FORTY YEARS ON                                        Chris Torrance

June 6, 2010. Forty years since I began living in the Upper Neath Valley in a small house surrounded by  fields and streams:

 

The house of stone

stuck

like a worn & stubborn thumb

in the Glen of Mercury .  .  . *

*From Book 1 of THE MAGIC DOOR

That in mind, reflection, as I contemplated the 2 gigs that lay ahead.  BTU on June 12.  & a biggie at Chepstow on July 9.

June 1966.   My bedsit at the top of 63, North street, Carshalton.   MONK PLAYS DUKE.   With a rhythm section that purrs like a contented cat.  IT DONT MEAN A THING IF IT AINT GOT THAT SWING.

A few bars into Monk's solo on that track, I would reach for my notebook.  When the record finished, slip out of the house.   Take the new poem for a walk along the banks of the River Wandle.   Scribbling as I went along.

Monk's spacings and dissonances & extended harmonies were running in tandem with my explorations of the "open field" poetics of Charles Olsen & others.  " Sketching " also,  in the style of Jack Kerouac. Attempting to catch the beingness of the moment,  while including the past,  & reaching into the future.  Plus holding in my head the idea of the musicianly boldness of jazz,  its freedoms & improvisations that provided a model for what I was trying to do in poetry.

.

6 June 2010.  Dazzling early summer.  Blue & pink & white Canterbury Bells tumbling in the borders.  The best early growing conditions for the garden ever experienced here.   Red kites bouncing up & down on thermals.  Crying that whistling eerie cry that sounds like a boy whistling up a far-distant sheepdog on a mountain pasture.

Cold hand of the marble goddess settles on my shoulder. "You must rehearse."

I sat outside in the sunshine timing the space between each burst of song from the blackbird perched on the power line.  I was looking for an ideal length of time to elapse between each small poem in the series I was performing.   To use those spaces as part of the music, so to speak.  Blackbird haikus.

As it turned out, the silences were uneven,  anything from 5 to 15 seconds long.   About 10 seconds would do me, I reckoned.  To be followed by a rocking, jarring LEAST LIKELY BUDDHA.

1966  Harry Fainlight slowly turning his notebook pages, every now and then reading just a few lines.  Holding us right to metal.   There in that chalk cave under Better Books, Charing Cross Road.

.

Extraordinary how what comes around, Comes around.  The old Carshalton Mob still functioned, at least in part, through the 80's& 90's.  This was the crowd that , in the early 60's used to meet in The Greyhound Hotel, & which published over a dozen issues of a magazine called ORIGINS DIVERSIONS, accompanied by live readings in various venues throughout Surrey and London.  Which got me writing, turned me towards writing poems.

Much later, when I was tutoring ADVENTURES IN CREATIVE WRITING down in Cardiff,  I'd got to know Ric Hool, a poetry activist who was running an eclectic series of readings at the Hen and Chicks pub, Abergavenny.  Soon, Ric began visiting me.   & thus began a series of spontaneous workshop jams during which we'd discuss poetry & writers, music, anything that cropped up, reading each others poems, with Ric often playing guitar as we rambled through the history of R&B, mod, jazz, rock and pop.

&, as things went on, Ric got to know veteran Mobsters Richard Downing & Roger Yates.  Richard had begun a Mob newsletter BENEATH THE UNDERGROUND in 2005; &, before long, the idea of a Mob reunion, a poetry & jazz festival at the Hen and Chicks, was in the air.

A reunion of the Carshalton Mob in Wales  -  what a prospect!

.

&, as it turned out, there were 3 reunion events, in 2007, 2008, & 2009, some of which I've already written about.  In a letter to Dave James (in Australia) in August 2009 I wrote; " . . . I read your 2 short poems for Don /_ a Mob member who recently died / at BTU, and also Bill's poem for Don.  Roger Yates, Steve Tremayne & band were terrific, one bebop classic after another, blazing stuff; the excitement like that I felt in the upstairs room at Dick Morissey gigs at the Red Lion, Sutton in the early 60's, before I met the Mob. & the upstairs room that night /_Sat Aug 1 2009 _/ became the same sort of sleazy back room, mellowed, yellowed by years of Masons & Buffaloes & Lord Lieutenants & nicotine & ale and food, a sort of gently worn beat tiredness, and atmosphere we all gathered up and made into a surging poteen."

.

Sat June 12, 2010.  The first BENEATH THE UNDERGROUND poetry and jazz festival not to be held in the middle of a wretched summer monsoon.  On the way in even the grim old A 465 looked good this day, the steep banks of the dual carriageway festooned with clovers & trefoils, buttercups & lupins, vetches & dog daisies. 

Abergavenny. Said Hello to a few mates gathered round the tables outside the pub, then drifted up the High Street on a lunch errand.  Scarcely any silver left to surf, but I'm turned out in white linen jacket and trousers, white flat cap, comfortable light brown loafers.  Find a market stall, score a couple of scones.  Eat them back at the pub.  Roger appears.  " You look like Burroughs on acid!" is his opener.  "You always look like Burroughs on acid . . . "

The band kicks off in the afternoon.  Glittering tenor saxes draw the sunlight into the room.  Then I was first poet to read.   Usual terror.  I'd forgotten what it was like to open.  Bill Wyatt did a great set.  Anne Bryan read her Mungo Park piece. & Graham Harthill did an unforgettable reading with Ian McLouglin on a large brass instrument, a euphonium.  Using both reed and brass mouthpieces, producing extraordinary sounds.  Many other poets read, culminating with Dave James, all the way from Australia.  & the Jazz Mobsters played us out.

The Mob. Nutrient compost or medium.  Part of the pre-psychedelic 60's, before it all came together in radical ferment.  Now reignited.

.

Ric Hool	Bill Wyatt
Graham Hartill and Ian McLoughlan	Roger Yates

Photographs from the event taken by Val Maillard. To see more of Val's photos go to http://www.valmaillardphotos.co.uk/