Pearls before swine

I'm in a funny mood today - keeping an eye on cricket, tonight's World Cup semi-final and the Tour de France, but with odd bits of poetry going through my head at the same time.

I'm re-reading some Larkin at the moment, a thrilling and simultaneously unpleasant experience. That led me to R S Thomas, perhaps the greatest poet of the last hundred years, and whom Larkin not-quite hilariously referred to as 'Arsewipe Thomas'.

Specifically, wondering about Larkin's posthumous reputation made me think of Thomas's bitter, despairing, 'Death of a Poet'.

Laid now on his smooth bed

For the last time, watching dully

Through heavy eyelids the day's colour

Widow the sky, what can he say

Worthy of record, the books all open,

Pens ready, the faces, sad,

Waiting gravely for the tired lips

To move once -- what can he say?

His tongue wrestles to force one word

Past the thick phlegm; no speech, no phrases

For the day's news, just the one word ‘sorry';

Sorry for the lies, for the long failure

In the poet's war; that he preferred 

The easier rhythms of the heart 

To the mind's scansion; that now he dies

Intestate, having nothing to leave

But a few songs, cold as stones

In the thin hands that asked for bread.

I wonder if he had it in mind the last time I saw him give a reading. It was in Bangor University's main lecture theatre. Thomas has just published Between Sea and Sky: Images of Bardsey, a collaboration with Peter Hope Jones, the photographer. Thomas was very old and frail, and many of us suspected it was his last public appearance. Some more mercenary people thought so too: whereas I asked him to sign Between Sea and Sky, the book-dealers were hovering like vultures, getting him to sign much older and valuable editions solely to increase their value.

Helping RS with his 'Afforestation'*

A couple of really interesting books have come in over the last couple of days - the Welsh bildungsromans I hadn't read on Rachel Trezise's list. I've received Catrin Dafydd's Random Deaths and Custard, which looks like fun, Aneurin Gareth Thomas's Luggage from Elsewhere, and Joe Dunthorne's Submarine. They're all set in urban south Wales (or South Wales - there's a heated argument about that): on the edge of Welsh but not fully included or totally excluded. Being Welsh hovers around the edges as a possibility, a mirage, or a position which makes all the ordinary teen horrors ever so slightly different (the narrator of Submarine, for instance, hides his part-Englishness, having been bullied for being Welsh when he lived in England: difference = weakness in the playground).

I read Submarine in one go the other night, even though I was exhausted from 12 hours of marking. The beautiful dustjacket helped, as did the narrator. It's the teenage boy to whom all the events happen, so there's a lovely gap between what he thinks he knows and what we know is actually going on, between his cleverness and how clever he thinks he is. The usual stuff happens: sex, parental marital problems, bullying (he's a guilt-ridden perp, not a victim) and meditation. It's comic, sad and knowing - well worth reading.

*How am I helping? Well, 'Afforestation' is an RS Thomas poem about the commercial forests imposed on historic Welsh locations in the 1950s and 1960s by the British Forestry Commission - historic villages and working farms were wiped out, covered in sterile, alien trees which supported neither animals nor workers, in pursuit of money in a way that wouldn't have happened in England. Every Welsh book is a blow FOR FREEDOM! Etc.

Subversive teachers speak out!

I'm still marking - my scripts are still measurable by the foot rather than countable. My academic colleagues and I are all excited by a study which says that college lecturers are predominantly lefties or liberals (hardly a surprise: conservatives tend to want more money). I think there is something inherently liberal/left about making a commitment to education. The basic reason, I suspect, is that liberals like argument, debate and the free exchange of ideas. Conservatives just don't: the old ideas (the Bible or whatever) said everything that needs to be said and teaching otherwise is just subversive.

I'm a teacher for a number of reasons - I'm otherwise unemployable, I like being paid money for talking about books and ideas, something I'd otherwise only do in the pub or on street corners, but most of all because I and most of my colleagues believe that with learning comes, power, freedom and responsibility, to oneself and to others. Without it, one is a passive consumer of other people's visions.

There's also, perhaps, something self-indulgent about being a teacher. Despite the scorn heaped upon us by students for our hair, clothes, beliefs, we enjoy the privilege of shaping students' perceptions of the world, often a traumatic process. It's not about grades, it's about sharing the excitement of discovering that everything is richer, more complex and more important than we previously thought - which is why a life teaching something 'vocational' doesn't appeal.

Being a teacher was once a religious duty. The tutor cast off thoughts of fame, temporal power and riches. There is something slightly self-denying about the job, despite the fact that we earn way more than most people in this country. We tell ourselves that we fulfil a duty rather than have a job, which is true, and that we're satisfied with a noble role - which is certainly true for me.

The duality of the Romantic/Puritan position is fascinating. Here's R S Thomas (an agnostic clergyman and poet) expressing the satisfaction of a stripped-down life better than I could ('At the End')

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A strange meeting of cultures

David Sylvian was the singer in New Romantic 80s pop band Japan. RS Thomas was Wales's premier poet from the 1940s until the early 90s (Dylan Thomas having bought one too many rounds in the 1940s). He was famous for: being a clergyman who mourned the absence of God and for his vehement support for Welsh cultural and political nationalism, particularly blaming Anglophone Wales for selling the pass.

How are they connected?

Sylvian, who's taken the Scott Walker route from pop fizz to auteur obscurity, has recorded an album inspired by Thomas, named Manafon after Thomas's first parish, a quiet little place just inside the border in North Wales. Weirdest cultural encounter ever?

Oddly though, Sylvian describes Thomas as 'the British poet', which would infuriate RS - one of the grumpiest people I've ever met. Sylvian's interest seems to centre on his perceived similarity to the former pop star, as a man who went his own way and pursued his interests without concern for 'mainstream' culture. Whether it's any good, I shall have to discover. I don't suppose anyone's bought it for me as a Christmas gift! Here's a taster - RS is the craggy-looking chap at the end.

Another day, another book

This time, it's Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints - partly a translation, partly a rewriting of her Welsh-language novel Atyniad. I bought it partly because I bumped into her at a conference or somewhere, while she was doing her PhD on R. S. Thomas (this book, like his Images of Bardsey) is set on Ynys Enlli, the Isle of 20,000 Saints), and partly because Welsh writing is going through another of its frequent golden ages - hip young things ripping up and remaking Cymru Cymraeg and English Wales in ever more fascinating ways, unbound by Celtic Twilightism or dour socialist realism and aided by forward-looking Eisteddfod judges.