Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
That's not me, by the way: it's Percy Bysshe Shelley. But it's a line that came back to me while we were programming BBC Two's poetry night this Saturday. Great poems are bottled spirit, capturing the mood of a country or a people at any given moment. They are little word bombs that resonate far beyond the page, able to change the way we think. Take the First World War as experienced by Siegfried Sassoon or the north of England in the 1950s as lived by Philip Larkin. This, I think, is what Shelley means by legislators of the world - although it's a long time since my English degree and my memory is a little rusty.
We wanted to programme of a night of poetry a few days before National Poetry Day, which has done so much over the last twenty years to bring poetry to a wider audience. But we knew, in doing so, we wanted to say something about Britain today, to create a state of the nation address through the mouths of poets.
In Railway Nation: A Journey in Verse, a film inspired by Nightmail, six of our leading contemporary poets join a train travelling between London and Glasgow. The poets are Sabrina Mahfouz, Liz Berry, Imtiaz Dharkar, Michael Simmons Roberts, Sean O’Brien and Andrew MacMillan: some of the best poets writing today, bringing a wide range of experiences and approaches to the film. Each poet observes and listens to their fellow travellers and turns their experiences into poetry: a mother visiting her child in foster care, a man visiting his own mother who has dementia, two students worrying about the cost of living. What emerges is a story of human resilience - a nation surviving, if not quite thriving - and all in one train carriage!
This singing line conveys an epic
Where the extras all have stories of their own,
With casts of the thousands we shall never meet,
As real and strange as those we find
Aboard this time machine with sandwiches
And Wi-Fi where we work or natter,
Vanish off the clock and read, or simply gaze
At what the restless window offers up.
Afterwards, we head to the Rivoli Ballroom in South London for Performance Live: Kate Tempest - an exclusive performance by spoken word poet, Kate Tempest and her band, courtesy of the Battersea Arts Centre and supported by Arts Council England. Let Them Eat Chaos is modern Britain as seen by Tempest, or at least the seven characters at the heart of her story. Seven characters struggling with alcoholism or anxiety, eviction or bereavement.
Bare branches sway in the front garden.
The lionmouth door knocker flaps in the breeze.
Streetlights glint on the Beware of the Dog sign.
The beer cans and crisp packets dance with the dead leaves.
It’s 4:18 a.m.
Tempest's last show, Brand New Ancients, was one of the hits of 2013. Since then she has put out an album and published a novel as well as a poetry collection. In Let Them Eat Chaos, we see a poet at the height of her powers. Afterwards, there are turns from three of her favourite poets: Deanna Rodger, David J Pugilist and Isaiah Hull, who was one of the stars of Words First (Radio 1Xtra's partnership with Arts Council England and The Roundhouse) earlier this year.
The evening will end with an Artsnight special Poets At The BBC, which mines the archive for encounters with some of our greatest poets, including Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith and Seamus Heaney. And because we pedantically wanted everything in the evening to be poetry, we also commissioned three leading poets - Jackie Kaye, Lemn Sissay and Ian Duhig - to write and the read the links between each programme.
To accompany the evening, iPlayer present a collection of poetry films curated or commissioned by The Space. There are extended performances of the Rivoli Ballroom poets. The Roundhouse is sharing its recording of its latest poetry slam. There's a rare outing of We Are Poets, the brilliant feature length documentary from Leeds Young Authors. And there is We Belong Belong Here, a thirty minute programme with interviews and performances by Hollie McNish, Lemn Sissay, Raymond Antrobus, Joelle Taylor, Jack Underwood, Madi Maxwell-Libby, Salena Godden and Sabrina Mahfouz.
All of this adds up to a snapshot of contemporary Britain as seen through the eyes of over twenty contemporary poets.
Jonty Claypole is Director, BBC Arts
- Poetry Night airs on Saturday 1 October, from 8.10pm on BBC Two