1965 in Poetry - Events

Events

• Meic Stephens founds Poetry Wales
• Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was allowed to travel outside the Soviet Union to Sicily and England in order to receive the Taormina prize and an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University
• The Belfast Festival at Queen's published pamphlets this year and next by some of the members of The Belfast Group of poets, including Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, which attracted some notice.
• In Spain, two new periodical reviews were founded:
  • Poesía para todos, started by younger Spanish poets and illustrated by renowned painters
  • Los sesenta, launched by Max Aub and with editors including the poets Jorge Guillén and Rafael Alberti. The second number was published in homage to the Unamuno.
• In the British Isles, the centenary of the birth of W. B. Yeats brought forth a number of critical works, prominent among them Thomas Parkinson's book, W.B. Yeats: The Later Poetry, and Conor Cruise O'Brien's long essay which addressed W. B. Yeats' relationship to Fascism, published in In Excited Reverie, edited by A. N. Jeffares and K. G. Cross.
• Dudley Randall, African American poet (1914–2000), founds Broadside Press in Detroit, which published many leading African American writers
• Paul Éluard's 1926 book of poems, Capitale de la douleur ("Capital of Pain"); influenced Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 French film Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution which has quotations from the book