Poezzing at the Court
By KENNETH ALLSOP THERE were twenty-one other denNalb names under the big black word JAZZETRY On the pro- gramme at the Royal Court Theatre on Sunday evening, but this was clearly going to be Christopher Logue's night. His 'boor name appeared nine times, plus a-large photograph, on the ten-inch by eight-inch leaflet, price one shilling. All in for the price was his credo, beginning Poetry is gratuitous. . . . In a time whose chief generality is the con- tention of rival plans for survival and govern- ment, a poet takes sides, and if this generality is being stated politically, he becomes political,' and concluding : 'I have asked composers to fit jazz to my poetry because it is beautiful to do so, and because it may interest people who would otherwise ignore my work.'
There was certainly no opportunity of ignor- ing it during the following two and a half hours, and in case anyone's attention wandered from the stage, there on the attendants' trays, among the Black Magic, the Players and the ice-creams, were copies of Mr. Logue's new book Songs. And a further loophole had been plugged. Printed in that bonanza programme was a poem entitled `The Whore's Song,' a vivid little soliloquy whose final lines are:
Open belly, open purse, Sometimes I wish I had a dose, Who knows if a ripper conies one day? Christ Jesus, what a way to die.
To this Mr. Logue had appended a signed foot- note, which read : 'The Times Literary Supple- ment, New Statesman, Encounter, Spectator, var- ious American and Canadian journals and Hutchinsons—my publishers—refused to print this poem. The BBC rejected it twice. Published once in Nimbus, the editors were obliged to have the page on which it appeared printed separately, because the compositors "didn't like the tone." I would be grateful if those of you who buy Songs Would clip this programme and stick the poem on the fly-leaf, thus completing the book for me.'
Even before the lights dimmed and the standing- room-only audience at the back had squashed themselves into a congealed, heavily breathing silence, it had therefore become obvious that Mr. Logue was a devilishly quick-witted fellow, that we were all, in fact, surrounded by Mr. Logue. The ambush began.
Out on to the stage walked 1Vir. Logue, militantly informal in slacks, open-necked' shirt and dark blue cardigan. 'What you are going to see is anti- dramatic,' he told us. 'Just smoke and consider.' The musicians, Tony Kinse. y's Quintet, climbed up some scaffolding and began playing. With interspersions from Peter O'Toole and some others, Mr. Logue read his poetry, hand-mike in one hand, TV-interviewer style, while snapping his fingers in a very gone fashion to the beat.
Thus Mr. Logue has got in smartly in Britain with the poetry-jazz experimenting that for the past year or two has been voguish in the cellars and bohemian bars of New York and San Fran- cisco. A year ago, Mr. Kenneth Rexroth, the chief innovator in America of this cross- pollination of art-forms, commented rather sourly on the way his techniques were being mangled by go-getting young beats who were leaping up at the merest clunk of a piano key to roar their verse and prose into a microphone. 'I expect any day,' he snarled, `to see T. S. Eliot touring the kerosene circuit with Little Richard and the Harlem Globetrotters.' He continued: 'Crazes are usually pretty empty, sterile things. It would be a pity if incompetents looking for a fast buck turned this into a temporary social disease like pee-wee golf or swallowing goldfish.' Mr. Logue's view is that not until he took the crusade in hand had the synthesis really been achieved. In a hand-out for a Third Programme preliminary canter last month, he said bluntly that in almost all the American recordings of jazzetry (apparently including Mr. Rexroth's) the words and music had no relevance to each other. 'There was no "third thing,"' he declared. 'This we wanted to create. . . . Maybe this technique will take poetry out of the private collection into the street again.'
I cannot say I left the Royal Court on Sunday feeling that I had been among the lucky initiates exposed to the sunrise glow of a 'third thing.' There were moments when the attractive, chaste modern jazz, which Mr. Kinsey and Bill Le Sage had composed with the aim of incorporating the words inside the music as an instrumental line, delicately evoked and intensified the mood. There were fewer moments when the two sounds hovered at the point of fusion—in Mr. Logue's versions of the love poems of the Chilean, Pablo Neruda. But this is an elusive and perhaps chimerical unity that depends upon the music and the poetry being con- sistently of equal quality, so that at no time does one distract from the other and merely irritate by its presence. Too often for the good of the pro- gramme I found myself more interested in hearing the Kinsey group, and wishing that Mr. Logue's words were not cannoning about in the foreground —especially when they were the Patience Strong calendar mottoes of his 'The Singing Prayer,' with its admonitions against the kind of character who may be found 'combing his hair each day, but not his heart.'
To spread the Logue, the second half of the programme was given up to a 'news-play,' in which the author's credo about 'becoming political' and `calling for changes' was, as in most of the poems, exemplified by the rather repetitive use of words like 'piss' and other 'downright' expressions of contempt for suburban finickiness. The point Mr. Logue seemed to have missed was that by intro- ducing a pantomime horse and a variety of lava- torial knock-about, he.was providing precisely the kind of Victoria Palace red-nosery dear to the suburbs, and which did not quite come off here without the Crazy Gang in the cast.
Presumably the challenge set down in type in the programme was meant to hold good to the end : the attempt to 'take poetry out of the private collection into the street again.' I fear that a full house at the Royal Court can hardly be said to have accomplished that, for the total result was an intellectual's ENSA show. Lots of Mr. Logue, but not much there to make the population bay hungrily for jazzetry.
'Hold it. The Lord Chamberlain's just cut out the monkey business.'
Previous page
