Poetry

Programme Outline

• Labi Siffre reads and discusses his ‘confrontational’ poems and the courage needed to write honestly.
• Gillian Clarke talks about the genesis of her poems and their relationship to nature and the Welsh tradition.

Labi Siffre talks about the confrontational nature of his poetry. ‘We should talk about what people say we shouldn’t talk about,’ he says. ‘Poetry should challenge taboo subjects.’ He reads three poems: ‘Niggers’ which confronts racism and homophobia, ‘Tongue-Tied’ which challenges narrow definitions of Welshness, and ‘Blood on the Page’ which tells us to go where people tell us not to. Siffre says he writes about the world he lives in. He feels poets too often write about nature. Poets need to be courageous; they need to go deep inside themselves (he explains this as being ‘vulnerable’ to themselves) and write honestly. In a discussion with students, he doubts whether poetry can change anything, referring to Auden’s remark that poetry didn’t help to save a single Jew from the Holocaust. He describes his way of writing poetry as a method of refinement, cutting away all that is inessential.

Gillian Clarke reads ‘A Dream of Horses’ and extracts from ‘The Animal Wall’. She talks of the origin of the first poem in a dream in which she was riding a horse in the sea, and its possible connections with riding a horse in her childhood. She also speaks of the early influence of nursery rhymes. She discusses with pupils how she writes her poems. She begins with a whole phrase which carries the rhythm and the tune of the poem, and contains its germ. She explains how she often does research, for example on a piece of limestone, which she discovers could contain calcified sea lilies. The remarkable fact that sea lilies have been turned to stone then helped to inspire the poem. She speaks of the influence of Welsh myths and legends on her writing and of how her father told her all these stories when she was young. The Welsh poetic tradition has also been an influence, with its use of assonance and half-rhymes which avoid the ‘clunking’ effect of full rhymes and are more subtle in their use of echoes of sound. She doesn’t fully agree with Wordsworth that poetry is ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’; she prefers to write in a ‘red-hot state’. ‘Poetry can be about anything,’ she says. ‘There’s no reason why there shouldn’t be an ode to a tea-bag.’