Abstract

This review-essay considers Mighty Beast, a radio feature by Sean Borodale, Sara Davies and Elizabeth Purnell, exploring how it approaches vernacular speech using poems based on auctioneering, sounds of market places and interviews with farmers and other workers. Listening closely to key passages, I highlight the role of Borodale’s 'in the moment' process and the use of sound editing as a form of writing, while situating the work within a longer history of livestock poetry and auctioneering in the sound arts. In the end, I argue that Mighty Beast is an outstanding piece to help think through larger issues of the future of the radio feature as a format, alongside questions about what can or cannot be depicted in vernacular-focused radio, a genre that seems to work on us at the 'creaturely' scale.

Keywords: cattle yards, auctioneer, radio feature, vernacular

How to Cite:

Verma, N., (2014) “Mighty Beast: a critical reflection”, RadioDoc Review 1(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.14453/rdr.v1i2.11