This week we examine the political power of the written word over the course of more than 1,000 years.
We start with our faces pressed up against the present moment, as the TS Eliot prize-shortlisted poet Terrance Hayes joins us to discuss a collection of poems written to the fevered rhythm of our 24-hour news culture. He explains how he started writing his American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin in the raw days after Donald Trump’s election victory in November 2016, how Wanda Coleman allowed him to unlock his anger and confusion, and how writing a sonnet a day is a challenge the present moment won’t let him put aside.
Then we head to the British Library, where we follow the soap-opera sagas of Queen Emma, enjoy a 10th-century Irish joke about the letter P and trace the imprint of a spear that once rested on a draft of the Domesday book.
Reading list
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes (Penguin)
Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
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