Culture Matters is publishing a series of important anthologies of working class poetry. ‘Witches, Warriors, Workers‘ edited by Fran Lock and Jane Burn. ‘The Children of the Nation‘ of contemporary Irish poetry. Most recently, ‘Almarks‘ radical poetry of Shetland. And the subject of today’s guest post ‘Onward/Ymlaen‘ anthology of radical poetry from contemporary Wales, edited by Mike Jenkins. Here’s Mike talking about the anthology (and lots of other fascinating insights) with a poem ‘No Memorial F Lisa ‘from upcoming collection ‘Anonymous Bosch’ which will be published by Culture Matters early next year. You can buy the anthology here:
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The Spirit of 1831 – ‘Onward/Ymlaen!’
“The anthology ‘Onward/ Ymlaen!’ published by Culture Matters comprises left-wing poems from Cymru rather than ‘Wales’. Why do I stress this? As the Welsh language poet Menna Elfyn rightly points out in notes to her poem ‘Neb-ach’, the very words ‘Wales’ and ‘Welsh’ are both associated with being ‘foreign’ : we call ourselves what others have chosen to call us, namely the English.
I choose Cymru because it means ‘fellow-countrymen’ and is intrinsically about belonging and co-operation.
Poetry has always been fundamental and not peripheral to our society. Every year at the National Eisteddfod we crown a bard for his/her free verse and chair another for their work in cynghanedd ( an ancient verse-form).
During the ceremony the Archdruid (who is, at present, Myrddin ap Dafydd: represented in this anthology) calls for ‘Heddwch!’ and the entire audience responds by calling out that Welsh word for peace.
Bards have traditionally come from many different backgrounds and one of the most renowned was ‘Hedd Wyn’ (bardic name of Ellis Humphrey Evans) who was a shepherd who fought and died in the 1st World War. An avowed pacifist, he was chaired posthumously at the Eisteddfod in 1917 , when they draped a black cloak over the Chair in his absence.
In Cymru, poets have also invariably had close associations with their ‘milltir sgwâr’, areas of belonging and identity, and you see this in the work of many here, such as Ness Owen from Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and Gemma June Howell with her Caerffili dialect poems.
Ness writes in both Welsh and English, with the language and her feminism at the fore in her work –
‘Tonge-tied
excusing our way through
we breath in Mamiaith’
While Gemma hails originally from a working-class estate in Caerffili called Graig yr Rhacca, writing in the voices of its inhabitants, for all their faults so full of humour and energy –
‘A’rite? Nairmz Rhiannon
an I leve on thuh Rock.
I luv drinken ciduh
and I luv sucken cock.’
As co-editor of ‘Red Poets’ magazine for 26 years (we annually publish left-wing poetry from Cymru and beyond) I am acutely aware of the importance of socialist and republican politics to our poets.
The majority in this collection will have appeared in that magazine over the years and, in particular, I think of Herbert Williams, Alun Rees, Tim Richards and Jazz who were there, at the very beginning.
The power of satire is vital to most of these, and Rees’s ‘Taffy is a Welshman’ deservedly won the Harri Webb Prize. It takes a well-known nursery rhyme and develops it into a scathing look at the history of the Welsh working-class, fighting imperialist wars –
‘He’s fought the wide world over,
he’s given blood and bone.
He’s fought for every bloody cause
except his bloody own.’
For many, their poetic heroes have been the likes of Idris Davies and Harri Webb, uncompromising poets never afraid to take on the burning issues of their times : Davies dealing with strikes and the Depression and Webb with the rise of Welsh nationalism and sense of Cymru as an oppressed colony.
In the 60s when Alun Rees, Herbert Williams and Sally Roberts Jones came to the fore, the worlds of Welsh and English language poetry were largely separate. Nowadays, poets like Siôn Tomos Owen and Rufus Mufasa move between both their languages, often within individual poems.
Rufus is also a quite amazing performer, somewhat like Kate Tempest but with more singing and an emphasis on dub rather than rap. Her work on the page is quite distinct from her performance poetry, though both move easily from Welsh to English –
‘ Y bwrdd cadarn, caer / our fortress made of blankets’
From the multi-cultural society of Cardiff to former industrial heartlands of slate, iron and coal, there are a strong feelings of injustice and anger shared by many working-class communities throughout the British Isles.
One younger poet, Hanan Issa (who I met and read alongside at the Homeless World Cup in Cardiff) draws on her Muslim background, here reflecting on an incident in Marrakech –
‘ Immersed in the maelstrom
of a Marrakech market.’
Yet, it has to be said that the emerging and enthusiastic independence movement, which many of these poets are part of and which is led by non-partisan groups like Yes Cymru, has created a sense of hope more akin to Scotland in recent years and I wanted to reflect this in the title ‘Onward/ Ymlaen!’ I took it from Patrick Jones’s poem ‘The Guerilla Tapestry’ to encapsulate this spirit .
‘Following the dream of emancipation
Your power we shall decline
Ymlaen Ymlaen’
Jones’s own journey from Labour supporter to embracing the emerging Indy movement is one which truly reflects our politically fluid times.
And the same word is echoed in Phil Howells’s poem about the Merthyr Rising which took place in my home town in 1831 when the ironworkers rose up against their masters to take over the whole town and, it’s claimed, raise the red flag for the first time.
image: dave lewis
In Welsh the slogan we’ve used for decades has been ‘Fe godwn ni eto!’ (we will rise again). Despite the Tory victory in the Westminster election, there is still plenty of room for optimism and these poems are sure indicators that the spirit of 1831 and the Chartists lives on.
Mike Jenkins is an award-winning Welsh poet and author. He is widely published and is much in demand for his lively performances and writing workshops. He has performed at the Hay Festival and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and has read and tutored at Ty Newydd, the National Writers’ Centre for Wales. Mike frequently appears on radio and television and is known among Cardiff City football fans as the club’s ‘unofficial poet’. (http://www.facebook.com/mjenkins1927; http://twitter.com/mjenkins1927)
She ewsed t live above me
I could yer the comins an goins,
theyer larfter an screamin.
Never knew she wern copin,
though she did joke once –
‘I’m even in debt to-a fuckin Food Bank!’
Mostly she wuz smiling
but sometimes I could see
the worries gnawin away –
rats in-a drains an sewers
bringin disease to er kids.
She woz a cleaner on fuckall pay.
Blokes ud come an leave,
er kids come first ev’ry time.
Few returned, sniffin, but not f long.
Er sister found er.
I know oo is t blame.
This town’s seen too many martyrs.
As we remember Tydfil
an, o course, Dic Penderyn ,
there’ll be no memorial f Lisa.
(Poem from ‘Anonymous Bosch’ which will be published by Culture Matters early next year, with photos by Dave Lewis of Pontypridd).
I try to watch the news once a day; more than that and it is really depressing. Alternatively it is infuriating, why do we need to see Royalty clapping in an obviously posed way with their children outside their front door which does not appear to be in a street where anyone else lives. When have they ever used the NHS?
Yesterday I made marmalade, from one of those tins of prepared Seville oranges; I knew they were good because my mother used them, rather secretly as she saw it as cheating. When I was quite small I remember going, in our fathers cab, to pick blackberries in 
My partner and I are both of an age where a store cupboard is normal. Our parents lived through the war so there were always a few tins and packets kept for emergencies. We order our shopping delivery fortnightly and have a kind of general store. We are trying not hoard and so far have managed to get roughly what we need. When our delivery arrives it gets washed, dried and put away. Sometimes the way we talk about what is happening reminds me of my childhood when food was still rationed and my parents were not very well off. My mother was a genius at making things stretch not just food but clothes too.
“For much of my life, I struggled with a range of symptoms which seemed to bare no correlation to one another. Chronic fatigue, an increasingly constant nausea level, violent aching without reason.
My poem, ‘young man,’ was really one of my first explorations of this tension between distance and closeness. It felt like an act of empowerment, as I initially struggled to find work, to admit defeat. To acknowledge flaws, and to ironise them. As it turns out, to be vulnerable in life makes it far easier to be vulnerable on the page, and soon a body of work began to form around the experience of living within my own body.
And as I looked for ways to complete my father’s portrait, I noticed how proud I am of him, how his work ideals and diligence have come to define him. Coming from a more working class background and without a university education, he wanted a different future for me, a future alien to him and his class, where more doors would be open with the promise of a good education.
“When we rang in the New Year, I don’t expect any of us thought our 2020 would include supermarket queues, panic buying, empty motorways, or an invisible Prime Minister, but here we are. The world is a quieter place, where we keep our distance from each other, do our weekly shop, and – in my case at least – spend far too much time online, seeking some kind of social interaction. For better or worse, our worlds have shrunk to our immediate neighbourhood, the few streets round us, the distance we can walk or cycle in an hour.
Many of the poems in my new book ‘
“The title poem for my debut collection, Her Lost Language, feels a bit like a ‘cuckoo’ in that I usually write about the legacies of British transatlantic enslavement, with direct reference to Jamaica. This seems to be where I find my voice, and can cover subjects from the maternal, food, past, present and future.
It feels clear on re-reading the poem that the environment I describe is not just ‘hostile’ for the character but for everyone who has to live in it. The phrase, ‘A lift shaped by urine is’, to me, about real suffering – for those that have to endure it and those that cause the offence in the first place. How alienated do you have to be, to literally piss where you live?
“Cardiff has one of the oldest BAME populations in the UK. However, it wasn’t a slave town like Bristol. The majority of the Black population were merchant seamen – who settled in Cardiff’s docks area, or Tiger Bay as it was known back then. My grandfather came to Cardiff via a familiar route in the 1890’s. 
Gradually people migrated to other parts of Cardiff, My grandparents moved out in the 1940’s. Unfortunately my grandfather was on a ship which was torpedoed during World War 2 – so we never met. I grew up in what I jokingly referred to later as a Black & White family with a ‘coloured’ telly…. It’s funny when you’re a child, you don’t think of yourself as a colour…. I discovered I was black accidentally. We would always watch the news at teatime. It was sometime around 1972, and the newsreader barked “and the Blacks are rioting in…”. It was somewhere in London. I said, ‘Dad – who are the blacks?’. My dad looked at me quizzically and said ‘We are son…’. It was a light-bulb moment. “Aaaah – that’s why people call me funny names at school”, I thought. They were strange times – ‘
The poem I have chosen from my collection, has to be ‘On the death of Muhammad Ali’. A) Originally, it was one of my poems that Eric Ngalle Charles chose for his ‘
“It seems to me, that this global pandemic leaves me unable to write a thing except maybe clichés; tired phrases. I can’t write about it but writing about anything else seems unthinkable. I’m aware that for some poets I know, the opposite is true and poems are pouring out of them. One way or another we are all affected and not just in regards writing; some people find themselves unable to do anything productive whilst others throw themselves into activity – we find our own ways of dealing with the anxiety. There is a definition of trauma that makes a correlation between the perceived level of threat and the perceived level of helplessness we feel in response to it; essentially when an event overwhelms our ability to cope. The reverberations of this collective trauma will be around long after the lockdown ends.
I remember the helplessness I felt then too and how painting led me to writing this poem, ‘Drowning’. I wanted to send something cheerful and uplifting for this guest post but of the few more cheerful poems I’ve written nothing seemed right. I read a Facebook post a friend shared recently by someone who said the last time they were in lockdown was during the 
internationally touring DJs and members of an all-female band of adults with learning difficulties. My aim wasn’t to get famous names but to talk to women who lived and breathed music in their everyday life, either professionally or at an amateur level.
But for all of this, this little area houses many people, or perhaps a better word, it homes them. Above the shopping centre are two residential complexes, Paige Heights and Sky City – architecturally unique when they were built – like neighbourhoods in the sky. You wouldn’t know they were there, looking up from the street. And on one side of the high street lies the vast Noel Park estate, street and after street of Victorian cottage style houses, originally built to home artisan labourers.
Proletarian Poetry 