Baroque in Hackney

Poetry: there's life in the grand old ruin yet.

And aside from the general fracas, what? My job ended, I had a bad night, and then I went to Wales on a train. It’s always a thrill, an old thrill like when a certain formulation of mountains comes into view in the Catskills – or the sight of the Hudson River, glistening silver between its ancient quiet banks of Indian trees – or the view east from Waterloo Bridge – when the train pulls into Cardiff Central and that little cluster of buildings, with their familiar outline and the big “Brains” bitter sign appears, with the shrouded hills behind. The smell of Wales, the coal fires and damp air – the idea of coal fires and damp air – is as evocative as the smell of steam and pretzels in New York City or the old roasting chestnuts you used to get in London all the time.

So we went on to Swansea, Tammy Yoseloff and me, and gave a really fun reading at the Dylan Thomas Centre. A wonderful, grand, neoclassical pile with saltwater-pitted pillars out front, and a real community inside.

The evening featured by far the most fun open mic section I’ve ever heard; I could happily have spent the rest of the night listening to them. The readers, all regulars, were introduced by their first names by the facilitator, Jo Furber, who clearly loves her work. The whole vibe was affectionate and happy, and you could see people really enjoying each other’s poems, not measuring them up and finding them wanting. The spirit was big.

And as for the poems themselves… Mad! Madness! They were big too! A diminutive round-faced 82-year old man recited a poem in rhymed quatrains, inspired by a sea shanty, called “The Wangle Dangle Dance.” It played with plentiful rhymes and alliterations on both “wangle” and “dangle,” separating the two words out and then bringing them together, separating them and bringing them together. It was so funny, and so like a cartoon, everyone in the place was trying not to laugh; but when the poet said, “I’ll only do the refrain once,” we all burst out. (In fact, he said he was inspired to read it by my rendition of my Pirate Prufrock!)

Joie de vivre, kids. This 82-year-old man in Swansea has it. When’s the last time you had so much fun at a poetry reading?

So don’t come and tell me Swansea’s a shithole. I really liked it. (Though do come and we’ll talk about what’s been done to the city centre; that’s another matter. Beautiful old buildings boarded up, a lovely old Welsh city with fluorescent excrescences stuck on top of it, a hideous enormous screen stuck in the central square by the castle, and the life sucked out of the middle – while the beautiful unmarketable Welsh hills all around its edges look on…)

Oh, there was another one, “Cats are crap pets.” It was all about how great rats are, and the poet – grinning broadly – held up a life-sized black plastic rat as he read – and he did give us the refrain every time, which was the final line of each verse (with variations): “And they have little hands…!” People were weeping with laughter, and it was very cleverly done, rhyming etc, and I wish to God I had it on video so I could show you. The first time he brandished the rat I think I almost screamed.

We had a staff member with  a poem he’s written for his soldier friend in Afghanistan, after a workshop he did at the Dylan Thomas Centre with Brian Turner (the Iraq war poet). We had a forlorn night in a barn in Wisconsin and a very pretty girl with a troubled-love poem (“The person this is about isn’t here tonight, so I can read it now”), an Indian doctor’s hilarious visit from his in-laws, and a young poet’s second-ever open mic reading, with two very interesting poems. The second one was called “Typography;” but he’d made his mark on me when he introduced his first poem saying, “This poem has a working title – I just made it in my lunch hour to amuse myself.”

That just says it all. If you can’t amuse yourself, who are you going to amuse? And it was good. He wasn’t being lazy and arrogant the way people are in London when they announce that they wrote it in their lunch hour.

So it was the welcome in the valleys indeed. Loved it.

The next day, a slap-up lunch with an old friend in her parents’ wonderful Thai restaurant in Cardiff, and that was great; & I made sure to ring the Baroque Mother with news that I was in the Land of her Fathers. I read her the car park sign: “St David, Dewi Sant.” She liked that. Then another train, the long trudge through Paddington, and the tube, and an odious 73 bus packed with sociopaths. I struggled into to Baroque Mansions about 9pm – to find Mlle B cooking dinner!

…Er – and then I woke up… Mlle B has been out all weekend, and goes to Greece next week, and the significant others are likewise off in sunny beachy places for two weeks, so I will sit here and attempt to sort out my accounts, look for money, do some bits of work, wrestle with the inbox, sort out some students, catch up with the couple of friends who are still in town, sort out the aged aunt, remake my website, and otherwise try to get my life back on track. Ah, summer at the desk.

And there was no time, so I still haven’t seen the sea. (I really get the feeling I’m doing it all wrong.) And I didn’t get a chance to look through the Dylan Thomas exhibition. So I’m clearly going to have to go back there…