Greetings!
As I sit down to write this, casting through a million disconnected thoughts, I wonder, how should I introduce this issue? Introduce the writers, or a theme, or blab about history, politics, and the future?
I think these are all the same thing.
You will find in these pages a mix of genres and moods from indignant, to lyrical, to bizarre. These are energetic pieces that rummage restlessly in the mind; they deal in dire and enigmatic futures. There are strange nuns and talking bunnies and a Catholic childhood.
We at the Whiskey Tit Journal were also lucky to be interviewed by the Sapling Substack newsletter, put out by our friends at Black Lawrence Press. Sapling interviews an independent small press writer or journal editor each week and alerts readers to upcoming publishing opportunities in the small press universe.
I just returned from two weeks at a writer’s workshop in Wales and have been thinking about language, about poetry as art and as culture, and about colonialism. In Wales, poetry is still a part of the culture. Thousands gather each year to witness the selection and crowning of the Arch Druid, whom I met, and the crowning of the Bard.
Wales is an Old English name that means ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’. The Welsh call their country Cymru, which means ‘fellow countryman’ or ‘compatriot’. I like the word ‘comrade’.
The Welsh language is a Celtic language, closely related to Cornish and Bretagne, and it was the Celts who were Druids. The role of poet was extremely important in Welsh courts—there was no unified kingdom of Wales—for poets had the power of life and death in their words. The Romans destroyed the Druids of Wales in a last stand on the isle of Anglesey in 77 CE, but they did not destroy the Welsh language or culture.
Edward the First, at the end of the 13th century, subjected the country to English rule, and Henry the 8th completed the process when he incorporated Wales into Great Brittain. It was Henry who banned the Welsh language from use in official documents and proceedings, and in the 19th and 20th centuries England did everything it could to eradicate the Welsh language from common use, and thereby eradicate Welsh culture. It failed. They never eradicated Welsh. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries a revival and recovery of Welsh culture began, both a rediscovery and invention of the Welsh poetic tradition. By the 1960s, and then increasingly over the ensuing decades the Welsh reclaimed their language and history. The Welsh language is the banner of rebellion and nationalism, the vehicle of revolutionary thought. Poets and writers are essential to the movement. Poets and writers were and are leaders in the restoration of Cymru.
The attack on language is a common tool of colonialists everywhere. In the US, Canada, and Australia, governments tried and often succeeded in exterminating indigenous languages, and thus the history and culture of peoples. Today, in our globalized, mediated world, the Tech Lords and Media Barons are the colonialists, and they are attacking our language. The media has narrowed the parameters of art to what is most profitable. Federal, state and local governments are attacking academic freedom and first amendment rights, to erase our history. What we are experiencing is a war on thought. There is a turning away from writing that is difficult, obscure, emotional. Writing that has a reason to be, that is witty, or sly. But the true target is the value of thought itself, the idea that art, that community, are values beyond profit. At Whiskey Tit Journal, we defend and protect that target as though our lives and our civilization depended on it—which, of course, they do.