Hay Poetry Jamboree:

HAY POETRY JAMBOREE:

Celebrating the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellows

Ten years ago, the Department of English was approached by the Royal Literary Fund with the proposal that a partnership be formed that would allow the RLF to place a Writing Fellow in the department whose responsibility would be to help develop the basic language and writing skills of students right across the University campus. This proposal was warmly embraced by the Department, so that Swansea became one of the half-dozen universities to pilot a scheme that has, by now, been extended to almost 100 HE institutions across the UK.

The first Fellow to be appointed under this new scheme was Sally Roberts Jones, who ensured it got off to an excellent start. Her groundbreaking efforts enabled Stevie Davies, the next Fellow, to consolidate and develop the scheme quite dramatically, so that it became acknowledged by the RLF as a model for all other partner HE to emulate. With the arrival of Lucy English and Roger Garfitt the scheme took on other dimensions and further increased its impact, so that when Sally Roberts Jones returned, in partnership with Menna Elfyn, the scheme seemed at times in danger of becoming overwhelmed by campus-wide demands. In autumn, 2009, Jo Mazelis will succeed the retiring Sally to ensure, in partnership with Menna, that this invaluable service continues to flourish.

To celebrate the RLF-Swansea University partnership, a special event, hosted by the Vice-Chancellor, was held in the university’s Council Room on April 23, and attended by some 30 invited guests. In welcoming everyone to the gathering, Professor Richard Davies paid very warm tribute to the work the RLF had done at Swansea over ten years, and emphasised how vitally important the service it had providing had become. In thanking everyone who had been involved in the management of the scheme, he paid particular tribute to Sally Roberts Jones, who was presented, by way of acknowledgement, with two handsome presents to mark her retirement after the best part of a decade’s association with the RLF in the Swansea area. The first was an early edition of a Winnie-the-Pooh book – the RLF scheme is underpinned money from the A. A. Milne estate . The second was a beautiful limited edition of The Book of Ruth, published by the internationally renowned small press, Gwasg Gregynog. Both gifts were presented to Sally by Steve Cook, the initiator of the RLF scheme who had managed it with such notable deftness throughout the first decade of its life

Emyr Humphreys@90

He published his first novel in 1948 and is still going strong more than sixty years later…. Emyr Humphreys, author of more than twenty novels (including the outstanding Outside the House of Baal), poet, cultural analyst and distinguished man of letters, celebrated his ninetieth birthday in late April. To mark the occasion, on Monday April 20th, over fifty of Wales’s leading writers and intellectuals gathered at an event at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, to celebrate his remarkable contribution to Welsh culture. Tributes were paid by a number of figures, and particularly memorable were the clips of film shown of Emyr Humphreys’s work for television. These included a scene from a fifties production of Saunders Lewis’s great Welsh-language play, Siwan. Emyr Humphreys had both translated it into English and directed the actual production, that featured the handsome young Peter O’Toole (looking like a Fifties Rocker) and Sian Phillips in all her striking youthful beauty. (Contributors to the celebratory event also recalled that early in the sixties, Emyr Humphreys had been instrumental in providing the young Anthony Hopkins with his first big break on the stage – a service Humphreys had earlier performed for another Port Talbot product, Richard Jenkins/ Burton.) Another clip of film had been taken from Emyr Humphreys’s notable fifties film version of R. S. Thomas’s great poem, The Airy Tomb.

The climax of this ninetieth birthday event was the launch of two books. The first, published by Seren, was The Woman at the Window, a brand new collection of stories by Emyr Humphreys. The second, published by Gwasg Gregynog, was a handsome special edition of anthologies from Emyr Humphreys’ writings, entitled Welsh Time.

Having been edited by M. Wynn Thomas, this last volume represented another link between the Abertystwyth celebrations and CREW. Other strong links already existed, since Emyr Humphreys is an Honorary Patron of CREW and a longtime Honorary Fellow of Swansea University.

After the Conference 3: the photos

Keynote 2: Prof. Susan Manning

Panel 1: Ireland and Wales; Claire Connolly, Laura Wainwright and Katie Gramich (Chair: Kirsti Bohata)

Panel 3a Comparative Identities: Jasmine Donahaye, Steve Hendon, Gareth Evans, (Chair: Daniel Williams)

Curry night

Childe Roland's Shearwater Oratario (feat. Daniel Williams, Elin Ifan and Mike Elfed Williams)

Panel 4a: New Approaches to Margiad Evans. Claire Flay, Diana Wallace and Michelle Deininger Smith 

(Chair: Kirsti Bohata)

After the Conference 2: Three Poets

Dr. Matthew Jarvis, Anthony Dyson Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wales, Lampeter, kindly agreed to write a report on the poetry reading that took place on the evening of March 28th.

Three Poets at Gregynog

The recent Association for Welsh Writing in English conference at Gregynog – organized by CREW’s Daniel Williams and Sarah Morse – brought together three poets for Saturday night’s after-dinner slot. First up was Jasmine Donahaye who seems due to follow in the footsteps of Pascale Petit as one of Wales’s most distinctive contemporary poetic voices. Donahaye’s first volume, Misappropriations (2006), was short-listed for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Award, and the controlled emotional impact of her plain language work – so significantly indebted to American traditions – made the reasons for that nomination abundantly clear. What’s so good about Donahaye is that, alongside a significant aesthetic, her work also has a compelling central core of subject matter and imagery, emerging from the troubled politics of the Israel-Palestine situation. Her accentuated, pulsing reading manner created an almost-hypnotic aura in the room, and the crowd listened in an unsurprisingly hushed fashion. I await her second collection, Self-Portrait as Ruth (due imminently from Salt), with considerable interest.

Donahaye was followed by Childe Roland – pen-name of Peter Noël Meilleur, the French-Canadian concrete poet who moved to Wales in 1979 and who has been, as Nigel Jenkins indicated to me, pretty much ignored by the poetry establishment here ever since. A bad mistake, in my opinion. Roland has a near-perfect ear for poetic sound, as the second piece he performed (‘Jones, the Poem’) made obvious. It should give some sense of his impact that this poem was greeted by a spontaneous burst of applause. And the crowd’s laughter peppered the performance as a whole, because it’s clearly the case that poetry is considerably to do with ready wit and sheer linguistic fun for this particular writer. But perhaps the highlight of Roland’s set was his ‘Shearwater Oratorio’, which tracks the journey of the Manx Shearwater from Argentina to Bardsey Island and which draws on a Morse-code ‘translation’ of the bird’s cry. Performed by Roland and three audience members – including a rather surprised Daniel Williams, who was told he was taking part just before the performance started – this is a rich and intriguing work, which weaves together English and Cymraeg phrasing. In fact, linguistic pluralism seems to be a feature of Roland’s work; his first poem of the evening, ‘Bardsey Island’, reappeared a little later in French and then in Cymraeg. If you’ve never read any of Roland’s work, you can find both ‘Jones, the Poem’ and ‘Shearwater Oratorio’ here, and if you haven’t heard him perform, there’s a recording attached to this useful essay about him. On the basis of what we heard in this session at least, Roland is an abundant and joyous poetic talent who I’d be delighted to have as a future National Poet of Wales. Petition, anyone?

The final reader was CREW’s Nigel Jenkins, a significant presence on the Welsh scene since the late 1970s and thus the best known of the three – and (like Donahaye) also a speaker from earlier in the day, when he’d revisited his work on Welsh missionaries in the Khasi hills of north-east India. For me, the highlights of Jenkins’s reading were his rumbustious piece ‘The Creation’ (from 1998’s Ambush) and a selection of the punctuation poems from his 2006 volume Hotel Gwales. In a brief moment of conversation with me afterwards, Jenkins modestly dismissed ‘The Creation’ as little more than a joke in poetic form. (For anyone who doesn’t know it, the premise of the poem is that God creates a Wales so abundantly full of natural beauty and wealth that the Archangel Gabriel asks the Almighty if he hasn’t rather overdone it – to which the divine reply of the cutting final line is ‘Not if you look at the neighbours I’ve made ’em’.) Well, a joke it may be, but ‘The Creation’ is a great performance piece – just like the small dramas of those punctuation poems – as the crowd’s enthusiastic response made clear. And of course, the whole set was also a showcase for Jenkins’s richly resonant bass, which must be one of the best reading voices around. As a rather eminent member of the audience said to me afterwards, somewhat wistfully, ‘I want a voice like that when I grow up’. Me too.

You may just get the sense from my comments here that I enjoyed this particular event. And you’d be right. This was as good a poetry reading as you could hope for, and the three poets in question – each quite different – worked together extremely well. To be frank, I hope they team up again, because it was an unusually good combination: passionate seriousness, sonic vivacity, and sharp wit. Anyone out there thinking about setting up a reading really should get on the phone and try to book them all, post-haste.

After the Conference 1

The Spaces of Comparison Conference (see posts below for details) proved to be a resoundig success. A report will follow, but we'll begin the post-conference posts with an 'instant poem' written during the conference by poet Sally Roberts Jones. Sally Roberts Jones's collections include Turning Away (1969), Sons and Brothers (1977), and Relative Values (1985). She has for many been been a Royal Literary Fellow at Swansea University, and a postgraduate at CREW.

Conference

The rustle of paper denotes our serious attention.
Words are bisected, symbols uncovered – the wind
Whistles outside, but here the air is unchanging,
Our minds tightly focused…

You might think we are here for a murder
Killing that we may dissect…
But no, we are miners,
Searching the hidden levels, the tell-tale fault
lines
Till they open in sudden wonder
To a seam of pure gold.

Gregynog 28/3/2009

John Goodby Wins!

CREW's John Goodby has won first prize in the inaugural New Welsh Review/ Aberystwyth University Poetry Prize competition 2009. Author and judge, Philip Gross presented John Goodby with the £200 prize for his poem '21st October 1966' at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre Bookshop on 12th March. John Goodby's poem focuses on 21st October 1966, the day of the Aberfan disaster, when 144 people, 116 of them children were killed when a tip of coal waste slid onto the village of Aberfan in South Wales.

John said: ""The poem began as a look at the search for links between Birmingham, where I was born and grew up, and Wales, where I've lived for the past fifteen years. I wanted to challenge the obsession many poets have with parading roots and belonging: asserting an identity intensely is too often seen as guaranteeing a good poem, when usually it means the opposite. I began with 'Birmingham Welsh' (along the lines of 'London Welsh') as a mild subversion of that obsession, and of the notion that often accompanies it, namely that if you derive from a place like Birmingham, with an unglamorous accent rather than its own language, and a history of moderate prosperity rather than of deprivation and oppression, your identity isn't worth as much (and so, according to the logic of essentialism, you can't write poetry either). For me, all places of origin are equally valid, though not validating, as subjects for poetry. But although the links the speaker offers are a kind of clutching at straws, constructed and inauthentic, he finds that they begin to coalesce around the black hole of memories of the Aberfan disaster. The poem's syntax starts to become unstable and fluid, like the frightful tip itself. The earlier attempt to force links now becomes its opposite, a teary fusion in which the excess is a kind of elegiac tribute. Nor can the speaker tell if this is a true memory or not: is he remembering the events because he wants to will the link; is his memory real, but a response learned from his teachers; is it genuine? I don't know if it's possible to decide, but I hope the ambiguities enlarge the reader's sense of the subject by suggesting that the acts of mourning and commemoration are often made both for selfish and generous reasons, at one and the same time, and by exploring what happens to language when we attempt to imagine the unimaginable or represent the unrepresentable."

21st October 1966

They followed their stolen water for miles, the Birmingham
Welsh. Why not? It swelled Rough Road’s green, square hill
to which it flowed 86 miles without being pumped,
through tunnels and pipes from the mountains of mid-Wales
the plaque said, and so should flow from their taps too, from Huw’s
and Glyn’s in Endhill, whose Dad carved lovespoons for hiraeth,
as from our own. And it is a little Wales I increasingly
gaze down on through the years’ glassed depths, the pain-
ful, jewelled beauty of a carboy garden, chalk-dust on desks,
endlessly repeated ms, beans in moist jam-jars, their horrid
roots preternaturally distinct, as if engraved. I over-
look it all, now, the crown of Bandywood Crescent—beeches,
wheeling rooks, a vertigo of clouds—and Kingsland Road
School, clear as some immaculately submerged valley, as their
escape by the book from mine and furnace to the fervour
impressed on our soft inland minds is clear now, cast into relief
by exile. Mrs Scott, thick-lipped, throaty, fierce, invokes
her father’s hen-coops above Merthyr; Mr Thomas grins
slowly, childless, his limp glib falling yet again, his plimsol
for what we called a pump half-heartedly falling, unlike
dark-jowled, beastly Mr Williams’s expert welting
action; his beer-and-Woodbines breath a bardic tenor
hoarse over stud-stamped wastes. Is that his string vest, or
an elaborate, blurring retrospect? And how, so far away, to see
the hymn-book bound in green anyway, a green hill
so far away it is black, under which three boys sat on the play-
ground wall, it was recalled, before the tremor minutes
after morning prayers; as we were opening desks and books
as well, monitors still at tasks then, milk from the gate trembling
in steel crates to classes ignorant of the pulsing well-
spring of the tip, our big clock, too, twitching to nine-
seventeen, hands telling of the gravity of time, of a hill water
moves as water moves to a hill, unbearable as love, as reservoirs
filled like our heads with hurt bent in dark rows next day, salt
tears we shed learnt from them also, or do I imagine all of this?