Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My cast away this week is the poet John Agard. His work is

studied widely in British schools. He was the BBC's first poet in residence, and along with the likes of

W.H. Auden and Philip Larkin, he's a recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for

Poetry. If these little snapshots from his CV make him sound like a fully paid-up member of the English establishment, he isn't.

Born in Guyana, he arrived here in the mid-70s, already playing with words, like some people play with musical notes. If his style is often

satirical, rhythmic and teasing his subjects provide the wincing realism,

examining say the keloid scars of slavery, or the historical myopia of a shared past judged solely through

European eyes.

He says he believes that the poet keeps us in touch with the vulnerable core of language that makes us what

we are. And so then, John Aegard, when it comes to language then, how would you best describe

yourself and the point of a poet?

Well, the words of a great poet and human being,

Shamos Heaney, puts it very simply poetry, language in orbit.

Because a poet is using the same number of letters of the alphabet as any other human being within the English

alphabet, 26 letters.

But that magical moment when you happen to put the right words in the right order,

can trigger off a verbal chemistry that can touch your depths and language begins to fly.

When this alchemy is happening for you, when you're in front of a page and the words start coming and I'm

sure it must be terribly hard work but as you describe it there is an intense I don't want to use the word spiritual, because I think that's probably wrong, but there seems to be a very intense quality to what you've just described.

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