Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. I want you to picture a scene.

It's 1969 and I'm a 12 year old school boy at Oldbury Technical School in the West Midlands of England

and I am about to read a poem in assembly.

Now assembly in those days was very much a religious thing.

And the poem I'm going to read

has been selected for me by the English teacher and it's not your

usual kind of religious assembly poem. I knew nothing of poetry but I'd certainly never seen anything like this before.

The poem was in a book in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Now incidentally the Penguin Modern Poets series was a

classic series of collections of poetry. I would recommend they're in second-hand shops all

over the world check them out. This was Penguin Modern Poets and number five and

as ever with these books, you get three poets and a selection

of each of their poems. Anyway, the one I had to read in assembly was a poem by an American poet called

Lawrence Furligetti and the poem was called, Sometime During Eternity. course sometime during eternity. Now the first thing that struck me about it as a

12 year old, I mean it was written in 1958 and it is full of sort of hipster language the thing that the

jazz crowd that kind of talk. It's about Jesus but you can imagine it being said by

someone in a baray in a in a downstairs coffee bar shortly after the bongo playing was finished.

Okay, here goes with the first bit.

I read it at the time in an American gangster accent because that was the only American accent I had at my fingertips.

I'm not going to do that now. Here goes.

Some time during eternity some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some

square type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hip to who made heaven and earth and that the cat who really laid it on us is his dad.

Now I know that sounds a bit like a parody thing now but it was written in 1955 and the idea

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