BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Lauren Laverne here, we're taking our Easter break.

So until we're back on air, we're showcasing a few programs from our archive.

As usual, the music's been shortened for

rights reasons. This week's guest is the poet Benjamin Zephania who

sadly died last year. Sue Lawley cast him away in 1997.

The program contains some strong discriminatory language. My cast away this week is a poet. Born in the West Indian community of Hansworth near Birmingham in the late 50s,

his childhood was rough. Approved school, detention centre, Borsall and prison were the principal educational

influences in his life. It wasn't until he joined the protest movements of London that his

talent for performance poetry came to public attention.

He had a book published. He was noticed by Nelson Mandela, who later asked him to take on projects in South Africa,

and he now travels the world, writing and performing. His book of poetry

for children talking turkeys was a bestseller and in 1989 he was nominated for the

Oxford Professor of Poetry.

I'd like to be counted, he says, as one of the people who popularized poetry again.

He is Benjamin Zephania.

But it's a particular kind of poetry,'t it Benjamin not the sort you can sit and

mutter to yourself up the corner. It's got to be performed. It's got to be given

everything. Yes, we always advise people when they're it to read it aloud, to read it to each other,

especially in children's work, it becomes a lot more fun.

And I always thought of poetry as something to communicate to people

not as something that I wanted to put into books in fact putting poetry into

...