Ric, Cris
I made a solemn new-millenium resolution to be prospective and give Memory
Lane a wide berth, but those two little words _Sparty_ & _Lea_ and the horse
just bolted!!
I have a memory of JHP recording for the occasion, other people's
readings at Sparty Lea, on equipment that had to be hauled by mule train and
sled over the Pennine watersheds, but I don't recollect him actually reading
_at_Sparty Lea, though he may well have done so. However, he did read,
together with Norman Nicholson, (who read first) at Mordern Tower, Newcastle
and a large number, if not all, of the SL gathering made the 60+ mile round
trip by car & etc. Tom Pickard introduced each poet and might know whether
the double-header was planned or improvised. The audience spanned the nice
people who'd come to hear NN and the assorted headcases from the hills who
hadn't. Nicholson had a charming, gentle presence and read confidently (he'd
be 52 or 3 if it was '67) Can't remember whether he had the Victorian
sidewhiskers of the Faber _Collected Poems_ but anyway, bardic, a northerner
(Cumbrian), at home.
Jeremy prefaced his reading by asking the audience to take the world
they'd just been presented with and give it a 90° twist, come at it
sideways, accept it's unfamiliarity. He didn't use 'making strange' but
behind it you sensed the Olson take on Heraclitus' 'estranged from that
which is most familiar' and also Donald Davie's _The Mushroom Gatherers_
(after Pasternak) 'Who would have thought these shades our lively friends?'
It was an emphatic act of distancing which accepted the risk of turning off
half the audience before he began. He read ,as far as I remember, with a
quiet intensity. There was a palpable sense of challenge, of two worlds
meeting and yet warmth in the way they greeted each other at the end.
Possibly we'd arrived just as the reading began. Looking now at some of the
poems from _The Pot Geranium_ (1954), 'Fossils', 'The Seven Rocks,' I see
that they had common interests. 'Windscale', from 'A Local Habitation'
(1972) but for all I know, perhaps already written, is suggestive of even
late Prynne, 'bringing milk in.....meat in his face as a fire/clay marker.'
(HWWR). "This is a land where dirt is clean,......Where sewers flow with
milk, and meat/ Is carved up for the fire to eat, / And children suffocate
in God's fresh air."
I seem to remember Ric, a few months ago, you giving an account of a
reading in Durham and implying its not being recorded was in keeping with
northern tradition. If so I wonder if the Tower readings were an exception??
Best,
John.
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