by Dr <\/b>Matthew Jarvis<\/b><\/p>\n
Dai George\u2019s debut collection The Claims Office<\/em> (Bridgend: Seren, 2013) undoubtedly shows its debts to south Wales: \u2018Jah\u2019,[1]<\/a> for example, recalls the visit of Haile Selassie to the Swansea area in 1939,[2]<\/a> and \u2018St Fagan\u2019s [sic<\/i>], for the first and last time\u2019 recalls a somewhat unsuccessful visit to the eponymous museum.[3]<\/a> However, the volume seems perhaps more sharply concerned, not with the idea of nation \u2013 which is perhaps what the back-cover blurb means by suggesting that the volume shows a \u2018reluctance to conform to nationalist clich\u00e9\u2019 \u2013 but with ideas broadly to do with social justice. Thus, for example, \u2018Boys of leisure\u2019[4]<\/a> starts with the speaker\u2019s memory of the Bob Bank at Cardiff City\u2019s Ninian Park football stadium,[5]<\/a> providing the boyhood pleasures of \u2018Saturdays with men\u2019 and their \u2018You are my Cardiff<\/em> chants\u2019. The discovery of this life is allied, in the following stanza, with the riches to which the speaker\u2019s boyhood self was admitted by virtue of a library card. However, both of these experiences seem to let him down, as their promise that \u2018all doors would allow \/ my passage\u2019 gives way to a sense of the \u2018failed vows of stadiums, books and railcards\u2019 \u2013 presumably, the sense that their suggestions of ready access to pleasure, knowledge and experience do not become a fundamental truth of later life. The rest of the poem then turns to leisure centres \u2013 specifically, swimming baths \u2013 with the assertion that they might be the speaker\u2019s \u2018last pastoral\u2019, as well as the sense that they provide places where the speaker finds that \u2018we are boys again\u2019, even as \u2018lost and compromised\u2019 adults. But what this gives way to, as the poem concludes, is the notion that swimming pools \u2013 George specifically cites Hatch End in Greater London (in the London Borough of Harrow) and Pentwyn Leisure Centre in Cardiff \u2013 are \u2018Shrines\u2019 to what he calls \u2018a vanishing, turnstile Britain, open to any jack, joke, \/ chump who had the change, or no\u2019. For the poem, in other words, public swimming pools are symbolic of a society that is defined by accessible civic amenities \u2013 crucially, ones that are open to anyone, irrespective of their achievements, for the payment of a very small fee (\u2018change\u2019). Of course, the poem\u2019s lament is precisely that what it sees as a social virtue that benefits any \u2018jack, joke, \/ chump\u2019 \u2013 a social virtue that is, in other words, to do with social levelling \u2013 is now in decline. Indeed, it is interesting that the poem identifies this particular virtue with Britain (\u2018a vanishing, turnstile Britain\u2019): \u2018Boys of Leisure\u2019 may start with the pleasures of boyhood Wales (at Ninian Park), but it ends by constructing a lament for what it sees (correctly or not) as a British<\/em> social virtue. What is most important, however, is its attachment to a notion of social equity \u2013 a level field on which all may play, irrespective of social status (the ordinary jack<\/i>) or achievement (it is open to everyone, even the joke<\/em> or chump<\/em>). Indeed, the desire for the poem\u2019s eponymous Claimant to be heard (\u2018consoled by nothing \/\/ so much as the thought of being heard\u2019) is a sentiment that is very much in tune with that of one 2011 Occupy protester in Chicago who is reported as saying that \u201899 percent of this country is disenfranchised and not being heard [. . .] that is irresponsible and awful, but it can be changed and we can change it\u2019.[11]<\/a> Of course, I do not wish to argue that this poem is, in some simplistic way, an Occupy poem; it may, indeed, have been written prior to late 2011 when the Occupy movement sprang up. But it does seem to suggest the particular attitudes of anger towards institutions of (especially financial) power that have followed the financial crisis of 2008.[12]<\/a> Or, to put it another way, there is a social justice agenda in this poem that is not comfortably reducible to the arena of one particular country or its developing political identity. To use Katie Gramich\u2019s terminology, this is not a poetic which is seemingly in pursuit of a Welsh \u2018autonomous agency\u2019;[13]<\/a> rather, it is in pursuit of agency for citizens outside Stiglitz\u2019s \u2018top 1 percent\u2019 \u2013 irrespective of nationhood and its possible claims.<\/p>\n Extract from work on the poetry of Dai George: Poetry and the 99% \u2013 PDF Version<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dr Matthew Jarvis Dai George\u2019s debut collection The Claims Office (Bridgend: Seren, 2013) undoubtedly shows its debts to south Wales: \u2018Jah\u2019,[1] for example, recalls the visit of Haile Selassie to the Swansea area in 1939,[2] and \u2018St Fagan\u2019s [sic], for the first and last time\u2019 recalls a somewhat unsuccessful visit to the eponymous museum.[3] … Continue reading “Extract from work on Dai George: Poetry and the 99%”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13396,"featured_media":0,"parent":17,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1832","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9R2R9-ty","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2237,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1832\/revisions\/2237"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nGiven this sort of sensibility, it is entirely congruent to find the poem \u2018Claimant\u2019[6]<\/a> which pits a \u2018Commoner\u2019 and \u2018Groundling\u2019 \u2013 as the poem\u2019s opening words put it \u2013 against a social elite, with the relatively simple hope of the Claimant himself \u2018being heard\u2019 by those in power. The primary imagery of the poem, then, gestures towards social exclusion, as the Claimant is portrayed as being outside a \u2018property\u2019 in which \u2018your worships feast indoors\u2019. Notwithstanding such exclusion, however, the Claimant is a determined social participant: he is \u2018Voter\u2019; he is \u2018Entrant \/ in the world\u2019s competition\u2019; he is, the poem suggests, emphatically not asking for charity (\u2018Mistake him for beggar \/ at your peril\u2019). Most importantly, he is unrealised power \u2013 but power that the social elite hopes will remain unrealised (\u2018Some are banking on the sheer \/\/ luck of him not fathoming his power\u2019). He seems to function, in other words, as an everyman \u201cordinary voter\u201d; but he is crucially an everyman who is waking up to the fact that he needs to \u2018reassess \/ his options\u2019, given that the levers of socio-economic power are being kept securely away from him (\u2018the account\u2019s been moved offshore, \/ the enquiry parked forever in the long grass\u2019). The poem, in this sense, offers a vision in which the worker, the voter, the everyday social participant whom \u2018your worships chose \/\/ to ignore until this evening\u2019 begins to assert his significance. Thus, as the poem ends, the \u2018Groundling\u2019 who has been previously ignored by the powerful is now outside the gates of their \u2018property\u2019 and \u2018occupies the lawn\u2019. More importantly, perhaps, in the very last words of the piece \u2013 words which, like the poem as a whole, are addressed to the powerful, inside and at feast \u2013 the Claimant stands outside the property of the mighty, \u2018Where his ballast \/ at the base was the condition of your height\u2019. In other words, what this poem seeks to acknowledge is the importance of the worker, the voter, the ordinary \u2018Entrant \/ in the word\u2019s competition\u2019; and the social injustice that the poem thus seeks to redress is the failure of the powerful to acknowledge the notion that it is only on the backs of such individuals that their own power, wealth and privilege are constructed.<\/span>
\nIt is, I suppose, possible to see such social concern as being in dialogue with<\/em> or even the product of<\/em> a Welsh post-devolution society that, from the top at least, has announced a desire for \u2018Clear Red Water\u2019 \u2013 i.e. an identifiably left-wing distance \u2013 between its citizens and what Richard Wyn Jones and Roger Scully call \u2018their fellow Britons\u2019.[7]<\/a> However, as Jones and Scully point out, in social attitudes testing about \u2018economic left-right opinions, and [. . .] libertarian-authoritarian stances\u2019, post-devolution Wales \u2018actually appears as the least \u201cradical\u201d of [Scotland, Wales and England] on both measures\u2019[8]<\/a> \u2013 although its population is \u2018significantly more likely\u2019 to self-identify as \u2018working class\u2019 (69.9%) than that of England (59.2%).[9]<\/a> As such, the emotional sympathies of post-devolution Wales might, like those of the poem, be with the \u2018Commoner\u2019 Claimant, rather than with those \u2018worships\u2019 who have ignored him \u2013 even if, in terms of opinions on actual policy, its sympathies might be rather more ambiguous. However, rather than this being a poem of clearly Welsh radical sympathy, I want to suggest that it is far more rooted in a concern for what has been popularly called \u2013 since the birth of the Occupy Movement in September 2011 \u2013 the \u201c99%\u201d, a notion which echoes the work of the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, who wrote in a 2011 article for Vanity Fair<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n
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