The passing of an era was marked at the end of the month by the death of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, described by Global Times as "the last great poet of the Beat Generation who helped to establish the counter-culture movement". Born in 1919, Felinghetti was famous for setting up City Lights bookstore and publisher, through which he issued key books of the Beats - most notably Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1956 - and he was a key thinker in the political and moral stance of the counter-culture over the coming decades. He was also, with Ginsberg, a keen enthusiast of Blake, becoming involved in Ginsberg's 1970s project to record a number of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience. He was recorded in 1972 singing "Ah! Sunflower", "The Garden of Love" and "The Nurse's Song" with John Fahey, and in an interview in 2016 he explained the importance of Blake's poems to Ginsberg's own works.
While exhibitions have been a rare occurrence in the age of pandemic lockdowns, one such event in February showed the ways in which Blake's art remain relevant to contemporary practitioners. Richard Ayodeji Ikhide's Future Past opened on 11 February at V.O Curations, the first of its exhibitions to mark the new gallery in Mayfair. Nigerian-born Ikhide who studied textile design at Central Saint Martins and a postgraduate diploma at the Royal Drawing School, has been artist in residence at V.O and draws on a wide range of inspirations, from prehistoric Japanese culture to European artists such as El Greco and Blake. In an interview with Steve Turner, he recounts how for his postgraduate studies he had to select an artist for his presentation:
Future Past is open until 20 March and selections of his work can be seen in the Steve Turner online solo exhibition, Cosmic Memory.
Another cultural casualty of the COVID has, of course, been the film industry. Saint Maud, a British psychological horror movie that follows a hospice nurse, Maud, and her obsession with a former dancer in her care, received its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2019 and was slated for general release in April and May 2020. It was eventually shown on some screens in the UK in October 2020, but only received a limited US release in the USA at the end of January 2021, the same date that it appeared on DVD in Britain. Although it was well-received in the UK, American reviews were more mixed throughout February: the Chicago Tribune that some would appreciate the religious themes in the film "more than others", while the Boston Globe recommended it even for those fans of horror whose tastes ran in a different direction. The movie's difference in part stems from the work of writer/director Rose Glass, and performances by Morfydd Clark and Jennifer Ehle, and the Blakean connection is a gift of a book of Blake's drawings made by the dancer Amanda (Ehle) to Maud (Clark). We'll be following up with a review shortly.
One thoughtful article to appear during February was Pete Yeo's ecocritical meditation on an evergreen and pleasant land for Finding Blake. First published by the University of York's Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, Yeo's work was adapted to make explicit the ways that he draws on Blake stanzas from Milton a Poem - more famously known as the hymn "Jerusalem" - for an understanding of the changing climate of Britain's evergreen plant life. The long view of the biodiversity of the British Isles does, of course, show us a land which was not always so green and pleasant, not least when it was covered in ice age glaciers, yet contemplating the deep time of life in this corner of the Atlantic also leads Yeo to reflect on the comparisons between spirituality and unified physics, most aptly caught for him in Blake's lines: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower";