A Very Quick Introduction to the Poetry of John Welch
Born in 1942, John Welch lives in Hackney. For many years
until his retirement in 2002 he worked in East London schools teaching English
to children recently arrived in the UK. His Collected
Poems appeared from Shearsman Books in 2008. Other collections had
previously appeared from Anvil and Reality Street. He has run a poetry
publishing imprint, The Many Press, edited an anthology of South Asian
Literature, Stories from South Asia,
and worked with poets from South Asia and Iraq on the English versions of their
poems. He has written extensively on the subject of poetry and psychoanalysis.
His most recent collection of poems is Its
Halting Measure, which appeared from Shearsman in 2012.
John Welch’s writing is often based on the details of life
and cityscape in the North East quadrant of London. It combines vivid detail
with psychological investigation and honesty, expressed in language both direct
and haunting. The poems convey a real world, a shared world, but one that is
also riddling, seen with eyes that fixate on its rich detail, but in a way that
conveys both its familiarity and its strangeness, and the vital but indefinable
processes that mediate between the two. This precise blend of the visual and
the psychological, conveyed with clear and delightful language, is forceful and
honest, quite gently attracting the reader in and presenting by the end of the
poem a complex and energising pattern of language, sound, sight & feeling.
Art and vision are important within his writing – John Welch
has collaborated with artists, indeed is married to the painter Amanda Welch. His
poems often involve processes of seeing and understanding through vision, with
all the mixed and confusing imagery of London as it is. There is also an
interesting fascination with a language which is, like the city, being
continually seen afresh – his professional and artistic involvement with new
communities in London has sharpened a sense of the English language’s
strangeness, in a lived and understated way. It is outstandingly contemporary
poetry – pleasingly unfashionable and unaffected unlike much that tries for
this.
Here are two interesting summations from reviewers: “Yet the
characteristic Welch poem is out walking through the north London streets,
measuring the presence of the conscious self in its passing settings, and
making more of this modest and unmistakeable music:
“And I will walk slowly
Making the most of it
Absenting myself in the song
“This book is full of integrity – again and again, the seriousness of address; writing as if poetry were a matter of life and death. Quiet lyrics following one another like cold waves onto an autumn shore. No flash effects, no random scramblings, no posturing, nothing sly or trivial. Writing as if your life depended on it.” (Peter Hughes reviewing the Collected Poems on Intercapillary Space website.)
Making the most of it
Absenting myself in the song
“This book is full of integrity – again and again, the seriousness of address; writing as if poetry were a matter of life and death. Quiet lyrics following one another like cold waves onto an autumn shore. No flash effects, no random scramblings, no posturing, nothing sly or trivial. Writing as if your life depended on it.” (Peter Hughes reviewing the Collected Poems on Intercapillary Space website.)
“Attention is the poet’s true task, as many writers have
reminded us. John Welch reinflects the notion, asking us, ‘Is there a reward
for all this watching?’ The reward is, of course, the attention itself; a ‘seeing
emptiness.’” (Andy Brown reviewing the Collected Poems in Stride Magazine.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Poetry
A Place Like Here (Katabasis, London
1968)
Six of Five (The Many Press, London
1975)
The Fish God Problem, with drawings
by Ken Kiff (The Many Press, London 1977)
And
Ada Ann, A Book of Narratives
(Great Works Press, Bishops Stortford 1978)
Performance (The Many Press London 1979)
Out
Walking (Anvil, London 1984)
Blood
and Dreams (Reality Street
Editions, London 1991)
Greeting
Want (infernal methods,
Cambridge 1997)
The
Eastern Boroughs (Shearsman
Books, Exeter 2004)
On Orkney (infernal methods,
Stromness 2005)
Collected
Poems (Shearsman, Exeter
2008)
Untold Wealth (Oystercatcher, Hunstanton
2008)
Visiting
Exile (Shearsman, Exeter
2009)
Its
Halting Measure (Shearsman, Bristol
2012)
Prose
editor, Stories
from South Asia (Oxford University Press 1984)
Dreaming
Arrival (Shearsman, Exeter 2008) – on the relationship between
psychoanalysis & writing
articles,
reviews etc in The Bowwow Shop, fragmente, Jacket , London Review of Books,
nth position, PN Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Reader, Scintilla, Tears
in the Fence, Use of English, Wasafiri.
Recordings
CD: Lip Service, a
selection of poems (Optic Nerve 2008)
JOHN WELCH ON THE INTERNET
John Welch: www.johnhopewelch.co.uk/
John Welch’s
blog: http://johnwelch.blogspot.co.uk/
author page
at Shearsman Books: http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/authors/welchA.html
audio recordings
on the Archive of the Now: www.archiveofthenow.com
- search for “John Welch” or look under
Authors
poems on Great Works: www.greatworks.org.uk/quickindex.html#welch
recent poems in The Fortnightly Review: http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/08/poems-john-welch/
reminiscences: Being There http://jacketmagazine.com/28/welch-being.html
& Getting
it Printed: London in the 1970s http://jacketmagazine.com/29/welch-print.html
Reviews
Andy Brown, Laying Siege to an Empty Fortress: Collected
Poems, John Welch www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202008/June%202008/John%20Welch.htm
Peter Hughes, John Welch, Collected Poems www.intercapillaryspace.org/2008/07/john-welch-collected-poems.html
Tom
Lowenstein, John Welch, Collected Poems www.signalsmagazine.co.uk/5/welch.htmLabels: bibliography, John Welch, poems, reading
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