Welsh Poetry, Psychogeography & EcoPoetics

It is 12:20 in Providence a Friday…
I scroll through the madding blogs and check in
with Harriet
 to see what the poets
in Wales are doing these days…

Zoë Skoulding

What ARE the poets in Wales doing these days, fifteen years after R. S. Thomas’ God-haunted Collected Poems
, fifty-five years after Dylan Thomas’ wildly popular Under Milk Wood
 and seventy-one years after David Jones’ incomparable, impeccable In Parenthesis
? If you read Welsh, you already know about the literary journal Barddas
 and the reluctance of many Welsh-language poets to allow their work to appear in English translation. If you don’t read Welsh, you can check in with PoetryWales
, edited by Zoë Skoulding, a magazine intended to bring into dialogue various poetry communities in Wales (and the rest of the world). In the new issue (Summer, 2008), there’s an illuminating essay on the thin history of alternative poetry in Wales, a remarkable translucination (or inspired mis-translation) by Harry Gilonis of the Canu Heledd
, a ninth century Welsh verse-and-prose saga, and reviews of new books by Peter Riley and Elisabeth Bletsoe by Peter Finch, a Welsh “poet and psychogeographer.”
Psychogeographer? It turns out that Skoulding, the editor of PoetryWales
, likewise describes herself as a psychogeographer. The word, defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals,” might serve to link 20th century Situationists with 21st century Ecopoetics, if Ecopoetics is considered to be less pastoral nostalgia than the kind of home-making (eco-poetics) that expands attentiveness to our interaction with the spaces around us. (It’s curious to note the continuing influence of the Situationists on various contemporary writers, from American poet Joshua Clover to Japanese poet Kiwao Nomura).
In the case of editor/poet Zoë Skoulding, who often performs her work to music and clips of site-specific sounds orchestrated by Welsh musician Alan Holmes, the Eco-poetics comes to resemble a kind of industrial opera. To get a sense of how this sounds, listen to the mp3 below. Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not Under Milk Wood
 anymore.
Download file
(This download opens the music file right away.)
You can also go straight to Zoë’s website.
(At the other—rural, North American—end of Ecopoetic soundscapes, you may want to bend an ear to the “Little Dictionary of Sounds” by Jonathan Skinner hosted by Palm Press.