How Cities Compare

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

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

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

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

□ 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

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

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

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

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

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