Although a relatively quiet month on the Blake front, the arts saw a number of events and exhibitions that were inspired by William Blake in one form of another.
Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries is an exhibition of the artist's work at Carnegie Mellon University, where Wilding formerly taught, as well as working with the cyberfeminist art collective subRosa. Quotes accompanying her impressive pieces draw upon a range of writers and artists, including Emma Goldman, Virginia Woolf and, unsurprisingly considering the exhibition's title, William Blake. Her work, as Bill O'Driscoll points out, is frequently overtly political, and anyone in Pittsburgh will have a chance to see it throughout March before it continues on a national tour.
The artist Siggi Ámundason, whose large-scale pen drawings reference William Blake as well as eighties anime, Goya and Francis Bacon, displayed some of his work at the Kjarvalsstaðir Museum in Iceland: his work, part of a larger exhibition entitled "Tales of the Unseen", will remain on display until April 22.
An exhibition on works inspired by T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land also takes in William Blake as well as Paul Nash and Henry Moore as part of the eclectic mix of Eliot's themes and inspirations, according to Hannah Luxton. "Journey's with the Waste Land" is on display at the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate until 7 May.
Film, stage and TV also had offered some intriguing snippets during February. While not directly inspired by Blake, the latest drama by Clio Barnard, Dark River, is a reminder that one of her previous short films, Lambeth MarshJoseph Walsh at the Financial Times, was so inspired. Dark River began an adaptation of Rose Tremain's novel Trespass before evolving into a story of the aftermath of abuse in the English countryside, and indeed according to Blake's poetry remains a source for the latest film.
Elsewhere on screen, Blake had a cameo from his death bed in the new TV series, The Frankenstein Chronicles: while, as Meghan O'Keefe observes, it is something of a stretch to say that Blake and Mary Wollstonecraft were firm friends, nonetheless his small part is a significant link in this entertaining show set in 1827 London.
A performance of Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem at the Crow's Theatre in Toronto drew enthusiastic reviews, as per this from Kelly Nestruck who declared it "pure theatre of the kind we rarely see". Kim Coates, the Saskatoon-born actor best known for his work on Sons of Anarchy, plays the role of Rooster Byron and the play continues at the Crow's Theatre until March 10.
February saw the 40th anniversary of Derek Jarman's punk tribute, Jubilee: a long-time fan of Blake's work (he dedicated the film to Blake along with many others of his heroes), Jarman's nod to the Romantic poet in the movie includes a brilliant version of 'Jerusalem' by Amyl Nitrate which, while not as visually compelling as her version of Rule, Britannia, is still striking. As Adam Scovell noted in The Quietus, the film is "a time capsule" of the time when subcultures could afford to grow in England's capital.
Musically, February saw the release of Shawn Colvin's The Starlighter, which includes a version of Blake's "Cradle Song". Colvin, an American singer-songwriter best known for her 1997 Grammy-winning song, "Sunny Come Home", discussed her music as part of the #MeToo movement with Michael Raver at The Huffington Post. We'll be carrying a review of Starlighter at some not too distant point in the future.
Finally, the bizarrest Blake reference in February came from Ben Shapiro, who made the following, oddly compelling remark about Donald Trump:
I would buy an album of Trump reading the poetry of William Blake.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 23, 2018