Professor David Peimer
Dylan Thomas: Great Poet or Overrated Alcoholic Wordsmith ?
Summary
By delving into his poems, partly in relation to his life, we will debate whether Dylan Thomas was a ‘serious’ poet or, as Graves and others claimed, not. We will also ask why he resonates so strongly today around the world.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
No, I just, one of my lecturers when I studied at Columbia, used to say, “Originality is merely lack of information.” And he used to talk about how everybody steals from everybody else. And it’s a playful, metaphorical idea of everybody builds on other poets, everybody borrows, steals, adapts from what has gone before. The classic Homer’s “Odyssey,” James Joyce, “Ulysses,” you know. Everybody borrows, adapt, steals, but the trick is how to make it something of their own. And that’s for me, an imaginative intelligence. They’re not just repeating or echoing. They’re able to take it a whole step further, you know.
Well, his father being an English teacher, taught him a lot, and as I said, he left school at the age of 16. So it was through his father. And you know, his mother was a seamstress, but his father loved, and his parents loved reading rhymes, children’s rhymes to him, and the rest I think, he taught himself. That’s it.