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       Graham Fawcett         

      writer, teacher, lecturer, translator and broadcaster

photo: Birgitta Johansson

e-mail: grahamkfawcett@gmail.com   telephone: 020 7405 3997

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Winter into Spring

      2012            

Monday 6th February 2012, 615pm (supper with wine) for 645pm start (ends 0830pm)

St Olave's, Hart Street, London EC3 (near Tower Hill) Click here for a printable map (new window - Adobe Acrobat is required, which can be downloaded here) A brand new series of supper lectures by Graham Fawcett on seven poets in history whose achievements on the page have made them national heroes, each evening also including the performance of a piano sonata by Beethoven Seven Olympians 2 - Chaucer Simon Watterton plays Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 27 No.1 in E flat and Sue Aldred reads Chaucer £15 (includes supper) on the door                                                LECTURE TWO                    Monday 6th February 2012                          at 615pm for 645pm            Chaucer               “It’s common sense, or so it seems to me, To make a virtue of necessity, Take what we can’t avoid with a good grace, Especially what’s due to all of us . . .”   Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by David Wright, Oxford University Press (The World’s Classics), 1985   All welcome, including those who will be coming for the first time. These lectures are written to be enjoyed one by one. You do not need to have attended the preceding lecture(s)              Chaucer, from the Ellesmere MS                   in the British Museum                      Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer was a Renaissance man long before the Renaissance. Sheer creative curiosity deployed his thoughts into a world vision. As a diplomat for the English crown, he went to Italy in 1372-3 and may well have met Petrarch and Boccaccio. He obviously feasted on the humour and invention of Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose characters took it in turns to tell stories before Chaucer's ever did.      Chaucer is a virtuoso verse-storyteller of the most disarming clarity. The Canterbury Tales may always be the main course, but should not be allowed to upstage his smörgåsbord of starters, which include four captivating early dream-poems and a Troilus and Criseyde which has been dubbed ‘the first English novel’.   ‘It’s common sense, or so it seems to me”, wrote Chaucer, ‘to make a virtue of necessity, take what we can’t avoid with a good grace, especially what’s due to all of us”. Here and elsewhere, Chaucer’s embrace encompasses everyone who reads him. In his creation of the Canterbury pilgrims each with a tale to tell, he used verse documentary to make the road to Canterbury the road of Everyman to Anywhere in the England of the 1380s and 1390s. “As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus numbered the plants”, wrote William Blake, “so Chaucer numbered the classes of men”.  William Bell Scott, Chaucer reading his Poem of 'The Flower and the Leaf' to his Friend and Patron, John of Gaunt, and the two Sisters, Catherine and Philippa, their Wives  Oil on canvas, arched top London. Royal Academy. 1842; Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy. 1843.                              Geoffrey Chaucer     Opening of his poem 'The Flower and The Leaf' WHEN that Phoebus his car of gold so high Had whirled up the starry sky aloft, And in the Bull <1> enter'd certainly; When showers sweet of rain descended soft, Causing the grounde, fele times and oft, Up for to give many a wholesome air, And every plain was y-clothed fair With newe green, and maketh smalle flow'rs To springe here and there in field and mead; So very good and wholesome be the show'rs, That they renewe what was old and dead In winter time; and out of ev'ry seed Springeth the herbe, so that ev'ry wight Of thilke season waxeth glad and light.   And I, so glad of thilke season sweet, Was happed thus upon a certain night, As I lay in my bed, sleep full unmeet Was unto me; but why that I not might Rest, I not wist; for there n'as earthly wight, As I suppose, had more hearte's ease Than I, for I n'had sickness nor disease. Wherefore I marvel greatly of myself, That I so long withoute sleepe lay; And up I rose three houres after twelf, About the springing of the [gladsome] day; And on I put my gear and mine array,  And to a pleasant grove I gan to pass, Long ere the brighte sun uprisen was . . .

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LAUNCH OF NEW OCCASIONAL SERIES Sunday 19th February 2012, 12 noon - 3pm EMPIRE (UPSTAIRS) BAR, THE LAMB, 94 LAMB'S CONDUIT STREET, HOLBORN, LONDON WC1N 3LZ         Poetry Anniversary Lunches                                           1              Walter De La Mare's 'The Listeners' (1912)* To mark the centenary of the publication in 1912 of Walter de la Mare's poem 'The Listeners', Graham Fawcett will, from about 1230pm to 130pm, talk about the background to the poem and the moment in the poet's life when he wrote it, read the poem line by line, and then open it up for discussion before the arrival of lunch (130pm-3pm). There will be a chance to buy drinks and pre-order lunch in the Upstairs Bar from 12 noon to 1225pm. Please come as near to 12 noon as you can.. £10 (excluding lunch)                                 SOLD OUT Waiting list now open - to join it, send no money but e-mail grahamkfawcett@googlemail.com   Menu choices to be announced soon   * To read the poem in advance, go to http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-listeners Photograph of Walter de la Mare, taken in June 1924, from Elfrida de la Mare (née Ingpen); Gilbert Spencer; Walter de la Mare, by Lady Ottoline Morrell

 

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Tuesday 21st February 2012 for five Tuesdays at 1045-1245

LONDON W1

1 Berkeley Street

THE COURSE

LOOK HERE UPON THIS PICTURE, THEN ON THIS

Shakespeare, Art & Music

LECTURER GRAHAM FAWCETT

 

The recently discovered portrait of Shakespeare

John W. Waterhouse: Cleopatra

 

Hamlet’s demand to his mother, that she hold his dead father’s picture in one hand, and new husband Claudio’s in the other, becomes our cue: Look Here Upon This Picture, Then On This is a weekly opportunity to compare works of art from the world’s great gallery of homage to Shakespeare’s plays. Here, in paint­ing after painting, artists have felt driven to recreate the enduring charisma of the Bard’s most famous characters and so celebrate the dramatic turning-points in the plays which changed lives then and have done so ever since for theatre-goers and readers alike. Opera and music will be featured each week too.

 

21 FEB

THE BARGE SHE SAT IN, LIKE A BURNISH’D THRONE (Antony & Cleopatra)

Is that barge moment the one every painter will go for? Some have, but the historical record of this most beautiful of women inspires other options - the marriage to Mark Antony, the pearl in the goblet, the Battle of Actium, and the little matter of the asp. Tiepolo and Alma-Tadema star.

28 FEB

O SWEAR NOT BY THE MOON, THE INCONSTANT MOON (Romeo & Juliet)

We are going to have expectations, and they are sure to include youthfulness, balconies, and death. Shakespeare’s play has a cast of two families, but should this most isolated of couples ever be painted in the company of others? Ford Madox Brown and Frederic Leighton have firm views.

06 MAR

FROM THUNDER AND LIGHTNING TO THE DEATH OF BANQUO (Macbeth 1)

In this darkest of Shakespeare’s imaginings, how do you achieve definition? Borrow the Bard’s own. So painters too take an excoriating interest in Lady Macbeth, who outstrips even the witches for visual impact. Corot is here, as are Blake, Sargent, Fuseli and many more.

13 MAR

FROM BANQUO AT THE BANQUET TO ‘HAIL, KING OF SCOTLAND’ (Macbeth 2)

Having been given a ringside seat for Banquo’s big moment at Macbeth’s benighted supper-table, we find the French artists relishing another visit to the witches. But will anyone dare show us Birnam Wood moving to Dunsinane? And what about Macbeth’s take-away head? Delacroix, Moreau, Chassériau, Reynolds and Rossetti lead the pack.

20 MAR

“THAT HANDKERCHIEF WHICH I SO LOV’D AND GAVE THEE” (Othello)

Envy, paranoia, racism and virtue make such a heady brew, painters must have asked themselves how on earth oils can convey the abstract power these words and actions have. And should Iago be invited to appear in any Othello group portrait? French artists like Delacroix, Chassériau and Colin lead the field in watching the tragedy unfold.

 

HOW TO BOOK FULL COURSE (5 lectures - 21st February - 20th March 2012) £175.00, SINGLE £40.00 THE COURSE 105 WILLIAM COURT, 6 HALL ROAD, LONDON NW8 9PB mail to:info@thecoursestudies.co.uk www.thecoursestudies.co.uk Telephone enquiries: 0207 266 7815

 

 

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Monday 5th March 2012, 615pm (supper with wine) for 645pm start (ends 0830pm) St Olave's, Hart Street, London EC3 (near Tower Hill) Click here for a printable map (new window - Adobe Acrobat is required, which can be downloaded here) A brand new series of supper lectures by Graham Fawcett on seven poets in history whose achievements on the page have made them national heroes, each evening also including the performance of a piano sonata by Beethoven Seven Olympians 3 - Byron Ovid, Chaucer, Byron, Pushkin, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Neruda and James Williams plays Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 26 in A flat major   £15 (includes supper) on the door                                                LECTURE THREE                          Monday 5th March 2012                             at 615pm for 645pm                Byron    I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs,    A palace and a prison on each hand:    I saw from out the wave her structures rise    As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand:    A thousand years their cloudy wings expand    Around me, and a dying Glory smiles    O'er the far times, when many a subject land    Looked to the wingéd Lion's marble piles, Where Venice sate in state, throned on her                                                                           hundred isles!   Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV   All welcome, including those who will be coming for the first time. These lectures are written to be enjoyed one by one. You do not need to have attended the preceding lecture(s)

 

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NEW OCCASIONAL SERIES REPEAT OF LAUNCH OWING TO DEMAND FOR TICKETS Sunday 11th March 2012, 12 noon - 3pm THE HARVEY ROOM (UPSTAIRS), ROYAL OAK, 44 TABARD STREET, LONDON. SE1 (nearest tube: Borough) 10 tickets sold, 9 available at the moment         Poetry Anniversary Lunches                                      1 (repeat)            Walter De La Mare's 'The Listeners' (1912)* To mark the centenary of the publication in 1912 of Walter de la Mare's poem 'The Listeners', Graham Fawcett will, from about 1230pm to 130pm, talk about the background to the poem and the moment in the poet's life when he wrote it, read the poem line by line, and then open it up for discussion before the arrival of lunch (130pm-3pm). There will be a chance to buy drinks and pre-order lunch from 12 noon to 1225pm. Please come as near to 12 noon as you can.. £10 (excluding lunch) To book, please send your cheque, made payable to Graham Fawcett, to him at 2 Harpur Mews, London WC1N 3PE, and write on the back of the cheque 'PAL1R - 11-03-12'. You will then be sent your ticket for the day. Menu choices to be announced soon   * To read the poem in advance, go to http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-listeners Photograph of Walter de la Mare, taken in June 1924, from Elfrida de la Mare (née Ingpen); Gilbert Spencer; Walter de la Mare, by Lady Ottoline Morrell

 

 

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NEW SERIES CONTINUES Sunday 25th March 2012, 12 noon - 3pm EMPIRE (UPSTAIRS) BAR, THE LAMB, 94 LAMB'S CONDUIT STREET, HOLBORN, LONDON WC1N 3LZ         Poetry Anniversary Lunches                              2   Derek Walcott's In A Green Night (1962) To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication in 1962 of Derek Walcott's first public collection In A Green Night, Graham Fawcett will, from about 1230pm to 130pm, talk about the background to the book and the moments in the poet's life when he wrote the poems in it, read two or three of the poems line by line, and then open the session up for discussion before the arrival of lunch (130pm-3pm). There will be a chance to buy drinks and pre-order lunch in the Upstairs Bar from 12 noon to 1225pm. Please come as near to 12 noon as you can.. £10 (excluding lunch)   To book, please send your cheque, made payable to Graham Fawcett, to him at 2 Harpur Mews, London WC1N 3PE, and write on the back of the cheque 'PAL2 - 25-03-12'. You will then be sent your ticket for the day. Note: tickets for the February lunch in this series sold out within ten days, so early booking is recommended   Menu choices to be announced soon

Derek Walcott To read several of the poems in In A Green Night, go to the websites listed beneath this box Derek Walcott's first collection's publication details are: In a green night : poems 1948-1960 Derek Walcott Cape, 1962.   In a green night Poems, 1948-1960 (Reissued) Derek Walcott London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. 1969 He can also be read in:   Collected poems 1948-1984 / Derek Walcott Derek Walcott New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.

POEMS FROM THE IN A GREEN NIGHT COLLECTION INCLUDE:

'Prelude' is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/26/featuresreviews.guardianreview27

'Orient and Immortal Wheat' at

http://decksandthecity.thepop.com/2010/01/15/orient-and-immortal-wheat-haiti 

'A Lesson For This Sunday' at

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15946

'A City’s Death By Fire'

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/derek_walcott/poems/11255

 

'A Far Cry From Africa'

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-far-cry-from-africa/

 

'Ruins of a Great House'

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=9184

 

'Parang'

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/derek-walcott/parang/

 

'The Hurricane'

http://tumblr.libraryjournal.com/post/9418818336/the-hurricane-derek-walcott

 

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Saturday 31st March 2012, 1030am-430pm

BRADWELL-ON-SEA, ESSEX

Poetry Places 8

Eliot's The Dry Salvages Day   

at Othona, East Hall Farm, East End Road, Bradwell-on-Sea

The coast near Othona, Bradwell-on-Sea

  

When T S Eliot was a boy, he would go with his family to the Massachusetts coast at Cape Ann, where his father had built a house for their summer holidays. The times he spent by the sea there inspired in Eliot a desire to write a book of essays about his memories of the place, memories which would later be embodied in a poem which takes as its title a ledge of rocks known as The Dry Salvages, a local landmark which could, and still can, be seen when the mist rises, a few hundred yards out to sea. “The sea”, Eliot would write in the poem, “is the land’s edge also”.

 

But why did thoughts and images of this Massachusetts location return to him fifty years later in wartime London during an intense period of writing in the last weeks of 1940? And how does the place fit into Eliot’s scheme of things for the third of his four Quartets, the other three of which are all set in England? ‘The Dry Salvages’ is the water quartet, its essence maritime. In Poetry Places 8 & 11, Eliot’s The Dry Salvages Day, Graham Fawcett transposes the poem to two places in coastal England, the estuarial Bradwell-on-Sea and the Jurassic coast near Burton Bradstock.

The cost of the day will be £40 for the teaching sessions (or £32.50* concs. for 18 years & under, senior citizens, full-time students, unwaged - ES40 - and disabled) and a further £17.50 for coffee, lunch, and afternoon tea at Othona. Booking form below.

For rail-travellers, Othona can be reached by rail to Southminster, from where the journey to Bradwell would be made by taxi (the cost to be shared between passengers if possible) or mini-bus in the event of there being sufficient demand. It may also be possible to arrange lifts from London and elsewhere given enough advance notice. Please say on your booking form if you are interested in any of these options. Make your cheque, for £57.50 or £50.00 concessionary rate, payable to Graham Fawcett and send it with the completed booking form to him at 2 Harpur Mews, London WC1N 3PE. You will then be sent your ticket(s) for the day.

Enquiries to: Graham Fawcett on grahamkfawcett@googlemail.com or 0207 405 3997.

Details of Graham Fawcett’s work and news on this event are available at www.grahamfawcett.co.uk.

St Peter's Chapel (7th cent.) Bradwell-on-Sea

 

COMMENT ON ONE OF GRAHAM FAWCETT’S ELIOT DAYS                                                                                                                                                                                          It was a great session – so lively and enlightening, and you were so informative. I hadn’t read Eliot in any detail for years and years, and it made me anxious to go back and read more.  You gave us all so much to think about and mull over and go off and pursue further. What I realised when re-reading the Quartets was just how much of Eliot has become part of my mental landscape – a bit like the Bible and Shakespeare..  I kept finding myself muttering, “Oh, of course, that’s where that quotation comes from!”  Joan McGavin

 

 

------------------------------------------PLEASE SELECT FROM HERE, CUT AND PASTE, COMPLETE, PRINT AND POST-------------------------------------------

    PP8 - Eliot’s The Dry Salvages Day at Bradwell-on-Sea, Essex                           

□ PLEASE TICK BOX:  I’d like to enrol on Poetry Places 8 – Eliot’s The Dry Salvages Day - to be held in Bradwell-on-Sea on Saturday 31st March 2012. I’ll be coming to Bradwell-on-Sea

• by car
• by train from ________________________ (delete whichever does not apply).

I would be interested in:

• sharing a taxi from and to Southminster
• booking a place in a mini-bus from and to Southminster
• offering a lift to 1 / 2 / 3 participants from and to ____________________ (please circle the relevant figure)
• being put in touch with a participant who can offer me a lift from and to ___________________________

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I enclose a cheque for £57.50* (or £50* conc. rate for 18 years & under, senior citizens, full-time students, unwaged - ES40 - and disabled), to include morning coffee, lunch & afternoon tea. I understand this does not include transport to and from Bradwell-on-Sea.

Please make your cheque payable to Graham Fawcett and send it with the completed booking form to him at 2 Harpur Mews, London WC1N 3PE. You will then be sent your ticket(s) for the day.

NAME(S), POSTAL AND E-MAIL ADDRESSES/TELEPHONE NUMBERS:

 

 

 

 

□ PLEASE TICK BOX: Please send me details of other events planned for 2012.

 

TO ALERT FRIENDS TO THIS AND/OR OTHER EVENTS:

□ PLEASE TICK BOX: Please send details of this event/all events to (ADD NAME(S) AND E-ADDRESSES HERE)

 

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Monday 2nd April 2012, 615pm (supper with wine) for 645pm start (ends 0830pm)

St Olave's, Hart Street, London EC3 (near Tower Hill)

 

A brand new series of supper lectures by Graham Fawcett on seven poets in history whose achievements on the page have made them national heroes, each evening also including the performance of a piano sonata by Beethoven

Seven Olympians 4 - Pushkin

 

Simon Watterton plays Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op. 90 in E minor

and Natalia Aldred reads Pushkin

£15 (includes supper) on the door

LECTURE FOUR Monday 2nd April 2012 at 615pm for 645pm Pushkin      Tatyana's letter, treasured ever      as sacred, lies before me still.      I read with secret pain, and never      can read enough to get my fill.      Who taught her an address so tender,      such careless language of surrender?      Who taught her all this mad, slapdash,      heartfelt, imploring, touching trash      fraught with enticement and disaster?   Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, tr C Johnston, Penguin, 1977

All welcome, including those who will be coming for the first time.

These lectures are written to be enjoyed one by one.

You do not need to have attended the preceding lecture(s)

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Saturday 21st April 2012 EAST GRINSTEAD TO COLEMAN’S HATCH, SUSSEX Open Country 3 Yeats and Pound at Stone Cottage In the Autumn of 1913, the 48 year old W B Yeats and the young Ezra Pound, just 28, became the joint tenants of a cottage deep in the Sussex countryside..   They spent the next three winters and springs there, writing, reading (including aloud to each other), entertaining, walking in the woods, and witnessing the army on exercise in preparation for the Great War. Pound acted as Yeats’ secretary, one of his first jobs being to help Yeats with the writing of his Autobiographies.   This castaway life on the edge of what Pound called the 'waste moor' of Ashdown Forest egged Yeats on to pursue with the passion of a Prospero his own ‘secret studies’ of magic and spiritualism, which were obviously contagious as Pound discovered a whetted appetite for esoteric literature. Pound had just received a parcel of papers from the great Orientalist Ernest Fenellosa from his widow, and now set to work translating Noh plays from the Japanese, at the same time pressing on with his Cantos, in one of which, he writes thirty years later while incarcerated in Pisa,   “I recalled the noise in the chimney As it were, the wind in the chimney but was in reality Uncle William downstairs composing at Stone Cottage in Sussex by the waste moor (or whatever) and the holly bush… well those days are gone forever.” (Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXIII)   Bringing those days back is the aim of Open Country 3 – Yeats and Pound at Stone Cottage, which sets out from East Grinstead station, discovers the delightfully reclaimed and landscaped railway track of the Forest Way, heads across country along the Vanguard Way, allows for a proper lunch stop at the excellent pub in Coleman’s Hatch, and culminates in a specially arranged visit to Stone Cottage itself, whose present owner has kindly offered to show us round the house and garden and so make possible not only the hunt for the holly bush but a unique chance to hear some of what Yeats and Pound both wrote at Stone Cottage under that very roof.   Open Country 3 begins at East Grinstead Rail Station at 9am and ends at 430pm. The walk to Coleman’s Hatch, over largely gentle terrain and along specially designated paths, is about 11 miles. The return journey will be by bus.   To enrol on Open Country 3, click here for booking form Open Country is a brand new series of poetry events combining fresh air, an invigorating walk and a good lunch with an exploration of the life, work and home ground of poets in the English countryside. Open Country 3 follows successful editions of the series retracing Edward Thomas’s footsteps at Steep near Petersfield and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight.

 

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Sunday 22nd April 2012, 3pm

Yeovil and Sherborne Literary Festival Venue to be announced- watch this space Graham Fawcett brings to this year’s festival the second of the Seven Olympians lectures he has been giving to packed audiences in London, in the lead-up to the 2012 Olympic Games, on poets in history whose achievements on the page have made them national heroes Seven Olympians 2 - Chaucer booking details coming soon                                                 “It’s common sense, or so it seems to me, To make a virtue of necessity, Take what we can’t avoid with a good grace, Especially what’s due to all of us . . .”   Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, translated by David Wright, Oxford University Press (The World’s Classics), 1985              Chaucer, from the Ellesmere MS                   in the British Museum                      Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer was a Renaissance man long before the Renaissance. Sheer creative curiosity deployed his thoughts into a world vision. As a diplomat for the English crown, he went to Italy in 1372-3 and may well have met Petrarch and Boccaccio. He obviously feasted on the humour and invention of Boccaccio’s Decameron, whose characters took it in turns to tell stories before Chaucer's ever did.      Chaucer is a virtuoso verse-storyteller of the most disarming clarity. The Canterbury Tales may always be the main course, but should not be allowed to upstage his smörgåsbord of starters, which include four captivating early dream-poems and a Troilus and Criseyde which has been dubbed ‘the first English novel’.   ‘It’s common sense, or so it seems to me”, wrote Chaucer, ‘to make a virtue of necessity, take what we can’t avoid with a good grace, especially what’s due to all of us”. Here and elsewhere, Chaucer’s embrace encompasses everyone who reads him. In his creation of the Canterbury pilgrims each with a tale to tell, he used verse documentary to make the road to Canterbury the road of Everyman to Anywhere in the England of the 1380s and 1390s. “As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus numbered the plants”, wrote William Blake, “so Chaucer numbered the classes of men”.  William Bell Scott, Chaucer reading his Poem of 'The Flower and the Leaf' to his Friend and Patron, John of Gaunt, and the two Sisters, Catherine and Philippa, their Wives  Oil on canvas, arched top London. Royal Academy. 1842; Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy. 1843.                              Geoffrey Chaucer     Opening of his poem 'The Flower and The Leaf' WHEN that Phoebus his car of gold so high Had whirled up the starry sky aloft, And in the Bull <1> enter'd certainly; When showers sweet of rain descended soft, Causing the grounde, fele times and oft, Up for to give many a wholesome air, And every plain was y-clothed fair With newe green, and maketh smalle flow'rs To springe here and there in field and mead; So very good and wholesome be the show'rs, That they renewe what was old and dead In winter time; and out of ev'ry seed Springeth the herbe, so that ev'ry wight Of thilke season waxeth glad and light.   And I, so glad of thilke season sweet, Was happed thus upon a certain night, As I lay in my bed, sleep full unmeet Was unto me; but why that I not might Rest, I not wist; for there n'as earthly wight, As I suppose, had more hearte's ease Than I, for I n'had sickness nor disease. Wherefore I marvel greatly of myself, That I so long withoute sleepe lay; And up I rose three houres after twelf, About the springing of the [gladsome] day; And on I put my gear and mine array,  And to a pleasant grove I gan to pass, Long ere the brighte sun uprisen was . . .

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Saturday 12th May 2012, 1030am-430pm

BURTON BRADSTOCK, DORSET

Poetry Places 11

Eliot's The Dry Salvages Day

        

Othona, Coast Road, Burton Bradstock, Dorset

When T S Eliot was a boy, he would go with his family to the Massachusetts coast at Cape Ann, where his father had built a house for their summer holidays. The times he spent by the sea there inspired in Eliot a desire to write a book of essays about his memories of the place, memories which would later be embodied in a poem which takes as its title a ledge of rocks known as The Dry Salvages, a local landmark which could, and still can, be seen when the mist rises, a few hundred yards out to sea. “The sea”, Eliot would write in the poem, “is the land’s edge also”.   But why did thoughts and images of this Massachusetts location return to him fifty years later in wartime London during an intense period of writing in the last weeks of 1940? And how does the place fit into Eliot’s scheme of things for the third of his four Quartets, the other three of which are all set in England? ‘The Dry Salvages’ is the water quartet, its essence maritime. In Poetry Places 8 & 11, Eliot’s The Dry Salvages Day, Graham Fawcett transposes the poem to two places in coastal England, the estuarial Bradwell-on-Sea and the Jurassic coast near Burton Bradstock.

  

The coast overlooked by Othona near Burton Bradstock

The cost of the day will be £40 for the teaching sessions (or £32.50* concs. for 18 years & under, senior citizens, full-time students, unwaged - ES40 - and disabled) and a further £20.00 for coffee, lunch, and afternoon tea at Othona.

For rail-travellers, Othona can be reached by rail to Weymouth and X53 bus to the Othona Gates between Swyre and Burton Bradstock. It may also be possible to arrange lifts from various places given enough advance notice. Graham is further currently exploring with Othona the possibility of an evening meal, and bed and breakfast overnight on Friday 11th May, Please say on your booking form if you are interested in any of these options. Make your cheque, for £60.00 or £52.50 concessionary rate, payable to Graham Fawcett and send it with the completed booking form to him at 2 Harpur Mews, London WC1N 3PE. You will then be sent your ticket(s) for the day.

 

You may also like to access the Othona West Dorset website travel and location page at http://www.othona-bb.org.uk/travel-and-location/ .

Enquiries to: Graham Fawcett on grahamkfawcett@googlemail.com or 0207 405 3997.Details of Graham Fawcett’s work and news on this event are available at www.grahamfawcett.co.uk.

 

COMMENT ON ONE OF GRAHAM FAWCETT’S ELIOT DAYS                                                                                                                                                                                          What a good day. I drove away from it feeling a bit like when you've seen a totally absorbing film and you can’t quite reconnect with the real world - or you want very much to connect what you've just experienced to the real world. Thanks so much for bringing that amazing work to such life - and death (!)  - for us all.                                                                       Greta Stoddart

 

 

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PP11- Eliot’s The Dry Salvages Day at Burton Bradstock, Dorset                           

□ PLEASE TICK BOX:  I’d like to enrol on Poetry Places 11– Eliot’s The Dry Salvages Day - to be held at Othona, Burton Bradstock on Saturday 12th May 2012. I’ll be coming to Othona, Burton Bradstock

• by car
• by train and bus from ________________________ (delete whichever does not apply).

I would be interested in

• booking a place in a mini-bus from and to Weymouth
• being put in touch with a participant who can offer me a lift from and to ___________________________

 

 I enclose a cheque for £60.00* (or £52.50* conc. rate for 18 years & under, senior citizens, full-time students, unwaged - ES40 - and disabled), to include morning coffee, lunch & afternoon tea. I understand this does not include transport to and from Othona Burton Bradstock.

Please make your cheque payable to Graham Fawcett and send it with the completed booking form to him at 2 Harpur Mews, London WC1N 3PE. You will then be sent your ticket(s) for the day.

NAME(S), POSTAL AND E-MAIL ADDRESSES/TELEPHONE NUMBERS:

 

 

 

 

 

///////□ PLEASE TICK BOX: Please send me details of other events planned for 2012.

 

TO ALERT FRIENDS TO THIS AND/OR OTHER EVENTS:

□ PLEASE TICK BOX: Please send details of this and other events planned for 2012 to:

 

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Monday 14th May 2012, 615pm (supper with wine) for 645pm start (ends 0830pm)

St Olave's, Hart Street, London EC3 (near Tower Hill)

Click here for a printable map (new window - Adobe Acrobat is required, which can be downloaded here)

A brand new series of supper lectures by Graham Fawcett on seven poets in history whose achievements on the page have made them national heroes, each evening also including the performance of a piano sonata by Beethoven

Seven Olympians 5 - Baudelaire

Ovid, Chaucer, Byron, Pushkin, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Neruda

and Yuki Negishi plays Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor - Op. 27 no 2 (Moonlight)

 

£15 (includes supper) on the door                  

 

LECTURE FIVE                          Monday 14th May 2012                             at 615pm for 645pm           Baudelaire Walking with Baudelaire in what he called the swarming city of Paris, it is tempting to think of Wilde's inspirational assurance that 'we're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars" and understand how for Baudelaire the lure of both acted on him as a tidal pull ebbing and flowing simultaneously. Like his English contemporary Dickens, Baudelaire read the city as a state of mind too, as place personified into mind and, hot on the heels of that, like a reverse-angle shot in film - mind de-personified into place. It is rather gripping to set alongside him the no less disquieted Rilke's habit of going for succour to Baudelaire's prose-poems about Paris as bed-time confort reading, knowing Baudelaire's gloriously unselfcensored voice would chime with his own revulsion for the place, and then realizing that Baudelaire's is a personal; triumph of daring to meet that Paris as it were at the cross-roads at midnight and offering the swarming city his soul. Because Baudelaire is a truth-teller, a realist on his own terms, dreams, far from cocooning him, are the breeding-ground of an unremitting stream of images of recognisable life from gracefully winged to awesomely graphic. The zest with which he finds his own life through what he feels and says is almost enviably volatile, free as the wind. "I don't know how to finish Baudelaire's portrait", said Gustave Courbet. "His face changes every day".                   Charles Baudelaire by Gustave Courbet (1848)

Charles Baudelaire by Emile Deroy                Charles Baudelaire c.1863

 

All welcome, including those who will be coming for the first time.

These lectures are written to be enjoyed one by one.

You do not need to have attended the preceding lecture(s)

 

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“A big thank-you to The Children’s Bookshow from our sixth form who were very positive about Graham's workshop yesterday. He was so energetic and engaged their attention brilliantly. Now we have a queue to read Iqbal! Thank you again for giving us this opportunity: it was a real treat."                                                                       (St Mary’s School, Ilkley)

 

"Your walks really have been one of the most pleasurable aspects of living here!" (Sarah Glazer Khedouri)

               

 

“Your” London has been most enjoyable and enlightening for “an American in Bloomsbury”. (Sarah Greene)

 

"The three long series you have done - Heaney to Homer and Back, World Poets and More World Poets - have given me an extensive library and range of cultural references" - Ted Booth

 

 

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