WPA Newsletter: Issue 2, January 2006
This is a second, updated issue of the WPA Newsletter published on the Association's website in the Autumn of 2005; more items will be added during the next few weeks. If you have something you would like to be included in this or a future issue, please send it urgently to editor@warpoets.org or write to him at the address given at www.warpoets.org/join, within this website. Otherwise please visit this page regularly to view the latest version: more details will be added regularly until the issue is complete. The final Newsletter will also be sent to all members by post, and by e-mail to those who use e-mail, to provide news of the WPA's programme or other activities and developments that may be of interest to WPA members and others.
Members have the opportunity to opt out of receiving the printed version and rely on using this online or e-mail copy, if they wish. To arrange this, please either e-mail editor@warpoets.org or return the form enclosed with the printed copy sent by post.
Much of the information in this newsletter is likely also to be published elsewhere on the www.warpoets.org website in the 'News' or other sections.
If you have comments to make about this Newsletter or news of relevant events, or publications or developments to add, please contact the editor via the 'contact' link on the menu at the left of this page, or e-mail him as above at editor@warpoets.org.
And now, some News!
14th October 2005 - 17 April 2006
Exhibition: 'Lawrence of Arabia: the Life, the Legend' at the Imperial War Museum, London.
All right, he was not notably a poet, but would like to have been: Lawrence's interest in poetry was strong and he sought the friendship of poets and was a friend, sponsor and inspiration for many of the First World war poets, notably Robert Graves, who later became one of his biographers. Having opened in the year (2005) which saw the seventieth anniversary of the death of T. E. Lawrence, this major new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London will continue showing until 17 April 2006. It reveals the life of this extraordinary man, including his early years, his wartime exploits in the Middle East, his post-war service career and writings, and how his story became a legend. It is not a WPA event but will be of interest to many WPA members. Please click here for further details (from the IWM) of the exhibition.
New Biography of Siegfried Sassoon published
40% off at Amazon via the WPA!
Max Egremont's authorized biography of this famous war poet and literary legend, written with unique access to all of Sassoon's previously unseen papers, was published in the UK by Picador on 21st October 2005. It can be ordered from Amazon via the WPA's website at www.warpoets.org/books for only £15.00, a major discount of 40% on the published price of £25.00; please visit www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/asin/0330375261/warpoetsassoc-21 for further details or to order. The biography was published in the USA on 7 December 2005, by Farrar Straus Giroux; web users may order this edition at similar discounts by clicking here or visiting www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/asin/0374263752/warpoetsassoc-21.
The life of Siegfried Sassoon has been recorded and interpreted in literature and film for over half a century. He was one of the great figures of the First World War, and his Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer are widely read, as are his poems, which did much to shape our present ideas about the Great War of 1914-18, and diaries. Sassoon was a genuine hero, a brave young officer who also became the war's most famous opponent, risking imprisonment and even a death sentence by writing a statement against the war and throwing his Military Cross into the Mersey. He was friend to Robert Graves, mentor to Wilfred Owen and much admired by Winston Churchill. After the war Sassoon was seen by many to be 'the perfect embodiment of a vanished age'. Many questions about his character, unique experience and motivations have remained unanswered until now. With unprecedented access to Sassoon's complete papers and the support of his family, and after insightful conversations with Sassoon's lover Stephen Tennant, Max Egremont has produced a wonderfully insightful and engaging book that is as much a vivid portrait of an era as it is an elegant and fascinating biography of a complicated and enigmatic man.
'The Pity of War' CD to launched at the Imperial War Museum, London, 6 November 2005.
'The Pity of War' is a double CD, including poetry and letters of Wilfred Owen read by Samuel West, and sonatas performed by young British violinist Matthew Trusler and internationally renowned pianist Martin Roscoe. A concert to mark the launch of the CD and mark Armistice Day, including a recital performed by these artists, was held at the Imperial War Museum, London, on Sunday 6th November, as announced previously on the WPA's website. The cover price of the double CD is £13.99, but it is still available to WPA members for £10.00, directly from the publisher's website at www.orchidclassics.com (please mention your membership of the WPA to take advantage of the discount; the special offer is only available for payment by cheque) or from Amazon via the following link: www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/asin/B000BM3MNY/warpoetsassoc-21.
Cecil Woolf Publishing's new War Poets Series launched at the Imperial War Museum, London, 8 November 2005.
At a lunchtime reception supported by the War Poets Association, Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft-Wilson launched the first titles in a new series of pamphlets on war poets and war poetry, published by Cecil Woolf Publishers and produced under the general editorship of Dr Jean Moorcroft-Wilson.
The event was attended by a group of about 50 guests, including members of the Association. The titles in the new series will vary from pamphlets of 20 pages to book length volumes. As with the first titles, publication will normally will be in November each year, in anticipation of Armistice Day ('Veterans' Day') commemorations.
The first four titles in the series, published in November 2005, are:
Alan Byford: Edmund Blunden and the Great War: recollections of a Friendship. London: Cecil Woolf, 2005 [No price or ISBN given, but see others below as a guide].
Richard Perceval Graves: Changing Perceptions: Poets of the Great War. London: Cecil Woolf, 2005. ISBN: 1 897967 195. £5.00
Anne Powell: Alun Lewis: a Short Life. London: Cecil Woolf, 2005. ISBN: 1 897967 888. £6.00
John Press: Sidney Keyes. London: Cecil Woolf, 2005. ISBN: 1 897967 241. £5.00
All of the above are available directly from Cecil Woolf Publishing, 1 Mornington Place, London NW1 7RP, UK, Tel: 020 7387 2394 (or +44 (0)20 7387 2394 from outside the UK).
Please mention the War Poets Association's website when ordering. (We don't receive a commission, but just like the publishers to know!)
WPA's journal War Poetry Review announced, January 2006.
Volume 1, Issue 1 (2006) of the War Poets Association’s new journal War Poetry Review is now in the later stages of preparation. The journal will be made available online early in 2006 (for the online edition, a password will be required and sent to all current members) and a copy of the printed journal will be sent by post to all WPA members early in the New Year. The new journal is edited jointly by the WPA's Chairman, Professor Paul O’Prey, and fellow WPA Board member Patrick Villa, The editors are pleased to confirm the following list of contents (which might still be subject to some minor changes) for the first issue:
WAR POETRY REVIEW Volume 1, Issue 1 (2006)
CONTENTS (in alphabetical order of author):
TED GENOWAYS
Three Poems
TIM KENDALL (University of Bristol)
Thomas Hardy’s Witness
PATRICK MCGUINNESS (St Anne’s College, Oxford)
Lynette Roberts’s 'Gods With Stainless Ears'
(Patrick McGuinness’s edition of Lynette Roberts’s Collected Poems was published by Carcanet in November 2005. His first book of poems, The Canals of Mars, shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Prize, appeared in 2004. This article has appeared in a different form in PN Review.
HELEN MCPHAIL
Why do They do it? – Some Thoughts About ‘Battlefield Tourism’ and the War Poets of
the Great War
JOHN MOLE
Five Poems
JEAN MOORCROFT-WILSON
Siegfried Sassoon: The Longest Journey
(This is the text of a talk given to the War Poets Association at St Andrews Church,
Mells, Somerset, during the WPA’s ‘Siegfried Sassoon at Mells’ day on 28th May 2005 .)
DENNIS SILK (Formerly Warden of Radley College and friend of Siegfried Sassoon)
Remembering Siegfried Sassoon
ROBERT YATES (University of Sussex)
David Jones, Un-consecrated Modernist
For enquiries about the journal, please e-mail editor@warpoets.org or write to the editors at:
The War Poets Association
c/o Veale Wasbrough (DBMW)
Orchard Court
Orchard Lane
Bristol BS1 5WS
UK
Poet Owen Sheers to speak about his new Keith Douglas play at the Seventh International Robert Graves Conference, Mallorca, 4-8 July, 2006.
Leading young Welsh poet, writer and playright Owen Sheers, whose latest book of poems, Skirrid Hill , includes the war poem 'Mametz Wood', based on a visit to a part of the Somme battlefied well known to both Graves and Sassoon, will be speaking about his play based on the life of a poet of another World War, Keith Douglas, at the forthcoming International Robert Graves Conference in July 2006.
Please see below for further details of the conference, which will be held in Palma and Deyá, Mallorca, Spain, from Tuesday 4th July – Saturday 8th July, 2006, on the theme Robert Graves and the Art of Collaboration. Owen Sheers will discuss his new play, entitled "Unicorns, Almost" after a line in a poem by Keith Douglas, with actress Josie Rourke, who directs the play, and possibly others involved in the production. The play will open as part of the Old Vic New Voices programme in London this Summer and the visit of the team to Mallorca is sponsored by the British Council in Spain.
The Robert Graves conference will be held at the Fundació “la Caixa”'s cultural centre in Palma, by kind invitation of the foundation. This superb Art Nouveau building, below, was formerly the Gran Hotel, where Robert Graves and Laura Riding stayed in 1929 on their arrival in Palma. 
‘Gran Hotel’: Fundació “la Caixa”, Palma. Photo: © Mallorcafact.com.
Keynote speakers will include Alastair Reid, poet, essayist, staff writer for the 'New Yorker', translator of Neruda and Borges and friend and collaborator of Robert Graves, and (subject to confirmation) two leading academic experts on Graves from Spain. Another highlight of the conference will be a private visit to Canellun, Robert Graves's house in Deyá, which is being meticulously restored under the direction of his son William Graves and will have just opened as a museum.
The aim of the conference is to explore the phenomenon of creative collaboration, through some of the many remarkable examples that Graves's work provides. His partnership with Laura Riding is undoubtedly the most celebrated and controversial of these, but Graves formed numerous other important artistic and intellectual alliances. His collaborators included Siegfried Sassoon (early poetry), Nancy Nicholson (Treasure Box), William Nicholson (The Owl), T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence and the Arabs), Basanta Mallik (Mock Beggar Hall), Frank Richards (Old Soldiers Never Die), Alan Hodge (The Long Week-End, The Reader Over Your Shoulder), his secretary Karl Gay (prose works), Lynette Roberts (The White Goddess), Joshua Podro (The Nazarene Gospel Restored, Jesus in Rome), Beryl Graves (The Infant with the Globe), James Metcalf (Adam's Rib), Janet de Glanville (The Greek Myths), Alastair Reid (The Twelve Caesars, Nausicaa), Edward Ardizzone (The Penny Fiddle, Ann at Highwood Hall), Raphael Patai (The Hebrew Myths), Paul Hogarth (Majorca Observed), Idries Shah and Omar Ali-Shah (The Sufis, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam). Then there were others whom he consulted: solicitors, stamp collectors, archaeologists, linguists, classicists . . . All were directly involved with Graves in producing a significant proportion of his 140 books of poetry, fiction, biography, criticism, anthropology, social history, mythology, Biblical studies, translation, and children's books.
Robert Graves with collaborators and friends at a café in Deyá, 1935. Photo: Mascaró
During the conference, Graves specialists and scholars from a range of disciplines will discuss how these relationships illuminate particular facets of Graves's genius. Members of the War Poets Association and others are invited to register for the conference (full details of registration fees, etc., are available via the links below) and it is hoped that some may also decide to respond to the call for papers, below.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers on aspects of literary, artistic and intellectual collaboration concerning Robert Graves and his contemporaries. Please send a 250-word abstract by 31 January 2006 to the Academic Programme Organiser:
Dunstan Ward
President, Robert Graves Society
University of London Institute in Paris
75340 Paris Cedex 07 France
E-mail: dunstanward@yahoo.com
with a copy by e-mail to both of the Conference Organisers:
Lucia Graves
Vice-President (Europe), Robert Graves Society
E-mail: luciagraves@aol.com
and
Patrick Villa
Secretary/Treasurer, Robert Graves Society
E-mail: pjvilla@aol.com
PARTICIPANTS
The conference is open to all. It will be of interest to academics, teachers, research students, and anyone else who is interested in the life and writings of Robert Graves and his circle. All speakers and other participants will be responsible for their own travel expenses, registration fees and accommodation during the conference, unless other specific arrangements have been made with the Academic Programme Organiser.
To register or propose a paper for the conference online please visit www.robertgraves.org/conference.php or complete the registration form available online and send it, with an abstract of your proposed paper if you wish to submit one, to: Secretary/Treasurer, Robert Graves Society, 50 Ham Green, Pill, Bristol BS20 0HB, UK.
LANGUAGE
The working language of the conference will be English, but some papers may be given in Spanish or Catalan. For most sessions, simultaneous translation from Spanish or Catalan into English or from English into Spanish will be provided.