Dylan Thomas – Arthur Hofn

“I am no poet, I am no philosopher, I’m just trying to help you out.”

A little late but the 2020 Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded… and I’d never heard of her… sorry. Having done a bit of research, however, I decided that I approved of the selection (don’t have a go at me about that being pompous, we all decide if we agree with it or not each year – I’ve simply admitted I do).

Louise Glück is a poet from New York and one of the first things I discovered about her was that paper copies of her works can be quite expensive! I’ve read a bit online and I can appreciate what I’ve read of her work and overall the decision seems to have gone down well.

However here is another admission that I’m sure will reveal me for the fraud I am… I struggle with poetry. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate it, I understand it’s a very skilled and precise art-form, that a few lines can be a depth of emotion, knowledge and philosophy concentrated into a neat potion. My problem is I don’t always have the patience for it. A poem of just a few lines can be revisited again and again, considered and unlocked… this is my problem I haven’t yet trained myself to do this.

Places and geography are very important to me, I love travel, I mean I really love travel, my feet itch; what is over that horizon? Where does this road lead? Give me a map or an atlas and I can be lost for hours. I’m moving, I’m advancing. I love the journey, but the whole point is the destination, my goal. Then when I’ve achieved that I see the hill on the horizon and need to know what it the other side of that. Yes I can explore a new city, town or place for days or longer but I need to be moving to different location within that destination and soon I have the desire to be on the move again. To ask me to stay in one exact spot and study a river, street or a building for days, no matter how incredible they are, I feel like I’m missing out. I need to be moving again.

With books I can immerse myself and do all my thinking as the writer carries me along, it’s a long journey and I can look out the window and see the landscape as we go, I feel I’m getting somewhere. Poetry is the opposite, it’s looking at a line of words and digesting the meaning, the intent, my opinion of it, and then to go back again… as I say it’s a skill I have not learnt and I am somewhat envious of those that have it.

That’s not to say I don’t like any poetry, Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night is one I can go back to again and again, so to Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen (a school assignment forced me to for that one, but I benefited) and I have explored more of these and other poet’s works.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
― Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (extract)

In the last two blogs I spoke about my love of Shakespeare and he wrote a lot of poetry. I have his complete works and try to read them but I can only deal with a couple of his sonnets at a time; I still haven’t managed Venus and Adonis or the other long ones – which is odd because I can read a whole play.

Song lyrics mean a lot to me, but take away the music and I have a mental block.

Last year a pamphlet entitled Island Of Towers was published by the poet Clarissa Aykroyd. This appealed to me because many of poems are about places, and as I’ve said places are important to me. Some are set in and around London, we see the poet’s experience of the city and moments in time as well as its heritage (some Sherlock Holmes love surfaces in Sign). Other cities and worlds are opened up, other places to explore, to sink your teeth into, some I have been to, some new: Berlin, Cairo and Lisbon to name a few. With the subsequent restrictions and lockdowns, this is a way to travel, to discover a soul in these new worlds.

Under the hills swollen blue with water
I remember my coming and its why.
There was a plainness in the sky a light
to clear the mind of all that’s left behind.
― Clarissa Aykroyd, Wicklow Mountains After Rain (extract)

My favourite poem in the collection is Realpolitik, which is very clever in its use of lines and words, I stopped and paused and considered… maybe there is hope for me.

I’m sorry if my understanding of this art-form is limited, that I’m still learning here, but I suppose poetry is like novels in that it can’t all be grouped together and opinioned on as if it were all the same. There are poems I like, maybe I just need to work to find some more.

Buy Island Of Towers by Clarissa Aykroyd

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Whole New Worlds From The Memoirs Of History

One of the wonders of reading is being taken in to a different world. I love history so love a book that can show me the past in a way I can feel what it must have been like to live there. How much better if the book was written in times gone by and was referring to its own near past, which to us is so much further away.

Contemporary fiction that has aged lets us see the real world back then more so than any amount of research done for a novel set in the past. Having just finished reading Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog by Dylan Thomas* (published 1940) I’ve had just a glimpse of what growing up in South Wales in the early part of the twentieth century was like. This is a coming of age selection of short stories, or moments from the “young dog’s” life – an actual voice from back then. How true they are, or if anything was added for artistic license I’ll never know. Regardless, sometimes it strikes a chord as boys will always be boys (the making of a friend from a pointless fight is very entertaining), but at other times it paints a picture of a life so much simpler than our own.

*My copy was printed upside down and backwards, which is really cool, but I think a mistake.

Thomas was born in 1914 and the earlier short stories are based in his childhood. Just the simple exploration of his families’ rural land in “The Peaches” lets us amusingly into the mind of a boy who has got the wrong end of the stick as he learns his Uncle is selling the piglets to fund his drinking. Soon he’s convinced it’s not just the pigs that are at stake.

“Where’s Uncle Jim?”
“He’s gone to market,” said Annie.
Gwilym made a small pig’s noise. We knew where uncle was; he was sitting in the public house with a heifer over his shoulder and two pigs nosing out of his pockets.

There is nothing ground breaking in this, but what a wonderful snapshot of rural Wales so long ago.

Later as an early teenager, with a group of lads, he goes hitch hiking to a rural spot to camp; just a handful of young lads in the middle of nowhere with just a tent for a fortnight. How times have changed.

Last year I read The Green Fool, likewise a collection of accounts of growing up, this time from Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh. Where Thomas intersperses obvious short fiction with his childhood memories, Kavanagh tells us a chronological account of growing up in a rural village in County Monaghan. Born in 1904 his book was published in 1938 and recounts his very early days with his family in a small house where his father was a cobbler and for the most part they were happy, through to his becoming a writer. Again there is probably a mix of the artistic licence, faded memories and truth, but it conveys so well what the real people who lived then and there were actually like. Rural living in Ireland (and for most of the Western World) is now so much closer to urban convenience.

Neither works are the stories of the rich and famous as the days recalled are before each author made their mark and so we get both these worlds from the perspective of the everyday people lived them. It’s easy to write a world where you take phones, cars and the internet out. But these are worlds that never had them in the first place. They don’t evoke the past, they are the past and so tell a far more tangible account of the history then anything we can write now.

Buy Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Dog
Buy The Green Fool