I checked the periodical racks at the local mini market this morning. Huge stack of pamphlets about the last days of Ninian Park. Boxing Monthly. Fighters On Top. Rock Star. Rap Star. Porn Star. Construction News. The Puzzler. Yours. Ok. Heat. Nuts. Lots of things full of pictures. Nothing at all to actually read.
There was a dream, once, that the literate world would enlarge and we’d be engulfed by great works and our lives would change. Might that still happen? At the brand new Roath Library someone has already put the door in with a brick. Attendance is up at Central but that’s mostly from punters going in there to check their emails. Magazine circulation figures wobble and sink. Why would they do anything else? Could it be that we no longer want to read new work this way?
I stood in the rain, once, for six hours outside the old Cardiff Library trying to sell poetry magazines. Shifted two. Had 10p given to me by an old lady who thought I was a deserving cause. Then a desperate wearing a stained mack came up and told me to sod off as this was his pitch. Literature was clearly for the specialist.
But then when you read a magazine like the new New Welsh Review you wonder why? Here’s Kathryn Gray, the hip new editor, giving us all something that’s genuinely exciting to engage with. Writing that matters, with a new direction and seemingly boundless energy again.
Inside is Kitty Sewell on the rise of crime writing. Rachel Trezise giving us street-wise band-chasing fiction full of wide boys and amphetamine cool. Thoroughly enjoyable poetry from Joe Dunthorne, Damian Walford Davies (a man these days who just can’t stop), Anne Stevenson and Meirion Jordan. Tim Lebbon reprising that master of Welsh dark fiction, Arthur Machen. Richard Gwyn rattling the bars in Sicily. There are also decent reviews and an excellent piece on Wales’s late master photographer, Philip Jones Griffiths.
This is issue number eighty-four, which ought to make the Review venerable. But it doesn’t read like that. £5.99 a copy. But buy it cheaper by post.
Agenda, the English Agenda that is, an erudite and pretty old fashionedly solid journal of letters, has come out with a bumper Welsh issue. The last time this happened its editorial reports, was fifty issues ago. The English take on Wales is broader than might have been expected but with quirky appendages, particularly in the reviewing. But is does give a good intro to how poetry is, here, in 2009. Inside everyone from Robert Minhinnick to Byron Beynon have their say. There’s probably no hope of getting this one in the local shop, either. Try www.agendapoetry.co.uk instead.
A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 4th July, 2009
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Monday, 29 June 2009
Restacking The Chairs Makes You Strong
I’ve just restacked the chairs and put them away. It seems as if I’ve been doing this all my life. Arrange the event, put the chairs out, fifty of them for a turn out of twenty. And then when it’s done put them all away again. The audiences don’t help. They arrive late. They scrape the things as they sit. Move them about. Make a big noise hunting in their bags just as the speaker begins. Their phones go off after ten minutes and they can’t find them. The theme from Eastenders done by Nokia slowly crescendos as the unfortunate hauls out cardigans, pencil cases, library books and newspapers in a desperate attempt to grasp the slippery beast and turn it off.
No one ever sits at the front. Always the back. And from there they inevitably can’t hear. Speak up please. A late arrival bangs in with a dog on a lead. It barks. Everyone turns to look but no one says a thing.
We had a literary bus trip once, to London, to hear Ted Hughes at the Poetry Society. Eternity ago. On the coach everyone tried to sit by themselves filling the seats next to them with bags and coats and papers. Didn’t work, of course.
While we were there we lost two on the Underground who had missed Earl’s Court on the District and then took great pleasure, maps in hand, in travelling right round London until the station came up again. The Underground map, as Mike Parker points out in his new book, Map Addict, resembles an electric circuit diagram. All straight lines with no real relationship with geography at all.
The map was created by Harry Beck a man who, according to Parker, filled his life with obsessive and reactionary views as he aged. This doesn’t stop his tube plan becoming a design gem. Many have tried to improve on it and, for that matter, to make art from it. Best known is Simon Patterson who replaced the station names with those of artists, writers and composers and reissued the whole things as The Great Bear. Buy prints of it at the Tate.
Somewhat less known is the now completely banned geek who created a version of the map with the station names rendered into anagrams. Crux for Disco (Oxford Circus), Written Mess (Westminster), Swearword & Ethanol (Harrow & Wealdstone), Shown Kitten (Kentish Town), Burst Racoon (Barons Court) This Hungry & Boiling (Highbury & Islington) and Queer Spank (Queens Park). Transport for London immediately had the thing banned and wiped from cyberspace. But Mike says it’s still there if you search hard. Mike Parker’s Map Addict, informative and hilarious in equal measure and written on an Academi bursary, is published by Collins.
A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 27th June, 2009.
No one ever sits at the front. Always the back. And from there they inevitably can’t hear. Speak up please. A late arrival bangs in with a dog on a lead. It barks. Everyone turns to look but no one says a thing.
We had a literary bus trip once, to London, to hear Ted Hughes at the Poetry Society. Eternity ago. On the coach everyone tried to sit by themselves filling the seats next to them with bags and coats and papers. Didn’t work, of course.
While we were there we lost two on the Underground who had missed Earl’s Court on the District and then took great pleasure, maps in hand, in travelling right round London until the station came up again. The Underground map, as Mike Parker points out in his new book, Map Addict, resembles an electric circuit diagram. All straight lines with no real relationship with geography at all.
The map was created by Harry Beck a man who, according to Parker, filled his life with obsessive and reactionary views as he aged. This doesn’t stop his tube plan becoming a design gem. Many have tried to improve on it and, for that matter, to make art from it. Best known is Simon Patterson who replaced the station names with those of artists, writers and composers and reissued the whole things as The Great Bear. Buy prints of it at the Tate.
Somewhat less known is the now completely banned geek who created a version of the map with the station names rendered into anagrams. Crux for Disco (Oxford Circus), Written Mess (Westminster), Swearword & Ethanol (Harrow & Wealdstone), Shown Kitten (Kentish Town), Burst Racoon (Barons Court) This Hungry & Boiling (Highbury & Islington) and Queer Spank (Queens Park). Transport for London immediately had the thing banned and wiped from cyberspace. But Mike says it’s still there if you search hard. Mike Parker’s Map Addict, informative and hilarious in equal measure and written on an Academi bursary, is published by Collins.
A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 27th June, 2009.
Saturday, 20 June 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, 13 June 2009
How Tea Can Improve Your Writing
I’m drinking tea. Around me is a disparate crowd of writers, artists, students, accountants, gardeners and housepersons. We are listening to a performance of Tracing Flight, the output of a local writers group presented by actors from the College of Music and Drama. The small crowd applaud enthusiastically. This is at the brand new Waterloo Gardens Teahouse, a stylish outpost of calm in Cardiff east. Next door is a hairdressers, the other side a sub-Post Office. Opposite are the gardens, home of dog walkers, smokers, sitters, kids on tricycles, old ladies with bags, men reading newspapers, and the occasional disaffected youth. South Wales suburbia. You can put on literature and get it to work where you like, it seems.
In the days of Ray Handy and Harri Webb poetry became synonymous with pints. You heard it chanted in pubs, between beers, surrounded by cigarette smoke and veneration. Today in Cardiff there are regular performances at Chapter Arts Centre and at the WMC. In Swansea they tend to happen at the purpose-built Dylan Thomas Centre – a home for literature in Wales’s second city. Bookshop, theatre, cafe, a regular literary programme put on in a set of dedicated performance spaces.
The Dylan Thomas Centre is a legacy of the 1995 UK Year of Literature, a status Swansea won against absolutely no competition at all from any other Welsh conurbation. The position was offered to Cardiff but the capital turned up its philistine nose. Dylan won again and with surprisingly successful and long-lived results.
Can we really put lit on anywhere? One-time media darling, Fiona Pitt-Kethley, editor of the much sought after Literary Companion to Sex, read her stuff to rush hour crowds arriving at Waterloo Station in London. Her publisher sold copies of her book hand to hand from a crate. They got rid of hundreds.
I’ve seen Peter Stead talking about his books in a cinema with a giant back-drop projection of his face in close-up on the screen behind. The Academi mounted a poetry stomp in the centre of Caernarfon Castle where the Investiture plaque had been swathed in bubble-wrap to protect it against anarchists. There have been literary performances in the lounges of cross channel ferries and standing on the decks of light ships and Campbell steamers. In poetry anything is possible.
But it’s also true that dedicated spaces are best. Such centres exist in Dublin, in London and in Edinburgh. But not in Cardiff. For the capital we add literature on, squeeze it between plays at the Sherman, perform it in the foyer of the Millennium Centre, listen to it at the Norwegian Church. Maybe users should start agitating. When they move the Vulcan to St Fagans, if they do, how about building a Literature Centre on the vacant site?
A stop press here: Vulcan saved for three more years. New lease signed by Liz the Landlady. A victory which for a while looked as if it just wouldn't come.
A version of the above appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 13th June, 2009.
In the days of Ray Handy and Harri Webb poetry became synonymous with pints. You heard it chanted in pubs, between beers, surrounded by cigarette smoke and veneration. Today in Cardiff there are regular performances at Chapter Arts Centre and at the WMC. In Swansea they tend to happen at the purpose-built Dylan Thomas Centre – a home for literature in Wales’s second city. Bookshop, theatre, cafe, a regular literary programme put on in a set of dedicated performance spaces.
The Dylan Thomas Centre is a legacy of the 1995 UK Year of Literature, a status Swansea won against absolutely no competition at all from any other Welsh conurbation. The position was offered to Cardiff but the capital turned up its philistine nose. Dylan won again and with surprisingly successful and long-lived results.
Can we really put lit on anywhere? One-time media darling, Fiona Pitt-Kethley, editor of the much sought after Literary Companion to Sex, read her stuff to rush hour crowds arriving at Waterloo Station in London. Her publisher sold copies of her book hand to hand from a crate. They got rid of hundreds.
I’ve seen Peter Stead talking about his books in a cinema with a giant back-drop projection of his face in close-up on the screen behind. The Academi mounted a poetry stomp in the centre of Caernarfon Castle where the Investiture plaque had been swathed in bubble-wrap to protect it against anarchists. There have been literary performances in the lounges of cross channel ferries and standing on the decks of light ships and Campbell steamers. In poetry anything is possible.
But it’s also true that dedicated spaces are best. Such centres exist in Dublin, in London and in Edinburgh. But not in Cardiff. For the capital we add literature on, squeeze it between plays at the Sherman, perform it in the foyer of the Millennium Centre, listen to it at the Norwegian Church. Maybe users should start agitating. When they move the Vulcan to St Fagans, if they do, how about building a Literature Centre on the vacant site?
A stop press here: Vulcan saved for three more years. New lease signed by Liz the Landlady. A victory which for a while looked as if it just wouldn't come.
A version of the above appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 13th June, 2009.
Saturday, 6 June 2009
Drinking with Ifor Bach
If you need to find something out chances are you’ll check with Google. Who exactly was Ifor Bach, for example. Has to be someone who did more than drink near Cardiff Castle. The Wikipedia tells us in about eight seconds that Ifor Bach scaled the walls of the Norman Stronghold at Cardiff in an act of glorious rebellion. But for info in greater depth a better place to look would be the recently published Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales. Here you’ll find accuracy, context and cross reference in reliable style. The Encyclopaedia has been a godsend to anyone with a concern for Wales. In the making ten years (when in hope and excitement the editors originally thought three would do it) but as comprehensive and readable as they come.
There are two editions, one in Welsh and one in English, compiled by a team of four editors and several hundred individual contributors. Entries in all fields of human knowledge and experience were commissioned, checked, cross-check, translated, amended and updated. John Davies, the eminence gris at the head smoothed the waters. Peredur Lynch, Nigel Jenkins and Menna Baines paddled furiously below. The books, published by UWP are certainly worth the wait. In their fine black covers they glow on the shelves. Every home should have one was the promotional slogan. To judge by sales so far almost every one has.
But the problem with works like this, glorying in their comprehensiveness, is that they can date. People die, things happen, the world moves. Anything printed can only ever be a snapshot of how it was and how it might have been thought of at a point in time.
Leaving aside the small number of inevitable infelicities reported to the publishers by keen members of the public - “The photograph you have on page 84 of the train leaving the station at Blaenau Ffestiniog is actually a photograph of the train arriving at Blaenau Ffestiniog” – some things will have to be updated.
In an age of digital everything from shopping to sleeping just how should this be done? Already Academi are in negotiation to trial a selection of the content on line. Faster access to greater depth when you Google. But the text, as it is, remains.
It has been suggested that the publishers might look at a sort of Wikipediaisation of the project. Put it on line, 1200 pages, more than 5000 entries, and then allow the public access to add and amend as they choose. An Encyclopaedia of the moment. Someone gets elected in a by-election and, instantly, details are added. A desirable possibility. But it would also be possible to add bogus facts and shift the weight of the scholarship. So Ifor Bach invented Brains, did he? What do others think?
A version of this blog appeared in the Western Mail on saturday 6th June as The Insider
There are two editions, one in Welsh and one in English, compiled by a team of four editors and several hundred individual contributors. Entries in all fields of human knowledge and experience were commissioned, checked, cross-check, translated, amended and updated. John Davies, the eminence gris at the head smoothed the waters. Peredur Lynch, Nigel Jenkins and Menna Baines paddled furiously below. The books, published by UWP are certainly worth the wait. In their fine black covers they glow on the shelves. Every home should have one was the promotional slogan. To judge by sales so far almost every one has.
But the problem with works like this, glorying in their comprehensiveness, is that they can date. People die, things happen, the world moves. Anything printed can only ever be a snapshot of how it was and how it might have been thought of at a point in time.
Leaving aside the small number of inevitable infelicities reported to the publishers by keen members of the public - “The photograph you have on page 84 of the train leaving the station at Blaenau Ffestiniog is actually a photograph of the train arriving at Blaenau Ffestiniog” – some things will have to be updated.
In an age of digital everything from shopping to sleeping just how should this be done? Already Academi are in negotiation to trial a selection of the content on line. Faster access to greater depth when you Google. But the text, as it is, remains.
It has been suggested that the publishers might look at a sort of Wikipediaisation of the project. Put it on line, 1200 pages, more than 5000 entries, and then allow the public access to add and amend as they choose. An Encyclopaedia of the moment. Someone gets elected in a by-election and, instantly, details are added. A desirable possibility. But it would also be possible to add bogus facts and shift the weight of the scholarship. So Ifor Bach invented Brains, did he? What do others think?
A version of this blog appeared in the Western Mail on saturday 6th June as The Insider
Saturday, 30 May 2009
Standing Right Next To Dylan Thomas
In the Irish author Flann O’Brien’s classic piece of invention, The Third Policeman, (certainly one of my top hundred books) one of the coppers becomes so obsessed by his bicycle that he begins to merge with it. As he sits on the saddle cycle becomes policeman and policeman becomes bicycle. The world changes by osmosis. Some writers view place with similar regard. Walk the rail tracks of Raymond Williams and you’ll access his thought processes. Visit the village of Gillian Clarke and you’ll understand her poetry. Stand where Dylan Thomas did and some of his power may seep into your soul.
This is psychogeography mixed with the sanctity of place. The poet Chris Torrance believed that a ley line ran right through his Pontneddfechan cottage and from it he could somehow channel verse. In the 80s the native American author, Thomas Rain Crowe, somehow got permission to stay at the Laugharne Boathouse for three whole months. The book he wrote there was a US bestseller. The spirit of Dylan infected every syllable. Didn’t do too well here, however.
There is an undeniable fascination with the tracking of places and paths important to the great and the good who have gone before. Seeing the world they saw increases our understanding of what they did. Standing at their desks or in their houses allows us to locate their works.
Visitors come from thousands of miles to visit Shakespeare’s Stratford, Thomas Hardy’s Dorset or Shaw’s Dublin. And those places have certainly capitalised on their associations. Shakespeare baseball hats, Thomas Hardy tracksuits and Oscar Wilde chewing gum sell by the shed load. This is something that Wales has yet to really wake up to. I did hear a rumour that someone was trying to sell Dylan Thomas trousers but found few takers.
This summer Academi are running coach tours which will take travellers into the heartlands of a range of our greatest literary creators. Days out for litterateurs. Anyone can join. We’ve already been to Pembroke in search of Waldo. In June John Pikoulis leads a trip to Talybont-on-Usk following the trails of the poet and historian Roland Mathias. In the same month Archdruid Dic Jones and National Poet Gillian Clarke will show visitors Ceredigion’s Talgarreg and Pisgah. In September there’s a trip to the red valley homelands of Cwmardy’ s author Lewis Jones. And in October there’s a Welsh-medium tour from Aberystwyth in search of Wales’ greatest Bard, Dafydd ap Gwilym.
The tours start from Cardiff, Aberystwyth and Carmarthen and cost £37 to join. Travellers will get talks, walks, readings, visits to significant hills, buildings, desks, windows, trees, streams and fields. Included in the price are lunch, tea, cakes, and numerous coffee stops. Call 02920472266 for a descriptive brochure or check the web site at www.academi.org.
A version of this posting appeared in the Western Mail as The Insider on Saturday 30th May, 2009
This is psychogeography mixed with the sanctity of place. The poet Chris Torrance believed that a ley line ran right through his Pontneddfechan cottage and from it he could somehow channel verse. In the 80s the native American author, Thomas Rain Crowe, somehow got permission to stay at the Laugharne Boathouse for three whole months. The book he wrote there was a US bestseller. The spirit of Dylan infected every syllable. Didn’t do too well here, however.
There is an undeniable fascination with the tracking of places and paths important to the great and the good who have gone before. Seeing the world they saw increases our understanding of what they did. Standing at their desks or in their houses allows us to locate their works.
Visitors come from thousands of miles to visit Shakespeare’s Stratford, Thomas Hardy’s Dorset or Shaw’s Dublin. And those places have certainly capitalised on their associations. Shakespeare baseball hats, Thomas Hardy tracksuits and Oscar Wilde chewing gum sell by the shed load. This is something that Wales has yet to really wake up to. I did hear a rumour that someone was trying to sell Dylan Thomas trousers but found few takers.
This summer Academi are running coach tours which will take travellers into the heartlands of a range of our greatest literary creators. Days out for litterateurs. Anyone can join. We’ve already been to Pembroke in search of Waldo. In June John Pikoulis leads a trip to Talybont-on-Usk following the trails of the poet and historian Roland Mathias. In the same month Archdruid Dic Jones and National Poet Gillian Clarke will show visitors Ceredigion’s Talgarreg and Pisgah. In September there’s a trip to the red valley homelands of Cwmardy’ s author Lewis Jones. And in October there’s a Welsh-medium tour from Aberystwyth in search of Wales’ greatest Bard, Dafydd ap Gwilym.
The tours start from Cardiff, Aberystwyth and Carmarthen and cost £37 to join. Travellers will get talks, walks, readings, visits to significant hills, buildings, desks, windows, trees, streams and fields. Included in the price are lunch, tea, cakes, and numerous coffee stops. Call 02920472266 for a descriptive brochure or check the web site at www.academi.org.
A version of this posting appeared in the Western Mail as The Insider on Saturday 30th May, 2009
Saturday, 23 May 2009
The Threat of Nintendo Gaming
For a time now the novel in English has been on the rise in Wales. Despite the ever-present threat from Nintendo gaming, talk shows, reality TV, vertical drinkeries and mobile internet fiction appears to be holding its own. The output from Welsh publishers has climbed steadily. New writers appear with the frequency of speed cameras and reinvigorated older ones pour the stuff out just to keep ahead. The short story, thought of by many as a relic from the pulp fiction past, has enjoyed a total rebirth. Entries to the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition these days exceed all predictions. Collections of stories dot bookshop racks. And rather than simply staring into space people have been actually seen reading them - in doctor’s waiting rooms and on trains. I spotted one man recently reading while cycling. I kid you not.
On the long list for the Wales Book of the Year are two fiction collections. Deborah Kay Davies’ pretty unsettling Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful and Gee Williams’ Blood Etc. There are also two novels – Joe Dunthorne’ s Submarine and Stephen May’s TAG. New authors all and making waves. Against them stand Dai Smith with his brilliant Raymond Williams biography, A Warrior’s Tale. How on earth will the judges make a choice among such disparate stuff?
They’ve also got the poetry complication to manage. Verse has rarely ever featured in the Awards. Too difficult. Too short. Too irrelevant. Can’t be compared to fiction. But things change. Poetry is again on the rise. Five whole titles have appeared on the long list. John Barnie, one of the Award’s three judges characterised the year as a vintage one for verse. Never has Wales produced so much consistently good stuff. Not in several decades.
Matthew Francis, Robert Minhinnick, Sheenagh Pugh, Zoë Skoulding and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch are all now shifting their slim vols by the shed load and sitting in the garrets with baits in their breaths. Might poetry get onto the short list of three? That will be announced at the Hay Literature festival on the 25th of May. Could verse even take the £10,000 prize? That distant possibility now looks considerably probable. Do I actually know anything? Has someone spoken to me, quietly into my ear? Not yet. I’m just giving you a balanced and informed view. Poetry is certainly in the best place it has been for years.
If you’d like to check for yourselves ask for Not In These Shoes, Long-Haul Travellers, King Driftwood, Mandeville and Remains of a Future City at your local bookshop. There’s poetry here from the survivors of both sides of the ancient warring divide. And excellent it is too. Check as soon as possible.
A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 23rd May, 2009
On the long list for the Wales Book of the Year are two fiction collections. Deborah Kay Davies’ pretty unsettling Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful and Gee Williams’ Blood Etc. There are also two novels – Joe Dunthorne’ s Submarine and Stephen May’s TAG. New authors all and making waves. Against them stand Dai Smith with his brilliant Raymond Williams biography, A Warrior’s Tale. How on earth will the judges make a choice among such disparate stuff?
They’ve also got the poetry complication to manage. Verse has rarely ever featured in the Awards. Too difficult. Too short. Too irrelevant. Can’t be compared to fiction. But things change. Poetry is again on the rise. Five whole titles have appeared on the long list. John Barnie, one of the Award’s three judges characterised the year as a vintage one for verse. Never has Wales produced so much consistently good stuff. Not in several decades.
Matthew Francis, Robert Minhinnick, Sheenagh Pugh, Zoë Skoulding and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch are all now shifting their slim vols by the shed load and sitting in the garrets with baits in their breaths. Might poetry get onto the short list of three? That will be announced at the Hay Literature festival on the 25th of May. Could verse even take the £10,000 prize? That distant possibility now looks considerably probable. Do I actually know anything? Has someone spoken to me, quietly into my ear? Not yet. I’m just giving you a balanced and informed view. Poetry is certainly in the best place it has been for years.
If you’d like to check for yourselves ask for Not In These Shoes, Long-Haul Travellers, King Driftwood, Mandeville and Remains of a Future City at your local bookshop. There’s poetry here from the survivors of both sides of the ancient warring divide. And excellent it is too. Check as soon as possible.
A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of 23rd May, 2009
Saturday, 16 May 2009
Jam
So it never actually did turn out to be the new rock and roll. That was merely a marketing ploy from the nineties. Poetry more popular now than soccer. That was the headline on a piece I read at the turn of the millennium. That didn’t seem to be true either, given the recent crowds at Ninian Park. But, and not wishing to be compared to a government finance minister, I have seen signs of new green shoots out there.
We have a new Poet Laureate and one who turns out to be best mates with our own National Poet, Gillian Clarke. Carol Ann Duffy, the radical choice and famous loose cannon is now actually the woman at poetry’s top. She’s no stranger to Wales, either, having toured here many times down the decades. And what’s more important, people actually enjoy what she does.
At the Hay Festival research showed that audiences like to hear writers talk to each other and reveal secrets about their private life. The work itself comes a poor second. I’m paraphrasing, naturally, but this doesn’t sound good for verse. Live poetry is an art form which scores by having itself read out loud, performed, recited, said.
Not that this hasn’t stopped Peter Florence including a whole raft of great versifiers in this year’s scintillating show. Among them are Imtiaz Dharker, Richard Marggraff Turley, Damian Walford Davies, Kevin Crossley-Holland, the woman tipped for the chair of poetry at Oxford, Ruth Padel, the nearly Laureates Roger McGough and Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, James Fenton, Maurice Riordan and Carol Ann herself.
Back in the town, Lyndon Davies and John Goodby’s Hay Poetry fringe runs at Salem Chapel. This alternative jamboree majors on the sort of poetry that normally attracts men in great coats and women in cheesecloth dresses. However this year it could be that the alternative has come of age. The programme sets out Wales’s alternative stall in some style. John Goodby’s performance troop, Boiled String, the dynamic duo of Wendy Mulford and John James, Chris Torrance, David Greenslade. The inimitable Chris Ozzard. Even the Insider, Peter Finch. A complete roster of outsiders - one-time, actual and real. The only significant Welsh name missing is Llangollen’s tri-lingual Childe Roland.
The Jamboree has two lectures – Alice Entwhistle on women and Matthew Jarvis on recovering the history of other Welsh poetries. It’s a history worth recovering, too. During the Welsh avant garde’s formative years – pretty much everything between 1966 to 2000 - the Welsh literary establishment engaged in what can only be described as an act of determined denial. Few magazine appearances, not anthologised, missing from the criticism. It’s great to see the work now celebrated. The Jamboree runs 28th to 30th May.
A version of this piece appeared in the Western Mail on saturday 16th May, 2009.
We have a new Poet Laureate and one who turns out to be best mates with our own National Poet, Gillian Clarke. Carol Ann Duffy, the radical choice and famous loose cannon is now actually the woman at poetry’s top. She’s no stranger to Wales, either, having toured here many times down the decades. And what’s more important, people actually enjoy what she does.
At the Hay Festival research showed that audiences like to hear writers talk to each other and reveal secrets about their private life. The work itself comes a poor second. I’m paraphrasing, naturally, but this doesn’t sound good for verse. Live poetry is an art form which scores by having itself read out loud, performed, recited, said.
Not that this hasn’t stopped Peter Florence including a whole raft of great versifiers in this year’s scintillating show. Among them are Imtiaz Dharker, Richard Marggraff Turley, Damian Walford Davies, Kevin Crossley-Holland, the woman tipped for the chair of poetry at Oxford, Ruth Padel, the nearly Laureates Roger McGough and Simon Armitage, Lavinia Greenlaw, James Fenton, Maurice Riordan and Carol Ann herself.
Back in the town, Lyndon Davies and John Goodby’s Hay Poetry fringe runs at Salem Chapel. This alternative jamboree majors on the sort of poetry that normally attracts men in great coats and women in cheesecloth dresses. However this year it could be that the alternative has come of age. The programme sets out Wales’s alternative stall in some style. John Goodby’s performance troop, Boiled String, the dynamic duo of Wendy Mulford and John James, Chris Torrance, David Greenslade. The inimitable Chris Ozzard. Even the Insider, Peter Finch. A complete roster of outsiders - one-time, actual and real. The only significant Welsh name missing is Llangollen’s tri-lingual Childe Roland.
The Jamboree has two lectures – Alice Entwhistle on women and Matthew Jarvis on recovering the history of other Welsh poetries. It’s a history worth recovering, too. During the Welsh avant garde’s formative years – pretty much everything between 1966 to 2000 - the Welsh literary establishment engaged in what can only be described as an act of determined denial. Few magazine appearances, not anthologised, missing from the criticism. It’s great to see the work now celebrated. The Jamboree runs 28th to 30th May.
A version of this piece appeared in the Western Mail on saturday 16th May, 2009.
Saturday, 9 May 2009
Photoshopping
Twentieth century America has been defined by its photographers. The masters have crossed and re-crossed the continent and recorded all they saw. Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange made black and white images of rural hardship. Ansel Adams shot the American west. Weegee captured the naked city. Garry Winogrand photographed women on the streets of New York. Their pictures have become iconic, reproduced on hoardings, in Sunday supplements and in volumes with the photographer’s name on the front. Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Ansel Adams: Yosemite. Weegee’s Naked City. And with its introduction from the King of the Beats, Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank: The Americans. American Americans, a whole culture followed that.
The publishing industry was not slow to capitalise. The books came out in heavy hardback, often costing enough to keep the rural poor in food for a week. They sold in quantity to the emerging middle classes. No coffee table was complete without one.
In Wales, however, we see ourselves through different eyes. We are defined instead not by grand landscape but by our TV presenters, our rugby stars and sometimes by our poets. No surprise, then, that the photographer here is a rarer beast. In recent years, though, the digital revolution has started to hit home and the streets have been replete with snappers attempting to catch everything from the surging of our football crowds to the ubiquitous Welsh street preacher.
I’d like to report that our publishers have been quick to react, but they haven’t. It is only comparatively recently that the Welsh equivalent of the US coffee table doorstop has begun to appear. Parthian’s Coalfaces, for example, is a lovely full-colour compilation from the work of Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne. These two documentary makers have recorded the townships of the Afan Valley as those lost places dealt with the end of coal. From the same publisher comes Shimon Attie’s The Attraction of Onlookers, a full plate colour study of the inhabitants of Aberfan. Black backdrops, hard poses and Welsh to the core.
Seren have gone to the top with Magnum Photographer David Hurn’s Living in Wales - duotone shots of Welsh greats – Bryn Terfel, Colin Jackson, Peter Hain. They have also published Anthony Stokes masterwork, The Valleys, a quirky, multi-coloured take on disparate and often workless communities. Iain Sinclair takes on the Kerouac role and provides the introduction.
Seren also publish the Real series. Books on conurbations by writers more used to the pen than the camera. Mario Basini, Nigel Jenkins, Niall Griffiths, Grahame Davies, Ann Drysdale and, soon, Jon Gower, have all snapped as well as typed. Check out their edgy and often unconventional results. Try Real Merthyr as an entrée. Move on to Real Wrexham and Real Swansea after that.
A version of this post appeared at The Insider in the Western Mail of 9th May, 2009
The publishing industry was not slow to capitalise. The books came out in heavy hardback, often costing enough to keep the rural poor in food for a week. They sold in quantity to the emerging middle classes. No coffee table was complete without one.
In Wales, however, we see ourselves through different eyes. We are defined instead not by grand landscape but by our TV presenters, our rugby stars and sometimes by our poets. No surprise, then, that the photographer here is a rarer beast. In recent years, though, the digital revolution has started to hit home and the streets have been replete with snappers attempting to catch everything from the surging of our football crowds to the ubiquitous Welsh street preacher.
I’d like to report that our publishers have been quick to react, but they haven’t. It is only comparatively recently that the Welsh equivalent of the US coffee table doorstop has begun to appear. Parthian’s Coalfaces, for example, is a lovely full-colour compilation from the work of Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne. These two documentary makers have recorded the townships of the Afan Valley as those lost places dealt with the end of coal. From the same publisher comes Shimon Attie’s The Attraction of Onlookers, a full plate colour study of the inhabitants of Aberfan. Black backdrops, hard poses and Welsh to the core.
Seren have gone to the top with Magnum Photographer David Hurn’s Living in Wales - duotone shots of Welsh greats – Bryn Terfel, Colin Jackson, Peter Hain. They have also published Anthony Stokes masterwork, The Valleys, a quirky, multi-coloured take on disparate and often workless communities. Iain Sinclair takes on the Kerouac role and provides the introduction.
Seren also publish the Real series. Books on conurbations by writers more used to the pen than the camera. Mario Basini, Nigel Jenkins, Niall Griffiths, Grahame Davies, Ann Drysdale and, soon, Jon Gower, have all snapped as well as typed. Check out their edgy and often unconventional results. Try Real Merthyr as an entrée. Move on to Real Wrexham and Real Swansea after that.
A version of this post appeared at The Insider in the Western Mail of 9th May, 2009
Saturday, 2 May 2009
Not On the Sat Nav Yet
GPS usually means something to do with phones and sat navs but in poet Ric Hool’s case it stands for Global Poetry Systems. Ric is from Abergavenny and is author of the excellent Voice from a Correspondent. He has recently been appointed to make a Welsh contribution to the new Southbank Centre plan to map the UK’s poetry world. When the irrepressible Lemn Sissay, the Centre’s poet in residence, decided to collect all the poetry available in the complex he discovered much more than a shelf of books. Lemn found text engraved in memorial signs, on stage in the words accompanied by great classical music, rhymes in the memories of visitors, poems from the greats in celebration of concerts they had attended, stuff on posters and graffitied on the walls. It struck him that verse actually penetrated much deeper into our psyches than we realised. It was all around us. Security guards wrote it in the depth of night. Parents sung it to their children. Students used it to change the world. He decided to do some mapping. He found poetry in quantity. The results were enormously encouraging.
The project has now been rolled out as a pilot right across the UK. A dozen poets and activists from Belfast to Birmingham will be devoting a week soon to collecting the poetry where they live. They’ll be scooping up everything from gravestone memorials to part-recollections of W H Auden and William Shakespeare, from poetry on the shelves in newsagents to brand new pieces made specifically for their locations.
Ric will be working his patch with diligence. He doesn’t have long. The results will be compiled into a Southbank Centre managed web site and, if things go well and funds from the Cultural Olympiad arrive as they should, there’ll be an exhibition right across the ground floor of Queen Elizabeth Hall. Cases of text. Works from the great and the good and the trying hard. Interactive posters. Giant maps that play verse recordings when you stand on them. Photographs of poetry in the landscape. Engravings. Poems knitted into bed quilts. Memories of books. Actual books. Words on the sails of yachts. Poems in newspapers. Verse workshopped by local school children, recalled by immigrants, written in paint and chalk across the city’s back lanes and city halls.
The precise extent of the geographic area Ric will be covering is yet to be agreed. Too large and poetry will get lost, too small and there won’t be enough. Expect it to be Abergavenny and environs. The town and the hills. The bookshops and the schools. The south-east Wales GPS project is a co-operation between Academi and the Southbank Centre. Dave Woolley will be running another will run from the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea.
A version of this blog appeared in The Western Mail on Saturday 2nd May, 2009 as The Insider
The project has now been rolled out as a pilot right across the UK. A dozen poets and activists from Belfast to Birmingham will be devoting a week soon to collecting the poetry where they live. They’ll be scooping up everything from gravestone memorials to part-recollections of W H Auden and William Shakespeare, from poetry on the shelves in newsagents to brand new pieces made specifically for their locations.
Ric will be working his patch with diligence. He doesn’t have long. The results will be compiled into a Southbank Centre managed web site and, if things go well and funds from the Cultural Olympiad arrive as they should, there’ll be an exhibition right across the ground floor of Queen Elizabeth Hall. Cases of text. Works from the great and the good and the trying hard. Interactive posters. Giant maps that play verse recordings when you stand on them. Photographs of poetry in the landscape. Engravings. Poems knitted into bed quilts. Memories of books. Actual books. Words on the sails of yachts. Poems in newspapers. Verse workshopped by local school children, recalled by immigrants, written in paint and chalk across the city’s back lanes and city halls.
The precise extent of the geographic area Ric will be covering is yet to be agreed. Too large and poetry will get lost, too small and there won’t be enough. Expect it to be Abergavenny and environs. The town and the hills. The bookshops and the schools. The south-east Wales GPS project is a co-operation between Academi and the Southbank Centre. Dave Woolley will be running another will run from the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea.
A version of this blog appeared in The Western Mail on Saturday 2nd May, 2009 as The Insider
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