‘Nigel Jenkins: Gower poet.’
How grotesquely inadequate an epithet, when used in a journalistic
context. Yet how otherwise apt. For Nigel was nothing if not a grounded person,
who fiercely stood his ground. And that ground was Gower, the beautiful peninsula
extending its fragile length out into the wild western waters, which provided
him with a vantage point not only on his beloved Wales in its infuriating
entirety, but on the wider world and indeed the cosmos. It was, so his friend Stevie Davies movingly
testifies, when bathing off Gower’s beaches he best felt able to immerse
himself in the oceanic immensities of the universe.
And then
there was the intricate chain of Gower bays – smugglers’ coves of old, with
their stories of wreckers, rum, and illicit dealings under cover of darkness.
Nigel was in his element there. With his strong frame, his beard of piratical
cut, his sexily deep voice, his satiric bent, there was something of the
buccaneer, the rebel, the outlaw about Nigel always.
He had been
made such partly by his early experiences. Sent to private schools across the
border to be ‘civilized’ into an Englishman, he came ‘home’ shamefully,
defiantly Welsh, and his whole life was spent trying to reclaim in its fullness
that of which, he felt, he’d been early deprived. Most of all, of course, the
language. Having learnt it, he placed
his talents at its disposal, his translations serving to bring together the two
cultures of his broken-backed Wales.
After
Wales, his life-long love was the USA, to whose recklessly innovative poetry he
was first introduced at Essex University in the turbulent sixties. Then came
his colourful but brutal initiation into the contrasting realities of
‘mainstream’ US culture, when he toured the States of the late Vietnam era with
a circus company.
By the time
I met him, in the early seventies, all this was behind him, as was the period
in journalism that provided him with skills on which he continued to draw to
the end. With me he wanted to study the
poetry of Meic Stephens, a figure who fascinated Nigel because he saw in him a
promising poet who had ‘abandoned’ his talent. And why? In order (or so Nigel felt) to become an arts
administrator, dedicated to the development of the infrastructure necessary for
the cultural survival of a small ‘stateless’ nation in the modern world. While respecting the achievement, Nigel’s
response was typically dissenting. He became ‘shop steward’ of a Welsh Union of
Writers intended as a check on the growing powers of the Welsh Arts Council.
Now, forty
years later, I can see that in Meic Stephens Nigel foresaw the dilemma he would
himself face: how to protect the ‘inner
rebel’ from which authentic writing (and most particularly poetry) could alone
come while devoting one’s energies to the collective good of one’s country and
its people. That such a balancing act
was possible was proved, for him, in the ample flesh of Harry Webb, himself
proud of his Gower stock, whose day job was that of a respected borough
librarian while in his roistering night life he presided, with Falstaffian
gusto, over raucous sessions of ‘poems and pints’ designed to educate the
post-industrial masses in their own lost history.
Education:
that, too, was eventually to be Nigel’s chosen medium and milieu. But first he
was a writer, and foremost a poet. He deliberately adopted such roles as that
of the bardd gwlad (poet to a
locality and its communities) and bardd
llys (poet of more grand, formal public occasions). In the latter capacity
he regularly recited tongue-in-cheek at Swansea University’s graduation
ceremonies his paean of praise to the Swansea he so passionately loved even
while lavishly cursing its philistinism and English provincialism. And then there was his tireless work to
enable local writers to make their silenced voices heard, and the ‘civic art’
that saw his poems pave streets and leave their mark permanently on buildings.
Nigel
laughed at the idea of a poet developing a preciously singular ‘voice.’ His
poems were deliberately miscellaneous in character, because he wanted them to
convey not only the multifariousness of human experience but also the range of
different collectivities that constituted any human society. The devotion to
Wales given such monumental expression in the great Encyclopaedia he edited with self-consuming energy and devotion
never blinded him to the terrible shortcomings of the country and its easily
complacent people. In a classic, prize-winning study, he tracked down the
history of the Welsh missionaries in the Khasia hills of the Indian
sub-continent, highlighting the white colonial aspects of an epic project that
nevertheless left a legacy of blessings. Naturally drawn to the ‘underside’ of
his native city, he brought a detective’s zeal and a reporting journalist’s
unsparing eye in his Real Swansea volumes
to those parts of the city its primly respectable citizens never reached. And then there was his love-song to his
Gower, in the form of a magnificent portrait-essay of the peninsula, from the
deep history of its ancient rocks to the packaged beauty of its present.
Having
developed, in tandem with the Welsh-language poet Menna Elfyn, a visionary
creative writing course at Trinity College, Carmarthen, Nigel eventually came
home to Swansea, where he worked alongside Stevie Davies (and later several
other close colleagues). Together, they established another pioneering creative
writing course uncompromisingly dedicated to honouring the integrity of writing
as both craft and vocation while valuing and nurturing the differing talents of
students. He was a wonderful teacher.
‘Nigel was
much loved,’ a colleague remarked movingly when he heard of his passing. Yes,
much loved even though he never compromised his beliefs or diluted his
principles in order to please. He remained a maverick to the last – quietly,
courteously but wickedly sabotaging every administrative and bureaucratic
attempt to bring him to heel. A free spirit, he somehow seemed most at home on
his bike, self-propelled, independent, unconfined, comrade of wind and weather.
Ffarwél fy
annwyl ffrind. A boed iti fwynhau yn y byd nesaf gwmni llawen y criw afreolus o
awduron, a cherddorion ac artistiaid yr oedd dy enaid erioed yn ei chwennych.
M. Wynn Thomas
