Dante’s Divine Comedy is one of the masterpieces of world literature, an epic that brings together compelling characters and vivid imagery while exploring the big questions: the meaning of our lives and the nature of good and evil.

In this LitSalon Short, Sean Forester and Tim Swinglehurst will share their love of Dante. The poem is divided into three parts, but you can begin with any one of them: Purgatorio this autumn which Sean will facilitate or Paradiso in 2027 led by Tim. The Divine Comedy is a perfect work to study with the Literary Salon. Like Joyce, Dante has many layers of history, mythology, philosophy and theology, and can be challenging to appreciate fully when reading alone.  Please join us for this free event to see if reading Dante might be for you. 

JOINING DETAILS:

• Free LitSalon Short with Sean Forester and Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom.
• Wednesday 9 September, 6.00-7.30 pm (UK time).
• There is no charge for this study but please use the form below to book your place.

i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

Warsan Shire, from What They Did Yesterday Afternoon

To live is to love, in all its many forms. Myriad entities become the subjects of our love: human and non-human animals, the land and water and sky. Because we love, we must suffer its corollary—loss. But how do we process the many losses we face, personal and collective, over a lifetime? Experts say that in the West our mourning rituals have diminished, even while we are confronted with increasing reasons to feel grief. Today, the world feels deeply damaged. Everywhere, it and we are hurting. In the last decade alone, we have been confronted with calamitous political violences, climate disasters, a global pandemic, and the breakdown of human rights. In these unsettling times, every flash of breaking news is enough to crack the human heart. And while we bear these, we continue to sustain personal devastation.

Can poetry help us process our grief? Can it be part of a grieving practice to help us make sense of our feelings? Can it invite us into a community of mourners who find strength in each other’s stories? In this workshop, we will examine three poems exploring different kinds of grief: collective, private and ecological. Join Julie Sutherland in a study of poems by Heid E. Erdrich (Public Grief), Jackie Kay (Darling), and Pamela Mordecai (My Sister Cries the Sea). We will close the session with a reading of Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods.

Please note: This workshop is rooted in the belief that poetry has the power to heal emotional wounds, shift public attitudes towards divisive topics and improve social connectedness during times of global distress. To allow participants extra time to experience the poetry contemplatively as well as intellectually, the single session runs for 2.5 hours.

Poems and resources will be sent to participants in advance of the session.

Communal Grief: Heid E. Erdrich – Public Grief

Private Grief: Jackie Kay – Darling

Ecological Grief (Eco-Grief): Pamela Mordecai – My Sister Cries the Sea

Conclusion – Practising the Bittersweet Art of Letting Go: Mary Oliver – In Blackwater Woods

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single 2.5 hour meeting live on Zoom, led by Julie Sutherland
• Thursday, 22 October, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)
• £50 for single meeting, to include notes and resources

“But where will you be? Where’s your abode?
You’re a man of mystery, as God is my maker.”

from Simon Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Believed to date from around 1400 and regarded as one of finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry, we know little about who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight other than that they were from the North of England.

Set at Christmas in Camelot, the court of King Arthur, it is a mythic tale of magic and mystery in the age of chivalry that has attracted countless translators to explore its rich literary artistry and subtle psychological depth.

In this LitSalon Short we will consider the enduring appeal of this otherworldly wintry adventure and the translation by the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, which will be the subject of a four-meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst in the weeks before Christmas.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Single meeting LitSalon Short led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom
• Wednesday 28 October, 6.00-7.15 pm (UK time)
• LitSalon Shorts are offered free-of-charge, but please use the form below to reserve your place
• Recommended edition: Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007, ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.

”Dark house, by which once more I stand

                           Here in the long unlovely street,

                           Doors, where my heart was used to beat

                  So quickly, waiting for a hand…”

We hope that this Salon on Tennyson will be the first of many, where Tim Swinglehurst invites salonistas to a tasting of a specific poet writing sometime between the English Renaissance and the outbreak of the First World War. His aim is that after two weeks you will be left wanting more!

In 1946 W.H. Auden articulated the polarised reception – Victorian idolisation versus Modernist rejection – of his venerable poetical predecessor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, writing “He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn’t know; there was little else that he did”. Tennyson’s mastery of form and exceptional ear for rhythm and lyrical phrasing (“the finest ear of any English poet since Milton” said T.S. Eliot) were praised; his preference for hypnotic, sensual musicality at the expense of intellectual rigour and moral seriousness condemned (according to F.R. Leavis he was guilty of an unhealthy, “dream world” escapism, while Eliot – again – described “a further stage in the disintegration of the intellect, the further separation of sound, image and thought”).

More generously, Professor Christopher Ricks has written, “That, among so much else, he knew – and could effect – consolation as no one else has in our tongue, knowing consolation in its substantiality as well as its limits; that he understood madness, bereavement, fear, shivering, erotic loveliness, undying friendship, loss, exquisite courtesy, as it has been given to very few to understand them.” Extraordinary that anyone should have such comprehensive understanding of melancholia as Auden claims for Tennyson, mind-boggling that his understanding may encompass so much more.

During this two-week Salon we will read short poems and selected passages from longer poems to taste Tennyson for ourselves and see how we respond to his verse. We will, among other poems, read from The Lotos-Eaters and Ulysses, listening to Tennyson in dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey; explore a fraction of Tennyson’s grief and the mind-altering challenges of geology and cosmology to his faith expressed in In Memoriam; and journey into the deeply disturbed and deteriorating psyche of the narrator of the monodrama Maud. We will, most importantly, take time to read some of Tennyson’s verse aloud together, experiencing with our ears and voices the Tennyson ‘sound’.

“Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

                  And slips into the bosom of the lake.

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.”

JOINING DETAILS:

• Two-meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom
• Tuesday 3 & 10 November, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
• £80 for two meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

“This kyng lay at Camylot upon Cristmasse,
With rich revel aright and rechlesse mirthes.”

It was Christmas at Camelot and the long fifteen-day celebrations of feasting, dancing and playing games were in full swing at the court of King Arthur when suddenly, at new year, a mysterious knight (“overal enker grene” – entirely vivid green) appears. The stranger issues a challenge to the king’s knights: he will withstand any blow from any knight, provided that in a year and a day’s time the Green Knight may return the blow. When Sir Gawain takes up this challenge and strikes off the Green Knight’s head, he unleashes a series of events which threaten not only his knighthood and the raison d’être of Arthur’s court but disturb his understanding of himself and the world he inhabits.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a perfect read for the winter season, as Gawain sets off at in November to seek out the Green Knight and receive the return-blow. He travels through snow-bound landscapes, where cold streams come clattering down from cliff-tops and hang high above his head in hard icicles, and un-blithe birds upon bare twigs piteously pipe at the pain of the cold, a cold which the poet counterpoints with the warmth of hospitality and festivity celebrated in the castle where Gawain finds rest over Christmas before his final confrontation with the Green Knight.

On the surface, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight appears to be a simple story of magic and adventure, but it is recognised as a great masterpiece of medieval literature, exhibiting keen and subtle psychological depth, and displaying rich and intricate literary artistry. Join us to journey with Gawain as he navigates the cold of winter, the otherness of the Green Knight and his other-worlds, and the complexities of medieval courtly love and fidelity.

The medieval English dialect of the poem is not straightforward. For this study we will be using the acclaimed translation into modern English by poet laureate Simon Armitage, with occasional forays into the original Middle English. The recommended edition is Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007. ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Four meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom
• Wednesday 25 November, 2, 9 &16 December, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)
• £160 for four meetings, to include background materials and resources
• Recommended edition: Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007, ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.