Coffee House Poetry: Old Rock & Roll- Poetry Of The 50's
Programmed Event - 7th July 2008
Doors 8pm
£5 entry
£6 concs
Themed poetry-party with guest readers, literary quiz, music…
In the ‘90s poetry was regularly hailed as the new rock’n’roll by movers’n’shakers too young to recall what the old rock’n’roll had looked like—Bill Haley’s kiss-curl & tartan d-j or Little Richard a-shakin’ & a-shoutin’ before abjuring jive for Jesus—or even what poetry, in the winkle-picking 1950s, really had to say.
Was it a golden era of novelist-poets-playwrights such as Wain, Larkin, Osborne and Amis, before some of those Angry Young realists became disgruntled old reactionaries, a time when Larkin was into jazz and Thom Gunn dared to write about Elvis and bikers, an age that Ted Hughes was about to bestride like a Colossus?
And what of the post-war, Cold War, US of A, where Miss Moore & Wallace Stevens gave way to the Beat Generation, their authenticity outbid in turn by the “howl” of Sexton, Lowell, Plath… while in Ireland Kavanagh & Hewitt ploughed wintered-out seeds of tradtion and romanticism into a barren field that Heaney, Longley and Mahon would reap in the ‘Sixties.
But perhaps for you the 1950s is Grandad’s ration book, Mum & Dad jiving at the Locarno, your own bootlace tie or hula-hoop… or McCarthyism, Austin A30s, Lonnie Donnegan, the Coronation, Aldermaston, the Goons, London’s famous coffee-bars…?
So where better than the Troubadour—where poets, actors, folkies, dramatists, Teddy-boys and bebop hep-cats met over espresso to discuss “the scene” from 1954—to come & listen to our guest-poets’ poems, their own and those of “Movement”, “Beat”, “Confessional” and other happening types, join in our ‘Fifties-facts-and-fictions prize-quiz, and listen to Fifties favourites and some good-ol’ Rock’n’Roll piano…