David writes:
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But I was thinking of a) the utter of unotherness of industrial South Wales
these days, that is it has a popular culture that is largely just as much
sub-American as
England's and b) literary Wales has lost its identity, there are a lot of
'Anglo-Welsh' poets aren't there who write flat mainstreamy kind of stuff
(Peter Finch might not like that statement but he's just one guy) but even
more so Welsh literary culture now may be one of the least distinct in
Europe: the Thomases are dead, Saunders Lewis and the London-Welsh David
Jones too. I gather there's some kind of kick still in the North, but no
really strong voice. Wales 'reads' to me like a culture that has truly
collapsed under a colonial weight.
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I'm not the best person to reply to this, being still fairly new to Wales,
but I'd better try anyway. Industrial South Wales has of course changed a
lot, being largely post-industrial these days. But it still has a great deal
of otherness as far as I'm concerned. Some of this has to do with the
landscape, that will never be quite tamed in the way that so much of England
has been. Then there is the accent, the loquaciousness, the dry
self-deprecating sense of humour, the sports mania (I have just witnessed an
entire nation, male and female, young and old, gripped by the collective
hallucination that they were about to defeat England at rugby), a relaxed,
couldn't-care-less attitude (about things other than rugby) which was not
all what I would have predicted in from an area with a tradition of
Nonconformism. I have been made very welcome here, but I'll always be a
foreigner. At my badminton club I was partnered in doubles with a boy about
17, on the grounds that we were both English. 'How long have you lived
here?' I asked him. '11 years.'
In some respects, the otherness has increased, since Welsh is more prevalent
than it has been for many years. If the spread of Welsh (encouraged by the
media, the Welsh Assembly and legislation on bilingualism) seems artificial,
it's no more so than the revival of Scots which has been such a fruitful
influence in Scottish poetry. Anglo-Welsh, by the way, is not the preferred
term nowadays; it's been replaced by the rather more longwinded but less
loaded Welsh writing in English.
Peter Finch may be only one guy, but he isn't the only one who would take
issue with your comments about contemporary Welsh poetry. For a good
cross-section, may I refer list members to the Welsh poetry edition of the
net magazine Slope at http://slope.org/slope/this.html ?
Best wishes
Matthew
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