The Verb

We reveal our new 'Rules for Writing' - six ideas to inspire, excite, and to break!

The musician and songwriter Damon Albarn - and award-winning poets Don Paterson and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett - all join Ian McMillan to illustrate these provocations, which are designed to help launch a new era of poetry, story-writing and performance. The composer and producer Gerry Diver has also contributed a piece of sound art inspired by the cadences of the human voice called 'You May be Mistaken'.

Across our 'Experiments in Living' season, The Verb asked over a hundred guests ( including Margaret Atwood, Yanis Varoufakis, Claudia Rankine and Simon Armitage ) for their ideas about how we might write most powerfully, and creatively in these times. Certain themes surfaced again and again, including time, uncertainty, the non-human world, and listening. Find out how they made their way into our manifesto, and inspired our six new rules.

Ian McMillan is joined by Anita Sethi, Kate Fox, Ira Lightman, and Tom Chatfield to explore the language of time, listening and uncertainty and to celebrate the most compelling ideas that have been gathered into the Verb's 'keepnet' over the last year. This is the final summit of our 'Experiments in Living' season, before we reveal our writing manifesto in the autumn.

Writer and journalist Anita Sethi reads from her book 'I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain' , the story of how a race-hate crime on a train led her to undertake a series of journeys through northern landscapes. Anita discusses the importance of thinking about deep time and the natural world, and listening as an act of restoration.

Technology philosopher Tom Chatfield's new book is called 'How to Think' and it touches on many of the themes that have been surfacing and resurfacing on The Verb over the last year, including 'uncertainty' and the way language can help us think clearly about technology and ecology.

Our regular Verb guests, the poets Ira Lightman and Kate Fox also join us for the season's coda programme. Kate shares a new collage poem which contains the words spoken by our guests at 20 minutes and 21 seconds within each of our Verb recordings - to see what it might reveal about the thinking of our guests in this challenging year. Ira helps us think about language and time and reads a brand new commission for The Verb which we hope will help us futureproof our manifesto.

What makes a good manifesto? Are they better if they are sloganeering or questioning? Radio 1's Greg James and co-writer Chris Smith's new book is like a manifesto for the imagination, Malika Booker co-founded a poetry workshop that has transformed the literary landscape, and Kathryn Williams' songs always chart new territory - they join Ian McMillan to help him shape The Verb Manifesto which will be launched in the autumn.

Malika Booker founded the poetry workshop 'Malika's Poetry Kitchen' alongside fellow poet Robert Robinson twenty years ago, inspired in part by the American writer June Jordan's ideas in 'Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Handbook' . The workshop has included many of our most exciting poets, and an anthology celebrating the workshop is published on 5th August, called 'Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different' ( edited by Maisie Lawrence and Rishi Dastidar).

Greg James and Chris Smith have turned an idea that came to Greg in a dream, into a novel for children called 'The Great Dream Robbery'. With a an acute ear for the sound of language, and a Dadaist expertise in the absurd , Greg and Chris celebrate the power of the imagination and the power of Llamas ( with bananas) - but will these things make it into our manifesto?

Celebrated for her songwriting, Kathryn Williams' first novel 'The Ormering Tide' (Wrecking Ball Press) may have a listening manifesto at its heart. Its narrator is a curious listener, both to the natural world, and the people on her island. It's Rozel's listening which gives the reader hints of something mysterious that happened a long time ago -and which unsettles the present. As Kathryn has such an acute sensitivity to place, we asked her to write a special song to celebrate the places where manifestos are conceived.

Ian McMillan is joined by the Labour Party politician Ed Miliband, by ambassador for ‘Compassion in Politics’ Jackie Weaver ( Jackie recently shot to fame after a parish council meeting went viral), by writer Emilie Robson with a 'Verb Drama' featuring an existentialist cat, and by our regular guest, stand-up poet Kate Fox.

How do they think the language of politics could change to become more compassionate? And what about their perception of the word ‘authority’? Can writers help us see it differently? And why did the young Ed Miliband love the 1980s US soap opera Dallas so much - which was all about the power and authority exerted by Stetson-wearing characters like JR Ewing?

Ian McMillan on the language we use to think and write about trees and the kind of thinking we do alongside them - with forester and environmentalist Peter Wohlleben whose books include 'The Hidden Life of Trees', poet and academic Jason Allen-Paisant, bestselling novelist Sarah Moss, and Scots language specialist and Makar of the North East, Sheena Blackhall.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

Ian McMillan on how language and poetry affect our perception of time.

In this Verb he explores the language of slowness with Oxford University geographer Professor Danny Dorling, asks poet Rachael Boast to read time-bending poetry from her new collection 'Hotel Raphael' (and also to take us deep into the different time-modes and time-zones inhabited by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge). Philosopher Roman Krznaric explains how to write about future time and how to be a good ancestor, and Verb regular, stand-up poet Kate Fox offers an insight into the smooth running of book groups for other species: the slow-reading flies, and the fast-reading deep sea isopods.

Suggestions for a time-themed Book Club:

Ian McMillan is joined by some of the most dynamic writers taking part in the Hay Festival: Michael Morpurgo, one of the nation’s best-loved children’s authors and author of ‘War Horse’, columnist and best-selling feminist chronicler Caitlin Moran, and the award-winning Cameroonian American novelist Imbolo Mbue. They’ll be discussing the stories that change us, and offer hope of change - and explore how we tell stories about ‘change’, be it ecological, emotional or physical.

Ian McMillan explores the dream like experience of 'reverie' - with Terrance Hayes, Bea Roberts, Rachel Genn and Ira Lightman.

What does reverie mean to writers in 2021? Is it simply a waste of time and a state of procrastination? Novelist and neuroscientist Rachel Genn argues that a reverie can be a creative state, a propping open of the self, which lets the world 'sniff around'.

The state of reverie was important to Wanda Coleman, the American poet known as 'the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles'. Coleman died in 2013, and her selected poems 'Wicked Enchantment' has just been published. The collection is edited and introduced by the poet Terrance Hayes, who joins us to celebrate her work, and to share one of her 'American sonnets', which inspired the form of his own collection 'American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin'.

A Verb about 'reverie' would not be complete without a reverie about the word 'reverie' itself. Our regular guest, the poet Ira Lightman lets us dream ourselves into its heart with a new poem commissioned for The Verb - and invites our guests to collaborate with him on air. And do we need a more approachable sounding word for 'reverie' ?

Ian McMillan explores the language of ancestry and the impact our families have on us across the generations and through the passing of time. With poets Hollie McNish whose grannies feature prominently in her latest collection 'Slug...and other things I've been told to hate', and Gillian Clarke whose new bilingual edition of The Gododdin - written by the 13th-century Welsh bard Aneirin - acknowledges what we inherit from the past. And columnist and author of 'House of Glass' Hadley Freeman, who found a shoebox of objects in the back of her grandmother's closet which told the story of four Polish siblings whose lives went in very different directions.

Presenter: Ian McMillan

Ian McMillan explores the skill of collaboration - joined by guests Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, who write best-selling thrillers under the pseudonym Nicci French, and by Britain's finest, if only, comedy-jazz-rap duo 'Harry and Chris' (poet Harry Baker is a Poetry Slam Champion, and Chris Read is an award winning songwriter); they talk - and sing - about the ups and downs of creative collaboration.

Nicci French's latest book is 'The House of Correction'. 'Harry and Chris' are performing with a socially distanced audience in May and June.

https://www.harryandchris.com/