Alice Walker - interviewed by Henry Lyman for Poems to a Listener (1984 series)

 

Alice Walker, reading from Good Night, Willie Lee and other collections, gives us poems about her childhood in rural Georgia, her travels in Africa, and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. She describes her baptism in a local creek: “It was just such an interesting thing to go down to the creek beautifully dressed in white, with all the other people dressed in white, and be held by the people of the community.”

Stevie Smith Interview | BBC Monitor | 1965

 

Including readings of "The Warden," "Not Waving But Drowning," the first two stanzas of "Look!", "I'll Have Your Heart," and "Pad, Pad."

Denise Levertov - interviewed by Henry Lyman for Poems to a Listener (1984 series)

 

Reading from Candles in Babylon, Denise Levertov discusses the threat of nuclear war and its psychological effect on adults and on children: “I’ve heard of a child, who, when asked what he was going to do when he grew up, said, ‘But I’m not going to grow up.’”

Seamus Heaney - interviewed by Henry Lyman for Poems to a Listener (1983 series), Part Two

 

In this continued reading and conversation Heaney talks about the political tensions between Protestants and Catholics, as well as the more friendly relations he observed in the countryside: “The individual Protestant farmer in your own district was your neighbor, rather than your enemy.”

Seamus Heaney - interviewed by Henry Lyman for Poems to a Listener (1983 series), Part One

 

Reading from Poems 1965-1975 and Field Work, Seamus Heaney, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, speaks of the landscape of Northern Ireland, the farm where he grew up, and the workers and craftsmen of the neighborhood: “The poet has to be a voice-box for something that is in the land and in the people.”

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Seamus Heaney speaking about Gaelic and the Irish landscape

 

3 Poems by Strider Marcus Jones ON BBC RADIO LANCASHIRE -Upload with Joel Mitchell on 12/03/2026

 

A Life in Study: Robert Lowell

 

James Joyce’s Ulysses (Arena, 2022)