Graham Fawcett Poetry
Talks No.2 – Geoffrey Chaucer
Wednesday 13 March 6pm for 6.30
Renowned broadcaster, educator and speaker Graham Fawcett is giving a talk on Geoffrey Chaucer on 13 March. Actor Sue Aldred reads the original Chaucer so well that it is easy to understand the Middle English and appreciate the humour and breadth of this wonderful poet. Graham Fawcett brings to life the man, his work and the world Chaucer took such an active part in. The talk will be followed by a Medieval themed celebratory supper in Sladers Yard’s award-winning café.
The seven lectures are part of Graham Fawcett’s acclaimed national tour, which explores seven poets in history whose achievements on the page have made them world-class heroes. The first, on Neruda, was enthralling and inspiring and Geoffrey Chaucer promises to be just as brilliant. 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 whose work obviously fed his own. 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 the England of the 1380s and 1390s the literary languages were latin and french. In choosing to write in the vernacular Middle English he lead the way in creating English as a great literary language comprehensible to all. “As Newton numbered the stars, and as Linnaeus numbered the plants”, wrote William Blake, “so Chaucer numbered the classes of men”.
Entertaining broadcaster, educator, translator and public speaker, Graham Fawcett has been a tutor for The Poetry School since 1997, devising and teaching new courses on poetry past and present from around the world. He has written and presented radio programmes about literature and music on BBC Radio 3 for many years. His current lecture series is on tour throughout 2013 covering Neruda, Ovid, Geoffrey Chaucer, Lord Byron, Alexander Pushkin, Charles Baudelaire and Emily Dickinson, who became and have remained national and international heroes for their uniqueness of voice, intensity of wonder at the world, formidable output, and prowess on the page.
Annie Freud’s Poetry Aloud
Saturday 23 March 2013, 6.30pm
Performance Tickets £8. Book a table for supper + chat later.
Annie Freud brings together eminent and interesting poets at Sladers Yard in an evening of very high quality poetry and performance, with affordable tickets and a light-hearted celebratory atmosphere. Performing with Annie are Penelope Shuttle and Roddy Lumsden. After the performance the licensed café will be open and tables can be booked for supper, drinks and chat. This is the second of our two-monthly get-togethers of all poets and poetry lovers in the vicinity.
Annie Freud was born in London in 1948. She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, maternal grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great-grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud. Freud was educated at the Lycee Francais de Londres and then studied English and European Literature at Warwick University. Since 1975, she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer, exhibiting work and undertaking commissions from people such as Anthony D’Offay, Jon Snow and Graham Norton. She taught the Advanced Class of the Poetry Writing Course at City University, London. Her first full collection from Picador, The Best Man Who Ever Was, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2007, and went on to receive the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award in the same year. Her latest collection, The Mirabelles, was published by Picador in 2010 and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2011. She is currently teaching the Advanced Class of the Poetry Writing Course at City University, London. She lives in Dorset with her husband.
Penelope Shuttle was born near London but has lived in Cornwall since 1970. She is the widow of Peter Redgrove (1932-2003). A biography of Redgrove, A LUCID DREAMER, authored by Neil Roberts, was published alongside Peter’s COLLECTED POEMS in January 2012 (both volumes from Jonathan Cape). Penny Shuttle’s 2010 collection, SANDGRAIN AND HOURGLASS, appeared from Bloodaxe Books in October 2010, and was a Recommendation of The Poetry Book Society, and a Poetry Book of the Year in The Financial Times. Ben Wilkinson (in The Guardian) described it as ‘a moving and abundant book’.
UNSENT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1980 – 2012 was published in October 2012 (Bloodaxe Books). Since 1980 Shuttle has published nine collections, plus an earlier Selected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1998). In 2007 she was awarded a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry. REDGROVE’S WIFE ( Bloodaxe Books 2006) was short-listed for the Forward Prize, and for the T S Eliot Award. It was described as a book of ‘lament and celebration.’ John Greening, writing on REDGROVE’S WIFE in the Times Literary Supplement, notes the author’s ‘elegiac authority’, and says that ‘Penelope Shuttle’s great strength is her natural myth-making lyricism.’ Penelope Shuttle is a Hawthornden Fellow.
She has been a judge for the Arvon Poetry Competition, for the Arts Council Awards, for the Eric Gregory Awards, and the National Poetry Competition, among many others. She is current Chair of the Falmouth Poetry Group founded in 1972 by Peter Redgrove. She has given numerous public readings at festivals such as Aldeburgh, King’s Lynn, Poetry-on-the-Lake, Poetry-next-the-Sea, Ways with Words, Ledbury, etc, and at many other venues including The Wordsworth Trust. Her work canbe heard at the Poetry Archive Website, and is available from The Poetry Archive on cd. She was a contributor to the BBC Radio 4 documentary, THE MALE MUSE. Her work is included on the cd LifeLines, produced by Oxfam.
Her work appears in numerous anthologies, including THE FIREBOX, SIXTY WOMEN POETS, THE PENGUIN BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY (edited by Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison), and the 2011 Bloodaxe Anthology, STAYING HUMAN. She is widely published in many magazines including The Poetry Review, The Manhattan Review, P N Review, The Rialto, The Wolf, Magma, The Yellow Nib, and The Times Literary Supplement.
Roddy Lumsden has published seven collections, most recently Terrific Melancholy (Bloodaxe) and The Bells of Hope (Penned in the Margins). He is Poetry Editor for Salt and Series Editor of The Best British Poetry. He lives in London where teaches privately and for Poetry School, for whom he is currently developing an MA course in poetry. He organises the monthly reading series BroadCast.
Roddy Lumsden’s first book Yeah Yeah Yeah (1997) was shortlisted for Forward and Saltire prizes. His second collection The Book of Love (2000), a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Mischief Night: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His latest collections are Third Wish Wasted (2009) and Terrific Melancholy (2011). His anthology Identity Parade: new British and Irish poets was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2010. He is a freelance writer, specialising in quizzes and word puzzles, and has held several residencies, including ones with the City of Aberdeen, St Andrews Bay Hotel, and as “poet-in-residence” to the music industry when he co-wrote The Message, a book on poetry and pop music (Poetry Society, 1999). His other books include Vitamin Q: a temple of trivia, lists and curious words (Chambers Harrap, 2004). Born in St Andrews, he lived in Edinburgh before moving to London.
‘There is a level of talent that will ransom any project in any school. On the one hand, it will be interesting to see where Lumsden goes next; on the other, he’s so good that it hardly matters’ – D.H. Tracy, Poetry.
‘One of the best poets writing in English on the planet today’ – Don Share, Squandermania.
‘Although the verse is hopping with linguistic antics, the foci of the language are music and rhetoric and, whip-smart as these poems are, they tend to resist chin-stroking analysis…the rhymes, the larks, the brutal punch-lines tug Lumsden’s poems off the page and into the living context they describe’ – Matthew Smith, Verse.
Please phone 01308 459511 now to book tickets for either lecture.
