Four Quartets performance comes to London

Four Quartets, a performance of dance and music hailed in the US as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century”, is coming to the Barbican in May 2019. The performance, based on T. S. Eliot’s sequence of poems, has choreography by Pam Tanowitz, music by Kaija Saariaho, images by Brice Marden and a reading of Four Quartets by actor Kathleen Chalfont. READ

2018 T. S. Eliot Society (UK) Lecture

Sir Christopher Ricks is to give this year’s Annual T. S. Eliot Lecture  in Cambridge on Monday 3rd December at 7pm. The title of the lecture is ‘The Imperfections of Humanity: T. S. Eliot and a Shakespearean Hero’.

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2018 T. S. Eliot Prize

The 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist, which includes five debut collections, one small press, five men, five women, and two Americans, has been announced. Judges Sinéad Morrissey (Chair), Daljit Nagra and Clare Pollard have chosen the shortlist from a record 176 poetry collections submitted by ‘a plethora of poetry publishers’:

Ailbhe Darcy – Insistence (Bloodaxe)Terrance Hayes – American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (Penguin)
Zaffar Kunial – Us (Faber & Faber)
Nick Laird – Feel Free (Faber & Faber)
Fiona Moore – The Distal Point (HappenStance)
Sean O’Brien – Europa (Picador)
Phoebe Power – Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet)
Richard Scott – Soho (Faber & Faber)
Tracy K Smith – Wade in the Water (Penguin)
Hannah Sullivan – Three Poems (Faber & Faber)

 

The T. READ

Submissions now open for the Four Quartets Prize

The Poetry Society of America has opened submissions for the 2018 Four Quartets Prize. The prize is for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book in 2018.

The judges this year are Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Rosanna Warren. READ

2018 T. S. Eliot Lecture with Stephen Pinker, Abbey Theatre, Dublin

The third of five annual lectures inspired by T. S. Eliot’s impact on modern literature will be given by Stephen Pinker, one of the world’s leading authorities on language and the mind and Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard.  The lecture, entitled Pessimism in a World of Progress, will be followed by an interview with Will Self. READ

World premiere of Four Quartets performance

Four Quartets – a performance of dance and music, alongside a reading of the poems – premiered last week at Bard College’s Summerscape festival in New York. This was the first authorised performance based on T. S. Eliot’s sequence of poems with choreography by Pam Tanowitz, music by Kaija Saariaho, images by Brice Marden and a reading of Four Quartets by Kathleen Chalfont. READ