Speechification

I’d never come across Something Understood before, probably because it’s broadcast at 6am and 11.30pm on Sundays, but it seems like rather a good idea, despite its new-agey premise. Every week, “the programme examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry”. This week: aging. Lovely stuff. [MP3]

If The Verb went out on Radio 4 there’d be complaints—Feedback would be busy for weeks. It’s one of those programmes that exposes Radio 4 as sort of uptight. Which is funny when you think that it actually goes out on dark brown corduroy Radio 3… Just goes to show (MP3).

At the end of the Seventies John Cooper Clarke lived in a little house opposite the front gates of my Secondary school in not-very-glamorous-but-not- very-gritty-either Stevenage, which is a new town at the wrong end of Hertfordshire. His presence there (I didn’t imagine it did I? Is there any evidence that he did live there?) was so unlikely and such a mad, peacock-haired challenge to the dreary suburban surroundings that boys I knew used to gather outside his house and throw chip papers and coke cans at him when he came out.

He passed by, implacable and apparently unmoved. Later he’d show up as support at practically every gig I ever attended. In fact I seem to remember thinking he must be resident at The Hammersmith Palais (or was it The Lyceum?). So here’s a lovely half hour about the man from the other reason I cut my hair weird and bought an Oxfam overcoat: Paul Morley (MP3).

Here’s the programme’s web page and here’s its press release, which has some more information.

Three poets (two postgrad students and one faculty member, Fred D’Aguiar) from Virginia Tech remember the massacre which took place a year ago. I’ll warn you: this is a very moving programme. I think poetry must speak to a special centre in the brain. It short-circuits rationality and this gives it permission to provoke the kind of involuntary emotional reaction that this 23 minutes must have produced everywhere it was heard. Poetry also seems to have a special freedom to deal with topics untouchable in other forms—like this most awful story of death and loss. Outstanding (MP3).

The World Service web site has improved a lot lately and programme pages are now excellent. Here’s this programme’s page.

Here’s a nice long one. Nearly two hours of poetry and music on the theme of the weather from Radio 3: you might consider it a companion to Dan’s much scarier Aussie weather post from a few days ago. You’ll probably think this one’s a bit soporific for your cutting edge tastes but the choice is eclectic enough—from A. A. Milne to Kurt Weill and from Kathleen Ferrier to Steve Reich. I think this would make a great soundtrack to a longish train journey. London to Bristol, say. In the rain.

Here’s the programme’s MP3 and here’s the extensive playlist.

Mark Radcliffe—practically radio Royalty these days—has made a lovely programme about his old friend Hovis Presley, Bolton stand-up and poet who retreated from fame and died much too young (MP3).

I didn’t expect much of this one but I’m a junkie for stuff about the creative process so I listened and it’s just excellent - the first of four half-hours apparently. They call it ‘an exploration of the differences between poetry and song’ but it’s really a genteel Radio 4 version of a Reality TV format: poets write lyrics for singers.

There’s something interesting about the reactions of the participants, too: the poets (Paul Farley and Jo Shapcott) are blown away by the whole process but the singers (Jamie Cullum and Doc Brown) are almost blasé. Maybe they just lead more exciting lives. The pay-off is unmissable and quite moving. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series (MP3).

Phill Jupitus used to be Porky The Poet. I’d forgotten that, so I was a bit surprised when he popped up presenting a programme about small poetry presses. But he’s the perfect person; he clearly revels in the tactile and sensory splendour of these little volumes and gets the poets to enthuse splendidly about this eccentric and essential world. It’s nice to hear a mention for the News From Nowhere bookshop and The Reader, and to be reminded just how posh and disdainful all those Spenders, Steins and TS Eliots sounded. (MP3 here)