It’s a hundred years this month, as you may have heard, since the BBC began radio broadcasts. And in a corner of the general celebrations, something appeared that I’ve been involved in for a while. It’s the BBC 100 Collection at the Poetry Archive website, which has made a new collection of poetry recordings publicly available, often for the first time in decades. It was a collaborative project at all stages, but most of the selections were made by me, my University of East Anglia colleague David Nowell Smith, and our PhD student Sandy Balfour. Among the rarities we were particularly pleased to find were readings by e.e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, David Jones, Marianne Moore, Dom Moraes, Stevie Smith, Wole Soyinka and Rosemary Tonks.
You can hear them all and more here: https://poetryarchive.org/keystones/bbc-100/
Not all eras of poetry at the BBC were equally rich, but the late Sixties — when the poet George Macbeth was working as a producer — were a Golden Age. I didn’t post here last week because I was writing a conference paper on Soyinka’s ‘Idanre’ (1967), which was broadcast in 1968. Below is a slide from my paper showing the range of BBC radio poetry programming over just three months of that year... ‘Please detach and keep for future reference’.