McGough - Poetry Please

Hello and welcome to BBC Radio 4s Poetry Please and a very special edition of the worlds longest-running and most-popular radio programme devoted to poetry: a programme that is made by you, its listeners, and which broadcasts your requests so that you can hear the poems you love, the poems you need, the poems you remember and the poems youd like others to know. As we do every week in the Poetry Please office when we are on the air, we have knelt before the fabled filing cabinets that store your requested poems and garnered this collection of favourites. The 350 poems here have all been asked for more than once in the programmes history, and reflect the very best of the nations poetic tastes since the first edition of the programme was broadcast in 1979. Many of them have been heard many times. We are forever stooping to those cabinets and drawing upon our listeners requests to make and shape the programmes. In the process we have given our knees for poetry.

But its a small price to pay. Poetry Please has been successful because it is simple. The poems we broadcast are the poems people want to hear. A line half remembered from school, a poem for a funeral, verses for a new baby or an old love poetry lodges with us and we share the shelter it offers. Moments of raw grief and sadness make up part of what we are, as well as joy and celebration. And laughter.

Although the programme takes its commitment to spreading the good news of poetry very seriously, it is never afraid to laugh at itself. All the programme has to do is narrow as far as possible the gap between a poems source and its destination. I sit in a studio with a sheaf of poems, a tray of your letters, emails and phone messages, and a couple of actors (sometimes a poet or two) and we make magic happen. The same magic is just as readily found in the pages of this book. Open it on any poem and let it all sink in: evidence of a nation whose heartbeat is poetry itself. S. J. J.

Tessimond, as well as living writers such as Paul Durcan and Billy Collins. The hope is that you too will find among these pages your own favourites, as well as discovering new voices that will resonate and uplift. Another lyrical hero is Robert Frost whose Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is the most requested poem on Poetry Please, and it is worth noting that I first came to that poem not by reading it in a book, but through listening to the poet himself reading it on television. It has often been the case that the spoken rather than the written word provides the spark that ignites a poem. The chart for the Top 10 most broadcast poems appears at the end of this Foreword. Although some poems may seem difficult, and occasionally impenetrable, poetry is not elitist, and I have witnessed in my own versifying lifetime, a surge in popularity of the spoken word, and of poems that appeal to the heart as well as the head.

Hopefully we will never take for granted the soft voices that speak truths so eloquently on Poetry Please each week. Making the programme is a continuing education in itself. First in poetry: it is wonderful that so many people carry so much poetry with them, stowed in their minds and in their hearts and ready to be put to use in all sorts of ways (not always happily, it must be said we often hear from people trying to get lines of stray verse out of their heads). Second, making Poetry Please offers wider lessons in humankind: it corrects any easy notion of poetry as being exclusive, or old fashioned, or only for people whose teachers made them learn lines by rote in the old black and white days. People get on with their lives and poetry keeps pace with them it is as simple as that. Nothing that has happened to our species is beyond poetry, and poetry earns its keep by being there at every corner in every life.

On Poetry Please, on Radio 4, and here between these covers we are simply listening in on the conversation. In 2009, Poetry Please celebrated its thirtieth birthday, and to mark that occasion I wrote a cento, a Latin word meaning cloak: in other words, a poem made up of lines from other poems. The poems I chose feature frequently on the programme and there are twelve poets in all, from Thomas Hardy to Adrian Mitchell by way of John Donne and John Cooper Clarke. The poem appears overleaf. If you would like to hear a favourite poem on the programme, you can e-mail me on poetry.please@bbc.co.uk, call 03700 100 400 or write to Poetry Please, BBC Bristol BS 8 2 LR . Goodbye. Goodbye.

ROGER M c GOUGH