Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. It's me talking about poetry. I'm not going to sell you anything that you're not going to get.

That's what it is and I'm doing it because I love poetry. But also, no, that's the only reason I'm doing it to be completely straight.

I really develop my love of poetry as a student at Birmingham Polytechnic. So that's going to give you a sort of inclination of the sort of level.

I'm going to be operating.

Today I want to look at a couple of poems and contrasting compare as I used to say on the old O-level exam papers.

First one I want to talk about is it's a poem by Stevie Smith called Not Waving but Drowning. It was written in 1957 as was I in a metaphorical sense.

Stevie Smith is really interesting. It's not a bloke, by the way. It's a woman. Her poetry has got a strange...

It's like a ballad and to me it has a sort of profoundly English pagan oddness about it.

They seem often quite simple and sometimes a bit rubbish and then when you read them and really get into the world of Stevie Smith, I think they can get a bit excellent.

This one is probably her most famous poem ever and it's called Not Waving but Drowning.

Now have I already said that? Oh look who cares. In 1963 Stevie Smith wrote a novel called Novel on Yellow Paper and she said in there and I quote,

this is a foot off the ground novel and if you are a foot on the ground kind of person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation.

It's kind of a bit how I feel. I should sell this podcast. What is a foot on the ground person, a foot on the ground person who I think is...

I'll tell you what it is. I once saw a naked bite ride going over Waterloo Bridge in Central London. Just naked people on bicycles, big people, small people, beautiful people, less beautiful people.

I thought it was a really fantastic image of the human spirit and there was a family standing next to me, a guy and a woman and two kids and the guys looked at the bite ride and said, weirdos.

And there I think is the two categories of humanity, those who were on those bikes naked and the one who just couldn't cope with that level of freedom.

So I'm going to start by reading. Actually read the whole poem or should I just read the first bit? It's quite sure. I don't want to stifle you early on. I'm going to blast it out.

Here we go, not waving but drowning. Nobody heard him, the dead man, but still he lay moaning. I was much further out than you thought, and not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, you always loved larking and now he's dead. Must have been too cold for him, his heart gave way, they said.

Oh no, no, no, it was too cold always, still the dead one lay moaning. I was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning.

So if we take that first, you probably know that each sort of lump of poetry within a poem is called a stanza. It's a kind of a poet's paragraph if that's what you want.

So it begins nobody heard him, the dead man. And I think straight off we're into this Stevie Smith world. Is there any literal truth in this or is it just poetic truth?

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