Capital Poet

High Winds and Hedd Wyn

Gillian Clarke gives an account of her early work as Cardiff’s Capital Poet.

It began slowly. The launch at BayLit. A photographer took my picture in a high wind outside the Old Library. The official Cardiff book was launched at the City Hall. After that, the BBC and WNO were quickest off the mark, and I was soon enjoying the guilty pleasures of The Magic Flute at Jonathan Adams’ thrilling new building for the arts (I can’t use the unpoetic and confusing name we’ve been landed with – more of that anon). Then the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World at St David’s Hall, and the Book of the Year Awards ceremony at the Hilton. At the last mentioned event the chair called Poetry was empty and draped with a black cloth. All those fine collections of poetry from Wales I’ve read this year, and not one poet was even on the longlist, except the excellent Deryn Rees Jones, whose only Welsh connection is her father’s name. Had Poetry been present in the Hilton that night, it would have been uneasy among the bling, the frocks and the cameras.

Coming home to Cardiff Central by train from Carmarthen, changing trains for Queen Street and the little train to the Docks, has been a guilt–free pleasure. I still can’t call it Cardiff Bay. It sounds corporate, slightly embarrassing estate agent language. It is a different place, though. Strolling the pavements in the crowds after the opera, and on the following morning, was to taste a renewed, sophisticated Cardiff that feels European as it never did in my childhood and youth. So many bars and pavement cafes! Well, we had the Hayes Island Snack Bar.

Things were rather quiet to begin with. Now the requests are coming in so thick and fast that sometimes I feel more like the Blaen Cwrt Blogger than the Capital Poet. July. Home from the Ledbury Fetival, where I was Poet-in-Residence, and where my mobile phone was a hotline to Cardiff. Please come on Sunday and read a new poem for Memorial Day. A new poem for Thursday’s Royal Visit. A new poem for Saturday’s Drawing the Cathedral Day. After a period of reading, scribbling and thinking, the poems are beginning to arrive. Ideas queue for my time and attention. To write to a purpose I need a day of writing all that must be binned before finding the real poem on the second day. Then, on the third day, sometimes, in a fair wind, I can bring it off. But the phone rings, and email arrives, and I must answer requests to write something, go somewhere. Or worse, ‘appear’. Poets aren’t supposed to appear. They are supposed to write, to speak, to perform their poems. They should be heard and not seen. I find the ubiquitous photographer particularly disturbing. Who was it said the camera steals your soul? It feels like being touched by a stranger. It reminds me I am ‘appearing’.

I suppose it would be simpler to be in Cardiff for a spell, then at home, in retreat, just writing. But that’s not to be. The celebrations are in many hands. The shakers and movers of scores of organisations are enthusiatic and welcoming. The invitations arrive. They are, as they should be, all in need of a poem to help make this a year to remember. I never again want to see the poetry chair empty.

PS. Let this be the year we give the WMC a real name. How about Opera? Some already call it the Opera House. Opera is Latin for work. Opus is a work. We writers, knowing its real meaning, should not mind its association with one art form. It works. It’s neither Welsh nor English. Opera. Tw Opera. Opera House. What do readers think?