Poetry, Geography, Gender

Women Rewriting Contemporary Wales

Alice Entwistle

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783165810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

Poetry, Geography, Gender examines how questions of place, identity and creative practice intersect in the work of some of Wales' best known contemporary poets, including Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Ruth Bidgood and Sheenagh Pugh. Merging traditional literary criticism with cultural-political and geographical analysis, Alice Entwistle shows how writers' different senses of relationship with Wales, its languages, history and imaginative, as well as political, geography feeds the form as well as the content of their poetry. Her innovative critical study thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first century Wales.

1 On the Border(s): The Interstitial Poetries of the Contact Zone

The contact zone where differences meet is as real and as significant a part of cultural formations, including the formations of identity, as the spaces of difference.1

To the Edwardian mind of the writer H. V. Morton, the inherently secret (rather than secretive) nature of Wales is its most compelling quality. Morton’s courteous and percipient travelogue of 1930s Wales, In Search of Wales, seems at least partly driven by the expectation of its own failure. Making his leisurely approach from Ludlow, Morton rehearses Wales’s painful history of cultural border making with circumspect sympathy; implicitly he urges us to understand Wales as having been taught to construct itself, like its embattled community, in defensively bounded terms. His arrival in Llangollen is accordingly marked, with respectful curiosity, by ‘the feeling that I had crossed a frontier. I was in a foreign country.’2

The American writer Anne Stevenson, who spends some of each year in a remote Gwynedd cottage owned by her husband’s family, is sanguine about the sense of cultural alienation she shares with Morton: ‘In Wales I cannot be more than a passionate observer, a student of its geology and Neolithic past, an admirer of its mountains as I learn stumblingly to name them.’3 Appearing at the close of the 1990 essay (‘Poetry and place’) in which these remarks appear, Stevenson’s poem ‘Binoculars in Ardudwy’ echoes her sense of separateness from the landscape it captures, expressively, ‘in the . . . noose’ of the watcher’s binoculars,

hauling hill, yard, barn, man, house

and a line of blown washing across

. . .

a mile of diluvian marsh.

However, in an irony compounded – as this intensely self-aware text knows – by the metonymically obscuring weather, the ‘noose’ confines the speaker as well as the scene:

. . ., just as I frame it, the farm

wraps its windows in lichenous weather

and buries itself in its tongue.

Not my eyes but my language is wrong.

And the cloud is between us forever.

Under cover of mist and myth

the pieced fields whisper together,

‘Find invisible Maesygarnedd . . .,

Y Llethr . . . Foel Ddu . . . Foel Wen.’ (‘Binoculars in Ardudwy’, in Lothar Fietz et al. (eds), Regionalität, p. 211; Poems 1955–2005, p. 185)

Both dividing and eliding the different elements of the scene they ‘haul’ into view, the binoculars honour the cultural separatism enshrined in, and shrouding, the farm and its spell-like field names. They also testify to the stranger’s imaginatively double perception of the continuities yoking Ardudwy’s figuratively misty patchworked (‘pieced’) landscape.

The recondite air which at once attracts and alienates Stevenson and Morton might derive partly from the relationship between demography and topography in Wales: its much-mythologised tracts of sparsely inhabited uplands can today still make its chief centres of population seem peripheral, Derridean supplements located with self-doubling ambivalence on the very margins of the marginal. The strangeness to which Morton and Stevenson both respond seems at once reified and troubled by the trope for which each reaches: the border. Like the boundary, which I have touched on already, borders are definitively liminal, permeable, polysemous spaces in which division and conjunction meet and interpenetrate. Susan Stanford Friedman puts it more elegantly:

Borders between individuals, genders, groups and nations erect categorical and material walls between identities . . . But borders also specify the liminal space in between, the interstitial site of interaction, interconnection, and exchange. Borders enforce silence, miscommunication, misrecognition. They also invite transgression, dissolution, reconciliation, and mixing.4

For a range of strategic reasons, later twentieth-century feminist literary criticism laid energetic claim to the cultural power of the liminal. On behalf of readers and writers alike, as my epigraph suggests, critics like Friedman came to prize the border above all as ‘contact zone’, a site ‘of constant movement and change, the locus of syncretist intermingling and hybrid interfusions of self and other’, in which conventional discriminations driven by hierarchies of sameness and difference are interrogated and refused.5 The gender emphases of Friedman’s argument are of course germane to this account. I also want to keep Homi Bhabha in mind, for his confident reaching beyond the constraints of gender into what we might call the inter-cultural: ‘the overlap and displacement of domains of difference [in which] the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural values are negotiated’.6

This chapter situates a number of poetries amid the productive uncertainties of the interstitial. As I show, the term can be applied as readily to textual as to territorial space(s), to material as to metaphoric forms of expression, as writers track the dynamic processes of cultural individuation in and through the complex contact zones of Wales’s ethnographic and sometimes psycho-social terrain. For political and aesthetic reasons, the poems I read below explore these interstices in the variegated languages of two central tropes: the human, pre-human and mythopoeic histories and topographies of Wales’s landscape; and the relational morphologies of the body, human and not. Again and again their authors exploit, with a poetic intelligence as likely to be playful as protective, both the aesthetic and the cultural-political opportunities of this eloquent, embodied, liminality.7 To adapt a point made by Clair Wills, they use genre to register the ethnographic uncertainties of their situation, by reconfiguring ‘the relationship between text and [culturally identifying] body’.8

Writing the March

The equivocal space of the ‘contact zone’ is writ large in Wales if only because, as Francesca Rhydderch notes, ‘For such a small country, Wales has an immense border’.9 Tacitly, Rhydderch might be referring to more than the country’s perimeter, the 177 landlocked miles bordering England swelled by a further 1,680 miles (2,740 km) of coastline (http://www.cartographic.org.uk).

Arguably, Wales has been deeply incised by the so-called ‘Marches’, the contested territories held for lengthy periods by (often absent) ‘Marcher lords’ in the name of a remote English monarch. Frequently mapped onto the Welsh–English borderlands of the south and east, in fact the mobile, partitioning Marches reached as far as the western coast. Hence Tony Conran, in 1997, linking Wales’s growing anglophone literature with the ‘March’:

These days the March is not a geographical feature. It can be anywhere – through my backyard in Bangor, where my children are Welsh-speaking but I am not – through a Cardiff shop or a Llangollen office. Most people in Wales live lives that at some point or other are different because of this insidious March, snaking along between them and the complacency of being completely Welsh or completely English.10

Conran’s elision of geographical, historical and linguistic division is typically shrewd. As Gillian Clarke tells David Lloyd, ‘living in a land with two languages is a delicate situation. There’s no moment of life in Wales that hasn’t got that edge . . .’11 If nothing else, the dynamism that both Clarke and Conran acknowledge resounds, as Tristan Hughes notes, in the ‘double-edged’ legacy of the bilingual

political, social and cultural fault lines that run through and between and across [Wales’s landscapes], [always] forcing us to think of ourselves as being either on one side of them or the other: insider or outsider, native or newcomer, custodian or usurper. And yet all the time those lines are becoming more fluid and amorphous, harder to fix . . .12

Situated by dint of birth, place of domicile, or cultural-political choice among Hughes’s shifting fault lines, many poets discover in the tension-filled, Bhabha-like ‘beyond’ of Conran’s ‘insidious March’ (comparable if not identical with Clarke’s politically enfranchised ‘far country’), a multidimensional space in which to sift the layered dis/continuities of both rural and urban, historic and mythologised, semiautonomous, increasingly trans-cultural, contemporary Wales. As Katie Gramich and Catherine Brennan say of their fourteenth-century foremothers, the poets I read write, with confidence and purpose, as ‘full participant[s] in the tradition, confident of [their] own craft and relishing what [they] depict as the privilege of [their] female Otherness’. 13 In doing so they invite us to read them, together and separately, as writing across or beyond the intersecting material, political and referential frontiers of their different cultural experiences. In ‘rethinking the parameters of parameter’, as Jo Gill puts it, writers like Anne Cluysenaar, Wendy Mulford, Jo Shapcott, Zoë Skoulding, Deryn Rees-Jones, Sarah Corbett, Pascale Petit and perhaps above all Gwyneth Lewis and Menna Elfyn echo Clarke’s affectionate sense of Wales as ‘a small country, a place of coincidence and connection’.14 At the same time, however, they endorse Daniel Williams’s noticing how ‘being both “inside and outside” . . . mutates into a position from which to speak, beyond the divisions, of the wider, international, relevance of Welsh cultural and political debates’.15 From this vantage point, they spiritedly re-imagine ‘what the geopolitical space [of Wales] may be, as a local or transnational reality’.16 As Lewis remarks of the edge: ‘It’s offered me freedom, so I choose to stay.’17

The language(s) of landscape

Every piece of land is itself a text.18

As Dennis Cosgrove explains, any landscape is a construct of the perceiving eye; ‘a way of seeing’; thus he warns against treating landscape ‘in a vacuum, outside the context of a real historical world of productive human relations and those between people and the world they inhabit’.19 Given the ‘primary role that discourses of landscape play in the field of cultural contestation’, and the tensions that still resonate inside and outside Wales’s many kinds of border, the interest which English-language poets have taken in ‘the relationship between language and the land in Wales’ in the twentieth century should, perhaps, not surprise.20 The divisive effects of this concern are both implied and dismissed...