National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke's National Poet Blog

Farewell to  A470, and the regular email from Petra in the office at our dear old Academi asking for 300 words by the end of the month. Deadlines and limits are good for writers. This page stretches before me, boundless as cyber space, telling me to cram three blogs into one.

First the maths: since my last piece for A470 in April 2011, 10 commissioned poems, 9 school visits, 19 readings, two poetry courses, 7 ‘events’, 2 commissioned lectures, and radio appearances as required. My work-load grows annually. I, and the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, are using our positions to spread the word for poetry, for our countries. We are joined this year by a new Makar for Scotland, Liz Lochhead. As Carol Ann quipped to the audience on the first occasion we three appeared on stage together, ‘You wait 400 years for a woman poet laureate, then three come along at once.’

It’s been an autumn of travelling, to Italy for a festival, to France at the invitation of the Mayor of Ors for the opening of a magnificent memorial to Wilfred Owen, and, most recently, 5 days with Hay Festival in Xalapa, in Mexico.

At the Festival on Lake Orta my Italian translator, Giorgia Sensi, shared the stage. Orta is beautiful. A keen audience filled the small venues. Wales as a nation within Britain was well understood and appreciated. The following weekend, we drove to Dover for the ferry to Calais. The memorial was created by British sculptor Simon Patterson with the help of a French architect, and paid for entirely from French sources with money raised by artconnexion. La Maison Forestière, the house in the forest where Wilfred spent his last night, has been gutted, except the cellar where he wrote his last letter to his mother. The house is a white shell, the path to the door spiralling like a conch. The glass roof is an open book, spine upward. Inside light streams from above, and Wilfred Owen’s poems appear and disappear on the glazed walls in English and in French in a trick of computer technology. All around stretches the forest. Hundreds came to the opening ceremony. Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and nephew of the ex-President, made an impressive speech, joined by other politicians, local and national.

We have the Mayor of Ors, M.Jacky Duminy to thank for this extraordinary memorial to a Welsh-English poet. To think of Ors under the jack boot and the tank is to understand the importance of a united Europe. At dinner I was called to make a speech of thanks and read a poem on behalf of Wales, and, as the Laureate could not be there, for Britain too.

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At the end of September, in the city of Veracruz, Mexico, 34 beheaded corpses were tipped from a lorry in broad daylight onto a busy street. On October 6th, the day after my plane touched down at Veracruz, 32 more bodies were found in the city. The drug barons were making their point. Driving from Veracruz to our hotel in Xalapa, we saw no sign of the armed police we later heard were patrolling the route. Later that week, at an elegant evening event of speeches and drinks in the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology, after impassioned speeches in Spanish from politicians, words from ambassadors, the British Council and people from the arts and education, Richard, from the British Embassy, turned to me and said, ‘Have you heard what happened here this week? These people are so grateful you’ve come.’

I was glad too - glad to be escorted by Chris Rawlings of the British Council to a secondary school of 1400 students, where, after the sort of welcome a rock star might consider his due, I watched teenage boys and girls perform a traditional folk dance. ‘They’ve prepared this specially for you,’ Chris told me. I was heaped with gifts, flowers, things the children had made, and, strangest of all, a framed certificate thanking me for my ‘services to the children of Wales and the World’. I recognise ‘Galles’ and ‘Mundo’. Later I worked in English with a class of 30 children (Years 9 and 10) looking at two of my poems, and answering their perceptive questions.

Later that week I was among the capacity audience at a symphony concert. I saw Wales win against Ireland in the hotel bar with Jon Gower and Peter Florence (both shouting!) and Martin Amis, (silent). I gave a poetry workshop for 20 young adults, asking them to write in their mother tongue, the appropriate language for any poet. It was a joyful festival in a nation, a region, a city which has lost 44,000 lives to the drug cartels since 2006. As the local press reported, the crowds defied the bullies, repossessed the streets, and turned out in throngs.

Meanwhile, email correspondence with students round the world is becoming more and more important to me. Some months ago I had an email from a teacher in Pakistan with her class’s questions about a poem of mine they are studying. It’s a poem that remembers the atrocities of war. After a long correspondence she wrote one more email:
‘I could teach them peace through your poem. Love from us all.
Yasmeen.’

Yes, poetry for peace, for cross-cultural communication, for being human, wherever we live.

Gillian Clarke, October 2011