Peter Finch

Editing

2012-01-26T12:23:00.009Z

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So I let the Torrance poem stand. And in the event no one noticed. Lucky that time.

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.

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.

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.

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 **!**!!

You are the man, Torrance, of course, you always were.

Woke Up This Morning

2012-01-20T10:39:00.005Z

In Ann Charters’ Portable Sixties Reader there are appearances from many of the expected literary stars of the period. Everyone from Susan Sontag to Timothy Leary, Diane di Prima to Charles Bukowski and Gary Snyder to Norman Mailer. In addition there are contributions from a few singer songwriters, notably Country Joe McDonald and Bob Dylan. 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. Seeing Dylan in here, a man who you’d imagine certainly might want to charge given his universal fame, fills me with hope. 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.

The singer songwriter back in the sixties was the harbinger of song writing’s rehabilitation. Suddenly we wanted to listen to what music was telling us again. 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. I seem to remember the Merthyr poet Mike Jenkins quoting Captain Beef heart as one of his main literary influences. That’s the kind of thing that would have had earlier generations spinning. Stuff no longer entirely in its box. Music and writing on the merge.

It’s a tradition that has stuck. We’ve a load of great contemporary examples writing out there. Have a look at the work of Mark E Smith for a start. The tradition is just as strong in Wales. Gorky’s set it flowing. Richard James, Gwyneth Glyn, Euros Childs, Gruff Rhys and others carry it on.

My early attempts to join in were singularly unsuccessful. First up I began writing blues lyrics. I’d heard Bob Dylan but not really understood what he was attempting. Things that began “Woke up this morning” seemed much easier. I typed mine up on small bits of paper and usually carried a bunch of them around with me in my inside pocket. 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. Willie Dixon, bass player and record producer, emerged, cigar in hand. Mr Dixon, I shouted, chancing my arm, have a look at these songs I’ve written. I shoved a few woke up this mornings and big legged mama’s into his pudgy hands. 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. I never heard from him again.

Down at the Greyhound, the scrumpy pub for down and outs and winos, on Cardiff’s Bridge Street, I was the resident singer. This was my decision, I had not been invited. Hell, in that place no one would. 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. 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. The can’t play his instruments one man band. Voice so out of tune the windows rattled. What was I doing?

I got requests. Play Nellie Deane. I don’t know it. Bloody useless you are. Can you play anything else? No. Sod off then. After a few more desultory wails on the harmonica I decided that maybe I wasn’t the new south Wales Dylan after all and left.

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. I found my blues lyrics file the other day, too, a book into which I’d pasted hundreds of the things. At its end is an entry which reads “No more book but I’m not stopping”. God, the things you write when you are young.

Anthologies

2012-01-09T09:29:00.005Z

This is the way of bird’s-eyeing the whole scene. Buy an anthology, check what you know and find out things you don’t. Have your prejudices confirmed, have your mind stretched. Discover new roads, find that the alley you are in has a dead-end. Be excited. Be bored to death.

Poetry anthologies have always been the great markers of their age. Editors rush to have their selection end up being the one. And out there are some great selections (although inevitably not everyone will agree). Donald Allen and George Buttrick’s The Postmoderns, Mike Horovitz’s Children of Albion from 1969, Edward Lucie-Smith’s British Poetry Since 1945 from 1970, Iain Sinclair’s Conductors of Chaos from 1996, Hulse, Kennedy & Morley’s The New Poetry of 1993, Armitage and Crawford’s The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland Since 1945 from 1998.

The editors of these books have become the taste makers of their age. They are the ones who have decided which names should mean something to the wider public. 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. Is it time now to leave the mid-century middle-class white male dominance? Should we 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?

The anthologists make these decisions. Unconsciously we follow their leads. Sometimes we do.

And if you are operator on the scene, a writer in the field, is your work included? Or have you once again been left out in the cold? I’m in Ric Caddel and Peter Quartermain’s Other – British and Irish Poetry Since 1970 and Allnutt, D’Aguir, Edwards and Mottram’s The New British Poetry but not in Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry. There you go. Am I upset? I don't know.

Does any of this matter? If you are not included in one book then you’ll be in the next, perhaps. If you are not then set out and edit your own. That’s the way the poetry scene rolls and tumbles.

I’m not included in the new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove either. 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). But then I’m not American but even if I had been I would have remained out in the cold. Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath didn’t make the final cut either. Not important enough to Dove’s world view. Dove is on record as saying that “the entire poetic trajectory of the century flashed before me.” From that arc she made her choice. I can see what she’s trying to achieve, to redress a balance. But with something as significant as this anthology perhaps not quite the thing to do.

Doyen of critics Helen Vendler has taken Dove to task for these and other exclusions. 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”. Dove, Vendler goes on, has included too many writers for “ their representative themes rather than their style.”

Dove, of course, does not agree. 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”. Not including Ginsberg and Plath was the logical thing to do, obviously. Their work does not fit with Dove’s new twenty-first century view of the past one hundred years of US verse. 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 is something else. A lot of people have now had their noses put out of joint.

But, of course, anthologies are supposed to do this. Upset some of, enrage others, as well as enthralling and exciting everyone else. Controversy is the stuff of poetry, it ought to be. If poetry is predictable then it has failed.

Meic Stephens edited the great anthology of Twentieth Century Anglo-Welsh poetry for the Library of Wales. Poetry 1900 to 2000. We are now a decade down the line. Time for some of the new voices to be seen as well as heard.

The Voyage of Dementia

2012-01-02T09:53:00.008Z

Ah dementia. Word of the year for 2011. A condition on the rise with any number of battles with a reluctant NHS up ahead. I’ve known at least two people who have ended their days in the grips of this mind thinner. It’s a condition that has no cure, that cannot be fixed, that cannot be made better. The mind wears away, its edges fray, its central parts rub thin like overused shoes. The memories flake off and float away. The ability to move from A to B becomes compromised. The familiar is no longer familiar.

Things get worse in stages, like descending steps. There are plateaus of calm but nothing ever climbs back up. Eventually it all goes on down. The drugs the NHS reluctantly prescribes, reluctant because they are deemed too expensive, can help. They can reduce dementia’s advance and slow its progress. But this condition cannot ultimately be stopped.

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. When she pulled them out she wondered what they were for. Who put these here, she’d ask? You did, I’d say. I did not. Why would I do that?

Yesterday I couldn’t remember the name of the pub built onto the restored pilot house in Cardiff Bay. Leave the Millennium Centre and turn left instead of right. Sam Smith’s Brewery. Like the Tardis once you got inside. What was it called? I just couldn’t recall. Today I still can’t. The name has become erased. Gone off into a set of brain cells which have had their ends taped up. It’s not the Eli Jenkins nor the White Hart. It’s The Waterguard. I’ve just looked it up.

Should I be worried? Not with Google at my side.

Mike, when he was in the teeth of it, would sit in the pub watching his beer evaporate. What do I do with this glass of brown stuff, he might have been thinking, who knows. But after we’d somehow persuaded him to drink a bit and the alcohol began to flow in his veins he’d brighten up. He’d become chatty, remember who he was and who we were. Told the odd joke. Smiled. Almost the man he once was. For Mike alcohol helped.

Dementia – Alzheimer’s –it’s a process, it’s a condition of our post-modern world.

Here’s the poem:

The Voyage of Dementia

The voyage of discovery
The victim of disaster
The volume of dissonance
The vileness of dementia

The discovery of shelter
The death of simplicity
The dissonance of decisions
The disaster of democracy

The viciousness of critics
The volume of criticism
The voyage of creation
The vision of cremation

The dimness of vicissitude
The demonstrability of volume
The debility of ventilation
The death of vision

The fracture of the future
The firmness of dissonance
The fullness of digression
The filibustering of death

The criticism of creation
The commuting of conquest
The consolation of commutation
The cessation of courage

The diagram of depth
The digitisation of drumming
The disregard of dignity
The dimness of diplomacy

The directness of the dharma
The diagnosis of devaluation
The desperation of death
The dementia of denouement

The denouement of dementia.

Olson, Ormond and the Energy Flow

2011-12-22T11:50:00.005Z

I was in the front bar of the Conway. This was back in the days when the Conway had a front bar. It was here that the great Anglo-Welsh poet and filmmaker John Ormond held court. 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. 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.

John was generous with his time. He’d looked at my amateur verse on a number of occasions and actually bothered to make suggestions which helped me improve it. “Why not take the beginning and put it at the end” was one of his better ones. I was the new white hope. This mainly because I was young, omnipresent on the nascent literary scene and full of energy.

“The trouble is, Finch,” he told me, “that they won’t be putting ‘he had energy’ on your gravestone.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about so he explained. “You need to start writing something of worth.”

The big literary subject of the age was the battle between form and content. Being full of enthusiasm for poetry but not actually having very much to say was anathema to John. Much of the theorising went back to Charles Olson (1910-1970) and his Black Mountain College in the Appalachians. His manifesto on Projective Verse had much to answer for. “A poem is transferred from where the poet got it, by way of the poet, all the way over to the reader.” Poetry as energy, poetry as flow. “Form is never more than an extension of content,” as Olson’s pupil Robert Creeley put it. Much of this was taken to mean that form on its own was sufficient. Not really what Olson meant, I believe, but what many of his followers actually carried out.

In my case that translated into an enthusiasm for the art of verse itself rather than what verse could do. Nothing much, the saying goes. Ormond begged to differ. “You must have a message,” he insisted. “Celebrate, describe, honour, encourage, excite, manipulate, promote. You need to do those things.” So I did.

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. Some things are prose fiction, some extended verse, some post-modern shake-ups in sound and letter. The idea arrives first then you work out where to take it.

Olson, revered as one of the great twentieth century American poets, was never readily available in the UK. 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. I was once standing on the poetry balcony at the second iteration of the Welsh Arts Council’s Oriel Bookshop. The one in the Friary, Cardiff, at a time when commerce was beginning to rear its difficult head. I was manager. I was showing Andrew Motion around. “What I’d like to see,” I said, waving at the endless shelves of titles, “is something like a collected Olson appear from Penguin. Wouldn’t that be a great idea?” There was silence. Motion was still. Then he spoke. “No. I don’t think so,” was all the future poet laureate said.

First Words Best Words

2011-12-12T09:31:00.001Z

For some Allen Ginsberg, at the heart of the last century, is the man who started it all. 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. The man who made poetry so bloody appealing and who made it so easy to get on board. For others he was simply a bearded, balding hippie who smoked too much dope and took himself far too seriously. Not me, not Bob Dylan, nor a host of others. For us Ginsberg set the motor running.

He invented things. Breath length. A long verse line that went on for as long as there was breath inside the poet to read it. Once the breath ran out so, too, did the line. A poetry that filled the page. Then there was first words, best words. Get it down as fast as it arrives and in the order that it comes. Hold back from rewriting, the spontaneity and energy might dissipate. 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. Easy poesy. Too much really. 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.

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. Nothing ever arrives complete. Everything needs some consideration. How much is what poetry is about.

First words, bets words, one side of the argument. “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. 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.””” That’s from Stephen Dobyns’ Best Words, Best Order: essays on poetry. Like Baudelaire Dobyns is no slouch when it comes to verse. And here I think he’s got it right.

For me I’ll go through any number of changes. Leave the thing lying and then sneak up on it and see how it looks. Inevitably something not spotted before will now need fixing. But there’s a limit. 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.

Readings help. You try the thing out in the air and suddenly it starts sounding so different from how did back there on the page. Bits don’t gel, don’t slide, go on for far too long. You take the text home and you change it ready for next time. And next time if the bumps are still in place you take it home and change it again.

If you have a look at Ginsberg’s original manuscript for his masterwork, Howl, you’ll see that he’s made any number of changes himself. Howl did not arrive in the night, fully formed, even if that’s the myth some like to promote. It was the result of concentrated effort and a considerable amount of editing.

First thoughts, best thoughts. It’s a great idea. But for poetry first words, best words – maybe ultimately not.

How Old Do You Need To Be?

2011-12-01T13:12:00.002Z

Do you need to be young to cut at the edge? Maybe the best thing is to burn bright and soon and then vanish. Arthur Rimbaud did this. J D Salinger too. Not quite one hit wonders but writers who said what they had to and then removed themselves from the literary scene. Other concerns, other fears, other things to do.

The alternative is to die. And to do that while still at the precipice of promise or, certainly, with still a lot in there to give. Jimi Hendrix, Shelley, Byron, Hart Crane, Emily Bronte, Sylvia Plath, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Buddy Holly. Not many from Wales. Round here in the rain we tend to resolutely hang on.

When I was young I firmly believed that it all happened then. Now I’m no longer I don’t. Big Bill Broonzy, I often quote, did not learn to play a guitar until he was forty. That gives credibility to the state of the late starter. Everything is still possible – and that despite your eyes starting to fail and the fat arriving. Although it turns out that Big Bill was nearer thirty when he bought his first guitar. He actually played the fiddle before that.

No matter. Can we still be at the cutting edge in retirement? Bob Cobbing was, roaring his sonic poetic wonders until well into his eighties. Although it can and has been argued that his ground-breaking all happened when he was much younger. The latter-day work was mere permutation, extension and repeat.

I’m really not sure.

But I am certain that the future should be firmly in the hands of those who are going to occupy it. That includes the whole digital text, end of the book as we know it rigmarole too. I’ve said it before and I’ll do so here again, critical articles in Planet notwithstanding. The ultimate future is no longer with hard copy print. Those who love paper will be safe until they die out. But then the keyboard thumb will become master.

Meanwhile the older person still rocks. Just about.

Performance - Standing Up or Sitting Down?

2011-11-21T11:41:00.003Z

Performance, what is this? It’s a label that sometimes gets used for what I do and it happens increasing often these days. It isn’t something I’ve sought either. In fact, being labelled a performance poet sets up an audience expectation that I often don’t really want. Calling what you do performance creates an expectation of arm-waving entertainment, histrionics, in-your -face politics, up-front humour, shouting, stage dominance, strange costumes, and most of all, instant gratification. Immediacy. Performance poetry equates with instantaneous access. With material that requires little distillation and hardly any subtlety. Material that works at the moment you hear it. Bang. Like that. And that is often just not what I do.

How did we get from there to here? There was a time when poetry readings were delivered in quite, considered mode, in front rooms and small quiet halls, in places where people with hats would sit and not, where poets would stumble and mumble and read with their heads down tight into their books rarely ever engaging the audience’s eyes. Poetry would seep. It would flow into the air like a kind of fog. Readings were attended because, why, who knows? Maybe because it would be an opportunity to see the face behind the word. It would be a chance to show solidarity with an arcane art. It would allow poetry lovers to hear how the lines were meant to fall, as delivered by their creator. That would be someone who might also add a few introductory remarks of illumination and explanation. A scene setting for verse. If you needed such things.

Some poets could do this and some did it fairly well. Dylan Thomas had the reputation although I only ever heard him on record. I did witness A G Prys Jones in action and Harri Webb, John Tripp, Glyn Jones, Gwyn Jones, John Idris Jones, Gwyn Thomas, Bryn Griffiths, Roland Mathias, Raymond Garlick, Tom Earley, and others central to the then Anglo-Welsh cannon standing up in halls and side rooms and having a go. Most of what they did was unedifying, poetry that seeped out and stumbled across the floor, that had you reaching for the relevant book to get a handle as to what was going on. I’m talking here about how they presented their material, of course, and not the material itself. John Ward turned up on stage once in a stylish working man’s donkey jacket. A breakthrough I thought. No chance. The organiser castigated him for not looking the part. Bloody hell. The part. Poets as bankers, poets as ministers. There had to be a better way than that.

Nobody seemed to care much about stage presentation, working out what they were going to read (their set lists), finding ways of doing this without spilling their books all over the place and dropping papers on the floor, about actually engaging with their audiences. It took a new generation of stand-ups like Adrian Mitchell and Brian Patten to come into wales and show the world the way to go. Even then the shoe gazers on the Welsh circuit carried on more or less as they were.

My interests were actually in the European avant garde. A place were writers made sounds for the sake of hearing how their voices came over in the actual air. Ernst Jandl. Bob Cobbing. Henri Chopin. Edwin Morgan. ZZxxbghghgh hick hooo ahahhh. To do this you had to push your voice out to the back of the hall, had to arm wave, have confidence, engage your audience by looking them in the eye. Famously we brought all this to the Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre in the early 70s and blew the sedate Cardiff poetry world into the corners. Some of it anyway.

For me that approach led directly to the one I use now. Standing up, using the voice, making it work for me as a prat of the poem itself. Adrian Mitchell told me that you can use your voice to slide across a faulty verse once or twice but that after a time it gets so you have to fix things. This has proved to be the case. Public readings always lead me into rewrites. I always use text, too. My poetry is a written thing. For some present day stand-ups that isn’t the case.

These days however, I often long for the old ones. Those times when you could quietly move through your work, sometimes explaining sections, letting the words themselves rather than the way they sounded do the work. Hard to manage amid contemporary expectation. Occasionally I announce that for my next reading I will sit. Sit and read. Harder to project then, less likelihood of histrionics, but still delivered with strong voice and for the audience rather than at them . Works too.

I’ll be at The Promised Land doing some of this again on the 5^th December, 2011. I might sit on the other hand I might also stand.

That's not me but the late Henri Chopin at the top of this posting.

Recording The Unrecorded - Has To be Done

2011-11-15T14:48:00.003Z

It’s good to see that after all these years there are moves out there to preserve who we are and who we were, to hang on to our literary heritage. Some of it, at least. After decades of allowing the best readings to pass unrecorded and our great readers to move into their fractured-voiced dotage without any of their performances being kept change is afoot. Lack of record hasn’t happened to everyone, of course. There are recordings out there of some of the historical world-beaters, certainly. W B Yeats sounding like an Irish rain dancer wailing The Lake Isle of Inishfree, TS Eliot coming across as a banker, Tennyson (yes, really) charging the light brigade in his Lincolnshire drawl and Dylan Thomas using the sort of received English that might have worked well when he was making albums but would get you nowhere fast today.

Yet of the many top readings I’ve witnessed over the past four decades scarcely one was put on tape. Jackson Mac Low at No Walls. Sorley Maclean heart clutchingly supporting R S Thomas. Ted Hughes at the height of his powers at the Sherman talking about being in Wales. Henri Chopin making body sounds at the Reardon Smith. John Tripp in full diatribe mode upstairs at the Marchioness of Bute. George Macbeth in the Blue Anchor. Yevtushenko at the Conway. John James and Bill Griffiths at the Central Hotel. D M Thomas at Oriel. Seamus Heaney at the Bute Theatre. There were scores more. All now lost in the air.

It was worse at more local readings where poets could rise to fame and fall from grace without ever cutting a single track. Admittedly occasional recordists brandishing fuzzy cassette recorders would appear. They’d ask if they might leave their microphone out front. Latterly, we’ve often witnessed men (and it was usually men) using tripoded video cameras from the corners of halls. Where their collected recordings ended up I’ll never know.

Of the poetry of these lands the conventional usually got the better deal. If a University set up a specialist department (such as the one with a certain amount of flair and prescience spearheaded by Tony Curtis at Glamorgan) then when recordings were made is was the central cannon who were invited in. Glyn Jones, Harri Webb, Leslie Norris, Emyr Humphreys. The innovators, experimenters, edge pushers and the frankly and boldly new were left to manage their own rock and roll.

But out of left field now come our online saviours. The new generation archivists have a particular interest in poetry of innovation, that broad left-field of writers who spent most of the 60s, 70s and 80s out in the literary and academic cold. The British Electronic Poetry Centre at the University of Southampton has captured a range of the British hard core including Ken Edwards, Thomas A Clark, Caroline Bergvall and Frances Presley. http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/ At what was once the Academi and is now Literature Wales the online writers database is slowly being populated with mp3 files of Welsh-based writers reading. Some of these come from live gigs other are by special arrangement. A thin presence right now but it’s thickening slowly. http://www.literaturewales.org/writers-of-wales/

The Archive of the Now – started by Andrea Brady at Brunel and now operating out of Queen Mary, University of London http://www.archiveofthenow.org/ - styles itself as constituting ‘a scholarly, aesthetic, social and political resource for writers and readers of innovative poetry’. Its range is wide and increasing. A glance down their extensive list of contributors revealed loads I wanted to listen to. They ranged ranging from Britain’s answer to John Ashbery, J H Prynne, to the land’s hardest working non-metropolitan innovator, Geraldine Monk. But there were also literally dozens of names new to me. Quite a few of those I’ve clicked on have been a revelation.

My contributions, online next month, are a mixture of material captured down the years at live performances, stuff made in electronic music studios plus new material, recorded standing up in my living room, giving it a good blow.

Reading to an audience of one certainly creates an austere atmosphere. The language shifts and fractures along with the bent vowels and mashed consonants were a breeze. Most of the jokes, however, fell flat. We’ll edit those out a leave the core intact. Finch, after all these years, once again Now. Check it out. It’s an honour. Put your speakers on high.

The Instant Gratification of Poetry

2011-10-31T16:42:00.005Z

I do the walk right across Rest Bay with Minhinnick. This is surprisingly successful given the condition of my muscles. Rob is pointing out the local landmarks and giving me a running gazetteer of their Welsh-medium place names – Gwter Hopsog, Gwter Gryn-y-locs, Bae Pinc. These places feature in his books, are inspiration points for plot turns in his novels. We’re heading out beyond the surfers’ paradise of the Lifeguard Station towards Sker Point. There are sea caves there with rocks that are full of lights.

Most people know Robert as a poet – recently successfully back on the scene reading with Sean O’Brien for William Ayot’s Poetry On the Border series at Chepstow and again for Ali Anwar’s H’m Foundation – but his recent successes have been essays and fiction. Sea Holly, his novel of Porthcawl low-life set among the dunes and the Treco Bay Caravan Park was short-listed for the Ondaatje Prize. And there’s a sequel in production.

Poetry, however, remains an obsession. Carcanet Press will bring out a new and revised Selected Minhinnick next year and Seren have a full length literary study of Robert’s work set to follow. 2012, Minhinnick year and well overdue.

Many people know Robert for the years he edited Poetry Wales. Forty-three issues, enough to bend the enthusiasm out of the most dedicated verse obsessive. Poets have thin skins, we agree. Sensitive souls ready to fall on the slightest misconstrued word as a signal of failure and of rejection. I can remember all this from days as editor of second aeon. I did twenty-one issues, less than half Robert’s total, but that was enough to tell me all I needed to know about how poets think of themselves. Nobody has any confidence it seems. Every previous success was somehow a fluke and the new work a desperate trial to see if the trick can be repeated. If the plan falters then the end of the world starts to loom. Poets want instant gratification, bangs on the back and their names in lights. Nothing less will do.

Performance poets are worse. Here the gap between the work and fulfilling exaltation has been reduced from perhaps weeks to something like seconds. The poet stands up, the poems get read and the audience react. If they don’t then the piece clearly hasn’t achieved its objective. But I think we need to remind ourselves here that some work, in fact a great deal of work, needs just that bit longer than a single out loud reading to give up its glories. By the same token much material provokes no response simply because no audible or visible response is actually appropriate. Not everything in life is designed to make you laugh or whoop. Some things burn slowly, from the inside.

Robert Minhinnick’s current book, launched this coming week, is The Keys Of Babylon (Seren) a set of linked short stories that cover much of Robert’s concerns with the end of dictatorships, the life of the planet and wider sustainable world. It isn’t poetry but then again in a way it is. Any instant gratification going on? Certainly not.

From Sker Point you can see over Kenfig Burrows and right up the coast to Port Talbot. It’s the end of October and the sun is still shining like it was summer. Soft seas out there and hardly a breeze. On this long and fragmented estuarial walk I’m ultimately bound for Gower. Worms Head. Standing on Sker Rock I can almost see it. But it’s too far. We turn back and do the return ramble into Porthcawl instead. Surf’s up. The gulls over Rest Bay are cawing.

Liverpool Returns

2011-10-24T13:54:00.003+01:00

It’s 1968 – the Cardiff streets are full of grit and darkness. Old men wear flat caps and shabby raincoats. The lights in the shops are there yet they don’t shine quite like they do now. But there’s hope. The kids are alright. I’ve sold six copies of my world-beating avant garde poetry mag second aeon outside the venue. I’m in Charles Street, half way down on the left, where the young are streaming into the Estonian Club. Just about the only place we’ve got that’s bookable for gigs. It has a basement cleared of internal walls and a small stage. Upstairs, guarded by ancient men with accordions and suits, is a tiny bar.

Penguin have just published volume ten of their ground-breaker Modern Poets series – The Mersey Poets. Verse that they don’t teach in school, poetry you can read for actual pleasure that’s about the world you come from, the one you live in. Roger McGough, Brian Patten and the amazingly plump jean-wearing painter, Adrian Henri. On stage tonight is Adrian’s band, The Liverpool Scene, poetry with guitars, electric stuff, poetry about love and lust and art and life.

They come on, all six of them, looking like beatniks. Andy Roberts on dazzling amplified acoustic guitar and vocals, Mike Hart a drop-out Liverpudlian Dylan, Mike Evans on sax and a poet too. In front the bohemian bulk of Adrian, not a singer, not a player of instruments, but a poet. He does it, mike in hand, “You keep our love hidden, like the nightdress you keep under your pillow, and never wear when I’m there”, intoned over Robert’s modal picking. Takes us all somewhere. Poetry you want to make soar in your head like it was a song. The album they’ve just recorded was produced by John Peel, The Amazing Adventures Of. My copy gets played to flatness, so often the grooves barely work.

Could be that Henri, in this persona, the public poet, the entertainer (as opposed to the painter, the surrealist, the lover, the political activist, the avant gardist, the literary creator), was the lode from which many future stage-stuck performance poets took their direction. Even without hearing him or even knowing of how the Liverpool poets moved verse right up the popularity stakes Adrian Henri’s influence today, unsung as it may be, is deep and long.

He died back in 2000 but not before painting the amazing Entry of Christ into Liverpool 1964 (after James Ensor), writing a poem of the same name, and getting the freedom of the city in 1999.

The band vanished from the racks and seemed, too, from the entire reissue market. In an age when everything is available again the Liverpool Scene for decades remained lost. But you can hear them again now, if you are interested in the roots of how poets on stage got up the courage to be so in your face, so moving, so entertaining, so rhythmic, so unfazed by their shuffling audiences and so full of spirit. An expanded version of the original album containing reruns from their later recordings has been reissued as a double CD. The Amazing Adventures of the Liverpool Scene is out on the Esoteric label and available through Amazon (where else). Get it for Adrian’s Love Story, his Batman Poem, Made in the USA or from Mike Hart’s transcendental Gliders, Parks.

Adrian had a Welsh grandmother there was funding found in the seventies to have him read in Cardiff, on his own, as funny and as challenging as ever he managed fronting his band. If you wonder who I’m talking about it’s time you checked him to see how entertaining and relevant he was. If you were there you’ll already know.

Frangipani And The Drift Of Kretek

2011-10-19T11:20:00.007+01:00

Coming into Indonesia from Singapore was uneventful enough. Admittedly the guy at check-in at Changi Airport had pulled a face and told me that he wouldn’t actually be able to forward our luggage directly to our Garuda internal flight onwards from Jakarta. But it should all be okay. I’ll label them for special handling, he offered, whatever that meant.

Off the plane and into the crazy queues to buy entry visas. No signboarding anywhere to explain what was going on. Milling hoards of mixed Australians, Malay, some Britishers and, standing next to me, a hairy, misshapen Dutchman looking like a character from Robert Crumb. He didn’t like queuing, you could tell, so he pushed and shoved and got to the head by sheer obnoxiousness, banging his case into everyone’s shins as he went. The rest of us hovered and fidgeted for half an hour as the line inched every slowly forward.

It has always amazed me that the level of bureaucracy in a given country usually operates in inverse to its world status. Try flying into Zimbabwe and see how long you have to queue for entry and how much their customs fiddle with your bags. But then again try the US Border point at Newark. You can be there for a day.

Visas done we moved on to a whirling melee surrounding a single check-in, unconnected to any sort of baggage belt system, and with one tired and shirt-sleeved operator doing his best to deal with the surging crowds. In this new queue, if you can call it that, I was joined again by Robert Crumb’s Dutchman. He looked dazed. He banged his case onto my foot and then shouted loudly that he wanted a flight to Jakarta. But this is Jakarta someone told him. He stood there, puzzled, taking this unexpected information in. Then his eyes widened and I didn't see him again after that.

This vast Indonesia is a Muslim land, of course. Largest Muslim nation in the world. You’d expect the women not to smile at you but they all do. The huge airport sells no alcohol, has no designer shops and no air conditioning. In the tropical heat locals walk past wearing knitted jumpers with jackets on top. Passengers have their cases wrapped in paper, carry bundles on their heads. Everyone has a mobile, everyone smokes. The onward flight arrives. What chance is there that our cases, left miles back at the beltless baggage check-in, will follow us? Not much.

I’m two thirds of the way through Francis Spufford’s splendid re-telling in dramatized form of the ultimate failure of Russian communism, Red Plenty. It's a Faber paperback. Send for yours now. I’ve got to the bit where Khrushchev has been ousted from the Kremlin and sent back home in an ordinary car rather than his long-serving limousine, the deluxe Zil. For the first time in his political life he has to sit next to someone and actually rub shoulders. Never happened before. Humanity you engage with. Flying Garuda’s like that.

Half way there I get given a packed meal and a bottle of water. The pack contains a tiny melting chocolate bar, a meat roll that’s seen better days and a second, mini bottle of what turns out to be water from Wales. Seven thousand miles away and the stuff still follows me round.

Malang airport, under development and certainly not there yet, is bolted onto an Indonesian Airbase. There are guns and soldiers and air force personnel in strong evidence. Access to the terminal is a walk down the steps and a stroll across the tarmac. Inside baggage reclaim is a bear pit. Cases being unloaded from the plane’s hold by hand and slung through an open door, just-arrived passengers pushing and shoving and grabbing. Being a westerner means that I’m taller than most of them so I can at least see what’s happening. I spot our bags, amazingly reached here on the same plane that we used. I get them with a swing of my arm. Then we run.

Suddenly there’s a hand on my shoulder. Can I see your baggage claim, sir? A polite, uniformed English-speaking official with a clip board. He’s asking me this at the point where I’m loading the bags into the waiting car boot. I show him our receipts and he checks them off and thanks us. Despite everything the system works.

Packed inside among our clothes are the things you just can’t get in Indonesia: bacon, cured ham, Cheddar cheese, jars of Marmite. And you need that stuff.

Beyond are the smells of frangipani and the drift of Kretek cigarettes and the Indonesian Java sun up there beaming and rolling.

Literary Monsters

2011-10-05T10:58:00.005+01:00

At the end of the street is a huge banner mounted on steel poles. The bottom half is a confectioner’s swirl of sponsor logos – ANZ, Casa Luna, Planet Wheeler, ExxonMobil, RBS, Intercontinental, Jakarta Post, The Egyptian Embassy, the Australian Government. Above are the faces – Nurri Vittachi, Chris Abani, Andrew Fowler, Alicia Sometimes, Fitri Yani, Jaya Savige, Marieke Hardy, Rebecca Starford, DBC Pierre. It’s the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival, mounted on a scale of which Hay would be proud, and starting next week. In an act of reverse serendipity my ticket home is dated tomorrow.

Bali is one of the most unlikely places imaginable in which to hold a predominantly English language festival. A lush, tropical, Hindu island almost as far away from the Western world as you can go. They speak Bahasa Bali here, frighten off the bad spirits with endless ceremony, make offerings to volcanos, waterfalls, trees, tend the tourists with meals of fried rice and stringy chicken. You can get beer but books don’t loom large.

Yet this is the eighth time they’ve run the festival and even if tickets cost more than they do at Glastonbury people come. Their lists of stars from the literary firmament are almost entirely unknown to me, world-striders Tariq Ali and DBC Pierre excepted. Australians dominate, Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese, New Zealanders, Indonesians. This is, after all, an Aussie back-yard. A place, now the bombings have been and gone, to be nurtured.

What’s surprising is the format of the events they run. Change the names from Om Swastyastu and Djenar Maesa Ayu to Twm Morys and Robert Minhinnick and this could be Bay Lit or the Dylan Thomas Festival back in Wales. How to write folktales. Journalism and Creative writing workshops at the local library. Turn your blog into a book. Words in motion – lose yourself in a lust for language. Storytelling: the secret society of the dragon protectors. Latin rhythms – sip on margaritas, graze on tapas, listen to Latin American words. The sun may be different here but what’s under it remains much the same.

We head back up the road to Nyoman Sumerta’s family temple where, for the first time in thirty years, the world is being purified. The twenty-eight strong Gamelan orchestra, suited and squatting, make Philip Glass sound old fashioned. The masked dancers act out Balinese morality plays, hands bent backwards, moustaches flying. Family members, and there are more than a hundred of these, are dressed in unison – the men in orange collared white polo shirts; the women in silken green blouses. Everyone is saronged. The men wear headscarves, the women flowers. They dance, they offer rice, blossom, chickens, water, fruit, roasted pig and fish to the gods. They sing, they chant. They photograph each other on their mobile phones. They all smile, they never stop.

In the corner on a raised platform two Bob Cobbing clones read from the ancient books as if this were a Cabaret Voltaire dada performance. I can’t understand a word but it sounds like Schwitters or Hugo Ball or Tristan Tzara, syllables bent and stretched, consonants crashing. Someone hands me two cakes and a bottle of water. If I’d wanted a cigarette I could have had one of those too. Almost every man present is smoking. There is nothing bad here now, shouts Nyoman, face a mass of smile, it is all banished. He claps me on the back. Beside him a small boy is imitating the leg bends of one of the masque-wearing dancers. His friends are laughing. Solemnity doesn’t feature in this religion.

The meal which follows, and to which we are invited, has rice and a raft of other unlabelled dishes all of them laced with high grade chilli. I’m given another bottle of water but one certainly isn’t enough to drown the fire. I feel like a dragon on the walk back to the hotel. Ogoh Ogoh – Balinese Monsters, a photographic guide to what they are and how to deal with them, gets launched next Friday. I’d have enjoyed that. But by then I’ll be back to reading the Western Mail and coping with changed rubbish collection days and the first of the new season’s rounds of endless drizzle. Next year, then, next year.

It's Such a Dangerous Medium This Photography

2011-09-08T15:27:00.004+01:00

I’m off along the Estuary, camera with me. The big one rather than the compact. With the big one they all expect something of you, even though you are just a snapper. Something to do with cost and size and expectation. Big cameras make you look professional even when you are not. Trouble is my Nikon D90 does take good pics. The long lens brings in distant subjects. The wide angle takes brilliant landscapes. When you point it you have an idea of what you are going to get.

With the Lave fishermen – these are the guys who sail out into the muddy Estuary below the Severn Bridge and fish with nets that look like something from the Sea of Galilee – it’s all laughter about how I might go flat on my back in the mud fields – glutinous stuff everywhere but on the camera. “He’ll protect that, you see.” Says Martin to his fishing companions, “just like that TV documentary man last week.” I don’t fall, in case you wondered. But I did get out there in the boat on the tidal waters and I took some great pics of men up to their chests in waders, hunting salmon. Didn’t catch any. Not a thing. “I’m off next week on holiday, “ Martin says. “Anywhere nice?” “Going to Ireland. Fishing trip, you know”. What else.

Going round Aberthaw Power Station is another matter. When there’s someone talking to you then you just can’t concentrate on taking pictures. It’s as much as I can do to point and shoot, hoping something I wanted will get in through the lens. This is where the compact comes into its own. Unpretentious. Easy to hold. Weighs nothing. Works every time. Don’t line anything up, to hell with the light and the focus, just hope. I use this as a sort of aide memoire, a notebook, I tell them. Saves me from having to write things down. “You go ahead”, they say, “take what you want.”

At Port Talbot it’s different. Here I have the big Nikon because I need it to see into the distance, because I want to try to make something of this industrial intrusion among the perfect sand dunes, because what’s there in front of me is so amazing. Full of fire and smoke and flying dust. I’ve walked up along the beach, top of the bund the Tata steelworks have built to keep the marauding sea back. The beach is a long yellow gleam of a thing and it’s totally empty. Not even a man in the distance digging for worms. I’ve got here on a public path and, far as I know, I’m still on it. Although I have to say it’s beginning not to feel quite like that. What with the thunder of heavy lorries and the grind of the conveyor belt and proximity of emissions and smog.

The guard who stops me, puts me into his gleaming, light flashing vehicle and drives me off site. He could demand my memory card at any second. He’s on the radio. “Pair of members of the public here illegally. Yep. One of them has a camera. Yes a camera. That’s right.” Hell, like being caught with dope or porn by your parents. I try to hide it, slide it round my back, hope it gets lost next to the daysack. You are not allowed to take photos here, I’m told, firmly. Sorry, I mutter. But to be fair he's pretty reasonable after that.

It was the same thing when we stopped the car half way across the site of the Dong power station outside Newport. John Briggs and I quietly shooting a road sign that reads DIVERSION WHEN FOGGY. Urban surrealism. Signs of the future. States of mind. A van arrives with lights flashing. “You can’t do that, you’re not authorised”. Hell no. It’s such a dangerous medium this photography. Shows the world the world and lots of people are not happy with that. It upsets people in a way that writing usually doesn’t. Why is that?

Peter Finch is currently researching his forthcoming Seren title Edging the Estuary – Where Wales Runs Out. Cameras, security guards, sea walls, wave cut platforms, gouts and fire, mud, menace, power and people will all feature. Watch this space for further details. It’ll be a while yet.

The Lave Fishing photos are here http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterfinch/sets/72157627430789629/

The Beat Generation

2011-09-03T11:28:00.008+01:00

Ah yes, the Beat Generation. Sounds so much like the past now, if it sounds like anything at all. Back then when the Rock’n’Roll fifties rolled into the Beatle sixties all we had here were the Angry Young Men. Men, you notice. Women had yet to be invented. John Wain, Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Stan Barstow, John Osborne, Colin Wilson. Angry, not really, not that much. Did they defy literary convention, compositional practice, plot line or form? No. Did they have good tales to tell, ones the young could relate to? That they did. But as a group they lasted hardly any time at all before moving on to other things. Their music was the pre-war jazz beloved of Philip Larkin. Kid Ory, Louis Armstrong, Teddy Wilson, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington. They were working class. They liked beer. They’d never heard of Buddha.

I read them. Hurry On Down, Lucky Jim, The Outsider, Strike the Father Dead. Well left of centre and with loads to enjoy but nothing that set the mind ablaze. It took the American Beats to do that.

Jack Kerouac in his List of Essentials gives some guidance as to how the business of writing ought to go. “Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy.” “Accept loss forever,” “Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind.” “Blow as deep as you want to blow.” “Be in love with yr life.” “Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in heaven.” You put Charlie Parker on the player, you find your records by Lester Young and you play them. The be-bop rocks and you follow where it goes. Out of the other end comes On The Road, Howl, Go, Gasoline, The Dharma Bums. These works were not just ideas on wheels but directories of where to look and what to read and how to live in this mad, naked, hysterical world.

When I turned around, over here, with Kingsley Amis already shifting to the right at a rate of knots and John Wain on a literary scholarship in the hillside heart of careful Wales there was not a single original beat in sight. We didn’t do that. Hang out where the music was, our minds expanded, the truth just there to pick up and touch. We didn’t have a Charlie Parker nor a Birdland. Instead we had Alexis Korner and Blues Incorporated, Klooks Kleek and the Marquee on Wardour Street. In Cardiff we had Top Rank and the Moon Club. The writers mixing with the musicians and the whole creative foam rising in a glorious unstoppable tide. No, we actually didn’t do any of that.

The nearest to a UK Beat Generation had to be the poet Chris Torrance and some of the writers in his circle – the haiku master Bill Wyatt, the mad saxophonist Barry Edgar Pilcher and at a distance the super cool Lee Harwood, the endless publisher Dave Cunliffe and that inheritor of Ginsberg’s breath pattern verse form, ex-pat George Dowden.

Torrance at least lived the life. Reached for answers like Gary Snyder, wrote in a Pound and Olsen inspired open field and moved himself out of Carshalton and then Bristol to a cottage in the back of everywhere at the head of the Vale of Neath. Cross two fields to get to him. Woollen hatted, infinity coming out of his typer.

Ann Charters’ The Portable Beat Reader (Penguin Books) is the best single volume beat intro there is. 650 pages that takes in the whole movement, includes slices from all the classics (and in some cases, Ginsberg’s Howl, the whole thing), work from fellow travellers like Diane DiPrima, Frank O’Hara and John Weiners, Tales of Beatnik Glory from Charles Bukowski, Brion Gysin, Ken Kesey, Ed Sanders, Michael McClure and others, classic commentary from Norman Mailer (The White Negro), Alan Watts (Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen) and John Cellon Holmes (The Game of the Name), material from the man who got inspired to glory by the whole deal (Bob Dylan) and, most importantly of all, hard core mainstream material from Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and more.

No Torrance, he’s a genuine outsider.

Beat inspired I’m at the player now hunting out my Charlie Parker. Anthropology. I'll add a bit of Mingus. Then some Monk. Transcendental. Just how Kerouac said writing should be.

Making A Lot Of Noise

2011-08-25T08:53:00.010+01:00

The Formation of Literature Wales

How do you merge three organisations? Two up for total merger and with the third to be semi -detached? Do you bang heads, bribe, threaten, cajole, insist, plead, persevere, finally agree, or bury your head in the sand? All of those, as it turns out. Although maybe not the last one. We have reputations to uphold.

The Arts Council of Wales (ACW) in its Investment Review wisdom came to the conclusion that its arrangements for the funding of literature were, to quote the document, untidy. Its major client, the national player, Academi, literature promotion agency par excellence, deliverer of schemes and activity the length and breadth of the country, needed to be formally tied-in with ACW’s other literary clients: Tŷ Newydd, the writers centre in Gwynedd; Welsh Literature Exchange, the international provider. Neither of those two descriptors are quite accurate, either. Tŷ Newydd is more than just a centre for writers. Welsh Literature Exchange engages in a plethora of activity beyond simple provision.

When I thought about it untidy was a difficult word to precisely understand. ACW’s Investment Review’s recommendations did little to clarify. Take the lead, Academi, ACW officers instructed me. The train is leaving the station and literature needs to be on it, said Chairman Dai Smith. Press ahead, instructed ACW chief Nick Capaldi. But against a background of rumour and bureaucratic fog not easy. It took ACW a full six months to get round to formally instructing its clients to merge. Academi was given the task of leading on the creation of the new organisation. I would become Chief Executive. There would be a new apparatus of governance. Loose ends would be tied together. Literature in Wales would become whole. Providers, producers and public would be wrapped in literary joy and the sky would become full of cultural sparks. That was certainly a future worth having.

Significantly the Hay Festival was to be excluded from the new arrangements. Given its substantial increase in funding for 2011-2012 (from £40K to more than £100K) it is hard to see why. But that elephantine anomaly is for others to argue about . And given a fair wind and a deal of co-operation there may end up being nothing to argue about at all.

In the late 1990s when Academi, the Literature Promoter, was created out a reformed Welsh Academy/Yr Academi Gymreig, the society for writers, its trading name was chosen because it could shape shift. Academi. Easy to say. A word with resonance in two languages. Comes early in any listing. Precise meaning depends on where you stand. The Welsh Academy trading as Academi. Yr Academi Gymreig dan yr un faner. At an early giving of evidence to the Assembly’s Culture Committee then AM Cynog Dafis had it in one. Great work Academi, he said, but your name is dreadful. No one knows what it means.

I considered this. He might be right. It took more than a decade for the opportunity to arise but ACW’s Investment Review provided it. Academi put it in its business plan. All arts orgs have these now, this is a professional twenty-first century world. Academi would rebrand. We would become Literature Wales. Llenyddiaeth Cymru. Says what we do. Easy to understand.

In the event the whole deal has turned out to be considerably more than a simple name change. A new and much larger organisation has emerged. Literature Wales, a true literature development agency with national status and support to match. The Welsh Academy and Tŷ Newydd inside, Welsh Literature Exchange at arm’s length.

But What Does It Do?

Writers write, don’t they? And readers read. Do they really need support? They do. Were support to be withdrawn in a bi-lingual country such as ours then literature as we know it would all but collapse. Without aid there’d be scant Welsh-medium publishing, no school author visits, few festivals or readings or courses or workshops or prizes, little book razzmatazz, negligible writing in prisons, no work with the health service, no literary engagement with the disadvantaged nor the deprived. There would be very little opportunity. For anyone. Welsh cultural life would fade. The situation for Welsh writing in English, pretty invisible at the best of times, would be worse. It would be totally compromised by the noise coming from over the border. Wales would vanish. We would be depleted. Totally. When we read, if we read at all, then it would be about America or England. Marvellous, say a small minority but I don’t think the rest of us would agree.

The Academi, ever since I was appointed to lead it in 1997, has pressed for the professionalization of writers. Big in the world, with opportunity before them, paid appropriately, and delivering the goods. Amateurs in Wales have a very real place but they need something against which to be measured. This need to make our authors professional continues to be at the centre of Literature Wales. Rates may not have gone up much in a decade but opportunity and perception certainly have. Those among us who get by on income derived from their skill with words – Gwyneth Lewis, Owen Sheers, Menna Elfyn, Nigel Jenkins, Robert Minhinnick, and Gillian Clarke among them – struggled in the nineties. I’m sure that they still struggle today. No Rolls Royces. No pension schemes. Hard, still, to get from one month to the next. But better than it once was.

Literature Wales will put writers into schools, run competitions for fiction, verse and the art of poetry performance, offer bursaries for authors to take time out from other employment in order to write; manage festivals; organise tours; run courses for writers at the truly splendid former Lloyd George mansion of Tŷ Newydd in Gwynedd; in co-operation with partners across Wales take literature to places it rarely visits. It will work with the Health Service, local authorities, the Prison Service, and social services to increase the number of ways in which literature can help our society, heal it, remove its conflicts and its devastations.

How Did We Get Here From There?

The answer depends on precisely where there was. For me it was a 1997 conversation in a quiet corner of the Friary-sited Oriel Bookshop. It was owned at that time by The Stationery Office, a group of venture capitalist backed operators who were later to abandon the shop’s Welsh-cultural content and then close it as a loss maker. Twenty years of culture build down the pan. I was the manager. The conversation was with John Pikoulis who, with the backing of M Wynn Thomas, Gerwyn Wiliam, John Osmond, Ned Thomas and Harri Pritchard Jones, wanted to save the threatened Welsh Academy by bidding for the Arts Council franchise to run a new literature promotion agency . Would I like to front it? Too right I would. In the face of at least 14 other credible bids we won.

What I discovered inside the run-down, carpetless Mount Stuart Square offices was not One Wales. Far from it. The Welsh and English sections of the august Society for Writers (founded 1959) might have shared a kettle but that was pretty much all. They ran unconnected phone systems, had separate financial accounts, used different banks, kept different hours, and sat on unmatching chairs in separate offices. Even their computers did not communicate – Macs on one side, PCs on the other. No internet. The internet then was just being born.

Down the road at Crickhowell House the brand new Welsh Assembly was getting into gear. Companies across the country were rebranding themselves with Wales in mind. Dragon Cabs, Dragon Security, Dragon Couriers, Dragon Rescue, Dragon Pies. Shirley Bassey was ironing her red dragon dress. Make Wales one. Show it as it is. End the divisions, linguistic, social, economic, and cultural. That’s what the new Academi would do. Bring our literature together in one place and make it swing.

What do you think I should do first, I asked John Osmond, IWA director, and at that time an Academi Board member. Make a lot of noise, he replied. I’ve done my best.

Where Are The Enemies?

Not everyone loves you, even with something as all-embracing and ultimately satisfying as literature. There are writers out there who are forever uncovering conspiracies to keep them away from success. There are those who, in the face of uncontroversial evidence to the contrary, still insist that they’ve been ignored. Those who cannot understand that where more people live there is often a greater occurrence of activity. Those who think that despite us pouring hundreds of pounds into their literary activities that at bottom we really doubt their talent. Those who imagine others are stealing their plot ideas and masquerading them as their own. And those who somehow just don’t like what we do because, perhaps, it is us that’s doing it and not them. It’s an unfair world. Although I have spent these past thirteen or so years desperately trying to iron out the bumps.

Perhaps the biggest problem is not the writers nor their audience but the bureaucracy that surrounds them. We live in a world obsessed with the collection of data. Of action plans, compacts, targets, visions, memos of understanding and tabulated projections. In my time behind the wheel I’ve seen, year on year, that vociferous data monster grow and grow.

I estimate a tenfold increase in ten years. For arts administrators the coalface moves ever further back. File your returns quarterly rather than annually. Provide attendance data on increasingly obscure population demographics. Demonstrate adherence to regulation. Prove that you have policies on everything including policies themselves. As I write the Assembly Government has told its ASPBs to reduce their running costs by 12% over three years. Do more for less. In response it seems as if the burden is merely being passed down the line. Forget the quality of the activity and what it does. Instead tell us the ages of all those in the audience, how far they have travelled, the WIMD analysis results for their postcode, if they used public transport, how many were vegetarians and how many of them wore a dress. I’m inventing some of this but you get the general idea.

Funding bodies should believe more in their clients and allow them to take risks. Regulate them less and trust them to deliver. Let them spend more on arts and less on filing. When I suggested this at a conference a few years ago everyone applauded. But that was then and to date, despite decreasing financial waistlines, little has changed.

What Next?

Set things on fire. What Literature Wales isn’t going to do is merely continue the existing programmes of Tŷ Newydd and Academi with a new logo on top and some economies of scale underneath. It will do that, of course, but there will a whole lot more.

What makes up Wales is its separate parts. What Literature Wales is now going to do is join them together. Writers are intimately connected with the places they occupy and the places they originally came from. Expect to see cross media literary ventures that wrap writers and readers together in co-operation with our heritage infrastructure: CADW, The National Trust, The National Museum, the National Parks, and that often overlooked resource, the Church in Wales. Work with young people will increase. They are the future. There’ll be more festivals, peripatetic ones, roaming the country to reach places we never knew we had. Expect to see a lot more glitter as writers the non-literary world recognises appear at venues not known for their cultural values. There will be endless opportunity to take part, as amateur writer, as newcomer, as interested party, as someone who simply wants to have a go, didn’t know they did but now they are in action turning out verses find that it’s uplifting, fulfilling, and fun. And where you don’t expect to encounter writing – hospitals, sports grounds, train stations, supermarkets – take note because soon you will. Internationally expect Rio to come here and for there to again be a Welsh feel to LA. Wales will make its mark.

me – I’ve now been with my head in administrative bucket for rather too long. When I joined the Academi as Chief Executive in 1998 I had this vague idea that after five years of changing the landscape I might reduce my office hours and spend some extra time writing. In the event that has proved impossible. Politics, policy, provision, vision, risk analysis, dealing with the difficult and administration rapidly fill any space you give them. I did manage a series of appropriately tiny poems, Haiku for the Academi, which are included in my collection Food (Seren Books, 2001).

Annwyl Syr, my last book appeared in 1965

but I have a backyard full of cherry blossom

can I join?

looked up cherry blossom in

the dictionary

not there

big new Wales a thousand flowers

hope and money

still as hard as ever

But now I need space to create something a little longer. I leave Literature Wales in landscape-changing form. John Pikoulis and Harri Pritchard Jones are joint chairs. Lleucu Siencyn is Acting Chief Executive and Sally Baker is at the helm in Tŷ Newydd. There is a great staff team, north and south. In Wales the A470 is no longer the only thing that joins us together.

An edited and shorter version of this piece appears in the current issue of Agenda, the magazine of the Institute for Welsh Affairs

The Bones of Blake

2011-08-16T09:19:00.003+01:00

I’ve been thinking about bones, as you do. Last thing to go in the crematorium fire, apparently. The skull hangs on for quite a time and sometimes has to be bashed a bit by workers with a metal bar. Dust, got to get back to that.

When Blake was buried in Bunhill Cemetery in 1827 his body was interred over the top of at least three others. Later four more bodies were buried over the top of his. Land in London was in short supply. The current grave marker drops the usual Here lie the remains of William Blake in favour of the vaguer The remains of William Blake lie nearby. Bones everywhere.

When I travelled to Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire in search of the mortal remains of the Norman Lords of Cardiff – the founding dynasty of de Clares – I found all four of them grave marked in elegant brass clustering around the holy warmth of the cathedral’s alter. They’d been there since the eleventh century and they are still down there, replete with armour, jewels and burial cloth, tight in their lead-lined stone coffins. Waiting for god. Waiting for redemption.

But actually, no. People just can’t leave alone and down the centuries various grave robbers, disinterers, historians, record keepers, holy archivists and the simply interested have dug down to look, pull, shift and fiddle. What’s there today, apparently, is a mess of bust stone, the odd bone and a mess of mangled rubble. The de Clare eternity. As it should be. Wreckage and dust.

Bones might work as a poem, if I could made them repeat themselves regularly enough. I decided to make them flicker on the edge of the reader’s boredom by changing them slightly but not significantly. A bit like this:

These are the things
you go through
all white bone
chalk white bone
flake white bone
cream white bone
sea white bone
pale white bone
bone white bone
wash white bone
powder white bone
lime white bone
liberal white bone
soft white bone

That began to sound okay, as I created it. I wrote it down, sounded it in the air, changed it, wrote it down again. I then added more:

gloss white bone
bridal white bone
hat white bone
paper white bone
quartz white bone
light white bone
mist white bone
honk white bone
jet white bone
hard white bone
old white bone
cloud white bone
bleach white bone
thin white bone
dust white bone
weak white bone
woven white bone

I stood up in my long study, thought about the bones in my legs and straightened them just like I’d been told to in tai chi, got the body weight to run from the top of my head right down through my bones and into the floor. Weight disposed by gravity. I read the whole thing. Boomed it. Still worked, but still didn’t go anywhere. That was the problem. Not why but where next?

Blake white bone
Clare white bone
Gone white bone

Are poems small intellectual stories with a punch line? Should they prove something? Should they end and the reader know that the end had been reached? Should they always have a deeper purpose? Or are their patterns and the way the air bends around them enough?

Second Class In Your Own Country

2011-08-05T13:04:00.003+01:00

The bus is sitting there at the north end of the Oval Basin like an arrival from Disneyland. It’s a bright red and yellow thing which ought to have Micky Mouse driving and Donald Duck as the guide. It represents part of what we’ve descended into in Cardiff – history as diversionary entertainment. Bang the tourists around the city, show them our glittering wonders, feed them chips at Harry Ramsden’s, send them home having had a great time. I don’t object to this, it imparts more knowledge than sitting in a pub would. But it is how we’ve become. Cardiff as zoo. The Capital as a destination, a place where you come to gawp rather than do.

Only this time the bus has a literary purpose. It’s taking the entrants, runners-up and winners and other interested parties to the annual Cardiff International poetry Competition round the city. They’ll see some our wonders and having them illuminated in verse. The verse part is me and Ifor Thomas. He’s out on the pavement right now shouting one of his works up at the amused travellers. A great crowd of kids crossing the Oval basin join in the cheering. Poetry as public art.

The bus goes round its circuitous route in the wrong direction but no one notices. We stop outside Ikea where I read my piece about incomprehensible tannoy announcements and wardrobes that take twelve hours to assemble. We pass the National Westminster Bank where Ifor delivers his poem about the creation of that building’s amazing doors.

For an English-language prize this is quite an event. English-language prizes in Wales are normally pretty invisible and always few on the ground. There’s no comparable Eisteddfod tradition where bards and novelists constantly compete for awards that range from book tokens to chairs and crowns.

The Cardiff International, managed by Literature Wales and funded by Cardiff Council, is usually won by people who don’t come from the city. This is true again this year with first prize going to Malcolm Watson from Hull for his the Naked Quaker and the Burning Boy. It’s a great poem. Hearing it read out by the author after fish and chips upstairs at Harry Ramsden’s (the Cardiff International always strives to keep tradition alive) make me wish, however, that there was something of comparable quality available exclusively for those Welsh writers who chose to write in English. In the pursuit of audience you so often end up being second class in your own country.

Up the road at the National Eisteddfod in Wrexham they are parading in their robes, receiving medals and crowns and kisses and great swathes of free TV coverage. The Welsh world knows who its poets are. Sadly the same can’t be said for Wales’ English side.

At the big chip shop Ifor does some more shouting. This time to thank the organisers and then the participants and, once again, the city for being forward looking enough to have put up the money. Then we all go home.

More information on the competition is at http://www.literaturewales.org/home/i/139553/desc/cipc11-winners-announced/

Low Life Art Stuff

2011-07-28T10:04:00.003+01:00

Beyond the Blue Dragon on Newport Road, familiar Finch territory, “Worst hotel in Cardiff - the bedding is appalling” or “excellent value for money !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, both this month’s comments on Trip Advisor, take your pick. East of here, out front of the social housing, transient accommodation bed-sits, nineteenth century stone built three stories, gardens paved over, is the Slavic Bar. It’s opposite a house, buried deep in its unclipped hedges, now giant green and towering, called Dom Polski, Polish House. Our friends from the East.

The low garden wall is lined with Slavic faced, crew-cut drinkers. Trainers. Cans. Cigarettes. Laughter. One of them demonstrating to another how he’d managed to punch someone in some fight somewhere and the victim had gone down with a single blow. He weaves it into the thin air, this clout, wide-mouth laughing. Takes another pull on his can, gets his cigarette lit. They could have done this in the comfort of the New Dock Tavern at twice the price but that Broadway pub has gone the way of all its fellows – the Locomotive, The Bertram - unprofitable and shut. So they drink in the street, or just off the street, in trouble-free unregulated harmony, the traffic louder than they are.

I go by here with my notebook. There’s that thing about walking and writing. The two are so close together. Walk and the ideas come foaming up. Scribble them illegibly, try to decipher your gems when you get home. Half the time this proves impossible. I don’t know the answer.

I’ve tried making notes by speaking them into a recorder, or in times of great desperation onto my phone, but this is pretty hopeless. At home I hear mostly the noise of the passing cars or the wind or both. My voice in the mix but hard to clarify. Notes by hand, well we’ve been into that. You need to stop and write slowly. Then either it starts to rain or the moment of inspiration passes.

Ideas are such fleeting things. Hold then up for consideration and they crumble. It is as if you have to get them down without actually thinking. Such a hard act.

None of the drinkers write. I’ve seen no evidence of any of them with pens or paper. Bukowski, if he were alive and here, would have made a whole book out his observations. He would have been there with the can drinkers, knocking his back and encouraging his fellows to go for more. Garrulously smiling. Then he’d make a poem of what he’d seen and heard. A dying art. Or maybe by now, in the twenty-first century, we’ve read just too much of this low-life as art stuff.

Henry Miller started it. Sitting in Paris cafes with his wine and his notepad. Recalling the drunken mauls and women chasing he got up to among the bars of Brooklyn. Whole novels fell from his pen. Sit and wait and stare and the world will give you what you need. Why walk anywhere?

But I have to. It’s what I do. I reach the house and get myself in front of the machine as fast as I can. Turn it on. Will it to boot-up just that little bit more swiftly and then, there it is, the Windows screen and Word launched. I press the keys and out it comes.

Elvis - Dylan Thomas churning out Patience Strong

2011-07-20T16:19:00.001+01:00

I don’t know why I’m doing this but I’m listening to Elvis again. The hard stuff. The fifties recordings, the famous Sun sessions, the early tracks he recorded for RCA. In fact pretty much anything that he laid down before disappearing at the end of the 1950s to Germany to do his US national service. Despite the big money backing him the Elvis of those days was still a rebel with a hand in the music he recorded. Try Elvis Presley As He Was Meant To Be Heard which is a four CD set containing his entire 1950s output. In mono, of course. Available for less than a tenner, now that the copyright terminator dateline has rolled another decade on.

When he died, August 1977, bloated and, as a creative force, completely worn I was standing in Buffalo Records on the Hayes in Cardiff. Buffalo was the nearest thing we had in Cardiff to a music superstore. Glass, light, albums everywhere. These were the days before Virgin. The racks were brimming with hand-made punk. Three chord garage music. Do it yourself, anyone can, and thousands did. Johnny Rotten was up there spitting at the world. The music dimmed and the store owner made a rare announcement. “The king has gone. Elvis Presley is dead”. The punks looked up. There was a pause then one of them started to cheer. Then another. It caught like a fire. The King is dead F*** him old fart hooray hooray. Not one of them realising that this man began right where they’d begun. Totally pissed with the staid music around him he created his own instead. Different chords but still only three. Pumped out lightning fast. Vocals screamed on top.

At Graceland last year, where I’d driven along Elvis Presley Boulevard, turned into Lonely Street and stopped just beyond Heartbreak Hotel, the car park was strung with speakers pouring out non-stop Elvis, 24/7. In the hotel my room had a TV set with three channels: Elvis on stage, Elvis films, Elvis songs. The phone was cocooned in fluffy pink cotton. There was a portrait of the great man smiling down at me from the wall. Around the heart-shaped swimming pool fans lounged – middle-aged to elderly, visiting the well springs of their youth.

The place was Elvis Disneyland, no contextualisation, no mention of the bloated, drug-addled state he’d ended up in. On the house tour you got to see all the gold discs, the rumpus room, the den, but for privacy purposes nothing upstairs. Could you get to the bathroom where the king actually passed on? No.

Why did Elvis never come to Europe, never play Wembley or appear at the London Palladium? Rumour was that he hated flying. The truth that his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was actually an escapee from Holland who couldn’t face going back or getting near anywhere near. The fat man with is cigar and his single artist was christened Andreas Cornelis ("Dries") van Kuijk. He never got closer to the Army than watching a military parade.

Elvis’s decline makes his 70s output painful to listen to. I’ve got the set on now, Elvis – Walk a Mile In My Shoes – The Essential 70’s Masters, 120 tracks for something like thirteen quid. I’m two thirds of the way through and I haven’t heard a single track that I’d want to play again. The voice is full of uncontrolled vibrato, unfocused, reaching hard for notes that just aren’t there. And then there’s the material. What on earth were they thinking of? It’s like Dylan Thomas churning out Patience Strong.

Could be, however, that the conspiracy theorists are right. In the same way that men never went to the moon and the twin-towers still stand, Elvis did not die. He’s among us still. Recording voice-overs for TV adverts, working at a petrol station in Dowlais, entering the Porthcawl annual Elvis look-a-like contest and losing. He’d be crap. And, as anyone who is a true fan knows, the king was never that.

Nobody Knows the Location of Ocean Way

2011-07-13T17:04:00.002+01:00

There are people out there who have no time for maps. I know. I’ve seen them. They’re the ones who stop you along Newport Road, shouting out from the driver’s seats of Ford Escorts and asking if you know where Toys R Us has moved to, how to get to the Divorce Courts and for precise directions to Ocean Way. Nobody knows the location of Ocean Way. It’s the most frequently demanded and totally under signposted destination in the entire city. And, yes, I do know where all these places are but explaining how to reach them in terms turning left at the fourteenth set of traffic lights and so on always causes eyes to glaze. You can see the information I impart draining into the ground never to rise again.

And why ask me? I suppose I’m now old enough to look either knowledgeable or safe or even both. I’ve been thinking of having a business card made that says YOU HAVE BEEN SAFELY DIRECTED TO YOUR DESTINATION BY THE AUTHOR OF REAL CARDIFF. BUY YOUR COPY NOW. I might as well get something out of the deal.

Printed maps in the twenty-first century are unaccountably in decline. They are missing from guide books, rarely used by newspapers, not there in leaflets that describe country walks. I’ve hauled up Google mapping onto the PC screen, a great recent blossoming. Key in anything, zip code, post code, fragment of name, and the system will have a go at locating your destination. Porthkerry Park (where I've just been) pulls up ten or so red pins identifying everything from the Porthkerry Hair Salon to Porthkerry’s Church of St Curig. In the middle is the park.

These maps are instant, enormously wide-ranging but totally lacking in any topographical detail other than the road network with flat blocks of green to indicate open ground. No paths, no contours, no lines showing the routes of the national grid or marks indicating the sites of ancient battles. OS this is not. You can’t spend an evening reading Google Maps like you can an Ordinance Survey explorer with its rich mix of quarry (dis), sink holes, Church (rems of), sprs, brooks, bridle-ways, paths, national walking routes, abandoned railways, disused mine shafts, and blue marks the shape of beer mugs identifying country inns.

But press the button marked Earth and the world changes. This is Google’s attempt at world domination. They’ve blended world-wide satellite imagery, visible down to the level of identifying a back garden barbeque, with street level photographs of just about everywhere. You’ve seen them, the slow moving cars with tripoded cameras on top, and for more challenging terrain the same set up affixed to three-wheeled peddalo rickshaws and other third-world transport. I won’t get into the politic here although directly following any Google mapping intervention a whole raft of this hits the fans with locals fearful of their security and their privacy now that the twenty-first century has come down the road and pulled them in.

Are maps back? They just well might be.

This blog posting may well end up as a component of Peter Finch's next book. Watch this space.

Talking

2011-07-05T12:04:00.000+01:00

Out there in story land the form is shifting. Beginning, middle and end plots, written down, are no longer sufficient. What we classify as literature is moving ever outwards. People sitting on stools gabbling whatever comes out of their heads straight at the crowds are fine. So too are the guys who write their plot lines on separate bits of paper and leave them in in a trail across the bars of the city.

Any number of authorities in Wales, driven by money leaking towards Community First areas or by cash available to help people get to grips with new technology, are investing in what they call Digital Storytelling. Standing before a camera and talking about how it once was, about where they live, what they like, who they know, what they do. You Tube territory. Life recordable by mobile phone. No previous experience necessary.

All this is extremely laudable but it is hardly art.

Yet the word Storytelling is in there and that activity has a decent pedigree. So art this digital activity now is.

Mainstream storytelling where tellers regale audiences with wit and wisdom drawn from memory and change what they say as circumstances dictate has been with us for decades. How much this activity can be called literature is an open question, creative as it genuinely is. If literature is stuff you write down then storytelling certainly isn’t it.

However, as someone who pushes at boundaries, I’m still not thoroughly convinced. Back in the1980s the poet David Antin extended the boundaries of verse by entering the auditorium, sitting on a stool and then extemporising. Talking. What came out of his mouth, these Talk Poems , he declared, was poetry. The difference between this activity and classic storytelling is that Antin’s work was recorded, transcribed and then published. Sent out into the world as text. Literature old style.

How do we distinguish between storytellers who are merely out of work actors who’ve read a few classic tales and now regurgitate them in entertaining fashion from more considered operators? Great Welsh tellers such as Daniel Morden and Michael Harvey can dazzle with their innovation. But in the wide-church that is literature just where do they fit?

Are there any definitions out there? There are none that I can find.

Hold Onto What You've Got. The Past, The Present and the Penylan Laundry

2011-06-20T12:46:00.002+01:00

For the past twenty years Cardiff has been a boom town. The centre, once riddled with brick terraces and soot-marked municipal Victoriana, has been turned into a futurepolis. The Docks, until the 1980s a decrepit post-industrial wasteland, have been reimagined as Cardiff Bay and made into the Emerald City with Lloyd George Avenue as the Yellow Brick Road. It’s a shining example of Welsh civic centralisation and local boosterism meeting up with profit- fuelled property development against a background of weak planning control. Cardiff has rocked, rolled and tumbled into the Dan Dare future. Along the way it has somehow achieved for itself a purpose that it has lacked since the days of coal.

Change has been Cardiff’s driver with almost nothing sacred. The canal went, docks were closed and filled-in, the meshed streets of the town centre were turned into shopping malls, the meeting halls and grand cafes became stores and apartment blocks, while the traffic, hated and loved by everyone to some degree or other, spun in ever tightening circles.

But move out from that white-rendered, glass and steel centre and what do you find? The world as it was. Cardiff’s 1890 to 1920 industrial red-brick boom still largely in place. The suburban streets with their corner shops, pubs and amenities are still there. So, too, the parklands, our beloved green lungs, our open spaces, our playing fields, our streams and rivers.

Nothing much changes in the suburbs. Canton, Cathays, Roath, Penylan, Ely, Llanishen. We live as we always did. New fitted carpets, inside bathrooms, double glazing and central heating maybe. But essentially we are as we were.

In Penylan, before the new build worker’s housing rushing up from Roath got there, on Lord Tredegar Land, halfway between Roath Court and the great houses of Bronwydd, Wellclose, Fretherne, and Oldwell on the side of Penylan Hill stood an open field – part of Tir Colly farm. In 1898 The Dyeing, Carpet and Window-Cleaning Company Ltd opened their new venture. The Cardiff Steam Laundry. Built of Cattybrook Bricks with bath stone and white marble embellishments the enterprise occupied an acre-wide site. Cardiff’s burgeoning middle-classes needed somewhere to send their soiled shirts and their creased sheets.

There’s a drawing in the Western Mail of September 23^rd, 1898 that shows the new laundry in full glory. It is surrounded on three sides by open fields, trees and hedges. That wouldn’t last for long. In 1900 Marlborough Road School opened alongside it. Same architects – Habershon and Fawckner – the company who also built most of the terraced houses in the road. Within ten years the farm and the fields had gone. The Laundry was taken over by United Welsh Mills in 1923 and later slid into disrepair as a buddleia-infested outpost selling cut-price carpets, wood flooring and pine furniture.

The school, for all of its one hundred and ten year existence has opened onto the laundry’s unbroken red brick wall. In the days when communism was a force somebody painted a patriotic hammer and sickle there. As fear of the Russians rose a gallows was painted above. The outlines of this long-lived graffiti are still just about visible. On a fine day.

In the 1940s the Infants school was hit by a German Bomb and pupils rehoused on a temporary basis at Albany Road. By the time I got there in 1952 the reception classes had been rebuilt. There were still bomb shelters in the yard. In the Junior school, several years later, I was sent out through the school window, half a crown in my hand, to slip up the hill to buy my form teacher a packet of ten Players Navy Cut. I told my mother. As a smoker herself all she did was smile.

In 2008 outline planning permission was granted by Cardiff Council for the development of a fifty unit retirement complex plus doctor’s surgery on the now almost vacant Marlborough Road laundry site. The 2009 recession led that developer to withdraw. When the economic climate subsequently improved the site went back onto the market. There followed a contest between a supermarket chain and provider of what’s euphemistically called “assisted living”, retirement accommodation builder McCarthy & Stone. Retirement won.

McCarthy & Stone are now proposing to demolish the laundry, red brick walls and all, to build in their place a multi-unit, landscaped retirement village. Check http://www.consultation-online.co.uk/cardiff/proposals for a detailed look at their plans. They’ve done the whole public consultation exercise, handing out leaflets and running an exhibition. 41 people came.

The McCarthy & Stone arguments are good ones. Retirees, they say, tend not to drive, live quietly, don’t hold late night parties and won’t want onsite drinking and dancing facilities. Impact on the local neighbourhood will be low. The red brick wall along the Blenheim Road frontage, in place at least a year before the school was built, will go. The retirement apartments will be built to look rather like the existing Blenheim Road housing stock. They’ll use red bricks. They’ll look the Victorian part.

It all sounds very reasonable. Measured. Calm. But for the fact that yet another part of Cardiff’s past will go and go forever. As a city we’ve never done very much to conserve what we have. Not that we had that much to begin with. Cardiff is essentially a Victorian and Edwardian creation. There’s little here that predates the nineteenth century. The façade of the Laundry, the steam boiler rooms, the stables and the sorting and storage sheds would be untouchable if they were a hundred years older than they actually are. CADW would have listed them as unique, designated them a site of significant historical and cultural interest, developed them as a tourist attraction, attracted Heritage Lottery grant aid and charged us to go in.

But they are too young. Rather like the Red House pub, lost to apartment development in the Bay, they’ll have to go.

A local opposition group with a growing membership has made a call for arms and wants to fight the developers head on. They have a Facebook page: Save The Old Laundry Cardiff. They suggest development of the site as an arts centre. A laudable aim. But one that would certainly present people living in the surrounding streets with more traffic, more noise and more late night drinking than they currently experience.

I wonder, too, in these times of arts-funding squeeze, who might pay for the development? The Council have already made clear who their preferred developer might be and finance for that initiative is already in place. Do we actually need another arts centre in Cardiff’s east? How can I, a long standing proponent of the east of the city’s creative development, be asking this? But a few blocks to the west of the Laundry site is The Gate, an existing arts complex, which could do without competition on its doorstep.

Is there an answer that will work? I’m desperately searching for one. Keeping the past as it was would mean knocking down the school and the nearby housing to return the Laundry and its outbuildings to their original field-surrounded state. Clearly ludicrous. How far should we go to keep what we once had? Would a development that retained the facades but rebuilt everything else be what we need? That’s happened to Altolusso on Bute Terrace where the Victorian façade of what became New college has been retained and a 232 foot skyscraper built onto the back. Does that maintain the continuity of our history? Maybe we could lift the whole thing, brick by brick, and rebuild it at St Fagan’s. That’s happened there with churches and workingmen’s halls. I fear, though, that economics and, more importantly, time will be against all this. Soon the bulldozers will come. Protest at that point will be too late.

Don't Blink. Write.

2011-06-14T17:16:00.002+01:00

There’s a solid history of Welsh authors doubling as newspaper columnists. Long ago the novelist and poet Herbert Williams moonlighted nightly as The Stroller on the South Wales Echo. Tom Davies was Pendennis on the Sunday Observer and then for years wrote an increasingly off the wall column for the Western Mail. How do you do it? You sit down with the idea in the back of your head and you bang the keyboard. For authors it’s the purist form.

In the days when I ran a bookshop in Charles Street I once commissioned R. Gerallt Jones to write the leader for Oriel, our monthly magazine. Copy was due by 4.00 pm Friday. Gerallt entered the shop at 3.30, asked for a notepad and a chair and then perched himself somewhere between Anglo-Welsh fiction and Celtic History and, surrounded by customers, scribbled furiously. At 4.00 he handed in his completed column and asked for the cheque.

So that, I thought, is how you do it. Don’t blink. Write.

For the Western Mail I’ve been The Insider now for two hundred and one columns. That’s a lot of banging the keyboard. I’ve been The Insider because I’ve been inside - watching Wales’ literature machine and helping to guide it. For the most part it has been a joy. Although discovering just how invisible Wales often is in the world has been painful.

We are a small a nation, perversely we keep celebrating that fact. No air force. No submarines. No international policy that means a light. A population that could be absorbed without trace in the twenty-first century suburbs of Istanbul, Tokyo, or Rio.

Our influence is nil. Most of the world hasn’t heard of us. Apart from perhaps in Patagonia the mark we’ve made on the planet is slight. Who are we? We’re the Welsh. We used to do a lot of things. When we were thick with coal and iron and social heroes. But today we sing. And we write.

It’s that last item that kept me going.

We write. And in increasing quantity we are turning out authors with big reputations whose words will endure. Owen Sheers, Ken Follett, Gillian Clarke, Dannie Abse, R S Thomas, Russell T Davies, Andrew Davies, Gwyneth Lewis. From the inside I’ve done a little to help let this achievement be seen. We had the Academi, the literature promoter, and now there’s Literature Wales, the National Development Agency. Literature with reach, walking tall. How it should.

But I need time to write. I started out that way, as a poet, and there remains a way to go. Administration slows you down. I’ve got two psychogeographies to complete, and a raft of poetry, on the page and off. So I won’t be fading quietly. I might not be weekly at the Mail but I'll be posting blog entries here. Keep in touch.

#201

How Much Future Is There?

2011-06-06T13:40:00.000+01:00

I guess the state of the future only really starts to concern you when you pass forty. Before that it’s all zoom and delight. My approach has been to find someone at least a decade older than I am and watch how they get on. If they are still having a good time then everything’s fine. I ran into our National Poet Gillian Clark reading, opening things, making welcome speeches and generally elevating the art form on at least four occasions last month. She’s older than I am by the requisite amount and shows not the slightest sign of flagging. Her work continues to hit target perfectly and the world clearly loves her. Plenty of future left.

When you die in Wales they name a competition after you. Just before that they have an event celebrating your life and work. Herbert Williams, whose lifetime achievement writer of the people event was put on more than a decade ago, told me that the next thing was daisies. Pushing them up. Since then, however, Herb has published two books of poems and at least half a dozen novels. And there are more on the way this year. Herb is clearly not ready for slowing down yet.

Those who have actually moved to another plain, including a few who managed to get their celebratory event after they’d gone, live on as names attached to gongs. The Dylan Thomas Prize. The John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry. The Harri Webb Award. The RS Thomas Poetry Prize. This latter trophy was actually only awarded once. It was given by the prize founder, Dafydd Wyllt, to the best poet who happened to be in the room at the time.

Some of you will remember Dafydd. He used to stand outside the Post Office in Hills Street playing an accordion. Welsh airs. The prize was an elaborately woven dressing gown cord attached to an engraved brass tag. I can’t recall now who actually won but it wasn’t me.

The Rhys Davies Short Story Competition is actually a contest of a totally different stripe. Set up in memory of the great Rhondda author the award offers a first prize of £1000 for a piece of Welsh fiction written in English of no more than 2500 words. That’s quarter of an hour’s worth read out loud. The entry fee is £6.00 a story and to enter you need to either live in Wales or have been born here. That makes both Prince Charles and Rowan Williams eligible. But would they win?

Judges this year are Trezza Azzopardi, Russell Celyn Jones and Sian Preece. Closing date is July 22. Winning stories will also be broadcast by the BBC. Funded by the Rhys Davies Trust and managed by Literature Wales entry forms are available online at www.literaturewales.org . Good luck.

#200

Following The Grid Line

2011-05-26T14:03:00.001+01:00

As I went up through Llandaf with an 1880 Ordnance Survey map of the district in my hand I wondered just what I’d find. Would the totality have changed? Would the old streets shown from a hundred and twenty years ago have vanished into the dust to be replaced by new structures, terraces, parking places, curry houses and shops? Not a bit. The grid was identical, it was just the detail that had morphed. How much had we added here in a century? Not as much as you’d think. I wrote what I discovered down.

This act, artificial, contrived, even faintly ridiculous, was one of psychogeography. I discovered this later when the book of which my Llandaf piece formed part was published. Real Cardiff. ‘Finch is clearly a flaneur, suggested one reviewer. ‘A situationist,’ remarked another. ‘A psychogeographer. One who lets the built environment inform his emotions, who has discovered new ways for the pedestrian to explore the city, someone who lets go and ambles, a literary explorer of maps.’ So that’s what I was. Amazing.

Will Self, I discovered, had for years authored a column called Psychogeography for The Independent. In it he wrote of his experiences walking to New York, using trains to reach sales conferences, living in an empty high rise on Merseyside. He was the embodiment of what turned out to be a growing popular movement of artists and activists who had for years been using such conceits to propel themselves across the planet.

There were those who used numbers, throwing dice to define a grid point and then seeing who could get there first. Others followed the grid lines themselves as they bisected the landscape. Could the line be walked? When it reached buildings could you go through them, into the window, through the door, over the roof?

Iain Sinclair, author of one of the seminal reworkings of the urban landscape, Lights Out The Territory walked the M25, staying within 300 meters of the roadway, and recorded his experiences. What was there, in this liminal landscape? Abandoned factories, mental asylums, storage tanks, waste.

My own psychogeographic amblings took me along the entire Cardiff route of the Glamorgan Canal. Gone for decades. Who knew where it had run? With photographer John Briggs I tracked the long vanished Roath Branch railway from Gabalfa into Cardiff Docks. In a single day I tried to climb as many of Cardiff’s tall buildings as I could. I visited every street named after a battle, planet or element. I drank in all the pubs of Canton.

This last episode took some doing and, I have to admit, is still incomplete. Progress is slow. The pubs are closing too fast. Check Seren’s Real series for progress.

#199

Gongs Again

2011-05-21T09:09:00.001+01:00

Its’ award season once again. Those months of the year during which the Eisteddfod, the Wales Book of the Year, the Dylan Thomas Prize and all the other lesser events give out their gongs. Winners will proliferate. But is the achievement real? Prizes? You get them by chance, because you know the judges, because your name fits, because you were in the right place at the right time, because your publisher pushed you, because of bribery, because it’s a fix.

As far as I can tell this latter accusation may run true in America but has little foundation here at home. Scandal, however, is a prize season currency. If things do not go according to plan the press come out in droves, delighted. Book cock-ups make headlines and have been doing so for years.

Back when the Nobel Prize was virtually the only literary award operating its first winner wasn’t contender Leo Tolstoy but a minor French poet called Sully Prudhomme. How could the judges be so blind? Quite easily, as it transpired. In future years they went on to omit Hardy, Ibsen, Kafka, Proust, Valery, Rilke and James Joyce. Did the award signify outstanding literary talent and world-beating prowess, asked the press? Clearly not.

In 1974 conflict of interest mired the Booker Prize when one of the judges, the wife of Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, short listed her husband’s Ending Up. In later years the same pattern repeated. Judges pushed works by their spouses, sons, lovers, agents and publishers. Can there be anyone on the scene who is truly independent?

James Kelman won the 1994 Booker with a novel in thick Glaswegian dialect, How Late It Was, How Late (in which the world’s favourite swear word appears more than 4000 times). It emerged that the judges had selected his book not because it was their first choice but rather to block the first choices of others. Judge Julia Neuberger broke rank after the ceremony and denounced the work as rubbish. The author, she said, “was just a drunken Scotsman”.

In Wales the Book of the Year attracts similar disturbances, although not quite on the same scale. Who will ever forget the Minister who read out the wrong name as winner? YouTube certainly won’t. In the long past there have been judges who have leaked and who have publicly disagreed. There have been writers who have been upset and those who have promised to give their award to charity and didn’t. And then there have been those who have immediately vanished from the literary scene without a trace thus underlining the award’s efficacy.

Overall, however this Welsh Booker has been a cracking success. Increasing sales, great winners, excitement, entertainment, literature as a horse race. The short list for 2011 is here

#198

This Stuff Is Like Liquid Gold

2011-05-16T17:43:00.003+01:00

What’s top of the loan list at libraries? What regularly rides high among the bookshop best sellers? Nothing less than that literary equivalent of a reality show, the biography. The life story, a tale pulled from the real world, from tangible events featuring named and actual people. How easy are these things to write? Very, if the number turned out by minor celebrities, pop singers, politicians and sports persons of every stripe is anything to go by. It doesn’t matter, it seems, how your earlier academic life might have gone. If you are famous then, by definition, you can write. Check out some of these wonders, they read like liquid gold.

The reality is, of course, that most are ghost written. The famous person’s manager sets it up. The famous persons speaks, the ghost takes notes. The book comes out and a million pounds are earned. The world simply can’t get enough of the truth behind the glitter. Or what they are told is the truth. And what might, to some, be glitter.

But not all biographies are done this way. Many are simply the product of a determined writer’s desire to tell a good story. John Williams’ recent biographies of Michael X and Shirley Bassey are cases in point. Both tell the tale of people who have had interesting and pertinent lives. And Williams recounts their stories with aplomb.

However, not everything always goes to plan. Here’s Dawn French: “I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.” Or, as Chris Eubank said when asked if he had ever considered writing an autobiography, “On what?”

These and some other problems that you may have encountered when trying to tell your own or someone else's story were the centrepiece of Literature Wales's Writing For Life conference at Blaenavon over the weekend. Howard Marks was the star, a man gone well beyond biography and now writing creative fiction. But it was Dai Smith who stole the show.

#197

Not Much Of A Spectator Sport

2011-05-05T11:25:00.003+01:00

Why do we listen to poetry? Many of us don’t, of course. Verse recitation is hardly a great spectator sport . It’s thought of by many of as a minority activity in the same category as collecting diesel electric shunter numbers or participating in kendo. That’s the Japanese art of the sword practised while wearing head to toe black robes and metal head gear, if you were wondering. Poetry, when read out loud by its author, can give us not only music and magnificence, entertainment and elevation, but new insight into what the writer actually meant. If, indeed, they did actually have some content to impart and were not simply making an artistic statement.

The form has come a long way. When I first experienced it (decades ago, back bar, Park Hotel, A G Prys Jones in an armchair delivering somnambulant verse to a prim audience already mostly asleep) poetry readings seemed to be too intellectual an activity for their own good. Organisers were chastised for letting their poets on stage wearing anything less than a suit. Poets were asked to hand out written versions of their verses in advance lest the audience lose their way. Poetry was straight and it was quiet. We went home at 9.30 full of worth.

In the twenty-first century this is no longer how things are. In reasonably quick succession I have recently experienced the whole contemporary range. First up was a reading by the backwoods open-field master of the mystic, Chris Torrance. This was delivered by a hat-wearing, seated poet to the accompaniment of techno, treated guitar music from the inimitable Chris Vine. The event was as much a poetry performance as it was a musical adventure. I then attended a more traditional poets from the floor stand-up event which included readings (i.e. with bits of paper in front of the poet), recitations (here the poet recited from memory), along with a performance from one new-tech innovator who read from text flashed to his iPhone. The entire audience appeared to be participants. I began to wonder who the readings were actually for.

At the launch for The Listening Shell, a book of poems celebrating the writing centre, Ty Newydd, there was a large crowd. The poets, and there were loads of these, everyone from Samantha Wynn Rhydderch to Tony Curtis and Nigel Jenkins to Paul Henry, appeared on stage in managed order. No one read more than a single piece. It was all over by 9.00. The audience loved it. Exposed but not drowned. Less is more.

At the Spoken Word All Stars in the Pierhead the multiracial crew had not a single scrap of paper between them. Poetry, delivered from the hip by the hip and for the hip, flowed seamlessly for ninety minutes. The audience rocked, poetry rolled. Verse out loud, it still works.

#196

Now I'm a Cyclist Too I Just Can't Cope

2011-04-26T16:09:00.001+01:00

I’m slogging up Newport Road, Cardiff carrying two bags of shopping and with a rucksack on my back. It’s been raining and there’s water everywhere. A cyclist dressed like a praying mantis and going like a rocket barrels down the narrowing pavement as it passes under the Valley Rail line to Queen Street Station. Pedestrians scatter. But somehow not me. I end up with my carrier of apples, M&S ready meals, a CD by Jeff Beck and a DVD of Elvis’ first four films (reduced to ten quid so therefore essential) ripped from my hand and scattered to the four winds. The streaking cyclist vanishes into the distance. Par for the course, this course, so it seems. Newport Road, the eastern gateway, the route out of here to Wales’ first city, Newport. Then Chepstow, the border and centralist England beyond. The only place now without its own devolved administration, as a Tweeter recently said.

I’ve come along here, down the years, with any number of writers. Adrian Mitchell when he was resident author at the Sherman. Adrian Henri after the Liverpool Scene had played Charles Street. Hunting for a late night drink. With Czech grandmaster Miroslav Holub looking for a room. With sound poet Bob Cobbing heading to my house to sleep on my battered settee.

There seems to be something about this whole writers on tour business that is against proper hotels preferring cut-price put-you-ups instead. It’s happened to me. I’ve slept on z-beds, collapsed couches, mattresses with mammary droop, sleeping bags on floors and piles of blankets. When you are touring you get expenses, yes, but given the level of fee usually offered you need to spend them with care.

This is one of the essential difficulties with writing. Everyone expects you to do it for free, or for a fee so low it might as well be. There’s a notion that somehow your book sales will increase and you’ll get your costs back from the margin you make on that. Or that your publisher, rich beyond dreams, will magically cover whatever you spend. Limousine, five star, fine dining, multiple top end sandwiches in the first class on the way back.

Last time I got myself up to the level of entitlement to that it turned out that the line I was travelling on didn’t run first class carriages. And when I asked my publisher to pay for my overnight at the five-star Llangollen Hilton they just laughed.

Back on Newport Road I’ve reached the Four Elms, a place where Ifor Thomas once carved a stack of books into fragments with a chain saw. You could do that then. No health and safety. Another bike hurtles towards me. I hide in the bus shelter. Is the world getting better or worse?

#195

Gabble Rather Than Books

2011-04-21T17:15:00.001+01:00

How many ways are there to read a book? You pick it up in the hope that you can lose yourself in it, that the story will grip you enough for you not to want to put the thing down. You hope it will illuminate parts of your life that have been dark for decades, that it will explain to you how you are what you are. You want it to be set in the world you live in, with characters like those around you, so you can relate. You want it to take you to places you’ve never been, worlds you don’t know, to give you vicariously experiences you could never get any other way. You want it to take the language in your ears and bend it into new and thrilling shapes. You want it to lift your spirit, to turn all the lights on and to make the world sing.

Reading can make us better people. Yet despite what you might hear there’s a crisis going on out there. Literature is in retreat – too elitist, too obscure, too non-productive, too economically backward, too difficult, too distant. What’s there to replace it? Immediacy, street life, gabble, things that engage for the shortest of moments. Literature has fought back with flash fiction (novels of fifty words or less), one word poetry, text message tales, life stories now told to camera but never written down.

At a literary dinner recently Ken Follett told us that thrillers worked only when there was a tension present that could be drawn out to fill the entire work. One that kept the reader engaged. He said that the life of his characters had to shift every five pages, just to keep the reader on board. Old stuff, sure. Dickens knew this. But still eminently true. Depicted life needs plot.

Glyn Jones was a great Anglo-Welsh poet and novelist. His classic tale, Island of Apples, will be reprinted shortly by the University of Wales Press. Glyn insisted that plots were best dealt with as core ideas. These things are like snowballs, he once told me. You get a concept, an image, an action, a name, and then you roll it forward and it attracts content as it goes. The novel as a glowing idea rather than a flowing line.

But it’s fiction with self-evident plot that sells, that gets borrowed the most from our shrinking libraries. Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth moves more than 100,000 copies a year. Glyn’s do only a fraction of that.

But don’t dismiss Island of Apples. This is a masterwork. A romantic tale without sex, the pre-adolescent angst of a valley schoolboy coming to terms with the world of the imagination. The reprint will be available in June.

#194

Books As Buses

2011-04-19T11:15:00.002+01:00

Buses come together, in gangs, like good films, like great nights out, like the men in the poet Wendy Cope’s life. But books, they roll and roll, in an ever rising tide. Of the making of books, as it says in Ecclesiastes, there is no end. Take a look, for example, at the lot of the judges of the Wales Book of the Year Prize. Back in the nineteen-nineties they would need to consider a hundred books and then make their choice. Today that number has doubled. This is the result of technological advance, an improved economy, a desire by funding bodies to see these things professionally hit market and a much enlarged producer base. The literature industry has been teaching creative writers how to do it in increasing numbers since the pale and dark nineteen-fifties. The consequence is more books.

There is evidence out there that, as a leisure activity, reading is on the increase. Book publishing, if not vibrant is certainly a viable activity. TV has not reduced us all to pulp. We turn it off sometimes and spend a few hours with a favourite author, thrilled, excited, enthralled, uplifted. Society has discovered that reading and writing can be acceptable alternatives to wrecking bus shelters, and can help combat depression by aiding feelings of self-worth. I write therefore I am. I read and I improve. The old adages return.

It’s the book prize season again. A time when the best books, or those the judges think might be, rise to the top. The Roland Mathias Prize has just been awarded while the Wales Book of the Year soon will be.

Bowing to pressure from readers who felt it inequitable that poetry should compete against fiction and non-fiction against verse, this year will be the last where that situation prevails. From 2012 Literature Wales will offer category prizes to the best work of fiction, the best book of poetry and the best work of creative non-fiction. From these three winners an overall Book of the Year will be selected. There’ll be a Welsh-medium award as well as one for works published in English. In keeping with these straightened times ceremonials will be minimized.

This year’s award, decided from the bumper crop of works that came out during the past twelve months, will be announced simultaneously in Cardiff and in Bangor.

Who might be in the running? Despite my current job I write I have absolutely no insider knowledge here. But it’s been a good year. Watch this space.

An earlier version of this posting appeared in The Western Mail as The Insider. #193

Still Real Afters All These Years

2011-04-09T09:01:00.003+01:00

It had been a good night at Chapter, proving that the cultural epicentre of the city hadn’t yet completely shifted to Roath. The night before I’d been at Market House, the art centre’s extension next door, a mess of studios, work rooms, offices for small arts companies, designers, publishers, dancers. I’d been talking up the capital, giving the assembled my take on what makes this great place tick, how it shines and shimmers, how it had been in its dirty past, how its Welshness works, how it fits into Wales, a post-industrial coal valley capital, growing ever larger over the hills that stand behind it, recovering land from the mass of tidal bog to its south.

“I bought your Real Cardiff when I first came here,” says the Turkish girl, smiling. “I thought it might tell me where I was”. I tell them about the lost wells of Penylan and the one with the shape of Christ’s knee on the rim. I tell them about the Butes being like Bill Gates and buying out anything that sprang up in opposition. The austere second Marquis with his docks and his visions. The Catholic third with his Victorian Disneyworld at Cardiff’s heart. I talk about the rivers, the Tan, the Whitebrook, the Canna, the Wedal, which we no longer have. We sup Cabernet Sauvignon and sporadically nibble at the crisps brought by the organiser. Some of the listeners buy books.

For many years I came here to the New Welsh Review offices, presided over, then, by the late Robin Reeves. Robin was a green-leaning socialist nationalist. Voice of understanding. Knew the world’s shape. He ploughed a liberal furrow with his literary magazine, NWR. You got a free mug if you subscribed. On these were the faces of Idris Davies and R.S. Mug collectors signed up and then threw the magazine away. The magazine itself has now moved to Aberystwyth and its former offices are occupied by men with drawing boards and computers and tubes of paint. Out of the window I can see early evening Market Road revellers, setting off for the pubs of Cowbridge Road – the Corporation, the Ivor Davies, the Kings Castle, the Admiral Napier. Places full of shine and light.

It has always been like this in West Cardiff. Before the Arts Centre came to Chapter in 1971 the buildings were Cantonian High School. Before that the space was used by the monthly Canton cattle market which ran from the Police Station to Carmarthen Street. Sheep and cattle pens, stables, slaughter house, meat market, manure, dust.

But today culture shines. Blown Magazine is based here and the theatre is the venue for John William’s In Chapters performances. NWR under its new editor Gwen Davies might even launch in the bar. Watch this space.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #192

Green and Green

2011-03-30T11:42:00.001+01:00

I’m at the bottom end of Brecknockshire set for one of the longest drives Wales has. I’ll cross Brecon, enter Radnor, cross Montgomery and end in the south of Denbighshire. I’m travelling from one side to the other of Powys, the giant county created in a fit of local government reorganisation in 1974. This is the paradise of Powys, the ancient kingdom, the land of Cynddylan, Rhodri the Great and Maredudd ab Owain ab Edwin. It’s been restored.

Powys might be the largest of Welsh regions but it is also the least populated. You can drive miles through intensely green upland without seeing a soul. There are places here where you can stand on hilltops and as far as can be seen spot no evidence of human intervention. The Green Desert, the late Harri Webb called it. He published a book of the same name in 1969. The concept only really hits home when you drive through it. All is hawthorn, ash, scrub oak, pasture, Sitka spruce reforestation. A glowing, constant green – evidence of ancientness, non-intervention, and constant rain.

Webb’s poetry was accessible, historical, humorous, and often highly political. He sang, he rhymed, he amused. The nearest writer we have to him today is the outspoken and entertaining Mike Jenkins. Neither poet actually spent much time in the Powys desert. Why would they? There’s nothing here.

I exaggerate, naturally. There’s Newtown and Brecon and Builth and the great Powys capital, Llandrindod Wells. A place of smelly water and middle class, where business meetings involving participants from both the north and the south are always held. The geographic centre of Wales. Equal misery - to get there everyone has to travel.

So why am I making the great green drive? So that I can write the introduction to Mike Parker’s next book, Real Powys. The Real books have hitherto concentrated on conurbations, built-up environments, big towns, cities, streets, places where industry has changed the landscape, places where people live. Cardiff, Llanelli, Merthyr, Aberystwyth, Swansea, Wrexham, Liverpool, Newport. In the pipeline are Bangor, Pembroke, more Swansea and Cardiff once again. But that still leaves great slices of Wales unrealised. Most of the country, in fact. Getting the Welsh compiler of the Rough Guide to have a crack at it was an obvious move.

Parker spent a time on television travelling around Wales’s B-roads in a camper van. He’s a map fanatic, author of the excellent Map Addict, a sort of history of the object mixed with his own often hilarious involvement. As an immigrant he’s written perceptively about the native Welsh. His latest, The Wild Rover, covers the chequered and turbulent history of the British footpath. That’s due from Collins next month. Real Powys will come from Seren next year. Expect green on the cover.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #191

Bigger Than The Beatles

2011-03-24T10:18:00.001Z

Come Together sang the Beatles in 1969 and we’ve been trying hard ever since. There are some great joinings out there. S4C and the BBC, Egypt and Libya, Spain and Gibraltar, Concord and Concorde, fish and chips, the Tories and the Liberals, Bradford & Bingley and Santander. John Lennon when he wrote that song from Abbey Road had in mind acid guru Timothy Leary’s Come Together campaign to oust Ronald Regan as governor of California. Lennon wanted revolution but Leary lost.

Back in Wales we have our own versions of togetherness. Plaid and Labour, Gwynedd and Anglesey, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the University of Wales, Swansea and Neath (now almost one city), Cardiff and Newport, still ten miles apart but from the Welcome to Newport signs on the road leading east from St Melons you wouldn’t know. It’s a Welsh thing, I suppose, because when you are small, as most things are in this country, then joining with someone else will make you bigger. The bigger the better. In a place where small has been beautiful for a lifetime that’s a revolution in itself.

The coming together of Ty Newydd, Wales’ National gem of a centre for writers and Academi, the literature promotion agency is something that’s been in the back of administrator’s minds for at least a decade. If the aim is to provide both consumers and creators of writing with a country in which to flourish then administrative slickness, financial security, and strategic clout become desirable options.

From April this year these two vital organisations will join together to become Literature Wales. In simplistic terms this means one web site, one ticketing agency, one place to call for literary excitement, access and advice.

Strategically this will ensure that that literature in Wales will now benefit from a truly national and rival-free delivery. From well-funded festivals in places where they’ve previously not been. From a commercially sponsored and completely restructured Wales Book of the Year. From free student and young people’s membership to Wales’s august Society of Writers. From a campaign to bring writers, reading and writing into the heart of communities that have previously felt themselves denied, disparaged or ignored. From a truly unified striding of Welsh writers on the international stage and a bringing to Wales of the writers of the world. To a knitting together of the loose threads of our culture, making theatre talk to poetry, linking health care to literature and putting our writers and their work in public places from the Cardiff Bay Barrage to the lighthouses off Anglesey.

Literature Wales, with the able support of the Arts Council, will put our literatures right where they need to be, make them enviable, accessible and enjoyable. Best of all Literature Wales will make them glow.

An earelier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #190

How Cities Compare

2011-03-19T08:57:00.002Z

The rivalries of cities are eternal. Cardiff vs. Newport. Cardiff vs. Swansea. Cardiff vs. the rest of Wales come to that. We know how these things work even if we don’t fully understand them. Drive east out of Cardiff and the signs welcoming you to Wales’s first city, Newport, begin almost immediately. Cardiff might have a high rising centre but Swansea has Wales’s tallest building, biggest book prize and the best library in the country.

In Newport they have the best pubs, in Cardiff it’s the shops, and in Swansea the beach, the sea, the pace of life. In Cardiff, as capital, things naturally cluster. Government, media, finance, culture, clubs. This is a product of economics and happens the whole world over. Not that this stops the complaints. Why is the Assembly in Cardiff and not in Pontyclun? The Stadium should have been built in Bridgend, the Millennium Centre in Bangor and the National Museum in Wrexham. The BBC would be far better off in Aberaeron. And Glamorgan Cricket’s SWALEC Stadium should certainly have been constructed in Llandod. These are not inventions, I’ve heard these things said.

Not that this is anything new. At the end of the nineteenth century, and despite the British Empire being at its height, Wales went through a brief patch of nation building. We would have both a National Library and a National Museum. In 1905 the Privy Council allocated the money and a bitter war broke out between Cardiff, Wales’ largest conurbation, and Aberystwyth, the country’s geographic centre and the Welshest place on earth. Aber already had books, but so too did Cardiff. Local worthies jostled, papers were written, meetings were held. Eventually a compromise was reached with the National Library going to Aber and the Museum being established in Cardiff.

Aberystwyth got the book collection of physician Sir John Williams and two of the great books of Wales: The Black Book of Carmarthen and The White Book of Rhydderch. But The Book of Aneurin, the prize, the work that contained the earliest known example of Welsh poetry, The Gododdin, the tale of the great battle against the Saxons at Catraeth, that went to Cardiff.

That would have been an end of it, too, if it hadn’t been for Local Government reorganisation and the recent abandonment of specialist archival services in the Capital. In a fit of unexpected co-operation the decision was taken to permanently loan The Book of Aneurin to Aberystwyth. In exchange Cardiff would get a pair of facsimiles, expertly produced by the National Library’s rare books department.

Who wins? Everyone. All we need now is for The Red Book of Hergest to be repatriated from its imprisonment in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and Wales will once more have the set.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #189

Lit Fest No Mud

2011-03-11T12:19:00.001Z

Literature festivals have always fascinated me. Not so much what they present but how they work. How is it, I wonder, that you can put on a middle-ranking novelist at a decent venue mid-week in a city and draw a crowd of twenty or so. At a festival hundreds will show up.

There’s a marketing parallel here. The best place to open a new shoe shop is, of course, right next to an existing one. The two of you become a cluster and attract those in need of choice. Sales increase. Both enterprises benefit. So too, it seems, with literature.

A heavy weekend of thirty or more events will draw larger crowds than the same sort of thing put on weekly on Tuesday nights. Festival goers don’t come for the literature either. Well, of course, they do, but it isn’t the hard-core stuff that pulls them in. They don’t want fictioneers reading chapters out of their latest books or poets declaiming from the lectern and then sitting down. Rather they want discussion, controversy, argument, debate, and most of all glimpses of fame. They want to nudge up near Philip Pullman as he queues at the ice cream stall. They want to bump into Rowan Williams in the bookshop. See Stephen Fry being interviewed live standing outside a tent.

Most of all they want to see those who whose main business may not be actually writing but in the process of getting through their complicated lives have actually published a book. Ghost written, self-written, compiled with the help of another, who cares. Fame glitters. It drives the book world on.

The Hay Literature Festival (26th May to 5th June) are experts at this. Not only can they be relied upon to provide one of the greatest literary shows on earth but they also excel at the fame game. Visit Hay where this year you’ll rub shoulders with, among a hundred others, Jo Brand, Sarah Brown, Nobel Peace Laureate and weapons inspector Mohamed El Baradei, Howard Jacobson, Paul Merton, Philip Pullman, Vanessa Redgrave, Sue Perkins, Sandi Toksvig, and legendary film-maker John Waters.

Running concurrently and in the centre of Hay itself is the annual Poetry Jamboree, a left-field alternative poetries smorgasbord of sonic improvisation, projective verse and alternative approaches. This year’s programme includes Alan Fisher, Sean Bonney, Kelvin Corcoran, Carol Watts, Tiffany Atkinson, Frances Presley, Gavin Selerie, Paul Green, Angela Gardner, Rhys Trimble, Glenn Storhaug, David Annwn, Robert Sheppard, Zoe Skoulding.

John Williams, Richard James and Richard Thomas’s lit and music Laugharne Festival runs over the long weekend of 15th to 17th April. Here post punk, alt folk and Welsh acoustic mix with presentations of cult fiction, new verse and the buzz of music culture as book. Check the web for details.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #188

Books As A Sideline

2011-03-05T10:04:00.002Z

Once was that at this time of the year Wales’s leading publishers would face each other down with their plans for the future. There would be a trembling in the trade. The plans would always be kept secret. No one knew, sometimes even the publishers themselves, just what would appear and when. Wales was a land of printers who, as a sideline, did a bit of publishing when the machines were quiet.

No more. Modern marketing and the need to be seen or die has laid waste to all that. Yet our two Welsh leaders in the field of English literary publishing – Parthian and Seren – have been remarkably slow to get onto the digital bandwagon. Last year there were a couple of e-book editions of the Library of Wales, nothing for the Kindle and certainly no vooks (digital texts which contain additional movie and sound content rather like the CD ROMs of old).

This year, however, all is set to change. Both publishers have announced digital programmes and it could be that the Kindle and the iPad will be the must-haves for the literate Welsh for the decade ahead.

Parthian’s spring list is headed by the irrepressible Niall Griffiths. This time he’s a Ten Pound Pom with his revisit to Australia, a place that took him as an immigrant thirty-five years ago. Cynan Jones who gave us The Long Dry a while back and has had fans waiting with bates in their breath for the follow up publishes Everything I found on the Beach, a drug-fuelled thriller set in west Wales. The Library of Wales has hooked Philip Pullman to introduce the previously unheard of Stead Jones’ Make Room for the Jester, a north Wales-set coming of age. Expect to see Pullman debate the work with Dai Smith at this year’s Hay Festival. Parthian bestsellers Stevie Davies and Glen Peters get mass market relaunches.

At Seren there’s more. Nia Williams’s The Colour of Grass is a cracking new novel about families falling apart. Tony Curtis appears with his take on the far west, Real South Pembrokeshire - visitors, artists, gold courses and ancient stones all get a touch of Curtis wit. Patrick McGuiness, poet and academic delivers The Last 100 Days, a tale of Ceaucescu’s fall and Romania’s survival.

Befitting a publishers that began as the imprint of the magazine Poetry Wales Seren also line up some spanking new verse - Ellie Evans’s The Ivy Hides the Fig-Ripe Duchess and Robert Seatter’s Writing King Kong join Nerys Hughes’s tilt at the new, Sound Archives.

There are the excepted art books – a Seren speciality – with works on Jonah Jones and painter Evan Walters. The high spot might well be the press’s Bob Dylan at 70 celebration. Here seventy poets present seventy poems tracking the all-pervading twentieth century influence of his Bobness. The Captain’s Tower: Poems for Bob Dylan at 70. Buy soon.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #187

The Financial Lives of the Poets

2011-02-26T09:54:00.001Z

Probably the biggest barrier to reading more is having to do other things with your time. Novels pass at glacial speeds if the only occasion on which you read them is when you are lying in bed. In the sun, in Egypt, on an island in the Nile, and a week before the troubles erupted, I managed to consume five books in six days. E G Farrell on The Siege at Krishnapur, Peter Guralnick on the early life of Elvis, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, Nicholas Murray’s Real Bloomsbury, Jess Walter’s hilarious Financial Lives of the Poets. With a title like that how could I not pick it up.

Luxor, which is where I was, has its literary attractions. Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile was set here, filmed here and written after a stay at the Winter Palace on Corniche el Nile Street in the heart of the town’s heat and dust. Given the association you think you’d see tourists about, camera in one hand, paperback in the other. Copies stacked high in the local Agatha Christie Museum. The author’s name cartouched in hieroglyphics and sold as a papyrus souvenir. But no, the world has moved on.

Down at the Luxor Temple, however, I did find the decadent French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s signature. Rimbaud, genius bard of the deranged senses, had written all he needed to by the age of twenty-one. His Seasons in Hell and Illuminations, works which would eventually spur a whole generation, were abandoned. Libertine Rimbaud, hashish smoker, absinthe drinker, forwent authorship as useless and set off for Africa never to write again.

His graffitied signature is there, atop one of the pillars in the Temple of Thebes. Why do we do this? Leave our names on the rocks of history, scratch who we are onto the brick, carve our initials into trees, write our names on the covers of our books? Once we know how to write it is as if the desire to scribble becomes unstoppable. The Egyptians were masters. Their hieroglyphics cover almost every extant ancient world surface. They are studied by tourists nowadays themselves covered in tattoos. Once you let the world loose on the land there’s no turning back.

Back at the hotel I return to the Financial Lives. Walter’s protagonist is a failed journalist with a young family and a wayward wife who turns to the offering of financial advice to earn a buck. His angle is to package his advice with poetry. Haiku on how to close a business deal. Sonnets on market investment. Free verse talking up hedge funds.

Naturally this approach fails to work. His business falls over just ahead of the world financial meltdown. Like Rimbaud he gives up, cuts and runs. Is the world ready for poetry that works? According to both these guys not yet.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #186

How To Vote On March 3rd

2011-02-21T20:01:00.001Z

□ I agree that there should be a Welsh Assembly.

□ I have thought about this and can guarantee my view.

□ Do you think the Assembly should be larger with whistles?

□ Do you want the Assembly to have the power now to pass laws on all the subjects which are devolved to Wales?

□ Do you agree Assembly is lively apricots tick box twice.

□ Do you agree that the Assembly should acquire the powers laid out in the Government of Wales Act 2006 (Part 4)?

□ Do you agree this act by tattoo reality wall poster mini series clarity? Leaflet available.

□ Should the Assembly have powers similar to the Scottish Parliament? Headquarters decorated like a celtic reservation craft shop. Hand-turned desks knitted flags bobble and icon 8% support for ingerland. Edible daffs.

□ Which Assembly o there are oooo oh. real virtual voted appointed administrative bracket ((((((h’m)))))) and (((((stilts))))) – also fire - if you think this question unfair leave box blank.

□ Should the Assembly relocate for ease of access eg Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant Llandybie Llanystymdwy Maes Parcio Asda Merthyr.

□ Do you think completely dwyiethog neu sod gog dim my right rural comisiynydd bilingual commodity victim?

□ The Scottish Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly have the power to make laws for Scotland and Northern Ireland on devolved matters. The National Assembly for Wales can also make some laws with the consent of the Westminster Parliament. Do you support the proposal that the Assembly should be fully responsible for Welsh laws on devolved matters?

an earlier version of this posting appeared in a recent issue of Planet

Projective Verse Still Flies

2011-02-19T09:14:00.001Z

You can get the Sunday Times in full colour on your iPad and now read fiction on your android while standing in a bus queue. So why would you want to continue with print? But history is slow to change. The past in which new writers tried things out in the small mags and pushed the culture forward in back rooms continues. The small mag, that hands-on, anarchic, partisan and delightful invention of early modernism which you might have expected to vanish at the first sign of a free digital future is still very much with us.

If the system won’t make you famous then change the system. Rhys Trimble’s ctrl+alt+del does just that. This is a distinctly avant-garde half-way house between a traditional small mag and online equivalent. The magazine arrives by pdf and you print it out yourself. Folding instructions come via YouTube. How you read it is up to you. Issue Four has a couple of mainstream left field contributions from a relaxed Chris Torrance and a philosophical Johan De Wit. Torrance reruns his creative writing class experiences aided by “furtive slugs from a vacuum flask”. Is this a fresh Torrance poem or a cut up of his classes’ reactions. That’s the joy of the avant-garde, one is never sure.

Elsewhere the cutting edge runs to wilder places. Damian Sawyer’s Blast! Crossword with its arbitrary clues, Alys Conran’s new definitions of Wales – “wind cornering on two wheels”, and the editor’s Open String Field Theory As Projective Verse – concrete ambiguity and Miltonian particles. If you find that hard to understand see how you get on with the original. Available for free at www.cad.theabsurd.co.uk.

Down in Cardiff’s Richmond Road Nick Fisk has published the ninth issue of his magazine Square. Neat, in colour, and rich with illustration Square tracks the irregular, the underdog and the new. Martin Daws avoids the cracks, Michael Pedersen takes deep breathes while Fisk himself makes an amusing found poem from descriptions of the first ten emerging Chilean miners. And there are reviews too. Disarmingly honest, acutely unstudied and bearing elements of truth if you read between the lines.

Mike Jenkins’s Red Poets is bold, A4 and as left leaning as it ever was, even when aided by a Books Council grant. The radical hard core – Alun Rees, Tim Richards, Alan Perry, David Greenslade, and Herbert Williams are joined by Ivy Alvarez, Emily Hinshelwood, Alexis Lykiard and others. How red is it all? There are letters to Che Guevara, calls for Afghanistan withdrawal, complaints about bankers, politicians, warmongers and capitalism. There are memories of how it once was in industrial Wales, laced with regret and pain and glory. The whole thing is uneven but proud, unsettling but engaging, and certainly worth seeking out. £4 a copy. www.redpoets.org

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #185

Hot Poets

2011-02-16T15:32:00.002Z

In Pontneddfechan, head of the Neath Valley, out in the fields beyond where the frosts grip in any usual winter stands Glynmercher Isaf. Poet’s cottage. Built on a ley line that runs from the standing stones on the top of the Brecon Beacons, through the grave marker on the Roman Road of Sarn Helen to the Christian sites of the valley itself. A place of strange power. Here lives Chris Torrance, bard, Welsh resident since the 1970s, and an inspiration to hundreds. Yet in this age of rampant everything and massive permanent availability he’s still without the Torrance Collected Poems he so richly deserves.

Chris Torrance, Carshalton Beatnik and Bristol hippie, has been working the mystic for as long as I can remember. His open and engaging poetry has appeared in pamphlets and small collections sporadically through the decades. He’s a champion of the open field, a way of writing derived from North Carolina’s Black Mountain poets such as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley. Here the finished poem is not the end. Rather each line is poem itself. The sound of speech is vital. Engage in immediate perception and then move on.

In a world constrained by form and addled by convention Torrance’s poetry is a liberation.

For years he inspired others with his series of Adventures in Creative Writing classes taught evenings at Cardiff University. Pupils would come back year on year for the sheer enjoyment of using the Torrance method, of finding themselves able to write without fear of rejection or failure.

A decade ago the classes failed, a victim of steadily increasing regulation and budgetary constraint. When we have something great going for ourselves in Wales we usually manage to mess it up. Could we find a way of accommodating Torrance’s brilliant but eccentric approach? No. He retired and retreated to his National Park cottage and the open skies.

His lifework is The Magic Door, a sequence, written sporadically over a period of some 35 years. Citrinas. The Diary of Palug’s Cat. The Book of Brychan. Slim Book / Wet Pulp. The Book of Heat. Path. Loosely autobiographical. Rich with Arthurian legend, Welsh mysticism, Egyptian mythology, stretches of geology, weather watching, personal loves and losses. There’s a touch of Ginsberg, Pound, and of Gary Snyder in the Torrance approach. But mostly it’s him.

And despite celebrations put on by William Ayot at On the Border in Chepstow and a rich cult fan-base you still can’t buy him in Waterstones. You need to watch the small presses and pounce when something comes out. There’s another opportunity soon. Working with guitarist Chris Vine and in his PoetHeat poet and rock band persona Torrance releases a new CD titled RORI. The launch is at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 23rd February, 8.00 pm.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #184

No Zips They Scratch

2011-02-09T15:13:00.001Z

I’m in Crewe. I’ve just been collected from the rail station by a uniformed chauffer piloting an elite Bentley Mulsanne. I sit in the back in isolated splendour and am driven the ten minute glide to the factory at Pyms Lane. A car works gleaming like a freshly glossed hotel. New limousines stand in the yard, cocooned in white plastic shrouds. Clean, clear post-Industrial assembly. None of the workers wear anything held together with a zip or a button. Bentley keep clear of things that scratch.

I’m here to write a feature for Blown magazine, Wales’s new and glossy magazine of image, text and cultural intelligence. “Swearing, Murder, Gypsies, Pies, Bingo, Torture, Drinking, Lies” are bannered on Blown’s cover. Inside there’s as much avant-garde fashion as there is Llwyd Owen and Paul Granjon.

The Bentley Piece is a joint amalgamation of my work with that of photographer Paul Avis. I’m listening to the guide telling me about how Bentley’s bling quotient is low. Mos Def doesn’t have one. The rappers go for Rolls. Bentleys are made to order, every single one. You tell them just where amid the tooled leather and polished walnut you’d like to fix your iPod and they do it. Paintwork to match the colour of your shirt? Done.

I cover the detail, find out how much of Germany there is in this quintessentially British car (the company today is owned by Volkswagen), check the lamps, stare at the machined radiator grills. Their planes and lattices. Their Cricklewood forms. Paul shoots on a digital half-plate, lamp lit, slow and sure.

The result, a car review like few others, fills the pages of Blown issue two. This is a print magazine that stakes new cultural ground, crosses genres, really does make new. The thrust is to forget that visual artists rarely mix with writers, dancers with film-makers and that fashion photographers live beyond art on a platform of their own. It’s a high risk strategy. Do you really want to wade through twelve full plate colour fashion shots by stylist Danielle Rees and photographer Jeff Orgina just to get Richard Huw Morgan and Sam Hasler’s interview with Bill Drummond? Fans of the Superfurrys reading Emma Price’s conversation with Gruff Rhys about his new film Separado! will they also read on into Sian Melangell Dafydd’s hunt for the answer to water and aging in Bangor and in Bala?

Here in 2011 where iPhones have no chance of replicating album sleeve gloss and TV programming rarely embraces such cultural diversity the answer is yes. Absolutely. Blown: you can’t really pin it down. You need to just sit there and look at it. Richard Gwyn, Niall Griffiths and Gerald Tyler mix with DJ Fonteyn, Charlotte Hatherley and Gordon Dalton. Fancy a great ride? Buy this.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #183

Liverpool - Capital of Wales

2011-02-05T09:38:00.002Z

In the north of Wales the Celtic fog drifts eastwards across the border. Not that anyone here uses that word. Celtic is the sea where they fruitlessly explore for oil. Celtic is the heart of Catholic football in Glasgow. The Celtic Celts. Nothing to do with the Welsh.

Giving a reading in Crosby, just outside Liverpool, sometime in the early 1990s I’d found myself in a time warp. In an upstairs pub room full of seeping conversation and the beepboop of guitars from somewhere below I unfurled my folder to read to an audience of new-agers, street walkers, locals, men in duffels and reefer jackets. Women with piled yellow hair and giant hoop earrings, wearing black tights below white short dresses, smoking, drinking dark beers, and with docs and working boots doubling as town shoes below the cast iron tables. I began. It’s great, I said, looking out through the window the rain-specked dark and buses passing and the street lights following the line of the Mersey estuary, to be here at last, Liverpool, capital of North Wales. Celtic silence. I could have said capital of Montenegro for all the connection I made. Nothing. Not a flicker.

Later, in those damp streets, I walked through some place that wasn’t England either. Walked back to my digs at a converted seminary where nuns from Ireland helped the Catholic Church by putting up strangers for money. You’re from Wales, the sister told me when I’d checked in. In case I didn’t know. She’d showed me to my cell with its giant crucifix on the wall above the bed. Wales as it might have been if it hadn’t been for Henry and the bedrock of the Celtic Church. That word again.

Would you like a cup of tea and a slice of cake? I nod. The sister goes away and returns ten minutes later, tray in hand. She sits, to wait. She’s clearly here until I finish. I’ll be turning the lights out at eleven, she says. You’ll need to be very quiet. The sisters all rise early to pray. I have a single sheet and the damp cold seeps in through my cell’s single window.

Liverpool has much more than a passing Welsh connection. It’s a city giant, by our standards, sitting there right on the northern border. It turns on its radio in the morning and blasts Liverpool at the whole of the north Wales coastal belt. Today it is the place you visit for big stores, for the M&S that Flint does not possess, for Gap and Next and Waterstones. For the buzz and the culture and then the clubs and bars and the dope and the drinking. The Welsh connection has been there as long as Liverpool has. Lliferpwll. Lerpwl. Still really ours.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #182

Refurbishing the Avant Garde

2011-01-31T13:37:00.002Z

One of the good things to come out of 2010 has been the refurbishing of the Welsh avant garde. Avant garde! We don’t do that in this country I hear some of you say. And for decade after decade in Wales that’s largely been true. Anyone operating even slightly outside the straight line of the artistic straight and narrow has been derided. Eisteddfods celebrating maps made from mud have been declared a total waste of public money. Painters who don’t actually paint have been laughed at. Musicians making music without instruments have been silenced. Conceptual artists who sit in fields thinking have had their grants cut to the bone.

When Gwyneth Lewis’s now massively famous poem was first installed on the front of the brand new Wales Millennium Centre it took a bit of persuading some people that this wasn’t a giant size bilingual cut up in the style of William Burroughs. Yes, like many an avant garde piece of verse you could read the thing in multiple directions. Yet underneath there was a traditional, potent and appealing message. In These Stones Horizons Sing. The past pointing at the future. What we are moving towards what we will be. Beautifully done.

Most of the performance poets, with an honourable exception or two, have spent the past ten years roaring their articulate in-your-face verses much in the style of the pioneers who did the same thing before them. Energising, entertaining, and enjoyable - but rarely really new. Even the liberating possibilities of sampling have somehow found themselves side-tracked into hip hop. Rhys Trimble aside most Welsh-based stand-ups take the old fashioned route. I’m not knocking them, far from it, but offering poetry as a form of bar room entertainment is not at all new. Maybe new is not what we now need to be. Perhaps good would be sufficient enough.

But in Wales, at the end of the new millennium’s first decade, things are waking. It’s taken us forty years but now that we’ve opened our ears we are reborn.

In the past months I’ve spoken with at least four teams of researchers from literary magazines, university departments and media companies – all bent on uncovering Wales’s contribution to twentieth century literary modernism. Angel Exhaust has a special issue devoted to The Welsh Underground, edited by John Goodby and Andrew Duncan. “Each Aeon free after the first one”, it proudly announces. Zoe Skoulding’s Poetry Wales, filled with risk takers and contemporary boundary pushers, is now the magazine I’d always wished it could be.

Pretty soon the critical studies will appear and the barren and straight-jacketed Welsh past I lived through will appear instead to have been a liberal and prolific period, populated by dozens of Welsh experimenters playing to insatiable audiences. History is malleable. It’s always been so.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail #181

The Kings of Egypt

2011-01-30T11:13:00.011Z

You don’t really expect to find Swiss food in the heart of Upper Egypt but that’s how it is on Monday night at the Hotel Maritim Jolie Ville, Luxor. Rosti, Basler Mehlsuppe, Aargauer Rueblitorte, G'Hackets and Hoernli, emmental cheese quiche and Älplermagronen. Swiss flags on sticks. Outside is the Nile, inside it’s Zurich. Not that we should really get any of this out of proportion. Apart from the hotel’s main buffet restaurant, one night of the week, the Jolie Maritim is squarely Egyptian. Doorways are arched, staff wear jallabia, there are palm trees and camels. Everyone smiles.

I’m on King’s Island, slipped into the Nile a ten minute car drive south of Luxor. This is an oasis of green and calm set in a desert landscape where it hasn’t rained for a dozen years. Luxor and its temples, Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Queens, the tomb of Tutankhamen, and the whole spectacular litter of the pharaohs are all minutes away. Luxor itself is a city made spoil tip by archaeological excavation. It has an economy that relies 85% on tourism. Egyptology drives. Around here touts proliferate, importuning visitors on every possible occasion. Carry your bag. Sell you postcards, water, fedora, straw boater, sunglasses, Pringles. Direct you to a restaurant. Find you a horse, a manservant, a guide. Change your money. Borrow your pen. Look at your camera. Smoke your cigarettes. Button your shirt. Hold your hand.

In Egypt it’s hard to know where to turn, or indeed how to turn. Smile at anyone and they’ll immediately begin the process that ends in you handing over cash. Persistent, irritating, pointless. But not at the Jolie Ville. Once you’ve crossed the newly installed road bridge, gone through security where men with mirrors on sticks check the undersides of your vehicle and the licence of the driver, you are free. Back to a world where a smile means a smile. You can cease muttering the mantra la shukran, thank you, no, go away, stop, don’t, please. Here service is delivered free. It’s part of the deal.

King’s Island was until a few years ago known as Crocodile Island – named after the reptiles that once swam the river here. Or maybe it was after the aged beast that lurked in the warm ponds of the Hotel’s zoo. Gone. The zoo’s croc sent on Egyptian government order to be set free in the waters of Lake Nasser. The island name changed because Kings sell better than reptiles. The island is a business after all.

General manager Urs Umbricht
and shoeshine man
Gamal Seddek Mansy Benjamen

Urs Umbricht, genial, fifty, is the King of Kings. He’s the Jolie Ville’s General Manager, the GM, forever present among his guests and his extensive staff. My predecessor, he told me, used to manage things by email, stayed in his office. I like to meet people and talk to them. The world spins better that way.

Urs has been in the hotel trade as long as he can remember. He began in the kitchens at his grandfather’s establishment, the Hotel Hasenstrick, in Zurich. He’s managed establishments across the world beginning with his first, in Kenya, at the age of twenty-seven. He’s a fixer. He moves in to manage change or to sort failure and then moves on. He was in Aswan before Luxor, and in Zanzibar before that. He’s been at the Jolie Ville for a year. Where next? Maybe my time of moving is over, he says. I’m getting older. Maybe I’ll stay.

The Jolie Vile used to be part of the European Mövenpick chain but now it’s owned by an Egyptian, Hassain Khaled Salem. Salem employs Urs on contract. And if that contract says “make it work” then Urs has fulfilled.

The hotel, which occupies the entirety of King’s island, has nothing over two stories with most of its structure at ground level. It has a central reception and series of restaurants around which, in landscaped gardens, are set residential bungalows. There’s a gym, tennis courts, football field, giant chess, a crocket lawn, ping pong, boules, hammocks, pools, snack bars, and more sun loungers than even the Germans can manage to reserve. Mid-afternoon a man with a trolley comes and sells you tea, coffee and cake. There’s no background music. All the sun does is shine.

Does it ever change, this blue sky weather? Outside, in early January, it’s a steady 26 degrees.Occasionally you’ll get cloud, says Urs. You are here in our mid-winter. You might be in t-shirt and shorts but the Egyptians will be wearing jackets and jumpers. We had a dust storm yesterday, highly unusual, caused chaos. The storm lasted half an hour and on the roads nothing moved for a whole day. Visitors from the Red Sea resorts, brought here by tourist coach, had to stay overnight. Bad for them, good for me. I sold an extra 200 rooms. A few years ago when I was in Aswan it rained for ten minutes. Egyptian houses don’t have roofs. Electrics are exposed to the air. There aren’t any street drains. The town shut down for forty-eight hours while they sorted things out.

The change Urs has been employed to manage at the Jolie Ville is the construction of an extension to the facilities. This is by way of a series of two-story bungalows to the island’s south, a new infinity Nile-side pool, an enlarged restaurant, a new reception and shops, and a set of town houses for newly-weds to the north. How do you stay open doing this in the heat and dust of an Egyptian forty degree summer without upsetting someone? Truth is you don’t. Some of the comments on Trip Advisor have been bitter. “If you want a break in a construction site then this is it.” “An oasis destroyed. We won’t be coming again.” “How could they do this to us?” But most have been reasonable. “The management have screened building work off. The Jolie Ville is an oasis of peace. The new build hasn’t made any difference to us at all.”

By the time I get there work is mostly done. There are some diggers in the distance slashing into the dry Egyptian sand where the town houses are going but you need to peer through screens to see them. Elsewhere all is calm. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere as comprehensively silent and unhurried. In the week I’ve been here I’ve read five books. Peter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis, an anti-intellectual rock and roll king if ever there was one, E G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, Paul Torday’s The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers, Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets, which turns out not to be what its title implies, and Tim Parks excellent study of urology, a subject dear to my heart, and meditation. It’s called Teach Us To Sit Still. A thing you do here, where stillness is omnipresent and sitting a joy.

But this isn’t really a place of the arts. It has little literary connection. Having said that Agatha Christie did come to Luxor before writing her famous Death on the Nile and the French decadent poet Arthur Rimbaud was here in the 1880s. His name is graffitied high up on one of the pillars at Luxor Temple. Urs Umbricht’s concession to culture is a regular classical concert played through loudspeakers at 6.30 pm. You sit on green baize covered steps. Beethoven is in your ears. The sun spectacularly descends. Herons fly in formation downriver. The feluccas drift. Vast five-storey white Nile cruise ships pass without making a sound. Fishermen cast their hand-made nets. You sip your sweet Egyptian tea. Bliss.

Change has been causing consternation among the Jolie Ville’s regulars for a year now. How much longer? Urs reckons four months but you never know, “Who can be sure. This is Egypt”. Returning guests are significant in the hotel’s business plan. Twenty per cent have been here before, some dozens of times. There’s one Swiss couple who have returned ninety-seven times. “I say to them,” says Urs, “ there are other places in the world, but they don’t listen.” The hotel sells to older guests and families with young children. There’s little here for young people. Target market is Germany, UK, Benelux, Switzerland, Scandinavia, France, a few Egyptians. “I don’t want cheap drinking groups,” insists Urs. No fights round the pool, no raucous behaviour. No letting off of fire extinguishers in the corridors. There are no corridors after all.

In the Ascot Bar where, being a Muslim country, non-alcoholic cocktails feature strongly on the wine list, I’m downing a paper parasol festooned Nile Sundowner and feeling a bit like Del Boy. The Dusseldorf-based Downtown Jazz band are giving it a soft blow. It’s Tight Like That, St Louis Blues. Eighty-year old Ken Blakemore, former trombonist with Ken Colyer and more recently with the Crouch End All Stars sits in. The abundant Egyptian bar managers tap their feet. This is a feature of the Jolie Ville. The abundant staff rather than the foot tapping. Human labour is cheap so enterprises make good use. Your empty glass is cleared as soon as you put it down. You want peanuts? They arrive at lightning speed.

The recorded classical concerts and this bit of sloppy Dixieland are the most music I encounter all week. There was a belly dancer in the restaurant on New Year’s Eve and a spectacular demonstration of Dervish dancing. But mostly the Jolie Ville goes in for birdsong. I stuff my earphones back in and listen to John Lee Hooker. Crawling King Snake. The Mississippi boogie man. The antithesis of Upper Egypt.

On site the Jolie Ville offers free Egyptian Arabic classes. We sit in the shade sipping fresh orange juice as Gamal explains how basic greetings work. I learn a few which I later try out on Ali in the corner shop back home in Cardiff. He is from Yemen. “This Egyptian Arabic is different from my Arabic, you know”, he complains. Waed, the Jolie Ville’s Tunisian receptionist says the same thing. But Egypt is the country that makes all the films and TV programmes and these are broadcast right across the Arab world. So everyone understands.

Urs, amazingly, doesn’t speak Egyptian. Why should I, he asks. The language of the Jolie Vile is English. English it may be but there are still some Egyptian guests. Does he have a position on the advance of radical Islam? Has there ever been trouble here? No. In the past the occasional devout female swimmer will have demanded to go in the pool wearing her street clothes. The lot. But we don’t allow that. Now they have these head-to-foot Islamic bathing costumes so it’s okay. Does this happen often? No.

The Jolie Ville has 647 rooms and 780 staff. That might sound high density but it is spread over 660,000 square meters of island. Everyone smiles at you. They all speak. The secret of the operation’s success, apparently, are the “7 Jolie Keys For Happy Clients”, a hospitality Bible carried in the top pocket by all those working here.

Hospitality Key no. 3. Entering/leaving a guest’s room. Wait at least 5 seconds before knocking a second time. Wait again a moment before opening the door.

Hospitality Key no 1. Attending to the guest. Show initiative. Ensure eye contact. Listen carefully. Show interest. Mention guest’s name.

I try this out. Sabah el Kheer (Good morning), I say to a gardener. He makes eyes contact as instructed, gives me toothy grin, and replies in English. “Ah, you speak Egyptian.” I shake my head. La, I reply.

Come again? As this is the most reliably hot winter destination reachable from the UK at reasonable distance then yes. It’s a five hour flight into the bedlam of Luxor airport. Then half an hour by coach to the Jolie Ville’s five star peace. You can get a free boat or bus into town to spend an enjoyable day being hassled beyond as you negotiate the bazars, temples, museums, mummies, tours of the tombs, visits to the amazing Colossus of Memnon and the vast Temple of Queen Hatshepsut. You can fly over the lot by hot air balloon for eighty quid or visit Cairo for the day by plane for three times that.

But I’m here for lying down. According to Guralnick Elvis did a lot of this. Hanging out by the pool. I’ve just ordered a club sandwich and another glass of Egyptian Stella. Alcohol content 4.5%. I can imagine the King doing that.

The Maritim Jolie Ville Kings Island Hotel Luxor is at Awameya Road - Kings Island, Luxor – Egypt, +20 (95) 2274855, resort@lux-maritim-jolieville.com

In late January 2011 the Egyptian revolution reached Luxor and there are reports of trouble near the town’s big hotels. The ruling party’s HQ has been set alight, says a posting in the blogosphere. There are tanks on the streets. UK Foreign Office advice is to avoid travel to Egypt until things settle down.

Peter Finch

How Late It Is, How Late It Is

2011-01-22T08:52:00.001Z

Late starters – what are they? Later flowerers we know of. John Lee hooker coming back at the end of a long and slowly back-sliding career to barnstorm his way to the pop top again. Loretta Lynn, the coalminer’s daughter, making records with Jack White of the White Stripes at the age of 76. Emyr Humphreys, novelist of the Welsh north and the Welsh conscience, on the long list for the 2009 Wales Book of the Year at the age of 92. Ruth Bidgood, at 89, still publishing prize-winning collections of poetry with Seren. Dannie Abse at 88 is writing more now than he did in the energy and heat of youth. His Two For Joy from Random House follows hard on the heels of a fat New Selected from Hutchinson.

Those who have the life experience suddenly see the reaper up front and, if their health is holding, begin to exhibit a paranoia about leaving a decent mark. John Updike lived to the age of 76. His Rabbit books mapped out the route from life to death. “I can appreciate the advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity”, he wrote in Aarp magazine, “You are not yet typecast. You can take a cold view of the entire literary scene.” Young writers have their as yet untapped youth still to work with. Their first and so vital twenty years. The older writer will have mined those experiences and be, as Updike puts it, “sifting” from the age of 40 on.

You want fresh then go for the young. You’d prefer life to be measured? Stick to age. But the late starter, product of increasing life spans and a culture that encourages creative writing, where do they fit in? Among the modules and courses in extra mural departments and cold school room night classes there are some who seem to have been attending for years. They turn up. They write. They come back again. Nothing ever seems to go anywhere.

According to Joy Howard, owner and operator of Grey Hen Press, everything is like this. Late talent is out there and in quantity. Her mission in life is to offer space to the writer over sixty and especially those who are less well known, who might have waited decades to reach the cutting edge.

Grey Hen’s anthology Cracking On, “poems on ageing by older women”, hardly sounds as if it will have the world by the throat. It is, however, remarkably engaging. Here is poetry of parental death, lost youth, dead lovers, failing limbs, and “the long blind alley of night”, sure. But there are also verses of hope and wonder. June Hall’s leap over the road’s last stile. Alice Beer’s young men in the kitchen. Ann Drysdale’s mastery of generational slip. Fight back. Write it all down. Not a bad idea.

An earlier version of the posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #180

Peter Finch Wins Ted Slade Award for Service To Poetry 2011

2011-01-17T09:46:00.003Z

The Ted Slade Award is given annually to a person who is in the opinion of the selection panel has given unstintingly of their time and efforts over many years to promote poetry to a wider audience. Nominations for the award are made by members of Poetry Kit, and the selection is made from suitable short listed nominations, by an appointed selection panel.

This years award goes to Peter Finch, poet, critic and Chief Executive of Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency. (www.peterfinch.co.uk)

Jim Bennett, who is a poet and Chair of Selectors, said, “Peter Finch has had a long and distinguished career, not only as a poet, but also as editor, critic and in recent years as Chief Executive of Academi, promoting literature. Peter has been an inspiration for many years and this award is given to acknowledge the tremendous contribution he has made to poetry.

THE TED SLADE AWARD FOR SERVICE TO POETRY

Ted Slade was the founding editor of The Poetry Kit, in every respect it was his vision and determination that saw the site grow to become one of the most visited poetry related internet sites in the world. This was done with the ethos of providing a service for readers and always putting their needs first when developing the site. For this reason Poetry Kit does not accept advertising or sponsorship and is run and funded by poets for poets. For all his work Ted received no official thanks and no payment, he did it because it was necessary and if he had not done it others with less integrity might have.

Ted died suddenly in 2004, and we always felt that we wanted to find a way to honour his memory and so we introduced an award in his name which is given to a person who has given their time and energies over an extended period to ensuring the continuance and development of poetry,. This will include people who have kept poetry as a presence in an area or community. Those who have pursued a poetic vision through a magazine or regular reading events. Those who have developed other media to explore its poetic use or have published poets who could not have otherwise found an outlet for their work.

In 2005 we gave the first TED SLADE AWARD and since then the following people have received it:

2005

Sally Evans

(Poetry Scotland)

2006

Gerald England

(New Hope International)

2007

Michael Horovitz

(Poetry Olympics)

2008

Connie Pickard

(Morden Tower)

2009

Geoff Stevens

(Purple Patch)

2010

Andy Croft

(Smokestack Books)

All recipients of the Ted Slade Award are acknowledged for their endeavour and dedication in the promotion of poetry. Without such people many of today's well known poets would not have had the opportunity to find a platform, develop their skills or find an audience. Recipients have their name entered onto the award and this will soon be on permanent display in a library in Liverpool.

PETER FINCH

Peter Finch is a poet, critic, author and literary entrepreneur living in Cardiff, Wales. He is Chief Executive of Academi, the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society of Writers. As a writer he works in both traditional and experimental forms. He is best known for his declamatory poetry readings, his creative work based on his native city of Cardiff, his series of books on Wales, and his knowledge of the UK poetry publishing scene.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Architects of Wales (RSAW), a Fellow of the English Association (FEA) and a Fellow of Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy.

In the sixties and seventies he edited the ground-breaking literary magazine, second aeon, exhibited visual poetry internationally and toured with sound poet Bob Cobbing. In the eighties and nineties he concerned himself with performance poetry, was a founder member of Cardiff's Cabaret 246 and of the trio Horse's Mouth. This was work with props, owing as much to theatre as it did to literature. In the new Millennium he was worked on psychogeographies and alternative guides to his native city of Cardiff. The city has become his obsession.

Today he is much in demand as a reader as well as a lecturer at festivals and venues up and down the country. You can get into Finch's performances. There's little deliberate obscurity. His talks on Cardiff and how it is with urban living are always entertaining. In addition to the readings Finch also delivers a number of presentations on the poetry publishing scene (how to get yourself published - a demystification of the arcane world of books, magazines and the internet), on the history of sound poetry (which features histrionic performances of dada texts and the playing of numerous historical recordings), on the writing of short fiction and on the history of the small press. He works with schools and has led young people's writing squads in co-operation with local authorities.

From the early seventies until the late nineties he was treasurer of ALP, the Association of Little Presses. Between 1975 and 1998 he ran the Arts Council of Wales's specialist Oriel Bookshop in Cardiff. In 1998 he took up his current post as Chief Executive of Yr Academi Gymreig/ The Welsh Academy - the Welsh National Literature Promotion Agency and Society for Writers.

Peter Finch has published more than 25 books of poetry. His latest is Zen Cymru, published by Seren Books (April, 2010). His other titles include Food, Useful & Poems For Ghosts (Seren) and Antibodies (Stride). His The Welsh Poems appeared from Shearsman in 2006. His Selected Later Poems was published by Seren in November 2007.

His prose works include a number of critical guides including How To Publish Your Poetry and How To Publish Yourself (Allison & Busby) as well his famous alternative handbooks, guides and literary rambles, Real Cardiff , Real Cardiff Two and Real Cardiff Three (Seren). With Grahame Davies he edited the anthology The Big Book of Cardiff (Seren). He is currently editing titles for Seren's Real Wales series and has published a book that takes in the whole country - Real Wales.

Nerys Williams's essay on Finch's work appears as Recycling the Avant-Garde in a Welsh Wordscape in Slanderous Tongues - Essays On Welsh Poetry in English 1970-2005, edited by Daniel G Williams and published by Serten, 2010.

Until recently Peter Finch compiled the poetry section of Macmillan's annual Writer's Handbook. He continues to write the self-publishing section for A&C Black's Writers' & Artists' Yearbook. He is a book reviewer and writes articles on Cardiff, Wales and the business of poetry. His poetry and criticism is widely published in magazines and anthologies.

THE POETRY KIT - http://www.poetrykit.org/ The Poetry Kit is one of the worlds most visited sites dedicated to poetry. Provides links to resources for poets across the world.

Contact for further information;

Jim Bennett – Editor of The Poetry Kit (www.poetrykit.org) email info@poetrykit.org

Buy It Now

2011-01-15T09:42:00.001Z

Buying books is not what it once was. Bookshops with their hands-on shuffle among the shelves are in retreat. The supermarkets take the cream of the pop tops and sell them like fury. Just released shouts the roadside hoarding. And at £9.99 each this is a price no traditional bookshop can ever get near. Martina Cole, Jamie Oliver, Michael McIntyre, Peter James, Jilly Cooper. You know the score.

On the internet, the purchase interface of choice for most these days, you need to know precisely what you want. Browsing is a dying art. Once there, with your copy of Citizenship Today, a key stage four textbook at several pounds more than you imagined up on screen, you press the one-click purchase button and it’s done. A copy will be with you in two to four days. Left outside under the bush. Or with the bloke next door who by the time you discover this has gone on holiday. Then you spot it. 21 copies also offered new at £0.71 or chose from 7 used at 68p. How do BendyBeckhambooks and Snailryder do it? The profit has to be in the carriage charge.

This is a bookselling revolution. The world is its own Oxfam. As the value of books shrinks their availability spins. How could a second hand store with ordered shelves, paper bags at check out, heated and lit, well lit anyway, ever compete?

Not that the second hand trade, when we had one, was ever really like this.

Fry’s, down in the centre of Cardiff’s Bridge Street, corner of Barrack Lane, and long demolished, was more a specialist in the retail of Harrison Marks’ airbrushed b&w photographic nudes than it was actual books. In those sensitive times, however, and this was before Lady Chatterley, nudes officially did not exist. They were kept out the back. Fry’s centrepiece was a vast table sprawled with previously owned books of every kind. They slithered and they slid.

Among them I discovered Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Alexander Cordell and Norman Mailer. Read as they were found, in battered copies, some with pages missing, or covered in ink markings and wine stains, or smelling of tobacco yet always vigorously exciting. These copies were all I could afford.

I guess it was the reading of copies as I came upon them that pushed my literary education along. The lesser Kerouacs before the famous ones (I’d done Dr Sax and Tristessa well before I found On the Road). Norman Mailer’s The White Negro before The Naked and the Dead. Could that happen today? Probably not.

I’ve put some of my surplus online recently. 10p a time plus £2.75 shipping. I’m Bashobooks. Have I sold anything? Not yet, but there’s time.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail. #179

Hard Core is the Best Core

2011-01-08T10:28:00.002Z

What use is literature? Ralph Waldo Emerson thought that books made us free. Literature transcended the ordinary. Society bloomed. For years I agreed. This is how it was. In Wales the great writers spent a lifetime on their craft and produced masterpieces worthy of the name. Poetry sang. When we heard it we were enthralled, elevated, engaged, and excited. Sometimes we cheered. Often we were moved.

But somewhere along the line things have shifted. Writing as great art is no longer perceived as being sufficient in itself. Sufficient for the gaining of state aid, that is.

Since the Second World War we’ve been steadily pushing public money into our literary culture. For the benefit of the public at large we’ve been supporting it and its practitioners. Giving it the institutions it needs to enable it to be heard against the great clamour coming in over the border. This is Wales, after all, not England. In the schools and the universities, at WH Smiths and among the shelves at Waterstones it can be easy to forget.

But things morph.

To cope with the media age we have begun to turn writing into a branch of the entertainment industry. Success is now often determined by how many laughs the author gets or how many turn up to witness their on-stage in-person interview. The details of the author’s life have become more significant than the books.

We have also begun to develop literature as a social service. Its public good and the arguments for its continued financing can now depend on how many disaffected youth it keeps off the streets. On how often it aids social cohesion. On the quality of self-worth it delivers to its alienated practitioners. On how much the act of creative writing itself may aid good health and mental well-being. Anyone can join in, everyone can.

These are laudable aims and genuinely good reasons for devoting public resource to their achievement. But they are at an increasing distance from the production of quality, hard-core literature – in Welsh and in English - and those works’ enjoyment by the public at large.

As a nation are we to be defined by how many of our people have been to a creative writing class?

And as someone who has spent his career organising such ventures why am I now asking this question? Maybe it is because I believe we need both. The available-to-all practice of creative writing and the much rarer production of work of enduring quality. I am fearful that in these difficult financial times the former may be in danger of engulfing the latter. The process of writing as more important than the material written. But maybe that’s now how it is in the new millennium world.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in The Western Mail. #178