The Size of Wales: differénce, exchange value, storytelling
Edward’s poem ‘The Size of Wales’ was first published in Poetry Review, as well as in his chapbook Swarming and the journal Domestic Cherry. It has been exhibited as a largescale concrete poem as part of the Swindon Festival of Poetry and published as a signed limited edition*. Here he reflects on the narrative themes of this work.
I wrote ‘The Size of Wales’ during the period I was working to introduce narrative mediation to the conflict-resolution charity I was running at the time - and in a roundabout way, it’s a meditation on some of the central themes of narrative theory, though I’m not sure I conceived of it like that as I was writing it. It was a really fun thing to create - starting out as a list poem, and then, by dint of subject matter, rather obviously suggesting the physical form on the page.
Anyone who has spent time in the UK has heard the phrase ‘the size of Wales’, widely used as a measurement to give a sense of the scale of very large things. It’s a common trope in news reports and other media. I understand that in the US both Rhode Island and New Jersey are used in a similar way.
Every item in the list either is (roughly) the size of Wales, or could be found in print being claimed as such, even if highly inaccurately. At the height of the War in Afghanistan, Helmand Province, a site of intense and often bloody fighting, was regularly described in the news as being ‘roughly the size of Wales’ despite being just shy of three times the size. It seemed useful to knowingly include these inaccuracies because the idea of ‘the size of Wales’ was so much more potent a social artefact than the mundane actuality of 20,779 square km or 8,023 square miles.
Two closely allied narrative and material ideas came together for me as I pieced the poem together. The slippery idea from Jacques Derrida of ‘différance’ - our ability to know something through comparison, not by what it shares, but by what it eludes, even as we get hold of the thing through comparison. Polly and I have written elsewhere about artist Hetain Patel’s performance ‘Who Am I? Think Again’ which includes his tracing of his own ‘becoming’ through a process of storied imitation: as a child he tried to become his father - and partly failed, tried to become Spiderman - and partly failed. This part-failure is the process by which an absent self becomes: it’s an evolutionary and a dialectical idea that suggests that what we antiessentialist selves are is the slippage in the cultural and intentional reproduction. This analogy is what creates the drama of this list of things which we know (at least while we read the poem) as being ‘the size of Wales’ but whose identity is found in the way they evade, the way they are resiliently not Wales.
And this, in turn, suggested the material process begetting a habit of mind that Karl Marx identified as ‘exchange value’ - the generation of value for a commodity, through a social reckoning to make it commensurate with a quantity of another commodity. It’s another way of knowing something not in-itself, or for-itself but in a relation - a fundamental operational illusion of capitalism. This seems a useful way to think about identity as a storied phenomenon - elusive, un-pin-downable, tragically alienated. Something socially potent, but not straightforwardly real.
In this way, the poem tries to operate as a collision between the stories we tell about a thing (in this case Wales) and the concrete, material reality of the thing evoked in the final phrases. It’s a poem in one sense ‘about’ Wales in which Wales is (mostly) absent - even as the very words assume the shape of the territory. I wanted to create a materialist poetic in the spirit of the story that Boswell tells of Samuel Johnson contemplating Bishop Berkley’s idealism:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Boswell and Johnson aid the materialist case very strongly, but the story has wit and force which, I hope, the poem somewhat emulates.
* The last few copies are still available - if you’re interested in purchasing one, please get in touch!
