I'd like to read something more cheerful.
And if I may, I'll read another page or two of prose, also
about Dylan Thomas.
It's necessary for me to tell you
that I had a book of poems published,
not long after Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems was published,
that my wife's name is Joan.
And I think it was--
this takes place in 1954.
My mother was busy telling Joan her some months earlier
she had called into Leah's bookshop in Cardiff
to inquire how my book of poems was selling.
I asked, "How is my son's book selling?"
And the assistant asked, "Who is your son, madam?"
So naturally I said, "Dannie Abse."
And do you know what he said?
"No", said Joan.
He said, "Not as well as Dylan Thomas's
Collected Poems, madam, which has also recently
been published."
So I told him, "My son--" I said,
"My son is the Welsh Dylan Thomas."
The previous November, Dylan Thomas had died in New York.
Like many others, I felt unreasonably
as if I had suffered a personal bereavement.
He seemed like a cousin, an older cousin.
Not only line from his poems immediately
came to mind, but a number of his sayings, too.
"Art is an accident of craft."
"When in doubt, fuck them."
"The printed page is a place to examine the works of the poem.
And the platform is a place to give the poem the words."
Dylan Thomas had not only been a marvelous if uneven poet,
but he also owned a genius for comedy, verbal and situational.
Not many contemporary poets were gifted in that way.
Like many others, I wrote an elegy for Dylan Thomas.
A month after his death, I had the opportunity
to read that poem out loud at a poetry
reading that took place in an echoing hall in Fleet Street.
Three other poets shared the platform with me.
Each of us was asked to read five poems.
In the middle of my first poem, I heard a disturbance
at the back.
I looked up from my book and saw Charles Hamblett
coming into the hall very late and pushing forward
a blond companion.
I had met Charles a few nights before the reading,
having been introduced to him by a manual listener.
Charles, I was told, wrote a gossip column
about cultural events for a national newspaper.
Evidently he was now on duty.
Unfortunately, he was also somewhat drunk.
He [? clomped ?] down the aisle between the rows
of wooden chairs as I continued my poem.
He [? hopped ?] out his [? ditsy ?] [INAUDIBLE] blond
girl in front of him, and people turned their heads hissing
"Shh."
I came to the end of my first poem that nobody, of course,
had listened to.
Without too much chagrin, I announced
the title of my second poem.
Charles settled in the middle of the sixth row
and smiled sweetly at me.
I had read only the first few lines
when Charles rose suddenly, swayed, and said, "But excuse
me," as he urgently shoved past bony knees on his way
to the aisle and the exit door.
I addressed my second poem to his disappearing back
and two rows of profiles.
Charles had left, I noticed, the posterior door open.
All was quiet as I began the third poem,
glaring at the blond girlfriend who had stayed behind.
I progressed through at least six lines unimpeded.
The hush was positively reverent.
The audience solemn.
Alas, in the middle of my poem, the audience and I
heard the distinct noise of a lavatory chain being pulled.
And worse, my fourth poem was also
interrupted, this time by Charles returning down
the long aisle.
When at long last Charles' [? wakey ?] feet were still,
I began to read my elegy for Dylan Thomas.
I began the poem uncertainly.
With all the eyes above those rows of wooden chair
stared up at me with goodwill, Charles and his blond friend
were now amazingly quiet.
Neither fidgety, I continued with rising optimism.
"Now one second from Earth, not even for the sake of love
can his true energy come back."
At this point, there was a dreadful howl
from the sixth row.
Charles, who apparently had been a good friend of Dylan,
suddenly began to cry uncontrollably.
He sounded like a wailing wall.
His blond friend plucked prostrated at his sleeve.
And I could do nothing but raise my voice to a megaphone boom
in order to be heard above his weeping.
(A LITTLE LOUDLY) "But far from the blind country
of crows, wherever his [INAUDIBLE] voice goes
about you walk through you."
"Shush," somebody shouted loudly at Charles.
"Why don't you leave the hall," another kind
member of the audience roared.
[INAUDIBLE] laid to rest, I gave up.
I sat down.
I could not compete with a hog of a man
in drunken mourning and an audience metamorphosed
into a potential lynch mob.
Unpopular, Charles and friend once more stood up
to leave, this time for good.
The next poet coughed, rose, coughed again,
and read his five poems through a great pained silence.
And that was it, the most disastrous reading
I've ever been involved in.
The next day I read in Charles' column
that the previous evening he'd attended a poetry
reading in Fleet Street, and that he'd
heard the most moving elegy for Dylan Thomas written and read
by the young poet Emmanuel Litvinoff.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]