John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry

John Tripp (1927 –1986)

A great raconteur and an entertaining reader of his own poetry, John Tripp was regarded by many as Wales’s finest performer of poetry. This competition is a fitting tribute to a serious and popular ’Anglo-Welsh’ poet whose mordantly witty poems kept a close watch on the pulse of his country’s social and political life. Born in the South Wales mining town of Bargoed to a Cornish father and Welsh mother, he moved with them, at the age of six, to a suburb of Cardiff. After military service in the Royal Army Pay Corps, he spent the fifties and sixties engaged in various kinds of journalistic work in London, returning to Wales in 1969. He published nearly a dozen volumes of poetry, and a selection of his work appeared in the Penguin Modern Poets series; his Selected Poems (Seren Books) appeared posthumously in 1989. An energetic and distinctive writer of prose, he published essays, articles, reviews and short stories in a wide range of periodicals, most notably Planet of which he was literary editor in the 1970s.

In the National Museum

I went there on Tuesdays
at lunchtime, to look
at the Impressionists. Their colours
could take me into an old French summer
and let Cardiff sink in the Taff.
I never told her I went there
because she despised arty men.

Outside, at the top of the steps,
I took off my deerstalker
and hid my sandwich-tin behind a pillar.
Inside, under the big dome and high balcony,
there was dignity in the marble hush.
I adjusted my steel-rimmed specs
for the feast ahead. Then I saw the back of her
with an arm through some man’s
going up the wide stairs. I turned back
to the revolving doors, scared,
thinking I would strangle her later.
She was wearing her best dress
and her hair was like a flame.

First published in Bute Park and Other Poems (Second Aeon Publications), 1971