Blake Evening April 4

Next month’s event is our Blake Evening on April 4, in the week before the Easter weekend. Can people email or post me or phone me with what they would like to read at the event. I’ll then draw up a schedule. I’ll put this up on the blog as I produce this, and make sure it’s circulated to everyone shortly before the event also. I suspect that there will be popular poems chosen by several people – fine. We’ll have them more than once, in different voices.

Also interesting would be music associated with Blake, eg settings of Blake poems. Mike Westbrook’s Glad Day is wonderful. Vaughan Williams’ Job – A Masque for Dancing also – based on Blake’s set of illustrations of the Book of Job likewise. We can surely include music too. Preferably CD or MP3. Suggestions also please of pieces to use!

Images? These might be worthwhile to somehow have available. I have the editions reproducing Blake’s books Urizen, Milton, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Songs of Innocence & Experience (latter very battered through teaching), plus a couple of books with big colour plates of various works. Anyone else?

What about writing influenced by Blake? Anyone daring this far? I’ll confess to a sequence that used Blake’s prophetic books as model, and an even odder point where the spirit of Robert Blake is presented as intervening in a poem.

Anyone prepared to say what they value or like in Blake also? I hope we can move to discussion at the end, but some points where people are prepared to say what they value when introducing poems etc would be very useful I think. Again, please let me know.

We also need to consider where we hold the event! I think I let everyone know of the sudden last minute change of venue to the Coffee Corner café – which worked extremely well. The sisters who run the place are very happy to repeat our use – a round of coffees and a few other things (food is available) made it worthwhile within those hours, finishing at 9.

My feeling is that meetings should continue at Waterstone’s, who were genuinely faced with a staffing crisis that evening – but use Coffee Corner for visiting poets. What do you feel?