Southbank

Ryan visits the Southbank Centre in London for a meeting of the Global Poetry System. He chats with GPS co-ordinator and folk musician Chris Kreinczes, librarian Chris McCabe, writer Dzifa Benson, radio co-ordinator Claire McDermott and Southbank participation producer Lucy Macnab. We've got music from folk outfit Dear Winesburg and an excerpt of the amazing Bellowhead's folk opera version of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' featuring Lemn Sissay as the Mariner.

Presented by Ryan van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Incidental music by Ewen Maclean. Twitter: @byleaveswelive & @anonpoetry. Mail: splpodcast@gmail.com

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First published 23 April, 2010

About Bellowhead

Bellowhead unleashed themselves on Oxford Festival in 2004, brought together by award-winning duo Spiers and Boden. Their plan was to gather a talented collective of disparate musicians into a group capable of playing many styles, idioms and textures from around the world - big band to soul; jazz funk to classical strings. They have since performed all over the world. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a much-acclaimed co-production by the Southbank Centre and The Young Vic with original music written and performed by members of Bellowhead and a cast featuring 150 children from local primary schools. Southbank writer in residence Lemn Sissay plays the Mariner. We are very grateful to all concerned for permission to reproduce a snippet in this podcast.

• More about Bellowhead

About the Southbank Centre

Situated on the south bank of the River Thames next to the popular BA London Eye, Southbank Centre is at the heart of an arts quarter stretching from the Royal National Theatre and National Film Theatre to Tate Modern and Shakespeare's Globe. 

• Southbank Centre website

About Dzifa Benson

Dzifa Benson has been featured in Tell Tales short story anthology, the National Gallery website and podcast, the Guardian, Evening Standard, Philosophy Now magazine and as a playwright, at the Bush Theatre. In 2008 she was a core artist in Africa Beyond's groundbreaking project Translations and was writer-in-residence at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2009.

• Dzifa Benson on Myspace

About Chris Kreinczes

Chris Kreinczes is the co- cordinator of the Global Poetry System. He writes and performs with the folk band Dear Winesburg.

• Dear Winesburg

About Chris McCabe

Chris McCabe is a librarian at the Poetry Library in London.

About Lucy McNab

Lucy MacNab is Participation Producer at the Southbank Centre where she has devised and led projects such as Trading Places, an intergenerational poetry and photography project on Lower Marsh, Waterloo; Fresh Off the Page, a series of performances curated entirely by young people at the London Literature Festival and Global Poetry System, an online user-generated world map of poetry found in people's everyday lives.

About Claire McDermott

Claire McDermott is Spark co-ordinator at the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry.

We recommend...

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Cambridge : Salt, 2008. Coleridge's own commentary on the fateful drama, written some years later at a time of renewed religious feeling, is printed alongside the poem, with a sequence of specially commissioned drawings by Mervyn Peake. His powerful, arresting images perfectly express the qualities of the text, its gothic atmosphere and supernatural terrors, ultimately softened by pity and the hope of redemption. SPL shelfmark: 3.Col

Listener by Lemn Sissay Edinburgh : Canongate, 2008. The Independent on Sunday says of his work: 'His poems are the songs of the street, declamatory, imaginative, hard-hitting ...' SPL shelfmark: 3.Sis

Find out more...

• Search SPL catalogue and borrow these items

Related links...

• Poetry Library, London
• Dzifa Benson's photo on the GPS site
  

Image: Poetry Hopscotch © Dzifa Benson