YEATS ALL THE WAY

YEATS ALL THE WAY



Damen O'Brien (to whom congratulations for taking out the WB Yeats Poetry Prize, announced yesterday at Village Roadshow Theaterette/ SLV) asked fellow contributors to the YEATS DAY '15, if anyone has heard the Waterboys' album of Yeats settings and what did they think of it (and of contemporary musicians' versions in general)? And Ronan McDonald, who organises a Bloomsday in Sydney I believe, whose morning paper, 'Common Things that crave : animal cries in Yeats's Poetry', I'd missed, piped up that he'd heard the album and in a word it was magnificent (whether or not with Bono's imprimatur), part of a long tradition of such collaboration… And I thought to myself this banter would be perfect for a note I could write about our long Irish weekend (Yeats x 2 and Joyce (Bloomsday) on Tuesday) --the bridge between Declan Foley's Yeats 150 seminar on Saturday and Yeats' second coming this afternoon & evening at the Evelyn in Brunswick street…

Having managed to get away from Collected Works Bookshop around 1-30, made it to the State Library in time to greet Declan, Caz Masel, Bob Di Napoli and grab a pew in the auditorium for the afternoon session, my own head still reverberating from the conversation with Carrie Tiffany & Lloyd Jones at the Shop about aspects of my recent English trip, the contradictions between South & West England and Melbourne Oz assuaged only by an investment in a parallel life, that ever deeper or entangled concordance of trajectories, the writing out of which might make boon out of bane… (--almost Yeatsean that, even if I say so myself! --catch a falling gyre & etc!) 

Apparently I'd just missed Chris Wallace-Crabbe, but did see Earl Livings at the stage, & heard him introduce the Yeats Poetry Prize judge & winners… Pleased to hear Damen O'Brien & Alana Kelsall read their poems, and Carolyn Masel deliver the extensive judges' report on behalf of herself & Penny Buckley. Frank McGuire, MP, made the presentation, eloquently describing the Parliament of Victoria's embrace of Joyce last year & Yeats this, advancing poetry at the expense of the conventional paddywhackery so to speak! The afternoon's piece de resistance was the presentation of Yeats' s noh play, The Dreaming of the Bones, directed by Jessica Bellamy & performed by Tony Yap & Brendan O'Connor as a largely silent dance work. I cant say anything about the discussion, The place of the Arts and Humanities in the 21st century, because I had to be elsewhere…

So it is, ditto, in two or three hours time I'll be out of here too! At the Evelyn for Michael Plater's Before the World Was Made : A Musical Tribute to W.B.Yeats...

[June 14, '15, at 1-36pm]
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