Yeats 19th Weekend Winter School 2012
Venues - Sligo Park Hotel and Yeats Memorial Building.
The Yeats Winter School is designed as an interlude, which allows the visitor the opportunity to learn more about W.B.Yeats and his family against the backdrop of the places—from Benbulben to Knocknarea—which inspired them. The aim of the weekend is to provide a basis for reading, exploring and thinking about Yeats’s poetry and his brother’s work, in the place where much of it began.
DIRECTOR
Margaret Mills Harper
Margaret Mills Harper is Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at the University of Limerick. She specializes in Irish Literature, literary modernisms, and poetry of the long twentieth Century.
She is the author of Wisdom of Two (2006), analysing the occult collaboration between W.B.Yeats and his wife George Hyde Lees; The Aristocracy of Art (1990), an examination of the autobiographical fictions of James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe; and numerous essays on modern and contemporary literature from Ireland and the U.S. She is the co-editor of two volumes in the four-volume series Yeats Vision Papers, and of Yeats’s A Vision (1925). She and Professor Catherine Paul of Clemson University are currently preparing the 1937 version of A Vision.
GUEST POET
Vona Groarke
Vona Groarke‘s fifth and most recent poetry collection is Spindrift published by Gallery Press, which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2009, and which was short-listed for the Irish Times Poetry Prize. Her Selected Poems will be published in 2012. She teaches Poetry Writing in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, and is a member of Aosdana, the Academy of Artists established to honour those who make ‘an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland’.
Programme 2012
Yeats and the West of Ireland
This year we welcome Margaret Mills Harper as Director and Vona Groarke as Guest Poet, and as in previous years, there will be a Poetry Reading and three lectures.
Friday 20th January
Check in to the Sligo Park Hotel at your leisure. The Bar serves food throughout the afternoon and evening, and the Restaurant is open from 7.00 p.m. You will need to make your own arrangements to dine before the first gathering.
8.30 p.m:
Introductions and Poetry Reading by Vona Groarke
Saturday 21st January
9.30 a.m.
Lecture by Margaret Mills Harper The Double Gyre: Yeats and Time (Sligo Park Hotel)
11.15 a.m.
Lecture by Vona Groarke What is a Poem? (Yeats Memorial Building)
PARTICIPANTS LUNCH AT THEIR PLACE OF CHOICE IN SLIGO
2.30 p.m.
Reconvene at the Yeats Memorial Building for a tour of the Yeats Country, returning at 5.30 p.m. to the Sligo Park Hotel
7.30 p. m.
Dinner and relaxation
Sunday 22nd January
10.30 a.m.
Lecture by Margaret Mills Harper The Double Gyre: And I Took the Blame: Yeats and the Crisis of Vision (Sligo Park Hotel)
12.30 p.m.
Lunch and departure
(Or plan to stay an extra night free of charge with optional Sunday afternoon and evening activities)
Accomodation & Optional Extras
Sligo City Hotel is offering complimentary Bed and Breakfast for Sunday night, if you decide to extend your stay. (It is important to mention this specifically at the time of booking.) On the Sunday afternoon, there will be the option of taking a car trip to explore lesser known parts of the Yeats Country, followed by an informal dining opportunity in the locality.
What better way could you find to spoil yourself, than to choose to come away to the Sligo Park Hotel, and the beautiful Sligo countryside? The hotel is set on lush landscaped quiet parkland and surrounded by some of the most scenic countryside in Ireland, ranging from the majestic Ben Bulben, to the gentle waters of
Lough Gill. The Saturday tour explores the best of the Yeats Country, stopping to view the places that caught the imagination of the youthful W.B. Yeats and his brother, the painter Jack B. Yeats.
As Michael Yeats has written, “To my father, Sligo was home, and Sligo was his initial literary inspiration”!
Tariff and Bookings
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