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 The year-long commemoration has already inspired a new,
television version of Thomas's radio play "Under Milk Wood",
starring veteran singer Tom Jones, and an opera based on the
same work. A whole new dictionary of Thomas-style invented words
suggested by the public is also in the pipeline.
The Dylan Thomas 100 festival includes events across Wales -
some of them in the estuary-side village of Laugharne where he
and his wife Caitlin lived for 15 years - as well as in London
and New York, where the poet died in 1953, aged just 39.
Organizers of the festival, which took two years to plan, hope
it will bring Thomas's poetry to new readers, inspire a fresh
generation of artists and bring him the recognition in academic
circles that some say he has been unfairly denied.
They also hope to shift public attention away from Thomas's
complicated love life and alcohol-fuelled death and towards some
of the most-quoted verse in the English language.
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light," is one of his.
"I'm a bit sick of the public image of him as a person and a
poet and of the mythic qualities that have crystallized about
him and obscured his work," fellow Welsh poet Owen Sheers told
an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales last month.
Lleucu Siencyn, chief executive of Literature Wales, agrees the
centenary is a chance to "right some wrongs" and to show that
viewing Thomas as a "ne'er do well" misses the point.
Not that Thomas, who was born in the coastal city of Swansea in
south Wales on October 27, 1914, didn't enjoy a tipple.
Literature Wales has organized a series of literary tours of
places of significance in his life and work. One such is Brown's
Hotel in Laugharne, where his wife often had to come looking for
him and which this year has served a beer bearing his name.
Laugharne, overlooking the "sloeblack, slow, black, coalblack,
fishingboatbobbing" Taf estuary, some 220 miles (360 km) west of
London, is a locus for Dylan Thomas pilgrims and is where he
wrote many of his best-loved poems.
"SEISMIC" POETRY
He and Caitlin lived with their young family in three houses in
the town - most notably a damp boathouse beneath a castle.
Up on the cliff is Thomas's writing shed overlooking the estuary
and Sir John's Hill. A replica of the shed, on wheels, is
touring Welsh schools this year to challenge children to produce
their own creative works in response to Thomas's poetry.
[to top of second column] |
 Throughout the year, visitors to the "Pop-Up Writing Shed"
are being invited to invent new words, as Thomas did, for
inclusion in a new Dictionary for Dylan. @dylandictionary
Suggestions submitted at the Hay Festival included "honky ponky",
meaning sexual activity between geese.
Laugharne is also widely seen as the inspiration of the
imaginary town of Llareggub (read the name backwards for a taste
of the poet's mischievous wit) - the setting for "Under Milk
Wood", first broadcast in 1954 with Welsh actor Richard Burton.
The cast of the 2014 television version is a who's who of
internationally acclaimed Welsh talent, including actor Matthew Rhys
and singer Katherine Jenkins as well as Tom Jones.
New York, where "Under Milk Wood" was first read on stage and where
Thomas died during a fourth tour of the United States, is a focus of
an international program of events led by the British Council in
five countries as part of the centenary.
One New York highlight is a mass participation performance of
Thomas's "And death shall have no dominion", set to music by British
composer Pete Wyer. Performers, synchronized by a smartphone app,
will walk across the city and converge on Rockefeller Park for the
finale.
Sheers says one reason for Thomas's U.S. success was his mastery of
poetry as performance. "Howl" author Allen Ginsberg, one of the
leading Beat poets, met Thomas in New York in 1952.
Despite the popular appeal of Thomas's poetry, it is rarely studied
in British universities and, said Sheers, is studied in U.S.
colleges less than it used to be.
"He influenced a lot of interesting poets and he deserves to be
studied like anyone else," Sheers said. "Whatever you might think of
Dylan Thomas as a poet, he was a seismic event in English-language
poetry."
(Editing by Michael Roddy and Gareth Jones)
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