Peter will be in America from early April to June, for a series of events and for his annual writer’s residency in Big Sur, California. He and acclaimed American novelist Andre Dubus III will be interviewed at an event at Massachusetts Lowell University. Peter will then head for Boulder, Colorado, where his new book Garden of Clouds/News and Selected Poems will be launched. Peter then goes to San Fransico to give a poetry talk and writing workshop at Book Passage. He then makes his way to Big Sur. Whilst a writer-in-residence, he will launch his new book and be interviewed at the Henry Miller Library. He will also go to Los Angeles, where he will receive an award from Global Poetry & Poetics, Mijusihak (USA) and where he will give a poetry talk and writing workshop. Before returning to Wales, he will go to New York for the Fiftieth Anniversary celebrations of his American publisher, Cross-Cultural Communications.
INTRODUCTORY TALK BY WELSH POET AND DRAMATIST PETER THABIT JONES FOR AN EVENTAT MASSACHUSETTS LOWELL UNIVERSITY, USA, APRIL 2020
As a boy, I use to sit on Kilvey, a sulking hulk of a mini-mountain that darkened and dominated the row of working-class houses in Eastside Swansea, Wales. I was born in my maternal grandparents’ home below Kilvey and they raised me. I spent a lot of time up there, alone, looking and thinking. Even then, to slightly mis-quote Edward Thomas, an English poet and a favourite of mine, I wanted “To bite the day to the core”.
Then in school Mr. James, my teacher, read out a poem, The Kingfisher by the Welsh poet and tramp W.H. Davies. The opening line is: “It was the rainbow gave thee birth”. That word rainbow lit up in my mind. I suddenly saw what one word, all by itself, could do. I’d once seen a kingfisher bird down by Port Tennant Canal when playing with some school friends.
It was the real beginning for me, when language became more than just a way of communicating in the ordinary world of relationships. Mr. James gave us an exercise to write a poem. I wrote one called The Canary (one of my uncles kept canaries in a shed in our garden). Mr James took my poem apart BUT, importantly, also showed me the way to really put a poem together, with obvious rhymes in those days (internal and external).
That, for me, was the beginning of the learning of the lifelong thing of craftsmanship. I realised the excitement of not knowing what was around the corner when one first received inspiration, when one first started to draft a new poem.
I think a sense of craft is essential in a poem, be it formal or informal. As the Irish poet Seamus Heaney stated, “Craft is what you learn from other verse. Craft is the skill of making”.
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Dylan Thomas told an American student in 1951, ‘I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in words…I use everything to make my poems work and move in the directions I want them to.’
The Welsh poet Vernon Watkins, a friend of Dylan Thomas, said, “Cold craftsmanship is the best container of fire”.
And T. S. Eliot pointed out in “The Music of Poetry” (1942) that “no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job”.
So, for me as a poet, it is not just what one says in a poem but it is also about the way one says it. ‘The colour of saying’, as Dylan Thomas put it.
Growing up as a poet in Wales, a bilingual country with two distinct literatures, Welsh and English, one soon became aware of the importance of sound-texturing, the musicality of a poem, the use of cynghanedd, strict Welsh-language poetic devices, utilized by English-language poets, such as Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who resided as a priest for a while in North Wales and studied the Welsh language and cynghanedd.
Cynghanedd means harmony; and a simplified description of cynghanedd is the harmonising of consonants, rhymes, and sounds.
I believe a poem should ‘sing’ as opposed to standard prose.
‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself’ as Walt Whitman wrote.
The musicality of a poem, sound-texturing, can contribute to T.S. Eliot’s notion that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. I believe this is because a poet is stirring something fundamental in us, the iambic beat within us, the very rhythm of our being.
And William Carlos Williams pointed out: “A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/…the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.”
A poet faced with the drama on the page (“Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry” as Irish poet W.B. Yeats said) is trying to create some kind of energy – verbal, visual and musical – and trying to ensure some 2
sort of integrity, believability, in the speaking voice of the poem, in the footsteps of the breath.
A committed poet will utilize all the poetic tools in the kitbag to lift a poem off the page.
But as Seamus Heaney once said, “Technique…involves not only a poet’s way with words, his management of metre, rhythm and verbal texture; it involves also a definition of a stance towards one’s life, a definition of one’s own reality.”
There is a mental cliff-edge gamble when one picks up a pen and paper. The gamble that what is stirring among one’s thoughts, one’s nest of emotions and experiences, could become a fully-fledged poem.
Without poetry I would find my own life less of an experience, less of a journey. A blank piece of paper and a pen are for me like a vast forest is to a man on the run, a scary but a somewhat exciting adventure. I love the uneasy stir of a poem in the mind, a word, a phrase, an observation, a rhythm, the way all is ejected for the focus of shaping something, the taking away of everything that is NOT a poem, until there is a poem: on that sheet of paper, possibly forever.
As William Carlos Williams claimed, “If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.”
I particularly like self-made forms, which can use rhythm, rhyme and metre but in which you can also make use of weakened rhymes and other ‘tricks of the trade’. So even if I write in free verse I try to make the poem sound good, for it to ‘sing’ when read aloud.
I use to encourage my students at Swansea University to try the traditional forms because they are a good way to practice using language, to control words into doing what you want them to do. I see traditional forms as an adventure and not a strait-jacket.
Structure, for me, is all-important, be it the stanza structure of a poem or the sound-texturing structure of a poem. I don’t think one needs to sacrifice imagination for structure. I think imagination can contribute to structure and structure can contribute to imagination. Even the energetic passion of a 3
painter like Van Gogh is contained within the rectangle or square of a frame.
A good poem should contain the THREE main ingredients:
— A MESSAGE or MESSAGES — IMAGERY – or as I prefer mind pictures (imagery was originally referred to as mental pictures) —THE TEXTURE OF A TUNE, in other words musicality or soundtexturing.
An excellent poem, of course, has ‘a ghost in the machine’, a touch of duende as the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca suggested, the unexplainable.
The difference between an ordinary poem and an excellent poem is a bit like Welsh poet R.S Thomas’s comment on translation – an ordinary poem is ‘kissing through a handkerchief’, an excellent poem is real kissing.
The writing of a poem for me is everything. Publication is secondary. The fear and excitement of a blank page is still something I love.
I feel craft assists in the communication, the connection, between writer and reader. One should use the available ‘tricks of the trade’, in other words the application of craft, to make a reader feel sorrow, sense a landscape of snow, or experience the eternal engine of the ocean etc.
For me the bones of a poem come first, a word, a phrase, a line, or a rhythm, usually initiated by an observation, an image, or a thought. Then once I have the tail of a poem I start thinking of its body. Nowadays, within a few lines I know if it will be formal or informal. If it is formal, all my energies go into shaping it into its particular mould, a sestina or whatever. If it is informal, I apply the same dedication.
Eventually after many drafts, a poem often then needs cutting back because of too many words, lines or ideas. Welsh poet R.S. Thomas also indicated that the poem in the mind is never the one on the page, and there is so much truth in that comment.
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My dear friend and mentor of the past thirty years New York poet, biographer, and critic Vince Clemente, often talks of the integrity of a poem being the integrity of the poet’s speaking voice.
The application of craft, of course, must not impact on that internal voice, or internal voices. As the English poet Edward Thomas said, ‘I should use as the trees and birds/ A language not to be betrayed’. The betrayal of one’s own voice, in other words the falsification of one’s voice, or putting on a voice which is not your real voice, leads to false art.
Unless, of course, one is speaking through the voice of another, such as a bullied child or a lonely old woman. Then, one must get as close to the reality of such a voice as is possible.
I think the finding of one’s own voice, or voices is the most important thing for a poet. In my case, the turning point for me was a deep personal grief in my life, the death of my second son, Mathew, when I was twentyfour years-old. I came face to face, to quote the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold, with the ‘eternal note of sadness’. I did not write for a long time, three years in fact. When poetry came back to me I knew I could not fall back on someone else’s voice or experiences. To be honest, though, I think it is only in the last twelve years that I have really started to understand and use, as I would like to, my own voice.
| Edward Thomas also said, ‘I cannot bite the day to the core’; and in a | |
| way, for me, each poem is trying to bite closer to that core. | |
I also think the rubber band of poetry can be stretched to take in all kinds of poems. I believe if you give yourself over to poetry, it will give you something back.
‘Words are the most powerful drug known to mankind’ wrote English writer Rudyard Kipling. Poetry is a way of ensuring words and language retain their real value.
I think in dealing with words, language, one is always conscious of the shadows of words, the shadows of language, where something deeper is residing than one’s knowledge and 5
imagination. It is the absence in the presence.
Knowledge and imagination can go so far, but not far enough.
I have always been interested in the undersong of reality, ‘the eternal note of sadness’, to quote Matthew Arnold again, the the ‘song-weary universe’, to quote my American friend Vince Clemente.
True meaning, for me as a poet, is like a room where an angel has just left. One senses something, but knowledge and even imagination can’t name it. It is, to quote American poet John Ciardi, ‘the prayer behind the prayer’.
To give oneself over to the beginnings of a poem is a solitary sacred act, a devotion to a vocation that demands one’s full attention.
William Carlos Williams endorses this in the poem The Thoughtful Lover:
“But today the particulars of poetry
that difficult art require your whole attention.”
The word poet is a derivation from the Latin poeia, which means ‘I make’ or ‘to make’.
The blank page, like a field of snow to a child, blocks out any sense of man-made time, any sense of the responsibilities to those others in one’s life. One is in another kind of time. Everything goes out the window when a poet is faced with a blank page and a poem stirs like an unseen slowly prowling animal in the mind. The blank page becomes the window, a window into the unknown.
During the ritual of creation, the committed poet is plugged into a no-man’s-land of memories, a no-man’s-land of emotions. Words, syllables, 6
their very singing, are as precious as breath.
The calling to poetry rings through one’s being. One is at the altar of all that makes life worth living. The ghost of one’s muse is back in the room. One is a poet once again.
American poet Allen Ginsberg stated, “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”
I think to be aware of past writers and their works humbles one, makes one aware of the importance of those titles, poet/writer, and makes one realize the importance of learning the craft of writing: one is always learning.
- But beware, as William Carlos Williams stated, “I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
Peter Thabit Jones © 2020
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