Really good to read Geraldine's, Rhys's and Sam's comments here on Chris Torrance's work. He seems to me an important and much-neglected poet; when Lyndon Davies and I kicked off our Hay Poetry Jamboree series in summer 2009, we consciously made Chris our closing reader (just as we had Peter Finch opening it).
Chris's many of years of running Creative Writing classes at Cardiff Uni's Extramural Department (1979-94) are one of the main reasons why Wales still enjoys such a varied alternative poetry scene; scratch the official, Gillian Clarke-and-Owen Sheers-polished surface, and you soon find those who benefitted from it. They'd include Elisabeth Bletsoe, Graham Hartill, Chris Ozzard and Phil Maillard, among many others, and he's also clearly been exemplary for younger poets not taught by him, like Rhys.
There is a larger context to the lack of recognition / understanding, I'd say. Other poets moved into Wales from England in the late 1960s and early 1970s - Jeremy Hooker, John Freeman and David Barnett, for example - but rather more Welsh poets left (John James, Wendy Mulford, Philip Jenkins, Paul Evans, David Annwn), and the problem of acknowledging their presence, let alone proper assessment, has been complicated by Welsh literary politics, which since the 1980s has tended to be dominated by a crude linguistic culturalist outlook that ignores those deemed to have been lured away from the territory of Wales by 'the whistle of the English pound' (Meic Stephens) as much as those it deems to be 'blow-ins', such as Chris himself.
This can't disguise the fact that Chris was one of the primary centres of energy of a remarkable poetic ferment in the 1970s in this part of the world, which included the concrete poetry of John Powell Ward, Finch's epic second aeon and Pete Hodgkiss's Galloping Dog Press. Later, in the 1980s, Cabaret 246 and the pioneering feminist performance duo Deadlier Than The Male (led by Gillian Brightmore), took their cue from Chris's stress on the importance of 'sounding the work', extending it into a more politicised terrain. Chris himself seems in recent years to have shifted his energies more towards music / performance (with Chris Vine in Poetheat), although I guess the Magic Door sequence is always open, as it were, and ongoing.
A proper consideration of Chris's achievement has to begin with the excellent chapter on his work in William Walton Rowe's Three Lyric Poets: Harwood, Torrance, MacSweeney written for the British Council (Northcote House, 2009). This is the only extended (30-page) treatment - interestingly, Rowe places Torrance in the same 'processual' poetic zone as early Dylan Thomas. John Wilkinson's shrewd, if rather sharp judgements in his Angel Exhaust piece, are useful in tempering Rowe's sometimes too-large claims.
I'm currently trying to finish a study of non-standard poetries in, of, and about Wales (Undispellable lost dream: Welsh alternative poetries 1930-2010), and put together the anthology that would have to accompany it, so much of this work being currently unavailable (small presses out there, are you listening?). Chris's work features prominently in both projects; the brilliant Acrospirical Meanderings in a Tongue of the Time (my copy: a £2.95 steal from Swansea Oxfam!) lends itself particularly well to the second of these (it consists of shortish lyrics), and is a favourite of mine - it seems to me to contain some of his most brilliant writing, and to cry out to be read and discussed.
John
