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Powerhouse of poetry notches up a quarter of a century
IN preparation for the Torriano Meeting House’s 25th anniversary this coming weekend, with three visual artists in residence all going at full blast, it was justly immortalised as “home to a thousand poetry readings” in last week’s Times Literary Supplement.
However, that paper didn’t mention Tobias Hill, poet and novelist, who gave some of his very first readings at Torriano barely out of his school uniform. The infamously depressed poet Les Murray came all the way from Australia especially to read for John Rety, and the quietly magisterial Stephen Spender enchanted a packed audience that included the poet William Oxley and his wife Patricia, editor of Acumen, shortly before his death. That’s just for starters.
It would be sad to forget the name of the Jewish poet AC Jacobs this coming weekend, much praised by Ted Hughes and the novelist Dan Jacobson. In a letter to Arthur before his solitary and painful death in Madrid in 1994, aged 57, Jacobson refers to “your northern Anglo-Scottish pragmatical self coming down hard on your more emotional Jewish self”. This is another way of saying that the poet had a unique way of brutalising himself.
The story of how John Rety and Anthony Rudolf painstakingly turned an unruly mess they found scattered (or shattered?) about Arthur’s bedsit, into the Hearing Eye book of Collected Poems & Translations, is hinted at in the poem quoted from at the beginning of Frederick Grubb’s insightful essay, The Wideawake Stranger:
All the poems not
collected,
That are left lying in drawers
Among dying papers, or go roaming
On pages one can’t recall,
Which of them really exist
And which are imagined?
Dr Grubb continued: For one who wished “to keep close / To the unsayable” he knew that
There is deliberate silencing,
To speak up against it
To make oneself heard.
It is therefore fitting that Arthur, who owed much to the nurturing in the form of readings he received from John and Susan at Torriano, immortalised some of its most persistent characteristics in his Triolet:
Are there poets from the floor?
John Rety asks at
Torriano
Just read one piece, please, no more.
Are there poets from the floor,
New or having read before?
Go up and stand beside the piano
Are there poets from the floor,
John Rety asks at
Torriano?
JOHN HORDER |
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