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1 Out of the Mist
A mid-June day in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I was sitting having coffee with the Canadian radio producer Chris Brookes in the studio at his home on the Outer Battery, where the Harbour narrows between high rocky cliffs before squeezing out into the Atlantic. Behind and above us was the great bulk of Signal Hill, where in 1901, Guglielmo Marconi listened through gales for the hint of the morse letter ‘S’, transmitted an ocean away in Poldu, Cornwall. A fitting place to discuss radio and its imaginative power. Summer comes late to this part of Canada, and the walk out from the city to visit Chris had been brisk, a stiff breeze funnelling in from the sea. Nevertheless it had been a bright day, and I had stopped several times to look back at the great harbour of St. John’s, the brightly coloured fishing boats and the larger mercantile shipping along its quays. Gradually though, the eye became absorbed in the detail of the Outer Battery itself; as the name implies, this was a major line of defence for Newfoundland’s provincial capital, and the remnants of fortification are not hard to find. This place has always been an enviable asset, in peace and war, a place to hold and preserve. The great rock sides of the Harbour entrance, with timber frame houses scattered precariously down the cliffs, are navigated on foot through lanes and unexpected paths, and the visitor will occasionally come across evidence of fortification, a cannon pointing across the water, lookout posts, rusting emplacements. The history of the place was visibly in the detail.
As Chris and I talked, however, there was a change. Rain started to streak the windows, a grey fog began slipping in past the lighthouse at the Harbour’s extremity, and very soon we were marooned on the cliff side in a tide of mist. There was nothing to see – the bright boats, the blue water, the rocks, oil tanks on hillsides and the city itself vanished into the murky soup that invades such places so often. The images I had absorbed just a few minutes earlier became memory. It was as though the whole view had been expunged. It was of course, as present as it ever was, and the mind provided pictures based on that memory which somehow projected onto the wall of fog; the physical reality of St. John’s Harbour had been replaced by the idea, the imaginative reality of the place, intense and dramatic. And then, out of the dense sea mist around the house, came the ghostly sounds of fog horns, lowing, hooting, different sounds from different places around the Narrows and the Harbour, an audible geography which to an experienced maritime ear gave a shape to the invisible. Fog in itself does not have a sound, but in place of its dumbness, the sirens became the sound of the enveloping mist. I was still staring out of the studio window, but my sensory perceptions had radically changed; what had been television was now ‘radio’. I was no longer an observer, I was actively involved in the experience of visualising my surroundings.
This book explores the idea of poetry in radio and sound; the concept of sound as poetry, and a poetic form of making in radio. It will do so both historically and within a contemporary perspective, examining examples of makers and works internationally. As early as 1936, Rudolf Arnheim wrote in his seminal text, Radio, ‘Poets should emphatically be brought into the wireless studio, for it is much more conceivable that they should be able to adapt a verbal work of art to the limits of the world of space, sound and music’ (Arnheim 1986[1936]: 208).
Today the art of the poetry of radio is celebrated at conferences and events all over the world – the Prix Italia in Italy, The Third Coast Audio Festival in Chicago, The New York Radio Festival, the travelling International Features Conference and The Sony Radio Academy Awards in the UK. The poetic form continues to be a recognised and distinguished part of literate radio-making around the world. New forms, new consumer platforms and new habits in listening meantime continue to develop the poetic possibilities of radio, be it through the imaginative power of words or the shaping of the poetic idea through pure sound.
Radio for many has always been the ideal partner to poetry. Both the printed word and the audio medium provide the reader/listener with material which to a great extent remains open to personal imaginative interpretation, much as my sense of St. John’s Harbour, fog-bound and haunted by sirens, became an internal experience as opposed to that of an onlooker. What I was experiencing at that time was a metaphor for the relationship between both heard and read words. Andrew Crisell has expressed it thus:
the intellectual potential both of listening to the radio and looking at symbols on a page lies in the fact that what we can see has no inherent connection with what is being referred to. Our understanding of a radio programme about political refugees and economic migrants, for instance, is all the better for the fact that what is before our eyes is an image not of a shabby, anxious people in internment camps but of the road beyond the windscreen or the eggs we are frying in a pan. Likewise, our understanding of a book on the same subject is enhanced by the fact that its printed text, though visible in itself, does not ‘resemble’ what it refers to.
(Crisell 2004: 10)
Central to this is the idea that poetry and radio find their respective voices without losing their essence, through an imaginative partnership between practitioner and audience. Robert Pinsky is right when he says:
There is a special intimacy to poetry because … the medium is not an expert’s body, as when one goes to the ballet: in poetry, the medium is in the audience’s body. When I say to myself a poem by Emily Dickinson or George Herbert, the artist’s medium is my breath. The reader’s breath and hearing embody the poet’s words. This makes the art physical, intimate, vocal and individual.
(Pinsky 1998: 8)
Yet Pinsky omits perhaps the most important element of the partnership: the imagination. Poets have always used sound as part of their imaginative arsenal: indeed poetry is sound. Radio has since its creation been peopled by poets as producers and practitioners; it is no accident.
That said, I want to ultimately consider an aspect of radio and audio production that takes us beyond the idea of poetry in a literal sense, the power of the medium to act as a voice for the poet. I wish here to explore what I would describe as a poetic style of making. At this point it might be helpful to turn to the dictionary definition of a poem. I do so with trepidation because often definitions are the antithesis of the poetic impulse, and are usually too narrow anyway. This is borne out by a first glance at the Oxford English Dictionary:
A poem is a composition of words, expressing facts, thoughts or feelings in poetical form.
Singularly unhelpful. Nevertheless, it does improve:
Something (other than a composition of words) of a nature or quality akin or likened to that of poetry.
I gain some comfort from the fact that the author here finds it so difficult to define what a poem is beyond a rather unsatisfactory vagueness.
Harvey Gross, in his book, Sound and Form in Modern Poetry writes:
A poem is not an ‘idea’ or an ‘experience’ rendered into metrical language; still less is it an attitude toward an experience. A poem is a symbol in which idea, experience and attitude are transmuted into feelings; these feelings move in significant arrangements: rhythmically. It is prosody and its structures which articulate the movement of feeling in a poem, and render to our understanding, meanings which are not paraphrasable. Prosody enables the poet to communicate states of awareness, tensions, emotions, of [our] inner life which the helterskelter of ordinary propositional language cannot express.
(Gross 1968: 10)
If we can extend the idea of prosody beyond the conventional application of the word to the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, to non-human but human-controlled sound, we can apply our understanding of what poetry is in terms of sound, more freely. After all, the nineteenth century nature poet John Clare frequently made up words which gave him the freedom to express the world around him more precisely, and when he was making up words, he was also making sounds. There is audio prose and audio poetry, just as there is the printed equivalent. This is where the boundaries between art forms start to blur. A stylised poetic form of storytelling as exemplified by the radio feature is a curious hybrid between documentary and drama, and has produced some of the finest and most distinguished work in the medium globally over the past 80 years. Producers such as Norman Corwin in the US, Douglas Cleverdon, Charles Parker, Alan Hall and Piers Plowright in the UK, Chris Brookes in Canada, Kari Hesthamar in Norway, Kaye Mortley, Robyn Ravlich and Tony Barrell from Australia, Edwin Brys from Belgium – to name but a few – have taken this form of radio into new realms of poetic experience. It is significant that one of the world’s greatest poetic feature-makers, Glenn Gould, is also best remembered as one of history’s most individual and gifted musicians.
Trying to define what a radio feature is can take us back into fog-bound waters even more treacherous and uncertain than identifying the nature of poetry. It is in the very ambiguities and potential for the dreamlike in sound that radio and poetry touch and become one, a twilight zone between the real – whatever that is – and the imagined. The British feature-maker, Alan Hall has expressed this idea eloquently:
In the world of the everyday, sound’s potency occupies the shadows between music and speech. This is why sound is so important to the feature-maker. In crafting radio features, the producer is using sound not only for its everyday, informational qualities – we do not hear a match being struck only to inform us that a cigarette is being lit – but for its metaphoric qualities. These are musical, poetic, or even balletic. Sound has the capacity to take the listener out of the everyday by making images dance across the imagination. Sound offers a kind of portal through which a deeper, often inarticulate consciousness can be glimpsed. It is with incidental and ambiguous sound that we can drill bore-holes into the deeper recesses of consciousness.
(Biewen and Dilworth 2010: 99)
The very term ‘radio feature’ identifies one of the purest of all radio forms. Most things exist outside of the electronic medium that disseminates them: news, drama, music, debate – all these can be found on radio, but radio has not created them. The feature on the other hand, owes its very existence to the medium; it is a creation of radio, audio, and cannot be transmuted into any other form. Yet the word ‘feature’ is not universal currency among producers. When Chris Brookes, undoubtedly a poetic maker of radio, creates a programme, he calls it a documentary, because in North American media language, the ‘feature’ as a term is not used in the way it would be by a producer, say, from Britain. On one level the term ‘documentary’ implies something borne out of a formal news-based journalism rather than an impressionistic sound world which plays with facts rather than ‘documenting’ them. A documentary feature ‘documents’ the feature-maker’s journey in coming to terms with what he or she is trying to do or say. So it is not a document of the reality – the subject – necessarily, it is a document of the maker as they try to find their way through it.
This description might well be familiar to a poet who seeks to explore the process of their own artistic creation. There are various forms of truth, and one of them is a poetic truth. The fog that turned St. John’s into an audio experience for me has inevitably found its way into one of Chris Brookes’s radio programmes; his home was the location from which he recorded a fog horn as sea mist rolled in, and he described what he heard as ‘the sound of fog’. As we have considered already, fog does not have a sound, but on radio – although we cannot see it – we can hear it through this man-made symptom of itself. The poetry of sound, the magic of which Brookes has said, is: ‘that extraordinary juice that happens sometimes about particular tones or timbres of sound and how they strike the ear, and about how they juxtapose against another piece of acoustic energy.’1
The poet Louis MacNeice was a producer in the BBC Features Department and Douglas Cleverdon’s famous production of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas was the work of that same BBC unit. The tradition continues to this day, through the work of a new generation of producers such as Julian May, Michael Symmons Roberts and Tim Dee. Symmons Roberts and May are both themselves poets; many of recent generation writers and radio-makers were inspired by those who came before, such as Thomas, David Jones, MacNeice and others who worked in radio and saw it as the perfect way to deliver their poetry to an audience, but more than that, to understand that here is an ally that demonstrates that the best poetry is made for voice and ear, and therefore is made for radio. Most poets would agree that when they are in the process of making a poem, they read it aloud; it is fundamentally about a spoken medium, much closer to music than it is to prose. It is therefore significant that the work ‘making’ comes into play in such a discussion. It is craft and art at one and the same time. In the words of Wolfgang Görtschacher, ‘the experience of poetry as sound demands craftsmanship, a training in rhythm, metre and phonology’ (Görtschacher 2010: 2), and in using these words we could equally be describing the making of music, radio or poetry.
Radio – like the print medium – is diverse. The division discussed above between documentary and impressionistic feature is one which is a microcosm for radio genres generally. There is news radio, music radio and numerous other forms; some of these are not appropriate to consider within the context of this discussion, as their function is purely entertainment or utilitarian. It is tempting to avoid the use of the word ‘art’ in defining the style and content of some of the work explored here against criticism of cultural elitism, but the word is nevertheless a key part of the argument. Of course a number of distinguished broadcasters around the world do not fear the use of the word, whereas some consider the use of the medium as a platform for imaginative, poetic or avant-garde ‘experimental’ innovative production to be eschewed. Yet others would wish to avoid the use of the word ‘experimental’ altogether citing the view that all creative radio should be in some way experimental. It is easy to become pinned down by such semantics. The division is perhaps most simply expressed by the views of two great radio drama producers from the 1930s and 1940s, Lance Sieveking and Val Gielgud. In his book The Stuff of Radio (1934) Sieveking openly criticised his BBC drama colleague on a number of points. Central to Sieveking’s argument were the words used by both men to describe the studio’s dramatic control panel, ‘one of the essential differences between us’ wrote Sieveking: ‘He thinks the instrument should be “operated”, I think that it should be “played”’ (Sieveking 1934: 58). I hope to move towards a point where the poetic possibilities of sound and radio come together with the oldest oral traditions, while at the same time taking us towards a place where pure sound, composed as music is composed, retains a kinship with poetry within its process of making and in its audience reception. This is not a journey into elitism: quite the contrary. It will take us across a terrain that poetry and radio have long travelled together: that of complementary voices which reflect the everyday through narrative sounds from the vernacular to the suggestive and all points between. We will discover a partnership which is the most direct and dynamic means of communication, capable of adopting new forms and adapting to platforms that will make the message continuingly relevant and increasingly accessible. It comes down to a fundamental: that we hear with our ears, but listen with our minds, just as we see with our eyes but read with our brains. So it is that an essential point linking both listening and reading is that they are interactive: the poet’s relationship with his reader, like the radio producer’s relationship with his listener – is one of collaborative partnership through the imagination. This can be intellectual communication – brain to brain – or it can be impressionistic, the effect produced by sounds in an abstract way, the emotional response evoked by music, or in visual terms the power of colour and form in a painting to evoke mood and emotion. While not setting out to explore in depth such phenomena as synaesthesia, there is no question that the colour of sound evinces effects that relate to the subconscious and personal circumstances of the listener. We become part of the making through our response to the clues that transmission sends us. A poem does not tell; it is. It therefore follows that sound as art, be it through traditional broadcast ‘real time’ media, or emerging platforms for audio that are developing now and will further develop in coming time, are creating and will create imaginative pictures that directly evoke responses in the mind before understanding. The radio journalist seeks to achieve instant understanding and clarity of issues and stories. It will be argued in this book that there is another layer of communication – also involving the idea of journalism in a wider, broader sense – in which the connection between subtle shaping borne of the subconscious in art, music and pure sound interact with the capacity for imaginative picture-making within each of us. It is on the face of it hardly surprising that the factor which makes the connection between poetry and radio in this thinking is ‘voice’. Yet this is not necessarily literally the physical tone and cadence; often it is the individual nature of the communicator, recognisable on hearing; a good poet has a voice and a good producer has a voice. It is a ‘voice’ that can show you pictures. It is this which, if we allow it, can open the world of response before understanding which may be found to be, in the end at the root of all true understanding after all.
We shall see that often poet and producer can be one and the same; poets have been attracted to radio since its earliest days and many have used it to develop new concepts of poetry. In the mid to late 1940s, the BBC employed many poets in production, editorial and management positions. William Empson was news editor for the Eastern Service, the same department that John Arlott, later to be associated mostly with cricket commentary, joined after the war. Roy Campbell, a South African-born talks producer ...
