Not Much Of A Spectator Sport

Why do we listen to poetry? Many of us don’t, of course. Verse recitation is hardly a great spectator sport . It’s thought of by many of as a minority activity in the same category as collecting diesel electric shunter numbers or participating in kendo. That’s the Japanese art of the sword practised while wearing head to toe black robes and metal head gear, if you were wondering. Poetry, when read out loud by its author, can give us not only music and magnificence, entertainment and elevation, but new insight into what the writer actually meant. If, indeed, they did actually have some content to impart and were not simply making an artistic statement.

The form has come a long way. When I first experienced it (decades ago, back bar, Park Hotel, A G Prys Jones in an armchair delivering somnambulant verse to a prim audience already mostly asleep) poetry readings seemed to be too intellectual an activity for their own good. Organisers were chastised for letting their poets on stage wearing anything less than a suit. Poets were asked to hand out written versions of their verses in advance lest the audience lose their way. Poetry was straight and it was quiet. We went home at 9.30 full of worth.

In the twenty-first century this is no longer how things are. In reasonably quick succession I have recently experienced the whole contemporary range. First up was a reading by the backwoods open-field master of the mystic, Chris Torrance. This was delivered by a hat-wearing, seated poet to the accompaniment of techno, treated guitar music from the inimitable Chris Vine. The event was as much a poetry performance as it was a musical adventure. I then attended a more traditional poets from the floor stand-up event which included readings (i.e. with bits of paper in front of the poet), recitations (here the poet recited from memory), along with a performance from one new-tech innovator who read from text flashed to his iPhone. The entire audience appeared to be participants. I began to wonder who the readings were actually for.

At the launch for The Listening Shell, a book of poems celebrating the writing centre, Ty Newydd, there was a large crowd. The poets, and there were loads of these, everyone from Samantha Wynn Rhydderch to Tony Curtis and Nigel Jenkins to Paul Henry, appeared on stage in managed order. No one read more than a single piece. It was all over by 9.00. The audience loved it. Exposed but not drowned. Less is more.

At the Spoken Word All Stars in the Pierhead the multiracial crew had not a single scrap of paper between them. Poetry, delivered from the hip by the hip and for the hip, flowed seamlessly for ninety minutes. The audience rocked, poetry rolled. Verse out loud, it still works.

#196

Creased By Fug

Somewhere in the world of writing there’s an academic study of the connection between writers and drink. Something which explains how great works rise from the sprawl of beer mats, the fog of talk and the slumping numbness of mind that alcohol induces. Why is it that the greatest minds of our generation can be those creased by fug and flattened by hangover? The poets whose verse only trips, sparks and rattles when powered by Brains or allowed to marinade in a sea of red wine.

The Dylan Thomas legend is something that follows Welsh writers everywhere. Sets us up in the minds of outsiders as alcoholic mumblers and Rabelaisian verse weavers content only to stumble from bar to boozer flashing the tropes and images of our musical poetry as we go. The problem with this myth, naturally, is that, for many, it’s actually the truth. Writers do spend time in bars, many of them, most of them even. A number have beaten the same path as Dylan. Loosing their manuscripts down the back of hotels’ plush upholstery, insulting barmaids in back bars and being forever long on hope and short on cash.

It’s almost always men too. Welsh writing is rich with male heroes who are golden at six but incoherent by ten. Some of the most respected among us have done their time sprawled in doorways and lying down quietly on front lawns. Are our women writers in this league just yet? Not quite, but coming soon.

Could this be a Welsh thing? Hugh MacDiarmid, the great Scots poet, reckoned that his drinkers (and he was referring here to the morose boozers of Glasgow) preferred “the hard-bitten, the recalcitrant, the sarcastic, the saturnine, the cross-grained and the cankered” to the sort of confiding, intimate, ingratiating, hail-fellow-well-met drinkers found in the rest of the British Isles. By the rest of the British Isles he meant, I guess, the English. Although there is certainly an element of secret-society, intimate wahoo about the drinkers of Gwynedd and a quantity of all right skip have one with me about some of those found in Cardiff.

Welsh writers also love drink related causes. There is huge support for the establishment of a pub in the grounds of St Fagans. Someone has come up with a name – Tafarn yr Iorwerth Peate. But it isn’t there yet. The Save the Vulcan campaign, to keep the Victorian south of Cardiff Prison in shape for the twentieth first century is led by authors. John Williams, Charlotte Greig, Ifor Thomas, Des Barry, Sean Burke and others have consumed beer in quantity in pursuit of that cause (and have got a result too - which is a really unexpected bonus - The Vulcan goes on - for now).

And when there are campaigns to put poems in public places where do these new verses end up? On the back of beer mats. Where else?

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 25th July, 2009