Poetry Pop-Up, Remembering Nick Drake

Normally, I go across the river to Clyro on a Wednesday evening, to the musical evening at Baskerville Hall, thanks to Brian, who drives. This week, however, I was tempted by the Poetry Pop-Up at Tomatitos. There's one at the end of every month, organised by Marva Lord. I don't know much about performance poetry, but I do know about Nick Drake, so I decided to go along.
There have been several events focussing on the work of Nick Drake in the area recently. On the Tuesday night there was a musical evening at the Castle Hotel in Brecon. Some of the people at Tomatitos had been there, and said it was a really good night. Another event was at the Tabernacle at Talgarth, an old Baptist chapel which has been transformed into a music venue, and was highly recommended by the chap who was talking about it.
We started late, waiting for two chaps who had been inspired to drive to Tamworth-in-Arden to lay flowers on Nick Drake's grave. It was a 170 mile round trip, and they thought it was totally worth it! The singer/songwriter died at the age of 27, while suffering from depression, partly brought on by the lack of interest in his music by the world at large. Today, he would probably have found his audience.
So we started off by chatting informally, and I had to admit that I hadn't heard of Nick Drake until I started reading Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins' series (though I was aware of his sister, Gabrielle Drake, who appeared in a purple wig in the early 1970s series UFO). One of the main characters in the Merrily Watkins series is Lol Robinson, a musician who is deeply influenced by Nick Drake's music (and becomes Merrily's boyfriend).
Marva led the conversation around to a discussion of song lyrics as poetry, and read out some that she thought were particularly good, including The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (which she brought up to date with some modern references), a song she chose because of the news from Ferguson, Missouri. She has a great knowledge of blues singers, something I'm totally ignorant about.
Someone else in the audience said that another singer who would be worth commemorating in the same way as Nick Drake would be Paul Robeson - especially in Wales, where he had seen the similarities between the black experience in the United States and the Welsh experience of English rule. He was a noted campaigner for civil rights as well as a singer with a wonderful voice.
Some of the other regulars had also brought poems to share. Chris the Bookbinder had brought the lyrics of a song he had written with a friend in 1979 - or at least, the lyrics he had reconstructed from hazy memories of the song he had written with his friend - called Ursula Was.
Another chap, ex-army, had brought along The Naming of Parts, reading the instructor's dialogue with an authentic military bark. He said he thought that the class who were learning the names of the parts of their rifle must have been subalterns rather than squaddies, because at one point the instructor says "Please"! I first heard this poem at school, when Mr Jones, the Classics teacher, read it out, (he'd served in the desert during the Second World War) and it had stuck in my memory so well that I could join in with some of the lines.
The second half of the evening was a performance by Llew Watkins, with songs accompanied by an autoharp, which is an instrument with lots of strings, like a harp, or a very tiny piano, and a bar across the widest part of the base with buttons like an accordian, which are pressed to get different chords while the other hand strums the strings above. He was reading his poems off his phone, because his printer had died! There was a set of haiku poems, each based on one of Nick Drake's songs, and several more of his own work. Chris had brought copies of the latest Quirk magazine along, and one of Llew's poems, the Griffin, was printed in there, so he could read that one off the page. Llew has come up to Hay from London, where he lives in Limehouse and is involved in the performance poetry and music scene. He was talking about a performance that is in the process of being developed, a one night only magazine. He's been making eight foot tall pages, using papier mache, some of which will have cut outs to show a performance behind them. He's taking the part of the contents page. It sounds like the sort of thing Tim the Gardener was telling me about, when the surrealists were doing strange things on stage in the middle of the First World War.