How the BBC 100 Collection Was Made

Posted November 2022 | News

How we did it

The BBC 100 Collection is the result of a collaboration between the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, BBC History and the Poetry Archive. It began in 2019 with a successful application for a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the AHRC-funded CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership on ‘Poetry Television Broadcasting at the BBC 1932–present’. BBC 100 Poets, however, focuses on the rich archive of modern poets who have read their work on BBC Radio. The supervisory team for the award brought together Robert Seatter as Head of BBC History and UEA poetry experts Professor David Nowell Smith and Dr Jeremy Noel-Tod, and the research for the project has been a collaboration between the team, the BBC Sound Archive, the Poetry Archive, and the CHASE CDA award-holder, Sandy Balfour. The Poetry Archive has created a dedicated web presentation of this collection, working with poets and their Estates and publishers to enable us to share these poems with you publicly.

Curation of any collection which aims to represent an entire century of activity will necessarily be subjective. The curation team aimed to represent a wide range of poets and poetry styles and to look beyond the most canonical examples of an individual poet’s work. To strengthen the selection and give a more rounded flavour of the historical context of each poem, we have aimed, wherever possible, to place poems in the decade they were composed in, rather than when they were later published or broadcast.

Where we have been unable to share the poem recordings in full, we have offered a representation of the poet’s voice through the existing collection of poems in the Poetry Archive. There are too many brilliant poets to mention in any one gathering so for the decade of the 2010s we asked our visiting public and BBC Radio producers for their favourite contemporary poets, and we have offered examples of their work which we care for in the Archive. We hope you love exploring these poems as much as we did bringing them together.

 

The Poetry Archive team behind BBC 100

Director: Tracey Guiry

Curation and credits: Maggie Sullivan

Web design: Nicola Wheldrake

 

 

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