Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a poet, born in the West Indian community of Hansworth near Birmingham in the late 50s,

his childhood was rough. Approved school, detention centre, Borsall and prison were the principal educational influences in his life.

It wasn't until he joined the protest movements of London that his talent for performance

poetry came to public attention.

He had a book published. He was noticed by Nelson Mandela who

later asked him to take on projects in South Africa and he now travels the world,

writing and performing. His book of poetry for children talking turkeys was a bestseller and in 1989

he was nominated for the Oxford Professor of Poetry. I'd like to be counted he says as one of the people who popularized poetry again

he is Benjamin Zephania but it's a particular kind of poetry isn't it

Benjamin not the sort you can sit and matter to yourself up the corner

it's got to be performed it's got to be given everything yes we always

advise people when they read it to read it aloud to read it to each other and especially in children's work it becomes a lot more

much more fun and I always thought of poetry as something to communicate to people not as something that I wanted to put into books.

In fact, putting poetry into books was the last thing on my agenda.

When I published my first book I couldn't read and write so I

wanted to reach people like myself. So it really is performance poetry. Now within

performance poetry there are different schools if you like there's rap poetry and there's

dub poetry and there's all these of a forms of poetry but it is poetry written mainly for

performance.

And it's yours rap or dub or both? It's called dub poetry

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