Chairman's New Year Message 2009

In 2008, the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War, we remembered many 90th anniversaries. We remembered on April 1st 2008 the death of Isaac Rosenberg killed near Arras and on 4th November 2008 the death of Wilfred Owen killed 90 years ago on the Sambre Canal bank at Ors. Wilfred Owen is now well known and widely read, probably the best known poet of the Great War, in proper publication since the 1930s and the strong determination of Edmund Blunden in particular to see him in print. Isaac Rosenberg is less well known than Owen. He is however now coming into his own. Recently there has been Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s full and excellent biography Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet and fine editions of poems and letters from Vivien Noakes and Jean Liddiard.
Many other good but relatively unknown poets also died in the Great War in 1918. Who now remembers Vivien Pemberton aged 24 killed in action in Sancourt on 7th October 1918 and his “War Meditations” and the poem “And if a Bullet” written by Alec de Candole aged 21 killed in a bombing raid on Bonningues on 3rd September 1918 and Henry Simpson’s “Last Nocturne”, also 21 when he was killed by a sniper on 29th August 1918 near Hazebrouck? These poets and their lives and poetry together with the other First World War British Soldier Poets killed in Northern France and Flanders are remembered in Anne Powell’s brilliant Literary Pilgrimage “A Deep Cry” (Palladour Books 1993). Last year Dominic Hibberd and John Onions published their comprehensive First World War Poetry anthology “The Winter of the World” with poems by the well known poets and also many lesser known and unfamiliar poems showing the development of poetry chronologically through the war years and into the 1920s. And in 2006 Voices of Silence, The Alternative Book of First World War Poetry, from Vivien Noakes introduced us to many unknown and little known poems and poets, the Voices of Silence of the title (R Gorell Barnes poem Ypres).
The War Poets Association (WPA), established in 2004, welcomes and supports these anthologies as essential in giving a voice to war poets who are not individually supported. The WPA exists also to support the many societies and organisations established to ensure the continued reading and study of the poetry of individual war poets such as Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Brooke and Kipling. Our website is a key development of the WPA and crucial to our future. Increasingly we will be looking and focussing also on other conflicts of the twentieth century, as well as current and also earlier conflicts (‘from Troy to Vietnam’ as Professor Jon Stallworthy put it, Afghanistan today), and poets of all nationalities in addition to our British poets. Recently the website has added portraits and appreciations of Georg Trakl and Maresuke Nogi. We aim to organise a couple of important events each year. Most recently on November 11th 2008, the 90th Anniversary of the First World War Armistice, at 7.00pm in the Imperial War Museum, the IWM and the WPA hosted a remarkable and moving evening of war poetry readings and talks - Poetry and the Memory of War - attended by more than 300 people. Our president Paul O’Prey chaired the occasion and opened the evening with an introduction on the importance of war poetry and talked personally about his introduction to the subject through his meeting and relationship with Robert Graves. We had poems read by relatives of the poets of the First World War: Margi Blunden, Edmund Blunden’s daughter, read Trees on the Calais Road and 1916 seen from 1921; Natalia Farran Graves, the granddaughter of Robert Graves, read Two Fusiliers and The Last Day of Leave; Wilfred Owen’s nephew Peter Owen read Exposure and The Sentry; Bernard Wynick, Isaac Rosenberg’s nephew, read Break of Day in the Trenches and Louse Hunting; Kendall Sassoon, Siegfried Sassoon’s granddaughter, read Dreamers and Everyone Sang and the grandson of Edward Thomas himself called Edward Thomas read When We Two Walked and In Memoriam. Jon Stallworthy gave an outstanding address based on his essay The Legacy of The Somme: From Maldon to the Somme, which you can find in his new book Survivors Songs’. And Andrew Motion read us poems by Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes from his 2003 First World War Anthology. It was superb evening.
Early next summer we are hoping to organise another tour of the Flanders battlefields and their poetry connections. I should be glad to hear from you, my e mail address is given below, if you are interested in joining this trip and would like to know more about it. The War Poetry Review, the first issue of the WPA Journal, was well received by WPA members, students of War Poetry and academics and we are working now on the next issue which will be published in early summer 2009.
We have more than a hundred members throughout the world and our membership, and reputation, is growing. If we are to achieve what we want to do we need more members, many more members. We also need funds to achieve the purposes for which the WPA was established, run our events and publish our Journal and develop our website. So in addition to renewing your subscriptions, which I encourage you warmly now to do, please will you tell your friends and anyone who is interested about us and encourage others to take an interest in the WPA and join and support us. In addition if you have ideas for funding and know of grants, bodies or individuals who might help, I would be very pleased to hear from you. The Committee also wants to hear from you with your ideas about the WPA and what you would like to see us do. Occasionally we require additional support on the Committee or assistance on a particular project and if you have skills from which we could benefit and want to help, do please let us know.
I send a particular message of greeting to our life members and thank you very much indeed for your continued support. We have a continuing long term, indeed life, relationship and I should be especially interested in your views as to the future of your Association and how also you can help us develop.
Finally I should like to thank very much indeed the WPA Committee, including our President Paul O’Prey, Angela Bolger, Vanessa Davis, Dunstan Ward and Patrick Villa for all their hard work and also their good company. Nothing would happen without them.

David Worthington
david@sancreed.demon.co.uk