The Philip Larkin Society is delighted to announce that Grayson Perry CBE RA is to be its Distinguished Guest Lecturer for 2017. The event will take place at the Middleton Hall, University of Hull on Wednesday 5^th July.

Grayson Perry is a particular Larkin fan and Larkin’s face features in ‘Julie’s House’, the conceptual holiday home he designed in Wrabness, Essex. In December 2016 he took part in the service of commemoration for Philip Larkin in Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey, giving a superb reading from one of Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones. In his lecture, he says he is looking forward to ‘exploring areas where my work bumps up against Larkin’s’.

Tickets – including a glass of wine on arrival – are priced at £20 (students and senior citizens £15). There will be a wine reception 6.30pm – all to be seated for Grayson Perry by 7.15pm.

Members of the Society have priority booking for this event until 18^th April and will have received details through the post on how to apply for tickets. In order to receive the same information new members need to ensure that they include their postal address on their Paypal application form. Any remaining tickets after this date will be offered for sale to the general public through the Hull Box Office website.

On 2 October 1974 Larkin sent his mother a colour postcard of Prince Charles, saluting in military uniform : ‘I am in the train going down to London where I shall see Betjeman and go to Westminster Abbey to see him unveil a tablet to Auden.’ On the following day he sent a follow-up letter: ‘It was a solemn ceremony. Poets’ Corner seems to be getting rather crowded! No doubt there will be room for me.’

Now the Dean and Chapter have sanctioned a memorial to this best-loved of recent English poets. Carved by Martin Jennings, who created the Larkin Satue in Paragon Square and the Betjeman statue in St Pancras, it displays the final lines of ‘An Arundel Tomb’. Because of the crowded space it is tucked in just below Chaucer’s canopy and close to the memorials to Auden, Eliot and Larkin’s younger contemporary, Ted Hughes, who beat him to the Abbey by exactly five years (partly Larkin’s own fault for turning down the laureateship.)

Eddie Dawes, Chairman of the Larkin Society, told the BBC ‘ Almost since the founding of the Society in 1995, ten years after Larkin’s death it had been our ambition to see Philip memorialized in Poets’ Corner and our first approach to the then Dean of Westminster was seventeen years ago. Happily, today that ambition is finally fulfilled.’

Following Evensong, with some sublime singing from the choir, the ceremony was introduced by the Dean. There were readings by the Larkin Society’s Honorary Vice-President, Baroness Bottomley, and by Grayson Perry, and the address was delivered by Blake Morrison. The Larkin Society’s President Anthony Thwaite and Eddie Dawes unveiled the plaque, and Rosemary Parry, Larkin’s neice, laid a wreath. Anthony Thwaite then read from ‘Church Going, and a reading by Sir Tom Cortenay of ‘Reference Back’ led to ‘Oliver’s Riverside Blues’ the jazz classic to which Larkin’s mother refers in the poem: ‘That was a pretty one’.

Larkin would be delighted to know that room has at last been found for him here.

For a lively description of proceedings by by Prof Jim Thornton go to: https://ripe-tomato.org/2016/12/04/poets-corner-at-last/

Photograph courtesy of Getty Images.

In celebration of Philip Larkin’s memorialisation in Poets’ Corner, the Friends of the Bodleian are to hold a  reading of Philip Larkin and Barbara Pym’s letters on Saturday, 10 December at 6pm in the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Libraries) in Oxford.

Further details are available via the Friends of the Bodleian website

www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/bodley/friends

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St James the Less, Pimlico: 21 September 2016, 6.00 for 6.30 – 8.00 pm

Schoolgirls, Seaside, Churches and Death: Betjeman and Larkin

James Booth

The poems of Betjeman and Larkin present striking similarities, but also strong contrasts. Larkin frequently cited Betjeman in his campaign of anti-Modernism. He derecated T. S. Eliot’s dictum that: ‘Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult‘, and praised Betjeman for managing ‘to bypass the whole light industry of exegesis that had grown up around his fatal phrase’. Betjeman had proved, he wrote, ‘that a direct relation with the reading public could be established by anyone prepared to be moving and memorable.’ In the same way he himself  followed the axiom: ‘The ultimate aim of a poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own.’ But Larkin was not always so positive. Betjeman, he wrote, ‘is a poet for whom the modern poetic revolution has literally not taken place.’ His themes are ‘insular’ and ‘regressive’; ‘what a poor figure he would have cut in the Paris of Stein and Cocteau: he was not, and has never been, a cosmopolitan’. Larkin champions ‘the robustness, precision and … vivacious affection’ with which Betjeman registers “dear old, bloody old” England’. But he is dismissive of Betjeman’s idiosyncrasies: what he calls ‘High Church camp about fiddleback chasubles and Eastern position and Low Church cocoa and so on.’

In this talk James Booth compares poems on the common topics of schoolgirls, seaside, churches and death, in order to explore the similarities and differences between the poets.

Tickets £12.00 Contact Carole Collinson: Tel: 01482 847047 Email: chriscarole@hotmail.com

Our 42nd AGM, held at the Lawns Centre, Cottingham on 4 June 2016, showed the Society at a high point. Our finances are under no threat, though Jackie Sewell’s clear and comprehensive Treasurer’s Report recommended various economies which have been put into effect. Our wish to take membership payments by Direct Debit would, she had discovered, be too expensive, but Standing Orders serve the same purpose and are our preferred option. Andrew Eastwood’s Secretary’s entertaining Annual Report recorded among other events, the Dean of Westminster’s visit to the University on 17 June 2015 in connection with the plaque by Martin Jennings to be installed in Westminster Abbey on 2 December 2016. (Members will be informed directly when our limited supply of tickets for this event becomes available.) The other highlight of the year was Rosie Millard’s address ‘Larkin Hull and 2017’ in the Brynmor Jones Library on 2 December 2015 which launched the Society’s contribution to the City of Culture activities. Andrew Eastwood welcomed new members on to the committee: Simon Wilson, Archivist at the History Centre, Chris Cagney who has taken over marketing (and was doing a brisk trade at the back of the room ably helped by his son Joe), Lyn Lockwood who will be responsible for the Education portfolio, and Rachel Galletly, who brings her experience as a teacher to the committee.  Andrew reported that our membership stands currently at 217 and asked anyone present who knew of possible new members to encourage them to join.

After a delicious lunch (for which many thanks to the Lawns catering service) the audience, now swollen to over 60, was welcomed by our Chairman, Professor Eddie Dawes. The Society’s President Anthony Thwaite introduced the Distinguished Guest Speaker, Mark Haworth-Booth, former Keeper of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, who gave a relaxed, informative talk on ‘Larkin as Photographer’, full of specialist insight and illustrated by some of Larkin’s well-known, and not so well-known photographs. Mark listed the three cameras which Larkin used, each of increasing technical sophistication and bought at what at the time was huge expense. He mentioned Larkin’s expertise with light-meter and tripod and concluded that, though he never ventured into developing and enlargement himself, Larkin’s photographs are well up to professional standard. Highlights of Mark’s talk were a front-lit photograph of Leicester football fans on their way to a match, a carefully cropped and enlarged photograph of picknickers in Pearson Park, a photograph of Eva, the poet’s mother in her garden seen from below, and, of course, most revealing of all, his numerous introspective, often ironic ‘selfies’ taken with a delayed action shutter release.

Mark began with a fascinating account of his own ancestral connections with this area of the country (including a poet who had written a couplet poem 112 pages long, extolling Cottingham), and ended with his own terza rima poem paying homage to Larkin’s example: ‘Walking through the garden in the dark / my forehead breaks a sticky spider thread. / A crescent moon describes a white-cold arc //… And now leaves and branches are silhouetted / against the early morning sky. Blue-grey. / Unscrew the thermos, pour the tea – a blessed / moment – and now the grass is on its way / to green and I recall that Philip Larkin / “loved everything about the everyday”.

Mark’s talk was a unique and rewarding experience for all who were there. His full lecture will be published in About Larkin 42 this autumn.

Saturday 4th June 2016

The Lawns Centre, Cottingham

AGM 12.30 followed by lunch at 1.15 pm

and at 2.30 pm our distinguished Guest Lecturer:

Mark Haworth-Booth (formerly Curator of Photography at the V & A): Larkin the Photographer

For tickets contact Carole Collinson Tel: 01482 847047. Email: chriscarole@hotmail.com

£12 for members and guests

Lecture only £5.00 for non-members

On Sunday 9th August 2015, to mark Larkin’s birthday and the 30th anniversary of the year of his death, a fabulous evening of musical and poetic performances took place at various stages along  Hull’s Larkin Trail, beginning in Spring Bank Cemetery and ending in Ye Olde Black Boy in the Old Town, where Larkin used to go to listen to jazz. Composed and created by local musician Dave Gawthorpe the event will stay long in the memory of those privileged to be there. Dave has now edited a brilliant film version of the event which can be viewed here.