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The Verb: W.S. Graham

W.S. Graham

BBC Radio 4 - The Verb, W.S. Graham

The Verb visits Cornwall to celebrate the centenary of the poet W.S. Graham.

The Verb visits Cornwall to celebrate the centenary of the poet W.S. Graham, with Rachael Boast, Penelope Shuttle, Gwenno, Gerry Bob Devereux and Adrian O'Reilly.

The Verb celebrates the centenary of the poet W.S. Graham - exploring his language and his relationship with Cornwall. Ian McMillan presents new poetry inspired by Graham from Rachael Boast and Penelope Shuttle, songs inspired by the Cornish landscape from Gwenno, specially commissioned work from Gerry Diver ('The Speech Project') and a collaboration between Bob Devereux and Adrian O'Reilly.

Writer's block, the silence of the blank page, words for the Cornish landscape, the Welsh concept of 'inspiration', 'the sea as metaphor of the sea' - hear about all of this and more in our W.S.Graham special. The Verb is in St Ives to celebrate W.S.Graham (known as Sydney), a poet fascinated by language, its possibilities and difficulties, who also wrote about 'love imagined into words' . In honour of Graham's centenary year, we hear unpublished poems (broadcast for first time), new commissions inspired by him ( written especially for The Verb), and we also present innovative performances of Graham's work. All this takes place in a remarkable venue called the 'St Ives Arts Club' in front of a poetry and art-loving audience. 

Graham grew up in Greenock in Scotland, but moved to Cornwall in the 1940s and spent the best part of his life there, in the midst of a flourishing community of artists (including Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, and Terry Frost ). 

T.S. Eliot was Graham's editor at Faber and Faber - he argued that Graham wrote some of the most important poems of the 20th century. His long poem 'The Nightfishing', with lines like 'sea as a metaphor of the sea' and ' the iron sea engraved to our faintest breaths', is one of Graham's greatest achievements, but as The Verb discovers he was also a remarkable poet of place, and of intimacy and thwarted intimacy. Above all he was preoccupied by language as his medium and subject.


Presenter: Ian McMillan
Producer: Faith Lawrence.

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