Title
‘Advice on Adultery’ is from the sequence ‘Welsh Espionage’, in Gwyneth Lewis’s first English-language collection, Parables and Faxes (1995). The title seems to have a confessional ring, appearing to promise frank advice derived from lived experience, in the manner of an agony aunt or uncle. Importantly, however, Gwyneth Lewis has refuted the label of the ‘confessional’ writer. She is perhaps more interested in the processes by which we construct and ‘put on’ a sense of identity, through the language(s) we use.
We might also notice the title’s wittily (wickedly) double meaning: on the one hand, it appears to offer a moral warning about adultery, but read another way, it promises advice on how to commit adultery. The poem, of course, plays with both meanings, refusing to offer a single standpoint of moral authority.
‘Parables’; ‘Espionage’; these words resonate with the themes of doubleness and deception that permeate Lewis’s writing. The critic Alice Entwhistle sees treachery as a keynote of Lewis’s poetics, a motif that she connects to Lewis’s bilingualism.[1] Lewis has explicitly figured her bilingualism in terms of betrayal, stating in an interview that it is ‘still regarded in some quarters as a betrayal of the Welsh language’.[2] Significantly, she surmounted this problem by embracing a kind of ‘double life’, as a poet who writes in both languages. This poem, then, looks at how standards of behaviour and morality (particularly those relating to gender and sexuality) are constructed through language. It also explores the hazards, tensions, and pleasures that are generated when you move between different linguistic worlds.
Form
The form of this poem is more complex than might initially appear. It is arranged, wittily enough given the subject matter, in six-line stanzas (sestets). Written mostly in free verse, it also makes use of iambic pentameter. Together with the regular use of enjambment, this serves to approximate the rhythms of the speaking voice. The influence of traditional Welsh strict-metre poetry can also be seen in the poem’s frequent use of alliteration and sound correspondences, which often link the first and second parts of the lines. The stanzas, too, are linked to each other by repetition: the final words of each line are the same in each stanza, although they are presented in a different order each time. In this way, the poem calls attention to its own craftsmanship and artifice – an artifice that mirrors the deception and play-acting of the characters in the text.
[1] Alice Entwhistle, Poetry, Geography, Gender: Women Re-writing Contemporary Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), p. 96.
[2] Gwyneth Lewis, interview with Alice Entwhistle (unpublished, November 2006).
Critic Katie Gramich has commented on Gwyneth Lewis’s ‘formidable technical dexterity’ and ‘apparently unlimited metaphorical scope’, and these qualities are clearly evident in this poem.[1] Lewis has frequently expressed the condition of being a bilingual poet in terms of adultery, writing in her preface to Keeping Mum (2003) that ‘it’s a difficult domestic arrangement, but it holds’.[2] She characterises her use of English words as something thrilling and illicit, accompanied by a lingering sense that she has betrayed her ‘mother tongue’. ‘Advice on Adultery’ explores these tensions, without (contrary to what the title might imply) trying to resolve them. As the title of the collection from which the poem is taken, Parables and Faxes, suggests, Gwyneth Lewis is a poet attuned to the modern world. Grounded in the mundane realities of office life, ‘Advice on Adultery’ is rather prescient, anticipating the flurry of gossip and opinion that is a feature of life in the internet age. Yet it also draws upon Lewis’s interest – stemming from her doctoral work on eighteenth-century forgery – in questions of authenticity in poetry, and the slipperiness of meaning and identity as expressed in language. This poem finds joy and creativity in language’s duplicitousness, as well as the ‘duplicity’ of the (bilingual) writer. The play of different voices and perspectives points to Lewis’s sense of ‘[t]he friction, fluidity, cacophony, and subversive impulse of bilingual poetry’.[3]
[1] Katie Gramich, ‘“The Shapes She Makes”: Contemporary Welsh Women Poets’, The Poetry Ireland Review, 62 (1999), 68–74 (p. 70).
[2] Gwyneth Lewis, Preface to Keeping Mum (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2003), p. 9.
[3] Laura Pfeffer, ‘Challenging Tongues: ‘The “Irreducible Hybridity” of Language in Contemporary Bilingual Poetry’, Synthesis, 4 (2012), 149–167 (p. 149).