Waiting for the green light
Post categories: Radio 3, behind the scenes, speech
|17:15 UK Time, Thursday, 16 September 2010
Ian McMillan dodges toppling towers of books to tell us what's in store for the new season of The Verb
The last Verb of the season is just before the Proms, halfway through July and then, although I present a few events in the Proms Literary Festival, I don’t have a weekly commitment through the Summer; so I say thank goodness for the Proms Literary Festival, because if it wasn’t for those little islands of learning in the months without an ‘R’ in them, my brain would turn to mush.
Having to read books and new writing for The Verb really sharpens me up intellectually and linguistically; when the programme takes a break my literary muscles inevitably slacken off a bit, but now, with the programme returning this Friday, September 17th, I’m back in training, and padded bags full of books are crashing through my letterbox every day.
The Verb’s got a packed Autumn; as well as our regular weekly shows, recorded in the studio on the 5th floor at Broadcasting House, we’ve got live shows at the Radio Theatre, a show at this year’s Freethinking Festival at The Sage Gateshead, a pre-Free-thinking (there must be a better way of saying that!) live show as part of the Durham Book Festival, and a Prison Writing Special, with new writing and a prison visit by Verb regular Toby Litt.
As the books begin to arrive, I tell myself that I really must do something about our spare room, which has become a kind of book room, with tottering towers of books everywhere; occasionally in the middle of the night one of the towers falls down and I rush out of bed thinking we’ve been burgled but of course it’s a few volumes of obscure Eastern European verse or a first novel or a collection of short stories by an older author who’s recently been rediscovered.
I’ll read them all before Christmas, I promise. Well, most of them...
Anyway, on Wednesday afternoon we gathered in the studio at Broadcasting House to record the first show of the new season and I felt an almost overwhelming sense of anticipation.
Our guests arrived in batches: Seb Rochford, the drummer with Polar Bear, who has been working with Jyager, a trilingual rapper (English/Portugese/French, if you’re asking!); he said he was only bringing one drum, and in the end he did, but sometimes drummers can’t resist bringing in that extra thing to hit! He was true to his word, though, and he and Jyager did a quick soundtest before the rest of the guests came, improvising a piece that we decided to use a version of at the start of the show.
Wendy Cope came in next; Wendy had brought some new poems for us and we’d decided to pepper them throughout the show. Wendy’s known as a formalist, great with line ricks and sestinas and pantoums and villanelles, but a number of these new poems are, unusually for her, non rhyming free verse.
Inua Ellams joined us fresh from rehearsals at the Soho Theatre; Inua is a Nigerian/British poet and playwright who was performing an extract from his new one man show, Untitled. That’s the title of the piece, by the way: it’s not that it hasn’t got a title. It’s about twin Nigerian brothers separated at birth and it touches on ideas of naming and identity.
Finally the Punjabi poets Amarjit Chandan and Shazea Quiraishi took their places round the table; they’re taking part in a Punjabi poetry event at London’s free Word Festival. Amarjit is an amazing poet, imprisoned in solitary confinement for two years as a younger man, he’s lived in this country for a long time, working tirelessly for the literary and the wider communities and writing in English and Punjabi and trying to discover linguistic bridges between the two. His book Sonata For Four Hands, published by Arc, is well worth getting hold of. Shazea is a younger writer who is using creativity to dig deeper into her Punjabi heritage; she’d brought along an extract from a long poem she’s working on which merges historical and contemporary views of women in the Punjab.
We’re all round the table, language at the ready. We’ve got the glasses of water. We’ve got our pieces of paper. We’ve got our words. Now all I need is the green light...
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Comment number 1.
At 19:18 7th Oct 2010, Russell wrote:Thinking about those towers of books . . . Why is it that some of us (including you, I'm sure) know that we'll never surrender those inconvenient ill-indexed space-sucking shelves for the convenience of a sleek electronic toy, upon which, we're assured, our beloved texts are perfectly safe and, apparently, more accessible?
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