Lors de cette séance chorale, qui viendra conclure le cycle interdisciplinaire « Du livre aux murs : la poésie exposée (musées, galeries, bibliothèques) » co-animé par Valentin Fauque et Juliette Utard depuis 2023, nous écouterons nos collègues de Dublin City University, Angela Finn, Kit Fryatt, Michael Hinds, Ellen Howley, et Jack Quin, membres du partenariat franco-irlandais PHC Ulysses « Correspondences: Poetry and Intermediality », évoquer divers contextes d’exposition de la poésie, irlandaise notamment, allant du beau livre au ferry aux poèmes-galeries (programme ci-dessous).

La séance débutera à 17h à la Sorbonne, dans la bibliothèque de l’UFR d’anglais (esc. G, 2e etage). Un cocktail suivra à 18h30 au Club (Sorbonne, RdC, près de la salle des actes) pour marquer la fin de ces deux années de réflexion collective et évoquer le nouveau cycle, qui portera sur « Les Tiers-lieux de la poésie » (2026-2028).

PROGRAMME – jeudi 23 octobre 17h-18h30

• Angela Finn’s short talk, “Poetry, Space and Typography: Rearranging the Reading Experience,” will take a look at three-dimensional poetry with reference to works by Augusto de Campos, Peter Downsbrough and Leontia Flynn.

Angela Finn is a final year PhD student at the School of English, Dublin City University, with a particular interest in hybrid literary forms. She won the 2020 Madrid Desperate Literature Short Story competition, was the 2022 recipient of the Iron Mountain Literature John McGahern Award and was recently shortlisted for the 2025 RTÉ Francis MacManus Award.

• Michael Hinds, “On Board W.B. Yeats”

What if you decorated the interior of a car ferry with an exhibit about the life and work of W.B. Yeats and nobody seemed to care? Irish Ferries, the company that owns the W.B. Yeats, installed placards offering a kind of info-tour about the poet on the main deck (with wall plaques containing QR codes to recordings), thematized names for various zones on the ship, menus and walls adorned with relevant citations to the poems, and a lightbox designed to display a layered version of “Sailing to Byzantium.” It could be that the use of Yeats in the Irish tourism and culture industry is so prevalent (e.g., Yeats Country Butter, Yeats Spring Water) that it becomes invisible, perversely turning the ship into a supermodernist non-place of consumerism (to use Marc Augé’s formulation). Yet perhaps the poetry on show here can still be thought of as a kind of participatory public art, even if people are not consciously participating in it? In effect, the indifference to Yeats’s poetry that its exhibition here generates is the enactment of a kind of Yeatsian anxiety over whether an artist ever gets the audience they want. The presentation will show images from a walk through on the ship.

• Jack Quin, Ellen Howley, Kit Fryatt, “Gallery Poems: an Irish case study”

From Tennyson’s “The Palace of Art” to W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the gallery poem is a genre, or sub-genre, distinct from traditional ekphrasis in its scale and ambition. These galleries, whether real or imagined, allow the poet to catalogue and inscribe artworks for their own purposes in poems that are typically meditative, critical of the world beyond the gallery walls, and creatively abrasive about the boundaries between the verbal and visual. This paper will consider the gallery poem as a distinct, albeit neglected, genre through a small handful of Irish examples. W.B. Yeats’s magisterial work in ottava rima, “The Municipal Gallery Revisited,” meditates on the portraits of multiple, now deceased, Irish artists and statesmen: “Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace.” Twenty years later, the Belfast poet and gallery curator John Hewitt penned his own gallery poem with the same name as a tongue-in-cheek critique of curation and conservation in the Municipal Gallery of Dublin.

Seamus Heaney’s “Summer 1969” from North mobilises Goya’s Black Paintings in the Prado to reckon with one of the darkest periods of the Troubles. Paul Durcan’s two collections Crazy About Women and Give Me Your Hand are poetic renderings of respective National Galleries in Ireland and the UK, which embody and parody a certain sort of accessible outreach curation in each institution. While Caitríona O’Reilly’s “The Sea Cabinet” sequence is loosely moored in Hull’s Maritime Museum thinking through the ethics of exhibition, and Paula Meehan’s “The Island, A Prospect,” written for the National Gallery’s exhibition “Shaping Ireland: Landscapes in Irish Art,” climbs through the frame to contemplate deep time and a landscape long after its human inhabitants depart.

Taken together, are galleries just one subject among many in Irish poetry or is there something particularly magnetic and paradigmatic about the gallery space? How does the rivalry, or paragone, of word and image play out in gallery poems where the speaker variously assumes the role of gallery tour guide, curator and exhibition label to artworks – with considerable poetic license? Do successive poets constitute a line of influence in gallery poems, and does the increasing popularity of the sub-genre for Irish poets suggest a competitive trend of writing them? (in parallel with competing Irish elegies, political poems, or even fixed forms like the sonnet, villanelle, sestina?).

Jack Quin is Assistant Professor in English at Dublin City University. Before joining DCU he was a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of W.B. Yeats and the Language of Sculpture (2022) from Oxford University Press, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on poetry and visual culture in Modernist Cultures, International Yeats Studies, the Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats, and the Edinburgh Companion to Yeats and the Arts.

Ellen Howley is Assistant Professor at the School of English in Dublin City University. Her monograph, Oceanic Connections: The Sea in Irish and Caribbean Poetry, was recently published by Syracuse University Press. She is the co-editor of Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking (Routledge, 2023) and has published work in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Comparative Literature and Irish Studies Review. She is the DCU representative on the board of the Irish Humanities Alliance. 

Kit Fryatt lectures in English at Dublin City University. His publications include Austin Clarke: An Introduction (Aberdeen University Press, 2020) and Book of Inversions (poetry, with Harry Gilonis, London: Veer2, forthcoming 2025).

Une lecture de poésie par Kit Fryatt viendra clore la séance.