Editor's note: Thursday 6 October is National Poetry Day and Radio 4 Extra has a special programme featuring the Saturday Live poets to mark it. Full details at the end of this post - PM.
The English romantic poet Shelley said "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". A grand claim but wreathed in truth. Poetry, whatever its cultural resonance, political colour or artistic aim is, at its best, a distilled entreaty to reflect and consider.
When delivered to you in person by a living poet it's an (occasionally raging) bugle call to pay attention, a vibrant and vital mix of high art and sweaty stand up performance.
Poetry can be very bad.
But it can also be sublime, hysterical, scurrilous and moving, as it was in a recently recorded live poetry show at the BBC Radio Theatre in London.
Saturday Live from 9 July 2011: Richard Coles with Cerys Matthews and the poet Murray Lachlan Young
For one short hour last Friday evening Broadcasting House was London W1's own Parnassus, inhabited by the regular poets from Radio 4's Saturday Live and 6 Music's Cerys Matthews who sang a version of a Robert Burns poem. The show was designed to celebrate National Poetry Day and it was a great collaborative effort between Radio 4, 4 Extra and 6music as well as the BBC Big Screens who are showing a film of the event.Working in the Radio Theatre is always a great pleasure and we had a very warm and generous audience. The shared experience of seeing such a diverse group of artists perform is powerful and for a while we were all poetic mariners buffeted and caressed in a maelstrom sea of spoken verse.
Or as Sylvia Plath less floridly put it: "There's nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends." Quite.
Chris Wilson is senior producer, BBC Audio and Music Factual Production
- Saturday Live Poetry Pop-Up is on Thursday 6 October 2011 which also happens to be National Poetry Day. You can first hear it at 10am and 3pm and repeated over the following few days. You can listen online from tomorrow (Thursday) from around midday for seven days.
- Mark Lawson interviewed Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy on Front Row last week. You can listen online.
- In the next episode of The Culture Show poet Simon Armitage marks National Poetry Day on BBC Two. Timing depends on where you live, details here.
