2 October 2004
Saturday 2 October 2004 22:15-23:00 (Radio 3)
Ian McMillan with more late night word cabaret: newly commissioned writing, hi-octane performance, and the best in world literature.
Programme Details
As National Poetry Day approaches, Robert Potts, editor of Poetry Review, asks what it's for, and whether it's working. National Poetry Day is on Thursday 7th October this year.
With the opening of a new production of The Solid Gold Cadillac by George Kaufman on the West End stage, Ian McMillan talks to novelist and journalist Maureen Freely and the writer, broadcaster and columnist Alan Coren about the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, the group of American writers including Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, and Edna Ferber, along with their literary circle of friends, who would meet to socialise and exchange their often savage witticisms. They called themselves the 'Vicious Circle', and they changed the nature of American comedy.
Alan Coren's novels 'The Crickelwood Dome' and 'A Year in Crickelwood', as well as his latest, 'Waiting for Jeffrey' are published by Robson Books. Maureen Freely's latest book is a translation of Orhan Pamuk's novel 'Snow' (Alfred A. Knopf), and her novel 'The Stork Club' is published by Bloomsbury.
The Verb's Sony award winning eartoonist Peter Blegvad uses some soft language in the attic, as he and his alter ego explore 'the female'.
It's political Party conference season, and Ian McMillan and The Verb Round Table discuss the poetics of political rhetoric.
The Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite remains one of the most compelling poetry performers around today. He's written literary criticism and many essays alongside his poetry, and he's Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. His voice belongs to Barbados, to its many languages and dialects, its ghosts, its history, its sea and its wide skies, and he joins Ian McMillan to read from his new collection of poetry, 'Words Need Love Too' (published by Salt, 2004), and to talk about his lifetime of writing.
And as an unpublished Ernest Hemmingway story is up for auction at Christie's in New York, Patrick McGrath, their rare books and manuscripts specialist, tells us about the story, and launches a new Verb writing competition. He's not allowed to read us the story until after the sale, so The Verb invites listeners to write, in 750 words, a pastiche Hemmingway story made from the components we have so far - more details to appear on our competition page soon, but we can tell you already that it involves a bull, a goring, and a happy ending.
