Poetry Is Communication

Venue: Online – £10/$12 for this online talk

The link giving you access to this lecture will be sent out after your booking has been received.

Poetry Is Communication

People who love poetry all have special poems in their lives to which they feel gratitude or indebtedness and one of the most common reasons for that special feeling seems to be that they had felt at the time, and have since, that a poem had communicated with them as though face to face. In Poetry Is Communication, Graham invites his audience to live and re-live their own personal relationship with all the poetry they have ever read and listened to since they were old enough to find pleasure and meaning in it, so that they go away at the end not only remembering what has always communicated and meant so much to them but cherishing its depths afresh, even as though for the first time. This evening was originally commissioned as the lead lecture for a conference on Poetry and Communication held at the University of Milan’s campus at Feltre in the pre-Alps and given there in Italian in 2000. This new lecture-performance, illustrated throughout from a wide range of poetry, tells a story - in voices as personal and engaging as good eye-contact between people - of discovering poems which talk straight to us, including by John Donne, D H Lawrence and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

"I finally managed to sit down and listen to Poetry is Communication (my own delay) and enjoyed it very much indeed. It is wonderful, for a start, to have all that poetry read to one, but then to have your wise and imaginative thought linking it all together is a stimulating and restorative blessing after a day of sadness for the world and personal fatigue and frustration (brought on by internet incompetence!)".
Brenda Herbert, online, London, April 2020
"I love the recordings of BBC war news reporters, with their plummy authoritative delivery. The truth. To me, you were channelling those news readers, although in a more appropriate conversational tone and conveying the truth in your poem selections".
Charles Porter, online, San Luis Obispo, June 2020

To access recordings of all ten lectures in the 2020 online series, click on SCHEDULED EVENTS below

Top picture:
National September 11 Memorial Museum, New York City

Lower pictures (left to right):
Isaac Oliver: John Donne
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University: D H Lawrence, 
Unknown artist: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Tickets £10/$12

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