Gillian Clarke

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the writer Gillian Clark.

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Wales's national poet, three years ago she received the Queen's Gold Medal for her work.

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She writes about everything from dinosaurs to suicide, but the potency and power of nature is a recurring motif.

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Although she's recognized for her significant and distinguished contribution to her homeland's literature and culture, her verse has been translated into ten languages, and she regularly receives fan mail from South America, Pakistan, and most countries in between.

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Aside from writing, her main project in life is the conservation of her own small patch of West Wales. Restoring hedges, conserving bluebells, and tending sheep take up her spare time. She says, A poem is the only work of art you can have for nothing. Read it, memorise it, copy it into your notebook, and it's yours. Now, I wonder, Gillian Clarke, when you got that call offering you the post of National Poet of Wales, how did you react? Were you daunted?

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I said no.

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Did you? I was in Southampton doing poetry live and I said, No, no, no, no, I don't think it's a good idea. I don't want to sit around being famous. I've got work to do. And by the end of a few hours, my fellow poets who were all in the green room in Southampton said, Yes, you have to do it, you have to do it. And my son said, Mum, you must do it. Ma'am, that's what they call me. You must do it. But if I was going to do it at all, I was going to do it for Wales, I was going to do it for poetry, I was going to do it for all the kids that I know who that I know need poetry, and human beings need this language in their lives, and I was going to do it with a passion. Since you were appointed, you've written, among many other poems, a tributes to the Cardiff branch of a very well-known department store. You've written a very moving poem called Daughter. That was a response to the disappearance of five-year-old April Jones from the Gundlerth. That happened, of course, last year. Two very different subjects I've plucked out there. The reason I've done that is because I'm wondering what it is that prompts you to write about an event. Just being alive and language. Just being alive and what being alive makes you alert to, and then some language will come along and join that thought. April Jones lived in a town not very far from where I live and everybody in the area was heartbroken. We none of us could think about anything else. I wrote the poem in minutes and I was in London. It just suddenly

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It wouldn't could not be resisted. The one in the store in in Cardiff I was commissioned to write but that was fun because I knew that shoppers would pass by and pause and think, Oh

Gillian Clarke3:17

So

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Poetry, I used to like that once. It's interesting. You've written about topics like suicide, the death of a child, as you've just mentioned, loneliness. All these things sound as if you might be somebody who has a melancholic air, and yet you bounded in rather jauntily this morning and you're very quick to smile. You don't seem a melancholic person at all. Your heart hurts when you hear about a suicide. Your heart hurts at people suffering at the death of that little girl.

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But it's a heart that hurts because it loves the world, maybe. If you love the world, then you hurt more. But you also um

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It also will rejoice more. Tell me about your first choice today, then, your first disc. What are we going to hear and and why have you chosen this, Julian? Well, I've chosen Mabanwi, which is a very, very sad love song, because of the melody being so delicate. And I thought these huge voices and this delicate melody, which is so sad, would be like the sea, the big sea and the quiet sea that's.

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Rolling in

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What I need

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The Triorky male voice choir singing Mavanwi. So you've said, Julianne Clark, that your first favourite word was pandemonium. Which is a complex, interesting sound for a little tongue to get itself around. In what context did you hear pandemonium? Well, my mother used to tell me not to make it upstairs.

Gillian Clarke5:13

Yeah.

Gillian Clarke5:15

Ah

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And you understood what she meant, did you?

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I think not knowing, but I mean, I sort of used to look for this thing upstairs.

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But I loved the grown-up words. I was the first of two girls in my family, so I was with the grown-ups. We lived with my grandmother in the very beginning, with three aunts, my father's sisters, my father, my mother, a husband of one of them. It was pandemonium downstairs rather than upstairs most of the time. All of them sort of very noisy in Welsh and English. And yes, you've said that your mother tongue was English, your father tongue was Welsh. Explain that on to me. Both of my parents were first language Welsh speakers. My father was passionately for the language and from south west Wales and loved the language very much and wanted me to speak it. And my mother was from one of ten children in a North Wales farm. And her parents had to pay rent to the landlord and my mother felt patronised by the man who came to the door.

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And she just thought, We are poor and speak Welsh, they are rich and speak English, I've got to get out. I mean, it's it's a generational thing, it's a very big tragedy,'cause it was it almost did for the language, because the mother is so important, mother tongue.

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In Welsh it's mammyaith. It's a very important phrase. When your when your father was talking to you alone, you know, if you were going for a walk, was he talking to you in Welsh? He was a B B C outside broadcast engineer travelling around and used to put me in the car and take me to my grandmother uh's house at my grandmother's farm and talk Welsh to me in the car, but not home.

Gillian Clarke6:36

Mm.

Gillian Clarke6:41

Was he talking about the

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The books were in English, my mother spoke English, the nursery rhymes were English, and she prevailed. You said that to speak two languages is to be in two minds, to see both sides. And when I was thinking about that, I thought, well, actually, for an artist, you know, to see things in black and white is much more vivid. To see things from both sides, to see that there are huge grey areas between culture and languages, is more difficult. Do you think it makes it more complex as a writer to think about it? I think it's a very, very creative tension. Is it? It's a creative tension. It's a pain. It's a hurt.

Gillian Clarke7:21

I think it's

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Nearly all of the Welsh writers who write in English wish they could speak Welsh, almost all of them. I think I can hardly think of one who doesn't. There was a big vote by English language writers not to have any English in the Nationalisthedwot. No, we said it's got to be Welsh, even though it would have been to our advantage. But it wouldn't, because killing something so precious is not to our advantage. But you write in English. I write in English because if you learn a language when you are a grown-up, you have none of those early physical, physical like pandemonium.

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So you don't understand a word before you do. And it's your body that begins to understand the word. And it's crucial to a poet, crucial to creative writing, to not understand first and then understand with your body. How old were you when you learned Welsh properly, as it were? Oh, I have never done it properly. I'm going to. I'm going to improve when I'm on the island. I'll have plenty of time. Let's have some more music. It's your second piece of the day. Gillian, tell me about this and why you've chosen it. Well, Kafalai, which means horses, is performed in the first place by one of my favourite musicians, the absolutely brilliant Welsh harpist Catherine Finch. But she has formed a marvellous partnership in music with Seku Keta, who is a chora player. Two ancient cultures talking to each other, and to me they sound like the wind and the rain.

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Kefolai, performed by Saku Keta and Catherine Finch. Sir Julianne Clark, you were born in Cardiff in nineteen thirty seven. I'm wondering as a little girl what your most vivid memory of the war.

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I was born in Cardiff and but we moved to Barrie when I was, I suppose, ba a baby, one or two, moved from the huge

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soup of family life in the house in Cardiff to a house of our own in Bury. And what do I remember? I remember going under the stairs once or twice with a lot of Teddies. We lived very close to the sea, and right beside a lake called

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called Knapp Laken. It was rumoured that there had been a shipwreck in the little harbour.

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And that it was an orange boat. I've researched it since. It was the Jamaica Planter, and it did really happen. And the whole beach was covered with oranges, and we children were always sent out, told to bring something back, a bit of stick, maybe to help the fire along, or blackberries in season. So I had a skirt on and knickers to match, and the sort of knickers were not like Marks and Spencer's ones. Your mother made them, so they were quite roomy. And I came home with so many oranges in my sleeves, in my skirt, in my knickers. Bounced home because nobody had oranges. Oh, for the days of roomy knickers. You just mentioned there this Coldknap Lake that your house was on. Probably one of your best-known poems, and certainly one that I love, is about Coldknap Lake. It is about a rather dramatic incident that you watched as a little girl. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Yes, yes, because my mother was a nurse.

Gillian Clarke11:05

It is about

Gillian Clarke11:10

Can you tell me

Gillian Clarke11:11

Yeah.

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People knocked on the door and said there's a child fallen in the lake, and they happening all the time. Boy fell out of the tree, the terrible gash in his leg once, and so on. On this occasion, um, the little girl had been pulled out of the lake, and I was with her, and I ran across the road with her, and I saw her save it, gave her the kiss of life. But I tell that from my

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Child point of view, I didn't I thought she was giving her her breath.

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And I knew my mother could kiss anybody better. So I knew the little girl would live. You write in this poem of your mother kneeling on the earth, a heroine, her red head bowed. Was she a beautiful looking woman? She was very beautiful. She had beautiful red curly hair. She was like a film star. She was very beautiful. As part of her problem, she was so vain and aspirational. But she was lovely, and I saw her head, her curls, while she was looking after this child, and I felt she is the heroine of this story.

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And your father, as you said, he was an outside broadcast engineer for the BBC. After

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years, I think, after his death, you you discovered in the BBC's archives your father's um his I suppose it was his personnel records really that you saw. And and you saw a note in there where very markedly his nationality worked against him.

Gillian Clarke12:29

I think

Gillian Clarke12:31

Yeah, it was

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I felt like an explosion going off in my head. It was from a book by His History of the B B C by John Davis. Oh, was it, right? And I was in the museum in Cardiff and my husband looked my father's name up in the back and turned the page and opened it.

Gillian Clarke12:40

Oh, was it right?

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And it said the Welsh personality was less suitable for management than.

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Than the English, and so he never managed to get promoted out of.

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engineering and intermanagement. So just to be clear, was that referring directly to your father, or that was just a general principle? For example, said John Davis, JP K. Williams, who I just I just realized that

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Lord Wreath had broken my mother's heart, because my mother was so ambitious and she never got the promotion that he did deserve, but she held that against him, whereas I now know it was racism. So I know what racism is like.

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Let's have a break for some music, Gillian Clark. We're on your third choice of the day. Tell me about this.

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Christina Rossetti is is a very fine poet, and the poem that is used nowadays as a Christmas carol is one of the loveliest poems about winter that's ever been written. And if you just read the words without the music Snow fell on snow in the bleak mid winter long ago It's such a common phrase, and I think all those centuries ago

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The snow has been falling. It's just an amazing, shivering thought.

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It's real.

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Cost to winged middle.

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Good lord and God.

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Hold thy life a stone.

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Sling that fear and snow slow, snare snow.

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in the bleak midwinter performed there by the King's College Choir, Cambridge. Julian Clarke, from the age of about ten, you were allowed to take an entire week off school to be taken to the theatre by one of your aunts. You went to Stratford upon Avon. How did your young ears cope, I wonder, with all that iambic pentameter? Did you enjoy it?

Gillian Clarke15:12

Yeah.

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But

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Changed my life. My Auntie Phyllis, my father's middle sister, never married. I mean, several of my old aunts and great-aunts never married because the war took their true loves away. Auntie Phyllis, I regard as one of the most important prompts in my life to become a poet. She was a railway clerk. She'd had no education. None of my family had had any education. Everybody was astonished when one of theirs went to university, me. She educated herself entirely through reading, and she began to love Shakespeare. So she decided when I was ten that I should go to Stratford-on-Aven. And I loved the red velvet seats. I loved the spittle of the actor on the spotlight. I know that you were sent away to weekly board and that you were given tuition in maths. And the idea was here's a bright girl and let's make the best of her, was it? Well, I passed the scholarship. I should have gone to Pernath Grammar School, but I think my mother then met people whose children went to St Clair's, Convent, Porthcall, and thought, Well, that's nice. I think I'd like my daughter to go there too. I think you are being slightly modest about how bright you were. You were 16 when you triumphed in the school I steadfast. You won in all three categories for your story, your poem, and your essay. Yeah, it was a very small school. And my brilliant English teacher, she thought I could be a writer. And when that teacher said to you, you could be a writer, did you think, oh, yes, actually. The fire was lit in my heart.

Gillian Clarke16:30

Yeah, as of

Gillian Clarke16:39

Fire was lit, was I?

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Let's have some more music. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear? This is your fourth one of the morning. I went to hear the Monteverd Choir sing Bach at St David's Cathedral in Pembrokeshire. And one of the things that my husband, who is an architect, alerted me to was the sound of the choir measures.

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the spaces of the architecture. So the fact that this is recorded in Venice, in a cathedral, is crucial to how it sounds. And I am not a churchgoer, but I am not an atheist. So when in the bleak midwinter is sung, I feel quite religious. And when this is sung, I feel quite spiritual.

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Art of Gloria Patra et Filio, performed by the Monteverdi Choir, conducted by John Elliott Gardner. Julian Clark, you married in your early twenties, and I understand that it was your first husband, Peter, who fished out a crumpled-up poem that you'd thrown in the bin, I guess, because you were unsatisfied with it. He ironed it and sent it off to the publisher. I had written a poem called The Sundial about my six-year-old son who had a fever, and I typed the poem out and I thought, no, and threw it in the bin. But for Christmas that year, I had been given by Peter a copy of a magazine called Poetry Wales. It still exists, very important to the writers in Wales, because there was no way anybody in the posh London magazines would ever have taken anything from me. And so.

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I had said, Do you know I think I could write as good as this?

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And then when I threw it in the bin, he thought, Okay, and he sent it off and it was accepted. That was my first publication. And at university, just prior to getting married, is it true that one of your tutors had said to you, forget this poetry stuff? Yes, he said, Oh, forget all the I'd gone into a tutorial and I had somehow or other disclosed that I had sent a poem in for something. And he said, This is an academic institution. You can forget all of that for now. And it was a setback, actually, because I I he was my tutor, I admired him. One of your earliest poems, Miracle on St David's Day, is about the transformative power of poetry. Tell me the story behind it.

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I went to a mental hospital in Abergavenny. I was invited in by occupational therapy, so I went and did a poetry reading and I put together my poems and poems by others connected with the Welsh Valleys. And they said, Don't worry about that big man there, don't talk to him, because he can't talk.

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and he was in fact suffering not from anything to do with his voice, but depression.

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So I read my poems, and all of a all of a sudden he stood up, and the nurses got very worried. What's happening?

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and he began to say in his head

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Wordsworth's Daffodils.

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Ten thousand saw it at one glance. He proclaimed it to the room, did he? To our whole room. They looked worried, and I said No

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Let him do it.

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And afterwards everybody praised him, and in a very, very broken voice, like someone who's had an operation, he said, I I I I always loved poetry.

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And it didn't it didn't cure him of the depression, but it did get him speaking.

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Let's have your next piece then. We're on your fifth choice of the morning. Tell me what we're going to hear now. When I heard that I was invited to do this, this is the first thing I said to my husband. I'm going to have the song of the blackbird. I love

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the countryside very much. When I was in cities all you know, all those years, I feel I was a country girl in the city. But the gorgeous thing about the blackbird is it sings everywhere. It sang in ancient Europe. I heard it in Orador in France, where the village was completely everyone in the village was murdered by the SS a few days after D-Day. The blackbird was singing. It was the only sound in the place. The blackbird in my garden every year is so beautiful. And the other thing is, on my island, I'll have skawking seagulls, and I can do without them. I would prefer the blackbird.

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That was the song of the blackbird there, Gillian Clark, to keep you company on your island and ward off the seagulls. In the introduction I said that you take care of your own little parcel of West Wales. This is around about Keradigion. You have a protected bluebell wood. And you have sheep too. Yes, but only twelve now, because we have a beautiful bluebell wood, and it's probably post-ice age. So the sheep now keep the brambles out of the wood, and then we take them out of the wood once there's any possibility of a little oak tree or a little bluebell appearing. So there you are with your husband, your second husband. You've been married for around about forty years. This is David the architect. Does he have to persuade you to stop working? Are you one of those people who would sort of always be writing at your desk? If you mean writing, yes. I obsessively write, obsessively work all the time and every and if a teacher from Pakistan r wants to know for her class what a certain poem means

Gillian Clarke23:04

Yeah.

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I will write to her, and then we in the end I will tell you this this real correspondence ended when that teacher from Mianwali, Pakistan, said, I could teach them peace through your poem, Love from All of Us.

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When I read your poetry, and when you write about your poetry, and when you certainly sit opposite me here talking about your poetry, you seem convinced that.

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Words, that poems have the power to change things. Is that something you innately and truly believe? Because people may take comfort in poetry. It may make them smile, it might make them cry, but the idea that it's actually a powerful thing might be pretty suspect for some. The whole language that we speak day in, day out, is cram-packed full.

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Of Shakespeare

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All sorts of other phrases used by poets all along the years have got into the speech of the language. Now, is it happening now? I suspect so. I'm sure the rappers are doing it. The other thing is, do you remember when Stop All the Clocks? Orton's poem was everybody's favourite poem in Britain. So if you give them, if you give people something that stays in the mind.

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Then it will stay. Let's have some more words. We're not going to hear a piece of poetry right now, but well, maybe in a sense you would say it is. Tell me about this next choice, your sixth piece for the day. I think Leonard Gowen is completely wonderful. He's a poet for a start. That's how I first was aware of him a very long time ago. I have twice been to see him perform in Cardiff. I met him, actually. Met him in the hotel. He was utterly charming. Did you contrive that meeting? Yes.

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How did you manage that? I booked into the hotel, thinking he's bound to stay there. He wouldn't stay anywhere else.

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And I was just had just become National Poet, and I thought maybe he'll let me interview him. Well, they didn't, because they said he had to have lots of rest. But he was very, very uh

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We talked. He was lovely. He was utterly charming. Well, you're using words like lovely and charming, but you are blushing slightly, is he? Oh, yes. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. What I feel when he's on stage is break your heart, young men. This is how to charm women.

Gillian Clarke25:16

Well you use

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Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river.

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You can hear the boats go by

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Come spend the night beside her.

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And you know that she's half crazy But that's why you wanna be there And she feeds you tea and oranges That come all the way from China And just when you mean to tell her

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Suzanne by Leonard Cohen. So, Gillian Clark. You've said that when a poem arrives, it's a coinciding moment of language and energy. When you begin writing, do you have a formed idea, a notion of what's going to end up on the page? Or are you often surprised by what does? No, I don't have a formed idea. What I have is.

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poem that hasn't got any words yet, and I feel if I put some magic poetry glasses on, I'll be able to read it in front of me. It seems to be behind my head somewhere. If I turn quickly I'll catch it. And you do start with a title, do you? I do. That's quite that's quite unfortunate. Nobody does that. It's just bizarre.

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Yeah.

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Very good thing.

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It's just a funny little habit. I like to write the title neatly in the middle of the page and then proceed. How do you know, I wonder, as a writer, when to let a poem go? I imagine many of your poems take

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Um you you said to me earlier that one came out very, very quickly when you were writing about the tragedy of April Jones and in a matter of minutes. I imagine some of your poems must take a good deal longer than that. When do you know that it is time to stop on a piece of work? Your energy's running out and your excitement. Well, I just tell the truth in my poems, that's all. It's just the truth, just the fact. I write factually, and I very often start with something around me, like the weather, maybe, you know, like a train passing uh a landscape and look out and see it. I start there, I think, and then the real poem starts to happen with any luck.

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quite quickly with

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If I'm lucky, it's very quick.

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But it m even very quick means lots of drafts. Yes. This is your seventh choice of the morning. Tell me about this. It was.

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An astonishing moment of grief for poetry.

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The death of Seamus Heaney. Such a shock. I loved him, I loved the man, I loved the poet. Probably one of for me one of the most inspirational poets I ever read. He's got a beautiful voice, I thought, I've got to hear that voice again. In a sense, of course, a poet never dies. And it's even more true now that we have recording, but words live forever. John Donne isn't dead, Shakespeare's not dead. So although the beautiful, real man Seamus has gone

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We can hear him.

Gillian Clarke28:23

The Blackbird of Glenmore

Gillian Clarke28:28

On the grass when I arrive, Filling the stillness with life, But ready to scare off At the very first wrong move In the ivy when I leave It's you, blackbird, I love.

Speaker 228:38

The I

Gillian Clarke28:44

I park, pause, take heed, breathe, just breathe and sit And lines I once translated come back I want away to the house of death, To my father under the low clay roof.

Gillian Clarke29:04

And I think of one gone to him, a little stillness dancer, Haunter son, lost brother, Cavorting through the yard, So glad to see me home, my homesick first term over.

Gillian Clarke29:19

and think of a neighbour's words long after the accident.

Gillian Clarke29:24

Yon bird on the shed roof

Gillian Clarke29:26

Up on the Ridge for weeks.

Gillian Clarke29:28

I said nothing at the time, but I never liked yon bird.

Gillian Clarke29:34

The automatic lock clunks shut, the Blackbird's panic is short-lived.

Gillian Clarke29:40

For a second I have a bird's eye view of myself, a shadow on raked gravel, in front of my house of life.

Gillian Clarke29:49

Hedgehop, I am absolute for you, your ready talk back, your each standoffish come back.

Gillian Clarke29:58

Your picky, nervy, gold beak.

Gillian Clarke30:01

On the grass when I arrive.

Gillian Clarke30:03

In the ivy.

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Yeah.

Gillian Clarke30:04

When I leave.

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The Blackbird of Glanmore, written and read by Seamus Heaney. Jillian Clark, you said as you were introducing that piece by Seamus Heaney, that a poet never dies. You are the third national poet of Wales. When your tenure is up, what would you like your legacy to be? What would you like to live on in your spirit?

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I think they'll sack me before I'm dead.

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So I feel uh that the universe is is mine and real and here it is. And I never think about that. I never think about the future. But when other poets die, one is reminded of one's mortality. What are you burning to write about next? Is there something formulating in your head? I've been very excited by being poet in residence for quite a short period, but a very intense one.

Gillian Clarke30:43

Correlating in your head.

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in Cambridge in the Museum of Zoology, and so I'm now building up a collection of poems under the title perhaps Zoology.

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Because I realize that what they do is not just preserve dead butterflies. What that museum and all those sorts of museums what they're about is the conservation of the earth as a whole. So the the museum plus my patch of land

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Together seem to be a tiny little contribution, but also.

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I'm thinking of human mortality as I'm writing r zoology. What about your little patch of land? Because of course I'm going to cast you away to a desert island. You're not going to see Caradithion and its green fields any more. How will you deal with that? Presumably you'll miss the the Welsh mists. You know, that's a really horrible thought. I suppose I'm going to try and conserve a little patch of this island. I'll make something grow. And I shall collect all the plastic floating up from the rest of the world and try and hide it somewhere. Make a hole and get rid of it. Tell me about this eighth disc that we're going to hear this morning. Why have you chosen this? Well, it's a lullaby, and I'll need something to help me to go to sleep. And Bryn Terraville is a very big man with a huge voice, and I think it's very moving to hear him.

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control. He's got I mean, why he's a wonderful singer is that he's got immense control. So he'll control down, down his voice. And yet all the power is there, held in the simple melody of this lovely lullaby,

Speaker 432:25

In a blended heart from unwest.

Gillian Clarke32:53

Are we all

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See Yogan, a lullaby sung by Bryn Terville there with the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera conducted by Gareth Jones. It's time, then, Gillian, to give you the books. You get the Bible, you get the complete works of Shakspere. What other book are you going to take?

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I want

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A huge anthology of poetry. It doesn't yet exist, but if you'll give me a little bit of time before sending me away, so that I can collect all the most beautiful poems in the English language, and some of them in the Welsh language too.

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Into

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The best anthology of wonderful language that has ever existed, then that will keep me happy for ever. Slightly bending the rules, but I suppose we can. And a luxury, too. What would you like as your luxury? I've got a

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a very much loved desk. It's made by unemployed miners in the twenties, who were taught to use this wood by a Quaker family who decided that they wanted to help the the unemployed.

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They were called a Prynn Maur.

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Furniture

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Makers. And I'm so proud to have it. You may have that desk then. I am proud to work at a desk which people.

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made so lovingly because someone gave them the chance.

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Now if you had to save just one of the eight tracks, which one would be your disc to save?

Gillian Clarke34:23

Yeah.

Speaker 434:23

To save

Presenter34:24

The blackbird I will not be able to live without that sound the real bird singing his aria

Presenter34:32

In a palm tree. Right, you may have the song of the blackbird then. Jillian Clark, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you for having me.

Presenter35:20

You've been listening to a download from the BBC.

Presenter35:23

You'll find more information on the Radio Four website bbc.co.uk/radio4.