Bristol’s Bukowski: debut collection at 93

Ray Webber is not what you expect. Of a 93-year-old. Or of a poet. Or a 93-year-old poet.

He sits across the room surrounded on either side by brimming bookshelves; a simple, almost monastic set-up of orthopaedic chair and hip-height round table covered with a neat spread of sheets of paper, a notebook and a small pile of books.

I first met Ray through my involvement in the publication of his debut collection of poems, High on Rust (Tangent Books, 2016, £9.99) and my initial reaction was a severe case of bookshelf envy (we’ve all had a good snoop around Bookshelf Porn, haven’t we). The jealousy rose as I scanned the titles packed onto the built-in shelving units in his Supported Living flat in Knowle West: Wittgenstein; Dorn; Foucault; Eliot; Ashbery; Sartre; Kafka; Kerouac; Kristeva amongst many, many more.

*cue heart-eyes emoji*

What’s astonishing about Ray is that he’s read each of these books –more than once– and can quote swathes and summarise far more concisely and eloquently than myself; having read them much more recently than Ray. Did I mention that he’s 93 years old?

Ray wrote his first poem, he tells me, in 1946 while waiting to be demobbed from the army after WWII. At this point he was based in Italy, and was first introduced to poetry by an officer who lent him a volume of poetry, which he promptly devoured (having only read political writing up until this point). Much to the officer’s surprise after he returned the book, Ray was able to recite much of the verse verbatim, having read the volume so closely.

Born in Redcliffe in 1923 to Welsh parents Charles Webber and Kate Regan; Ray’s father was a leading member of the Communist Party in Bristol and his mother was a devout Catholic:

‘my real name

is Marvin Derryberry Grubcock.

my father was a part-time docker

and a full-time anarchist.

my mother was a full-time domestic slave

and a double-time catholic saint’

‘The beautiful miracle of childbirth’, High on Rust

Ray insists that the dialectic between these two very different ideologies is not the foundation of his writing, though he does not deny its influence on him, especially growing up. His father was imprisoned for his role in leading the Bristol Unemployed marches and his family denied welfare so Ray and his siblings grew up in poverty, their mother struggling to make ends meet.

His debut collection High on Rust came about through the hard work of Steve Bush, a long-time friend and admirer of Ray’s work, who has selected and edited this collection from decades’ worth of work.

Steve was a founding member of Essential Bop who along with the the Art Objects were at the fore of Bristol’s art rock scene in the late 70s/early 80s and has known Ray for more than 40 years. They met at a poetry group at Bristol Arts Centre in King’s Square (now the Cube cinema).

A contemporary of Steve’s – Gerard Langley (Art Objects and Blue Aeroplanes), also knew Ray during the post-punk era into which Ray and his writing slotted so neatly.

It was Langley who dubbed Ray ‘Bristol’s Bukowski’, perhaps in reference to his wilder, more heavy drinking days as well as the similarities in writing style:

‘agog

at fullblown

atom embers

shaped like

the high polish

on a coffin

or

the veneer

that passes

for wisdom’

‘Little things’, High on Rust

I now visit Ray regularly (not just for the bookshelf porn) and, although he can’t manage too long a visit, I thoroughly enjoy talking about poets and philosophers from all over the world in a flat in a care home for the elderly.

On one such visit I foolishly brought my battered copy of Lectures on Silence by John Cage, hoping to share something new with Ray but, of course, he was delighted to see another familiar tome and we ended up chatting about Cage, Cunningham, Duchamp, silence, noise and whiteness.

More recently, Ray’s been critiquing some of my own work (not for the thin-skinned) and is extremely adept at whittling out any whiff of poetic conceit, which he deems – in the same light as Sartre viewed existence – unnecessary

The incongruity surrounding Ray Webber does not need overstating: his familiarity with avant-garde and Modern writers, artists and philosophers, as well as the nigh-on 70 year long discipline of writing poetry is at odds, both with his 93-year-old body and his geographical location: Knowle West is not well known for its poets and philosophers.

After decades of honing and a determination that ‘everything I wrote would be different from everything I read’ (as well as a period in the 1970s when he destroyed his entire body of work), Ray’s poetry defies conventional lyric expectations to take on a voice and form that is entirely his own:

‘i’m the poet who abhors the poetic.

i’m the poet who epitomises

the self-lacerating paradox

of being an anti-poetic poet.’

‘I’m the modernist poet’, High on Rust

Join Tangent Books on Thursday, September 15 from 6pm at the Arnolfini bookshop to celebrate the launch.

High on Rust is available to order from www.tangentbooks.co.uk now.