On Being a Poet in Wales: Dai Smith

Dai Smith

On the valley streets where we commonly congregated together in the early years after that World War which then still enveloped us, our prime necessity was survival against the odds: a mode of being that was ingrained as a fragile, unwanted, irredeemable defiance.

The gloves came laced together at Christmas.

A rite of passage, as if by osmosis, it seemed

For all the eight-year-old boys in the street.

We emerged, as one, from our terraced houses:

Gloved up, short trousered, dapped feet pawing

The cold uneven ground, one by one, in waiting.

(from ‘Street Fighters’)

My apprenticeship for being a first-time poet in Wales, at the age of eighty, was grounded in place and germinated by prose. The collection, Street Fighting and Other Past Times, is a late, unexpected blossom from a tree whose roots and branches I have tended and shaped over the years in different ways as critical essays, historical narratives, cultural manifestos, political imprecations and polemics, TV documentaries, short stories, novels, biographies and memoirs.

Public time 

My core subject matter has, invariably, been the public time which has cradled my individuated life since 1945, and thereby the people whose collective life made up the numinous history of South Wales. I have never been entirely objective about all that: too passionate, too angry, too enamoured, too fascinated, too involved to shy away from inflecting each chosen genre of articulation with a personal stance.

In April 2024 when I finished the last draft of Measuring the Distance, a late style foray via essays and stories into the fictive and the factual, I thought  I had said, in sum, all that I had left to say. I was wrong. Whatever poetry then “happened” did so because the real, and final, impulse, one I  felt almost immediately, was to reach for another way of saying things, as an essence, a compression if you like, of what was as much emotion as it had been explication, and one, paradoxically, which required the distancing of being wrought with objectivity if it was to resonate with meaning.

In this making, however incantatory the recall of incident and existence as actualities, there has been an infusion of history as it was lived in the moment and stored away until now as memories. I have chosen to release them in the only form which can bear witness to their flickering incandescence, their pressing weight, their fleeting presence: poetry.

Power

As I wrote though last summer into the late autumn of the year, I found that the pace and power I had habitually invested in prose had to give way, over and over, to a tentative stop start process of hesitancies about single words and phrases and their mutual playing out in lines. I had read poetry aloud to myself, for its sonority, for decades – Hardy and Houseman, Millay and Roethke, Yeats and Auden, Thomas and Hughes, Abse and Heaney, Davies and Ormond, Curtis and Finch – but only now did the reading aloud of my own verse detect and defeat any falsity of tone and intent. Ruthlessness in cutting became paramount to any composition.

Whatever is left might not be pitch perfect but nor is it hollow. I thanked Peter Finch, an early reader and constant mentor, for that, and more.

So, cracked gourds resound

And seeds spilled late

Scatter over the ground

To shrivel or germinate.

A late beckoning

From fading light.

    (from ‘Twilight’)

Sometimes, over these intense months, the poems seemed to appear, the one from the other, like ball bearings flashing on the lights of a pinball machine, that brain of unheralded dreams where images are both graphic and fanciful, their meaning elusive and unforgettable.

When the women died

One by one, the dogs

Came to us two by two.

On mantelpieces arrogantly

They sat, twinned and haughty

Readying to become a pack.

[…]

We know all former owners well

This Mamcu and that Bopa,

That Auntie and Nana.

These creamy dogs have pride of place

As was, and is, their right –

Not ornaments, household deities.

(from ‘Dogs’)

Of course, it remains lamentably true that you cannot (entirely anyway) teach an old dog new tricks. At least, not this one. A citizen of my advanced age, latter-day poet or not, cannot stray far from hard-won convictions on the centrality of historical understanding and the concomitant scorn for contemporary neglect of the lived experience of the Welsh people by the narcissistic elevation of a mythos of Cymru.

Bert Brecht

In his unanswerable poem ‘A Worker Looks At History’ (“So Many Questions, So Many Answers”), that old, gimlet-eyed reprobate, Bert Brecht, asked “Who built the seven gates of Thebes?” and told us it was not the “kings”, aka the self-appointed movers and  shakers, who hauled the building blocks of stone; and elsewhere, with sardonic devastation, that if the people on the ground, as they really are, do not suit the ideal vision of their would-be leaders then, perhaps, it would be best to “dissolve the people and elect another”. We may be near that crossroads of unwanted destiny.

When the Future

Did not arrive

They just invented

What they could.

(Cymru for Wales)

[…]

When the political Map

Blushed populous red

They highlighted green

Territory bottom to top.

(Grass not Class)

[…]

When I cried out in anger

‘Over my dead body!’

They made especially for me

One more coffin of secrecy.

(The Alone to the Alone)

*

‘No Brit here

Nor Cymro either

Will ever lie.

Just Pure Welsh.’

(Mongrel History)

*

(from ‘This Mongrel Breed’)

Dai Smith’s debut collection of poetry, Street Fighting and Other Past Times, is published by Parthian