Actors should be able to shape the performance of a single poem without a director, but perhaps it doesn’t come across well is because, by trade, they work to inhabit a character and much of poetry doesn’t really do that. I’ve also been struck in the past by how badly poets read their work – and not just those who’ve not had much practice, but on recordings of famous old names. I really do think it’s something problematic with the form and the ambiguous ‘who’s-speaking-to-who-ness’ of it (it’s partly why I still prefer poetry on the page).

I thought that workshop we went to made a good job of making sense of how to read poetry to be more engaging, but without gesture, movement and physical presence, on the radio, it must be more difficult.

re slam – or ‘read one poet like another’? (The Beowulf poet reads Emily Dickinson; John Cooper Clarke reads Milton…).

It might also be that poetry readings on radio are low budget; maybe they just give an actor the text without a director to shape the performance.

Olly, I think I see another variation on the slam format coming from your ‘famous poems read is if by Radio 4′ idea!

I know what you mean about BBC poetry reading (Poetry Please being a particularly culprit). I take it to be the result of a basic misrepresentation of the range of what poetry is and does: it’s presented to be comfortable and soothing and all rather wonderful, without allowing for it being angular, conflicted, distracted, blunt, challenging, funny, mocking, or the thousand other things it can be. It’s like the selection-bias of Palgrave’s lovely-but-limited Golden Treasury filtered once more for our times. Poetry=lyric=lyrical… although it’s interesting how little of either new poetry or the Canon this approach suits.

(Perhaps there’s a performance in ‘famous poems read as if by Radio 4′, with Beowulf, Howl, Brecht, Dryden, Pound etc read in a Nigella Lumley style…!)

I’d also suggest it’s a sign of the (valuable, if limited) niche(s) that poetry’s got in society: a comfort, a moment of pause, a pleasant indulgence. It’s good it can do and be those things, but you and I may prefer its wider range to be more widely available.