Celebrate Dylan Thomas Day With Nailed
May 14th is officially Dylan Thomas Day.
It commemorates his life and work and is the 65th anniversary of Dylan Thomas’s first performance of “Under Milk Wood” in New York. “Under Milk Wood,” Dylan Thomas’s play about life in a small fishing village in Wales, was commissioned by the BBC and is a comic & literary masterpiece.
“A Dylan Thomas Treasury,” Dent 1991 & Phoenix (Orion Books Ltd) 2014 contains other work by Dylan Thomas broadcast by the BBC including “The Festival Exhibition” (1951) about the Festival Of Britain Exhibition on the South Bank, London (which Crich Lane Gardens commemorates); “Holiday Memory” about August Bank holiday by the seaside; “A Visit to America” about literary life; and “Return Journey” a moving play for voices about returning to his home town after the Second World War.
Do you have a favourite line by Dylan Thomas and/or has his work inspired you to poetry?
Perhaps you could send your poem or favourite line to Nailed for Dylan Thomas Day.
My favourite line from “Fern Hill” is “the rivers of the windfall light.”
National Poetry Day this year is on the theme of “change,” so why not pen an ode – you have until Thursday 4 October.
Perhaps you have something to say about the changes which could be brought about by Brexit or some positive change in your life which has inspired you to put your thoughts into verse?
Happy writing.
Its the 65th anniversary of the first performance of “Under Milk Wood” in New York (not the 55th) as the performance was on May 14 1953. Apologies for the error.
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
Especially when spoken by Richard Burton.
The New York radio performance is available via the Internet Archive:
Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood 1953 “A play for voices”.
“In its earlier stages entitled Llareggub, a Piece for Radio. The first section was performed at the YMHA in New York City in 1953, with Thomas himself reading parts of it”.
https://archive.org/details/DylanThomasUnderMilkWood1953