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Since its inception, | 0:00:05 | 0:00:07 | |
the BBC has captured the greatest names in poetry. | 0:00:07 | 0:00:10 | |
The BBC's archive features some of the most popular | 0:00:14 | 0:00:17 | |
literary figures of the modern era. | 0:00:17 | 0:00:19 | |
Here is a poor man who got drowned. | 0:00:19 | 0:00:22 | |
His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea | 0:00:22 | 0:00:24 | |
but really he was drowning. | 0:00:24 | 0:00:26 | |
This programme will look at how bards turned into broadcasters... | 0:00:28 | 0:00:32 | |
Poetry is religion, religion is poetry. | 0:00:32 | 0:00:35 | |
The core of both are imagination, as far as I'm concerned. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:39 | |
..as poets braved the cameras | 0:00:39 | 0:00:41 | |
to be beamed into the nation's living rooms, | 0:00:41 | 0:00:44 | |
a tradition that still continues today. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:46 | |
The First World War saw industrial slaughter across Europe. | 0:00:57 | 0:01:01 | |
Out of the horrors of the front lines would come | 0:01:06 | 0:01:09 | |
a new, more direct kind of writing. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:11 | |
Robert Graves was a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers | 0:01:16 | 0:01:19 | |
and a budding poet. | 0:01:19 | 0:01:21 | |
The war had a profound effect on his poetry | 0:01:22 | 0:01:26 | |
and in 1916, Graves' first volume of verse was published. | 0:01:26 | 0:01:30 | |
That same year, his name appeared in print again, | 0:01:31 | 0:01:35 | |
this time in a national newspaper, | 0:01:35 | 0:01:37 | |
listed among the dead. | 0:01:37 | 0:01:38 | |
Many years later, Graves reflected on his own death for the BBC. | 0:01:41 | 0:01:46 | |
I was 22 hours dead. It was on my 21st birthday | 0:01:49 | 0:01:52 | |
and that's where I started again, so I'm now only 53 instead of 74. | 0:01:52 | 0:01:56 | |
You were reported dead. | 0:01:57 | 0:01:59 | |
They... They closed my bank account. | 0:01:59 | 0:02:02 | |
They wrote to my parents and said how heroic I was. | 0:02:02 | 0:02:05 | |
They did everything. They stole all my kit and I appealed for it, | 0:02:05 | 0:02:09 | |
but I never got it back. | 0:02:09 | 0:02:12 | |
As the war ended, Graves wrote a poem recalling | 0:02:16 | 0:02:19 | |
the jubilation of Armistice Day. | 0:02:19 | 0:02:21 | |
Armistice Day, 1918. | 0:02:23 | 0:02:25 | |
What's all this hubbub and yelling, | 0:02:27 | 0:02:29 | |
Commotion and scamper of feet | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
With ear-splitting clatter of kettles and cans, | 0:02:31 | 0:02:33 | |
Wild laughter down Mafeking Street? | 0:02:33 | 0:02:36 | |
O, those are the kids whom we fought for | 0:02:36 | 0:02:38 | |
You might think they'd been scoffing our rum | 0:02:38 | 0:02:41 | |
With flags that they waved when we marched off to war | 0:02:41 | 0:02:44 | |
In the rapture of bugle and drum. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:45 | |
But his anger at the futility of the war meant that celebrations | 0:02:47 | 0:02:51 | |
were of little comfort. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:52 | |
When the days of rejoicing are over, | 0:02:54 | 0:02:56 | |
When the flags are stowed safely away, | 0:02:56 | 0:02:58 | |
They will dream of another wild "War to End Wars" | 0:02:58 | 0:03:01 | |
And another wild Armistice Day. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:04 | |
But the boys who were killed in the trenches, | 0:03:04 | 0:03:06 | |
Who fought with no rage and no rant, | 0:03:06 | 0:03:09 | |
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud | 0:03:09 | 0:03:12 | |
Low down with the worm and the ant. | 0:03:12 | 0:03:15 | |
SWING MUSIC | 0:03:20 | 0:03:23 | |
In the 1920s, a weary post-war Britain was keen to put the misery | 0:03:28 | 0:03:32 | |
of the trenches behind it. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:34 | |
But perhaps it wasn't quite ready | 0:03:35 | 0:03:37 | |
for a poet who was about to make a dramatic entrance. | 0:03:37 | 0:03:40 | |
The eccentric, aristocratic Edith Sitwell. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
At that time a change in the direction, imagery and rhythms | 0:03:47 | 0:03:51 | |
in poetry was taking place, | 0:03:51 | 0:03:53 | |
owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, | 0:03:53 | 0:03:55 | |
the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns | 0:03:55 | 0:03:59 | |
of some of the poetry immediately preceding us. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:03 | |
It was therefore necessary to find | 0:04:03 | 0:04:05 | |
rhythmical expression for the heightened speed of our time. | 0:04:05 | 0:04:09 | |
Sitwell was a poetic innovator | 0:04:11 | 0:04:13 | |
but it was her strikingly eccentric looks that drew the most attention. | 0:04:13 | 0:04:17 | |
At six foot tall and draped in Tudor gowns and jewels, | 0:04:17 | 0:04:21 | |
she cut quite a dash. | 0:04:21 | 0:04:22 | |
Everything about Sitwell was a performance. | 0:04:24 | 0:04:26 | |
The clothes, the face - and she knew she looked weird, | 0:04:26 | 0:04:30 | |
and so her decision was | 0:04:30 | 0:04:32 | |
to look even weirder, and to make no allowances for people. | 0:04:32 | 0:04:36 | |
People had to know that, "Look, she has to be a poet, look at her." | 0:04:36 | 0:04:41 | |
In 1959 she was interviewed | 0:04:43 | 0:04:45 | |
by John Freeman for the celebrated BBC series Face To Face. | 0:04:45 | 0:04:49 | |
Dame Edith, the world outside your own circle of friends | 0:04:53 | 0:04:57 | |
tends to think of you as being remote, eccentric, | 0:04:57 | 0:05:00 | |
forbidding and rather dangerous. | 0:05:00 | 0:05:02 | |
Now, perhaps that's a false impression and I want you to tell me | 0:05:02 | 0:05:06 | |
face-to-face what sort of person you really are. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:08 | |
Now, first, your appearance, which everybody knows - why did you | 0:05:08 | 0:05:12 | |
devise the very personal style of clothes that you wear so often? | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
Well, because I can't wear fashionable clothes. | 0:05:16 | 0:05:20 | |
You see, I'm a throwback to remote ancestors of mine | 0:05:20 | 0:05:25 | |
and I really would look so extraordinary if I wore coats and skirts. | 0:05:25 | 0:05:29 | |
I would be followed for miles | 0:05:29 | 0:05:31 | |
and people would doubt the existence of the Almighty | 0:05:31 | 0:05:33 | |
if they saw me looking like that. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:36 | |
There was the dressing-up aspect but there was also the idea | 0:05:36 | 0:05:40 | |
that she is, as we think of her, | 0:05:40 | 0:05:43 | |
a kind of a series of modernist lines and angles. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:47 | |
She somehow transcends the flesh, | 0:05:47 | 0:05:50 | |
which she didn't really have much of, and becomes lines and bones | 0:05:50 | 0:05:55 | |
and costume jewellery and turbans and rings. | 0:05:55 | 0:05:59 | |
She is a confection, a construction, | 0:05:59 | 0:06:01 | |
she's like something that's been built | 0:06:01 | 0:06:03 | |
rather than something that was lived. | 0:06:03 | 0:06:05 | |
You ask me, just now you said that people's idea of me | 0:06:05 | 0:06:09 | |
was that I was eccentric and... and savage? | 0:06:09 | 0:06:13 | |
No, forbidding, I said, and dangerous. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:16 | |
Well, I don't think I'm forbidding, excepting when I absolutely refuse | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
to be taught my job by people who know nothing about it. | 0:06:19 | 0:06:23 | |
I have devoted my whole life to writing poetry, | 0:06:23 | 0:06:25 | |
which is to be a form of religion, and I'm not going to be taught | 0:06:25 | 0:06:28 | |
by people who don't know anything about it. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:31 | |
I think it's very impertinent. | 0:06:31 | 0:06:32 | |
I mean, I don't teach plumbers how to plumb. | 0:06:32 | 0:06:35 | |
Ever the innovator, Sitwell worked with composer William Walton | 0:06:36 | 0:06:41 | |
to create lively musical settings for her poems. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
ORCHESTRA PLAYS JAUNTILY | 0:06:44 | 0:06:46 | |
# So do not take a bath in Jordan, Gordon | 0:06:46 | 0:06:48 | |
# On the holy Sabbath, on the peaceful day | 0:06:48 | 0:06:50 | |
# Or you'll never go to heaven, Gordon Macpherson, | 0:06:50 | 0:06:53 | |
# And speaking purely as a private person | 0:06:53 | 0:06:55 | |
# That is the place, that is the place | 0:06:55 | 0:06:58 | |
# That is the place for me! # | 0:06:58 | 0:07:00 | |
There is a genealogical relationship between Sitwell and rap, | 0:07:03 | 0:07:07 | |
because her poetry was popular in recorded form. | 0:07:07 | 0:07:11 | |
You bought a Sitwell LP. Her work should always be listened to. | 0:07:11 | 0:07:16 | |
Don't read it if you don't have to. | 0:07:16 | 0:07:18 | |
Hear her perform it, because the music of it is there in her voice. | 0:07:18 | 0:07:22 | |
# "As they watch me dance the polka" | 0:07:22 | 0:07:25 | |
# Said Mr Wagg like a bear | 0:07:25 | 0:07:28 | |
# "In my top hat and my whiskers that | 0:07:28 | 0:07:30 | |
# "Tra la la trap the Fair." | 0:07:30 | 0:07:32 | |
# Tra la la la la la Tra la la la la la | 0:07:32 | 0:07:34 | |
# Tra la la la la la la la la | 0:07:34 | 0:07:36 | |
# La la. # | 0:07:36 | 0:07:37 | |
The 1930s took Britain into an age of political tension, | 0:07:44 | 0:07:47 | |
economic crisis and high unemployment. | 0:07:47 | 0:07:50 | |
In Europe, political leaders were squaring up | 0:07:53 | 0:07:56 | |
for another devastating war. | 0:07:56 | 0:07:58 | |
From this uncertainty, a young writer emerged | 0:08:01 | 0:08:04 | |
convinced that poetry should have an engaged political voice. | 0:08:04 | 0:08:08 | |
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, the son of a doctor. | 0:08:12 | 0:08:16 | |
He won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he held sway | 0:08:18 | 0:08:21 | |
over a group of idealistic young writers with strong left-wing views. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:26 | |
They believed their duty as poets was to inspire political change. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:31 | |
In his 20s, Auden travelled to Berlin | 0:08:33 | 0:08:36 | |
to bear witness and report back. | 0:08:36 | 0:08:39 | |
There, he discovered and wrote about a Europe on the brink of catastrophe. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:45 | |
If you read Auden's poetry of the '30s, | 0:08:49 | 0:08:51 | |
there's a kind of urgency to it. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:53 | |
He wrote about demagogues, | 0:08:53 | 0:08:55 | |
dangerous leaders such as he was seeing in Hitler and Mussolini. | 0:08:55 | 0:08:59 | |
You know, he's engaged and politicised. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:01 | |
At the same time he's a very individual voice. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:05 | |
Fantastically mature and precocious from the start. | 0:09:05 | 0:09:08 | |
The six-line poem Epitaph on a Tyrant shows Auden's gift | 0:09:10 | 0:09:15 | |
for devastating political verse. | 0:09:15 | 0:09:17 | |
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, | 0:09:19 | 0:09:21 | |
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand. | 0:09:21 | 0:09:25 | |
He knew human folly like the back of his hand | 0:09:27 | 0:09:29 | |
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets. | 0:09:29 | 0:09:33 | |
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter | 0:09:34 | 0:09:38 | |
And when he cried, the little children died in the streets. | 0:09:38 | 0:09:42 | |
Hungry to experience conflict, in 1937, Auden volunteered | 0:09:46 | 0:09:50 | |
for the Republican forces fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:55 | |
My first guest, WH Auden. | 0:09:57 | 0:10:00 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:10:00 | 0:10:02 | |
But in later life, Auden would come to reject his youthful belief | 0:10:02 | 0:10:06 | |
in the power of poetry to inspire change. | 0:10:06 | 0:10:09 | |
He was interviewed by Michael Parkinson in 1972. | 0:10:09 | 0:10:12 | |
You seem to deny the thing that a lot of people might suspect a poet | 0:10:14 | 0:10:19 | |
hopes he could be, which is some kind of social political reformer. | 0:10:19 | 0:10:23 | |
No, that they can't be. I mean... | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
At least, not in the West. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:28 | |
By all means, I... | 0:10:28 | 0:10:31 | |
Let a writer, a poet, if he feels like it, | 0:10:31 | 0:10:34 | |
write what we now call an engagee poem, | 0:10:34 | 0:10:38 | |
but he must not imagine that by doing so | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
he will change the course of history. | 0:10:41 | 0:10:44 | |
Nothing I wrote postponed the war for five seconds | 0:10:44 | 0:10:48 | |
or prevented one Jew being gassed. | 0:10:48 | 0:10:50 | |
-Yes. -No. I mean, of course one can do them | 0:10:50 | 0:10:53 | |
as long as one doesn't imagine | 0:10:53 | 0:10:55 | |
that one will change the course of history by doing it. | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
I mean, I think if you ask what the function of not only literature, | 0:10:58 | 0:11:02 | |
of writing, but also of all the arts is, | 0:11:02 | 0:11:05 | |
I would say, first, I'd say what Dr Johnson said - | 0:11:05 | 0:11:09 | |
"The aim of writing is to enable readers | 0:11:09 | 0:11:12 | |
"a little better to enjoy life or a little better to endure it." | 0:11:12 | 0:11:17 | |
When the BBC visited Auden in Austria, | 0:11:20 | 0:11:23 | |
the poem they recorded had nothing to do with politics. | 0:11:23 | 0:11:27 | |
Instead, it was an ode to melancholic love. | 0:11:27 | 0:11:30 | |
As I walked out one evening | 0:11:31 | 0:11:33 | |
Walking down Bristol Street | 0:11:33 | 0:11:35 | |
The crowds upon the pavement | 0:11:35 | 0:11:38 | |
Were fields of harvest wheat. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:40 | |
And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing | 0:11:40 | 0:11:43 | |
Under an arch of a railway | 0:11:43 | 0:11:46 | |
"Love has no ending. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:48 | |
"I'll love you till the ocean is folded and hung up to dry | 0:11:48 | 0:11:52 | |
"And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky." | 0:11:52 | 0:11:56 | |
The reason that he's so important is to do with the incredible | 0:11:58 | 0:12:04 | |
technical versatility and freedom of his poetry. | 0:12:04 | 0:12:08 | |
It was often said that WH Auden had this peculiar gift | 0:12:08 | 0:12:12 | |
of making ordinary words sound terribly poetic | 0:12:12 | 0:12:16 | |
by putting them into echoing patterns of sounds. | 0:12:16 | 0:12:21 | |
"Stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start | 0:12:21 | 0:12:25 | |
"You must love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart." | 0:12:25 | 0:12:30 | |
It was late, late in the evening | 0:12:30 | 0:12:33 | |
The lovers they were gone | 0:12:33 | 0:12:35 | |
The clocks had ceased their chiming | 0:12:35 | 0:12:37 | |
And the deep river ran on. | 0:12:37 | 0:12:40 | |
On the whole, I think one's rather proud to serve a medium | 0:12:43 | 0:12:49 | |
which in our time, when the public | 0:12:49 | 0:12:52 | |
has learned to consume almost everything like cans of soup, | 0:12:52 | 0:12:57 | |
poetry has somehow or other remained something that you either have to read it or leave it alone. | 0:12:57 | 0:13:01 | |
It's rather nice, I think, that one has this medium, | 0:13:01 | 0:13:06 | |
that at any rate, as few as one's readers may be, | 0:13:06 | 0:13:09 | |
at any rate one knows they can read. | 0:13:09 | 0:13:11 | |
If Auden came to distance himself from politics, | 0:13:20 | 0:13:23 | |
one fellow poet never wavered in his political commitment. | 0:13:23 | 0:13:27 | |
Hugh MacDiarmid was born Christopher Grieve | 0:13:29 | 0:13:33 | |
in the Scottish Borders in 1892. | 0:13:33 | 0:13:36 | |
Fiercely patriotic, MacDiarmid was a member of both the Communist Party | 0:13:36 | 0:13:40 | |
and the Scottish National Party. | 0:13:40 | 0:13:43 | |
He also listed Anglophobia as one of his hobbies. | 0:13:43 | 0:13:46 | |
I'm a Scotsman, as you can hear. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:51 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:13:51 | 0:13:53 | |
In the Declaration of Arbroath, away back in 1320, | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
perhaps the greatest democratic pledge of all time, | 0:13:56 | 0:14:00 | |
my people, the Scottish people, | 0:14:00 | 0:14:02 | |
swore that as long as 100 of them remained alive, | 0:14:02 | 0:14:05 | |
they would never allow themselves to be dominated by the English. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:09 | |
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE | 0:14:09 | 0:14:11 | |
My people have done little but betray that oath ever since. | 0:14:14 | 0:14:19 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:14:19 | 0:14:21 | |
Some poets get their engine out of a kind of rebellion against the world. | 0:14:21 | 0:14:25 | |
He was deliberately very provocative. | 0:14:25 | 0:14:28 | |
He thought that was part of his duty, to be provocative. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
MacDiarmid felt that Scotland had lost itself | 0:14:32 | 0:14:35 | |
and that its identity could be reclaimed through poetry, | 0:14:35 | 0:14:39 | |
but for him, the experience of being Scottish could not be | 0:14:39 | 0:14:43 | |
properly expressed in English. | 0:14:43 | 0:14:45 | |
He formulated an ambitious plan to create a new Scots language. | 0:14:45 | 0:14:49 | |
I myself was convinced that there was nothing that the Scottish mind | 0:14:51 | 0:14:55 | |
could conceive that couldn't be better expressed in Scots | 0:14:55 | 0:15:00 | |
than in English or any other language. | 0:15:00 | 0:15:02 | |
There's a whole range of feelings, of combinations of ideas, | 0:15:02 | 0:15:08 | |
all related to the specific character of Scottish landscapings | 0:15:08 | 0:15:13 | |
and to the history of Scottish race and relation to the landscape, | 0:15:13 | 0:15:17 | |
which was embodied in the vocabulary of Scots, | 0:15:17 | 0:15:21 | |
and which is very little used the last couple of hundred years. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:25 | |
He passionately wanted to write Scots | 0:15:25 | 0:15:28 | |
and he wanted that not to be a backward-looking thing. | 0:15:28 | 0:15:30 | |
He wanted to fuse modernism and language that often was antique. | 0:15:30 | 0:15:36 | |
He didn't write dialect. | 0:15:36 | 0:15:39 | |
He made a new, plastic language. | 0:15:39 | 0:15:42 | |
He was actually before his time. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:44 | |
He was before his time while using this old language | 0:15:44 | 0:15:49 | |
in this amazing way. | 0:15:49 | 0:15:51 | |
In 1978, MacDiarmid read his most famous work, | 0:15:52 | 0:15:56 | |
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, for the BBC. | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
O Scotland is the barren fig | 0:16:00 | 0:16:03 | |
Up, carles, up, and round it jig! | 0:16:03 | 0:16:06 | |
Old Moses took a dry stick and instantly it floo'ered in his hand. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:11 | |
Pu' Scotland up, and wha can say | 0:16:11 | 0:16:13 | |
It winna bad and blossom tae. | 0:16:13 | 0:16:15 | |
A miracle's oor only chance. | 0:16:15 | 0:16:18 | |
Up, carles, up | 0:16:18 | 0:16:19 | |
And let us dance! | 0:16:19 | 0:16:20 | |
The poem is a long monologue | 0:16:23 | 0:16:25 | |
in which a drunk man lying on a hillside contemplates | 0:16:25 | 0:16:28 | |
Scotland's position in the world and rages against its seeming passivity | 0:16:28 | 0:16:33 | |
in the face of English domination. | 0:16:33 | 0:16:35 | |
Inside this flimsy story of somebody lying drunk in a ditch, | 0:16:37 | 0:16:41 | |
all this stuff goes through his head, and it's ancient, it's modern | 0:16:41 | 0:16:47 | |
and it's very angry, and it's very anti-British-Empire. | 0:16:47 | 0:16:52 | |
It's one of the most brilliant and game-changing poems | 0:16:52 | 0:16:56 | |
that have ever existed. | 0:16:56 | 0:16:58 | |
MacDiarmid helped spark a renaissance in Scottish literature, | 0:17:01 | 0:17:05 | |
but in later life he felt the battle was far from over. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:08 | |
It's very questionable whether the whole business that I started | 0:17:09 | 0:17:15 | |
wasn't too late. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:17 | |
I was hopeful, when England lost its empire, that it might not be, | 0:17:20 | 0:17:27 | |
but England's fighting back, of course, | 0:17:27 | 0:17:30 | |
and still thinks it has a world influence and a world mission, so... | 0:17:30 | 0:17:36 | |
Let's get rid of England somehow or other, completely. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:40 | |
-You're still hopeful? -Hmm? | 0:17:40 | 0:17:41 | |
-You're still hopeful? -I'm still hopeful, yes. | 0:17:41 | 0:17:44 | |
In the suburbs of north London, | 0:17:48 | 0:17:50 | |
another poet was planning her own quiet rebellion. | 0:17:50 | 0:17:54 | |
Stevie Smith is a rebel, complete. | 0:17:56 | 0:18:00 | |
She's going to write poetry | 0:18:00 | 0:18:02 | |
and she's going to mock the way we write poetry. | 0:18:02 | 0:18:05 | |
She was actually taking the kind of assumptions we make about poetry | 0:18:06 | 0:18:12 | |
and what's important and how poetry works, | 0:18:12 | 0:18:14 | |
and she was just refusing to even try. | 0:18:14 | 0:18:19 | |
Her verse seemed jaunty... | 0:18:21 | 0:18:23 | |
..yet it was hugely preoccupied with death. | 0:18:25 | 0:18:28 | |
As you can hear in her most renowned poem. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:32 | |
In my poems the dead often speak and the ghosts come back. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:39 | |
Here is a poor man who got drowned. | 0:18:39 | 0:18:42 | |
His friends thought he was waving to them from the sea, | 0:18:42 | 0:18:44 | |
but really he was drowning. | 0:18:44 | 0:18:46 | |
Nobody heard him, the dead man, | 0:18:48 | 0:18:50 | |
But still he lay moaning | 0:18:50 | 0:18:52 | |
"I was much further out than you thought | 0:18:52 | 0:18:55 | |
"And not waving but drowning." | 0:18:55 | 0:18:57 | |
Poor chap, he always loved larking | 0:18:59 | 0:19:01 | |
And now he's dead | 0:19:01 | 0:19:03 | |
It must have been too cold for him, his heart gave way, they said. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:07 | |
"Oh, no, no, no, it was too cold always" | 0:19:08 | 0:19:12 | |
(Still the dead one lay moaning) | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
"I was much too far out all my life | 0:19:15 | 0:19:19 | |
"And not waving but drowning." | 0:19:19 | 0:19:22 | |
Beyond the apparent simplicity of her poetry | 0:19:25 | 0:19:28 | |
lay a carefully crafted and innovative style. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:31 | |
The poetry that was written by gentlemen for gentlemen to read | 0:19:34 | 0:19:37 | |
in the years when everybody learnt Latin and Greek at school | 0:19:37 | 0:19:41 | |
is over, it's gone. | 0:19:41 | 0:19:43 | |
You want rhyme? Bugger you. You're not getting a rhyme. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:46 | |
You want a story? I can't even be bothered telling you a story. | 0:19:46 | 0:19:50 | |
She's going to write | 0:19:50 | 0:19:51 | |
in chip-chop rhythm, | 0:19:51 | 0:19:54 | |
she's going to use extraordinary, limited vocabulary, | 0:19:54 | 0:19:58 | |
high level of repetition | 0:19:58 | 0:20:00 | |
and it works in a minimalist way. | 0:20:00 | 0:20:04 | |
People in rather odd circumstances are what most of my poems are about, | 0:20:05 | 0:20:09 | |
mixed up with | 0:20:09 | 0:20:10 | |
arguments, religious difficulties, | 0:20:10 | 0:20:13 | |
ghosts, death, fairy stories... | 0:20:13 | 0:20:16 | |
and a general feeling of guilt for not writing more. | 0:20:16 | 0:20:20 | |
Humdrum suburbia was also to inspire another great writer, | 0:20:23 | 0:20:28 | |
John Betjeman, who delighted the nation | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
with poems that celebrated ordinary life. | 0:20:31 | 0:20:34 | |
Miss J Hunter Dunn, Miss J Hunter Dunn, | 0:20:35 | 0:20:39 | |
Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun, | 0:20:39 | 0:20:42 | |
What strenuous singles we played after tea, | 0:20:42 | 0:20:45 | |
We in the tournament - you against me! | 0:20:45 | 0:20:48 | |
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy, | 0:20:48 | 0:20:53 | |
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy, | 0:20:53 | 0:20:56 | |
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won, | 0:20:56 | 0:20:59 | |
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:04 | |
John Betjeman was born in 1906, | 0:21:04 | 0:21:07 | |
the son of a luxury-goods tradesman. | 0:21:07 | 0:21:09 | |
As a child, Betjeman was painfully aware of his family's low status | 0:21:09 | 0:21:14 | |
in Britain's class system, | 0:21:14 | 0:21:16 | |
a preoccupation that would later come to define his poetry. | 0:21:16 | 0:21:20 | |
Around us are Rovers and Austins afar, | 0:21:20 | 0:21:24 | |
Above us the intimate roof of the car, | 0:21:24 | 0:21:28 | |
And here on my right is the girl of my choice, | 0:21:28 | 0:21:31 | |
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice. | 0:21:31 | 0:21:35 | |
And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said, | 0:21:35 | 0:21:39 | |
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead. | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
We sat in the car park till twenty to one | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
And now I'm engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn. | 0:21:46 | 0:21:50 | |
Betjeman's verse saw a return to old-fashioned elements of poetry - | 0:21:54 | 0:21:59 | |
regular rhyme, familiar rhythm | 0:21:59 | 0:22:03 | |
and a wry sense of humour. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:06 | |
A passionate lover of buildings, he championed Victorian architecture | 0:22:06 | 0:22:11 | |
at a time when historic towns and cities | 0:22:11 | 0:22:13 | |
were being threatened by modern ideas of progress. | 0:22:13 | 0:22:18 | |
He became a poet of a passing England, | 0:22:19 | 0:22:23 | |
an England that was being subsumed | 0:22:23 | 0:22:25 | |
under the concrete of new developments. | 0:22:25 | 0:22:29 | |
And there's something in the work like that, too. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:32 | |
It's attached to rhyme and rhythm | 0:22:32 | 0:22:35 | |
in an attractively conventional, consoling, comforting kind of way. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:41 | |
So just as he defended the Victorian architrave, | 0:22:41 | 0:22:45 | |
he's there defending certain kinds of end-stopped rhyme, | 0:22:45 | 0:22:49 | |
when other people are rejecting it | 0:22:49 | 0:22:51 | |
or seeing that as like the equivalent of having | 0:22:51 | 0:22:53 | |
too many knick-knacks over your fireplace. | 0:22:53 | 0:22:56 | |
He slightly strikes you as a fuddy-duddy, | 0:22:58 | 0:23:00 | |
but actually, he embraced TV, modern media, newspaper, radio. | 0:23:00 | 0:23:07 | |
You know, he wanted to run with that, | 0:23:07 | 0:23:09 | |
and I think he understood how poetry could work, | 0:23:09 | 0:23:13 | |
you know, with a general reader and the general public. | 0:23:13 | 0:23:17 | |
Well, if you mention the word "poet" to most people, | 0:23:17 | 0:23:20 | |
they reach for the sleeping tablets. Well, there's one poet who manages | 0:23:20 | 0:23:24 | |
to bridge that hitherto unbridgeable gap between the public and his art. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:28 | |
Here's Sir John Betjeman. | 0:23:28 | 0:23:30 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:23:30 | 0:23:32 | |
Betjeman found a natural home in front of the camera | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
and was a regular guest on prime-time chat shows. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
What is the function of a poet, Sir John? | 0:23:47 | 0:23:49 | |
I think primarily it's to say things simply, | 0:23:49 | 0:23:54 | |
shortly, | 0:23:54 | 0:23:56 | |
rhythmically, | 0:23:56 | 0:23:58 | |
memorably. | 0:23:58 | 0:23:59 | |
And it's luck, it's inspiration. | 0:23:59 | 0:24:02 | |
-There is such a thing as inspiration. -Yes. | 0:24:02 | 0:24:04 | |
And when you tell me that thing, if it's true, | 0:24:04 | 0:24:07 | |
that my poetry is read by | 0:24:07 | 0:24:09 | |
lots of people who don't ordinarily read poetry, | 0:24:09 | 0:24:12 | |
that's all I could want to happen. | 0:24:12 | 0:24:15 | |
'Betjeman could speak to a couple of million people | 0:24:15 | 0:24:20 | |
'through one transmission. And I take my hat off to anybody' | 0:24:20 | 0:24:24 | |
who can take poetry out to the general public, | 0:24:24 | 0:24:28 | |
because the general public don't always want it. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
And he forged a link and a bond with them, | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
and some of that was through his personality, | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
but a lot of it was through his work. | 0:24:36 | 0:24:39 | |
Betjeman could even be highly satirical. | 0:24:40 | 0:24:43 | |
He attacked the administrators | 0:24:43 | 0:24:45 | |
who were casually laying waste to British heritage | 0:24:45 | 0:24:48 | |
in his poem Executive. | 0:24:48 | 0:24:51 | |
I am a young executive. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:55 | |
No cuffs than mine are cleaner; | 0:24:55 | 0:24:57 | |
I own an oblong briefcase and I use the firm's Cortina. | 0:24:57 | 0:25:01 | |
In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill | 0:25:01 | 0:25:05 | |
The maitres d'hotel all know me well, and let me sign the bill. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:09 | |
You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know, | 0:25:09 | 0:25:12 | |
I'm partly a liaison man, and partly PRO. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:16 | |
Essentially, I integrate the current export drive | 0:25:16 | 0:25:19 | |
And basically I'm viable from ten o'clock till five. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:23 | |
'Those poems, they're not facile, they're not just party tricks.' | 0:25:23 | 0:25:27 | |
He's got a good eye for social conventions | 0:25:27 | 0:25:30 | |
and...a tongue for undermining things when he chooses. | 0:25:30 | 0:25:34 | |
I do some mild developing. The sort of place I need | 0:25:34 | 0:25:39 | |
Is a quiet country market town that's rather run to seed | 0:25:39 | 0:25:43 | |
A luncheon and a drink or two, a little savoir faire - | 0:25:43 | 0:25:47 | |
I nobble half the council, the banks, the clerk, the Mayor. | 0:25:47 | 0:25:50 | |
And if some Preservationist attempts to interfere | 0:25:50 | 0:25:54 | |
A "dangerous structure" notice from the Borough Engineer | 0:25:54 | 0:25:57 | |
Will settle any buildings that are standing in our way - | 0:25:57 | 0:26:01 | |
The modern style, sir, with respect, has really come to stay. | 0:26:01 | 0:26:05 | |
That's beautiful. | 0:26:05 | 0:26:07 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:26:07 | 0:26:11 | |
In the post-war Britain of the 1950s, | 0:26:12 | 0:26:16 | |
Betjeman's knack for capturing the everyday | 0:26:16 | 0:26:19 | |
foreshadowed a group of new voices in poetry | 0:26:19 | 0:26:22 | |
known as "the Movement". | 0:26:22 | 0:26:25 | |
The early poetry of those writers | 0:26:26 | 0:26:28 | |
was full of observation and anecdote, | 0:26:28 | 0:26:32 | |
and often observation and anecdote | 0:26:32 | 0:26:35 | |
drawn from the daily lives of the poets, | 0:26:35 | 0:26:37 | |
which mean the daily lives of the readers too. | 0:26:37 | 0:26:40 | |
The Movement was made up of mostly male white-collar workers, | 0:26:41 | 0:26:45 | |
including librarian Philip Larkin | 0:26:45 | 0:26:47 | |
and university lecturer Kingsley Amis. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:51 | |
When you have movements and generations and little collectives | 0:26:51 | 0:26:55 | |
there's always one person that stands out, really, | 0:26:55 | 0:26:57 | |
and it's around them everything revolves. | 0:26:57 | 0:26:59 | |
And in the case of those '50s poets, it's Larkin. | 0:26:59 | 0:27:02 | |
Philip Larkin was affectionately known as "the hermit of Hull". | 0:27:03 | 0:27:08 | |
Though he won critical acclaim in his thirties, | 0:27:08 | 0:27:11 | |
he shunned the limelight | 0:27:11 | 0:27:12 | |
for a quiet career as a university librarian | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
for over three decades. | 0:27:15 | 0:27:17 | |
But in 1964, he allowed himself to be filmed | 0:27:18 | 0:27:22 | |
for the BBC's flagship arts programme, Monitor. | 0:27:22 | 0:27:25 | |
Work and I get on fairly well, I think. | 0:27:25 | 0:27:29 | |
There are just these occasions when one would like to prove it | 0:27:29 | 0:27:33 | |
by not working for a bit. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:35 | |
When I bind up library committee minutes at the end of five years, | 0:27:35 | 0:27:40 | |
it makes a great, fat volume, | 0:27:40 | 0:27:41 | |
but it's not the same as a volume of poetry. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:45 | |
Larkin was always described to me at school | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
as "the voice of the man next door". | 0:27:48 | 0:27:50 | |
He didn't sound like the man who lived next door to me, | 0:27:50 | 0:27:54 | |
but I understand where that comment comes from. | 0:27:54 | 0:27:57 | |
There's a sense of him describing the daily, the ordinary, | 0:27:57 | 0:28:03 | |
er, the domestic. | 0:28:03 | 0:28:05 | |
It was a language that came out of the bus stop and the newspaper. | 0:28:05 | 0:28:11 | |
Transformed through his poetic powers. | 0:28:11 | 0:28:15 | |
This gift for ordinary and even vulgar language | 0:28:16 | 0:28:19 | |
was captured in poems like A Study Of Reading Habits. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:23 | |
When getting my nose in a book Cured most things short of school, | 0:28:24 | 0:28:29 | |
It was worth ruining my eyes To know I could still keep cool, | 0:28:29 | 0:28:35 | |
And deal out the old right hook To dirty dogs twice my size. | 0:28:35 | 0:28:40 | |
Later, with inch-thick specs, Evil was just my lark: | 0:28:41 | 0:28:46 | |
Me and my coat and fangs Had ripping times in the dark. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:51 | |
The women I clubbed with sex! I broke them up like meringues. | 0:28:51 | 0:28:57 | |
Don't read much now: the dude Who lets the girl down before | 0:28:57 | 0:29:03 | |
The hero arrives, the chap Who's yellow and keeps the store | 0:29:03 | 0:29:07 | |
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed: | 0:29:07 | 0:29:11 | |
Books are a load of crap. | 0:29:11 | 0:29:14 | |
The striking thing about Larkin's poetry is, in a way, | 0:29:14 | 0:29:19 | |
its eloquent ordinariness. | 0:29:19 | 0:29:21 | |
You can analyse as much as you want his poetry | 0:29:21 | 0:29:24 | |
in terms of sort of the nerves it touches | 0:29:24 | 0:29:28 | |
and the experiences of sort of welfare state Britain, | 0:29:28 | 0:29:33 | |
life in the post-war world that it illuminates, and that's all true, | 0:29:33 | 0:29:37 | |
but in the end, it's his gift for memorable phrases and lines. | 0:29:37 | 0:29:42 | |
He had the tendency to send himself up, rather. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:47 | |
So when he appears on camera he is, | 0:29:47 | 0:29:49 | |
in a way, playing a kind of a part. | 0:29:49 | 0:29:51 | |
I read that, er... | 0:29:51 | 0:29:54 | |
you know, I'm a miserable sort of fellow | 0:29:54 | 0:29:57 | |
writing a sort of welfare state sub-poetry, | 0:29:57 | 0:30:01 | |
er - doing it well, perhaps, but it isn't really what poetry is | 0:30:01 | 0:30:05 | |
and it isn't really the sort of poetry we want. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:08 | |
But I wonder whether it ever occurs to the writer of criticism like that | 0:30:08 | 0:30:13 | |
that, really, one agrees with them, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:15 | |
that what one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is | 0:30:15 | 0:30:19 | |
and the kind of environment one's had and has now. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:23 | |
Er, one doesn't really choose the poetry one writes - | 0:30:23 | 0:30:26 | |
one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or can write. | 0:30:26 | 0:30:29 | |
Living on the margins suited Larkin. | 0:30:33 | 0:30:36 | |
His writing captured a remote awkwardness | 0:30:36 | 0:30:39 | |
with the world around him. | 0:30:39 | 0:30:41 | |
He's always very keen to make us understand | 0:30:41 | 0:30:45 | |
that sense of separation, | 0:30:45 | 0:30:48 | |
partly because we all feel it. | 0:30:48 | 0:30:50 | |
It's particularly powerful, I think, in Church Going, | 0:30:50 | 0:30:52 | |
where you get that self-irony of him taking off his bicycle clips | 0:30:52 | 0:30:57 | |
because he feels there's something about it, | 0:30:57 | 0:30:59 | |
you just shouldn't be in a church with bicycle clips on. | 0:30:59 | 0:31:02 | |
It's somehow disrespectful. | 0:31:02 | 0:31:04 | |
Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:10 | |
Move forward, run my hand around the font. | 0:31:10 | 0:31:14 | |
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new - | 0:31:14 | 0:31:18 | |
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't. | 0:31:18 | 0:31:23 | |
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, | 0:31:23 | 0:31:28 | |
and pronounce "Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant. | 0:31:28 | 0:31:33 | |
The echoes snigger briefly. | 0:31:33 | 0:31:35 | |
Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, | 0:31:35 | 0:31:40 | |
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. | 0:31:40 | 0:31:44 | |
If Larkin thrived on solitude, his close friend Kingsley Amis | 0:31:49 | 0:31:54 | |
embraced the celebrity of being a writer. | 0:31:54 | 0:31:58 | |
He frequently appeared on television. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:04 | |
On the BBC, Amis voiced his disappointment | 0:32:07 | 0:32:10 | |
with the conservatism of '50s Britain. | 0:32:10 | 0:32:13 | |
I personally then was suffering from a good deal of depression | 0:32:14 | 0:32:18 | |
for quite a long time over the results of the 1951 election, | 0:32:18 | 0:32:23 | |
which seemed to me to say that the modest bit of social revolution | 0:32:23 | 0:32:27 | |
that the British might have been going in for | 0:32:27 | 0:32:30 | |
between 1945 and 1951 | 0:32:30 | 0:32:32 | |
had now come to an end and the public had turned their back on that | 0:32:32 | 0:32:35 | |
and, er, were trying to reverse the process. | 0:32:35 | 0:32:38 | |
Which I found depressing. | 0:32:38 | 0:32:40 | |
Although Amis was better known as a novelist, | 0:32:41 | 0:32:44 | |
most famously with Lucky Jim, | 0:32:44 | 0:32:47 | |
he actually began his career as a poet. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:49 | |
I think Kingsley Amis would see himself as a light-verse poet. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:53 | |
He edited an anthology of light verse, | 0:32:53 | 0:32:56 | |
he enjoyed making people laugh. | 0:32:56 | 0:32:58 | |
Lucky Jim, how I envy him! | 0:32:58 | 0:33:00 | |
Author, poet, fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, jazz critic. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:04 | |
You ask what his name is - I say Kingsley Amis. | 0:33:04 | 0:33:06 | |
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE | 0:33:06 | 0:33:09 | |
The first poem is on an ever-interesting topic, | 0:33:12 | 0:33:14 | |
though you might not think so to start with. | 0:33:14 | 0:33:17 | |
There's a poem of his called The Bookshop, which sort of... | 0:33:17 | 0:33:20 | |
looks at the differences between what men read and what women read. | 0:33:20 | 0:33:24 | |
But interestingly it's a poem that turns everything on its head | 0:33:24 | 0:33:27 | |
at the end and admits that actually, men have got a softer side too. | 0:33:27 | 0:33:30 | |
Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart | 0:33:30 | 0:33:33 | |
Or squash it flat? | 0:33:33 | 0:33:35 | |
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; | 0:33:35 | 0:33:37 | |
Girls aren't like that. | 0:33:39 | 0:33:41 | |
We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff | 0:33:42 | 0:33:45 | |
Can get by without it. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:48 | |
Women don't seem to think that's good enough; | 0:33:48 | 0:33:50 | |
They write about it. | 0:33:50 | 0:33:52 | |
And the awful way their poems lay them open | 0:33:52 | 0:33:56 | |
Just doesn't strike them. | 0:33:56 | 0:33:58 | |
Women are really much nicer than men: | 0:33:59 | 0:34:01 | |
No wonder we like them. | 0:34:01 | 0:34:03 | |
Deciding this, we can forget those times | 0:34:05 | 0:34:08 | |
We sat up half the night | 0:34:08 | 0:34:09 | |
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes, | 0:34:09 | 0:34:15 | |
And couldn't write. | 0:34:15 | 0:34:17 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:34:17 | 0:34:19 | |
Poets of Amis's generation were all about emotional restraint. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:26 | |
Across the pond, a new type of verse was emerging | 0:34:28 | 0:34:32 | |
that was visceral and cathartic. | 0:34:32 | 0:34:34 | |
The Bostonian Anne Sexton was breathtakingly honest, | 0:34:36 | 0:34:41 | |
and her verse was informed by her battles with mental illness. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:45 | |
I did get very manic once, | 0:34:48 | 0:34:50 | |
and they told me I was psychotic in the hospital. | 0:34:50 | 0:34:53 | |
And I thought that was a riot, cos I was still me. | 0:34:53 | 0:34:56 | |
You know, I thought psychotic was someplace else, but I was still me. | 0:34:56 | 0:34:59 | |
Sexton more than anybody else | 0:35:01 | 0:35:02 | |
wrote about previously taboo subjects in her poetry. | 0:35:02 | 0:35:06 | |
She wrote about menstruation, she wrote about masturbation, | 0:35:06 | 0:35:09 | |
she wrote about incest, she wrote about adultery, | 0:35:09 | 0:35:11 | |
and she wrote about them in ways | 0:35:11 | 0:35:13 | |
that suggested that she was not imagining them - | 0:35:13 | 0:35:16 | |
that these were things she had intimate personal experience. | 0:35:16 | 0:35:20 | |
Menstruation at Forty. | 0:35:20 | 0:35:23 | |
I was thinking of a son. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:27 | |
The womb is not a clock nor a bell tolling, | 0:35:28 | 0:35:32 | |
but in the eleventh month of its life | 0:35:32 | 0:35:34 | |
I feel the November | 0:35:34 | 0:35:36 | |
of the body as well as of the calendar. | 0:35:36 | 0:35:40 | |
In two days it will be my birthday | 0:35:40 | 0:35:42 | |
and as always the earth is done with its harvest. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:46 | |
This time I hunt for death... | 0:35:46 | 0:35:49 | |
She was forcing in subject matter that was definitionally ugly. | 0:35:50 | 0:35:55 | |
It was in the womb all along. | 0:35:55 | 0:35:57 | |
I was thinking of a son... | 0:35:59 | 0:36:01 | |
You! The never acquired, | 0:36:01 | 0:36:04 | |
the never seeded or unfastened, you of the genitals I feared, | 0:36:04 | 0:36:09 | |
the stalk and the puppy's breath. | 0:36:09 | 0:36:11 | |
It was at the suggestion of Sexton's therapist | 0:36:13 | 0:36:15 | |
that she began writing poetry. | 0:36:15 | 0:36:17 | |
She was what we would now call bipolar - | 0:36:17 | 0:36:20 | |
at the time called manic depressive - | 0:36:20 | 0:36:22 | |
and it was suggested to her | 0:36:22 | 0:36:24 | |
that poetry might help her in a therapeutic way. | 0:36:24 | 0:36:28 | |
Um, many people have tried to write poetry in therapy. | 0:36:28 | 0:36:32 | |
Anne Sexon wrote very great poetry. | 0:36:32 | 0:36:34 | |
My psychiatrist suggested that I watch Channel 2. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:38 | |
"You have an educational television there, why don't you look at it?" | 0:36:40 | 0:36:43 | |
So I did, and IA Richards was explaining the form of the sonnet, | 0:36:43 | 0:36:47 | |
and I thought, "Oh, so that's a sonnet!" | 0:36:47 | 0:36:49 | |
So I sat down and tried to write one. It was a pretty bad thing. | 0:36:49 | 0:36:52 | |
And that just turned me on, and then I, you know, turned on. | 0:36:52 | 0:36:56 | |
Eventually, it became impossible to separate Sexton | 0:36:56 | 0:37:00 | |
from her intensely autobiographical work. | 0:37:00 | 0:37:04 | |
She has a role she sees for herself | 0:37:04 | 0:37:07 | |
and she insists on playing it. | 0:37:07 | 0:37:09 | |
And I just got sick of it - the endless posturing | 0:37:09 | 0:37:13 | |
and just thinking, "I don't want to go on any more about female stuff, | 0:37:13 | 0:37:18 | |
"I don't want to be wombing and entrailing all over the place," | 0:37:18 | 0:37:21 | |
all that stuff. And I just wanted her to...go for a walk. | 0:37:21 | 0:37:25 | |
I myself will die without baptism, a third daughter they didn't bother. | 0:37:29 | 0:37:34 | |
My death will come on my name day. | 0:37:34 | 0:37:38 | |
What's wrong with the name day? | 0:37:38 | 0:37:40 | |
It's only an angel of the sun. | 0:37:40 | 0:37:42 | |
Woman, | 0:37:42 | 0:37:44 | |
weaving a web over your own, | 0:37:44 | 0:37:47 | |
a thin and tangled poison. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
Scorpio, | 0:37:49 | 0:37:50 | |
bad spider - | 0:37:50 | 0:37:52 | |
die! | 0:37:52 | 0:37:54 | |
But there were still poets who turned their focus not inwards, | 0:38:00 | 0:38:05 | |
but outwards, towards the beauty of the natural world. | 0:38:05 | 0:38:09 | |
Seamus Heaney grew up on a cattle farm in rural Northern Ireland, | 0:38:10 | 0:38:14 | |
an experience that fed directly into his verse. | 0:38:14 | 0:38:18 | |
There are two ways to look at Seamus Heaney's early poetry, | 0:38:20 | 0:38:24 | |
and indeed English writers did look at them in these two ways. | 0:38:24 | 0:38:27 | |
One, to think it's wonderful, about nature, | 0:38:27 | 0:38:29 | |
and two, to think it's rural, earthy, | 0:38:29 | 0:38:33 | |
it's all about root vegetables and crops and so on. | 0:38:33 | 0:38:37 | |
Both, actually, reactions are rather condescending | 0:38:37 | 0:38:40 | |
to what Heaney was actually doing. | 0:38:40 | 0:38:41 | |
Heaney's so-called nature poetry is actually dealing with | 0:38:41 | 0:38:44 | |
a lot of other things to do with identity, his own, | 0:38:44 | 0:38:48 | |
to do with family and tribe and home, | 0:38:48 | 0:38:51 | |
and belonging. | 0:38:51 | 0:38:54 | |
It's not just about describing blackberries or potatoes. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:57 | |
Heaney linked poetic creating to farming life | 0:38:59 | 0:39:02 | |
in one of his most famous poems. | 0:39:02 | 0:39:05 | |
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep | 0:39:05 | 0:39:09 | |
To scatter new potatoes that we picked | 0:39:09 | 0:39:12 | |
Loving their cool hardness in our hands. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
By God, the old man could handle a spade. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:18 | |
Just like his old man. | 0:39:18 | 0:39:20 | |
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap | 0:39:21 | 0:39:25 | |
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge | 0:39:25 | 0:39:28 | |
Through living roots awaken in my head. | 0:39:28 | 0:39:31 | |
But I've no spade to follow men like them. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:36 | |
Between my finger and my thumb | 0:39:36 | 0:39:38 | |
The squat pen rests. | 0:39:38 | 0:39:39 | |
I'll dig with it. | 0:39:40 | 0:39:42 | |
In Heaney's verse, the natural world provided a way of understanding | 0:39:44 | 0:39:48 | |
profound human experience. | 0:39:48 | 0:39:50 | |
In Personal Helicon, nature was a way of explaining the transition | 0:39:50 | 0:39:56 | |
from childhood to adulthood. | 0:39:56 | 0:39:58 | |
As a child, they couldn't keep me from wells | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. | 0:40:08 | 0:40:11 | |
I loved the dark drop, | 0:40:11 | 0:40:13 | |
the trapped sky, the smells | 0:40:13 | 0:40:16 | |
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. | 0:40:16 | 0:40:20 | |
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. | 0:40:20 | 0:40:24 | |
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket | 0:40:24 | 0:40:27 | |
Plummeted down at the end of a rope. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:29 | |
So deep you saw no reflection in it. | 0:40:29 | 0:40:33 | |
The magic of poetry is that the individual can take an experience, | 0:40:33 | 0:40:37 | |
paint it in words, | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
and other people can see themselves in it. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:42 | |
He's not... He's not about anything, | 0:40:42 | 0:40:44 | |
there's no polemic in his poetry. | 0:40:44 | 0:40:46 | |
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, | 0:40:46 | 0:40:51 | |
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring | 0:40:51 | 0:40:56 | |
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme | 0:40:56 | 0:41:00 | |
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. | 0:41:00 | 0:41:04 | |
Heaney grew up in a rural community and that was his world, | 0:41:08 | 0:41:10 | |
the world that he wrote about in his first two or three collections. | 0:41:10 | 0:41:14 | |
But then he was living in Belfast at the time of the Troubles. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:17 | |
Suddenly, the urgency of that matter | 0:41:17 | 0:41:20 | |
was something he felt he had to address as a poet, | 0:41:20 | 0:41:22 | |
to be a public voice, to be a political voice, | 0:41:22 | 0:41:25 | |
to show solidarity with his own people. | 0:41:25 | 0:41:28 | |
Interviewed on the BBC in 1973, | 0:41:30 | 0:41:33 | |
at the height of the Northern Irish conflict, | 0:41:33 | 0:41:36 | |
Heaney was forced to consider how he would play a public role. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:40 | |
In your early years, your first poetry, | 0:41:40 | 0:41:43 | |
wrote what I'd call modern landscape poetry, basically, of the land. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:47 | |
And now that landscape that you're all too familiar with | 0:41:47 | 0:41:50 | |
is torn by often arbitrary but certainly tormenting violence. | 0:41:50 | 0:41:54 | |
Surely this must have some effect on the poetry you're writing now? | 0:41:54 | 0:41:57 | |
My...view and way with poetry | 0:41:57 | 0:42:01 | |
has never been to use it | 0:42:01 | 0:42:04 | |
as a vehicle for making statements about situations. | 0:42:04 | 0:42:09 | |
The poems have more, er, they have more come up like | 0:42:09 | 0:42:13 | |
bodies out of the bog of my own imagination. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:18 | |
Er, I want to wait, in a sense, | 0:42:18 | 0:42:21 | |
until the violence comes out of the pores of my mind, naturally. | 0:42:21 | 0:42:25 | |
I think it does, in a way. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:27 | |
While Heaney drew inspiration from Irish landscape and history, | 0:42:34 | 0:42:38 | |
the hills of Wales found their own bard with RS Thomas. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:43 | |
Thomas was a Welsh Anglican priest and a staunch nationalist. | 0:42:45 | 0:42:49 | |
His poems were deeply rooted in | 0:42:51 | 0:42:53 | |
the atmosphere of some of the remoter parts of North Wales. | 0:42:53 | 0:42:56 | |
His poem The Welsh Hill Country | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
evoked the harshness of the landscape | 0:43:03 | 0:43:05 | |
and the struggles of isolated farming communities | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
in the mid 20th century. | 0:43:09 | 0:43:10 | |
Too far for you to see | 0:43:13 | 0:43:15 | |
The fluke and the foot-rot and the fat maggot | 0:43:15 | 0:43:19 | |
Gnawing the skin from the small bones, | 0:43:19 | 0:43:22 | |
The sheep are grazing at Bwlch-y-Fedwen, | 0:43:22 | 0:43:26 | |
Arranged romantically in the usual manner | 0:43:26 | 0:43:30 | |
On a bleak background of bald stone. | 0:43:30 | 0:43:33 | |
Too far for you to see | 0:43:36 | 0:43:38 | |
The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys, | 0:43:38 | 0:43:42 | |
The nettles growing through the cracked doors, | 0:43:42 | 0:43:47 | |
The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira, | 0:43:47 | 0:43:50 | |
There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight, | 0:43:51 | 0:43:56 | |
And the fields are reverting to the bare moor. | 0:43:56 | 0:43:59 | |
Though he shunned the media, | 0:44:01 | 0:44:03 | |
Thomas agreed to make two films with the BBC | 0:44:03 | 0:44:06 | |
about his life and work in the Welsh hills. | 0:44:06 | 0:44:09 | |
Well, I came out of a kind of bourgeois environment | 0:44:09 | 0:44:15 | |
and, er, this muck and blood and, er, hardness, | 0:44:15 | 0:44:20 | |
the rain and the spittle and phlegm of farm life | 0:44:20 | 0:44:27 | |
was of course a shock to begin with, | 0:44:27 | 0:44:29 | |
and one felt that this was something not, er... | 0:44:29 | 0:44:32 | |
not quite part of the order of things, but... | 0:44:32 | 0:44:36 | |
..as one experienced it and saw | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
how definitely part of their lives this was, | 0:44:40 | 0:44:43 | |
sympathy grew in oneself, | 0:44:43 | 0:44:46 | |
and compassion, and admiration. | 0:44:46 | 0:44:51 | |
And I did find that | 0:44:51 | 0:44:53 | |
the strongly charactered hardness of these border people | 0:44:53 | 0:44:59 | |
really did make an impression on me | 0:44:59 | 0:45:02 | |
as far as poetic material was concerned. | 0:45:02 | 0:45:05 | |
BELL TOLLS | 0:45:05 | 0:45:07 | |
For Thomas, language and imagery | 0:45:12 | 0:45:14 | |
connected his work as priest and as poet. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:17 | |
Poetry is religion, religion is poetry. | 0:45:19 | 0:45:23 | |
The message of the New Testament is poetry. | 0:45:23 | 0:45:26 | |
Christ was a poet. | 0:45:26 | 0:45:28 | |
The New Testament as metaphor, the Resurrection as metaphor, | 0:45:28 | 0:45:34 | |
and...when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity. | 0:45:34 | 0:45:40 | |
And when one discusses Christianity, one is discussing poetry | 0:45:40 | 0:45:46 | |
in its imaginative aspects - | 0:45:46 | 0:45:49 | |
the core of both are imagination as far as I'm concerned. | 0:45:49 | 0:45:54 | |
He couldn't bear literalism. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:56 | |
He loved the fact that poetry and | 0:45:56 | 0:45:59 | |
religion provided for each other | 0:45:59 | 0:46:02 | |
very ready explanations. | 0:46:02 | 0:46:05 | |
He could link in his imagination | 0:46:05 | 0:46:09 | |
the idea of the story of the Resurrection | 0:46:09 | 0:46:13 | |
with the word "metaphor". | 0:46:13 | 0:46:16 | |
It's how he wrote his sermons, how he thought about God, | 0:46:16 | 0:46:21 | |
how he wrote his poems, | 0:46:21 | 0:46:23 | |
and I believe it all to be one whole way of being. | 0:46:23 | 0:46:27 | |
Nes bod ni wedi ymffurfio... | 0:46:27 | 0:46:30 | |
Despite his isolated existence, | 0:46:30 | 0:46:33 | |
Thomas was passionately committed to contemporary causes. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
He was well known for his campaigning - | 0:46:36 | 0:46:39 | |
for nuclear disarmament | 0:46:39 | 0:46:40 | |
and for wider use of the Welsh language. | 0:46:40 | 0:46:43 | |
-NEWSREADER: -As the arson campaign enters its 14th week, | 0:46:45 | 0:46:48 | |
police in Wales have warned that all homes owned by English people | 0:46:48 | 0:46:52 | |
are now at risk. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:54 | |
Most controversially, when a militant Welsh nationalist group | 0:46:54 | 0:46:57 | |
burnt down English-owned holiday homes in the 1970s, | 0:46:57 | 0:47:01 | |
Thomas was moved to defend them. | 0:47:01 | 0:47:03 | |
TRANSLATION: | 0:47:05 | 0:47:09 | |
One supremely bleak poem | 0:47:20 | 0:47:22 | |
summed up Thomas's despair about the fate of Welsh culture. | 0:47:22 | 0:47:26 | |
I have walked the shore | 0:47:30 | 0:47:32 | |
For an hour and seen the English | 0:47:32 | 0:47:34 | |
Scavenging among the remains Of our culture, | 0:47:34 | 0:47:37 | |
covering the sand | 0:47:37 | 0:47:39 | |
Like the tide and, with the roughness | 0:47:39 | 0:47:42 | |
Of the tide, elbowing our language | 0:47:42 | 0:47:45 | |
Into the grave that we have dug for it. | 0:47:45 | 0:47:49 | |
In the '60s, defiantly urban voices began to break through. | 0:48:02 | 0:48:08 | |
The Liverpool Poets were | 0:48:08 | 0:48:10 | |
geography graduate turned pop star Roger McGough, | 0:48:10 | 0:48:13 | |
music journalist Brian Patten | 0:48:13 | 0:48:15 | |
and artist Adrian Henri. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:18 | |
Together, they would bring poetry into the heart of '60s pop culture. | 0:48:20 | 0:48:24 | |
The BBC filmed the group in 1966. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:29 | |
They captured McGough performing a witty poem | 0:48:29 | 0:48:33 | |
that was infused with the language of modern consumerism. | 0:48:33 | 0:48:37 | |
Monika, the tea things are taking over, | 0:48:37 | 0:48:40 | |
the cups are as big as bubble cars, they throttle round the room, | 0:48:40 | 0:48:43 | |
the tin-openers skate on the greasy plates | 0:48:43 | 0:48:45 | |
by the light of the silvery moon. | 0:48:45 | 0:48:47 | |
The biscuits are having a party, they're necking in our bread bin, | 0:48:47 | 0:48:51 | |
that's jazz you hear in the salt cellars | 0:48:51 | 0:48:54 | |
but they don't let non-members in. | 0:48:54 | 0:48:56 | |
The egg spoons had our eggs for breakfast, | 0:48:56 | 0:48:58 | |
the sauce bottle's asleep in our bed, | 0:48:58 | 0:49:00 | |
I overheard the knives and forks, | 0:49:00 | 0:49:01 | |
it won't be long, they said | 0:49:01 | 0:49:03 | |
it won't be long, they said... | 0:49:03 | 0:49:05 | |
In 1967, the hugely influential Mersey Sound was published | 0:49:05 | 0:49:09 | |
and became Britain's bestselling poetry anthology of the time. | 0:49:09 | 0:49:14 | |
I remember finding Roger McGough's | 0:49:14 | 0:49:17 | |
Let Me Die A Youngman's Death - | 0:49:17 | 0:49:19 | |
not a clean and inbetween the sheets holywater death. | 0:49:19 | 0:49:23 | |
I remember reading it in the Sunday Times one Sunday | 0:49:23 | 0:49:26 | |
and thinking, "Wow, I want to do that." | 0:49:26 | 0:49:29 | |
McGough became a familiar face on television | 0:49:30 | 0:49:33 | |
performing cheeky and affectionate poems like Summer With The Monarch. | 0:49:33 | 0:49:37 | |
The Queen came up to Liverpool To dine at our Town Hall | 0:49:39 | 0:49:42 | |
In the evening wrote to her husband "Dear Philip, I'm having a ball | 0:49:42 | 0:49:46 | |
"I think I'll hang about I mean everything's happening here | 0:49:46 | 0:49:49 | |
"I'm beginning to dig the poetry scene | 0:49:49 | 0:49:51 | |
"And the ale is bloody gear." | 0:49:51 | 0:49:53 | |
So while she was having a castle built | 0:49:53 | 0:49:55 | |
Down in Castle Street | 0:49:55 | 0:49:57 | |
She had a look round Liverpool 8 | 0:49:57 | 0:49:59 | |
Found a pad there, small but neat | 0:49:59 | 0:50:01 | |
She moved in a few belongings | 0:50:01 | 0:50:03 | |
Corgis, crown, a throne... | 0:50:03 | 0:50:05 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:50:05 | 0:50:07 | |
And blueblood in the neighbourhood Really raised the tone. | 0:50:07 | 0:50:10 | |
It seemed very near | 0:50:10 | 0:50:13 | |
and seemed very approachable | 0:50:13 | 0:50:15 | |
and yet when you look at it now, in some respects, | 0:50:15 | 0:50:18 | |
of course it was very formal poetry. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:20 | |
There they are in little four-line verses, rhyming perfectly. | 0:50:20 | 0:50:24 | |
So it was... It was magical. | 0:50:24 | 0:50:27 | |
McGough could tell a whole life story in a handful of words. | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
Out of work, divorced, usually pissed | 0:50:34 | 0:50:37 | |
He aimed low in life | 0:50:37 | 0:50:38 | |
and missed. | 0:50:38 | 0:50:40 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:50:40 | 0:50:42 | |
But McGough's popular approach met a critical backlash. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:49 | |
If you write about ordinary stuff, | 0:50:49 | 0:50:52 | |
and if you write about things | 0:50:52 | 0:50:53 | |
that other poets have written about in quite high-falutin' ways | 0:50:53 | 0:50:56 | |
and you write about it in very ordinary ways, | 0:50:56 | 0:50:58 | |
people will treat you with disdain. | 0:50:58 | 0:51:00 | |
There was still a lot of hostility | 0:51:00 | 0:51:02 | |
towards the Liverpool Poets. | 0:51:02 | 0:51:03 | |
Poets found it unbearable. They do, | 0:51:03 | 0:51:06 | |
if somebody comes along who's popular. | 0:51:06 | 0:51:08 | |
I once read a review that was outrageous. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:12 | |
I mean, it was just as if somehow or other he had profaned poetry. | 0:51:12 | 0:51:16 | |
He hasn't, he hasn't at all. He's done the opposite. | 0:51:16 | 0:51:20 | |
He's kept it alive. | 0:51:20 | 0:51:21 | |
What do you think the role of the poet is? Or your poetry? | 0:51:21 | 0:51:24 | |
Um, I don't quite know, really. | 0:51:24 | 0:51:27 | |
I think... I do things I think are... | 0:51:27 | 0:51:29 | |
There are two reasons - reasons for writing, | 0:51:29 | 0:51:31 | |
I'm not sure why one writes poetry, it's very personal. | 0:51:31 | 0:51:33 | |
But then when you actually stand and read it to people, | 0:51:33 | 0:51:36 | |
then I think it possibly can be entertaining. | 0:51:36 | 0:51:38 | |
The choice of poems should be entertaining. | 0:51:38 | 0:51:40 | |
Do you see yourself as an entertainer? | 0:51:40 | 0:51:43 | |
Not in the sense of, er, | 0:51:43 | 0:51:44 | |
like a showbusiness sort of thing, not really. | 0:51:44 | 0:51:46 | |
I think it's all sorts of things. | 0:51:46 | 0:51:48 | |
You know, it can be serious, it can be entertaining, it can be funny. | 0:51:48 | 0:51:52 | |
I think entertaining tends to mean funny, I think, that's the problem. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:55 | |
In people's minds. | 0:51:55 | 0:51:56 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:51:56 | 0:51:59 | |
Poetry had become a familiar part of popular entertainment | 0:51:59 | 0:52:02 | |
and was reaching a wider audience than ever before. | 0:52:02 | 0:52:05 | |
But in the mid 1970s, at a time of deep social unrest in Britain, | 0:52:10 | 0:52:15 | |
more urgent marginalised voices started to be heard. | 0:52:15 | 0:52:19 | |
Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote about the disaffection of British black youth. | 0:52:23 | 0:52:29 | |
He was the only voice that was speaking to us, | 0:52:30 | 0:52:33 | |
putting our situation under a microscope, | 0:52:33 | 0:52:35 | |
and not only just reporting and observing | 0:52:35 | 0:52:39 | |
but kind of offering direction and ideas. | 0:52:39 | 0:52:42 | |
You look at the body of his work | 0:52:42 | 0:52:43 | |
and he sums up the '70s into the early '80s, | 0:52:43 | 0:52:46 | |
what it was like to be black in Britain, like nobody else. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:50 | |
Kwesi Johnson used poetry to tackle the riots of the early '80s. | 0:52:51 | 0:52:57 | |
Madness, madness | 0:52:57 | 0:52:59 | |
Madness tight on the heads of the rebels | 0:52:59 | 0:53:02 | |
The bitterness erup's like a heart blas' | 0:53:02 | 0:53:05 | |
Broke glass, rituals of blood an' a-burnin'... | 0:53:05 | 0:53:12 | |
Kwesi Johnson wrote in a Jamaican dialect | 0:53:12 | 0:53:15 | |
and performed his poems over reggae beats. | 0:53:15 | 0:53:18 | |
Broke glass, cold blades as sharp as the eyes of hate | 0:53:18 | 0:53:23 | |
And the stabbin', it's | 0:53:23 | 0:53:25 | |
War amongs' the rebels... | 0:53:25 | 0:53:29 | |
One of the fibs about British poetry | 0:53:29 | 0:53:31 | |
is that it's always been written in Standard English. | 0:53:31 | 0:53:33 | |
The point is, many poets, both in Britain and America, | 0:53:33 | 0:53:36 | |
have written in what you might call non-standard, or in dialect. | 0:53:36 | 0:53:39 | |
So when Linton was writing in patois, | 0:53:39 | 0:53:42 | |
people said, "Oh, well, I don't understand it." | 0:53:42 | 0:53:44 | |
I think they were making a statement | 0:53:44 | 0:53:46 | |
that they didn't want to understand it. | 0:53:46 | 0:53:47 | |
Kwesi Johnson's unique style of performance | 0:53:47 | 0:53:50 | |
attracted the curiosity of even the most traditional BBC programmes. | 0:53:50 | 0:53:54 | |
You do use a Creole patois, don't you, which is very difficult | 0:53:54 | 0:53:57 | |
for a white person to understand. I found listening to some of them | 0:53:57 | 0:54:00 | |
that I would have liked to | 0:54:00 | 0:54:01 | |
understand them more than I did and that in a way | 0:54:01 | 0:54:03 | |
you weren't actually reaching me as a white person. | 0:54:03 | 0:54:06 | |
Well, perhaps it forces you, if you're really that interested, | 0:54:06 | 0:54:11 | |
you know, to try and penetrate the language | 0:54:11 | 0:54:13 | |
and check it out and try and understand it. | 0:54:13 | 0:54:15 | |
But would you not also like the white people to understand | 0:54:15 | 0:54:17 | |
a little bit of what the black people are going through? | 0:54:17 | 0:54:20 | |
Sure, um... and I think they, um, some people do | 0:54:20 | 0:54:25 | |
get some insights into our experiences from my poetry. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:30 | |
We looked to our language and the way we delivered our language | 0:54:30 | 0:54:33 | |
as part of our rebelliousness. | 0:54:33 | 0:54:35 | |
You know, our parents, you know, when they came over in the mid '50s, | 0:54:35 | 0:54:38 | |
the way that they thought they'd succeed is by assimilating, | 0:54:38 | 0:54:41 | |
which...you know, really meant trying to play the white man. | 0:54:41 | 0:54:45 | |
I mean, you know, Jamaican language, it's got a bass, man. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:48 | |
It's got a certain power to it. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:51 | |
..So smooth So tight and ripe and smash! | 0:54:51 | 0:54:56 | |
You like also to perform your poems, don't you, | 0:54:56 | 0:54:58 | |
rather than to actually have people read them? | 0:54:58 | 0:55:00 | |
Absolutely, because it's oral poetry. | 0:55:00 | 0:55:02 | |
The emphasis is on the spoken word as opposed to the written word. | 0:55:02 | 0:55:07 | |
And of course the spoken word has a greater immediacy | 0:55:07 | 0:55:11 | |
and impact than the written word does. | 0:55:11 | 0:55:14 | |
Published in the run-up to the Brixton riots of the early '80s, | 0:55:17 | 0:55:20 | |
Dread Beat An' Blood became Kwesi Johnson's politically charged anthem | 0:55:20 | 0:55:24 | |
to his generation's struggle with police brutality and injustice. | 0:55:24 | 0:55:28 | |
Dread Beat An' Blood is a really powerful piece of work | 0:55:30 | 0:55:34 | |
that's definitely informed by the times, | 0:55:34 | 0:55:36 | |
and I don't think there's any better encapsulation | 0:55:36 | 0:55:39 | |
of what the Black British experience was at that time. | 0:55:39 | 0:55:44 | |
I mean, it certainly changed my life. | 0:55:44 | 0:55:46 | |
The BBC arts documentary strand Omnibus | 0:55:48 | 0:55:51 | |
followed Kwesi Johnson's campaign for George Lindo, | 0:55:51 | 0:55:55 | |
a Black British man who had been wrongfully imprisoned for robbery. | 0:55:55 | 0:56:00 | |
The slogans that the demonstrators were chanting | 0:56:02 | 0:56:05 | |
had a kind of a calypso tempo. | 0:56:05 | 0:56:07 | |
# Jailhouse ain't George house | 0:56:07 | 0:56:09 | |
# Jailhouse ain't George house... # | 0:56:09 | 0:56:11 | |
And, um, that simple chant gave me the inspiration to write this poem. | 0:56:11 | 0:56:16 | |
Dem frame up George Lindo up in Bradford town | 0:56:16 | 0:56:19 | |
but de Bradford blaks dem a rally round | 0:56:19 | 0:56:23 | |
Maggi Tatcha on di go wid a racist show | 0:56:23 | 0:56:26 | |
but a she haffi go | 0:56:26 | 0:56:28 | |
Kaw, rite now, | 0:56:28 | 0:56:30 | |
African, Asian, West Indian, | 0:56:30 | 0:56:33 | |
an' Black British | 0:56:33 | 0:56:35 | |
stan firm inna Inglan | 0:56:35 | 0:56:37 | |
Inna disya time yah. | 0:56:37 | 0:56:39 | |
Throughout its history, the BBC has always used radio and television | 0:56:46 | 0:56:50 | |
to broadcast poetry. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:52 | |
But in the 21st century, it is showcasing poetic genius online. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:58 | |
The iPlayer series Women Who Spit | 0:56:58 | 0:57:01 | |
drew on the most exciting new female poets. | 0:57:01 | 0:57:04 | |
And the last word goes to Vanessa Kisuule | 0:57:06 | 0:57:09 | |
with her plea for women to claim their place in the world. | 0:57:09 | 0:57:13 | |
Take up space. | 0:57:13 | 0:57:14 | |
Wear pink skirts or black Doc Martens. | 0:57:14 | 0:57:17 | |
Know that souls | 0:57:17 | 0:57:19 | |
can dance unchecked beneath the fortress of a hijab | 0:57:19 | 0:57:21 | |
as well as baggy T-shirts and ripped jeans | 0:57:21 | 0:57:24 | |
Shave your legs, or don't | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
Smile from ear to ear, or don't | 0:57:27 | 0:57:30 | |
Liberation has no dress code, etiquette or secret dialect | 0:57:30 | 0:57:33 | |
Give yourself the space to be fickle | 0:57:33 | 0:57:36 | |
to bumble with your faith to fail | 0:57:36 | 0:57:37 | |
to fluff up your lines and make things up | 0:57:37 | 0:57:40 | |
Your shabby slip-stitch mistakes make you miraculous | 0:57:40 | 0:57:44 | |
A goddess of spit and sweat stumbling in a pit of phoenix ashes. | 0:57:44 | 0:57:48 | |
Take up space. | 0:57:48 | 0:57:51 | |
Believe the compliments you are given | 0:57:51 | 0:57:54 | |
Give yourself the benefit of the doubt | 0:57:54 | 0:57:56 | |
Don't doubt the benefits | 0:57:56 | 0:57:58 | |
of being the brightest shade of you on the spectrum | 0:57:58 | 0:58:01 | |
You | 0:58:01 | 0:58:02 | |
You with the shoulders prone to shrugs | 0:58:02 | 0:58:04 | |
and the throat full of half-formed whispers | 0:58:04 | 0:58:06 | |
You are indispensable. | 0:58:06 | 0:58:09 |