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Sophie Woolley/Alex Horne/Sam Lee and Thomas McCarthy

Ian McMillan's spoken word cabaret features a new commission from writer and performer Sophie Woolley, and an audacious poetic experiment from the show's language spy Alex Horne.

Ian McMillan presents the spoken word cabaret.

Writer and performer Sophie Woolley has over the years amazed and delighted with her ability to play all the characters in stories such as When to Run and Fight Face. She presents a new short story, Poodle Mood, written specially for the programme.

Verb language spy Alex Horne launches an audacious poetic experiment:

Vocabularyclept poetry is the art of making one poem from the words of another: One person takes a poem, writes down all its words in alphabetical order and sends this list to another person. This second person then tries to write their own poem with those words. It is an intriguing word-game and we invite listeners to send us your Vocabularyclept poems.

The rules are simple:

Budding Vocabularyclept poets must make their poem from the following list of words only. All the words in the list must be used. The poem can take any form or style you choose.

The aim of the experiment is to see if poems written using exactly the same words have similarities. Will writers choose the same rhymes? And, more importantly, will anyone be able to accomplish the task?

The words you must use are:

A
A
Bloke
Called
Crimes
Dylan
Glorious
Have
He'd
He'd
His
If
Jazz
Like
Made
Mcmillan
Mixed
Of
Once
Plotted
Quite
Rhymes
Skill
The
There
Verse
Villain
Was
Was
With
With
Whose

Send us your poems! You can email them to theverb@bbc.co.uk or write in to The Verb, Room 7045, Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London, W1A 1AA.

You can also post them on The Verb or Alex Horne's Twitter pages. Details are below.

Singer and folk song collector Sam Lee has travelled the length and breadth of the British Isles to record the traditional songs of traveller and Romany communities and tells the programme about his work. He is joined by Thomas McCarthy, a singer and songwriter of the Irish traveller tradition.

45 minutes

Broadcast

  • Fri 25 Sep 2009 21:15

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