by Steve Logan
“I began to write poems and music in earnest to save my life”
Issue 59.1 of Poetry Wales focused on poets who experience economic stress or grew up and live in areas of economic stress, and Steve Logan’s poem ‘Boyo’ was featured. Here Logan begins a new occasional series, ‘How I Became a Poet‘
I was brought up by guardians, my great-aunt and great-uncle, in Pontymister, Risca. It’s a part of Wales that, in discussions of contemporary Welsh identity, can get treated a bit dismissively, chiefly because simplified versions of ‘the valleys’ on film and TV are seen as having somehow caricatured the rest of Wales. It’s often said, by progressive commentators on Welsh affairs, that the ‘valleys accent’ is perceived outside Wales as the quintessential Welsh accent. Then it’s pointed out that the valleys communities, built on coal, steel and mass-immigration, are now fractured by unemployment, hopelessness, drugs and crime. Well, caricatures work both ways. The fifties may have been prone to sentimentalisation. The post-millennia may be prone to caustic scepticism. At any rate, Pontymister was and is very different from Oxford, where I got a place by taking an entrance exam after studying to re-sit my English Literature A Level at the The Working Men’s College, London.
As a boy I’d loved music as far back as I could remember. My father was a club singer in Newport and a long-distance lorry driver. My mother gave me a record player and a single called ‘Last Train to San Fernando’, which had a line about fateful decisions: ‘If you miss this one, you’ll never get another one’. I made a fateful decision myself, aged 10, when my mother, who lived in London, asked me to phone her from a phone-box in Risca and then asked me to decide whether I wanted to live with her or with my great-aunt. Some developments do have a definite beginning. I learned in that phone-box that momentary decisions can change lives forever. In choosing London I created a wound that loyalty keeps open.
Tensions, as well as love, had long existed between my mother and my great-aunt (who had helped bring my mother up as well). I knew I was at the centre of some kind of struggle and I strove, most probably, not to think about it. But when I was fishing in The Deeps, a magical section of canal above Risca, I was learning how to brood. Vague quotas of psychic energy shifted their weight as I stared at the brown water under silvery leaves of willow and thought of songs I’d heard on the radio—‘Keep on Running’, ‘I Got You Babe’, ‘One, Two, Three’. The songs inspired a wild kind of yearning which was utterly unclear about its object and which later would attach itself to places and to people as if they might afford a cure for this weirdly pleasurable, catastrophic pain.
As a young scholar I learned that in England the term ‘English Literature’ was slowly becoming problematic. Unwittingly I adopted Received Pronunciation as camouflage and tried to forget that where I was and where I was from didn’t recognize each other. I wrote poems uncertainly, thinking that if Wordsworth was ‘great’ and R. S. Thomas ‘important’, I was nothing. Fearing the rock music I’d loved and performed at school, I taught myself flute and listened to classical music mostly. Then one night I heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Street Legal’ and my studiously orchestrated network of defences collapsed.
There was more to it than that of course. It wasn’t till I’d left Oxford, gone to work at Cardiff university, left there for Cambridge and most importantly met my wife, that I began to write poems and music in earnest to save my life. Poems I think of as dry music. I write poems about things where the idioms of song seem too elliptical and songs where the idioms of page-poetry are over-explicit, though sometimes I’ll make a song of a poem or a poem of a song. Sometimes one just turns, as I write, into the other. As the history of ‘poetry’ makes clear, lyrics were poems set to music. And songs (like Donne’s or Wyatt’s) may have had music but are known mostly as words.
In a book called Heartlands, I’ve written elegies for my great-aunt and great-uncle and the life I remember from our corner of the valleys. That life informs all the rest. I am still, here, now, in songs, poems and prose, trying to tell the story of a single human sensibility, for whatever it may be worth. I describe myself to poets as a poet who is also a musician, to musicians as a musician who is also a poet. I write and sing to give private experience a public place to go.
