5.00 pm: Zoom Poetry Reading. The theme of the session is Soldiers and Buglers. Members select and read poems by Hopkins and other poets on the theme. The session will last approximately one hour. Joining instructions will be circulated to members beforehand.

To commemorate Hopkins’ time teaching at the Oratory School (September 1867 – April 1868), the Hopkins Society is holding a day-event with lectures, visits to the Oratory Church and its Museum, together with lunch at a nearby cafe.

We shall be meeting at Birmingham Oratory, 141 Hagley Rd, Edgbaston B16 8UE.

Programme

10:00am:  Arrival and tea/coffee.

10:30am:  Revisiting ‘Inscape’ and ‘Instress’: an exploration of their origins,
Lecture by Dr Jill Robson, Hopkins Society UK.

12:00pm:  Lunch at Café Rumi, 205 Hagley Road, Birmingham.

1:30pm:    Visit to the Museum of Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman and the Oratory Church.

2:30pm:    Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Idea of a University
Lecture by Philip Healy, Hopkins Society UK.

3:45pm:    Tea/coffee and departure.

The cost for the day, inclusive of tea and coffee, is £40 per person, and £20 for students (full time education or theological training). At lunchtime we will go to Café Rumi for pre-ordered food; this is not included in the cost for the day. Please note, the closing date for registration is 18 September 2023.

To register and pay for the event, please download, complete and return this registration form:

On receipt of your registration form, you will be sent the Café Rumi menu to pre-order your lunch. You will be able to pay for your lunch on arrival at Café Rumi.

10.15 am: Arrival and coffee/tea.

10.45 am: Morning lecture:

2023 Annual Hopkins Lecture

‘ “Daily make me harder hope”: Hopkins and the place of the poet’ (Dr Rebekah Lamb, University of St Andrews).

12.15 pm: Walk in the grounds and readings of Hopkins’s springtime poems.

1.15 pm: Lunch

2.15 pm: Afternoon lecture:

‘Punctuation and Prosodic Markings in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ (Irene Kyffin, Hopkins Society).

3.30-4.00 pm: Tea/coffee and departure.

The cost for the day, inclusive of two course lunch and teas and coffee: £25.00 per person.

To register, please download the Booking Form here, and follow the instructions for completion.

5.00 – 6.00 pm
Theme: Trees.

Details will be circulated to members in advance.

Friday 14 to Sunday 16 October at the Christian Heritage Centre, Stonyhurst 

The weekend had as its focus Hopkins, science and poetry.

The programme included the Hopkins Lecture on ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins and his letters to Nature’ by Dr Jill Robson and:

• Dr Anna Nickerson (Cambridge University) gave a talk on her research in progress for her forthcoming book, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Epistemology: Poetry and the Manifoldness of Knowledge (Bloomsbury);
• A visit to Whalley Abbey;
• A presentation by Elaine Marshall on Ribblesdale.

Sunday included a Eucharist at which recently deceased members of the Society, Lance Pierson and Chris Proudfoot, were remembered.

The Theme: Hopkins, Voice, and Echo.
When trying to define the terms “underthought” and “overthought,” Gerard Manley Hopkins observed, “Perhaps what I ought to say is that the underthought is commonly an echo or shadow of the overthought, something like canons and repetitions in music, treated in a different manner, but that sometimes it may be independent of it.” Hopkins’s poem “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo” demonstrates the most obvious thematic and structural ways in which echo, voice, and dialogue function in his writings. The conference will feature presentations that will discuss voice and echo broadly defined, as well as the textual networks, intersections, or recontextualizations that inform Hopkins’s poetry, and the intertextual practices and voices (allusion, citation, translation, pastiche, parody) shaping his prose and verse. Papers that examine his epistolary voices, the homiletic voice of Fr Hopkins, or Hopkins as echo in other poets’ works, would also be welcome.

Keynote Speaker
We are pleased to announce that Martin Dubois has accepted our invitation to be the Keynote Speaker at this year’s conference. Martin Dubois is Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, UK. His first book, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience, appeared in 2017. He is currently editing Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context, a collection of thirty-eight essays on Hopkins to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.
 
Organising Committee:
Paul Kelly (Chair), Lesley Higgins, Amanda Paxton, Stephen Tardif, Frank Fennell