Even More Dylan Thomas

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. 

Editing

Any idea what this word means? There have been an array of editors appearing recently at the Leveson Enquiry. What do these people do? Do they go through texts with blue pencils removing that which they do not like? Or are they primarily selectors – the ones who read through the stack of submitted material and decide what’s worth using and what is not? Maybe they are commissioners of the material to be used in the first place. The ones who ask for stuff to be done.

On the other hand they may just copy edit. Correct loose grammar, bad spellings, difficult punctuation, imprecise word choices, remove ambiguity, check facts. Nope, from what we’ve all seen on TV they certainly don’t do too much of that.

I got into literary editing at an early age. I had no idea what I was really supposed to do. The editor was the one who chose. That’s how I decided in the end to pitch it. I was running a small poetry magazine at the time – second aeon. The name was all in lower case. Spirit of the age.

Poetry magazine editors, I soon learned, might be well able to decide what went in and what did not. What they could not do, however, was change anything. Correcting text was absolutely forbidden. The editor was not allowed to add or subtract punctuation or suggest stylistic alterations possible infelicities of thrust or meaning to his or her writers. This was mainly because these creatives were poets rather than prose writers. When a poet put it down then there it stayed.

I once tried to remove an expletive from a poem by Chris Torrance and was told, very firmly, no. The poem went in with **!**!! included or it stayed completely out. I’d already had a few run ins with the PostOffice who were on the verge of stopping me from using Her Majesty’s Mail anymore if I continued publishing linguistically offensive stuff. “We have women working here,” the supervisor told me. “We can’t have you pushing such crude through their hands.” “But they won’t be able to read it,” I protested. “The magazines all go out in sealed envelopes.” “Doesn’t matter,” the man said, hat pulled hard over his forehead, “the fact that the words are there is enough.” Shades of Marcel Duchamp, I thought. Deep Modernism at work in the GPO.

So I let the Torrance poem stand. And in the event no one noticed. Lucky that time.

Later I heard how other editors operated. The famous tale of the compiler of an early anthology of Anglo-Welsh poetry who by mistake left off the second page of a poem by Glyn Jones. The book went to press (and stands uncorrected today) with half the text missing. No one noticed until the poet himself got to see it. Glyn was upset but nothing was done.

Nearer home I learned how the newspaper trade did things. Differently from the literary trade that’s for sure. “It’s all copy,” John Osmond told me. “Copy you cut to fit the space. Usually you just slice a bit off the end to make the text fit.” A bit like sawing a bit off the leg of a table to make it balance. In action this boiled down to stories being sliced up as if John Cage was authoring them. If you work in the newspaper business then you learn to live with this. But I didn’t. And when it happens to pieces I’ve written – and it still does - then I find it hard to manage.

But I have emerged with a sense of the text being text. Once it leaves your hands then it’s gone. The best work is always the latest work. The past work is in the past. But poetry, of course, is full of echoes and has a Zen-like staying power. It’s always there, as it were. You can abandon it but you can never let it completely go. It can come back to you when you least expect it, snarling at you in its unadulterated from for the long past, last week, or wherever else it’s been.

Anyway, editors are a dying breed. In these days of access and digital over supply who needs them? Everything is everywhere for everyone every time, as Gertrude Stein might have put it. I once believed this. But now **!**!!

You are the man, Torrance, of course, you always were.

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.