What's it like being awake at 4am? How do we feel about toads? Where does the word chortle come from, and when is an anthem truly personal?

Ian McMillan gets to the heart of these questions through brand new poetry commissions, exploring the poems and poets we love, and through celebrating language's delights and quirks - all in the company of his guests: the poets Jackie Kay and Helen Mort, the actor Paterson Joseph, and the singer, songwriter and song 'treasurer' Sam Lee.

Guests:

Jackie Kay is the former Scottish Makar - her new poetry collection is May Day. Jackie discusses a poem by the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig called 'Toad', and reads her own poem 'Cairn'.

Sam Lee's new album is Songdreaming. Sam is an arranger, folksong interpreter, passionate conservationist, song collector and creator of live events. He performs 'Banna's Lonely Shore', a song that he heard the Irish Traveller Nan Connors perform, and which he has never heard anywhere else.

Paterson Joseph is an award-winning writer and actor, known for his powerful Shakespearian performances as well as his comic roles in television series like 'Green Wing' and 'Peep Show'. Paterson performs Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky'. His novel is called 'The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho'.

The Verb, which for the past 22 years has been bringing linguistic delights to the Radio 3 audience, will be leaving to make its new home on Radio 4.

But in a mood of celebration Ian McMillan and his guests put the number 3 in the spotlight as they explore the magic and the power of three in poetry, storytelling and writing; with poet and memoirist Don Paterson to guide us around those poetic forms based on the number three, by long-time Verb favourite Ira Lightman with a brand new commission, storyteller and author Daniel Morden and The Bookshop Band who'll be performing songs inspired by books and by The Verb.

Presenter: Ian McMillan

Producer: Cecile Wright

Ian McMillan is leaning into unease this week as he discusses writing and Claustrophobia. His guests are Holly Pester, whose new novel 'The Lodgers' examines the psychological disturbances of precarious housing situations; we meet a woman renting a flat that is more like a sandwich packet than a house, and another who must make her own life extremely small as she lodges with a family.

Catherine Coldsteam’s new memoir is ‘Cloistered’, a book about the twelve years she spent in a Carmelite monastery where she lived the life of a silent contemplative nun.

Hannah Sullivan won the T.S. Eliot award for her collection ‘Three Poems’. Her latest book ‘Was it For This’ considers a life shrunk small by new motherhood.

The last in our series of Verb Dramas is Ghost In The Machine by Karen Featherstone

Presenter: Ian McMillan

This week The Verb offers you another chance to hear a special extended interview with Zadie Smith. Her audacious first book 'White Teeth', written when she was just 24, was one of the most talked about debut novels of all time. Most of Smith's novels take place in north west London, where she grew up, and which she has described as the location of her imagination, and her heart. In her latest novel 'The Fraud', also set in the area, Smith moves into historical fiction with a story inspired by an extraordinary real life court case.

Presenter: Ian McMillan

First Broadcast 13 Oct 2023

On International Women's Day Ian McMillan is joined by poets Joelle Taylor, Rommi Smith, Kim Moore and Shirley May to explore how women poets are using poetry and writing to explore and challenge sexism and to empower women through words. There's also music from soul singer, Sarah-Jane Morris, and musician, Tony Remy, from their new album 'Sisterhood'.

Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’ practise notebooks, pianist Stephen Hough’s account of tackling Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, the voice of Fairport Convention’s Sandy Denny in the words of Scottish poet Don Paterson, and E. M. Forster’s evocation of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in Howard’s End: just some of the texts we’ll hear on tonight’s celebration of writing about music.

Ian’s joined by four Radio 3 presenters to discuss the challenges of all sorts of music writing, from concert reviews to programme notes, memoirs, poetry, fiction, and scripts for radio. His guests are Essential Classics Georgia Mann who pored over Oasis reviews in the N.M.E. in her teens, Hannah French from The Early Music Show who once read a biography of Pablo Casals in a day, Composer of the Week’s Kate Molleson who started out writing concert reviews at University in Montreal, and Corey Mwamba who presents Freeness and immersed himself in jazz books at Southampton library whilst doing his A-Levels.

Producer: Ruth Thomson

This week it’s the ‘cabaret of cuteness’ as this week Ian McMillan and his guests examine all things small, fluffy, wide eyed and sleepy in The Cute Verb. Ian is joined by poet Isabel Galleymore who reads from her new collection Baby Schema which asks what we ask cuteness to do for us and follows Mickey Mouse’s journey towards cuteness across the past one hundred years. Tom Morton Smith wrote the smash-hit RSC adaptation of My Neighbour Totoro, here he helps us consider being cute as well as being big, noisy, smelly, and a little bit scary. Karen McCarthy Woolf’s new experimental verse novel is ‘Top Doll’, a story told by a chorus of cute and not so cute dolls. And finally Kate Fox imagines a meet-cute between a cute creature and a not so cute one – can cute be an eco-strategy?

Presenter: Ian McMillan

The World in Words. The Verb, presented by Ian McMillan, revisits the Contains Strong Language which was held in Leeds in September of last year. It was a gathering of poets from all over the world and featured Felene Cayetano from Belize, Andre Bagoo from Trinidad and Tobago, Ngwatilo Mawiyoo from Kenya, Lebo Mashile from South Africa, Chris Tse, the Poet Laurete of New Zealand, Ramya Jirasinghe from Sri Lanka and Titilope Sonuga.

This edition of the verb is a celebration of the physical - everything from mountain climbing, human desire, a mother's touch or the act of writing. The poet Helen Mort writes in her head, while running, climbing and she even wrote one whilst in labour. She tells Ian about her new collection The Illustrated Woman - inspired by what she calls a "pain epiphany" while being tattooed - and how her poems "spookily" prefigure her life.

The Norfolk born writer Jon Ransom wrote The Whale Tattoo, which won the Polari first book award, on his phone on the bus. His new novel The Gallopers opens in the aftermath of the 1953 North Sea flood where 19-year-old Eli yearns for Jimmy Smart, the handsome older fairground worker his aunt has taken in.

And award-winning poet Victoria Kennefick has written on the back of her child's drawings and on shop receipts when an idea urgently strikes. She tells Ian McMillan about her collection Egg/Shell, inspired by a lockdown encounter with a swan whose eggs wouldn't hatch.

Produced in Salford by Olive Clancy.

The Verb goes back to the brilliant Contains Strong Language Festival held in September last year in Leeds to consider the poetics of rap, rhyme and flows with a celebration of 50 years of hip hop. Rapper and playwright, and friend of The Verb, Testament led a panel discussion on one of the 20th and 21st century’s most powerful and influential literary movement with guests UK rapper Jehst, writer and spoken word performer Michelle Scally Clarke, and hip hop luminary Paul 'Oddball' Edmeade.