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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191120T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191120T200000
DTSTAMP:20260528T165457
CREATED:20190915T202447Z
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SUMMARY:Michael Wood\, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen - 20 Nov
DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society is delighted to announce that the speaker for this year’s Annual Yeats Lecture will be Professor Michael Wood. Drawing on his book Yeats and Violence (2010) Professor Wood reflects on how poetry\, seen through the instance of a single poem\, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none\, and also\, in certain crucial cases\, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W.B. Yeats ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilisation crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history’s victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? One hundred years on from the historical setting of the poem we have asked Wood to consider the poem in its historical context and its place in Yeats’ work. Wood will then join our Vice President\, Roy Foster\, in conversation and the poet Martina Evans will offer a poem\, commissioned for this event\, in response to Yeats’ work. “The appeal to the dream has all kinds of echoes in Yeats…we might think the dream justifies the dreamer\, since that is part of the argument of ‘Easter 1916’\, and this is the argument the speaker of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ helplessly gestures towards: ‘We know their dream\,’ the earlier poem says\, ‘enough/To know they dreamed and are dead.’ This particular dream had its price\, even apart from the death of the dreamers. It turned hearts to stone\, it was part of the old myth of sacrifice Yeats himself used to be so eloquent about.”  \n \nWood’s criticism is exuberantly characterful\, adventurous in its scholarship\, and greedily\, giddily speculative. Leo Robson\, New Statesman\n \n \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Michael Wood\n\nMichael Wood was born and educated in England but has worked for much of his life in the United States\, first at Columbia University and then at Princeton. He has written books on Luis Buñuel\, Franz Kafka\, Vladimir Nabokov\, and Gabriel García Márquez\, as well as The Road to Delphi\, a study of the ancient and continuing allure of oracles. Among his other works are America in the Movies and Children of Silence. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature\, a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences\, he is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. Selected Works: Stendhal (1971); America in the Movies (1975\, 1989); The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1994); Children of Silence: on Contemporary Fiction (1998); The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife of Oracles (2003); Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005) and Yeats and Violence (2010). \n  \nSpeaker: Martina Evans\n Martina Evans is a poet\, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub\, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children. She is the author of ten books of prose and poetry. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University\, London and a Lector for the Royal Literary Reading Round 2014-2016. Watch\, a pamphlet was published by Rack Press in January 2016 and The Windows of Graceland\, New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Her latest collection Now We Can Talk Openly About Men was published by Carcanet in May 2018. It featured in the Times Literary Supplement\, Observer and Irish Times Books of the Year and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award as well as the Pigott Poetry Award. Currently she is Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and poetry reviewer for the Irish Times. \n   \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Roy Foster Roy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His most recent book is Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914.\n Image above shows detail from Jack B Yeats’ Something in the Air\, 1948.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/michael-wood-nineteen-hundred-and-nineteen-20-nov/
LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR
CATEGORIES:art,biography,history,lecture,poetry,politics,tradition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191125T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191125T203000
DTSTAMP:20260528T165457
CREATED:20190915T181936Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200203T214611Z
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SUMMARY:Polly Devlin\, Writing Home - 25 Nov
DESCRIPTION:Polly Devlin joins Joan Bakewell to discuss the latest collection of her work\, Writing Home\, and to reflect on a rich career as a writer\, her working as features editor of Vogue in London in the Swinging Sixties\, to encounters with Bob Dylan\, Janis Joplin\, Barbara Streisand\, John Lennon…In the pieces brought together in Writing Home\, Polly Devlin OBE\, covers subjects that range over her whole life and thought. She writes about places: about her childhood deep in the countryside of Northern Ireland (where\, in the late 1950s\, the first electricity poles looked ‘literally out of place’); her sudden transition\, at the age of twenty-one\, to Swinging Sixties London\, where she worked for Vogue and became very much part of the scene (although – ‘it’s like being a provincial at Versailles’)\, on to New York\, back to London\, then to the English countryside\, and to Paris\, Venice\, the world over – and always back to Ireland\, London and New York. \nShe writes about the people she has known\, among them Yoko Ono\, Mick Jagger\, Peggy Guggenheim\, Diana Vreeland (‘as fantastical as a unicorn’)\, Jean Shrimpton (‘she looks as though she sleeps in cathedral pews and sucks artichoke hearts for sustenance’)\, Princess Margaret (who came to dinner and did the washing up\, ‘which I gabbled she didn’t need to – she looked at me frostily and the royal hands went back into the Fairy Liquid’). And she writes about the issues that have preoccupied her: about emigration\, feminism (‘I grew up in a society where men were fundamental and women were secondary’)\, reading\, writing\, collecting\, shopping\, houses\, dogs\, rooks\, hares\, dreams\, friendship and the kindness of strangers; about daughters and mothers. \n \n \n\n“…affectionate sketches of friends including Nuala O’Faolain and her brother-in-law Seamus Heaney…ring with truth and tenderness.”Irish Times\n\nThe event will be followed by a book sale and signing by the author. \n  \nOur thanks to the publishers of Writing Home:  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Joan Bakewell\n\n\nJoan Bakewell has a distinguished career as an author\, journalist and broadcaster. She has served on the board of the National Theatre and as Chair of the British Film Institute and of the National Campaign for the Arts. Joan was made a CBE is 1999 and Dame in 2008. In January 2011 she took her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Bakewell of Stockport. In April 2013\, she became President of Birkbeck College.She has led some of the BBC’s most well-remembered documentaries and news programmes\, challenging taboos around sex; examining religion from a critical\, objective standpoint; and being a champion for arts and culture and their relevance to life. \n\n  \nSpeaker: Polly Devlin\n\n\nPolly Devlin is a writer\, broadcaster and filmmaker. She holds an OBE for services to literature. After spending her childhood in Northern Ireland\, at the age of twenty-two she took up her first job – as a writer\, and soon features editor\, on British Vogue\, at the heart of 1960s London. A couple of years later she was again transported\, to New York\, to work for Diana Vreeland on American Vogue – where\, once more\, she was very much part of the scene she wrote about in her newspaper column and articles including for The Sunday Times\, New Statesman and Observer. Her first book\, All of Us There\, is now a Virago Modern Classic. The most recent\, New York: Places to Write Home About (Pimpernel Press\, 2017; published in the United States by Gibbs Smith\, as New York: Behind Closed Doors) was greeted with delight on both sides of the Atlantic. She now divides her time between London and New York\, where\, until her recent retirement\, she taught Creative Non-Fiction at Barnard College\, Columbia University.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/polly-devlin-writing-home-25-nov/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,exile,feminism,interview,Reading,research,social history,women
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