Ian reads at SVP in London, with Peter Larkin, on 8th May 2001
http://www.crosswinds.net/~subvoicivepoetry
L
----- Original Message -----
From: "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 10 February 2001 08:23
Subject: Re: A Long Post About Welsh Poetry in English
| Thanks for that, David, it's a very thoughtful piece, and I think I
withdraw
| my previous reservation about 'always'.
|
| I can think of one poet in Wales who is working along the kind of lines
that
| resemble what people like Trevor Joyce and Randolph Healey are doing
| elsewhere: Ian Davidson.
|
| best
|
| david b
|
|
| ----- Original Message -----
| From: David Kennedy <[log in to unmask]>
| To: <[log in to unmask]>
| Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 3:58 PM
| Subject: A Long Post About Welsh Poetry in English
|
|
| > I thought it might be useful if I posted the relevant section of my
| review.
| > [This is a long posting so if you're not following this thread here's
your
| > chance to dump now]
| >
| > "I began by referring to the brevity of Amy Wack’s introduction. One
| assumes
| > that this was done to avoid the trap that lies in wait for all anthology
| > editors: having the introduction reviewed at the expense of the
contents.
| As
| > a co-editor of The New Poetry I can certainly sympathise! Nevertheless,
| even
| > a short introduction attempts to define how the work anthologised is
| > presented and how the editor hopes it will be received. In this context,
| > Wack raises a number of points which I want to examine in detail not
| because
| > I disagree with them but because they hint tantalisingly at important,
| wider
| > issues which are all concerned with Welshness. Amy Wack recently wrote
in
| > these pages of a new poet that ‘Despite her residence here, Wales
appears
| > only once, in the form of a bunch of daffodils’ but Oxygen does not
convey
| > what is Welsh about its English language poets except birth or later
| > residence. Wack does try to confound clichéd definitions of nationality,
| the
| > sort of thing Duncan Bush once described as a youth running onto the
pitch
| > at Cardiff Arms Park ‘carrying the national emblem: a leek, of felt, as
| big
| > as himself.’ However, the book is subtitled ‘new poets from Wales’ and
| this
| > inevitably raises expectations in potential readers. I don’t think
anyone
| is
| > expecting leeks and dragons at the start of the new millennium but I was
| > expecting more of the uneasy but unavoidable engagement that animates
| Deryn
| > Rees-Jones’s poem
| > ‘Connections’ - not included here - which pictures ‘a Welsh mountain I
can
| /
| > Just remember - mynydd - a word I can’t pronounce too well.’ If, as Wack
| > argues, the English poets in Oxygen are ‘children of the information age
’
| > whose ‘tastes are sophisticated and rarely plain’ then this is more the
| kind
| > of take on identity and origin one would expect.
| > [...]
| > Amy Wack goes on to assert that ‘Wales does reasonably well in the
| > production of poets. We do have some way to go in fostering a cultural
| > climate as favourable to them as those in Dublin or Edinburgh.’ Leaving
| > aside the strangeness of comparing an entire country with two capital
| > cities, this begs a number of questions. First, few poets seem
interested
| in
| > following Stephen Knight’s lead in The Sandfields Baudelaire and writing
| an
| > Anglo-Welsh dialect equivalent of Kathleen Jamie’s and Bill Herbert’s
| > energetic Scots poetry. Second, I’ve often wondered why Wales appears to
| > lack writers comparable to the broadly neo-modernist Irish generation of
| > Trevor Joyce, Billy Mills, Catherine Walsh, Maurice Scully and Randolph
| > Healy. Third, there is another missing generation in Wales. It is very
| easy
| > to construct a narrative of postwar British poetry in which writers from
| the
| > periphery - in terms of class or geography - who were born in the period
| > 1935-45 have gradually occupied the mainstream with work which deals
| overtly
| > with issues of class, education and internal colonialism. Three writers
| who
| > would group together quite naturally in such a narrative are Douglas
Dunn,
| > Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney but it is difficult to find a Welsh
writer
| > who, as the saying goes, ‘fits the profile’. John Davies - another
| massively
| > under-rated poet - has written Harrisonian poems about his relationship
| with
| > his father but these form only a small part of his work. Gillian Clarke’
s
| > best work has a comparable historical focus but it real emphasis seems
to
| me
| > to be on asserting the value of the feminine in a masculine culture and
| > mythology.
| > If this analysis is correct - and I offer it for further debate -
then
| > it suggests that
| > Anglo-Welsh poetry lacks precisely the things that have made Irish,
| Scottish
| > and regional English identities into what might be termed highly
tradable
| > commodities in poetic terms. As a consequence, the most recent
generations
| > of Anglo-Welsh poets lack literary contexts to position themselves in or
| > react against. But I also want to suggest that the reasons for the
| apparent
| > unavailability of Anglo-Welsh poetic identity - both inside and outside
| > Wales - might actually be historical. In a survey of nationalist
movements
| > in the British Isles between 1900 and 1939, the historian J. H. Grainger
| > argues that Wales was ‘a country without the institutional bases for
| > separateness.’ Indeed, after its annexation by England in 1536, Wales
had
| no
| > governmental institutions that differed significantly from those of
| England
| > apart from
| > the Council of Wales which was abolished in 1689. And because Welsh
| > distinctiveness was primarily linguistic, Grainger goes on to argue, it
| > became intrinsically cultural rather than political. [...] This is
| crucial
| > because of the particular absences I mentioned earlier. And this
suggests
| to
| > me that poetry needs an established and vibrant political culture
because
| it
| > ’s politics that drives all the factions and schools that make other
| > poetries in English so various, so constantly surprising and so readily
| > identifiable."
|
|