Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet and writer, Oxford professor of poetry, former foreign correspondent who covered the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh.
On the island
Eight records
This one is from the Beggars Opera and it's called Fill Every Glass. It's from my childhood. I remember it as being an English carol and it was the carol called What is This Fragrance? And it used to be my favourite tune as a kid.
I used to love it when we did this as an anthem at Durham. It was accompanied with an organ, of course, and the tuber stop used to make me laugh with joy. I really adored it.
This next one is Kathleen Ferrier singing a Brahm song, Geistliches Vegenlied, but it's two for the price of one because the accompaniment is a carol. ... Kathleen Ferrier is a voice that I recall from seventy eight records in childhood in this period.
Oh, this is just a very, very simple spiritual. This is Jesse Norman singing it. Perhaps a bit sad for a desert island, but perhaps one would be contemplating death, which is the subject of this song.
Dies Irae (from Verdi's Requiem)Favourite
I assume on this desert island that I've got pretty good speakers and I wanted something really very loud for days when I just wanted to blast the silence of the island and this is a very exciting piece of loud music.
While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks
This is a very surprising version of While Shepherds Watch Their Flocks. And it's the way this would have been sung in the eighteenth century in sort of Norwich. ... This is provincial 18th century church music, I think terrific.
Fear No More the Heat of the Sun
Um well, this is not music, this is Shakespeare, Fear No More the Heat of the Sun, which I thought might be appropriate for a desert island.
The last record is it's a song by Reynaldo Hahn. It's called A Cloris. He wrote it, I think, when he was quite a young man. And it's another of these two for the price of one songs because the accompaniment is very beautiful.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:04So the professor of poetry was a foreign correspondent and a political animal too. It sounds like an odd combination, is it?
If you decide to write poetry in life, it's improbable you're going to spend all your time writing poetry. So you set out to have something el you know, something else to earn your bread and butter, to um keep you busy for the rest of the time. A proper job, yes, that's right.
Presenter asks
1:50Was there part of you that was choosing that kind of job because you knew you would find inspiration for your poetry?
I didn't think of it like that at the time. And the other thing about it is that the poems that I wrote about, say, the Far East and the war and so on, were written a long time after the experiences that they were inspired by. And so there isn't a kind of necessary connection. And I also I didn't think that it would be right to go off to places in the hopes of writing poems about them. I thought there was something wrong with that.
Presenter asks
4:10Is there much poetic passion to be found for you on a desert island?
Well, I've spent quite a bit of time in the Far East, uh in the Philippines, on not a desert island, but a stretch of sandbar with palm trees and there's quite a bit of poetry there to be found there.
The keepsakes
The luxury
On a desert island if there's not much to do except swimming, swimming is very boring. If you can't see things, but very interesting if you can see things and a snorkel makes it awesome. More of a pleasure to swim.
Presenter asks
7:14But why did you want it [the professorship]?
Although there have been these forty previous professors, it's a relatively recent thing that poets have done it. And since the war, a series of poets have held this post. Now there are very few jobs in England that are traditionally filled by poets. And this tradition seems a nice thing to keep going. So there should always be a choice of poets, I think. And it's a recognition of poetic artificial.
Presenter asks
11:41A terrible thing happened when you were ten; your mother died very suddenly of leukemia. That must have been a terrible shock.
Well, it it was indeed. It um By then we were living in Litchfield. She'd put me on the train in Litchfield to go back to Durham. And I would say something like two weeks later she was dead. It was a big shock, but it was also there was something else happened, which was. Um before then I'd been quite b uh bullied quite a bit. And at that point, I stopped being bullied. There was a kind of month, at least, when nobody could treat me badly. And... I took off as a student and I really took off as Somebody who was planning his own life in a kind of way and I got a lot of attention particularly from my headmaster but also from the staff. So in my case, I don't think this happens to every child who loses a parent, but in my case it meant that I was treated specially, different from other people.
Presenter asks
25:28The cliched view of the poet has him like Dylan Thomas wild and drunk and penniless. You made a fortune by accident. What have you done with it?
Not by accident. I if you you you mean I'm working on Les Miserable? It was a French musical that had been done in in Paris for a couple of brief seasons. I worked on it. And was rather slow, and in the end was bumped off it. There is a song in that musical that although the words had been completely rejigged, it was my song. A song called Empty Chairs and Empty Tables. But that small percentage, whatever it was that that you got, has has made you a a millionaire. More multimodal. Not well. Anyway, the money keeps coming in.
“I didn't think of it like that at the time.”
“I took off as a student and I really took off as Somebody who was planning his own life in a kind of way”
“I always felt w when I was writing about wars and trouble spots I always felt that one shouldn't get into a position where you felt that the only way of truly living was being in a danger zone.”