Without a Doubt

Was the great novel you’ve just read a fluke? Could its author do it again and would the new book be as good as the first? Doubt follows writers around like a ghost. It’s worse with verse. Can the poet ever again write a new poem as decent as the one just completed? Isn’t the whole business a catalogue of chance? Writers persistently doubt their powers and always need people out there to reassure them that, yes, they should carry on.

Years back when blues singers were being rediscovered living in shacks on the Mississippi delta they were encouraged, fifty years on, to record again in spanking new studios and on first class instruments. It turned out that all they wanted to know was how they’d done today. Had the track they’d just laid down been anything like as good as the stuff they used to make? They had no idea if it had been Cripple Hard-Armed Davies playing with them on that recording of Wuppa Wuppa Blues they’d made in Clarksdale in 1928. Who cares? All that matters is now. So, too, with writers.

Doubt comes in insidious forms. It sneaks up on you. Wales Book of the Year long listees sometimes wonder if they’ve got in there by mistake. Wasn’t the novel they wrote two years back, which got absolutely nowhere, actually much better?

Why are my poems not in your anthology, a well-known poet complained to me. The book I was editing collected work originated from Cardiff. He lived in Aberystwyth. I explained, or tried to. But his doubts persisted. There was a conspiracy, out there, against him. His work was not up to the mark. I had taken against him because of that dismal review he’d written of my work and published in Planet in 1978. As time had moved on his poems had become dated. He was on a black list somewhere. Anything but the truth. I needed material about the capital. He hadn’t written any.

Recently I discovered the work of Philip Roth. I read The Plot Against America, by chance, and found it spellbinding. Why had I never read this genius before, for genius he certainly appeared. The book was a thrilling meld of history, fantasy, personal demons and ideological battle. It was written with erudition and humour and had a plot which whistled.

When done I tackled Amazon and ordered a Roth bucket-full. The Ghost Writer, The Human Stain, American Pastoral. How often in life do you discover a new writer with so much published brilliance under his genius belt? Roth, an author possessed of no doubt whatsoever. His works stretched, glowing, towards the horizon.

And how did I find them? I’m not sure yet. Has doubt arrived? We’ll see.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday, 31st July, 2010. #158

Finding Traffic

A little while back the sages of publishing predicted that the first thing to go in the burgeoning online world would be encyclopaedias, gazetteers and handbooks. Those textural tomes that break your wrist just to lift them. The AA Gazetteer Of Places To Stay. The Directory Of British Sub-Post Offices. The Whiskey Lovers Guide To The Scottish Islands. The Cyfansoddiadau. Wisden’s Cricketers’ Almanack. And it’s mostly come to pass. The handbook has all but vanished, although maybe not yet in the case of the last two mentioned. The Cyfansoddiadau, Wisden’s for Eisteddfod-goers, looks as if it will never fade. Wisden’s itself, however, is morphing into an all-sports compendium and has an online version beckoning.

Barry Turner’s enduring and always vital The Writer’s Handbook has just published its 2011 edition. Tome it is, too. At 766 pages it needs a desk just to be read. It’s heavier than the iPad, but just as new and vital. Amid the advice on characterisation in popular fiction, how to get ahead as a ghost writer, how to write children’s books, do your accounts, command the network, produce a bestseller, settle your accounts and handle bad reviewers sits a cogent section entitled poetry.

This is compiled by the man behind Salt Publishing, one of the great short-run phenomena of the noughties, Chris Hamilton-Emery. Among his informative and useful advice Hamilton-Emery hones in on the ten changes he expects to see in the coming decade. In the order he lists them these are as follows: Print magazines will vanish. Criticism will move entirely online. Choice will drive the reader to compile their own anthologies, set up their own internet channels, make their selections the yardstick of poetry commerce. Books as the poetry unit will fade. Everyone will become their own publisher. The bricks and mortar bookshop will disappear. Poetry will become increasingly performance based and delivered by multi-media. Verse will return to its roots, “as the shared imagination of a specific online community”. Creative writing will produce vast and participative infrastructures and almost all poets will work within this industry. Getting published will cease to be the benchmark of success. Being read, “finding traffic” as Hamilton-Emery puts it, will be the indicator instead.

Some of this sounds obvious. Already the review in hard print has ceased to be the point of judgement. By the time your reviewed book appears in Planet, for example, you may well be out there promoting your next. In Wales we have never worried much about immediacy. But instant reaction via the blogosphere is seeing an end to all that.

Other of Hamilton-Emery’s predictions, however, do push the envelope. Will performance really become the only way forward? The Writer’s Handbook 2011 is published by Macmillan.

A version of this posting appeared in the Western Mail of Saturday 24th July, 2010 as The Insider - #157

Instant Lit

How instant is this age we’re living in? A poet of my acquaintance, a pretty well-know poet actually, has just told me that his next collection, submitted to his not insignificant publishers in good time and in perfect form, has been accepted. They said it was a great book, he told me, something that would enhance his reputation. But it wouldn’t come out until autumn 2012. 2012! We could all be dead by then. The wave of tax-increases we face may well have induced mass Welsh suicide. The bomb might return and there’d be no Wales left. 2012. Three years away. By then the world’s last bookshop will have closed and literature will have been dropped from the school syllabus in favour of street-talk studies.

This is an instant world where it is expected that the email will elicit an immediate response and the text message be replied too almost as fast as it is sent. The whole population operates as if it were on caffeine overdrive. Only those who have phones “for emergencies” and never turn them on are excluded.

It once was that the advice to young poets was to write the stuff then leave it in a drawer for several months where, like cheese, it might mature. When you came back to it, a good distance now between you and the hot point of the work’s inspiration, you’d be able to tell if it actually worked. If you were onto something. Or was this, in reality, a piece of self-indulgence. Half the amateur poetry in the world actually is. No, that’s an exaggeration. It’s more like ninety percent.

What we seem to have lost in this rush of speed, scrabble for short, screen-readable sentences, and images which hit the spot as you read them is anything considered. Poetry works best when it opens slowly to reveal its wonders one by one. Not everything under the sun has to go bang. Too much of that and your ears will fail.

In the rush to contain costs many contemporary publishers have sacked their copy editors. No longer do we have someone on staff pointing out the difference between “principal” and “principle” or explaining when it’s right to say “most of her verse” rather than “the majority of her poetry”. With the aid of native wit and Microsoft the writer is expected to get it right first time. Many don’t. Take care who you copy. Just because it’s in print doesn’t make it right.

Which brings us back to the long wait until 2012. Why the log jam? All the publisher needs to do is add a cover and get the thing into the shops. And there may be the answer. How many of us actually buy? Clearly not enough.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 17th July, 2010. #156

Real Bloomsbury

The Real series of alternative handbooks, histories and guides to the conurbations of Wales is expanding. South Pembrokeshire next. Powys soon. Then Bangor. But beyond that is another country. In preparation for the publication of Nicholas Murray’s book I’ve spent the weekend walking around Bloomsbury. Not a thing I usually do nor something, it seems, that all that many tourists do either. For a slice of central London this Georgian suburb of avenue and leaf seemed relatively deserted.

Bloomsbury is that region of London elegance stretching from the British Museum to Euston and the far end of Oxford Street to St Pancras, that new entreport for visitors from Europe. They arrive from their green French fields and their muscular German industrialnesses to gaze on what, until very recently, was the red light district of Kings Cross. Today those urban difficulties have been moved on. What remains is a sprawl of cheap eateries surreally enlivened with a statue of John Betjeman.

What I did find, specialist bookshops aside, was something we don’t see that much of in Wales – plaques. In Bloomsbury the bookshops are as diverse as they come – horses, Tunisia, the gay universe – and so too are the plaques. Circular inscriptions celebrating the fact that W B Yeats spent many years of his life writing in this back room. That Charles Dickens lived in Doughty Street for long enough to complete five novels. That the man who thought up the idea for the postal service did it while residing near Tavistock Square. That the Bloomsbury set itself – Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Lytton Strachey – all lived, at one time or another, in the tall, beautifully proportioned houses of Gordon Square.

Back home the Rhys Davies Trust has been putting up plaques to the literary eminent for decades. John Tripp, Leslie Norris, Glyn Jones, Brenda Chamberlain, John Ormond, R S Thomas are all celebrated. More men than women but that’s the shape to which Welsh writing once conformed. But it’s slow progress. The unsubstantiated fear is that a plaque on the house will attract visiting hoards who will come to stare and trample on the tulips. As a nation we should be more welcoming.

To promote our native plaques – and despite what I’ve said there are still a fair number – visitors can use the Academi’s new interactive plaque finder web site at www.academi.org. There are also free of celebratory black and white postcards. Series one has sixteen cards showing some of our greatest including John Tripp, Roland Mathias, Raymond Williams, Brenda Chamberlain, Emyr Humphries, T H Jones, Jack Jones, Leslie Norris, and R S.

Sets are free and can be obtained by sending a large stamped addressed envelop to the Academi, 3^rd floor, Mount Stuart House, Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff CF10 5FQ.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday July 10, 2010. #155

World Leaders and Vertical Drinkeries

Cardiff is a world leader in a few things, or so it imagines. City of arcades, city of parks, youngest waterfront, greatest number of vertical drinkeries (bars where you stand up rather than sit down), more stag nights than anywhere outside Vilnius. It’s also host to one of the english-speaking world’s most popular poetry contests – the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. Founded way back in the 1980s and offering five thousand pounds prize money for a single 40 lines (max) poem. That’s an amazing sum for a single piece of unpublished verse.

When the competition started, initially on its own and without council help, entrants were stunned at the possibilities of instant wealth. Better odds than the lottery suggested one wannabe, although as there was no lottery back then maybe I imagined that.

The Cardiff Competition is run by the Academi. The idea is that entries are judged with the names of the poets removed. The fact that you may be Simon Armitage will cut no ice. The quality of the work is what gets you through.

The competition’s judges – a panel of three – are usually pretty well-known names. Gillian Clarke, Roger McGough, Ian Macmillan and Les Murray have all been on the team. Entrants come from everywhere. This is an international competition and stuff wings its way into the capital of Wales literally from the whole wide world.

In the days when communication could only be made by letter post things were relatively straightforward. Admittedly some entrants would send by special courier, or turn up themselves bearing their poems with faces full of hope. Fuss was minimal. Understanding of how the thing actually worked was commonplace.

But now we have email and entrants, some of them, and despite a rule which warns that no communication can be entered into, feel the urge to ask things of the organisers on a daily basis. Your competition says that entries should be unpublished. I read mine out at my brother’s wedding. Does this count? When you say that winners will be notified in the spring do you mean March or might you mean April? My poems are only two lines long. Do I still have to pay the same entry fee?

Instant communication has allowed the world’s litterateurs free reign. Emails arrive giving line by line justification for each poem. Explanations, amplifications, attached photos of the object being lovingly described in verse, detail on the circumstance of composition, bulletins on the entrant’s health, requests for free tickets to the ceremony, offers of house exchanges, free holidays, and drink.

As organisers the Academi have learned to ignore the lot.

Giles Goodland, a former Gillian Clark student has just won the 2010 contest. Watch this space for upcoming details of how to enter for 2011.

An earlier version of this posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 3rd July, 2010. #154

How To Make The Job Work

What happens to columnists when they’ve done six hundred and find the place where they started coming round again? If you were Tom Davies then you’d simply carry on. Tom, novelist, raconteur, reporter, investigative hack and perpetual commentator on the vagaries of life in Wales has spilled the beans in his recent Berwyn Mountain Press paperback, The Reporters Tale. Davies was for many years a columnist on this paper. He was a firecracker of a journalist who delivered news and insight as often as he did outrage, indignation and shed loads of damning with faint praise.

His life as a regional journalist making good on the London nationals and then falling from grace and returning to Wales makes for exhilarating reading. The story of his trials and tribulations is almost as engaging as the stuff on which he reported. Davies began work on the Mail in grand company. Among fellow newcomers in 1966 were Geraint Talfan Davies, later Controller of the BBC, Meic Stephens, Director at the Welsh Arts Council and Rhys David, editor of the Financial Times. The Mail, it turns out, has much to answer for.

Tom went on to work on the Guardian, The Daily Express and The Sunday Times

with episodes as a coalman and a Christian evangelist in between. In that way of wayward creatives who are never happy where they are he ended up working as a novelist. There are sixteen fat titles listed on this ink man’s bibliography. One Winter of the Holy Spirit, the story of Evan Roberts and the 1904 revival in Wales is an excellent place to start.

Herbert Williams also did time with Media Wales although it was called the South Wales Echo back then. This much loved seventy something performing poet, novelist and historian can still be found making spirited forays onto the poetry platform. Phil Carradice has pieced together his life in a Writers of Wales series critical handbook. The Williams volume tells the story of an Aberystwyth-born Anglo-Welsh pioneer who tangled with news stories as often as he wove fiction.

Like Tom, Herbert found the place he began, the old Welsh Gazette, creatively stifling. He went to work on the Reading Standard before shuttling back to Wales to scribe for the South Wales Echo, the Wales Tourist Board and then the BBC.

Novels, poetry, histories of trains, stagecoaches and monuments spun out of him.

Try Davies The Ocean, the story of the great industrialist David Davies Llandinam or A Severe Case of Dandruff, his novel about the ravages of TB to see what a class journalist can turn out when he puts his mind to it.

These two are writers who made the job work. Check them out.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 26th June, 2010. #153

The Sounds of Silence Once Again

What kind of silence do writers need? Absolute, according to some. Grahame Davies told me that even a creak on the stairs could foul up one of his couplets. Creativity only works when the world sleeps and there’s a seep of silence through everything. Not so for me, however. Unless I’ve got Miles or Jackson Browne on the player then nothing happens. Things that roar seem to occupy the part of my head that normally deals with distractions leaving the rest free to get on with the business of putting words in order.

Readers seem to find the same thing. Silence notices in libraries are a thing of the past. Bookshops fill their backgrounds with pop. It’s an age of multitasking. Many young people appear able to listen to their iPods, text on their phones and cycle on the pavements all at the same time. Do any also consume paperbacks? Allegedly they do.

Thirty years ago music and poetry rarely occupied the same slice of space time. Mike Jenkins might pull out a harmonica and do a Captain Beefheart impersonation between verses but he was an exception. Mostly music stayed on the radio. Today it’s another world. The new Welsh book has to have music at its launch. Readings without some sort of musical diversion are starting to become rare.

If it’s not Patrick Jones winding his words into his brother Nicky Wire’s sonic slipstream then it’s John Williams reading slices of his forthcoming biography of Shirley Bassey to jazzy riffs from Richard James. Llwyd Owen’s first English title Faith, Hope & Love swam into sight backed by The Gentle Good. Matthew David Scott’s Balloon events in Cardiff always mix music with text. The last time the literary scene was as musically rich as this was when John Tripp recited to the accompaniment of live music at the old Oriel Bookshop. Beer, jazz and literature made a heady mix.

Music journalist Will Hodgkinson’s The Ballad of Britain, an entertainingly written travelogue that follows the author’s treck around the UK in search of folksong, has a fair bit about Wales. Hodgkinson drives west to reach the rain-filled Dyfed triangle in the company of Cate le Bon. The eminent chanteuse is reported as having some disarmingly honest things to say about the Eisteddfod and the Welsh musical tradition. Hodgkinson also records a singing Gruff Rhys wearing noisy wellingtons in the car park of Brecon’s Green Man festival. Our heritage is enriched considerably as a result.

When the title was launched (at Laugharne, where else) the author interspersed his readings with singers. When done the audience were unsure if they should now buy the book or hunt out the accompanying CD. Do both. The book comes from Portico. The CD from Heron. It’s a new world.

Aversion of this blog posting appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 19th June, 2010. #152

How Wide Is This Country?

How big is Wales? Our size makes a good media simile. “A region on Mars about as big as Wales”. “The fast approaching oil slick covers an area about the size of Wales”. “The Ganges Delta, a flood plain about the size of Wales”. Wales, of course, used to be much bigger than it is now. Check the Welsh sounding villages that riddle Herefordshire. Visit Catterick, once named Catraeth, home of the Gododdin, the earliest Welsh text. The whole of the north of Britain lapping into Scotland was once Yr Hen Ogledd, the Old North. Can you imagine how many Gogs there were then?

The size of Wales today, naturally, is readily defined. You can see the country’s shape incorporated into logos, t-shirts and the sides of builders’ vans up and down the land. What’s much harder to discern is the nature of the Welsh who live here (or elsewhere for that matter). How do you become Welsh? Be born here? Have Welsh parents? Speak the tongue. Have an uncle who visited once in 1910?

The more you delve the harder definitions become. For every rule there always turns out to be a valid exception. In the end you conclude, as Prof Tony Curtis once did in his hunt for a definition of poetry, that you are if you say you are. A poem is so because its creator has decided it is. In our massively mobile world so, too, it seems with identity.

At the Wales Book of the Year Prize, awarded for the best creatively written works in English and in Welsh, we’ve gone through a similar process of definition. Things are easy with the Welsh language. If the work is in that tongue then it’s considered. With English things are much tougher.

What should we do with significant writers, born elsewhere, but now entirely at home in Pontypridd and contributing to our culture? Or those who have lived and worked all their lives in Wales but now reside retired in, say, Orkney? How about Tynesiders, with accents to match, who have lived in Wales long enough to master the language and win Eisteddfod prizes?

How wide should our embrace be? As wide as possible. Are we not a welcoming country? Book of the Year stretches the borders. Nikolai Tolstoy, the Anglo-Russian historian and UKIP candidate from the English midlands is in. His book is about the Mabinogi, how much more Welsh can you get than that? Jasmine Donahaye, English, Jewish, but now living in Swansea and the new editor of that eminent Welsh journal, Planet. She’s in. So too is Philip Gross, Cornish, Estonian, but now at the heart of Welsh creativity in Glamorgan.

Watch out for the results. Wales Book of the Year Winners will be announced on 30 June 2010.

An earlier version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday June 12th, 2010. #151

Tweet If You Agree

Technology is wonderful. When it’s shown on TV it’s always in HD, runs at lightning speed and works everytime. Our heroes patch themselves without flicker directly into the city’s CCTV to watch fluid action on the city streets. The protagonist will open his laptop and with instant boot-up will connect via brilliant, colour enhanced and stable Skype to a fellow operator calling in from the Gobi Desert. Action will flow. Voices will sync. When M checks her email she can always remember her password and without a pause her account loads first time.

Workstations do not get viruses. Nothing gets in to take the embarrassing content of C drives and to mail it out, in fragments, to all the operator’s friends. EBook readers work in full sun and their batteries never run down.

On the train along the Welsh border it is not like this. Signal is as fictional as the novel I’m reading. Text messages are about as instant as old time letter post. By the time we reach Ludlow my battery, which I forgot to put on essential overnight charge, is down to 10%. I try checking the weather. The screen stays blank.

In the house it’s just as bad. Here I have to lean against the inside of the front door to get anything. And I don’t live anywhere odd. This is a standard city terrace not surrounded by big buildings. The tallest nearby thing would be a passing double-decker bus. There’s a better signal at the Writers Centre at Ty Newydd in Llanystumdwy. Although you do have to stand on a tree-stump in the top field to get that.

Pre computer the worst thing that ever happened was that through overuse keys on your typewriter stopped working. The poet John Tripp’s machine was famous for having most of the vowels type out of alignment. The lines of his verse wobbled as they sang.

The Oulipo group of writers developed a whole art form based around malfunctioning pre-computer technology. A typewriter which had the letter e missing was seen as a creative challenge. Could a novel be written using only words which avoided this vowel? George Perec’s “A Void” (La Disparition) was the result. “A familiar story of a drunk man waking up with his brain in a whirl”.

Do we do this kind of thing in Wales? The poet J P Ward has a letter to the editor of the latest Poetry Wales in which all the keys of his typer appear to be transposed. “Imno pqrstuvwx” he writes. “y za bcdefgh……” M could probable work out what he’s saying, no bother.

On the train near Newport the phone signal returns. Mark Taylor is the new WMC CEO an incoming tweet tells me. Progress at last.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 5th June, 2010. There is too much text for me to tweet.

The Zen of Epynt

On the cover is a black and white photograph taken somewhere in Epynt. It shows a tree and a sort of corrugated sentry box. Inside the box, on guard against the elements, are two sheep. The pic is by Magnum photographer David Hurn. What does it mean? That’s like asking what the sound is of one hand clapping or the look of your real face before you were born. This is the cover of my latest collection of poetry, Zen Cymru. Hurn’s photograph sums that up. The zen of Welsh life, the unanswerable, the ever present, the one we know.

A friend, picking up this neat slim vol for the first time, told me that the cover was where the book’s strength lay. Support when you need it. The cover is the only part not by me.

The book collects new poems from the past several years. Age, passion, spiritual searching, house fires, hospitals, guns. Poems about hunting down Buddha, Christ’s arrival in Cardiff in 2005 and the title sequence, a pared-down haiku sequence that rolls from Splott to Abereiddi and back.

But that’s certainly not all. There are music poems. Folk singer, late Phil Ochs’s only visit to Cardiff. The trial of Phil Spector. Sightings of Elvis in Merthyr. The grave of Bela Bartok among the bushes in Hungary. On the train from Severn Tunnel Junction with John Tripp and Bob Dylan. I’ve always found music completely enveloping. I could never work without it, never compose without something playing out there, keeping my thoughts on their central zen track.

As expected a number of the poems have Cardiff concerns. Included is the text that makes up the acrostic construct made from the various ways the capital’s name have been spelled through history. The final version is in the paving outside John Lewis. The original of The Ballast Bank, a poem about the city population’s origins, sits carved in rock outside South Wales Police Headquarters on James Street.

Kerdif lists some of the city’s great street characters – Everyone from Peg the Wash to bin-banger Ninjah and Toy Mic Trevor.

Looking at the content with the detachment that distance gives – nothing more I can do now, the thing is out – I can see that there’s much about death and the fight of life against decrepitude. Miro is in there. So is Llywelyn Goch ap Meurig Hen. Unexpectedly for some there’s also a handy index to the Holiday Timeshare Sellers Handbook. Number of times they say it isn’t actually a timeshare – 432. References to luxury – 34. Mentions of rain – 1.

It’s a book that again treads the thin line between tradition and innovation. Just when you think you’ve got it the ground shifts. Then shifts again. Zen Cymru is published by Seren Books.

A version of this post appeared as The Insider in the Western Mail of Saturday 29th May, 2010. Zen Cymru launches at Hay on Tuesday 1st June, 8.00 pm on the Dream Stage where Peter finch will be reading and in conversation with John Goodby.