The Poetry Hour: The Josephine Hart
Poetry Foundation
It truly was the art of diplomacy last night. Damian was one of several readers who recited selected poems at the American Ambassadors Residence in London on Tuesday, April 23, 2024. The intimate evening titled The Poetry Hour, is an ongoing project that is part of The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation. Other readers included Elizabeth McGovern and Charles Dance.
Poems from Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell were selected for Tuesday’s reading. Guests of the evening included Gloria Obianyo, Parth Thakerar, Alison Mosshart and more. The event was led by director Dr. Mary Wellesley and sponsored by US Ambassador to the UK, Jane Hartley. View more photos from the event in our Gallery here.
The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation helps develop advancement of arts, culture and education, with a particular focus on poetry, literature and dramatic performance across the UK. Specifically, The Poetry Hour is “great poetry of the dead poets read aloud by great actors.”
The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour began life as The Gallery Poets In Cork Street in the late 1980s and quickly became a transatlantic phenomenon playing regularly at The Hay Festival, The National Theatre, The Donmar, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, the New York Public Library and Harvard University. In 2004 The Poetry Hour made its home at The British Library where it continues regularly in Josephine’s memory. After her untimely death in 2011, Westminster Abbey hosted The Poetry Hour there to celebrate her contribution to poetry.
Josephine Hart was a gifted Irish woman who blazed a trail in literary London – she was the first woman director of Haymarket Publishing. She wrote six best- selling novels – Damage made into a film by Louis Malle, starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. She was also a successful producer who proved, by selling-out a six-week West End run of TS Eliot’s poetry, that there was a “huge appetite for great poetry being read aloud by great actors” in London.
For more information about The Josephine Hart Foundation and The Poetry Hour, please visit their website here. Photo Cred: Joanne Davidson
Source: Daily Mail