Cahal Dallat : Arts

Arts

With fellow lecturers at 49th Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, 2008

(Photo: Massimo Bacigalupo)
In discussion with Hans-Magnus Enzensberger at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, 2005

(Photo: Peter Everard-Smith)
Gasworks Walls & Marble Halls: Joyce & the Making of Musical Choices: lecture/reading/music at Kansas City Irish Fest 2015 by Cahal Dallat & poet Anne-Marie Fyfe (Photos by John Baucher)

Talks, Lectures, Readings, Classes

Poet, musician, critic, Cahal Dallat has given poetry readings, played (bandoneon, musette-accordion, mando-fiddle, balalaika, piano, clarinet, soprano-sax &c) and talked on literature, religion, drama, politics, film, Ireland, bandoneons and the Cold War, India, Spain-and-the-Thirties in Britain & the US, art, Yeats & lutes, science-fiction, tango, Russian “Silver Age” poets, jazz, Celtic baroque, Joyce and Bohemia &c, throughout Britain, Ireland and the US, as well as teaching poetry seminars & creative-writing classes, chairing lectures, panels & discussions, and interviewing writers & artists over many years at conferences, universities, colleges & schools, bookstores & literary & arts venues, & festivals including … the Voice Box on London’s South Bank, Aldeburgh Festival & Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour, Poetry Society/Somerset House, the John Hewitt Spring-Festival/Summer-Schools in the North of Ireland, Glasgow’s Celtic Connections, Bridlington Poetry Festival, Essex Poetry Festival, Torbay Poetry Festival, Arvon Foundation, StAnza: Scotland’s Poetry Festival, Aspects (Bangor NI) Irish Literature Festival, Brighton Festival, Ilkley Festival, Lyth Arts Centre, Cafe Ibsen Limassol, Wokingham’s ArtsBar, Kansas City Irish Fest, Kent & Sussex Poetry Society, Westchester Festival (NY), Clemson Literary Festival (South Carolina), Tor House Foundation (Carmel CA), WB Yeats Society of New York at Glucksman Ireland House NYU, WB Yeats Society of Savannah, Georgia, One-City-One-Book (Belfast), Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans, Southern Historical Collection at UNC, Chapel Hill, Ware Poets, the Crypt in Islington, Over the Edge at Sheridan’s Cheese Shop in Galway, the Belfast Festival at Queen’s, Bedford Park Festival, Magdalene College’s Year-in-Literature Festival & Yeats International Summer School in Sligo.

Essays and Reviews

C.L. Dallat’s work on Irish writers appears in:

Contemporary Literary Criticism (Gale, US),
The Glow upon the Fringe (VAC, Derry),
Returning to Ourselves (Lagan, Belfast)
& in Acumen, Verse, Wasafiri, Talking Verse, The North, Gairfish, Southfield, Poetry Ireland Review, Honest Ulsterman, Causeway, Fortnight, The Hopkins Review & New Ohio Review.

He has written for the TLS, Guardian, Poetry Review, Magma, Poetry London and Magill (Dublin).

A long-standing contributor to radio arts programmes — including Kaleidoscope, Nightwaves and Arts Extra (plus, occasionally, BBC World TV News) — he has been, since 1998, a regular panellist on BBC Radio 4’s weekly arts & panel discussion, Saturday Review.

Interviews

C.L. Dallat has interviewed & chaired panel discussions with a range of writers including Colm Toibin, Mark Doty, Hans Magnus Enszenberger, Roger McGough, John Banville, Paul Muldoon, Tom Sleigh, Glenn Patterson, Thomas Lynch, Dennis Nurkse, Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Hector McDonnell, Gillian Slovo, Hannah Lowe, Clare Short, Goran Simic, John McCarthy, Eva Hoffman, Daljit Nagra, Ciaran Hinds, Darcus Howe, Bernard McLaverty…

Talks/Performances

Joint lit.hist talks/reading/music events with Anne-Marie Fyfe

To Sweeten Ireland’s Wrong: Music, Poetry & the Easter Rising, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro GA & WB Yeats Society, Savannah GA
Tangled Weave: Music & Irish Literature, Auburn University, Auburn AL & Carson-Newman University, Jefferson City TN
Electric Light: Seamus Heaney, A Life in Poetry, Hunter College, NY
A Hundred Thousand Stages: W.B. Yeats 150th Anniversary Lecture (with Anne-Marie Fyfe), Bedford Park Festival, London
Carolina Two-Step: from Ayrshire to Appalachia via Antrim County, Southern Historical Collection/Southern Folklife Collection, UNC, Chapel Hill NC
Gasworks Walls & Marble Halls: James Joyce & the Making of Choices, Catawba College, Salisbury NC, & KCIrishFest, Kansas City MO
Tower and Song: Robinson & Una Jeffers in Ireland, Tor House Foundation, Carmel CA
Carmel to Cushendun: Robinson & Una Jeffers in Ireland, Big Arts Festival, Cushendun, Co. Antrim
From Brian Boru to the Foggy Dew: Music, Poetry & the Easter Rising, West Belfast Festival, Seattle Irish Festival, & Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans

Lectures:

Charles Causley: the Sounding Heart, A Centenary Lecture presented by The Poetry Society & Charles Causley Trust
Pack Up Your Troubles: Generational Responses to Heaney’s Responsible Tristia, The Place for Poetry, Goldsmiths College, London
Room to Rhyme: Poets from the North of Ireland, Lenoir Rhyne College, Hickory NC
Land of Heart’s Desire: An Annual WB Yeats Walk, Bedford Park Festival, London
… and as a virtual walk for WBY Society of NY at NYU and at Mapping Yeats Symposium at Univ. Missouri, KC
A country road, a tree, evening: Beckett, W.B. Yeats and brother Jack, WBY Society of NY at NYU
Mapping Beckett, The Bookshop Theatre at Cockpit Theatre, London
Russian poets of the Silver Age: Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva & Akhmatova, Aldeburgh Festival
Lute-Thronged, Rook-Delighting Heaven, Yeats International Summer School, Sligo
WB Yeats: Meditations in Time of War, Poetry Society/Poetry School, Somerset House, London
Among A Crowd: Isolation & Irish Writing, Elizabeth Bowen Conference, Goldsmiths College
The Fall and Rise of Bedford Park, Bedford Park Festival, London
WB Yeats: Dream-Visions & Bedford Park, Bedford Park Festival, London
Why Poetry Matters: Writers Here and Now, University of Maryland, College Park MD
Crazily Tangled: Poetic Roots in the Subsoil, Magee College, University of Ulster
Writing and Reeling, Year of Literature, Magdalene, Cambridge
Young Turks and Old Traditions in Irish Drama, Kaleidoscope Special, BBC Radio 4
Conscience and the Republic: Seamus Heaney & Political Poetry, Sevenoaks School, Kent
Varieties of Irish-English, English Language Conference, Richmond-upon-Thames College
The Importance of Being Irish: Wilde & Social Satire, Latymer Upper School London
Losing the Faith: Joyce & the Art of Making Choices, Dulwich Festival, London
Victorian Gothic & Conor McPherson’s Drama, Dulwich Festival, London
Portrait of the Irish Writer as a Young Man, Latymer Upper School, London
Before the Troubles: Seamus Heaney & Times of Change, Sevenoaks School, Kent
New Answers to the Old Question, Bryanston School, Dorset

—for The John Hewitt International Summer School:

A Single Flame: Radical Reformers & Cradle Catholics
Strangers in the Capitol: John Hewitt & “The Colony”
Ulster Voices: Poetries of Heaney, Hewitt & Montague*
The Locust Eaters: Poetry before Heaney
Sleeping Beasts: Paramilitaries & Policemen in Gary Mitchell’s Drama
Forging an Identity: John Hewitt and the Glens of Antrim
The Sure Acre: An Introduction to John Hewitt
The Other Sort/The Other Side: Difference in Hewitt and Heaney

—for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour:

readings/talks/seminars on Langston Hughes, John Clare, Octavio Paz, Wallace Stephens, W.H. Auden, Arthur Rimbaud, Louis MacNeice, Jorie Graham, Derek Mahon, C. Day-Lewis, Osip Mandelstam, Michael Longley, Stephane Mallarmé, Ciaran Carson, Cesar Vallejo, Dan Chiasson, Anna Akhmatova, John Ashbery, W.B. Yeats, Medbh McGuckian, Marina Tsvetaeva, Pablo Neruda, Michael Donaghy, Paul Muldoon, Boris Pasternak, Charles Baudelaire, Philip Levine, Seamus Heaney…