Tagged with: poetry
Posts (41)
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Literature festivals in Wales this weekend
Laura Chamberlain
Love literature? Love summer festivals? Well you're in for a treat this weekend as three different literary events are taking place in Wales. First up is the inaugural Dinefwr Literary Festival that takes place across the weekend in the picturesque setting of the National Trust's Dinefwr Park and Castle in Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire. The festival runs from Friday 29 June to Sunday 1 July. Highlights will include performances by writers Gillian Clarke, Sir Andrew Motion, Howard Marks, Julian Cope and previous Wales Book of the Year winners Deborah Kay Davies, Philip Gross and John Harrison. Newton House at Dinefwr. Image courtesy of the National Trust Photo Library/David Norton Other authors appearing include Joe Dunthorne, Pascale Petit, Alastair Reynolds, Paul Henry, Robert Minhinnick, Wendy Cope, Catherine Fisher and Horatio Clare among many others. There's a host of musical events happening too, with Gruff Rhys, Emmy The Great, Georgia Ruth, Ghostpoet, Steve Eaves and Jodie Marie all on the line-up. Weekend and day passes are available - for more information see dinefwrliteraturefestival.co.uk. Meanwhile, the Beyond the Border storytelling festival returns to St Donat's Castle this weekend. The festival, which has an international feel with participants from across the globe, carries on the oral tradition that has been well versed in Wales over the centuries. Beyond The Border is Wales' leading international festival of storytelling. The biennial storytelling festival, which began in 1993, celebrates the worlds of myth, legend and folktales with performances by storytellers, musicians, writers and artists from Wales and the world. There are a number of themes running at this year's festival in addition to the individual artist performances. These include celebrating 200 years of Grimm's Fairy Tales and honouring the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Plus there's a look at journeys along the Silk Road and an exploration of the myths and legends of Celtic Britain. Beyond the Border in 2010. Photo: James Mendelssohn The art of storytelling is not a new one in Wales as the country has enjoyed a long history with the tradition: it was known as the cyfarwyddyd in medieval Wales. Wales can also boast an impressive literary history, with examples of texts dating back to the sixth century: browse articles on early Welsh literature on the 成人论坛 Wales Arts website. Beyond the Border runs from Friday 29 June until Sunday 1 July. For the full line-up and ticket information visit beyondtheborder.com. Finally, Busk on the Usk is a one day festival on Saturday taking place at the Riverfront Theatre and the City Campus of the University of Wales, Newport. It is the Welsh Contemporary Music contribution to the London 2012 Festival, but the festival also has a number of discussions and literary readings. The team behind the Laugharne Weekend have helped to organise the literary side of the festival with authors including Pauline Black, Malcolm Pryce and musician, artist and writer Jon Langford on the line-up. All the events at Busk on the Usk are free but ticketed, so for more information and the full line-up visit buskwales.co.uk.
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National Botanic Garden residency for poet Mab Jones
Laura Chamberlain
Welsh spoken word artist Mab Jones has been named as the first ever poet in residence at the National Botanic Garden of Wales in Llanarthne, Carmarthenshire. Mab Jones The garden first became aware of Mab's poetry after she penned a poem about one of their more unusual plants, the Chilea...
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Radio 4's Poetry Workshop from Swansea's Dylan Thomas Centre
Laura Chamberlain
This Sunday's episode of 成人论坛 Radio 4's Poetry Workshop was recorded at Swansea's Dylan Thomas Centre, and features a number of local Welsh poets. The radio series Poetry Workshop explores the pleasures of both writing and reading poems. In each episode poet Ruth Padel leads a workshop with a g...
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Poet laureate to judge poetry competition on climate change
Polly March
Carol Ann Duffy and the Welsh poet and translator Elin ap Hywel are to judge the entries submitted to a bilingual poetry completion on the theme of climate change. The contest is being organised by the energy charity Awel Aman Tawe, the body behind the development of a community wind farm on Mynydd y Gwrhyd in the upper Swansea Valley. The wind farm project has been many years in the offing but the charity says there are just a few more planning hoops to jump through before it is able to start generating green energy. The original mission statement of the development was that all profits from the sale of wind energy would be transferred back into the community and would help fund environmental ventures. The charity has an active arts arm which regularly hosts events to get local people thinking about greater environmental issues. This is the second annual poetry competition it has hosted. Last year the competition was judged by National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke and the award-winning Welsh language poet Menna Elfyn. It attracted 350 entries from adults and children and Awel Aman Tawe published a book of the best entries called Heno, Wrth Gysgu and launched it at the prize giving night at Pontardawe Arts Centre. Organiser Emily Hinshelwood said: "I talk with people all the time about climate change and there's a terrible feeling of powerlessness in the face of ever worsening scenarios for the earth. "Whether it's the diminishing sparrow populations in their own gardens, or the flooding of entire islands, most people have a personal response to the subject. "We want them to capture that feeling in poetry. "The place where poetry happens," she says, reflecting on her own poetry, "is that creative place within us - the same place where we improvise, and play. "And sometimes unexpectedly we come across solutions to problems that have been bugging us for years." AAT manager, Dan McCallum, said: "It's only by involving people that we can build something sustainable." Duffy was asked to be a judge because of her own interest in the subject of climate change. Her poem "Atlas" examines the fragility of the planet and the theme is one she has been returning to with frequency in recent poems. Adults and children are welcome to contribute to the competition, which has a closing date of 31 March 2012. Carol Ann Duffy will judge the English entries while Elin ap Hywel will judge the Welsh entries. First prize for adults is 拢500, 拢100 for second place and 拢50 for third place. For children the first prize is 拢50; second is 拢30; while third is 拢20. Entry fees do apply. Visit awelamantawe.co.uk for more details.
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New artist in residence at National Wool Museum
Laura Chamberlain
Welsh poet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has taken up a new post as artist in residence at the National Wool Museum in Dre-fach Felindre. Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Photo: Keith Morris The artist in residence post is a result of funding awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, which makes awards for t...
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Fieldnotes - an exhibition by Iwan Bala and Menna Elfyn
Polly March
Award-winning poet and playwright Menna Elfyn and artist and writer Iwan Bala have teamed up for a thought-provoking new exhibition at the Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthen. Image courtesy of Iwan Bala. Photograph by Toril Brancher This creative dialogue is the product of conversations and ideas the two have shared during their time as colleagues at Trinity College, Carmarthen, where Menna is director of the master's programme in creative writing and Iwan is a senior lecturer in creative arts and humanities. Fieldnotes uses a collaboration of Iwan's paintings and Menna's poems to explore notions of memory, interpretation and errors in translation and also links this to Welsh cultural heritage and the shared knowledge of communities. It draws on the concept of notes made by any researcher as they investigate a topic. It is something Bala feels is intrinsically linked to his own artwork, which has always been about his lived experience and ideas drawn from his reading - in effect a product of his own field notes. His fascination with combining words and images, such as in maps and diagrams, acts as a springboard for much of the thinking behind the exhibition. "The meanings they contain are in constant flux," he says. "Despite their implied certainty - there is often a subtext, an error in translation, gaps, omissions, terra incognita, which is open to interpretation." For Elfyn, this gap, especially between the two languages of Wales, is fascinating because it allows people to interpret and read the same thing so differently. She says: "If you look at a diamond, it will gleam in so many different ways and it's the same with language - so much can be lost in translation." Image courtesy of Iwan Bala. Photograph by Toril Brancher The artists both relate this to Wales where many of the names of places - towns, villages, farms and houses - have been translated or lost by renaming. Elfyn says it is more than a place name that is lost, but the common shared knowledge of a people. "In the exhibition Iwan has a photograph with different names of farms and it's a very plain-looking list but opposite I have printed a list of nicknames given to miners that I heard growing up in Pontardawe. "They are nicknames that come from a local understanding and the brotherhood that exists in a rural place, but may not be carried on through the generations. "Much of our work in this exhibition is about mapping and remembering and an aura of place. "If you take the word snowdrop for example, in Welsh there are five different names for it, all of which are linked to images - one literally means 'brooch in snow' and another 'child's bell'. "I think it's up to each artist to rediscover these old names and give them prominence so they are not lost forever. It's important to get them down on paper." This merging of the historic and current is something Menna is very conscious of in her own work, with her modern Welsh poetry often supplemented by older words, which she hopes to "wash anew" in a new light for her readers. Both artists were determined the exhibition would evolve organically rather than with Menna writing in response to Iwan's art and vice versa, although it does include one picture of his of a map of Wales and Menna's poem about a map of Wales as well as a work Iwan has created in response to her poem Size of Wales, about a piece of ice the size of the country, breaking off. Image courtesy of Iwan Bala. Photograph by Toril Brancher Menna adds: "Writing is all about field-work and the act of digging deep to unearth mysteries. We know too well that we are only passing through as we sub-consciously make our personal field-notes. "Two artists seeing 'something down there to smile at in the dust' share the fascination of lifting and sifting through the cae hir (long field)." Fieldnotes will be opened by Professor M Wynn Thomas, Emyr Humphreys Chair of Welsh Writing in English, Swansea University on Friday 6 January at 6pm. Just before the official opening Iwan Bala and Menna Elfyn will be in conversation with visitors to the exhibition. The show runs from 7 January to 18 February. For more details visit www.orielmyrddingallery.co.uk.
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Gillian Clarke pens new poem for opening of Gwent Archives
Laura Chamberlain
National poet of Wales Gillian Clarke has written a new poem to mark the opening of the new Gwent Archives office in Ebbw Vale. Clarke's sonnet is entitled Archive and is written in both Welsh and English. Excerpts of the poem have been incorporated into the design of the fa莽ade of the buildin...
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National Poetry Day in Wales
Laura Chamberlain
Thursday 6 October marks National Poetry Day in the UK, and there are a number of events taking place in Wales that you can get involved with. The Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea are staging a free event, Song For A Raggy Boy - a celebration of the life and work of Patrick Galvin. One of Irelan...
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National Poet's tour diary: Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea
Gillian Clarke
Home soon! No more gigs, no travelling, no going anywhere before Twelfth Night. There's work to do, poems to write, competitions to judge, manuscripts to read, correspondence to catch up with, but it can all be done at home at the table in the glass-walled room from where I can see miles of Cere...
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National Poet's tour diary: Aberystwyth
Gillian Clarke
Saturday 27 November Y Drwm, National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth Another veil of snow, and all has turned to ice. It's very, very cold. People phone: 'Is the reading still on? Are you going?' Of course! Try and stop me. The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, is on the train from Manchester. The coldest November for decades would not stop her keeping her promise. The car takes the first icy hill in the helpful tracks of tractors. After the mile to Post Bach, the A486 is clear. Kites are aloft, flying in pairs and in fours, scanning the land for carrion. David drops me at the library and goes to meet Carol Ann's train. Aberystwyth looks gorgeous, the town spread below, the great library building high above the sea, the curve of Cardigan Bay against miles of snow covered mountains. We take it in joyfully, then retreat for a warming bowl of broccoli and stilton soup, bread and cheese, in the National Library caf茅. The Drwm is drumming with life as we enter. The audience applauds, and I feel like applauding them too for coming through ice and snow to be with us. Fifty per cent of the atmosphere of every good poetry reading is created by the audience. The circular shape of the Drwm helps too, a cosy, enclosing arena that seats 100 people. Rocet Arwel Jones introduces us eloquently, and Dafydd John Pritchard reads a special poem written in response to Carol Ann's The World's Wife. The perfect Welsh introduction. A full house, an audience alert to the movements between solemn and light moments. These are what a good audience gives to make a warm afternoon in a cold world. We rise to the occasion, enjoying ourselves. There is no strain in communicating music, meaning and perhaps magic to such a gathering. Carol Ann reads some of her innovative new bee poems, the movingly beautiful elegies and remembrances to her mother, poems of war (Afghanistan, and older wars recalled). Her litanies come close to inventing a new form, using a historically sacred form to weave the ordinary with the epic. The audience love John Barleycorn, listing old pub names, and her rebuke to Royal Mail for abolishing the poetry of county names in favour of postcodes only. Try replacing 'all the birds of Oxfordshire' etc with 'all the birds of CF11', or equivalent! Turn in your grave, Edward Thomas. I read mostly unpublished poems, a new Carol of the Birds, and a few old ones to mark the season of Advent. Afterwards we linger to talk with old friends, people we've tutored at Ty Newydd, met at other gigs. Then an elegant bone china cup of tea and a slice of home-made lemon cake with friends in St David's Road, and off to the station for the little train which will carry Carol Ann across the icy map of mid-Wales, where, in the night, the temperature at Llysdinam plunges to -18 celsius. Another typical Welsh gig, as Carol Ann would say. Gillian Clarke National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke is blogging for the 成人论坛 during her seven-date poetry tour of Wales, which runs until 10 December 2010. For more information on the National Poet's tour of Wales visit the Academi website.
