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DYLAN UNCHAINED:

ABSTRACTS BY PANEL THEME

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WEDNESDAY 3 SEPTEMBER

PANEL 1a: Translations

Alyce von Rothkirch: ‘Waliser, Dichter, Trinker’: On the Ethics of Translating and Representing Dylan Thomas in Germany

Recent translation theory has done much to re-evaluate the role of the translator from that of invisible medium, which merely served to channel an author’s text into a different language and cultural environemnt, to that of active interpeter and intervener (Wyke, 2010; Venuti, 2006). As a consequence questions around the ethics of translation have changed: as we move away from questions of ‘faithfulness’ of translation and hence beyond the text, the role and responsibility of the translator in creating an image of an author and his/her work in another country have become central to an investigation of the translation process. This paper will focus on the collections of poetry by Dylan Thomas that have been published in translation and as bilingual editions in Germany in recent years. Questions regarding the choice of poems, the translation strategies, the ordering of the poems in the collections and the way they represent ‘Dylan Thomas’ to the German reading public will be discussed in the light of an ethical translation theory. This analysis will be supplemented by a discussion of some secondary material about Dylan Thomas, such as the lavishly illustrated Dylan Thomas: Waliser, Dichter, Trinker (‘Dylan Thomas: Welshman, poet, drunkard’; Knesebeck, 2011), which creates the myth of the mysterious ‘unknown’ figure, who, nevertheless, had such influence on figures like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and Richard Burton. How successful are translations and representations by semi-biographial work in creating a certain image of an author and what are the ethical implications of doing so? References: Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: a history of translation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006. Wyke, Ben van. 'Ethics and Translation.' Handbook of Translation Studies Vol. 1. Eds. Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. 111-116. Biog Dr Alyce von Rothkirch is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Adult Continuing Education at Swansea University. She teaches 19th and 20th century English literature. Her research interests include Welsh writing in English (especially drama), detective and crime fiction (1890s-1940s), the study of periodicals and other ephemeral cultural production and ethical criticism. She is also currently completing an MA in Literary Translation.

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D. Gareth Walters: Under Milk Wood as Translated and Analogous Text in Spanish and Catalan In this paper I explore how Under Milk Wood has fared in translation into Spanish and Catalan by paying particular attention to issues such as onomastic invention, cynghanedd effects and lexical clusters. I shall refer to two translations into Spanish – the versions by Victoria Ocampo and Felix della Paolera (1959) and by Ramón Andrés (1997) – and one into Catalan by Angela Buxton and Salvador Oliva (1987). I also suggest how, in turn, Thomas’s text provides an analogy, if not a point of reference, for a translation into English by Philip Polack of Salvador Espriu’s play Primera història d’Esther (The First Story of Esther), one of the major works of the post-Civil War period in Catalonia. In Polack’s version the setting for Sinera, a palindrome of Arenys, is transposed to a South Welsh village that offers an evident affinity with Llaregyb.

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Biog Gareth Walters is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Swansea University. He has published widely on Spanish and Catalan poetry and on translation studies. His articles include a comparative study of Lorca and Dylan Thomas. ******************************************************************************************

PANEL 1b: Modernism and Modernity

Andy Webb: Dylan Thomas and Welsh Modernity My paper takes theoretical inspiration from two sources: Franco Moretti’s idea of modern national literatures emerging as a ‘structural compromise’ between the formal influence of a mainstream Western tradition and local material and form; and recent attempts by the Warwick Research Collective (Neil Lazarus et al) to extend the Marxist notion of ‘combined and uneven development’ to the study of literature. My paper builds on their work by outlining a theory of Welsh modernity, the literary registration of which is manifested in texts characterised by various forms of ‘structural compromise’, as well as depictions of the co-existence within one geographical space (in this case, Swansea and its environs) of pre-capitalist practice alongside new, capitalist modernity. This paradigm is then considered in relation to the work of Dylan Thomas, in particular to the prose short stories in Portrait. Biog Andrew Webb is a lecturer in English at Bangor University. His first monograph, Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies: Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature, was published in July 2013.

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Gareth Downes: ‘prince of the apple towns’: Dylan Thomas and the Enactment of a Modernist Pastoralism

This paper explores the highly textured, complex and ironic manner in which the rural topography of Dylan Thomas’s poems of the 1940s is generated. Rather than reading such poems as ‘Fern Hill’, in particular, as a signification of a late or neo-romanticism that is problematically de-historicized and detached from the exigencies of modernity, these poems are read as modernist textual spaces in which there is a subtle yet transgressive appropriation of the conventions of the pastoral, and in which there is an intense awareness of the materiality of language. This paper seeks to demonstrate how and why such a modernist pastoralism is enacted and performed. Biog Gareth Downes was born in Newport in 1975. He obtained his BA and MA degrees from University of Wales Swansea before being awarded a PhD from St Andrews University for an AHRB funded thesis on James Joyce, Catholicism and Heresy. He was awarded an International James Joyce Foundation Studentship for this research. He has published essays and journal articles on David Jones and James Joyce in the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays and the Joyce Studies Annual; book chapters on Joyce have also appeared in Critical Ireland: New Essays in Literature and Culture, edited by Alan Gillis and Aaron Kelly, and Joyce, ‘Penelope’ and the Body, edited by Richard Brown. He is Head of English at Sedbergh School in Cumbria.

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THURSDAY 4 SEPTEMBER

PANEL 2a: Poetics/Language

Alexander Yemets: Devices of Poeticalness in Dylan Thomas’s Prose In every epoch there are writers who are especially sensitive to the acute problems of their time, to social injustice or injustice of human existence. Dylan Thomas was destined to live in a tragic period between and during two world wars, and he reflected the conflicts of human life in his emotional poetry and prose. His short stories are emotional, poetical and-timeless. What is poetical prose? The term is used rather often but first linguistic explanation of prose poeticalness was done by Wolf Schmid. He defined it as the introduction of poetical properties into a prose text with the help of three main devices of text organization: the introduction of the phenomena of mythical thinking and the extended metaphor; the text paradigmatization; the use of intertextual allusions ( 1987:210-214 ). While analyzing the short stories of Thomas and Kate Chopin, I singled out another, no less explicit device of poeticalness – stylistic convergence ( 2012:9 ) . In many stories by Thomas stylistic convergence, i.e. the accumulation of different stylistic devices, produces a strong emotional and pragmatic effect: Of a sudden the valley filled all its hollows with the wind, with the voice of the roots, with the breathing of the nether sky. Not only a mandrake screams; torn roots have their cries; each weed Mr.Owen pulled out of the ground screamed like a baby ( “The Enemies” ). The extended anthropomorphic metaphor, combined with assonance and alliteration as well as syntactical repetitions, reflects in this fragment, like in other texts, Thomas’s pantheistic outlook, with the underlying conceptual metaphor NATURE SUFFERS LIKE PEOPLE. The text paradigmatization seems to be rather a wide and oblique term, therefore I suggest more exact terms - phonetical repetitions and syntactical devices as they are typical for poetry. Rhythm as a phonetic component is a peculiar device in Thomas’s prose: The world was a ball under his feet; it kicked as he ran; it dropped; up came the trees (“ The Dress” ). These devices of poeticalness are foregrounded in Thomas’s stories in different ways. The writer represents the trend of literary bilingualism ( the term of Roman Jakobson ) when writers create both poetry and prose. I agree with Annis Pratt that Thomas’s early prose is closer to poetry, but in his later short stories there are fragments of poetical prose like in “ The Peaches”, “One Warm Saturday”, and especially in “ The Followers”, “ A Story” where the initial parts are brilliant examples of poeticalness. Thus, poetical prose reflects the author’s talent and gives the reader what Roland Barthes called “ the pleasure of the text”. References Schmid, Wolf ( 1987). Prose and Poetry in Povesti Belkina. Canadian Slavonic Papers. Volume 29, №2-3:210-227. Yemets, Alexander (2012). Investigating Poeticalness of Prose. Saarbrucken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. Biog I was born in Khmelnytsy, Ukraine. In 1975 I graduated Kharkiv State University. After working at school for 3 years I began teaching English at Khmelnytsky State University. In 2000 I defended the dissertation for Candidate Degree ( Ph.D.) in Philology. The topic of the dissertation is “ Semantics, Syntactics and Pragmatics of Tropes in the Aspect of Prose Poeticalness ( based on the short stories of Dylan Thomas ).” Since 2001 I have been working as the head of foreign languages department, Associate Professor, at Khmelnytsky National University. I am teaching English Stylistics, Text Interpretation and Translation. My fields of research are Stylistics, Poetics, Text Interpretation, Translation.

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Lorraine Ryan: Consubstantiation or Transubstantiation? Semantic Progression in ‘This bread I break’

The young Thomas described his poems as having ‘a progressive line of movement’, ‘a narrative line’. The research on which the analysis of ‘This bread’ is based construes this progression as, rather, semantic and phasal. Gregory and Malcolm’s work on text phases (e.g. Malcolm, 2010) is the basis for the identification of three main phase types in the Collected Poems 1934-1953: I name these Exposition, Development/ Modulation, and Resolution: Transformation, Inversion, or Recapitulation – all terms being adapted from music analysis. This stylistic analysis uses the tools of systemic functional linguistics (e.g. Halliday, 1994) in the three metafunctional areas (ideational, interpersonal, textual), as well as prosodic changes, to identify the patterns in the poem, and focuses on the patterning of these patterns, i.e. on ‘consistency of foregrounding’ (e.g. Muka ovsk (1964); Hasan (1985)). This patterning indicates the phasal divisions in the poems and so their overall interpretation. ‘This bread I break’ is the second poem in Thomas’s second published volume, Twenty-five Poems. Commentators include Tindall ([1962] 1979), Leech (1965), W. Davies (1986), McNees (1992), and Maud (2003). Spender (1955, pp. 38-39) observes that

the mystery of the transubstantiation seems to be hidden within the changes going on in the words themselves. If one completely understood what was happening with these verbs and nouns, one would have a deeper knowledge of the Christian mystery.

The aim of this analysis is to try to penetrate the ‘mystery’ of ‘what [is] happening with these verbs and nouns’, that is, of the changes which bring about the semantic progression the poem seems to feature. Biog I have a background in (Old and 19th century) French literature, and have lived extensively in France and Portugal. More recently, I completed a M. Appl. Ling (2003) and later a PhD in Linguistics (Macquarie University, Sydney; 2013): my thesis was on the poetry of Dylan Thomas (“‘A progressive line of movement in every poem’: Semantic progression in the poetry of Dylan Thomas”). Since 2003, I have been working at the Learning Centre, University of Sydney: the Centre provides resources for students to build and extend the skills they need for study and research at university (e.g. discipline-specific support programs within some faculties, and both online and print resources for students).

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Anne Paivarinta: Negative Embodiment and the Rhetoric of Distancing in Dylan Thomas's War Elegies

In his so called war elegies, Dylan Thomas explores the devastating effects of World War II by zooming in on anonymous victims from a self-reflexive poetic distance. These three poems (“Among those killed in the dawn raid was a man aged hundred”, “Ceremony after a fire-raid” and “A refusal to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London”) are different in terms of their rhetoric, but they all build on a series of 'shattered' body metaphors. The paper argues that embodiment – as defined in cognitive linguistics – creates both stylistic and emotional estrangement in the poems. Rather than just invoking embodied reader involvement with a negative twist (cf. Kimmel 2011), the poems foreground active figurative negotiation: they focus on the verbal building of a scene and its immediate tearing down in a strongly felt manner, which can be seen as a parallel to the destruction of war. What is more, the reader is made very aware of the thematic significance of the figuration taking place due to elaborate sound patterning and the explicit breeching of elegiac conventions. The paper then sets out to investigate how the violent character of such embodied projections relates to the resonance said to be induced in the reader when identifying conceptual metaphors (see Lakoff & Turner 1989), and how negative forms of embodiment might affect the immersion supposedly created by literary patterns of experience and emotion. Biog Anne Päivärinta is a researcher in the School of Language, Translation and Literary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her doctoral dissertation, due out in 2014, explores embodiment in Dylan Thomas’s works. Combining a stylistic approach with an up-to-date take on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, her research aims to prove

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that embodiment defines Thomas’s writing as a theme as well as in terms of style. Anne Päivärinta’s publications include a chapter in the forthcoming book Cognitive Grammar in Literature, edited by Peter Stockwell et al. (John Benjamins 2014). *******************************************************************************************

PANEL 2b: Dylan and Wales

Charles Mundye: Joined by the Cormorant Boat: Dylan Thomas and Friends Whilst Dylan Thomas was establishing his early career in Victor Neuburg’s Poets’ Corner, Keidrych Rhys was working in bullion for Barclays Bank. Rhys was temperamentally unsuitable for such work, and by November 1936 he was also a published poet, once again through the auspices of Neuburg, the astonishingly eccentric poet and impresario who as a young man was a supposed lover to and disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley. Rhys and Thomas had poetry, Wales, London, and bohemianism in common: it was inevitable that they should become friends. When Rhys changed his name by deed-poll Thomas was the witness; when Rhys married the Anglo-Welsh Argentinian modernist poet Lynette Roberts in 1939 Thomas was ‘best man’ in a borrowed suit; early in the war Thomas and Rhys witnessed a conscientious objectors’ tribunal together and decided this was no way forward. By this point Rhys had already founded the most provocative of Anglo-Welsh publications – the literary, political and cultural magazine Wales. The first 1937 issue opens with Thomas’s apocalyptic ‘Prologue to an Adventure’: ‘As I walked through the wilderness of this world, as I walked through the wilderness, as I walked through the city with the loud electric faces...’. Rhys extends this energy to the editorial: ‘In case the English should claim our contribution for their own, we produce the pamphlet, calling it Wales in defiance of parasitical adoption. Though we write in English, we are rooted in Wales.’ This paper will examine aspects of the creative relationships and networks of influence between Thomas and a small circle of his Carmarthenshire friends to include Rhys, Roberts, and the artist Stanley Lewis. Biog Dr Charles Mundye is Head of Academic Development in the Department of Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University. His edition of Keidrych Rhys's The Van Pool: Collected Poems is published by Seren (2012).

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Liza Penn-Thomas: Poets Writing Drama: Keidrych Rhys' Literary Network Undefining the 'Well-Made Play'

By 1939 the call for a Welsh verse-drama was published in the letters pages of The Western Mail. Keidrych Rhys saw clearly the connection between the Welsh poetic tradition and the place of verse-drama in its theatrical development. “Wales has produced poets galore, so perhaps it is not asking the unexpected for it to concentrate on entertaining verse plays.” This paper seeks to examine the poetic dramatic works of three contributors to Rhys’s Wales magazine – Vernon Watkins, Ken Etheridge and Dylan Thomas – as expressions of a late-flowering Welsh Modernist theatre. As MacFarlane explains in his introduction to Modernism 1890 – 1930 the Modernist theatre is a more disparate concept than the Surrealist movement in the visual arts or the shared quest to challenge language explored in Modernist literature. Writers of modernist drama are “not in obedience to some central containing force that holds them within well-defined boundaries”. With a strong shared dynamic hard to find, such groupings that can be constructed are inevitably inadequate. However, examining the poetic drama of writers who were part of Keidrych Rhys’ literary network gives us the opportunity to examine a grouping that is more than just “loose lattices of relationships”. I seek to explore some of the commonality that linked them and the individuality that saw them seek their own dramatic aesthetic unchained by manifesto or fashion. Biog In 4th year of pt PhD in English within CREW at Swansea University under the supervision of Professor Daniel Williams. My PhD examines the idea of ‘Theatres of Nation in Wales and Ireland 1900-1950’. It aims to interrogate the assumption that Wales had no theatre tradition prior to the 1950’s. My research explores the ways in which a thriving amateur scene facilitated artistic freedom allowing theatrical performance to become a physical and imaginative space in which dominant culture could be challenged or subverted.

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Ceri Thomas: ‘The Force’ Paintings of Ceri Richards This illustrated lecture will take as its primary focus three key paintings produced by Ceri Richards in the Forties: The force that drives the water through the rocks (1943-44); Cycle of Nature (1944); The force that through the fuse: The Source (1945). The obvious links to Dylan Thomas’s 1933 poem “The force that through the green fuse” which have been discussed by various writers will be revisited. However, the context of Richards’s images in relation to the Second World War, his residency in south Wales and related works by him has been less fully explored. Moreover, the links to the works of Leonardo da Vinci have not been made by anyone else. It will be proposed that one of the clues lies in the fact that the first of these three paintings was originally titled Allegory of Blue and Red Figures. In addition, there are thematic connections and numerous visual correspondences between Richards and da Vinci’s outputs and therefore relevant texts and images by Leonardo will also be included in the presentation. Biog Dr Ceri Thomas is a curator, art historian and artist. He lives in Swansea and works at the University of South Wales, Treforest, where he specialises in the visual culture of south Wales since 1910. He has curated exhibitions and published books and articles on numerous individual artists, artist groups and the south Wales art scene. He has exhibited his own work in Wales and beyond and in 1993-94 he lived in Dylan Thomas’s first home at Cwmdonkin Drive which resulted in him producing a series of artworks related to the poet’s place, writing and name. These images will be exhibited in his ‘Placing Dylan’ exhibition at the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, from 11 October to 30 November 2014. ***********************************************************************************************

PANEL 3a: Dylan and Popular Culture/Media

Edward Allen: Dylan Thomas on the Eastern Service With the outbreak of war in 1939, the nation’s airwaves began to fill with poets’ voices. The onset of ink and paper rationing in 1942 would have material consequences for literary production, but so long as the radio was up and running, British audiences could look forward to the occasional snatched lyric, nestled between bulletins. Dylan Thomas had long admired the wireless for this sort of ephemerality; for the shorter form of a spoken poem, rather than for the long verse drama, a genre Louis MacNeice would make his own. ‘I love reading poems aloud,’ Thomas confessed in 1937, following one early broadcast, ‘and I do hope Mr. Maine will succeed in making the BBC interested enough to let me read some more’. The BBC proved to be an exacting employer, and Thomas often complained that his contract with the Corporation afforded little room for manoeuvre. HIs work on-air requires special attention, however, both for the things it has to tell us about the economy of lyric expression at midcentury, and for the implications it might have for the way we conceptualise poetry as a free-floating event; a free radical in the ether. What I want to consider in this paper is the distance Thomas imagined his voice might travel in the wake of war. As well as contributing to the Home Service, Thomas spent a good deal of the forties reading poetry on the Eastern Service; poetry of his own, and the work of his forebears, as with the case of ‘Wilfred Owen’ (1946). The aim of this paper will be to reimagine the scope of Thomas’s voice, then, and to trace its influence among distant ears. Biog Edward Allen is a Research Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. He has held visiting fellowships at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. Most of his work to date has

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shown an interest in the mediation of printed and spoken voice, including articles on contemporary lyric poetics, and the textuality of typewriting.

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Kieron Smith: Dylan Thomas’s Life on the Small Screen In this centenary year of the birth of Dylan Thomas, graven images of the great Swansea poet abound. It’s difficult to avoid his plump and slightly pompous face – that face with, in his own words, its ‘thick blubber lips, snub nose, curly mouse-brown hair’ - pasted as it is in just about every space and in every capacity, from pub walls to websites and from letterheads to the sides of buses. It is a face, too, that has been the subject of an impressive variety of likenesses, a face that is both photogenic and eminently paintable. Augustus John and Alfred Janes’s famous portraits spring to mind, as do Vernon Watkins’s famous photographs. If such iconizing in some way kills the subject, then Dylan is firmly - in the words of the Cwmdonkin park-keeper in Return Journey - ‘dead, dead, dead, dead, dead…’ David Slivka’s bronze death mask is surely the ultimate example of this. Yet the return to Dylan this year is part of a concerted effort to re-activate the poet in the popular consciousness - to resurrect his legacy. Swansea city council’s latest Dylan “logo” revises a photograph of Dylan’s proud mug by vibrantly colourizing it, rendering it amply available for mechanical reproduction in the realm of the civic and, thereby, the public imagination. For me the image emblematizes this more general sociocultural project of bringing Thomas to new light and life. But it strikes me also that “DT100” might have been helped to this end by displaying not only still images but also images of a moving Dylan. Sadly, such footage – tellingly referred to by Jeff Towns as the ‘holy grail’ of DT memorabilia – is a mere fable. Besides two live television appearances in the early 1950s, the poet was never captured on film. Of course, this is not to say that the idea of Dylan has never found its way to the screen. Dylan on film is itself a key facet of the DT industry, with examples ranging from wartime propaganda work, feature film scripts, through to the numerous documentaries and biopics that continue to be produced for cinema and television. I want to focus in this paper on some of the early documentaries produced about Thomas, specifically those produced for television in the early 1960s by two Welsh documentary makers. These are Jack Howells’s Dylan (1961), starring Richard Burton - this is still the only Welsh film ever to have won an Oscar - and John Ormond’s BBC Wales adaptation of Thomas’s Return Journey (1964). Both films were efforts – like DT100 – to resurrect the poet’s life and work in the public imagination (Ormond’s film was broadcast on BBC Wales on the poet’s fiftieth birthday). They are both key examples of the filmic cultural activation and revival of Dylan Thomas, and, examined together, illuminate each other – and Thomas – in interesting ways. Biog Kieron Smith has recently completed a PhD at CREW, Swansea University, on the poems and films of John Ormond.

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Christopher Wigginton: Dylan Thomas and Popular Culture This paper will consider Dylan Thomas's continuing purchase upon the popular cultural imagination, cutting through the myths, anecdotes, legends and downright lies that have accumulated around him in order to gain a proper perspective of the image and work which has emerged since his death. To do so, the paper will explore the various ways in which Thomas has been appropriated by the culture industry, arguing that his reception has been trapped within a limited frame of the poet-as-bard, of life-affirming energy in a bureaucratised, impersonal era, or - oppositionally - as a warning of the dangers of excess and overblown Romanticism. From his regular cultural usage today (like Sylvia Plath, Jackson Pollock and Kurt Cobain) as the typification of the artist as a self-doomed, prophetic, rebel against society, to the assumption of his name by Robert Zimmerman and the use of his poetry in popular culture (recently Family Guy and Solaris), Thomas is produced and reproduced to signify certain meanings associated with poetry, nationality, identity and society. Demythologising these polarised (mis)understandings, Thomas will be seen instead as a key modernist figure of twentieth-century culture (one of the first artists to use almost all media - film, film documentary, television, radio,

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drama, opera, poetry and prose). Further, and following recent work, it will take into account the way he worked at the interface between popular culture and high art and in so doing challenge the idea that there is a real contradiction between his writing some of the most impenetrable lyric poetry of his time and his standing next to Marlon Brando on the cover of the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club album. Biog TO FOLLOW ***********************************************************************************************

PANEL 3b: Dylan and Un/Belonging

Jessica Stephens: Orality, Community and Be-longing in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood Dylan Thomas once remarked that poetry is “memorable words-in-cadence which move and excite (…) emotionally “. In the same interview he also stated that poetry “should always be better when read aloud (…) “ In this paper I would like to focus on Dylan Thomas’s play-poem, Under Milk Wood, in relation to the structures of orality as identified and analysed by Albert Lord, Eric Havelock and Walter Ong. Indeed a close reading of Under Milk Wood – and more specifically of the monologues of the First Voice – shows to what extent Dylan Thomas works within the oral tradition : the use of coordinate clauses and compound nouns, of cadence and alliterations, the repetition of formulaic segments or adjectives, the repetition of sounds to create a soundscape, and at times, the very specific uses of the ing form…. The dynamic structures of orality are clearly at work in Under Milk Wood and they contribute to the energy that ripples through the poem-play. And this vitality is further compounded by the fact that orality is, by definition, anchored in the here and now, the present and the immediate environment. However these ancestral linguistic and stylistic mechanisms which are used - and sometimes slightly adapted by the Welsh poet writing in the XXth century - also have a bearing on the semantics of the poem-play. In Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas gives us access to the thoughts and emotions of endearingly mad villagers as they go about their business, and he also portrays the varied and eccentric guises of love and desire ; but, above all, what the poem-play encodes is the life of a community - the ties and interaction between the inhabitants of a small seaside town. And it is this deep connection between orality, the sense of community and the emotional sharing of the poetic experience in Under Milk Wood that I would like to discuss and bring to light.

Biog Jessica Stephens is an assistant professor of English at Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, where she teaches translation. Until the spring of 2011 she ran a Translation MA program at the University of Angers, where she taught poetry and literary translation. Her research focuses on contemporary Irish and Welsh poetry and how poets translate other poets.

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Tony Brown: The “Strange” Wales of Dylan Thomas’s Short Stories In 1935 Dylan Thomas, on holiday in rural Ireland, wrote home to Bert Trick, expressing homesickness for the familiar routines of Swansea; then he comments:

But I wouldn’t be at home if I were at home. Everywhere I find myself seems to be nothing but a resting place between places that become resting places themselves. […] It may be a primary loneliness that makes me out-of- home. It may be this or that, & this and that is enough for today. Poor Dylan, poor him, poor me. (Collected Letters, 1987, 191)

While the letter expresses a degree of homesickness, Thomas is clearly aware of some deeper lack of security, even of divided or insecure identity (“Poor Dylan, poor him, poor me”.)

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The paper will examine Dylan’s sense of being ‘out-of-home’ as it manifests itself in his short fiction. The paper will suggest that the roots of this insecurity of identity may lie in the liminality of the culture in which he was brought up, his continued crossing and re-crossing of the cultural frontier between respectable, anglicized Cwmdonkin Drive and rural, Welsh-speaking Carmarthenshire, and his continued awareness of that latter culture. The examination of the stories will draw on Freud’s notion of the Uncanny (“Das Unheimlich”, the unhomely), examining, for instance the presence of disorientated, frequently lonely figures in the early surrealist stories, set in a ‘strange’, uncanny landscape, before discussing the stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. The paper will argue that, in these stories, supposedly autobiographical material is shaped repeatedly into narratives that are fundamentally concerned with issues of insecurity, estrangement and alienation, with being ‘unhomed’, and thus that there are important links between the two groups of stories. Biog Tony Brown is Professor of English at Bangor University and Co-director of the R.S. Thomas Research Centre. The founding editor of Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays (1995-2007), he has lectured and published widely on Welsh writing in English, especially on the work of R.S. Thomas and Glyn Jones. He has a particular interest in the Anglophone short story in Wales.

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Catriona Ryan: Alchemy of Place: A Paleo-Postmodern Reading of Dylan Thomas’ Poetry This paper is based on my belief that Dylan Thomas’ poetry involves a Yeatsian-type paleo-modernist vision of an essentialist Welsh identity through surrealist depiction of place and it is one that is mediated through the deconstruction of the colonial language of English. This study is inspired by both a visual and literary interpretation into Dylan Thomas’ work in the context of my current research into the relationship between the creative act of poetry writing and visual aesthetics. In this paper the analysis of Thomas’ poetry and visual interpretations of his work will be taken from a paleo-postmodern perspective. I developed the new critical theory, paleo-postmodernism, to describe the uniqueness of the Irish experimental writer Tom Mac Intyre whose aesthetic is unique in Irish literature in that he combines a Yeatsian paleo-modernist romantic vision with postmodern deconstruction. Paleo-postmodernism involves the integration of the theoretical frameworks of Lacan and Jung as tools to examine the writer’s linguistic deconstruction in his search for an archetypal identity. In the case of Dylan Thomas it is a Welsh identity that will be discussed as depicted through his vision of the Welsh landscape. By examining Thomas’s poetry and poetic and visual interpretations of his work from a paleo-postmodern perspective I think this new hermeneutic methodology of will provide new interpretations of Thomas’ work. Biog TO FOLLOW

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FRIDAY 5 SEPTEMBER 2014

PANEL 4a: Theorizing Dylan

Christopher Moylan: Thomas's 'Refusal' and the Lacanian Real Scholarship on Dylan Thomas’s poetry often emphasizes the thing-like quality of sound in his work, his cynghanedd-like texture of sonic and rhythmic devices. But what does one mean by thing? The word can refer to a non-specific object, and something inanimate or inert, suggesting that the words feel palpable or textured. Without denying those qualities, there is also an aspect of strangeness, of resistance to interpretation. Scholars of Thomas’s work are familiar with such reactions, particularly among early critics. In “O Make Me a Mask,” “On No Work of Words,” and “Incarnate Devil” among other poems, Thomas is no less harsh in representing the speaker as inauthentic, deceitful, and helpless or impotent. I argue from a close reading of the poems, influenced by Lacanian criticism, that the word as thing is not an object merely of rhapsodic fascination, but of disgust and horror, the horror of an encounter with Das Ding, or the fragment of the Real. The encounter with the Real, the monstrous and a-linguistic empty site of an originary jouissance, stands as the middle term between the nostalgic, wistfully melancholic late Thomas and the sexually appalled, self-castigating early poet. The ‘and’ is the Real, the impossible ‘hard kernel’ that negates and substantiates both figures. This ‘and’ was replaced, in the generation of poets who came to maturity after Thomas, by the problematics of ideological-aesthetic subject positions, primarily ‘confessional’ (a term Lowell enacted even as he distanced himself from it) and Beat. The absence of such an ideological position in Thomas, his persistent refusal of designations (he is not a war poet, Surrealist, high Modernist, etc.), constitutes his paradoxical integrity. He is the poet we don’t know what to do with: authentic, inauthentic, witty, pathetic, eloquent, empty… Thomas, in an important sense, is the Real of twentieth century poetry. Biog September. I am an associate professor of English at NYIT. I have published a couple of articles on Thomas, and have read his work since I was a teenager. My working class parents in Boston, and several of their friends, admired Thomas's work and quoted it from time to time. I have been waiting for a Thomas conference for many years.

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Rhian Bubear: ‘Now that my symbols have outelbowed space’: Celebrating and fetishizing the signifier in Thomas’s postmodern sublime

In his desire to make the poem ‘an event, a happening, an action perhaps, not a still-life or an experience put down, placed, regulated’, it would seem that Dylan Thomas’s aim was to try to recapture, in his writing, some sense of the literal, a physicality that is normally castrated by the disinfecting force of language. Drawing on the idea of a postmodern sublime (as theorised by Jean François Lyotard), and taking as its main focus Thomas’s poem ‘Today this insect’, this paper will suggest that the festive radicalism of the signifier in Thomas’s work can be read as gesturing towards the un-presentable, thus indicating the presence of a postmodern impulse in the writing. Paradoxically, however, it will be shown that at the same time that the writing is communicating, through the play of signifiers, a sense of the fact of the Real (as theorised by Lacan), it is working through an excess of signification to defend the reading/writing subject against the threat of being engulfed by that self same Real. What will be proposed is that Thomas fetishises language, raising, in Žižekian terms, the signifier to ‘the dignity of the-thing-itself’, making of it the sublime object. A comparison will be made between Thomas’s linguistic superabundance and the abstract minimalism of Barnett Newman, Lyotard’s exemplary artist of the postmodern sublime, since both appear to offer the signifier as a kind of defence that ‘plugs’ the void of the sublime, thus preventing the subject from collapsing back into the terrifying and overwhelming Real. Biog

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Dr Rhian Bubear currently works as a teaching assistant at Swansea University. Her forthcoming title Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-sexual Servitude will be published by UWP in spring 2015.

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Tomos Owen: Shibboleth: For Dylan Thomas Dylan Thomas’s poems show a recurring concern with dates, and with recurring dates in particular. Among his most celebrated are the birthday poems: ‘Twenty-four years’, ‘Poem in October’ and ‘Poem on his Birthday’ respectively commemorate the poet’s twenty-fourth, thirtieth and thirty-fifth birthdays. Like letters, these poems are dated from a time and a place, addressed with a mark of their here-and-now. But these poems also address themselves to the date, by invoking past memories of blissful childhood while also anticipating future mortality. As such, they commemorate past and future birthdays, and continue to speak beyond the circumstances of their immediate point of departure. This paper argues therefore that Thomas’s birthday poems enact what Jacques Derrida describes as ‘the enigma of the date’: they simultaneously mark and efface the unique events which they commemorate.1 In his lecture on the poetry of Paul Celan, Derrida examines the concept of the shibboleth, describing it as a password which is both a cipher and an alliance, something with the ability to bring people and things together even if the original meaning of the word is long forgotten: it signifies a multiplicity of incalculable meanings, not ‘a single determinate secret’ (p. 413). Through a reading of the birthday poems, including ‘Especially when the October wind’, this paper considers how these poetic utterances speak to each other and to us, and contends that the birthday functions as a kind of shibboleth in Thomas’s poetry. While they are dated so precisely, these poems also efface their dates, and mark themselves off from them. The cyclical inter-dependence of life and death, growth and decay, is a noted thematic feature of Thomas’s poetry. This paper reads Thomas’s fascination with dates –what I describe here as his ‘anniversary poetics’ – as a force which calls us back to each poem’s unique origin, but which also drives each poem outwards, beyond its immediate context to future (including centenary) anniversaries, so that they may ‘Still be sung / On this high hill in a year’s turning.’2

(1) Jacques Derrida, ‘From Shibboleth: For Paul Celan’, in Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 370-413 (378). (2) Dylan Thomas, ‘Poem in October’, in Collected Poems 1934-1953, ed. by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: Phoenix, 2000), pp. 86-88 (88). Biog Tomos Owen is a Lecturer in the School of English at Bangor University. His research focuses on Welsh writing, and he is currently completing a monograph on Welsh literary culture in London at the turn of the twentieth century. ***************************************************************************************

PANEL 4b: Creative/Performance

Liz Wride: 21st Century Boyo: Exploring what Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill’ and Commemorative Theatre means for a Modern Audience via the Dramatic Stage Piece No. 5 Cwmdonkin Drive

This paper explores the purpose and impact of commemorative stage dramatization via my 2014 stage piece, No. 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (Welsh Fargo Stage Company, 2014). The role of commemorative theatre will be brought into question. Is it a totalitarian arena (don’t speak ill of the dead) or a more democratic platform (warts-and-all)? Moreover, what does this mean for a modern audience? Should commemorative theatre be a memorial plaque or a space for dialogue in the twenty first century? Biog

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Dr Liz Wride gained her PhD in Creative Writing from Swansea University in 2013. The stage play, Hearts of Oak, (which formed part of her thesis) had its debut at the 2012 Dylan Thomas Festival. Her most recent stage play, No 5 Cwmdonkin Drive was written specifically for the Dylan Thomas centenary and premiered in February 2014 as part of Welsh Fargo Stage Company’s ‘On the Edge’ season.

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Lucy Gough: Unlocking a Mind Journeying into an unfinished novel and the dissection of a mind. ‘In a writer of great originality there is sometimes a heckler closer to him than his admirer, a dissenter who will not keep step with fame, a spur which contradicts progress, such a writer was Dylan Thomas.’ VERNON WATKINS (Introduction to ‘Adventures In The Skin Trade’) I was commissioned by Theatr Iolo to adapt for the stage ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE by Dylan Thomas (an unfinished novel) as part of the Dylan Thomas centenary celebrations. The challenge for me was not relating the central narrative of a young man, Samuel Bennett’s, first heady experience of London but of portraying the complex interior thoughts of self doubt and self disapproval which plague this young adolescent man and are so much part of the novel. In this paper I discuss the strategies I used to transfer these interior, intimate and complex thoughts into a three dimensional space. SAMUEL : ‘The Rossers, the Proberts and The Bennets still and safe and deep in their separate silences. Only my mind harpies, shrill untouchable gorgons disturb the dawn. ‘ Quote from Lucy Gough’s Adaptation of Adventures in The Skin Trade Biog Lucy Gough is based in Aberystwyth and has written extensively for TV, Radio, and Stage, she has been shortlisted for a number of awards including ‘The John Whiting’ and the Nick Darke Award. She wrote for Hollyoaks Channel 4 for ten years and currently writes for BBC drama Doctors. She was awarded a ‘Granada artist’ writing residency in California and has just completed a Creative Wales Award by the Welsh Arts Council. She is currently writing a play about Brenda Chamberlain for The National Theatre Wales and an adaptation of ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE (touring Wales 2014 and Internationally 2015) for Theatr Iolo. She is a Creative Research Fellow at Aberystwyth University. Methuen and Seren, Parthian and Nick Hern have published her plays.

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Tilla Brading: Travelling the Unravelling Lullaby, incantation or declamatory; dichotomous, coherent or inchoate; every word in Thomas’s poems demands attention.

This paper sets out to explore aspects of Thomas’s use of language, particularly the use of compound words, to explore idiosyncrasies in his vocabulary or to investigate sources.

I will tend to focus on particular words and poems and may also extend this to look at repetition and echo; did Thomas only ever write one poem? Travelling the unravelling conundrum we may go anywhere. Biog

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Tilla Brading - poet, performer & textual artist teaches creative writing as well as working most of her life with students with a variety of Learning Difficulties. Brought up in Ystradfellte, Powys she was joint editor of PQR (Poetry Quarterly Review) and assistant Custodian of Coleridge Cottage, where the poet lived, in Nether Stowey, Somerset. Her poetry has appeared widely in a variety of magazines and on-line i.e. Shearsman, Oasis, Fire, Staple, Terrible Work, HOW 2, Great Works etc.. ********************************************************************************************

PANEL 5a: Dylan and “Friends”

Gwilym Games “The School for Witches and the Mystic Tumulus”: Dylan Thomas and Arthur Machen Certain critics have long posited a connection between Dylan Thomas’ early tales of surrealist terror and the writings of the Welsh fin-de-siècle master of mystical horror, Arthur Machen (1863-1947). This paper will briefly examine the known connections between the two men, an association which included Dylan quoting Machen in Under Milk Wood, and explores the interesting parallels between Machen and Dylan's careers: their shared move from Wales to London where they moved in similar bohemian circles; their mutual admiration for Caradoc Evans; their contributions to wartime propaganda; their joint success in America, where both inspired a cult following; a shared obsession with the pub, and above all a dedication to the craft of literature. In particular, the paper will explore the complex relationship both men had to their Welsh heritage, seen in stories showing a mutual fascination with a gothic Welsh landscape full of sex, horror, witchcraft and death. It will also contrast Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams with Dylan’s Adventures in the Skin Trade as portraits of a young man’s move from Wales to London. The paper will conclude by looking at their contrasting portrayals of life in Welsh communities in fictional creations like Dylan’s Milk Wood and Machen’s Caermaen and Llantrisant. Biog Gwilym Games is Local Studies Librarian for the City and County of Swansea. Swansea Libraries has a large collection of Dylan Thomas material including some early magazine and newspaper appearances. He has been editor of the periodical Machenalia for the Friends of Arthur Machen since 2005. He is the author of numerous articles on all aspects of Machen's life and work.

Rose Atfield: Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney: The “hydraulics” of Poetry

Seamus Heaney had agreed to be a Patron of Dylan Thomas 100, commenting : " ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower' still drives those uniquely powered poems." In a comment about the power of poetry, Heaney suggested, “…this is truly creative writing… a spurt of abundance from a source within …spills out to irrigate the world beyond the self.” He shares with Thomas the delight in the power of words and the image of the poet as a conduit for this power. Heaney described himself as “Jungian in religion” and these words are complemented by Jung’s observation, “…the creative process as a living thing implanted in the human psyche.” These remarks all cohere in a metaphor of hydraulics, liquid moving in a confined space under pressure. When asked about a summary of what drew him to Thomas’s work, Heaney replied, “ The rhapsodic thing for sure…I heard Thomas's voice before I read him in a book”. Heaney recalled “Dylan Thomas’s records were as near as we seemed to get to the living thing…” and in “The Bookcase”, he again recreated this early excitement at the potency of poetic language, “Dylan at full volume..‘Do not go Gentle.’ ‘Don’t be going yet’ “.

In “Dylan the Durable?”, Heaney suggests for Thomas, “…writing was palpably muscular, the sensation of hydraulic passage through the words paramount and indispensable…In “Do Not go Gentle”…the old murkiness has been worked through…” this makes a most interesting comparison with Heaney’s own mature development, as in “Fosterling” he refers to the recognition of the “immanent hydraulics of a land/Of glar and glit” and the need for “…the heart to lighten”.

Biog Rose Atfield has published on Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland and other contemporary Irish poets; initially introduced to Heaney’s work in the context of Hardy’s, Thomas’s and Lawrence’s poetry, she completed her PhD. on Heaney’s

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poetry. Recently retired from Brunel university, she still teaches English literature, particularly poetry, in evening classes. She is currently working on a companion to the poetry of Eavan Boland.

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Jim Keery: ‘If We Are Gong to Call Peots Bda...’: Kingsley Amis and Dylan Thomas Bright November (Fortune Press, 1947) is passed over in silence in the recent OUP volume, The Movement Reconsidered. The ironic achievement by Amis and Larkin of each other’s greatest ambition has tended to cast even Amis’s mature poetry into the shade, let alone his Apocalyptic ‘prentice work’:

My hymn of doves, echoed upon this earth … Lives for a second echoing to birth … And vacant air; the hot blood lashes seed Unsilting channels in the absent shell.

‘X’ is one of six poems pointedly assigned to an early date (before October 1943) by Amis’s own note, though he is still at it in the poem entitled and thus dated ‘27 January 1946’, which reads like a cento of ‘I see the boys of summer in their ruin’:

For spring sleeps in the pulse like womanhood ... To trumpets’ hymn and singing of the blood; Love’s deadly anger in the summer sun.

A year later, in a letter to Larkin dated 9/1/47, Amis formulates his response to ‘the influence of Mister Dylan Thos.’, which he proceeded to impose on our literary culture in its entirety:

I have traced the nastiness of my early words to the influence of Mister Dylan Thos. ... I have only to see words like An old man’s shank one-marrowed with my bone ... to groan 8 laid. And if we are gong to call peots bda because of the fefect they have dha on Egnilsh peorty, then he is bad...

Amis’s 1953 collection is subtitled Eighteen Poems, a direct challenge to Thomas’s celebrated debut collection, 18 Poems (neither Leader nor Blake Morrison records the subtitle, but look at a ‘Bookseller Image’ on Abe.com), reinforcing the rebuke to neo-romantic splurges of emotion implicit in the title, A Frame of Mind. Amis pursued Thomas through his fiction, from the inspired parody of Probert’s verse-drama in That Uncertain Feeling to the portrait of Brydan in The Old Devils. Yet the relationship between the long-dead Brydan and Alun Weaver is a self-laceratingly serious one, culminating in Weaver’s apoplectic expiry after a literary humiliation at the hands of a candid friend. My argument is that the lifelong relationship between Amis and Thomas is equally grievous and profound. Biog Born Coleraine, Northern Ireland, 1958. Married to Julie, with two children, Jenny, 23 and Jack, 19. Head of English, Fred Longworth High School, 1995-date, after joining this school in 1986, six years into teaching. PGCE at the Graduate Society, Durham University, after BA at Churchill College, Cambridge. One collection of poetry, That Stranger, the Blues, Carcanet Press, 1996. Edition of the Collected Poems of Burns Singer, Carcanet Press, 2001. Contributions include a series of articles on Dylan Thomas and Apocalyptics, entitled ‘The Burning Baby and the Bathwater’ in PN Review (2003-2006); a chapter on Poetry London in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, OUP, 2009 (and paper at Conference at De Montford University); a paper at the W.S. Graham conference, ‘What is he like?’, Cambridge English Faculty, 2005, printed in the Journal of british and Irish Innovative Poetry March 2012, edited by the co-organiser, Rebecca Ann Barr; and a chapter in Blake 2.0, ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly and Jason Whittaker, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, entitled ‘“Only the wings on his heels”: Dylan and Blake’, co-written with Steve Clark (Bob Dylan, that is, though the title quotation is of course Dylan Thomas on Blake – ‘only the wings on his heels are in sight’). ***************************************************************************************

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PANEL 5b: Dylan and America

Daniel G. Williams: ‘Wales-Bird’: Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker In ‘The Pursuer’, a short story by the celebrated Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, a ground-breaking jazz musician named Johnny Carter is pursued by Bruno, a critic who is increasingly anxious about his inability to capture the essence of jazz in prose. The Argentinean Cortázar uses Dylan Thomas’s ‘O Make Me a Mask’ as the epigraph to his work, which is dedicated in memoriam to the musician on whom the story is so clearly based: alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. These lines are also teh last words spoken by Carter in the novel. There’s no evidence that Parker himself ever recited lines by Dylan Thomas, but Cortázar is drawing on the fact that many likened Parker to Thomas, not least in the fact that their remarkable creative exploits were seen to ‘be matched by equally extraordinary acts of personal dissolution’. Parker died in New York, aged 35, in 1955. Thomas had died two years earlier in the same city, aged 39. Both deaths offered themselves to romanticization and mythologization. This paper, drawing on evidence from a range of writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Amiri Baraka and Al Young, explores this process of mythologization. Both Parker and Thomas were imagined to be, and to some extent cultivated images of themselves, as wild bohemians, deceiving those ignorant of their meticulous working methods into believing that their art was a spontaneous outpouring. The writers of the 1950s Beat generation emphasized the spontaneity of Thomas and Parker’s art, as this supported their essentially romantic view of allegedly ‘marginal’ or ‘primitive peoples’. ‘Dylan’ and ‘Bird’ became culturally constructed figures of some significance as they got drawn into broader, and often highly charged, debates on the relationship between the cultures of black and white America, and between American and Europe. My paper will explore this process.

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David Annwn: The Vectors of Vertical Attack’ – Dylan Thomas and Maya Deren, 1953 This paper concerns the ongoing creative importance of the notorious and highly public argument between Dylan Thomas, star performer on tour, and Maya Deren, America’s most famous avant-garde film-maker and voodoo initiate at City College, New York in 1953. On October 28, Willard Maas chaired a Cinema 16 symposium, ‘Poetry and the Film’ with Dylan, Deren, Arthur Miller, and others. Deren opened her statement: ‘A poem […] creates visible or auditory forms for something which is invisible, […] it also may include action, but its attack is what I could call the ‘vertical’ attack […]’ Within minutes Dylan had launched his own attack on the cineaste’s terms in favour of traditional cinematic narrative and against the ‘poetic’ film. This extended clash has been variously characterized as Dylan ‘rallying’ by playing the ‘ingénue’, drawing laughs by ‘deflating the pretensions of his fellow panelists.’ (Andrew Lycett) or an example of Dylan’s ‘coarse wit’ and ‘narcissism’, his ‘grandstanding joviality’ directed against the ‘seriousness of a woman as independent film-maker’ (Annette Michelson) or an example of Dylan being ‘condescending and dismissive’ (Renata Jackson). Using details from Dylan’s poems and Deren’s films, I argue that the charges of mere sexism on Thomas’s part and intellectualism on Deren’s have obscured one of the most important confrontations in Modernist and Romantic Post-Modernist intermedial discourse. Biog David Annwn, poet, critic and magic lanternist, is the great-nephew of the Welsh bard, Ap Hefin. His most recent book of poems is Disco Occident. His study of pre-cinematic horror visual & literary culture, Gothic Machine, sold out in four months. He is a recipient of the first prize at the Cardiff International Poetry Festival and the Bunford Prize for academic excellence. The final stage of his 6-year project Prismatic Array, a poetic exploration of Postmodern artists: Barbara Hepworth, Claude Cahun, Maya Deren and Dylan Thomas was filmed at the Hepworth Gallery in May of this year, continued at Leeds Art Gallery in June and culminates in his reading at the Dylan Unchained Conference. Nobel Prize-winner, Seamus Heaney, has called his work: ‘wonderfully sensitive and accurate’. David teaches for the Open University in Manchester and Leeds.

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David Boucher: 'The Price of Fame: Dylan Thomas, the Beats and Bob Dylan'

In this paper I want to explore the connection between Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas and the Beats, and suggest that what drew them all together was the sheer desire for fame, and the precipitous price at which it came. Dylan Thomas achieved within his lifetime unimaginable fame as a poet in America, and his example was something the Beats were desperate to emulate. Robert Zimmerman’s attraction to the Beats coincided with his rejection of his past identity and the assumption of the persona of Bob Dylan. Fame proved for them all a powerfully destructive force, which only some could resist and survive. Biog David Boucher is professor of political philosophy and international relations at the Cardiff School of Law and Politics. He is Director of the Collingwood Centre; Senior Research Associate University of Johannesburg; and serves on the Council of the Learned Society of Wales. He has published numerous books, among which are Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll (2004) and The Political Art of Bob Dylan (ed. with Gary Browning 2009). Recently he has published The Limits of Ethics in International Relations (2009), British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed (with Andrew Vincent, 2011); and 'What's in a Name: Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan’, Journal of Popular Music History. During the centenary year David Boucher has appeared on panels with Jeff Towns and Mike Jones talking about 'The Two Dylans' at literary festivals in Swansea, Laugharne, Aberystwth and Dinefwr.

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ABSTRACTS: KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Leo Mellor: 'On almost the incendiary eve': Dylan Thomas and the apprehension of war This lecture will consider Dylan Thomas as a war poet – and then explore why such a designation might matter, both for our understanding of Thomas and for the category of ‘war poetry’. After surviving the first raid of the Blitz in London in 1940 Thomas wrote to Vernon Watkins:

Guns on top of Selfridges. A plane brought down in Tottenham Court Road. White-faced taxis still trembling through the streets, though & buses going & even people being shaved. Are you frightened these nights? When I wake out of burning birdman dreams […] and hear the sound of bombs and gunfire only a little way away, I’m so relieved I could laugh or cry […] I get nightmares like invasions’.

Thomas’ major poems from 1939-45 will be read as emerging from this charged mixture of mental fear, quotidian survival and a cityscape of surreal transformations; their content - of charred corporeality fighting a will-to-transcendence – is both from and against destruction. To understand this position a comparative element will play a part in the lecture, seeing Thomas alongside other writers of the Second World War: These include Lynette Roberts –especially her piece ‘Swansea Raid’, Humphrey Jennings, and David Gascoyne; but also the photographer Lee Miller, and the painters Graham Sutherland, John Minton and Ceri Richards. Questions surrounding film, especially Thomas’ scrip for Our Country (1944), will play a part too. Moreover, thinking of Thomas as a war-poet – and one who moved back-and-forth between Blitzed London, a devastated Swansea, and a Carmarthenshire countryside filled with evacuees – should allow a new angle on Thomas’ status as an Anglo-Welsh writer, as well as a Modernist inheritor of both forms and ruins. Biog Dr Leo Mellor is the Roma Gill Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge. He read English for a BA at King's College, Cambridge. He then worked and studied in Sapporo (northern Japan), Berlin and Wales. His research is now focused on Modernism, photography, Second World War fiction and poetry, and the relationship between locale and literature. His first book - Reading the Ruins - has recently been published by Cambridge University Press. ******************************************************************************************

Carol Watts: Listening to the Dead Dears: Poetry and Voice

ABSTRACT TO FOLLOW

Biog Professor Carol Watts joined Birkbeck in 1989 and is Director of the Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century literature and contemporary poetics. She is particularly interested in working through collaborative cross-arts practice. She runs the innovative Voiceworks project with colleagues at Guildhall Conservatoire, bringing Birkbeck postgraduate writers together with composers and singers to produce songs annually performed at Wigmore Hall. She has published several poetry collections, including Wrack and Occasionals, both published by Reality Street, and a number of chapbooks, including the When Blue Light Falls series (Oystercatcher Press, 2008, 2010, 2012) and Mother Blake (Equipage, 2012). ******************************************************************************************

John Wilkinson: Wave Power: The Effacement of the Caesura in Dylan Thomas’s Poetry This paper describes Dylan Thomas’s war on the caesura, both technically in his adoption of syllabics, and psychically in his refusal to acknowledge what Freud termed the caesura of birth and also of death. In Thomas’s syllabic poems especially, caesura is overcome in a wave-like lapping. The paper proposes that the war on the caesura participates

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in a poetic practice of ‘universing’ which entails further effacement of divisions such as male/female, voice/text and self/surroundings. The paper focuses its argument on a reading of ‘Poem in October’. Biog John Wilkinson is Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Department of English Language and Literature, the University of Chigaco. He is an English-language poet whose research interests derive from the reading which continues to be provocative to his writing, whether through absorption, enjoyment, skepticism, envy or antipathy. In recent years his critical writing has been more tightly focused than he might have wished, mainly on poets of the first-generation New York School and on contemporary English and North American poets. Central to all his critical writing is a preoccupation with the peculiar properties of lyric poetry. What is the social ground of lyric? Does lyric prosody carry a capacity for thought distinguishable from semantics? What principles govern lyric coherence, especially for extended works in sequences or books? What political valency can and should lyric poetry aspire to? His approaches to these questions are governed by a training in close reading, an interest in object relations theory, and a moderate amount of errant curiosity.