Mark Ford
speaker
404 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 31 Aug
Mark Ford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Who knows what it means?
Its world is so arbitrary, and its beginning is as unpredictable but as irresistible as a Grimm's fairy tale.
It really does connect into what the ballad tradition was about, which was some archetype, archetypal figure...
rising out of nowhere and somehow gripping you and saying, listen to this.
This happened to me.
And what then happens, although it gets completely weird, is also amazing and irresistible.
And I think that those first stanzas carry that irresistibility of the mariner, which is a transposition
of Coleridge's own charismatic conversational powers.
Yeah.
We don't want to embarrass our listeners with our very poor Ayrshire accents.
So Andy O'Hagan has very kindly agreed to read the lines, but we will be commenting on them.
He is, but he's part of that interest in poets who, I don't want to call them peasant poets, that's in inverted commas, but poets who write about scenes very different from the Rape of the Lock, for instance, that the interest was in regional dialect.
Wordsworth was also interested in it and travels in Scotland, for instance, doesn't he, and writes about
solitary reaper.
So this idea that the regional was somehow authentic in some way, that the metropolitan wasn't.
And I think the appeal of both Crabbe and Burns, and they both were extremely popular in their time, as was, say, John Clare, another peasant poet or poet who grew up in poverty, that they incarnated a kind of connection to a region and a kind of could channel the folkloric as well in a way which you don't
I mean, the only other great rival to Burns in that, I guess, will be Thomas Hardy.
Yes.
What do you make of that?
The sulky, sullen dame doesn't come out too well from this poem, that she knows that he's a skellum, as she calls him later on, and a blellum as well.
Showing 321–340 of 404 · page 17 of 21
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