Readings are a stock part of the poet’s trade. They are today, in the literate twenty-first ,
although I’m sure some can remember when they were not. Poets are better on their feet than they once
were. They look audiences in the
eye. They’ve learned not mumble. Down at the Swansea Grand Theatre from where
I’ve just come the Dylanthon has been in progress. This was an off the wall idea dreamt up by
producer Michael Bogdanov and Dylan Thomas expert Jeff Townes. Why not put on a reading of everything DT wrote? The lot.
Poems, stories, letters, stumbles.
It would take about 36 hours to do straight through. We could charge £150 a ticket for a show that
long.
If I’d been asked I would have said that getting Leanne Wood
invited round to sing for HMQ would have
been an easier prospect.
The event Bogdanov mounted was a triumph. A well-attended, very well organised
professional performance at a comfortable, central Swansea venue featuring a cast of several score performers many
of whom were extremely famous. Who else
could have got Jo Brand, Nicholas Parsons, Katherine Jenkins, Dai Smith, The
President of the Republic of Ireland, Jonathan Pryce and Ian McKellen onto the
same bill and without paying any of them anything?
My slot was on the Sunday morning, right at the beginning
when most people were still home reading the papers and eating
toast. But even at that time Bogdanov
had managed to fill the theatre. Punters
were allowed to buy slightly cheaper tickets for selected three hour slots. The programme flickered between poetry and
prose. On stage were a stream of TV
personalities, actors, singers, a very few writers, plus the occasional MBE and politician. It also included a range of school choirs who
attracted their otherwise not that
interested in DT parents and grandparents to the audience. Tickets flew out the box office.
The readings began to roll.
Where I was at the beginning they were heavily weighted with
selections from the often impenetrable mouth music of 18 Poems. I went on four
times. I was bracketed by Lisa Rogers, Lucy Owen, Rakie
Ayola sitting resplendent in a leather armchair and reading a slice from a
short story, The Flight, and Tony
Lewis CBE, who doesn’t normally do this kind of thing, clearly, but made a
decent stab. I did I
see the boys of summer in their ruin and then The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. The words tumbled into the air and frothed
all around me. I didn’t own them.
When I got to When Once The twilight locks, my last
presentation and so far faultlessly, I made the mistake of thinking briefly
about something else as I was actually reading.
Fatal. I did this on the
penultimate line and, of course, stumbled.
Not to be defeated I repeated the word then added a few more of my own
to give it resonance. Dylan Thomas aided,
as Marcel Duchamp might have said. Did
anyone notice? No.
As a reading the whole deal was as professional as it could
be. You got a dressing room with your
name on it. A runner to bring you rolls,
coffee, pies, etc., a fresh bath towel, a piece of scented Welsh soap, and a basket of
fruit. What is more the audience
appeared actually to be enjoying the whole affair. In the style of those sixties art happenings
where you all sat for eight hours watching a man holding a lit candle elements
of Zen came into play. Poetry was first exciting,
then it was boring, and then eventually it
returned full of vigour, thrill and excitement.
Just as it should.
Up the hill afterwards at the Do Not Go gentle Festival
presented at the Dylan Thomas birthplace.
5 Cwmdonkin Drive. Here, among the drizzle and the falling leaves and
the freshly repainted windows, I read
again. This was the new Nia Davies Poetry Wales experimental issue launch. I did a reprise of my Altarwise by Owl Light mashup created for Radio Three, told a few
stories and then did some Dylanesque sound pieces. The house was packed right up the
stairs. Poetry certainly rocks in
Swansea.
