Sligo Poets Reading

The 54th Yeats International Summer School Gathering 2013 is in its second and final week. I usually try to attend at least one day of the school and this year was delighted to be included in the Sligo Poets Reading in the Poets' Parlour in the Yeats Memorial Building.

This takes place at 1pm on Friday 9 August, the final day of the school. I've read as a guest at the Poets' Parlour last April and really enjoyed it. A great knowledgeable audience. I also took part in the open mic there on Yeats Day. Now to choose a few suitable poems. Sligo themes or not?

Earlier on Friday, at 9.30am, Susan Wolfson will lecture on Yeats’s ‘Romantic’ Conversations in the   Hawkswell Theatre. Susan Wolfson is a Professor of English at Princeton University. Her research interests include is the Romantics and their contemporaries, that is, the writers in Britain from 1780 to about 1850. This lecture will be about Yeats’s poetry of engagement with the British Romantics, in particular Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.

The results of the iYeats Poetry Competition, held as part of the Yeats Festival Season, were announced last week at a reading in the Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo. The winner was Breda Wall Ryan from Bray, Co Dublin for ‘Dreamless’. The emerging poet prize was awarded to James Conor Patterson from Newry, Co Down for his poem ‘Animal Psalms’. The commended poets were Offaly native, Connie Roberts, now living in the USA and Cróna Gallagher who is based in Co. Leitrim.

Full report here. And full marks to the organizers for the prompt publication of the results!