Melvin: As a writer who gives us the option to get the first look in, everybody who reads Smith feels like they're rediscovering her. I think perhaps another thing to think about is the idea that anything could be a subject for a poem. She can take a pot shot at anything, the most ordinary thing, and make it into a poem. We are usually living on the edges, that means she's filthy and in peril,. what do you mean by the edge? Melvin: In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
In 1957 Stevie Smith published a poetry collection called Not Waving But Drowning – and its title poem gave us a phrase which has entered the language.
Its success has overshadowed her wider work as the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry and three novels, mostly written while she worked as a secretary. Her poems, printed with her pen and ink sketches, can seem simple and comical, but often beneath the surface lurk themes of melancholy, loneliness, love and death.
With
Jeremy Noel-Tod
Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia
Noreen Masud
Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol
and
Will May
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Southampton
The photograph above shows Stevie Smith recording her story Sunday at Home, a finalist in the BBC Third Programme Short Story competition in 1949.