One of my principal tasks during the life of Devolved Voices is to interview thirty poets to camera. Work on this began several months ago. Since June I have carried my camera and tripod through sun, rain and wind into west Wales, Norwich, and London, to explore aesthetics and the thorny issues of identity and belonging with seven poets emerged since 1997, with another three to follow in the next month. This initial tranche encompasses both Welsh-born and Wales-associated poets. It’s been a fascinating process so far, eliciting some surprising responses – such is the nature of research in effortlessly challenging every preconception you may have had. If you discover you were wrong after all, then you are probably right.

Identity has been a key line of enquiry during this process. It’s a way of relating individual poets and their output to their present environment or the environment that may have been formative in shaping them, of course – and of relating the poets themselves to post-devolution Wales. I’ve been struck by the consistency with which many poets I have interviewed have pronounced skeptically on the issue of identity. Writing in Poetry Wales almost ten years ago, Robert Minhinnick reflected on forty years of an iconic magazine which has played a remarkable role in shaping a culture. Things, he claimed, had undergone a sea change:

For the young being is better than belonging. And uncertainty does not have to mean anxiety […] What differentiates today’s youngest poets from the stalwarts that built this magazine […] is the determination with which the newer writers seek roles in the UK literary world. They are not afraid, suspicious or contemptuous of it.[1]

But was this, I remember wondering at the time of reading, true? To speak with candour: as a young poet myself back then, with my own concerns about how, as a Welsh poet based in London, I could attain visibility, I thought perhaps not. One might reasonably argue that such determination to seek roles in the wider British context might just as well be symptomatic of anxiety. The anxiety of wanting to belong – but to somewhere else.

Welsh-born poets I’ve questioned to date explored the sense of their Welshness with great honesty and directness. Welsh? Yes, but this was a fact, they stressed, rather than to be understood as a mission statement in itself of any socio-political intent or purpose. All were keen to emphasise the paramount importance of creative liberty and individuality, and the inherent problem in seeking to systematise a distinctively Anglophone Welsh poetry in any case. If anything, they were ambitious to be taken on their own terms. Spokespeople? No. They spoke for themselves.[2] And this, it seemed, was what they regarded as their wellspring of confidence and standard of artistic progress. This common interest among Welsh-born poets interviewed indicated that perhaps, in fact, artistic strides have been made. But I’d adjust Minhinnick’s declaration for my thinking. These first interviews suggest that being is now no longer better than belonging – simply being may itself have become a form of belonging to the poetic community.

Those poets who constitute our Wales-associated cohort noted that from the outside of Wales they were very often classified as ‘Welsh’ poets. For these poets, however, this was generally understood as convenient shorthand for their geographical location rather than identity. There was little indication that this was problematic for them. But then, there was no question for such poets that they were therefore obliged to grapple with Welshness, matters of nationhood and nation-building or the place of the Welsh poet – so there was no attendant cultural baggage. Indeed, they pointed out that within Wales they were very definitely considered English poets or simply poets associated with an area of Wales (for example, Aberystwyth). At the same time, they enjoyed very strong, creatively productive relationships with other, Welsh-born poets and felt very warmly accepted into the Welsh literary scene  – which they praised for its lively and inclusive publishing houses and magazines.

Welsh-born poets continue to stay in Wales and create; some make homes elsewhere and create. Poets from elsewhere arrive in Wales and create. It was ever so. The contours and colours of the land, as some of the interviewees pointed out, inhabit their work. Myth and history do appear to remain important and, as is the case with Meirion Jordan’s Regeneration (Seren, 2012), for example, would seem to indicate interesting new poetic directions for an excavation of heritage redux. Wales has not disappeared; it palpably endures in the output. But, it would seem from these initial explorations, the poem’s now most definitely the thing.

Interviews with Damian Walford Davies, Katherine Stansfield, Pascale Petit, Matthew Francis, Richard Marggraf Turley, Meirion Jordan, Jasmine Donahaye, Tiffany Atkinson, Rhian Edwards, and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch will go live in the early autumn.