READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Auden's reserved book list for classes on Shakespeare (1944) How many ways can we read William Shakespeare? Reading together on holidays the lectures of John Berryman and W.H. Auden on Shakespeare resurrects the world of seventy years ago, its irresistible confidence, its newfound hope. Both poets are finding their feet within a transatlantic milieu in which the whole terrestrial globe is now mapped. Auden believed that an English-language poet’s views on Shakespeare were essential to our understanding of themselves as poets, a sign of the nature of their vocation. Berryman agrees implicitly with this view and it drives the force of their interpretation, and their own poetic character. Although we know much already from their writings about their takes on Shakespeare, both books of lectures are posthumous, published over a quarter of a century after their deaths in the early seventies. So we encounter several pasts at once, that of their own lives now ended, that of...

Image by Talitha Fraser you put up the new fence but don't take down the old instead of recycling for parts there is merely a slow degradation of the old material tumour benign or malignant? diagnosis unknown https://thelightanddarkofit.wordpress.com/2017/09/07/you-put-up-the-new-fence/ P: There are times when it's clear who 'you' is in your poems, other times when 'you' defies easy identification. This poem is in the latter category, if it's a category. T: Here the "you" is me! # contemplativereflection # firstthelog P: Well, that clears that up then. T: I just fell into a black hole of pros and cons of the use of first person narrative in poetry... which hasn't cleared up anything but suffice it to say the most humbling moments of sharing my poetry would be when I manage to write something that others say it resonates with them and names something they didn't have words for... so whi...

Peter Gebhardt could be old school, which is amusing when we consider he spent half his life turning old schools into new schools. One way he was old school was how he lived on the telephone. The telephone is a conversational device via which he conducted long conversations with family, friends, and colleagues; probably also reformed individuals he watched through the courts. I imagine this was a lifelong practice, or rather, pastime. I would pick up the receiver to hear the Gebhardt voice commence a dialogue that could go for the next three or the next fifty-three minutes. He never said, “Peter here”, or introduced himself in full, or said hello, it was straight into it. For example: “What do you make of the Prime Minister this week?” This was less an opportunity for me to remark on the government’s latest misadventure than for Peter to launch forth on his newest series of mock-shock observations and rock solid opinions. The Prime Minister, inevitably, was put in his place. ...

 Bloomsday in Melbourne went to new extremes in 2017, in short, the nose. Here is my review of the main show for the journal Tintean. Many photographs of James Joyce show the author with his nose in the air. This mannerism is interpreted as otherworldliness, or arrogance, or as a symptom of his manifold eye afflictions, though who is to say Joyce is not simply avoiding the down draught of the photographer’s noxious fart? Ulysses is famously an exposition and celebration of the five senses. Rarely in literature had the sensory, sensual nature of all human experience been given such constant immediacy in a novel. The sight, sound, feel, and taste of Dublin is worded up on every page. But of all the precious five, smell is the most challenging to turn effectively into words. How to transform a list of smells into theatre requires in-depth knowledge of the Ur-Text, or perhaps that’s the Ewww-Text. This was the challenge set for the Bloomsday in Melbourne committee ...

Newman House, University College Dublin, facing St. Stephen's Green On Thursday the 27 th of April Will Johnston, Robert Gribben and I gave a presentation on Gerard Manley Hopkins to the Institute for Spiritual Studies at St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. Here is the second part of my contribution to the evening.   Pied Beauty Glory be to God for dappled things –    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;       For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;    Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;       And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange;    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)       With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathe...

St Peter and St Paul Church Yattendon, with the Bridges family cross in the foreground On Thursday the 27 th of April Will Johnston, Robert Gribben and I gave a presentation on Gerard Manley Hopkins to the Institute for Spiritual Studies at St. Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. Here is the first part of my contribution to the evening. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Bridges were born three months apart in the year 1844. Their families were devoutly religious, also inspired by the movement of reform within the English Church which we today call Anglo-Catholicism. The Hopkins family attended High Anglican churches, including All Saints’ Margaret Street in London, a church designed and built by William Butterfield, the same architect who designed the cathedral down the hill from here near the Yarra River. The books tell us Hopkins and Bridges met at university, but they were moving in the same social and cultural circles for years, taking in the same air. In a p...

This profile of Rowan Williams was written by Philip Harvey for the ‘Heroes of the Faith’ page of The Melbourne Anglican , April 2017. Rowan Williams, as a child, grew up in a Welsh Calvinist village. We encounter this formative world of Wales throughout his writing, for example in his translation of the Nonconformist poet Ann Griffiths: Under the dark trees, there he stands, there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes? I thought I knew a little how he compels, beyond all things, but now he stands there in the shadows. It will be Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning, when I shall wake to see him as he is. It’s only when the family moved to another village that Rowan first encountered High Church Anglicanism, with its strong emphasis on social action and a sacramental worship that engaged all the senses. As a young man Rowan almost became a Benedictine, a decision that his biographer Rupert Shortt avers would have disappointed some of his female f...