Penillion Singing - Thomas Love Peacock (1785 - 1866)

Besides the single songs, there were songs in dialogue, approaching very nearly to the character of dramatic poetry; and penillion, or unconected stanzas, sung in series by different singers, the stanzas being complete in themselves, simple as Greek epigrams, and presenting in succession moral precepts, pictures of natural scenery, images of war or of festival, the lamentations of absence or captivity, and the complaints or triumphs of love. This penillion-singing long survived among the Welsh peasantry almost every other vestige of bardic customs, and may still be heard among them on the few occasions on which rack-renting, tax collecting, common-enclosing, methodist-preaching, and similar developments of the light of the age, have left them either the means or inclination of making merry.

From :- The Misfortunes of Elphin

Hen benillion ( literally 'old verses') are a unique form of folk poetry in Britain. Dating from the 16th century and earlier these short verses, or chains of verses, were composed to be spoken or sung to a harp accompianiment. They have been performed at socialgathering in Wales for centuries, enriching the collective public memory with their mix of proverbs, saws, catchphrases and commentary on local events characters. They are, quite literally, a people's poetry, and regular reciters would have hunreds in their repetoires. They were written in free, as opposed to traditional fixed metres.

from:- A people' poetry, seren , 1997.

PENILLION

Hardd yw Conwy, hardd yw Nefyn,
Hardd yw brigau coedydd Mostyn,
Haddaff lle'r wy'n allu 'nabod
Yn y byd yw dyffryn Meifod.

(Conway is fair, Nevin is fair, the tips of the Mostyn trees are fair, the fairest place I can ever know in the world is Meivod Valley. )

Cleddwch fi, pan fyddwyf farw,
Yn y coed dan ddail y derw;
Chwi gewch weled llanc penfelyn
Ar fy medd yn canu'r delyn.

( Bury me, when I am dead, in the trees under the oak leaves; you shall see a yellow-haired youth on my grave playing the harp.)

Mae dwy galon yn fy mynwes,
Un yn oer a'r llall yn gynness;
Un yn gynnes am ei charu,
A'r llall yn oer rhag ofn ei cholli.

( There are two hearts in my bosom, one is cold and the other warm; one is warm through love of her, and the other is cold through fear of losing her.)

Futher Penillion translated By Mr Glyn Jones

Amser sydd i dewi ar bopeth,
amser sydd i ddwedyd rhywbeth,
Ond ni ellir cael un amser
I ddweud popeth yn ddibryder.

( Theres a time for saying nothing;there's a time for saying something; there never is a time for pouring the whole truth out and nver caring.)

Cyn i mi yfed nid oeedwdwn yn gweled
Ffordd yn y byd i dalu fy nyled.
Ond wedi im yfed yr oeddwn yn gweled
Digon i dalu a digon i yfed.

( Before I got boozed up I just couldn't see, how to pay all the bills they kept sending me, But when I got drunk, oh I knew how to get more money to booze with and pay off my debt.)

Maent yn dewdyd bod yr wylan
Ar y traeth yn cadw tafarn,
Ac yn gwerthu'n rhad y ddiod, -
Dyna un o'r saith rhyfedodd.

I'm told the seagull in some cavern
By the sea-shore keeps a tavern,
Where he sells cheap beer for fun.
Of the Seven Wonders - this is one!

Tebyg ydyww'r delyn dyner
I ferch wen a'i chnwad melysber;
Wrth ei theimlo mewn cyfrinach,
Fe ddaw honno'n fwynach, fwynach.

The gentle harp is like a fresh
Young maiden, and her tender flesh;
What follows fingering her in secret
Is something sweeter and more dulcet.

Pen-Y- Gadair

Edwin Morgan - Colossus of Scotish Poetry has left the building ( 27/4/1920- 17/8/2010).

Edwin Morgan who died last week was the national poet of Sotland, a masterful writer with a vast palatte to draw on, he was both poet and scholar. He was a true innovator and experimenter influenced by numerous forms such as the Black Mountain poets, the Beats ( he was a friend and champion of Alexander Trocchi) Russian modernism, and the Portugese concrete poets. Born in Glasgow in 1920 to presbertarian parents he had a strong sense of fun, mischevious but gentle. His love poems very tender, although gay he never actually came out until ageds 70, so until then the love objects in his love poems were not gendered. He was loved nevertheless by his people, along with Sorley MacClean and Alisdair Gray he opened my eyes to Scottish culture, and its details .He was a true individual who saw himself as a republican Scottish nationalist and was of deep and passionate feeling. Outspoken but gentle. Surrealistic laughter, never guess what's round the corner. Tender, passionate.
He served with the RAMC as a conscientious objector during the second World War in the Middle East. He became a lecturer in English at the University of Glasgow until his retirement in 1980.
He caught in full sight his lyric epiphanies, in the focus and refocus of sequences, the wily reification of words in concrete poems, and the wierd rhythyms of sound poems. His transforming imagination was democratic, generous and inclusive. Ian Crichton Smith wrote that Morgan's poetry ' welcomes the twentieth century, with its gadgets, its paradoxes, graffiti, new languages, torn advertisements, uncoscious jokes, voyages...' His words were always an adventure and were like looking at a stained glass of paradise. A magpies eye for detail , in tune with modern pop culture not afraid at speaking out, mocking,anger, rage but then capable of huge reliefs of quick fire humour.
I heard him last on an album by the Scottish band Idlewild in which he recited a poem , "Scottish Fiction " . In later years he lived in a care home as his health got worse but he never stopped writing.
Yesterday as I wrote these words on a computer I was using in the local library suddenly all the computers crashed and their was a sudden emptiness that I can't explain, I do know I believe in the power of poetry and yet another leaf had fallen. May he be at peace. A writer of many many wonderful books check them out.

The Change

For all its banks bursting with bullion,
the land of injustice will not prosper.

The skyscrapers shine as if they could never
smell black smoke or shake to thunder.

Tanks, whips, dogs, laws - the panopoly
cracks steadily, being built over a fault.

Of course there are battleships, communications,
planes; but the sophisticated do not have it.

The spirit has it, the spirit of the people has it
townships, shantytowns, jails, funerals

have it. It is no use digging in,
rulers, unless you dig a pit to be

tipped into. Ruling has gone on too long,
will not be saved by armbands or the laager.

The unjust know this very well.
They lay ears to the ground, hear hooves.

Beasts, one time; an express, one time;
men, one time; history, one time.

Straighten up and pat your holsters.
Self-righteousness and a ramrod back

will not help. The sun goes down with you,
other fruits ripen for other lips.

1987

A Good Year for Death

Where is Callas la Divina
with her black velvet and her white passion?
Where are the women and women and women
she threw into life for an hour from her throat
to float and fight? She cannot hear
the last bravo.
Death has danced her tune away.

Where is Nabokov with his butterfly-net,
his galoshes, his mushrooms, his index-cards?
He has gone in a whiff of bilberries and blinis,
his fire has paled, his puns have flunked.
Shades crowd the lakeside hydrangeas and sallows
skim quick and low.
Death has danced his tune away.

Where is Bolan, the elfin, now?
Who has taken his spangles and songs,
bongos and gongs, and his white swan?
Who has pied-piper'd the pied piper
ino that childless, teenless wood?
The metal shadow,
Death, has danced his tune away.

Where is Presley all in silver,
with his sideburns and his quiver
of simple rock, and what is that army
he's uniformed for, in a white sheet,
will theslowstep motorcade battalion
never let him go?
Death has danced his tune away.

And where is Lowell that sweet mad poet
with his rumpled suit and uranium finger?
A giant forsythia covers the Pentagon
with better than gold, but the magnolias
wax the Potomacwhite with grief-
in words at least. Be true, be brief:
we lack his fellow.
Death has danced his tune away.

(26/9/77) - a description of 5 famous people from the world of popular culture who died in 1977.

Smoke

I scratch a gap in the curtains:
the darkest mornings of the year
goes grey slowly, chains of orange street-lights
lose out east in Glasgo's haze. The smell
of cigarette smoke fills the bedroom. I drown
in it, I gulp you through my lungs again
and hardly find whatcan be breathed.
Are you destroying me? Or is it a comedy?
To get together naked in bed, was that all?
To say you had done it? And that we did nothing
was what you had done. Iago and Cassio
had a better night. It must be a laugh
to see us both washed out with lying there.
It doesn't feel like laughing, though,
it feels like gasping, shrieking, tearing, all in silence
as I leave your long curved back
and go through to the kettle and the eggs.


Opening the Cage
14 variations on 14 words

I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.
John Cage

I have to say poetry and is that nothing and am I saying it
I am and I have poetry to say and is that nothing saying it
I am nothing and I have poetry to say and that is saying it
I that am saying poetry have nothing and it is I and to say
And I say that I am to have poetry and saying it is nothing
I am poetry and nothing and saying it is to say that I have
To have nothing is poetry and I am saying that and I say it
Poetry is saying I have nothing and I am to say that and it
Saying nothing I am poetry and I have to say that and it is
It is and I am and I have poetry saying say that to nothing
It is saying poetry to nothing and I say I have and am that
Poetry is saying I have it and I am nothing and to say that
And that nothing is poetry I am saying and I have to say it
Saying poetry is nothing and to that I say I am and have it











The Loch Ness Monster's Song

Sssnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl ffnnwfl hnl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl -
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gn.
Hovpplodock-doplovok-plovodokot-doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl-
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp.

At the Television Set

Take care if you kiss me,
you know it doesn't die.
The lamplight reaches out, draws it
blandly- all of it- inyo fixity,
troops of blue shadows like the soundless gunfight,
yellow shadows like your cheek by the lamp
where you lie watching, half watching
between the yellow and the blue.
I half see you, half know you.
Take care if you turn now to face me.
Foe even in this room we are moving out through stars
and forms that never let us back, your hand
lying lighyly on my thigh and my hand on your shoulder
are transfixed only there, not here.

What can you bear that would last
like a rock through cancer and white hair?

Yet it is not easy
to take stock of miseries
when the soft light flickers
along our aems in the stillness
where decisions are made.
You have to look art me,
and then it's time that falls
talking slowly to sleep.



As I have said Edwin Morgan bought out a vast quantity of work
nevertheless I would strongly recommend his collected poems on Carcanet. Think it was reprinted in late 1990s.

James Kirkup - Tea in a Space-Ship.

In this world a tablecloth need not be laid
On any table, but is spread out anywhere
Upon the always equidistant and
Invisible legs of gravity's wild air

The tea, which never would grow cold,
Gathers itself into a wet and steaming ball,
And hurls its liquid molecules at anybody's head,
Or dances, eternal bilboquet,
In annd out of the suspended cups up-
Ended in the weightless hands
Of chronically nervous jerks
Who yet would never spill a drop,
Their mouths agape for passing cakes.

Lumps of sparking sugar
Sling themselves out of their crytal bowl
With a disordered fountain's
Ornamental stops and starts.
The milk describes a permanent parabola
Girdled with satellites of spinning tarts.

The future lives with graciousness.
The hostess finds her problems eased,
For thereis honey still for tea
And butter keps the ceiling greased.

She will provide, of course,
No cake-forks, spoons or knives.
They are so sharp, so dangerously gadabout,
It is regarded as a social misdemeanor
To put them out.

VINTAGE SOVIET RUSSIAN TEA CUPS.


For Bonnie, good moggie
faithful friend and companion
R.I.P

Datblygu- Ugain I Un

another classic from the mercurial Mr David Rupert Edwards, home again
lets hope their is hope.

Dafydd ap Gwilym, (c. 1325-c. 85) - To the Gull.

Bird that dwellest in the spray,
White as yon moon's calm array,
Dust thy beauty ne'er may stain,
Sunbeam-gauntlet of the maim!
Soaring with aerial motion
On the surges of the ocean.
Bird of lofty pinion, fed
On the fishes of the sea,
Wilt thou not disdain or dread
Hence to learn a rhapsody-
Rhymes of praise to her whose dart
Ever rrankles in my heart?
Wilt tou (lily of the sea!0
Draw near, hand-in-hand with me,
To the beatous maiden's home;
(Nun that dwellest in the foam!0
With thy glossy figure climb
Round her castle's walls sublime.
Soon the girl of virgin hue,
On those tow'rs will meet thy view.
Tell her ev'ry rapt'rous word
Thou of her from me hast heard:
Court her glance - be polished - wise,
When on thee she turns her eyes:
Say her poet loves her more
Than bard ever lov'd before;
That a maid so pure and bright
By Taliesin ne'er was sung,
Nor wild Myrddin's flatt'ring tongue.
Sea-gull if she meets thy sight,
Tell her that I must resign
Life, if she will not be mine:-
With unequalled pangs I pine!

Translated from the Welsh by :-
ARTHUR JAMES JONES ( MAELOG )

UK Zionist Federation Team Up With English Fascist Group EDL, Strangebedfellows indeed, wonders never cease.

A PORTRAIT OF A POET by Lewis Morris (1700 - 1765)

I wonder how the poor devil of an offeiriad ( priest ) goes on now. I don't hear anything of his being to be turned out. I suppose they don't drink as much as they did, poverty hinders them, and the alehouse will not give them credit. Nawdd Duw rhag y fath ddyn! ( God protect us from such a man! ) What beggar, tinker, or sowgelder ever groped more in the dirt? A tomturd man is a gentleman to him. The juice of tobbacco in two strams runs out of his mouth. He drinks gin or beer till he cannot see his way home and has not half the sense of an ass, rowls in the mire like a pig, runs through the streets with a pot in his hand to look out for beer; looks wild like a mountsain cat, and yet whenhe is sober his good angel returns and he writes verses sweeter than honey and stronger than wine. How is this to be solved? His body is borrowed or descended from the dregs of mankind and his spirit from among the celestial choir: what a stinking dirty habitation it must have.


From: 'Morris Letters'

Claribel Alegria (born 12/5/24) -Small Country.

Behind you
a riot of pallid orphans,
children with protruding bellies,
mendicant mothers
exhibiting their kids
full of flies
tricky beggars
who pour their life
onto a clotted, scabby leg
and filthy bandages.
I stop and yell:
'The sky is falling!'
'Dear friends,'
the fat lady comments,
shuffling her cards,
'have you heard the latest?
They say the sky is falling.'
At three in the afternoon
the board meeting starts.
I rise and say:
'Gentlemen,
there's omly one item
on the agenda today.
The sky is falling.'
The manager is upset.
'I propose,' he exclaims,
'the construction of a vault
under the earth.
We must protect our archives,
our valuables.'
The sentry reports the order
to the barracks.
'Have the troops fall out
in combat fatiques,'
screeches the general.
'Raise your rifles and bayonets,
hold up the sky.'
The day is overcast.
A normal quota of events
takes place.
Butchers sell 3/4s
to the housewives
and charge them for a kilo,
fat old maids vent their hatred
in classrooms,Don Juans
peacocks with their pals
while maids
ruin the meal,
and contemplate abortion.
Soon the small tree by the cafe
will issue red cherries;
sugar cane, honey,
marching cotton
and meaty clouds
will turn into Cadillacs
on a casino night
upon renting a suite in Cannes.
I sit down at the table of intellectuals.
'What can we do? I ask.
'The sky is falling.'
An old radical smiles.
He saw it coming twenty years ago.
'And if it's true,'
an angry student asks,
'what will we do?'
With a gesture appropriate
to the historical significance,
he pulls out a pen
and on the tablecloth
begins to compose a manifesto
by intellectuals and artists.
I don't go out for days.
The sky is not falling.
The politicians have said so,
the directors,
the generals,
even the beggars confirm it.
For every young lord
there's a knocked-up maid,
holding her own.
For every fat matron,
someone tubercular picking cotton,
for every politician
a blindman with a white cane.
Everything is licit, right.
My terror, infantile.
The public show
of anxiety
is bad for people,
is rotten for business,
scares children.
Tomorrow I'll go to the market.
The psychiatrist prescribed it.
I'll be in a position
to offer ten centavos to a beggar
and to feel compassion.

Liliane Lijn ( b 22/12/39.- Receiving Change.

Liliane Lijn was the first woman artist to work with kinetic text ( Poem Machines ) and moved in the same circles as William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Grecory Corso and Sinclair Beiles. She has described her work as a constant dialogue between opposites.She sees the world in terms of light and energy. It never stops.The duality in man and woman is set free. Their is ritual, their is the act, their is the moment.

Receiving Change

... the act of receiving, the passive act , is in essence active the moment it is accomplished with awareness. It is this specific awareness which is the particular characteristic and moreover the function of the artist.Call it attention, care, love. I see it as a tenderness with which I perceive the world. In looking I am caressing what I see. I allow it to pass through my system carefully with regard for its every attribute. This is my intention and my pursuit. Is this feminine? It is the way of pleasure and feeling. I speak here of the way in : reception. I speak of a way of receiving which I consider whole. At once passive and active. Passive in that its receiving is an acceptance as opposed to a taking. Active in its attention and its ability to focus. Focusing is the most natural way to make choices.

The Sky never stops.

Martin Ramirez (1895 - 1963) An accessible happiness.

Separado!

Last night I went to see the film Seperado, a charming searching film seen through the eyes of Welsh pop music legend Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals while on both tour and journey to find his distant uncle and famous over night Patagonian poncho wearing guitarist Rene Griffiths.
In 1880, following a controversial horse race that led to an unresolved death Gruff Rhys's family split as Daffyd Jones took his young family to join a burgeouning Welsh community in Patagonia. There was to be no contact between the families for almost a century until 1974 when Rene Griffiths arrived in Wales with his latin infused Welsh love songs and became an overnight sensation. He traces the footsteps of the Welsh colonists who fled their homeland in the 19th Century for Argentina, and it is truly a fascinating glimpse of Welsh history.
Director Dylan Goch follows Gruff on a tour that takes in theatres, nightclubs and desert teahouses of , Brazil and the Argentinian Andes as he discovers what became of his family, the Welsh diaspora and its musical legacy. He takes us on a kind of psychedelic road trip and what has been created is really quite magical, a portrayal of a beautiful and at times harsh isolated land, offering glimpses of a parallel universe. Building many bridges and links discovering many more sundry musical talents along the way.

It managed to hold my attention and most of the audience whilst not sidestepping the issues of colonisation and the beast of globalisation and its ravages. It deals successfully in my mind why a number of Welsh speakers went to Patagonia in search of a new life, in order to preserve their way of life, their language and the many conflicts that arise when people look for a new paradise and heartland.
It was of particular interesting to me to see the long lasting influence of intermarrying with the indiginous population. Their Welsh seemed to me to be clearer than our modern Welsh despite being handed down, and perhaps paradise was not truly found but they have managed to preserve their language and culture.
A must see whether a fan of Gruff Rhys's music or not, very enthralling in a hip, arty ,ramshackle way. Whimsical with a magnificent broad sweep.

Bill Hicks - MY PHILOSOPHY (AUGUST 1993 ).

I love to smoke. To me, everything, about smoking is cool. When I hear 'Kinda Blue' by Miles Davis, a cigarette magically appears in my hand, and I am THERE. Smoking is Miles Davis. Smoking is Tom Waits. Smoking is Keith Richards.
Billy Ray Cyrus does not smoke. Michael Bolton doesn't smoke. Paula Abdul doesn't smoke. Is this clear? I'm not saying people who don't smoke aren't cool - although there does seem to be a pattern.i'm saying a lot of cool people smoke,and smoking is part of their coolness. I know I surprised a few people when I toured the UK last year. During the first tour, I was smoking and discussing my love of smoking onstage. By the time the second tour had begun, I had quit smoking, and all the people who liked what I did before seemed genuinely hurt and betrayed. People wre yelling 'Judas!' and 'Traitor' and throwing cigarettes at me onstage. It was like Dylan going electric. While it was all done in good fun - except the lit ones - I explained my new lifestyle quite ingeniously. ( There's nothing quite like a hail of burning embers raining down on you to make you quick on your feet.) I told everyone the pont of my old smoking routine was that I should have the right to smoke even if you think I SHOULDN'T. Now, I should have he right NOT to smoke even if you think I SHOULD. The pont is - THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. After explaining this to the audience, they calmed down somewhat. While cigarettes were still thrown fewer and fewer lit ones were flicked at my head.
I don't want to toot my own horn here - you couldn't hear it from this distance anyway - but, I think I'm fairly open-minded when it comes to ideas of Freedom. I think I'm one of the only former drug abusers and alcoholics who doesn't decry the years I partied, or regret them. Instead, I look on those experiences As fun and exciting and crucial to getting me where I am today. And I believe all drugs should be legal and available. In fact, I believe that as long you don't harm another person, or get in the way of their freedom ALL THINGS should be legal and available. As no amount of laws passed seem to prevent people's love of freedom, nor squelch their curiosity, nor their basic humanity, we would do better to look through the eyes of love and compassion, rather than condemnation and fear.
Drug abusers are not criminals in my mind's eye. At worst, they are just sick, and I know of no jail that has ever healed anyone.
I ascribe to a philosophy of Gentle Anarchy. I believe people are inherently GOOD, and left to their own devices - with the free exchange of ideas and information - a joyful lightness would spread across the face of our dour world.
I am aware there are many people who do not feel this way. This is why I figured out a way to make everyone happy, while also furthering the idea of Freedom. Here it is: for those people who think smoking, drugs, abortion, and prostitution should NOT be legal and available - they're not, they never were, don't worry, we're cracking down. There. That way, the world would remain exactly as it is now, only without the onus of guilt, shame, and legality.
Does this mean I am suggesting people smoke, take drugs, get abortions, or go to prostitutes? No. I recommend you do what you want to do, which is what you're going to do anyway. I am merely suggesting we accept life on life's terms instead of drowning in a quagmire of niggling SHOULDS and SHOULDN'TS which have done NOTHING to freeour spirits from the cloud of guilt and shame that shrouds this planet. Again- forgiveness rather than condemnation, compassion rather than judgement, and love rather than fear. And keep in mind, this radical philosophy is coming from me - an avowed misanthrope. If I can feel this way, surely there is hope for us all. Have we learned anything from all this? I have. The next time I tour the UK, I'm not going to tell the audience I quit smoking. I'm going to tell them I quit fucking, just to see what they throw at me then. I look forward to seeing you.

POSTSCRIPT.

There was never a next time Bill Hicks died on February 26th, 1994.His honest ability to cut through the bullshit still very much missed.

.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Hicks

Terence Mckenna - Culture is your operating system

Llwybr Llaethog & David R Edwards - Ffansin Ynfytyn

Cicumnavigating: an experiment

River Teifi


It was fun, oh how we laughed, the driftwood floating, chasing
moss, dreaming of schemes, counting the hours, unpadlocking
the gates, half-in, half-out, a way to blue through a tunnel of zen
paradoxes unfurling wading through time, latitude and longtitude,
earth rythyms wearing their cloaks of anomynity
in these spaces  are the tiny resources of hope.
Alcohol is an anaethesetic it numbs the pain of silence
something that allows us to  hastily rearrange
moving round in circles,with detail pencilled in .
it is the last stand in the sorting room,
seeds of ideas breaking out
running backwards the honesty wanders
memory upturned, weight of the west meets east
towards another summer ending getting dressed
looking beyond grey, walking on goodtimes
Rising towards tomorrow
i'd like to know that acceptance is not surrender
old ghosts collect the rainwater
every day wears out..
to beat time I do not understand.
beat time i do not understand time beat i do
not understand we will vanish smiling we will rise
home is eternity.
The secret is surprise love is always here
delusions of heavens and sweet summer scents.
wild fermentation and from ancient springs we gather
waiting for dust to settle as the weekend laughs in secret.
Perseverence is never defeated
from beginning to end
I am an initiate of invisible chains
reverberating through existence
as beautiful threads bloom again
seek out satisfaction.
Amber gathers dust
echoe comes back from sound
these polished mirrors reflect the shape of things.
How soon is now? sooner or later
we will tiptoe on the water,
what follows is destiny
circle of ceremonies removes all
boundaries and wildness becomes visible,
the invisible  rising sustenance in us  all.
Is paradise's one hand clapping?
When is it time to surrender
follow mystic river down to the sea
tumbling beyond precarious tensions.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) - Revolt against poetry.

We have never written anything except against a backdrop of theincarnation of the soul, but the soul already is made (and not by ourselves when we enter into ppetry.The poet, who writes, addresses himself to the Word, and the Word to its laws. It is the uncoscious of the poet to believe automatically in these laws. He believes himself free thereby, but he is not. There is something back of his head and over the ears of his thought. Something budding in the nape of his neck, rooted there from even before his beginning. He is the son of his works, perhaps, but his works are not of him; for whatever is of himself in his poetry has not been expressed by him but rather by that unconscious producer of life, who has pointed life out to him in order that he not designate life himself; and who obviously has never been well-disposed toward him. Well, I don't want to be the poet of my poet, of that self which fancied it'd choose me to be a poet; but rather a poet-creator, in rebellion against the ego and the self. And I call to mind the old rebellion against the ego and the self. And I call to mind the old rebellion against the forms that came over me.It is by revolt against the ego and the self that I disemburden myself from all the evil incarnations of the Word, which have never been anything more for man than a compromise between cowardice and illusion, Aad I only know abject fornication when it comes to cowardice and illusion. And I don't want a word of mine coming from I don't know what astral libido completely aware of the formations of, say, a desire that is mine and mine alone. There is in the forms of the human Word I don't know what operation of rapaciousness, what self-devouring greed going on; whereby the poet, binding himself to the object, sees himself eaten by it. That is a crime weighing heavy on the idea of the Word-made -flesh, but the real crime is in having allowed the idea in the first place. Libido is animal thought, and it was these same animals which one day were changed into men. The word produced through these men is the idea of an invert buried by his animal response to things, who has forgotten ( through the martyrdom of time and things) that the word has been invented. The invert is he who eats his self, and desires that his self nourish him, seeking his mother in it and wanting to possess her for himself. The primitive crime of incest is the enemy of poetry and the killer of poetry's immaclacy. I don't want to eat my poem but I want to give my heart to my poem. And what is my heat yo my poem? My heart is what isn't my ego. I am that forgotten poet who one day saw himself hurtle to matter, and matter never will devour me, my ego. I don't want those old reflexes, results of an ancient incest come from an animal ignorance of the Virgin law of life. The ego and the self are those catastrophic states of being in which the Living Man allows himself to be imprisoned by the forms that he percieved by himself. To love his ego is to love death, and the law of the Virgin is infinite. The unconscious producer of our selves is that of an ancient copulator who frees himself to committ more vulgar magicks, and who has pulled off the most famous wizardry by having brought himself back to his self-same self over and above his very self, eternally, so that he was able even to pull a word out of a cadaver. The libido is the definition of that cadaverous desire, and the falling man an invert criminal. I am such a primitive, discontented with the inexiable horror of things. I don't want to reproduce myself in things but I want things to happen through my self. I don't want to reproduce myself in things but I want things to happen through my self. I don't want an idea of my ego in my poem and I don't want to meet my self again there, either. My heart is that eternal Rose come from the magic power of the initial Cross. He who crucified Himself never returned to himself. Never. For he also surrendered to Life the self by which he sacrificed Himself, after having forced it within himself to become the being of his own life. I want only to be such a poet forever, who sacrificed himself in the Kabbala of self for the immaculate conception of things.

translated by :
Jack Hirschman.


A CRY

The little clestial poet
Opens the shutters of his heart.
The heavens clash. Oblivion
Uproots the symphony.

Stableman the wild house
That has you guard wolves
Does not suspect thewraths
Smouldering beneath the big alcove
Of the vaults that hang above us.

Hence silence and darkness
Muzzle all impurity
The sky strides forward
At the crossroad of sounds.

The star is eating. The oblique sky
Is opening its flight toward the heights
Night sweeps away the scraps
Of the meal that contented us.

On earth walks a slug
Which is greeted by ten thousand white hands
A slug is crawling
There where the earth vanished.

Angels whom no obscenity summons
Were homeward bound in peace
When rose the real voice
Of the spirit that called them.

The sun lowe than the daylight
Volatilized all the sea
A strange but clear dream
Was born on the clean earth.

The lost little poet
Leaves his heavenly post
With an unearthly idea
Pressed upon his hairy heart.

Two traditions met.
But our padlocked thoughts
Lacked the place required,
Experiment to be tried again.


A.A.

EMPTINESS.

Looking to deep
find we forget
what lies on the surface,
reasons to be alive
instead of half dead.
Yesterday I refused
heroin tears
as Noel Edmonds
was blasting
loudly
from the T.V.
The record needle
revolved around
like death
nobody listened,
nobody cared,
until the 10p box was declared.
I see old friends,
putting holes in their skins,
these are the people
that new crusades don't win,
yesterdays divisions
now over the price of a tin.
Outside the sun was shining
but democracies village had gone
and a system that fails them
was getting away with murder
but there in happy mount
injection alley
they had erected a fence
around their own milltir sqwar
each to his own I guess.

Nick Griffin's tea party

detached
a little cold
listening to dambusters
on continuous loop.
Thinking of aryan boys
and the Queen
shines his eye
in transparency.
Reflection of his image
is very blurred
he wants to break free
feed the ignorant.
The shit flows
as he celebrates non diversity
switches off the lights
but darkness already in full possession.

Johnny Rotten: "Rise" against racism, boycott Israel - TRCB

Johnny Rotten: "Rise" against racism, boycott Israel - TRCB

From Penyberth to Parc Aberporth: Welcome to warmongering Wales.

Here is an excellent lecture on the militarisation of Wales in which an articulate voice from the Welsh media speaks out against the whole military industrial complex.
In which Angharad Mair condemns the use of West Wales for the development and testing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs. An issue very much close to my heart.
Sadly I have not seen much coverage of this issue from other outlets of the Welsh media itself.
I wonder why.
You can read the lecture here.

BEPJ - Lewis Valentine Annual Memorial Lecture – Angharad Mair

Pete Morgan - Poet, R.I.P 7/6/39 - 5/7/10 MY ENEMIES HAVE SWEET VOICES.

I was in a bar called Paradise
The fiddler from the band
asked me, ' Why do yo stand
here crying?'
I answered him, 'Musician
this may come as a surprise-
I was trying to split the difference
when it split before my eyes?
My enemies have sweet voices
their tones are soft and hard
When I hear my heart rejoices
and I do not seem to mind
I was playing brag in Bedlam
asking, ' Why does he kneel
down weeping?'
I answered him, 'Physician,
I think you would have cried
I was falling back on failure
when the failure stepped aside.'
My enemies have sweet voices
their tones are soft and hard
when I hear my heart rejoices
and I do not seem to mind
I was blind to the gutter
when Merlin happened by
asking 'Why do you lie
there bleeding?'
I answered him, 'Magician,
as a matter of fact
I was jumping to conclusions
when one of them jumped back.'
My enemies have sweet voices
their tones are soft and kind
when I hear my heart rejoices
and I do not seem to mind.


FROM
'Grey Mare being the Better Steed'. 1973

George MacBeth - To the small creatures of the dark.

Out of the dark
into the red moon-light of the corridor,

out of the dark
into the artificial day of your cages,

out of the dark
howling,

out of the dark
for the sake of new food,

in your mottled skin,
gathering hair, wool, and scales,

wings pleated,
or at ease in a straw nest,

so many of you,
believers in what the light will do,

and fearing it,
all fall, creep, run and prey,

all rise, flap, sing,
all cry to teach me,

I beseech you,
out of the dark,

into the dark
of another day,

all fly, step, waver,
all reach, leap, wander,

all come,
all bow down,

all pray for me.

ROMAN CIESLEWICZ - 1930 - 1996

Polish poster legend friend of the great Alejandro Jodorsky member of Parisian surrealist collective PANIC.He had a huge influence on European design when he moved to Paris in the 1960's, his work becomming very influential on the artists and designers that took part in the Ateliers Populaire in May 1968 and especially on those that would go on to form the political design firm Grapus.
 A  retrospective of his work now showing at Royal College of Art, S47 and it's all free, the showing that is, and i'll be fortunately in the vicinity, so will have to take a little look.
It's from 16th July to 6th of August

Tea and Sympathy

Nine to five
reflections
treading through
explanations
that do not
want to play
eclipse is due
apologies
come slipping
through sun and moon.
Sometimes
a tall tale
an ugly murmour
gathers
inconspicuous
functionality
seduced by distant violins
as sands of time
stretch out
arrangements.
Cherry lips
reconnect
bring us water
wash away our tears
all gods are equal
especially mine
illusions of nurture
and the long distant plan
am working at the femininine instinct
lights flick on again, bring me cold tea and sympathy.

THE LOGIC OF FIRE - Vernon Edgar

Picture :-
the logic of war, by William T. Ayton

The logic of fire is divided to the no nonsense of corpo- reality. Atomicity's sublimiyity broke, rudely awoke in excruciating compromise of humanoid form. Cyclotronic dees drived dichotomic percussion. Bombarded, we awoke, broke through and through our pierced side of Christ_Adam bomb-blown stilted mentalities. Meta-terran trippers trapped in science fiction jails, mystics run amucked up botched hockshop pitch batch shits gunk stuck, stainin' to filter out great moontide's flash flood of bad scenarios, the para-news deletions, unholy Hal-Lucy machinations of poor-toned think tank, a roller coaster green, hourglass-assed spider omegas, automated camp with globe-wide showers, blasted planet's bitter-bitten escapist exhaust, robotomized bludgeonists in the last metal horror, the fate of the Third Men, and according to John, attack of the interstellar locusts, snares and snags of snarls and sundry elect lookin' for the iceberg in their lakes of fire, private eye spying private eye in public dark of alien nation.


FROM ' Prosaic Mosaic '

WELSH POET AS MEDICAL HISTORIAN - Glyn Penrhyn Jones

The supreme genius of the English language proclaimed that " the lunatic, the lover and the poet of imagination all compact", and it is clearly difficult to define a poet or bard, versifier or rhymster. The Poet Laureate has been described as a mere " Versifier Royal " and his office has included such notables in their own way as Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Austin, C.Day-Lewis and John Betjeman. Not only are we in difficulty in defining a poet, but doubly so in the term "Welsh poet" - be he again prydydd, bardd or rhigywr. The world at large generally assumes that Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet- after all he was Welsh and he was a poet. So were Henry Vaughan, George Herbert, Vernon Watkins, Alun Lewis and even Edward Thomas, but they chose to write in English - their medium and their message was English, and thus they were essentially English poets and were virtually outside the Welsh literary and poetic tradition. I know that the Scots would hardly consider Robert Burns to be a Sassenach poet ( he did write in English)- perhaps they would compromise by calling him a Lallans poet, or more non-committally in the meaningless term, a British Poet. And then again was Yeats an Irish poet, when his fame as a poet rests on his English poetry but who was of a mixed French-Irish ancestry? There is no difficulty about calling Richard Wilson a Welsh painter or Alan Ramsey a Scots painter or Benjamin Britten an English composer, but when the medium of artistic expression is the spoken or written word in a language, then we must surely confine the term "Welsh poet" to those who use the medium of the Welsh lanuage.
That language is one of the oldest languages of Western Europe, and the earliest examples of its poetry date from the sixth century; it is truly remarkable that those ancient sixth century epics are comprehensible to the educated Welshman of today.Beowulf, the Anglo-Saxon epic, dates from the eighth century but is basically Germanicand noe reads like a foreign tongue. If English literature, as we know it,began with Chaucher, then Welsh literature in comparison is of hallowed antiquity indeed. At least over the fourteen centuries of its tenacious if nowtenuous existence, Welsh poetry - apart from its inherent artistic values and beauty- abounds with social commentaries, reflecting the political and cultural evolution of Wales in the manner of all national literatures. And even more so in Wales, since the poet here has always enjoyed the sympathy and the acclaim of his fellow countrymen to a far greater extent than in England. He in turn has been everready with the judgements, praises and castigations that have been expected of him.
The internal evidence of some poetic compositions sheds light on the poets' own infirmities, and their incidence. We know, from the format of their paintings, that Cezanne, Renoir, Pisarro and Degas were all myopic, that El Greco was a stigmatic, and that John Constable was partially colou-blind. The ebb and flow of William Cowper's and John Clare's poetic geniuses indicate their manic-depressive state- episodic melancholia was a common eighteenth century affliction. Some of their contemporaries in eighteenth century Wales followed the same clinical fashion, Lewis Morris and Ieuan Fardd, both suffered from hypochondria, "the spleen". William Thomas (Islwyn), the poet of Gwent, followed suit in the nineteenth century and with him a whole corpus of mid-Victorian Welsh versifiers, obsessed with death, in the manner of John Donne, and generally referred to as the "Cemetery School". The fashionable addiction to laundenham in the early nineteenth century influenced the poetry of Coleridge and the prose of De Quincey; it also kindled the fervid imagination of Iolo Morganwg, the 'onlie begetter' of the Gorsedd of the Bards at the National Eisteddfod of Wales. Again, the physical infirmaties of the bards, may have contributed to their inspiraiotn; it is conceivable that Byron's talipes equinvarus influenced his political and poetic heroics, that Pope's spinal deformity contributed to his waspish epigrammatic quips. In Wales we are historically fortunate in that the character and the physical peculiarites of the bards were often evident in their names and epithets; to distinguish all the Joneses and Thomases of today we must have Jones the Milk and Thomas the Tax, and they have their poetic counterparts for Gruffydd Gryg, the sixteenth century Welsh poet was evidently 'cryg', a stammerer. Presumably both the 'Gwargam' and Daffydd Gam had congenital kyphosis. Llefored Wynepglaw had the flat face of Lupus, syphilis or leprosy; Ithel Grach presumably suffered fronm an exfoliative disease, possibly psoriasis.
But we must turn to the poems themselves-the vast majority of them in systemised alliterative verse, 'cynghanedd', that has characterised Welsh poetry from the beginning-for the eclectic facts of interest to the medical historian The earliset of these, in general, would only excite the military medical historian, referring as they do to the nasty, brutish, and short lives of the peasantry in tribal society. The Anglo-Saxon 'maldon' poem of the tenth century, the French 'Chanson de Roland' of the eleventh century, and the Icelandic sagas, all have common ground with the early Welsh epics of Aneurin and Taliesin and others of similar vintage. Deaths in battle are commonplace, entrails hang festooned on gorse bushes, 'Angeu a gawsant a mynych goddiant' (Death they have suffered and frequent pain). Heads cut off by the hundred ('Vi a leddis cant pen'.) But among these insistent sanguinary pageants the occasional gem such as the picture of ageing, which must have been an uncommon experience in those days, in the llywarchy Hen poems of about the seventh century. In a picture reminiscent of a Durer engraving, an old man admits 'wyf cefngrwm, wyf trwm, wyf truan'. ( I am bent, heavy and wretched) and his @pedwar prif casethau' (his four great hates) are 'pas, henaint, haint a hoed'(a cough, old age, disease and longing). His back is bent like his old wooden crook('baglan bren'). He is the Lear of Shakespeare.
A sequence of stanzas in this poem are recited by a 'claf' of Abercuarwg ( The sick man of Abercuawg.) One writer has suggested that he was a leper - at least his affliction appears to have kept him from the battlefield - perhaps the only blessing of his dreaded leprosy. The prevading belligerence of the pre-Norman Welsh canbe surmised from the fact that the Chronicles of the Princes. 'Brut y Tywysogion, record that between 949 and 1046 no less than 35 Welsh rulers died by violence, a further four being blinded. One entry for 1043 records that Hywel ab Owain,hing of Glamorgan, died in his old age, ademise so uncommon apparently as to deserve a special mention in this record of the monastic scribe.
But it was not warand pillage and the occasional catastrophic harvest in that very vulnerable society of early mediavel Wales that decimated lord and labourer alike ( gwych a gwachul). Always menacingly poised was the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, pestilence. And Welsh poetry throughout the period of the Princes and right up to modern times was elonquent in lamentation and despair on the depredations of the traditional epidemics.
The true nature of these epidemics is often a matter of conjecture and conroversy. Professor Shrewsbury has questioned the nature of the Plague of the Phillisines, hitherto generally accepted as a classical visitation of bubonic-pneumonic plaque. ( It seems indeed that nothing is sacred). Since contemporary descriptions of the ancient epidemics are notoriously imprecise and unspecific, and speculation on thei nature is inevitable, a gentle academic jousting is enjoyed by all. Allusions in Welsh literature to pestlential disease are likewise frustratingly vaque, poetically bedecked perhaps, but clinically bare. Time and again the medical historian in this field is much like the clinician trying to sort out the symptoms of a patient who just will not stop talking. There are several instances in Welsh mediaeval poetry, in the 'cywyddau' of the poets of the princes and the later schools, where the manifestations of disease as presented are so protean and so obscurantly verbose that the affliction could be anything in the spectrum between devastating plaque and mass hysteria, However some @cywyddau' leave no doubt about the diagnosis and this is particularly and poignantly true when the poet himself is the immediate eye witness of the cataclysm, when his own family was threatened, and when his own children died in consequence.
There were episodic outbreaks of bubonic plaque in Wales throughout the fifteenth century- in the wake of the mid-fourteenth European pandemics; those episodes of @haint y nodau' ( the infection of the lymph-nodes') are vividly recorded in the 'cywyddau' of those Welsh poets who suffered personal tragedies. Ieuan Getin ap Iuean Lleision - although some manuscripts ascribe the authorship to Llywellyn Fychan ap Llywelyn Foelrhon- lost five children from the disease, firstly one Ifan, then another Ifan nine years later at the same time as the deaths of Dafydd, Morfudd and Dyddgu. There is little doubt what killed them; their father bewailed the 'swllt mewn cyswllt cesail'- 'the deadly shilling in the depth of the armpit'; glands like little onions here and there, as dangerous as hot embers, inch-long harbingers of death'. And then the haemorrhagic black rash, 'seeded like black peas, spread like sea-coal'. 'Galar oedd im eu gweld' he cried, ' I grieved to see them'.
Similar outbraks no doubt caused the deaths of the ten children of Gwilym ap Sefnyn, a north Wales poet of the mid-fifteenth century. Dafydd Llwyd o Fathafarn, of mid-Wales, about 1440-1450 described the death from the plaque of the girl he loved in a memorable 'cywydd', uniquely combining the poet's lament with a remarkable clinical objectivity. 'Ysgrifen chwarren a'i chwys yn llywio dan ei llewys, A hefyd i gyd ei gwar dimeiau fel mod mwyar'. ' The graphic gland, the trailing sweat, under her sleeve, Mites like berries around the nape of her neck'. The rash he described as 'powdered ermine on a lovely white skin'. as ' brown pepper and ink on white paper'. These English paraphrases are mundane compared with the Welsh original, but even these make us ruefully aware that the phraseology of our current medical textbooks is pretty insipid and humdrum.

Wearer of plaque mask



Dafydd Nanmor, another north Walian,descibed an epidemic with similar clinical features in 1448, and Tudor Aled, later in the fifteenth century, descibed how a nobleman of Flintshire and his family died of 'the black rash' ('Y Frech Ddu'0. In the sixteenth century Gruffydd ab Ieuan ap Llywellyn Fychan, of St Asaph, again in 'cywydd' form, described a Denbighshire outbreak of bubonic plaque- either the 1535 or the 1557 visitation to Shropshire and the other Border counties-@Gwenwyn yw'r bel lle y delo; Saeth y farwolaeth ye fo'- 'The bubo is poison wherever it comes; It is the arrow of death'. The threnody of Ieuan ap Madoc ap Dafydd about his fellow poet Syr Dafydd Trefor in the fifteeth century ' Gwae o'r nod ddyfod a'i ddwyn' ('Woe that the bubo wrested him away') certainly refers to bubonic plaque. It seems that Robin Ddu ap Siencyn Bledrudd O Fin, Gruffud Dwnn, Rhisiart ap Rhys, Lewis Morgannwg, and Ieuan ap Rhys ap Llywellyn, all fifteenth or early sixteenth century poets, were aware of the decimations of bubonic plaque. There is no doubt therefore that in the golden era of Welsh 'cynghanned @ poetry, the ubiquitious plaque often fired the poetic imagination.
Smallpox likewise; the Welsh poet often remarked on the pockmarked faces of so many of his countrymen. Tudor Aled, at the turn of the sixteenth century, when smallpox was commonplace , described the arms of a buckler-shield- perforated as if by smallpox- ('A'i freichiau oll o'r Frech Wen'0. Many of the popular lyric and ballads of the eighteenth century Wales referred to the 'frech wen', its deadlines and its disfigurements. One of the peasant bards of the 1730's, Cadwaladr Roberts of Pennant Melangell, bewailed his own fate in verse after an attack of smallpox and more particularly of his damaged matrimonial prospects, obviously pock-marked and very repugnant to the pretty maidens; thus, only hags for him for ever more! No doubt he was voicing the fears of many of his kind before the advent of variolation and vaccination.
The bards were naturally reluctant to record their venereal vicissitudes, and later-day academics still more reluctant to give them light of day.However Dafydd Llwyd o Fatarn, the author of the moving elegy to his lady who died of the plaque, himself contracted gonorrhoea, and waxed just as elonquently about that infection, apparently widespread at that time, about 1450. He admits though, as a loyal Welshman, that the infection was acquired in England. One or two of the rumbustious, if not Rabelaisian, Welsh poets of the eighteenth century, Lewis Morris and Thomas Edwards ( Twm o'r Nant) did imply that venereal infection was quite prevalent. In fact, a bardic and bucolic colleaque of Twm o'r Nant, Dafydd Samwell, an alcholic and a laudenum addict, naval surgeon and no mean poet himself, accompanied James Cook to the Pacific and there witnessed the death of his Captain.
In the immediate pre-industrial period of British history, several Welsh poets, particularly the ballad-mongers, recorded many of the more significent socio-medical events. The late 1720's were notorious years of death in many parts of Wales. Deaths were commonplace with the rural parish records providing a clear teatimony for the ravages of famine and of famine fever, typhus. One ballad writer of Bodedern, Anglesey, signally described the morbid years of 1728-29 in that locality. Again in the year 1740-42 typus and bloody flux added havoc to the general destitution, a morbid combination well known to the rustic poets of the prriod in Wales. Commentaries in verse, for popular edification, on similar catastrophies continued well into the twentieth century, being evocative and not only on the sociomedical milieu of expanding industrial south Wales, but also recording such visitations as the four major cholera epidemics between 1832 and 1866 and the typhoid outbreaks of the 1870's.
But onr of the foremost causes of death in nineteenth century Wales was tuberculosis, and to the Victorian Welsh poet this was manna for the muse. During the middle years ofthe 19th century some 3,000 people, mostly young, were dying annually of phthisis in Wales and the mortality rate here fell some 25 years after it had started to fall in England in the 1850's. As many of the deaths occurred in children and since the diseease was so widely morbid both in rural Wales and in the industrial south and noth-east many of the vernacular poets of the period testified, often from harrowing personal experience, to the banes and perils of consumption. J.R.Pryce (Golyddan), a medical apprentice, died of T.B in 1862 when the disease wasat its zenith of morbidity in Wales.
He was an introspective romantic and had modelled his poetry and his life on Keats. His Gwenonwy, who figures in his epic poem to Death, is directlly comparable to 'La Belle Dame...' but Golyddan was essentially a Victorian who was overwhelmed with the idea of death, at a time when death was commonplace, and in that respect was no different from Tennyson, Rossetti and other English contemporaries.
Welsh ballads of the late 17th century referred to the malevolent consumption; some poets of that perod list the clinical signs of disease in a way that leaves no doubt about its nature. Robert ap Gwilym Ddu, one of the most distinquished of the strict metre poets in Wales in the 19th century described the death of his only daughter from tuberculosis in 1834 in a 'cywydd' of the classical mould. There seems no doubt that she died of pneumonic phthisisis. The heavy debilitating and deadly cough, the drenching sweats, the toxic flush are all noted meticulously by the grieving father. The poetic form are the same, the familiar tradition was thesame, as in medieval Wales, but the disease now was pneumonic phtissis and not pneumonic plaque.
A little later, Elis Wyn, another poet of Gwyfrai, a notorious black spot for T.B until now, saw his sister die of the disease, as he must have seen many others. He noted the lassitude, the pallor, the weakening voice, the beady brow of the advanced T.B, patient. Between 1840 and 1880 a whole array of young Welsh poets died of T.B.; the deaths of so many promising young men is a stark reminder of social conditions in the towns and villages of mid-Victorian Wales.
This however was the last of the great pestilences, those catastrophies that caused the poet in Wales to voice the fears of the peasant. It is symptomatic of our history and of our nation that the Welsh poet of today, as our current Eisteddfodau confirm, is now concerned with the modern plaques of biological, chemical and cultural pollution. In this he is again a mirror of his generation; he may only protest plaintively about the growth of the subtopian Sahara but he is one of the breed that Shelley once caled 'the unacknowledged legislators of the World'.



THIS HAS BEEN ADAPTED FROM A PAPER READ BY
Glyn Penrhyn Jones
to the 9th British Congress on the history of Medicine
at Swansea on 7th September, 1973.
He suffered an untimely death shortly afterwards.