Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet and professor of creative writing, best known for his biography of Philip Larkin and his own poetry.
On the island
Eight records
Dylan is. In my book, A Poet, and There's No Argument About It. ... This song is a simple little lyric which goes round in its wheel, but it's very beautiful and charming, and whenever I hear it actually in any recording, but I think especially in this one It makes me think about being young. It makes me feel young and as though my life is still in front of me.
Ich habe genug, BWV 82: I. Aria: Ich habe genug
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Munich Bach Orchestra & Karl Richter
Well the next record is um. In a sense, for me, about my mother, about how you contend with, in her case, very acute suffering. Um and how you look for some sort of consolation in it. And the consolation here is a is a religious one, a Christian one.
And quite early on in our first conversation, Larkin discovered that my father's family had been brewers, and I think he rather liked this because. ... He thought he comes from stock who produce things that people really want, alcohol, rather than rather than things which people can take or leave, poems.
On Wenlock Edge: V. From Far, from Eve and Morning
Adrian Thompson, Delmé String Quartet & Ian Burnside
Vaughan Williams actually, as it happens, was one of the classical composers that Larkin most enjoyed, and I often think about him when I'm listening to this piece. But I also think about my great friend Alan Hollinghurst. He educated me more than almost anybody else about classical music, and this was a piece that he liked very much, too.
Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-Flat Major, Op. 106 "Hammerklavier": III. Adagio sostenuto
This piece in particular and this moment in this piece seems to me in one sense depressed and Inverted. And got down by life, and in another and simultaneous sense, heroically determined to continue trying to Find a way through life.
Violin Concerto: I. Andante - Allegretto
Isaac Stern, New York Philharmonic & Leonard Bernstein
This is a piece of music which I also particularly admire, and seems to me at once. astringent and ravishing, and that's not a bad combination.
I think will, when I listen to it on the island, make me think of. Having had friends round, they've gone. And I'm trying to put off the washing out by listening to this.
Cello Suite No. 6 in D Major, BWV 1012: I. PréludeFavourite
This is the second piece of music by Bach that I've chosen, as you've noticed. Um he is by some distance the composer who means most to me. And this is Sublime noise.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:05Is writing poetry as biological a process as that makes it sound?
It does make it sound a bit biological putting it like that, doesn't it? But I've always have felt about writing poems that it was ... an entirely visceral thing. ... Something that happens out of a part of your mind that does know what it's doing and is educated and manipulative and interventionist and sophisticated and all all of that. ... what happens with me is that that side of my mind manages to strike up some sort of relationship with the side of my mind which is a primeval swamp, very murky, and the bubbles in it are things coming up from God knows where in my unconscious, subconscious, um and that somehow a relationship is created between that, as it were, ignorant part of my mind. and the less ignorant part of my mind, and that produces the poem.
Presenter asks
5:06Can you describe life before [your mother's] accident? What kind of mother was she?
Well, to be perfectly honest, I find it extremely difficult to remember her before the accident, and this is, I suspect, one of the reasons that I go on writing the sort of poems that I do write. ... The effect of the accident was to really annihilate quite large parts of my memory. ... I was extremely fond of her. We were very, very close. Um and in those little photographic sort of shots that I have of her, she is. Beautiful. Kind. all the things that a sort of ideal person is.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
The Prelude (Penguin edition containing the 1805 and 1850 versions)
William Wordsworth
I think the prelude is one of the two or three poems which means most to me.
The luxury
Well, I'm a very keen fisherman, and I nearly decided to take a large number of fishing flies, because I imagine I'd be spending a great deal of time fishing on this island and I would like it a lot. But I don't think that I could not write, so I'm afraid it's rather dull, but I'm afraid I just want to take Some pencils and paper.
Do you think that you are obsessed by death?
Yes, I think that's probably fair to say. And I don't want to sound too kind of quick to agree, because it's not a very happy thing to be obsessed by. ... The evidence of my writing is to me that I am obsessed by it, and I'm worried about it happening. It's the one thing we know that is going to happen, as many people have said before me.
Presenter asks
10:24When did you decide that you were going to be a poet?
I had an English teacher who switched all the lights on, a man called Peter Way ... He put in front of me a poem by Hardy. called the self unseeing. ... And what happened to me then is what Huisman describes in The Name and Nature of Poetry, which is that all the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I thought, by the time I'd got to the bottom of it, I want to do that.
Presenter asks
15:40Why did you decide to reveal [Philip Larkin] warts and all in his biography?
Because I didn't think there was anything I mean, I agree that the book caused a great controversy, but at the same time I didn't think that I was revealing anything. That was criminal or deeply peculiar or Really against the grain of grain of ordinary human ... what I the thing that surprised me most well, two things surprised me about it. One is that people work who, as I might say, ought to have known better, made a curious conflation of the life and the work, as though Art is merely a convulsive expression of personality. Well, among the many things we don't know about art, one of the things we do know is that it never is that.
Presenter asks
26:05Is there a suggestion that you wrote a better book [on John Keats] because you, like Keats, thought you were dying?
Well, it's true that all the time that I wrote the book, I thought that I might have had it. ... it did make me think about his circumstances in ways that I wouldn't otherwise have done. I mean, Keats spent his whole life feeling short of time, and then ran out of it in the most spectacular way in the last part of his life. I've always felt a bit short of time, too. And I think that that probably motivated me as I was writing the first part of his story. And then undoubtedly, this being ill did. Enlighten me with darkness, I can put it like that, as I wrote the last part of it.
“If you ask yourself the big questions about what art is for, the most satisfactory answer that I can come up with for myself is to do with. How they help other people in moments of particular emotional crisis.”
“The effect of the accident was to really annihilate quite large parts of my memory.”
“The evidence of my writing is to me that I am obsessed by [death], and I'm worried about it happening. It's the one thing we know that is going to happen, as many people have said before me. I mean nobody gets let off.”
“it's the apparently insignificant things in people's lives. Which matter j in a sense just as much as the significant things. I mean, the important days are not. Only the days when You meet the person who matters to you more than any other person, but there are also the days when apparently nothing is happening and you're just sort of stewing around.”