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An Eclogue
for the World’s
Year’s End
KEITH BAYLISS © BOILED STRING 2007
a new work performed by
BOILED STRING
written by
JOHN GOODBY
7.30 p.m. Tuesday 11 December 2007
Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea
Full price £5.00 Concessions £3.50 PTL £2.00: includes a glass of mulled wine!
BOILED STRING are a multimedia poetry performance outfit set up in summer 2007 to present contemporary experimental poetry. They also perform adaptations of neglected masterpieces by twentieth-century Welsh poets such as David Jones, Idris Davies, Lynette Roberts and Glyn Jones. Performances combine the spoken word, pre-recorded sound, live music and visual displays in a heady mix that blurs the boundaries between poetry and other arts. The name of the group derives from Dylan Thomas’s antics at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, when he circulated among visitors with a tray bearing a teapot of boiling water and a cup full of string, enquiring: “Weak, or strong?” .
BOILED STRING are John Goodby (artistic director), Angela Coldrick (actress), Margot Morgan (actress and chanteuse) and Peter Williams (composer and musician). All have many years of experience and acclaim in the practice of their various crafts. Their mission is to promote experimental writing and Welsh poetry in these islands and beyond; to provoke, entertain and tease our audiences into thought; and to banish the glazed look that typically greets the dread words “poetry” and “reading”.
‘AN ECLOGUE FOR THE WORLD’S YEAR’S END’ takes its cue from four poems by Louis MacNeice, the centenary of whose birth is celebrated this year (‘An eclogue for Christmas’, ‘Eclogue by a five-barred gate’, ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, ‘Eclogue between the motherless’). An eclogue is a form of classical pastoral poem (the word means ‘selection’ in Greek) which takes the form of a dialogue between shepherds about their loves, lives and flocks. However, the innocent rustic setting is invariably a guise for an unfavourable comparison between wholesome rural life and the corrupt city and court: this is a poetry of oblique, but cutting, social criticism.
MacNeice’s eclogues, at once urban and urbane, personal and political, express Thirties anxieties about the Depression, the state of poetry, consumer culture and the rise of fascism. John Goodby’s updating of MacNeice articulates some of the disquiet and obsessions of the world of 2007 in a manner which is both newsy and apocalyptic, humorous and satirical: expect poetry about poetry, love, the misuse of language, gates, glaciers, global warming, terrorism, death, mothers, geopolitics and, of course, sheep.
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