Bill Griffiths on Radio 3
Yesterday (Wednesday 3 February) I travelled to BBC Broadcasting House in London to record an interview with the redoubtable Ian McMillan for Radio 3's The Verb about Bill Griffiths' Collected Earlier Poems. The poet Sean Bonney was also interviewed about what Bill had meant to him. I hope they'll also be broadcasting a snippet of Bill reading from a CD I took in.
We talked a bit about how Bill was just getting known towards the end of his life for his work on Geordie pit dialect - indeed, Ian revealed that they were going to have him on The Verb in 2007, but his untimely death intervened. However, I made the point that as a poet his public profile is still in no way commensurable with his achievement. This is something we're hoping to remedy with the Reality Street collection, which is the first to put Bill's poetry into chronological context - an achievement for which we have Alan Halsey to thank.
The programme is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Friday 5 February at 21:15 GMT, and is available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer for a week thereafter.
We talked a bit about how Bill was just getting known towards the end of his life for his work on Geordie pit dialect - indeed, Ian revealed that they were going to have him on The Verb in 2007, but his untimely death intervened. However, I made the point that as a poet his public profile is still in no way commensurable with his achievement. This is something we're hoping to remedy with the Reality Street collection, which is the first to put Bill's poetry into chronological context - an achievement for which we have Alan Halsey to thank.
The programme is broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Friday 5 February at 21:15 GMT, and is available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer for a week thereafter.
Posted by Ken Edwards. Posted In : Reality Street
I'm the editor and publisher of Reality Street, and a writer and musician.
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