Grasmere! The Lake District!! Summer!!!

My dear reader,

I hope you will forgive my recent shortfall of correspondence. It is not for lack of goings-on here worth noting, but from the abundance of activity. All Cumbria is confused as the weather turns manic-depressive and poor tourists require first aid after becoming dangerously entangled in their Ordance Survey maps.

The Wordsworth Trust has opened it's Edward Lear the Landscape Artist exhibition, which brings together for the first time Lear's sketches and watercolours of his tours in Ireland and the Lakes from 1835-6. I love Lear. I love that he got famous drawing parrots. I love the poems, the stories and the recipes. I love that he was the twentieth of twenty-one children, and that he called Kendal a 'slop-basin'. The exhibition contains letters from the tours. In these, Lear is so charming he makes the world around him - including his own travels, the rain that besieges him, and his illness and disappointments - into marvellous prose descriptions through humour and irreverence. This creates a wonderful contrast with the level of professionalism and obsession that he shows in his landscape drawings. The pictures are ridiculously topographically accurate, as demonstrated by a 3D digital map that makes you feel as though you're having an out-of-body experience.

Invigilating the gallery is also a little like having an out-of-body experience. I love everything I do here at the Trust, and it's all necessary, worthwhile work, but after an hour and half of patrolling a room (trying to tread the fine line between vigilant and stalkerish) I had lost all concept of space and time and thought my brain was in my knees. So, if you do visit, please give the people with walkie-talkies a kind smile, and possibly a lollipop - the exhibition couldn't be put on without us.

List of the Celebrated Invigilantes

who descend into nonsense but keep on walking

Heather Anderson, Lucy Clarke,

Amy Concannon, Jane Connolly,
Jeff Cowton, John 'Visitor Services' Coombe,

Helen Donald, Tomoko Egiuchi,

Catherine Harland, Emily 'me' Hasler,

Molly Heal, Catherine Kay,

Matty O'Neill, Rie, Esther Rutter,
Carrie Taylor,Rebecca Turner,

Victoria Weaver, Wendy Woodhead

Back in the vale

I have been safely couched back in the vale for over a week now. Blog posting is becoming increasingly difficult as we enter the busy season, so apologies for the long silences. We have just opened the temporary exhibition here about Wordsworth and Tennyson; The Prelude and In Memoriam were published in 1850 and the exhibition explores that moment. The poetry season is also in full swing. So, in short, busy-busy - however, posts soon I hope.

In the meantime, save Salt publishing by buying a book...

Flatland

So I've made my first visit back to Suffolk - my county of origin - since I moved to the Lakes. All is summer hot, Constable country of greens and yellows. The soil is more dirt than soil, baked hard and purple-brown already. There's something unsettling about the sudden lack of hills that I'd never noticed before. And there's an eeriness to what is on the skyline; giraffic cranes, circular watertowers, pylons. But it's beautiful too, not just the At the Fishhouses parts and rivers that barely move with flitting white scalene sails, but the perennial bulbs along the seafront at Felixstowe (the town I come from) all hardy colours: blue, cerise and what passes for gold. And it's a port town, so there's always the sense of being about to move on.

Free Poetry

A great online edition called Poets on Poets with audio of modern poets reading various Romantic works. From the site Romantic Circles who have a number of fantastic resources. Interesting to see the Romantics that these poets have chosen to read and the ways they adapt them to their style of performance.

The Wordsworth Effect

Either I'm becoming increasingly sensitive to a real conspiracy or I'm going mad. Wordsworth is everywhere. Places you'd expect to find him, of course. My place of work obviously. And many pieces of writing about poetry. But recently it's been becoming a worrying trend that I can't get past the first paragraph of something without finding him there. The editorial of the latest Poetry Review isn't that much of a shocker, but escaping the confines of Town End for a stand up gig in Warrington with a few work mates, I opened the program to find a reference there again. First paragraph. Mixed feelings of validation and of being stalked by my day job on a night out. Then there was a reference to Keats and Shelley within the first fifteen minutes of the act.

Now, I'm well aware the above proves little more than that I am attracted to comedy with literary appeal and spend far too much time reading. I also know that we're liable to see what we want to or are trained to in things, or to pluck at them when they are only a thread of the whole fabric. But Wordsworth and his contemporaries are woven into a good deal of things so that we quote them without realising or date ideas back to their time. Then there's the relatives. The literary relatives. The things, the places, and the words words words.

It's wonderful. It makes me very happy. It gives me a job to do. It means I never leave work.

Success

The system works guys. A nice person from Cambridge University Press sent me a copy of Bronk's 'The Romantic Economist'. So, if anyone wants a review of this book I'll be happy to do one for you.

Wordsworth's Birthday (was yesterday)

Wordsworth was born on April 7th, 1770. He died on April 23rd 1850, but this did not stop us from celebrating his 239th birthday yesterday. (1770-1850 is a marvellous date for remembering and making calculations from.)

In honour of this day we did all the typically Wordsworthian things such as eating pizza and drinking large amounts of wine. We also had some entertainment: a song, a few readings and a Wordsworth vs. Coleridge rap battle with hand puppets...