Western Worlds

a day @Yeats & the West

William Butler Yeats, poet, playwright, politician, and Nobel prize-winner for literature, always looked west. The Yeats & the West exhibition at NUI Galway, with rare books, art, music, drama, and film, discovers what the west meant to him, and what this means for us. Part of the Yeats & the West programme, the day event Western Worlds tells the story of the western cultural revolution that shaped modern Ireland. Featuring talks on W.B.Yeats’s poems, plays, artistic collaborations and love affairs, and featuring his co-conspirators Jack B.Yeats, J.M. Synge, Padraic Pearse and Eva Gore- Booth, it includes dramatized poetry readings and an exclusive interview with the artist John Behan about his current exhibitions of Yeatsian sculptures and drawings. Western Worlds tells a story of going west to find those places, real and imaginative, that change our sense of where and who we are.

http://yeatsandthewest.org

Programme

10.45am Welcome & Kisses

Adrian Frazier Yeats & Maud Gonne: The Meaning of Their Kisses

12pm Poems

Brian Arkins W.B.Yeats & G.M. Hopkins

Deirdre NÌ_ Chonghaile ‰Û÷Listening to this rude and beautiful poetry’: J.M. Synge as song collector in the Aran Islands

1pm Lunch

2pm Plays

Barry Houlihan ‰Û÷Suffering Spirits and Remorseful Dead’: Remembrance and Re-enactments in the plays of W.B. Yeats

Ian Walsh The Painted Play: Jack B. Yeats and the Postdramatic Theatre

3pm Revivals

Mary Harris Realism, Idealism and the Gaelic Revival

Maureen O’Connor Some Vague Utopia: Eva Gore-Booth’s The Death of Fionavar (1916)

4pm Coffee

4.30 Arts

Adrian Paterson with Barry Houlihan (curators of Yeats & the West) Yeats among the Arts: exhibition highlights tour

from 5pm in Special Collections

5.30pm Poems

David Clare & Deirdre Clare dramatic readings

6.15 Reception

6.30pm Bulls

John Behan The Bull of Sheriff Street in conversation

For more information please contact adrian.paterson@nuigalway.ie