I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.
Paul Klee, epitaph
Join us for this unique public event exploring the relationship between poetry and art, in the magical setting of The EY Exhibition Paul Klee: Making Visible at Tate Modern. Surrounded by Paul Klee's iconic works, this evening features live poetry readings by poets Lawrence Sail and John Mole, joined by Lucy Tregear, as well as discussion and a private view of the exhibition, offering a fascinating insight into the influence of Klee’s art on some of the great poets of our time.
Considering Klee's powerful effect on such poets as Paul Muldoon, Sylvia Plath and Tom Paulin, this evening explores the way these poets, including Sail and Mole, illuminate Klee's paintings, highlighting such themes as childhood, the tug of history and a sense of theatre, as well as Klee's own practice as a painter and poet.
Biographies
Lawrence Sail
Lawrence Sail is a contemporary British poet and writer. He was chairman of the Arvon Foundation from 1990 to 1994, has directed the Cheltenham Festival of Literature and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has presented the BBC Radio 3 programme Poetry Now and Time for Verse (Radio 4). His most recent poetry collections are Songs of the Darkness (2010), an illustrated selection of his Christmas poems; Waking Dreams: New and Selected Poems (2010), which draws on poems from ten previous collections. Sift (2010) is a memoir of childhood, while the title piece of The Key to Clover, a collection of essays published last year, considers Klee's paintings.
John Mole
John Mole is a poet, critic, jazz musician and currently Poet in Residence at Poet in the City. He has been a recipient of the Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards for Poetry, and the Signal Award for his collection for children, Boo to a Goose, illustrated by his wife Mary Norman. As a broadcaster he has presented BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please and Time for Verse and, for Radio 3 he has compiled and presented Poetry Now as well as feature programmes about Robert Graves and Charles Hamilton Sorley. For many years, with Peter Scupham, he ran The Mandeville Press. He has written the libretto for a community opera, Alban, staged in St Albans Cathedral in 2010, and his most recent collection is The Point of Loss ( Enitharmon, 2011).
Lucy Tregear
Lucy Tregear is an actor, a singer and a regular reader for Poet in the City. She has been acting for over 25 years for stage, TV, film and radio. She has appeared in theatres in the West End, across the country and with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has recently finished the successful Middlemarch Trilogy at the Orange Tree Theatre.
This event has been developed in partnership with Poet in the City
