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...
Issue 17 Page 2
An Irregular Magazine More about Junction Box
[caption id="attachment_8128" align="alignleft" width="440"] Chris Torrance and Chris Vine at Chapter Arts CentrePhotograph by Dan Hartill[/caption] When you listen to Heat Poets, there’s likely to be a surprise in store. What is this? We might be bringing certain expectations: ‘poetry and music’; ‘poetry and jazz’: what might these terms connote? The music as backing track, a kind of easy-listening, subliminal even, an evocation of ‘mood’, conditioning our response? Expect a folky guitar then, or ripplingly trite piano, for ‘atmosphere’. Or perhaps a certain context: we’ve heard that Torrance grew up with a love of be-bop, we know he admired Kerouac and Parker: expect nostalgia then, for the heady myth of beatnikdom, which was, after all, getting on for seventy-five...
Peter Hodgkiss: I started Poetry Information in London in January 1970 as a modest broadsheet listing recent poetry publications. Moving to Swansea in the mid-1970s gave me the time to expand the magazine to include critical articles on poets involved in what has (rather grandly) been described as the British Poetry Revival (i.e. poets outside the mainstream of the established presses and literary magazines). With this in mind I discovered that Chris Torrance, whose work I already knew from his Ferry Press collections of the late-60s, had recently moved to a cottage in the Vale of Neath high above the Swansea valley. What could romantically called a hermits life. He made the occasional visit to the “big city” and we linked up, got on well, and I was able to organise several readings...
To Read the Poems: 13 Friendships - To Chris Torrance Ric Hool has 11 collections of poetry to date: Since I Last Wrote will be published in June 2023. His work is featured in poetry magazines & journals in Europe, USA & UK. His poetic themes are the psychological and geographical impact of place, time and space on the human experience. Ric Hool is from Northumberland but lives in Wales. Click here to go back to: Contributors and Links to Pages 1 - 4
I see a thin man leaning over a crooked gate, his grey stone home behind. I see a man brown skinned, even in darkest winter but one who will not be parted from his woolly jumpers, even in hottest summer. I see man in all seasons, who sits, rug on knees, writing and thinking and drinking, in the light that glows peacefully through the tear in the red lampshade. I see him feeding the fire which fumes and spits and tells its own stories, as the logs crumble and twist, turning from crimson to grey as the flames take them. I see the cobweb wall hangings, many moons old, lifting gently behind him but I have never seen a spider in the house. I see the sparkling Christmas mobile that remains all year round, stirring and spinning a little in the rising warmth of the fire. I see him bending to...
15/9/22 “Chris Torrance is out of Tupi – kicks a ball up against a wall. He’s gone, out of county Tupi - kicks a ball up against a wall. Listless city - own wash water god – ain’t no jungle monk at all. So call out the weather guard, she’ll come and take him home. Please you call out Yara – the weather guard – she to come and reach him home. Out the agri business – to the Buddhas, the deepens and the stone” 22/9/22 “The red + green rushes wildly when you leave the house, can never leave the mass the rushes, never stop the hour discourse of plants, or control a glass that shines on a human mind that is no different. But one fears totalitarian nature, it has ruined the town. And it is right to feel swayed + ill when you go to the house, through...
Open field music. Vine traces Torrance's lyrical beat rather than the metronome. Harmonic grooves superimposed. Snippets weightlessly floating. Dislocated bars of hypnotic rhythm. Found melodies in chance conjunctions, rhythms of nature, patterns of moons, birds, stars, tracing terrain. Beat prosody rides the pulse. Dionysiac-ascetic hermit rap. Offbeat projective lines launch and constellate. Drums and riffs roll in and skitter out. Frinite Frinite opens with its raunchy slab. Hot off the camel's back. Bass bins jelly quiver. Tabla conga stampedes the veins. Flanged sirens starfall in intimate whispers. Shudders of trojan voodoo sub. Dubby strut bellying the neutron flightplan. Ectoplasmic hedonistic hymn. Gritty chip butty rainy souls hugging moon. Slithery slinky succubi...
The following poem in response to Chris Torrance emerged through Rhys Trimble and Lee Duggan's ongoing collaborative project. To Read the Poem: trees trees trees Rhys Trimble is a neurodiverse, bilingual, Welsh, English and Wenglish poet, visual-poet, teacher, translator, performer, critic, musician [in Lolfa Binc, Punk, Anxiolytics electro, in gglec -sound art and Wolframite in Nantes - improvised ensemble], visual artist, mystic, pastynwr, performance artist, publisher and editor [of ctrl+alt+del ezine] born in Zambia, raised in South Wales and resident in North Wales. www.rhystrimble.com Lee Duggan’s first collection, Reference Points (Aquifer 2017) met with enthusiastic reviews in Poetry Wales, Elliptical Movements, and Litter Magazine. Her highly...
To Read the Poem: The Shades of Autumn Surging - (After Torrance) Lee Duggan’s first collection, Reference Points (Aquifer 2017) met with enthusiastic reviews in Poetry Wales, Elliptical Movements, and Litter Magazine. Her highly individual sonnet sequence Green (Oystercatcher 2019) was also met with critical acclaim. Lee’s work featured in the ground breaking anthology of contemporary Welsh innovative poetry, The Edge of Necessary (Aquifer 2018). More recently her work has appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review, Black Box Manifold, Tentacular, Tears in the Fence, Noon, Molly Bloom, Poetry Wales, Seren and Junction Box. She has forthcoming collections from Aquifer and Contraband. Click here to go back to: Contributors and Links to Pages 1 - 4
Lloyd Robson introduction: Chris Torrance and his poetry have had a significant influence on me. back in the 1990s i regularly attended his ‘Adventures in Creative Writing’ class at the University of Wales, Cardiff. it was an evening class, mostly for locals. sometimes Chris would crash at my place, afterwards; and i would visit him, up in the Neath Valley. we spent many hours talking, reading out loud, worrying the bones of poetry, and trying to find a precision of thought through language, while also having a laugh. Chris was very generous with his time, his consideration, his knowledge, and imagination. his input was intrinsic to the developmental leap my writing went through at that time, but he never tried to influence me to write like him, however much i enjoyed his poetry. he...
Ron Berry and Chris Torrance lived no more than ten miles from each other, as the hawk flies. By road, it’s further – 15 miles or so. Environmentally, it’s further still, with Berry at the head of the strip development of the industrial Rhondda, and Torrance in the upper Neath valley, within the Brecon Beacons National Park. The journey between those two places is a remarkable one. Torrance described his cottage as being ‘two fields from tarmac’, which was pleasant enough in the summer, but more of a challenge on a cold wet winter’s day. Beyond the field gate, to the left, a narrow lane drops down to the bridge over the Neath, Pont Melin-Fach. To the right, it twists upward past the farm, past piles of timber on one side, past a beautiful spreading oak in a rough...
To Read the Poem: In a Tongue of the Time John Goodby is Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University. He is a poet, critic, and translator, and an authority on the work of Dylan Thomas, whose Collected Poems he edited in 2014. His poetry books include Illennium (Shearsman, 2010) and The No Breath (Red Ceilings, 2017), and he has published translations of Soleiman Adel Guemar (with Tom Cheesman), Heine, Pasolini and Reverdy. With Lyndon Davies he ran the Hay Poetry Jamborees 2009-12 and edited the anthology The Edge of Necessary: innovative Welsh poetry 1966-2018 (Aquifer, 2018) Click here to go back to: Contributors and Links to Pages 1 - 4
