tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54469657032468581032024-03-14T15:59:49.832+00:00Peter FinchPeter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.comBlogger174125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-36056227456847846762017-09-12T10:01:00.000+01:002017-09-12T10:07:21.417+01:00These Things Are Like Buses<div class="MsoNormal">
Poems come to me in batches, like buses. You’d think that after all these years I
would have learned how to turn the taps of creativity to make them spread
themselves out like real work, like a job, a 9 to 5. Get up, write the poem, then get on with
other parts of your life. But poems are not really like that like
that. All too often they come in darts
and crashes with gaps as long as a country mile in between.<br />
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When I edited a literary magazine I regularly chased the
late Dannie Abse for a contribution. He
was from Cardiff originally and strode large on the UK literary stage. As a fan of Cardiff City football club he
regularly returned to the Welsh capital and was well disposed to what I was
trying to do with Second Aeon. He’d
suggest people I could ask, commented on the quality of what I’d already
included and generally enthused. But when
I asked him to contribute a poem of his own he always found some excuse for not
doing so. “I’ll send you some at the end
of the summer”. But he never did.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Eventually I cornered him at a launch at Lears bookshop at
the end of the Royal Arcade and he admitted that as poets go he was an
incredibly slow composer and simply didn’t produce enough new material. Demand always outstripped supply. “I’ll try”, he said. After the passage of what had to be a good
six months he finally gave me <i>The One
Prayer, </i>a poem about god and that perennial for poets, death. I included it in issue 16. Dannie Abse at last in there, in the company
of William Burroughs, John Ormond, William Wantling, Edwin Morgan and Pablo
Neruda. It was an eclectic mix.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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I used to worry about my own output. Was I writing enough? Why hadn’t I manage a new piece this
week. In the days of the weekly
performance poetry explosions in Cardiff during the 1980s this need for a
regular supply of new material became acute.
The stage was such a critical place.
If you were on it with any regularity then reciting your greatest hits
simply wouldn’t hack it. Your audience
expected to be constantly entertained anew and not simply given reruns of stuff
they’d already heard. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’d sit in my room banging hard the keyboard of my Alan
Sugar Amstrad for hour after hour in the
hope that something worthy would eventually emerge. Occasionally it did, too but what a stretch
of dross lay in between. The key is to
own an Ernest Hemingway built-in, shock-proof, shit-detector. Shove everything into it and expect most of
it never to re-emerge.<o:p></o:p></div>
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These days now that the world’s poetry fury has subsided and
to a degree I have less to prove I worry less.
If the page is blank and there’s nothing arriving to fill it then I move
on to something else.
Psychogeography. Essays about
music. Reviews of new books. Blogs about the NHS. Cleaning the car. Rebuilding that falling down wall.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There are plenty of techniques for making yourself write
when you don’t want to or don’t think that day you have anything significant to
say. They should be used with care. My view is that the world is now oversupplied
with poetry. Production has been on the
increase steadily since Victorian-era publishing for the masses brought verse
to the wider world. What we don’t need
this morning is yet another new volume that will languish on the bookshop shelves
unsold, unselling, unlooked at until stock check stock clearance consigns it
first to the bargain bin and then the pulpers.
Who reads this stuff? Admittedly more
now than did decades back but never enough for the bestsellers. Verse remains a Cinderella art.<o:p></o:p></div>
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How many digital copies of your latest book of shouting
poetry have actually been downloaded? Does your poetry-filled blog get consumed
by thousands of fans? Probably not. And while we are on the subject why does
everyone interested in poetry also seem to write it? I paint a dark picture. The poetry world is
often brighter than this. <o:p></o:p></div>
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If you are sitting there and want to poem to come but it
won’t you could try automatic writing. You
could cut up some great work and see where the joy of random discovery will
take you. Will the banging together of
words and phrases that previously never sat anywhere near each other now draw
fruit? If not then you could try
intertextuality, the taking of the work of another and using it as the base for
something of your own. The problem here is
ensuring that what eventually emerges is your own and not simply a retread. Many poets including some of the famous have
run foul dabbling here.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Failing everything then a walk in the stiff air and a look
at the shape of the clouds is often enough to set the spark flaring.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I sometimes revisit my earlier books, the ones that are more
than 20 years old and lost to me now back in the swirls of time and wonder how on
earth I ever composed like that. Did
those things happen? How did they? What motivated me? Was it all a fluke? How could I ever do this again? I puzzle.
I worry. Then after a while I
don’t. Instead I look out the window at
those clouds, still up there in glory, moving, not moving, full of colour, all
dark, all white. <o:p></o:p></div>
Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-81354862023987424562015-10-07T16:22:00.003+01:002015-10-07T16:22:50.945+01:00Roots Of Rock, Almost ThereWe are beyond the cover design, the proofs, the index, the acknowledgements, the changes and the re-checks. It's now down to arguing about colours. It'll be out soon. <br />
<br />
You can read a bit more here:<br />
<br />
https://rootsofrock.wordpress.com/<br />
<br />
The Roots of Rock - Peter Finch's journeys in the world of music - complete with playlists. Rock on.Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-341351721319123932015-06-12T11:24:00.000+01:002015-07-03T11:18:19.121+01:00The Stetson And Other Signs That You Are In The Country<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m outside the twin-domed front of the Gaiety cinema on
City Road. I’ve got a mackintosh over my back like a western cape and a stick
for a gun shoved inside my elastic s-buckle belt. Near as I can get to a fifties cowboy. I’ve got friends with me, a whole gang of
them. It’s Saturday mid-day and we’ve
just emerged from a few hours of bliss watching episodes of Flash Gordon,
Laurel and Hardy and a full B-movie western.
Today it was Cody of the Pony express in his buckskin jacket riding the
range and vanquishing all foes with a brace of six-shooters. The mail, even out there in the arrow-filled
desert wilds, just had to get through. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back at Peter Hughes’ house the only television in the
entire district sat like a religious relic.
It was encased in walnut and
revered by all. Before it we clustered. On the black and white 405-line screen
Hopalong flickered. Black Stetson,
silver studded belt. There were others
too. Gene Autry, the singing cowboy,
unexpectedly breaking into <i>Back in the
Saddle Again</i> while wearing an
embroidered shirt with smiling mouth pockets and mother of pearl buttons. Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys, in a Stetson
and red bandana, galloping Trigger to the tune of <i>Happy Trails</i> or <i>Cool
Water. </i> There was something here, subliminally, about
gun smoke and western songs, about the rhythm of horses hoofs and the thrumming
of guitars, about Stetsons and country music.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Western dress, de rigueur in the actual west, rarely
surfaced in British fashion. There were
moments when cowboy boots, in particular cowboy boots for women, would be
acceptable, even sexily racy. For a time
they were a feature on London’s Kings Road.
But these moments were not many.
Elements of western dress, in particular the bolo or shoe-string tie, moved
as if by osmosis into the dress of teddy boys.
There were also times when fringes hanging down from the arms of your
massively round-collared leather jacket in the hippie seventies recalled the
kind of thing Indians habitually wore, or so the films said. But if you wanted to see what cowboys dressed
in then you needed to visit the places where they roamed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Stetson hat, which would make you look a little like
Crocodile Dundee if you wore one on the streets of New York is common
throughout the south. It’s the big
signal of western wear, this large, broad-brimmed, and certainly not inexpensive headpiece. Once thought to have been the hat of choice
throughout the west during its wilder days, study of old photographs shows this
to be entirely untrue. If you were on
the frontier as a pioneer in the first part of the nineteenth century then you
were far more likely to be seen wearing a black derby bowler hat of the kind
regularly seen on the streets of London than you were some wide-brimmed
sombrero. Despite Frederick Remmington,
populariser of the image of the wild west in paintings and a whole host of Hollywood
films, the Stetson did not make an appearance until around 1870. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Its creator, John Batterson Stetson, himself the son of a
hat maker, came up with the design for the first “boss of the plains” hat in
1865. This had a wide brim to keep off
the rain and sun, a high crown to hold in a pocket of insulating air and could,
at a push, be used to carry water. They
were great for fanning recalcitrant trail side camp fires. A version was adopted by the US Cavalry and
the hat style took off right across the whole cowboy west. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sharp shooters adopted it.
So did sheriffs and just about everybody else with business attended to
from the back of a horse. When the
movies finally arrived they depicted a western population where the Stetson, in
both its black and its white incarnation, was what you had on your head. Some stars adopted wilder styles, innovating
with the super-large ten gallon version, fine on celluloid, impractical on the
plains. There’s a photo out there of Tom
Mix wearing one that’s taller than his face.
There’s another showing Gene Autry plus police escort leaving the
Cardiff Capitol Cinema in 1939. He has
on his head a white ten gallon. He looks
more of a cowpoke than Cowboy Copas.
Copas stuck to a flat topped Stetson.
But he did go for enormously wide brims.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, too, did most of the other singers in the emerging
country and western style of music.
Didn’t matter if you were a steel guitar player with a western swing
band, a mainstream Nashville country singer in the style of Eddy Arnold, an outlaw like Waylon, a man in
black or a Dwight Yokham Americana purveyor you wore a hat. Alan Jackson, George Straight, Clint Black,
Brad Paisley, Garth Brooks and other mainline 80s and 90s singers all did and
became known as hat acts. Man, guitar,
and Stetson. The style of dress
persists. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Turning the supermarket aisle corner in Food City in 2014
Dandridge, Tennessee, a sleepy tiny town on the edges of Douglas Lake, I bump
into an oldster coming the other way.
He’s pushing a trolley loaded with pensioners’ goods – cheap meat cuts,
packets of grits, large cans of beans.
He’s wearing cowboy boots, western jeans, a shirt with smiling pockets
and black piping. On his head he has a
white Stetson hat. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Country music, or at least its stage and TV appearance
component, was the driver behind much of present-day western apparel. Right across America there are stores that
specialise in retailing hats, massively expensive tooled leather cowboy boots,
embroidered shirts, ranch buckle belts, string
ties and the rest of the regalia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The original cowboys dressed as they did for practical
reasons. Their hats kept off the
sun. They were tied to their chins with
strips of leather or ripped-off hat bands.
Their brims were decorated with Indian beads, woven horsehair or
rattlesnake hides. Their boots could
slide easily into the stirrup. The high
Cuban heel prevented them from slipping out.
The tall laceless style of the boot protected the leg. Shorter versions with cut-down walking heels
came later. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Cowboy’s denim
shirts, derived from the sort worn by Confederate soldiers, lasted well in a
difficult climate. They wore leather
chaps to keep off the cactus spines or woollen ones as a hedge against cold
wind. Round their neck they wore a
bandana to stave off dust. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Early cinema cowboys
and country singers took the style and elaborated it. Boots became increasingly ostentatious and
were manufactured from alligator and rattlesnake skin or coloured highly
decorated leather. Shirts were tailored
with contrasting yokes often outlined in piping and began to be embroidered
with cattle insignia, stars and entwining roses. Colour, which the real cowboys avoided for
fear it might spook the cattle, rolled like a rash of rainbows. Stripes, plaids, garish checks, bright
greens, blues and reds. John Wayne, as the Ringo Kid in the film <i>Stagecoach</i> (1939), wore a bib fronted Western shirt in a style
adapted from those worn in the Civil War.
Casey Tibbs, the bronco rider, did the same. In 1938 Denver shirt maker Jack A Weil replaced
standard buttons with a metal ring
gripper snap made by Scovill of Connecticut.
The C&W shirt popper button. The
style caught on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For many outside country music’s heartlands western apparel
meant nothing until the advent of country rock and the arrival of The Byrd’s <i>Sweetheart of the Rodeo </i>(1968) and, in
particular, the Flying Burrito Brothers’ album, <i> Gilded Palace of Sin </i>(1969).<i> </i>Here,
on the album cover of the Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman show stopper, the band
sport lavishly embroidered Nudie suits.
These show roses intertwined with marijuana leaves which added a whole new
dimension to the style of alt-country that this album was to launch. There might not have been an immediate rush
to appear on the streets of cities across the world dressed as country stars
but the style of dress did become socially more acceptable. Just a little. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Today western dress does duty in many parts of America’s Southern
States as formal wear. You dress in your alligator boots and your
bolo tie to worship at church, sell insurance, go for a job interview, attend a
funeral. The style is so common no one
notices. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I track the outfit I’m going to buy down in a store in
Pigeon Forge. Boots, shirt, jacket. There’s a range of footwear that runs two
entire fifty meter walls. Boots in just
about every colour and style possible so long as they’re cowboy. Levi jeans, tooled leather belts with
elaborate decorated silver buckles.
Chaps seem to be missing which is understandable. Urban cowboys do not look cool turning up
wearing what look like giant fleece waders on their lower limbs. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I try on a hat, a black wide-brimmed outlaw headpiece with a
deep red hatband of the kind I imagine law breakers might sport in their desert
hideaways in New Mexico. It fits but I
look ridiculous, even here in the heartland.
A Welsh-accented cowpoke with a face that lacks both beard and weather-beaten
gnarls. How it would be walking down St
Mary Street back home I just can’t imagine.
I settle for a shirt with green and red roses intertwining across the
yoke and those famous metal popper buttons.
It’s heavy, tailored, and perfect
for strolling down Nashville’s Broadway.
I love it. It’s on a hanger now
in the back bedroom wardrobe. Preserved
in a plastic bag. Never worn it once. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>This is an edited <a href="http://peterfinchpoet.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/deeper-and-deeper-into-roath.html">slice</a> taken from the forthcoming </i>Peter Finch: The Roots Of Rock From Cardiff To Mississippi And Back<i>, due for publication from Seren Books in the autumn of 2015.</i></span></div>
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Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-67990440757858637312015-04-28T16:29:00.002+01:002015-04-28T16:29:42.591+01:00Deeper And Deeper Into Roath<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve been looking for the traces great writers leave on a
place and there aren’t many in Roath. In
my hand I’ve a copy of Dannie Abse’s <i>A Strong Dose Of Myself. </i>It’s a collection of the late poet’s
essays. It came out in 1983. In the first, “Return Ticket to Cardiff”,
Dannie recalls his youth in the district and then lists a range of houses in
which he and his family lived. He was born in a smoky house (which he can’t
remember) in Whitchurch Road. The others,
later residences, were all strung out along the fault line that divides Penylan
from Roath. “We were wandering Welsh
Jews,” he writes. Why move so often, he
asks himself. And then replies: because
the bathroom needed decorating, because my father’s fortunes had changed, because the
mice had taken to chewing aphrodisiacs, or because it’s sometimes easier to
move than to get rid of guests. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Rhys Davies Trust who put up plaques to the Welsh
literary great and the Welsh literary good had asked me to check out Abse’s east
Cardiff. Would anywhere be suitable? Dannie
had listed three houses in Albany Road.
I visited each in turn. The first
was now an Estate Agents and hopeless.
At the second, a run-down property with evidence of heavy use by
children, I could get no reply. At the
third a nice Asian lady asked me in broken English to come back evening. See the men. </div>
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At Dannie’s one time Sandringham Road house in view of the
site of Roath Mill the owners were in and were interested. The Trust will be in touch, I told them. Nearby was Waterloo Gardens. It once held a wooden shelter inside which
both Dannie and I, as schoolchildren of different eras, had gone to carve our
names with a penknife. When, in later
life, he and I returned together to check this piece of synchronicity out we
found that the hut had been pulled down.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Right now I’m at the planning stages for two cycle tours which
might take this no longer there hut in.
They’ll run deeper and deeper into Cardiff’s east. <i>Roath,
Capital of Wales, land of hills and waterways, lost mansions and holy
wells. </i>Something like that. The tour will be managed by Pol’s Cardiff
Cycle Tours – check <a href="http://www.cardiffcycletours.com/">http://www.cardiffcycletours.com/</a>
for more information. It’ll take place
on Saturday 13<sup>th</sup> June, 2015
and then repeat on Saturday the 20<sup>th</sup>. If you don’t have a bike then you can hire
one from Pol.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This new tour, I’ve decided, will take in lost holy wells,
lost mansions, the site of the now partially destroyed Roman Quarry, the place
where Cardiff’s Corporation star observatory once stood, Cardiff’s equivalent
to the Magdalena Laundries, the remains of a thousand year old mill and the
place where the geese once roamed. We’ll
visit the island on which Jimi Hendrix once woke unable to tell the world just
how he got there. There’ll be sight of
the graves of some of Cardiff’s most famous.
We’ll also take in the ghosts of the Butes and the hill fort that no one
knows about. I’ll enliven things with a
few poems. To the point and not. But then you’d expect me to do that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What I’ve not yet worked out is how able cycle tour
attendees will be when it comes to actually getting up Penylan Hill. That’s a long slope. Welshman’s Hill as it was once known. We could walk up but that might be regarded
by the fit as cheating. We could cycle the
whole way but then I’d be too breathless to speak when we got to the top. Maybe some sort of half and half operation, a
long and loping side street zig zag with
a bit of bike pushing at the end would do it.
I’m doing a few trials shortly. Watch
this space to find out how they went.<o:p></o:p></div>
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For information on plaques for writers check here - http://www.literaturewales.org/writers-plaques/<o:p></o:p></div>
Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-65590533492695288202014-10-28T16:35:00.002+00:002017-09-12T10:05:48.125+01:00Even More Dylan Thomas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Readings are a stock part of the poet’s trade. They are today, in the literate twenty-first ,
although I’m sure some can remember when they were not. Poets are better on their feet than they once
were. They look audiences in the
eye. They’ve learned not mumble. Down at the Swansea Grand Theatre from where
I’ve just come the Dylanthon has been in progress. This was an off the wall idea dreamt up by
producer Michael Bogdanov and Dylan Thomas expert Jeff Townes. Why not put on a reading of <i>everything</i> DT wrote? The lot.
Poems, stories, letters, stumbles.
It would take about 36 hours to do straight through. We could charge £150 a ticket for a show that
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If I’d been asked I would have said that getting Leanne Wood
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The event Bogdanov mounted was a triumph. A well-attended, very well organised
professional performance at a comfortable, central Swansea venue featuring a cast of several score performers many
of whom were extremely famous. Who else
could have got Jo Brand, Nicholas Parsons, Katherine Jenkins, Dai Smith, The
President of the Republic of Ireland, Jonathan Pryce and Ian McKellen onto the
same bill and without paying any of them anything? <o:p></o:p></div>
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My slot was on the Sunday morning, right at the beginning
when most people were still home reading the papers and eating
toast. But even at that time Bogdanov
had managed to fill the theatre. Punters
were allowed to buy slightly cheaper tickets for selected three hour slots. The programme flickered between poetry and
prose. On stage were a stream of TV
personalities, actors, singers, a very few writers, plus the occasional MBE and politician. It also included a range of school choirs who
attracted their otherwise not <i>that</i>
interested in DT parents and grandparents to the audience. Tickets flew out the box office.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The readings began to roll.
Where I was at the beginning they were heavily weighted with
selections from the often impenetrable mouth music of <i>18 Poems</i>. I went on four
times. I was bracketed by Lisa Rogers, Lucy Owen, Rakie
Ayola sitting resplendent in a leather armchair and reading a slice from a
short story, <i>The Flight, </i>and Tony
Lewis CBE, who doesn’t normally do this kind of thing, clearly, but made a
decent stab. I did <i>I
see the boys of summer in their ruin</i> and then <i>The force that through the green fuse drives the flower</i>. The words tumbled into the air and frothed
all around me. I didn’t own them. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When I got to <i>When Once The twilight locks, </i>my last
presentation and so far faultlessly, I made the mistake of thinking briefly
about something else as I was actually reading.
Fatal. I did this on the
penultimate line and, of course, stumbled.
Not to be defeated I repeated the word then added a few more of my own
to give it resonance. Dylan Thomas aided,
as Marcel Duchamp might have said. Did
anyone notice? No.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As a reading the whole deal was as professional as it could
be. You got a dressing room with your
name on it. A runner to bring you rolls,
coffee, pies, etc., a fresh bath towel, a piece of scented Welsh soap, and a basket of
fruit. What is more the audience
appeared actually to be enjoying the whole affair. In the style of those sixties art happenings
where you all sat for eight hours watching a man holding a lit candle elements
of Zen came into play. Poetry was first exciting,
then it was boring, and then eventually it
returned full of vigour, thrill and excitement.
Just as it should.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Up the hill afterwards at the Do Not Go gentle Festival
presented at the Dylan Thomas birthplace.
5 Cwmdonkin Drive. Here, among the drizzle and the falling leaves and
the freshly repainted windows, I read
again. This was the new Nia Davies <i>Poetry Wales</i> experimental issue launch. I did a reprise of my <i>Altarwise by Owl Light</i> mashup created for Radio Three, told a few
stories and then did some Dylanesque sound pieces. The house was packed right up the
stairs. Poetry certainly rocks in
Swansea. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-52659420346512722872014-02-02T16:12:00.001+00:002014-02-09T10:39:53.658+00:00Nigel Jenkins 1949 -2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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We were in a long room above a pub somewhere in Neath. Nigel was teaching a creative writing class and
I was the guest. I was there to explain
what sound poetry was. This was the
south Wales late 1970s and there were edges out there to be pushed. Encouraged by Nigel I’d done a run of sonic
recreations of Schwitters, Jandl and Cobbing and then finished with a blast of
my own stuff. At the back someone
evinced the opinion that this was all, actually, crap. A common perception. TS Eliot would be spinning in his grave if he
knew. Dylan Thomas would be aghast. However, this didn’t prevent one of Nigel’s more
enlightened students from vocally disagreeing.
It’s not crap, he shouted, it’s good.
No it isn’t, was the immediate reply. There was growling, a scuffle and then fists
began to fly. God this poetry is
exciting stuff, Nigel told me, as he leapt forward to separate the fighting
pair. </div>
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And it was too. With
Nigel at the heart of it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Throughout the rest of his long career Nigel kept himself
there. At the heart. Whatever else he became famous for – and
there were a great many things – he still called himself a poet. First and foremost. For Nigel poetry was the same thing as
blood. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Although never an avant gardist himself, not quite, he
supported those who were. If there was
an underdog out there, someone not getting the right treatment, someone
neglected or grossly misunderstood then Nigel would be the man to champion
their cause. He supported the work of
extreme Welsh-Canadian concretist Childe Roland, for example, offering him
readings, bringing him to Swansea, espousing his cause. He supported the successful bid to get that
writer offered full membership of the Welsh Academy. </div>
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The mainstream was not where Nigel felt most at home and
despite his not inconsiderable success out there at the top of the tree – the
BBC, The Arts Council, the posher publishers of Wales – he never lost touch
with the other way of carrying on. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In America they loved the sound of his voice. I was with him in upstate New York where he
was fronting his poetry and music group Y Bechgyn Drwg. Dressed in Stetson, long black coat and
cowboy boots he could have doubled for Johnny Cash. But it was the Richard Burton-like sonority
of his voice that engaged his audience. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In the latter part of his life the haiku, that three line
form, seemed to take the place of his longer verse work. He told me once, walking across Swansea Bay
in early 2012, that he thought poetry
had deserted him. I just haven’t written
much lately, he confessed. Does that
mean you are no longer a poet, I asked?
Certainly not was the immediate reply.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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We’d worked on psychogeography together. His <i>Real
Swansea </i>was a great success.<i> </i>He’d followed it with <i>Real Swansea Two</i> and before he died had virtually
completed <i>Real Gower</i>. We’d wandered Mumbles together doing research
for my <i>Edging The Estuary</i>. Nigel was keen to show me the ancient
roadways of Swansea, Celtic walkways that went out into the sea, wooden paths
built millennia ago, unearthed by archaeologists and still magnificently there
– except in the incoming tide we never found them. We turned in circles. Nothing.
That non-finding, as Nigel later pointed out, was in itself a perfect psychogeographic
act. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’ll be hard now not having Nigel out there on the other
end of the phone and always ready to respond to emails. Like me he was a hater of Christmas and in
the early days did almost everything he could to be in work away from it all while
the festivities rumbled elsewhere. For many
years we’d celebrate this fact by calling each other while the rest of the
world was eating turkey. He’d known John Tripp well, had written the
Writers of Wales volume about him. He
was one of the few in Wales who’d followed the poetry wars of the 70s and was
familiar with how verse was everywhere from Serbia to San Francisco. He also understood and valued the little
magazine and the small press. He ran
one himself, publishing unknowns and setting them against the prevailing
mainstream tide. He knew who Wales’s champions
were, the real ones. He possessed one
of those Hemmingway devices, a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. He knew who our chancers were. He tolerated them with ill-ease.<o:p></o:p></div>
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He valued our country and hated to see it maligned,
misrepresented or misunderstood. He was patriot to the core. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Others better qualified than I can write about his place as
a travel writer, peace protestor, editor, encyclopaedist, teacher, critic,
essayist, prize-winner, associate professor, publisher, champion, linguist,
administrator, walker, harmonica player,
bon viveur, broadcaster and donkey jacket wearer. The
jacket, that one with the embroidered shoulders. He must have worn it for forty years.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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Nigel, we’ll miss you.
We won’t be able to replace you.
You’re an impossible act to follow.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>an earlier version of this tribute appeared in the Wales Arts Review</i></div>
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Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-66208524469443357382013-09-02T11:13:00.000+01:002013-09-02T11:47:04.601+01:00Edging the Estuary - What is all about?<div class="MsoNormal">
Hemmingway knew how it went with new work. You needed to keep your head down and do
it. In an interview with George Plimpton
he told him “though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no
harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the
structure cracks and you have nothing.”
If the book isn’t complete then talking it up isn’t going to get you
there. Explaining how it all fits
together will ruin it. So what’s the new
book going to be about? They ask me that
at the pub. I try not to explain too
much. It’s about the estuary, the river,
you know. What, another Real book? Maybe</div>
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Actually what I’ve ended up writing isn’t a Real book at all and although it most
certainly is about the Severn Estuary it’s also about an incredible amount more
than that. Is it a psychogeography? Maybe, it could be that.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’d long been interested in the idea of the linear
city. This was something first proposed
by Arturo Soria y Mata in the nineteenth century. He proposed turning Madrid into an elongated
rope of buildings which would follow the Rio Manzanares. The Soviet planner Nikolay Alexandrovich
Milyutin took the idea further but nothing actually got built. In the late twentieth century the notion regained
currency with proposals to run the resorts along England’s south coast together
to form one continuous conurbation. They
were almost that anyway. The fiction of JG Ballard’s dystopian future suddenly became real. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Cities did not need to be lozenge shaped, walking suburbs
had been outmoded by city metros, communities had become acclimatised to
scattering. Conurbations could be ninety
miles long and half a mile wide. Then I
read about the Cardiff Custom House back in Tudor times. The Custom House was the base for the king’s
officers. These were bold Englishmen
sent out from London to collect taxes levied on all goods landed on the king’s
shores. And these Welsh shores belonged
the English king. All of them. For ease of admin everything landed from
Chepstow right down to Worm’s Head on Gower was controlled from Cardiff. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Cardiff, that wide.
The linear city in place hundreds of years before its time. It was a concept I could not leave
alone. I vowed to walk it and to write
about what I found. <i>Edging the Estuary</i> is the result.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The walk was completed in sections, done largely in the
right order, east to west, always chasing the sun. There were diversions. Trips inland up rivers, the tracking of
canals, the crossing of cities. There
were three of those – Newport, Cardiff, Swansea – and each deserved and got
more than a single traversing. Using a
technique I’d exploited in the Real series I often got someone who knew the
area well to travel with me, to tell me about themselves and their locale,
about the place we were walking through.
Tony Curtis at Barry. Robert Minhinnick
at Porthcawl. Nigel Jenkins in
Swansea. John Briggs at Newport. Des Barry and John Williams in Cardiff. Lynne Rees at Port Talbot.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It soon became apparent that this Welsh walk alone would not
be sufficient to describe the great muddy estuary I was tracking. I had to get to the islands, to the far tidal
reaches up beyond Gloucester, to the bridges, the barrage sites, the boats that
sailed on the waters and, most importantly, the much richer English side.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I needed to explore the literary connections – John Williams
at Cardiff, R D Blackmore in the Doone Valley, Shelly at Lynmouth - and the industrial ones - lime, asbestos
cement, electricity, steel, coal, copper.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There were difficulties and deviations. The electricity generators alternated come on in welcomes with you are
not entering these premises under any circumstances go aways. I was given tea and tours in about equal
number to chases off and no mate not without a permit, this area is forbidden,
you’ll have to walk round. Sometimes I
obeyed, sometimes I did not. This land
is not entirely a free land, despite what you may read.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I met characters, chancers, owners, renters. I talked to locals, to visitors, to workers
just passing through. Gareth Woodham
told me about his Severn Lake barrage proposals. Glyn Jones, the ebullient chairman of BARS,
the Barry Amateur Radio Society, gave me Marconi’s history. Paul Parker at the Severn Estuary Partnership
explained just how the estuary worked, where its past was, and where its future may lie. <o:p></o:p></div>
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What came out of this was a community that lived and worked
the greatest waterway Wales has residing cheek by jowl with a larger population
many of whom barely understood that they lived on the coast and that the water
out there beyond them was the world’s most powerful thing – the sea.<o:p></o:p></div>
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History underpinned everything. I read of the Conquest and of the Normans
riding down the Welsh coast from their base at Tewkesbury to invade the and
subsequently subdue the Welsh princedoms.
I followed their route along the northern shore of the Severn – through Lydney
towards Newport. I tried to feel as they
must have done galloping the flat Severn shorelands. And when I got back home to Cardiff where Robert
Fitzhamon had taken up residence in around 1093 I read of what actually occurred. They came across the water from the direction
of Bristol, by boat.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I wound what I discovered and what I experienced into a homogeneous
whole, brightening it with memory and personal experience. I digressed from the true course as many
times as I needed. This thing is be
read. So what <i>is</i> it about?<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s about the difference between Wales and England, here in
the place where the border is, where the one place runs out and the other
begins. Fishermen at Black Rock by the
bridge speaking in clear Gloucester accents but declaring themselves eternally
welsh. Tourists at Lynmouth who barely
knew that that was Wales over there through the sea mist. Students in Cardiff who had little idea that
they were studying in what was once the world’s greatest coal exporting port
and still a city on the coast.</div>
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It’s about the history of the waterway – from its time in
the age of the saints as a sort of sea motorway, its time as one of the
greatest merchant sea routes in the world, to today when there are barely
enough commercial sailings to warrant the existence of all our ports and docks
and the most anyone sees are leisure craft and fishing boats.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s about the communities that cluster along these coasts: the
farmers, the fishermen, the walkers, the industrialists with their docks and
their container parks and their power stations, the leisure provider with their
fair grounds and their family beaches, the caravaners, the historical remains,
the castles and iron-age headland forts, the scrap-metal merchants, the tyre
hoarders, the horse traders, the turf growers, the flatlanders, the heritage
industrialists, the wedding planners, the lighthouse keepers , the harbours,
the creeks, the sea walls, the muds, the conservationists, the nature reserves,
the sites of scientific interest, the sewage outlets, the barrage builders, the
atomic scientists, the b&b owners, the hoteliers, the surfers, the
beachcombers, the time wasters, the manic, the retired, the wonderful, the
hopeless, and the lost.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s got a map – I twisted the publisher’s arm and they
provided that. It has no photos. The links to several gross of them are here: <a href="http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/Estuary/estuary.htm">http://www.peterfinch.co.uk/Estuary/estuary.htm</a> <o:p></o:p></div>
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It comes out on the 19<sup>th</sup> of this month – September,
2013 – published by Seren books at £9.99.
the launch is at the Norwegian Church the same day. 7.00 pm.
I’ll be in conversation there with the former director of the Institute
of Welsh Affairs, author and journalist John Osmond. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Start edging now. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-16398443133382878952013-07-25T11:21:00.001+01:002013-07-25T12:58:37.698+01:00zeeeyooosshhhhhh <div class="MsoNormal">
Sometimes people just vanish. They are in focus for a time and then you
stop looking. When you look again they’re
gone. It happened to Cavan McCarthy . Concrete poet, literary innovator, small press
publisher with a mission to fill the little magazine information gap. He lived in Bristol from where he published
his experimental small mag, <i>Tlaloc</i>
and its attendant LOC sheets of magazine information listings. He also made rings in which were embedded
concrete verse. He came across to Cardiff
to visit and travelled by hovercraft.
You could do that then. The
sixties were full of roaring and the sense that the walls that surrounded our
worlds were falling down.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When I looked again forty years had passed and Cavan had vanished. His publications lingered deep within a few
specialist collections. Most of his
poetry had turned to dust.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What had endured was the anthology I published in 1972. <i>Typewriter
Poems</i>. A Second Aeon co-publication
with that leader of the American avant garde Dick Higgins. At
Something Else Press Higgins had welcome the idea with enthusiasm. There would be two editions – a UK version
and a second with $2.95 marked on the back cover. Several thousand were printed and bound by Browns of Burnley. The bulk of the American edition were shipped
direct to Vermont. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For reasons I’ve never understood and now won’t (Higgins
died in 1998) the man took a dislike to the finished work. In his introduction he says “And since one of
the most interesting of serious magazine editors is <i>Second Aeon’s</i> Peter finch, he was in a position to make up one of
the most exciting collections. The
ultimate, universal collections it is not – it makes no pretence at
internationalism. But a constellation
from an epicentre of the whole concrete earthquake it is. And it’s in that spirit we are proud to
present it.” But the American edition
was poorly distributed, unaccountably kept in boxes, and then finally pulped.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cavan’s contribution is <i>zeeeyooosshhhhhh</i>
where a rocket of typewritten words zooms across the page to crash in a
blackened woomph against the right hand margin. Hhhh h h h h h and then a deep stack of ns - nnn n n
nnnn. It isn’t as good as his landmark <i>plurble poem</i> but almost.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a writer Cavan sits somewhere in that arc formed by John
Cage, Andy Warhol, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Yoko Ono. All of these artists whose largely
post-modernist ideas came to focus in the sixties have repetition in
common. Warhol films the Empire State
building in one take 485 minutes long. The
lights come on and go off again. Yoko’s
1966 <i>Film No 4</i> runs for 80 minutes
and consists of 365 naked bottoms of the famous all shot from the same angle. Cage composed pieces of silence presented as
sonatas. Stockhausen pioneered musique
concrete where the electronic modulation of sound became more important than
the sound itself. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The great constants
were chance and repetition, the sub-text, the surface and minutiae found deep
deep inside. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Henri Chopin, France’s greatest sound poet fled the country
during the riots of 1968. His <i>Le déjeuner sur l'herbe</i> delves into what he calls language’s micro
particles. The atoms deep inside a given
sound that make up what we eventually
hear. Chopin would find them by slowing
down tape recordings, interfering with the erase head and speeding up the
results. You can hear the world inside
his productions but it isn’t quite the one you know.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
George Perec, a member of the Oulipo Group, hidden from the
Anglo-Saxon world by the complexities of the French language, wrote the ground-breaking <i>La Disparition</i>, a 300 page novel in which the letter e makes not a
single appearance. It took until 1995
for this 1969 masterwork to appear in English (brilliantly and painstakingly translated
by Gilbert Adair as <i>A Void</i>).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If there are seeds for Cavan’s work then these are they. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the notes at the back of <i>Typewriter Poems</i> Cavan declares “I have never published a separate book
of verse, apart from an exhibition catalogue, and have never made an unsolicited
contribution of poetry to a magazine.” He
was reticent even then.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Recently there has been a revival of interest in Typewriter
verse. Down the years I’ve kept copies
of the original anthology in print and more recently made it available on Amazon. Suddenly it has started selling again. Its slim white spine refixed with new century
carpet glue, padded-bagged and mailed to addresses across the globe. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At least two editors are now hard at work preparing new
anthologies. Marvin Sackner of the
Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Florida is working on <i>The Art of Typewriting</i> for Thames and
Hudson. Barrie Tullet of the Caseroom
Press is editing <i>Typewriter Art</i> for
Laurence King. Big books with hard covers and dashes of
colour. Cavan is in both.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve tracked him down too.
Louisiana. Via Brazil. Librarianship
and teaching. Although he has retired
now. His 1700<b>
</b>pamphlets plus supporting materials went to the Prussian Cultural
Institute in Berlin. I suggested to him that after all this time he
should really consider putting together a book of what’s he’s done. Taciturn as ever he said he’d think and see how it went.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-42715145512251028942013-06-19T11:19:00.001+01:002013-06-19T11:20:38.249+01:00By Bike<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The situationist Guy Debord defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific
effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the
emotions and behaviour of individuals.”
The medium was the message, as Marshal McLuhan suggested. The city was a city because it was a
city. Its
shape and its style came well before its use as an economic and social
hub. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Will Self had psychogeography as walking to New York from
London, an exercise in discovering the personality of place itself. Peter Ackroyd, says Self, “practises a ‘phrenology’
of London. He feels up the bumps of the
city and so defines its character and proclivities.” Nick Papadimitriou looks for a place’s deep topography,
hunting the minute detail of selected locales.
The label bends and moves. It
defines, I suggest, an alternative way of proceeding through space. Follow the grid lines. Listen to the noise the streets make. Walk every road beginning with A. Interview people wearing hats. Use ancient maps to navigate the
present. Look below the surface and
track what remains of the past. Every
place has a past. Everywhere is rich in
history. Every local has a memory. Tapping it is the prime psychogeographical
act.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Saturday’s cycle tour (on which there are still places –
book now – and if this Saturday is no good then we repeat the tour the
following Saturday, the 29<sup>th</sup>) will have psychogeographic
elements. But don’t let that worry you.
We’ll cycle and stop and hear a bit about where and what we are.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ll read <i>Mewn/Mas – </i>a
poem about what’s in Cardiff fashion and what’s not. I’ll do this at the start outside Bute Town
History and Arts Centre at the bottom of Bute Street. The Docks.
Now the Bay. Everyone knows it as
that. We’ll cycle around County Hall –
why is this place here with its pagoda style?
What did its arrival herald? We’ll
go up through Cardiff’s little Venice, along the development-fronted feeder
following streets few Cardiffians know exist.
We’ll visit the magic roundabout that displays Pierre Vivant’s <i>Landmark 1992</i>, a wonderful assemblage of
traffic signs that somehow sums up just how most of us feel about roads and
what they do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We’ll pass the Vulcan, or where it once stood, with the
memory of its original use mixed with the memory of the long campaign to save
it from being pulled down. Under Churchill
Way lies more of the feeder. Can we see
it? There is a place.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the psychic centre of Cardiff, just a little north of
Kingsway, the ley lines cross and the past breaches the present. On some dark nights there are sparks and
ghosts. We’ll stop and savour before
crossing through the Park to view lost rivers, shifted bridges and gates that
go nowhere.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Down Westgate Street where the Taff once flowed are the
memories of quays and cannons and eventually at the back of the Prince of Wales
of the glory that was once St Mary’s Church.
Near here were canals and foundries and ship builders. Their memory remains in the sculpture outside
the new central library. I have a poem
on the wall here. I’ll air it to finish.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-bottom: 14.4pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 14.4pt; vertical-align: baseline;">
Join us. <i>The
Hidden Delta – Estuary Cardiff You Didn’t know Existed. </i> Real Cardiff by Bike in the company of author
Peter Finch. Dates and price: 22nd June
and 29th June. £12 for the tour, bike hire £3 extra. Limited places.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 18pt; margin: 14.4pt 0cm; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
This tour starts
at 14:00 from the Coal Exchange and ends at 16:30 at the cycle festival hub in
the Royal Arcade off St Mary Street. More details <a href="http://www.cardiffcycletours.com/real-cardiff-by-bike/">here</a><o:p></o:p></div>
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Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-13407349297493750762013-02-21T08:57:00.000+00:002013-02-21T08:57:06.671+00:00Drinking After Dark<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Drinking a lot isn’t new. The world has always been
filled with drunks. But the idea has got around that here in the burgeoning Welsh
capital, the city that along with London, Los Angeles and Llanystumdwy never sleeps, drinking has taken on epidemic
proportions. It never used to be like
this. That’s the complaint of our steady
and suburban council tax payers. They
lie abed listening to the josh and clatter of inebriated youth staggering home.
In my day, they say, we’d have a pint or
two, certainly. But we always knew how
to behave. This barbarism they see, or
think they see in the city’s sparkling
streets, is new. They are worried. It’s a respectable fear. The world has once again gone wrong. What can you do.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
But is it all new?
Certainly the mass falling about in public is but then that’s what you
get when cities are developed so that indoors and outdoors merge. Today the centre of Cardiff is one great
well-lit pedestrianized precinct. The
smooth oft-swept plazas are rich in street furniture – bins, benches, booths, revolvers,
statues, billboards, plantings. They are
illuminated by lines of shop windows like giant televisions. In fact in front of St David’s Hall there is
a giant television. Half the concert
hall’s frontage now broadcasts rolling sport and news. Some of these exteriors are now more
comfortable than their user’s homes.
Little wonder we search for joy within them, ambling slowly in soft
shoes. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Public Houses across Wales, indeed right across the UK,
have been closing at a prodigious rate.
This is nothing to do with the population losing its taste for alcohol. It is entirely down to how we now consume
our drink. We like it cheap, we buy it
in supermarkets. We drink at home. Together, alone. We drink with impunity in our gardens,
leaning on our front walls, walking down the streets, swaying inebriatedly
across the city’s centre with our open lager cans in our hands. It’s an economic driver, a swift hit at a
quarter of the price we’d pay in an old dark wood, wilton-carpeted public
saloon. So the Taff Vale and the
Moulders Arms, and the Salutation, The Bristol Hotel, the Marchioness of Bute, The
Vulcan, The Lifeboat and the Greyhound have all closed. Their badly-shaven regulars, fags in hand,
have gone to the winds. The land the
pubs once occupied have been redeveloped and profit has been made. Cardiff’s stock of watering places has been severely
reduced.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
In those lost pubs drinkers of many generations
mixed. The old stager would be in the
corner, the young buck with his brylcreamed hair at the bar, the travelling
salesman in his cheap suit ensconced in the lounge. There were darts and cards, crisps and
conversations. Behaviour was
cordial. The rising pissedness that alcohol
brings was controlled by the generational mix.
These pubs certainly had their beer-fuelled moments but the norm was
calm. You could go into them and feel
safe. Nobody ever felt out of place.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Today in the recessing twenty-first century it’s different. If we do venture out to drink then it’s likely to be to a suburban tavern near where we live. These places mix food with coffee mornings
and offer families a complete package: games machines, sizzling steaks, bouncy
castles, cakes, wine, death by chocolate, cider with ice cubes in it, high
chairs. The city centre with all its
lights is too far off, you can’t park there readily, it’s full of marauding
youth.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
We’ve been here before, sort of. In 1863 with a population a quarter of the
city’s number today Cardiff had 211 places where you could drink – inns, pubs,
hotel bars. According to Brian Glover’s
excellent C<i>ardiff Pubs and Breweries</i> (Tempus)
Adam Street back then had seven pubs while Bridge Street boasted eight. The
density of available watering holes was unmatched. Working men, these pubs’ main clientele,
would spend their entire leisure hours inside them, staggering home at stop tap
through the poorly lit streets to their homes in the walking suburbs of Butetown,
Grangetown, and Splott. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Today this mesh of sawdust-floored town-centre drinkeries
has been largely replaced by the new phenomenon, the vertical bar. These gleaming palaces are spread throughout
Cardiff’s revitalised heart. They are vast
and built from glass and aluminium. They
have pinewood floors and laser lighting.
In them you stand, vertically, in your hundreds. You crowd their long bars and down shots and
cocktails and lager stuffed with chillies.
You shout and yell. You do it
with your jacket at home and your skirt as short as it will go. You have body art tattooed on every available
surface. You wear thumb rings and earrings
and rings on your toes. You enjoy it
all. You are young.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
This is the new and frightening to non-participant world for
which Cardiff has become famous. Cardiff is the UK’s epicentre for the stag and
the hen do. Coachloads arrive from
Swindon, Gloucester and Portsmouth, dressed as nuns, or supermen or fairies. They stay for days. They have a blindingly staggering time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Cardiff photographer Maciej Dakowicz has captured it all
in his exhilarating night photography. He
has spent much of the past five years staying up late and not drinking. He follows the revellers, men dressed as superheroes
and women dressed as Playboy bunnies. He
takes their photographs. He depicts them from when they start, full of
smiles and upright vitality, to when they finish, lying pale faced and dishevelled
among Caroline Street’s discarded chip wrappers.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
‘Photography is nothing’, the great photojournalist Henri
Cartier-Bresson once said. ‘It’s life that interest me.’ That’s Maciej’s approach too. In his
collection, <i>Cardiff After Dark, </i> the capital’s street nightlife is revealed in
a way that many will find both amazing
and shocking. Amazing because they had
no idea that the city’s night life was this extensive and shocking because they will no doubt disapprove
of what they see. Cardiff, the binge drinking capital. Cardiff, no simple centre of Welsh culture
and Welsh government, but the place you
come to revel in and then be sick.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Maciej’s approach is to stay out of the action. He awaits Cartier-Bresson’s moment and then he
takes the shot. He reached Cardiff in
2004 to study at the University of Glamorgan and as for many of his compatriots found the city’s
atmosphere to his liking and stayed.
Like Cartier- Bresson he takes an enormous number of photographs. On a
good night, he says, he’ll shoot five hundred.
This splendid Thames & Hudson full plate and full colour hardback
narrows that vast collection to ninety-nine.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Nothing is taken with an flash which gives the
photographer the chance to slide around the action unnoticed. The results are stunning. Revealed in all their glory are the leisure
times of the young: their pains and their joys, their rollicking up yours
attitudes, their relentless pursuits of the hit and the high. People sit and lie in the gutters, on
pavements, on street furniture, in doorways.
They sprawl in ungainly fashion, grope each other, suck their cigarettes,
drain their stomachs onto pavements, stare blind-eyed at their mobile phones.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
In the queue outside Walkabout they simultaneously text each other. Outside the Prince of Wales they squat eating
chips. A woman in hair curlers and a
respectable man in a double-breasted suit sit on a street bench as if this were
a park. Around them the wash of Macdonald’s wrappings rises like an incoming
tide. On St Mary Street a mid-thirties
couple in short-sleeve shirt and fawn jacket lounge on the pavement imagining
the place to be Barry Island. Behind them revellers queue for endless fast food. There are pole vaulters, bench sliders,
knicker revealers, head holding ill faces, dissolutes surrounded by police in
high-vis vests, and men praying at the windows of patrol cars. A woman carrying a seven foot plastic penis comes
out of Wood Street to meet the man with the tennis racket from the 118 118
advertisement. Blokes take their tops
off, kiss each other, show their bums.
Captain America has his head up someone’s skirt. A guy with red hair and the words “One Life
One Chance” across his back leans on a bar.
There are inflatable women and inflatable men, fatties with their shorts
bursting. Women wearing L plates. Men
dressed as women. Women dressed as men. Waitresses
out of their minds. Dancers and singers. Gropers and fondlers. The young of this part of the wider world all
having a good time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Maciej Dakowicz spent seven years living here. He founded the Third floor Gallery at the
bottom of Bute Street. He now lives in London. That’s our loss. He’s gone, the bars stay on. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i>Cardiff After Dark</i>
by Maciej Dakowicz is published in hardback by Thames and Hudson at £24.95<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
An earlier version of this posting appeared in the magazine of the IWA, <i>The Welsh Agenda</i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-58331566071946044512013-01-11T11:58:00.000+00:002013-01-11T15:36:29.110+00:00Eros Islanders<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHa_HMqCrUOjlPS8sQPibN97fdcRHOyRUZhmwFizv2Vtx66bAbeF8nQAigoHheaJcgBQMNK-wZYLjziqYlcNmt-I9_PPWO5DfMtTqdZbcUm7JDmbLYBpjEvPaOr0uzpoa0KyYrD4CkNaZM/s1600/Copy+of+Eros+Islanders.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHa_HMqCrUOjlPS8sQPibN97fdcRHOyRUZhmwFizv2Vtx66bAbeF8nQAigoHheaJcgBQMNK-wZYLjziqYlcNmt-I9_PPWO5DfMtTqdZbcUm7JDmbLYBpjEvPaOr0uzpoa0KyYrD4CkNaZM/s320/Copy+of+Eros+Islanders.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Back in 1965 the Evening Standard ran this:<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Anne Sharpley
meets…<br />
<br />
<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">The Eros Islanders</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>Everybody Has Seen
Them …<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>So Few Know Them<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Taken from <i>The</i> <i>Evening Standard, Monday August 16, 1965<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
By your second day of sitting in Piccadilly you’ve stopped
demanding to know <i>who</i> are all those people sitting around
Eros?” For a start they’re you and
Moloch. And Peter and Geoff, and the boy from the Bahamas who reads William
Tell in German all day, Luis Carlos, from Lisbon, and the rest of the
semi-regular Eros islanders.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lovely Lynne will be along later. The Yorkshire miner who was so generous drunk
last night that his Haig bottle orbited among us so fast he had to run to keep
up with it, is certainly sleeping it off until he can summon up the first of
his daylong chorus of “Eee, ain’t life grand!”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Vigilant<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The plainclothes man is there again looking bored and
vigilant- - which is what marks him off from the rest of us since we’re neither
bored , nor vigilant.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The pigeons are there, of course, though you can never be
sure with pigeons that they’re the same ones.
And there is a cast of hundreds with walk-on parts who just walk on the
island, circle it, and walk off again.
You soon feel very safe on the island, although it can cost you your
life getting on it. Occasionally you see
other would-be islanders running terrified among the traffic, baffled by those
unbroken stretches of railing trying to reach the safety you are enjoying.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The traffic, after an hour of sitting there, stops being
noisy and becomes simply a series of hostile stares. They just hate you for being there, lounging
and idling while they’re working.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Affront<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You just go to pieces marooned there. You spread papers
about, scratch, stretch, flop, gangle, open bottles and sleep. You are an affront to London, particularly to
the taxi-drivers who, it has been estimated, circle Eros six times in every
shift – and they show it. But after
another hour you don’t even notice that.
After all, they are mere transients, you <i>belong</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Moloch blows the cow’s horn he bought for a pound in
Watford. It is as plaintive and primeval as he wants it to be. He is 19, a nice quiet boy from Cardiff who
wears wide hunter’s hat, pouched leather belt, armlet of white hide, white hide
trimmings to his jacket, a heavy charm on a leather thong round his neck, a bracelet
and three rings.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He is called Moloch after the Hebrew god to whom children
were sacrificed because he has a “reputation for being cold and
heartless.” Inspired, and perhaps
flattered by this, he has covered himself with Moloch images, including the
huge charm round his neck that he made from fire tile cement. “Peter calls it my biscuit, because he is
obsessed with the idea that everything is for eating.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Exodus<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Peter, his friend, wears a fez, a Jew’s harp round his neck
and carries an ocarina, three harmonicas and two whistles. They, and Geoff, the third of them, have made
what they call an “exodus to sanity,” which means living largely on nothing and
sleeping in the parks. Peter has written
a poem about sleeping out in Hyde Park.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>A red sky in the night<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Crashing<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Booming<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Competing<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>With London’s neon
brilliance …<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He takes out one of his harmonicas, licks, pretends to bite
it as though it were a bar of chocolate and plays Ripley’s Blues wastefully and
unimpressionably into the traffic uproar.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Two little Cilla Blacks from Liverpool ask if they like the Beatles. “You <i>don’t</i>
We’ve seen Help ! 25 times,” they scream.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lovely Lynne who is two yards tall and has a yard of lovely
young brown hair, takes over the harmonica and plays. Lynne lives by sketching other Eros Islanders
for three shillings a time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Her tight old jeans are smeared with paint, her small pale
perfect face is weighed down with eye make-up.
Together they discuss cheap places to eat and stay, emigration to
Australia, going to Africa, their hatred of society. Near them stretched out insensible and
stinking, is a tramp, round whom the short-term islanders tread with concern
and caution.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Kings<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“They’re the kings, those old boys. Live free.
More of a man than all those office zombies,” says Moloch shedding
affection all over the deep, rotten, needy sleep of the tramp.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The drunken Yorkshire miner is trying to persuade everyone
to go to Belgravia with him. “They’re
smashing there, treat you as an equal.
Are you going grouse shooting?” he says imitating an upper-class
soprano. Luis Carlos from Lisbon,
wearing an enormous pair of wrinkled jeans and “je viens de Portugal” on his
pocket confesses he lives on cornflakes and milk but loves London.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The sun sinks over the Café Royal, as it has risen over the
Criterion. The Eros fountain like some
ghastly Victorian weed with its bulb showing is surrounded by explosions of
neon instead of the daytime junkyard of buildings that no one can decide what
to do with. Patiently, steadfastly,
uncritically the islanders sit on …<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Check the photo above. Which one is Peter Finch?<br />
<br /></div>
Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-12081954722205903302012-06-12T10:04:00.001+01:002012-06-12T10:04:34.591+01:00Foxed, Dust Marked, and Staples Rusted, But Still Hanging On.<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I’ve got myself into the dark far reaches of the loft
now. The place where the flickering of
the strip-light doesn’t quite reach. It’s
full of dust and that particularly black Cardiff soot that sticks to your
hands, fills your hair and gets inside the collar of your shirt. This soot is an echo of the city’s industrial
past, from the days when down the road
they made steel and shifted coal and the air was dark with rolling smoke. We might be clean post-industrial now but in
Cardiff’s aged lofts what was still exists.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The box I open dates from the early 1970s. It’s got an ancient Cyngor Llyfrau address
label on the outside with my Maplewood Court address hand written on it. Originally used, I guess, by the Books
Council to return unsold Second Aeon Publications from the shelves of their Aberystwyth
distribution centre. William
Wantling. Typewriter Poems. Bob Cobbing.
Found poetry. T L Kryss. J P Ward’s concrete verse. The Second Aeon Travelling Circus’s rambling
mash. Twentieth century avant garde poetry
never really went down that well in Ceredigion and Gwynedd. Europe never
was Welsh.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The journal I edited between 1966 and 1974 was called <i>second aeon.
</i>Its name permanently, as the Bauhaus suggested, in lower case.
In those pre-internet days there was a great information gap. The world might have been full of poetry but
finding it was a task. <i>Second aeon</i> took upon itself the job is
filling the gap. Its large <i>Small Press Scene, </i>run at the end of
each issue, tried to detail what was going on.
Magazine name, address and some information about the kind of material
it contained. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Back at Maplewood Court, my flat which doubled as an
editorial office, I was deluged with booklets, books, journals, broadsheets and
poetry newspapers. At first from the UK and
then as the name <i>second aeon</i> became
better know, from the wider world.
Material flooded in. Big fat
yellow envelopes form America. Bright packages
form Europe. Shabby bags from
India. Stuff from South Africa, Japan,
Hong Kong, South America. Argentina, in
particular, seemed to be in publishing overtime.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
And it’s all still here, part of it, that ancient
echo. It’s in the box, aged, bent,
foxed, dust marked, staples rusted, but still hanging on in all its edge-pushing, counter culture glory. <i>Atlantis</i>
magazine out of America’s Midwest, full of the Upanishads, Khalil Gibran-recycled, articles on reincarnation, Open Letters to
Man – <i>I am a Woman</i>, and poetry from mystic
Christians. Peter Cash’s <i>Gong</i> from Nottingham with poetry by Jon
Silkin, Owen Davis, Michael Lenihan, William Oxley and an editorial that promotes
Joni Mitchell as the goddess she once was.
<i>The Occasional Parish Butterfly</i>,
from Cardiff, a cyclostyled, set by typewriter multi-coloured thing which managed to omit the names of most of
its poets. An Andrei Voznesenski <i> </i>poem
lifted for the back cover. “There is no
editor, bias, affiliation and no immediate policy” it says inside. Ah the freedom of that vanished age.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I open a large yellow envelop which has the words CONCRETE
KONGLOMERATI 5 LB.NET<i> </i>in red on its
outside. This is from Gulfport, Florida
and contains a magazine, some stickers and a set of booklets. The poets are Gerard Malanga, Richard
Kostelanetz, Clark Coolidge and others.
They all flash their pre-LANGUAGE visual muscles. Many once worked this way. Now, mostly, they don’t.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Deeper in are editions of Lawrence Upton’s <i>Good Elf, R&B Monthly, </i>Michael
Moorcock’s <i>New Worlds</i>, the
super-hippie <i>Oz</i>, Arthur Winfield
Knight’s beat generation reviver <i>The Unspeakable
Visions of the Individual</i> (this issue devoted to Herbert Huncke),<i> </i>Alex Hand and Alan Turner’s
Durham-based <i>Iconolatre </i>rich with the
poets of that time – Charles Bukowski, George Dowden, Andrew Lloyd, William
Wyatt, Michael Horovitz, Jeff Nuttall, Chris Torrance. All men, you’ll notice. <i>Quark</i>
with its translations from the Spanish by Cid Corman and Clayton Eshleman. Beneath this are some of Ruthi Blackmore’s Cardiff-based
second aeon precursors <i>Mainly, Cutley </i>and
<i>Nicely.
</i>Little hand-made magazines of local verse. Dust comes up in gouts
and gushes. The magazines shine.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
None of this happens now.
The small mag has gone, all but.
Replaced by geographically indistinct internet grab-alls that roll on
for endless pages. Editing a matter of putting everything
in. Reading something most people don’t. For the publishers there are no more
distribution hassles, visits to the post office with arms breaking under the weight
of the envelopes. No standing outside
the library in the rain trying to sell the magazine to reluctant readers. No hunting for the cash to pay the print
bills. No painful dealing with the
rejected. Poetry, who wants that. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Poetry was a mystery back then. It came from the skies, most thought. Today it’s chanted in pubs, shouted by TV
comedians and rapped into places where the written word would never
penetrate. Poetry is commonplace. No longer the province of the fey and the
limp wristed. Poetry has conquered the western
world. And, of course, to do that, there has had to
be a certain amount of dumbing down and an almost total abandonment of
adventurous creation. Like what you
see? Thought not.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
I stick my head back in my dusty box.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i> </i> <o:p></o:p></div>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-4320043229372674572012-04-06T09:46:00.003+01:002012-04-06T09:51:35.833+01:00Adopted<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM9KYqibVHe23fzpNUpvl748ErmkFrsthar-SQ7d_7VpGGlEhwhI-GjBJQX8-hyl6LWcEE7KWC3lNvVMkO90-WKGlH41PYvLSGl8y-YYoO22kjfI2a5BTXkOrJf1hb2YWCzIofuNJ8lDo-/s1600/hmm.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 159px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM9KYqibVHe23fzpNUpvl748ErmkFrsthar-SQ7d_7VpGGlEhwhI-GjBJQX8-hyl6LWcEE7KWC3lNvVMkO90-WKGlH41PYvLSGl8y-YYoO22kjfI2a5BTXkOrJf1hb2YWCzIofuNJ8lDo-/s320/hmm.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5728207342209501138" /></a><p class="MsoNoSpacing">I’ve never been one to win things or obtain honours. My books don’t get onto short lists. Not that I’m complaining. This is how it is. After at least forty years in the business I’ve barely a literary award anywhere in the house. There was a runners-up book token in a 1970s National Eisteddfod Concrete Poetry Competition. I was the only entrant and I still didn’t win. And a third prize in the 1982 Bridport Short Story Contest. I didn’t enter anything after that. Last year I got the Ted Slade Award for Services To Poetry. A significant boost. Maybe the times have turned.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Last time I got another. I’m now the officially adopted poet of the Institute of Directors. There was a ceremony at their headquarters, the William Burges-designed and rather splendid Park House Club on Cardiff’s Park Place. The building is going through a new promotion campaign and has itself wrapped in a giant pink bow. Could have been to coincide with my reading I suppose but I rather think not.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Getting companies to adopt poets is the idea of Ali Anwar, an Iraqui-born Cardiff businessman. He has set up the H’mm Foundation to promote his cause. Poets are cheap, announced the evening’s mc, the broadcaster and author Jon Gower. You’d be amazed how little they charge. He does us down. It’s true that many a bard will turn out for not much but in the end we all need to keep the same wolf from the door. In terms of remuneration a small rise in the level poets are paid wouldn’t go amiss. Current rates of anything between £50 and £250 for an evening’s show have been pretty much the same for decades now. But I digress.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Ali Anwar’s idea has a certain amount of brilliance to it. He’s determined to get poetry into the workplace and into places where it previously has never thought of going. Poetry at board meetings, creative writing classes for workers as an aid to productivity, verse as inspiration to sales teams, poetry in the PR departments, specially commissioned works for the annual conference, poets leading the workers in the singing of new company songs. Poetry that does something, poetry that earns it keep.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The room is packed. Directors, associates, company presidents, board members, Assembly members, innovators plus a few other writers here to see how the whole thing hangs together. I spot Ifor Thomas there, Clare Peat, and Clare Potter. We’ve all had some wine and are slightly mellowed, the mc has set the scene and now I’m on.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">For me it’s a new audience. I give them a fair sampling from my greatest hits. With my own business background and with time spent in the corporate sector it’s not that difficult for me to build bridges. I start with a sound poem which predictably stuns and then follow with a found poem made from lines taken from North American Welsh ex-pat newspapers. I then add a few pieces about committee meetings, sales techniques, sending your offspring to university, meeting your wife’s lover and, for good measure, the political economy and future of that place we all love, Europe. Be eclectic. Stare them straight in the eye. Stay on your feet. Entertain, engage, make them laugh if you can. I do.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">My cop out is to leave my new poem, part of a sequence about Assembly members drawn from their public pronouncements, <i>Omaggio a Edwina Hart</i> (The Welsh Government’s Business Minister) in my bag. Never yet done in public and still unrehearsed. It might have struck the wrong note. But given the nature of this group I doubt it. Next time.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Georgia Ruth, who amazingly worked as my personal assistant for my few last months with Literature Wales, rounds the event off with three song. Two of these are her own and one is a plaintive ballad from the American minstrel shows, <i>Old Dog Blue. </i>She’s got something, Georgia, a voice that lifts the spirit and an ability to write songs as if she were the reincarnation of Jackson Browne. <span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The other side of the applause I’m standing there with a glass in my hand, pleased I’ve managed my first real event in an age when I’m confronted by the smiling face of an academic not normally an attender of my events.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">You know, he says, that was really good. I didn’t know you did things like this. Your books are, you know, okay, sort of. But hearing the poetry performed brings it alive. Ali Anwar and a small collection of others standing in the same circle all nod in agreement. It’s a compliment. Isn’t it? I’m not quick enough, of course. I should have replied, thank you, you know that’s rather how I feel about your own work. But I don’t. I smile instead. <span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">It was a compliment, says Sue, on the way home. Just not that well expressed. She’s probably right.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">This morning Robert Lloyd Griffiths, Institute of Directors secretary tweets “Thanks so much for your contribution to our even. Superb!”. Got through somewhere then.<span style="font-size: 100%; "> </span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Now for the hard part. Taking poetry on to where drink is absent and commercial success is paramount. A place where you don’t normally find poetry. At work.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-49688843750611023352012-03-14T09:04:00.006+00:002012-03-14T10:23:00.912+00:00The Unrecorded Literary Past<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim9E5uckaN6z3YBk6htWaqaKlP6MrPCboyEb-O9YkJ5MD7kx5CbusTOM3kkdSepLqsWA7jgOHk_4FxLL2yZMJtjToyEu5nhuGDwvpRqLmv0eH_EXZ70oHommllio98zxtUA3zju69y78xN/s1600/dorn_buffalo_19740419_006.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEim9E5uckaN6z3YBk6htWaqaKlP6MrPCboyEb-O9YkJ5MD7kx5CbusTOM3kkdSepLqsWA7jgOHk_4FxLL2yZMJtjToyEu5nhuGDwvpRqLmv0eH_EXZ70oHommllio98zxtUA3zju69y78xN/s320/dorn_buffalo_19740419_006.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5719676445099058690" /></a><p class="MsoNoSpacing">The past is littered with them.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>My past is.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Poetry readings, literary events, evening of live verse, of poets standing there expounding, shouting, declaiming, orating, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>performing, reciting,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>generating poetry into the thick book free air.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Poetry live manages something that poetry dead, or at least poetry printed, simply does not. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The theory is that spoken poetry possess some sort of power that the stuff you experience silently by reading it from a book does not possess.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Having the poet present adds value.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The activity becomes an event, transcends itself, makes sparks. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Of course, as anyone who has been an habitué of the reading, and in particular the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">open</i> reading, will know not all live lit is like this.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There are the longeurs.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The great spaces into which the untried and untested stumble.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The spaces where the imperfect spout their material.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Where the not that good spend time.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Where the less than perfect flaunt their broken parts.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Where the never to be really exciting try so hard to be something they are not.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">But we’ll skip round that.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s part of the territory.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A necessary component of the great twenty-first century literary experience.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Hidden in this morass are the great readings.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The outstanding events that happen once in a lifetime.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The recitations by the great who are now dead.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The sparkling <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>performances by the rising and the recitations by those at the top of their games.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve been to these.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Heard Sorley Maclean read with RS Thomas, watched John Ashbery smile, listened to Ed Dorn act out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Gunslinger</i>, bp nichol enthral a hard-bitten north London mob, Ian Macmillan make his audience <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>laugh more than they knew was possible.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve listened to Yevtushenko electrify a stadium full of Russians, John Ormond thrill a Cardiff pub back room, Ted Hughes act like a great standing stone at the Sherman, and Bob Cobbing stun a room full of besuited businessmen.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The great readings.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The ones where something happens that’s out of the ordinary, where the poetry lifts and flies.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Where the usual is totally transcended into something many thought it never could be.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">And all of this goes unrecorded, the large part of it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Little is taped.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Less filmed.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The reading happens and then it’s gone.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>All that’s left is memory and mist. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">When I began as a poet I sort of hoped that here in Wales at least we’d have our newspapers review literary performances.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The one last night by Lawrence Ferlinghetti making a rare visit to the Oriel Bookshop, Jeff Nuttall falling off the stage at the Reardon Smith or Lily Greenham making truly amazing sounds at the Park Hotel.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But no.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Soccer, running, fishing, horses, am dram, school pantos – all of that.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But poetry readings?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>No.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Never seen a one.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Julia Novak recognises this.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Live Poetry – An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance</i> (Rodopi) is the first study I’ve seen that sets about trying to provide academics with an apparatus with which they can discuss the poetry reading.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Poetry readings have become an essential part of the writing and distribution of poetry during the past forty years.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Why is it that “we know almost nothing about how specific poems, poets and types of poetry have been shaped by expectations of performance?” </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The argument that performed poetry is somehow inferior to the printed kind or that the live reading is merely an extension of the written word no longer hold water.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There are too many top end writers out there who make money from the circuit.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They produce work specifically for those arenas.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But it is their books that get reviewed rather than their performances.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Check the Sunday papers.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Gillian Clarke’s latest from Carcanet will get a complete discussion but not her full-on performance with Carol Ann Duffy at the Hay Festival.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Barry MacSweeney<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>at the Sandringham Hotel gets no mention but his great <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Wolf Tongue, </i>that gets the full treatment. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Novak is nothing if not thorough.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Her study encompasses not just the poet with a voice on the platform but offers a whole analysis of how arm gestures, stances, introductions, contexts and ways of actually mouthing the words can have an effect on the emerging poem.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>She offers ways of analysing the articulatory parameters of the poet’s verbal utterances.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Pitch, movement, deviation from the printed text, body communication, accent, tone, range and context are all quantified.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>She concludes that there is a branch of artistic endeavour, of literature, being practised that has yet to be fully-engaged with by the academic community.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>She proposes that a start be made.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>She has something here. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Live Poetry</i> gives us valuable insights into a reading scene that many know little about.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The whole battle between street wise and studied, between black and white, between loud and quiet is explored.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>She says what she means.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Live poetry “can be defined as emerging from the fundamental bi-mediality of the genre of poetry – i.e. its potential realisation as spoken or written word – as a specific manifestation of poetry’s oral mode of realisation, which is parallel to, rather than a mere derivative ‘version’ of, written mode.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s something different.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Back down at the Juno Lounge or Clwb Ifor or Chapter’s Media Point the latest open mic is in action.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A cluster of newbies are there with poem in hand waiting for their slots.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The main acts, the guests, brought there as the supposed reason for this night’s live event, have their audience<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>swelled by the wannabes and the wannabe’s mates.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In fact without the wannabes and their cohorts <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>there may, on occasion, be no audience at all.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It is how it is in the poetry world. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Sometimes someone will record something on an iPhone.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Now and again there’ll be a camera on a tripod in the corner, its red record light winking.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But generally the experience will sift off into the air once it’s done.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We’ll talk about it for a bit in the bar.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We might mention it when we get home.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But after that it’ll be mostly forgotten.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Poetry reading, gone.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The pic at the top is Ed Dorn reading at Buffalo</span></i></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-16130485214747065772012-03-02T09:32:00.004+00:002012-03-02T16:24:36.259+00:00Literary Heroes<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxVk5BYtsUC3g9YcmJ6-8WK3iLp2nHL28ZG6k39b5773UvrKE5JXIgmHpzk4nl5NfRL_z5VAQFDwLrv2tKvkLyDbOFFJLI0MXmxzSxffHUnCT2TzMKxviOVkeOXvWQdrn9TM3dDhqjCo0f/s1600/McClure+-+Ghost+Tantras.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxVk5BYtsUC3g9YcmJ6-8WK3iLp2nHL28ZG6k39b5773UvrKE5JXIgmHpzk4nl5NfRL_z5VAQFDwLrv2tKvkLyDbOFFJLI0MXmxzSxffHUnCT2TzMKxviOVkeOXvWQdrn9TM3dDhqjCo0f/s320/McClure+-+Ghost+Tantras.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5715230528014165506" /></a><div><p class="MsoNoSpacing">Do you have them?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What’s it like when after the passage of time you go back and check?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Are these guys still up to it?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Do they thrill like they once did?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Do they remain the ground breakers and the jet engined bodhisattvas you once imagined them to be?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve just got round to reading Joyce Johnson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Minor Characters.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></i>This is a book I sold for decades when it appeared as a British Picador but never got round to actually reading.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Until now. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></i>Johnson was Kerouac’s girlfriend in the fifties and one of the few women who made any sort of impression as a Beat.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Minor Characters</i> is her memoir of the period.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“A young woman’s coming-of-age in the beat orbit of Jack Kerouac.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It was published in 1983.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Johnson, Jewish Joyce Glassman at the time, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>emerges as a writer to be reckoned with.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The book is half beat memoir and half the story of Johnson’s own struggle to make it as a female writer. This was a time when, despite all the rule breaking, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>the masculine ethos still ruled.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Ginsberg is there, the intellectual centre, the master of turn and spin.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Robert Frank, the photographer, is the quiet genius.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>John Cellon Holmes is the man you can talk to. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Michael McClure and Gregory Corso are tolerable outsiders.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Kerouac comes out as a misanthrope, a drunk, a bore, a writer who perpetually let his friends down and was inconstant as the wind.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>All the qualities, of course, which made his writing as exciting as it was.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But as a hero this wasn’t the sort of description I wanted to find.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p>I looked again at the Kerouac poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Mexico City Blues, Old Angel Midnight, The Book of Haikus, The Scattered Poems</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Surface here was and still is everything.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Depth barely exists.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Everything seems to have been written instantly without a thought for revision.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The beat way.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Only in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Trip Trap: Haiku On The Road</i> does the poetry really fly and that’s probably down to the fact that these are collaborative poems made with both Albert Saijo and Lew Welch on a road<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>journey from San Francisco to New York in 1959.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Disheartened? I am. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">I chase down another hero.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Michael McClure. The San Francisco poet appears as Pat McLear in Kerouac’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Big Sur</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>His beast language as exemplified by some of the work in his seminal 1964 City Lights title <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Ghost Tantras</i> was a big influence on my early sound improvisations.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">McClure’s version went something like: </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Grahhhhr. Grahhhr. Gahar. Ghrahhr. Grahhr. Grahhr.<br />Ghrahhr. Grahhhr. Grahhr. Gratharrr! Grahhrr.<br />Ghrahrr. Ghraaaaaaahrr. Grhar. Ghhrarrr! Grahhhrr.<br />Ghrahrr. Gharr! Ghrahhhhr. Grahhrr. Ghraherrr. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">A mix of guttural and laryngeal sound that brings together lion roars, a touch of detonated dada, and emotional truths.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I set up my BBC B computer with a data pool derived from McClure’s beast outpourings and let the machine randomly rip.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Finch the sound poet as beast master.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For a time I’d be there on stage, roaring at startled audiences who’d never heard of McClure and wondered what I was on. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Penguin have now reissued two earlier McClure titles, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The New Book/A Book of Torture</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Star</i> in one set as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Huge Dreams – San Francisco and Beat Poems</i> with an introduction by Robert Creeley.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Irresistible.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And never read by me.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In it McClure pours forth spontaneously.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“I was twenty-seven.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Writing these poems, I imagined it as one long poem.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That was as coherent as I could be…..I imagined I was Shelley, sometimes I imagined I was Antonin Artaud.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He would have done better if he’d imagined he was Allen Ginsberg.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">But I’m probably being Unkind.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Spontaneity can succeed, as McClure’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Ghost Tantras</i> so well proved.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>As a performer McClure went on to work with Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek and to take the results out on the circuit.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You can see him reciting Chaucer in Scorsese’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">the Last Waltz</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Two down.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Where next?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>At the British Library recently I bought a postcard of the late J G Ballard.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Taken by Fay Godwin in 1976 at Ballard’s experimental height.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s on my notice board now, behind me.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I take down <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">High Rise </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Crash</i> and, for good measure, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Drowned World</i> and check, gingerly, to see if they still hold their original exotic and innovative power.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I dip and read.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I needn’t have worried. Unlike batteries left alone in a dark room for decades these books are still full of spark.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Ballard was the hero I’d never invite as a guest to the Oriel Bookshop for fear that he might turn out to be ordinary and not the genius I’d expected.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But I need not have worried.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Yet I can’t give up on Jack, can I?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I reread a slice of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Dharma Bums</i>, his description of the void and his wine-fuelled search for enlightenment.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Still speeds, still crackles, still works.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not all lost. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Kerouac had already begun to fade as the fifties turned into the sixties, the time I discovered him.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>As Johnson has it, Kerouac “who retreated farther and farther from the centre of the stage into the dusty wings, out to the back alley, tunnelling backwards through decades toward the Lowell of his earliest vision, and – finding it in a narrow place, the wonder gone from it – making the desolate effort to assume its prejudices, its bitter suspicions,<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>‘The pure products of America go crazy,’ Dr William Carlos Williams had written.” <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So it all went. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">I put the books back. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>All of them.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Turn round and face the future.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This is 2012. Move on.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There’s a hell of a lot still to happen.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p></div>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-89156443838532936132012-02-09T11:33:00.001+00:002012-02-09T11:35:17.989+00:00Commissions<p class="MsoNoSpacing">Are these the best ways to create new work?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When you are starting out and you have none and all the work you’ve ever done has been written because you wanted to write it you imagine that commissions are somehow the pot at the end of the rainbow, the holy grail.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Get one and the future will be secure.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Real work.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Stuff you get asked to do and with recompense somewhere down the line at the end of it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You fervently hope. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The Poets Laureate who are on a sort of full time permanent commission, at least for the period of their holding of the office, are a particular case.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>How well do they fare?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Ted Hughes, heart not in it, clearly hopeless.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Andrew Motion, considerate and acceptable enough but nothing really to make the heart soar.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Duffy, early days, so far so good, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>but where next?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Commissions are drivers but they are also constraints.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They remove the need, as it were, for the hunt for initial inspiration.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They mark out territory. The commissioned bard simply has to fill in.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s a game full of joy, strain and endless teeth-gnashing stress. Can I do it, will I do it and, having done it, will it be any good? </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The playwright Roger Stennett told me years ago that his method was to do absolutely nothing until the deadline for the commissioned work was virtually on him.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Then he’d lock himself in his room for a day or however long the work would take and go like fury.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This was the up against the wire solution.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The terminator arriving and the work coming out of you like sweat.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Start too early, he argued, and the adrenalin wouldn’t be there to help.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">One’s attitude depends, I suppose, on where you see the poet sitting in society.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Is twenty-first century verse still a self-indulgent activity with the poet right at its heart?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Should poetry’s ultimate audience be considered at all?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Or is poetry still essentially a personal art?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Indeed, who do poets write for?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Do they act like late capitalists looking for a gap in the market and then moving in to fill?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>From the evidence of the blogs and the anthologies and the mags most certainly don’t. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Commissions do away with this dichotomy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They walk right round it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But they can still induce copious fear.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I am usually scared to death when one arrives.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Can I really do this?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Will what I come up with be as good as my last creation?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Do I still cut it as a poet?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Hasn’t everything I’ve done so far just been some sort of<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>fluke?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Will the future be an Alzheimer’s’ plateau of inability and dark? </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">My technique is to go at it immediately and not to let up until I’ve enough down on paper to stop the sweat from worrying my brow.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That happened with the recent piece I’ve written for the Penarth poet Harry Guest.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Guest <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>will be 80 this year.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A famous Penguin Modern Poet with a Shearsman festschrift due for publication soon.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I opened the commissioning letter, thought about it for a moment or two, then turned on my computer and didn’t turn it off again until I had the bones of what I was going to do written down. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The same sort of thing happened with the poem outside the James Street South Wales Police HQ in Cardiff.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>On that occasion I had to make a presentation of my idea to a lay panel and worried myself stupid about it all week.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The poem was the only thing in my brain, 24/7.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the event the art work architect talked, the panel smiled, and I then performed.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Someone cheered.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The rest of the panel applauded.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I knew then that <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>we were in.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">What you end up with here is completed work.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Material that broadens your range.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Up ahead money usually changes hands and to make that happen you need to deliver the goods.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Otherwise you fail.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Poets don’t fail.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They never do.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I haven’t done so.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not that I know of.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not yet.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br /></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br /></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-46378217277061275772012-02-07T11:42:00.005+00:002012-02-07T11:49:21.584+00:00In Celebration of the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYQb3bZmMiZC1KaARU5pqUhX3i6988cXO_2CTpUAyXgCJxfM_9jdRDWnQ-llu4UUbRvrkh0G99l9-6H5Yrzf7w1784M3H4LhEnj9wtzKaq4mebLydmLYOR_mWiMC7pdv3SEILFv6d3A_iv/s1600/mutual+friend.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYQb3bZmMiZC1KaARU5pqUhX3i6988cXO_2CTpUAyXgCJxfM_9jdRDWnQ-llu4UUbRvrkh0G99l9-6H5Yrzf7w1784M3H4LhEnj9wtzKaq4mebLydmLYOR_mWiMC7pdv3SEILFv6d3A_iv/s320/mutual+friend.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5706359050514918818" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;">Ready Availability<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">The Bachelor the Bachelor the Barnacles the Bachelor the Badger</span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;"><br /></span></span><span style="color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Dedlock </span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color:black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">(Dartle)(Drummle)(Duff) Cripples (Crimple)(Crupp)<br /></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:arial;">Cupcake (Caught)Creakle (Gradgrind)(Grimwig) (Gulpage)(Great)<br />Rokesmith (Rudge)(Rudge)(Rudge)(Rudge)(Real)(Rug)<br />Sloppy (Slowboy)(Slightboy)(Slammer) Situation (Speculative)(Slight)<br />the Warden the Warden (Wardle)(Wardle)(Waterbrook)<br />Wopsle (clerk)(friend)(actor) (thesb.)(fame) (luck)<br />Plornish (plasterer)(lime) (aggregate)(hair))(lath fix)(shrinkage)(scuttlebuck)<br />Petowker Price Prigg Pross (pretty) (fix)(sort)(guess)<br />Podsnap Pogram (shuffle)(shard) Potterson (experience)(list)<br />start somewhere (Adams) rattle hiss wish concentrate realign<br />rhestr reallocate random rip retaliate render rich realise reach<br />Fanny Cleaver aka Jenny Wren cripple doll driven dressmaker<br />Dilber distrust Dodson and Fogg duplicity dealers (foxed)(slight<br />Scuffing)( rusted staples)(binding loose)(rip)<br />(uncut)(pages mssng) (water damage) (author sig)<br />(brittle)(buggered)(book club ed)(dedication “my Johnny lad you are<br />a wonderful boy, love Uncle Ron”)(shelf cocked)(tanning visible)<br />(torn)(rip) (crease)(cracked)(defaced) (mild mould) (binding undone)<br />bought Grewgious guardian (Rosa Bud) man of many angles<br />no conversation (Fips) (Fish)(Finching) found (fell) (filched) (fractured)(fresh)(filled)(fixed)(frozen)(finished)<br />Pickwick eminence (see 7 above) mender of roads<br />filibuster final finisher surface like a calm pond (shouting)<br />storm at sea episodic (multiple) cliffhang forthright<br />(available)read (read to) don’t stop.</span></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family:Calibri;color:black;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Peter Finch</span></b></span></span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="mso-bidi-;font-family:Calibri;color:black;"><b><br /></b></span></span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing">taken from <i>A Mutual Friend - Poems for Charles Dickens.<br /></i>Edited by Peter Robinson.<br />Two Rivers Press with the English Association. £10.00 </p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br /></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br /></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-45539684501641414302012-02-01T11:34:00.002+00:002012-02-01T11:37:04.162+00:00A Shelf Full<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh14UN8eNArFj6nflB3z5e3M_3oG9sCaRSkGCEDkppq5FEEjYTG75fivbTf922VXHDgt06TKFcyujbU4bgMkFrE8ihWVgYh7dngtScV_tvagfRdkfMBWS0e_58bfsbhJqt8ufGhAmh4TFHc/s1600/maclow.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 226px; height: 157px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh14UN8eNArFj6nflB3z5e3M_3oG9sCaRSkGCEDkppq5FEEjYTG75fivbTf922VXHDgt06TKFcyujbU4bgMkFrE8ihWVgYh7dngtScV_tvagfRdkfMBWS0e_58bfsbhJqt8ufGhAmh4TFHc/s320/maclow.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5704129418527340194" /></a><div><p class="MsoNoSpacing">When you start out as a collector of books you just have a few.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You put them on a shelf.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And in the way of things that shelf soon becomes full.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>After that it’s only a short jump to owning several shelves, all of them packed.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You don’t throw anything away or pass it on.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It may become useful at some indeterminate time in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You may need to check that reference.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Remind yourself of just what it was that author said.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The books multiply.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They arrive in floods.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They flow around the room. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">You can hold the catalogue in your head too.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You know just where everything is.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Then, after a further few years of book collecting, you find you no longer can.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The stacks and piles surround you.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Things you want disappear.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Something must be done. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">When this happens, and it has happened to me many times in my life, decisions need to be made. Keep, chuck, donate, sell – which? </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">I always believed that books were an investment.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was brought up that way. Books held intellectual, cultural and economic <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>value.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You could use them, in hard times, as a means of barter.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You could exchange them at second hand shops for cash.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You could sell your rarities for high sums.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You could, if you were Richard Booth, the self-styled King of Hay, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>donate the dross to poor pensioners who could heat their winter rooms by burning burn them in their stoves. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Truth is it hasn’t worked out like that. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Books today appear to have a rapidly decreasing intrinsic value. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>No one wants them<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>anymore.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The second hand shops have all closed and the market for rarities is shrinking fast.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Where once a decent hard-backed ex-review copy could be resold for a few pounds you are now lucky if you can find a jumble sale willing to take it for nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Charity bags shoved through your letterbox want clothing not paper.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>At Amazon you download the digital rather than delight in the smell of print on paper.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Well, a lot of people do. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">But to hell with all that.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I come from an older world.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’m back in the study where my new Ikea Billy Bookcases now line the walls.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’m engaged in the big job.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Reorganising the home library.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The pamphlets, those unwanted nuisances even when they were new, are mostly now in a box.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Or several boxes.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When they first came out they were only visible when you held them in your hand and you only did that for a few brief moments.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Then they were consigned to the literary past.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Instant gratification before dissolution.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The early Anglo-Welsh Triskel pamphlets of John Tripp and Leslie Norris, the wonders of Bob Cobbing’s seemingly endless Writers Forum, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s cards, booklets <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>and folded sheets, Topher Mills’ Red Sharks with their bindings still intact.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>My own second aeon delights, D M Thomas, Thomas A Clark, Will Parfitt, JP Ward, William Wantling, Geraint Jarman, David Callard, all with their staples rusting and their glue coming undone.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">There’s a shelf of Beat Generation originals that I hold extremely dear.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>My early paperbacks of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>My City Lights first editions.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>My hardback obscurities.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Norman Mailer’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The White Negro</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Ginsberg’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Kaddish</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Howl.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></i>Below them the books by the Angry Young Men.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>John Wain.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Kingsley Amis. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And the fellow travellers.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>B S Johnson.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Alexander Trocchi.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><o:p> </o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Next <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve set out my collection of concrete poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>All embracing when it arrived and flourished between the early 50s and the late 70s.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Reduced to three and a half shelves now.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve all the major anthologies, books by the masters, European material, American stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In the centre are my books by Jackson Mac Low.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The genius of repetition and process, of system writing, of variations driven by mathematics, of permutation and alignment and chance.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>His was a poetry that challenged the whole idea of what could be poetry.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Verse’s Alban Berg, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, poetry’s John Cage. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">He came to Cardiff.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I got him to read at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">No Walls</i> in the Marchioness of Bute pub where Boots now stands in the centre of the city.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He gave us the works: chants, murmurings, declarations, repeats, glorious showers of verbiage that may have held no inherent narrative but thrilled the audience nonetheless.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What Mac Low was presenting us with was idea rather than emotion, light bulb moments rather than sentiment, poetry that worked not because of what it did but because of what it was. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">I check my titles.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve half a dozen.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>None of them signed.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I rarely remembered to ask.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Jackson came back to the flat and slept on the couch.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I presented him with a copy of my own early visual stuff.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve no idea if he read it or not.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He never wrote to say.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">After a while he worked out that having heard how words arrived at by process often sounded one could create them anew, avoiding process all together, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>right out of the middle of the head.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Abandon the process and write as you imagine process to be.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Read his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Twenties </i>(Roof Books,1991) Here are 100 separate poems “that were written intuitively and spontaneously”.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></i>Although he does qualify this when he says that “it might be misleading, however, to call these poems ‘intentional’,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> </i>in that each word, etc., was written as soon as it came to mind or (in some cases) when I saw or heard it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I hardly ever revised<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">..”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></i>Jackson Mac Low died in 2004. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">How much Mac Low is there out there free forever on the net?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Copious amounts at <a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/maclow/">http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/maclow/</a><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>as it turns out.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But as much as I have on my shelf?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I doubt it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Let’s keep it that way.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br /></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br /></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p></div>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-3854998534376818452012-01-26T12:23:00.009+00:002012-01-26T14:45:03.666+00:00Editing<div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitTsFJOIsvoGeWjuOFnpqcJQEZzaoOSES_abrbyXPzMhTXGT8UGhvIb3PvF65shicoiaxCdZ71TGpZWeMmRPlw4gNweGzvqh7HQ9KMAyWSWx2ou0q_eNQyDIGN8-ZQt4sIEwM9X1NOMl4V/s1600/editing.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 255px; height: 320px; text-align: center; display: block; cursor: pointer;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5701915402820301058" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitTsFJOIsvoGeWjuOFnpqcJQEZzaoOSES_abrbyXPzMhTXGT8UGhvIb3PvF65shicoiaxCdZ71TGpZWeMmRPlw4gNweGzvqh7HQ9KMAyWSWx2ou0q_eNQyDIGN8-ZQt4sIEwM9X1NOMl4V/s320/editing.jpg" /></a><br /><div><br />Any idea what this word means? There have been an array of editors appearing recently at the Leveson Enquiry. What do these people do? Do they go through texts with blue pencils removing that which they do not like? Or are they primarily selectors – the ones who read through the stack of submitted material and decide what’s worth using and what is not? Maybe they are commissioners of the material to be used in the first place. The ones who ask for stuff to be done.<br /><br />On the other hand they may just copy edit. Correct loose grammar, bad spellings, difficult punctuation, imprecise word choices, remove ambiguity, check facts. Nope, from what we’ve all seen on TV they certainly don’t do too much of that.<br /><br />I got into literary editing at an early age. I had no idea what I was really supposed to do. The editor was the one who chose. That’s how I decided in the end to pitch it. I was running a small poetry magazine at the time – second aeon. The name was all in lower case. Spirit of the age.<br /><br />Poetry magazine editors, I soon learned, might be well able to decide what went in and what did not. What they could not do, however, was change anything. Correcting text was absolutely forbidden. The editor was not allowed to add or subtract punctuation or suggest stylistic alterations possible infelicities of thrust or meaning to his or her writers. This was mainly because these creatives were poets rather than prose writers. When a poet put it down then there it stayed.<br /><br />I once tried to remove an expletive from a poem by Chris Torrance and was told, very firmly, no. The poem went in with **!**!! included or it stayed completely out. I’d already had a few run ins with the PostOffice who were on the verge of stopping me from using Her Majesty’s Mail anymore if I continued publishing linguistically offensive stuff. “We have women working here,” the supervisor told me. “We can’t have you pushing such crude through their hands.” “But they won’t be able to read it,” I protested. “The magazines all go out in sealed envelopes.” “Doesn’t matter,” the man said, hat pulled hard over his forehead, “the fact that the words are there is enough.” Shades of Marcel Duchamp, I thought. Deep Modernism at work in the GPO.<br /><br />So I let the Torrance poem stand. And in the event no one noticed. Lucky that time.<br /><br />Later I heard how other editors operated. The famous tale of the compiler of an early anthology of Anglo-Welsh poetry who by mistake left off the second page of a poem by Glyn Jones. The book went to press (and stands uncorrected today) with half the text missing. No one noticed until the poet himself got to see it. Glyn was upset but nothing was done.<br /><br />Nearer home I learned how the newspaper trade did things. Differently from the literary trade that’s for sure. “It’s all copy,” John Osmond told me. “Copy you cut to fit the space. Usually you just slice a bit off the end to make the text fit.” A bit like sawing a bit off the leg of a table to make it balance. In action this boiled down to stories being sliced up as if John Cage was authoring them. If you work in the newspaper business then you learn to live with this. But I didn’t. And when it happens to pieces I’ve written – and it still does - then I find it hard to manage.<br /><br />But I have emerged with a sense of the text being text. Once it leaves your hands then it’s gone. The best work is always the latest work. The past work is in the past. But poetry, of course, is full of echoes and has a Zen-like staying power. It’s always there, as it were. You can abandon it but you can never let it completely go. It can come back to you when you least expect it, snarling at you in its unadulterated from for the long past, last week, or wherever else it’s been.<br /><br />Anyway, editors are a dying breed. In these days of access and digital over supply who needs them? Everything is everywhere for everyone every time, as Gertrude Stein might have put it. I once believed this. But now **!**!! </div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>You are the man, Torrance, of course, you always were.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> </div><div> </div></div>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-51376553905002869812012-01-20T10:39:00.005+00:002012-01-20T10:43:26.666+00:00Woke Up This Morning<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0X9-A94VOqq70nGphifw3rP2FXjSju62C9TiUjdrw4c-8_TTWyaLJtbzH8mBkrxDiRJ-PQMfp1-1yV5y1BCfucJ79etp6Ypgl9QcdFq6NHfElKNpqhU6o94MtpeV12Gt23op-m-F1DoCh/s1600/vamper.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 302px; height: 167px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0X9-A94VOqq70nGphifw3rP2FXjSju62C9TiUjdrw4c-8_TTWyaLJtbzH8mBkrxDiRJ-PQMfp1-1yV5y1BCfucJ79etp6Ypgl9QcdFq6NHfElKNpqhU6o94MtpeV12Gt23op-m-F1DoCh/s320/vamper.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5699662101930518258" /></a><div><p class="MsoNoSpacing">In Ann Charters’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Portable Sixties Reader</i> there are appearances from many of the expected literary stars of the period.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Everyone from Susan Sontag to Timothy Leary, Diane di Prima<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>to Charles Bukowski and Gary Snyder to Norman Mailer.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In addition there are contributions from a few singer songwriters, notably Country Joe McDonald and Bob Dylan.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>All too often such songwriters have been excluded from similar compilations on the grounds that they are inappropriate and somehow unliterary or, more likely, because the copyright holders of their music simply want to charge too much.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Seeing Dylan in here, a man who you’d imagine certainly might want to charge given his universal fame, fills me with hope.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s in such marked contrast, for example, to Rita Dove’s exclusions for copyright fee reasons of several greats from her Penguin Anthology of American verse.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The singer songwriter back in the sixties was the harbinger of song writing’s rehabilitation.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Suddenly we wanted to listen to what music was telling us again.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Leonard Cohen, Ray Davies, Phil Ochs, Fred Neil, Marc Cohn and many others became as much a part of the literary backdrop as WH Auden, Allen Ginsberg, RS Thomas and Sylvia Plath once had been.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I seem to remember the Merthyr poet Mike Jenkins quoting Captain Beef heart as one of his main literary influences.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That’s the kind of thing that would have had earlier generations spinning.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Stuff no longer entirely in its box.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Music and writing on the merge. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">It’s a tradition that has stuck.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We’ve a load of great contemporary examples writing out there.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Have a look at the work of Mark E Smith for a start.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The tradition is just as strong in Wales.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Gorky’s set it flowing.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Richard James, Gwyneth Glyn, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Euros Childs, Gruff Rhys and others carry it on.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">My early attempts to join in were singularly unsuccessful.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>First up I began writing blues lyrics.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’d heard Bob Dylan but not really understood what he was attempting.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Things that began “Woke up this morning” seemed much easier.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I typed mine up on small bits of paper and usually carried a bunch of them around with me in my inside pocket.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When I made it in the mid-sixties to Bristol’s Colston Hall to hear the great American Folk Blues tour featuring Howlin Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson and Sleepy John Estes I found myself hovering around the stage door.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Willie Dixon, bass player and record producer, emerged, cigar in hand.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Mr Dixon, I shouted, chancing my arm, have a look at these songs I’ve written.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I shoved a few woke up this mornings and big legged mama’s into his pudgy hands.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He smiled, grunted, folded the papers without looking at them into a pocket of his saggy suit, said something that sounded like thank you boy and then went back inside.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I never heard from him again. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Down at the Greyhound, the scrumpy pub for down and outs and winos, on Cardiff’s Bridge Street, I was the resident singer.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This was my decision, I had not been invited.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Hell, in that place no one would.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I sat there in the corner with bottle caps clasped to my shoes with rubber bands, a guitar on my lap, capo in place, and a harmonica harness holding a Horner Super Vamper in C and a kazoo round my neck.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I played the one twelve bar thing I knew how to, mumbled a few lyrics into the space in front of me and then blew a few bits on the kazoo.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The can’t play his instruments <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>one man band.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Voice so out of tune the windows rattled.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What was I doing?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">I got requests.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Play Nellie Deane.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I don’t know it. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Bloody useless you are.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Can you play anything else?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>No.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Sod off then.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>After a few more <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>desultory wails on the harmonica <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I decided that maybe I wasn’t the new south Wales Dylan after all and left.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span> I’ve no idea what happened to the guitar after that but the harmonica and the kazoo are still in a box up in the loft.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I found my blues lyrics file the other day, too, a book into which I’d pasted hundreds of the things.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>At its end is an entry which reads “No more book but I’m not stopping”.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>God, the things you write when you are young.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p></div>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-44219428049041645832012-01-09T09:29:00.005+00:002012-01-09T09:43:26.670+00:00Anthologies<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU5NA8KorCB6Lzyj27lokw8Z1E1dJbPfP3cr7nFrY8bvxco5IMTCSP9Ebg4gX1DRGkoEESrzf0OlFrJBt2lzdVXmA_s6VhBbGQne_8ovafcvR-gtFlB9gbeBqM2L-FD-z9DdF0wm_IkCIZ/s1600/Dove-cover.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 198px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU5NA8KorCB6Lzyj27lokw8Z1E1dJbPfP3cr7nFrY8bvxco5IMTCSP9Ebg4gX1DRGkoEESrzf0OlFrJBt2lzdVXmA_s6VhBbGQne_8ovafcvR-gtFlB9gbeBqM2L-FD-z9DdF0wm_IkCIZ/s320/Dove-cover.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5695562723539595058" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNoSpacing">This is the way of bird’s-eyeing the whole scene.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Buy an anthology, check what you know and find out things you don’t.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Have your prejudices confirmed, have your mind stretched.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Discover new roads, find that the alley you are in has a dead-end.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Be excited.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Be bored to death.</p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Poetry anthologies have always been the great markers of their age.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Editors rush to have their selection end up being <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">the</i> one.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And out there are some great selections (although inevitably not everyone will agree).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Donald Allen and George Buttrick’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Postmoderns, </i>Mike Horovitz’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Children of </i>Albion from 1969, Edward Lucie-Smith’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">British Poetry Since 1945</i> from 1970, Iain Sinclair’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Conductors of Chaos</i> from 1996, Hulse, Kennedy & Morley’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">The New Poetry</i> of 1993, Armitage and Crawford’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945</i> from 1998. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The editors of these books have become the taste makers of their age.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They are the ones who have decided which names should mean something to the wider public.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This on the basis that the wider public are not capable of buying individual books but will chance their arms on an anthology, I suppose. They are also the markers of trends and new departures.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Is it time now to leave the mid-century middle-class white male dominance?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Should we <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>shift across to poetry from immigrants, travellers, mobile populations, work translated from minority tongues, regionalist, feminist, non-academic rather than university researched, the output of creative writing departments instead of work from the genuinely inspired, wild edge pushing texts in place of measured steady verses, performance work rather than verse from the page? </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The anthologists make these decisions.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Unconsciously we follow their leads.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Sometimes we do.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">And if you are operator on the scene, a writer in the field, is your work included?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Or have you once again been left out in the cold?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’m in Ric Caddel and Peter Quartermain’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Other – British and Irish Poetry Since 1970 </i>and Allnutt, D’Aguir, Edwards and Mottram’s<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> The New British Poetry </i><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>but not in Keith Tuma’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Anthology of T</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">wentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry</i>. There you go. Am I upset? I don't know.</p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Does any of this matter? If you are not included in one book then you’ll be in the next, perhaps.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If you are not then set out and edit your own.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That’s the way the poetry scene rolls and tumbles. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">I’m not included in the new <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry</i> edited by Rita Dove either.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Dove, her of the Pulitzer prize, former poet laureate of America and star of Barak Obama’s White House poetry evenings (yes, there have been such things).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But then I’m not American but even if I had been I would have remained out in the cold.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath didn’t make the final cut either.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not important enough to Dove’s world view.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Dove is on record as saying that “the entire poetic trajectory of the century flashed before me.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>From that arc she made her choice.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I can see what she’s trying to achieve, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>to redress a balance.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But with something as significant as this anthology perhaps not quite the thing to do.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Doyen of critics Helen Vendler has taken Dove to task for these and other exclusions.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Dove’s selection, Vendler claims, “expressed a clear preference for “multicultural inclusiveness that would shift the balance away from the centrality of the century’s acknowledged titans of English-language poetry—Eliot, Frost, Stevens…—by introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors”.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Dove, Vendler goes on, has included too many writers for “ their representative themes rather than their style.” </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Dove, of course, does not agree.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>She has issued a point by point rebuttal claiming that Vendler has “allowed outrage to get the better of her, leading to a number of illogical assertions and haphazard conclusions”.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not including Ginsberg and Plath was the logical thing to do, obviously.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Their work does not fit with Dove’s new twenty-first century view of the past one hundred years of US verse.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The small matter of Dove having run out of permissions fees and therefore not being able to pay the copyright charges and then failing to sort this out with her publisher <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>is something else.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A lot of people have now had their noses put out of joint. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">But, of course, anthologies are supposed to do this.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Upset some of, enrage others, as well as enthralling and exciting everyone else.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Controversy is the stuff of poetry, it ought to be.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>If poetry is predictable then it has failed. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Meic Stephens edited the great anthology of Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh poetry for the Library of Wales.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Poetry 1900 to 2000</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We are now a decade down the line.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Time for some of the new voices to be seen as well as heard. <o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-42666061639848292512012-01-02T09:53:00.008+00:002012-01-02T17:51:32.999+00:00The Voyage of Dementia<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjosUY5VoiLxvkxZNSDSX0pryKSkJWh0zMaCj4FtLrPyfCLiaWx3UsyIxN_49vKIjJNbpO9JENGiFsujgZsqIdTeLByYNsbJN4vPTI4-5qEm075FpS7IDe-6f1xeCtAT2LRnEdfYBHB6wR/s1600/clock+drawing+test+dementia.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 303px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjosUY5VoiLxvkxZNSDSX0pryKSkJWh0zMaCj4FtLrPyfCLiaWx3UsyIxN_49vKIjJNbpO9JENGiFsujgZsqIdTeLByYNsbJN4vPTI4-5qEm075FpS7IDe-6f1xeCtAT2LRnEdfYBHB6wR/s320/clock+drawing+test+dementia.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5692971436694008354" /></a><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><br />Ah dementia.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Word of the year for 2011.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A condition on the rise with any number of battles with a reluctant<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>NHS up ahead.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve known at least two people who have ended their days in the grips of this mind<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>thinner.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s a condition that has no cure, that cannot be fixed, that cannot be made better.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The mind wears away, its edges fray, its central parts rub thin like overused shoes.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The memories flake off and float away.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The ability to move from A to B becomes compromised.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The familiar is no longer familiar.</p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Things get worse in stages, like descending steps.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There are plateaus of calm but nothing ever climbs back up. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Eventually it all goes on down.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The drugs the NHS reluctantly prescribes, reluctant because they are deemed too expensive, can help.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>They can reduce dementia’s advance and slow its progress.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But this condition cannot ultimately be stopped.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">My mother carried the names of things she couldn’t remember around with her on scraps of paper in her pockets and in her purse.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>When she pulled them out she wondered what they were for.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Who put these here, she’d ask?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You did, I’d say.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I did not. Why would I do that? </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Yesterday I couldn’t remember the name of the pub built onto the restored pilot house in Cardiff Bay.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Leave the Millennium Centre and turn left instead of right.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Sam Smith’s Brewery.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Like the Tardis once you got inside.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What was it called?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I just couldn’t recall.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Today I still can’t.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The name has become erased.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Gone off into a set of brain cells which have had their ends taped up.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s not the Eli Jenkins nor the White Hart.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s The Waterguard.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve just looked it up. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Should I be worried?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not with Google at my side. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Mike, when he was in the teeth of it, would sit in the pub watching his beer evaporate.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What do I do with this glass of brown stuff, he might have been thinking, who knows.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But after we’d somehow persuaded him to drink a bit and the alcohol began to flow in his veins he’d brighten up.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He’d become chatty, remember who he was and who we were.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Told the odd joke.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Smiled.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Almost the man he once was.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For Mike alcohol helped. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Dementia – Alzheimer’s –it’s a process, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>it’s a condition of our <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>post-modern world. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Here’s the poem:<br /><br /></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;">The Voyage of Dementia<o:p></o:p></span></b></p> <p class="Poems"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="font-size: 16.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></b></p> <p class="Poems">The voyage of discovery<br />The victim of disaster<br />The volume of dissonance<br />The vileness of dementia</p><p class="Poems"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems">The discovery of shelter<br />The death of simplicity<br />The dissonance of decisions<br />The disaster of democracy</p><p class="Poems"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems">The viciousness of critics<br />The volume of criticism<br />The voyage of creation<br />The vision of cremation</p><p class="Poems"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems">The dimness of vicissitude<br />The demonstrability of volume<br />The debility of ventilation<br />The death of vision</p><p class="Poems"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems">The fracture of the future<br />The firmness of dissonance<br />The fullness of digression<br />The filibustering of death</p><p class="Poems"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems">The criticism of creation<br />The commuting of conquest<br />The consolation of commutation<br />The cessation of courage</p><p class="Poems"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems">The diagram of depth<br />The digitisation of drumming<br />The disregard of dignity<br />The dimness of diplomacy</p><p class="Poems"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems">The directness of the dharma<br />The diagnosis of devaluation<br />The desperation of death<br />The dementia of denouement</p><p class="Poems"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems">The denouement of dementia.<br /><br /><br /><br /><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="Poems"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight:normal"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-22205678671691970462011-12-22T11:50:00.005+00:002011-12-22T13:43:32.005+00:00Olson, Ormond and the Energy Flow<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmC_-PbojVHpNb0h5JUqv2Z0huCkIJvYogCZX5um_7YI1dDZIAWVEQtCpefHN8EyveSJSyFycoZIONCrvUBayeAT3-LMFVuuwuYRRsiMsINKlYhb2NMTICb6m3JwR1-zsqASZUUg4n2Bhp/s1600/olsen.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 220px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmC_-PbojVHpNb0h5JUqv2Z0huCkIJvYogCZX5um_7YI1dDZIAWVEQtCpefHN8EyveSJSyFycoZIONCrvUBayeAT3-LMFVuuwuYRRsiMsINKlYhb2NMTICb6m3JwR1-zsqASZUUg4n2Bhp/s320/olsen.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5688919252878738178" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNoSpacing">I was in the front bar of the Conway.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This was back in the days when the Conway had a front bar.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It was here that<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>the great Anglo-Welsh poet and filmmaker John Ormond held court.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Ormond had risen to fame by making unparalleled documentaries about the poet R S Thomas, by writing verse good enough to get Oxford University Press to publish, and for knowing Dylan Thomas personally.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There’s a photo, somewhere, of a barely recognisable Ormond sitting on some rocks with a few other people. One of them is allegedly Dylan. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">John was generous with his time.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He’d looked at my amateur verse on a number of occasions and actually bothered to make suggestions which helped me improve it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“Why not take the beginning and put it at the end” was one of his better ones.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was the new white hope.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This mainly because I was young, omnipresent on the nascent literary scene and full of energy. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">“The trouble is, Finch,” he told me, “that they won’t be putting ‘he had energy’ on your gravestone.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">I didn’t know what he was talking about so he explained.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“You need to start writing something of worth.” </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">The big literary subject of the age was the battle between form and content.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Being full of enthusiasm for poetry but not actually having very much to say <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>was anathema to John.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Much of the theorising went back to Charles Olson (1910-1970) and his Black Mountain College in the Appalachians.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>His manifesto on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Projective Verse</i> had much to answer for.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“A poem is transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poet, all the way over to the reader.” <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Poetry as energy, poetry as flow. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“Form is never more than an extension of content,” as Olson’s pupil Robert Creeley put it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Much of this was taken to mean that form on its own was sufficient.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not really what Olson meant, I believe, but what many of his followers actually carried out.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">In my case that translated into an enthusiasm for the art of verse itself rather than what verse could do.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Nothing much, the saying goes.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Ormond begged to differ. “You must have a message,” he insisted.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“Celebrate, describe, honour, encourage, excite, manipulate, promote.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You need to do those things.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>So I did. </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">I suppose that as my ability to work in a range of forms has expanded over the years I’ve learned that the content of what I want to say usually dictates the form it will eventually take.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Some things are prose fiction, some extended verse, some post-modern shake-ups in sound and letter.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The idea arrives first then you work out where to take it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Olson, revered as one of the great twentieth century American poets, was never readily available in the UK.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You could read about him and the work of his pupils but rarely could you get your hands on the poetry of the man himself.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was once standing on the poetry balcony at the second iteration of the Welsh Arts Council’s <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Oriel Bookshop.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The one in the Friary, Cardiff, at a time when commerce was beginning to rear its difficult head. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was manager.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was showing Andrew Motion around.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“What I’d like to see,” I said, waving at the endless shelves of titles, “is something like a collected Olson appear from Penguin.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Wouldn’t that be a great idea?”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>There was silence.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Motion was still.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Then he spoke.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“No.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I don’t think so,” was all the future poet laureate said.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-22000541072771816482011-12-12T09:31:00.001+00:002011-12-12T09:33:30.196+00:00First Words Best Words<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio67-0wy3Sz5sDkwRXzFuoo5rpRUfjHLPuP3unQMyhq_NUnlyqcq5PdebP7fPVp0yfAAZH748YVXk98wXGSThnwbGLitgp9cVv7QcD6FfaSQ3yW7FnJSSmWAg-Cob32BBE5fS1xufgZ3IZ/s1600/ginsberg.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 286px; height: 176px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEio67-0wy3Sz5sDkwRXzFuoo5rpRUfjHLPuP3unQMyhq_NUnlyqcq5PdebP7fPVp0yfAAZH748YVXk98wXGSThnwbGLitgp9cVv7QcD6FfaSQ3yW7FnJSSmWAg-Cob32BBE5fS1xufgZ3IZ/s320/ginsberg.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5685172404518072578" /></a><p class="MsoNoSpacing">For some Allen Ginsberg, at the heart of the last century, is the man who started it all.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He was the one who made poetry thrilling, who made it vital, who made it something that the young wanted to engage with, who used it as a weapon of resistance that had authorities rushing to investigate and ban him.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The man who made poetry so bloody appealing and who made it so easy to get on board.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For others he was simply a bearded, balding hippie who smoked too much dope and took himself far too seriously.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not me, not Bob Dylan, nor a host of others.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>For us Ginsberg set the motor running.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">He invented things.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Breath length.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A long verse line that went on for as long as there was breath inside the poet to read it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Once the breath ran out so, too, did the line.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>A poetry that filled the page.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Then there was first words, best words.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Get it down as fast as it arrives and in the order that it comes.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Hold back from rewriting, the spontaneity and energy might dissipate.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That led to a whole raft of followers churning out their first thoughts and leaving them as they were, unamended, unmoulded, sitting there in their ragged and unfixed glory.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Easy poesy. Too much really.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But the Beats were into spontaneous bop prosody, ways of making their thoughts align with the horn solos of the bebop jazzmen they so admired.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Yet despite Ginsberg’s teachings it’s my belief that rewriting is about as essential as coming up with the words in the first place.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Nothing ever arrives complete.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Everything needs some consideration.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>How much is what poetry is about.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">First words, bets words, one side of the argument.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>“On the other is the belief that intuition provides only so much raw material, which the revision process shapes, much as a sculptor shapes his stone.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Baudelaire mocked those writers who “make a parade of negligence, aiming at a masterpiece with their eyes shut, full of confidence in disorder, and expecting letters thrown up at the ceiling to fall down again as a poem on the floor.”””<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That’s from Stephen Dobyns’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Best Words, Best Order: essays on poetry. </i>Like Baudelaire <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></i>Dobyns is no slouch when it comes to verse.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And here I think he’s got it right.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><o:p> </o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">For me I’ll go through any number of changes.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Leave the thing lying and then sneak up on it and see how it looks.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Inevitably something not spotted before will now need fixing.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But there’s a limit.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Robert Graves made a virtue of rewriting and there are tales, apocryphal no doubt, of him making fifty drafts and even then not feeling he’d made the poem work.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">Readings help.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You try the thing out in the air and suddenly it starts sounding so different from how did back there on the page.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Bits don’t gel, don’t slide, go on for far too long.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>You take the text home and you change it ready for next time.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And next time if the bumps are still in place you take it home and change it again.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">If you have a look at Ginsberg’s original manuscript for his masterwork, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Howl</i>, you’ll see that he’s made any number of changes himself.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Howl </i>did not arrive in the night, fully formed, even if that’s the myth some like to promote.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It was the result of concentrated effort and a considerable amount of editing.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing">First thoughts, best thoughts.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It’s a great idea.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But for poetry first words, best words –<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>maybe ultimately not.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNoSpacing"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><o:p> </o:p></i></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5446965703246858103.post-9691727399643367622011-12-01T13:12:00.002+00:002011-12-01T13:13:54.451+00:00How Old Do You Need To Be?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY44uLUilWjhyphenhyphenL8b72SmYHCoXZbBvd0GnAxutSVD9ARHRO2LrQVunNJX-gYXnP-nZb0tZTdkgv2Y450qKFDVfZoCFcooD4otCULbhYW6EWXUSoPlgG4pO0_3ZvWLvhmSSUzP2ZINOsaUNW/s1600/arthur_rimbaud_postcard-p239551711655358403z85wg_400.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY44uLUilWjhyphenhyphenL8b72SmYHCoXZbBvd0GnAxutSVD9ARHRO2LrQVunNJX-gYXnP-nZb0tZTdkgv2Y450qKFDVfZoCFcooD4otCULbhYW6EWXUSoPlgG4pO0_3ZvWLvhmSSUzP2ZINOsaUNW/s320/arthur_rimbaud_postcard-p239551711655358403z85wg_400.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5681147303307264578" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNormal">Do you need to be young to cut at the edge?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Maybe the best thing is to burn bright and soon and then vanish.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Arthur Rimbaud did this.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>J D Salinger too.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not quite one hit wonders but writers who said what they had to and then removed themselves from the literary scene.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Other concerns, other fears, other things to do.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The alternative is to die.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And to do that while still at the precipice of promise or, certainly, with still a lot in there to give.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Jimi Hendrix, Shelley, Byron, Hart Crane, Emily Bronte, Sylvia Plath, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Buddy Holly.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not many from Wales.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Round here in the rain we tend to resolutely hang on.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">When I was young I firmly believed that it all happened then.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Now I’m no longer I don’t.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Big Bill Broonzy, I often quote, did not learn to play a guitar until he was forty.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That gives credibility to the state of the late starter. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Everything is still possible – and that despite your eyes starting to fail and the fat arriving.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Although it turns out that Big Bill was nearer thirty when he bought his first guitar.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He actually played the fiddle before that.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">No matter.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Can we still be at the cutting edge in retirement?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Bob Cobbing was, roaring his sonic poetic wonders until well into his eighties.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Although it can and has been argued that his ground-breaking all happened when he was much younger.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The latter-day work was mere permutation, extension and repeat.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I’m really not sure.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But I am certain that the future should be firmly in the hands of those who are going to occupy it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That includes the whole digital text, end of the book as we know it rigmarole too.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve said it before and I’ll do so here again, critical articles in Planet notwithstanding.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The ultimate future is no longer with hard copy print.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Those who love paper will be safe until they die out.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But then the keyboard thumb will become master.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Meanwhile the older person still rocks.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Just about.<o:p></o:p></p>Peter Finchhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07894891082003041608noreply@blogger.com6