Introduction
'You can read a poem or hear a song and you think that someone must know you. Have they been in my life? Are they watching me through the window? They say and feel exactly what you're feeling, they put it into words as though you'd written it down yourself.'
Carleen Anderson - Passwords 1998
This programme covers five poems from the NEAB GCSE Poetry Anthology. Each poem is introduced by Simon Armitage and read either by the poet or by an actor. The poems are in a variety of styles and from different periods; but all deal with the themes of death, fear and resistance. They range from Henry Newbolt's formally crafted hymn to the stiff upper lip 'Vitaļ Lampada' to the form-busting energy of American beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's 'The world is a beautiful place'. The formal elegance and tight control of Chidiock Tichbourne's sixteenth-century poem 'Elegy for Himself' seems in complete contrast to the frightening circumstances in which it was apparently written - in the few nights before the poet's execution for treason in the Tower of London.
This selection of poems reminds us of the early origins of poetry in magic and ritual, in which poets used their skill with words to give their audience ways of imaginatively coming to terms with the ups and downs of life. A poem like Margaret Atwood's 'Song of the Worms' seems like a rallying call to groups who feel themselves to be oppressed, while Maya Angelou's 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me' with its simple language and imagery offers companionship to those going through times of pain and personal insecurity - 'when the going gets tough'.
© 2000 Channel Four Television Corporation
