Solidified Might

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss

And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.

I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,

I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this

More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,

Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

It would be cool to say I grew up on a back porch listening to Elmore James and Big Bill Broonzy (as name-checked by George Harrison on late Beatles and later solo albums) but my first childhood blues experience was Tommy Steele on a dansette record player channelling Elvis (who himself channelled  the Black blues musicians of the South) and his "Singin' The Blues" is still my default. It always come into my head in these moments. Soon after, I was fascinated by Frank Sinatra's haunting track  "Birth of the Blues" with its mysterious tale of "some people long ago" working out on the fields (ie on slave plantations) who "nursed it, rehearsed it, put it through a horn till it was worn into a blue note...". I then progressed to a "Top 6" cover band's version of the Stones "Little Red Rooster" themselves covering (superbly it has to be said) the original Black artists. Later of course there was Jim Hendrix who actually was Black and sang some authentic root blues like "Hey Joe" amid the psychedelic developments though his record company left his terrific blues standard "Redhouse" off his first album because it was "too Black'! I was actually more interested in the various fusions and developments and I still am. Ditto Dylan. Ditto the Beatles venture - after years rooted in and  brilliantly fusing it with European traditions - the Black music they loved on 'Yer Blues" on the White album. Ditto Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac. (The debate by then was is it ethical for white men to sing the blues at all, an early version of our cultural appropriation debate. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's contribution was "Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?") Ditto the brilliant Side 4 of the American-heavy CBS sampler "Fill Your Head With Rock" - starting with Janis Joplin and even including one Black artist Taj Mahal. The Blue Horizon sampler "How Blue Can We Get?" offering one White album and one Black album (including Elmore James), was much rootsier. I realised its importance as the starting point of our music but , as with Led Zeppelin, it was the fusions and developments into 'rock' and prog and psychedelia etc that really excited me.   

In much later life, having a bash at playing and singing it myself, I realise that its great gift is its accessibility. There are blues virtuosos and geniuses of course - most of the above named, in the case of the visionary Hendrix perhaps the greatest blues-rooted performer and composer of all time  - but like skiffle and punk it's also not too hard to do it at a simple level. And that simple urgent formula and the way it lets your heart sing out with longing or sorrow is a Godsend. It began and flourished out of great suffering but it endures as a vehicle for joyous creativity, lover's complaint and a consolation for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 

Speaking of developments and fusions, the lyric is a villanelle, a 14C  dance form adopted and developed (from its folk origins)  by the French renaissance court. I'm not sure if anyone has ever sung a formal villanelle as a blues before. The villanelle form is dance-like, recurring and repetitive and based on only two rhymes and pivoting around two refrains. This suited it for my subject, a stony consciousness longing to escape from its deadening self-confinement. This is a metaphor we use in expressions like 'stony stare' and 'heart of stone' but I'm also exploring the idea from "God Speaks" by Meher Baba of what (infinitesimal) consciousness an actual stone might have. For more see,  - https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/villanelle-in-e-stone-blues

Back Porch Blues

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.
Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss
And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is. 

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.
I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,
I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this
More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,
Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit
Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.
The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

credits

A villanelle poem I published in 1991 sung on our back porch as a blues in E.

Villanelle in E (Stone Blues)

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

Birth of the deadliest thing on the planet,

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Damn all these currents of feeling that kiss

And wear me, so much, with their wetness, or grit,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is. 

Silence, a stare, are my anaesthetists.

I freeze out pressure, heat. I won’t admit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Sunshine, tears, won’t melt my heart like Ice’s,

I’m dead hard. Whatever moves, I’ll kill it,

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

I went to pieces once; perhaps round this

More grainy core, less brittle, I can fit

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

Made of dead reactions, buried stresses,

Grist to milling Earth, I’ll never quit

Solidified might, past-imperfect as is.

The Verb into Noun, the process into stasis.

 @PeacocksTaleFolkIndieDuo  for all our videos. The lyric is a personal best, perhaps a lifetime best, and comes from a sequence ("Evolution') admired by poetical luminaries like Ted Hughes and the editor of "Encounter" magazine, who published two poems from it in the 1980s commenting that in this one I "was brilliant at entering others' souls, even rock it seems." So while not necessarily any more profound than your average blues lyric (the human longing and suffering expressed in the folk poetry of the blues can reach an eloquence as high as any) this is in a higher literary register than "Well I woke up this morning" etc). For a start, it's a villanelle, a 14C Renaissance dance form adapted from folk tradition by a very sophisticated French court and given a new lease of metaphysical life in the 20C by 'difficult' modernists like Dylan Thomas and William Empson. To succeed, the poet has to manage two refrains introduced in the first triplet and repeated alternately as the closing each of the succeeding three line verses, before reappearing as the final two lines of the final quatrain, the whole in a regular line and meter. And to do it all using only two rhymes.) Like the sonnet and ghazal, it's a form the poet has to master before he or she can say anything meaningful through it but its recurring and repetitive (though graceful and dance-like) nature makes it unfit (claustrophobic and static) for many purposes. For "Stone' though (and for another I wrote called "On Being Locked Inside A Shrinking Room By an Inept Caretaker") it was perfect. The philosophical basis of my "Evolution" sequence is based on the "Evolution" strand of "God Speaks" ( Dodd, Mead, 1973) by the Indian spiritual Master Meher Baba - the most brilliant book I have ever read. In it Baba (amid much else) resolves completely the conflict between Science and Religion by explaining how the soul pursues consciousness through seven inadequate forms - (with Gas as a sort of precursor) Stone, Metal, Vegetation,Worm, Fish, Bird and Animal before reaching its optimum in the human form. Much remains to be done, millions of human reincarnations as every class/race/gender of human being and then a process of Involution by which the soul gradually withdraws itself from its own ego-consciousness and self-interest through ever-increasing love towards identifying its true self as God. Before the human form such conscious divine identification is impossible, hence its value as the perfect form. Stone is the least conscious form, being hardly aware of itself at all and lacking all the self-preserving instincts, mutual attraction and caring (as for the little ones) of the higher pre-human forms. But the soul identifying with it will eventually one day progress to a relatively more 'sensitive' responsive and aware form, metal, then eventually vegetation (with its first stirring of sexuality) and so on. So trying to tell its story is in many ways the basis of the whole of this sequence. Especially when it becomes evident that as consciousness ascends through higher forms, it becomes clear that we don't get rid of all the 'impressions' gathered on the way. Not only is the human body made up of a lot of 'stone' (our big heads for a start) but the potentially universe-embracing, passionately feeling, loving and compassionate divine humanity we have (humanity worthy of the name) is also still capable of 'stony' insensitivity to others and ourselves, so that the metaphors 'stone-hearted' 'stony stare' 'stony silence' may actually be actual as well as figurative. This is the metaphysical idea explored here in this adoption of a stone as a poetic persona. Finally, stone is petrified energy, was once overwhelmingly active and explosive as lava, or once living bones, or metamorphosed by heat or weight etc etc. And this principle - the verb into noun, the process into stasis - is also at work throughout Creation and in consciousness. (Baba called this impressing of consciousness 'sanskaras' or impressions, the formation of habits of thinking, feeling and action). Emotionally we re all "made of dead reactions", the experiences we have had and the impressions we receive, the habits of a lifetime (and millions of lifetimes?) become the 'solidified might' of our personalities. What can shift this stone-like petrification, reinforced by fear, hate, greed, doubt, lust, mistrust, despair, negativity? What can get our lives flowing in tune with the rest of existence? Only Love. More of that at a later stage of this sequence, (and especially in the second sequence 'Involution". ) Now though, I'll just sing the blues. digital download on Bandcamp, https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/villanelle-in-e-stone-blues )

A Love That Involves Evolution

 

Dereham Times Review of From Creation To Cromer

From Creation To Cromer by Gareth Calway.

Elsing Village Hall, Saturday 26th October.

Mention poetry to most people and the reaction usually garners a whole range of misconceptions and prejudices towards the form. Why does the general public have such a problem with the “P” word? It is, after all, only an imaginative arrangement of words making use of the amazing diversity of the English language, often with some sort of rhyming scheme and definitely embracing a strong sense of rhythmic flow; in fact all the elements found within a pop song, but without the music! So why is poetry seen as being difficult to comprehend or dull and irrelevant to today?
It was therefore possibly a daring idea to promote Gareth Calway’s new show at Elsing Village Hall, From Creation To Cromer, as a “stand up poetry performance” but this was certainly no dry monotone recitation of dusty old verse. The idea behind the show was to start at the beginning; the beginning of everything in fact and to take a journey through time from the first days of creation up to living in Norfolk today.
The show started with a sequence of poems and spoken word pieces centred on the first six days of creation. The poem “Comet” likened the birth of the universe to a sort of cosmic “fart” and saw Calway speaking whilst circumnavigating the hall on a trajectory representing the flight path of his subject. “Animal” was performed on all fours as Calway took on the personas of the creatures he mentioned, even at one stage howling wolf-like at the moon. By the end of the first half the audience were certainly in no doubt what “performance poetry” entailed and responded with appreciative and enthusiastic applause.
After the interval the advance through time continued encompassing a diverse range of themes, mostly with a Norfolk slant. Boudica’s uprising against the might of Rome was portrayed as a punk rock band on tour. The more personal pieces of poetry were introduced with wry and sometimes moving anecdotes and included such diverse subjects as studying at UEA in the 1970s, observations upon the game of football (Calway was club poet for Bristol City FC) and the profession of teaching. Drawing the evening to a close, Calway's love of Norfolk was evident through poems about Sedgeford, Kings Lynn, Walsingham and Great Yarmouth. The poetical journey finally arrived at Cromer upon a stormy night when Fairport Convention played at the end of the pier. Calway’s painstaking observation manages to capture the feel of the county in his poems, from its rural depths to the bright lights of the seafront, evoking that strong sense of place which connects the human spirit to the landscape. Poetry; dull, boring and irrelevant? Not when it’s impassioned, witty, nostalgic and poignant writing performed with a total belief in every word.

Dereham Times

Stand Up Poet at Elsing Oct 26

Review by Tim Chipping published in The Dereham Times

From Creation To Cromer by Gareth Calway.

Elsing Village Hall, Saturday 26th October.

Mention poetry to most people and the reaction usually garners a whole range of misconceptions and prejudices towards the form. Why does the general public have such a problem with the “P” word? It is, after all, only an imaginative arrangement of words making use of the amazing diversity of the English language, often with some sort of rhyming scheme and definitely embracing a strong sense of rhythmic flow; in fact all the elements found within a pop song, but without the music! So why is poetry seen as being difficult to comprehend or dull and irrelevant to today?
It was therefore possibly a daring idea to promote Gareth Calway’s new show at Elsing Village Hall, From Creation To Cromer, as a “stand up poetry performance” but this was certainly no dry monotone recitation of dusty old verse. The idea behind the show was to start at the beginning; the beginning of everything in fact and to take a journey through time from the first days of creation up to living in Norfolk today.
The show started with a sequence of poems and spoken word pieces centred on the first six days of creation. The poem “Comet” likened the birth of the universe to a sort of cosmic “fart” and saw Calway speaking whilst circumnavigating the hall on a trajectory representing the flight path of his subject. “Animal” was performed on all fours as Calway took on the personas of the creatures he mentioned, even at one stage howling wolf-like at the moon. By the end of the first half the audience were certainly in no doubt what “performance poetry” entailed and responded with appreciative and enthusiastic applause.
After the interval the advance through time continued encompassing a diverse range of themes, mostly with a Norfolk slant. Boudica’s uprising against the might of Rome was portrayed as a punk rock band on tour. The more personal pieces of poetry were introduced with wry and sometimes moving anecdotes and included such diverse subjects as studying at UEA in the 1970s, observations upon the game of football (Calway was club poet for Bristol City FC) and the profession of teaching. Drawing the evening to a close, Calway's love of Norfolk was evident through poems about Sedgeford, Kings Lynn, Walsingham and Great Yarmouth. The poetical journey finally arrived at Cromer upon a stormy night when Fairport Convention played at the end of the pier. Calway’s painstaking observation manages to capture the feel of the county in his poems, from its rural depths to the bright lights of the seafront, evoking that strong sense of place which connects the human spirit to the landscape. Poetry; dull, boring and irrelevant? Not when it’s impassioned, witty, nostalgic and poignant writing performed with a total belief in every word.

Dereham Times



The pics shows the poet shortly after the Himalayan-recorded tantric horn making the OM at the start of 'Creation' - 'Creation' is a one-man theatre sequence exploring the first six days of Creation in which (among other things) I orbit like a comet, wriggle like a worm and howl like a wolf on my way to the playing fields of Eden for a sequence of football and teaching poems, all nearer hell and purgatory than heaven but with glimpses of it;
one of Tim's Biblical signs
and finally the poet in media res The Clash Between Boudicca and Rome, an exhortation that Norwich gets a statue of Norfolk's ancient queen not just another 2000 years celebrating the Roman version. Leading into an odyssey of stand up poems from Celtic Norfolk through West Norfolk to Yarmouth, the North Sea - that seaside meeting of sandcastle holiday impermanence and the eternal fathomless ocean - and finally Cromer. One man theatre/stand up poet/one man theatre/ stand up poet. It seems to work.

Particularly prized was the audience participation OM with which the show ended, and over which I pitched the final couplet of the evening. It put the Om into Home.


AS FEATURED ON FOUR COUNTIES RADIO SUE MARCHANT BIG NIGHT IN SUNDAY OCT 20 33minutes in... (Steve Hackett was my warm up man and the show is rooted in Genesis...what can it all mean?)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001d7sb

October 26 is the day once believed to be the first of Creation (Oct 26 4004, to be precise, and they had calendars which worked it all out.) So, like Creation, I'm going to start from there and see where it goes.

I’ll be ranging through my seven published books of poetry – by heart and off the page – including the ballads and stories that have proved popular around the folk clubs. A chance to hear how the lyrical moments fit together into some kind of overall vision. And a no-repeat guarantee: Elsing has heard none of these – and nothing like these – before!

PRESS RELEASE

FROM CREATION TO CROMER

One man theatre/ poetry performance at Elsing Village Hall Saturday October 26

PRESS RELEASE
FROM CREATION TO CROMER

One man theatre/ poetry performance at Elsing Village Hall Saturday October 26

There are no lonely, wandering daffodils or dust-dry crossword puzzles here, only insightful, impassioned, witty and poignant writing which draws on our collective experiences of living in the modern age. Of Gareth Calway, Ted Hughes (Poet Laureate until his death in 1998) said, "wholesome, strong and to my tastes, simple in the best way, the real way"; The Guardian thought his ‘Tales Out Of School’ ‘very funny...a metaphor for a country in decline’; our very own EDP (reviewing his Norfolk and Norwich festival show House on the River) proclaimed Gareth “an eloquent poet,” The Scotsman described his performance of King Arthur’s legend at the Edinburgh Fringe as “slam poetry with a patriotic twist..... packed full of boyhood glee’ while Three Weeks (the Fringe festival review) called his punk-rock take on Norfolk’s warrior queen Boudicca ‘impassioned ruthless and funny’.
Of From Creation to Cromer Gareth says, ‘This is my first one man theatre/poetry show since I took Arthur and Boudicca to the Edinburgh fringe in 2011 and I’m really excited about premiering it at Elsing Village Hall, where Tom and Harry (Gareth’s play about Anne Boleyn and then men in her life) played to a full and appreciative house last May.
http://www.derehamtimes.co.uk/news/review_lots_of_history_as_cast_serves_up_a_real_treat_in_the_village_hall_1_2228196)
After a series of successful and enjoyable collaborations with actors and musicians across Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, and many well-received individual poems performed at Norfolk folk clubs like The Wolf, Gin Trap Folk, Meet In The Hedge and Folkspot Radio, I want to bring all the music and theatre of words back home to the single poet on stage, acting out his stories - and fitting the heightened moments each individual poem gives into an overall vision.’
‘October 26 4004 was once believed to be the first day of Creation. You could say ‘From Creation to Cromer’ sets the passing fairs of time represented by the sea front against the metaphorical eternity of the North Sea. But not always as seriously as that sounds!
Tickets are on sale now priced £6 advance from The Old Chapel, Elsing, Tel. 01362 637331 or from Sounds Music, Dereham. Entry will be £7.50 on the door. The Mermaid Inn will provide a bar which will be open from 7.45pm when the doors open. Performance commences at 8.30pm.