Might there be a utopian dimension to some of these poetic visions of the archipelago? On the other hand, some of the poems juxtapose domestic and maritime settings, and dramatise a tension between the safe and comfortable houses or beds in which listeners enjoy the broadcasts, and the exoticised coastal margins of the Isles in which the forecasts may be merely the ‘cold poetry of information’. If culture is, as Wendy James has argued, ‘adverbial’ rather than ‘nominal’, what kind of cultural geography of the Isles is practised in the poems which draw upon the forecast’s daily and nightly ritual of naming the sea areas around Britain and Ireland? How might this maritime and archipelagic imagination of the Isles be related to current post-devolutionary attempts to reconceive the British Isles, both politically and intellectually? All of the poems revel in the forecast’s litany of names such as Dogger, Fastnet, Lundy, Heligoland and Finisterre, for example, which do not evoke places so much as they imply ideas of untapped spatial and cultural possibility within the British Isles. The aim of the lecture is to consider how both the radio broadcast and the poems it inspired conceptualise the cultural geography of the British Isles. Description: A version of Ronald Binges 'Sailing By' (BBC Radio 4s Shipping Forecast music) for solo piano, with an additional treble clef for the flutey sweeps. This lecture examines poems which make reference to the Shipping Forecast, as broadcast by BBC Radio Four, including poems by Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean Street, Andrew McNeillie, and Andrew Waterman. Series 13: Dublin, One City One Book 2015 - The Barrytown Trilogy. Series 11: Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities.Series 10: The Ireland Chair of Poetry Lectures.Series 9: Dublin: One City, One Book Lectures 2014.
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