tony conran again

here's the rest of the Conran piece:

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-centred, but celebrates how the object had value imposed upon it by individuals, one who carved and abandoned it, and one who later found it and cherished it, and gave it to the poet:

On one side only the flesh of the slate

Has been split:

Was it once the bed of a stream, this featherlike pattern

Rippling through it?

I don’t even remember

Who gave it me –

Only that someone did.

Yet he or she

Liked me and it enough

To carry it home

With hands that its dead weight chilled

To the bone.

two poets

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

Birdwatching in Namibia

I love to watch birds and other wildlife but I'm pretty incompetent so it always feels likely that there's an osprey twenty yards away flagrantly sitting on a branch and I've missed it. I'm happy to listen to blackbirds and to watch flocks of sparrows but what I love above all is to be somewhere that contains astonishing birds which are easy to see, where you don't have to look hard, and then they constitute a marker of the exotic. When you're floating along the Nile, the Nile kingfisher is simply there, pied black and white and hovering over the water. So in Namibia, which I visited recently, there were three different kinds of eagle which could be regularly seen and I saw thirty white-backed vultures circling over a road, and, in one place, flocks of rosy-cheeked lovebirds flaunting their astonishing colours. Even more amazing there was a lit pool, visible from a restaurant, which was visited in daylight by baboons and warthogs, and which at night was visited by a giant kudu with a broken horn and had a speckled nightjar swooping around it, the bird which was audible through the night making an incongruous yapping sound. At the same pool one night an eagle owl sat nonchalantly, not caring he was visible to twenty diners, or that a genet was prowling around, and apparently that powerful bird is quite common now even in the suburbs.

Hawking on myth

Hawking seemed to be on more solid ground in the next episode in his mini-series when he suggested that science has replaced myth. The program invented a group of Vikings watching a solar eclipse and chanting to chase away the wolf god which they believed was eating the sun. Sometimes myth provides a good source of imagery and it obviously provides insight into the primitive mind. But surely quite often the best reaction is just to say that 'aetiological' myths like the wolf god one are quite stupid and boring, and that the scientific explanations are far richer and more beautiful, even if they often take more mental effort. The prestige of myth in the literary world has declined and you don't get, anything like as often, poems like those of Tennyson that centre on mythical characters. But the 'mythic' is still often accorded more respect than it deserves and this can produce things like the Seren series of novels based on stories from the Mabinogion. The ones I've seen in that series are very poor, and I do think that mythic content is very often a sign of lazy thinking, and often of a kind of unexamined mysticism, and that this kind of writing really isn't representing the contemporary world.

stephen hawking on the meaning of life

In a recent TV program, Stephen Hawking said that philosophy is dead and has been replaced by science. Given the astonishing discoveries in recent science you can see what he means - some of the staple questions in philosophy like the mind/body question look entirely different given what science has been saying. Hawking's philosophical outlook has inevitably been shaped by his scientific background which has made him focus on the construction of an infinite universe from atomic particles - which translates philosophically into a form of materialism so that, when he comes to translate this into what the meaning of life might be, he's clearly faced with the premise that human meaning is largely irrelevant. Struggling against that obvious conclusion he decided to say that life does have meaning and that it arises from how individuals impose meaning in their own lives. This is banal at best and demonstrates that ignorance of philosophy is likely to lead you, when you're forced to philosophise, into reiterating philosophical cliches. His line was little better than 'life is what you make it' or, less colloquially, a crude version of existentialism.

David Gaffney

I went, last weekend, to the 60th birthday celebrations for Stand magazine, which has played a major role in contemporary poetry and deserves to be supported in every possible way. I gave a reading and listened to others and the general standard was extremely impressive. The most distinctive though was by David Gaffney who writes micro-fiction, - each piece 150 words long. He read, for example, one about the emotional meaning of the spiral structure of Ikea stores,  a deeply creepy one about wardrobes, and one about a man who hates grocery shopping so much he starts - on the principle that people buy more or less the same things - to commandeer trolleys which have already been loaded by other people. One day his victim notices what he's done, but he decides to pretend he knows her:

'Darling, I'll just get eggs.'
'We've got eggs,' the woman chirped. 'Listen, do you want to go out to the car? You look stressed. You can listen to your tape.'

I talked to David at the interval and, in an attempt to influence him, broached the subject of blowdry handriers: how the conventional ones breathe a death rattle on your hands and leave them no drier than before, but the Dyson Hyperblade is scarily effective - if you look at your hands while it's operating, you can see it drives deep ripples across them, as though it's plunging underneath your skin to dry it from the inside. It may work, he seemed interested.

Hillsborough Report

Tony Blair said 'We're all middle-class now', but the horrors explicit and implicit in this report indicate the very powerful role that class still plays in British society, and which is all the more powerful because class is being so cleverly and subtly marginalised as a way of understanding contemporary experience. That the innocent victims of this horror could actually be blamed for causing it, and that such blame was routinely extended and so widely believed, shows the extent of the dismissive contempt with which they were regarded in the first place, and shows how class prejudices carry the weight of unexamined 'common sense', and can be used against the working class by the same people who say it is old-fashioned to talk about class at all.