The Blake Society at St James’s Piccadilly
Programme
2003

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Tuesday 18th March 2003
Allen Fisher
Broken Emblems: aspects of ‘crowd-out’ in the combined visual & written work of William Blake.
Allen Fisher is a painter, poet & art historian. He is Professor of Poetry & Art and Head of Art at the University of Surrey Roehampton. He has over 130 books & chapbooks to his name, some are documentary, others are conceptual or graphic, a few are theoretical & very many are collections of poetry. Popular books include ‘Place’ in 1974 & ‘Brixton Fractals’ in 1985. He has visual work in the Tate collection; Living Museum, Iceland; & many private collections in America, Australia & Britain. He regularly reads his work in Britain & America.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St.Ann¹s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 15th April 2003
Sparks of Fire Revisited: Readings, Singings, & Viewings from an Unusual Anthology on Blake.
Presented by James Bogan & an Assortment of Mystery Guests.
In 1982, ‘Sparks of Fire’, an anthology on the contemporary response to Blake, was published featuring work by Robert Creeley, Paul Piech, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Roger Zelazny, James Broughton, Michael Horovitz, & numerous others who had been Blake sparked. Co-editor James Bogan & others will present selections from the volume. Anyone willing to sing a Blake song will be awarded a rare vinyl disk of Blake songs sung by Allen Ginsberg & Tom Nichols.
James Bogan is a professor of art history, a poet, a film-maker, & most recently a sculptor, who has taught at the University of Missouri-Rolla since 1969. During the winter semester of 2003 he is the Program Director of the Missouri-London Program at Imperial College, where he is teaching art history & meditating on the metamorphosis in May 2003 of his Celtic Double Spiral Space Centering Vehicle for the Fourth Exhibition of European Fantastic Art at the Sculpture Garden in Eben-Emael, Belgium.
City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St.Ann¹s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm. Free (collection).

Tuesday 20th May 2003
Bill Goldman
‘Oh Mercy’: William Blake & Bob Dylan.
Bill Goldman is completing his PhD thesis on William Blake & Robert Browning at King’s College London. He is a Dylan fan from way back. He hopes to launch his writing career, as well as an academic one, once this PhD is finished. He has been Programme Secretary of the Blake Society since 1997.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St.Ann¹s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 17th June 2003
Carter Kaplan
William Blake & the Epic Form of Satiric Vision.
Carter Kaplan, the author of ‘Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology’, is Associate Professor of English at Mountain State University in West Virginia. He received his BA & MA from the University of Toledo, & his PhD from the University of North Dakota. He has taught at universities in Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York State, New York City, & Scotland.
CANCELLED.
Carter Kaplan has been forced to cancel his visit to England due unavoidable family circumstances.   We hope that his planned talk on “William Blake & the Epic Form of Satiric Vision” can be given on a future occasion.

Tuesday 15th July 2003
Josie McQuail
Beat Readings of Blake.
Josie McQuail explores the mystical connection between Allen Ginsberg & William Blake. Ginsberg claimed that in auditory hallucinations he heard Blake sing some of his “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” Blake did supposedly sing the songs, but never wrote down the tunes. Ginsberg transcribed the music he heard accompanying the songs, learning how to write music in order to do this. Ginsberg would often begin his own readings by these performances of Blake’s songs. He also was inspired by Blake’s poems, as is obvious from many of his poems.
Dr. Josie McQuail received her Ph.D. in English from U.C. Berkeley, with Morton Paley directing her dissertation on Blake’s The Book of Urizen. Her interest in Blake was first sparked by Leo Damrosch, with whom she studied at University of Virginia, where she received both her B.A. & M.A. degrees in English. She has published in Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, the European Romantic Review, & the New Review of Librarianship and Children’s Literature. She has also written analyses of the lyrics of the band The Grateful Dead. She currently has an article on Blake & women in Modern Language Studies. She lives in the U.S. in Tennessee where she teaches English at Tennessee Technological University.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St. Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Sunday 10th August 2003
Bunhill Fields
‘His eyes Brighten’d and He burst out in Singing of the things he saw in Heaven’
As ever we meet at Bunhill Fields on the anniversary of William Blake’s death. We meet by Blake’s grave, at 12 noon, probably then repairing to a nearby public house.
Bunhill Fields Cemetery has entrances in City Road & Bunhill Row, London EC1. Nearest tube: Old Street exit 5; buses 43, 141, 214, 271 all stop outside the cemetery in City Road.
Not the Blake Society: The William Blake Memorial Walk.  Meet Oxford Circus, exit 6.  A walk devised & lead by Ed Glinert for The Original London Walks (PO Box 1708, London NW6 4LW; 020 7624 3978).  A London Walk costs £5 & takes about two hours.

Tuesday 16th September 2003
Tom Paulin
Irish Blake
Tom Paulin, poet & critic, was born in Leeds in 1949, grew up in Belfast, & was educated at the universities of Hull & Oxford.  Well-known for his appearances on BBC2’s “Newsnight Review”, Tom Paulin is currently the G.M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.  He has edited numerous award-winning collections of poetry, including ‘The Faber Book of Political Verse’ & ‘The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse’.  The first of his five books of poetry, ‘A State of Justice’, received the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1977.  His latest collection, ‘The Invasion Handbook’ (Faber, 2002) has just been reissued in paperback.
Tom Paulin writes “… what drew Yeats & Van Morrison to Blake - that strain of visionary protestant radicalism - at times headbanging, obsessive, obscure & relentless in its search for secret codes & meanings, at others capable of a natural simplicity & boundless wonder above & beyond institutional ways of thinking. It was this quality or energy that spoke to the eternally anti-institutional Joyce. One day perhaps a study of this imagination will be written - for the moment we need to read Blake through Yeats, & Yeats through Blake.”
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St. Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Tuesday 28th October 2003
Blake & his Artist Friends
Andrew Solomon
A comparison of the work of Blake, Flaxman, Fuseli & Romney noting their influence on each other.
Andrew Solomon is the author of Blake’s Job, a Message for Our Time, & William Blake’s Great Task—The Purpose of ‘Jerusalem’
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St. Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Friday 28th November 2003
Blake’s Milton
We mark William Blake’s birthday with a programme of John Milton’s poetry with William Blake’s accompanying designs.
Blake’s own great inspiration was Milton; the actors will read extracts from Milton’s L’Allegro & Il Penseroso, Paradise Lost & On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, accompanied by the beautiful visual images Blake created for these poems. The evening will also include music by contemporary composers inspired by Blake: John Taverner, Benjamin Britten & Francis James Brown. Leading actors Anna Calder-Marshall, David Burke & Janet Whiteside will perform this work with singing by Mary Gifford Brown.  Devised & directed by Valerie Doulton, Artistic Director of the Blake Society. Her own company Live Literature was founded in 2003, with the opening production of Byron in Love performing in London & Verona.
(The Nehru Centre, 8 South Audley Street, London, W1K 1HF; 7.00pm.)

Tuesday 9th December 2003
Annual General Meeting
& immediately after the AGM
Blake Set To Music
Keri Davies
According to his friend J.T. Smith, Blake wrote many songs to which he also composed tunes. These he would occasionally sing to his friends; & though, according to his confession, he was entirely unacquainted with the science of music, his ear was so good, that his tunes were sometimes most singularly beautiful, & were noted down by musical professors.
Blake’s tunes have been lost. In 1874 Doyne Courtenay Bell (1831-1888) composed a setting of ‘Can I see another’s woe’. He was perhaps the first composer to discover Blake as a source of inspiration. By 1990, Donald Fitch’s comprehensive bibliography listed a staggering 2,662 settings of Blake’s words, including well over 250 of ‘The Lamb’.
Dr Keri Davies introduces a sample from the many recordings that show how Blake’s words have been set to music, in idioms that range from classical to sixties folk, from jazz to heavy metal.
(City of Westminster Archives Centre, 10 St. Ann’s Street, London SW1P 2DE; 7.30pm.)

Last edited 17/03/2008 20:16:34