Dear Poetry Friends
LIVE
Sunday September 8th, 2024 – 11am to 1pm
POETS AND WRITERS OF HAMPSTEAD WALK
A walk starting from outside Keats House and following paths through semi-rural Hampstead past houses and settings which provide marvellous opportunities to eavesdrop on the working lives of poets and writers apart and together.
Keats dines with Shelley at Leigh Hunt’s house, bumps into Coleridge on the Heath and ends up walking with him at his ‘alderman-after-dinner’ pace for nearly two miles.
Expelled from Cornwall for being overheard speaking German during World War One, Lawrence and his wife Frieda came to London, lived in a house on our route while his publisher was being pursued through the courts for obscenity in The Rainbow, and saw a Zeppelin at night picked out by searchlights.
Heath House’s threshold is crossed by Crabbe, Cowper, Campbell and Wordsworth.
John Constable, Hampstead Heath (1820)
Constable’s house is here, and he is buried in the churchyard of St John’s, Hampstead, where young Gerard Manley Hopkins used to worship.
Joanna Baillie is visited at her house by Wordsworth, Byron and Keats, and praised by Scott as ‘the best dramatic writer since the days of Shakespeare and Massinger’.
We pass doors where H G Wells moved in after writing just about everything and elsewhere Rabindranath Tagore’s lodgings found for him by Sir William Rothenstein the year before he won the Nobel Prize in 1913, and we see where Robert Louis Stevenson came when he was 23 and had written almost nothing, and tiptoe up the little close where composer Sir William Walton lived.
Full details, including how to book now (11 places left): https://www.grahamfawcett.co.uk/event/poetsandwritersofhampsteadwalk-2/
ONLINE
Monday 16 September to Monday 18 November 2024
OVID’S METAMORPHOSES
A new 10-week course, Mondays 1530-1700 (postponed from early 2024)
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), The Fall of Phaethon (1638), Prado, Madrid Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 2, lines 31 to 328
Ovid’s masterpiece, a poem in fifteen books, the Metamorphoses, a great poetic symphony of transformations, has influenced art and literature across two thousand years, as much as, and perhaps even more than, any other poem.
Like moths to a candle-flame, our English poets have turned to Ovid: Chaucer, Spenser, Arthur Golding, Shakespeare, Gower, Dryden, Pope, Shelley, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney have translated or done versions of the Metamorphoses. And if Ovid’s Metamorphoses had never existed, there would be plenty of empty walls in the art galleries of the world.
Mondays 16, 23 and 30 September
Mondays 7, 14, 21 and 28 October
Mondays 4, 11 and 18 November
There may be three vacancies on this course. I will know for certain on, or before, August 8th. To join the waiting-list, write to me at grahamkfawcett@gmail.com.
Coming in November – save the dates !
LIVE
Saturday 23 November 2024, 7pm
St Mary’s Church, 2 Elsworthy Road, London NW3 3DU
REFLECTING DEEPLY IN AN AGE OF ANXIETY
a concert of piano music and poetry
with Robin Rubenstein and Graham Fawcett
Edward Hopper, Automat (1927)
Poets: Anna Akhmatova, Guillaume Apollinaire, Matthew Arnold, W H Auden, Dante Alighieri, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Donald Hall, Louis MacNeice, Aleksandr Pushkin, Adrienne Rich, W B Yeats
Composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mussorgsky, Bartok, Antheil and Prokofiev, with Szymanowski and Shostakovich in the wings.
Ticket and booking details to be announced soon
LIVE
Wednesday 27th November 2024, 630pm, Brendon Books, Taunton, Somerset – at the Taunton Literary Festival 2024
DANTE AND ME
tells the story of a life-changing coincidence of love-lives in Florence between 1273 and 1975 and how it led to Graham’s discovery of the poet of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri.
After three years spent living in Tuscany and working in Florence without having read a line of Dante, Graham moved to the French Catalan town of Cérét in the Eastern Pyrenees.
One afternoon at the end of Winter, he writes, “an American couple asked us to tea just out of town. There was a thunderstorm on. We went anyway. Later, as we left, the elderly husband handed me a book. “Read that”, he said. It was a paperback edition of Dante’s Inferno translated into English verse by John Ciardi.
I had not read a line of Dante before. It was like the storm breaking all over again. That book led to a life in which Dante has been presidential. I wish I could remember my benefactor’s name. But his wife was Grace, and the publisher Mentor. It set me reading and translating Dante’s Inferno. My prose version was completed in 1978. It was the beginning of my experience of Dante. He has never gone away”.
Dante Alighieri is one of the chapters Graham has recently completed for a book-in-progress about his poetry life, Being There.
Booking details to be announced soon.
Above image: Henry Holiday (1839-1927), Dante and Beatrice. 1883
If you are writing . . .
Graham continues to read, comment on, and give tutorials for typescripts of poetry and prose, including collections. Contact him if you would be interested in this for yourself or anyone else at grahamkfawcett@gmail.com .
“How grateful I am for your unfailing gift of wise counsel – whether it’s about a philosophy or the placing of a comma, you’ve been on to it. And never daunting, always friendly”. Patrick Coldstream (2021)
“Your work on my book taught me so much”. Celia Purcell (2022)
“A masterclass in line-breaks and word order”. Owen Gallagher (2022)
Recordings of fourteen single-poet lectures and two poetry concerts available in the online series can all be booked via https://grahamfawcett.co.uk/events. Click on link here and then on the image.
All best wishes
Graham