Cynghanedd experiment with Literature Wales

Last spring I was invited to participate in an incredibly special project that involved taking—alongside a handful of poets from all over the world—a crash course in the Welsh Cynghanedd, an incredibly complex sound-echo grammar (!) with a long and storied tradition in Wales. After the course, we each contributed an original poem, adapting some of the Cynghanedd's principles. You can see and hear my contribution, “Into the Air (Spring)” here.

I've been thinking so much lately about that William Carlos Williams quote "A new music is a new mind." I'd been on the hunt for my new music, post-Judas Goat, and experimenting with principles of Cynghanedd helped me catch a scent I'm continuing to track in the work I'm writing now.

Cynghanedd can never be *exactly* applied to any language but Welsh, but it felt incredibly rewarding and challenging to attempt to map some of its complicated sound-chain-grammars into a poem in English. The way I approached it for my piece was, essentially, to take all the consonant sounds in the first half of each line and then repeat those consonant sounds, in order, for the second half of the line, using different vowels between them to create different words. Doing this and making any sort of semantic or syntactic sense was a puzzle that prodded me to life at a time when I felt in danger of slipping away entirely under the fog of a severe depression and fairly debilitating neck pain last spring. As a poet I'm not typically energized by received forms in composition, but the elaborate constraints I adapted for this project felt more organic—Cynghanedd is not a received form, after all, but a kind of syntax.

All the pieces from this experiment are now featured on the Literature Wales website, under the project title "Cerdd Tafod Arall | Music of Another Tongue," thanks to Hanan Issa, National Poet of Wales, who has become beloved to me for her remarkable warmth and care in stewardship.