REPORT ON THE FIRST HAY POETRY JAMBOREE 28 MAY – 30 MAY 2009
The first Hay Poetry Jamboree, organised by John Goodby and Lyndon Davies, and supported by Swansea University School of Art /CREW, the Dylan Thomas Centre, Library of Wales and Academi, took place at the Oriel Gallery in Hay-on-Wye on 28th—30th May. It was made possible by the generosity of Geoff Evans, Oriel’s owner, who allowed free use of the gallery (a listed seventeenth-century building with Victorian chapel attached), and of the artist-poet Christopher Twigg, who bravely allowed his home at Church House, Talgarth, to serve as a dormitory-cum-junketing centre and yurt-pitching zone for many of the poets and performers.
Buoyed by such gifts and sponsorship, plus much goodwill, the Jamboree ran as an unsolemn antidote to the ‘High Street poetry’, as Ric Caddell once called it, on offer at the official Hay Festival of Literature. Rather than blandly glittering prizes and commercialist razzmatazz, the event showcased five leading Welsh poets in the experimental tradition founded by David Jones, Dylan Thomas and Lynette Roberts—that tradition which, while it tends to be neglected, is Wales’s most important contribution to twentieth century literature.
Electrifying performances by Peter Finch and Boiled String on Thursday evening, got proceedings under way in appropriate style. They were followed, at Friday’s main event, by a memorable reading from her latest collection, The Land Between, by Wendy Mulford, and by John James, whose set included striking new ‘sonnet’ pieces and powerful elegies for Barry MacSweeney and Andrew Crozier. Chris Torrance and David Greenslade brought the poetic proceedings to a close in a packed and lively final session on Saturday evening, after which discussions went on far into the night in Church House’s owl-haunted, riverrun garden, over Romanian potín and seventeen meals from the local Chinese takeaway.
Between the three keynote readings came two rapid-fire mini poetry-fests, on Friday and Saturday, featuring a further dozen poets, among them Samantha Rhydderch, Graham Hartill and Chris Ozzard. There were also two academic lectures, by Alice Entwistle (University of Glamorgan) on Welsh women’s experimental poetry, and Matthew Jarvis (the Antony Dyson Fellow at Lampeter University) on Wales’s alternative poetries. There were many other memorable highlights and portents: among them the blackbird which entered the gallery and took part in proceedings on Friday afternoon, Messrs Harthill and Ozzard’s shamanic / shambolic attempts to conjure up a Cabaret 246 member last sighted in 1991, and John James’s generous suggestion that the Hay Jam might become a successor to the late lamented CCCP. These aside, glorious weather also played its part in the high attendance throughout the three days, as did the postgrad golden horde from CREW (Swansea University’s Centre for Research into English Language and Literature in Wales), which descended on Hay on Saturday to push attendance up to the fifty mark. But the turnout, and the general buzz, was a reflection above all of the current revival of innovative poetry going on in Wales.
Over the last few years, this revival has been reflected in many and varied ways—in the poetry lists of Parthian, Salt and Shearsman, plus non-Welsh presses such as Reality Street Editions, Shearsman and Waterloo; in the Glasfryn seminar series; and in the hospitality to experiment of the pages of Poetry Wales under Zoe Skoulding and her predecessor, Robert Minhinnick. In this sense, the Hay Jam was part a broader movement, although its success couldn’t have been predicted at the outset—almost no-one from mainstream Welsh poetry felt it was likely to be worth their while turning up, and no account of the Jamboree has been requested by either the Academi e-newsletter or its listings journal, A470. But this was predictable enough, and official imprimaturs weren’t missed; it was the grassroots success of the event that was the big talking point, and that which makes a repeat highly likely. The organisers would like to thank everyone who turned up and supported the Jam, then, and throw open an invitation for 2010. So watch this space. Once again we’ll be relishing our proximity to the publishing industry apotheosis which passes itself off as Britain’s largest literary festival, and will be trying to show that if versified anecdote is one thing, a truly contemporary poetry invariably thrives with some element of jamming—and that whether that means more discussions under the stars, yurts, and strong spirits, it will always require the dislocation of language into new meaning.
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