Fe br uar NEWSLETTER 2011 y No. 33 Editor: Andrew Maund, 57 Marlborough Avenue, Bromsgrove, Worcs B60 2PH E-mail Address:
[email protected] Combined magic of Ricks and Burnett dazzle New York audience Kate Shaw reports on “Passwords” at Poets House on 27th October, sponsored by the Housman Society. Archie Burnett and prison for Oscar Wilde, were Christopher Ricks were on terms used by other poets as sparkling form at Poets well as A.E.H. House,1 New York on October 27, 2010. The Christopher Ricks read ASL dynamic duo had entertained XLI, ‘In my own shire’, to us with Housman letters in show the utter simplicity of Oxford in 2009, now they A.E.H.’s poems but then went called their talk ‘Passwords’. on to dazzle us with the Their combined magic dazzled complexity of the poem with an audience which included its anagrams and alliteration: James Fenton, a previous lines such as ‘The earth Professor of Poetry at Oxford because my heart was sore, who had given a lecture on sorrowed for the son she Housman in the 1996 bore’. celebrations, and Nick Laird, the poet and novelist who has Ricks thinks the literary value of the anagram has been spoilt recently written the introduction to the Penguin Classic edition by crossword puzzles but he pointed out that it has been of Housman’s poems. Archie Burnett explored the relation used by poets as far ranging as Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes, between biography and poetry in his talk while Christopher Pope, Austen Clark, Byron and T.S.