We have now posted our first two interviews with poets for the Devolved Voices project. These first two feature acclaimed poet Pascale Petit, thrice shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and notable younger poet Meirion Jordan. Follow this link and choose from the drop-down ‘Media’ menu or click on the links to the right of the webpage.
Further interviews will be posted in coming weeks.
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.
[1] Robert Minhinnick, ‘Poetry Wales at 40: An Editor’s Outlook’, Poetry Wales, 40:3 (Winter 2004/5), p.3
[2] Robert Minhinnick, invaluable commentator and visionary on the scene, again – this time writing in 2001: ‘[W]hat seems exciting about literature in Wales is that writers no longer feel the need to act as social campaigners. The poet, at last, is nobody’s conscience. He is his own man. Writers are now determined to act and behave as artists. They will stand and fall by their art alone and understand this is the only honourable stance to take […] This means that writing from Wales is more varied than before. The poet is no longer subordinate to events.’ ‘Under a Red Sky: The Outlook from Vertalershuis’, Poetry Wales, 36:4 (April 2001), p.3
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has become one of the most notable of Wales’s post-1997 cohort of poets. Published now by Picador, her latest volume is Banjo – a collection which Alice Entwistle praised to the heights in summer 2012’s NWR (‘mesmerising’, ‘precision-tooled contents’, ‘beautifully calibrated’ – even ending with a warning of ‘how far short a review like this must fall’ of properly conveying the quality of the work).
It can be interesting with poets who develop into significant figures to recall where they came from. So I thought I’d look again at a few poems from SWR’s first volume, the pamphlet Stranded on Ithaca, which came out from Bradford’s Redbeck Press in 1998.
What’s striking for me is just how strong the techniques are – strong, I mean, in the sense of being strongly apparent. Like a strong flavour. The first few poems manifestly set the tone. ‘Rockclimbing in Silk’ (the opening piece) displays a language that is heavy with descriptives and mots justes: there’s the finger of a castle beckoning ‘jaggedly’; the sea is ‘unconsoled’; the wind is ‘bandaging’ towers; there are seagulls that are ‘disenchanted’ and ‘mim[ing] agony’; and, in the final lines, the air in the throat of the poem’s protagonist is ‘uncertain’. This is language, in other words, that’s marked by a regular reaching for the special word, the linguistic moment that will elevate the tone of the whole above the ordinary. Poetry, if you will, as a counterpoint to linguistic plainness – although done with judicious care, without pushing such a trait to extremes.
But what’s more important, I think, is how this particular poem uses narrative. In his chapter in the 2010 book The Cambridge History of English Poetry, when he is discussing British poetry of the 1980s and early 1990s, Peter Barry suggests that ‘the tricksy, decentred “secret narratives” of James Fenton and Andrew Motion pleased a public which seemed to enjoy a moderate amount of narratological teasing with its poetry’ (p. 970). This draws on Barry’s earlier book, Contemporary British Poetry and the City (2000), in which he describes the ‘secret narrative’ approach as being about ‘the use in poetry of obliquely told, often fragmented and unanchored narratives, emotive but obscure in character’ (p. 135, note 7). ‘Rockclimbing in Silk’ fits this pattern very neatly, with its manifestly unanchored narrative of someone undertaking an unexplained and somewhat unusual activity (the eponymous ‘Rockclimbing in Silk’) which moves to a conclusion that is itself unclear – viz. does the protagonist fall or just give up climbing because of the heat? Narratological teasing indeed: or to put it differently, the poem as slightly tricky, half-told tale.
The pamphlet’s second piece, ‘Pope Gregory XI’s Bedroom’ proceeds along related lines. The language is no less careful, although it’s a bit less concerned with conjuring up recurrently striking words (notwithstanding the bathetic shift of ‘some Italian / jerk’ in the fourth stanza). What the poem offers up in place of this, however, is a sequence of striking images: ‘rhyming wallpaper’ (which still puzzles me); a dome made of ostrich feathers; the fear of choking on quails; eggshells crushed between teeth; a river seen as filled with blood. Poetry, if you will, as dramatic images; a counterpoint, then, to conceptual plainness. The images in this second poem, in other words, are doing the same sort of work that language did in the first.
As for the narrative – well, it wouldn’t do to call it ‘secret’, really. If you don’t know about Pope Gregory XI (last of the Avignon popes), an encyclopaedia will soon sort you out. But what’s vital is that the poem doesn’t do that work for you. Its air of evocative mystery is created by not saying. By giving you fragments of the story (‘that odd Dominican who / writes continually, insisting that he / give it up, come back to Rome’), but not the whole thing. It’s a clever technique: the frisson of a puzzle; the sense that we’re seeing a tale through a glass, darkly.
And the third poem in the pamphlet, ‘One Way Ticket’, does precisely the same thing. There’s a man on a ship, thinking about his troubles – presumably the troubles that have resulted in the ticket of the title. And then, right at the end, we’re told that he still hears ‘the shot’ at Soar-y-Mynydd. Was someone shooting at him? Was there a duel? Was there some feud? Did he hear the shot of someone’s suicide? The point is that the poem doesn’t tell us. It’s all about the half-told tale, the mystery of the not-really-explained event. Even the very precise Welsh reference to Soar-y-Mynydd does the same sort of thing, causing this reader at least to wonder whether there’s a nod to a particular community tale here, a tale drawn from the upland region around the Camddwr valley – but a tale, of course, that this poem is certainly not going to reveal.
I think that much of Stranded on Ithaca owes a great deal to this particular narrative technique. Even the longish title poem, with its grounding reference to the figure of Penelope in The Odyssey, is a narrative puzzle in so many ways. Indeed, that’s a poem for which Peter Barry’s description of ‘secret narratives’ as ‘emotive but obscure in character’ fits the bill pretty much perfectly (perhaps especially for sections II and III.) So when there are poems in which the narrative seems to be fundamentally clear (‘Flavia’s Curtains’, ‘The Ballroom’), the difference comes almost as a shock. ‘The Ballroom’, for example, dramatizes the washing of a paralysed nonagenarian woman by a carer, in the context of a nearby photograph of the same woman when young, in which she is captured ‘in a sepia waltz with some man’. Whilst the half-told tales are very clever creators of atmosphere, ‘The Ballroom’ – in its relative narrative clarity – is a poem that I find much more directly moving. Obviously, that’s an entirely personal response to the difference in technique. But that difference in technique is important for demonstrating, precisely by means of the contrast it creates, one of the primary methods of poetic construction at play in this volume.
There’s much more to say about this undeniably interesting poet, even just in terms of Stranded on Ithaca – her use of vignettes, for example, being another of her approaches to partially rendered narrative; her humour, both on the scale of a complete poem (‘Mona’) and in a playful phrase such as ‘So many men, so little wine’ (‘Stranded on Ithaca’); her rich range of cultural references. But, for me, it is probably those half-told tales which most stand out here: the poet not quite as mystery-maker, but crucially as playing with that-which-is-not-said.
Peter Barry
In our work on the ‘Devolved Voices’ project so far, we have tried to spell out precisely what we mean by some of our key concepts. We are studying ‘emergent’ poets of the post-1997 period in Wales, but what exactly is ‘emergence’? We tried to define it precisely and objectively in one of our first documents. I think we were right to do so, as we want the principles by which we are making our choices and emphases to be as transparent as possible.
However, I haven’t always felt exactly as I do now about transparency. I edited an academic journal for 20 years, during the period when the notion of peer reviewing was becoming established in the UK as the litmus test of academic quality. But at the heart of every journal is an inner core of day-to-day practice which is simply unknowable to outsiders. Exactly who decides what, and exactly how, is not always open to external audit, and is not necessarily the same as official policy might dictate.
For instance, I would sometimes receive an essay from a famous academic, accompanied by an oddly self-effacing note. I would think, ‘That can’t really be the famous Prof X – s/he wouldn’t write a cover-note of that self-deprecating kind’. But on a number of occasions, involving different people, it really was the Prof X.
It was evident to me that having a piece by this person in the journal would be noticed, and would improve our standing. What should I do? Should I render it anonymous, and send it out to two academic readers, letting it take its chance, as if it were the work of an early-career beginner? Or should I make the decision myself and take responsibility for it?
If the article turned out to be not so good, even that might be a noteworthy and significant fact, simply because it was by Prof X, and would give some indication of that person’s latest thinking. As a fairly new editor, whenever I went against this principle of seizing an opportunity and taking editorial responsibility, I later regretted it and felt I had been over-timid.
The submission which focuses this issue for me now, was written by a household-name. It was a speculative article about the sex-life of the young George Eliot, based on an interpretation of the coded sex diary of a figure associated with her. I agonised about it for several weeks, and have never before mentioned it to anybody. Was this not a sexist piece, I said to myself, irrelevant to the novelist’s worth and standing as a writer? Should I not high-mindedly reject it? And so on. Eventually, I did reject it, in that self-flattering spirit, but I now know I was wrong.
It would have been an unmistakably news-worthy item, and I should have had the courage to publish it, tipping off national media in advance about its contents. That is what a proper editor would have done, one who was an editor through and through, in spite of the obvious personal and academic risks involved
So what lessons do I take from that experience for Devolved Voices? It’s something like this: Yes, I want our procedures to have the maximum possible transparency, and, yes, I want us to be able to show the principles by which we are working. But in the end, we have to make the judgements, and we have to take the responsibility for doing so. In the last analysis, that is what the money entrusted to us is for.
I’ve been interested by statistics to do with national identities in post-devolution Wales for quite a while, and the recent Welsh Devolution in Perspective conference at the British Academy got me thinking about the issue again.
Cardiff University’s Professor Richard Wyn Jones was one of the speakers at the event, and references he made to the 2011 Census made me realise that there were things in the Census data that might well be important for our understanding of national identity in the post-devolution period. And this is an issue that is clearly important for Devolved Voices: the project crucially challenges us to address potential relationships between post-1997 Anglophone Welsh literature and the socio-cultural milieu out of which it emerges.
What RWJ said, then, was that the results of the 2011 Census question about national identity indicate a weak sense of British identification and a strong sense of Welsh identification in the Welsh population. (These are the results for Question 15 in the ‘Individual questions’ section of the 2011 Census questionnaire: ‘How would you describe your national identity?’) Strange, I thought: if that’s the case, don’t the results about Britishness conflict with existing information about national identity in Wales?
As RWJ pointed out to me in a subsequent conversation, the Census hasn’t asked this particular national identity question before. (The row about the lack of a Welsh tick-box in the 2001 Census was, of course, to do with the question in that Census about ethnic identity.[1]) So, in the strictest sense, the 2011 Census results about national identities exist without comparative context. Or to put it slightly differently, the information drawn together by the Census isn’t directly comparable with previous statistical considerations of the same broad issue, as earlier surveys have (for example) been collected along different lines and under different conditions from the Census itself.
Admitting this caveat, what Richard Wyn Jones had said at the conference still surprised me. Turning to Martin Johnes’s recent volume Wales Since 1939 (Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 431 very helpfully offers a table of Moreno scale surveys of national identity in Wales from 1992 to 2007 (table 14.3).[2] Just a little data-crunching from the figures in this table suggests that, in recent years, a significant percentage of the population of Wales has had some level of identification with British identity – either alone or in some sort of combination with Welsh identity.
To get the amounts of people identifying in some way with Britishness, you need to exclude respondents identifying with the ‘Welsh not British’ label, as well as anyone who does not identify themselves at all with the various Welsh/British options offered by the Moreno scale. If you do this, Britishness plays a part in the various surveys as follows: 71% of respondents in 1992 considered themselves in some way to be British; 80% in 1997; 76% in 1999; 73% in 2001; 73% in 2003; and 72% in 2007.[3] Even if you exclude the weaker British identification suggested by the ‘More Welsh than British’ category of respondents, the figures come out as follows: 51% in 1992; 51% in 1997; 57% in 1999; 50% in 2001; 46% in 2003; and 51% in 2007. Some sense of Britishness, in other words, has apparently been a substantial player in the national self-identification of the Welsh population in recent years.
Then we have the 2011 Census. The national identity question allowed respondents to choose multiple identities, although not (and by contrast with the Moreno scale) to indicate their comparative importance. The upshot – according to the separately downloadable chart associated with Figure 4 of the ONS document Ethnicity and National Identity in England and Wales 2011 – was a level of British identification across the Welsh population which was around half as large as the latter set of figures cited above: 26.3%.
But what if we consider the data Johnes cites in terms of what it tells us about Welsh identification? Well, in that case, we see the following: 85% of respondents in 1992 identified in some way with Welshness; 78% in 1997; 79% in 1999; 86% in 2001; 85% in 2003; and 84% in 2007.[4] Again, if you remove the weaker element of Welsh identification (the ‘More British than Welsh’ category), you get this: 78% in 1992; 68% in 1997; 72% in 1999; 75% in 2001; 77% in 2003; and 74% in 2007. The Census tells us that 65.9% of respondents self-identified with Welshness (either alone or in combination).[5] In other words, there is far less of a difference between these figures than there is between the corresponding figures for Britishness. Or to put it differently: identification with Welshness seemingly holds up between the two different survey approaches, whilst identification with Britishness does not.
Of course, as I said above, detailed or direct comparisons are difficult to draw between the Moreno scale data that Johnes’s book gives us and the rather different form of the data obtained by the Census. Nonetheless, the detailed breakdown of 2011 Census data provided in the ONS data sheet 2011 Census: National identity (detailed), local authorities in England and Wales (document QS214EW) does give some pause for thought.
From this more detailed Census data, then, we discover that British-only identifiers in the Welsh population come in at 16.9% – interestingly not much below the 19.2% for England. Moreover, that 16.9% also broadly resonates with at least some of the figures that Johnes cites for the proportion of ‘British not Welsh’ identifiers since 1992: 14% in 1992; 15% in 1997; 14% in 1999; 11% in 2001; 9% in 2003; and 10% in 2007.
Turning to Welsh-only identifiers in the Census, we find that this cohort comes in at an average of 57.5% across the country as a whole – with the highest percentage figure being found in Rhondda Cynon Taf (73.3%). By contrast, the ‘Welsh not British’ cohorts in Johnes’s table never reach past 28% (in 1992). (In the years of the devolution ‘yes’ vote in 1997 and the establishment of the WAG in 1999, the figures for ‘Welsh not British’ identification were 13% and 17% respectively; the most recent figure cited by Johnes, 2007, was 22%.) Even taking into account that the Census data set is structurally different from the sets cited in Johnes’s book, the broad suggestion of difference here is striking.
It is, however, in the combination of British and Welsh identity that such a ‘broad suggestion of difference’ is perhaps most startling. Even if we only consider the ‘Equally British and Welsh’ cohort of the data sets given in Johnes’s book (i.e. if we exclude the ‘More Welsh than British’ and ‘More British than Welsh’ categories from a combined British and Welsh identification), the percentage of such identifiers is as follows: 30% in 1992; 26% in 1997; 36% in 1999; 28% in 2001; 29% in 2003; and 31% in 2007. Indeed, in all the sample years except 1997, ‘Equally British and Welsh’ was the plurality category of national self-identity. In the Census, however, respondents who identified themselves as both British and Welsh (with no other identifiers chosen alongside those two) came in at just 7.1% across the whole of Wales – a figure that is, it should be noted, less than English-only identifiers, whom the Census indicates as accounting for 11.2% of the population of Wales.
As merely an interested observer rather than a trained political scientist, I’m cautious about trying to draw anything like precise conclusions from two clearly different sorts of data. Indeed, I would be very pleased to hear from any experts about what implications the differences in data collection and question construction might have for the sets of data themselves – and for how they might be read against one another.
However, I find it hard get away from the fact that there are apparently some very substantial differences between the broad suggestions about national identity in the surveys cited in Johnes’s book – surveys, of course, going back a number of years – and the results of the 2011 Census. The large size of the cohort in the Census that self-identifies as Welsh-only is one striking thing; the small percentage of those who identify as both British and Welsh is a second; and the modest level of British self-identification as a whole is a third. Then there is what I suggested above: that identification with Welshness seemingly holds up across the Moreno scale surveys and the Census; levels of identification with Britishness, however, do not.
It would, I think, be somewhat naïve to draw those final observations to the defence of a position that sought to argue, in a very straightforward manner, that Wales-associated literary production is now taking place in the context of some sort of newly dominant Welsh identification on the part of the population of Wales. However, I’m tempted to speculate that there may be something here about the apparent resilience of Welsh identity – in other words, that self-association with Welsh identity in the Welsh population is something that does not seemingly disintegrate in the change from one sort of survey to another. Might any political scientists care to comment? Because if this is the case – this notion of the resilience of Welsh identification – then it’s an issue that certainly demands some thought in the context of a project that requires attention to the socio-political contexts out of which poetry emerges.
Notes
1. The 2001 ‘Wales Household Form’ is available to download from http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/census-2001/about-census-2001/census-2001-forms/index.html. Question 8 in the sections for each individual ‘Person’ in the household is about ethnic identity; there is no question about national identity. For a brief explanation of the rationale behind the new question on national identity in the 2011 Census, see the ONS document Ethnicity and National Identity in England and Wales 2011, p. 10.
2. The Moreno scale asks respondents to place themselves in one of the following categories: ‘Welsh not British’, ‘More Welsh than British’, ‘Equally Welsh and British’, ‘More British than Welsh’, ‘British not Welsh’, ‘None of these’.
3. These figures draw together the following cohorts: ‘More Welsh than British’, ‘Equally Welsh and British’, ‘More British than Welsh’, and ‘British not Welsh’.
4. These figures draw together the following cohorts: ‘Welsh not British’, ‘More Welsh than British’, ‘Equally Welsh and British’, and ‘More British than Welsh’.
5. As in the previous paragraph, this figure is drawn from the separately downloadable chart associated with Figure 4 of the ONS document Ethnicity and National Identity in England and Wales 2011.
The latest addition to the ‘Materials’ section of our website is based around a couple of graphs which present trends in poetic publication (collections/pamphlets) since 1997, with the data divided up according to gender.
Responding to existing suggestions about the particular importance of female writers amongst recent Wales-associated poets, Matthew Jarvis’s graphs offer up numbers and percentages for our post-1997 poetic cohort.
To read the research, please follow the link to ‘Graphic Thinking’. We are, as always, particularly interested to hear your responses, so please post your comments below or – if you’d rather – you’re always welcome to contact the team directly via email at devolved.voices [@] aber.ac.uk.
We have now uploaded our discussion document, Mapping Poetic Emergence 1.0. The aim of this document is an attempt to describe some of the significant stages which are usually observable during the process of poetic emergence. These represent our initial thoughts relating to poetic emergence; the document will be updated and adapted during the course of the project.
We warmly welcome your comments and questions relating to this document; your feedback will help to inform our thinking as the document evolves. We encourage posting here on our blog,and you can also contact us directly at devolved.voices [@] aber.ac.uk.
We have now launched our Devolved Voices website.
As part of our ongoing and extensive bibliographic survey, you can now access a list of individual collections produced by those poets who come under our post-1997 scrutiny, together with reviews covering these works. Also crucial to our bibliographic survey is Context: Wales and Devolution. Here, you can find a list of short, targeted texts (together with commentaries) which function as touchstones for the project’s understanding of the devolved context in which poets under our scrutiny are working.
In our materials section, you can find our working paper, Mapping Emergence, which seeks to pinpoint the stages and context of poetic emergence. This document can be printed off as a pdf, and we welcome both the sharing of this document and your responses to it.
The team has also produced a poster for display and distribution at the 2013 Association for Welsh Writing in English Conference. This poster functions as a useful map – indicating our lines of inquiry and the issues that follow from these, as well as our outputs over the course of the project. The poster is available on the website to print off as a pdf.
Included on the website is our Media section. You can listen to the team talking about the genesis, work and outcomes for the project, and, in due course, this section will be populated with video recordings of poets talking about their work and reading from a selection of their work. We will also be interviewing other notable figures on the Welsh literary scene, exploring their perspectives on the context and evolution of a burgeoning scene.
One of the key outcomes and values of the project is a commitment to outreach. Whether scholar, practitioner or engaged reader, we warmly welcome your comments on the website and the project on this blog, and you can also contact us directly at devolved.voices [@] aber.ac.uk to share your views on the project and its materials.
The initial stage of Devolved Voices has been to conduct a literature survey. My specific task has been to survey reviews that have scrutinized the output of post-1997 poets from Wales writing in English.
I began by compiling a list of print journals I considered to be important in providing us with a narrative of the review culture for the poets under our focus. I selected those magazines I believed offered some of the finest and most lively reviewing and those that are viewed as especially credible and circulated within the community, and those that provide a narrative of what was happening both home and away – Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review, Planet, the TLS, PN Review, The Wolf, the LRB, The North, Ambit, The London Magazine, Acumen, Poetry London, Agenda, Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, and The Warwick Review. These were, crucially, magazines that were likely to be read and to be regarded as opinion-formers within the British poetry community for engaged readers and practitioners at both the gateway and the more specialist level. Alongside the magazines, I also researched reviews appearing in the broadsheet pages of the national newspapers – an especially coveted spotlight for any poet.
Reviews provide us with an obviously important resource for our research: they offer us a critical response to the output – and one that has reach outside of the scholarly community. But – and this is crucial – by the very nature of their existence, they also provide us with an indication of how the reviewing culture has chosen to engage with post-1997 Welsh poets writing in English.
For practitioners, reviews hold a dual importance, of course. While it is certainly true that poets require reviews in order to signal the arrival of a new collection and to promote that title to a small but engaged target market, we know that, with a few exceptions, poets unfortunately stand outside of truly commercial concerns. Indeed, the efficacy of positive reviews in contributing meaningfully to sales remains something of a moot point with many poets and publishers; in many cases it is good fortune in the prize culture that may lead to a welcome boost in sales. In other cases, sales of collections may increase over time, as accomplished poets produce several collections – slowly but surely heightening their visibility within the community and securing, in the process, a generally still relatively small but nevertheless increasing readership.
However, reviews obviously provide something much more than potential sales promotion – as they do for all literary practitioners, regardless of genre. Reviews inevitably signal importance. When a book is selected for review, irrespective of the subsequent content of that review, an editorial statement is made. This may reasonably be interpreted as either personal approval (the editor views the title as a collection of some note) or as an expression of wider cultural approval (the community at large will likely view the title as a collection of some note) or as a harmonious combination of both personal and wider cultural approval. In certain cases, in smaller magazines, there may also be an element of redress – with some focus given to very small presses or to pamphlets, both of which are often overlooked or given very slight coverage by the major magazines. Editors function as cultural gatekeepers. Entry into the review pages therefore amounts to either signaling an auspicious arrival for a new poet or a further consolidation of importance for an already established poet. At its most basic level, review coverage promotes visibility; at its more sophisticated level, review coverage sends a message to a readership and a community about significance and contributes in itself to the creation of reputation.
* * *
Pressure on pages – even for those magazines dedicated solely to poetry – revealed itself clearly during my survey, which was to be expected. Regular readers of literary magazines will be familiar with its management – as will practitioners. Editors will often review two or three titles in a single review or commission a review round-up – scrutinizing many more titles again. Such decision-making leads, of course, to a sense of refinement – and, with that, an inevitable hierarchy. ‘Major’ poets, for example, may be furnished with a single-title review of their work – or be paired with a peer. Within the hierarchy, those poets seen as less progressed on the scale of emergence (debutants, for example) or perhaps less aesthetically aligned to an editor’s particular taste – although still regarded as noteworthy within the community – may find they are reviewed in a round-up. This, of course, comes back to editorial judgment and does not necessarily equate to the actual quality of poet or title, although it does tell a story about perceived status.
Unsurprisingly, the Wales-based major magazines – Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review and Planet – served poets within our post-1997 focus very well indeed. Collectively, they accounted for more than half of all reviews recorded – 226 out of 441 (even though two out of the three magazines – New Welsh Review and Planet – do not simply focus on poetry). They also furnished titles with the most space within individual reviews (often around 500–700 words per title). And this is important. The literature survey not only revealed the breadth of reviews, but it also revealed the depth. Welsh or Wales-based poets can, therefore, not only be relatively confident of coverage within Welsh journals, they can also be confident of deeper coverage – in other words, they can expect to receive a relatively detailed review. In general, the magazines could lay claim to a fine roll call of poet-critics from both within Wales and, importantly, outside of Wales. The critical culture can therefore be regarded as highly credible.
Coverage for Welsh titles in the pages of these magazines is not, however, simply or necessarily an indication of personal editorial approval – although it is an indication of cultural approval. Poetry Wales, New Welsh Review and Planet receive funding from the Welsh Books Council (WBC) and are charged within their remit to provide significant coverage of titles produced by Welsh or Wales-based authors, or by writers with a strong connection to Wales. This is a key element of their function and their vision. And they communicate quite explicitly, although not exclusively, to a Welsh or Wales-connected audience. The magazine culture within Wales has done much to promote Welsh writing in English; this is laudable. But we must naturally be conscious that what it reflects is also part of a pre-determined responsibility.
Over the border, of course, it is a different story. Those magazines based outside of Wales and outside of WBC funding do not have any such obligation to review work from Welsh poets or those writing out of Wales simply by virtue of their nationality or connection. Moreover, coverage in these publications, as we know, is coveted by all poets in the UK – regardless of provenance or location, both new and established. For Welsh poets, of course, there is an additional significance in terms of achievement; Irish and Scottish poets can likewise no doubt identify. The anxiety over regionalism exists. Can one be seen to have ‘made it’ without entry into reviews pages outside of Wales? Being seen within a UK-wide context is crucial, and this is still achieved through the England-based magazines.
But just how efficient is the reviewing culture for our post-1997 Welsh poets in these magazines?
Let’s look at four major platforms outside of Wales as a snapshot.
Poetry Review, for example, covered forty-two titles from Welsh poets or those with a strong Welsh connection in its pages over fifteen years. Reviews came with the necessary quality-impact – Poetry Review is widely considered to be the premier magazine within the establishment; a presence in the reviews pages of Poetry Review is therefore more than highly desirable. By virtue of its status, Poetry Review has a wide circulation and can command major figures of influence as reviewers. Visibility and the potential for significance come attached to any coverage for an individual poet. In the Autumn 2004 issue two Welsh poets were furnished with single-title reviews. Since then, only one Welsh poet has received a single-title review (in 2010). Typically, Welsh poets who have emerged since 1997 appeared in round-ups of four titles. Coverage of an individual title within such composite reviews tended to hover at around 250 words. But while space in the pages was relatively small, we must factor in the reach of Poetry Review – and the claim upon its pages.
PN Review presented a solid showing for Welsh poets. Eighteen collections were covered in the review pages, so far fewer than those published in Poetry Review. However, PN Review afforded a more generous level of space to each title (around 300–400 words per title in a round-up) and there were five instances of single-title reviews (1000 words) – PN Review’s poetry-publishing wing, Carcanet, has a demonstrable interest in Welsh poetry.
Poetry London was a generous outlet. Twenty-seven Wales-connected titles were reviewed, and although reviews were typically of three poets (a customary approach of the magazine towards new, established and major figures alike), space allotted to each title was strong (500–600 words). Poetry London was also impressively resistant to pigeonholing, with very little emphasis on grouping Welsh or Wales-based poets together (there are just two instances of such grouping – in both cases the titles sit in marked contrast to one another, and no efforts are made to connect them by virtue of their ‘Welshness’).
The Times Literary Supplement, like Poetry Review, is a much sought-after platform, although, as we know, it covers a wide range of literary and scholarly material in its reviews. It provided coverage to twenty-one titles authored by Welsh poets writing in English over the period. All of these were within single-title reviews, allowing for varying degrees of engagement according to whether they were ‘In Brief’ reviews (around 300–350 words) or more detailed analyses (around 700 words). Notably, the twenty-one reviews were shared between eleven poets in total, with certain poets receiving reviews for several titles over the years. By contrast, two debutants were reviewed in 2000 another in 2004, and another in 2009. In other words, securing an initial review tended to lead to further reviews in the future – suggesting that the TLS appears to work along a momentum model within its pages. The TLS also provided an interesting gender contrast. Twelve titles under review were authored by male poets, while nine were authored by female poets. This was not reflective of the survey as a whole, where women outweighed men for coverage in both individual magazines and overall.
Securing reviews in the broadsheets remains a goal for poets. Anecdotal evidence from poets suggests that this registers high on the scale of significance – which is to be expected. Space in the newspapers is difficult to achieve: pressure on pages coupled with poetry’s relatively marginal status in the wider literary culture means that opportunity is scant. Good fortune in the prize culture certainly seems to help. Several titles given coverage had already secured nominations for one of the two major UK poetry awards – the Forward and T S Eliot prizes. There was the impression that coverage tended to reflect, rather than inform, the culture.
Overall, the survey has been highly informative in terms of reception. It demonstrates a generally very positive critical response to the output with which we are concerned, suggesting that Welsh Anglophone poetry is in rude health; it demonstrates a responsiveness on the part of editors to the output in providing coverage, even if the degree of focus is variable. It confirms the belief in a poetic shift as regards Anglophone poetry from Wales: women are now at the centre of output and coverage. It also led me to consider the competing demands of individual poets alongside the demands of a renaissance in our national literature. While I was struck by the unexpected breadth of reviews recorded – their sheer number – I was also struck by the fact that very few poets seem to have secured deep focus in the pages of poetry magazines outside of Wales. Factored into this, of course, is the very nature of our study: post-1997 emergent voices. Many poets under our study have completed only one or perhaps two collections, and thus they will inevitably find it harder to secure major-focus scrutiny. It will be interesting to see how the years progress their fortunes. Poetry, after all, is the long game.
It’s a gloomy Wednesday afternoon in October, and Room D59 is packed. More are pushing in to sit on the floor and lean against walls – literature and creative writing staff, postgraduates, undergraduates. It’s the first public event for the new Leverhulme-funded Devolved Voices project at Aberystwyth University, and interest is high.
Most departments hold regular research seminar series, in which invited scholars, research staff and postgraduates present new work to colleagues and students in informal settings, usually followed with lively discussion over a glass of wine. They’re stimulating, often exploratory, and offer a chance for the researcher to connect with others. Research is a lonely job, even when it’s collaborative – and in this case it is highly collaborative, with its three-person team of Peter Barry, Kathryn Gray and Matthew Jarvis, and its PhD student Bronwen Williams. The collaboration goes further, however, because from the outset the project has engaged with the public through Facebook and with a blog, inviting contact from established and emerging poets (and their publishers), and the submission of comment and ideas. The response was immediate. Evidently many poets hope to show up brightly on this particular green radar screen, because, while the project will be looking at the making of reputation, it will undoubtedly also help contribute to the making of reputation. Publishers are therefore also eager to see their poets included.
The initial announcements about an examination of poetic ‘emergence’ in particular stimulated a strong response. How do you measure ‘emergence’? What are the parameters? The questions were predominantly about identity and inclusion: Do you have to be Welsh or of Welsh extraction to be considered? Live in Wales? Publish in Wales? Engage with Welshness? These are the familiar and long-standing anxious questions about belonging and exclusion wherever the word ‘Wales’ is concerned – updated from the 1990s, when the questions were about allegiance (having to jump through nationalist hoops in order to prove who you are, as poet Stephen Knight put it at the time).[1] The answer – ‘Wales-identified/Wales associated’ – will of course need further definition as the project makes progress.
While Matthew Jarvis addressed such questions about parameters in this first presentation about the project, given the remit of Devolved Voices it might seem surprising that he should devote a great deal of his talk to a carefully researched overview of the political and economic lead-up to the devolution vote in 1997, focusing in detail on the argument for 1997 as the start date for inclusion. His stress on the importance of 1997, when Wales voted for a devolved assembly, rather than 1999, when the first devolved assembly was elected, appeared in some ways to be answering an objection that had not yet been raised. Of course establishing a start-date of 1997 rather than 1999 for assessing ‘emergence’ is an important partial answer to that first and loudest explicit question of who would and would not be included, and to the implicit question by the potential subjects of this project, ‘Will I be included?’ However, the project is not determined by its subjects, no matter that they are being invited to contribute opinion and comment, and the focus on this date points to more methodological concerns, perhaps highlighting the intended rigour of the research project.
As the discussion indicated, the popular approach to understanding the impact of devolution has been to consider the impact of the vote’s structural outcome – the formation of the assembly – rather than the change in perception initiated by the vote itself two years earlier. While Jarvis presented arguments about the history of devolution’s constitutional process, it might also be the case that, as far as creative expression is concerned, the vote counts more heavily than the election of the first assembly.
Certainly the vote stimulated an enormous and excited response by literary critics. In 1998 I was researching my undergraduate thesis on Welsh poetry since the sixties. At the time, no one at Berkeley knew anything about Welsh writing in English, but editors, critics and poets in Wales responded eagerly and energetically to my enquiries. There was an outpouring in the immediate aftermath of that vote in 1997; it was exciting. Whether it led to an exciting departure in the poetry is a question that I hope this project will explore – certainly it resulted in a shift.
Welsh poetry in English has been the subject of numerous studies and many combined anthology-surveys, and their critical quality has varied widely. However, there has not, to my knowledge, been a committed institutional survey project of this sort before, and it is clear that its terms are intended to be very different: not ad hoc, personal and partial, but instead rigorous and comprehensive, and theoretically, methodologically and structurally sound. Poetry criticism has always had to position Welsh poetry in English in relation to Anglo-American poetry, and therefore engage in some form of self-definition, and this project too by its nature is politicised, not only because of the word ‘Devolved’, but because the project’s implementation constitutes part of the developing civic consciousness and institutional structures that embed the much older cultural, critical and expressive consciousness.
Jarvis’s presentation clearly laid out the arguments for the parameters of the project, and the stimulating discussion afterwards mapped out many of the areas it will be exploring. Again, the questions largely concerned inclusions and exclusions – women, poets writing in prose, different ways of examining emergence, the relationship with the Welsh language, Wales’s postcoloniality or otherwise, and ideas of Celticity. They also pointed to gaps in public knowledge that reinforced the need for such a project.
Of course one has to be able to define certain categories in order to proceed at all with research, but even if, as Jarvis stated in his talk and on Facebook, ‘the categories are meant to be capacious’, poets do not imagine, or write, or publish within tidy definitional boundaries, however expansive they might be. As it has been presented so far, the project’s concern with parameters and methodology is laudable, and is an important corrective to hazy and often nostalgic definitions in past studies. However, I hope that this focus on what Jarvis calls its ‘socio-cultural scaffolding’ does not determine the project’s exploration in qualitative terms, too. It is, of course, in untidy and contradictory ways that the work of poetry takes place, and it will be interesting to see how the researchers proceed with this messier and creative work now that the parameters have been decided: after all, in addition to being researchers, they are also themselves poets.
[1] Stephen Knight, ‘Remember us?’, Poetry Wales 33/3 (1998), 41.
Jasmine Donahaye‘s poetry collections are Misappropriations (Parthian, 2006) and Self-Portrait as Ruth (Salt, 2009). She is also the author of the critical monograph Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (UWP, 2012).