Using inspiration from Rimbaud and Verlaine to encourage engagement with the arts, widening appreciation for the arts, championing the importance of the arts in education and social capital building, and making the arts more financially resilient and sustainable
The Foundation’s long-term aim is to develop 8 Royal College Street as a European-style "poetry house".[3] In the meantime, it is using the two poets as an inspirational starting point for a much wider mission to champion arts and culture. Exploring the vital role played by the arts in education, social capital building and cultural exchange, the Foundation is also developing a new and more sustainable business model for the arts, based around earned income.
Governance
Portrait of Graham Henderson
The Foundation is managed by a board of English-speaking and French-speaking trustees, chaired by Thomas Venning, head of Books and Manuscripts at Christie’s.[4] Its chief executive (since April 2014) is Graham Henderson,[5] who was previously chief executive of Poet in the City.[6]
History
8 Royal College Street in 2007, before restoration8 Royal College Street in 2015, after restoration
The Foundation was created by Graham Henderson and was initially incubated within Poet in the City.[7] Henderson was part of (and inherited) the previous campaign to save the property at 8 Royal College Street. For many years this was run by Gerry Harrison, a Camden councillor,[8] during the process of which many celebrities have rallied to the cause, including the actor Simon Callow,[9] the writers Julian Barnes,[8][10]Lisa Appignanesi[8] and Tracy Chevalier and the musician Patti Smith.
In 2007 the house was bought and sympathetically restored by a new owner, Michael Corby. Committed to the historic identity of the property, he agreed in 2011 to leave the property as legacy gift to the Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation, created especially by Graham Henderson for this purpose. The Foundation has always been clear, however, that it does not want to be just a small house museum. It has therefore used the idea of the "poetry house" to create an arts organisation with the wider goal of promoting culture and the arts and championing their role in social capital building.[11] This has seen the Foundation deliver an extensive programme of cross-arts events and commissions and take an innovative approach to audience and business development.
Events
The programme of events delivered by the Foundation has been intentionally eclectic, involving many different art forms, and up-and-coming talent from across the arts and cultural sector. Amongst other things this programme has included events featuring opera, classical music, sculpture, poetry, literature, theatre, jazz music and rock music. Highlights have included The Disappearing Poet,[12] an event exploring why poets disappear, Faure’s Verlaine Settings, an event presenting classical song settings of the poet’s work, and Rock for Rimbaud, a concert featuring Americana artists. Institutional partners have included the National Opera Studio, Bloodaxe Books and Pernod Absinthe. From 2018 the Foundation is organising a series of salon-style events at Blacks Club in Soho in London, featuring speakers and artists, and designed to champion its work.
Commissions
The Foundation has also been responsible for commissioning new work in the arts. For instance, in 2016 it commissioned both a full-length jazz show (Jazz from the Playing Card Factory)[13] and a full-length theatre show (Poetry House Live).[14] As well as several performances the latter has resulted in a full-length film made in partnership with the film department at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow.[15] The Foundation has also been responsible for an original poetry commission involving a suite of poems by George Szirtes, and a series of 24 paintings by the artist Rebecca Taber inspired by the poetry of Rimbaud and Verlaine. In 2018 the Foundation is seeking funding for, amongst other things, an original chamber opera, and an original puppet show.
Educational work
The Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation is committed to encouraging new generations of students in secondary schools in the UK to engage with the arts and literature, and to gain an international perspective. In particular, it seeks to engage with young people in local Camden and Islington schools, located within a short distance of the property at 8 Royal College Street, many of whom come from socially and economically deprived backgrounds. The Foundation wants to provide these young people with experiences and educational opportunities they might otherwise not possess. This charitable mission lies at the heart of the Foundation’s identity, and forms an important part of its contribution to the local community.
In 2017, the Foundation delivered an extensive programme of educational placements featuring poetry in four schools in the London Borough of Camden, working with students from Maria Fidelis Roman Catholic Convent School, Regent High School, Camden School for Girls[16][17] and La Sainte Union Catholic School in a programme that involved over 500 students. This schools programme was generously supported by the T.S. Eliot Foundation. As well as work in the classroom, it included school shows and the publication of an 89-page poetry anthology entitled How We Make Daylight, featuring work by the students.[16]
The Foundation is facilitating a repeat programme of schools’ placements in Camden in 2018, with poetry in translation as its main focus, which will be delivered by Modern Poetry in Translation.
International connections
Delegates attending Kindred Spirits conference in Bucharest, 2015
The Foundation has also been working internationally. In 2015 Graham Henderson and the organisation took the lead in creating the Kindred Spirits network of European poetry houses including seven arts organisations based in six different European countries.[18] The Foundation’s partners include the Rimbaud Museum in Charleville-Mézières, La Maison de la Poesie in Paris, Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, the Lorca Foundation in Granada, the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, the National Museum of Literature in Bucharest, the Druskininkai Poetic Fall festival in Lithuania and the Halldór Laxness Museum in Iceland.[19] The network became a vehicle for an application for a European Union Large Cooperation Grant in the autumn of that year. The Foundation was all set to resubmit its application in 2016, with every chance of success, when the referendum result in favour of Brexit intervened. As a result, the charity's trustees decided that it was no longer sensible to place EU funding at the centre of the organisation’s future strategy. The Foundation, nevertheless, is keen to build on the relationships it had established with its "poetry house" partners, and particularly on the experience of the conference held in Bucharest in May 2015, bringing together representatives from all of the partner organisations.[20] The Poetry House Live theatre show in 2017 was commissioned expressly with the purpose of involving talented up-and-coming playwrights from all of the seven countries involved in the network.
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes, and his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away from home to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood he produced the bulk of his literary output, then completely stopped writing literature at age 20, after assembling his last major work, Illuminations.
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement and the Decadent movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.
Jeremy John Ratter, better known as Penny "Lapsang" Rimbaud, is a writer, poet, philosopher, painter, musician and activist. He was a member of the performance art groups EXIT and Ceres Confusion, and in 1972 was co-founder of the Stonehenge Free Festival, together with Phil Russell aka Wally Hope. In 1977 with Steve Ignorant, he co-founded the seminal anarchist punk band Crass and served as its drummer. Crass disbanded in 1984. Until 2000 Rimbaud devoted himself almost entirely to writing, returning to the public platform in 2001 as a performance poet working with Australian saxophonist Louise Elliott and a wide variety of jazz musicians under the umbrella of Last Amendment.
Illuminations is an incomplete suite of prose poems by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, first published partially in La Vogue, a Paris literary review, in May–June 1886. The texts were reprinted in book form in October 1886 by Les publications de La Vogue under the title Les Illuminations proposed by the poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's former lover. In his preface, Verlaine explained that the title was based on the English word illuminations, in the sense of coloured plates, and a sub-title that Rimbaud had already given the work. Verlaine dated its composition between 1873 and 1875.
The Wordsworth Trust is an independent charity in the United Kingdom. It celebrates the life of the poet William Wordsworth, and looks after Dove Cottage in the Lake District village of Grasmere where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth lived between 1799 and 1808. It also looks after the majority of the surrounding properties in the conservation area of Town End, and a collection of manuscripts, books and fine art relating to Wordsworth and other writers and artists of the Romantic period. In 2020 it introduced the brand name Wordsworth Grasmere.
Germain Marie Bernard Nouveau (1851–1920) was a French poet associated with the symbolist movement.
The Faith and Belief Forum, formerly known as the Three Faiths Forum (3FF), is an interfaith organisation in the United Kingdom.
The Royal Drawing School is a not-for-profit educational organisation and registered charity in the London Borough of Hackney in England. It was founded in 2000 by Charles, Prince of Wales, and artist Catherine Goodman as The Prince's Drawing School and received its current name in 2014.
Acland Burghley Secondary School is a mixed comprehensive secondary school in the Tufnell Park area of the London Borough of Camden, in London, England. The school received specialist status as an Arts College in 2000 and is a part of the LaSWAP Sixth Form Consortium.
The Arvon Foundation is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom that promotes creative writing. One of Arts Council England's National Portfolio Organisations, its national office is in Free Word, a centre for literature, literacy and free expression in Farringdon, London. Andrew Kidd is CEO and artistic director, Jeremy Treglown chair of the board of trustees.
A Season in Hell is an extended poem in prose written and published in 1873 by French writer Arthur Rimbaud. It is the only work that was published by Rimbaud himself. The book had a considerable influence on later artists and poets, including the Surrealists.
Royal College Street is a major thoroughfare in London, England in the Borough of Camden. The street is home to the London headquarters of Parcelforce and the London campus of the Royal Veterinary College, a constituent college of the University of London.
Poet in the City brings poetry to life beyond books, digging out classic and contemporary gems and immersing audiences in the worlds of poets through events, commissions and participation.
The Amy Winehouse Foundation is a registered charity in England and Wales, set up in memory of English singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse (1983–2011).
Ernest Delahaye (1853–1930) was a French writer and essayist. He maintained a long and close friendship with Arthur Rimbaud with whom he first met in April 1865 when they attended school together in Charleville in the Ardennes region of France. He and Rimbaud had a shared interest in poetry, and he would help Rimbaud by making fair copies of his drafts for distribution to Rimbaud's literary friends. He was one of the few (seven) recipients of the privately printed A Season in Hell though Rimbaud later asked for it back to give it to someone else. According to Rimbaud biographer, Charles Nicholl, Rimbaud's "[last] strictly dateable poem" was contained in a letter to Delahaye of 14 October 1875. Through Rimbaud, Delahaye also met poet Paul Verlaine and became friendly with him. Verlaine wrote a poem - Sonnet Boiteux - which is dedicated to him. Delahaye mixed his civil service career, working at the Education Ministry, with writing biographical material on both Rimbaud and Verlaine, contributing first-hand accounts of the poets' lives and families. Most of Delahaye's correspondence with Rimbaud and Verlaine survives.
Paterne Berrichon - the pseudonym of Pierre-Eugène Dufour, born 10 January 1855 at Issoudun and died 30 July 1922 at La Rochefoucauld - was a French poet, painter, sculptor and designer. He is best known as husband of Isabelle Rimbaud, and the brother-in-law and publisher of Arthur Rimbaud.
Nell Regan is an internationally renowned Irish based poet and non fiction writer.
Graham Henderson is a cultural entrepreneur based in London. He is best known for developing the arts organisation Poet in the City. In 2014 he launched a second arts organisation, the Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation, committed to cross-arts commissioning and to championing a new funding model for the arts. Henderson has also been involved in many other arts-related initiatives including the development of a public art consultancy, the creation of an international arts network and a campaign to create a new investment fund for the arts.
Pope's Urn, on Champion's Wharf at Twickenham riverside in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, is a contemporary piece of public art inspired by the poetry of 18th-century Twickenham resident Alexander Pope, who is buried in the parish church that overlooks the wharf. It consists of a stylised urn on a pedestal, both made in corten steel and standing just over eight-foot high, surrounded by wooden benches inscribed with aphorisms written by Pope. It was commissioned to celebrate the 2015 Rugby World Cup, for which Twickenham Stadium was one of the venues, and was opened in a ceremony on 21 September 2015.
Poetry School is a national arts organisation, registered charity and adult education centre providing creative writing tuition, with teaching centres throughout England as well as online courses and downloadable activities. It was founded in 1997 by poets Mimi Khalvati, Jane Duran and Pascale Petit. Poetry School offers an accredited Master's degree in Writing Poetry, delivered in both London and Newcastle, in collaboration with Newcastle University. Online courses are delivered via CAMPUS, a social network dedicated to poetry.
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