Festival Event: Home and Abroad, A Poetry Life. Graham Fawcett in conversation

Graham Fawcett has been talking and writing about poetry all his life.

As the son of a London schoolmaster who was passionate about it himself and threw some Keats at him which knocked him flat, Graham was really hooked on poetry at school by Coghill's Chaucer, Coleridge's Mariner and doing Greek and Latin versions of Shakespeare, Keats and Tennyson, and spoken translation of the Greek playwrights and the Iliad into English.

His Cambridge lecturers, George Steiner and Raymond Williams among them, would quote from poems while talking about history or the novel.Poetry International in London between 1967 and 1973 was a dramatic annual revelation, letting him see Auden, Neruda, Hughes, Sexton, Popa, Soyinka, Paz, Grass, Ginsberg, Amichai, Rozewicz, Levertov and MacDiarmid.Living in Italy, he caught the poet Patrick Creagh's bug for Leopardi, Apollinaire and Corbiere, and met Robert Penn Warren, who knew Robert Frost, and Barbara Weekley Barr, step-daughter of D H Lawrence.

In France and at the BBC he translated Dante.Working for the Arvon Foundation in Devon, and years of interviewing and travelling for the BBC, gave him repeated new shots in the arm about how languages work on the page, in conversation, on the stage in theatre and opera and the public reading of poetry, and in translation.

He interviewed Ivan Lalic, Miroslav Holub and R S Thomas in London, and Kinnell, J Graham, Rich, Milosz, Hass and Gunn in America.In his seventeen years at The Poetry School in London, his commitment to the poetry of other countries grew: as well as workshops in translating poems, he taught day courses on Reading the French, the Scandinavians, the Japanese, the Russians, the South Americans, the Greeks, the Romans, and the East from Central Europe to Iran.

At Almaserra Vella not far from Alicante, he ran a five-day course on Spanish poetry from the beginnings to the present day.In 2008 he started lecturing on individual poets to audiences in London and beyond: Ovid, Chaucer, Byron, Pushkin, Baudelaire, Dickinson and Neruda in the first series, and then Lawrence, Bishop, Yeats, Hardy, Akhmatova, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Donne and Whitman.

In 2014 he began an annual series of poetry on location in Britain, Europe and America.Along the way, the Dead Poets Society he found himself walking into has only increased his appetite: 2014 saw the start of international tours to track down Dickinson and Eliot in New England; Vergil, Horace, Dante, Ariosto, Keats and Pasolini in Rome; Whitman, M Moore, Lorca, D Thomas, cummings, Millay and Auden in New York; Donne, J Thomson, Keats, Hughes and Plath in London; Yeats, Kavanagh and Heaney in Ireland; Hardy in the West Country; and Hopkins and R S Thomas in North Wales.In recent years he has come to know and love the work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Koch and Ted Kooser in America, and Fleur Adcock, Eavan Boland, Mahmoud Darwish.

Olav Hauge and Tomas Transtrmer after seeing them on London stages.Poems by any of the above may drop into our conversation, the way one is so often rather thrilled to think of what a poet once said that makes the point you were trying to make only better !