to read you actually, Knock on Wood, which is part one of trout fishing in America,

just to give you a bit of a flavour of it. Before I do this, as a bit of backup, I'd like to say that Richard Broughtigan, who I'll point out now, in case you're anxious, is also a poet, and it's his poetry that I'm concerned about on this podcast. but we'll come to that in a moment. I want to give you a sense of what my first experience of Richard Broughtigan was like. But for a bit of background, he was born in America in 1935. He grew up in true poverty and had a very difficult childhood.

I think it would be fair to say. In fact, I read someone saying that they thought his childhood hurt him into poetry, which is a great phrase I think and he moved to San Francisco and in 1956 he was there handing out his poems in the street and doing his stuff in small clubs and stuff like that but what changed his life

was this novel trope fishing in America which I'm about to read you a little bit of now as a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America. From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine. Summer of 1942. The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal. Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing. I'd like to get it right. Maybe trout steel. Maybe trout Steel made from trout, the clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

Imagine Pittsburgh, a steel that comes from trout used to make buildings, trains and tunnels, the Andrew Carnegie of trout. And then we get a separate paragraph, the reply of trout fishing in America. So trout fishing in America now is about to speak. I remember with particular amusement, people with three cornered hats fishing in the dawn. Quite nostalgic old trout fishing in America. So anyway, I had a flavour of what Broughtigan was like and how brilliant he was, but I never pursued it. And I'll admit I didn't know that he wrote poetry.

And then in the dressing room at the lovely eggs gig one night, Holly said to me, you must love Broughton. and I said, does he write poetry? Well, she was horrified. And pretty soon she got me a book of his poetry called The Pill versus the Spring Hill Mine disaster, which was published in 1969. Some of the poems are from earlier than that. But that is the collection that I'm going to be concentrating on today. And I'm going to start off. with it's not actually a poem, it's a note that Broughtigan puts in this book, underneath one of the poems, which I love. This is the note. A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems.

He came back today and asked to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, it makes me want to write poetry. And I know exactly what he means. There's something about Broughtigan's poetry that makes you think, oh yeah, I want to be part of this. Now, as you probably know,

if you're a regular listener to this podcast, as much as I love poetry, I don't write it. In fact, I think probably because I love poetry, I don't write it. As I've always said, I don't want to poison the well of poetry with my own inadequacies.

But Broughtigan, I can see why you would inspire someone to write poetry because you might remember I did a podcast about Frank O'Hara, the American poet, and I said they almost sound like Asides his poems, but you feel the brilliance and you think, wow, if these are a sides, this guy was a well of genius. This is what I think about Broughtigan. The poems sound sort of easy. They feel like they're done without much thought.

And when you start analysing them, and as you know, I can't resist analyzing poems, you do worry, am I imposing craft and subtext where there is none? But they're too consistently brilliant to be just a memo. I just can't accept that. He might not have been totally confident. of the content, but lots of poets aren't. So what? It's just something about this poetry. They sort of let in clean air. Does that make any sense? Clean air and light. That's what

seems to fill them with meaning for me anyway. They sort of feel like bursts of, yeah, clear light. I find them refreshing and exhilarating and they make me happy. Okay, that's my speech out the way. I'm going to read you a Broughtigan poem. It seems to make sense at this point. I want to read you a couple of poems about loneliness and they cover, I would say, both sides of loneliness. The first one I find heartbreaking. I would go as far as to say that. And it is a poem called Widow's Lament. You'll know that a lament is a very sad poem, but the sadness here for me so deep you could almost miss it. Anyway, this is the Widow's Lament. It's three lines, okay? It's not quite cold enough to go borrow some firewood from the neighbours.

Now I could imagine a cynical person. There won't be any of you listen to this podcast, obviously. You would think, what is that? That's just a sentence. It's not quite cold enough. So there's a measurement here, a sort of aching consideration of, is it cold enough?

Is it legitimate for me to go and borrow firewood from the neighbours. I don't get the feeling that this widow needs firewood. I think what she needs is company. It's not quite cold enough to go borrow some firewood from the neighbours. We don't even get a name of the neighbours. It's like they're not that close, they're not that familiar, but they are people, someone to talk to.

That's what's sad about it for me. She wants it to be cold. enough to legitimise visiting the neighbours on this pretense of getting firewood. That's how it feels to me. And she has to, not quite cold enough, she has to measure the suitability of the visit, whether it's legitimate, wanting to go, but it's not quite right to go now. And that, oh man, I can feel this woman's. deep, deep loneliness.

But the next poem is sort of what I would call the plus side of loneliness or certainly of being alone. It's called love poem. I know. He could have done better than that, especially as I don't know if it's about love as such. See what you think. It's so nice to wake up in the morning all alone and not have to tell somebody you love them. when you don't love them anymore.

I mean, this is like the freedom and ease of being alone. I don't know if I'd call it loneliness, but I've had experience of loneliness and it can be heartbreaking and desolate and it can be incredibly liberating. And these two poems, I think, cover both sides of this.

You might be thinking, these are very short poems and is this how it's going to be? Yes, I want to get in as many Broughton poems as I can because I think they're all really rich and interesting. I'll just some love poems and he's not afraid to be self-deprecating

Richard Broughton. There's a quote from one of his poems about the fact that he's not doing so well with women at this period when he wrote he. If I were dead, I wouldn't have tried. a female fly. That's a line you could drop into a conversation.

You could make it a male fly if that's your taste. Okay, so love poems. The thing is with Richard Broughtigan's love poems is all his poems really. What I especially love is his similes. A simile, you know, when you say something is like something else. and he really does take this skill and he runs with it. He flies, I would go so far as to say. So this next poem is called Kafka's Hat.

Franz Kafka, you all know, the novelist who is often pictured in a hat. I think of him in a bowler, but I think he also has Trilbe's. But let's say it's a bowler for the purposes of this. So Kafka's hat is two-stitcher. answers. Here's the first one. With the rain falling surgically against the roof, I ate a dish of ice cream that looked like Kafka's hat. Okay. So with the rain falling surgically against the roof, I think that suggests a sort of straight, direct, cotting kind of rain if it's falling surgically. I ate a dish of ice cream that looked like Kafka's hat.

So it might well be that it was a bowler. So it's like a lovely round mound of ice cream. The interesting thing about this is there's a very famous Kafka quote, which is in argument similes are like songs in love. They describe much but prove nothing. And that seems to be Kafka saying, you know, they're nice similes. And just like love songs, they're beautiful and interesting and descriptive. But there's no real substance.

There's no proper firm analysis of reality. I mean, they replace reality with something else, often something that's a bit easier to express and a bit easier to explain and easier to handle. So further from the truth of the situation, I think that's what he means by they describe much but prove nothing. So given that Kafka has this slightly dismissive attitude to similes, certainly a reductive attitude to similes. With the rain falling surrogately against the roof, I ate a dish of ice cream that looked like Kafka's hat as a sort of irony to it, I think,

because it's a simile that actually involves Kafka. The similes get much better in the second stanza. It was a dish of ice cream tasting like an operating table with the patient staring up at the ceiling. Now, what is going on? there. So is that just basically saying, I'm with Kafka, when he says that similes always fall short of the truth and therefore don't really prove anything, then he might be saying, let's just go crazy

with the similes then. Let's celebrate the inadequacy of similes by just going wild. and the sort of verbal equivalent of fireworks or very energetic dancing. Let's just live it up with the similes. That is one possibility. So what would be a really wild simile? Having already pointed out that the ice cream was like Kafka's hats, or maybe putting the idea of the shortfall of similes into the reader's mind if they know that famous Kafka quote.

and you literally can get it on t-shirts and coasters and stuff. So now it was a dish of ice cream tasting like an operating table with the patient staring up at the ceiling. So it could just be, well, let's just go crazy and just say some of it sounds cool. Or there could be something in this. It could be that there's somewhat wrong with the ice cream,

something unsettling about. The fact that the patient is staring up at the ceiling, has something gone wrong with this, the way something has gone wrong with the ice cream. This is, I think, a possibility. It also, you can't have a simile that involves a patient on an operating table without thinking of T.S. Eliot's poem, the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which has got one of the most famous simile. in all English language poetry,

and that is when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. So it's too similar, isn't it? It was a dish of ice cream tasting like an operating table with the patient staring up at the ceiling. Surely that's supposed to remind us of earlier. So in the first stanza, he's saying with the rainfalling surgery, against the roof. And the word surgically is giving us a little hint of what's coming here.

With the rain falling surgically against the roof, I ate a dish of ice cream that looked like Kafka's hair. So I'm using a simile, but I'm reminding you of Kafka, who was slightly dismissive of similes. And now I'm going to remind you of one of the great similes of, as I say, English language poetry, Elliot was American. It was a dish of ice cream tasting like an operating table with the patient staring up at the ceiling. It's almost like he's slightly celebrating that proofrock simile, but also slightly mocking it, sort of saying, yeah, I can do that as well.

And I'll show you just how ridiculous it is to go so crazy with the simile that you just depart from the truth. Can I say I love Elliot's patient, etherised upon a table? but I also love ice cream that tastes like an operating table with the patient staring up at the ceiling. I'm going to pursue now another Broughtigan simile because I love them so much. We'll be done soon, bear me out.

I love him. I hope you can feel the love and I hope you are starting to feel a little bit of that love too. What about this for a title? This is a poem called, I cannot answer you tonight. answer you tonight in small portions. Now, that sounds to me like the sort of thing you could say if you were a couple, a romantic couple arguing. You know, sometimes you argue about little things, but you're arguing actually about

big things way over there. But what you're talking about here is quite trivial. But it's got this backdrop of lots of big, repeated arguments. I think that's what's going on here. I can't answer you tonight in small portions. It's too big. It's too emotional. I need the overall full story of the relationship to come out.

I need to talk about that. Okay, here we go. I cannot answer you tonight in small portions. That's the first line as well as the title. I cannot answer you tonight in small portions torn apart by Stormy Love's Gate. I float like a phantom, face down in a well where the cold, dark water reflects vague, half-built stars. I'll stop there. Did you spot the great simile?

Okay, let's try it again. I cannot answer you tonight in small portions. I can't pretend this is a small thing when it's a big thing. Torn apart by stormy Love's Gate. So Love's Gate sounds like the entrance or the exit to a love to a relationship. And why would you be torn apart? Because it's been sort of weaponised by the stormy nature of that relationship. Torn apart by Stormy Love's Gate.

It's like this gate is banging and flying wildly open and closed. And it's dangerous, basically. I float, so having been torn apart, having been battered by Love's Gate, I float like a phantom face down in a well where the cold, dark water reflects vague, half-built stars. Oh, Richard. Right, I float like a phantom face down in a well. So dead, ghostly, worn out, empty, spent, exhausted by this whole relationship, presumably. Like a phantom face down in a well.

I mean, isn't that a great simile? I felt like a phantom face down in a well where the cold dark water reflects vague, half-built star. So the water he's face down in reflects half-built stars. And you know this theory that the stars that we see, we're seeing them as they were like 60 years ago in some cases because light takes that long to get to us. There might be half-stars, stars that are being formed that we can see. But what it suggests most of all, I think,

the fact that this dark water, this dark, cold, dark water, that's what the relationship has become cold, and dark and stifling, if you lay face down in it, reflects vague, half-built stars. Things that could have been so sparkling and bright and beautiful, but they were unfinished. It's a series of neelis that this relationship has left him with. I'm going to go back because I sort of stopped mid-sentence, okay.

Torn apart by Stormy Lovesgate, I float like a phantom face down in a well, where the cold dark water reflects vague, half-built stars and trades all our affection, touching, sleeping together for tribunal distance. So that's where we are now. We had this beautiful, we had affection, we had touching, we had sleeping together. That has been traded for tribunal distance. That's such a fantastic phrase of how,

a relationship can become cold and dark like that water in the well, how all the love can seem to drain out of it. Tribunal being an assembly of judges, you know, it's a judicial thing, cold and formal, and it's what happens in a relationship, you start cross-examining and you start talking about what went wrong and who was right and who lied. And it, it gets a long way from touching affection, sleeping together. So trades all our affection touching, sleeping together for tribunal distance. I'm about to close with an even better simile. Standing like a drowned train just beyond a pile of Eskimo skeletons.

Now, I think there is some humour in that. It's like someone who's been. so broken by this relationship. They've gone for a simile which suggests just the end of the tether exasperation, but also a drowned train just beyond a pile of Eskimos. Elkos is not a word we normally use there. We generally say Inuit, I think, you know, this is of its time. It's of the 60s. Standing like a drowned train, so already there's an idea there of, of, of, of something with a trajectory, something that goes forward. Forward movement, the inner life of a train, all the stuff going on inside.

There's also something very romantic, I think, about a train. But now it's drowned, it's paralyzed, dead inside, presumably. It's the lifeless remains of the train. Likewise, a drowned train just beyond a pile of Eskimos. skeletons. And I say that can just be someone so lost and broken that they are saying crazy surreal things. But also, Eskimo skeletons, they would be against snow. So yeah, there's coldness and death and loss in that pile of Eskimo skeletons. But also, you can't really see it. It. It's hard to see.

It's something white against snow. Something that was so alive and vivid once, it seems, is now you can barely see its remains, just like you wouldn't be able to see human skeletons against snow. So some of his similes sound wild and crazy, but I don't know, I find truth in them. Okay, so look, going to do one last poem and I want to do this because the thing I want you to hold on to

about Richard Broughtigan is his compassion. He's very non-judgmental. He tells you about stuff, but you don't feel that he's disparaging or approving a lot of the time. He just tells you about stuff. And the winos of Portrero Hill is the poem I want to end with Portrero Hill is a place in San Francisco, which became very much, well, for a long time the home of Richard Broughtigan, and he was very much associated with that old 60s, height Ashbury, hippie, peace and love movement, although he liked booze, but he didn't like drugs, so he didn't fit all the stereotypes. Anyway, I'm not going to do any big analysis on this. I'm just going to end with it because I think it's beautiful.

And it shows a man with a great heart. I'm going to tell you before we did this, he suffered a lot with depression and all sorts of mental illness in his life, Richard Broughtigan, and he took his own life in 1984, aged 49. But he left a lot of brilliant stuff behind, and I'd love you to check out the poetry. And also, I don't normally recommend novels, but they're all quite poetic, to be honest.

Okay, this is the Winoes of Portrero Hill. It starts with the word alas, you know, suggesting, oh, this is sad. But it's almost like a headline. It's like the whole poem is filled with his sadness and his compassion and his empathy. So it almost begins. It's like a call before the poem begins, if you like. winos on Portrero Hill. Alas, they get their bottles from a small neighbourhood store. The old Russian sells them port and passes no moral judgment.

They go and sit under the green bushes that grow along the wooden stairs. And this last four lines, man, I love it. So these winos are sitting under green bushes, which sounds beautiful, but they're growing through stairs. So even the green bushes sound like they're in a ron down place where bushes grow through stairs. Okay. They go and sit under the green bushes that grow along the wooden stairs. They could almost be exotic flowers. they drink so quietly.

And that's so opposite of the received view of public drinkers like this, they seem there's no party, there's no euphoria, there's no anger, no rage. It really is drink as a sedative to get you through, sort of putting life on mute. It's a beautiful, gentle ending. And Richard Broughtick and see, these beauty everywhere, including in these gentle winos, gently sopping their port,

gentle winos, gently sopping, I don't normally like to end on that kind of casual repetition. But you know, I don't script these things. They're based on love. I love Richard Broughtigan. I mean, read trout fishing in America. Read any Broughton you can get your hands on. and also listen to The Lovely Eggs, and I think your life will be enhanced on all fronts. Thank you so much for listening to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. Don't forget to follow, and then you'll never miss an episode. See you next week.