All That is Wales
Page 33
I’m about in my doubles, mad, may the whole female
Population of this parish have scabs.
I’m wasting my time here, I have never managed
To fix a date with a single girl yet.
Not with a decent, easy-going lovely,
Nor with a little toots, or even a housewife, or a hag.
(Collected Poems, 225)
Contrast this with Norris’s altogether more constrained, and linguistically straitened, version:
Plague take them, every female!
With longing I’m bent double,
Yet not one of them, not one,
Is kind to my condition.
Golden girl, wise wife, harsh witch,
All reject my patronage. (159)
A like difference emerges if one places a passage from Glyn Jones’s translation from ‘The Seagull’ (in which the bird becomes a love-messenger) next to Norris’s version. This is the former:
Girl-glorified you shall be, pandered to,
Gaining that castle mass, her fortalice.
Scout them out, seagull, those glowing battlements,
Reconnoitre her, the Eigr-complexioned.
Repeat my pleas, my citations, go
Girlward, gull, where I ache to be chosen.
She solus, pluck up courage, accost her,
Stress your finesse to the fastidious one;
Use honeyed diplomacy, hinting
I cannot remain extant without her. (Collected Poems, 52)
And this Norris’s attempt:
Wide praise is for you and her;
Circle that castle tower,
Search till you see her, seagull,
Bright as Eigr on that wall.
Take all my pleading to her,
Tell her my life I offer.
Tell her, should she be alone –
Gently with that gentle one –
If she will not take me, I
Losing her, must surely die. (158)
What seems to be restraining Norris here is that sense of poetic ‘good taste’ he began to absorb fatally early, when he was first exposed to the work of Wordsworth and others at his Cyfarthfa Castle School. And unlike Jones, he never reached out to alternative models, available not least in the Welsh-language poetic tradition, that might well have rendered his mature poetry less cautiously conventional, rhythmically monochrome and conversationally understated in the fashion of the English tradition of ruminative nature poetry than it was too often inclined to be. America might well have had a liberating effect on him – one thinks of A. R. Ammons’s fine comment in ‘Corsons Inlet’:
I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work.16
But while his eventual exposure to the USA certainly helped loosen up his poetry a little, it came far too late in his career to affect his poetics of rather comfortable and predictable closure in any fundamental way.
Part of the reason for the relative conservatism of his tone and the caution of his poetic discourse might well have been his understandable reaction against a dangerous youthful addiction to Dylan Thomas’s ‘colour of saying’. He touches on this in what was, perhaps, his signature poem, ‘More than Half Way There’, clearly intended to confirm the emergence of his mature poetic. It reflects on the difference between his ‘young voice [that] told/ Of swallows’ ruby eyes between such trees/ As the cool moon allowed’ and his present more temperate utterance. ‘The common/ Blackbird sings and I accept this marvel’, he quietly notes, while recognising that the protection of any ‘true voice …/ Means constant vigilance’: ‘I am alert lest an old voice soften/ What needs to be said’ (25). And a visit to Dylan Thomas’s grave at Laugharne prompts him to a similar meditation on internal change, in a poem that on occasion deliberately echoes, in its dispassionate way, the impassioned rhetoric of Thomas himself:
So I’ll not denounce this death
Nor embitter the ordinary air
With blown words that my breath
Is now too small to wear.
Having thus briefly paid his respects to the at-times blowsy poet of ‘A Refusal to Mourn’, Norris is then careful to inoculate himself against the infectious extravagance of such rhetoric by soberly noting how ‘Smoothly the plain day ends’ (180). The mature Norris believed, no doubt correctly, that his development into a credible poet had necessitated a move away from Dylan Thomas, but his translations from Dafydd ap Gwilym provided him with a safely distanced way of deploying a bolder poetic than his normally cautious self would allow. Those translations also leave one feeling his poetry might have benefited from more regular excursions in such directions. Within his limits, Norris was a fine, humane, attractive and accomplished poet. But, given his not inconsiderable gifts, he should, one reluctantly and sadly feels, have been capable of so much more.
(Published in Literature and Belief: 29 + 30.1 [Utah: Brigham Young University, 2009–10].)
Notes
1Leslie Norris, Albert and the Angels (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
2‘For many years I have been collecting such poems and am nearing the end when they will form one long poem written in sections, rather like Wordsworth’s “spots” (his word) of time in “The Prelude” without the boring philosophical bits’. Leslie Norris, Recollections (Provo: Tryst Press, 2006), p. 77.
3‘When I was perhaps fifteen, I read Wordsworth’s “There was a Boy” in my school anthology, I read it with the greatest satisfaction, and believed at once that the purpose of poetry was to preserve, perhaps even to reanimate, lives (in every sense) – which for the poet continued to live. The poem was not one which had been set for us to read, but this was an important development in my poetic theory and I suppose I still believe it’ (Recollections, p. 19).
4‘Anglo-Welsh Manqué: On the Selected Poems of Bobi Jones’, Planet, 76 (1989), 68.
5Anthony Conran, trans., The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 72.
6Leslie Norris, Collected Poems (Bridgend: Seren, 1996), p. 252. All subsequent quotations will be from this volume, unless otherwise identified.
7Tony Conran, Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), pp. 231–3.
8Translated as ‘The Fate of the Language’, in Alun R. Jones and Gwyn Thomas, Presenting Saunders Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973), p. 127.
9Tony Conran, Welsh Verse (Bridgend: Seren, 2003).
10Thomas Parry (ed.), The Oxford Book of Welsh Verse (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 10.
11Joseph P. Clancy, trans., Medieval Welsh Poems (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 88.
12‘Publisher’s Note’, Leslie Norris, Translations (Provo: Tryst Press, 2006). This volume also includes lecture notes by Norris about Dafydd ap Gwilym which, while interesting, are not without several basic inaccuracies.
13Anyone interested in the very numerous English-language translations of Dafydd ap Gwilym, and in the wider subject of Welsh–English literary translation, can find a comprehensive listing in S. Rhian Reynolds (ed.), A Bibliography of Welsh–English Literary Translation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005).
14Leslie Norris, Glyn Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press; Writers of Wales Series, 1973), p. 22.
15Meic Stephens (ed.), The Collected Poems of Glyn Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), p. 75.
16‘Corsons Inlet’, in A. R. Ammons, The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 46.
11
‘STAYING TO MIND THINGS’: GILLIAN CLARKE’S EARLY POETRY1
The account any poet chooses to offer of himself is always fascinating, and in our time all the more so, perhaps, when that self is a herself. In her poem ‘Llŷr’, Gillian Clarke traces her origins as a poet back to Stratford. There, in what elsewhere she has called one of Shakespeare’s ‘father–daughter plays’,2 she was ‘
taught the significance of little words’.3 And what significance they turned out to have. With its tragic demonstrations of how dangerous it may be for woman, in a man’s world, either to speak or to remain silent, and its painfully glorious demonstration of the way the English language may eloquently appropriate and distort indigenous Welsh materials, King Lear provided the ten-year-old Clarke with an ‘object lesson’ that was eventually to set her up for life. Almost fifty years later she was to find in writings such as Eavan Boland’s remarkable Object Lessons powerful confirmation of central aspects of her own early history as a women poet. ‘As I read the poems of the [Irish] tradition,’ wrote Boland, ‘it could often seem to me that I was entering a beautiful and perilous world filled with my own silence.’4 But long before reading words such as these, Clarke had had to find ways of empowering herself to write; ways of granting herself permission to be a poet; ways of coming to understand that
for me poetry is a rhythmic way of thinking, but it is a thought informed by the heart, informed by the body, informed by the whole self and the whole life lived, so that being a woman and being Welsh are inescapably expressed in the art of poetry.5
Absent from the poem ‘Llŷr’ is the aunt who, Clarke subsequently explained in an essay, had actually taken her ten-year-old niece on that fateful outing. Written out of the text, shouldered verbally aside by Shakespeare, Lear, Laughton and Olivier, that aunt now seems to stand for the female self that Clarke eventually discovered needed to be ‘outed’. Thus identified, Auntie Phyllis (to give her her real name) may also conveniently stand for the need to relocate the sources of poetry in the traditional domain of the female. In a world where poetry is Shakespeare, and therefore male, Shakespeare’s very language nevertheless runs ‘like a nursery rhythm’ in Gillian Clarke’s head – the connecting of it with the traditionally ‘female’ preserve of the nursery (that crucial early nurturing space) pointedly redresses the gender balance.
In the magnificent concluding peroration of A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf urges women to realise that ‘[Shakespeare’s dead sister] lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed’.6 Gillian Clarke is making an analogous point when she takes Shakespeare back to his nursery, and to hers, describing her genesis as a poet in the process. As she has explained, her own love-affair with language began with nursery rhymes, playground games, biblical language and Welsh hymns (HPW, 124). And before ever she encountered Lear or Cordelia (and how intricately the one name there echoes and recasts the other), she had already identified with Branwen, the daughter of Lear’s prototype, the Welsh king Llŷr. Moreover, in another example of breaking the male monopoly over the creative imagination, Clarke recalls how, on first hearing the phrase ‘The isle is full of noises’ spoken in a stage production of The Tempest, she recognised it as arising from, and applying to, her own wartime experience as a child:
My father’s radio was the voice of the radio-teller. Later, when I was ten, I was to hear Shakespeare’s words, and would at once know they were describing the ‘sounds and sweet airs’ of Fforest. It was not difficult to imagine my grandmother’s farm as an isle full of noises, cut off by the sea, poor roads, weather and the family from bombs, sirens, and air raids, though not from the rumours of war. Life into language equals fiction. (HPW, 124)
Her grandmother’s farm thus becomes the setting for The Tempest, with Clarke implicitly acting Prospero on her ‘island’. In admitting that she has been writing such ‘“fiction” […] all my life’, Clarke is of course tacitly admitting that she has always been a poet. But hers was a gradual and phased awakening to that fact, since her society neglected to offer her the means to authentic self-recognition. Poetry seemed largely the preserve of the male, and such was the manifest authority of the great masters whose work she studied while reading English at University College, Cardiff, that Clarke was into her thirties before she found the confidence to publish her work.
True, she had kept a diary since she was fifteen, a form of writing that was well suited to her early life as young wife and as mother to three children whose needs monopolised her attention. But then in 1970–1 she stumbled upon a new identity, and with it she entered upon a new existence, almost unawares:
I threw my first poems in the bin because I was unaware they were poems. I suppose it was because I hadn’t read anything in print that was like what I was writing. I think we all need models, and I was both Welsh and a woman. The world wasn’t very interested in either. Have you noticed how late in their careers women get published? Both Ruth Bidgood and Jean Earle, whose work I like, were published late in their lives. I read Poetry Wales, and I saw things there that spoke to half of me, the Welsh part. It would never have occurred to me to send work to London. My former husband posted some poems off to Poetry Wales because I had said ‘I could write as well as this.’ Meic Stephens, the editor at that time, wrote back accepting them.7
This simple statement is dense with quiet details that turn it into the most poignant of parables about the developing of Welsh women’s writing. Poetry’s failure to recognise itself, in the absence of any objective confirmation of its status; a woman’s dependence on men for identity and opportunity; these and other features of the case make it troublingly exemplary.
Joseph Conrad has a striking remark by Novalis as epigraph to Lord Jim: ‘It is certain any conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.’ Poetry Wales, a magazine founded by Meic Stephens in 1965, partly to allow English-language poets to contribute to the revitalised nationalist culture of the period, helped provide Welsh poets with self-belief and thus sponsored an important new generation of Welsh writers. It so happens that the author of the first poem in the first issue was Alison Bielski, and such writers as Ruth Bidgood and Sally Roberts (Jones) (the only woman featured in Bryn Griffiths’s important 1967 anthology Welsh Voices) also figured prominently in the early numbers, but the contributors were preponderantly male, consistent with the gender profile of the literary culture of the period. Beginning with Gillian Clarke’s significant appearance in 1970, however, a change began to occur. And just as it is appropriate that Meic Stephens, the mover and shaker of the poetry scene in Wales during the later 1960s, should (with Sam Adams) have acted as male midwife to this new development, so is it appropriate that Roland Mathias, a major influence on the ideological restructuring of Anglo-Welsh literature in the post-war period, should have so readily and rapidly provided Gillian Clarke (first as contributor and then as editor) with the opportunity of redesigning The Anglo-Welsh Review. Jeremy Hooker, a poet and critic himself at that time emerging as an important new talent on the Anglo-Welsh scene, was another who was quick to recognise Clarke’s potential. And in choosing four of her poems for his Poems ’71 volume he set a pattern to be followed for several years by his successors as selectors of the best poems to have appeared in Wales.
By (presumably) a coincidence, the first poem Gillian Clarke ever published in Poetry Wales was about the coming alive of a dead self.8 ‘Beech Buds’ likens the experience to the putting of dry, bare twigs in water:
From the hard,
Brittle wood came tenderness and life, numerous
Damp, green butterflies, transparently veined,
Opening like a tree that is alive.
It also so happens that, with its naively unguarded exclamations (‘I feel so happy’), its conspicuous evidence of delicate sensibility, and its implicit representation of the female self as dependent on male sustenance, the poem could have been read by males as reassuringly, stereotypically ‘feminine’. A similar reassurance seems to radiate from ‘Nightride’ and ‘Sailing’, with their emphasis respectively on warmly protective and anxious maternal care.
In its immediate difference, though, a fourth poem from that very first set, ‘The Fox’, not only suggests a much more edgy and self-troubled sensibility than may previously have been apparent but also ha
s the power to persuade us to reread those other poems with an altogether less complacent eye. It is the kind and the quality of the sensuous writing in these poems that now comes into startling focus. A child’s head is seen as ‘nodding on its stalk’ in ‘Nightride’; in ‘Beech Buds’ twigs dipped in water produce ‘bubbles/ Of silver against the light’; and in ‘The Fox’, a hill is set ‘flying free and horizontal from the plane of symmetry’. In such lines the senses are as it were given their head; that is, they are granted a mind, an intelligence, and with it a life, of their own. They set us free to feel how we come to both ripeness and vulnerability in our small children; how the very air we breathe may have aesthetic as well as functional qualities; how a transgressive wildness may be inhering in the most solidly familiar mass and matter.
Yet, as early as these first published poems, Clarke ironically lays herself open to the charge of deriving her poetry from influential male models. So, in its fascination with the violent convergence of life and death as expressed through the configuration of ewes giving bloody birth, little silver skulls smeared with gore, a fox hanging red and dead from a tree, Gillian Clarke seems to be trespassing on the Gothic pastoral territory of Ted Hughes. But although at this early stage Clarke’s personal touch is by no means sure (‘the lambs/ Leapt away round the hill’), there is nevertheless already a sense not of mere imitation but of a conversation between poets that is also a conversation between genders. ‘The Fox’ is a poem not only by a woman but also about the contradictions of female ‘nature’. The ewe and her lambs is contrasted not with the predatory male ‘fox’ (of the deliberately misleading title) but with the vixen, in whose violent death may be seen the full ambivalence of her nature – her warm flaming beauty, her role as provider of both milk and raw meat for her young, her dual aspect of killer and victim. Similarly, in another poem, ‘Birth’, the Hughes-like registering of the sticky, messy physicality of the process of calving (‘Hot and slippery, the scalding/ Baby came’) is offset by a human mother’s empathy with the cow. This is registered both through the sensual recall of the erotic physiology of the newly maternalised body (‘I could feel the soft sucking/ Of the new-born, the tugging pleasure/ Of bruised reordering, the signal/ Of milk’s incoming tide’) and through the diffusion of the birthing experience throughout the landscape (‘The light flowed out leaving stars/ And clarity’). The latter involves a strategy of refiguring the body as world, a strategy which has traditionally been central to male love poetry but which has drawn upon uniquely female experience only in recent decades.