I haven't blogged for a while and that's partly because I was away a long time but also because, soon after I got back, I heard that two poets I knew had died on the same day. One of them, Douglas Houston, I met a long time ago through my association with Hull and poets there such as Peter Didsbury and Sean O'Brien.
He was one of those poets who gets insufficient
attention because they have a subtly shifting identity which evades convenient
labels. That slipperiness allowed him, for example, to morph for a while into a
Welsh poet, but it’s a clear sign of his quality that, during that period, he
exerted on Welsh poetry a distinctive and important influence which helped it
to learn new tricks more attuned to the contemporary world. The major figure in
contemporary Welsh poetry, Gwyneth Lewis, has some marked Houston qualities in
her earliest work.
Tony Conran was a major feature of my early days in Bangor. I was asked by Zoe Skoulding to write a piece for him for
Poetry Wales, so I'll paste that here:
When my daughter was born in 1985, Tony Conran wrote a ‘gift
poem’ for her, and he and his wife Lesley visited us. Because of Tony’s vocal
problems, it was Lesley who read the poem, but it was Tony who was directing
the performance, which involved a ‘toast’ in milk. The idea of performance was
a key one for the Conran poetic , and one of my earliest experiences of Bangor
was participating, along with student actors and musicians, in rehearsals, and
then performances, of Tony’s poems, including ‘Life Fund’, which was ‘designed
as a cantata’ but was made to work ‘as a piece for choral speaking, providing
opportunities for the producer to play his full chorus against smaller groups
or soloists’.
It was
clearly this that led eventually to Tony’s very successful verse dramas, such
as Branwen, but the idea of
performance has a wider significance for Tony’s work as a whole, especially in
its connections to his gift poems. The idea of a male poet bestowing milk
struck me at the time as odd, but it’s a characteristic oddness – in this case
it defamiliarises gender, which is a recurrent preoccupation in Tony’s work,
but his poems constantly use a sense of disorienting oddness in order to
subvert social and cultural assumptions. It connects to one of Tony’s key
contributions to Welsh writing, which is his unique combination of passion and
scepticism (based on a profound historical scholarship) about Welsh identity –
he was always dubious, for example, about Welsh claims to colonial status.
Deliberate
oddness works inside the gift poem poetic as a strategy which questions the
relationship in poems between the poet speaker and the addressee; it is in this
poetic space that Tony made his most important contribution to Welsh poetry. As
he wrote in his collection Spirit Level:
Welsh poetry is second-person poetry. A poem praises,
satirises or laments within the magnetic field of I and Thou. The giving and
receiving of gifts, like the giving and receiving of poetry itself, formed the
central arch of Welsh civilisation; and the celebration of gift and giver an
important sub-division of the Welsh poetic art.
So the gift connotes a poetic tradition and a social role –
in bestowing a poem-as-milk on my daughter, Tony was simultaneously celebrating
her birth and affirming the poet’s bardic role in order to invoke social
activity and the Welsh poet’s traditional response to it. For Tony, the poet
wrote out of his immediate community which, in his case, was Bangor and its
environs. So he once told me off for using the names Peter and Vanessa in a
poem because it meant I was ignoring the fact that there was a couple with
those names living in Bangor (it didn’t matter that, in the poem, ‘Peter’ was
actually a parrot).
The key point is that, in
emerging out of a specific community, and addressing itself to specific
individuals, the poem transcends lyric and enters the ‘magnetic field’ of the
dialogic. Tony wrote some personal poems, but there is remarkably little in his
work, for example, about his cerebral palsy which, for many writers with such a
major disability, would’ve been the starting-point and core of their work.
Instead he invented an outward-looking poetic which was as generous as the
stress on gifts implies. So ‘Upright Slate’ explores the way that objects acquire
meaning in poems, and the way that poems become centred upon objects. However,
it is not itself object-c
When my daughter was born in 1985, Tony Conran wrote a ‘gift
poem’ for her, and he and his wife Lesley visited us. Because of Tony’s vocal
problems, it was Lesley who read the poem, but it was Tony who was directing
the performance, which involved a ‘toast’ in milk. The idea of performance was
a key one for the Conran poetic , and one of my earliest experiences of Bangor
was participating, along with student actors and musicians, in rehearsals, and
then performances, of Tony’s poems, including ‘Life Fund’, which was ‘designed
as a cantata’ but was made to work ‘as a piece for choral speaking, providing
opportunities for the producer to play his full chorus against smaller groups
or soloists’.
It was
clearly this that led eventually to Tony’s very successful verse dramas, such
as Branwen, but the idea of
performance has a wider significance for Tony’s work as a whole, especially in
its connections to his gift poems. The idea of a male poet bestowing milk
struck me at the time as odd, but it’s a characteristic oddness – in this case
it defamiliarises gender, which is a recurrent preoccupation in Tony’s work,
but his poems constantly use a sense of disorienting oddness in order to
subvert social and cultural assumptions. It connects to one of Tony’s key
contributions to Welsh writing, which is his unique combination of passion and
scepticism (based on a profound historical scholarship) about Welsh identity –
he was always dubious, for example, about Welsh claims to colonial status.
Deliberate
oddness works inside the gift poem poetic as a strategy which questions the
relationship in poems between the poet speaker and the addressee; it is in this
poetic space that Tony made his most important contribution to Welsh poetry. As
he wrote in his collection Spirit Level:
Welsh poetry is second-person poetry. A poem praises,
satirises or laments within the magnetic field of I and Thou. The giving and
receiving of gifts, like the giving and receiving of poetry itself, formed the
central arch of Welsh civilisation; and the celebration of gift and giver an
important sub-division of the Welsh poetic art.
So the gift connotes a poetic tradition and a social role –
in bestowing a poem-as-milk on my daughter, Tony was simultaneously celebrating
her birth and affirming the poet’s bardic role in order to invoke social
activity and the Welsh poet’s traditional response to it. For Tony, the poet
wrote out of his immediate community which, in his case, was Bangor and its
environs. So he once told me off for using the names Peter and Vanessa in a
poem because it meant I was ignoring the fact that there was a couple with
those names living in Bangor (it didn’t matter that, in the poem, ‘Peter’ was
actually a parrot).
more in a minute
