Interview 

Introduction

God I’ve got a great job! Well, TWO great jobs, really. I teach academically gifted teenagers, which is amazingly rewarding, and which I get paid for. But as the evening darkness falls and the moon rises, I mutate: I leap to my desk, howl, and become — Editor of The Chimaera! My duties for this job include researching and interviewing poets whose work I really like, as well as gathering critical material and personal reflections on them, for The Chimaera’s Spotlight feature. Performing this task is a poetic education in itself:  I have learnt immense amounts about the craft and discipline of poetry in the process, but I’ve also come to know some of the most interesting people on the planet. Working so closely with them, they become part of my life: none more so than Ann Drysdale. The to-and-fro communications over several months, constructing her interview and other aspects of the feature, as well as reading and re-reading her poems, memoirs (and travel guide to Newport in South Wales!), have made me feel very connected to Ann in the same way you feel connected to a friend whom you’ve known long and intimately, through thick and thin.

Ann says in the interview, “Being a woman is an accident, being human is much more relevant to my work.” Humanity and human connection are, for me, at the centre of Ann’s poetry, which is witty, very well-read, thoughtful, skilfully-crafted, entertaining, moving and enriching; but above all, it is poetry that speaks to you personally, touches, makes human contact. That is a rare and crucial virtue: one that transforms good poetry into essential poetry. A virtue, too, that makes an author who possesses it a good person to sup a pint with!

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Paul:

                        …One can just imagine how
            Imaginative thought would feel the pinch
            Of being squeezed into a villanelle
            Whose rigid metre wouldn’t give an inch
            When freedom’s feet demanded space to swell.
            Who in their right mind would contrive a sonnet
            If anything worthwhile depended on it?

                              — ‘Against Rhyming’, Backwork

Why do you write in form rather than free verse?

Ann:  The smart-arse answer is “because I can”. My early poems were little notes, metaphorically tucked into a forked stick and poked into the world from behind the sofa, where the scaredy-cats hide. The subtexts were mostly “Oh, yeah?” and “Gotcher!”

A more honest answer is that form imposes discipline. Shaping what I’m saying helps me to understand what I’m thinking. I know that at some point I have to hand my poem over to the mob, who may misconstrue and deconstruct, but form gives me a fighting chance of getting it to the target unbuggered.

By “form”, I don’t necessarily mean rhyme or even good old Blank Verse. There are other, less obvious ways of holding a poem together, specialised glues that I boil up in my head to suit the material. And I do sometimes write what I classify as Free Verse, but it’s the hardest of all the poetic manifestations to do well. It may not have a demonstrable form but it still needs grace and music or it isn’t poetry. You can pull an idea out of your head like a rabbit from a hat, but unless you handle that rabbit with knowledge and skill, you’ll never get it to dance.

Can I show you in a poem?

Paul: Please do!

Ann:

Glosa

          Aspiration might become
          a pre-owned Mercedes
          do not roll or squeeze
          but pick up your own tab.

              — from Jump Start by Tony Lopez,  Devolution  (2000)

            Once inspiration was a necessary
            First step towards eventual success.
            Next came adventures in vocabulary
            And then experiments with sound and stress.
            The special mouthfeel of the crafted object,
            The absolute conviction in your head
            That this was what you felt about the subject
            And this the only way it could be said.
            With skilled investment of the mounting sum,
            Who knew what aspiration might become?

            Now — funding makes you aspirational —
            So fabricate what generates the ready
            And if that means the ugly and irrational
            Then go for those, and never mind the heady
            Pleasure of making something worth repeating
            And knowing what it is you’re aiming for.
            You can achieve it without ever meeting
            Any of the sad old criteria.
            Settle for second-best, whose accolade is
            A bit of skirt in a pre-owned Mercedes

            Define the middle ground and aim below it;
            The spirit of the age will show you how.
            The past is not the province of the poet;
            Poetry should be of the here and now.
            Latinate diction is a gross offence.
            Verse should not rhyme unless by accident
            Nor should it scan, nor, God forbid, make sense.
            The reader must determine what you meant.
            Seize, then, the zeitgeist by the balls, but please
            Have some decorum. Do not roll or squeeze.

            Found poems are a labour-saving caper
            (Best to ignore the fact that someone lost them)
            A painless, mindless way of filling paper.
            Old boundaries collapse after you’ve crossed them.
            The laundry list, the memo, the prescription;
            It’s written — rip it off and put it in!
            The condom packet and the job description…
            Art is a buffet lunch — sod discipline;
            Love bids you welcome. Blunder through and grab
            What turns you on. But pick up your own tab.

(Note: The glosa is a Spanish form introduced by the court poets in the fourteenth century, based on an Arabic pattern that has been traced back to the ninth. It has two parts, which are normally written by different authors.

The first part — the texto or cabeza — consists of a few lines which set the theme for the entire poem. Typically this will be a stanza taken from a well-known poem or poet.
 
The second part — the glosa proper — is a gloss on, or explanation of, the texto.  It takes the form of an ode, with one stanza for each line of the texto. Each stanza in turn expands upon its corresponding line, and ends with a repetition of it.

It is arguably, therefore, the earliest form of “found” poetry…)

Paul: “…the heady / Pleasure of making something worth repeating / And knowing what it is you’re aiming for… ” What one or two poems of your own do you feel this heady pleasure with? What do you reckon you’ve written that’s particularly worth repeating?

Ann: Aha! You’re tempting me to be immodest here, which is not in keeping with my image as a gentlewoman. What I am trying to describe is how the sheer bloody graft of getting it right sometimes culminates in the sweet certainty that a line or a phrase is as good as you can get it. This is best demonstrated by saying it aloud, which is especially satisfying. Sometimes I actually sigh “yesssss” or clap my hands like a Japanese businessman at a brainstorming. These are secret ceremonies celebrating moments when meaning and form are joined in unholy matrimony by something that was waiting in my own word-hoard all along.

An example? I remember searching for the missing piece of a sonnet that was floundering in my head like a beached whale. I knew what I wanted it to say but the idea was too big for a single pentameter. I was trying to express the realisation that what you’ve been struggling to understand (in this case a religious mystery) is actually perfectly comprehensible when you come across the right bit of motherwit in the bottom of your pocket. I remember laughing aloud on the bus to Brynmawr when I thought of “small serendipitous epiphanies”.

Paul: The theme of how we are constructed by our childhood seems important in your work: I’m thinking of poems like “The Only Road There Is” or “Waiting to Sign On” from Backwork . Why do you return to this theme? How does it bear on your own childhood?

Ann:  I’m not sure how you see these particular poems as redolent of my childhood! Nor can I see an immediate link between them. The first was written as a riposte to the Poet Laureate, who was supposed to have asked Britain’s finest poets to produce a piece on “Journeys” for National Poetry Day. Sadly my invitation seems to have been lost in the post. But I wrote it anyway. And “Waiting to Sign On” was from personal, adult experience. Oh, wait a minute! — the reference to potty training was meant to reflect the attitude of the administrative staff rather than a personal formative experience. It wasn’t till I was in my forties and unemployed that anybody forced me to crap on command, so to speak. And it was just that word “job” that became meaningless through repetition until it reminded me of the time when it was a universal euphemism for a turd. Nowadays genteel folk say “poo” in the same context. Me, I prefer shit.

Paul: Tell us about your early poems. What made you start writing? What writers inspired you?

Ann:  My first recognisable poems were skits and parodies of the things I was finding in the literature curriculum. I did them to forge myself a reputation as a bit of a wit. It’s a hard role, that of a scholarship child in a fee-paying school and I needed the kudos. I loved to recite and perform the things that rang with music — Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’ was the first poem I learned by heart — and the certainty of rhythm that flowed through Kipling and the anonymous balladeers. But the poetry I loved quietly in my heart was the sort my father introduced me to — Yeats and Graves and the “moderns” of the thirties. I fed my head with it from then on, adding French and Latin writers on the way. And Auden, who lit it all up from within.

Paul: What was your “relationship” with Robert Graves? In your poem “First Love” you speak of him as “…the love-poet who had set the first fire / In my small, clean grate.” Did he influence your thinking and writing? Has your assessment of his work changed since?

Ann: Ah, First Love. Well, I refer you, sir, to your own poem “Two Seconds”. It’s the same voice speaking from the other side of the room. I had found Graves’s poem “A Frosty Night” and clung to it with the conviction, not only that I was alone in understanding it, but that Graves had somehow written it especially for me. I had the pubescent girl’s conviction that “nobody understands me” and suddenly here was a red-blooded poet who did. I explored his work and discovered its congruence with my own classical studies. He was lecturing at the City Literary Institute on his latest novel, Homer’s Daughter, which dealt with the Princess who saved Odysseus when he was washed up, naked and needy on the shores of her father’s country. Oh, I wanted a piece of that! I was a scruffy schoolgirl with inescapable uniform and sensible shoes, but I wanted to catch his eye and convince him that I was Homer’s “Nausicaa of the white arms”, to show him a fatal face and a smile that I had rehearsed for days in a mirror. I didn’t even get two seconds.

Despite this personal setback, my love of his work grew steadily. I wish his war stuff could be regarded as highly as that of Owen and Sassoon and Rosenburg. It is in so many ways more moving because he has accepted his role as a soldier and that gives the poems a different honesty that still takes my breath away. How about “A Dead Boche” — something he found on a recce in Mametz wood, harvesting German greatcoats to keep his own men warm? Or “Escape” which tells of his return from his recorded death? Or Sergeant-major Money, which I still can’t read without emotion?

Paul: Ann, can Hardy, Yeats, Graves and Auden be said to have influenced your own verse? If so, in what ways?

Ann: Of course they did; they must have done. I read them and loved them and my heart moved to their music. But if I look too hard to find their notional chromosomes in my own written children, I might never produce another word. It’s an alternative aspect of the old bicycle metaphor. Even as you’re whizzing downhill with your lips moving in silent prayer or pedalling like the very bejasus up a one-in-four, you daren’t stop to analyse what you’re doing. If you did you’d know that it’s impossible for a big-bottomed woman to cover any sort of terrain while balanced on a mere inch of rubber tubing. And there you’d be, in the gutter (though looking up the stars…).

If I sought out my influences and inspirations with any real honesty, I might well find a similar truth. It’s something I don’t have to be afraid of so long as I don’t look at it while I’m pedalling — the suspicion that “All I am is the things I’ve read / and there’s not an original thought in my head.”
 
Please, Paul, don’t make me go there. Let the reviewers do it.
 
Paul: Oh, you spoil all my fun! Well, let me bowl up another googly. How far do you see yourself as a “She-Poet” rather than a “He-Poet” (“The Seven Ages of the She-Poet”, The Turn of the Cucumber)? Do you see a difference between the poetry of men and women? Do you think you have a distinctively female voice in your poems (perhaps more so than other female poets, whose poetic voices often seem to me to be little different from men’s)?

Ann:  I don’t think you can divide poetry on a man/woman basis. I write as a woman because my plumbing has defined me as such, but not self-consciously so. If I thought any of it came across as “girly” I’d drink bleach. I try to be true to myself rather than represent my sex in an ongoing struggle in which I do not quite believe. I’ll tell you a secret. When I went to the prize-giving for the National Poetry Competition the year I got second prize, I was horrified to find that the line taken by the media was “Look — the first three prize-winners are all women!” whereas I thought it was much more remarkable that they should have chosen to honour a sonnet. During the doings I was approached by a wellknown feminist writer who handed me a glass of wine and told me to drink “to the Sisterhood”. I was too afraid not to take a mouthful, but when she looked away for a moment I dribbled it back into the glass. Being a woman is an accident, being human is much more relevant to my work. I hope.
 
Paul: How important is dialogue, or the use of distinctive speaking voices in your poems?

Ann:  I’ve tackled this in a poem — may I?

Paul: Of Course!

Ann:
 

            Masks

            The test of the truth of a poem “in persona”
            Is whether or not I can read the poem and know
            That it is so.

            “But Sir…” so strong is the atmosphere of classroom
            I can feel the weight of my hand above my head:
            “But Sir — you said…”

            I’ve tried; tried to speak in the voice of other or object
            A Roman soldier, a knob-headed, fingerworn
            Cherrywood pawn

            But still in the final couplet, the envoi, the punchline
            I find I can’t stop myself twitching the curtains and
            Showing my hand.

            How else can the words of a marionette have meaning
            When a voice that is somebody else’s, however one tries,
            Demonstrably lies?
 
 
Paul: How important are poem openings to you?

Ann: Very. They are sometimes, though, the last piece of the poem to fall into place. Very often, especially with a formal poem, I start with an ending and then, when the beginning takes its rightful place I realise that the end isn’t as good as I thought it was and it has to go.
 
Paul:

            …So sock it to me Sunshine. I can take it.
            I’ll dredge the sludge for something new to say.

                    — ‘Handling Shit’, Backwork

How much do your poems depend on your personal life for inspiration?

Ann:  Almost totally. Should I be ashamed of this? I find it natural to write in the first person — I think it’s more honest than to assume that one’s small angsts and aperçus are universal concerns. The reader can choose whether or not to identify with them.

Paul: On the contrary: I think that your poems give a very strong sense of a real person talking to me about very real things. And I think that one of the distinctive qualities of your art is how it captures the elusive poetry of the ordinary but closely-observed details and scenarios of everyday existence. The direct, authentic voice of these poems shines through. It’s like talking to a sensible, straight-talking (but eloquent) person after spending an evening with a room full of delirious ranting bullshitters (I’ve been reading lots of trendy free verse lately and feeling rather jaded as a result). Perhaps some of your work might be described as light verse; certainly it is very accessible verse. But if that is true then it is light verse with a very serious poetic undertow to which “Those who really matter” (“The Case for Light Verse”, Between Dryden and Duffy) will respond. How would you describe your work in this context?
 
Ann: I’m not quite sure how I can improve on your glorious assessment. I’m afraid I might break it or make it disappear. Thank you. It makes up for all the times that They (the bullshitters?) make me feel that I ought to apologise for being comprehensible.

Paul: Richard Tyrrell reviewing The Turn of the Cucumber in The Independent (October, 1995) described you as “light poet of the month”. Do you see light verse as “horribly inconsequential”? Do you see yourself as a “light poet” writing “reader-friendly verse”?

Ann: Alas, in the opinion of those who really do describe light verse in such dismissive phrases, that’s me. I know I used the terms myself but it was in the context of an ironic “Cheer up, old chum” to John Whitworth who was bemoaning the fact that “our sort of stuff” is so often seen as being on a lower plane. I like to think this is because we do not have what Anne Stevenson described as “Too damn much literary ambition” and what I, were I brave enough, would call pretentiousness. We are, I suppose, poetical Untermenschen, too often satisfied with the smile when what we should be aiming for is the awed gasp or even the blank stare.

But my poetry is not all deliberately hilarious. Now and again I pile the furniture in the middle of the room, clamber on top of it and howl. And d’you know, those readers to whom I have always been friendly, the ones “who really matter” always seem to be able to hear me. Isn’t that odd?

Paul: Do you ever catch part of yourself scanning an unfolding personal situation with an eye for the poetic main chance?

Ann: Oh, yes. It’s a necessary lifeline. Sometimes it’s a way of conserving something precious, like a bug in amber. Sometimes it’s a sort of private Prozac. Whoops — there’s another “confessional moment”! I hope you realise that when this interview is finished you will know so many of my innermost secrets that I shall have to kill you.

Paul: My present existence is in any case posthumous. Do the people who might recognise themselves subjects of your poems ever get awkward about that?

Ann: It doesn’t happen often. I learned a long time ago that although it feels good to let rip now and again, spite is never very funny for very long. I usually take care to avoid hurting people if I can. Mind you, that’s partially because I’m a scaredy-cat. I once wrote a poem about a guy who lived a couple doors away. (“Darren”, Backwork) who took a dislike to me (he was a bit of a gym-bunny and was stuffing himself with steroids). It won a prize in the Cardiff poetry competition and I was terrified in case he found out about it.

I knew at the level of reason that the chance of his actually reading it was — how do you say it on your side of the world? Buckley’s? — but I can still recall the terror, the waking in the night wishing I could go back and unwrite the damn thing, the paralysing attacks of “what if?” I also felt guilty for having used my special powers to mock the afflicted. Mind you, I pocketed the prize money and eventually came to look on it as just recompense for being threatened with violence by a mindless yobbo. Besides, it was true.

Paul: Ah — so you speak Australian! Yet despite your own terror and guilt, some of the poems you’ve written that really resonate with me are where you provide a little backstory to a problematic scenario and then give some actor in that scenario a bit of a serve. I’m thinking for instance of “The Red Mud of Lydney” . I really like this sort of poem: it reminds me of the power that ancient Irish and Welsh poets had to compose satires or cursing poems on those who offered them any indignity, verses such as would bring out blotches on the malefactor’s face, or even drive him insane.

For someone who wants the poems rather than the poet to resonate (“What I am is whatever you see when you hear me…”, “Self Portrait”, Gay Science), your poems seem to reveal a lot more about you than say Pope’s do about him (“Occasional Poem”, Gay Science). They’re very personal poems indeed. How do you see the relationship between the poet, the poem and the reader?

Ann: I scare myself sometimes when I’ve written something especially revealing. Sometimes such poems sit at the back of a metaphorical drawer for a while till I feel safe enough to get them out and wear them. I suspect that deep down in the psychology of my poetic openness is a fear of being found out if I dissemble. Poetry is also a way of telling the truth safely. If I write a poem (to use a safe example) about the accumulated ghastliness down the back of my cooker then that somehow dignifies it so in theory I don’t have to feel ashamed of it any more. And there are all those other people out there with similar secrets, blessing me.

As to the relationship question — let’s do metaphorical!
 
            Poet makes his poem to the best of his ability,
            Drops it down a chimney that is lined with languid hands.
            There it goes past most of them until it touches one of them
            That snatches it and catches it and reads and understands.
 
And yes — I just did that in a couple of minutes. But it says what I mean, so I’ll let it stand.

Paul: And well let stand too, Ma’am! “Poetry is also a way of telling the truth safely… ”

            …the sad old god
            Who wanders through the wreckage of the world
            Twanging the slack strings of a busted lyre,
            Seeking an echo in a mortal heart.’

                    — ‘Meeting Apollo’, Between Dryden and Duffy

What else do you see as main functions of poetry?

Ann:  Making sense of it all. Picking up the interesting bits and making sure they don’t go to waste. Polishing thought. And, to refer back to your earlier question, telling the truth.

Paul: Many of your poems seem to be socially (rather than personally) critical, with an edge of wit. And you deploy Popean couplets from time to time. Do you see yourself (amongst other things) as a satirist?

Ann: Oh, I wish! And I’d be proud and delighted if the world regarded me so.

Paul: David Perman, writing in Acumen, draws a distinction between light verse and satire, asserting that light verse “does not assail the subject or make it ridiculous” whereas “satire needs to draw blood. There is something cruel about it, or at least deeply antipathetic: ridicule and contempt are close relatives.” Is this a distinction you would agree with? Do you think that your own satire “draws blood?”

Ann: Ah, David and I have duelled before! At a Festival in Torbay we argued the relevance of rhyme. Not to the death, though, more to the handshake and the grin. He’s a nice guy and he plays Devil’s advocate with panache, but I ruefully concede his point here. I like to think I have a bit of an “assail” from time to time and I do set out to make my subject ridiculous when I feel it asks for it (see “An Alternative Proposal” or “Risk Assessment” in Between Dryden and Duffy). But most of the time my weapon is the whoopee cushion rather than the Howitzer.

Jeff Nuttall said that my poetry “guns down bureaucracy” and I’m happy with that, but the thought of homing in on an individual bureaucrat makes me cringe. I don’t do blood and I don’t respect cruel. So perhaps I’m not a satirist after all, just a sad old hippie. Bummer.

Paul: It all just, like, is. And maybe whoopee cushions are more deadly than Howitzers — more effective anyway at restoring the karmic balance. What effect does the front cover art by Beryl Cook on your Peterloo Poets books have in positioning your work?

Ann: I chose the covers. I love Beryl’s work. She paints her own truth and she paints it with love. Beryl was one of Britain’s most popular artists (she died last year) but the art world rejected her out of hand chiefly because she was the darling of hoi polloi. I once did a reading from a newly published collection at the University of Glamorgan (there is one, honestly) and the Professor of Poetry (there is one, honestly) said that my publisher had let me down with the choice of cover. He held it away from him as though it were smelly and when I saw that look on his face I decided that I would stick with Beryl’s art for as long I could afford her fees. I choose images that mischievously mis-illustrate my titles. For instance, a couple of hookers for Backwork and a drag queen on a motorbike for Gay Science. Watch out for the new one coming soon!
 
Paul: Of COURSE there is a University of Glamorgan — and a Professor of Poetry there as well! I love the naughty mis-illustrations on your book-covers! Tell us something about your relationship with Peterloo Poets.

Ann: Years ago I did that thing that everyone says not to do. I made five copies of my first collection and sent them simultaneously to five different publishers. I heard from Harry Chambers by return with an offer of publication five years in the future and I said yes. I am pleased to say that I did so before hearing from the other four publishers, who told me, with varying degrees of politeness, to rack off.

In an overview of small presses, Peterloo was described as “proof that the alternative to the mainstream is not necessarily the avant-garde”. I was more than happy to align myself with that. Being a Peterloo poet meant being part of a true élite. We were chosen people: chosen by Harry Chambers who, with his clear criteria and refusal to delegate, was Peterloo. Knowing it had been a respected press for almost forty years we took it for granted and believed it would go on forever.

I use the past tense because Peterloo has now ceased trading; it has run its course; it has gone. I mourn its passing, treasure the friends I have made among its fellow-poets and cherish my relationship with Harry.

Paul: You have an MA in Creative Writing and have taught at University, in schools and writing centres. How does teaching creative writing sit with being a practising creative writer? Is it a comfortable combination? Are there conflicts?

Ann:  First of all, I must emphasise that I am not a “proper” teacher. I have never been trained as one. My only teaching qualification is the MA — I am a writer first and a teacher second, hoping to use my expertise (which is only demonstrable through my published work) to earn a few bob on the side.

My chief problem is that I don’t really believe that Creative Writing can be taught. Not from scratch, anyway. Encouraged, enhanced, polished, yes, and all that worthy the doing — but not taught to the sort of people who turn up to community classes, convinced I can give them a crash course in literary success. People who haven’t even bothered to find out who I am, much less read anything I’ve written. It galls me to have to pay lip-service to the dumbed-down mission statement that “anybody can write”, because I have spent my whole life straining after my own notion of Excellence and this miserable system is telling me that it is somehow wrong to bang on about it. I try to avoid this sort of“teaching”

The writers’ centres are a different thing entirely. There I get to exchange ideas with people of insight and understanding; people who will listen and question and feed my head in return for what I can put into theirs. They are the people who stop me going wiggy.

I enjoy working with undergraduates. They are so often terrified of what this element of their course may contain, unsure of their ability to write spontaneously. They have just clambered through a series of examinations that require them to put set texts into a killing-bottle and dissect them according to the received wisdom. They have been trained in the production of the academic essay, which requires them to demonstrate their grasp of literature without ever descending to the first person singular. They are like battery hens. I take pleasure in setting them free and watching them find out how to forage.

One of the best teaching projects I took part in was initiated by the library service in central Powys (Wales’s Outback). It was all carried out on the Net. I was given as “their” poet to a class of Year Ten pupils at a rural school and told them about myself and my doings in a regular blog. They emailed me any poetry they wanted to show me and I discussed it with them online, one-to-one. The interchanges were monitored by the teachers and everybody understood that this was an experiment. It was a great success till the funding ran out. At the end I went into the school to meet them all and we partied on poetry.

I like residencies. Having been chosen to contribute to a particular project on the strength of one’s reputation is a tremendous boost to the ego. I take pride in doing good work for my masters in these situations, though I only apply for posts that enthuse or intrigue me in the first place; a privilege not accorded to “real” teachers. I am proud of some of the work I have done during residencies — the poem carved in stone on the riverside walk near my house, the words cut in steel on the gate to a park further away. I want to contribute to Wales, I really do.

Paul: What’s it like living in Wales? Why do you live there?

Ann: I came here in the late eighties. I needed a new start after twenty years bringing up my children on a tiny farm in Yorkshire. South Wales was a place I could afford to live. A bloke I got on with had moved here and I got a place nearby and a job on a local paper. I started to make a bit of a reputation in my new land. I joined local groups and performed in pubs. I even joined Plaid Cymru before it took on racist overtones. I was happy paddling in the shallows and when Dannie Abse included me in his collection of Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry I felt I’d really arrived.

But things are changing. It’s the twenty-first century now and I find myself deficient in Welshness. There’s a growing undercurrent of anti-English feeling, a desire for separatism and a push for the adoption of the Welsh language that scares many a monoglot. I couldn’t help noticing that during the Six Nations championship the Rugby commentators spoke of competing against Italy, Scotland and France — but nearly always spoke of “The English” rather than “England”. Just something you notice if your stock in trade is the language you’ve spent a lifetime studying. They are building a new school down in the Valley where the children are to be educated entirely in Welsh and I wonder, but daren’t ask, to whom they will eventually speak it. Receipts for postal services and directions on road signs are worded first in Welsh and although the vast majority of people here in South Wales are English speakers, the National Eisteddfod, which is to take place here next year, will not include any of my poetry unless it is translated into Welsh and performed by somebody else. I’d defend to the death the right of aboriginal people to speak their own language and celebrate their ancient culture, but it breaks my heart to feel that my own is being presented as a threat to it. I miss the country I came to live in twenty years ago.

Forgive me, I am probably exaggerating for effect. Poets do. Nonetheless, one of the most depressing things to come through my letterbox recently was a bowel screening kit with instructions in Welsh.

Paul: How far do you think the personal doings of poets should count when they aspire to be Oxford Professor of Poetry?

Ann: Since their personal doings are in essence the stuff of which their poetry is made, I suppose they have to be counted — but only through the medium of the poetry. The whole Oxford débâcle was a triumph of hysteria over common sense and while it intrigued the media for a while, it did poetry no good at all. Least said soonest mended, eh?

Paul: Tell us some of the background to Three-three, two-two, five-six and Discussing Wittgenstein. Why did you write these books?

Ann: Those books tell the story of my last few years with the bloke I mentioned, the one I followed to Wales. We had a short and happy time together until he fell ill and died. As I once wrote in a letter to a friend “awful things happen to those we love and the only thing I have to offer up on their behalf is the gift of telling”.

Paul: Is there place for a prospective as well as a retrospective? Where do you see your work going from here? Are there any directions you particularly want it to go?

Ann:  I don’t have any particular goals — a little bit of fame might be nice, but if I had any desire for fortune I’d have chosen a different path. What I want is for this one to go on and I’m perfectly happy for it to choose its own direction. I want to go on waking up in the night, suddenly knowing just how to say what’s in my head. I want to go on being surprised by ideas, losing myself in creating things that please me and might please others. Keats had fears that he might “cease to be” before he had used up all his poetic potential. In my darker moments, I have fears that I might not. Oh dear, that’s a bit heavy. Go on, Paul — ask me something daft!
 
Paul: Well then, before we go: please tell us what is the true meaning of the baby’s dummies in the famous photo.
 
Ann: Guess what — you’re not the first to ask this. Discarded dummies are like street furniture in these parts. They decorate the pavements like chewing gum, dropped and forgotten. In days gone by, babies’ comforters were pinned to their little knitted cardies by people who had a different attitude to economics. They instructed their children in the preciousness of personal possessions and the small tragedy of their loss. I rescued a few and displayed them without much thought, but when neighbours asked me about them I was a bit embarrassed and found myself wittering guiltily about symbolic representation of declining values in our throw-away society. Then people started collecting them for me, leaving them on the step and stuffing them through my letterbox. The high point came when one of them brought a little girl to my door and watched proudly as she handed me a small plastic bag, “These are for you because I’m a big girl now and I don’t have numnums any more”. Paul, I swear one of them was still warm.

So I wrote a poem for them all. It is a very serious poem. It employs the meta-collection of the words they used for the gifts they brought. And it is written, of course, in the great poetic tradition of the South Wales Valleys, whose bardic inheritance owes more to the Rugby club than to the Eisteddfod… And I’m grinning as I write…
 

            Mad Annie Explains All

                  For all the people who make assumptions  
                  about the bunch of babies’ dummies that 
                  hangs by my front door.

            In the house of the hanging noonoos
            At the sign of the surrogate tit,
            In mysterious mess lived an anchoress
            Who collected discarded kit.

            At the house of the dangling didies
            She created an installation
            That turned each find of the comforter kind
            To a source of inspiration

            Till her cherished collection of cushies
            Became a delightful distraction
            Whenever she thought in more depth than she ought
            About oral satisfaction

            And under the tumbling numnums
            She would sit by herself and sigh
            At the pitiful waste that her lapse of good taste
            Exposed to the public eye.

            For they sell them in packets of seven
            As an easy commitment to bliss,
            A knee-jerk reaction to dissatisfaction,
            An over-the-counter kiss

            And each of the colourful dumdums,
            As far as she could discover,
            Had slipped from the grip of an infant lip
            Like a taken-for-granted lover

            And if anyone noticed its downfall
            It was always discreetly ignored
            Till the madwoman came and pocketed same
            To add to her magical hoard.

            Now she sits by herself in her hovel
            With the relics that should have been binned
            And the noonoos, the numnums, the little kiss-condoms
            Revolve in the winnowing wind.

“Mad Annie Explains All” was published in The Chimaera Isssue 5.