Over the last two decades Mike Jenkins has become synonymous with literature from Merthyr Tydfil, regularly drawing on his experiences in the area for inspiration in his numerous collections of poetry and short stories. A former Secondary School teacher, Mike has also become one of the key figures in Welsh writing; he is a previous winner of the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry and the Wales Book of the Year Award and is a co-founder of the annual Red Poets magazine. Mike writes regularly on his blog and frequently takes part in readings and open mic nights throughout South Wales.
In this interview Mike explains the reasons for the unusual title to his latest collection of poems and short stories, Barkin!, reflects on how art has influenced his work on this collection and why he was honoured to take part in a recent project designed to encourage primary school children to enjoy poetry.
Your new collection of poetry and short stories, Barkin! is available now, tell us a bit more about it:
It consists of poems and three stories written in Merthyr dialect over a period of about five years. Following on from my other books in dialect ‘Graffiti Narratives’ and ‘Coulda Bin Summin’ (both published by Planet), I have tried to develop the vernacular to bring it closer to the spoken word and therefore more phonetic.
Now that I am no longer a teacher in Merthyr, my contacts with the town and its people are through friends and my time on the streets, in the bus-station and in the shops of the town itself. Therefore, the focus of subject-matter has shifted largely to these experiences, though there are still poems inspired by the classroom, such as ‘All Poetree’s Gay’ and another based on a person I used to teach ‘In Memree of Toilet’.
Some of the poems and stories are derived directly from experience, such as ‘Itchcock’s Brother’, others use experience as a starting-point for an imaginative ‘take-off’ like ‘Ewman Advert’, while some are purely fictional , for example ‘A Big Party’.
I especially like the idea of taking widely differing viewpoints and also of creating very strange situations which are on the verge of being incredible, but could easily happen in a place like Merthyr.
I recall sending some dialect poems to a... shall we say... refined English literary magazine. In one poem I described a Social Worker head-butting a TV screen in a pub and the editor told me this was pure fantasy. He obviously hadn’t been to Merthyr!
Barkin! is certainly a very striking title, how did you choose it? More specifically, why did you decide to drop the ‘g’ from the end of the word?
The title seemed to sum up a great deal of the characters and predicaments in the book. It’s a word that could be used both as compliment and insult, depending on the context.
Mostly, it suggests people and situations which are crazy in an eccentric or idiosyncratic way, rather than those whose madness is dangerous to themselves or others.
Obviously, it’s not a specifically Merthyr word, yet it’s one that my good friend Andrew Bartz uses often. I got the idea for some of the poems from him, particularly ‘Owlin at-a Moon’ and the word reflects so much of the book, from the people in that pub to the ‘Posh Pirate’ and the character known as Dress-up Dave, who is the subject of two poems. The ‘g’ is left out simply because that’s the way it’s spoken here.
The cover is designed by Gus Payne (a Merthyr based artist who you have collaborated with before) and is a very arresting image, what can you tell us about the scene it depicts?
Gus (on his website ‘Michael Gustavius Payne’) and I collaborated on an exhibition called ‘Dim Gobaith Caneri’ which toured Wales in the last two years. The painting used on the cover is called ‘Blwyddyn o eira, blwyddyn o lawndra’ (year of snow, year of plenty) and was part of that exhibition.
It’s a very striking image of a thickset man who is kneeling down next to his dog, as feathers of snow fall. His face is open to the sky, body bent and arms making a ‘cross’. His dog is feeding from a bowl on the road, seemingly oblivious. The setting is a pavement and grass verge, with spiky fence behind and, in the background, a chapel-like building. To the right of the man is a tree, similarly bent.
The craziness of the man’s behaviour makes sense here, in a primitive homage to the forces of Nature. The irony is that the animal appears calmer and hardly stirred by what’s happening. Gus and I share a great deal. We both want to see the extraordinary in what others would call ‘ordinary’ lives.
I’m sure that ‘Barkin!’ has been influenced by his work. I try to let my imagination lift off and not to be tied to the limitations of social realism and there’s no doubt that Gus’s paintings do likewise, while still carrying strong political messages.
As with a number of your previous collections, you frequently make use of humour in Barkin!, why do you think humour is so important in telling the stories of the people depicted in the book?
I hope that ‘Barkin!’ has more humour in it than any of my previous collections and that the humour succeeds in making the characters and their tribulations all the more interesting.
It is very important to me, as laughter is both a form of release and enlightenment. To the people of a town which is one of the poorest and most maligned in the country, I believe it’s a weapon we use both to survive and as a protection against the attacks of others who don’t really understand (politicians like IDS, for instance, who urged Merthyr folk to ‘get on a bus’ to find work).
I’m not saying that Merthyr people are unique in this respect, but there is a working-class humour here, which relishes the bizarre and can be truly ‘barkin!’
There have been many ‘barkin’ characters as well, who have been accepted by the townspeople and one was the character Dezzy in my story ‘ Bus-station Clinic’. Humour often combines with tragedy and there is a very thin line between the two , as the life of the protagonist in this tale illustrates.
Most of the poems and stories in this collection, and your previous ones, are set in quite specific areas of Merthyr Tydfil, yet your work seems to garner significant attention from all areas of Wales and beyond, why do you think that is?
Since John Barnie ceased to be editor of ‘Planet’ the main literary magazines in Wales haven’t been at all interested in the dialect work.
However, these poems do seem to appeal to quite a range of people and this is maybe because they aren’t written in the formal English associated with poetry learnt at school, but the language of the streets.
Hopefully, the situations described have a universal appeal, such as the influences of junk food in ‘Ewman Advert’ and that of fundamentalist religion and its bigoted response to literature in ‘The On’y Way’.
You have written quite extensively about life in Merthyr over the last two decades and there seems to have been a significant increase in the amount of creative writing coming out of the area in that period. What do you think are the main reasons for this change?
Over the last four years (and with the encouragement of Gus Payne, in his other hat as Merthyr Arts Officer) I have organised monthly Open Mic. sessions at a pub. As well as local poets, we have a guest writer each time, who reads two sets.
There are some excellent Merthyr poets who have come along regularly, as well as others from the Valleys. I really hope that the Open Mic.’s have given them impetus both to create and perform their work. In Merthyr, there is a greater convergence of artistic talent, with artists like Gus and musicians like Jamie Bevan inspiring the writers.
I am also very encouraged by younger writers who are emerging, such as Jonathan Edwards, whose first book ‘My Family and other Superheroes’ is out from Seren next year. Jonathan is a teacher who writes about family and places and I feel a great affinity with his work. He is a native of Cross Keys in Gwent and a very promising new voice from the Valleys.
You recently spent time working on poetry with children in a primary school on the Gellideg estate in Merthyr, is that kind of project something which you would like to see more Welsh writers becoming involved in?
There are a lot of writers in Wales, such as Mab Jones, Mike Church and Patrick Jones, who are probably more involved than me in these kind of projects.
It was an honour to work with these children, who were so enthusiastic and creative and always tried to improve their work after listening to advice.
We need so much more of this happening throughout the country, but with the cuts to Council budgets, these are the kind of things which will inevitably suffer.
It’s invaluable, as children can discover a talent that teachers – because of the understandable pressures of the curriculum – may not have found.
I taught for over 30 years , mostly in Comprehensives, and one thing I did find was that, more often than not , imaginative ability (certainly in relation to poetry-writing) and so-called ‘intelligence’ didn’t tally.
Sadly, education is becoming more and more obsessed with what can be assessed and readily measured. Poetry, in particular, defies that. All the more reason why there should be more projects like the one I took part in.
Barkin! is available to buy here.
You can get in touch with Mike through his blog or follow him on Twitter.
For more information about the work of Gus Payne visit his website.
In this interview Mike explains the reasons for the unusual title to his latest collection of poems and short stories, Barkin!, reflects on how art has influenced his work on this collection and why he was honoured to take part in a recent project designed to encourage primary school children to enjoy poetry.
Your new collection of poetry and short stories, Barkin! is available now, tell us a bit more about it:
It consists of poems and three stories written in Merthyr dialect over a period of about five years. Following on from my other books in dialect ‘Graffiti Narratives’ and ‘Coulda Bin Summin’ (both published by Planet), I have tried to develop the vernacular to bring it closer to the spoken word and therefore more phonetic.
Now that I am no longer a teacher in Merthyr, my contacts with the town and its people are through friends and my time on the streets, in the bus-station and in the shops of the town itself. Therefore, the focus of subject-matter has shifted largely to these experiences, though there are still poems inspired by the classroom, such as ‘All Poetree’s Gay’ and another based on a person I used to teach ‘In Memree of Toilet’.
Some of the poems and stories are derived directly from experience, such as ‘Itchcock’s Brother’, others use experience as a starting-point for an imaginative ‘take-off’ like ‘Ewman Advert’, while some are purely fictional , for example ‘A Big Party’.
I especially like the idea of taking widely differing viewpoints and also of creating very strange situations which are on the verge of being incredible, but could easily happen in a place like Merthyr.
I recall sending some dialect poems to a... shall we say... refined English literary magazine. In one poem I described a Social Worker head-butting a TV screen in a pub and the editor told me this was pure fantasy. He obviously hadn’t been to Merthyr!
Barkin! is certainly a very striking title, how did you choose it? More specifically, why did you decide to drop the ‘g’ from the end of the word?
The title seemed to sum up a great deal of the characters and predicaments in the book. It’s a word that could be used both as compliment and insult, depending on the context.
Mostly, it suggests people and situations which are crazy in an eccentric or idiosyncratic way, rather than those whose madness is dangerous to themselves or others.
Obviously, it’s not a specifically Merthyr word, yet it’s one that my good friend Andrew Bartz uses often. I got the idea for some of the poems from him, particularly ‘Owlin at-a Moon’ and the word reflects so much of the book, from the people in that pub to the ‘Posh Pirate’ and the character known as Dress-up Dave, who is the subject of two poems. The ‘g’ is left out simply because that’s the way it’s spoken here.
The cover is designed by Gus Payne (a Merthyr based artist who you have collaborated with before) and is a very arresting image, what can you tell us about the scene it depicts?
Gus (on his website ‘Michael Gustavius Payne’) and I collaborated on an exhibition called ‘Dim Gobaith Caneri’ which toured Wales in the last two years. The painting used on the cover is called ‘Blwyddyn o eira, blwyddyn o lawndra’ (year of snow, year of plenty) and was part of that exhibition.
It’s a very striking image of a thickset man who is kneeling down next to his dog, as feathers of snow fall. His face is open to the sky, body bent and arms making a ‘cross’. His dog is feeding from a bowl on the road, seemingly oblivious. The setting is a pavement and grass verge, with spiky fence behind and, in the background, a chapel-like building. To the right of the man is a tree, similarly bent.
The craziness of the man’s behaviour makes sense here, in a primitive homage to the forces of Nature. The irony is that the animal appears calmer and hardly stirred by what’s happening. Gus and I share a great deal. We both want to see the extraordinary in what others would call ‘ordinary’ lives.
I’m sure that ‘Barkin!’ has been influenced by his work. I try to let my imagination lift off and not to be tied to the limitations of social realism and there’s no doubt that Gus’s paintings do likewise, while still carrying strong political messages.
As with a number of your previous collections, you frequently make use of humour in Barkin!, why do you think humour is so important in telling the stories of the people depicted in the book?
I hope that ‘Barkin!’ has more humour in it than any of my previous collections and that the humour succeeds in making the characters and their tribulations all the more interesting.
It is very important to me, as laughter is both a form of release and enlightenment. To the people of a town which is one of the poorest and most maligned in the country, I believe it’s a weapon we use both to survive and as a protection against the attacks of others who don’t really understand (politicians like IDS, for instance, who urged Merthyr folk to ‘get on a bus’ to find work).
I’m not saying that Merthyr people are unique in this respect, but there is a working-class humour here, which relishes the bizarre and can be truly ‘barkin!’
There have been many ‘barkin’ characters as well, who have been accepted by the townspeople and one was the character Dezzy in my story ‘ Bus-station Clinic’. Humour often combines with tragedy and there is a very thin line between the two , as the life of the protagonist in this tale illustrates.
Most of the poems and stories in this collection, and your previous ones, are set in quite specific areas of Merthyr Tydfil, yet your work seems to garner significant attention from all areas of Wales and beyond, why do you think that is?
Since John Barnie ceased to be editor of ‘Planet’ the main literary magazines in Wales haven’t been at all interested in the dialect work.
However, these poems do seem to appeal to quite a range of people and this is maybe because they aren’t written in the formal English associated with poetry learnt at school, but the language of the streets.
Hopefully, the situations described have a universal appeal, such as the influences of junk food in ‘Ewman Advert’ and that of fundamentalist religion and its bigoted response to literature in ‘The On’y Way’.
You have written quite extensively about life in Merthyr over the last two decades and there seems to have been a significant increase in the amount of creative writing coming out of the area in that period. What do you think are the main reasons for this change?
Over the last four years (and with the encouragement of Gus Payne, in his other hat as Merthyr Arts Officer) I have organised monthly Open Mic. sessions at a pub. As well as local poets, we have a guest writer each time, who reads two sets.
There are some excellent Merthyr poets who have come along regularly, as well as others from the Valleys. I really hope that the Open Mic.’s have given them impetus both to create and perform their work. In Merthyr, there is a greater convergence of artistic talent, with artists like Gus and musicians like Jamie Bevan inspiring the writers.
I am also very encouraged by younger writers who are emerging, such as Jonathan Edwards, whose first book ‘My Family and other Superheroes’ is out from Seren next year. Jonathan is a teacher who writes about family and places and I feel a great affinity with his work. He is a native of Cross Keys in Gwent and a very promising new voice from the Valleys.
You recently spent time working on poetry with children in a primary school on the Gellideg estate in Merthyr, is that kind of project something which you would like to see more Welsh writers becoming involved in?
There are a lot of writers in Wales, such as Mab Jones, Mike Church and Patrick Jones, who are probably more involved than me in these kind of projects.
It was an honour to work with these children, who were so enthusiastic and creative and always tried to improve their work after listening to advice.
We need so much more of this happening throughout the country, but with the cuts to Council budgets, these are the kind of things which will inevitably suffer.
It’s invaluable, as children can discover a talent that teachers – because of the understandable pressures of the curriculum – may not have found.
I taught for over 30 years , mostly in Comprehensives, and one thing I did find was that, more often than not , imaginative ability (certainly in relation to poetry-writing) and so-called ‘intelligence’ didn’t tally.
Sadly, education is becoming more and more obsessed with what can be assessed and readily measured. Poetry, in particular, defies that. All the more reason why there should be more projects like the one I took part in.
Barkin! is available to buy here.
You can get in touch with Mike through his blog or follow him on Twitter.
For more information about the work of Gus Payne visit his website.