For twenty-five years The Poetry Trust in Suffolk has been celebrating national and international poetry. Now many of their live events are available online. Naomi Jaffa and Dean Parkin explore the development of the Trust’s Poetry Channel.
About the authors: Naomi Jaffa is Director of The Poetry trust; Dean Parkin is Creative Director) at The Poetry Trust: www.thepoetrytrust.org/
The Poetry Trust began life in 1988 as a registered charity set up by a small group of Suffolk poets wanting to hear world-class poets without always having to go to London. Benjamin Britten had established an international music festival in rural Suffolk in 1948 and they wanted to create something similar for poetry. The very first Aldeburgh Poetry Festival took place in 1989 and quickly became recognised as the UK’s pre-eminent annual celebration of national and international contemporary poetry.
"The Poetry Trust is an organisation driven by the conviction that poetry as an art form can make a significant contribution to the quality of our cultural life" - Andrew Motion
Renowned for the depth and creativity of its programme, the Festival has built a reputation for independence, quality and diversity, for the attractiveness of its location, and for the exceptional size of its audiences. The first weekend each November attracts people from all over the UK and overseas to the east Suffolk coast and last year, after outgrowing its original Aldeburgh venues, the Festival expanded six miles inland to the larger and better-equipped performance spaces at Snape Maltings. Overall attendance of 6,000+ broke all previous records and with the Festival’s 25th ‘silver’ anniversary this year, even bigger crowds are expected over the weekend of 8-10 November 2013.
Kay Ryan & Naomi Jaffa, APF 2011 (Photo by Peter Everard Smith)
The Trust is passionate about the quality presentation of poetry – on stage, in print and online – and has always believed that clarity of sound is fundamental to a good reading. We agree with Robert Frost that “the ear is the only true writer and the only true reader” but live poetry demands ‘active’ listening – you can’t zone in and out of a poem the way you can with music – and it’s crucial to be able to hear every word. Consequently the Festival has always employed professional sound engineers to ensure the best possible amplification for poets and most satisfying audio experience for audiences, and because most events have been recorded over the past two decades, the Trust has amassed a substantial and unique audio archive.
For a long time, we hadn’t known what to do with it – even though we knew we were sitting on a valuable resource and something that should be shared. The answer came gradually, with the development of the internet and as more and more people turned online to access audio and video material. How could we make highlights from the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world? Time for The Poetry Channel, which went live as part of The Poetry Trust’s website in December 2008.
We always had clear ideas about our new digital ‘home’ and the kind of listening experience it should offer. We absolutely didn’t want to throw whole recordings up online – complete with unnecessary introductions, the entrance of the poet, the shuffling papers, the coughs and the lengthy asides. We absolutely did want to generate broadcast quality ‘programmes’ which would extend our curatorial skills and ambitions. Creative and incisive editing of the hundreds of hours of raw material would be vital.
... serendipity played a major part in the setting up and continuing success of The Poetry Channel
As ever, serendipity played a major part in the setting up and continuing success of The Poetry Channel. The Poetry Trust is based at The Cut Arts Centre and the office directly below ours is occupied by an award-winning radio, video and on-line media producer who has worked in a freelance capacity for the BBC for 30 years. Nick Patrick is the Series Producer of BBC Radio 4’s popular magazine programme Making History and his other radio credits include the interactive environment series Home Planet. Nick also happens to be a big fan of The Poetry Trust and agreed to become our ‘in-house’ podcast producer, bringing the expertise, practicality and enthusiasm that has enabled us to make 72 podcasts to date. These have recorded some 35,000 downloads from The Poetry Channel itself (and countless more when programmes have been shared with Guardian Online, The Poetry Foundation, The Poetry Archive and Faber & Faber).
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.
In terms of popularity, the all-time top five Poetry Channel podcasts are:
- Seamus Heaney in conversation with Michael Laskey (Poetry Prom 2010)
- Young Poets – with Caleb Klaces, Andrew McMillan, Rebecca Perry and Warsan Shire (Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2012)
- The Female Poem: Discussion with Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud, Pascale Petit and Jo Shapcott (Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2009)
- In Conversation: Poetry & Landscape with Alice Oswald (Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2007)
- Craft Talk with South Africa’s Antjie Krog (Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2010)
This list makes interesting reading and reflects how we really like to programme across the range: big names, international poets and, most encouragingly, a podcast about Young Poets presented by brilliant livewire Andrew McMillan from last year’s Festival which has really caught on!
Young Poets Rebecca Perry, Caleb Klaces, Warsan Shire, Andrew McMillan, APF 2012 (Photo by Peter Everard Smith)
So what’s for the future of The Poetry Channel? Well, despite the continuing economic downturn and the endless challenge to raise money for the arts – both of which inevitably lead to funding constraints – the good news is that we’ve managed to keep going. Yes, there’s been less time and cash to curate, edit and promote more podcasts, but the listenership continues to be gratifyingly loyal and the potential to expand excitingly real. The average number of downloads remains around 2,000 each month and we’re committed to recording and producing new podcasts each year. We would like to commission more individually-curated podcasts by Festival poets. We would love to have a Poetry Channel Poet-in-Residence – recording and curating his or her own way through the Festival. We’ll always want to edit and make available more craft talks, close readings, discussions and lectures from previous Festival programmes. And above all, we’re planning something special to celebrate this year’s 25th Aldeburgh Poetry Festival on The Poetry Channel. Watch this space. Or better still, listen out for it.
Naomi Jaffa (Director) and Dean Parkin (Creative Director) at The Poetry Trust
The Poetry Channel www.thepoetrytrust.org/poetry-channel
Watch the recent short film for more about the journey of Aldeburgh Poetry Festival: www.thepoetrytrust.org/events/film-a-journey-of-the-aldeburgh-poetry-festival/