Robert Minhinnick – Unsuitable Blog and HappenStance News

HAPPENSTANCE GOES WELSH

Scottish poets? No problem.

English poets? Certainly – which county would you prefer? Irish poets? By all means. American poets? Yes, we have two of those.

But up to now, no poems by Welsh writers.

Hurray! This sad omission is now remedied. Two new publications, both to be launched in Wales next month, are putting things to rights.

First there’s Unleaving by Kristian Evans, the debut pamphlet from a young man I met in Wales last year when I went to launch Robert Minhinnick’s lively essay The Mythic Death of Dylan Thomas. That was the first foray into Wales, land of my childhood holidays and therefore a magical place for me.

Of course, the two new publications are in English, not Welsh. However, Unleaving has a strongly Welsh flavour—not in the lobsters on the cover (though they are there for good reason) but in some of the contents. There’s a splendid translation of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s mischievous ‘Merched Llanbadarn’, for example.

Kris Evans is a poet who really knows his oats in terms of poetic tradition: his influences are many and various – from Tristan Tzara to D H Lawrence. He loves form, but he likes surreal experiment too. And there’s prose to wallow in, full of assonance and richness. Kristian Evans is a writer on his way somewhere, and well worth following.

The other new publication, Pattern Beyond Chance, is a first book from Stephen Payne, whose debut pamphlet The Probabilities of Balance was brought out by Smiths Knoll in 2010 and distributed to readers of that lovely (now extinct) magazine. Stephen’s day job is in academic psychology. No surprise when you see the way these poems are presented.

The volume is divided into sections: Design, Word, Mind and Time, with a quotation from a leading psychologist at the front of each. Payne is provocative and playful: he’s thinking about thinking even when he’s thinking about poetry. This book is a pleasure to read, I would say (although yes, I am biassed).

There’s a wonderful poem in Pattern Beyond Chance in memory of Linda Chase, the American, Manchester-based poet who was a leading influence on Stephen, and died far too soon. ‘To: Linda’ makes me cry each time I read it, and I know all friends of Linda (she influenced numerous writers) will feel the same.

Poets sometimes appear to be fiercely in competition with each other in this age of prizes and shortlists, but in fact they’re all on the home team. There’s a generosity of spirit in Pattern Beyond Chance that confirms this. Hard to pin down exactly what I’m talking about, but it’s there. Trust me. I’m a publisher . . .

THE LOUD HILL OF WALES . . .

. . . is still singing in my head.

The world launch of two prose pamphlets took place on Friday night in the Grand Pavilion, Porthcawl. You can still avail yourself of a copy via the HappenStance website, though their numbers are diminishing, but you have lost the opportunity – forever – to be there. What fun we had!

How lovely it was to hear Robert Minhinnick himself gloriously challenging the myth!

How wonderful to hear the quiet chuckle of the audience in response to Ruthven Todd’s wit and mischief (with his picture in THE HAT on the screen behind me as I shared some of his words)!

Such a great audience, and with what enthusiasm they chipped in with their thoughts and insights about the great DT!

I don’t rememberl writing this many exclamation marks, ever!

And in between, Kristian Evans read his marvellous translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym, and another from Rimbaud, and another poem of his own. Oh, if you can’t have an Irish accent, have the soft music of Wales singing in your voice!

And I haven’t yet mentioned the music, the astonishing music from Peter Morgan (who also took the photographs included here). He began with a copy of the poster for the event (which included a photo of Dylan Thomas), and he had a computer programme that converted visual image into sound. Obviously this is magic. That magic was followed by conjuring electronically manipulated sound files of Dylan’s voice into the mix, and on top of all this Peter himself extemporised on a keyboard which looked like no keyboard I have ever seen in the world. Bright squares in a rectangle. Utterly amazing.

We had an official artist-in-residence at the event too: Kristian’s small son Gwion drew us on stage as we launched the world. A first.

I am returned to Scotland overwhelmed with Wales. The weather in Wales is glorious always. The sea shimmers in the morning light. The circus has permanently just arrived. There is jasmine in every garden and yucca trees shaking their heads ever so slightly. The machines and the rides and the windmills and the candy floss of the fair are new minted. Little children in white sun hats, clutching small spades, are pressing their first footprints into the sand ripples and shivering with delight. Windmills and shrimping nets are clustering outside shops, longing to be bought.

The Grand Pavilion is grand. The perfect place for the world launch of two tiny pamphlets. They are now tiny paper boats bobbing through the Celtic Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

But Porthcawl is a whole hotbed of creation. On Thursday night, Robert Minhinnick hosted a poetry event in the Green Room above the Sustainable Wales shop. Everybody should go to an event in this green Green Room. Everybody should go to the Sustainable Wales shop, where I bought the green green dress that I wore to read Ruthven Todd the very next night in the Grand Pavilion. I have never been to a friendlier or more sustaining open mic event than the one on Thursday in the green Green Room above Sustainable Wales: such lovely, enthusiastic, talented people. We are all part of this writing thing – there are no winners and losers, only participants, celebrants and supporters – and these are rotating roles.

And Robert Minhinnick, Porthcawl writer and local international poet, is the warmest possible host to poets. And Margaret Minhinnick, from Yorkshire once removed, lighting an entire room with her smile and her welcome. There is writing, and there is creating the space in which writing and making can happen and be celebrated. Margaret and Robert are heroes. Go to Porthcawl. Sustainable Wales will sustain you. Fair, local, eco-chic. You can get there via the internet. The sun will be shining.

THE MYSTERY OF RUTHVEN TODD

The past is not as past as we think it is.

1914 seems such a long time ago. A century. But a century is short. Some people born in 1914 are still alive.

Others born in 1914 were killed neither in the first world war nor the second. They were twentieth century people and although their stories ended, the trail’s still warm.

Two 1914 babies were Dylan Thomas, the poet, and his Edinburgh friend Ruthven Todd, (also a poet). You’ll have heard of the first; maybe not the second. But Ruthven was an important person in the Dylan Thomas story. For a start, he was the first official biographer after Dylan’s spectacular demise in New York, though his account of the Welsh poet’s life and death was never completed.

To mark the centenary of the births of these two poet-friends, HappenStance has just published two prose pamphlets (http://www.happenstancepress.org/index.php/shop/category/49-dylan-thomas-centenary)

The first is a witty essay by Robert Minhinnick, another Welsh poet of note, about the advantages of dying in New York (for a poet). The other is by Ruthven Todd, largely rescued from his archive in the National Library of Scotland. He had a marvellously engaging style.

Human lives metamorphose into printed papers. It’s almost possible to forget they were real, especially Dylan, who carefully made sure he was larger than life even before he died. But yesterday I met Peter Main, Ruthven Todd’s biographer, in the flesh, in Edinburgh. We sat in a pub on Victoria Street and Peter told me the story of how he came to start writing about Ruthven – the book is not yet done, though it is promised for 2015. We toasted our dead friends. Peter downed a pint of Stewart’s No 3 for Ruthven and Dylan. I drank whisky and ginger for Caitlin.

It was Peter who supplied the picture of Ruthven, on the title page of his pamphlet, wearing the hat he was sporting when he first met Dylan with Geoffrey Grigson:

“Dylan, at this time, was short and slim, with lots of curly hair of a neutral brown, and when his full, but not yet blubbery, lips were parted, they disclosed irregular, slightly yellowed, but adequate teeth. A suggestion of the nineties still hung around him. A piece of silk was knotted below a would-be floppy collar, and he seemed to be trying to give the impression of a stunted Yeats. To be fair, I was wearing the broadest brimmed black hat Edinburgh could supply, and my own aim was to be Wyndham Lewis as The Enemy. Beside us, Geoffrey must have seemed anonymous.”

So Ruthven Todd’s story is still unfolding. Peter, who is also a detective fiction buff, is on the case. If anyone can track Todd down in living detail, he is the man.

But that same day, I had had an email from poet Angela Kirby who noticed I’m to talk about Dylan and Ruthven at a Poetry in the Pumphouse event on June 22^nd in Aldeburgh. She told me Ruthven (which is Gaelic in origin and pronounced Riven) was a friend of her sister, the late IM (Iris) Birtwistle, a poet, gallery owner and marvellous character in her own right. Ruthven’s sister Alison stayed in their family home in Lancashire for part of the war as a refugee from the bombing. He was a real person in their lives. Gordon Jarvie, whom I chatted to at StAnza only a week ago, also pursued his interest in Ruthven to the school annals at Fettes (he wrote about him in Duncan Glen’s magazine Akros). And Christopher Todd, Ruthven’s son, sent me an MP3 recording of Ruthven reading ‘Laugharne Churchyard in 1954’.

So the past is really not as past as we think it is. We hand the memories and anecdotes and events from one person to another. Dylan Thomas died in 1953, four months after I was born. It’s a living thread. We’re all characters in the story. There are lots of chapter endings, but the book itself is never done.

THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STANZAS

This is cheating. I am really thinking about StAnza.

And this morning it’s snowing and around me all the trees are white and I’m not even there. I’m working. But this is a space between yesterday (when I was there) and today when I’m working.

When I went to bed last night my head was full of the space between the stanzas, which for me was the space between the events at StAnza. The events are many, marvelous and magical, of course, and you can read about them elsewhere.

The spaces between the events are just as remarkable, and somewhat more mysterious because completely unpredictable, and not on the programme. When you run an arts festival, you create spaces for unexpected concatenations, correspondences and coalescences. I know that’s just alliteration, but how do you describe it?

On your way to hear a poet read, someone you may never have heard of, perhaps even in a language you don’t know, you stop for a coffee and fall into conversation with Michel (?) from Belgium, there to present a film poem event, and whose job it is to co-ordinate and run literary events in Antwerp – such a charming and interesting young (to me) man. And then we are joined by poet Paula Jennings and Jenny Elliott. Jenny is an old friend (we were once StAnza trustees together) and also a poet and originator of the Shed Press (in her garden shed). Together we sorted out European politics and then moved on to discuss our mothers, over soup and sandwiches (it’s not just poetry). As the table filled up with friends, I moved the flowers onto the floor. Out of the corner of my eye I could see people I knew and wanted to speak to, and others I dimly recognized from their dusty photos on book jackets.

Then an event and then the poetry book fair and then more chats with Tony Lawrence, who has redefined poetry according to laws of mathematics, and the man from Monifieth whose name I can’t remember but who has come to the festival every year for eleven years, and D A Prince, and Karin Koller, and Robyn Marsack and Sheila Wakefield and Stephanie Green and a long conversation – the longest we have ever had, (a GREAT conversation about the late David Tipton and his wife Ena Hollis, taking in John Lucas, Tony Ward and Alan Hill) – with Martin Bates; and another with the lady at the second hand book stall – shop in Newport – I forget her name but it will come back to me; and of course Gerry Cambridge and briefly Rob Mackenzie.

And Richie McCaffery and Stef, and Sally Evans and how lovely to see Ann Drysdale, who has written a whole book about Newport and thus a long conversation about W H Davies and other matters, and briefly (hug interval) Lyn Moir, and Lydia Harris (well met, for the first time) and Christine Webb, and Robert Minhinnick on Dylan Thomas, and Joy Howard and Alan Gay.

And many more. Many more, and some sought for but just missed. Deus ex machina (I’ve just realised that’s a double dactyl) Eleanor Livingstone slipping in and out carying strange objects and messages and inspirations. And others glimpsed in the distance or pausing to share treasure, or say ‘see you later’.

Extraordinary.

The sun has come out and lit up the snow.

And now back to work.