Under Milkwood

This afternoon I had a chance, while recuperating from a back outage, to catch up on the Netflix backlog. So Kim and I watched The Edge of Love. I knew virtually nothing about the film beforehand, and thought it was going to be a sort of dramatic quasi-documentary about Dylan Thomas. But it turned out to really be about the two women in his life ... and we enjoyed it.

This led me to recall how, years before I met Kim, I heard a radio broadcast of the Dylan Thomas "play for voices", Under Milkwood, with Richard Burton as the main voice, on late night KPFK in Los Angeles. I captured it on cassette tape, but haven't heard it for years. I used to replay it like music. The tape is presumably somewhere in my basement, garage or storage shed. Somewhere. And who knows in what condition. In the meantime, I came upon this, the first few minutes of this remarkable classic:



This should whet your appetite for the whole thing.

And here is a nice reading of Thomas' piece for his dying father, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, with photos:



Somewhere I have John Cale and Brian Eno putting this thing to music. But I much prefer it as spoken poetry.

And ... finally, was Thomas really the inspiration for the name Bob Dylan (once Robert Zimmerman) assumed?