The Essay: The Art of Apology

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The Essay: The Art of Apology: Episode 3

The Art of Apology

Episode 3

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, The Art of Apology, Episode 3

Poet Helen Mort explores whether apologies sometimes stand in for a failure to understand.

Poet Helen Mort explores apology in all its messy complexity and asks whether an apology sometimes stands in for a failure to understand.

How often do we imagine saying sorry to someone or wish they had said sorry to us, particularly if they are no longer with us? Poet Helen Mort continues her journey exploring the complexities and subtexts of apology, drawing on both her own lifelong tendency to over-apologise and on remarkable poetic apologies. 

She asks whether sometimes we apologise for something superficial or even trivial as a way of saying sorry for a more fundamental gap in understanding – for all the things that can get lost in translation in the messy business of communicating with other people who are different from us. 

Through Tony Harrison's poem Marked With D, she reflects on how apology can stand in for an unbridgeable gap between people – a failure to understand another human being. 

Producer Zita Adamson
An Overtone Production for BBC Radio 3

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Poet and self-confessed apology addict Helen Mort explores the human impulse to apologise.

Drawing on poems that have helped shape her, poet and self-confessed apology addict Helen Mort explores the human impulse to apologise and what we seek when we say sorry.

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