Episode description
Ian McMillan explores space in language and writing. Space can be explicit or implied through the space between words, between lines, at the margins of a page, or with pauses and gaps and silence. Ian's guests include the poet Raymond Antrobus whose new collection All the Names Given explores different kinds of space: physical, philosophical and cultural; the architectural critic, Jonathan Glancey, who understands more than most people how human beings relate to space; the poet and Britain’s first professor of Radio, Sean Street who celebrates the work of that great explorer of the radio space Piers Plowright, and we meet Ai-Da, an Artificial Intelligence robot, who is writing poetry in response to Dante's The Divine Comedy. Lucy Seal who is curating this remarkable refashioning of Dante's poem explains how AI technologies might offer both a vision of heaven and hell through that space in between, Purgatory.