Auden The Amazing Moderns W.H. Auden (Radio Script)

"Jumpstart" radio show theme song playing.

RADIO ANNOUNCER:

Good afternoon girls and boys, guys and gals! This is Boom Bill Bass, a.k.a. Three B, ready to jumpstart your afternoon with my "unofficial" DJ mix and musings about prose and poetry, music and lyrics, and anything in between these things!

Listen up! We will be doing a great series in Jumpstart this month, called the "Amazing Moderns." This is a poetry series -- yes dear listeners, a poetry series this time -- showcasing the works of great poets in American literature in the 20th century. If you're wondering what 20th century means, guys and gals, it's that period when you're not yet born, oh yeah I'm kidding -- NOT! This period is between the 1900s and well before the Millennium, before the futuristic years of "2Ks" -- that's 2000 and up -- started.

So what's up with the 20th century, you say. It's only that period where we produced not only great music, but also great thinkers. It was a time when Man and Machine became a dynamic duo and real changes started happening all over the world. You have new technologies like the TV and the atomic bomb, great music from music greats like the Beatles, the Space Race between the U.S. And the Soviet Union, the Beatles, Communism, the Watergate Scandal, the Beatles, Civil Rights Movement, and the Beatles. FX: Beatles' "Hard Days Night"

All right, for more information about your 20th century history, please contact your friendly History teacher at the Faculty. Or the library.

So, back to our "Amazing Moderns" poetry series. Yeah, we'll be doing this series and as a special treat for you, guys and gals, we'll start with the hardest but coolest one -- W.H. Auden. That's Wystan Hugh Auden in longhand, WH Auden for short. Sounds British, you say? Oh yes you're right! This great American poet and the first poet we'll feature in our Amazing Moderns poetry series is actually...

Yes, he's that American poet with the English-sounding name -- WH Auden.
For today's series, we'll be talking about his cool poetry, and nothing beats the coolness of -- nope, you guessed wrong -- the Roman Empire -- yeah, I can hear gladiators thumping -- and of course, the great American feat of putting the first man on the moon! Yes, Auden covered these important events in our history, and creatively so with his poetry, writing the poems "The Fall of Rome" in the 1940s and "Moon Landing" in 1969. So, if you have your iPhones, Blackberries, iPads, mobile phones and laptops ready, let's jumpstart the series by giving me your questions or comments about WH Auden, The Fall of Rome or Moon Landing. We'll be right back, with poetry reading and tweets from our Twitter friends!

[RADIO COMMERCIAL]

We're back at Jumpstart with Boom Bill Bass, a.k.a. Three B, with a new poetry series called the "Amazing Modens," and we're starting off with WH Auden. You heard me right before our commercial, I'll do some cool poetry reading for the first time, so tweet and give me your comments on FB if I read poetry, alright, guys and gals? Let's start with Auden's "The Fall of Rome." Buckle up, guys and gals, hold your breath as I read WH Auden's "The Fall of Rome." Poetry reading of "The Fall of Rome"

Whew! That was a first for me, dear listeners. So, what do you think about the poem? Let's check out tweets from our listeners:

Dancecrew77 tweeted, "talks abt d modern&ancient.Rome's ancient disciplines of a noble warrior, Modern U.S.' Marines fightin 4 basics.fall of Rome happens now."

Dancecrew's tweet is one way to look and understand Auden's "The Fall of Rome." Dancecrew's message takeout from the poem is to compare Rome with modern society today, specifically the U.S., and how the ancient Roman Empire can still be compared, and has similarities, with the modern American society.…