Graham Fawcett
writer, teacher, translator and broadcaster
e-mail: grahamkfawcett@gmail.com
telephone: 020 7405 3997
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IS DISTANCE EVER AN ISSUE FOR YOU? IF SO, READ ON. |
One of the most frequent comments on my work comes from people who would have liked to attend a course or event but live too far from London.
As a direct result of this, I have in recent years increasingly been holding - well beyond London - a range of evening, Saturday or weekend events, all of which have been requested by poets and readers living locally. These events have included:
- the very well-supported Dante's Dramatic Journey series of three Saturdays in Dorchester (which I am currently looking into the possibility of repeating in Exeter), or
- the equally popular and continuing one-day on-location events devoted to Eliot's 'Burnt Norton','East Coker' and 'Little Gidding' in Gloucestershire, Somerset and Cambridgeshire, or
- writing days in Bournemouth, Devon or Surrey - or
- the repeat of one of the Pepys Parallel Lives London lectures in Buckinghamshire.
and, more often than not, those who attend live either very locally or within 30 miles of the venue.
This very combination of local request and active local/regional support encourages me to use the present web-page as a notice-board on which to offer lectures, seminars or events to groups or individuals who would like them in their part of England. What follows is a selection of existing events which could be repeated in your area on request, although it may well be just as possible to offer other activities being advertised on earlier pages in my web-site, e.g. in [events calendar], [lectures] or [poetry school].
I would also welcome requests for new events in an existing series like the growing Poetry Places or the new Open Country series.
1. One-day events These have usually been held on a Saturday and can be made available either to groups or to individuals who would like to create a group for the event in their locality
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2. Morning, afternoon or evening events
These can last anything from two to three hours with a short break, and would take the form of ‘interruptable’ lectures which lead into a close reading and discussion of a number of poems by the chosen poet. Generous handouts are provided and no advance knowledge or preparation is required.
You may like to request one or two sessions in a day.
Poets may be selected from the following course (the syllabus is set out anti-clockwise starting with Seamus Heaney):
Heaney to Homer and Back Reading Poets Present and Past as a Companion to Writing
Heaney to Homer and Back is a course for those who read and/or write poetry. Each session aims to give an overall sense of the work of one of thirty poets, and encourages you to read further and think in ways which may help with your own work.
1939 Seamus Heaney 1898 Federico Garcia Lorca 1930 Derek Walcott 1875 Rainer Maria Rilke 1904 Pablo Neruda 1863 Constantin Cavafy 1892 Hugh MacDiarmid 1830 Emily Dickinson 1889 Anna Akhmatova 1821 Charles Baudelaire 1885 Ezra Pound 1799 Aleksandr Pushkin 1879 Wallace Stevens 1798 Giacomo Leopardi 1865 W B Yeats 1608 John Milton 1819 Walt Whitman 1564 William Shakespeare c.1524 Luis de Camoes 1265 Dante Alighieri c.1340 Geoffrey Chaucer c.1200 the Nibelungenlied c.1080 La Chanson de Roland 1020BC - 762AD Early Chinese c.800 Beowulf Lyric Poetry 70 BC Vergil 43BC Ovid c.500BC onwards The Kalevala 65BC Horace c.800BC Homer
Poems will be read in their original English or in English translation. In each case, we will look at individual poems and the poets' own thoughts both about them and about poetry in general. What we harvest from each session will vary: it may be a different kind of feeling about tackling a particular subject or length of line, or perhaps a cadence that stays in the mind like a tune, or a more general sense of companionship.
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Or from the following two courses:
World Poets and More World Poets These reading courses look at the work of poets who have made their mark upon their own countries or lifetimes and who offer a fresh and enduring vitality of thought and feeling to readers and poets alike, with writing represented from a number of very different Europes as well as Asia, South America and Africa from antiquity to now
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More World Poets
Octavio Paz Vénus Khoury-Ghata Ivan Lalíc The Battle of Maldon poet Kalidasa Mahmoud Darwish Wislawa Szymborska Li Po Osip Mandelstam Nina Cassian Catullus Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Fernando Pessoa African poets writing in Portuguese Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Octavio Paz Vénus Khoury-Ghata Wislawa Symborska Mahmoud Darwish Goethe Nina Cassian |
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THE BOOK YOU ALWAYS MEANT TO READ
Dante meets Beatrice, by Henry Holiday Lectures available: INTRODUCTORY LECTURE 1. Before Reading Dante THE INFERNO LECTURES 2. The Journey Begins 3. The Deepening Route 4. Navigating The Precipice 5. Imaginable Peril 6. How To Get Out Of Hell THE PURGATORIO LECTURES 7. Above the Southern Ocean 8. Altitudes of Pride and Envy 9. What Love Is and What It Isn't 10.Through The Wall Of Fire 11. Being With Beatrice OVERVIEW OF INFERNO AND PURGATORIO AND AN INTRODUCTION TO PARADISO 12. Hell, Purgatory and the Flight Into Paradise THE PARADISO LECTURES 13. Heavens of Venus, Mercury, the Sun and Mars 14. The Eagle and The Ladder 15. Vision's Pinnacle Single or short sequences of lectures also available Taking the Dante lecture series on tour - dates in 2012 available on request from: grahamkfawcett@googlemail.com
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Dante Alighieri by Joos Van Gent Gustav Dore, Dante in The Dark Wood (Inferno, canto 1, line 2)
Giotto di Bondone, Dante Alighieri Bargello Chapel, Florence |
PARALLEL LIVES AND PEPYS 350 LECTURE TOUR 2012
Lectures available: Pepys and 1660 - The Diary Begins, But Why ? Pepys and two Januaries - 1660 and 2010 Pepys and two Februaries - 1660 and 2010 Pepys and two Marches - 1660 and 2010 Pepys and Milton Pepys and John Evelyn Pepys and Andrew Marvell Pepys and John Bunyan Pepys and 1667 Pepys and John Dryden Pepys and the Royal Society Pepys and Aphra Behn Pepys and Daniel Defoe Taking the Parallel Lives and Pepys 350 lectures on tour - dates in 2010 available on request from: grahamkfawcett@googlemail.com
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My usual fee is £300 for a morning, afternoon, or evening session, £400 for a consecutive morning and afternoon or afternoon and evening, £500 for a whole day from morning to evening inclusive or a 24-hour period away from home, and negotiable for a series of 2 or more lectures - plus travel expenses, subsistence, and overnight accommodation where necessary. |
You may also like to look at the Lectures page - click here [lectures]