Some Thoughts on Returning Home from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC American. American't. AmeriCAN. Before I went to America, playing with the word itself was a favourite sub-sub-hobby of mine.
Americamp (to describe an effeminate US native). Americrass (their version of toilet humour). Americrap (my opinion of most schmaltzy Hollywood films).
As you will notice, most of these descriptive hybrids were negative. The positive side of any culture is maybe more difficult to see from a distance: or, perhaps I tend towards a more cynical viewpoint...Either way, America to me was the new imperialist, replacing England as world leader, and little old Wales was even littler as a result. I, personally, don't like being a little fish in a little pond. I wanna be a shark, baby!
I was mightily pleased, then, to be picked to represent Wales at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC. A comic-political poet such as myself ain't the most likely of choices. But, they wanted “diversity”, I guess, and diversity is what they most definitely got. Gillian Clarke, as national poet, was first on the plane (so to speak) and her poems are undoubtedly very eloquent – if made into human form, they would be a fair-yet-witchlike Welsh maid singing sadness and joy from atop a fern-clad mountain. Mine would be a chub-cheeked Cardiff scrag smoking a self- made rollie and screeching an anti-upper class diatribe through a vocal pipe as raw and ragged as a just-ripped fingernail.
Actually, the poems I wrote (especially) for the festival were (shock!) family-friendly. But, you get my drift.
Luckily, there is a great liking for, and history of, political humour in DC. It's the capital, after all, and Americans, I found, do possess a sense of the absurd. On the fourth of July – Independence Day – for example, there was a celebratory extravaganza featuring both Obama and Big Bird, on the same stage/bill (Big Bird was the headliner, of course). During some, longer, sessions performing on my own, I read a (comic!) poem about the end of the world (ha ha), and was pleased to find the audience laughing at the undoubtedly dark humour of the piece. Satire, irony, and surrealism are also well within the grasp of an American audience. Not that I had thought otherwise – people are people wherever you go, and some of my fave writers are “dumb yanks” - but, the stereotype exists, and floated around in my mind as I worried over which poems to take with me.
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