Event overview
GLITS (Goldsmiths Literature Seminar)
For MacNeice ‘impure poetry’ meant poetry conditioned by the poet’s life and the world around him. When he wrote ‘The Suicide’ in 1961, the immediate world around MacNeice was the BBC Features Department. The Administrator, first broadcast in the same year, was the final play written and produced by MacNeice while working full-time at the BBC. Both the poem and the play were hailed as a return to form after the years in which MacNeice’s work had been regarded as ‘disappointing’. Edna Longley describes the poem as ‘one of MacNeice’s finest’– she also sees it as a ‘coded goodbye to the BBC’. MacNeice himself described The Administrator as a study in ‘frustration’. He also observed that ‘in radio: as one’s time is too often too limited, it pays to do so several things at once’. This paper will examine the ways in which MacNeice did ‘several things at once’ in both his poems and his plays. By examining the links between The Administrator and ‘The Suicide’ it is possible to gain a greater insight into the work of this writer whom Colette Bryce has described as ‘utterly contemporary’.
Rebecca Farmer completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths in December 2016.
Her poems have been widely published in magazines including The Interpreter’s House, The London Magazine, The North, Poetry Review, The Rialto, Smiths Knoll, South Bank Poetry, Under The Radar and The Warwick Review, as well as The Asahi Shimbun and other publications.
In 2014 she was an overall winner of the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition for her pamphlet Not Really which was published by smith|doorstop. The competition was judged by Carol Ann Duffy who said ‘this outstanding pamphlet is ultimately up-lifting, because of the restrained energy in the poems and their openness to the world’.
Rebecca was a writer in residence at The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout in 2015 and she was chosen as one of four writers to be awarded a residency at Gladstone’s Library in 2016. She has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2017
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 16 Mar 2017 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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