O THOU with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!
("To Spring", Poetical Sketches, 1789)
Blake once wrote that in Jerusalem that after "three years slumber on the banks of the Ocean" he was ready to display his giant forms to the public once more. Zoamorphosis has had a year's slumber since I left the banks of the Ocean, but my Spring resolution is to start writing about Blake more regularly.
Regarding recent and upcoming events, for those in London on May 25, the Blake Society and Waterstone's will be presenting a talk by Tobias Churton on "The Religion of William Blake". Churton, a composer and writer as well as a lecturer in Freemasonry at the University of Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism, has produced various films and books on the Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism, Aleister Crowley and, in 2015, published Jerusalem! The Real Life of William Blake. He will be discussing Blake's own esotericism at the Picadilly branch of Waterstones.
(As a brief aside, for anyone interested in events taking place in Blake's very own Jerusalem-Babylon, the Londonist has a wonderful collection of links tagged under William Blake.)
The end of April saw the premiere concerts in Pimlico and Framlingham, performed by Trinity Laban Conservatoire's a capella ensemble, Rubythroat, of Dark Disputes and Artful Teasing, a song cycle composed by Julian Marshall and based on Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Marshall's notes to the work describe it as somewhere between "American spiritual" and "a more genteel legato".
For Blake scholars, the William Blake Archive has added searchable editions of the forty issues of Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly that were published between 1980 and 1990. BIQ has long been the leading publication devoted to Blake's work, and the latest issues are part of the ongoing project at the Archive to make the journal freely available to the public.
On the web, there have been some interesting sightings of Blake in recent weeks. The New Yorker includes a profile of the poet and rapper Kate Tempest, who describes her work as influenced by William Blake and the Wu-Tang Clan and there's a delightful video published by the Khan Academy and Tate in which Maurice Sendak, author of Where The Wild Things Are (the first book I can remember reading), discusses the inspiration of William Blake and how he loves Blake despite the fact that he often doesn't know what the Romantic poet and artist was talking about. Meanwhile, while working on a photo shoot for Esquire magazine, the actor Idris Elba took out time to recite Blake's poem "London", filmed by Tom Craig and Alex F. Webb.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that the phrase "Blakespotting" was taken from an excellent 2006 article by Mike Goode, in which he referred to a feature originally published in Vanity Fair in 2003 on the "library dining room" at Trump Tower. Ben McGrath, the author of the Vanity Fair piece, observed that there were framed proverbs from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, including "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom". I've been thinking about that proverb a lot in recent weeks, and really hope that Blake could see something about the presumptive presidential nominee that a whole host of us might be overlooking at the moment...