Season highlights: Poetry
Season highlights: Poetry
Published: 22 September 2016
Saturday 26 November
Poet Alice Oswald preserves the memory of the rainstorm which hit Romford in Essex during the early hours of the morning of June 23, with a new poetic piece written specifically for radio. She borrows the spirit of an advertisement ran by Daniel Defoe in the London Gazette 13-16 Dec 1703, a few days after a big Storm had passed:
"To preserve the Remembrance of the late Dreadful Tempest, an exact and faithful Collection is preparing of the most remarkable Disasters which happened on that Occasion, with the Places where, and Persons concern’d, whether at Sea or on Shore. For the perfecting so good a Work, ‘tis humbly recommended by the Author to all Gentlemen of the Clergy, or others, who have made any Observations of this Calamity, that they would transmit as distinct an Account as possible, of what they have observed, directed to John Nutt, near Stationers-hall, London. All Gentlemen that are pleas’d to send any such Accounts, are desired to write no Particulars but that they are well satisfied to be true, and to set their Names to the Observations they send, which the Undertakers of this Work promise shall be faithfully Recorded, and the Favour publicly acknowledged."
Alice uses a collection of eye-witness accounts for inspiration, including stall holders on Romford Market, allotment gardeners, dance students and teachers at the flooded WMCA building , traders in a local wood yard and homeowners driven from their newly refurbished houses by rapidly rising water. Rain is for two voices - Alice and an actor, recorded with a soundscape in binaural sound.
Three Score and Ten
Monday - Friday, 29 September - 4 December
Ian McMillan begins a fifty-part series celebrating 70 years of Radio 3’s recording of poets and poetry since it was launched as the Third Programme in September 1946. Every weekday night, Three Score and Ten features archive recordings from the last seven decades of the Third Programme and Radio 3, with 70 remarkable poets reading their own poems. Amongst them T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, WH Auden, Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy. Plus there will be ten brand new poems by contemporary poets commissioned specially for the series and broadcast on The Verb.
