Peter Thabit Jones, "Under the Raging Moon"

 

Peter Thabit Jones has authored sixteen books. He has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe and is an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. A recipient of many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, London) and the Homer: European Medal of Poetry and Art, two of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, and Theatre National Du Luxembourg.  A book of poems, A Cancer Notebook, is forthcoming. Further information is on his website here.  

Front cover artwork by Swansea artist Jeffrey Phillips

About Under the Raging Moon: One Night with Dylan Thomas in Greenwich Village, New York: A Drama in Four Acts, by Peter Thabit Jones

October, 1953. Dylan Thomas, unwell and harassed by personal problems, is on his fourth and fatal visit to America, organised by John Malcolm Brinnin, Director at the YM & YWHA Poetry Center in New York. 

October 25th. Dylan, accompanied by Liz Reitell, Brinnin’s assistant, with whom he started an affair on his third visit, is in a taxi on the way to Greenwich Village. Since his arrival in the city, she has been trying to keep him away from his ‘hangers-on’ and to focus him on the upcoming two performances of his Under Milk Wood at the Kaufmann Auditorium. Unhappy and upset by his general behaviour, she stops the taxi near her apartment and abandons him to do whatever he pleases.

In this imagined scenario, he stops at some bars where he mainly meets people unknown to him. The final bar is the White Horse Tavern, his favourite drinking place in the Village.

Note: In the early hours of 3rd November, Dylan would leave the Chelsea Hotel and an upset Liz. His last-ever drinking spree would lead to him being rushed to St Vincent’s Hospital on November 5th, where he would go into a coma and die on November 9th. 

This imagined evening with Dylan Thomas, unwell and who becomes somewhat drunk as the hours pass in his visits to four pubs in Greenwich Village, New York, aims to show the man behind the legend when he is among non-literary people: people unknown to him, apart from two bar people and two hangers-on. Always in the back of my mind were some comments by his Swansea friends, such as the poet Vernon Watkins and the painter Alfred Janes, who knew the pre-legend Dylan, that he could be ‘ordinary’ with the right people. I have aimed for that ‘ordinariness,’ the ability to empathise with others, in a genius of a man. 

His time with my chosen characters brings out certain themes: fatherhood, childhood, money, love and death. They were some of the themes that permeated his works and his letters.

You can read more about Under the Raging Moon on the UK publisher's website here and in the US here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening of Act Two. 

From Under the Raging Moon

ACT TWO

The stage is lit to show a section of another American bar. AVA, the young barwoman, is behind the counter. Enter DYLAN THOMAS. 

AVA: Mr. Dylan Thomas! (Looking at EZRA LOWELL, who is sitting at a table).  This is Dylan Thomas, a very famous poet. 

DYLAN THOMAS: I’m just posing as Dylan Thomas, my dear.

AVA: Oh, you are a wicked, Mr. Thomas! You don’t fool me!

AVA to EZRA LOWELL: He’s from England.  A very famous—

DYLAN THOMAS: From Wales. I’m Welsh. Welsh as a slice of bara brith from Carmarthen market.

AVA: Oh, I just love it when someone speaks another language! Don’t you, Mr. Lowell?  No friends with you tonight, Mr. Thomas?

DYLAN THOMAS: No.  I’m a dumped poet. Dumped by a female friend who thinks I am not fit to share the Manhattan air with her.

AVA:  Oh, poor Mr. Thomas.  Sit with Mr. Lowell. He’s by himself too.

DYLAN THOMAS (looking at EZRA LOWELL): May I become the second member of your club for lonely men? 

EZRA LOWELL: Take a seat. What you drinking, famous poet?

DYLAN THOMAS: An Old Grandad whisky, Ava.

EZRA LOWELL: Another gin for me.

AVA: Drinks for the lonely men coming up.

DYLAN THOMAS sits at the table. He lights a cigarette.

EZRA LOWELL: I’m Ezra Lowell, company manager of Ezra Lowell Cars Limited.  I have six car showrooms throughout New York and I’m planning to set two up in Boston next year. I own two properties in Greenwich Village, which of course is the more genteel part of Manhattan.  

DYLAN THOMAS: I’m Dylan Thomas, company manager of various poems and stories. I don’t have a car and I don’t own a single property. I live in Laugharne, which is not even shown on a map of Wales.

EZRA LOWELL: I take it sarcasm is part of a poet’s baggage?

DYLAN THOMAS: I prefer to call it the Welsh wit when it comes to words.

EZRA LOWELL: So what do you think of our Manhattan?

DYLAN THOMAS: All is (emphasising) now in this city! It’s gaudy carnival of neon lights calling all to worship mammon. Its canyons of skyscrapers threatening the ceiling of the night. Car horns going into battle with each other. Traffic flooding the avenues and people flooding the sidewalks. It’s as if a dream and nightmare have got into bed together. Is this the madness before the second Fall of mankind?  

EZRA LOWELL: Are you serious? This is the greatest city in the greatest country in the world.

DYLAN THOMAS: And money electrifies this buzzing, massive fairground! Ah, the heart is a green dollar! Even I, an overweight and word-burdened poet, have a beer-cleansed belly of hunger for it. The need for money sings among the rhyming lines in my mind. Money for Caitlin, oh my lioness of a wife. Money for our little litter of children, and money for me as poor as a public bar mouse.

Why have I come once more to this insomniac city, to parade my roar of a voice in the judging-eared halls, to be tortured by the educated questions of the sweet salaried academics? Ah, a pocket’s bulge of tempting dollars as green as envy!

EZRA LOWELL: Very fancy words, as expected from the likes of you.

AVA places their drinks on the table.

AVA: Enjoy!

EZRA LOWELL: Wouldn’t a proper job feed and clothe, what did you say, your litter of children?

DYLAN THOMAS: Each man and woman contributes to this blessed planet. If you need an electrician, a poet is of no use to you. If you need a poem, an electrician is of no use to you.  We all serve a purpose. You sell cars. I sell poems and stories, dear man.

EZRA LOWELL: You can’t be serious in comparing your contribution to society to that of a nine to five worker? (He downs a mouthful of his drink).

Ava, would you rather go out with an electrician with a regular salary and a Chevrolet or an impoverished poet?

AVA: Most gals I know like a guy with a load of dollar notes, but I like the thought of a poet writing love poems all about me, and whispering romantic words in my ear!  (She laughs loudly). Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (She laughs again). We did that one in college!

Peter Thabit Jones, "Garden of Clouds: New and Selected Poems"

The author of fourteen books, several of which have been reprinted and four published in Romania, Peter Thabit Jones's work has been translated into over twenty languages. He is the recipient of the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, London), The Society of Authors Award, The Royal Literary Fund Award, and an Arts Council of Wales Award. He was awarded the Ted Slade Award for Service to Poetry in 2016 by The Poetry Kit (UK), the Shabdaguchha Poetry Award 2017 (USA), and the 2017 Homer: European Medal for Art and Poetry.  

In March 2008 Peter’s American publisher, Stanley H. Barkan, organised a six-week poetry reading tour of America for Peter and Dylan Thomas’s daughter, Aeronwy. 

Peter's chamber opera libretto, Ermesinde’s Long Walk, for Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic, premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg in 2017 and at the National Opera House Stara Zagora in 2018. His full opera libretto for her, with Svetla Georgieva, Love and Jealousy, premiered at the National Opera House Stara Zagora in Bulgaria in 2018, at the Théâtre National Du Luxembourg in 2019 and at the International Festival “Sofia Music Week,” Bulgaria, in September 2020. 

Peter has resided at Big Sur, California, as writer-in-residence for two months each summer from 2010 to 2019.  His drama The Fire in the Wood, about Big Sur sculptor Edmund Kara, premiered at the Actors Studio of Newburyport in Massachusetts in 2017 and at the Henry Miller Library and the Carl Cherry Center in California in 2018. 

You can find further information about his work here.     

About Garden of Clouds: New and Selected Poems
Published by Cross-Cultural Communications, New York, Garden of Clouds: New and Selected Poems comprises some poems published in previous books by Peter Thabit Jones and a larger group of new poems. There are poems about a boy raised by his maternal grandparents in a working-class home below Kilvey Hill in Eastside Swansea, Wales; poems about dementia, autism, widowhood, and favourite poets (such as Rilke, Edward Thomas, R. S. Thomas, and Dylan Thomas); poems about a Welsh town busker, an Elvis Lookalikes competition, participating in an outside poetry reading in Belgrade, Serbia, and trips to the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon; poems about human conflict, such as the poems ‘War Child’ and ‘Soliloquy of a Leader,’ and personal loss and grief for the poet’s second son, Mathew. There is also a selection of poems about Big Sur, California, where the poet has resided annually for two months as a writer-in-residence since 2010. 

The Big Sur poems are new poems, not included in his previous book, Poems From A Cabin on Big Sur (also from Cross-Cultural Communications). The poems engage with the rugged and wild beauty of the landscape that spreads all around the isolated writer’s cabin. The cabin is a fifteen-minute walk from the Pacific Ocean, which can be viewed in all its glory from the main cabin window. The lament of the ocean is the ever-present aural backdrop to the chosen solitude.

Below, you can read three poems from Garden of Clouds: New and Selected Poems.

Stones

Stones take to each other naturally,
Like a family of sleeping creatures,

The large ones accommodate little ones,
To create a colony of hardness;

They rest in centuries of stark stillness;
They are elephant-heavy to lush grass.

Their colours employ the afternoon sun;
They are as warm as loaves from an oven.

Each one embodies its personal death;
They are cobbled memories of the sea;

They are the solid language of labour:
Each one weathered to a perfect image.

They rest, innocent of their history,
Like a grey display of featureless skulls.

They have tasted our sweat and absorbed our blood.
They rise and fall, symbols of man’s conscience.

Their persistence has sculptured their silence;
They hint that their souls haunt other planets.

They are magnets for our primitive thoughts;
They are the armour of truths beyond us.

They shape our built fears of an afterlife,
They could tempt us into acts of worship.

War Child

He is already a hundred years old.                               
Barely nine, his eyes slowly drown                                 

In his sudden tears as his brown fingers                       
Tremble below the wound of his lips.                              

His thoughts walk through the dust memories             
Of destruction, the bomb-collapsed                                  

Building where his parents, three brothers                    
And his two sisters were killed.                                           
                     
He is alone in the world.  Alone with his fears.               
His small bag of experiences is already full.

The Western reporter and cameraman                              
Will go back to their hotel and stitch together                  

Yet another war story, while the boy will wander            
His devastated city, where horror                                         

Is piled on horror, where planes scratch                                
The night sky and break up the morning.                              

He shakes his dark head, he is lost for words,                       
As his eyes stare through the flesh                                            

Of so-called civilization                                                                 
To the foul and bloodied bones of reality.         

Edward Thomas in Swansea

You brought your troubles
With you: the almost-empty
Pockets of your poverty;
The tarnished wedding-ring

Of your worn love for Helen;
The mind’s shelves of commissioned
Books far too many.
It’s said you looked down

At Lower Swansea Valley,
The hell-smouldering
Far sprawl of tall
Choking factories.

Was your mind a mess,
A trench of dark thoughts
That stretched away
From reality.

The jigsaw of Europe
Was breaking apart,
Young men queuing
To wear the King’s khaki.

You returned to England,
To your nest of worries‒
The sparks of the war
Burning possibilities‒

Then Robert Frost coaxed
Your mind towards poetry.