An Invitation from poet Cahal Dallat.
You’re all invited to celebrate Yeats’s anniversary on Saturday, 28th Jan @ 11am by joining us for the launch of London’s latest arts adventure and poetry/lit.hist/heritage visitor-experience…
…when BBC/Channel5 presenter The Jeremy Vine launches www.wbyeatsbedfordpark.com/#discover, the first ever poetry-places literary-walk available 24/7 at the click of a QR code on the info-signage by Conrad Shawcross‘s dazzling Yeatsian gyre, #EnwroughtLight, near Turnham Green Tube Station at the gateway to Yeats’s boyhood London neighbourhood.
That’s
Bedford Park, the quaintly Bohemian and radically progressive artist’s-colony that fostered Yeats’s Irish poetic genius, channelled his love of Irish landscape, legends and lore into Nobel-Prize gold, sparked his first forays into drama, enlightened his lifelong interest in Eastern religions, nurtured his siblings’ love of the visual arts, hosted his meeting with the woman he would love and lose, facilitated the founding of the Irish Literary Revival, and so much more – eight locations all, incredibly, within a few hundred yards of each other (plus two slightly farther afield).
And at each location – on your smartphone/tablet/iPad – images, history, a short talk and a Bedford-Park-inspired Yeats poem read by 2022 Oscar+BAFTA-nominated Irish actor, Ciarán Hinds.
The young Yeats, in the days he walked the very path that you see in the pic (below) to his school, fared better in maths and science subjects than English and Latin, and dreamt of a ‘unity’ of arts and sciences, nature and spirit, (or ‘psychogeometries’ in Conrad Shawcross’s terms) so we know he’d be delighted by a 21st-century gizmo that time-travels the poetry/arts-lover back to Bedford Park’s Utopian late-19th-century heyday and to the people and places that inspired some of the greatest political poems and love-lyrics of the 20th-century.
(More to watch out for in 2023 so check-out/bookmark our website, where you can donate to support ongoing project costs and our 2023 celebrations, subscribe-to/unsubscribe from newsletter etc, and, of course, follow us on Twitter @YeatsBedfordPk.)
Would be great to see you there!
Nick Hennegan's Bohemian Britain 