Margaret Reynolds, on Adventures in Poetry
March 2013
‘Adventures in Poetry’ is a half-hour radio programme on BBC Radio4 on the subject of
one iconic poem. It takes one, well loved and much requested poem, and examines it in
detail, through a montage of interviews with people who can throw light on its popularity,
appeal or effect, either through personal experience or through some professional
expertise.
The selection of poems so far includes Kipling’s ‘If’, Psalm 23, Marvell’s ‘To His Coy
Mistress’, Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Journey of the
Magi’, Adrian Henri’s ‘Tonight at Noon’, Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day’, Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ and Allen Ginsberg’s ‘First Party
at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels’.
‘Adventures in Poetry’ has been running since 1999 on BBC Radio 4. It was devised by
Robert Ketteridge, then based in Bristol, and now Head of Documentaries in London.
The first producer for the series was Sara Davies, and she then went on to be Series
Editor for the programme which was made by the Literature Unit at BBC Bristol. The
first series of four had individual presenters for each programme. I have been the
presenter of the programme since 2000.
‘Adventures in Poetry’ shares a 4.30pm Sunday afternoon slot with ‘Poetry Please!’, a
request format presented by poet Roger McGough which is the longest running radio
poetry request programme in the world. ‘Adventures in Poetry’ is then repeated in a late
night slot at 11.30pm on Saturday. To date, with one or two series of four to six
programmes commissioned each year by the BBC, we have made nearly sixty
programmes. All of the programmes are a collaborative effort, and I have worked with a
number of talented and creative producers based at the BBC in Bristol including Sara
Davies, Tim Dee, Christine Hall, Sarah Langan, Frances Byrne, Mark Smalley, Viv
Beeby, Peter Everett, Paul Dodgson, Rachel Kiddey and Jane Greenwood. The
programme has been favourably reviewed in all the major newspapers and on on-line
sites. Gillian Reynolds, the radio critic of The Daily Telegraph, is a particular fan.
Early on in the series I wrote a piece about the programme for the BBC website and this
is what it said:
I have been teaching poetry for nearly as long as I’ve been reading it. From
Chaucer and Shakespeare, through Wordsworth and Tennyson, to poets writing
now - Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney, Jo Shapcott - they all
offer different things, and they all give me the same thing.
Poetry’s power can happen in the most ordinary places. I have read, say,
Tennyson’s In Memoriam many times, written on it, taught it with enthusiastic
students and reluctant ones. And yet still…I can sit in a classroom on a dull
Monday morning reading out ‘Dark house, by which once more I stand’, and my
eyes fill with tears. The students stare at me. They look out of the window,
embarrassed. Do I care? No. I love that overflow of feeling as the poetry spills
through me, and want always to be open to it.
In this, poetry is like music. It works on the rhythms of the body and the feelings
that are the gut experiences - desire, fear, anger, pain. But then it shapes them.
The effort is always to keep the emotional tone of what happened, while
controlling it enough to impose a pattern. One favourite teacher of mine used to
like the pun in ‘composing’. Poetry composes feelings, images, ideas, - in the
sense of making it into an artistic object – but it also composes – in the sense of
calming, containing, reconciling what is otherwise diffuse.
When Sara Davies and I started work on this series of Adventures in Poetry we
knew that we wanted to keep that excitement. All of the poems are well known,
but we’d like you to hear them as if for the first time. So we’ve tried to show
where they come from – how William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ germinated with
an entry in his sister Dorothy’s journal – as well as the scattering of that seed –
how Gillian Clarke wrote a modern version about one traumatised man’s
persistent memory of the Wordsworth poem.
Don’t worry. It’s not all serious. There are quite a few jokes along the way - and
plenty of surprises. Listen out for the tortoise that’s linked to Tennyson’s ‘The
Charge of the Light Brigade’, and the saucy tale of how an ex-editor of
Cosmopolitan first encountered John Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’.
With each programme, with each poem, Sara and I - and Christine Hall who
worked with us on the series - have tried to let ourselves be taken where the poem
leads. In the case of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’ this meant that we recorded
by her family grave in Highgate Cemetery.
Other things just worked. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’ begins with the words
‘Love set you ticking like a fat gold watch’. And, as one of our experts - Erica
Wagner, literary editor of The Times and the author of a book on Plath and
Hughes – has just had a baby, he obligingly gurgled away in the background.
Theo wasn’t our only casting triumph. In this series you’ll find Sue Limb, author
of ‘The Wordsmiths of Gorsemere’, the poets Peter Porter and Anne Stevenson, a
group of Eton schoolboys, Derek Jarman’s garden, music by Purcell and Manfred
Mann, the editor of the Faber Book of Blue Verse, Rice Krispies, and some
primary school children worrying about what it means to be ‘lonely as a cloud’
and have no one to play with.
And where else are you going to find a half hour line-up that includes the voices
of the BBC correspondent John Simpson, the cult 60’s actor David Hemmings,
and the Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson?
I’ve known all of these poems for a long time. I thought I had thought every
thought possible. But when we were working on John Donne’s ‘The Sunne
Rising’, Lisa Jardine remarked that in a C17th materialist economy that relied on
a complicated exchange of gifts, a poem was as much a commodity as any other.
Including – perhaps especially – a poem given to someone you love.
But you can only do that with poetry. With something in language that is jewelled
and rare, something so refined and precious that it can be turned into a touchstone
and an icon, and a message to the one someone who will understand.
And that is the beauty of poetry, of the best poetry. It will always challenge
everything you think you know, and it will always tell you more than you can
ever know. And sometimes, it might even make you cry in the middle of a Sunday
afternoon.’
All the different producers bring their own special talents, enthusiasms and creative
methods to the programme, but the principles of ‘Adventures in Poetry’ remain in place.
First of all we wanted to be true to the poem. Every programme includes a complete
reading of the poem, except in those cases where the work is too long. These are few, but
include the anonymous narrative poems ‘Donal Og’ and ‘Tam Lin’, and Tennyson’s ‘The
Lady of Shalott’ where we only included selected stanzas.
Most often, the poem is read by an actor. Some times these were recordings made for
‘Poetry Please!’ or some other BBC programme such as ‘With Great Pleasure’. More
often, these were specially recorded readings, and some of them are works of art in
themselves. When I sat in a studio and listened to Stephen Rea’s masterly reading of
Louis MacNiece’s ‘Snow’ I said to my producer, Frances Byrne, ‘Let’s just play that over
and over for half an hour’. But the line up of actors reading for this series is altogether
impressive and varied and includes Judi Dench, Samuel West, Janet Suzman and Douglas
Henshall, as well as archive recordings by Peggy Ashcroft and Kenneth Williams. In
other cases we used archive recordings by the poets themselves including T.S. Eliot, Ted
Hughes, Philip Larkin, Adrian Henri, U. A. Fanthorpe, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, and
Alan Ginsberg.
And then we wanted to make these poems belong to everyone. We were determined to
recognise that poetry is for everyone and can indeed be – as Wordsworth said – ‘the real
language of men’ – and women and children. So when we did Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Matilda’
Sara sought out two six year olds, Tilly and Matty, to give their opinions about the story
of their namesake. For Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’ we found Elizabeth Lord, who
had recently read it at her mother’s funeral. For ‘Psalm 23’ we spoke to a country vicar
who found consolation in the poem for himself and his parishioners.
And of course we speak to poets – asking them both about the poem in question, but also
about how it might relate to or connect with their own work. Such poets include Simon
Armitage, Michael Rosen, Marilyn Hacker, Robert Pinsky, Gillian Clarke, Andrew
Motion, Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Michael Longley.
Then we do often ask well known people, who are household names in some other
discipline, to give their special take on the poem. So we went to speak to the human
rights lawyer Helena Kennedy and to Nicholas Phillips – then Lord Chief Justice, later
President of the Supreme Court – about Shakespeare’s ‘The quality of mercy’ speech
from The Merchant of Venice. In the same way, we interviewed Rowan Williams – then
Archbishop of Canterbury – about T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’ and got a very
personal story about the three Kings in his own family’s Nativity set travelling day by
day across the carpet during the days from Christmas to Epiphany. We spoke to David
Blunkett about politics and the experience of blindness for Milton’s ‘On His Blindness’.
We asked the well known children’s author Michael Morpurgo about Hilaire Belloc’s
‘Matilda’, and we heard Frieda Hughes unveiling a blue plaque dedicated to her mother
in a programme about Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’.
And because poetry works in metaphors and unexpected images, Sara and I and all the
‘Adventures’ producers, are also always keen to bring in things that are unexpected,
surprising and funny. While we were working on John Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’ I
puzzled away for weeks, trying to recall some odd place where I had recently
encountered the poem. Then it came to me. It was in the glossy magazine The World of
Interiors in a feature on Derek Jarman’s cottage on the beach at Dungeness. So Sara
tracked down Keith Collins to hear the story of the poem-sculpture on the wall of the
cottage. Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ took us off to consult the Chairman of the English
Daffodil Society. Edward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ sent us to the cookery
writer Sophie Grigson for expert information on quinces, and to television and radio
presenter Zoe Ball and her father Johnny for a story about her wedding day.
And then we go to academics who can fill us in on contemporary history, on the life of
the poet, on the facts of whatever story it is that is in the poem. They might have strings
of degrees, they might be expert, but they also know how to tell a good tale.
I vividly remember visiting the late Colin White at the Naval Museum in Greenwich to
hear about the battle of Aboukir Bay during the Napoleonic wars for Felicia Hemans’s
poem ‘Casabianca’ - much better known by its first line, ‘The boy stood on the burning
deck’. Colin had actually been to the site of the battle in Egypt and had taken part in a
diving expedition to see and touch the wreck of the Orient that was captained by Louis de
Casabianca, father of Giocante, the unfortunately steadfast boy in question.
On another occasion, on the trail of another famous battle, we visited the military
historian, also sadly the late, Richard Holmes, at an army base near Swindon. Richard
was another true hands-on man, and he had ridden in a cavalry re-enactment of the Battle
of Balaclava, the subject of Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. But the
moment I remember, as we sat in his bland but efficient office, was the brilliant vision he
conjured of the battlefield when he cupped his hands and said:
We can think of the landscape really by putting our two hands together with our
palms open, and our left hand is the north valley, our right hand is the south
valley. And where our hands join there’s a road called the Voronsoft Road, which
was a major route in to the Russian port… The wrist, where our wristwatch might
be, is the high ground from which the British Commander in Chief, Lord Raglan,
is watching events.
It was one of those moments when radio really does give you the best pictures.
And we work with pictures in other ways too. When Christine Hall and I were working
on Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ we went to Chichester Cathedral to see the C14th
effigy that Larkin had himself once visited. With Mark Smalley, for the poem ‘I Am’, we
traced John Clare’s beginnings at the village of Helpston and followed on to the stillsurviving buildings of the Northhampton General Lunatic Asylum, now part of St
Andrew’s Hospital, where he lived for his last forty four years. For Henry Newbolt’s
‘Vitae Lampada’ (‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight’) we visited Clifton
School in Bristol which was his alma mater and the site of the cricket pitch that inspired
the poem. For Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’ we went to the Bodleian
Library in Oxford to look at the manuscript in the poet’s own hand.
But for all these stories, locations and embellishments we never forget that we are dealing
with something very particular and special, and at every stage we think about the
technical qualities that make poetry into poetry: the form, the sound, the look on the page,
the rhyme, the rhythm, the metaphors and images.
I, and all the producers and researchers who have worked on ‘Adventures in Poetry’,
have had some real adventures of our own. In the course of our work we have been
privileged to visit Lambeth Palace, the Royal Courts of Justice, any number of
fascinating schools, and support groups, museums and libraries and historic houses. We
have talked to many people and heard much more than just a discussion of the poem in
question. Poetry opens up space in the heart and in the mind, and many personal
confidences and remarkable stories have gone into these programmes.
I think now of a moment, as we were working on U.A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Dear Mr Lee’, when
Rosie Bailey read us an unpublished poem by U.A., clearly holding a private
conversation in which we had no part, but which we were permitted to witness. Or there
was Susan Chitty, biographer of Henry Newbolt, comparing his status as a ‘one poem
wonder’ with memories of her own mother, Antonia White, who was always annoyed to
be labelled as ‘the author of Frost in May’ when she had written so much more. Or else I
think of the English folk singer June Tabor telling us how she first came across a song by
Eric Bogle, who had taken a well known Australian poem by Banjo Patterson and turned
it into a protest and a requiem, ‘And the band played Waltzing Matilda’.
Poetry works because it speaks to the spirit and to the senses. As with music, we are
moved in our very body by its rhythms and its form. But our intellect and our souls are
addressed too in the best words the poet can muster.
Poetry today is more popular than ever. In London, Poet in the City commands big
audiences both for old poetry and for new at its home in King’s Place. All across the
country poetry festivals attract enthusiastic audiences. Poetry reading groups draw in
members both young and old. Books like Ruth Padel’s The Poem and the Journey are
part anthology, part analysis and all enlightenment. Daisy Goodwin’s Off By Heart
reminds us that a poem can be a private gem and a shared treasure trove. Listeners to
BBC Radio 4’s ‘Poetry Please’ choose their favourite poems year in year out. Listeners to
BBC Radio 4’s ‘Adventures in Poetry’ hear the stories behind their favourite poems as
those poems come to life all over again.
And we need poetry to live, to live fully. In 1994 the eminent American poet Adrienne
Rich called a book of essays What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics.
Her title came from a poem by William Carlos Williams – a poem about the importance
and necessity of poetry:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die every day
for lack
of what is found there