David Gascoyne is wheeled in front of the audience. He is a day short of his 81st birthday. This is an extremely rare public occasion for him. Perhaps his first reading in a decade. David Gascoyne's appearance has drawn me here tonight. I might not have ventured out for the other poets such is my unfamiliarity with them or their material. Their readings tonight made me glad I came.
Ian Sinclair reads two poems about the Isle of Wight. First a marvellously apt recollection about a weekend spent on Freshwater Bay at the Albion Hotel. The poem ending with a mention of Freshwater based poet and author Dr. Brian Hinton. Hinton suitably dressed in evening wear, holding a customary glass of red wine guffaws with the rest of us on that one.
The second 'Island' poem details a visit to record David Gascoyne's contribution for National Poetry Day in 1995. It was for the Albert Hall concert which featured the last reading in this country from Gascoyne's admirer and beat iconalist Allen Ginsberg. In a hundred years time you might find this poem on a dusty shelf. You will encounter an accurate description of visiting David Gascoyne's Northwood home.
Barry MacSweeney is on a tour called Hell Hound on my Trail. Like Vivian Stanshall, like Robert Johnson his demons were sourced from the bottle. Tonight he just sips water. Back from the brink, less Baptist convert, more poet with a desire to live rather than to expire amongst his own vomit in the gutter. From three bottles of gin a day to nourishment by a drip in a hospital bed. The Hell Hound on my Trail tour, the Book of Demons published by Bloodaxe. Off the bottle, on the road and on form judging by tonight's readings.
Tonight MacSweeney split his performance between "a collection of innocence and experience." His innocence recalled in a poem about his childhood friend Pearl. Both grew up in the wilds of the great Allen valley which he described as "Like the Yukon, the biggest lead mining area in the world." From this he switched to the dark days of adulthood in a poem written about his near death two years ago on a life support system. He called it after the sign above his bed 'Nil by mouth' and subtitled it 'The tone poem'. It is a reflective work ending with a demon leaning down to ask him in the gutter "Just one more Sir, for the road?"
Barry MacSweeney's final poem focused on the once industrially vibrant city of Durham which suffered financial depravation during the Thatcher years. The poet titled it by the fortunes of a pet shop in the city which offered in magic marker pen 'Free pet with every cage'. "Ten days later it was shut, the first line is a straight steal from a tremendous American country singer called Bonnie Raitt. Get out the shotgun put it in the gunrack . . ."
Johnson strode on to dispense with tables and the microphone. He asked for the lights to be lowered. We had begun with a Londoner, moved on to a Northumbrian poet and now in Nicholas Johnson we had an artist whose words floated on a honeyed West Country burr. He exuded praise for the evening and David Gascoyne in particular. His first poem professing a wonderment in a comet which lit up his village one December night. A night when he was reading David Gascoyne. A man, he confesses that he had never met and only knew through his works and a brace of pictures.
There is a country village remoteness about his poems tonight. He draws on rustic images intermingling them with oblique references of the human condition. "Torrent on a revolving gate of water, a tallboy of eels etched an oily light, kicking goose shit in the river, are you hunting for a ballad?" A poet like them all tonight to investigate further.
After the interval Nicholas Johnson came back to the floor to clear the decks of the table and microphone again in order to give the next artist space. Clearly he had been taken by the site of the Quay Arts Centre. He said: "During the interval I went out to the little quay and I saw five swans and I thought well what will happen to all our poetry. They swam away but two came back . . ."
Nicholas Johnson told how he had first heard Dun at the 1995 National Poetry Day event at the Albert Hall. The event at which a recording of David Gascoyne reading was played. Where Allen Ginsberg had given one of his last readings. Here Johnson described how Dun had stunned him with "Dantes mode of writing". He alluded to Dun's 150 page book of poetry Vale Royal
Dun fitted his sprawling exotic pieces right down to his black soldier's boots. He looked every inch a pirate from the Spanish Main. A bandana folded around his head. A long white shirt down to his thighs. His long untied black boots. He paced back and forth across the floor pushing his voice up amongst the audience.
The effect was mesmeric. As rich and spice exotic as the lands of Africa and Persia in his first piece where he spoke of:
"Navigator of endless modes beyond the pentatonic scale, eclipsing all players of the Mississippi delta blues with ancient African jally road songs . . ."
His second piece was separated from the first with just a turn of the body, a retreat to the back of the floor. Then he emerged to the front of the floor to launch into a poem about Trinidad. It was like the English Patient set in the Caribbean. Full of rich, vibrant language like a classical actor delivering Shakespeare. It began:
"Trinidad, paradise, outside the order of the garden, arcadia of servitude, green isle of malaise, against your amethyst jacaranda mountainsides must weigh heavily the yellow jack nightmare cities of cardboard foundations and galvanised sections, ramshackled swampland, graveyards of high fevered children where delirious women roast a sickening incense made of Michelin and Goodyear. Black sour smoke mixed with the bitter green citrus orange leaves puming to keep the whining malaria from the sick room rainy season tin roof construction of hopelessness . . ."
As Lord Buckley might have said it was "A gasser."
"The swans on the waterfront tonight draw closer and crane their necks to hear these poems which follow. It is my very great pleasure, it does me honour, to introduce a giant among poets, a poet with the true consciousness of a seer. The imagination of David Gascoyne travels in unique skies, his spirit moves in and above this shadowy world. As for his life itself it is a record of legendary occurences. We are all very honoured tonight to be with David Gascoyne."
The introduction received warm applause as the poet was brought to the centre of the floor to read from his wheelchair. Here sat before us is a man who was a contemporary and friend of Salvador Dali, an author who wrote a unique insight into the Surrealists in the thirties (A Short Survey of Surrealism) and is himself, a surrealist poet who was much admired by Allen Ginsberg.
David Gascoyne read tonight with a spirit and a warmth undimmed by age. He was relaxed with only the lowered lights and his failing eyesight making him fumble as he reached the end of a series of poems. At one point Judy Gascoyne would call out "Darling do you think you would be better without your glasses?" "Yes I was just thinking that," he replied discarding the spectacles onto the table.
There were poems about Corfu and the Durrells, poems about Paris, unique little pieces on wartime London, small Dorset villages, November in Devon even a poem that made it into the Penguin book of light verse. That seemed to tickle the poet. The poem which made it for me was September Sun. He read it with a power and a majesty all of its own. It was the poem that his now wife Judy had once read, one of her favourites, to the inmates of the Whitecroft Hospital on the Isle of Wight. One of the patient's told her afterwards: "I wrote that." That patient was David Gascoyne.
September Sun
Magnificent strong sun! In these last days
So prodigally generous of pristine light
That's wasted only men's sight who will not see
And by self-darkened spirits from whose night
Can rise no longer orison or praise
Let us consume in fire unfed like yours
And may the quickened gold within me come
To mintage in due season, and not be
Transmitted to no better, end than dumb
And self sufficient usury. These days and years
May bring the sudden call to harvesting,
When in the fields man's labours only yield
Glitter and husks, then with an angrier sun may He
Who first with His gold seed the sightless field
of Chaos planted, all our trash to cinders bring.
©David Gascoyne
At the end David Gascoyne was given mass applause by poets and audience alike. It had been a unique occasion. From the young Nicholas Johnson, the iconalistic Aidan Dun, the Northumbrian warmth of Barry MacSweeney, the London poems of Ian Sinclair to a rare public performance from David Gascoyne who Dun claimed 'moves in and above this shadowy world.' An apt description of a surrealist if ever I heard one.
Mike Plumbley