In Celebration of the 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens

Ready Availability

The Bachelor the Bachelor the Barnacles the Bachelor the Badger
Dedlock (Dartle)(Drummle)(Duff) Cripples (Crimple)(Crupp)
Cupcake (Caught)Creakle (Gradgrind)(Grimwig) (Gulpage)(Great)
Rokesmith (Rudge)(Rudge)(Rudge)(Rudge)(Real)(Rug)
Sloppy (Slowboy)(Slightboy)(Slammer) Situation (Speculative)(Slight)
the Warden the Warden (Wardle)(Wardle)(Waterbrook)
Wopsle (clerk)(friend)(actor) (thesb.)(fame) (luck)
Plornish (plasterer)(lime) (aggregate)(hair))(lath fix)(shrinkage)(scuttlebuck)
Petowker Price Prigg Pross (pretty) (fix)(sort)(guess)
Podsnap Pogram (shuffle)(shard) Potterson (experience)(list)
start somewhere (Adams) rattle hiss wish concentrate realign
rhestr reallocate random rip retaliate render rich realise reach
Fanny Cleaver aka Jenny Wren cripple doll driven dressmaker
Dilber distrust Dodson and Fogg duplicity dealers (foxed)(slight
Scuffing)( rusted staples)(binding loose)(rip)
(uncut)(pages mssng) (water damage) (author sig)
(brittle)(buggered)(book club ed)(dedication “my Johnny lad you are
a wonderful boy, love Uncle Ron”)(shelf cocked)(tanning visible)
(torn)(rip) (crease)(cracked)(defaced) (mild mould) (binding undone)
bought Grewgious guardian (Rosa Bud) man of many angles
no conversation (Fips) (Fish)(Finching) found (fell) (filched) (fractured)(fresh)(filled)(fixed)(frozen)(finished)
Pickwick eminence (see 7 above) mender of roads
filibuster final finisher surface like a calm pond (shouting)
storm at sea episodic (multiple) cliffhang forthright
(available)read (read to) don’t stop.

Peter Finch

taken from A Mutual Friend - Poems for Charles Dickens.
Edited by Peter Robinson.
Two Rivers Press with the English Association. £10.00

Not Much Of A Spectator Sport

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

Liverpool - Capital of Wales

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

Peter Finch Wins Ted Slade Award for Service To Poetry 2011

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

Shoes Full of Mud

You are in a field in the rain listening to a band whose name you can’t remember. You get back to your tent and find it’s been stolen. There’s no water and the queues for the toilets stretch half a mile. Your shoes are full of mud. But the music is great and when the sun shines this is the best place to be anywhere in the world. Get ready. The festival season will be on us again any day soon.

Literature festivals, of which there seem to be an endless number in green green Wales, are not quite the same as ones for music. But there can be similarities. Sell-out performances by writers who you’ve only ever seen on television. Readings by media stars who you didn’t know could write. Visits by politicians keen to let the stardust settle on their sleeves. Rain. Overpriced ice-cream. Endless opportunities for wannabees and the prospect of meeting just about everybody and anybody on the literary scene.

The Urdd Eisteddfod, the Welsh-medium young people’s bash, visits Llanerchaeron in deep Ceredigion at the start of June. There’ll be music, literary contest and, amazingly for a children’s show, a beer tent. The Guardian Hay Fest Director Peter Florence’s granddaddy of all literary shows runs more or less at the same time. This festival’s inexorable rise to world domination has now reached truly American proportions.

At Hay you can witness the world passing by your window. Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, John Updike. This year there’ll be readings and talks from Bill Bryson, Roddy Doyle, Tom Stoppard, Booker prize-winner Hilary Mantel and music from Christy Moore. Hay is a dream – an almost perfect mix of affordable lit presented in a civilised and consumer-friendly fashion. And there’s so much of it, literarily hundreds of events fill the 10-day programme.

So successful has been the festival that the brand is replicated across the world. Segovia, Alhambra, the Maldives, Nairobi, Zacatecas and Oxford all now host Peter Florence directed events.

On a far more local and encompassable scale is John Williams and Richard Thomas’s Laugharne Weekend. The show is held in the pubs, bars, hotels, millennium halls and other spaces around Dylan Thomas’s Laugharne during the first week of April each year. Events mix cult fiction with hard-edged poetry, indie bands with alt folk and alt country with Welsh rock. Musos and writers stand next to each other in the small town’s bars. For 2010 expect to see and hear Roddy Doyle, Bill Drummond, Stuart Maconie, Nicky Wire, Martin Carthy, Niall Griffiths, Trembling Bells, David Quantick, Howard Marks, Mark Olson, Jane Bussman, Rachel Trezise, Alasdair Roberts, Trezza Azzopardi, Twin Town, Richard James, Helen Griffin, Nick Kent, Clinton Heylin, and Rupert Thomson. More to come says the Laugharne web site. Watch that space.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 27th March, 2010

Just When You Think They Are Finishing They Carry On

Jaci Stephen had this right ages ago in The Evening Standard when she dryly remarked about poetry readings – “just when you think they are finishing they go on…” And go on some of them do. Tell the poets they have a fifteen minute slot and inevitably they’ll attempt to read for forty. How much poetry read out loud does the world need?

I’ve been on the road recently promoting my new book, Real Cardiff Three, which ostensibly is not poetry. This is travel writing, history, memoir, psychogeography, story. I get onto the platform and talk about the city’s history, my take on how it has come into being and why it looks like it does. I discuss Cardiff’s peculiarities – the lost watercourses, the vanished holy wells, the ways in which the place has got itself named after metals, precious stones and the shires of England. I talk about its tall buildings, its sophistication, its hidden tunnels, its all-white cityscape, its place as Wales’ heart, stuck out like a fist, here on the south east border. My audience listens. Then I read one of Real Cardiff’s poems. The books have just a few. I do the one about the Russell Goodway Memorial Roundabout or list the books people never borrow from the new Central Library. A History of Minor Roads in Wales. The Joy of Splott. Highlights in the History of Concrete. Bombproof Your Horse. Did Lewis Carroll Visit Llanrumney? Caerphilly Cheese Problems Solved. The audience wakes up and falls about. Poetry gets to places where prose never can.

At the biennial John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry the other month the level of sophistication, invention and sheer linguistic verve proved once again that good verse could still thoroughly entertain. The place was packed. I don’t think I’ve seen a poetry audience enjoy themselves so much in years. Dafydd Wyn, the west Wales winner, gave us Anglo-Welsh poetry like it used be but with added oomph. Liam Johnson made the air flicker with his verbal virtuosity. Thaer Al-Shayei came on dressed as a gorilla and had the entire place falling off their chairs. Sally Spedding managed the same trick with her tales of medical misdemeanours. There were top end performances that embraced everything from football to fighting demons. Live poetry still does it. In two and a half hours I spotted not one yawn.

And if you look about you’ll see that this reading thing is going through a revival. Mab Jones and Ivy Alvarez rock at the Promised Land. The Absurd in Mold mashes music and bi-lingual verse into an entertaining whole. Seren take the high ground with their First Thursday series. John Williams works lit and music at Chapter this month. There are rumours of new poetry and music series starting up elsewere in the city. Poetry certainly has a future.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 16th January, 2010

Will It Fit The Bookrack?

Publishing in Wales is nothing if not diverse. At the point where the demands of the market might have been considered uppermost – everything the same shape to fit the same shelves, the same size to fit the same racks and the same look so as not to frighten the horses – out come two new magazines that couldn’t differ more. In Bangor Sophie McKeand and Andy Garside, a pair of upstart poets and graphic designers, have set up the Absurd. What they like is the weird, the avant garde and the wonderfully creative. They organise cabarets, readings, put on bands, launch books, bring out albums and promote the kind of thing Ezra Pound would have loved, the ever turning new.

They also engage in a bit of publishing but being design adept and aware of what it can be like printing piles of things and then having them unsold under your bed they do everything online. Their ctrl+alt+del, is a free magazine that comes in the form of a pdf. You print it out, fold according to online instructions and find yourself holding what now looks like a traditional poetry mag. The content of the two recent issues is pretty wide-ranging. Richard Downing’s Jazz Haiku, Phil Maillard in the mist on a Sunday morning in Sully, a terrific piece of poetry history from Chris Torrance in which he recounts his early days at the core of the Carshalton mob and British beat generation. Ken Cockburn and Scott Thurston add a slice of twentieth century avant garde. Homan Yousofi encircles Jericho. Check for yourself at www.theabsurd.co.uk

By contrast and in Cowbridge, a place nothing like Bangor, Ric Bower and associates launch Blown, a magazine of cultural intelligence. The contrast could not be greater. This is a heavy 162 page full-plate and often full-colour glossy. It mixes a range of seemingly incompatible bedfellows – art, music, fashion, photography. Photographs play a huge part. Defining just what the mag does is intentionally difficult. A series of stunning photographs from Peter Finimore, Toril Brancher, and Richard Page are accompanied by tangential texts from Brennan Street, Catrin Dafydd and Diarmid Mac Giolla Chriost. John Beynon writes up the football casual. John Beynon snaps two likely lads at the gates to the ground and then screws his photos up and blanks out his subject’s eyes.

Elsewhere Michael Oliver deconstructs the language of council estates. Ed Pereira compares Scars with Basement Jaxx. Niall Griffiths goes to southern Ireland. Sarah Broughton interviews Sarah Waters. Ric Bower photographs the author and makes her look like a side lit elf. There’s a superb piece on the work of Diane Arbus accompanied by a raft of full plate reproductions. All this and more for £6.95. A new Wales. Get to Smiths now.

A version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 28th November, 2009

Not Plastered Ever

One of the great myths surrounding the late gnarled bard John Tripp is that he drank to excess. No, maybe I should rephrase that. One of the great myths is that he was usually drunk when he did readings. Hardly ever, in my memory. Afterwards, when stray poets, raconteurs and other Tripp aficionados settled for conversation in the back room of the Conway or in the bar of Cardiff docklands’ Big Windsor almost certainly. But never on stage. Tripp understood well that place in which a performer needs to be in order to give a decent performance. Not stone cold, scientifically clean and Baptist sober for sure. But not plastered either.

JT could walk on stage and engage his audience just by looking at them and shuffling his papers. If he happened to have papers at the time, that is. He knew how to mix his programme – something serious next to something racy, a profound slice of Welsh political positioning followed by a touch of nostalgia, a slice of kitchen sink before a devastating funny. Stand still, he told me once. Don’t wander all over the stage. You might fall off. Know what you are going to do before you do it. Check your texts. Look into their eyes.

The eyes bit is quite important. Politicians are experts at this. Check them out. Very few stare at their papers when they deliver their speeches. Instead they engage directly with their audience. Stare straight at them. What the speechmakers are actually doing is fixing their eyes in a sort of roving pattern across the back wall of the hall. Audience members all imagine that they are being spoken to directly. Dark glasses are a complete no no, no matter how pop-star they may make you feel. Tripp wore the same clothes he had happened to put on when he got up that day, as a rule. But wear your suede jacket, Finch, he’d advise me, it gives you style.

What JT had managed to do was to combine literary ability with delivery. People listening to his readings were, dare I use the word, entertained. The biennial Academi-run competition in his name looks for the same qualities. The 2009 John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry runs this October. There will be heats in Llanhilleth, Pontardawe, The Gate in Cardiff, and Venue Cymru in Llandudno. The final is at the Wharf in Cardiff Bay on Thursday November, 19th.

It costs £6 to enter and forms are available by ringing the Academi on 02920472266 or from the website at www.academi.org. If you get through your heat and into the final expect some entertaining competition. First prize is £500. Runners-up were once given packets of tea and bananas but I’m not sure yet about 2009. Watch this space.

An earlier version of this post appeared in the Western Mail of Saturday 26th September, 2009 as The Insider

How Changing Your Name May Make Things Better

Changing your name ought to be simple enough. If your surname happens to be Bottom or Willie or some other potentially embarrassing body part the chances are that you are either pronouncing it in a way that is nothing like it’s written - Bowtham or While-ay maybe. Or you will have changed it years ago. Usually straightforward but not always. Eileen de Bont, a receptionist, fell foul of the Passport Office who refused to accept her legally changed by deed poll new name of Pudsey Bear. The rumoured John Jones of Abersoch who allegedly changed his to John Rocket Brother Big Bollock Splash in Cardigan Bay in celebration of his interest in both missiles and disarmament had no such trouble. He never went abroad.

If you want to go double-barrelled then that’s easier. The Smithson-Cumberledges and the Moledigger-Johnsons are on the increase. The Welsh tradition of the Vaughan Joneses and the Walford Davieses are there to fall back on. Triple barrel names also look like they might be in for a return. Although not, apparently, in Germany. There they’ve been declared illegal on the grounds that they might confuse. Germany, of course, is the country which once gave us the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, a name abandoned at the time of the Great War in favour of the much more friendly sounding Windsor.

Name change among companies and their products is just as prevalent. And often just as difficult. Hands up those who have any idea who Consignia were going to be? That was the nice new brand name for the Post Office that most people thought sounded more like a Roman General or an ointment for piles. Snickered recently? They used to be known as Marathon Bars – a name dropped because it turned out to mean something rude in the local language of an emerging far eastern market. How about Aviva, Aveva, Avuncular, Celsa, Crispo and Corus? One of those might be the new name for the Norwich Union. Or I might be making them up. You choose.

Square – the music, poetry and new fiction magazine edited by energetic Nick Fisk and full of bright underdogs and exciting new voices - has discovered that too many other things are either already square or moving in that direction and has changed its name to Cool.

The new issue, still disarmingly square shaped, comes with a free sew-on lemon patch. Ideal for making literary headway, I thought. Content is an entertaining mix of music journalism and accessible verse. Chris White and Dylan Moore on the Stone Roses, Barrie Llewellyn on tattoos, Nick Fisk on artist John Squire.

Way back there was a plan to rename the WMC “Awen” – the Welsh word for “Muse”. But then someone discovered that in English it also meant a facial lump. A wen. Plan swiftly dropped.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 20th June, 2009.

Squads

And they shall all have prizes might no longer be society’s great plan. There are signs out there that everyone might not be equal to everyone else, at least not everytime anyway. We’ve had a couple of decades now where ability and personal achievement have been in retreat. Actually getting somewhere in the world has been regarded as, well, vaguely dishonest and certainly unfair.

Among the writers this has led to a slew of vast and seemingly never ending digital magazines where the poems slide about in their weakness like dead sardines. New books have fallen off the presses much in the style of the collapsing rocks along the Glamorgan Heritage Coast. Indiscriminately, in great impenetrable piles. At least, here on the inside, it has sometimes felt like this. I’m exaggerating, of course. But only slightly.

Real achievement, the ability to write and to do that well, has been regarded with suspicion in some quarters. At school the whole class get their work on the wall. The badge-winning Guides and Scouts have been banned. The non-competitive Woodcraft Folk have come to the fore.

But things are shifting. In Wales the Writing Squads movement has seen healthy growth over the past few years. Squads are groups of youngsters in a single geographic area who meet together four times a year in the company of a famous writer. For one term it will be Robert Minhinnick, learning about non-fiction, the next it will be with Gillian Clarke, learning how to craft a national poem.

Meetings occur off school premises, often in Libraries or community centres, and always out of school time. Participants, who start at around eight years old and often stay the course until they are eighteen, attend because they want to. That’s the first essential qualification. The second is that they have to be good.

In some sense squads are like county level sports teams. You get to join if you have ability. You can’t simply sign up. Traditionally, amateur writers have thought this kind of thing totally unfair. Down the years I have encountered many who write their first poem and having written it imagine that they are now ready for a whole book. Rather like men who buy a play-in-a-day guide to the violin at the start of the week and by the end have sent in their applications to join the LSO.

Squads nurture real talent. They are where the Welsh literary future lies. Academi has recently been given a Beacon Award in order to increase their number and to encourage activity. Currently, there are active Young People’s Writing Squads in Anglesey, Blaenau Gwent, Bridgend, Cardiff, Ceredigion, Denbigh, Gwynedd, Merthyr Tydfil, Monmouthshire, Newport, Pembrokeshire, Powys, Swansea, Torfaen and Vale of Glamorgan Expect more elsewhere in Wales soon..

An earlier version of this post appeared at The Insider in the Western Mail.

Spark

I've spent most of my life wondering just where the spark of creativity actually comes from. From the sky maybe? Coming down on rays of sunlight as in the engravings of Blake. From the ground, seeping up into our minds by some process of osmosis. From the air about us, blowing into our veins. From the back of the head, from the well of the mind, from that untouchable dark space within us all. The surrealists thought that Freud had discovered the truth. The unconsciousness was where everything began. That place of dreams and mist where chance and stumble created sparks.

They were probably right, I think.

Dream as good as consideration.
Discovery by flash of light.
Writing by starting the hand to move.
Writing by keeping moving.
Writing by staying the course.

Or maybe it's just as Flann O'Brien suggested it might be in his great novel, The Third Policeman. You become your bicycle by spending time sitting on it. I'm hard at it right now. I have a volume of Proust, heavy, in each hand.