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...

Poem beginning with a line of John James As August counts itself out so the percentage plummets reading pamphlets avec pastis as is to be expected Words out of Time 'The Collect Gallery crammed with poets' p.43 Down to the lake for birding stench of beached dead carp Kenny trains the scope on the island sunlight on the water there is a poem in that no, there is a poem in that The respite of a rest area temperature drops at midnight Carried sandwiches foil & plastic wrapped evening before some kind of souvenir bread like bread bought from a post office Treated like a treat somethings taste better away from home Mattresses floored a camp shutters shut this is France after all     ‘Nightmare’ – tracking down an omission from...

To Read the Poem: Conversations in the Mountains (A Poem for John James)   2022 sees the publication of three books by Simon Smith, Last Morning (Parlor Press) a companion volume to Municipal Love Poems (Shearsman), and Source (Muscaliet Press) with artist Felicity Allen. His translations of Catullus were published by Carcanet as The Books of Catullus (2018), and he appeared on the ‘In Our Time’ programme on BBC Radio 4 in 2020 to talk about Catullus and translation.  Between 2006 and 2022 Simon Smith taught poetry, translation and creative writing at the University of Kent, London South Bank University and the Open University. In 2009 he was a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and a judge of the National Poetry Prize in 2004.  From 1991-2007 he worked at The Poetry Library in London,...

Three from Rolf Dieter Brinkmann ‘again the poems I’d like to translate’ John James   After Shakespeare The hand of winter falls and lies in the garden, where now a wooden frame has been erected. Dusky summer   fallen as the hand. Your head is frozen. The autumn with its dead fish on the   riverbed is like the stall with aged woman, who sits and reads the daily paper, till anybody   comes, buys one of the cold legs of chicken which lie in the fat-splattered glass container. The passer-by   pays, eats, slings the bone after the invisible angel. And spring comes, scatters the car headlights through   tinny leafage in the evening which with the wooden frame sinks down in the stream.     Mourning on the Line in January A...

Swift Songs for John James Late Advance to Bonheur i.m. J.J. the Atlantic Drift scrum spiders ahead to leave us pacing behind I’m attentive to frailty the dandyism of the advanced guard we plod the endless perimeter of the museum’s black railings its global plunder sealed for the night all the tourists off to their bolt holes all the wage slaves back to the peripheries (even as far as Cambridge) August Sander’s ‘last people’ swept out of our way all the poets ahead of us, it seems to play catch up I sing through Fred Astaire the British Museum had lost its charm you laugh and your laugh dances along the pavement ahead jouissance on its last barricade     Un(en)titled big ‘Old’ England – we’re still here and...

I met John James soon after moving to Cambridge in the autumn of 1978. I’d gone there, after doing some farm labouring in the Isles of Scilly, to do a degree in English Literature at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology. Later they changed the name to Anglia Windows Polytechnic, or something. After my course finished I moved away. First to Brighton, then Stirling, then Italy. But I moved back to Cambridge in the early 90s just in time for the first Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry. I had the pleasure of reading with Ralph Hawkins and David Chaloner at that first event. I taught in schools in and around Cambridge for the next 15 years. John James was a central figure in poetry. I had the good fortune to hear him read on several occasions. In 2007 I moved away from Cambridge...

Exultation (after Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd [fl. 1140-1170]) White the wave-foam that washes the grave of Rhufawn Befr, prince of rulers. I love, now, all that England detests: north Gwynedd, the groves that fringe the Lliw. I love the one who can grant me mead; that spot that the seas reach, contending. I love its warband’s sturdy buildings - a warband keen to wage war when bid. I love its salt-marsh and its mountains, its fort by the wood, its fine surrounds, its fields, its waters, its broad valleys, its white sea-birds and its fair women. I love the soldiers, their trained stallions; the woods; those who are steadfast - their homes, their fields, that are scattered with clover; a place where honour is triumphant; its lowlands, held by right of valour. I love its wild...

A Paper given at the John James Conference in Cambridge, 11th March 2017 In his introduction to the 2010 Salt Companion to John James Simon Perril, referred to a ‘politics of poise’ existing in James’s poetry and to my mind this relates to the poet’s wry sense of transience and his concern for the particularity of the moment. The artist Peter Cartwright’s contribution to that book was titled ‘art is a balm to the brain / & gives a certain resolution’ and his field of observation was ‘The impact of, and engagement with, the visual arts in John James’ writing’. In particular Cartwright noted how throughout John James’ oeuvre there appeared to be a constant interaction between the poet’s full awareness of what he saw and the ensuing fluidity of these perceptions...

  [caption id="attachment_7804" align="alignleft" width="675"] Wandering for John, after Friedrich 2022-11-08[/caption]     For John James, after Hölderlin    Unforgettably came, astonishing Hot, that plenitude. For we lack Song, which frees us now we are far apart sharer of my sorrows And trees surrounded us with fragrances   Came over us, dumbfounding Hot is wealth. For we lack Song that loosens the mind where we went separate ways sharer of my sufferings And there was fragrance of trees around us   In time for lunch, speechless Hot that encounter. For we lack Song that lifts our intentions until we met again Distant, in the undergrowth, and trees Were all around us with their scent       Allen Fisher, poet, painter,...

John James and J.H. Prynne Three letters written from John James to J.H. Prynne referring to texts which had been exchanged between the two poets. The letters are held in the Cambridge University Library Poetry Archive. I Written from Ross Street in Cambridge and dated 29th December 1994: Dear Jeremy Many thanks for sending me a copy of Her Weasels Wild back in May. It was much appreciated. I had time merely to tarry lovingly over the fur in a stolen diversion from my not-feel-good & job-enslaved abjection. Later in the midst of a bold defiance I carried it with me on an all too short excursion into the oaken fastness of the deep Morvan but was so possessed by the pursuit of the sacred that this singular liturgy remained in case & unleafed. Soon enough I was back to the flickering...

Lightness is an important motif, quality, and trajectory in the later poetry of John James – beyond the The Collected Poems and particularly in the Equipage volume In Romsey Town. By ‘Lightness,’ I don’t mean the kind of simplicity that John Wilkinson writes so well about; I take my bearings from Italo Calvino. When contemplating his 40 years writing fiction, and seeking some definitive account of his various experiments he decided ‘my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight.’ And he proceeds to pit what he calls the values of ‘lightness’ against his sense of the pressures a young writer is under to ‘represent his own time.’ He confides ‘at certain moments I felt the entire world was turning into stone’; and then grasps for mythology...

This previously unpublished poem was given to Simon by the artist Peter Cartwright at John James' funeral:   To read the poem, click here: Studio Poem by John James     A Poem by Simon Perril   always and never been i.m. John James   John, in the epistolary moment of the perpetually unsent, I headache today slipping between the always and never been   as an unusual was - my dripping, viral self high on Reckoning with the Dead, on an outsized Rutland bed - ways us towards evening, day’s climbdown, an act of brinkmanship.   So, let’s roll with it out to shape, seascaped on the outer-rim of circles and cycles unfit for Dante – what city isn’t unreal in the consequences it bites into residents’ dreaming flesh, official and...