Gillian Ayres at the Museum of Wales

It takes a certain degree of chutzpah to be this bold and huge with your work, but if you like your abstracts eye-wateringly bright and best viewed from as far away as the gallery space will afford, then this is the show for you.

Cardiff plays host to Gillian Ayres this summer. I'm not entirely sure why, but the National Museum decided to hang the show in reverse chronological order. Something of a pointless gesture if you ask me. I resisted being directed in this way and saw them in the order of making, preferring the earlier to the later, as well as her works on paper.

It was a welcome refuge from the more or less constant rain of the last two weeks, but I did feel sorry for all that day's graduands and graduates taking shelter in the museum as a good back drop for their photographs.

Archiving

This website is going to be archived by the National Library of Wales as it is apparently important to Wales' documentary history. I am honoured and rather amazed. Diolch yn fawr.

Dylan Thomas for St. David’s Day

Actually, this poem has nothing whatsoever to do with St. David’s Day other than the fact that I am writing about it today. So whilst the nation is busy sporting daffodils, anthem singing, dressing up in national costume of dodgy provenance and being rightly proud of itself (Wales 27, France 6, just to remind you), I am sitting in rainy Paris, reading.

The force that through the green fuse (pg. 13) deals with the big issues life, love and death which haunt most of Dylan’s poetry. The force, and yes, you can think Star Wars here if it helps, seems to be the notion of universal energy. It is both life giving and life taking as the poem is packed with these opposites from the natural and human world, every stanza has this.

The poem starts with a repetition of the title in the opening line. It’s striking these days how archaic this structure seems to be. It’s unnecessarily repetitive and something most current poets try to avoid. That said, what of this mysterious ‘green fuse’? Young spark I think we might say more clunkily, but it’s arresting and functions to call the readers’ attention from the start – you are going to have to read this one carefully.

As well as the pattern of opposites, the poem focuses on the poet being silenced – the word ‘dumb’ is used in each stanza, but, of course, this is an irony as the poem is anything but silent on its topic. Perhaps it is better to think of this less as silence and more as an inability to articulate fully.

Key words, because they are repeated, are water, blood, love, hang, force, crooked and wind; the basic elements of life and death, if you will. This writing is again in contrast to contemporary practice where we tend to eschew non-patterned word repetition, but we are forgiving readers and can luxuriate otherwise in the imagery.

The antecedent poem that this brings to mind, and which Dylan acknowledged, is Blake’s Sick Rose, with its invisible worm, both of which Dylan makes crooked here:

O rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy.
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

I once went to a lecture by Germane Greer, who talked for over an hour about these eight lines of Blake’s, so Good Luck trying to explain that in one short blog post. Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus.

 

Dylan Thomas On Welsh Poets and Artists

I am using my 1983 Everyman edition of Quite early One Morning (pg. 139-154), the compilation of radio scripts, for this post. There are two essays: Welsh Poets, and Wales and the Artist. In the first Dylan looks quickly at Henry Vaughan, Edward Thomas, W. H. Davies, Idris Davies, Glyn Jones and Alun Lewis, a poem or two from each and makes some pithy comments. He introduces these half dozen meritorious Welsh poets (all men) by distancing himself from his contemporaries, busy beating themselves up about not writing in Welsh; 'It is the poetry, written in the language that is most natural to the poet that counts, not his continent, country, island, race, class or political persuasion.'

He skips from Vaughan (17th century) straight into the century with Edward Thomas, killed in 1917, the great lover of the countryside. The poem Dylan chooses echoes with a death knell ('the bell on the buoy in the bay') and the tender reflection Dylan ascribes to his work. There is a classic Dylan list here worthy of reading.

Dylan describes W. H. Davies (the Super Tramp, you may know him as) as a unique observer of the 'tiniest reflections on the natural world.' He offers The Inquest and The Bust, like all the other poem choices without further comment. It is up to the reader to form her own view.

Idris Davies work is a contrast to the truth and beauty of the rural idyll. Dylan describes how he and others in South Wales wrote of 'the lies and ugliness of the unnatural system of society under which they worked,' or in the Depression 'under which they were not allowed to work,' in 'ragged and angry rhythms' with Davies shaping this violence into real poems.

Cue Dylan list number two. These two rhetorical devices make for an interesting contrast one with the other and sum up theWales of Dylan's lifetime. It is ironic that so little has changed in the ensuing seventy or eighty years.

Glyn Davies' experiments using Welsh Bardic forms in English only succeed for Dylan in 'warping, crabbing and obscuring the natural genius of the English language,' so he choses a sub-Lawrencian poem that avoids  awkward sound and syntax.

Finally Dylan presents Alun Lewis, describing him as 'humble before his own confessions, awed before the eternal confession of love' and for whom 'in war, the poetry is the pity.' Lewis was killed in an accident in India in 1944.

By contrast to the praise heaped on the poets of Wales, Dylan unleashes his vitriol on its artists in the next essay. In a wonderful piece of (surely) self-deprecation, he bemoans the Welsh in London, who try to lose their accents and end up sounding like their mouths contain the Elgin marbles, and who set up in exile a 'government of dispossessed intellectuals, dispossessed not only of their country, but their intellects.' Ouch!

On the other hand, and to be fair, Dylan rounds on the stay at home Welsh artists too, too many of whom 'spend too much time talking about the position of artists in Wales.' This short piece ends with a much quoted aphorism: 'There is only one position for an artist anywhere, and that is upright.' Is there a tongue in his cheek here? I think so.

Dylan Thomas - Childhood, Religion and Countryside

Yes, probably Dylan's most beloved poem, Fern Hill, (pg 134)  and read here by Richard Burton, has all these elements. It is both hymn of praise and love song to a rural upbringing 'Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs.'

Apple tree related images are just one of a number of motifs that repeat themselves throughout the poem, as does the colour green, green also in the sense of innocence in this paradise, emphasised, as if that were necessary, by his mention of 'Adam and maiden' and indeed the apple tree itself.

Other religious imagery also appears in every stanza ('his eyes,' 'the mercy of his means,' 'blessed,' 'fields of praise,' 'follow him out of grace,' 'lamb white days' and so on).

But the poem changes tack in the last stanza with the lack of foreknowledge that 'time would take me' out of innocence and to the final couplet: 'Time held me green and dying/though I sang in my chains like the sea.' What exactly does Dylan mean? It seems to me that this is the adult reflection of the illusion of childhood as not as idyllic as we might remember, green but a kind of death to the will perhaps, and happy enough to ellicit song, but still be enslaved. Perhaps that's why he called it a 'poem for evenings and tears.'

Things to be enthralled by in this poem are, as always, the lush and beautiful imagery. Who doesn't wish that they had thought of 'the sabbath rang slowly/ in the pebbles of the holy streams,' or describing a farm on a winter morning as 'like a wanderer white/with dew?' Lovely.

Dylan Thomas - On Immortality

Find yourself the Everyman edition of Dylan's Collected Poems (ed. Davies and Maud), which collects the poems he chose to keep and publish in 1952. I am using the 1993 edition if you are trying to follow my page references. And Death Shall Have No Dominion (pg. 56) was Dylan's first published poem (at the tender age of 18), although he edited it heavily later in the version we now have.

It varies a well known bible verse from (St. Paul's Epistle to the) Romans 6:9 as the repeating phrase at the opening and closing of each of the three stanzas. This repetition and the insistent rhythm gives the poem its power as a meditation on immortality. If you're going to say something more than once, make it something worth hearing.

Boats at Laugharne

Most of the lines elaborating the theme are end-stopped, so it's interesting to focus on those that are not as they break that pattern and draw attention. There are three enjambed lines, one in each stanza:

'Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon.'

'Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily.'

'Where blew a flower may a flower no more
lift its head to the blows of rain.'

In each of these there is yet more repetition (man/man, winding/windily and flower, repeated even on the same line). Is this lazy writing? Perhaps the last one as the object is the same, but not the others I think as these add to the circular effect of the poem turning over its ideas on themselves.

I am curious as to the nature of the man in the wind and the west moon. We know of the man in the moon, but not in the wind, so that seems a playful variant. But the man in the west moon? What does he mean by the west moon. Literally there is no such thing, we only have one moon. The moon over Wales i.e. in the west perhaps? But why? As illustration of the poem's panthesism is one suggested explanation.

As to windings/windily, this jars for me rather badly and if it were my poem, I'd have edited that out. The flower line on the other hand is interesting, or rather the blows of rain are a clever conjuring of the wind and its punches and is imagery extended in the next to lines: 'dead as nails' and 'hammer'. Dead as nails seems again to be Dylan invention, we know deaf as a post or thick as a board, but not this.

The mention of the unicorn myth and its abilities to dispel evil in stanza two is rather suspect and undermines the poem from within, even more so as this is the only line in which the syntax is tortured. I am inclined to smirk at this image, and that's me being unkind and reading it eighty years after it was written, but it does give the poem a risible register. This is a pity, but yet, classic Dylan imagery is at work here: moon, sea, stars, bones, all busily resisting death.

Roundyhouse

I have a new poem, Cairo 2011, in the latest edition of this magazine from South Wales. For information on how to buy a copy, go here http://www.benybont.co.uk/another/roundy.htm#rx

Graffiti Project - latest

Sorry I have given up counting them - there was an excellent article in the Guardian last week on street art, with some amazing examples from all over the world - see the ten of the best here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2011/aug/07/art?INTCMP=SRCH to which I offer the following  little dragon from Newport, South Wales - simple but cute (note fire!)

Ty Newydd

I have just come home from a writing retreat at the National Writers' Centre for Wales. It is in Lloyd George's last home in North Wales (I slept in his bedroom, un-haunted!). It's the perfect location for writing new poems, meeting new poets and catching up with friends. If you ever have the opportunity to spend a week on a course of retreat there, grab it with both hands and then hope you are blessed with good weather. This week we were spoiled for sun and sea. Over the years I have met people on courses there that I am still in touch with, some of whom I am proud to call my friends.

http://www.tynewydd.org/english/home.html

Academi - Big News

I am absolutely thrilled to have been invited to be a member of the Welsh Academi. This is truly a great honour for a Welsh writer and I am very proud. Thank you.