Learning on ScreenAll Ears for The Poetry Channel
Nick quickly become part of the Festival team and ‘Aldeburgh Backchats’ are the brief encounters with poets he corners each year. Throughout the Festival weekend, Nick also works closely with Robert Seatter – a fine poet in his own right, Head of BBC History and also a Trustee of The Poetry Trust – to add another dimension to The Poetry Channel’s content. In 2010 Robert began recording informal ‘behind the scenes’ poet-to-poet conversations. So far these include illuminating one-to-ones with Julia Copus, Ingrid de Kok, Jane Draycott, Fleur Adcock, John Glenday, Elaine Feinstein and Maureen Duffy.
Jackie Kay, Lavinia Greenlaw and Maggi Hambling at the 2012 Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (Photo by Peter Everard Smith)
One of our earliest ideas was for an ongoing series of podcasts called ‘The Poem Show’. We would take Aldeburgh’s signature ‘three-handers’ (the Festival’s main readings always present three contrasting poets – well-known names, emerging or overlooked talents, poets in translation etc) and create mini podcast-versions. A Poem Show would comprise three poets reading just one poem each, and it would differ from the Festival in that we could mix and match poems to be as idiosyncratic and thematic as we liked. Any poet could ‘appear’ alongside any other poet, and from any Festival year. And by picking memorable poems, the aim was for a sort of ‘greatest hits’ podcast series – and certainly they’ve proved popular.
We have also made available some wonderful Festival occasions – edited highlights of stand-out interviews or talks, for example with exceptional American poets like Philip Levine and Kay Ryan. And we like to take advantage of our annual Poetry Prom – the UK’s biggest annual reading outside London which is part of the Snape Proms each August – thanks to which we’ve been able to release interviews with two of the world’s greatest living poets, Seamus Heaney and Sharon Olds.
