Thank you for your patience.

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

Interchange, Hampstead Town Hall, 213 Haverstock Hill,
London NW3 4QP (Belsize Park Tube)

A rehearsed reading of a new play by John Ashworth performed by
professional actors from Equity and the North West London Equity
branch. Directed by Catherine Arden.

England 1800 – a dangerous and uncertain time. The colonies of
the New World in America are fighting against the British crown
for independence and Napoleon is advancing across Europe with
England in his sights. Fear, mistrust and suspicion lurk in every
corner of the land.

The plot centrepieces are William’s relationship with his wife
Catherine; his desire to write an epic of England struggling against
inhumanity and war; imagination in conflict with repression;
Blake’s trial for sedition; and the determination and vision to live,
love, and work in a new way.

The play is in two acts with a 20 minute interval between.
Tickets £5 (Blake Society members free of charge).

The City of Westminster Archives Centre,
10 St. Anne’s Street,
London SW1P 2DE – just off Parliament Square.

One of the most extraordinary evocations of Blake in many years, My Business Is to Create : Blake’s Infinite Writing is also a manual on creative writing, the jewel on which a writer’s life might turn.
Professor Eric Wilson is the author of many other books including Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, In Praise of Melancholy, and, The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace, an account of how Blake’s idea of forgiveness helped Wilson in his struggle with clinical depression.
For more information see Events.

Invitations to the celebration (which will take place at St. James’s Church in Piccadilly) will be sent out separately in the autumn.

Continuing our occasional series of ‘walking in Blake’s footsteps’,
this year we are going on a pilgrimage to a place he never visited. In
the final plate of Jerusalem, Stonehenge uncurls to build Jerusalem’s
walls or is Stonehenge transforming into the chains of transmission of
an industrial age or is this site a precursor to the Oracle at Delphi?

The visit has been arranged for the early evening after the World
Heritage Site has closed to the public; we will then have access to
the inner circle of stones alone. Numbers are limited to 26 members
and the visit may incur a cost with travel to be arranged.

Booking essential, please email to reserve your space.

An Illuminated Talk By Martin Sexton

A tale of the artist’s explorations, influences and conjunctions with William
Blake using slides, film and dialogue. Martin will articulate his own insights
into Blake’s sincere and romantic desire to ‘…restore what the Ancients
call’d the Golden Age’ and in some small part to demonstrate that this
act of restoration may indeed be a temporal ability through the agency of
vision and imagination to realise that … it has indeed never left us.

Martin Sexton works at the interface of ancient history, metaphysics, the
psychosocial aspects of ufology & the politics of aesthetics – all countered
with a wilful poetic vision that has echoes of the extremism of rock n’ roll.
His art has been exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including
Tate Britain, Benaki Museum Athens & the Venice Biennale. He works with
ice, fire, meteorites, sound, film and text.

In this joint event with the Mental Fight Club we celebrate MFC’s
latest venture, the Dragon Caf̩ Рa nutritious and creative space in
which it is hoped ‘joy shall conquer all despair’ and where we can
all embrace all that we fear.

During the day from 10 am anyone may read aloud Blake’s work
and there will be an opportunity to record and listen to your own
voice. In the evening at 7.30 pm we will be joined by professional
actors who will explore the 17 emotions in Blake through voice,
performance and play.

We gather at Bunhill Fields at noon to mark the life of William Blake
who died on Sunday 12 August 1827. By tradition people often read
or share a favourite text.

It is the one deliberately social event of our calendar when you have
an opportunity to weave new friendships between the dissenting
stones of Bunhill Fields.

After the recitations you are invited to repair to a local pub for lunch.
For those interested in recording one of Blake’s works for our Librivox
project (to make his work available for all to hear), join us at The
Artillery Arms in Bunhill Row to learn more about the project.

Reading any poetry aloud is a wonderful experience that brings an added
dimension to a work. This is never more true than for the poetry of Blake.
Like any performance though, a reading can sap the life from a poem
and obscure its meaning. The good news is that anyone can learn how to
avoid this sad fate. In this workshop we will draw on the experience of the
leading performance poetry expert, Jane Boston, to gain skills that will help
to enrich both the readers and the audience’s pleasure.

In the year in which the Blake Society begins the systematic recording of
all Blake’s poetry to make it freely available, we hope to gather together a
group who are each interested in producing one poem. This workshop will
focus on the specific skills needed to make a great recording.

Jane Boston is Head of International Voice with an interest in the
contemporary performance of verse and in particular the place in voice
training of the Romantic Poets.

Booking essential, please email to reserve your space.

A Talk by David Pollard

Yeats, in a letter to Lady Gregory of 1902, wrote: ‘Nietzsche completes
Blake and has the same roots’. They were alike in so many ways. This
talk is a comparison of one of the key elements in their thinking: their
notions of Self-annihilation and Self-overcoming and the dialectical
movement both followed towards the true Jesus, whose energy they both
espoused.

David Pollard was born under the bed in 1942 and has been furniture
salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He got his
three degrees from the University of Sussex and has since taught at the
universities of Sussex, Essex and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He has published The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience which
was his doctoral thesis, A KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Edition
of Keats’ Letters, a novel, Nietzsche’s Footfalls, and three volumes of
poetry: Patricides, Risk of Skin and Bedbound (translated into Galician and Spanish). A fourth, Self-Portraits, is forthcoming.