Performance - Standing Up or Sitting Down?

Performance, what is this? It’s a label that sometimes gets used for what I do and it happens increasing often these days. It isn’t something I’ve sought either. In fact, being labelled a performance poet sets up an audience expectation that I often don’t really want. Calling what you do performance creates an expectation of arm-waving entertainment, histrionics, in-your -face politics, up-front humour, shouting, stage dominance, strange costumes, and most of all, instant gratification. Immediacy. Performance poetry equates with instantaneous access. With material that requires little distillation and hardly any subtlety. Material that works at the moment you hear it. Bang. Like that. And that is often just not what I do.

How did we get from there to here? There was a time when poetry readings were delivered in quite, considered mode, in front rooms and small quiet halls, in places where people with hats would sit and not, where poets would stumble and mumble and read with their heads down tight into their books rarely ever engaging the audience’s eyes. Poetry would seep. It would flow into the air like a kind of fog. Readings were attended because, why, who knows? Maybe because it would be an opportunity to see the face behind the word. It would be a chance to show solidarity with an arcane art. It would allow poetry lovers to hear how the lines were meant to fall, as delivered by their creator. That would be someone who might also add a few introductory remarks of illumination and explanation. A scene setting for verse. If you needed such things.

Some poets could do this and some did it fairly well. Dylan Thomas had the reputation although I only ever heard him on record. I did witness A G Prys Jones in action and Harri Webb, John Tripp, Glyn Jones, Gwyn Jones, John Idris Jones, Gwyn Thomas, Bryn Griffiths, Roland Mathias, Raymond Garlick, Tom Earley, and others central to the then Anglo-Welsh cannon standing up in halls and side rooms and having a go. Most of what they did was unedifying, poetry that seeped out and stumbled across the floor, that had you reaching for the relevant book to get a handle as to what was going on. I’m talking here about how they presented their material, of course, and not the material itself. John Ward turned up on stage once in a stylish working man’s donkey jacket. A breakthrough I thought. No chance. The organiser castigated him for not looking the part. Bloody hell. The part. Poets as bankers, poets as ministers. There had to be a better way than that.

Nobody seemed to care much about stage presentation, working out what they were going to read (their set lists), finding ways of doing this without spilling their books all over the place and dropping papers on the floor, about actually engaging with their audiences. It took a new generation of stand-ups like Adrian Mitchell and Brian Patten to come into wales and show the world the way to go. Even then the shoe gazers on the Welsh circuit carried on more or less as they were.

My interests were actually in the European avant garde. A place were writers made sounds for the sake of hearing how their voices came over in the actual air. Ernst Jandl. Bob Cobbing. Henri Chopin. Edwin Morgan. ZZxxbghghgh hick hooo ahahhh. To do this you had to push your voice out to the back of the hall, had to arm wave, have confidence, engage your audience by looking them in the eye. Famously we brought all this to the Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre in the early 70s and blew the sedate Cardiff poetry world into the corners. Some of it anyway.

For me that approach led directly to the one I use now. Standing up, using the voice, making it work for me as a prat of the poem itself. Adrian Mitchell told me that you can use your voice to slide across a faulty verse once or twice but that after a time it gets so you have to fix things. This has proved to be the case. Public readings always lead me into rewrites. I always use text, too. My poetry is a written thing. For some present day stand-ups that isn’t the case.

These days however, I often long for the old ones. Those times when you could quietly move through your work, sometimes explaining sections, letting the words themselves rather than the way they sounded do the work. Hard to manage amid contemporary expectation. Occasionally I announce that for my next reading I will sit. Sit and read. Harder to project then, less likelihood of histrionics, but still delivered with strong voice and for the audience rather than at them . Works too.

I’ll be at The Promised Land doing some of this again on the 5^th December, 2011. I might sit on the other hand I might also stand.

That's not me but the late Henri Chopin at the top of this posting.

The Zen of Epynt

On the cover is a black and white photograph taken somewhere in Epynt. It shows a tree and a sort of corrugated sentry box. Inside the box, on guard against the elements, are two sheep. The pic is by Magnum photographer David Hurn. What does it mean? That’s like asking what the sound is of one hand clapping or the look of your real face before you were born. This is the cover of my latest collection of poetry, Zen Cymru. Hurn’s photograph sums that up. The zen of Welsh life, the unanswerable, the ever present, the one we know.

A friend, picking up this neat slim vol for the first time, told me that the cover was where the book’s strength lay. Support when you need it. The cover is the only part not by me.

The book collects new poems from the past several years. Age, passion, spiritual searching, house fires, hospitals, guns. Poems about hunting down Buddha, Christ’s arrival in Cardiff in 2005 and the title sequence, a pared-down haiku sequence that rolls from Splott to Abereiddi and back.

But that’s certainly not all. There are music poems. Folk singer, late Phil Ochs’s only visit to Cardiff. The trial of Phil Spector. Sightings of Elvis in Merthyr. The grave of Bela Bartok among the bushes in Hungary. On the train from Severn Tunnel Junction with John Tripp and Bob Dylan. I’ve always found music completely enveloping. I could never work without it, never compose without something playing out there, keeping my thoughts on their central zen track.

As expected a number of the poems have Cardiff concerns. Included is the text that makes up the acrostic construct made from the various ways the capital’s name have been spelled through history. The final version is in the paving outside John Lewis. The original of The Ballast Bank, a poem about the city population’s origins, sits carved in rock outside South Wales Police Headquarters on James Street.

Kerdif lists some of the city’s great street characters – Everyone from Peg the Wash to bin-banger Ninjah and Toy Mic Trevor.

Looking at the content with the detachment that distance gives – nothing more I can do now, the thing is out – I can see that there’s much about death and the fight of life against decrepitude. Miro is in there. So is Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen. Unexpectedly for some there’s also a handy index to the Holiday Timeshare Sellers Handbook. Number of times they say it isn’t actually a timeshare – 432. References to luxury – 34. Mentions of rain – 1.

It’s a book that again treads the thin line between tradition and innovation. Just when you think you’ve got it the ground shifts. Then shifts again. Zen Cymru is published by Seren Books.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 29th May, 2010. Zen Cymru launches at Hay on Tuesday 1st June, 8.00 pm on the Dream Stage where Peter finch will be reading and in conversation with John Goodby.

Real As It Can Get

I’m in the real city again. Water south, hills north. A city of rhomboid sprawl. Where else would I be? I’m standing on the B4487 in bright early-morning sunlight. Traffic low. Birds in inner-city twitter. This was the Via Julia Maritima once, the paved Roman route west. A thousand years on it was the stage coach route to London. Full of ruts and mud. Then it was the hard-topped A48, when A roads meant something. Newport Road when I was a kid. Still is. New arrivals are walking down it now. The endless displaced. Heading up beyond Roath Court for the Refugee Council at Phoenix House. Fewer now that the recession has hit. The Polish Shop is having a hard time. The Czech version has already closed.

We always wondered why in Cardiff there was so much new housing. Apartments rising like wheat right across the boom city. Concrete mixers. Deliveries of brick. Tower cranes like locusts. Men in hard hats in every bar. What drew them to the capital? What were we doing that made them come? Nothing, it turns out. Investors are blind. Invest where walls rise and your money will climb in step. No need to sell what you’ve built. Let the vacant towers glitter. Let their apartments stand empty, value accumulating as prices soar. Manage a let if a visitor asks. Sell one to an executive needing a town centre toehold. Rooms with a water view for singles. Wasp territory. Audi in the undercroft. Wine in the rack. Families not needed. No toy cupboards. No gardens. No schools.

Now that boom has bust these investments stand barren. For Sale. To Let. Those not yet completed stay so. Across the city are half-finished metal frames, surrounded by fencing, waiting for the interest rates to rise once again. Build has stopped. Apart from the mega projects like St David’s 2, the new Ninian Park and the scatter of enterprise across the sports village on the Ferry Road. On the hoarding at the north end of St David’s 2 are graffitied the words More Yuppie Flats Please. Word on the street is that the blocks inside will stand largely empty. Shells. Unfixed, unfinished walls. A city waiting for the bankers to take control once more.

There have been many visions for this place in which Cardiffians live. Plans for the port to take ocean liners. For the rich to sail for America from Tiger Bay rather than Southampton. Passengers would arrive by Great Western. There would have been grand hotels, piers and custom sheds and deep-water berths, but the Severn’s giant tidefall defeated them all. Now the city has changed again. Enormously. You can see what I’ve made of it in Real Cardiff – The Changing City, out from Seren on the 26th November, 2009.

Visit the web site: http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/realcardiff3in.htm or

view the photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterfinch/sets/72157622697245780/

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 14th November, 2009

Real Wales

It's the new book and coming - ever so slowly - before Christmas from Seren. The Real technique applied to the whole country. Real Wales. Full of Finch photos and Finch humour. Here's an extract, described by John Osmond, Director of the IWA, as quirky. That's what I do.

So what is this place? Grey crags and green miasma in the western British mists. A place like poetry, where nothing happens. A place of sheep and hairy men. Where is this land? Most of the world do not know. And if they do then they can rarely point us out. Wales, I never heard of that place[i]. Wales, the invisible, the lost. Wales, the real Cantre’r Gwaelod. A small island in the Hebrides. A rock off the west coast of Ireland. A hummock out there in the stormy ocean. Wales, Grassholm writ just that little bit larger. A floating land, full of birds.

The great historian Gwyn Alf Williams said the people of this place had “for a millennium and a half lived in the two western peninsulas of Britain as a Welsh people, (and) are now nothing but naked under an acid rain.” The tourist trade sells us as a place of endless singing, long yellow beaches, rugby rugby and folk in stovepipe hats. Business promotion says we are a global centre, a land of opportunity, a place to relocate to, perfect transport, weather like Bermuda. The government says we have the highest incidence of heart disease in Europe. We smoke too much. We don’t climb enough of our hills. Wales, a fake place made by Woolworth, cellotaped to the west of the midlands, useful for car rallies, and as a butt of English jokes. You are a country. You can’t mean that.

Everyone looks for Wales and so many do not find it. Either like R S Thomas they search for a Wales which does not exist, moving ever westward, in hope. Or like the academics find a new Wales right in front of them, constructed from the past’s framework, a place that changes and doesn’t simultaneously. A land of magic. Wave your divining rod. Follow your ley.

Defining Wales is rather like defining verse. For every rule someone comes up with there will be an exception which breaks it. Ultimately poems become what they are because the poet says so. Wales is like this. The bit you think of as real probably is. The Feathers in Llanystumdwy. The Greyhound on High Street in Newport. Barafundle. The power station at Connah’s Quay. Splott. The Millennium Coastal Park at Llanelli. The Spar at Flint. The writers gathered at the Vulcan in Adamsdown. The street of subscribers to Taliesin in Pwllheli. The coach spotters at Swansea bus station. Brecon Cathedral. The cairn at the far end of Golden Road. The Urdd Welsh classes for adults. The sewage works at Aberystwyth. The place up near Dyfi Junction where there’s no platform but the trains still stop. Pete Davis’ Chicken Shed at Brynamman. The left bank of the river Lugg near Bleddfa. The Codfather of Sole chipshop on Barry Island seafront. The place where Dafydd Elis Thomas parks his car near the Senedd. The steps of the National Museum and the pillars behind which John Tripp once hid his bicycle clips. The jetty at Mostyn from where the Airbus wings set sail. The bridge over the lost Roath Rail branch on Penylan Hill. All as real as each other.

In a country the size of ours it should be possible to visit everywhere – some claim to have – but there are still towns and villages appearing on the nightly BBC Wales weather maps that I have never been through. And on occasions there is one of which I’ve never heard.

Some people never bother. Cardiffians – and some of them can be the worst – live and die inside the capital. The Wales beyond is an alien land. Full of workless pits and mountains. No Asda. No Lidl. I am not going there. Why should I? What would I get out of it? I have also met a well-known north Wales novelist who claimed never to have visited Pembrokeshire. The south. Not Welsh enough. Non-compliance as a political act. For him there are three countries: Y Fro Cymraeg, Welsh Wales, an arc of land in the western reaches; Wales that might as well be England, including the capital and the north east and the southern coasts; and Y Fro Efallai where desire and actuality mix, where reality comes in like a short wave signal – Myddfai, Banwen, Merthyr, Pontcanna, Aber out of term time. Trefdraeth when the sun shines. Who is to say that his Wales is any better than mine? Or that mine is more real?

This book is about this country. A place where some imagine that no one has raised a sword in anger since Glyndŵr’s rebellion went down in 1409 and the Welsh were banned from ever owning anything outside their borders. A place where others know, for certain, that the real Wales is waiting, just round the political corner, and a new day will come. Minorities rise. Nation states fragment. It’s the post-modern way.

The real Wales may well be a place of people, a land of human intervention, of despoliation in the search for minerals, of pipelines and power grids, and roads that mesh the green like fishnet, but it is not an urban country. The city life of disenfranchisement, dislocation and alienation is not ours. Wales, land of communities, where decisions reach the surface through compromise and conciliation. Wales where power frightens and underdogs are prized. Wales where time slows and life is longer. Wales where the past actually is important and historians are honoured. Wales where highrise is feared and there is no navy. The real Wales is where people always talk about who they are, strive after roots, want fields rather than mansions, although generally have neither. The real Wales is the one I’ve gone looking for. Not sure I’ve found it all yet.

When I wrote Real Cardiff, back in 2002, I determined to write about the land as I saw it. No considered history nor topographical guide, no socio-economic handbook, nor fictional prose. As I observed it the world kept changing. The past slid from me. Those guarding it seemed to want to usher it away. What we were went underground to stay hidden or to be dug up by the disinterested and burned. Few seemed to care. The land also seemed to be secret. Full of self-contained, excluding epi-centres, places where you could only gain access if you had a key. The Cardiff of Geraint Jarman’s Welsh reggae, of Philip Dunleavy’s Castle, of Callaghan’s slum clearance, the Cardiff of Geoffrey Inkin’s Barrage and Bay. These innovations were making us a completely new Welsh city, a post-industrial capital for an incoming millennium, something out there was happening. It had to be tracked and written down.

Real Wales adopts the same approach for the whole country. The Real Cardiff books (volumes one and two already best sellers and a third out there in the hazy, not-yet-completed wings) spawned a series. Real Swansea. Real Merthyr. Real Newport. Real Wrexham. Real Aberystwyth. And more. Written by experts to the Real formula. Series edited by Peter Finch. The present volume is my look at my country. Didn’t know it was mine until I grew and went out there to see. There are many like me. Lights go on. We need to find out just who we really are.

I’ve used classic Real Cardiff techniques here. Visited places by accident, simply because they sounded interesting, or because I found myself nearby. Places determined by their importance to Wales. Places that had to be rediscovered. Places where things existed. Places where, apparently, they did not. I went on tour, doing poetry readings. I visited alone, with my partner, in the company of local experts, literateurs, odd balls, historians, novelists. I used old maps and new ones. I read local histories and national overviews. I travelled by car and train and on foot. Much of the distance on foot, for often there were only unpaved tracks.

I discovered a lot. The sheep are many. The rain is often. The light is brilliant. The skies can be huge. The past can be picked up because it is often so near the surface. The past can also never be found again because of what we have done to it. Broken it, built on it, lost it, thrown it away. And there is also the matter of the mysteries, that stuff of Wales which makes things happen, or seem to happen, of which I’ve found no evidence anywhere else. Kings sleeping below rocks. Blood in trees. Wonder in the grass. Future in the air.

Notes:

[i] conversation between the author and some picnicking black Americans on the coast of South Carolina.

Where can you get your copy? In the shops at £9.99 pretty soon.