Reading Walter de la M are › ... · Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 2017. Ghosts...

Reading

Walter de la Mare1873 - 1956

lsquoa voice which has no fellowrsquo

20th - 21st September 2018

Cambridge UK

TALKS | DISCUSSIONS | MUSIC

For further details visit our website or get in touch with the convenors Yui Kajita and Anna Nickersonhttpsreadingwalterdelamarewordpresscom | readingwalterdelamaregmailcom

Speakers

Aneesh BaraiAnindita BhattacharyaAdam GuyLaura HelyerJenny McDonnellChristopher OrsquoShaughnessyFrances SpaldingMarc VermeulenAnne Welsh

Pop-up exhibition

Jacqueline Reid-WalshCarolina Rabei artist

NEWNHAM COLLEGEUNIVERSITY of CAMBRIDGE

The Walter de la Mare Society

Keynotes

Gillian Beer Angela Leighton

Peter DavidsonPeter Scupham

William Wootten

Special guest

Giles de la Mare

Live performance

The Lancashire HustlersMackie and Me

Daytime events Faculty of English Sidgwick SiteEvening concert and dinner Newnham College

Reading Walter de la Mare 1873-1956 lsquoa voice which has no fellowrsquo

20th ndash 21st September 2018 University of Cambridge

PROGRAMME

Day 1 ndash Thursday 20th September

1230 ndash 1300 Registration and welcome

1300 ndash 1315 Welcome from conveners amp Giles de la Mare (Walter de la Mare Society)

1315 ndash 1415 Keynote

Gillian Beer (Cambridge) lsquoUneasy Encounters Henry Brocken and Other Fictionsrsquo

Angela Leighton (Cambridge) lsquoRiddling de la Marersquo

1415 ndash 1430 Teacoffee break

1430 ndash 1545 Panel 1 | Archival Creativity Literary Networks

Laura Helyer (independent) lsquoWalter de la Mare Elizabeth Bishop and the ldquothing-y poemrdquorsquo

Anne Welsh (UCL) lsquoldquoBeyond wealth beyond fame the making of friends ndash friends known

and friends unrevealedrdquo De la Marersquos Sentimental ldquoWorkingrdquo Libraryrsquo

Marc Vermeulen (independent) lsquoThe Unknown Walter de la Mare Letters in the Temple

University Library Collectionrsquo



William Wootten (Bristol) lsquoQuestions Riddles and Mysteries in the Works of Walter de la Marersquo

1730 ndash 1850 Concert | lsquoSinging Walter de la Marersquo

The Lancashire Hustlers

Mackie and Me

1900 ndash 1930 Drinks reception at Newnham

1930 ndash 2100 Dinner at Newnham College Clough Hall

1

Day 2 ndash Friday 21st September

945 ndash1100 Panel 2 | Keeping Company Literary Affinities

Adam Guy (Oxford) lsquoDorothy Richardson Walter de la Mare and

the Emergent Modernist Readerrsquo

Jenny McDonnell (IADT Dublin) lsquoldquoNot a persistent or substantial ghostrdquo

Walter de la Mare and Katherine Mansfieldrsquo

Frances Spalding (Cambridge) lsquoStevie Smith and Come Hitherrsquo


1115 ndash 1230 Panel 3 | lsquoOn the Edgersquo Uncanny Worlds

Aneesh Barai (Cambridge) lsquoA landscape as still and miraculous as that of a dreamrsquo

Rethinking Childhood and Nature in de la Marersquos Short Stories for Childrenrsquo

Anindita Bhattacharya (Dublin City University) lsquoldquoI Hear the Sound of Revelry by Nightrdquo

Carnivalesque and Coming of Age in Crossings A Fairy Play by Walter de la Marersquo

Christopher OrsquoShaughnessy (Goldsmiths) lsquoLiminal Worlds and Horror Thresholds

in the Work of Walter de la Marersquo

1230 ndash 1315 Lunch break

1315 ndash 1415 Pop-up exhibition

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh (Penn State US) lsquoTransformations and Multimodality in

Walter de la Marersquos Childrenrsquos Poetryrsquo

Carolina Rabei (artist) lsquoIllustrating Faber amp Faberrsquos Series of Walter de la Marersquos Poemsrsquo

1415 ndash 1430 Teacoffee break with book signing by Carolina Rabei

1430 ndash 1530 Keynote | lsquoGhostsrsquo

Peter Davidson (Oxford)

Peter Scupham (poet and Royal Society of Literature Fellow)

1530 ndash 1630 Roundtable discussion with Giles de la Mare

1630 ndash 1635 Closing remarks by conveners

2

ABSTRACTS amp NOTES ON THE SPEAKERS

KEYNOTES (alphabetical order)

Uneasy Encounters Henry Brocken and Other Fictions

Gillian Beer (gpb1000camacuk) is a British literary critic and academic She was a fellow of Girton College for 30 years and later King Edward VII Professor of English at the University of Cambridge She holds honorary doctorates at the Universities of Oxford Harvard and Ghent and is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Her first book Darwinrsquos Plots (1983) remains one of the most important studies of the interrelations between literature and science in the Victorian period Her latest book Alice in Space The Sideways World of Lewis Carroll (2016) won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 2017

Ghosts

Peter Davidson (peterdavidsonelloxacuk) is Senior Research Fellow and Archivist at Campion Hall Oxford where he teaches both English Literature and History of Art Much of his work is concerned with the life of the Recusant Catholic Community and the achievements of the Society of Jesus especially The Universal Baroque (2007) and his edition of The Collected Poems of S Robert Southwell (2007) In recent years he has also written about landscape and art in The Idea of North (2005) Distance and Memory (2013) and his cultural history of twilight The Last of the Light (2015)

Riddling de la Mare

Angela Leighton (al474camacuk) is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy She has worked mainly on nineteenth and twentieth-century literature on womenrsquos writing on aestheticism and the aesthetic and on poetry generally She has published many articles and various critical books including On Form Poetry Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word (2007) as well as four volumes of poetry most recently Spills (2016) mdash a collection of new poems memoirs and translations from the Italian Her latest book Hearing Things The Work of Sound in Literature (2018) includes two chapters that focus on Walter de la Mare

Ghosts

Peter Scupham (twomermaidsbtinternetcom) is a British poet and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature His work includes Watching the Perseids (1990) The Ark (1994) Night Watch (1999) and Borrowed Landscapes (2011) as well as an edition of Ovidrsquos Metamorphoses (2005) His collected poems were published by Carcanet Press in 2002 With John Mole he founded The Mandeville Press a small press using traditional letterpress methods of printing He lives in Norfolk where he runs a second-hand book business Mermaid Books with his wife Margaret Steward In Spring 2018 the PN Review published a symposium about him and in April 2013 the Cambridge Univeristy Library held an exhibition to celebrate his eightieth birthday

Questions Riddles and Mysteries in the Works of Walter de la Mare

William Wootten (WilliamWoottenbristolacuk) is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol a literary journalist and a poet His writings on modern and contemporary poetry in English include The Alvarez Generation Thom Gunn Geoffrey Hill Ted Hughes Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter (2015) He has published the poetry collection You Have a Visitor (2016) He also writes for newspapers and magazines including the Guardian the London Review of Books Poetry Review and the Times Literary Supplement An active member of the Walter de la Mare Society William Wootten is currently preparing several publications on de la Marersquos work and is editing an annotated edition of de la Marersquos Selected Poems for Faber and Faber

3

PANEL 1 | ARCHIVAL CREATIVITY LITERARY NETWORKS

Walter de la Mare Elizabeth Bishop and the lsquothing-y poemrsquo

lsquoI was but just awake so too was the world itself and ever isrsquo As both an archivist and a creative writer Irsquom interested in how histories are made and how

archives records are collected described and classified My postdoctoral research is concerned with the archival as an aesthetic and strategy in poems poetry collections and anthologies I explored loss preservation and the archival in the work of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) as an aspect of my PhD (awarded 2015) I will address this theme again in my paper through an analysis of lsquoI Was But Just Awakersquo ndash Bishoprsquos review of Walter de la Marersquos poetry anthology for children Come Hither (1923) in which she articulates her appreciation of lists how identity is invested in objects ideas of home and the home-made Bishop writes

He loves ldquolittle articlesrdquo home-made objects whose value increases with age Robinson Crusoersquos lists of his belongings homely employments charms and herbs As a result he naturally chose for his book many of what Randall Jarrell once called ldquothing-yrdquo poems and never the pompous abstract or formal (Poems Prose and Letters p700)

I will discuss the significance of family heirlooms collecting and ordering in Bishoprsquos writing about her childhood with reference to the popularity of the Come Hither anthology and the enduring potential of the lsquothing-yrsquo poem to recover the songs in the archive and the sounds of childhood I will consider Bishoprsquos appreciation of de la Marersquos lsquolyrical confidencersquo (PPL p701) in relation to Jarrellrsquos criticism of the lsquothing-yrsquo poem and his argument that lsquothere are no things in a poem only processesrsquo (Randall Jarrell lsquoLevels and Opposites Structure in Poetryrsquo)

Laura Helyer (Lineament66outlookcom) holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature (Southampton Chichester) and MLitt in Creative Writing (St Andrews Distinction poetry) She is also a trained archivist and librarian currently based in Glasgow A chapter from my doctoral thesis on Elizabeth Bishop and Katherine Mansfield will appear in the collection of essays Edinburgh Companion to Elizabeth Bishop (Edinburgh University Press 2018)

lsquoBeyond wealth beyond fame the making of friends ndash friends known and friends unrevealedrsquo De la Marersquos Sentimental lsquoWorkingrsquo Library

This paper examines ldquoThe Working Library of Walter de la Marerdquo at Senate House Library classmark [WdlM] arguing that although some of the books contain evidence of the writer at work the real focus of the collection is on the literary friendships he enjoyed throughout his long life

Oram has pointed out that writersrsquo libraries are most frequently ldquoa collection of books at the time of their death or a subset thereofrdquo After the sale of the most financially valuable books at Sothebyrsquos in 1980 de la Marersquos literary trustees looked for an institutional repository for his remaining books finding a temporary solution at the Bodleian and much later in 2005 a permanent home at Senate House From its beginnings in London it was referred to as the ldquoWorking Libraryrdquo in an attempt to indicate the booksrsquo coherence as a collection and the types of research they might repay

Indeed there are examples in which we can see annotations on the page of a book making their way word for word into de la Marersquos own writing as well as less obvious evidence of influence However these are not as plentiful as we might expect and the absence from [WdlM] of most of the books he reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement speaks to a surprising lack of evidence about his jobbing literary endeavours Instead what we find in great quantities are volumes demonstrating what de la Mare termed ldquothe company one meets in booksrdquo and works penned by his acquaintances and friends Useful in considering his role as a ldquogod of modern Grub Streetrdquo this new view of [WdlM] as a sentimental library makes physical his claim for ldquoone reward beyond all estimation which the writing of books may bring to a man ndash beyond wealth beyond fame friendsrdquo

4

Anne Welsh (awelshuclacuk) is Lecturer in Library and Information Studies at University College London where she teaches Cataloguing amp Classification and Historical Bibliography She is about to submit her PhD on the impact of The Working Library of Walter de la Mare (Senate House [WdlM]) on his poetry and short stories

The Unknown Walter de la Mare Letters in the Temple University Library Collection

Walter de la Mare was an avid letter writer with an estimated 15000 letters in his lifetime Anyone asking for information or advice was sure to receive an answer of the kindest of men Apart from this he developed warm and lasting friendships and tight business connections This paper offers an insight in the exchange of letters with some of the 82 hitherto unmentioned correspondents in a large collection (1000) of de la Mare letters in the Temple University Library collection in Philadelphia It throws light on friendships with other authors (Sassoon Meyerstein Redwood Anderson Elisabeth Myers W Bett Thomas Quayle) on neglected works like Chardin (correspondence with Wilenski) The Beginning Poems 1919 to 1934 Nonsense and so on and Broomsticks amp other Tales and Mr Brush Furthermore much information on his lectures (subjects frequency) and his dislike of delivering them is made available The letter collection also sheds light on remarkable and important facts of the de la Mare biography De la Marian scholars know about the pound100 annual pension he received yet the correspondence that led to it was as yet unknown of It resides in the collection a series of letters between Sir Henry Newbolt Austin Dobson and Henry Higgs that would set WJ free from the drudgery of work in the office

Marc Vermeulen (marcvermeulenbvbatelenetbe) obtained his masterrsquos degree at the University of Gent (Belgium) with a dissertation on Walter de la Marersquos letters (1979) He delivers communication and management trainings for companies and has written extensively on the training business performance management and customer hare He developed Belgiumrsquos most special meeting venue in Mechelen His website is wwwm-arcbe

PANEL 2 | KEEPING COMPANY LITERARY AFFINITIES

Dorothy Richardson Walter de la Mare and the Emergent Modernist Reader

In July 1916 Walter de la Mare reviewed Backwater ndash the second volume of Dorothy Richardsonrsquos novel-sequence Pilgrimage ndash for the Times Literary Supplement Retrospectively the review stands as an important moment in Richardsonrsquos unfolding reception history firstly because de la Mare turns out to have been one of the highest-profile literary figures to have reviewed Richardsonrsquos work in her early career as a novelist and secondly because of the reviewrsquos particular stakes The terms de la Mare develops for describing Richardsonrsquos novel ndash regarding its rejection of lsquoldquoplotrdquo novelistic convention even lucid sequence of narrativersquo and its status instead as lsquoa piece of the purest and in a sense barest impressionismrsquo ndash as well as the fact that these terms do not carry a negative valence mark this review as indicative of an emerging discourse about the modernist novel I will look at de la Marersquos review in this light before contrasting it with certain items of Richardsonrsquos correspondence where she writes on his poetry perhaps less kindly than he did on her prose More broadly I will ask what can be gained if we see both de la Mare and Richardson as an emerging kind of reader newly adapting to understand and experience new aesthetic forms

Adam Guy (adamguyst-hildasoxacuk) is the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the Dorothy Richardson Editions Project an AHRC Major Grant collaboration between the Universities of Birmingham London (Birkbeck and Queen Mary) and Oxford

lsquoNot a persistent or substantial ghostrsquo Walter de la Mare and Katherine Mansfield

Walter de la Mare seems to have made only fleeting appearances throughout Katherine Mansfieldrsquos life but she frequently expressed her admiration and affection for him indeed when she wrote her will in August 1922 de la Mare was included among a short list of people to whom she wished to bequeath a book from her library Elsewhere Mansfield had described de la Mare as a figure who lsquohaunts me [hellip] not a persistent

5

or substantial ghost but as one who shares my (our) joy in the silent worldrsquo These words seem particularly appropriate for a writer who was associated with supernatural fiction and poetry throughout his career they also provide the impetus for this paper which seeks to identify gothic elements in Katherine Mansfieldrsquos writing by re-considering her relationship with de la Mare The paper aims to explore resonances between a selection of texts by Mansfield and de la Mare with a particular focus on recurrent motifs of haunting andor haunted spaces in each writerrsquos work

Jenny McDonnell (JennyMcDonnelliadtie) lectures in IADT (Duacuten Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology) Dublin Ireland She is the author of Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace (Palgrave 2010) and essays on Mansfield Robert Louis Stevenson Samuel Butler and Walter de la Mare She is a former editor of the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter and The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies

Stevie Smith and Come Hither

Stevie Smithrsquos interest in poetry came to the fore in her 1928-30 reading notebook Several pages in this indicate that her assimilation of Walter de la Marersquos anthology Come Hither played a part in her poetic development

Frances Spalding (fs454camacuk) is an art historian critic and biographer She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for the TLS The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-graduate She has a specialist interest in twentieth-century British art and first established her reputation with Roger Fry Art and Life She went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell John Minton Duncan Grant Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith Her survey history British Art since 1900 in the Thames amp Hudson World of Art series has been widely used in schools colleges and universities and in the mid-1990s she was commissioned by Tate to write a centenary history of this national institution Between 2000 and 2015 she taught at Newcastle University becoming Professor of Art History She acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine 2015-16 and is now is Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall Cambridge She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature

PANEL 3 | lsquoON THE EDGErsquo UNCANNY WORLDS

lsquoA landscape as still and miraculous as that of a dreamrsquo Rethinking Childhood and Nature in de la Marersquos Short Stories for Childrenrsquo

My PhD thesis was on modernist childrenrsquos literature including works by T S Eliot Virginia Woolf James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and in particular my research connected the works of Virginia Woolf with Walter de la Marersquos short stories for children on ideas of nature the uncanny and reflections on psychology in the early twentieth-century

This paper will read lsquoThe Dutch Cheesersquo (1908) and lsquoThe Lord Fishrsquo (1930) in terms of contemporary and competing theorisations of dreaming by Freud D H Lawrence and de la Mare himself in the preface to his edited collection Behold This Dreamer (1939) In de la Marersquos writing he connects childhood and dreaming in manners that radically revise earlier (and ongoing) preconceptions about the ldquoinnocencerdquo of both childhood and nature through presenting nature as a dreamlike location for the surreal and the supernatural

In particular in lsquoThe Lord Fishrsquo he blurs natural space and dreamspace in a story of intense dreams and fairy-tale happenings John the hero of lsquoThe Lord Fishrsquo dreams of fish and sirens only to meet a mermaid and to himself turn into a tench in order to infiltrate the castle of the humanoid cod Lord Fish De la Marersquos wrought prose is filled with technical vocabulary for breeds of fish and birds and species of flora and fauna describing the minutiae of British country life but encasing a dreamlike surreal world of magic inside this rural realism

6

As I will argue this re-evaluation of childhood through contemporary psychology places de la Mare alongside modernist authors like Woolf and Stein encouraging us to broaden the confines of ldquomodernismrdquo as a movement to include both de la Mare as an author and childrenrsquos literature as a mode of writing grounded in the complex concerns of its time

Aneesh Barai (ab901camacuk) is a Teaching Associate in English Childrenrsquos Literature and Film at the University of Cambridge His research interests include intersections of modernism and childrenrsquos literature representations of education in fantasy literature and film and ecocritical approach to childrenrsquos literature

lsquoI Hear the Sound of Revelry by Nightrsquo Carnivalesque and Coming of Age in Crossings A Fairy Play by Walter de la Mare

Childrenrsquos literature in the first leg of the 20th century mostly emphasized on the glorification of childish innocence and naiveite reflected in Peter Panrsquos eternal calling ldquoI donrsquot want ever to be a man I want always to be a little boy and to have funrdquo Critics opine that the shift from this romanticisation in childrenrsquos literature in favour of a more subversive portrayal of childhood happened quite late into the second half of the 20th century Many also say this romanticisation was a predominantly British offering and the most seminal works problematizing childhood appeared first in American fiction Whilst British authors such as Edith Nesbit Kenneth Grahame JMBarrie AAMilne were glamorising amaranthine boyhood one man was penning tales of ldquodifferencerdquo reshaping popular childrenrsquos literary discourse His poetry and short fiction have been read re-read and analysed copiously But what stands out is how little his solo play The Crossings A Fairy Play is known among children let alone read or studied This paper argues that this play by Walter de la Mare was written in defiance to the literary trends of its time by incorporating elements of Bakhtinrsquos notion of the lsquocarnivalesquersquo to celebrate lsquocoming of agersquo as opposed to idealizing eternal childlikeness The siblings Sally France Tony and Ann in Crossings gets a surprise opportunity to lsquoenactrsquo a life without the assistance or interference of the adults such as the conceited Aunt Agatha in a haunted house left to them by their Aunt Susan where they participate in a Christmas revelry that culminates in their discovery of the joy of growing up These children unlike the Peter Pans and the Poos do not want to be frozen in time and cocooned in comfort they want to embrace the uncertainties and responsibilities of adult life

Anindita Bhattacharya (aninditabhattacharya2maildcuie) is an Ireland India Fellow at the Dublin City University Ireland She has a masters in English Literature from Presidency University India She is currently working on her doctoral thesis that reads the comparative representation of the preternatural in Irish and Bengali childrens literature through the lens of postcoloniality She has contributed to various literary journals and magazines

Liminal Worlds and Horror Thresholds in the Work of Walter de la Mare

Walter de la Marersquos poetry evokes through breathtakingly beautiful poetic language structure and rhythm a world half-way between the reality of the everyday and the more intangible ineffable dimension of dream and vision This engagement with liminal worlds experienced as a facet of the human extends to some of his short stories and novels and was certainly a familiar experience in his own life

By examining and re-reading selected poems and extracts from stories and novels and using as a critical lens the thought of psycho-analyst Julia Kristeva Jungian apologist James Hillman and poet-philosopher John OrsquoDonahue a case is made not only for the need to recognise and revalue the brilliance of these artistic creations but to appreciate even more or perhaps for the first time the generosity of vision which they offer The relevance of de la Marersquos sense of liminality in human consciousness counteracts post-modern spiritual economy (or atrophy) and the comparative lack of affective appreciation in an entrenched secular mindset With his emphasis on the English language as a channel of the mysterious and the power of words to transmit the ineffable his achievement provides a thought-provoking counterbalance to what is missing in poetry today

De la Marersquos fascination with thresholds of human experience with their unsettling views of the horrific and the demonic has something to tell us in this age of terror and mistrust of forces which seem out of reach yet liable at any moment to exert their startling power over humanity His use of carefully-

7

authored words to evoke these worlds and thresholds should help us critique the reductive language theories of Barthes and Derrida helping us rediscover and celebrate the residual aliveness of written language

Christopher OrsquoShaughnessy (coshaughnessytiscalicouk) is a practice-as-research doctoral candidate in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths University of London His research focuses on spirituality in English-speaking drama since 1935 His two plays The Ruth Ellis Show and Servants about Virginia Woolf and her servant illustrate embody and develop the findings of his thesis

EXHIBITION

Transformations and Multimodality in Walter de la Marersquos Childrenrsquos Poetry

Jacqueline Reid-Walsh (jxr67psuedu) is an Associate Professor in Education and Womenrsquos Studies at the Pennsylvania State University She studies the connections between old media and new media She studies old media as new media and uses new media to understand old media Her research interests center on historical movable books created for and by children Her current research project involves locating documenting digitizing and creating interactive 3-D simulations of old fragile materials This is in partnership with Penn Statersquos Special Collections Library and Penn Statersquos Interdisciplinary Digital Studio (IDS) in the School of Visual Arts She is one of the founding members of the Walter de la Mare Society

Illustrating Faber amp Faberrsquos Series of Walter de la Marersquos Poems

Carolina Rabei (carolinarabeiyahoocom) is a childrenrsquos illustrator based in Cambridge She studied Fine Art in Moldova and Childrenrsquos Book Illustration at the prestigious Cambridge School of Art Her work involves a unique mix of practices incorporating both traditional and digital techniques Her first picture book Snow ndash an illustration of Walter de la Marersquos poem of the same name ndash was published by Faber and Faber in 2014 to much critical acclaim in 2015 it was nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal The Walter de la Mare series is completed by three more picture books The Ride-by-Nights (2015) Summer Evening (2016) and Silver (2017)

ROUNDTABLE

Giles de la Mare (gilesdelamaredialpipexcom) was a full-time publisher of books for 58 years until March this year when he made a deal with Faber and Faber to take over the 25 titles he brought out over 22 years in his one-man independent publishing company Giles de la Mare Publishers They are publishing them in the Faber list under his own imprint including the three volumes of the Walter de la Mare Short Stories which he himself compiled and edited He retired from Faber where he had been a director for nearly 30 years in 1999 He has been an active Literary Trustee of Walter de la Mare since 1982 and in 1997 he founded the Walter de la Mare Society of which he is the chairman and publisher He was also the main editor of Walter de la Marersquos Complete Poems in 1969 He has written numerous pieces about Walter de la Mare his grandfather in the Walter de la Mare Society Magazine including lsquoQuest for Walter de la Marersquos Clark Lecturesrsquo (which he gave at Trinity in Cambridge in 1922-3) in 2016 Earlier this year he published in the Magazine a reconstructed version of an unknown and partially incomplete Walter de la Mare short story (lsquoRichardrsquo) which has much in common with his famous early story lsquoThe Almond Treersquo He is also an active musician and sings in up to half a dozen concerts every year mainly with the Hampstead Chamber Choir

8

CONCERT | SINGING WALTER DE LA MARE

The Lancashire Hustlers (httpwwwlancashirehustlerscomindexhtm) are a musical duo made up of Brent Thorley (vocals guitars keyboards) and Ian Pakes (drums vocals other instruments) originally from Southport but now based in London Musical magpies they borrow from a variety of genres including soul pop folk jazz old musicals psychedelia bossa nova film soundtracks and blues Their critically acclaimed Sing Walter de la Mare (2013) sets to music four poems by Walter de la Mare lsquoAutumnrsquo lsquoComfortrsquo lsquoJohn Mouldyrsquo and lsquoSome Onersquo Tracks from the EP have been featured on BBC Radio Shropshire BBC Radio Ulster and Phonic FM amongst others but will be performed live in front of Walter de la Mare enthusiasts for the first time with additional new music especially made for this conference

Mackie and Me (mackieandmecom) comprises Adegravele Paxton (vocalist) and Dennis ldquoMackierdquo McCorkle (guitar electronics FX) They will perform new works from their upcoming album Songs of Enchantment These songs explore a number of Walter de la Marersquos playful quirky and metaphysical poems using a ldquojazzsicalrdquo composition style and vocal approach intended to complement lyrical and rhythmic elements within his texts Adegravele was introduced to de la Marersquos works through songs by composers such as C Armstrong Gibbs Lennox Berkeley Herbert Howells and Benjamin Britten In her Bibliography of the Song Settings of Walter de la Mare published by the Walter de la Mare Society in London 2011 she has collated over 800 solo vocal settings inspired by his writing As a classical singer Adegravele Paxton has sung extensively across Europe in USA and Brazil Her many credits include performances at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Glyndebourne Opera Kings College Cambridge Westminster Abbey Wigmore Hall and the Lincoln Center New York She has sung in broadcasts and recitals at Aldeburgh Festival the Purcell Room St Johnrsquos Smith Square for BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM Adegravele has also always had an interest in the capacity of the human voice for pure expression of our inner world of feelings independent of classical ideas of beauty of vocal tone Bringing this to de la Marersquos texts allows for more freedom in exploring musical ideas and invites a newer more contemporary style of vocal interpretation within the song art form Dennis McCorkle learned his craft as a musician and composer from Dennis Sandole Frank Mullen and John Marlow and played guitar with the United States Navy Band Performing and recording in Washington DC Philadelphia and Atlantic City NJ for over twenty years he moved to New York to become Executive Director of Music Minus OnePocket Songs He composes prolifically across genres including jazz new age sacred film music and musical theatre He wrote the official March of Grand Central Station premiered at the opening of the refurbished station New York in 2001 His published books include The MIDI Orchestratorrsquos Handbook and The Davidic Cypher Unlocking the Hidden Music of the Psalms (included in The History Channelrsquos 2008 presentation The Naked Archaeologist In Search of King Davidrsquos Harp) This work uncovers the hidden music of tersquoamim and was described by Jewish scholar Reuben Ebrahimoff as lsquoamazing it allows us to hear today what the music in the time of the Temple sounded likersquo

9

VENUES

The daytime events will take place on the ground floor of the Faculty of English on the Sidgwick Site (9 West Road Cambridge CB3 9DP) marked on the map below The evening concert will take place in the Old Labs in the Newnham College garden The dinner for delegates will be in the Newnham College Hall called Clough Hall

FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL

CAMBRIDGE RAILWAY STATION

PARKERrsquoS PIECE BUS STOPS

Reading Walter de la Mare - Full Poster

Programme and Abstracts Final 1

Maps

Reading Walter de la Mare 1873-1956 lsquoa voice which has no fellowrsquo

20th ndash 21st September 2018 University of Cambridge

PROGRAMME

Day 1 ndash Thursday 20th September

1230 ndash 1300 Registration and welcome

1300 ndash 1315 Welcome from conveners amp Giles de la Mare (Walter de la Mare Society)


Gillian Beer (Cambridge) lsquoUneasy Encounters Henry Brocken and Other Fictionsrsquo

Angela Leighton (Cambridge) lsquoRiddling de la Marersquo


1430 ndash 1545 Panel 1 | Archival Creativity Literary Networks

Laura Helyer (independent) lsquoWalter de la Mare Elizabeth Bishop and the ldquothing-y poemrdquorsquo

Anne Welsh (UCL) lsquoldquoBeyond wealth beyond fame the making of friends ndash friends known

and friends unrevealedrdquo De la Marersquos Sentimental ldquoWorkingrdquo Libraryrsquo

Marc Vermeulen (independent) lsquoThe Unknown Walter de la Mare Letters in the Temple

University Library Collectionrsquo



William Wootten (Bristol) lsquoQuestions Riddles and Mysteries in the Works of Walter de la Marersquo

1730 ndash 1850 Concert | lsquoSinging Walter de la Marersquo

The Lancashire Hustlers

Mackie and Me

1900 ndash 1930 Drinks reception at Newnham

1930 ndash 2100 Dinner at Newnham College Clough Hall

1



























2





Ghosts


Riddling de la Mare


Ghosts




3












4











5











6










7



EXHIBITION





ROUNDTABLE


8




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps



























2





Ghosts


Riddling de la Mare


Ghosts




3












4











5











6










7



EXHIBITION





ROUNDTABLE


8




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps





Ghosts


Riddling de la Mare


Ghosts




3












4











5











6










7



EXHIBITION





ROUNDTABLE


8




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps












4











5











6










7



EXHIBITION





ROUNDTABLE


8




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps











5











6










7



EXHIBITION





ROUNDTABLE


8




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps











6










7



EXHIBITION





ROUNDTABLE


8




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps










7



EXHIBITION





ROUNDTABLE


8




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps



EXHIBITION





ROUNDTABLE


8




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps




9

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps

VENUES


FACULTY OF ENGLISH

OLD LABS

CLOUGH HALL





Maps

Reading Walter de la M are › ... · Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 2017. Ghosts...

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Transcript of Reading Walter de la M are › ... · Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism in 2017. Ghosts...