|
Gillian Clarke in
her own words
Please note
that due to server restrictions, the sound file is not currently
available.
|
What
inspires you to write poetry?
The prospect
of Britain losing all its animals and the thought of the rail
crash. In other words: what goes on makes me write.
Why
did you start writing in the first place?
I think
reading was the most important thing and just loving the language.
|
What
is inspiration? Hear what Gillian Clarke has to say.
1.7MB
wave sound file
Please
note: Microsoft Windows Media Player, Nullsoft Winamp or other
audio programme required to listen to this file.
Download Winamp
(external link).
|
Would you
recommend others to choose poetry as a career?
Well it's not
really a career. It has become a career to me but I call it my
so called career' because it's happened by chance. I've had some
lucky breaks and also some unlucky breaks and I'm not rich by any
means. In a good year I earn about the same as a teacher, but with
no pension ahead. I think that actually the best things to do are
the things you love to do, like reading. I did English at University
because I loved it. I wrote because I had always written then I
got published so I got called a poet', by chance. So I never had
a career and I never had a job, just children and poetry.
You also
have a sheep farm in Ceredigion, West Wales and a real love of the
land is evident in some of your poems, as is your family life. How
do you integrate writing into your working and family life?
Family life
is now pushed to the margins as my family is grown up and they look
after themselves, though I do see a lot of them. When I did have
teenagers at home it was difficult, I must admit. Not because they
need you as little children need you, but because they need you
like teenagers need you. It's almost more demanding. You've got
to put a lot of effort into your children's lives and support them
through everything. All that does take a lot of time and, above
all, it drains emotion. But on the other hand it gives you emotion
and it gives you energy it takes and it gives, it's an exchange.
It's kind of like a circuit of electricity, which has been very
important to my writing.
As for the sheep,
this isn't a farm: it's eighteen acres. We also have bees, which
need attention three or four times a year. The sheep need attention
from this coming month, we brought them up close to the house and
we have to keep an eye on them because their lambs are coming. So
this is a busy time, unlike the rest of the year although there
is the odd highlight, like shearing season. They're organic, we
just look after them according to organic practice; if we didn't
have them we'd have to cut the grass I suppose. It's simple. It's
just a pleasure.
In 'Five Fields',
the real intimate relationship between us and our animals is there
in a whole series of poems. They are linked. For instance, there
is a poem about a difficult birth of lambs on the night they sign
the Irish peace deal. So the lambs and the world are the context.
The five fields of that book are the five continents of the planet
and the oceans. They are a symbol of those other things and of the
way of life lived everywhere.
top
How does
your Welsh nationality and being bilingual affect your writing?
My first language
is English because, although my parents were Welsh speaking, my
mother decided to bring me up English speaking. It was the fashion
to be English in those days, it was posh to be English so she decided
to deny me Welsh. She thought I'd get on better in the world. It's
not true is it?
So my second
language is Welsh. It's what I am. I cannot imagine not being Welsh.
I think I'm a very different person, being a Welsh person, from
the person I would be if I were English. You know the classlessness
of Wales?
What do you
mean by that?
I wouldn't recognise
that someone had been to a public school. I wouldn't know if someone
was grander than another person: I'd have no way of knowing that.
I can't read the signals, I don't know the codes. I've been to University
and my parents didn't: they were humble people but intelligent and
aristocrats in a way. My father in law was a miner and he and I
shared a heck of a lot, we shared more than we didn't share in fact.
He and an English person of my education would have a lot to explain
to each other before we understood each other. We didn't have anything
to explain: there was a code, a kind of classlessness that valued
so many things. When I hear the foxhunters on the radio speaking
I can't believe it. Some of these people are so imbued with a sense
of class, but not with a sense of worth and it's not something I
understand in the least.
We ran a very
interesting course once at a Welsh speaking school near Swansea.
My fellow tutor was English. Half way through the week one of the
girls said that her father was a surgeon and my English fellow tutor
was totally astonished to hear this, because she spoke exactly the
same way as all the others did. That's what happens. As an English
person he would expect a surgeon's daughter to have a posh accent
and an unemployed miner's daughter because there's no such thing
as a miner anymore to have a working class accent. That isn't
the case in Wales.
top
There is
a tradition in Wales of immersing children in the arts, most famously
for the Eisteddfod. You yourself do a lot of work in education.
What do you feel is the value of teaching children about poetry
and creative writing?
Poetry is the
soul of the arts. Research has shown that the more educated people
are, the more content they are with not having not much money, which
is a very interesting thing. I suspect this is because it is so
much easier to be happy if you love books, if you can pop into free
art galleries and see that as something you want to do, if you can
join a writing group and talk about your writing with each other.
People love that and I think that infinite numbers of people would
love it if they had the chance to come across it. I think that the
arts are absolutely the most important thing.
It's very interesting
that sport is thought to be very important. I must admit I'm not
a sporting person at all, but do I think that there's something
that's quite ugly about competitive sport. For example what has
happened to rugby, or the way that a lot of footballers behave demonstrate
to me an incredible greed and lack of concern that never happens
in the arts world. The material arts sculpture and painting and
so on have a value set on them, which does diminish the world
of the arts slightly. But you still don't get that bad behaviour
of artists being nasty to one another.
In poetry of
course it's totally lacking because there's no value to poetry.
It has no purchasable value to the customer who logs on, or goes
to the library, or who memorises a poem. It's absolutely free. You
can get a superb work of art for nothing. It's not the same as having
a postcard of the Mona Lisa, that's just a postcard and not the
Mona Lisa. If you have a poem by Yeats, you have the real thing.
My collected works will cost you less than £10, poetry seems to
me to be extraordinarily cheap.
top
Now that
students have to pay their own fees and perhaps be quite financially
minded about their educational choices, have you seen any change
in the value placed on learning about creative writing?
Funnily enough,
no. It's becoming more and more popular, isn't this interesting?
I couldn't physically go to all the schools I get invited to and
I teach on the Mphil at the University of Glamorgan. There is an
endless stream of people who haven't got much money but who save
up a thousand pounds a year to do that course. Ty Newydd is incredibly
successful, the courses fill more and more. There is a huge demand
in Universities, instead of ignoring living poets as they did before.
Their attitude was "we don't want a cow in United Dairies, leave
us to our Victorian poets".
But they now
employ poets to run poetry courses. They can't do it with academics
because they know very little about the craft of poetry so they
can't help people to write. They only know how to read poetry in
an academic setting. I'm being very crude here in my division between
the one sort of person and the other, because there are poet-academics
and there are academic poets but the division is a traditional one
and it is a deep one.
top
Does teaching
others writing interfere with your own writing, or otherwise affect
how you write?
I think it actually
gets me writing very often. Obviously when you spend a week at Ty
Newydd with the students, it takes everything you've got. But when
I'm sitting around a table with those students writing, I always
join in and I frequently get a poem out of it. Some of the poems
on my website came out of getting people to write and having a go
myself. But then I don't really connect them deeply. Take for example
some other poets Danny Abse's a doctor, Vernon Watkins worked
in a bank so I regard poetry as something you don't do every second
of the day. You need to live real life anyway so it doesn't interfere
it's just another thing to provide for.
What do you
think that the audience at your live readings gets out of the experience,
that they wouldn't get reading your poems in a book?
I love it. I
just love an audience. It's a lovely feeling, sometimes it's magic
but it's always okay. I don't worry now if the magic doesn't happen,
but very often it does. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a professional
performer now, not someone who's dragged unwillingly out of my lovely
study in the cowshed. It's a wonderful opportunity to communicate
with the listener. I think it's a perfectly straightforward, normal
way to communicate. When you think of the Celtic past, live reading
with the public was normal and should never have stopped being normal.
I cannot imagine ever writing a poem without reading it aloud and
nobody who's any good writes a poem without hearing it.
As for the
audience, I can only say what they tell me. Usually they get a lot
out of it. Of course there are a lot of bad readers around, but
it's up to us poets to be good readers. We should project properly,
test the microphone, wear tidy' clothes and be generally approachable.
It is a performance, just not an acting performance. All good English
teachers read stuff aloud to students and share the sound of language
with students.
top
Do you think
that the Web offers new opportunities for poets?
I never look
at anybody else's website. I have to admit I prefer books. So I
only use it for information. I think that if you're a lesser known
poet no one will ever find you. On the other hand, I get a lot of
emails from people and getting responses is good. I've had a website
since late September 2000 and it's had about 2000 visitors.
Finally,
what are you working on at the moment?
I've got another
book growing. I'm very interested in geology, everything depends
upon stones. Absolutely nothing happens without depending limestone
or granite and so on
.rivers and therefore the harebell, a tribe
and therefore a language, absolutely everything that's ever happened.
I'm very interested in the geology of the earth and the geography
of the earth. This has grown a lot since I wrote poems for a book
about the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. I feel now that those
poems will grow from what they were into a poems that are for me,
not for a commission.
I'm terribly
upset by this sheep thing and by the train crash, also by Iraq.
It's just a mess: I'm deeply disturbed by the things that go on.
I can't sleep and so I write. I write because I can't deal with
it any other way. So I suppose it's a mixture of the long slow events
of geology and the sudden flashes of politics, catastrophe, or wonder
that get together in my head and make me want to write.
top
|
This
site is not responsible for content of external sites.