Month: April 2021 | Yeats Society Sligo

Ever The Journey

April 20, 2021/in News/by yeats-admin

A CELEBRATION FOR POETRY DAY IRELAND 2021
With readings from Victoria Kennefick and Yeats Society Sligo Poet-in-residence Jessica Traynor, Thursday 29th April 2021 7pm via our FaceBook page.

Victoria Kennefick’s first collection, Eat or We Both Starve, is published by Carcanet Press. Her pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry News, Prelude, Copper Nickel, The Irish Times, Ambit, bath magg, Banshee and elsewhere.

Jessica Traynor will continue as Yeats Society Sligo poet-in-residence 2021-2022. We are delighted that she will be working with us once again and thank her for her thoughtful and considered help and for her performances and new works during the past year.
Jessica Traynor is a poet, essayist and librettist. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award and in 2016 was named one of the best poetry debuts of the past five years on Bustle.com. Her second collection, The Quick, was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. A Place of Pointed Stones, a pamphlet commissioned by Offaly County Council, was published by The Salvage Press in 2021.

Awards include the Hennessy New Writer of the Year, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and the Listowel Poetry Prize. In 2016, she was named one of the ‘Rising Generation’ of poets by Poetry Ireland.

Denis Donoghue 1928-2021

April 20, 2021/in News/by yeats-admin

Denis Donoghue, first Director of the Yeats International Summer School and Henry James Chair of English at New York University, died in North Carolina on 6 April. He was 92.
Professor Donoghue can lay claim to being the foremost Irish literary critic of the sixty or so years of his professional career, publishing over thirty books and innumerable articles, while delivering many memorable keynote lectures and talks. His last appearance in Sligo was in 2015 at the Yeats Summer School which celebrated the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth.

Donoghue was born in County Carlow and brought up in County Down, at Warrenpoint, the town which provided the title of his 1990 memoir of his early years. Like his contemporary John McGahern, his father was a policeman, in Donoghue’s case a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. His Irish Republican Brotherhood uncle was told to stand down in Easter week but was interned by the British anyway.
In terms of Irish culture, this North-South bilocation as a member of a Catholic nationalist family whose father worked in a largely Protestant police force in post-partition Ireland, went some way to define Donoghue’s political as well as literary lineage. In the 2015 lecture he told us, ‘I date my origin from the Post Office’, while recapping his explicit opposition to historians who say that Home Rule would have happened after the Great War. He also expressed his not so explicit scepticism of the value of the Good Friday agreement 80 years after Easter week.

Donoghue’s career took him to UCD before joining NYU in 1980. UCD made him as one of the last true expert generalists, a professor of literature who taught a wide curriculum and could lecture and publish outside the narrow specialisms in which the modern academic is forced to work. It was clear that his thinking for undergraduate lectures and student classes would emerge in broadly-conceived but also textually-detailed critical books: on American poetics (Connoisseurs of Chaos), Victorian and Modern poetry (The Ordinary Universe), compendious essay collections on Irish and American literature (We Irish and Reading America), aesthetics (Speaking of Beauty and Metaphor) and studies and biographies of individual writers, including Jonathan Swift, Walter Pater, Emily Dickinson, Henry James and, of course, William Butler Yeats.

Donoghue’s writing on Yeats is both an essential first round for the new student and a crucialargumentative sparring partner for the expert. The criticism has lasted: his 1971 Fontana Modern Masters book, Yeats – really a long essay in a little paperback which can still be found in second-hand bookshops – remains as a perfect introduction to the poet and still the best place to explore a stringent and complex account of Yeats’s politics and symbolism.
The view of Yeats that Donoghue developed throughout his long career ultimately argues that Yeats was neither an idealist nor a symbolist, and that if Yeats’s poetry really carried through some of its author’s more extraordinary philosophical positions he would be considered a minor mystic rather than a major poet. For all that he challenged the hieratic in Yeats – the poet’s sense of the holy calling of artist – Donoghue’s own writing could tend to the hieratic at times, happiest breathing the rare air of an elevated sense of his vocation as scholar.
That is a small price to pay for a critic who dealt with canonical literature in all its seriousness, a teacher who demanded big thinking for the highest stakes. It is a rare position in contemporary literary criticism or history, and one we may not see again. His friends in Sligo will miss his commanding frame and the extraordinary command of his intellect.

Matthew Campbell
University of York

Plate Finds

April 14, 2021/in Past Exhibition/by yeats-admin

“Plate Finds” is an exhibition by Sligo artist Alison Hunter. These new works are a continuation of Alison’s explorations of found broken tableware. Works are of cultural significance which displays respect for our heritage. Everything is interlaced and related by materials used, form, and/or story. Life has been reinstilled into old broken tableware by creating a new function for the piece as art. Felted wool is used to replace the missing parts. Working with wool felt the pieces are given a softness and contrast well with the coolness and smooth texture of the original plate. The old and new parts are easily distinguishable.

“If something is broken or damaged I don’t think its life is over, maybe its original function can not be used anymore but a new purpose as an art piece to be admired can be achieved. In this way, old memories are preserved and it lives on to create new memories.”

Pattern elements have been taken out of context, exaggerated, and displayed in new ways. Early Delft style tiles featuring Irish fauna have been reimagined in wool felt. Alison has used broken plate fragments/chaneys which she has found in ploughed fields and arranged these in a way in which together is more. The exhibition also explores popular pattern designs and allows us to pause and look while we remember memories and people through plates and ceramics.

You can find Alison on Facebook Instagram Website

This Exhibition is supported by the Sligo Artist’s Network with funding by Creative Ireland programe (Sligo) 2018-2022

Yeats Unwrapped – Learn

April 10, 2021/in News/by yeats-admin

A Series of Four Masterclasses in May

Welcome to Yeats Unwrapped at Yeats Society Sligo. We hope that, in coming months, we can offer you opportunities to: explore, listen, read, learn, enjoy and visit – so that you will come to know the life and work of WB Yeats and his family in a new way.

Our first opportunity is Yeats Unwrapped – Learn, a short series of masterclasses provided by four great writers.

We have a small number of places that we can fill for our great May Masterclasses.

Cost: €30 per class.

Tickets are available on Eventbrite

: Elaine Feeney

: Mikel Murphy

: Jessica Traynor

: Arnold Fanning

11am – 2pm on Saturday 8th May

Author Elaine Feeney has just been awarded the Kate O’Brien prize for her marvellous new book As you Were.

She lectures at The National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is also a founding member of the Tuam Oral History Project. She published three poetry collections including The Radio was Gospel & Rise. She has also written the award-winning drama WRoNGHEADED commissioned by the Liz Roche Company, which toured internationally including a very successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Feeney’s Sojourn is included in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories. She was chosen by The Observer as a top debut novelist for 2020.

THE COURSE
Is a masterclass in writing. Elaine Feeney’s Masterclass offers the writer advice from the first kernel of an idea, through to writing a synopsis, planning your novel and what to do when you get there – the submission process and what to expect. She will focus on developing voice, characters, and practical information on what to expect when you send your manuscript out. Also, and perhaps the most damning of all – how to avoid procrastination!’

11am – 2pm on Saturday May 15th

Mikel Murfi is from Sligo. He trained at L’Ecole Theatre de Jacques Lecoq, Paris.

He is an actor, writer and a director. His theatre performances include his 2 solo shows The Man in The Woman’s Shoes and I Hear You and Rejoice, (Loco and Reckless Productions), Dolores (Junk Ensemble), The Last Hotel and Ballyturk; (GIAF/Landmark) Swan Lake/Loch na hEala, (Teac Damsa), The New Electric Ballroom (Druid); Morning After Optimism, Playboy of the Western World (Peacock Theatre); The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest (Abbey Theatre) Giselle, Rite of Spring and Petrushka (Fabulous Beast) Desire Under The Elms (Lyric, Hammersmith).
Recent directing work includes Waiting for Godot (Theatre Du Pif, Hong Kong); The Far Off Hills (Nomad Theatre Network). Toraiocht (Fíbín). Other directing work includes Falling out of Love (Yew Tree), Focal Point (TEAM), B for Baby (Abbey), The Second Coming (Fidget Feet/Hawk’s Well Theatre) and The Walworth Farce, Penelope (Druid); Arrah na Pogue Abbey TheatreFilm includes: The Ballad of Kid Kanturk, Sweety Barrett, The Butcher Boy, Love and Rage, Guiltrip and Jimmy’s Hall. As a director: Drum and John Duffy’s Brother.

THE COURSE

The course is centred on writing for theatre. The focus is primarily on those people who have not yet had work produced.

11am – 2pm on Saturday 22nd May

Jessica Traynor is poet in residence at Yeats Society Sligo and a creative fellow at UCD.

Her debut collection Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014) was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award and was named one of the best poetry debuts of the past five years on bustle.com. It has been translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil. Her second collection The Quick was an Irish Times poetry choice of 2019. She has worked as Literary Manager at the
Abbey Theatre and Deputy Museum Director at EPIC – the Irish Emigration Museum.

THE COURSE
Taking our lead from some of Yeats’ best loved poems, we’ll be generating some new work and also workshopping one poem by each participant. Participants should have a poem ready to share with the group, and familiarise themselves with the ‘Share Screen’ function on Zoom so the work can be read by the group. It’s recommended that this workshop is taken on a laptop or desktop rather than a phone or tablet.

11am – 2pm on Saturday May 29th

Arnold Thomas Fanning is a writer living in Co. Cork.

His fiction and non-fiction have been published in The Dublin Review, Banshee, gorse, The Lonely Crowd, The Stinging Fly, Correspondences: An Anthology to Call for an End to Direct Provision, The Music of What Happens: The Purple House Anthology of New Writing & elsewhere. His work has also been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and on RTÉ Radio 1, including for Arena, and A Living Word. In 2020 he was Arts Council Writer in Residence, NUI Galway. Mind on Fire: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery was published in 2018 and shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.

THE COURSE
Memoir, or Life Writing, is among the most challenging, as well as the most rewarding of genres to write in, and today is enjoying increasing prominence and popularity. Writers of memoir need to be able to have an arsenal of technical methods to hand, as well as be able to navigate through issues of veracity, ethics & other people, motivations & approaches, all the while approaching the potentials and limitations of memory.
Arnold Thomas Fanning will lead participants through some of the key aspects of writing Memoir/ Life Writing, in a practical and participatory workshop. Drawing inspiration from the autobiographical writings of WB Yeats, as well as other writers, participants can expect to be reading and discussing extracts of Memoir, writing to prompts, and sharing and critiquing each other’s work in a structured and supportive environment.

Places are non-transferable.

Places are very limited to ensure participants have a good experience

We would like to thank our warm and generous masterclass hosts, Elaine Feeney, Mikel Murfi, Jessica Traynor and Arnold Thomas Fanning for delivering our first ever masterclasses. The feedback has been very positive and we hope to run further masterclasses later in the year.

Ever The Journey

Denis Donoghue 1928-2021

Plate Finds