Cahal Dallat : Diary

Diary

Mon 18 Nov 8pm: Talking Transatlantic with Jane Hirshfield: reading & in-conversation with Cahal Dallat

New-York-born poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield makes a welcome & much requested, much anticipated return to Coffee-House Poetry’s #poetrymonday talking transatlantic reading/interview series (with poet & critic Cahal Dallat), following her recent tour of China & the publication of her eleventh book of poetry, The Asking: New & Selected Poems, earlier this year by both Bloodaxe in the UK & Knopf in the US.

Recognised by The New York Times Magazine as ‘one of the most important writers in the world today’, Hirshfield has been praised by Nobel-Prize-winner Czesław Miłosz for her ‘profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings’, & celebrated by former US Poet Laureate Kay Ryan as an ‘eloquent and exacting’ poet. Her poems, according to Judith Kitchen ‘negotiate the difficulty of living while, at the same time, paying homage to what life has to offer’.

Hirshfield has long explored the poetry/science relationship (including as artist-in-residence at a Univ. California neuroscience program), is one of American poetry’s leading ecological thinkers, founded an online and travelling exhibit exploring the poetry/science interface/intersection, & in July 2024 became the first American & the first woman to receive the Zhongkun International Poetry Prize at Peking University.

Always an engaging conversationalist on the subject of poetry & the writer’s life (& author of two collections of essays on the world of poetry), Jane, like all our #poetrymonday interviewees, will be asked will be asked to reveal one specific secret in her poetry practice!

Major poetry event, free & online but limited to 100 so advance booking only: email info@coffeehousepoetry.org & Zoom link will be forwarded

@: Coffee-House Poetry

Fri 26 Oct—Sat 14 Dec, £280: Between the Lines #18, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat

(art: xydrick)

Explore an exciting new group of chosen poets — starting, this time, with enigmatic Canadian poet, Anne Carson — through each week’s ‘guest-poet’ handout (inc. poems, tutor comments, analysis, context etc), hone your own critical faculties on these & fellow workshoppers’ latest poems, & be poetically inspired to write great new poems as your weekly assignment!

Discover what’s between the lines… not just what poems ‘mean’ but how they achieve their effects — through form, structure, sound, imagery, etc, what they reveal about poet, identity, context, language, about the art & craft of poetry itself.

Join poet & critic Cahal Dallat, & his limited-numbers workshop group, in the latest episode of this exciting exploratory/critical course… all via e-mail, with an online post-final ‘wrap’ reading/get-together.

On six Fridays you’ll receive Cahal’s low-down on the week’s hand-picked paragon poet plus — after week-one — your own & fellow-workshoppers’ new poems, critiqued, plus the group’s collated critical responses to your week-before poem, each other’s, & the week’s poet-of-choice… all triggering the creative process for your next Friday poem submission!

Numbers limited, email coffpoetry@aol.com to apply, & booking link will be forwarded if place available.

@: Coffee-House Poetry

Recent

Sun 8 Sep, 2:30-5pm, £24: Poetry in the Pavements: explore the young WB Yeats’s West-London world with Cahal Dallat

A longing for the West of Ireland’s mystery & magnificence inspired WB Yeats, growing up near West London’s Turnham Green Station, but it was in the company of poets & authors, actors & anarchists in the Bohemian/Utopian artist’s colony of Bedford Park, that he honed his craft, developed his aesthetic, workshopped (& published!) his poems & wrote his first plays: leading, of course, to a national cultural revival/revolution, the Nobel Prize for Literature, & a uniquely significant place in 20th century poetry.

The WB Yeats Bedford Park Project has honoured Bedford Park’s role in fostering Yeats’s unique creative genius with Conrad Shawcross RA’s spiralling #EnwroughtLight gyre, between ‘the roadway’ and ‘the pavement grey’ on which Yeats stood to write his best known poem.

A chance to join the project’s founder, Irish poet Cahal Dallat, on a September Sunday stroll that includes the river island that inspired Innisfree, discovering en-route, places & people that fostered Yeats’s unique poetic genius such as Maud Gonne, Pissarro, Daniel O’Connell, Florence Farr, Sarojini Naidu, Whistler, William & May Morris, Aubrey Beardsley, Sergius Stepniak, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, The Rhymers’ Club & WB’s own fascinating family.

Starts at: Ravenscourt Park Tube Station, District Line, West London
Ends at: #EnwroughtLight Artwork, by Turnham Green Tube Station, District Line, West London

Numbers limited, email coffpoetry@aol.com to apply, & booking link will be forwarded if place available.

Fri 6 Sep—Sat 26 Oct, £280: Between the Lines #18, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Thu 13 Jun, 7.30 for 8pm, £10: Bedford Park Festival — Yeats-Birthday Poetry Night: ‘In the Deep Heart’s Core’ with special guest Jeremy Vine plus guest poets hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat

Celebrating WB Yeats’s famous line (written in Bedford Park!), tonight’s poets read poems that touch the ‘deep heart’s core’, along with broadcaster Jeremy Vine who, last year, launched (with a great Yeats reading!) Bedford Park’s unique Yeats smartphone audio trail.

Join us on Nobel-Prize-winning ‘local poet’ WB Yeats’s birthday, for poems of love — of people & place, past & present, home & elsewhere — introduced by Coffee-House Poetry organiser, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe (preceded by music & drinks on the lawn by the #EnwroughtLight artwork from 7:30 pm)…

…with, after the interval, Chiswick resident Jeremy Vine, reading & discussing favourite poems with poet & Yeats/BedfordPk project-founder Cahal Dallat.

And do bring your own ‘heart’ poem (max. 25 lines) for a chance to read!

Hosted by: Bedford Park Festival
Booking: Bedford Park Festival
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Church, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX

Fri 24 May—Sat 13 Jul, £280: Between the Lines #17 – Focus on Form#2, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat

art: mountain road, murad jawed

Discover — & explore for yourself as you write new poems — the pleasure & power of familiar (& not-so) poetic forms in a workshop that focuses on how form functions, with examples from expert exponents analysed in a weekly discourse by poet & critic Cahal Dallat.

Plus your weekly challenge, to create your own poem in the featured form: not to mention the reciprocal opportunity to hone your critical/close-reading skills on fellow poets’ poems & the week’s exemplars!

All via email with an online post-final ‘wrap’ reading/get-together: on six Fridays you’ll receive Cahal’s low-down on form-of-the-week with instances & analysis of that particular form, plus – Mondays, from week-two – workshop participants’ own new ‘form’ poems complete with tutor critique, plus the group’s collated critical responses to last week’s poems.

And you’ll respond with your own (next) new-minted & to-be-workshopped poem in the featured form, plus your thoughts on the handout examples & on fellow-poets’ creations.

Numbers limited, email coffpoetry@aol.com to apply, & booking link will be forwarded if place available.

@: Coffee-House Poetry

Thu 28 Mar: Poetry Worth Hearing Episode 22

This episode features Cahal Dallat, poet, critic and musician, talking about W.B.Yeats in his capacity as founder-organiser of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project. Cahal also reads some of his own poems from his recent collection, Beautiful Lofty Things. In keeping with Cahal’s talk, the theme for this episode is ‘after’ – in the sense of ‘influence’, or temporally, or anything else poets took it to be. So we have poems from Lyn Thornton, Helen Overell, Matt Bryden, Trisha Broomfield, Stephen Paul Wren, Diana Bell, Heather Moulson, Simon Rees and Dinah Livingstone.

Produced by Kathleen McPhilemy

Fri 16 Feb—Sat 6 Apr: Between the Lines #16, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Fri 5 Jan—Sat 24 Feb: Between the Lines #15 – Focus on Form#1, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

2023

Thu 14 Dec, 7.30pm: Inaugural WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture by Roy Foster

To celebrate WB Yeats’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm one hundred years ago on 10th December 1923, we’re delighted to welcome his biographer, Professor Roy Foster, to the poet & dramatist’s boyhood London neighbourhood (to the Yeats family’s parish church, in fact), to deliver the first WB Yeats Bedford Park Lecture.

R.F. Foster FBA FRHistS FRSL is former Carroll Professor at Hertford College, Oxford and author, as Yeats’s official biographer, of the two-volume WB Yeats, A Life — The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 and The Arch Poet 1915-1939

Introduced by: Cahal Dallat
Hosted by: Chiswick Book Festival
At: St. Michael & All Angels Church, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd, Chiswick, London W4 1TX

Wed 22 Nov, 7pm–9pm: Poetry Masterclass with Cahal Dallat

A chance to be part of a one-off, limited-numbers online poetry masterclass with poet Cahal Dallat (long-standing reviewer on BBC Radio 4 arts programmes and in TLS, Guardian and literary journals) who runs the popular Between the Lines critical workshop series for Coffee-House Poetry.

Participants, once booked, will submit their poem a week before the online workshop: in the session Cahal will take each poem on-screen in turn giving his detailed critique and opening up group discussion of the poem itself and of his analysis and advice. A real opportunity not just to have your poem explored but to hone your critical approach to poetry in general and to polish your self-editing skills.

Fundraiser for: Causley Trust

Fri 27 Oct—Sat 16 Dec: Between the Lines #14, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Mon 30 Oct, 7pm: Stanza 2 Open Mic Zoom with guest Cahal Dallat

• Reading
• Questions and Answers
• Interval
• Open Mic Poets

Sun 8 Oct, 2.30-5pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: WB Yeats literary walk with Cahal Dallat

(photo: Richard Ivey)

Every poet has, surely, their own Land of Heart’s Desire. For 1923’s Nobel-Prize-winner, WB Yeats, the sublime landscape, and the lore and legends of the West of Ireland inspired his early work. But poets need a network of publishing, poetry groups, friends, and literary/artistic connections in which to thrive, and Yeats’s uniquely Irish genius was fostered in the improbably progressive Bohemian/Utopian ambience of the beautiful and unique 19c Arts-&-Crafts artists’ colony that is Bedford Park, in Chiswick, West London, where he spent much of his youth.

Join Irish poet, Cahal Dallat, founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Project which has led to the unveiling of Conrad Shawcross RA’s dazzling Yeatsian gyre outside the Yeats family’s former parish church (and who’s lectured on Yeats at a great many colleges, conferences, festivals and societies) on a Centenary stroll round the young poet’s favourite haunts, by way of Kelmscott House and the island that inspired the world’s best-loved poem of exile, and on to Bedford Park. And take in, en route, talk of Pissarro, O’Connell, Wm. and May Morris, Stepniak, Florence Farr, George Bernard Shaw, Henley, Jack B and the Yeats sisters, plus actors, anarchists, occultists, and much more.

All proceeds go to WB Yeats Bedford Park Project

starts at: Ravenscourt Park Tube Station, West London
ends at: #EnwroughtLight Artwork by Turnham Green Tube Station, West London

Fri 8 Sep—Sat 28 Oct, £280: Between the Lines #13, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

(pic: Brooklyn Bridge, streeteasy.com)

Wed 14 Jun, 7.30 for 8pm: Bedford Park Festival celebrates Yeats’s Birthday: Only My Dreams with special guest Marina Warner

…plus London and local poets hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat

1923-Nobel-Prizewinner WB Yeats, wrote ‘I being poor have only my dreams’ in his Bedford-Park-era poem that inspired Conrad Shawcross RA’s dazzling #EnwroughtLight artwork!

And so he wrote, right here in Bedford Park, as a young man, of his dreams of love, of art, of elsewhere, of literary greatness.

Join us in this year’s Festival poetry-evening marking Yeats’s June 13th birthday & hear today’s poets with their poetry of dreams, introduced by Coffee-House Poetry organiser, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe. (Preceded by music and drinks on the lawn by #EnwroughtLight from 7.30pm)

And after the interval, listen to author Marina Warner, who’s written on Yeats, myth, fairytale & symbol, read & discuss her choice of literary favourites with poet & Yeats/BedfordPk project-founder Cahal Dallat.

And bring your own poem on dreams, wishes, aspirations & desires (max. 25 lines) for a chance to read!

@: St. Michael & All Angels Church, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd, Chiswick, London W4 1TX

Tue 13 Jun, 6pm, Yeats’s Birthday: Online Talk: The Yeatses, Morris and Kelmscott House by Cahal Dallat

While Wm Morris’s ideas were central to the first garden-suburb’s aesthetic, for young London-Irish Bedford Park resident William Butler Yeats, Morris himself was somewhere between patron and hero. And Kelmscott House, where his sister Lily worked for May Morris, became both focal point for Sunday-night meetings with artistic and political London, and hub of a network that would fire his political thinking, foster his Nobel-Prize-winning career as dramatist and one of the best-loved poets in English literature, and inspire (with his sisters Lily and Lolly) a Celtic cultural revival.

Chiswick-based Irish poet, Cahal Dallat, founder of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project and creator of the Discover Bedford Park with WB Yeats smartphone trail which features Kelmscott House as one of the ten West London locations that nurtured the young poet’s talent, explores – on Yeats’s birthday (13th June) in his Nobel-Centenary year – why Morris and his circle mattered so much to the emerging genius.

Hosted by: The William Morris Society, Kelmscott House
@: Live talk via Zoom.

Fri 3 Mar—Sat 29 Apr: Between the Lines #12 – focus on form#2, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

(pic: Urban Camouflage: Keith Thomson)

Sat 28 Jan, 11am, Discover Bedford Park with WB Yeats smartphone poetry-places launch with Jeremy Vine

Come along and join us as we launch an exciting and unique visitor experience Discover Bedford Park with WB Yeats focused on Conrad Shawcross’s @YeatsBedfordPk artwork #EnwroughtLight and taking phone/personal-device users around eight great Yeats poetry places in the immediate locale, each with directions, images, a short talk on the Yeats/Bedford-Park context/inspiration, and, at each, a Yeats poem on audio by 2022-Oscar-and-BAFTA-nominated actor Ciarán Hinds.

With tech-savvy Jeremy Vine showing us how it all works and starting off the trail: bring your smartphone/tablet and no, you don’t have to do the walk on the day, just enjoy the launch! Jeremy’s been an enthusiastic supporter of our project from day one, as well as of so many Chiswick ventures including Bedford Park Festival and Bedford Park Bicycle Club

Free public event: everyone welcome!
Hosted by: Chiswick Book Festival director, Torin Douglas, with YeatsBedfordPk project organiser Cahal Dallat and guests Anne-Marie Fyfe and Polly Devlin
@: the green triangle outside St. Michael & All Angels (opp. Turnham Grn Tube), Bath Rd, Chiswick, London W4 1TX

…media:
Sean Rocks talks to Cahal Dallat on #WorldPoetryDay for RTÉ’s Arena with readings from Ciarán Hinds (17 mins)
Samira Ahmed on BBC Radio4’s flagship arts magazine Front Row with a 15-min feature (@ 18 mins in)
Lucinda MacPherson reports for The Chiswick Calendar
Twitter clip of Jeremy Vine reading The Second Coming
Nick Hennegan talks to Cahal Dallat on Bohemian Britain on Resonance 104.4FM

2022

Wed 2 Nov, 8pm, The John Hewitt Birthday Reading with Cahal Dallat, Rachael Hegarty and Annemarie Ní Churreáin.

Presented by The John Hewitt Society in association with the Belfast International Arts Festival & Poetry Ireland

Cahal Dallat, poet, musician and critic, was born in Ballycastle, Co Antrim and now lives in London. Winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize and Strokestown International Poetry Prize, he is founder/organiser of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Project. Poetry collections include The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff) and his latest, Beautiful Lofty Things (Salmon Poetry, 2022).
Rachael Hegarty is a Dubliner whose debut collection Flight Paths Over Finglas, won the Shine Strong Award in 2018. A child survivor of the Talbot Street Bomb, her collection May Day 1974 (Salmon, 2019) has received international acclaim. Her third collection, Dancing with Memory (Salmon, 2021) is a ballroom of memory for her mother who lived with Alzheimer’s.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Bloodroot, published by Doire Press in 2017, was shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award and the Julie Suk Award. Other collections include Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (Gallery Press, 2021). She is a recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award and co-recipient of the Markievicz Award.

Booking: www.belfastinternationalartsfestival.com
Venue: John Hewitt Bar, 51 Donegall Street, Belfast BT1 2FH

Fri 7 Oct—Sat 3 Dec: Between the Lines #11, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Tue 6 Sep, 4.30pm, free, WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork by Conrad Shawcross RA: Unveiling

Free public event by @YeatsBedfordPk with Yeats poems from local schoolchildren, music by Irish Heritage musicians, address by Rt. Rev. & Rt. Hon. Dr. Rowan Williams, poet and former Archbishop of Canterbury, hosted by Cahal Dallat. All welcome.

@: the green triangle outside St. Michael & All Angels (opp. Turnham Grn Tube), Bath Rd, Chiswick, London W4 1TX

Tue 6 Sep, 6 for 6.30pm, The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation celebrates WB Yeats in Bedford Park with Ciaran Hinds, Sinead Cusack and guests for WB Yeats Bedford Park Project

The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour marks today’s unveiling of the Yeats Bedford Park Artwork, Enwrought Light, with great actors reading great Yeats poems. Readers include actors Sinéad Cusack, 2022 Oscar and BAFTA nominee, Ciarán Hinds, Ruth Negga and Jeremy Irons, director: Shevaun Wilder
Musical prelude from Irish Heritage
@: St. Michael & All Angels (opp. Turnham Grn Tube), Bath Rd, Chiswick, London W4 1TX
Bar open from 6pm.

Mon 13 June, 7.30 for 8pm: Bedford Park Festival Poetry Evening: The Poetry of Things

Poems about things everyday & eclectic, keepsakes curious or commonplace, that make up our world, our memories; plus launch of Chiswick poet Cahal Dallat’s latest poetry collection Beautiful Lofty Things (Salmon Poetry, 2022).

So do bring a favourite poem, about an object or artefact, whether by you or from a well-known poet (max. 25 lines).

With special guest: Cahal Dallat, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe
Plus: music and refreshments.
@: St. Michael & All Angels (opp. Turnham Grn Tube), Bath Rd, Chiswick, London W4 1TX

Mon 23 May, 8pm (UK time): Tom Sleigh & Cahal Dallat: reading & in-conversation (free online event hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe) @: Coffee-House Poetry

Two poets, two new collections, & a change in our transatlantic format as US poet, Tom Sleigh, & Coffee-House Poetry’s London-based Irish poet Cahal Dallat — who’s interviewed our guests for many years — both read from their latest publications & talk about their own & each other’s work/writing-lives.

Tom Sleigh’s poetry collections, include House of Fact, House of Ruin, Station Zed &, just published, The King’s Touch (Graywolf, Feb 2022): he is the author of the essay collections The Land between Two Rivers & Interview with a Ghost. A Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College, Tom lives in Brooklyn, & during the last eight years, he has also worked as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, & Libya.

Cahal Dallat’s latest collection is Beautiful Lofty Things from Salmon Poetry. Poet, musician & critic, he is founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project, winner of the 2017 Keats-Shelley Prize, & a regular BBC R4 contributor. He has been Writer-in-Residence at Lenoir-Rhyne University, Hickory NC & a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin TX. His previous poetry collections include The Year of Not Dancing & Morning Star.

Sun 15 May, 7pm (UK time): Reading from Beautiful Lofty Things in interview with Olivia O’Leary on The Poetry Programme, RTÉ Radio1

Fri 13 May—Sat 16 Jul: Between the Lines #10 – Focus on Form#1, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Wed 20 Apr, 7.30 pm, free: What did WB Yeats ever do for Bedford Park (and vice versa)?

Free public lecture by: Cahal Dallat
With Yeats readings by: Anne-Marie Fyfe
Introduced by: Fr. Kevin Morris
@: St. Michael & All Angels Church, Bedford Park

Who was WB Yeats? What makes him unique in twentieth-century world literature? And unique among so many Bedford Park writers & artists?

And how does Conrad Shawcross RA’s Yeats-inspired #EnwroughtLight, to be unveiled this summer, symbolise and celebrate progressive, aesthetic, multi-cultural, 19c Arts-&-Crafts Bedford-Park’s fostering of a Chiswick schoolboy from an Irish migrant family – a fostering that led to some of the world’s best-loved poems, to a Nobel Prize, and to Yeats’s status as Ireland’s national poet!

WB Yeats Bedford Park Project founder/organiser, Cahal Dallat, conjures up the Bohemian/Utopian atmosphere that made Yeats a poet, explores the meanings of Shawcross’s dazzling Yeats/Bedford-Park vision and its significance at the gateway to Yeats’s boyhood London neighbourhood, and describes the visitor experience currently under development which will share Bedford Park’s unique history and Yeats’s poetry with the local community, future generations, and poetry/arts-lovers worldwide.

@: St. Michael & All Angels Church, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX

Fri 28 Jan–Sat 19 Mar: Between the Lines #9, a 7-wk close reading & critical masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Mon 17 Jan 8pm: Jane Hirshfield, reading & in-conversation with Cahal Dallat (free online event hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe) @: Coffee-House Poetry

(image: Curt Richter)

Next guest in our US poets’ #poetrymonday reading/interview series (with poet & critic Cahal Dallat) is New-York-born poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield, an ‘eloquent and exacting’ poet according to Kay Ryan.

Author of nine poetry collections, Hirshfield has been praised by Nobel-Prize-winner Czesław Miłosz for her ‘profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings’: & Judith Kitchen has written on how Hirshfield’s poems ‘negotiate the difficulty of living while, at the same time, paying homage to what life has to offer’.

Hirshfield has long explored the poetry/science relationship (including as artist-in-residence at a Univ. California neuroscience program), an intersection that takes on new global/climate-crisis urgency in her just-launched latest collection Ledger (Penguin, Fall 2021).

free online event, numbers limited, advance booking only, email info@coffeehousepoetry.org to apply
& PayPal booking link will be forwarded if place available.

2021

Fri 17 Sep—Sat 6 Nov: Between the Lines#8 — Focus on Form, a new 7-wk critical/craft masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

(pic: Urban Camouflage: Keith Thomson)

Mon 14 Jun, 8pm: Naomi Shihab Nye: reading & in-conversation (free online event) with Cahal Dallat @: Coffee-House Poetry

Mon 14 Jun—Sat 24 Jul: Between the Lines #7, a new 7-wk critical/craft masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Mon 22 Mar, 8pm: Dana Gioia: reading & in-conversation (free online event) with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Mon 25 Jan—Mon 15 Mar: Between the Lines #6, a new 7-wk critical/craft masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

2020

Mon 30 Nov, 8pm: Joshua Bennett: Reading & In-Conversation for Coffee-House Poetry #poetrymondays

Hear rising US poetry star Joshua Bennett read from just-launched Owed (Penguin, Sep 2020) & The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), & talk with poet & critic Cahal Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry #poetrymondays

Joshua Bennett has read at the White House at the invitation of President Barack Obama, is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire &, in addition to his poetry publications, is the author of Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (Harvard University Press, 2020) & Spoken Word: A Cultural History, forthcoming from Knopf. His 2016 collection The Sobbing School — a National Poetry Series Selection & NAACP Image Award finalist — was described by Gregory Pardlo as an arresting debut…abounding in tenderness and rich with character.

Mon 12 Oct—Mon 23 Nov, £110: Between the Lines #5: Focus on Form, a new 7-wk critical/craft masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

(pic: Flood: Niken Anindita)

(See Between the Lines #8 above)

Mon 20 Jul—Mon 24 Aug: Between the Lines #4, a new 7-wk critical/craft masterclass with Cahal Dallat (see above)

Mon 10—Sat 15 Aug, Summer Poetry in the Glens of Antrim with Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat

(2020 course postponed)

After the success (& fun) of the past two years’ Summer Poetry in the Glens of Antrim, your chance to join Coffee-House Poetry tutors Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat in August 2020 for another inspiring, lively, productive (!) residential poetry week, & enjoy the classic comforts of full-board hospitality in the historic Londonderry Arms (built 1847), a traditional family-run hotel, at Carnlough Bay on the dramatic Coast Road in the heart of the Nine Glens.

An Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, WM Thackeray thought Antrim’s coastal route, through the nine deep glens & their high headlands, more sublime than Monaco’s Grand Corniche, & described the Glens themselves as Switzerland in miniature.

Daily sessions will include new themed creative workshops, editing/polishing masterclasses, assignments, discovering poets/poetries, traditional forms vs freedom, shape & shape-shifting, & — at the cutting edge of contemporary writing — crossing poetry/prose/lyric-essay/creative-nonfiction boundaries.

With ample time to write, walk, explore & simply enjoy: plus after-dinner pleasures including poetry readings/games/challenges, & music in the Londonderry’s Coach House bar.

Mid-week our poetry outing takes us to Ballycastle Harbour where we board the fast (25-minute) ferry to Rathlin Island (pop. 150), the Enchanted Island in Longfellow’s Poems of Place anthology, long an inspiration to poets & novelists, with its dramatic scenery, three lighthouses & RSPB seabird sanctuary, a fascinating history including Marconi & the world’s first commercial wireless link, the quiet pleasures of Church Bay, & lunch at the island’s Manor House.

@: Londonderry Arms Hotel, 20 Harbour Rd Carnlough BT44 0EU

Mon 27 Jul—Sat 1 Aug, The First John Hewitt Digital Festival of Literature and Ideas

In the 33rd year of the John Hewitt International Summer School it’s all happening online for the first time with a range of free events including, poetrywise:

Thu 30 Jul, 5.30 Gallery Goes with… poets Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Tom French and Vona Groarke, introduced and interviewed by Nessa O’Mahony
Fri 31 Jul, 7.30 Poetry Gala with Terrance Hayes & Mona Arshi, hosted by poet Paul Maddern
Sat 1 Aug, 4.20 Going Equipped with a Pen, poems written by students from the Prison Arts Foundation
Sat 1 Aug, 5.30 Out of My Time: John Hewitt on Brexit, COVID, shifting borders and altered identities?
- John Hewitt’s radical vision for the region and its relationships – with the rest of Ireland and with the rest of the United Kingdom – was ahead of its time: Dublin-based Belfast poet and academic, Gerald Dawe, Belfast novelist and lecturer Heather Richardson, and London-based Ballycastle-born poet and critic, Cahal Dallat, read Hewitt’s poetry and discuss what it can or can’t tell us about community, identity, and the importance of the arts in our own fraught times.

- and for those with a taste for current affairs and the state of the world about us,

Fri 31 Jul, 4.00 The Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse with Misha Glenny in conversation with Cahal Dallat

- plus Donal Ryan, Michael Hughes, Eimear McBride and more, plus panel discussion with Arts Council Chief Execs, north & south, Can the Arts return to health without a vaccine?

Sun 7 Jun and Sun 14 Jun, 2.30-5pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: WB Yeats Literary Walk with Cahal Dallat (cancelled)

Every poet has, surely, their own Land of Heart’s Desire. For Nobel-Prize-winning poet WB Yeats the sublime landscape & legends of the West of Ireland inspired his early work. But poets need a network of publishing, poetry groups, friends, & literary-&-artistic connections in which to thrive, & Yeats’s unique genius was fostered in the unique & curious 19c Arts-&-Crafts garden-suburb/artists’-colony that was Bedford Park, in Chiswick, West London, where he spent much of his youth.

Join Irish poet & critic Cahal Dallat (founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project, who has lectured on WB Yeats for Poetry Society, Sligo’s Yeats International Summer School, Mapping Yeats 2015 at UMKC, WBY Society at NYU etc) on a Sunday stroll (starts Ravenscourt Pk Tube, ends Turnham Grn Tube) round Yeats’s favourite haunts, by way of Upper Mall, along Thames riverside by Old Chiswick Churchyard to Bedford Park, taking in, en route, Pissarro, Pope, Thackeray, O’Connell, Wm. Morris, Whistler, Stepniak, Shaw, Holst, Henley, other Yeatses, actors, anarchists, occultists, typographers, & much more.

Sat 7 Jun, for WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project
Sun 14 Jun for Bedford Park Festival charities
&: Open-air walk from Ravenscourt Park Tube Station Hammersmith London

Thu 14 May—Thu 18 Jun: Between the Lines #3, see Between the Lines #6, see Mon 25 Jan 2021, above

Thu 27 Feb—Thu 2 Apr: Between the Lines #2, see Between the Lines #6, Mon 25 Jan 2021, above

Tue 25 Feb, 7.30pm: A Whole Day’s Dreaming: Yeats, the Thames, and Poetry

Host: Chiswick Pier Trust
Lecture by: Cahal Dallat with Yeats readings by Anne-Marie Fyfe

The Thames has long had a magnetic attraction for writers and artists but for Nobel-Prize-winning poet WB Yeats, growing up in nearby Bedford Park, the riverbanks between Chiswick Pier & Hammersmith were a vital resource: both a place to meet influential and inspirational people, and the source of one of the world’s best-loved poems of longing, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Chiswick poets Cahal Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe, both from Ireland’s Glens of Antrim, conjure up for us, through talk, excerpts from the young WB Yeats’s poems & letters, and a little music, Yeats’s late-19th-century Thames-side circle of poets, painters, playwrights, political thinkers and small-press publishers, and the natural riverbank world of willows, osiers, & water lapping with low sounds by the shore.
@: Chiswick Pier Trust. The Pier House, Corney Reach Way Chiswick W4 2UG

Mon 24 Feb, 7.30pm: Ciaran Carson—A Celebration

The Irish Literary Society is delighted to partner with The Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University Belfast to produce a celebration of the life and work of Ciaran Carson, the great Belfast poet and former Director of the Centre. Carson was due to deliver last year’s joint Irish Literary Society/Irish Texts Society annual lecture but his cancer diagnosis prevented his coming and we were saddened to hear news of his death in October 2019. The event will be presented by the current Director of the Centre, Glenn Patterson, and will feature music, song, readings and reflections from Liam Carson, Cahal Dallat, Martina Evans, Leontia Flynn, Roy Foster, Bernard O’Donoghue, James Conor Patterson…
@: The Bloomsbury Hotel, Gt Russell St Bloomsbury WC1B 3NN

Tue 14 Jan to Tue 18 Feb: Between the Lines, see Between the Lines #6, Mon 25 Jan 2021, above

2019

Poetry in Aldeburgh 2019

— Sat 9 Nov, 3-5pm, No Wall: Migrant Poets of the USA with Cahal Dallat
Reading workshop & discussion

Discover how, in a nation of predominantly migrant heritage where, ironically, migrant status is continually contested, migrant writing is often the new lifeblood of American poetry.

Cahal Dallat – after US travel/research including a Spring 2019 university poetry residency – explores the work of Richard Blanco (b. Madrid, in a Cuban exile family), Naomi Shihab Nye (b. Missouri with a Palestinian refugee father), Ocean Vuong (b. Ho Chi Minh City), Chen Chen (b. Xiamen, China) & Ada Limón (b. California, Latino heritage).
@: Cinema Studio, 51 High St
— Sat 9 Nov, 4-6pm, Memory Cloud—New Ways of Writing Memoir with Anne-Marie Fyfe
@: South Beach Lookout, 31 Cragg Path
— Sun 10 Nov, 10-11am, No Far Shore: Charting Unknown Waters, with Anne-Marie Fyfe, music by Cahal Dallat
‘Hear the tale of a coastal quest (in talk, excerpts, image & music) which took poet Anne-Marie Fyfe from her native Cushendall by way of Felixstowe, Orkney, Barra, Swansea & Cork to Cape Cod & Cape Breton Island. Looking into myth, memoir & the mesmerised horizon-gazing of maritime writers such as Virginia Woolf & Elizabeth Bishop, & back, emotionally, through shifting tidelines of memory to chart the hidden inlets & unexpected deeps in her own family narrative.’
@: Peter Pears Gallery,152 High St Aldeburgh

Coffee-House Poetry Oct/Nov/Dec

#sundaypoetry, 12-4pm, themed creative-writing workshops with Anne-Marie Fyfe
#poetrymondays, 8-10pm, readings hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
Book: Coffee-House Poetry
@: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Sun 20 Oct, 2.30-5 pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: WB Yeats Literary Walk with Cahal Dallat

Fri 13 Sep, 6.15pm, On the Pavements Grey: WB Yeats in Utopian Bedford Park

Lecture by: Cahal Dallat with Music, and Yeats readings by poet Anne-Marie Fyfe at the London Buddhist Vihara
The story of WB Yeats, who, though much inspired by West-of-Ireland legend, landscape and longing, spent two-thirds of his youth in London, mostly in Bedford Park, the diverse artists’-colony of actors, anarchists, Arts&Crafts practitioners, poets, painters, playwrights, & late-nineteenth-century seekers after wisdom & truth who fostered his unique Nobel-Prize-winning literary genius.

A rare opportunity to hear the Yeats/Bedford Park story from the founder/organiser of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project, Cahal dallat, in the unique setting of the Buddhist Vihara, in the building which was, from 1877 to 1939, The Bedford Park Club where Yeats’s father, painter John Butler Yeats joined in debates with fellow artists, writers, critics & political thinkers, where the young WB Yeats witnessed the pageants that were to inspire his symbolist drama & his co-founding of the Irish National Theatre, a particularly appropriate location, too, because of Yeats’s interest in his search for a spiritual dimension, in Hindu & Buddhist literature & teachings. (Chiswick Book Festival)
Venue: London Buddhist Vihara, 17 The Avenue London W4 1UD

Fri 13 Sep, 5—6pm, Poetry Competition Prize Giving

Poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, organiser of Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour, and former chair of the Poetry Society, will present the prizes for the Chiswick Book Festival’s 9th Young People’s Poetry Competition

Supported by ChiswickW4.com (Chiswick Book Festival)
Venue: London Buddhist Vihara, 17 The Avenue London W4 1UD

Mon 26—Sat 31 Aug, 2019 Summer Poetry in the Glens of Antrim

Residential poetry course with Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat
Venue: Londonderry Arms Hotel, 20 Harbour Rd Carnlough BT44 0EU

Mon 22—Sat 27 Jul, John Hewitt International Summer School 2019

… a week of readings (poetry, fiction & flash fiction), talks, lectures, discussions, creative writing, drama & music, with poets including Billy Collins, Kathryn Maris, Mona Arshi, Kerry Hardie, Fiona Benson, Mary Jean Chan, Tamar Yoseloff, Billy Ramsell, Nessa O’Mahony, Siobhan Campbell, Sarah Clancy & Zaffar Kunial; Terence Brown on poet John Hewitt, novelists including Kevin Barry, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Sarah Moss, Brian McGilloway, Jo Baker, Bernie McGill and much more
Venue: Marketplace Theatre, Armagh BT61 7BW

Sat 29 Jun, 7.15pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4:

Cahal Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe and guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 24 Jun, 8pm, Endings

…end-of-season poem-party celebrating finales, conclusions, and the last of anything & everything…

At the end of the day endings may be even more important to writers than beginnings, not just last lines, happy endings, twists-in-the-tail, poetic punchlines, final movements, literary denouements, epilogues, wrappings-up & post-scripts…

… but real-life endings, the end of summer, end of childhood, of a friendship, a relationship, job, the end of the rainbow, the year’s end, Land’s End (or Finisterre), coming to the end of the line, dead ends, the light at the end of the tunnel, Douglas Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Graham Greene’s End of the Affair, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Van Morrison’s Dark End of the Street or Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love.

Come along and listen to invited guests read their poems on this open-ended, never-ending theme, listen to endings-themed music (final movements, The Last Waltz and more…) & join in our not to serious ‘endings’ quiz: answers — & wine prizes — at the very end & we have, as ever, the final say!

Hosted by: Anne-Marie Fyfe with music and prize quiz by Cahal Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Sun 9 Jun, & Sun 16 Jun & Sun 23 Jun, 2.30-5 pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: WB Yeats Literary Walks with Cahal Dallat

Wed 12 Jun, 7.30 for 8pm, Poetry Places with special guest Imtiaz Dharker

Bedford Park Festival Poetry Evening 2019

We’ll be celebrating ‘poetry places’, from Wordsworth’s Lakeland to Clare’s Northamptonshire, from Yeats’s Sligo to Burns’s Ayrshire and Dylan Thomas’s Swansea, from rural idyll & Celtic mists to our great diverse, energetic, multicultural capital cities. So do bring a favourite poem of place, your own or by a well-known poet (max. 25 lines), to read in the first half. And after the interval, meet this year’s guest, poet, artist, film-maker & Queen’s Gold Medal award-winner, Imtiaz Dharker, with her personal literary choices. Born in Lahore, brought up in Glasgow, Imtiaz now divides her time between Wales, Mumbai and London.
Hosted by: Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX

Mon 10 Jun, 8pm, Born in the USA!

…celebrating American poets & poetry, with Dan O’Brien, Kathryn Maris, University of North Florida Poetry Group, plus singer/guitarist Mark Ari, & 21 Troubadour poets each with a favourite American poem

Hosted by: Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Mon 27 May, 8pm, What We Should Have Said:

…an entertaining, enlightening, innovative & unpredictable spoken-word shindig with Pat Boran, Martina Evans, Richard Douglas Pennant, Stuart Silver, & Peter Foggitt plus, before the break, twenty-one troubadours with poems on the theme of chance…

Sponsored by: Cegin Productions
Hosted by: Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Tue 7 May, 6.30-8.30pm, On the Pavements Grey: WB Yeats and Being Irish in London

US Launch of: WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project and
Lecture by: Cahal Dallat with Music, and Yeats readings by poet Anne-Marie Fyfe

Nobel-Prize-winning poet, WB Yeats, though much inspired by Irish legend, landscape & longing, spent two-thirds of his young life among the London roadways & pavements grey mentioned in one of his best-loved poems.

That experience, familiar to so many Irish families whether manual workers, or writers such as Sheridan, Goldsmith, Moore, Shaw, & Wilde, was crucial to shaping both Yeats’s (& Ireland’s) identity, & 19th/20th-century English literature, a mutual cultural interdependence often not fully appreciated in Britain.

For most of his youth Yeats lived, with his family, in London’s Bedford Park, the first-ever ‘garden-suburb’, developed by Dublin-born Jonathan Carr (from another family of artists) & much influenced by both American Utopian/communitarian ideals & British/American Arts&-Crafts aesthetics, a community whose diverse ‘artists colony’ residents, fostered the young Yeats’s genius.

Irish poet, musician, & literary critic, Cahal Dallat, has lived within a few blocks of the Yeats family’s two Bedford Park homes for all his adult life & — fascinated by the ways in which Willie, his father, & artistic siblings, negotiated the metropolis’s social networks, while dreaming of Sleuth Wood or Ben Bulben in the West of Ireland — has long lectured on the importance to 19th century London of a range of Irish artists (poets, painters, playwrights, composers, & politicians, for politics, too, is an art in Ireland); on the equal importance, to often penniless, exiled Irish geniuses, of London’s complex cultural intersections & opportunities; and on the significance of Bedford Park’s progressive fostering of culture & anti-imperialist ideas on Ireland’s Celtic Revival & subsequent struggle for political independence.

The Lecture marks the US launch of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project bringing together local West London residents with British public figures, & with Irish, American & international poets and academics, to honour both Bedford Park’s role in Yeats’s artistic development and Yeats’s importance in Britain’s & Ireland’s shared cultural life, by placing a permanent contemporary artwork at the heart of this progressive & beautifully preserved English nineteenth century garden-suburb.

Hosted by: Ambassador Daniel Mulhall and Mrs. Greta Mulhall
Sponsored by: Embassy of Ireland
Venue: The Ambassador’s Residence, 2244 ‘S’ Street NW, Washington DC 20008

Jan—May, Writer-in-Residence

…(jointly with Anne-Marie Fyfe) at Lenoir Rhyne University, Hickory NC

Thu 28 Feb 2019, 7pm: Visiting Writers Series,

Poetry Reading: Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat
Venue: Belk Centrum, Lenoir Rhyne University, 625 7th Ave NE, Hickory NC 28601

Thu 25 Apr, 12.15-1.30pm, Lenoir-Rhyne Spring 2019 Poetry Workshop, Group Reading

Hosted by: Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat
Venue: Colloquium Room, Rudisill Library, Lenoir Rhyne University, Hickory NC

Feb—Apr… Exploring Writers

Thu Feb 21st, 7pm, for Black History Month: Langston Hughes & Gwendolyn Brooks

Renaissance & Enlightenment: incredibly influential in the 1920s, when Harlem was in vogue (to quote Hughes’s own words), jazz-poet Langston Hughes died in 1967 having chronicled a very different America from that which Gwendolyn Brooks was to observe between 1950 (when she was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, first of her many firsts) & her last collection In Montgomery, And Other Poems, published posthumously in 2003. Poetry of wit, wisdom, and witness.

Mon Mar 18th, 7pm: Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell

Breathe the Rich Air: New England poets, for sure, yet Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry owes as much to her Nova Scotia upbringing (which Anne-Marie Fyfe has explored in the past year); while her Bostonian friend & Maine summer neighbour, Robert Lowell, owes much in turn to Bishop, & to New Jersey’s William Carlos Williams, & Kentucky’s Allen Tate. Emotional, artistic & actual geographies.

Mon 22 Apr, 7pm, Exploring Writers: James Joyce & Elizabeth Bowen

Dubliners: two more different Dubliners would be hard to imagine, Elizabeth Bowen & the privileged society which made her the arch-chronicler both of London’s middle-classes & Ireland’s vanishing landed gentry, & James Joyce, his impecunious upbringing in a swirl of British imperialism, Irish inheritance & Catholic piety, producing one of the twentieth century’s most influential & original writers. Shifting social & artistic boundaries in a changing society.

A chance to visit & re-visit some outstanding writers as Lenoir-Rhyne’s 2019 joint-writers-in-residence, Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat, both Irish poets, both living in London, invite you to discover/re-discover the magic of words in the hands of some of their own favourite writers, some of the all-time greats… With two writers in each session, Cahal & Anne-Marie will provide a little backstory on each, and lead us in close-readings of some favourite poem/prose passages (handouts provided, so no advance study required!), & create a lively literary discussion evening: everyone welcome!

Venue: Patrick Beaver Memorial Library, 375 3rd St NE, Hickory NC,

Recent Events – The Voyage Out, 2017-2018

… with Cahal Dallat providing ‘sea-music’ on mandolin, accordion & traditional flute for Anne-Marie Fyfe as part of her Arts-Council-supported Voyage Out words+music event/performance over a year starting at Cushendall in the Antrim Glens in Autumn 2017, through coastal locations, in Antrim, Cork, Wexford, Suffolk & Cornwall coasts, in Scotland’s Highlands & Islands, on US & Canada’s Atlantic seaboard, and ending at the Troubadour in November 2018 (see the full story on www.annemariefyfe.com):

Mon 12 Nov, Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour, 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA
Sun 21 Oct, Torbay Festival of Poetry 2018
Sat 22 Sep, Dylan Thomas Centre, Dylan Thomas Centre, 6 Somerset Pl, Swansea SA1 1RR
Sat 8 Sep, Hooked on Poetry, Fort Conan Hotel, Duncannon, New Ross, Co. Wexford
Mon 3 Sep, Ó Bhéal, The Long Valley Bar, 10 Winthrop St, Cork, T12 NW64
Thu 12 Jul, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, Lochmaddy, Isle of North Uist HS6 5AA
Sat 7 Jul, ƒorWORDS (The Forres Writing Group), Findhorn Village Centre, The Old School, Church Pl, Findhorn, Forres IV36 3YR
Tue 3 Jul, Assynt Crofters Trust 25th Anniversary Celebrations The Marquee, Stoer Green Clachtoll IV27 4JD
Sat 30 Jun, Stromness Library, 2-12 Victoria St, Stromness KW16 3AA
Sun 3 Jun, Charles Causley Festival Eagle House Hotel, 3 Castle St, Launceston PL15 8BA
Sat May 19, Lunenburg School of the Arts 6 Prince St, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, B0J 2C0
Sat May 12, Evergreen Writers, Alderney Gate Library, 60 Alderney Dr, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia B2Y 4P8
Sat May 5, Bangor Public Library, 145 Harlow St, Bangor, ME 04401
Sat Apr 28, Merrill Memorial Library, 215 Main St, Yarmouth, ME 04096
Sun Apr 22, Pathways Gathering Space, 9 State Rd, Chilmark, Martha’s Vineyard, MA 02535
Fri Apr 20, , host: The Poetry Salon, Boston MA
Thu 22 Feb, Suffolk Poetry Society, Felixstowe Ferry Sailing Club, Ferry Rd Felixstowe IP11 9RZ
Thu 5 Oct 2017, Crickhowell Literary Festival, The Dragon Inn, 47 High St Crickhowell NP8 1BE
Fri 15 Sep 2017, Cushendall Golf Club, 21 Shore Rd Cushendall BT44 0NG

Recent Events – 2018

Mon 10 Dec, 8pm at the Troubadour, No Snowflakes: a themed poetry-party

…with invited guest readers, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music & prize quiz by Cahal Dallat
Booking: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Sat 1 Dec, 7.15pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4:

Cahal Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe and guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 26 Nov, 8pm at the Troubadour, 2018 Troubadour International Poetry Prize, Prizewinners Night

…2018 judges Jo Shapcott & Daljit Nagra read with 2018 prizewinners, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
Booking: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Sat 24 Nov, Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Festival

— 10am, Writing the Horizon, themed poetry workshop with Anne-Marie Fyfe
— 10.30-11.30am, Charles Causley: The Sounding Heart, a talk by Cahal Dallat

Charles Causley Trust centenary (2017) writer-in-residence, Cahal Dallat, explores what makes Charles Causley (1917-2003) not simply a best-loved 20c poet but a poet for posterity (as both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin recognised), a local poet of universal importance, a poet who defies pigeon-holing that would have him sewn-up neat – ‘war-poet’, ‘60s-ballad-maker’, ‘Christian poet’, ‘children’s versifier’. A voice for our times and ahead of his own, as eco-poet, protest-poet; a poet of the quotidian yet cool as history, darkly mysterious, of amazing variety, and with a trenchant subversive streak … Who simply listened to the sounding heart and took the heart’s advice rather than following fads and embracing elitism. Discover a poet whose time has come: again!

— 2.00-3.30pm, Poetry Reading, Gerdur Kristny and Cahal Dallat
— 4.15-5.15pm, Poetry Crossing Borders, panel discussion with Gerdur Kristny, Sean O’Brien, and Cahal Dallat
— 8pm, Poetry Reading & Judge’s Report by 2018 Cornwall Contemporary Poetry Competition judge Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: The Falmouth Hotel, Castle Beach Falmouth TR11 4NZ

Mon 19 Nov, 6pm: On the Pavements Grey: WB Yeats in Utopian Bedford Park,

The Fifth Annual Irish Literary Society Lecture, at Embassy of Ireland
Lecture by Cahal Dallat with guests Ciarán Hinds and Anne-Marie Fyfe,
& Launch of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project

Nobel-prizewinning poet, WB Yeats, though much inspired by Irish legend, landscape and longing, spent two-thirds of his youth in London, the majority of that time in the first-ever ‘garden-suburb’, Chiswick’s Arts-&-Crafts-influenced Bedford Park, whose diverse artists’-colony of inhabitants fostered his literary talent and endeavours.

Irish poet and literary critic, Cahal Dallat, has lived within a few blocks of the Yeats family’s two Bedford Park homes for all of his adult life and – fascinated by the ways in which Willie, his father, and his artistic siblings, negotiated the metropolis’s social networks, while dreaming of Sleuth Wood or Ben Bulben – has lectured on the importance to Victorian London of Irish artists (poets, painters, playwrights, composers, and politicians, for politics, too, is an art in Ireland) … and on the equal importance to often-penniless, exiled Irish geniuses, of London’s complex cultural intersections and opportunities.

The 2018 WB Yeats Lecture also marks the launch of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project founded to honour Bedford Park’s role in Yeats’s artistic development, and recognise Yeats’s importance in Britain’s and Ireland’s shared cultural life over the past century-and-a-half, by placing a permanent artwork at the heart of this progressive and beautifully preserved nineteenth-century garden-suburb. www.cahaldallat.com/yeats
Venue: Embassy of Ireland, Grosvenor Pl, London SW1X 7HR

Mon 29 Oct, 8pm at the Troubadour, The Best New Writing

with Fiona Moore, Scarlett Sabet, Oliver Comins, Mara Bergman, Fiona Larkin, & Bryony Littlefair, plus Troubadour poets with new poems… introduced by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music from Cahal Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Thu 25 Oct, 7.30pm, Words & Ears Poetry Reading

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat
Venue: Swan Hotel, Bradford on Avon Wiltshire BA15 1LN

Mon 22 Oct, 2018 Troubadour International Poetry Prize Deadline

…submission deadline, judges: Jo Shapcott & Daljit Nagra

Mon 15 Oct, 8pm at the Troubadour, To Look for America,

…with J Chester Johnson & Elizabeth Powell, reading & in-conversation with Cahal Dallat, & 20 Troubadour poets reading current us poetry

First #poetrymonday of the season with two US guest poets, guest readers with US poem-choices, & a ‘Paul Simon’ guitar spot … all come to look for America

poet & dramatist J Chester Johnson (latest collection Now & Then: Selected Longer Poems) is noted for his writing on 9/11, on racial injustice, & on the Civil Rights struggle: his collaboration with WH Auden is the subject of Auden, The Psalms and Me (2017)
poet & professor Elizabeth Powell is a winner of the Philip Levine Prize, latest collection Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances
plus, J Chester Johnson & Elizabeth Powell ‘in-conversation’ with Cahal Dallat
with 20 Troubadour poets each with their contemporary US poem choices including Warren Czapa, Steve Kendall, Matt Barnard, Jan Heritage, Catherine Davidson, Miranda Peake, June Lausch, Sue Greenhill, Diana Pooley, Matthew Paul, Michelle Penn, Barbara Barnes, Elaine Baker, Betsy De Lotbiniere, Mary Powell, Rosie Johnston, Jo Roach, Karen Rydings & Nancy Hynes
plus, as poet & troubadour Paul Simon hangs up his guitar after his last London gig this summer, we celebrate his (1964) first London gig at the Troubadour with singer/guitarist, Henry Fajemirokun
Booking: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Fri 14 Sep, 6.15pm, The Life and Interesting Times of Roger McGough

Roger McGough in interview with Cahal Dallat, introduced by Anne-Marie Fyfe, Booking: Chiswick Book Festival
Venue: London Buddhist Vihara, Dharmapala Building, The Avenue, Chiswick London W4 1UD

Mon 27 Aug—Sat 1 Sep, Summer Poetry in the Glens of Antrim

… residential poetry course with Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat (fully booked)
Venue: Londonderry Arms Hotel, 20 Harbour Rd Carnlough BT44 0EU

Thu 23 Aug, Arundel Festival

2-5.30pm, Smoke & Mirrors: themed creative-writing workshop with Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: Arundel Library, 2 Surrey Wharf, Arundel BN18 9DW
7.30pm, Paintings, Poems & Prosecco, Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
Venue: Andy Waite’s Studio, 54 Tarrant St, Arundel BN18 9DN

Mon 23—Sat 28 Jul, John Hewitt International Summer School 2018

Facing change: shifting borders & allegiances … a week of readings, talks, lectures, discussions, creative writing, drama, music, with poets, novelists, playwrights, musicians, political thinkers and much more, including

Mon 23, 1.30pm, Patrick Gale in conversation with Cahal Dallat
Mon 23, 8.30pm, Michael Longley and Imtiaz Dharker introduced by Cahal Dallat
Tue 24, 11.15am, Philip Gross and Kim Moore introduced by Anne-Marie Fyfe
Wed 25, 11.15am, Raymond Antrobus & Rachel Long, introduced by Anne-Marie Fyfe
Thu 26, 11.15am, Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley introduced by Paul Maddern
Fri 27, 11.15am, Ruth Carr and Maria McManus introduced by Paul Maddern
plus novelists David Park, Liz Nugent, Mary O’Donnell, Sheila Llewellyn & Michael Hughes, creative-writing classes with Eoin McNamee, Ferdia McAnna, Bernie McGill, Mary O’Donnell, Siobhan Campbell, David Wheatley and Nessa O’Mahony, plus creative-writing showcase, visual art exhibitions, music, drama, lectures, panel discussions, open mic & walking tours.
Venue: Marketplace Theatre, Armagh BT61 7BW

Troubadour, May/Jun, fortnightly…

#CoffeeHousePoetry #sundaygallery, 12-3.30pm, themed creative-writing workshops with Anne-Marie Fyfe
#CoffeeHousePoetry #poetrymondays, 8pm, readings hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Mon 25 Jun, 8pm, Sounds and Silence: themed poetry party at the Troubadour

… hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music & prize-quiz by Cahal Dallat

Noise & its absence have long divided poets & philosophers: silence is golden, apparently, — Whatever you say, say nothing, says Seamus Heaney, with Wordsworth waxing lyrical on the bliss of solitude.

Yet poetry’s continually working its own aural, audible music, its subtle sound-effects… & the mere mention of traffic noise, the barking dog, distant voices, a Sunday lawn-mower, a jarring ringtone or forgotten album track, all instantly conjure up place, time, mood & emotion!

WB Yeats longed for peace, far from the rumbling city, but still ached for the sound of lake water lapping: Thomas Hardy was redeemed from centennial gloom by the ecstatic sound of a darkling thrush, TS Eliot peppered his poetry with snatches of overheard conversation, while Emily Dickinson was wary of the taciturn: I fear a Silent man she admits, a sentiment seemingly echoed by Geoffrey Hill’s Speech! Speech!

So noise & its opposite number continue to battle it out, between Douglas Dunn’s The Noise of a Fly & Fiona Sampson’s Rough Music, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Silence & Brian Turner’s Phantom Noise, between Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence & Robert Crawford’s Full Volume…

Come along & listen to the sound of our guest poets reading poems aloud(!), their own or by other poets, on the subject of either sounds or silence, hubbub or tranquility, chatter or taciturnity… listen to the sounds of silence-themed music, join in our supersonic prize quiz & speculate (quietly) on who’ll win the night’s bonus prize for the best, or best-sounding, poem on the theme of sound … or silence.

Wed 20 Jun, 7.30 for 8pm, Poems & People: Bedford Park Festival Poetry Evening

…with special guest Yasmin Alibhai Brown, hosted by Chiswick poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat

This year we’re be celebrating ‘people poems’, about famous people, fictional people, sad people, people we know & love, people we’ve met – or never met: from Yeats’s lone Fisherman to Larkin’s Mr. Bleaney & Carol Ann Duffy’s Mrs Aesop … So do bring a favourite ‘people poem’ (your own, or one by a well-known poet, max. 25 lines) to read in the first half.

And after the interval, this year’s guest with her personal literary choices, is local author Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (The Settler’s Cookbook, Exotic England), 2017 Columnist of the Year for her i newspaper features & popular TV commentator on The Wright Stuff!

Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Grn tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX

Sun 10 & Sun 17 Jun, 2.30-5 pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: ‘WB Yeats’ literary walks with Cahal Dallat

Join Irish poet & critic Cahal Dallat (who has lectured on WB Yeats for Poetry Society, Sligo’s Yeats International Summer School, Mapping Yeats 2015 at UMKC, WBY Society at NYU etc) on a Sunday stroll (starts Ravenscourt Pk Tube, ends Turnham Grn Tube) round Yeats’s favourite haunts, by way of Upper Mall, along Thames riverside by Old Chiswick Churchyard to Bedford Park, taking in, en route, Pissarro, Pope, Thackeray, O’Connell, Wm. Morris, Whistler, Stepniak, Shaw, Holst, Henley, other Yeatses, actors, anarchists, occultists, typographers, & much more.

Sat 10 Jun, for WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project
Sun 17 Jun for Bedford Park Festival charities

Mar—Apr, Spring 2018 Research Fellowship

… at Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas in Austin, supported by CP Snow Memorial Fund

Mon 5 Mar, 8pm, Mirror, Mirror: themed poetry party at the Troubadour

… hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music & prize-quiz by Cahal Dallat

Poetry holds the mirror up to life, so we’re holding the mirror up to poetry for a change, or to the poetry of mirrors at least, to discover how our world looks Through the Looking Glass.

Poets have long been fond of reflection & refraction, for their metaphysical/metaphorical possibilities, & wisely wary of the lore & luck associated with the looking-glass: Tennyson certainly knew it was all up with his Lady of Shalott, when the mirror through which she watched the world crack’d from side to side, though Yeats’s admonition, to gaze no more in the bitter glass, would have saved Snow White’s stepmother from the magic mirror’s infuriating answer to her daily mirror, mirror on the wall interrogation.

So what do contemporary poets make of the myriad of mirror images & random reflections that face us daily?

Come & listen to invited guest poets’ choices: their own poems — some of them, no doubt, written in our Smoke & Mirrors themed Sunday workshop — or those by famous poets from John Donne to John Ashbery, all on the magic of mirrors. Plus, of course, a mirror-themed (and not-too-serious!) prize-quiz that will certainly require reflection! And, as always, a bonus-bottle prize for the most dazzling poem of the night.

Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Sat 24 Feb, 7.30—9.30pm, The Scientists’ Shuffle at The Poetry Cafe

Discover how Science and Poetry share the same Bunsen biurner, with seven fantastic scientist poets featuring Mario Petrucci, Jemma Borg, Barbara Cumbers, Cahal Dallat, Rachel McCarthy, Michael McKimm & Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
Venue: The Poetry Cafe
Address: 22 Betterton Street London WC2H 9BX

Troubadour, Feb/Mar, fortnightly…

#CoffeeHousePoetry #sundaygallery, 12-3.30pm, themed creative-writing workshops with Anne-Marie Fyfe
#CoffeeHousePoetry #poetrymondays, 8pm, readings hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
Booking: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Wed 31 Jan, 7—9.30pm, Charles Causley: the Sounding Heart

A Centenary Lecture presented by The Poetry Society & Charles Causley Trust

Cahal Dallat, Charles Causley Trust centenary writer-in-residence, explores the lasting work and influence of Charles Causley: war poet, Christian poet, children’s writer, eco-poet and protest poet. A voice for our times and ahead of his own.

Join us at 7 for a drink, then head downstairs for for the lecture to begin at 7.30. Writers from our Young Poets Network have been considering Causley over the Winter months – they will introduce the evening with a selection of their new poems.

Venue: The Poetry Cafe
Address: 22 Betterton Street London WC2H 9BX

2017

Oct—Dec, 8 pm fortnightly, Troubadour Autumn 2017 Readings

…hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by Cahal Dallat
Venue/Bookings: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Mon 11 Dec, 8pm, Down by the Riverside: a ‘Waterways’-themed Poetry Party with music & prize-quiz by Cahal Dallat

Rivers run through Alice Oswald’s Dart, Sarah Howe’s Yangtze, Philip Levine’s On the River, Mary Oliver’s At the River Clarion, Billy Collins’s Fishing on the Susquehanna in July, & Mimi Khalvati’s River Sounding, while the Thames – just a mile from the Troubadour – flows from Eliot’s Lower Thames Street pub right back to Geoffrey Chaucer (who actually lived on Upper Thames Street).

Should’ve mentioned Eliot’s Sweet Thames source, of course, Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, (Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song) which flows us sweetly into songs from Ewan McColl (Sweet Thames Flow Softly), Lindisfarne (Fog on the Tyne), Bruce Springsteen (The River) or Julie Driscoll (Cry Me a River)… Many Rivers to Cross, as Jimmy Cliff puts it, all flowing into the same poetic sea.

So go with that flow, on a night of the new & the well-known, some by poetry greats, contemporary & canonical, with surprises, invariably, from poets who’ve been Troubadour-Sunday River Deep workshoppers this season… And river-music will flow, as will wines from Rhine, Rhone or Napa river valleys, as the prizes in our literally littoral fun quiz with a special (drinkable) party-night bonus prize for the evening’s most powerful river poem.

Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Mon 30 Oct, 8pm, Charles Causley, Troubadour: with John Mole, Alyson Hallett, Rory Waterman, Cahal Dallat, Bernadette Reed & Jim Causley

Join our Causley-Trust/Coffee-House Poetry words&music 100th-birthday bash for Charles Causley (1917-2003), one of the century’s most popular poets whose modern ballads, subversive wit, & odes to everyday experience, captured the imagination in a way few poets have done. Join our guests as they read Charles’ poems & their own, discuss & perform new musical settings of his work in part#1, & talk about, in a part#2 Troubadour ‘colloquy’, his imagination, influences & legacy:

John Mole, loves language, uses it with subtlety & skill, Charles Causley said, describing his as the work of a true poet; winner of Eric Gregory & Cholomondeley awards, his many collections include Gestures and Counterpoints (Shoestring, 2017)
Alyson Hallett was first Causley Trust poet-in-residence in Charles’s Cyprus Well house on Launceston’s Ridgegrove Hill: her books include On Ridgegrove Hill (Atlantic, 2015) & Suddenly Everything (Salzburg, 2013);
Rory Waterman’s 2nd Carcanet collection, Sarajevo Roses, is just out; Belfast-born Sen.Lect. at Nottingham Trent Univ, his Belonging & Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, RS Thomas & Charles Causley is published by Ashgate (2014);
Causley Trust musician/poet-in-residence (& regular Troubadour piano-player), Cahal Dallat, has spent 2017 writing new music/poem-settings & exploring Charles’ musical/poetic influences, with performances at Edinburgh Book Festival, Launceston Castle, Cornwall Folk Festival, Causley Festival, Tamar Valley Classical Festival etc;
Bernadette Reed, poet & vocalist, (latest album, Walking on Water, 2012) will sing some of Cahal’s new Celtic, salsa, & jazz settings;
Charles’s relative, Jim Causley, (accordion & piano), finest singer of his generation, according to Mojo Magazine, & nominated for BBC Radio2 Folk Singer of the Year 2017, has written & recorded versions of Charles’s poems at Cyprus Well (on CD, Cyprus Well) & has appeared at Causley-Centenary celebrations around the country.

Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House 263-267 Old Brompton Rd Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Fri 6 Oct, 2—3.30pm, Beyond Eden Rock, Cahal Dallat on Charles Causley

Appointed Causley Trust centenary poet/musician-in-residence in the former Cornwall home of poet, Charles Causley (1917-2003), poet Cahal Dallat has spent a year rediscovering Causley not simply as a poet of faith, or war, or schoolyard rhymes, but as one whose everyday life, revealed through the poems, parallels, surprisingly, Cahal’s own life and poetry. Cahal will read and talk about both his and Charles Causley’s poems, with their takes on small town life, schooldays, family, neighbours, and of the early death of one parent, a recurring theme in both their poetry worlds.
Bookings: Crickhowell Literary Festival
Venue: The Parish Hall, Church Lane Crickhowell NP8 1BB

Mon 18 Sep—Sat 23 Sep 2017, Productivity, Polishing and Perfection: Arvon Course

…(residential) with co-tutors Anne-Marie Fyfe, and Cahal Dallat
Expect seriously creative writing sessions that explode with original ideas, fresh energies and unlikely directions to get you generating new poetry. And tutorial sessions that don’t just help polish the poems you’ve produced, but encourage you to find your own inner critic, your workshop-of-one, to perfect your own poetic practice. Whether you’re starting out or long confident in your writing ability, during this week you won’t just take away poems that will surprise you, but develop new approaches to editing, crafting and polishing. Discover new ways of seeing your work.
Guest poet: Robert Seatter

Sun 3 Sep, 3pm, Tea at the Priory: Chas. Causley & The Rhythm Kings

(see more details of Causley residency below)

Members of Suffolk Poetry Society have been invited by Mr and Mrs Henry Engleheart to tea at Stoke-by-Nayland Priory. This year we welcome poets Cahal Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe, who will present Chas. Causley & The Rhythm Kings: a leading 20c poet’s poetic and musical inspirations.

The Charles Causley Trust’s 2017 poet/musician-in-residence, Cahal Dallat, and his wife, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, in an 45-minute words-and-music mix, talk about the work – and life – of poet Charles Causley (1917-2003) and about Cahal’s Causley Centenary Year commission to create new settings of, and new music for, a number of Causley poems. Influenced by a wide range of sources – from street ballads, Gaelic laments and baroque compositions (Causley’s Cornish/West-Country and wider British and Celtic heritages) to jazz, blues, 60s folk songs, and the 30s and 40s music Causley once played in dance-bands, these sounds and styles reflect many aspects of his life, and place his poetry at the very heart of our contemporary concerns. With music from Cahal on accordion, piano, mandolin & flute, and readings by Anne-Marie from Causley’s poems and letters.
Venue: Stoke-by-Nayland Priory Colchester CO6 4RL (Suffolk Poetry Society members only)

Thu 24 Aug, 5.30pm, Cornwall Folk Festival celebrates Charles Causley

…celebrating Charles Causley’s birth-centenary with new musical settings of Causley poems written by Causley 100 poet/musician-in residence, Cahal Dallat and performed by poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, local singer Morwenna Gee, and musicians from Wadebridge Secondary as part of Cornwall Folk Festival 2017
Venue: Wadebridge Town Hall, The Platt Wadebridge PL27 7AQ

Thu 24 Aug, 2.30pm, A Ceilidh for Charlie Causley

…celebrating Charles Causley’s birth-centenary with new musical settings of Causley poems written by Causley 100 poet/musician-in residence, Cahal Dallat and performed by poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, local singer Morwenna Gee, and musicians from Launceston College in Charles Causley’s home town.
Venue: Launceston Castle, Launceston PL15 7DR

Sun 20 Aug, 7.30-9pm, Charles Causley 100 Years

…with Roger McGough, Jim Causley, Karen Hayes, Jennifer McDerra, Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat as part of Edinburgh International Book Festival
Venue: Garden Theatre, Charlotte Sq Edinburgh EH2 4DR

Mon 24 Jul—Sat 29 Jul, John Hewitt International Summer School 2017

… a week of readings, talks, lectures, discussions, creative writing, drama, music, with poets, poets Mark Doty, Liz Lochhead, Pat Boran, Frank Ormsby, Katie Donovan, Denise Riley, Luke Kennard, Malika Booker, Sean Hewitt, Siobhán Campbell, Maureen Boyle, Nessa O’Mahony, Jean Bleakney, Lorna Shaughnessy, Enda Coyle-Green, and Jessica Traynor among others, novelists, political thinkers, journalists, critics, academics, art curators, actors etc including John Boyne, Bernard McLaverty, Michael Harding, JB Vallely, Shane Connaughton, Helena Kennedy, Jan Carson, Seamus Mallon, Denis Touhy, Eamon Mallie, Joan McCready, and many many more. Plus a Mark Doty masterclass, plus (eight!) week-long creative-writing courses, plus publishing workshops, lectures, panel discussions, art exhibitions, open-mic night, bookquiz, drama & music.
Venue: Marketplace Theatre Armagh City

Spring/Summer 2017, Causley 100

Cahal Dallat is Causley 100 musician/poet-in-residence at Charles Causley’s Cyprus Well house, Launceston, Cornwall incl:

researching Charles Causley’s papers at Exeter University
blogging on Causley Trust website
— Possession: A Poet’s Things
— Charles Causley’s Irish Influence
— Musing on Poetry and Place
talking to Literature Works: Interview with Cahal Dallat
writing new musical settings of Charles Causley poems
working with local musicians and music students to create performances of new settings.

Thu 13 Jul, A Musical Celebration of Charles Causley

6.15-7pm, The Breathing River: Ballads, Bards, and Classical Composers: CL Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe in a pre-concert talk in the Guildhall
Dublin-born composer Charles Villiers Stanford and Cornish poet Charles Causley both drew from a living stream of traditional ballads and old Celtic airs. With mandolin, accordion and flute in hand, two celebrated Irish poets explore the sources of inspiration for these two Charleses.
7.30pm, Singing Games: Dante Quartet with CL Dallat, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Caradon Strings and Launceston Choral Society in the Main Hall
A glorious mixture of music and poetry presented by the Dante Quartet together with Celtic poets and local musicians. Inspired by lively renaissance part-songs, Martinu’s virtuosic Madrigals set the scene. Charles Causley’s poetry takes centre stage in a setting by Andrew Wilson of Singing Game for string quartet and choir, and his ballads are read by celebrated poets Cahal Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe, with musical accompaniment. After a Celtic interlude from the young Caradon Strings, Stanford’s brilliant string quartet forms a romping Irish finale.
Part of: Dante String Quartet: Tamar Valley Festival Mon 10—Fri 14 Jul
Venue: Launceston Town Hall (Guildhall), Westgate St, Launceston PL15 7AR

Sat 8 Jul, 10am—noon, The Enchantment of Things: Poetry Workshop

… for Endelienta Poetry Group

The Enchantment of Things: in this workshop we’ll test William Carlos Williams’ insistence on No ideas but in things and discover how things ‘enchant’ us, as Anna Akhmatova showed, how they give us ideas, build poems… ‘Things’ evoking a time, a place, a person; the tangible focus for a particular story, drama, event in our lives; artefacts with their own identity, history, ownership, with their own talismanic quality, good or bad; objects with their everyday familiarity, their quotidian-ness; and their unpredictable futures. Write about what you know, we’re always told, but we need to re-engage with the things around us to be reminded of what we do know, and just sometimes, to let things be various, unpredictable, go off in their own directions.
Contact: news@cahaldallat.com
Venue: Stone Barn St Endellion

Mon 26 Jun, 8—10pm, Planet Earth:

… poetry party on the theme of planets and perseids, stars and satellites, orbits, galaxies and constellations… with music and prize-quiz by CL Dallat
Venue/Bookings: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Sun 25 Jun, 2.30-5pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats walk

Every poet has, surely, their own Land of Heart’s Desire. For Nobel-Prize-winning poet W.B. Yeats the sublime landscape and legends of the West of Ireland inspired his early work. But poets need a network of publishing, poetry groups, friends, and literary and artistic connections in which to thrive, and Yeats’ unique literary genius was fostered in the curious 19c Arts-and-Crafts garden-suburb/artists’-colony that was Bedford Park, in Chiswick, West London, where he spent much of his youth.

Join Irish poet and critic Cahal Dallat (who has lectured on Yeats for Poetry Society, Yeats International Summer School, Sligo, Mapping Yeats 2015, Univ. Missouri Kansas City, and W.B. Yeats Society at NYU) on a Sunday stroll (starts Ravenscourt Pk Tube, ends Turnham Grn Tube) round Yeats’ favourite haunts, by way of Upper Mall and Old Chiswick Churchyard to Bedford Park, taking in, en route, Pissarro, Pope, Thackeray, O’Connell, Wm. Morris, Whistler, Stepniak, Shaw, Holst, Henley, other Yeatses, actors, anarchists, occultists, typographers, and much more.
Bookings: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour
Venue: Open-air walk from Ravenscourt Park Tube Station Hammersmith London

Sat 24 Jun, 7.15pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4:

Cahal Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe and guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 19 Jun, 10am—4pm, The Enchantment of Things: Poetry Workshop

… for Indian King Poets (see workshop details below under Endelienta Poetry Group)
Contact: indianking@btconnect.com
Venue: Indian King Poets Camelford

Sun 18 Jun, 2—5pm, Causley Centenary Poetry & Tea in the Garden

Celebrating 100 years since the birth of Charles Causley with poetry, readings and tea in the gardens of Victoria House, hosted by Les and Margaret Baker, with music by CL Dallat (accordion) and readings of Charles Causley poems.
Donations to: The Causley Trust & St. Thomas Church.
Contact: 01566 772821
Venue: Victoria House, St. Catherines Hill Launceston PL15 7EJ

Mon 12 Jun, 8—10pm, A Matter of Life and Death: with Thomas Lynch

… the much-loved, and award-winning, Michigan poet, essayist and undertaker, Thomas Lynch, reading, plus ‘in-conversation’ with CL Dallat, plus, music from classical string duo, Aisling & Julie-Anne Manning
Venue/Bookings: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Sat 3 Jun, 5pm, Chas Causley and The Rhythm Kings

…with CL Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe

Causley Trust poet/musician-in-residence, CL Dallat, talks about, and illustrates his latest project to create new settings of Charles Causley’s poems. Influenced by a range of sources – from street ballads, Gaelic laments and baroque compositions (Causley’s Cornish/West-Country and wider British and Celtic heritages) to jazz, blues, 60s folk songs, and the 30s and 40s dance-band numbers he once played locally – these sounds and styles place Causley at the heart of modern life, of contemporary concerns. Cahal will illustrate his talk with music (on piano, mandolin, accordion, flute) and will be joined by his wife, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, reading excerpts from Causley’s poems, prose, and letters.
Part of: Charles Causley Festival 2017, Launceston, Thu 1—Sun 4 Jun
Bookings: Charles Causley Festival
Venue: Launceston Town Hall (Guildhall), Westgate St, Launceston PL15 7AR

Mon 29 May, 8—10pm, States of Writing: Brooklyn poet D. Nurkse

… reading, plus ‘in-conversation’ with CL Dallat, plus, students from University of North Florida, plus singer/guitarist Mark Ari
Venue/Bookings: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour, Earls Court London SW5 9JA

Sun 28 May, 2.30-5pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats walk

(for University of North Florida, fully booked, but see Sun 25 Jun, open now for bookings)

Fri 12 May, 7.30pm, Cookham Festival/Stanley Spencer Prize 2017

CL Dallat reads as Stanley Spencer Prize shortlisted poet.
Members of the public will have a chance to hear some of the selected poems being read during this year’s Cookham Festival, at a special poetry event to be held at Cookham Dean Village Hall on Friday 12 May. The anthology will also be launched at this event, with copies being available for sale. At the same time, the final shortlist will be announced, with the three prize winners being revealed at a special awards evening at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham on Friday 19 May.
Venue: Cookham Dean Village Hall, Church Road, Cookham Dean SL6 9PG

US Spring 2017 Tour: readings, talks/performances and workshops

…by Anne-Marie Fyfe and CL Dallat in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee…

Tue 28 Mar, 6.30-8.30pm, Poetry Reading

featuring Anne-Marie Fyfe and CL Dallat
Venue/Bookings: The Creek Cafe 110 E Old Andrew Johnson Hwy, Jefferson City, TN 37760

Mon 27 Mar, 7pm, Tangled Weave: Music and Irish Literature

Irish poets Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat trace the shared history of Irish writing and the country’s centuries-old musical tradition, discovering how words and music together re-created the soul of a nation. In an hour-long mix Cahal’s literary/musical history is interwoven with traditional Irish (and a touch of classical) playing on accordion, mandolin and traditional flute—and with Anne-Marie’s choice of readings from Joyce, Yeats and contemporary Irish writers.
Venue: Thomas Recital Hall, 1620 Russell Ave, Jefferson City TN 37760

Mon 27 Mar and Tue 28 Mar, Talking Poetry

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe and CL Dallat
Venue: Carson-Newman University, 1646 Russell Ave, Jefferson City TN 37760

Fri 24 Mar, 5pm, Reception

Venue: Southern Historical Collection and Southern Folklife Collection, 4th Fl., Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC 27514

Fri 24 Mar, 5.30pm, Carolina Two-Step: from Ayrshire to Appalachia via Antrim County

Antrim’s rugged Glens, on Ireland’s North Eastern coast facing Scotland’s Ayrshire and Campbelltown, were, for centuries, the landing point for generations of Scots (Lowland and Highland, pre- and post-Reformation) and a meeting-point/melting-pot for diverse cultural traditions, as Border Ballads such as Barbara Allen, The Unfortunate Rake and The Lass of Roch Royal, blended with modal Gaelic laments and the reels and jigs of Irish pipers and harpists. So when Ulster’s 18c Scots Dissenters upped sticks again and took their chances across the Atlantic, they took their cultural baggage of ballads and fiddle tunes to the North Eastern states and on down into the sparsely-populated Appalachian foothills. Poet and musician, Cahal Dallat, and poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, both from the Glens of Antrim, tell how Scots and Ulster Scots music and poetry not only weathered the rigours of that two-step migration but went on to influence the course of twentieth century folk, country and rock music.)
Sponsored by: Southern Historical Collection and Southern Folklife Collection
Venue: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC 27514

Fri 24 Mar, 10.30am, Talking Poetry

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe and CL Dallat
Venue: Cromer Center, Lenoir Rhyne University, Hickory NC 28601

Thu 23 Mar, 7pm, Poetry Reading

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe and CL Dallat
Venue: Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery, 29 2nd St NW, Hickory NC 28601

Wed 22 Mar, 7pm, Poetry Reading

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe and CL Dallat
Venue: South Main Book Company, 110 S Main St, Salisbury NC 28144

Mon 20 Mar, 6.30pm, (Reception, Dinner and Performance), To Sweeten Ireland’s Wrong: Music, Poetry & the Easter Rising,

Nobel-prize-winning poet WB Yeats acknowledged an Irish poet’s duty:
Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;

Yet later he wold ask himself:
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?

Can it be that the Irish poems, plays, paintings and old Gaelic airs (of lost love, lost land, slain heroes) that amused London’s (and all of Europe’s!) 19c drawing-rooms and concert-halls were actually heard by Ireland’s volunteers, men and women, so many of them poets and playwrights themselves as well clerks and schoolteachers, as a signal to strike a match and blow … In an hour-long mix of poem, music, history, life and letters, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe and historian/literary-critic, Cahal Dallat (with mandolin, traditional flute and accordion) explore the intersections of history with poetry, song and story, over 900 years from the 11th century Brian Boru’s March, by way of Robert Emmett and the Fenians, to Yeats’ Easter 1916 and that great post-1916 anthem, The Foggy Dew (written by Cahal’s great-uncle): with readings/excerpts from Thomas Moore, WB Yeats, Padraig Pearse, Alice Milligan and Roger Casement…
Venue: WB Yeats Society, at The Yeats Room, Circa 1875, 48 Whitaker St, Savannah GA 31401

Mon 20 Mar, 1pm, To Sweeten Ireland’s Wrong: Music, Poetry and the Easter Rising

Details: see Savannah Yeats Society event above
Venue: Georgia Southern University, 1332 Southern Dr, Statesboro GA 30458

Sat 18 Mar, 6-7.30pm, From Brian Boru to the Foggy Dew: Music, Poetry and the Easter Rising

In this performance/mix of poem, music, history, life and letters, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe and historian/literary-critic, CL Dallat (with mandolin, traditional flute and accordion) explore the intersections of history with poetry, music and song, over 900 years from 11c Brian Boru’s March by way of Robert Emmett and the 19th century, to WB Yeats’ Easter 1916 and that great post-1916 anthem, The Foggy Dew (written by Cahal’s great-uncle Charles O’Neill): with Anne-Marie’s readings/excerpts from Thomas Moore, WB Yeats, Padraig Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, Alice Milligan and Roger Casement.Plus discussion/chat/Q&A.
Venue: Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans, 933 Conti St, New Orleans LA 70112 (@ICMNOLA)
Admission: $10

Thu 9 Mar, 6.30pm, Tangled Weave: Music and Irish Literature,

Irish poets Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat trace the shared history of Irish writing and the country’s centuries-old musical tradition, discovering how words and music together re-created the soul of a nation. In an hour-long mix Cahal’s literary/musical history is interwoven with traditional Irish (and a touch of classical) playing on accordion, mandolin and traditional flute—and with Anne-Marie’s choice of readings from Joyce, Yeats and contemporary Irish writers.
Venue: Pebble Hill, 101 Debardeleben, Auburn University, Auburn AL 36849
Admission: Free

Thu 9 Mar, 1pm, Creative Writing Workshop

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe and CL Dallat
Venue: Auburn University, Auburn AL 36849

Wed 8 Mar, Wainwright Reading

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe and CL Dallat
Venue: University of North Florida Gallery of Art, Founders Hall, 1 UNF Drive,, Jacksonville FL 32224

Wed 8 Mar, 2pm, Wainwright Masterclass

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: University of North Florida, Jacksonville FL 32224

Mon 20 Feb, Weather Report:

… a themed end-of-season Troubadour poetry party on/around the themes of wind, hail, showers, cloud-cover and sunlight… with invited guest readers, music and prize-quiz by CL Dallat

I get all the news I need from the weather report, Paul Simon says: but writers get more than news from the weather’s infinite variety, from Bob Dylan’s Hard Rain to The Beatles’ Good Day Sunshine, or the range of mood-altering possibilities experienced in sunnier, or wilder and more tempest-riven, climes…

… from George Herbert’s Storm and TS Eliot’s yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes, through to more contemporary poetic evocations Medbh McGuckian’s Snapdragon, choosing cloudy weather, the mantle of weather in Jorie Graham’s San Sepolcro, Paul Muldoon’s New Weather, Ruth Padel’s Icicles Round a Tree in Dumfriesshire and former Troubadour prizewinners, Marilyn Francis’ The Waltzer in Sunlight, Diana Pooley’s Heatwave and Mary O’Donnell’s A Young Fisherman Waits for the Weather to Change.

The use of weather similes and metaphors is ubiquitous, with Wordsworth lonely as a cloud, mercy dropping, according to Shakespeare, as the gentle rain from heaven, and weather a substitute for something, surely, in Emily Dickinson’s last words: Let us go in:, she said, the fog is rising.

Book, film and song titles abound too… Gone With the Wind, Stormy Weather, The Sun Also Rises, Snow Falling on Cedars, House of Sand and Fog, Cloud Atlas, The Ice Storm, Henderson the Rain King… But if we list too many of these, our quiz-questions on the night (which are always easy-peasy) will be even easier!

Come along to hear invited guest poets’ weather-report poem-choices, their own work, some written in Troubadour Sunday Gallery workshops perhaps, or poems by famous weather-watching poets of the past, listen to meteorologically-themed music; pit your weather-wits against our famously not-too-literary literary quiz and hear whose storm-tossed, rain-beaten, snow-drifted poem and performance wins our party-night bonus prize!
Venue/Bookings: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Sun 19 Feb, 2.30-5pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats walk

Every poet has, surely, their own Land of Heart’s Desire. For Nobel-Prize-winning poet W.B. Yeats the sublime landscape and legends of the West of Ireland inspired his early work. But poets need a network of publishing, poetry groups, friends, and literary-and-artistic connections in which to thrive, and Yeats’ unique literary genius was fostered in the curious 19c Arts-and-Crafts garden-suburb/artists’-colony that was Bedford Park, in Chiswick, West London, where he spent much of his youth.

Irish Literary Society members join Irish poet and critic Cahal Dallat (who has lectured on Yeats for Poetry Society, Yeats International Summer School, Sligo, Mapping Yeats 2015 at UMKC, and W.B. Yeats Society at NYU etc) on a Sunday stroll (starts Ravenscourt Pk Tube, ends Turnham Grn Tube) round Yeats’ favourite haunts, by way of Upper Mall and Old Chiswick Churchyard to Bedford Park, taking in, en route, Pissarro, Pope, Thackeray, O’Connell, Wm. Morris, Whistler, Stepniak, Shaw, Holst, Henley, other Yeatses, actors, anarchists, occultists, typographers, and much more.
Venue: Open-air walk from Ravenscourt Park Tube Station Hammersmith London

Sat 18 Feb, 7.15pm, Saturday Review on BBC Radio4:

Cahal Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe and guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Jan—Mar, 8pm fortnightly, Troubadour Spring 2017 Readings

…hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by CL Dallat
Venue/Bookings: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

2016

Mon 12 Dec: Here Comes the Night:

…an end-of-season poetry party with invited guest readers, music and prize-quiz by CL Dallat

Hey, well here it comes, Van Morrison warns, as someone leaves the world to darkness and to Thomas Gray, Lord Byron forswears so-late-into-the-night a-roving, WH Auden’s Night Mail snorts noisily as she passes, The Platters rhapsodize over heavenly shades of night, John Lennon hears a blackbird singing in the dead of night, Charles Baudelaire reflects on the moon’s tristesse, and Louis MacNeice recalls only that the lamp was dark beside my bed…

How are they for you, the witching hours between twilight and dawn? A Long Day’s Journey, perhaps, into Eugene O’Neill’s Night, into James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night? Or are they rich with Claude Debussy’s Claire de Lune or a Frederic Chopin Nocturne, as one by one small cafés shut on Seamus Heaney’s warm Night Drive through France?

Tonight, says Leonard Bernstein, won’t be just any night…: John Donne called tonight the year’s midnight. So come along and hear invited guest poets’ favourite odes to the small hours, their own or by famous poets… Enjoy a little night-music, test your night-knowledge with our Hard Day’s Night not-too-literary prize-quiz and join in the excitement of hearing whose gets chosen as winning ’Night-Poem’ of the Night.
Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Wed 30 Nov, 7.30pm, Open Mic Poetry

…with guest CL Dallat
Venue: Jubilee Hall, New Park Centre Chichester West Sussex PO19 7XY

Mon 17 Oct—Mon 12 Dec, 8pm fortnightly, Troubadour Autumn 2016 Readings

…hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by CL Dallat
Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Sun 16 Oct, 2.30-5pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats walk

…with CL Dallat (for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour)

Every poet has, surely, their own Land of Heart’s Desire. For Nobel-Prize-winning poet W.B. Yeats the sublime landscape & legends of the West of Ireland inspired his early work. But poets need a network of publishing, poetry groups, friends, & literary-&-artistic connections in which to thrive, & Yeats’ unique literary genius was fostered in the curious 19c Arts-&-Crafts garden-suburb/artists’-colony that was Bedford Park, in Chiswick, West London, where he spent much of his youth.

Join Irish poet & critic Cahal Dallat (who has lectured on Yeats for Poetry Society, Yeats International Summer School, Sligo, Mapping Yeats 2015, Univ. Missouri Kansas City, and W.B. Yeats Society at NYU) on a Sunday stroll (starts Ravenscourt Pk Tube, ends Turnham Grn Tube) round Yeats’ favourite haunts, by way of Upper Mall & Old Chiswick Churchyard to Bedford Park, taking in, en route, Pissarro, Pope, Thackeray, O’Connell, Wm. Morris, Whistler, Stepniak, Shaw, Holst, Henley, other Yeatses, actors, anarchists, occultists, typographers, & much more.
Venue: Open-air walk from Ravenscourt Park Tube Station Hammersmith London
Booking: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Sat 20—Sat 27 Aug, Poetry Course (residential)

with Anne-Marie Fyfe & co-tutor CL Dallat
Venue: Château L’Age Baston Angoulême Charente

Sat 13—Sat 20 Aug, Poetry Course (residential)

with Anne-Marie Fyfe & co-tutor CL Dallat
Venue: Château L’Age Baston Angoulême Charente

Fri 5 Aug, 2pm Féile 2016/Cultúrlann

Brian Ború go dtí an Drúcht Gheal Cheo: Ceol, Filíocht agus Eirí Amach na Casca.

From Brian Boru to the Foggy Dew: Music, Poetry & the Easter Rising

In an hour-long mix of poem, music, history, life and letters, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe & historian/literary-critic, Cahal Dallat (with mandolin, traditional flute and accordion) explore the intersections of history with poetry, music & song, over 900 years from 11c Brian Boru’s March by way of Robert Emmett and the 19th century, to WB Yeats’ Easter 1916 & that great post-1916 anthem, The Foggy Dew (written by Cahal’s great-uncle Charles O’Neill): with Anne-Marie’s readings/excerpts from Thomas Moore, WB Yeats, Padraig Pearse, Thomas McDonagh, Alice Milligan & Roger Casement.
Venue: Culturlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, 216 Falls Rd, Belfast BT12 6AH
Tickets: £5 02890 964180, oifigfailte@culturlann.ie

Mon 25 Jul—Sat 30 Jul 2016, John Hewitt International Summer School 2016

…a week of readings, talks, lectures, discussions, creative writing, drama, music, with Sarah Howe, Sinead Morrissey, Tom Hartley, Jane Yeh, Glenn Patterson, Matthew Francis, Jo Baker, Gerald Dawe, Caitriona O’Reilly, Andrew McMillan, Ciaran Carson, Belinda McKeon, Martina Devlin, Paul Durcan, Leontia Flynn, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Sam McCready, Liz Weir, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Rita Ann Higgins, Grace Wells and many more…
Venue: Marketplace Theatre Armagh City

Thu 23 Jun, 7.30 for 8pm, Bedford Park Festival The Poetry of Light:

…a Poetry Evening with special guest, Rowan Williams

From the kaleidoscopic blur of headlights, street-lights & traffic signals, to flaming prairie sunsets, the crack of dawn & scorching noon, light & half-light, natural & artificial, have bedazzled poets & painters as much as they’ve fascinated scientists & cinematographers.

With special guest, poet, former Archbishop of Canterbury & Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, Dr. Rowan Williams, who’ll introduce & read a selection of his own favourite poetry & prose.

So do bring a favourite poem to read (your own, or one by a well-known poet, max. 25 lines) on a light-related theme, sunlight, headlights, twilight, gaslight, firelight, starlit skies, lamplight through evening windows…

Plus music, refreshments, hosted by local poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Green tube station, Bath Road Chiswick London W4 1TX

Mon 20 Jun, 8pm: The Hidden Life of Cities:

…an end-of-season poetry party with invited guest readers, plus music & prize quiz by CL Dallat

The most visible, obvious, populous places on the planet, our urban spaces nonetheless abound in hidden quarters, from lost subterranean workings, abandoned bunkers, unused underground tunnels, forgotten alleyways, closed-up shops, secret corners of railinged parks, a night-time roofscape of chimney-pots & parapets…

… to a vanished address in Berlin, an overgrown courtyard in the 8th arrondissement, a figure in a dimly-lit Venetian passagio, a children’s playground amid Manhattan skyscrapers, the 2 am cyclist on Blackfriars Bridge…a couple disappearing into the glow of a Waterloo Sunset, Eliot’s passageways, Wordsworth’s London lying still at dawn or Hopper’s Nighthawks café.

Come to the city’s liveliest cellar-club hotspot & hear invited guest poets read favourite poems, their own & those by famous poets fascinated by the city’s hidden life… Listen to city-themed music & join in our ‘sous-les’pavés’ prize quiz!
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House Earls Court London

Sun 19 Jun & Sun 26 Jun, 2.30-5pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats walk

…with CL Dallat (for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour)

Sublimely inspired, poets nonetheless need a world of publishing, poetry groups, and literary connections in which to develop. Join our Sunday stroll (2.30-5 pm, starts Ravenscourt Pk Tube, ends Turnham Grn Tube) by way of Upper Mall, Old Chiswick Churchyard and the Nobel-prize-winning poet’s favourite riverside haunts, to Bedford Park, London’s 19c artists’ colony, where the young Yeats’ poetry flourished: a walk that takes in, en route, Pissarro, Pope, Thackeray, Wm. Morris, Whistler, Stepniak, Shaw, Holst, Henley, other Yeatses, Chiswick Mall, actors, engravers, sundry poetry presses, & much more.

Poet and critic Cahal Dallat, who has lectured on Yeats for the Poetry Society, at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, at Mapping Yeats, Univ. Missouri in Kansas City, and for the W.B. Yeats Society of New York at NYU, walks the walk and talks the literary talk.
Venue: Open-air walk from Ravenscourt Park Tube Station Hammersmith London

Sat 18 Jun, 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 6 Jun, 8pm: The End of the Page?: a Coffee-House Colloquy

…with Hannah Lowe, Gregory Leadbetter, Richard Price, Carrie Etter & C.L. Dallat

We all read more & more poems on e-zines & blogs, via e-mails, on poets’ & poetry orgs’ sites & apps, even on social media, as well as consuming whole collections on Kindle, i-Phone or Android.

Fiction & journalism are already registering the impact of change from print to digital… but will poets & their readers still hanker after a ‘proper’ printed page, hold out for the perfect font, crisp endpapers, the heft of a slim volume, the avoirdupois of a lifetime’s collected? Or are we perfectly happy to right-click on link after hyperlink, to Google & surf our way through sonnets & sestinas?

Do new platforms positively increase poetry’s scope? And what’s the negative impact on sales at readings, on book signings? Bring your webworld thoughts, hopes & worries for/about virtual poetry to our Troubadour colloquy, hear four state-of-the-art poets read from their latest (print) collections & join in the biggest poetry publishing debate since Gutenburg!

Chick from Next-Gen poet Hannah Lowe won the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Award, Long Time, No See was a 2015 BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week & Chan is due from Bloodaxe in June
Director of Inst. of Creative & Critical Writing at Birmingham City Univ, Gregory Leadbetter was a scriptwriter on BBC drama Silver Street, writes on Coleridge, & has published The Body in the Well (Happenstance, 2007)
Richard Price has worked with musicians, sculptors & digital artists & is British Library Head of Contemporary British Collections (including print, digital, manuscripts, & sound); latest poetry publication, Small World (Carcanet, 2012)
Bath Spa University Senior Lecturer Carrie Etter (b. Illinois) edited Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman) & has published 7 books of poetry including Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014)
chaired by poet & BBC R4 Saturday Review critic, C.L. Dallat, latest, The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff, 2009)
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House Earls Court London

Sat 14 May—Sat 28 May, Writer’s Residency

at Heinrich Böll Cottage Achill Island Co. Mayo

Mon 9 May—Mon 20 Jun, 8pm fortnightly, Summer 2016 Readings

…hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Sat 30 Apr, 11am, Cushendun Big Arts Festival

Carmel to Cushendun:
Having risen to fame as the California poet, & made his home on the beautiful & remote Carmel coast, Robinson Jeffers, with his wife Una & their sons, traveled, in 1929, to the Ireland of his & Una’s forebears. Based on their explorations on the Antrim Coast in the similarly beautiful & remote landscape of the Glens of Antrim, Una was to rediscover the Gaelic music of her grandparents, Robinson would write about Ireland’s ancient mountains & battles, & both would read & explore avidly in the world of the Irish literary & cultural revival, much of which had its origins in the Antrim Glens in the 1900s.
After a visit (plus readings, recital & workshops, see Apr 8th/9th above) at Tor House, the Jeffers’ former Carmel home, Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat explore (in poetry, music & talk) Robinson & Una Jeffers’ 1920s Cushendun visit, Una’s love of Irish music, the Glens’ influence on Robinson’s poetry, & his legacy to the poetry of John Hewitt, John Montague & Seamus Heaney

A John Hewitt Society event
Venue: Mary McBrides, 2 Main Street Cushendun BT44 0PH

Spring 2016: US West Coast Tour …readings, music, talks & a workshop, by Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Carmel, Santa Cruz …

Tue Apr 12, 7.30pm Poetry Santa Cruz with Anne-Marie Fyfe & C.L. Dallat

Venue: Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Av Santa Cruz CA 95060

Sun Apr 10, 9pm, Dennis Morton’s Poetry Show on KUSP, guests Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat

Fri & Sat, Apr 8 & 9, Coast to Coast: Two Poets from Ireland’s Glens of Antrim celebrate Robinson & Una Jeffers

Venue: Tor House, Carmel CA 93923, reservations required, for reservations and/or information: 831.624.5725

Fri Apr 8, 7pm, Tower and Song: Robinson & Una Jeffers in Ireland, Parlor of Tor House, Admission: $35
Glens of Antrim poets Cahal Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe, in talk, readings, poems and music (on traditional flute, button accordion & Una’s piano) will discuss the Glens of Antrim revival of the early 20th century; explore the 19th century encounter between composed/classical music & Ireland’s traditional music heritage; & bring to life the passionate group of writers & musicians who popularized a romantic Ireland…
Sat Apr 9, 10am-2pm Coastal Margins: A Poetry/Creative Writing Workshop with Anne-Marie Fyfe, in The Library, East Wing, Tor House, Limited to 15. Workshop fee: $50
Poet Anne-Marie Fyfe’s first home was within yards of the legendary Sea of Moyle on the Antrim Coast. While always engaged with the contemporary, with love, loss, journeys, & alienation, her writing — from her first publication A House by the Sea to her most recent, fifth collection of poems, House of Small Absences — has always echoed the rush of tide, the North Channel’s waves, the sounds of fishing boats, the lives of coastguards & lighthouse men, of neighboring islanders, & the isolation & marginality, the shifting boundaries, real & metaphorical, between land & sea, between headland & deep.
A series of writing & teaching residencies at Aldeburgh on England’s East Coast, on Rathlin opposite the Jeffers’s much-loved Fair Head in County Antrim & on Inishmaan in the Aran Islands, have led to her current prose/poetry project — Coastal Margins/Wavesound — & to a themed poetry/creative writing workshop for writing groups in coastal/island settings.
Sat Apr 9, 7pm, Coast to Coast: Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat, Parlor of the East Wing, Tor House, Admission: $15
Having risen to fame as the California poet, & made his home on the beautiful & remote Carmel coast, Robinson Jeffers, with Una & their sons, traveled, in 1929, to the Ireland of his & Una’s forebears. Based on their explorations on the Antrim Coast in the similarly beautiful & remote landscape of the Glens of Antrim, Una was to rediscover the Gaelic music of her grandparents, Robinson would write about Ireland’s ancient mountains & battles, & both would read & explore avidly in the world of the Irish literary & cultural revival, much of which had its origins in the Antrim Glens in the 1900s.
Poet Anne-Marie Fyfe, from Cushendall, & poet/musician, Cahal Dallat, from Ballycastle, bring to the Jeffers’s California home their own poetry & music. (In the first half of the program, they will talk about the Glens of Antrim, its landscape & cultural revival, & read excerpts from Jeffers & other Glens & North-of-Ireland writers, with one or two of Una’s favorite melodies on accordion or traditional flute. In the second half of the program, they’ll each introduce & read poems from their own current poetry collections.)
Venue: Tor House, 26304 Ocean View Carmel CA 93923

Mon Apr 4, 1.30pm, Reading & In-Conversation

with Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat
Venue: Mt San Antonio College, 1100 N Grand Av Walnut CA 91789

Wed Mar 30 to Sat Apr 2, AWP (Assoc. of Writers & Writing Programs) Annual Conference

Coffee-House Poetry & Troubadour International Poetry Prize at Stand 632,
Venue: LA Conference Centre, 1201 Figueroa St Los Angeles CA 90015

Mon Mar 28, 6.30pm, Poetry Reading

featuring Brendan Constantine, Nicelle Davis, Maureen Grady,Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat
Venue: Stories Books, 1716 W Sunset Bvd Los Angeles CA 90026

Fri Mar 25, 7pm, Poetry Reading

featuring Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat
Venue: Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St San Francisco CA 94118

Sun Mar 20, 1pm, Reading & In-Conversation,

with Anne-Marie Fyfe& Cahal Dallat
Venue: Book Passage(Marin County), 51 Tamal Vista Bvd Corte Madera CA 95925

Tue Mar 15, doors 7pm for 8, Poetry Showcase

with Edward Skoog, Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat,
Venue: Salon Skid Row SW Alder St Portland OR 97204

Sat & Sun, Mar 12 & 13, Seattle Irish Festival

Sat Mar 12, 2pm, From Brian Boru to the Foggy Dew: In an hour-long mix of poem, music, history, life and letters, poet Anne-Marie Fyfe & historian/literary-critic, Cahal Dallat (with mandolin, traditional flute and accordion) explore the intersections of history with poetry, song & story, over 900 years from 11c Brian Boru’s March by way of Robert Emmett and the Fenians, to Yeats’ Easter 1916 & that great post-1916 anthem, The Foggy Dew (written by Cahal’s greatuncle): with Anne-Marie’s readings/excerpts from Thomas Moore, WB Yeats, Padraig Pearse, Alice Milligan & Roger Casement.
Sun Mar 13, 2pm, Gasworks Walls & Marble Halls: Irish poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat trace the tangled weave of Irish music (from the early harpers through to The Chieftains & The Dubliners) exploring James Joyce’s — & Ireland’s — great cultural dilemma: whether to opt for the West of Ireland authenticity of the tragic (Galway gasworks employee) Michael Furey singing the plaintive Lass of Aughrim (in Joyce’s best-loved short story, The Dead), to join the ‘modern tide’ of commercial music, or to aspire to the Marble Halls of high European culture… Cahal’s history is interwoven with traditional Irish (& a touch of classical) playing on his musette accordion, mandolin & traditional flute — & with Anne-Marie’s choice of readings from Joyce, Yeats & contemporary Irish writers
Venue: Seattle Center Armory (Upper Level), 305 Harrison St Seattle WA 98109

Thu Mar 10, 7pm, Bookstore Reading, Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat

Venue: Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Av Seattle WA 98122

Mon 7 Mar: The Sea, the Sea:

invited guest poets read their own & others’ poems of sea & shore, of bays & boats, of tides & tempests …plus sea-themed music & nautical prize quiz by CL Dallat

La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée, Paul Valery wrote in 1920, giving Iris Murdoch the title for her 1978 Booker-winner The Sea, the Sea, both testifying to the tidal pull the mercurial element that covers two-thirds of the world surface has had on the literary imagination from Jorie Graham’s Sea Change back through Louise Glück’s All her life she dreamed of living by the sea, Mark Doty’s last outpost in the huge indetermination of sea & Seamus Heaney’s timeless waves, bright, shifting, broken glass…

… via John Masefield’s Sea Fever, Eva Gore-Booth’s Little Waves of Breffny to Shakespeare’s multitudinous seas incarnadine & Homer’s wine-dark sea.

Emily Dickinson relishes the divine intoxication/ of the first league out from land while Matthew Arnold hesitates where the sea meets the moon-blanched land & Walt Whitman indulges in marine metaphors in O Captain! My Captain!. But all is not Baudelaire’s flat, calm, vast mirror, with sea-faring tragedies like Longfellow’s Wreck of the Hesperus, Richard Murphy’s Cleggan Disaster & Gerald Manley Hopkins’ Wreck of the Deutschland.

There lies the port: the vessel puffs her sail (as Tennyson says): catch that tide & come along with us to celebrate the thrill of the ocean wave, the lure of harbour lights, in poems by our invited poets &/or by their favourite famous poets, listen to themed maritime music & join in our not-too-nautical prize-quiz…
Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Thu 11 Feb, 6.30—8.30pm, Poetry Reading

…with Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat for Institute of Creative & Critical Writing, Birmingham City University
Venue: Grd.Fl.Lect. Theatre, School of Art, Margaret St Birmingham B3 3BX Birmingham

Mon 8 Feb, 8—10pm, The Poem as Selfie-Stick:

a Coffee-House Colloquy with Fiona Sampson, R.A. Villanueva, Fiona Moore, Tim Liardet & C.L. Dallat

Self-portraiture’s slicker on Smart-phone than it was in Rembrandt’s 17c studio but he managed ninety(!) nonetheless: & would’ve had to change his profile picture every few months on social media. But long before the ‘selfie’, the poem has always allowed us a variety of poses, personae, dressing-up, trying on studied looks, allowed us to explore identity, adopt identities… Is the ‘I’ in poetry always ‘me’? Is it ever really ‘me’? Is the ‘you’ or ‘he/she’ sometimes ‘I/we’?

Hear four significant poets read their work in the first half and, after the break, join in a Coffee-House Colloquy on how they regard, or disregard, the self-portrait in poetry, self-expression, the sense of self, the divided self…

Fiona Sampson is Professor of Poetry at Univ. Roehampton, where she is Director of the Poetry Centre & edits Poem: latest colllection The Catch (Chatto, publ. Feb. 2016);
R.A. Villanueva (b. NJ, lives in Brooklyn & teaches at NYU) was 2013 recipient of the Ninth Letter Literary Award; latest collection Reliquaria (Univ. Nebraska Press, 2014);
Fiona Moore blogs on displacement-poetry.blogspot.co.uk & is Assistant Editor on The Rialto; her second pamphlet, Night Letter, was published by Happenstance Press in 2015.
Tim Liardet is Professor of Poetry at Bath Spa University; his poetry collections include The World Before Snow (Carcanet, 2015), shortlisted for the 2015 TS Eliot Prize
chaired by poet & BBC R4 Saturday Review critic, CL Dallat, latest collection, The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff, 2009)

Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Mon 25 Jan—Mon 7 Mar, 8pm fortnightly, Spring 2016 Readings

…hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

2015

Mon 14 Dec, 8pm: A Winter’s Tale:

…invited guest poets read their own & others’ winter words …plus midwinter music & prize quiz by CL Dallat

A sad tale’s best for winter, Mamillius tells Hermione in A Winter’s Tale: & poets have long revelled in the bleak midwinter (Christina Rossetti), the dead of winter (WH Auden), a winter’s day/ in a deep and dark December (Paul Simon)…

But winter has other moods: consider the emotional range of Schubert’s Winter Journey, the potential for mystery in Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, satire in Simon Armitage’s Snow Joke, irony in WR Rodger’s White Christmas, pathos in Thomas Hardy’s Music in a Snowy Street, optimism in his Darkling Thrush… And what about all those contradictory winter titles: Wild Decembers (Edna O’Brien), Summer in February (Jonathan Smith), The Snow Party (Derek Mahon), December Bride (Sam Hanna Bell)?

Yes, there’ll be poems about snow & ice, poems such as Frost’s Stopping by Woods…, Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight, MacNeice’s snow & the huge roses, Sharon Olds’ True Love, right through to Edward Thomas’ Thaw, Ted Hughes’ Thaw & Louise Gluck’s End of Winter…

But there’ll certainly be poems, too, about winter light & warmth, with lines like …after-image of lamps/ swinging through the yards/ on winter evenings (Seamus Heaney, from Wintering Out), poems about December cityscapes exploding in festive light, about interiors becoming warmer, more inviting, about Christmas, & Twelfth Night, & all the seasonal revelry that dispels the lengthening darkness…

Come along & celebrate some or all of the myriad hazy shades of winter in poems by our invited guest poets &/or by their favourite famous poets, listen to themed midwinter music & join in our seasonal prize-quiz…
Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Mon 16 Nov, 8pm: An Evening with New-York Poet, Tom Sleigh

…reading & in-conversation with C.L. Dallat plus former troubadour prizewinners Paul Stephenson & Mona Arshi

Award-winning poet Tom Sleigh was born in Texas, lives in New York, is director of Hunter College’s Creative-Writing MFA, & has published ten books of poetry including Station Zed (Graywolf, 2015), plus a full-length translation of Euripides’ Heraklitus & a book of essays, & has had five of his plays produced.
plus former Troubadour International Poetry Prize prizewinners:
Paul Stephenson (b. Cambridge) lives in Paris, & has won second prize in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize: his first pamphlet Those People was a winner in last year’s Poetry Business book and pamphlet competition, judged by Billy Collins, and was published in May 2015.
Mona Arshi, also a Troubadour prizewinner, was joint winner of last year’s Manchester Creative Writing Prize: first collection is the Forward-shortlisted Small Hands (Liverpool University Press, 2015)
plus, after the break, Tom Sleigh, in-conversation & Q&A with poet & critic, C.L. Dallat
Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Mon 9 Nov—Sat 14 Nov, Poetry: Work in Progress for Arvon Foundation

…residential course with tutors Maura Dooley & CL Dallat plus guest Jamie McKendrick
Venue: Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton Devon

Sat 31 Oct, 11—4 pm, Coastal-Margins/Wavesound Project

…drinks 12—2 pm, poetry by Anne-Marie Fyfe, music by CL Dallat
Venue: Aldeburgh Beach Lookout 31 Crag Path Aldeburgh Suffolk IP15 5BS

Sat 24 Oct, 7.15pm, Saturday Review on BBC Radio4:

Cahal Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe and guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 19 Oct—Mon 14 Dec, 8 pm fortnightly, Autumn 2015 Readings

…hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Earls Court London

Sun 11 Oct, 2.30—5pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: a WB Yeats walk

…with CL Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Poet and critic Cahal Dallat, who has lectured on Yeats for the Poetry Society, at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, and for the W.B. Yeats Society of New York at NYU, walks the walk and talks the literary talk.
Venue: Open-air walk from Ravenscourt Park Tube Station Hammersmith London

Wed 7 Oct, 8 pm Poetry Reading

Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat for Essex Poetry Festival
Venue: Southend Poetry Group, Naval & Military Club, 20 Royal Terrace Southend-on-Sea Essex SS1 1DU

Thu 24 Sep, 6.30 pm The Squat Pen, Poetry Reading

…with guest Anne-Marie Fyfe plus Stephanie Conn, Geoff Hatt, Darran McCann and CL Dallat chooses his Desert Island poem
Venue: No Alibis Bookstore, 83 Botanic Ave Belfast BT7 1JL

Tue 8 Sep, 6.30 pm City Lit Books Poetry Reading

…with Jacquelyn Pope, Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat
Venue: City Lit Books, 2523 N Kedzie Blvd Chicago IL 60647

Sat 5 Sep & Sun 6 Sep, 4-4.50pm, Gasworks Walls & Marble Halls: Joyce & the Making of Choices

…joint music/talk/reading performance by Anne-Marie Fyfe & CL Dallat

Gasworks Walls & Marble Halls: Joyce & the Making of Musical Choices. Irish poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat trace the tangled weave of Irish music (from Brian Boru’s 12c march through to The Chieftains & The Dubliners) exploring James Joyce’s—and Ireland’s—great cultural dilemma: whether to opt for the West of Ireland authenticity of ailing gasworks employee Michael Furey singing the plaintive Lass of Aughrim, join the ‘modern tide’ of commercial music, or aspire to the Marble Halls of high European culture… Cahal’s history is interwoven with traditional Irish (and a touch of classical) playing on his musette accordion—and with Anne-Marie’s choice of readings from Joyce, Yeats & contemporary Irish writers.
Venue: Kansas City Irish Festival, Crown Center Square, 2450 Grand Boulevard Kansas City MO

Fri 4 Sep, Mapping Yeats: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of W.B. Yeats with keynote lectures from Declan Kiberd and Vicki Mahaffey, and including

2.45 pm, Land of Hearts’s Desire, lecture by C.L. Dallat
4.30 pm, A Poetical Map of the Heart: reading by Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: University of Missouri Kansas City, MO

Mon 27—Fri 31 Jul, John Hewitt International Summer School 2015

…a week of readings, talks, lectures, discussions, creative writing, drama, music with Hannah Lowe, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Paul Muldoon, Niall Campbell, Colette Bryce, Bernard O’Donoghue, Paul Muldoon, Siobhan Campbell, John F. Deane, Eamon Grennan, Sara Berkeley, Alan Gillis, Moyra Donaldson, Iggy McGovern, novelists Ian Sansom, Dermot Bolger, Pat McCabe & many more, plus music, theatre, lectures, discussions, week-long Creative-Writing courses, plus The Squat Pen, The Lifeboat & Purely Poetry, plus opening address by David Steel (Lord Steel of Aikwood), and including

Tue 28 Jul, 9:45 am, The Other Sort, lecture by C.L. Dallat
Tue 28 Jul, 4.15 pm, Learning to Live with Difference, panel with Hannah Lowe, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and C.L. Dallat
Tue 28 Jul, 10 pm, The Squat Pen, poetry with Desert Island choice from Anne-Marie Fyfe
Thu 30 Jul, 11.15 am, Poetry Reading by Anne-Marie Fyfe from House of Small Absences (Seren) with Tess Gallagher
Venue: Marketplace Theatre, Armagh City

Sun 21 Jun, 2.30-5 pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats walk with C.L. Dallat

(for Bedford Park Festival & Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour)

Poet and critic Cahal Dallat, who has lectured on Yeats for the Poetry Society, at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, and for the W.B. Yeats Society of New
York at NYU, walks the walk and talks the literary talk.
Venue: Open-air walk from Ravenscourt Park Tube Station

Sat 20 Jun, 2 pm, A Hundred Thousand Stages: The WB Yeats Anniversary Lecture

with C.L. Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe
Bedford Park Festival

Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages
(Lapis Lazuli: W.B. Yeats)

From Bedford Park picnics & pageants, via Chiswick amateur dramatics, to a dramatic revival & a theatrical revolution…

Poets Cahal Dallat & Anne-Marie-Fyfe (through talk, & excerpts from Yeats’ letters & writings) tell how Bedford Park neighbours were to inspire the poet and dramatist to develop the stagecraft that revolutionised contemporary theatre.

Venue: The Studio, 2a Blenheim Road, Chiswick, London W4 1UA

Wed 17 Jun, 7.30 for 8 pm, Tread Softly: Favourite Poems in Celebration of WB Yeats with Fergal Keane

Bedford Park Festival

WB Yeats’ magical words echo throughout 20th century poetry & we’re celebrating his 150th birthday by sharing & listening to favourite poems in honour of our former Bedford Park Nobel-Prize-winning neighbour!

Our special guest, international journalist, broadcaster & author Fergal Keane, will introduce & read his own selection of much-loved Yeats’ poems.

So do bring a favourite poem to read (your own, or one by a well-known poet, max. 25 lines) on any one of the great Yeatsian themes—place, dreams, myth, magic, politics, the modern world, youth, age, romantic love: (if not your own poem, make your choice anything other than Yeats since we’re leaving that entirely in Fergal’s capable hands…)

Plus music, refreshments, hosted by local poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & C.L. Dallat
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Green tube station, Bath Road, Chiswick, London W4 1TX

Sat 23 May, 7.15pm, Saturday Review on BBC Radio4:

Cahal Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe and guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 11 May-Mon 22 Jun: Coffee-House Poetry, Summer-2015

fortnightly programme of readings, alternate Mondays, 8-10pm, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Thu 7 May—Fri 8 May, The Place for Poetry 2015

…with Paul Muldoon, Maura Dooley, Blake Morrison, Ros Barber, Jack Underwood, Stephen Knight, C.L. Dallat and more..

This dynamic two-day festival will investigate the spaces in which contemporary poetry operates. Through a programme of seminars, masterclasses, readings and academic papers from leading poets and poetic practitioners, we aim to explore the place of as well as the spaces for poetry in modern life.
Venue: Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW

Mar-Apr 2015 US Tour

Sat 11 Apr, Westchester Poetry Festival

Venue: Estherwood Mansion, The Masters School, 49 Clinton Ave, Dobbs Ferry NY 10522
h4. Fri 10 Apr, 2.30pm Poetry Reading:

Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat
Venue: Appalachian Cultural Centre, Carson Newman College, Jefferson City Tennessee 37760

Thu 9 Apr, Room to Rhyme:

C.L. Dallat on poets from the North of Ireland
Venue Lenoir Rhyne University, Hickory North Carolina 28601

Wed 8 Apr, Poetry Reading:

Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat
Venue: University of North Carolina at Charlotte North Carolina 28223

Tue 7 Apr, Poetry Reading:

Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat
Venue: Catawba College, Salisbury North Carolina 28144

Thu 2 Apr, 6.30 pm, Bookstore Reading:

Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat
Venue: Parnassus Books Hillsboro Plaza, 3900 Hillsboro Pike, Nashville Tennessee 37215

Wed 1 Apr, 7pm Poetry Reading

Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat
Venue: Young Hall Auditorium (Room 113), Center College, Danville Kentucky 40422

Tue 31 Mar, 3pm, Poetry Reading & Craft Discussion

with poets Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat at Hannah Ford Room, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi 38677

Fri 27 Mar, 12.30 pm, 8th Annual Clemson Literary Festival

The South Carolina Review presents Contemporary Irish Writers with poets Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat
Venue: Academic Success Center, 118, 836 McMillan Rd, Clemson South Carolina 29634

Wed 25 Mar, Why Poetry Matters?

with poets Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat,
in the Writers Here & Now Series
Venue: 0220 Jimenez Hall, University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742

Mon 23 Mar, 7 pm, Poetry Class

with poets Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat
Venue: Hunter College, 695 Park Ave, Manhattan NY 10065

Sun 8 Feb: 12 noon—3.30 pm, The Magic of Realism: Neruda, Vallejo and Paz

seminar with C.L. Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry

I’ll die in Paris in a shower of rain/ On a day I already remember (Vallejo); Hammers pound there above/ pulverized voices/ from the top of the afternoon (Paz); Taut and dry Spain was/ a day’s drum of dull sound (Neruda)… Discover three major Latin American poets (in translation), all three major world artists engaging with the local and universal, each from a particular perspective, Peruvian, Chilean or Mexican, yet all approachable, immediate, profoundly influential: a chance to spend Sunday in Santiago, Lima, Mexico City, the world…
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Mon 23 Feb, 8-10pm: An Evening with John Montague:

rare chance to hear major Irish poet John Montague reading & in-interview with C.L. Dallat, with songs from World Runners, Josie Frater & Steve Taylor

Father-figure to a cohort of 60s Irish poets, Brooklyn-born John Montague was raised in County Tyrone, educated in Armagh & Dublin, has taught at University College Cork & the Iowa Writers Workshop & has lived in Paris, Dublin & West Cork, his cultural life intersecting those of Richard Wilbur, Claude Esteban, Sean O’Riada & The Chieftains, Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett & several generations of Irish poets in the years since his Forms of Exile (first of a dozen or so seminal poetry collections, plus essays, short-stories etc) first appeared in 1958.
plus, after the break, John Montague, in-conversation & Q&A with poet, musician & broadcaster C.L. Dallat
plus songs/world-music from World Runners – vocalist Josie Frater & drummer/percussionist Steve Taylor have appeared on Radio 2 & Jazz FM & at Jazz Café, Ronnie Scott’s & Glasgow’s Celtic Connections Festival
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Mon 26 Jan-Mon 9 Mar: Coffee-House Poetry Spring 2015

fortnightly programme of readings, alternate Mondays, 8-10pm, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

2014

Sun 30 Nov, 12-3.30pm: Electric Light: a Seamus Heaney seminar with C.L. Dallat

A chance to explore the development of an amazing poetic gift from the urgency & innocence of Death of a Naturalist (1966), through the complexities of the middle years in The Haw Lantern & Seeing Things to the emotional riches of Electric Light, District & Circle, & the deeply moving Human Chain (2010): & an opportunity to explore a journey from life on a 1940s Country Derry farm by way of Queens University Belfast to Harvard, the Nobel prize & international status as the best-known poet in the world (The Independent).

With Cahal Dallat, poet, musician & critic, b. Ballycastle, Co. Antrim, has written on contemporary poetry for Guardian, TLS, Poetry Review, Wasafiri, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London & The North (among others): a regular contributor to Saturday Review (BBC R4) over the past 15 years, he has won the Strokestown International Poetry Competition & his latest collection is The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff, 2009).
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Mon 3 Nov, 8 pm: An Evening with Roger McGough:

…leading Liverpool poet, performer & Radio4 poetry presenter, Roger McGough, in-conversation with C.L. Dallat with songs from Bernadette Reed

Ever since his poetry first appeared in The Mersey Sound In 1967 (& sold over half-a-million copies) Roger McGough has been a fascinating & highly popular cross-cultural figure recording three Top-10 singles (& The Liver Birds theme) with The Scaffold, contributing to Yellow Submarine, appearing in a Beatles mockumentary, translating Molière, recording a one-minute version of The Wreck of the Hesperus, publishing around 30 poetry collections (with another dozen or so for kids) & currently presenting BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please: Roger is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature & President of The Poetry Society
plus after the break, Roger, in-conversation & Q&A with poet, musician & broadcaster C.L. Dallat
plus songs from jazz/acoustic singer/songwriter Bernadette Reed whose 2009 album Walking on Water explores sound, form and the silent radiant emptiness that permeates creation
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Sun 2 Nov, 8 pm: Buzzwords Poetry featuring C.L. Dallat

Poetry workshop with C.L. Dallat, 7pm, Poetry Reading with C.L. Dallat & open-mic, 8pm
Venue: Exmouth Arms, Bath Rd, Leckhampton, Cheltenham GL53 7LX

Sat 1 Nov, 7.30 pm, Poetry Reading featuring Anne-Marie Fyfe & Donald Gardner plus music from C.L. Dallat Venue: The Maltings Arts Theatre, St. Albans

Sat 18 Oct, 7.15pm, Saturday Review on BBC Radio4:

Cahal Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe and guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 6 Oct-Mon 15 Dec: Coffee-House Poetry, Autumn-2014/Troubadour60,

…fortnightly programme of readings, alternate Mondays, 8-10pm, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Sun 28 Sep, 7.30 pm: Tongues & Grooves, Irish Showcase

with poet, musician and critic, Cahal Dallat, The Croppies (violin, banjo, accordion and guitar/mandola) and special guests Bernard MacDonagh and Catherine Ward.
Venue: The Square Tower, Old Portsmouth

Mon 28 Jul—Fri 1 Aug, Twenty-Seventh Annual John Hewitt International Summer School

Venue: Marketplace Theatre, Armagh City

Sat 12 Jul 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Wed 18 Jun, 7.30 for 8 pm, Bedford Park Festival

Poets & Mandolins: A Poetry Evening with special guest Louis De Bernières, plus poems, music, refreshments, hosted by local poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & C.L. Dallat

T.S. Eliot wrote of, & played, the mandolin, as did George Herbert though he knew it as a lute, like Wyatt, or Shakespeare, singing of Orpheus’ lute, or Edgar Allan Poe, or local Bedford Park poet W.B. Yeats & his ??lute-thronged angelic door??…
so where better than St. Michael & All Angels to throw its angelic doors open on a midsummer evening to Captain Corelli’s Mandolin author, Louis De Bernières, for his personal selection of poetry & prose; (poet, author & mandolin-player, Louis De Bernières has published eight novels including the bestselling Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, now a major motion picture, &, in 2013, a poetry collection, Imagining Alexandria: Poems in Memory of C.P. Cavafy;
plus an evening of poems about music—do bring a favourite poem to read (your own, or one by a well-known poet, max. 25 lines) about music (great music, light music, distant music, forgotten songs), about musicians & composers, famous & familiar, about musical instruments old & new, stringed & otherwise…

Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Green tube station, Bath Road, London W4 1TX

Sun 15 Jun, 2.30-5 pm: Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats walk with C.L. Dallat

(for Bedford Park Festival & Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour)

Mon 9 Jun, 8-10pm: An Evening with Paul Muldoon

Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet & New Yorker editor, Paul Muldoon, with music from Christine Tobin

Paul Muldoon (b. Co. Armagh), studied at Queen’s University Belfast, has worked as a radio producer, has lived in the US since 1987 & in 2007 was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College. His poetry collections range from New Weather & Mules (1973 & ‘77), to Horse Latitudes (2006) & Maggot (2010), with a selected, Poems 1968-1998, published in 2001, he has won the T.S. Eliot Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Shakespeare Prize & Aspen Prize & is regarded as ‘the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War’ (TLS)
plus, after the break, Paul, in-conversation & Q&A with fellow-Queens University-Belfast poet C.L. Dallat
plus, songs from Irish-born, London-based, jazz-rooted, world-music-influenced, BBC 2008 Jazz Awards’ Best Vocalist, ‘24-carat-voiced’ singer-songwriter Christine Tobin
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Mon 26 May-Mon 7 Jul: Coffee-House Poetry, Summer-2014/Troubadour60

fortnightly programme of readings, alternate Mondays, 8-10pm, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Fri 16-Sat 17 May, Twelfth John Hewitt Spring Festival

Regionalism: The Last Chance?
Local identity in a shrinking world

Friday 16th May

Creative Writing with John Glenday: 7pm: £12 Writer’s Block vs Reader’s Block: John Glenday leads this intimate writing workshop, looking at strategies for increasing creativity and output & how to hone their poetry to appeal to readers. No advanced preparation is required.

Saturday 17th May

The Great Scottish Novel 11.15am £8 Our annual Great Northern Novel panel debate takes on a Scottish flavour in light of the upcoming Scottish Independence referendum. Poet John Glenday, theatre critic & cultural observer Joyce McMillan and Lagan Press poet Damian Smyth debate the merits of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam.

Tae Think Again! With Robert Crawford & Joyce McMillan: 2.15pm £8 Have Scotland’s writers signed-up to cultural independence? Or like Scotland’s footballers, are they playing on a UK-wide pitch? Join Joyce McMillan, theatre critic for The Scotsman, and Robert Crawford, author of Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and the Literary Imagination, 1314-2014 in discussion with poet and broadcaster C.L. Dallat

Children of the Devolution!: 4pm: £8 Poetry from across the dis-United Kingdom, representing nations that have defined their own political & imaginative independence. John Glenday (Scotland) will be joined by Paula Cunningham (Northern Ireland) and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch (Wales).

Joanne Harris & Robert Crawford: 5.30pm: £8 A poet with a strong regional voice ,followed by a best-selling novelist who has made provincial France her fictional heartland.

Robert Crawford has published six poetry collections, with a seventh due in Autumn 2014.
Joanne Harris is author of 18 novels, including the No.1 bestseller Chocolat and her most recent, The Gospel of Loki (Feb 2014).

Anne-Marie Fyfe

Venue:

Carnlough

Booking:

Sat 12 Apr, Westchester Poetry Festival

with readings by C.L. Dallat, Ann Lauterbach, Dorothea Lasky, Kevin Varrone, Margo Stever & Cornelius Eady (festival sponsored by The Masters School & The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center)
Venue: Estherwood Mansion, The Masters School, 49 Clinton Ave, Dobbs Ferry NY 10522

Wed 9 Apr, Poetry Reading by C.L. Dallat

Venue: An Beal Bocht Cafe, 445 W 238th St, Bronx, New York NY 10463

Sun 6 Apr, 4-6 pm, Phoenix Reading Series

with Mike Graves, Carol Stone, Anne-Marie Fyfe & C.L. Dallat
Venue: The Upright Brew, 547 Hudson Street New York NY 10014

Sat 5 Apr, 10am-5pm, , Taste of the Yeats Summer School

featuring Geraldine Higgins, Maureen Murphy, Anne-Marie Fyfe, C.L. Dallat & Spiral Theatre’s production, Gonne/Yeats
Venue: Glucksman Ireland House, NYU, One Washington Mews, New York NY 10003

Tue 1 Apr, 6 pm, Irish Literary Festival

with Anne-Marie Fyfe & C.L. Dallat
Venue: Reith Recital Room, Goshen College, Goshen IN 46526

Mon 31 Mar, Ohio University, Athens OH 45701

Wed 26 Mar, 7pm Echoes Across the Pond: Voices, Irish & American

Poetry Reading with Anne-Marie Fyfe, C.L. Dallat, Tim Nolan, Patricia Kirkpatrick & Joyce Sutphen
Venue: The Loft Literary Center 1011 Washington Ave Sth, Minneapolis MN 55415

Tue 25 Mar, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN 56082

Sun 9 Mar, 12-3.30pm: Electric Light: a Seamus Heaney seminar with C.L. Dallat

Fri 7 Mar, 8pm, Ware Poets, with C.L. Dallat plus open-mic

Venue: Ware Arts Centre, Kibes Ln, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 7ED

Sun 23 Feb, 7pm: The Bookshop Theatre presents Mapping Beckett

Beckett, Yeats & brother Jack, introduced by C.L. Dallat

Peter Marinker writes: …in our correspondence Cahal has teased out the warm relationship Beckett had with the painter, Jack Yeats and the ambivalent one he had with Jack’s brother, the poet W.B. Yeats. We’ll be looking at Yeats’ play Purgatory, poems The 2nd Coming and Byzantium, Beckett’s, Embers, Endgame & much more. Book ahead if you can
Venue: The Cockpit Gateforth Street, Marylebone, London NW8 8EH, 020 7258 2925, Tickets, £7

The Bookshop Theatre (patron, Edward Beckett) evolved from The Godot Company & John Calder’s Theatre of Literature. On a trip to the West of Ireland to launch Calder’s publication of Beckett’s poetry with readings by Peter Marinker, the actor and the publisher decided to build a company to perform WAITING FOR GODOT as closely to the intentions of the author as possible- not as a star vehicle but as a company of players. The resulting production toured London’s Fringe theatres and went to Edinburgh & Paris where audiences were astonished by its simplicity and clarity. Over the past 10 years we have performed most of Beckett’s plays, poetry and much of the prose at the Calder Bookshop in Waterloo. Last year, as Calder moved out of London to work in Edinburgh & Paris, Marinker moved the performances to the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone where, this autumn, the Company will be reviving the orginal production. To be included in mailing list please send a message to thebookshoptheatre@gmail.com

Mon 17 Feb, 8-10pm: Coffee-House Colloquies: The Art of Choosing:

listen to the poet-editors who bring us the best in magazine poetry: Maurice Riordan (Poetry Review), Michael Mackmin, (The Rialto), Patricia McCarthy (Agenda) & Ahren Warner (Poetry London), discussion chaired by C.L. Dallat

In a Troubadour60 return to our much-loved Coffee-House poets-in-discussion format, come along to hear what makes the editors of our four leading poetry magazines tick! Listen to them read their own poems &, after the break, hear them join in a panel discussion, with audience Q&A, on what makes a poetry magazine & what makes, for them, a magazine poem:

Maurice Riordan (ed. Poetry Review), b. Lisgoold, Co. Cork, has taught at Goldsmiths, Imperial & Sheffield Hallam; latest collection The Water Stealer (Faber, 2013)
Agenda editor Patricia McCarthy (latest collection, Around the Mulberry Bush, Waterloo, 2013) was born in Cornwall, has lived in Washington, Paris, Nepal, Ireland & Mexico, and won the 2013 National Poetry Competition
Rialto magazine & books/pamphlets editor (& keen North-Norfolk bird-watcher) Michael Mackmin was one of the magazine’s founders in 1984; his own collections include Twenty-Three Poems (Happenstance, 2006)
Eric Gregory Award-winner Ahren Warner was appointed as Poetry London’s poetry editor in Feb. 2013; his latest collection, Pretty (Bloodaxe, 2013) is a PBS Recommendation
discussion chaired by poet & BBC R4 Saturday-Review critic, C.L. Dallat, latest collection, The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff, 2009)
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Mon 20 Jan-Mon 17 Mar: Coffee-House Poetry, Spring-2014/Troubadour60

fortnightly programme of readings, alternate Mondays, 8-10pm, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

2013

Sat 14 Dec 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Sat 23 Nov 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 7 Oct-Mon 16 Dec: Coffee-House Poetry, Autumn 2013

fortnightly programme of readings, alternate Mondays, 8-10pm, hosted by Anne-Marie Fyfe with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Mon 7 Oct, 8-10 pm: An Evening with Mark Doty

Mark Doty reading & in-conversation, plus singer/songwriter Bernadette Reed

A welcome back to Coffee-House Poetry for US poet Mark Doty, Professor/Writer-in-Residence at Rutgers University, winner of (among others) the National Book Award for Poetry & the T.S. Eliot Prize & author of The Art of Description, a handbook for writers, four prose books including Firebird & Dog Years, & eight books of poetry including School of the Arts??& ??Theories & Apparitions (Cape, 2008).

… including, after the break Mark, in-conversation & Q&A, with poet & critic C.L. Dallat
… plus songs from jazz/acoustic singer/songwriter Bernadette Reed whose 2009 album Walking on Water explores sound, form and the silent radiant emptiness that permeates creation (with guitarist Les Davidson)
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Sat 18 Aug 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 22—Fri 26 Jul, Twenty-sixth Annual John Hewitt International Summer School

Venue: Marketplace Theatre, Armagh

Mon 8 Jul Poetry Reading with C.L. Dallat & Anne-Marie Fyfe

Venue: Café Writers, Norwich

Sun 30 Jun: 12 noon—2.30 pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats Walk with C.L. Dallat

for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Sublimely inspired, poets nonetheless need a world of publishing, poetry groups, and literary connections in which to develop. Join our Sunday stroll (12-2.30pm, starts Ravenscourt Pk Tube, ends Turnham Grn Tube) by way of Upper Mall, Old Chiswick Churchyard and the Nobel-prize-winning poet’s favourite riverside haunts, to Bedford Park, London’s 19c artists’ colony, where the young Yeats’ poetry flourished: a walk that takes in, en route, Pissarro, Pope, Thackeray, Wm. Morris, Whistler, Stepniak, Shaw, Holst, Henley, other Yeatses, Chiswick Mall, actors, engravers, sundry poetry presses, & much more.

Sun 16 Jun: 12 noon—2.30 pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats Walk with C.L. Dallat

for Bedford Park Festival in association with Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Wed 12 Jun, 7.30 for 8 pm, Bedford Park Festival

A World of Wildlife: Poetry Evening with special guest poet Ruth Padel
…plus music, refreshments, hosted by local poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & C.L. Dallat
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Green tube station, Bath Road, London W4 1TX

Mon 10 Jun, 7.30 for 8pm The Fall & Rise of Bedford Park

— with C.L. Dallat, John Rowe, John Scott & Nigel Woolner

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Bedford Park Society and the preservation of the world’s first garden suburb. With poet Cahal Dallat on its early arts community; John Scott on its architecture; actor John Rowe on John Betjeman’s contribution; Society president Nigel Woolner on the heritage battles; and a look ahead to the next 50 years.
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Green tube station, Bath Road, Chiswick, London W4 1TX

Mon 20 May—: Coffee-House Poetry, Summer 2013

fortnightly programme of readings, with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Sun 19 May: 12 noon—3.30 pm, A Northern Spring:

poetry seminar with C.L. Dallat
for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

A new look, not simply at the seismic 60s upsurge in poetry in the North of Ireland through the Heaney, Longley & Mahon years, but also at the quirkily eclectic & postmodern, sometimes obscure, often playful poetry that followed from the North’s ‘next generation’: Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson & Paul Muldoon, some of the key influences on British poetry today.
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Mon 12 May: One City One Book

Panel discussion on Belfast in Fiction with Lucy Caldwell, David Park & Colin Bateman chaired by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Whiterock Library, Belfast

Fri 10—Sat 11 May: Eleventh John Hewitt Spring Festival

Living Among Strangers with Sarfraz Manzoor, Ronan Bennett, Louise Doughty, Kim Leneghan, Cherry Smyth, Anita Robinson, Michael McKimm, Kenneth Irvine, Heather Newcombe, Elaine Gaston, C.L. Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe, plus the Great Northern Novel Debate, Creative-Writing with Cherry Smyth and All-Day Bookstall courtesy of NoAlibis
Venue: Londonderry Arms Hotel, Carnlough Harbour on the Antrim Coast Road

Sat 27 Apr 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 4 Mar: Ó Bhéal” Workshop & Reading

7 pm Ó Bhéal Poetry Workshop with C.L. Dallat
9 pm Ó Bhéal Poetry Reading with Guest Poet C.L. Dallat plus Poetry Challenge plus Open-Mic
Venue: The Long Valley, Winthrop St, Cork

Mon 28 Jan: Coffee-House Poetry, Spring 2013

fortnightly programme of readings, with music by C.L. Dallat
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

2012

Sun 9 Dec: 12 noon—3.30 pm, Damned Poets: Baudelaire, Rimbaud & Mallarmé, seminar with C.L. Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry

Enter the world — in translation — of French 19c poètes maudits, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) & Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98), all Bohemiéns en voyage, all living life to the extreme, condemned to misery, brilliance and crashing-out early, the poets who left us an astoundingly contemporary legacy and an enduring sense of what it means to choose the poet’s life!
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Sat 8 Dec 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 8 Oct, 9 pm: Spoken Word Paris

Poetry Reading with C.L. Dallat & Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: Au Chat Noir, 76 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, Paris 75011, Métro Parmentier/Couronnes

Sat 17 Aug Jul 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 23—Fri 27 Jul: Twenty-Fifth Annual John Hewitt International Summer School

…with a full five-day festival programme of creativity and culture with Roger McGough, Frieda Hughes, Anne-Marie Fyfe, John Banville, Gillian Clarke, John McCarthy, Leanne O’Sullivan, Mary Robinson, Adam O’Riordan & many more
Venue: Marketplace Theatre, Armagh

Sun 8 Jul: 12 noon—2.30 pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats Walk with C.L. Dallat

for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Wed 20 Jun: 7.30 for 8 pm, Bedford Park Festival Poetry Evening

…with Andrew Motion, guest readers, music, refreshments, hosted by local poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & C.L. Dallat
Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Hall, opp. Turnham Green tube station, Bath Road, London W4 1TX

Sun 17 Jun: 12 noon—2.30 pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats Walk with C.L. Dallat

for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour & Bedford Park Festival

Sat 5 May 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Fri 20 — Sat 21 Apr: 10th John Hewitt/Glens of Antrim Spring Festival

…featuring Mavis Cheek, Hector McDonnell, Eoghan Walls, C.L. Dallat, Heather Richardson, Martin Mooney, Moya Cannon, Bernie McGill, Anne-Marie Fyfe & Kapka Kassabova
Venue: Londonderry Arms Hotel, Carnlough Harbour on the Antrim Coast Road

Sat 14 Apr, 10 am—5 pm, Yeats in Utopia, talk by C.L. Dallat

for Taste of the Yeats Summer School plus Poetry Reading by Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: Glucksman Ireland House, NYU, 1 Washington Mews, NY

Sat 17 Feb 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Sun 5th Feb: 12 noon—3.30 pm, The Magic of Realism: Neruda, Vallejo and Paz with C.L. Dallat

2011

Sun 27 Nov: 12 noon—3.30 pm, The Magic of Realism: Neruda, Vallejo and Paz with C.L. Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry

Sat 24 Sep 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Sun 10 Jul: 12 noon—2.30 pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats Walk with C.L. Dallat

for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Sat 7 May, 2.30 pm, Collective Amnesia and the Age of Absurdity

C.L. Dallat in conversation with Michael Foley as part of Ninth John Hewitt/Glens of Antrim Spring Festival at Londonderry Arms, Carnlough, on the Antrim Coast: full Sat-Sun programme also includes Rita-Ann Higgins, Eoin McNamee, Mairide Woods, Moyra Donaldson, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Iggy McGovern, Kate Newmann plus Great Northern Novel debate, creative writing and Glens-of-Antrim literary tour
Venue: Londonderry Arms, Carnlough, on the Antrim Coast

Sat 12 Mar 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Thu 3 Feb, 8pm, Dalriada Festival: Poetry Reading with Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat

A reading by two Glens of Antrim poets, now London-based: arts-organiser and freelance creative-writing teacher, Anne-Marie Fyfe, from Cushendall, and her husband, musician and critic, C.L. Dallat from Ballycastle.
Venue: Thyme & Co, Quay Road, Ballycastle

Mon 31 Jan, 8pm, The Importance of Music to Poets: Coffee-House Colloquies III with Lavinia Greenlaw, Katharine Towers, Will Eaves and C.L. Dallat

Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, 263-267 Old Brompton Rd, London SW5

Sun 30 Jan, 12 noon—3.30pm, There Were Four of Us: Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva & Pasternak

Seminar with C.L. Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, 263-267 Old Brompton Rd, London SW5

2010

Sat 16 Oct 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Wed 29 Sep, 7pm, Back To School: 7 Poets for Oxfam

Autumn 2010 Fundraiser at Oxfam Marylebone featuring Carole Baldock, Anthony Thwaite, Charles Boyle, Anna Smaill, C.L. Dallat, Evan Jones and Helen Oswald, hosted by Todd Swift
Venue: Oxfam Books and Music Shop, 91 Marylebone High Street, London W1

Sun 26 Sep, 7pm, Aspects Irish Literature Festival in Bangor, County Down

Closing event of Aspects Irish Literature Festival (22nd-26th Sep) features Poetry & Song with Ciaran Carson, Anne-Marie Fyfe and Silhouette with Open-Mic session for local writers.
Venue: Vin Café, 132 Main Street, Bangor, Bangor, BT20 4AG

Sun 19 Sep, 12-2.30pm, Land of Heart’s Desire:

A guided W.B. Yeats walk with poet C.L. Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Sat 30 Jul 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 26—Fri 30 Jul, The 23rd John Hewitt International Summer School, in Armagh

including Sharon Olds in conversation with Anne-Marie Fyfe, keynote lecture from Eavan Boland, Boland/Olds in joint reading, plus poetry from Michael Longley, Paul Perry, Dennis O’Driscoll, Eoghan Walls and Chris Agee, plus Blake Morrison, Terry Eagleton, Glenn Patterson, Louis de Bernieres, fiction, drama, poetry workshops, music, dicussions and much more.
Venue: Marketplace Theatre, Armagh

Sun 27 Jun, 12noon, Akhmatova, Mandelstam & Tsvetaeva

seminar with C.L. Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, 263-267 Old Brompton Rd, London SW5

Thu 24 Jun, 7.30pm, Bedford Park Festival Poetry Event

The Poetry of Gardens in the world’s first Garden Suburb
…with special guest Polly Devlin, plus themed music, refreshments, hosted by local poets Anne-Marie Fyfe & Cahal Dallat

Sat 19 Jun, The Wolf Poetry Magazine Launch at the Poetry Society Studio

Featuring editor James Byrne and contributors including Alfred Corn and Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: Poetry Society Studio, upstairs at the Poetry Café, 22 Betterton Street, St. Covent Garden. London WC2H 9BX

Mon 14 Jun—Fri 16 Jul, 7-8.30pm, 15th Irish Writers in London Summer School

Sat 12—Sun 13 Jun, Bridlington Poetry Festival

with Simon Armitage, Carole Bromley, Colette Bryce, Pat Borthwick, James Byrne, C.L. Dallat, Antony Dunn, Paul Durcan, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Martha Kapos, Daljit Nagra, Heather Phillipson, Jacob Polley, Robin Robertson and David Wheatley
Venue: Sewerby Hall & Gardens, Bridlington

Sat 12 Jun, 4pm, Seminar, Relishing Difficulty: C.L. Dallat discusses John Ashbery, Medbh McGuckian & Jorie Graham
Venue: Goodin Room

Sun 13 Jun, 1.30pm, Poetry Reading, James Byrne and Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: Orangery

Sun 13 Jun, 3.15pm, Poetry Reading, Martha Kapos and C.L. Dallat
Venue: Orangery

Sat 5 Jun 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 24 May, 8pm, Vetcherniy Zvon/Evening Bells

at Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour
vetcherniy zvon/evening bells: Russian Poetry in translation from Pushkin, Khodasevich, Shvarts, Lipkin, Mandelstam & Ratushinskaya with Peter Daniels, Sasha Dugdale, Robert Chandler, C.L. Dallat, Yvonne Green and Xenia Dennen with Russian music from David Juritz and Milos Milivojevic
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Fri 7 May, 8pm, Poetry at Ware Arts Centre

with poetry from C.L. Dallat plus local poets
Venue: Ware Arts Centre, Kibes Lane, Ware, Herts

Sat 10 Apr, all day, Eighth John Hewitt Spring Festival

Back to Uncertainty: Considering Other Possibilities
with Linda Grant, Ciaran Hinds, John Walsh, Frank Ormsby, Sinead Morrissey, Hector McDonnell, Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat
Venue: Londonderry Arms Hotel, Carnlough, Co. Antrim

Sat 3 Apr 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Thu 25 Mar, 8.30pm, Poetry & Jazz

with Deborah Brown Quartet & poetry from C.L. Dallat & Richard Douglas Pennant (courtesy of Global Music Foundation & Cegin Productions)
Venue: Pizza Express Jazz Club, 10 Dean St, LONDON W1D 3RW

Thu 25 Mar, 6pm, Oxfam Books in Bloomsbury

Anne-Marie Fyfe reads with Owen Sheers and Ben Crystal
Venue: 12 Bloomsbury Street, WC1B 3QA (near Tottenham Court Road & British Museum), phone 020 7637 4610 for details

Sun 21 Mar, 12noon, The Art in the Everyday writing workshop with C.L. Dallat (first presented at Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2009) for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Wed 17-Fri 19 Mar, StAnza, Scotland’s Poetry Festival

Wed 17 Mar, 7pm, StAnza Festival Launch with Dr Louise Richardson, poetry from Anne-Marie Fyfe & Kei Miller, traditional Irish music from C.L. Dallat

Wed 17 Mar, 10pm, Inklight Poets with music from C.L. Dallat

Thu 18 Mar, 5pm, Five O’Clock Verses: Anne-Marie Fyfe & Luiz Munoz with John Burnside (translator)

Fri 19 Mar, 10am, Poetry Breakfast: “How Poets Develop” with Anne-Marie Fyfe, Jacob Polley, Monika Rinck & Swithun Cooper

Mon 15 Mar, 9pm, North Beach Poetry Nights

with Anne-Marie Fyfe
Venue: Crane Bar, Sea Road, Galway

Fri 12 Mar, 8pm, Over The Edge

with C.L. Dallat, Orla Higgins, Moya Roddy & Kate Dempsey
Venue: Over The Edge at Sheridan’s Wine Bar, 14-16 Church Yard Street, Galway

Thu 18th Feb, 8.30pm, Poetry & Jazz

Charles McPherson Quartet and Anne-Marie Fyfe, introduced by C.L. Dallat (courtesy of Global Music Foundation & Cegin Productions)
Venue: Pizza Express Jazz Club, 10 Dean St, LONDON W1D 3RW

Tue 16th Feb, 8pm, Kent & Sussex Poetry Society

with C.L. Dallat plus open-mike
Venue: the Camden Centre, Victoria Pl, TUNBRIDGE WELLS TN1 2SW

Thu 11th Feb, 7.30pm, Poetry Matters

with Anne-Marie Fyfe & C. L. Dallat
Venue: Artsbar, Wellington Rd, WOKINGHAM RG40 2AN

2009

Sat 12th Dec, 8pm, “Celtic Poets” at Café Ibsen, Limassol

Reading by Welsh poet Richard Douglas Pennant (Alabaster Jar, 2008, & CD, Old Stones, New Tales, 2004) & Irish poet/broadcaster C.L. Dallat (The Year of Not Dancing, Blackstaff Press, 2009) plus music, food, etc
Venue: Café Ibsen, Chrysanthou Mylonas 16, Ag. Zoni, Limassol

Thu 26th Nov, 8.30pm, Rhythm & Muse at the Lion

Poet C.L. Dallat reads with Kavita Jindal, with music from singer-songwriter Liz Simcock

Sat 7th Nov, 2-3pm, Reading: Emerging Voices

with Annie Freud, Sasha Dugdale, C.L. Dallat & Roger Robinson at The Twenty-First Aldeburgh Poetry Festival
Venue: Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh (plus, at Peter Pears Gallery Aldeburgh, 5.45-6.00pm, FREE, Join C.L. Dallat as he scrutinises a favourite poem…)

Sat 24th Oct, 3.15pm, The Act of Creating at Torbay Festival

with Mike Barlow, C.L. Dallat & Maggie Sawkins
Venue: Torbay Festival of Poetry, Grosvenor Hotel, Belgrave Rd, Torquay

Sun 27th Sep, 7.00pm, Over to You/Poetry & Song at Vin Café

with Enda Wyley, C.L. Dallat, Anthony Toner & Open-Mike with Malachi O’Doherty (as part of Aspects Irish Literature Festival 23rd to 27th September 2009, Bangor, Co. Down)

Sat 19th Sep, 7.30pm, Poetry Reading

featuring Anne Berkeley, C.L. Dallat and Siriol Troup
Venue: Poetry in the Crypt St Mary’s Church, Upper St, Islington,

Sat 22 Aug 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Mon 27th — Fri 31st Jul, Unfettered Thought: Belief in the Future: the 22nd John Hewitt International Summer School

with Helen Dunmore, Lewis Wolpert, Eugene McCabe, Daljit Nagra, Yang Lian, Siobhan Campbell, Donal O’Kelly, Leontia Flynn, Ian Sansom, Joyce Sutphen, Claire Kilroy, Joe McWilliams, Lucy Caldwell, Brian McGilloway, WJ McCormack, Joe McWilliams, John Wilson Foster, Claire Keegan plus creative writing (drama/fiction/poetry), panel discussions, readers’ group, music, drama, exhibitions, receptions…
Venue: Marketplace Theatre, Armagh

Sat 20 Jun 7.15 pm, Saturday Review on BBC R4

…CL Dallat joins Tom Sutcliffe & guests to discuss… a book, a play, a film, an exhibition etc

Sun 14th Jun, Gift of Tongues – a Michael Donaghy seminar with C.L. Dallat

for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Five years since London poetry circles were deprived of the intellectual conjuring and amiable company of Irish-American poet/musician, Michael Donaghy, Picador have now launched his Collected Poems and Collected Prose. C.L. Dallat, who shared a workshop with Mike, as they frequently shared poetry and music gigs, will lead a seminar on one of the most pleasurably dazzling poets of his generation.
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London

Thu 28th May, 6pm, Belfast Launch at Queen’s

Venue: Queen’s Visitors’ Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, BT7 1NN
Launch to celebrate publication of C.L. Dallat’s The Year of Not Dancing
Hosted by The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry and Blackstaff Press, t:028-9045 5006, refreshments, all welcome…

Wed 27th May, 7.30pm, Limavady Launch at Books Upstairs

Venue: Books Upstairs, 11a Market Street, Limavady
Launch to celebrate publication of C.L. Dallat’s The Year of Not Dancing
Plus collection of paintings by Anne Patterson
Hosted by Books Upstairs, t: 07711-127 331, refreshments, all welcome…

Mon 25th May, 8-10pm, Reading at Coffee-House Poetry

Venue: Troubadour, 263-267 Old Brompton Road, London SW5
Poetry Reading with Maura Dooley, Michael Laskey, Lorraine Mariner, Siriol Troup and C.L. Dallat (launching The Year of Not Dancing)
Music by Paul McLoughlin and Pete Clark

Sat 18th Apr, Seventh John Hewitt Spring Festival

at Carnlough’s Londonderry Arms Hotel on the Antrim Coast:
a day of literature and the arts with Polly Devlin, Brian Keenan, Hector McDonnell, Colette Bryce, Chris Spurr, Malachi O’Doherty, Anne-Marie Fyfe and C.L. Dallat (launching The Year of Not Dancing), for info see John Hewitt Society

Sundays – 15th, 22nd, 29th Mar, 2-4pm, Land of Heart’s Desire: a W.B. Yeats Guided Walk around Chiswick/Bedford Park with C.L. Dallat

for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

As part of Coffee-House Poetry’s celebration of Yeats’ 70th anniversary, a chance to explore the elegantly inspiring aesthetic urban environs in which Yeats first flourished.

The great Irish poet spent most of his childhood in Bedford Park, Chiswick, the world’s first garden suburb and a much-satirised 19c artists’ colony, where his poetic genius was nurtured in the company of pre-Raphaelite painters & illustrators, Celtic & Icelandic scholars/folklorists, dramatists, musicians, scene-painters, small-press printers and embroiderers…

A walk on the Yeats side – ending at Turnham Green on the District Line: a walk/talk that contextualises the multi-talented Yeats family, mentioning, in passing, Pissaro, Thackeray, Wm. Morris, Whistler, Arts and Crafts, speculative building, wallpaper patterns, peacock feathers, the Jameson Raid, Hogarth, Pope, G.K. Chesterton, Sergius Stepniak, Conan Doyle’s illustrator, Shaw’s mistress, musicians Holst & Dolmetsch, & divers printeries.

Inveterate walker of Bedford Park’s rook-delighting avenues and of the Thames’ Chiswick/Hammersmith reaches, poet, musician and critic, C.L. Dallat has long written & lectured on Irish literature and has talked on Yeats at the Bedford Park Society, Poetry Society/Poetry School and at the 49th International Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 2008.

Sun 1st Mar, in the deep heart’s core: a w.b. yeats seminar with C.L. Dallat for Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

A chance to discover and rediscover some familiar and not-so-familiar Yeats poems—and something of the dreamer and dream-maker behind the poems—in the company of Irish poet and Yeats-enthusiast Cahal Dallat who gave the Yeats Family Lecture at last year’s 49th Yeats International Summer School in Sligo.
Venue: Troubadour Coffee-House, Earls Court, London