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 to be completely straight. I really developed

my love of poetry as a student at Birmingham Polytechnic so that's that's going to give you a sort of an inclination of the sort of level.

I'm going to be operating a.

Today I want to look at a couple of poems and contrast as they 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.

And her poetry has got a strange it's like a ballad and it 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 bike ride going over Waterloo Bridge in

Central London just naked people on bicycles big people small people people,

...