Yeats Day Festival 2023
9th – 13th June. Yeats Day celebrations this year marked William Butler Yeats 158th birthday – and the Centenary of his Nobel Prize award, made in 1923.
9th – 13th June. Yeats Day celebrations this year marked William Butler Yeats 158th birthday – and the Centenary of his Nobel Prize award, made in 1923.
We are delighted that Victoria Kennefick will continue her ‘poet in residence’ with us until April 2024. We are especially pleased that she will also take part in our Yeats Nobel Centenary celebrations later this year.
Victoria read at our recent Poetry Day Ireland event, celebrating the strong and vibrant tradition of poetry across the island of Ireland. We were also delighted to welcome her guest, emerging poet Joe Carrick-Varty and to be supported by Poetry Ireland.
Victoria will present a creative poetry workshop at this year’s Yeats International Summer School and will also read at the School.
She is the current UCD Writer in Residence and her new, and much anticipated, collection will be published in 2024.
OCTOBER 20 2021 PRESS RELEASE
Yeats Society Sligo is delighted to announce generous funding from the London-based T.S. Eliot Foundation. The funding association will run for five years 2022-2027 and totals £125,000.
The T.S. Eliot Foundation celebrates the life and work of T.S. Eliot, the American poet, who became a British citizen and spent most of his life in London. Eliot and Yeats were associates, whose lives criss-crossed in poetry and plays and both were significant in the growth of modernist poetry in the 20th century.
Eliot was a prolific poet and playwright. His best-known works include “Four Quartets” and “The Waste Land” and his lighter poetry collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. His work as publisher with Faber and Faber ensured that it published many distinguished poets, a tradition that has endured. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
T.S. Eliot was invited to deliver the first annual Yeats Lecture at the Abbey Theatre – set up in June 1940 – one year after the death of WB Yeats in the south of France. In this he discussed the influence of Yeats on poetry and on his own work and said: “the influence of which I speak is due to the figure of the poet himself, to the integrity of his passion for his art and his craft which provided such an impulse for his extraordinary development.”
Chair of Yeats Society Sligo Chris Gonley said: “We express our gratitude to the T.S. Eliot Foundation for their generous support at this time, allowing us to continue to pursue our work. We are delighted to form this association with the Foundation and to acknowledge the work they do in keeping alive the work of T.S. Eliot and in supporting many literary and cultural organisations.” Trustee of the TS Eliot Estate Clare Reihill said: The T S Eliot Foundation is delighted to support the further understanding of the work of this continuingly vital poet.’
For further information:
Susan O’Keeffe, Director, Yeats Society Sligo;
00 353 851314084 or director@yeatssocietysligo
Celebrate poetry this holiday season with our new Yeats Society gift vouchers!
Your Christmas voucher for Yeats Society Sligo can be used to purchase:
When did you first discover your love of Yeats?
Perhaps it was in the school classroom, conjuring Innisfree from the pages of a dusty textbook, or walking through County Sligo and seeing the landscapes that he recorded in the poems. Perhaps Yeats was read at your wedding, or maybe your love of his poetry inspired you to write yourself.
Whether you’re a writer, poet, academic, Summer School attendee, reader, member or visitor to our Sligo centre, Yeats is part of Ireland’s DNA. His poems have shaped our nation’s literary tradition.
But right now, over 100 years of Yeats’ literary legacy is under threat. We must raise €100,000 by August to Save Yeats Society Sligo.
Yeats Society Sligo’s income has taken an unprecedented hit during the pandemic. Our centre was forced to close its doors and while we had reserves to see us through one year of closures, we now urgently need to raise €100,000 in the next two months to remain open.
Your gift to our urgent crowdfunder can keep Yeats’ spirit alive for future generations.
The €100k will keep the Society running from October 2021 to December 2022, and covers our core costs: heating, light, insurance, maintenance and key staff – just about! During that time, we will be working to enhance visitors’ first-hand experience of Sligo and the centre – masterclasses, poetry afternoon teas, poetry weddings, classes for primary school children and bespoke weekend tours. And we want to begin planning for the centenary of Yeats’ Nobel Prize in 1923.
We are not core funded by the State in any way. We greatly appreciated some of the Covid supports, but we are one of the few cultural institutions that have never been core funded by the State. We do get some project funding but this does NOT include any core costs – all must go to the project. It’s of course valuable to have this funding, but we can’t run projects if we are closed!
Our members and private donors have risen to this challenge, and have already pledged funding for this emergency. But we still need public support to raise the full amount. The Yeatsian legacy belongs to the world, not to Sligo or Ireland or any one group alone: to be here for the public after September this year, we need your support.
Join with the world in marking the 156th birthday of Nobel poet WB Yeats by recording your Yeats poem and sharing it on social media, using the hashtag #yeatsday and tagging Yeats Society Sligo and Yeats Day.
Download the timetable of events here:
Hyde Bridge Gallery presents, in association with Yeats Day, Plate Finds, 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 re-instilled 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 which contrasts well with the coolness and smooth texture of the original plate.
The exhibition will run until June 27th.
Event will be livestreamed via @yeatssociety Facebook page
ANNUAL NORA NILAND LECTURE, honouring the work of former Sligo county librarian and member of Yeats Society Sligo, who, in the 1960s, gathered an extraordinary collection of Irish 20th century art.
“Secret Identity: The Comic Strips of Jack B. Yeats“, Marking the 150th birthday of Jack B Yeats this year.
Michael Connerty will present an illustrated talk on Jack B. Yeats’ work as a strip cartoonist for a number of popular comics that appeared in the UK between 1892-1917. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics. These were the forerunners of The Beano and The Dandy. These lively and snappy tales of maritime adventure, stage entertainment and urban spectacle appeared during a key period in the early development of the comic strip, and Yeats was a central figure of the time.
Michael lectures at the IADT, institute of Art, Design & Technology in Dublin.
Our famous free Yeats Day birthday cake, sponsored by Sligo bakers O’Hehir’s, will be cut and shared. And we will be reading Yeats poetry in our river garden Penny Café, at the Yeats Building. (Adhering to Covid regulations).
Live outside, at Yeats Building, Hyde Bridge, Sligo
Eily Kilgannon School of Speech and Drama will be performing WB Yeats poems from the 2021 students, aged 7-17.
Event will be livestreamed via @yeatssociety Facebook page
Hamilton Gallery presents, in association with Yeats Day, Meditations in Time of Civil War. An exhibition of new work by 125 visual artists, on the theme of this famous poem, written by WB Yeats in 1921.
Eily Kilgannon School of Speech and Drama will present readings of WB Yeats poems from the 2021 students, aged 7-17.
Event will be livestreamed via @yeatssociety Facebook page
Paul Murray presents: Banjaxed by Joyce?
An opportunity to get under the skin of one of the greatest books ever written, with a man who has read it countless times and who is related to James Joyce through Joyce’s mother, May Murray.
Event will be livestreamed via @yeatssociety Facebook page
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, 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
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
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!’
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.
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.
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.
Tel: +353 7191 42693
Email: info@yeatssociety.com
Yeats Building
Hyde Bridge
Sligo, F91 DVY4
Ireland
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