ANDREW DARLINGTON

BRYN FORTEY AND

THE DEATH OF BLIND LEMON JEFFERSON

Book Reviews of:

‘I GUESS THAT’S WHY THEY CALL IT THE BLUES’

& ‘WHEN I MENTIONED THE BEATS’
by BRYN FORTEY

(Outlaw Chapbook Press, January and February 2020)

Limited editions from: 212 Caerleon Road, Newport, South Wales NP19 7GQ

You need long-distance vision to see things up close. We are all our own stories. Poems just say things more effectively, considering every possible letter, making each pulse count. Bryn was never a joiner, now we’re all lost in a time of separations. When a writer becomes part of a movement, when that time goes cold, they get stranded with it, the Beats are beaten, the Mersey Poets run dry on ribs of mud, Rappers do TV-ads for casinos. They go from movement, to motionless. Bryn Fortey and me started out sketching poems like this one, I’ll not ask if you remember it, I don’t think either of us will ever forget it. Some of these poems go back to ‘Global Tapestry Journal’, ‘Quarry’ or Bryn’s own ‘Outlaw’, others are from now-sites such as ‘Ramingo’s Porch’ or ‘Bradlaugh’s Finger’.

His Blues poems cleave to narrative, lopped-off into concise lines, telling the Chet Baker life, or Sonny Stitt ‘playing second fiddle to heroin addiction’. Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup who lives in a packing case, Bo Diddley who is ‘the baddest cat in town’, haunted by juke-joint rhythms and forgotten photographs. The Beat poems tell tales in dialogue, although they cross-contaminate. In an argument with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Bryn sides with his wronged wife Hettie, in a gesture of left-handed solidarity. Or he posthumously threatens David Meltzer for steamrollering his own ‘cool but not cold’ poem about Lester Young with his huge weighty bio-tome, ‘keep out of dark alleyways’ he darkly warns David, ‘don’t think dying in 2016 will save you.’ Without Kerouac there’d perchance be no Bukowski, no Selby, no Carver… no me, no Bryn. That’s another ongoing discussion. It doesn’t necessarily require truth, just some soft painless lies. Not all poets make it big, some just get high on the smell of the blackest ink slinking across chapbook pages. That’s enough. Sure, there are what-if poems of other outcomes. Bryn sends postcards from other continuums too, he has the necessary long-distance vision. But we’ve had the loyalty card for some time, here are two more stamps to go in it. Let the rave-up never end.

 ANDREW DARLINGTON