This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Rememory’ by Nerys Williams from her third collection Republic. You can listen to our in depth interview with Nerys about Republic in episode 6 of The Seren Poetry Podcast Series 2.
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This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Lyrical Invention’ by Nerys Williams which was recently Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. The poem is published in her latest collection Republic.
In anticipation of Mother’s Day and because today is St Patrick’s Day, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘Curating a space for anachronistic design’ by Welsh/Irish poet Nerys Williams from her new collection Republic.
As we publish her new collection Republic, poet Nerys Williams gives us an insight into the music which accompanied its writing.
Listening to Republic
Writing Republic I found that post punk music of the 80s and 90s became key in an attempt to articulate a relationship between community, language and culture. Given the current preponderance of School Disco compilations, initially it might seem that retreating to the music of the 80s and 90s is another variant in communal nostalgia. This is not the intention of Republic. I believe that music carries an energy for future action and desire for change. What you learn over the years changes how you listen to those important early albums. Context shifts meaning.
Republic is an anti-memoir, it came from a need to transcribe the voices of a community (as opposed to a single voice) and a refutation of the easy and often predictable epiphanies of some memoirs. Music has a voice throughout this volume. Music is not a soundtrack or sonic wallpaper. Some of the lyrics I cite are just as beloved to me as Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
The sounds in this discography list are eclectic – moving from SKA, 80s pop, Welsh language electronica and rave to 90s shoegazing, jazz samba and classical minimalism.
I grew up in a part of West Wales which in the early 80s had an ambivalent relationship to the Welsh language. Welsh bilingual education was still an experiment. The 11+ existed to partition kids. English language music culture was king. Crucially Welsh language post punk music gave me a love of language that no primer could ever do.
In the late 1980s Fideo 9 on S4C, with is wonderful presenter Eddie Ladd, pushed boundaries. It was a relief to watch bands with strong female leads like Fiona Owen of Eirin Peryglus and Patricia Morgan from Datblygu performing in videos and asserting a space for non-rock female personas. Before the web, encountering such bands as Datblygy, Anhrefn, Y Cyrff onthe TV and at gigs arranged by Cymdeithas yr. Iaith, felt like finding a community. An outsider Wales which was vibrant and questioning.
The range was broad: moving from the reggae dub of Llwybr Llaethog, the malleable beats of Pop Negatif Wastad and guitar riffs of The Crumblowers to Traddodiad Ofnus’s socialist love letters and Tŷ Gwydr’s dance utopianism. Welsh language music was part of a global community. Datblygu could be cued between Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares and The Sugarcubes.
Republic offers a full discography. A Spotify playlist accompanies the book giving a sense not only of the period, but also issues that remain. Elfyn Presli’s “Jackboots Maggie Thatcher” and The Specials’ “Ghost Town” have not lost their resonance, or their relevance. There are some bands (especially Welsh bands from the listing above) whose work cannot be located on Spotify. Archive recordings exist on various web platforms (such as Ffarout’s YouTube channel). But I want to stress that Apple Music and Bandcamp offer ways of financially contributing to Welsh bands and labels through subscription downloads.
Writing this, on Welsh language music day 10th February 2023, I am grateful to those 1980s bands who were never able to get any sustainable income from their music, but did it anyhow. I thank those bands who loaded their vans and cars, went cross-country in the cold and rain to visit run down country hotels. I hug those band members who having travelled on B roads, played to drunken audiences. I acknowledge those experimentalists who often faced jeering or apathy. I salute the women who organised gigs and Cymdeithas cells tirelessly. I carry this archive of voices with me (with recent updates).
Nerys Williams
Full Discography (by section number)
8
Elfyn Presli ‘Jackboots Maggie Thatcher’ The First Cuts Are The Deepest (Words of Warning, 1987)
Coldplay A Rush of Blood to the Head (Parlaphone, 2002)
PJ Harvey Let England Shake (Island, 2011)
In her explosive new poetry collection Republic Nerys Williams opens a window on life in rural west Wales during the 1980s and 90s. English and Welsh-language post-punk bands, politics, feminism and family life are thrown together on the page as she questions what makes a republic?
Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Loie Fuller’s Dancing School’ by Nerys Williams from her collection Sound Archive. Nerys will be performing poems from her collection Cabaret at the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival as part of the Cardiff Poetry Experiment.
Sound Archive by Nerys Williams uses formal strategies to conjure a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature. A thoughtful, subtle and fascinating collection.
The Cardiff Poetry Experiment: Irish Women Poets event, hosted by Ailbhe Darcy, takes place at 6pm on Saturday 15 February as part of the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival. Nerys Williams will read alongside Cherry Smyth and jazz singer Lauren Kinsella. Buy your tickets on the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival website.
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Our Friday Poem this week is ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’ by Nerys Williams, from her collection Sound Archive.
Sound Archive is Williams’ strikingly original first collection, in which she conjures complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning.
In ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’ we join the speaker and her partner as they’re ‘queuing for relics’, thumbing through the brochure for an auction of Marilyn Monroe’s belongings. The poem laces together the mythologised symbols of Marilyn’s image with modern desires and needs.
If you would like to discover more of Nerys Williams’ poetry, you can find several of her new poems in the new issue of Poetry Wales Magazine.
On Wednesday the world celebrated its cutest holiday, World Penguin Day, so in continued praise of these adorable birds our Friday Poem this week is ‘Penguin Love’ by Nerys Williams.
Taken from Nerys’ 2011 collection Sound Archive, ‘Penguin Love’ is a vibrant and evocative portrait of black, white and yellow – of curiously wistful creatives who stand ‘angled at constellations’ and ache for the gift of a perfect smooth stone – the symbol of budding penguin romance. Sound Archive was shortlisted for both the Forward Best First Collection Prize and the Michael Murphy Prize, and won the Poetry Now / Mountains to Sea DLR Strong Award. This is a strikingly original debut in which the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning.
This week our Friday Poem is Nerys Williams’ ‘Kinetic Melodies’, from her award-winning debut collection, Sound Archive.
Winner of the DLR Strong Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Michael Murphey Prize, Nerys Williams’ Sound Archive is a strikingly original and critically acclaimed first collection of poems. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, Williams conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning.
Look out for Nerys Williams’ new collection, Cabaret, out soon from New Dublin Press.
Kinetic Melodies
It is easy to speak of language as ownership,
your purring phonemes are not my right
nor any dialogic imagination.
It is like the time I mixed metaphors
and found myself nude, addressing a crowd
with no immediate
parallel or paradox to flail at.
An empty lectern, a thousand eyes.
Small inconsistencies alert us:
a time to find a colour of saying,
how dialect forms the melody of tall tales.
After storm fields have disappeared
sulphur fills the air where the tree stands.
Here it says I am branch
root and hollow, rub my charcal into clean hands,
serenade me with your speech,
curse the carrion crow below.
This week’s poem is from Nerys Williams’ debut collection, Sound Archive, which won the 2012 DLR Strong Award.
Sound Archive is the strikingly original first collection of poems from Nerys Williams. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. There is a playful lightness of touch and tone and for every serious inquisition like ‘An Anatomy of Arguments’ or ‘Conversations with Cocteau’, there is a poem that will muse on ‘Canter’s Starstruck Diner, L.A.’ or on the ‘artifacts’ left by Marilyn Monroe, in ‘Marilyn’s Auction House’. Williams confronts our preconceptions about what it might mean to be a woman writing against the background of two formidable traditions: that of Welsh-speaking Wales and of English literature. A thoughtful, subtle and fascinating first collection.
Sound Archive for Cliff Anderson
It takes patience this piecing of noise in an archive for voices.
Chronicled on my silver-silicon a focus of of gravity gone, scene unset.
Tempos in the unthreading of flight beating.
Misremembered movement the voice still says:
Do not package me as an afterthought or a bulletin.
Though I have never been to Spain I understand attachment theory and have been told of thanatology.
Raise your glass to this last flourish as I switch from Andante to Largo
I toast Dubrovnik, Elvis and Chopin free the slaves of my imagination.
I will wear boaters in the rain and fill one room with flowers.
I will raise hell in remaining chapels never searching for injunctions nor pardons.
I will be the sage on the hill filling in for memorial towers.
I will finish that string quartet begun at twenty-five.
I will flirt with the ladies at the till and get my groceries free.
I will smoke over the baby grand turning to my right for a tumbler of gin.
I will mark a map of all colours felt frame them into a continent.
There will be methods to my madness which I will name kinetic imbalance.
On this day thought is blown over the wall over trees to the road,
jazzed up and jiving a bouquet of spectral dandelions for you to hold.
Nerys Williams will read from her first poetry collection, Sound Archive, at The Boar House, Laugharne, Monday 23rd May 2011 7pm.
To find out more about Nerys Williams the author and her first poetry collection published by Seren, click the tagged ‘Nerys Williams’ or go to our website – www.serenbooks.com – to find out more!