In Person: World Poets on Irish Radio
Arena, RTE Radio 1, Tuesday 4 July 2017, 7pm
Neil Astley was interviewed down the line on RTE Radio 1's week-nightly arts show Arena about the DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets. This includes films of almost 60 Bloodaxe poets from around the world reading and speaking about their work. Neil spoke about the eight-year filming process, and about how he came to publish some of these poets.
Recordings of four of these poets reading one of their poems were featured on Arena. These included the late American poet Ruth Stone, who spoke about how she would ‘catch’ poems rather than write them. She read ‘The Excuse’ from memory (as she was almost blind at the time she was filmed for the book, aged 93 and 94). India’s Arundhathi Subramaniam read ‘Prayer’ from Where I Live: New & Selected Poems; American soldier-poet Brian Turner read ’16 Iraqi Policemen’ from Here, Bullet and the show ended with a recording of Ireland-based American poet Julie O’Callaghan reading her poem ‘Problems’. All the poems read on the films are included in the accompanying book.
Click here to listen. Archived in chapters.
Neil Astley and Pamela Robertson-Pearce have been screening an hour-long film, taken from the 14 hours’ of footage in their DVD-anthology In Person: World Poets, at festivals across the UK and Ireland. More showings to follow in autumn 2017. Details will be posted at http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/events in due course.
[17 July 2017]
