Dylan Thomas Photography Competition
#mymilkwood
This is Llaregyb Hill, old as the hills,
high, cool, and green…
you can see all the town below you sleeping in the first of the dawn.
Dylan Thomas,
UNDER MILK WOOD
DylanDay 2023 – Gianpiero Actis
Category: Dylan Thomas
LOVE THE WORDS: Lidia Chiarelli is one of the winners of 2022 Poetry Contest for Dylan Thomas’ celebration
Lidia Chiarelli’s Installations for DYLANDAY 2022-#dylanday
“My Liquid World” (amid winds of war), poem by Lidia Chiarelli, Italy
My liquid world
(amid winds of war)
to Dylan Thomas
This ashen day in March
opens with dancing shadows –
images carved in the air
of the spring still too far.
An insidious mist enshrouds me
in crescendo.
Among echoes in subtle vibration
teach me, Dylan, to seek shelter in
my liquid world
take me to feel the pulse
of the tides that ceaselessly
ebb and flow
and while time and space dissolve
in the primordial roar of the Ocean
lead me to fly away, with you, from
the void … of this bewilderment and of that insanity*
* from: Although through my bewildered way
Lidia Chiarelli, Italy
#dylanday #lovethewords
Lidia Chiarelli’s MOON CALENDAR HAIKU
Images and Haiku by Lidia Chiarelli are published in THE SINDH COURIER (Pakistan – Editor Nasir Aijaz) and they are the response to #LoveTheWords invitation to write haiku inspired by Dylan Thomas’ verse “HOW TIME HAS TICKED A HEAVEN ROUND THE STARS”.
#LoveTheWords – #DylanDay – #Infinitybooksuk
Aeronwy Thomas:
AERONWY THOMAS:
BEYOND THE TEXT – HOW TO ENHANCE DYLAN THOMAS’ WORK
Music has been much used in Shakespeare’s works so why not Dylan Thomas’?
I will try to make an incomplete but impassioned case why music and poetry including poetic prose as used in my father’s play for voices, Under Milk Wood, can well do without the addition of music. My suffering in this regard should prove part of the case.
Ever since I returned to England in 1970, I have been approached by modern composers to listen to Fern Hill or more obscure poems arranged to music. My first experience was to be approached by an earnest American graduate who wished to use “If my head hurt a hair’s foot” in an original musical composition, using the words as a loose lyric for the music. In those early days returning from a long stay in Italy, I must have been somewhat naïve. I agreed to accompany him to the recording studio where his pre-recorded composition was overlain somehow onto a reading of the poem. Last minute, I was informed that the reader would be me and requested a moment to look at the poem. A more obscure poem about a child’s fear of causing his mother pain in birth could not have been chosen from my father’s poems. For me the meaning was almost impenetrable at such short notice so that I must have read it clearly but without understanding. This was no problem as the music was dominant and drowned the words effectively. The young artistic entrepreneur then revealed his plan. Because I had read the poem no royalties would be expected as a beneficiary. The reason that poem and a couple more had been chosen for the recording was that it was little known to the general public and therefore doubly immune to the payment of royalties. In any case, the young man told me, he’d spent his last dollars on the recording and was sleeping on friends’ sofas as a result. I had a sinking feeling that this sort of situation was going to be inevitable now that I was living in London and not in faraway Sicily or even Rome. Cheap flights to these destinations were still to happen in the future.
My foreboding was increased when asked to read “Fern Hill” at a public function for the Welsh Development Corporation. It would take place at the Hilton and feature clog dancing and harp playing which made me slightly uneasy. However, the fee of £30.00 was an inducement and I turned up in a long cotton Laura Ashley dress and a copy of Dylan’s Selected Poems. Immediately before I closed the evening with my reading, a band of merry clog dancers filled the floor and skilfully demonstrated how you can dance in uncomfortable wooden shoes. I would have to change the mood skilfully and dreaded being helped by the except the harpist. I was lucky that time as the harpist topped and tailed by did not over-ride the poem with a tinkling waterfall of background musak.
That occasion kick started my own poetry performance career and I was asked by any number of different organisations to give a reading of my father’s poems. Included were literary festivals and groups as well as entertainment spots at art galleries or even book launches of biographies about my father. My constant dread was to be requested (after all the arrangements had been made) would I mind a quiet musical accompaniment as I read
the poems. My fear was often justified as three piece flautists or recorders drowned the words. By the end, I had to ask that the musical interludes were just that… a musical item between not during poems. Nowadays, unless it is a reading abroad with translations so that Fern Hill can take 10 minutes to read with its translation, I insist the music is kept to three slots: beginning, interval and end.
Under Milk Wood, a play to be heard – but mostly seen, integrates songs into the text with words by my father and music by his friend, Swansea composer Dan Jones. These seem to work very well and give a little break from the richness of the text in so much that the words are song-like in scansion and use simple, often childlike words. The director Michael Bogdanov was the first to add Welsh folk songs for the glee party mentioned in the play to great effect. Nearly all the productions I see nowadays include additional music such as the UMW Jazz suite by Stan Tracey directed by Malcolm Taylor, a veteran of these productions, played as the audience settles itself and during the interval. These productions I can only recommend but I have also suffered all singing and all dancing(the expression used by one of the performers of Under Milk Wood. On a slightly higher level one hopes, The Welsh National Opera has also approached the literary trustees to sing Under Milk Wood. I await the outcome.
Returning to my experiences abroad, I have now new artistic decisions to make regarding my own poetry. As a result of teaching creative writing to school children in Turin, one of the teachers, Lidia Chiarelli Actis (who later became my official translator) introduced me to her husband, a part-time painter, Gianpiero Actis. He was keen to illustrate some of my poems and in this way we have to date had dozens of exhibitions based on Word and Image.
The local civic council became involved and subsidised events in which painters all over Turin were invited to illustrate a surreal poem of mine, The Object. The response was surprisingly positive with nearly a hundred painters of every imaginative style taking up the invitation. Lidia, herself a poet, has also experimented with a Canadian artist who works over the internet. I wouldn’t be surprised if music will be part of future collaborations.
.
In conclusion, I have to admit that the cross-fertilisation of the different arts: words, illustration and music can work if thought out and executed sensitively. This appears to contradict my initial assertion that music and poetry (and as it happens images) cannot enhance each other. They can and do as experience has taught me.
AERONWY THOMAS, 2008
Rosaria La Rosa for #DylanDay
I loro volti splendevano sotto il misto chiarore
Della luce lunare e della lampada –
DYLAN THOMAS
From: Their faces shone under some radiance
Olio su tela 40 x 60
Rosaria La Rosa, pittore, scultore, scenografo, critico d’arte e curatore eventi artistici. Ha frequentato l’istituto d’arte e l’accademia di belle arti, laurea in pittura, ha frequentato i corsi di specializzazione di pittura iperrealista e di mosaico. dal 2009 dirige la galleria d’arte L’urlo di Rosaria di Trapani, le sue opere sono state acquisite da cultori dell’arte in Europa e in sud America. https://urlodirosaria.wordpress.com/
#DylanDay 2018 in Kolkata, India – photo gallery
#DylanDay 2018 in Kolkata, India
Event Report
Rhythm Divine Poets celebrated the International Dylan Thomas Day, or Dylan Day as it is commonly referred to, in India for the first time this year. The event, which took place in the historical city of Kolkata, was held in the beautiful apartment of Professor Tathagata Sen of Bhawanipur Education Society College. It consisted of an academic discussion on Modernity and the poetry of Dylan Thomas by noted academicians, and a Dylan-inspired poetry reading session.
At the onset of the academic discussion, Dr. Shubhadeep Paul spoke on “Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan: Transtextual Interlacings & Creative Mistranslations”, thus looking at Dylan the poet AND Dylan, the man from the same vantage point. Dr. Sudeshna Chakravorti spoke about the Difference in Dylan Thomas’s Approach to Life and Art as opposed to the other modernists like Eliot, stressing on the importance of an ‘opposing’ or a different voice in societal or literary spaces. Prof. Aparna singh chose to speak on the Critical Reception of the works of Dylan Thomas, speaking of the critics who praised him, as well as the ones who wrote him off. This entire session of academic discussions was moderated by Ms. Sufia Khatoon.
A beautiful poetry reading session followed the formal talk. All the poems recited were influenced by the life and works of Dylan Thomas in some way or the other. For instance, Nikita Parik (Poet, and Chief Coordinator for this event in particular) created a repartee of ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death’ by fusing the death of the little girl in London with that of children in Kashmir. Sufia Khatoon read a poem on existences and the cycle of life and death, themes that are recurrent in the poetry of Dylan Thomas. The beautiful evening came to an end with the official release of Green is the Colour of Memory, a poetry anthology by Huzaifa Pandit, winner of the international Poetry Chapbook competition organised by Rhythm Divine Poets.
***
Rhythm Divine Poets is a poets’ group founded by three poets- Sufia Khatoon, Dr. Amit Shankar Saha and Anindita Bose.The poets of this group, from all over India as well as abroad, primarily share poems on a daily basis over Facebook and whatsapp groups, as well as curate literary events and festivals with the intention to serve poetry as a form of art as well as to use poetry for aesthetic, therapeutic and philanthropic purposes. They have organized poetry festivals and poetic gatherings at schools, colleges, universities, cafes, restaurants, NGOs, philanthropic groups, Embassies (American embassy, Russian Embassy, French Embassy,) Kolkata International Book Fair, Kolkata International Music Festival, and so on, with the aim of associating with all sectors of the society to make poetry reachable and loved.
– Nikita April
[Youth Coordinator- Rhythm Divine Poets]
#DYLANDAY in Torino, May 14 2018
Marina Rota speaks of Caitlin MacNamara Thomas
Maria Fiorenza Verde remembers Aeronwy Thomas
(photo credit: Claudio Chiabotti)
immaginepoesia 