Making A Lot Of Noise

The Formation of Literature Wales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But What Does It Do?

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

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

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

How Did We Get Here From There?

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

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

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

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

Where Are The Enemies?

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

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

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

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

What Next?

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

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

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

Annwyl Syr, my last book appeared in 1965

but I have a backyard full of cherry blossom

can I join?

looked up cherry blossom in

the dictionary

not there

big new Wales a thousand flowers

hope and money

still as hard as ever

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

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

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The Bones of Blake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blake white bone
Clare white bone
Gone white bone

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

Second Class In Your Own Country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low Life Art Stuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elvis - Dylan Thomas churning out Patience Strong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody Knows the Location of Ocean Way

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

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

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

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

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

Are maps back? They just well might be.

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

Talking

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

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

All this is extremely laudable but it is hardly art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Blink. Write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s that last item that kept me going.

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

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

#201

How Much Future Is There?

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

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

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

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

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

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

#200