Cardiff Cut

By Lloyd Robson

"Cardiff Cut" takes a scenic and disenchanted tour of the Welsh capital. Witty, obscene, defiant... an aimlessly anarchic Joycean monologue... steeped in the city of Cardiff…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913640507

Lloyd Robson

Lloyd robson is a cardiff-born welsh writer and text artist based in virginia, usa. he is responsible for the books city&poems (blackhat, 1995), letter from sissi (blackhat, 1997), cardiff cut (parthian, 2001), bbboing! & associated weirdness (parthian, 2003), and oh dad! a search for robert mitchum (parthian, 2008). He also created the sense of city road ffoto-poetry montage (blackhat, 2000).

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‘A navigation of the night, an urban Rime of the Ancient Mariner... with cardiff cut robson confirms an important reputation as an authentic and original voice, able to deliver streetwise power punches with the deceptive subtlety of true ringcraft... he has given us a night to remember... it’s a tonsil-ripping cocktail of a book. Down it in one!’

John Harrison, New Welsh Review

‘A breathlessly delivered rant against mediocrity filled with splendid punning, extravagant colloquial speech and enough frenetic energy to keep the pages turning of their own accord... ecstatic brilliance... Joyce for a wider audience, a popular avant-garde... exemplary.’

Steve Spence, Tremblestone

‘Innovative, hilarious, exhilarating, remarkably astute... delivered with a sandpaper sense of humour this frantic, sometimes savage eruption of chaos and poetry will leave you exhausted... truly unique... great stuff!’

Melanie Daley, The Big Issue

‘A torrent of language fuels a narrative in and around the raw ends of Cardiff. Well-paced, bundles of charm and humour... an extended prose poem in the Beat tradition. (robson) is now a writer of achievement.’

David Caddy, Tears in the Fence

‘The nearest we have to a novel celebrating the city of Cardiff in all its vulgarity... if we hear an echo of Joyce’s Ulysses, that’s all to the good.’

Meic Stephens, The Western Mail

‘Some of the best dialect writing in these islands, ever.’

Niall Griffiths, The Guardian

lloyd robson is a Cardiff-born Welsh writer and text artist based in Virginia, USA. He is responsible for the books city&poems (blackhat, Cardiff, 1994), edge territory (blackhat, Cardiff, 1995), letter from sissi (blackhat, Cardiff, 1997), cardiff cut (Parthian, Cardigan, 2001), bbboing! & associated weirdness (Parthian, Cardigan, 2003), and Oh Dad! A Search for Robert Mitchum (Parthian, Cardigan, 2008). He also created the sense of city road ffoto-poetry montage (blackhat, Cardiff, 2000).

www.lloydrobson.com

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CONTENTS

Foreword

cardiff cut

Glossary

Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

lloyd robson emerged onto the Cardiff literary scene in the 1990s. It was a prescient moment. There was a buzz going on. The traditional ways of reading and presenting poetry in public had already been dealt severe blows. First by the British poetry revival of the 1960s and then by the performance poetry explosion of the 1980s. Poetry had suddenly become entertainment. On your night off you went to listen to it. If you had any pretentions at all you joined in.

lloyd who’d caught the tail-end of performance poetry’s rise by virtue of his attendance at the groundbreaking extramural classes run by poet Chris Torrance at the University was a natural for this kind of creative activity. Spoken literature that was as valid delivered by voice as it was printed on the page. Like many of his contemporaries – Tôpher Mills, Chris Ozzard, Nick Fisk, and J Brookes included – lloyd started a small press mainly as an outlet for his own work. His was called ‘blackhat’. Not the first time that outsider name had been used by a small publisher bent on groundbreaking but a pretty good describer of the kind of material it brought out nonetheless.

Cardiff, lloyd’s permanent home by this time, having spent parts of his earlier life successively in Cwmbran, Symonds Yat, Monmouth and Plymouth, was going through an identity crisis. The rush of rebuild and change seemed unstoppable. County Hall’s 1980s move to the heart of the Bay had started something. Cardiff had become a shot-downing, drinking weekend destination for coaches from all over the local countryside. The city had bright street lights and a pedestrianised heart. It had pubs, clubs, bars and music venues by the score. It was a vibrant place. You came here to party.

Cardiff was, after all, both a Welsh city and the Welsh capital. ‘The Youngest In Europe’ ran the boosters’ banner. It was also unsure of both its own accent, hated elsewhere across Wales, and its actual Welsh identity. How Welsh was it? How Cymreig could it become? Buzz-saw accented lloyd who had made a virtue of street slang and out and out Cardiffness was having no truck with this slice of intersectional identity confusion. The literary tradition he was part of was not Anglo-Welsh, not Cymraeg, not Welsh much anything at all. He wrote in the Cardiff language which, as he recently reminded me, is not one fixed thing but an accent full of local variations. When confronted by an overvocal critic at a reading complaining that ‘nobody speaks like that’ lloyd told him, ‘well i fucking do, mate. if you want it to sound like you then write your own fucking book’.

Cardiff in the 1990s which is the one that gets celebrated in cardiff cut had, at that time, yet to really attract much of a literary tradition. Dannie Abse had published There Was Young Man From Cardiff but the city had yet to acquire the celebrity that new works from John Williams, Trezza Azzopardi, Sean Burke, Llwyd Owen and others would give it. The Irish, English and Scottish capitals all had their literary walking tours, selling out to visitors. Cardiff could do little better than manage a stumble from Roald Dahl Plass to the spot where Tom Jones eluded fans among the bushes in Gorsedd Gardens.

cardiff cut is actually a prose poem, or a set of prose poems, blended to form a novel-length whole. This is a form the author admits he enjoyed using. But, as the world knows, poetry and especially something as grandiloquent sounding as a ‘prose poem’ doesn’t sell. The book was marketed as a novel and as such roared with success. There’s little plot in any traditional sense although if it’s anything this work is Ulysses rather than Finnegans Wake. It fits straight into that tradition of street-life dope taking, drink swallowing, panhandling, petty crime engaging, roaring and rocking work begun god knows where but certainly promoted by William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller and Allen Ginsberg. cardiff cut is filled with Angel-Headed hipsters and buddha-breathed bodhisattvas. It’s just that the author doesn’t refer to them so.

The work reaches forward in a rush of heavily accented