Glasfryn Project

Click on the green page number to link to required page.   Page 1 Editorial Gavin Selerie: Marks Outside the Spa Elisabeth Bletsoe: Two Poems and a Miscellany for Chris Torrance Ian Brinton: Notes from a Correspondence with Chris Torrance Allen Fisher: Leeks and Leaves for Chris Torrance Elaine Randell: Chris, Barry and Me Ian Davidson: Tripping Peter Finch: Torrance Tilla Brading: Pieces for Chris Torrance Robert Minhinnick: Llia Jeremy Hilton: Poems for Chris Torrance   Page 2 Graham Hartill and Chris Vine: Bronze Age Disco: the music of Heat Poets Peter Hodgkiss: Interview with Chris Torrance for Poetry Information 1977 Ric Hool: 13 Friendships - To Chris Torrance Jill Nicholls: Chris Remembered Steven Hitchins: Glyph-licks of skitty squall: Listening to the...

Welcome to Issue 17 of Junction Box. This is a special edition celebrating the life and work of two poets with strong links to Wales, each of whom died fairly recently. John James was born in Cardiff and spent his early years there. Chris Torrance grew up in London and moved to Wales in the early 1970s. For both poets, to different degrees, the landscapes and townscapes of Wales held a fascination, nostalgic or otherwise, as did aspects of its industrial and rural past and its ancient literature. But it's rarely really so much about Wales as about place, internal and external, modes of belonging, transpositions and overlays of identity. For Torrance, more or less pinned to one very particular location, the continual need to find ways of productively responding to it drove his attention deep...

i.m. Chris Torrance A woman with a baby between her legs covered with red ochre— anointment deep in forest shade where a meteor might have crashed, mildew on emulsion Two roe deer antlers point up from her head a furry helmet with teeth dangling over eyes as if she were the landscape Curved bones frame her face leaving the mouth open to chant or scream Below the neck a necklace—bones and teeth of a bison or boar— stretches It can’t be graphed, it stares out from what travelled between worlds the animal mother dismembered and put back whole through sweat and herbs Numbness, itching, to get secrets from an ancestor the gift in shock To faint, to see double, to throw limbs and vent noises in foam To control weather, tell the future and heal the sick acting the...

Two Poems Written for Chris:   Here Hare Here   BIRDS OF THE SHERBORNE MISSAL XVI     Stone T. in the "Cobweb Palace" (Chris's title for the photo)   A Letter from Chris         Two Valentines from Chris (one made out of lichen, the other I keep on the fridge - we had a ritual of sending each other valentines every year.)           Elisabeth Bletsoe is the curator of Sherborne Museum in Dorset and was a friend of Chris Torrance for over 30 years. Here Hare Here appeared in The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, ed Harriet Tarlo (Shearsman Books, 2011) and Wrenne, Wren in The Lonely Crowd 7 (ed. Chris Cornwell) and Birds of The Sherborne...

                      Grieving for the civilisation now in exit, for Chris Torrance, after Du Fu   Gaze on the peak without ever there green unending compacted splendours riving dusk and dawn exhilarated layers of cloud splits in eye-pupils the entry of homing birds a summit you never climb to one sweep how all the world is small days of rushing through the yard without study my eyes roam free drift of clouds stretch the level moors cloud billows out peals of thunder swallows winging from the curtains a sudden downpour and fish sink then hear the gate the shore of the clear lake a sweet banquet the mournful strings of a shack-dweller leave...

‘slowness & slow laps, say, around a center’ (Robert Creeley to Charles Olson) In his interview with Glyn Pursglove for Poetry Wales, volume 19 no. 2, in 1983 Chris Torrance gave a picture of what it was like for him to come to Wales in 1970. He came ‘fresh and unknowing, with an enthusiasm unsullied by any prejudice or knowledge about Wales, unanticipating what was actually going to come.’ In his pursuit of history, geography and geology he recalled one particular midnight expedition which he came to see as his key into the ‘Matter of Wales’: To read the full article: A Correspondence with Torrance       Ian Brinton’s most recent publications include Language and Death, a translation of poems by Philippe Jaccottet (Equipage, 2022), a translation...

So many wonderful, indelible memories of Chris.  The colours, the very greenness of the fields surrounding Glynmercher Isaf, the green mould in Chris’ kitchen, grey stone of the house, grey wide skies, the brightest of inks which Chris used when writing which would be a delight as a letter dropped on the mat at Spot where I was living in a remote part of Kent in the late 1970s.  Smells of course also are permanently etched, the compost toilet which, when staying overnight with Chris, ensured my bladder had practice. It's hard to pin a date or place where or when I first met Chris.  It may have been at a reading someplace in London, perhaps during the Poetry society conflictual days of 1970  or at a PCL poetry conference when Barry (MacSweeney), Chris and I were reading. But in my memory...

(for Rob Stoddard, who I thought about as I wrote this essay, and who told me in Wivenhoe in 1981 that I need to believe in the possibility of truth). Poetry sometimes reminds me of the walls of Risley remand centre in Liverpool, England, when I visited a friend there in the 1990s. They were tall and bulbous and made out of concrete without any apparent imperfection. I could neither scale those walls nor speak back to them. Even words didn’t stick. Perhaps the shiny surfaces of poetry serve the same purpose, to imprison the deviant and the dangerous, and to keep the uncontrollable out of circulation. Words become the captives of the poem, unable to run free and form new and potentially fertile associations. Some academic papers make me feel the same. The speaker is so adept with the knife...

To Read the Poem: Torrance   Peter Finch is a poet, writer, performer, walker and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff.  He has been a publisher, organisation manager, periodical editor, event organiser, literary agent and literary promoter.   He was at the forefront of the UK’s small press revolution in the 60s and the 70s with his magazine Second Aeon and pioneered performance poetry in Wales during the 1980s.  From 1974 to 1995 he ran the Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff.  From 1996 to 2011 he was Chief Executive of Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy, an organisation which was later rebranded as Literature Wales. He specialises in books about the Capital including the successful Real Cardiff series (4 vols – published by Seren Books), Edging The Estuary and the more recent...

Confluence and Divergence. I have experienced both a confluence with the work of Chris Torrance, and a divergence from it.  Our paths joined in the place that I grew up in and strongly identify with and which we share as a fundamental influence on our writing. It is the Ystradfellte landscape where Chris made his home. Our confluence is in the source of the river Nedd (Neath), its tributary river valleys and the hills from which they spring. When he arrived in the valley, I was leaving home so a distance between us existed because I was unaware of his work until his Ystradfellte years. It was not until we’d left the farm  and I’d moved away, that I became more involved in writing and small press publishing in the course of which I come across his work. Here was someone identifying...

Llia (i.m. Chris Torrance) Not far from here in the last dark place in Wales they killed the last wolf. Ice was everywhere. A glacier’s gimlet and its moraines still visible. Yet in this corner of the sky stars are feral and air teems with myths, their tapestries lit against military megaliths. Above us behind us and sometimes below lie the crooked anvil the road of spilt milk the waterfall’s blizzard. Least of our rivers is Llia yet beyond us constellations converge and creatures contort across the sky atlas. But as night creeps out of Maen Llia’s shadow daylight despite its sacrifice will be restored.     ORDNANCE SURVEY GRID REFGERENCE SN92651660 -   AFON LLIA. I recall driving Chris Torrance to Llandrindod Wells for...

Introductory notes to the poems - The 5-part sequence of poems, "Roads to Glynmercher" was written in the early months of 2001 as a contribution to the celebration of Chris's 60th birthday. My aim was to try and convey something about the person and the place - Torrance and his remote cottage - through the different approaches I had made, driving my car, over the previous 30 years. I was aware of a shortage, compared to Europe and the U.S., notably Dorn and Kerouac, of road poems in British alternative poetry. The final poem of the five attempts to convey a sense of the invisible and spiritual pathways associated with Chris Torrance and Glynmercher. The "Elegy for Chris Torrance" was written about 2 months after his death. To Read the Poems: Poems for Chris Torrance     Jeremy...