15 January 2005
Saturday 15 January 2005 22:00-22:45 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan with another cabaret of the word. Tom Paulin continues his series the Secret Life of the Poem with Robert Browning's Meeting at Night, and audio cartoonist Peter Blegvad returns.
Programme details
The Verb Programme Details January 15th 2005
A transatlantic theme to the programme this week, which begins with a specially commissioned short play by Matt Thorne. Thorne is a prolific young British novelist whose books often feature inept men and unsettling women, and their struggles with reality. In 'Levitt in London' an affable forty-something American tries to fathom a change which has come over his young British friend, twenty-something Kat. As Levitt tries to extract the truth it becomes apparent that they are, as Churchill put it, divided by a common tongue.
Matt Thorne's latest novel, the Booker-Longlisted 'Cherry', is published by Wiedenfeld and Nicholson.
Also on the programme this week Ian McMillan talks to Al Alvarez, a poet, critic, editor and author, whose new book 'The Writer's Voice' is as much concerned with ways of reading as it is with writing. Succinctly and incisively, Alvarez uses work by Plath, Coleridge, Jean Rhys and John Donne to illustrate and explore his themes: how an innate sense of rhythm is at the heart of original voices in poetry and prose; how biography is a distraction from the business of criticism; how a writer's creativity is an almost physical response to the world. Poetry, Alvarez says, springs as much from the muscles as the mind. He lauds the critic T.E Hulme and dismisses the American 'Beat' generation.
'The Writer's Voice' is published by Bloomsbury.
Al Alvarez and Ian McMillan are joined in discussion by the poet Eva Salzman - whose latest collection, 'Double Crossing' is a vivid compilation of witty, sceptical and restless poems, products of a transatlantic life - and The Verb's audio cartoonist Peter Blegvad, whose two Peter Blegvads, 'two halves of a self divided' grapple this week with the idea that one of them might be a Brit, the other a Yank. Eva reads from 'Double Crossing' and Peter defends the Beatniks from against Al Alvarez.
'Double Crossing' is published by Bloodaxe
And there's the second in Tom Paulin's series on the secret life of poems. This week, Tom close reads 'Meeting at Night' by Robert Browning, and shows how the mechanics of the poem achieve its longing, erotic charge:
"The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!"
