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Ian McMillan, presenter of Radio 3's The Verb, celebrates a century of poetry on the ´óÏó´«Ã½.

To read a poem on the page is like holding someone’s hand; there is a tactile intimacy between the poet and the reader, between the page and the eye, as the words settle in as though they are birds landing on an expanse of water.

To hear a poem at a reading is to feel part of a community; the other people in the room are experiencing the work at the same time you are and so you as an individual feel like you’re part of a wider poetic body, brought to life by the electricity of heightened language.

And, of course, the crowd is made up of individuals who all hear the poem slightly differently depending on who they are, how much poetry they’ve read and, oddly, exactly where they’re sitting in the room. (In the fragile light from a window is good; at the back of the room by the slamming door is bad.)

For me, listening to a poem on the radio combines the best of these two worlds: there’s the intimacy of the lines flying through the air to land on the ear and there’s the sense that, although I’m probably listening to the poem on my own in a room, there are many more people listening in their rooms somewhere and we are tied to each other by the stanzas that the radio is giving us.

To celebrate a century of poetry broadcast on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ we’ve been putting out a poem from the ´óÏó´«Ã½’s extensive archives every week on The Verb for a few months now, and the treasures we’ve unearthed are astonishing; we’ve also been commissioning new poems that are heard on the radio for the very first time, taking their first steps on the tightrope of air.

I’m so excited by the fact that these poems can surprise and delight listeners who may be listening intently to the show or who may just be flicking through stations in search of something to hear. They may have just walked into the house and turned the radio on or they may have gone into someone else’s room and the radio is playing. And here are brand new combinations of words, variations on the 26 letters of the alphabet that have never been heard before.

The "Something new" poems, as we call them to distinguish them from the "Something old" archive poems (see what we did there?) are about the power of radio listening, and so they make perfect bedfellows. In this section of The Verb you’ll hear poems by Malika Booker, Simon Armitage, Rachel Boast and many others, each one a brand new creation stepping into the world for the first time, each one a fresh look at the joy of listening, the power of hearing.

Poetry and radio: two forms made for each other, two sides of the same coin, two different views from the same window, twins joined at the line-ending. New that stays new, as Ezra Pound almost said.