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Celebrated as a leader of London’s ‘Underground’ in the 1960–70s, and a leading British poet and performance artist of his time, Jeff Nuttall found fame through his critique of post-nuclear culture, Bomb Culture, which provided an influential rationale for artistic practice through absurdism but lost that recognition a decade or so later. Less well recognised, and with greater influence, is the distinctively visceral sensibility underlying much of his creative work, notably his poetry that draws on Dylan Thomas and the Beat Movement, his graphic drawing and luscious painting styles, and his pioneering performance art. This article argues that it is through these artistic expressions of visceral intelligence that Jeff Nuttall’s art and its long-term influence can now best be understood. It is intended to complement the Jeff Nuttall Papers in the Special Collections of The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester, deposited by the gallerist and poetry publisher Robert Bank (1941–2015), to whose memory this article is dedicated. Further papers have been added by Nuttall’s friends and relatives.
relationship which binds parent and child. Whereas a comparable poem – Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go Gentle into that Good Night’ 26 – revolves around humanity’s struggle against death. Pasolini’s ‘ Supplica’ opens and ends with the subjective position of the poet. The focus of Thomas’s famous poem is clearly the confrontation with mortality on a level beyond the singular fate of the poet’s father. Pasolini
use of traditional rhyme and metre towards the free-verse and syntactical experimentation of his later work, as well as from his long-term publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis, to the London-based Macmillan. 2 The phrase ‘the heart’s need’ is Thomas’s own, occurring for the first time in ‘The Lonely Farmer’ (An Acre of Land, 1952) and again in ‘Taliesin 1952’ (Song at the Year’s Turning, 155). 3 John Ackerman, in his valuable study Welsh Dylan: Dylan Thomas’s Life, Writing and His Wales (1998), echoes Eliot’s definition, perceptively highlighting a similar quality in the
there, omnipresent and all-powerful, to be propitiated, thanked, obeyed, and co-operated with. (13–14) While Scammell, in this quotation, seems to create an historical then/now dichotomy, he goes on in succeeding lines to defeat that dichotomy by reference to the poetry of Dylan Thomas. He writes that, for those early humans, ‘“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower” … was no more detachable from existence than birth or death, and certainly not an object of study’ (13–14). Scammell is using Thomas here to indicate a modern consciousness towards
with a pre-planned message. 4 An approved ‘way to go round’ for visitors was illustrated in the guidebook by means of dotted lines, and accompanied by a neurotic emphasis on mapping and signposting on the site – but was generally ignored. Detailed captions and information boards were carefully composed, but, as Black put it, ‘it is doubtful whether more than a single sentence lingered in the mind’. 5 Dylan Thomas, speaking in a BBC Radio broadcast, described how the chaotic subjectivity of the individuals passing through made the South Bank a playful and liberating
the aborted dramatic fragment Mittelalterliches Dreieck , for which Beckett drew on a scene from Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (Van Hulle and Verhulst, 2017a : 29–34)? Additionally, while he condemned the New York staging of Dylan Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood as a ‘crime’, despite the author's own involvement in the adaptation process (Cleverdon, 1969 ; Brinnin, 1989 ), 8 he lauded Mary Manning Howe's stage adaptation of Finnegans Wake ( The Voice of Shem ) as ‘[v
Wedding Anniversary’ by the Welsh author Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), and this links the composition and the quotation to the title of Pérez-Sauquillo’s book. The poem, directed to a second-person singular, successfully presents love as something raw, aggressive and 166 Cullell_ContempPoetry_02_Poems.indd 166 28/04/2014 17:24 even distressing. This composition is also dominated by two distinct elements: the Egyptian references and their high-cultured attitude, and a more informal and colloquial tone. Lines 1–10: The lack of a capital letter at the beginning of the first
librarian at Yale University, and would often regale her children with whatever it was that she happened to be reading at the time. These readings included poetry, Elson’s earliest experience of which was when her father read ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ by Dylan Thomas to them during the festive season. As well as listening to and reading poetry, Elson also began to write poems from a young age, her first forays surfacing alongside those initial scientific endeavours: in the camper van while driving along the shores of Lake Agassiz. Elson’s English teachers further
his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame; which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities’. The second epigraph is from a Dylan Thomas letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson: ‘All Wales is like this. I have a friend who writes long and entirely unprintable verses beginning, “What are you Wales, but a tired old bitch?” and, “Wales my country, Wales my sow”’.3 The novel is thus set up to be a fictional autobiography in which the author’s projected dreams of glory are punctured by a troubled
, it is also foundational to them, a characterisitc which Thomas inherits more recently from Blake, and one which he shares with his contemporary Dylan Thomas.5 All three poets depict the possibility of the physical and spiritual regeneration of the modern world through the realisation and application of a vision in which the dualities and divisions they perceive in contemporary urban or industrial life are re-incorporated through imagination and art into an original whole. R. S. Thomas is not only a poet who poses bleak dilemmas but one who, at times, offers