Recently we launched issue 24 of ‘Red Poets’ magazine at the Imp in Merthyr Tudful, now an annual ritual.
We’ve actually been going 25 years as we managed to skip a year while suffering a prolonged hangover from all the collating and stapling of issue 1.
It was a wild and stormy night in Cymru and some contacted me with apologies, saying they were lost in the floods.
However, Harry Rogers made it all the way from Castell Emlyn, John Williams had come from Lewisham and Leon Lazarus had been re-born while trudging up the valley and emerged looking like he’d nearly drowned!
It was another great night of music and verse and wonderful to welcome poets such as Adele Cordner from the Port and Paula Denby with her surfer son, both making their debuts. When Paula sang ‘Ar lan y môr’ it was a moment of sheer magic.
The issue’s so packed with fascinating contributions that I can’t mention everyone…..opening poems by the Buddhist Boyz Barry Taylor and Al Jones reflect wryly on the Red Poets themselves.
There’s much masterful satire from the likes of Dave Hughes, Martin Hayes and , of course, Phil Knight whose ‘I love Wales’ refers repeatedly to our many types of rain –
‘I love its rain.
The hard rain, the soft,
The acid rain, the carbon rain,
The salt and sand rain
Of lost Saturday afternoons.
The rain, the glorious rain.’
…..read marvellously by Heather Falconer to the soundtrack of that very rain crashing down outside in Merthyr.
There is a poem by the eminent poet, essayist and critic Jeremy Hooker who – for the first time in his life – recently joined a political party, namely Corbyn’s Labour and who shows his passion and praise in ‘Aneurin Bevan Memorial Stones’ –
‘ …this young man with a stutter
declaiming Shakespeare or Marx,
correcting his voice, and honing it,
like a tool, useful as a miner’s pick.’
Such precise description and so apt.
Fittingly there are 4 poems dealing directly with the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower : Merthyr’s own John Williams went to help in the aftermath and ‘Fully Furnaced Flat’ is a frighteningly stark response. Then there’s the anger of Des Mannay and Tim Evans’ poems and the righteous indignation of J. Richardson –
‘ The media carefully avoids the bottomless vault
Of anonymous horror
The un-glamorous deaths of the poor.’
One of my favourite poets on the scene today is undoubtedly Becky Lowe of Swansea and it’s high time a publisher in Cymru brought a book out by her, because her work is always imaginative and thought-provoking ; ‘This Pen’ is no exception –
‘ This pen contains
Love or poison,
Can amputate hearts
At a single stroke
Can make you disappear
Or become immortal.’
Another poet who, like Becky, reads regularly at Talisman in Swansea, is Teifion Hughes, so underrated and unassuming. His ‘ A Single Spark’ tells of Che and Fidel in Mexico, a narrative poem yet full of strong descriptions –
‘ Here comes the wind to mimic
Che’s asthmatic : his drug left
dry on a Mexican shelf.’
I feel proud and honoured to give poets like Teifion this opportunity.
Then there are the old-timers such as myself, Alun Rees and Tim Richards who’ve been here from the beginning ( well, almost in Tim’s case). Tim’s ‘Being Welsh’ is as pertinent today as it would’ve been when we were all members of the Welsh Socialists , Cymru Goch the very group who gave birth to the Red Poets in Clwb-y-Bont, where Alun Roberts must have been mid-wife!
Tim questions our allegiances and how easily these can be cast aside –
‘ So I loyally vote Labour
and get English Tory governments
‘cos when it really comes down to it
I am a True Brit.’
Red Poets remains a multifarious collection of voices from all different parts of the Left : SWP to left Plaid, staunch Corbynites to anarchists.
As I say in the Intro to this issue, referring to young poets like Rufus Mufasa and Kate Tempest –
‘ Despite the blandness of much of the literary scene, I’m heartened by young artists taking poetry onto the main stage and challenging the predictability of so much popular culture.’
Indeed, we have both Leon Lazarus and Patrick Jones who often use spoken word and music so effectively.
From red to green to black and back again, 25 years after our first ‘one-off’ magazine.
RED STORM
A storm blew them in
bedraggled and blasted ,
up the flooding High Street
past flying branches
and clogged-up drains.
A storm with innocuous name
like that of an Aunt
visiting over the summer ;
but here they gathered
wet and wound up
by the one-way system,
to take a stand.
A storm they didn’t shake off
or change like damp clothing,
but which became their words :
bringing down barriers and walls
and lifting everyone like seabirds
in a full-feathered freedom.
We’ve actually been going 25 years as we managed to skip a year while suffering a prolonged hangover from all the collating and stapling of issue 1.
It was a wild and stormy night in Cymru and some contacted me with apologies, saying they were lost in the floods.
However, Harry Rogers made it all the way from Castell Emlyn, John Williams had come from Lewisham and Leon Lazarus had been re-born while trudging up the valley and emerged looking like he’d nearly drowned!
It was another great night of music and verse and wonderful to welcome poets such as Adele Cordner from the Port and Paula Denby with her surfer son, both making their debuts. When Paula sang ‘Ar lan y môr’ it was a moment of sheer magic.
The issue’s so packed with fascinating contributions that I can’t mention everyone…..opening poems by the Buddhist Boyz Barry Taylor and Al Jones reflect wryly on the Red Poets themselves.
There’s much masterful satire from the likes of Dave Hughes, Martin Hayes and , of course, Phil Knight whose ‘I love Wales’ refers repeatedly to our many types of rain –
‘I love its rain.
The hard rain, the soft,
The acid rain, the carbon rain,
The salt and sand rain
Of lost Saturday afternoons.
The rain, the glorious rain.’
…..read marvellously by Heather Falconer to the soundtrack of that very rain crashing down outside in Merthyr.
There is a poem by the eminent poet, essayist and critic Jeremy Hooker who – for the first time in his life – recently joined a political party, namely Corbyn’s Labour and who shows his passion and praise in ‘Aneurin Bevan Memorial Stones’ –
‘ …this young man with a stutter
declaiming Shakespeare or Marx,
correcting his voice, and honing it,
like a tool, useful as a miner’s pick.’
Such precise description and so apt.
Fittingly there are 4 poems dealing directly with the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower : Merthyr’s own John Williams went to help in the aftermath and ‘Fully Furnaced Flat’ is a frighteningly stark response. Then there’s the anger of Des Mannay and Tim Evans’ poems and the righteous indignation of J. Richardson –
‘ The media carefully avoids the bottomless vault
Of anonymous horror
The un-glamorous deaths of the poor.’
One of my favourite poets on the scene today is undoubtedly Becky Lowe of Swansea and it’s high time a publisher in Cymru brought a book out by her, because her work is always imaginative and thought-provoking ; ‘This Pen’ is no exception –
‘ This pen contains
Love or poison,
Can amputate hearts
At a single stroke
Can make you disappear
Or become immortal.’
Another poet who, like Becky, reads regularly at Talisman in Swansea, is Teifion Hughes, so underrated and unassuming. His ‘ A Single Spark’ tells of Che and Fidel in Mexico, a narrative poem yet full of strong descriptions –
‘ Here comes the wind to mimic
Che’s asthmatic : his drug left
dry on a Mexican shelf.’
I feel proud and honoured to give poets like Teifion this opportunity.
Then there are the old-timers such as myself, Alun Rees and Tim Richards who’ve been here from the beginning ( well, almost in Tim’s case). Tim’s ‘Being Welsh’ is as pertinent today as it would’ve been when we were all members of the Welsh Socialists , Cymru Goch the very group who gave birth to the Red Poets in Clwb-y-Bont, where Alun Roberts must have been mid-wife!
Tim questions our allegiances and how easily these can be cast aside –
‘ So I loyally vote Labour
and get English Tory governments
‘cos when it really comes down to it
I am a True Brit.’
Red Poets remains a multifarious collection of voices from all different parts of the Left : SWP to left Plaid, staunch Corbynites to anarchists.
As I say in the Intro to this issue, referring to young poets like Rufus Mufasa and Kate Tempest –
‘ Despite the blandness of much of the literary scene, I’m heartened by young artists taking poetry onto the main stage and challenging the predictability of so much popular culture.’
Indeed, we have both Leon Lazarus and Patrick Jones who often use spoken word and music so effectively.
From red to green to black and back again, 25 years after our first ‘one-off’ magazine.
RED STORM
A storm blew them in
bedraggled and blasted ,
up the flooding High Street
past flying branches
and clogged-up drains.
A storm with innocuous name
like that of an Aunt
visiting over the summer ;
but here they gathered
wet and wound up
by the one-way system,
to take a stand.
A storm they didn’t shake off
or change like damp clothing,
but which became their words :
bringing down barriers and walls
and lifting everyone like seabirds
in a full-feathered freedom.
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