Mr Oxford Don Monologue

Interviewer:

He is a fascinating poet but also a children’s book writer. One of his most famous poems are “Half-caste” and “listen Mr Oxford Don”. John Agard was born in British Guiana 1949. When he was growing up, he enjoyed listening to cricket commentary on the radio, and at some point he started making up his own. By making up cricket commentaries, he discovered a passion to language. In his final years of school, he studied English, French and Latin, and that was when he also began writing his first poetry. In 1977, he moved to Great Britain, where he worked for BBC. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Today he came for a visit and tell us what is on his mind right now.

As I have mentioned to the audience that you are a poet, could you tell us how do you go about writing your poetry?

John Agard: When anything can start you off, you get that nibbling feeling. It may be words; it could be a memory, a funny headline. As long as it touches you, and you feel an emotional engagement in this subject or this remark. Even a strong word can trigger you. One of the words that gave me the nibbling feeling was half-caste. It means a person of mixed race. When I hear this word, that trigger turns on, and that 's why I started writing a poem about it. As I

One of my intents was to show that there is no need of changing yourself if you live in a foreign country. You should keep your personal identity. In order to achieve that, I wrote a poem with phonetic spelling. The phonetic spelling shows the pronunciation of words in my dialect.By not using the correct spelling of the word and not using standard english the poem appears to be sloppy. In addition, no rhyme was used, so it can be understood easily that it was written from the point of view of a person who is mixed