Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Seamus Heaney. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New critical biographies of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney and a reissue of Anne Sexton's poems prompt a conversation for National Poetry Day about our image of a poet. Is it possible to separate a poet's life from their work? Shahidha Bari is joined by New Generation Thinkers Sophie Oliver and Peter Mackay, and by Plath biographer Heather Clark. And she talks to Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi about her new novel, The First Woman – a coming of age story of a young girl in Uganda, mixing modern feminism and folk beliefs against a backdrop of Idi Amin’s regime.
The First Woman is out now. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and her other books are Kintu and the short story collection Manchester Happened.
Mercies: Selected Poems by Anne Sexton is being issued in the Penguin Modern Classics series in November 2020
On Seamus Heaney by Roy Foster is published by Princeton University Press
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark is published in October by Vintage.
Sophie Oliver teaches at the University of Liverpool and researches women and modernist writers, including Jean Rhys. She also writes for the TLS, Burlington Magazine, and The White Review.
Peter Mackay teaches at the University of St Andrews and has published writing on Sorley MacLean; an anthology, An Leabhar Liath: 500 years of Gaelic Love and Transgressive Verse; and his own collection of poems Gu Leòr / Galore.
Free Thinking has a playlist of conversations about prose and poetry on the website - all available to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh
If you have been affected by the mental health issues in this programme, you can find details of support organisations from the BBC Action Line website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4WLs5NlwrySXJR2n8Snszdg/emotional-distress-information-and-support
Producer: Emma Wallace
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello, Sylvia Plath once said that she could never write poems about toothbrushes, the ordinary banal parts of life. |
| 0:39.7 | Poetry came from more sensuous, emotional experiences. |
| 0:43.4 | So is it possible to separate a poet's life from their work? |
| 0:47.1 | We'll be talking about Plath, Anne Sexton and Seamus Heaney for National Poetry Day in today's Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:55.8 | Join me, Shahed Abari, |
| 1:05.9 | just after this. Hi, I'm Amal Rajan, and I want to tell you about a new podcast from the BBC. It's called Rethink. The podcast is all about the enormous opportunity we have to change what the future looks like after the coronavirus pandemic. |
| 1:14.6 | We've asked leading thinkers from around the world to give us their three-minute audio essay on the kind of change they want to see, |
| 1:21.0 | covering issues such as travel, healthcare, homelessness, democracy and humility. |
| 1:26.2 | What kind of change can we expect? |
| 1:28.5 | Will it be changed for the better? |
| 1:30.0 | Or will we pick up where we left off as if nothing had happened? |
| 1:34.5 | We created the Rethink podcast to find out. |
| 1:37.8 | It's an opportunity for all of us to consider the kind of change we want to see |
| 1:41.4 | in our own lives and in our societies. |
| 1:44.4 | Subscribe to the Rethink Podcast Now, you can find it on BBC Sounds. |
| 1:52.6 | Hello, folklore, feminism and a teenage girl coming of age in Idi Amiens, Uganda. |
| 1:59.1 | In her new book, The First Woman, |
| 2:03.1 | novelist Jennifer Nansabuga-McCumbi asks, how do you make sense of love, life and family |
| 2:06.8 | when your country is cast into political turmoil? |
... |
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