David

I understood the inverted commas as distancing *you* from the phrase
'Anglo-Welsh' but felt they implied you were attributing it to contemporary
Welsh poets and thus suggesting a complicity in their own colonization.
Whereas it is precisely this generation of Welsh writers, not your praised
generation of the Thomases, Saunders Lewis etc, who have rejected it. 'Welsh
writing in English' is hardly a handy label, but by no means bad English,
and it seems it will have to do.

I nearly left sport out when attempting a characterization of the Welsh. The
fact is that it is important to them (and to me, and a great many other
people, as a matter of fact). I don't see why it should be denigrated. Rugby
is both a symbol of Welsh national identity and a link with the industrial
past - it is a working-class game here, and has traditionally served to
strengthen social bonds among work colleagues.

As for the Welsh sense of humour, it's difficult to explain. We English have
long complimented ourselves on ours (I'm not sure anyone else shares our
high opinion of it), but we reserve most of it for close friends and
suitable occasions. The Welsh, on the other hand, seem to find everyone and
everything funny, themselves most of all, and it's difficult to have a
conversation with anyone, friend or stranger, without ending up laughing.
This is a huge change after living in the South of England all one's life.

Welsh still is a language - I hear it spoken practically every day,
something which cannot have been the case in Anglicized South Wales for at
least fifty years or so. And there are plenty of poems and novels being
written in it. (Gwyneth Lewis writes in both languages.) It seems to me
you're romanticizing Wales's past at the expense of the reality of its
present. Anyone can point to the great dead and ask where are their
equivalents now? It's an old, tired rhetorical device. They've sealed their
reputations by dying, whereas the mediocrities of those days have been
forgotten. Contemporary Welsh writers are as intensely involved in the
political
and cultural issue of Welshness as any of their predecessors have been.
They are not wannabe English or American, nor are they caricature Welsh.
The country deserves better than the easy dismissals it has so often had
from
the English.

Best wishes

Matthew

-----Original Message-----
From: david.bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 07 February 2001 01:37
Subject: Re: A caution


>Matthew
>
>There seems to a mild problem of perception on this list about the use of
>inverted commas as a stylistic device of stylistic to indicate distancing.
>That was the context of my employment of 'Anglo-Welsh'.
>
>I'm afraid that the flourishing of a moniker like 'Welsh writing in
English'
>rather suggests that its perpetrators do not know how to. Write in English,
>that is, whether Welsh or not.
>
>I respect the work Peter Finch has done over the years, but he is just one
>guy, and at the same time he's allowed himself an all too accomodating
>attitude to obvious mediocrity. I say this in sorrow, not anger, Wales
needs
>writers, writers to speak for it.
>But they're all dead.
>
>I really don't share your valuation of sports-mania as an indicator of
>cultural well-being, while self-deprecatory humour is prevalent throughout
>this here isle, it being a country for many of ritual daily denial, like a
>Russian queue.
>
>As for the accent, it used to be a language.
>
>But, as I said before, I'd LOVE to be wrong on this, the perception gives
me
>no pleasure.
>
>regards
>
>david b
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Matthew Francis <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 11:46 PM
>Subject: Re: A caution
>
>
>> David writes:
>> >
>> >
>> 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.
>> >
>> >
>> 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
>