LONDON: Les Murray lecture

Tuesday, 11th May, 2010, 7pm
Tickets: £12 (£8 Poetry Society members and concessions). Tickets can be booked on line at www.poetrysociety.org.uk or telephone 0207 420 9886. All welcome.
Beveridge Hall,
University of London
Senate House, Malet Street
London
WC1E 7HU

Les Murray, Australian “super-league” poet, delivers the Poetry Society’s Annual Lecture - Infinite Anthology: Adventures in Lexiconia, a talk about words and the poems they inspire.

In a rare UK appearance, Australian poet Les Murray gives the Poetry Society's annual lecture, in which he'll explore his life-long fascination with word-collecting. From the folk words and country speech he heard as a child, to the new coinages he collects for the Macquarie Dictionary, Murray explains how he has used poetry as a word-store. From rangas and pobbledonks to belly leggings and jail tats Murray serves up some of the words that have most inspired him, while discussing how he's chosen to direct each word's unique potency. He finishes the evening with a poetry reading.

"There is no poetry in the English language now so rooted in its sacredness, so broad-leafed in its pleasures, and yet so intimate and so conversational." Derek Walcott on Les Murray.
Supported by the Institute of English Studies, University of London