Here’s one I prepared earlier…and earlier…

At this stage, I’d love to share an early draft of a new Canterbury tale with innovative use of setting; be as brave as Jay Bernard sharing a raw longhand manuscript embroidered with colourful notes and corrections. But I’m still at the thinking stage and still plucking up the courage to share a first draft with the world when it eventually arrives. So here’s one I prepared earlier, The Wife of Bafa.

The poem was a long time coming. It was conceived in an A’level classroom in Colwyn Bay 28 years ago. I lived five minutes from the sea and firmly believe that winter walks along the prom, with waves crashing on the sea road, helped channel my teenage angst into gritty poetry. (I regularly brainstorm in the shower – water clearly inspires me). I first encountered Chaucer’s General Prologue and fell for his irony and the flamboyant, three-dimensional Wife of Bath. My English teacher set us homework to write a character sketch in the style of Chaucer. I got my only ‘A’ and subsequently wrote a General Prologue to the Colwyn Bay Tales. It’s a sequence of portraits of mods, rockers, New Romantics and scooter boys. So here’s one I prepared even earlier:

The Prologue whetted my appetite. I vowed that one day I’d do justice to the Wife of Bath’s character. I finally wrote the piece ten years ago, my first attempt at a dramatic monologue. A dramatic monologue is first-person poem that reveals the character’s own psychology and the dramatic situation. Once I decided to make her Nigerian, I let her character take over and paid little attention to the dramatic situation. I never set out to make her sell something to her audience. Yet there she was, stepping out of the page trying to sell cloth by line 6! It’s later been suggested I was inspired by the end of The Pardoner’s Tale when he tries to sell fake pardons to his fellow pilgrims. As this was another A’level text it must have influenced me subliminally. I’ve written an analysis of The Wife Of Bafa, but at the end of the day, readers and listeners will always find more meanings than I ever imagined…