Edited by Ian Brinton, with a Preface by Phil Maillard
Published 2023. Paperback, 130pp, 9 x 6ins, £12.95 / $20
ISBN 9781848619098 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]
One evening in 1961, in the Greyhound pub in Carshalton, Surrey, 20-year-old Chris Torrance – a solicitor’s clerk with novelistic ambitions – encountered a volatile Mob of nascent artists, writers and musicians. For Torrance, this was “the most important day of my life”. Dazzled, he was soon joining in their activities: wild weekends in the country, his first scary public readings, and, from 1963, co-editing the poetry and jazz magazine Origins/Diversions
. In literary terms, Torrance’s greatest influence from the group was Bill Wyatt, who introduced him to “useful short forms” like haiku, and to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson
. Wyatt, later a prolific poet, translator, naturalist, and the first Zen monk ordained in Britain, remained a life-long friend and ally.
[…] In the spring of 1965 Torrance gave up his seven-year career in solicitors’ offices, and joined the local Parks Department as a labourer. As the title Green Orange Purple Red implies, he wanted a more sensual take on the world via his writing – a Keatsian ambition. About then he found a second-hand copy of The New American Poetry , and embarked on a lifelong ‘love affair’ with those writers and that energy. In particular, the enormous presence of Charles Olson, seemed to confirm that – in terms of big ambition and local detail – Torrance was on the right track with his writing.
Validation came in July 1966, with ‘The Carshalton Steam Laundry Vision’. Torrance was cutting the grass outside the Laundry, when his vocation was revealed to him: ‘I’m going to be a poet’. It wasn’t a ‘vision’; it was a powerful voice that had to be obeyed (“I accepted it completely”). As The Voice diminished into the clatter of machinery and the chatter of the laundry girls, the path ahead lay clear.
—Phil Maillard
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