It's always a revelation when you had assumed for years that everyone was agreed on a certain point and then it turns out not to be so! Being a writer, reader and one-time teacher of writing, I have always assumed that when readers come across the story ending "and then he woke up and found it had all been a dream", they do what I would, ie hurl the book across the room, curse the author for wasting their time and cross him/her off their reading list. Even if - especially if - I have enjoyed the story up to then, I feel cheated by the fact that nothing has changed, indeed nothing has actually happened and my time and emotions have been engaged to no purpose.

So it's a surprise, in a facebook discussion of John Masefield's The Box of Delights, an otherwise fine children's book which pulls this unworthy stunt in the last sentence, to find not just people who can forgive this because they like the book otherwise, but some who like this ending anyway. It has of course been taboo with writing gurus for years, but that's not just because of fashions in teaching, rather it's because this ending is perceived as so unpopular with readers as to be a commercial killer. I have always assumed indeed that editors and publishers have the same attitude to it, on the same grounds, but am I wrong there? (Re Alice in Wonderland, btw, yes, it has that ending, but (a) that doesn't make it right and (b) the device was at least a great deal newer then.)

EDIT: See steepholm's comment below for a link to a fascinating fact i didn't know about the ending of Masefield's book...

Can we figure out how to do a poll, perchance?

Poll #1485330 It Was All A Dream
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

"It was all a dream" endings are

Here's a disheartening article.

Now of course print journalists are in the business of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi about the Beeb, but the “Safeguarding Trust factual drama interactive module” can hardly have been invented by the paper, and the idea of providing an established writer with the kindly advice: “Don’t oversimplify the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies’ ... the truth is rarely as cut and dried as this” and “tone of voice and facial expression can significantly alter what an audience infers about a character” is insulting in the extreme - if they really think he might not know that, then they shouldn't be employing him.

Since the BBC depends on public money, it does have to think twice before gratuitously offending licence-paying members of the public. But surely that is what editors are for, and there are also established remedies in place for aggrieved individuals. Ideally, an editor on Mock the Week, which doesn't go out live, would have cut Frankie Boyle's uncharacteristically silly and unfunny remarks about Rebecca Adlington; the man can be cripplingly funny but like most great comics he works on the edge and sometimes crosses it. Or Adlington could have complained, though in fact maintaining an attitude of dignity and ignoring the whole thing seems to have worked quite well.

But giving offence can be a perfectly legitimate thing for a broadcaster to do and some of the examples given here are ludicrous. Most worrying is the concentration on "factual drama", ie that based on real life, and the apparent inability of programme-makers to understand the use fiction habitually makes of real life:

Hugh Bonneville, the actor who starred alongside Julie Walters in BBC2’s Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story, said it was time to return to common sense. “I now detect a creeping self-censorship in the television scripts I am given to read,” he said. “I remember in the light of the Queengate affair the producer of the Mary Whitehouse programme saying the compliance unit wanted him to go through the script pointing out which bits actually happened and which were dramatic invention.

“Whatever next? Do you put up a warning at the beginning of the programme telling the audience that Julie Walters is not Mary Whitehouse?”

One does wonder what warnings will encumber the screen if the BBC ever re-dramatise Richard III. Indeed, why weren't we warned when watching The Tudors that Henry, by the time he was cavorting with Katherine Howard, looked nothing like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, more's the pity?

Becoming Merlin on the BBC Wales site, part of a series of retelling of myths for children. I wish they had let her read it, but still, better than nowt. Took a while to load for me, but it's interactive and on the last pages you can make the sun do things....

I thought about joining the Facebook group for Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Then I thought: why would I want to read poetry simply because it was "innovative"? Not that it might not also be good and/or enjoyable; it might and it might not, but whether it is will have damn all to do with how "innovative" it is or isn't.

I can see why someone might buy an anthology of poetry with a particular subject matter - cat poems, travel poems - if that's what turns them on. I don't, myself, usually, but I do avoid certain subject matter, which comes to the same thing. It's hard to convince me that I'll enjoy collections about Lerve or domesticity - I didn't buy Newborn or Rapture, (though in the latter case it was because I had browsed it in the shop and could already name several reasons I disliked it).

I can see too why you'd buy an anthology of poems from a particular time or situation - I've a favourite, Voices of Silence: the Alternative Book of WW1 Poetry ed Vivien Noakes. Or even from a particular place at some time in the past. I'm less convinced by place-based contemporary anthologies, because we are so mobile these days that few poets who happen to live in the same place really have much in common.

I'm still less convinced by gender-based anthologies. I don't feel I necessarily have anything in common with X and Y just because we share the same reproductive equipment; I don't write with that. It's around this time that I start thinking of granfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut's name in Cat's Cradle for artificial groupings that don't depend on any real likeness or commonality; that are, as he puts it, "meaningless in terms of the way God gets things done". In these he includes various companies, hobby groups, political parties and any nation, anytime, anywhere, and defines them in a verse:

If you wish to study a granfalloon,
Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.

A lot of poetry groupings are granfalloons. The late Norman MacCaig (a lovely man) once observed at a reading in Cardiff that the only division that really mattered in poetry was the one between good and bad, enjoyable and excruciating, and unfortunately it's the very one that partly eludes definition because enjoyment is so personal - hell, I've met people who enjoyed what seemed to me the most staggering rubbish, and none of my poet friends can figure out what it is about "Sohrab and Rustum" that reduces me to a happy if wet dishrag. If someone could only invent a Journal of British and Irish Enjoyable Poetry and guarantee that their taste matched mine...

If you're the same kind of nosy blighter that I am, you are going to love this website.It is, simply, texts and transcripts of people's letters, from all periods and places. Like a 9th-century Chinese template apology for drunkenness, issued to civil servants, who must have been rather ill-disciplined in those days:

Yesterday, having drunk too much, I was intoxicated as to pass all bounds; but none of the rude and coarse language I used was uttered in a conscious state. The next morning, after hearing others speak on the subject, I realised what had happened, whereupon I was overwhelmed with confusion and ready to sink into the earth with shame.

Or Thomas Hampton, teenager, writing in Australia in 1922 to the Immigration Dept to ask for his brother to join him, original spelling preserved:
Dear Sir

Mr Poysden as agreed to help me in getting my brother to Australia but he thinks it would be best for me to fill in nomination papers as I know more about my brother than he does. My brother is at present in the National Childrens Orphanage in Bramhope Leeds Yorks we have no parents and I (?) should like to get him near me. Mr Poysden has agreed to make a home here until he is old enough to work at least. I am getting on well here. I have been driving a team since the day I arrived I am now driving an Harvester and I have had a rise in my wages. I think this is a fine country.

Yours faithfully

J E Hampton

PS I am not to sure about my brothers age but I think he is 12 on the 29th of this month.

Wah. I foresee that I shall waste aeons on this site. Must be some potential poems in it though. Thanks to my friend Gino Rossetti for the link.

Will Self, in an article in today's Guardian on Roald Dahl, has this quote:

I was once with Martin Amis when he was asked if he'd ever consider writing a children's book. He thought for a few moments before drawling: "I might . . . if I had brain damage."

No wonder I've always found Amis a dull author! Indeed he's a dullard full stop, if he seriously imagines you need less ability to write for the world's most discerning and least forgiving audience. When, years ago, I was reading the first page of some Amis on which bugger all of any interest appeared to be going on, I ploughed on with it in case it got better, as adults do (it didn't). A child, faced with the same lack of any narrative hook, would have thrown the book across the room and gone in search of something more interesting, an expedient I only reached after several more pages. Self, by the sound of him, would consider it, but then he's a far sparkier, more open-minded and more surprising author.

When I taught creative writing, I'd sometimes have first years ask advice on what to study in the second year. This was when children's writing kicked in (too advanced for first years, see) and I'd always say, by all means have a go at it if the craft fascinates you, just don't, whatever you do, opt for it because you're struggling with writing for adults and think this'll be easier, cos it isn't.

In the Guardian's current series of fairytale booklets, A S Byatt describes Hans Andersen as an "emotional terrorist" who "writes to hurt". She means both as compliments; she admires him greatly.

As do I, and my first thought on reading this description was that it provided a plausible reason for the devotion of a chronic angst-cum-h/c fan like myself. But on reflection, I'm not quite sure about it. ( more behind cut )

- ones I either like or have been influenced by:

Louise Glück
Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg
Karen Annesen
Anne Berkeley
Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill - admittedly for a single poem, that we know of, but what a poem...
Sappho - cliché choice but what would you; the woman's good.
Christine de Pizan
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
U A Fanthorpe - much missed.
Rosie Shepperd

- so here's a poem by my friend Paul Yandle which does something I like in poems: lulls and then jolts slightly. His website, with more poems, is here

Shell


'The average garden snail has a top speed of 0.03 mph.'

It took him a good ten minutes
to cross the first patio slab
and so he was obviously not in any rush
to reach the small patch of lawn
that lies outside the kitchen window.

You know –
I thought as I watched him heading
towards the tall grass –
if you were going your top speed
you could have been there by now,

and I would not be watching from this chair
your steady, soothing progress,
but making that phone call to my father,
whose own father died exactly ten years ago today.

I would just be dialling his number
as you settled in your shell.

Paul Yandle

There's an article in the current issue of The Author (the magazine of the Society of Authors) which at first sight looks like bad news for those wishing to sell books... but I'm not so sure. It's by lifelong author Roger Williams, who like most lifelong authors wasn't making oodles of money and who had decided to seek "a market that would drive sales". He devised a cunning plan (well, I expect it seemed so at the time) to write a book of fact-based short stories all set in the 200 or so hotels around the world that happen to be called the Hotel Bristol. The idea was to sell them direct to the hotels to put with the Gideon bibles as light reading. He self-published High Times at the Hotel Bristol, at a cost of about 60p a copy for 2000 copies. That meant he didn't have a publisher's marketing dept to rely on. But I doubt any publisher would have gone the length he did in marketing.

He sent copies to the local press and targeted the city of Bristol. The local Waterstones and Blackwells took copies, as did the tourist office, it went up on Amazon and he went on local radio (BBC) to talk about it.

This resulted in some sales in the city but not one outside (he knew, as all orders came to him). Then the Mail on Sunday named it their travel book of the week. That brought a grand total of one new order. However this was better than the result of exposure on Radio 4 (he'd sent a copy to the producer of Excess Baggage; again classic author marketing strategy but not a single order resulted.

So he went online - set up blogs, put chapters online, made podcasts. He reports "barely a sale" as a result. Then his luck seemed to turn - the Wall Street Journal picked up on it and he got 29 column inches and a mugshot in both the US and European editions. Total extra sales? One.

So where's the ray of light for writers in this sad story? I think there might be two. One: before you market your idea you must have it, and if it's a dud it'll be a dud however good you are at the marketing. I think a collection of stories that just happen to take place at various hotels called Bristol was just not a very fascinating idea to start with. Neither do I see why the inhabitants of Bristol should have been likely to buy it just because it name-checked their city. (I do think he might have done better to home in on cities outside the UK called Bristol; "exiles" tend to have a more sentimental attachment to old-country names etc than those of us who live there).

And the other thing that's interesting is that he chose the idea not because it fascinated him but because he thought it would sell. The fact that it didn't suggests that at least for writers, who tend anyway not to know much about what sells and why, it might be better to write what pleases them, as well as they can, and hope it also pleases others. Do the marketing afterwards, by all means, but don't create your product with marketing principally in mind; it may work for beans but on this showing at least, it doesn't for books.

I used to have a random poem generator. Actually it still exists, over here at Geocities but it won't for much longer, because Geocities goes down the tubes on 26th October. I moved my site ages ago, in fact it's been in two incarnations since then, but few hosts can cope with javascript as Geocities, for all its faults, did.

I made it because I wanted to see if I could, really. I don't write javascript, but an intelligent man adapts; I had a sample generator and it struck me that with a basic knowledge of html it should be possible to work out which was the javascript and which the actual bits of fixed and random text, and insert one's own in place of this text, which worked fine. It was a very long job actually thinking up all the bits of text, putting them in and then changing ones that didn't work well in practice.

After that, however, one had only to hit reload to bring up half a dozen or so new lines of more-or-less sense. I'd say six out of ten were duds, another three had lines worth thinking about and the tenth would be really interesting. Sometimes images would accidentally work together, sometimes I'd get a contradiction, like the sun shining at night, that could actually be more interesting and that I'd maybe not have thought of by other means. What I liked about it was that it'd sometimes kick-start poems for me when ordinary methods didn't, yet because I'd created all the text in the generator, any poem that came out of it was still All My Own Work.

Anyone who fancies doing this as an aid to composition, and has somewhere to host it online, can right-click on the generator page, hit View Source and copy the script when it comes up, so they can then alter the relevant text. I've kept the script too, and also some of the results that came up lately. The words in bold in the first example are the only fixed text, all else was random. As you can see, you don't get masterpieces out of it; you get some odd juxtapositions of words and images that just might set something off.
( examples behind cut )

I’ve blogged before about analysis of poems and how they work, and how some love it while others avoid it. Here’s another dip into the same pool, occasioned by a Facebook discussion of the way a poem featured on Woman’s Hour had given rise to wide discussion, all, apparently, centred on the issues it raised, rather than on the way the poet used language. Someone defended the right of readers not to care about the way a writer uses language, but instead to value a poem solely for what it does to their emotions, and of course they do have that right. Indeed you could argue that the better a poem, or any writing, is, the less its craft should be noticed by the reader, just as you don’t expect to see the scaffolding once the roof’s up.
( But... )

Am doing some readings while down in Cardiff. (Actually threee, but the middle one isn't, as far as I know, open to anyone but the members of the Pontypridd WI, so if you join by next Wednesday...)

The one I've just done was in Chepstow for Poetry on the Border, with Wendy Cope, and, aside from being enjoyable, was notable for there being an unnerving number of poets in the audience, and good poets too - I counted Rosie Bailey, Anne Cluysenaar, Gwyneth Lewis and Ann Drysdale that I actually got to speak to, and I think there were others. That sort of audience really makes you feel you need to raise your game! But all must have gone well, because we sold books. I'm not sure the good citizens of Chepstow could quite give the erudite and noble inhabitants of Haverfordwest a run for their money, but they certainly compared favourably with most venues. (Haverfordwest is special; if you're a writer and ever get invited to read at Haverfordwest Library, go at all costs and take a shedload of books along to sell.)

Next (public) stop is Wednesday 16th September, 6.30pm: reading at Waterstones, The Hayes, Cardiff, to launch my Later Selected Poems (a title that seems to imply I'm a little more dead than when the last one came out). If anyone's localish, do come!

Here's the world's current smallest cinema, the famous bus shelter on Unst in Shetland, specially adapted for the Shetland film festival,

and Masks, the film which opened the festival, made by a group of young people called Maddrim as a sort of metaphor for drug abuse. It's set in the main street of our metropolis, Lerwick, Commercial Street, though they must have closed it temporarily to get it so empty, and you might need to know there is a theatrical costume shop in said street.

Went south on Tuesday, to the Edinburgh Book Festival. I'd won third prize in the Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition (which, obviously, I'd entered because it was named after the UK's greatest living poet) and I was there along with the other prizewinners to read the poem and collect the dosh. So that meant flying down first thing in the morning (the plane leaves at 7, an early start mitigated only by the fact that they give you rather yummy pastries for breakfast courtesy of Sumburgh Hotel Catering) and spent the day in Edinburgh, mostly at the festival itself in Charlotte Square Gardens. The venue was tents-in-a-square, not unlike Hay, and probably with the same duckboards, which was fortunate as it had been very wet, though the day I was there the sun shone. But it's a much more bookish festival than Hay, more proper books and far fewer celeb autobiographies. They have a yurt for the artists, which was very cosy though sadly lacking in baby goats and camels. However, the place I stayed at had a lovely cat called Peter, black, long-haired with eyes like orange saucers, so I did get an animal-petting fix.

Met some nice people I already knew, like Polly Clark, one I knew online (the excellent and talented verdandiweaves) and some totally new to me - Paul Batchelor, Emily Hasler, David Kinloch - who was running the event and was quite unnecessarily worried it would all go pear-shaped; in fact it ran like clockwork and ended on time, which is hard to achieve with poets. And a bunch of people at the reception afterwards whose names, as usual, I didn't catch and very much wish I had - I don't hear well in crowds. So if you were one of them and happen to read this, please drop a comment!

My poem is behind the cut, for anyone who's interested. It didn't have the epigraph when I entered it, because of the anonymity rule, but I've restored it now because it's important to me. There's a photo of the event at the competition site linked above, and all the prizewinning poems are also up there.

( Travelling with Ashes )

(and no, the answer isn't che sera, sera, third on my list of most hated songs). It's a writer thing.)

If I call someone a German poet, or a French novelist, I tend to mean someone who writes poems in the German language, or novels in the French language. The person in question might actually hold a Swiss or Canadian passport, but by and large I don't think birth nationality has anything like the impact on a person's writing that language does; we do not think of Joseph Conrad as a Polish writer. In that sense I am and will always be an English writer, though I'd probably phrase it a writer in English, because my reaction to "are you English?" would always be "no, I'm bloody not!"

Having said that, where you live, whether out of choice or necessity, is always going to affect your writing if only by osmosis. It's possible that one's sense of heredity affects it too, though myself I don't think that can go farther back than your own parents and grandparents, who will pass on their sense of who they are to you. And if you never actually go the length of travelling to your supposed roots, I'm not sure they really exist; I've met so many people who professed to be proud of their Irish or Welsh descent and yet had never set foot in the places concerned. That's at best a sentimental pseudo-attachment. But environment, whether chosen or compelled, is different.

I am by birth half Welsh, half Irish if you go by heredity, all Welsh if you go by environment, given that my mother, though wholly Irish by descent, was born and brought up in Wales. I wasn't born in Wales but I've been living, writing and publishing in Wales for 40 years and calling myself a Welsh writer. Being called one too, by most though not all -for some, writing in English is enough to disqualify you from the title, others would contend you needed to be born here and/or have the matter of Wales as the main concern of your writing; others would say you need to live and publish here while some few would include anyone born here but living elsewhere and publishing with a non-Welsh house.

"Living and publishing in Wales", which applies to me, works for most though; it does for instance qualify you for Welsh writing awards. My friend Matthew Francis the poet, who moved from Winchester, was surprised to find he at once qualified as a Welsh poet, rather in the way that football players with an Irish great-uncle used to find Jack Charlton on the phone. (At the time it might have seemed a bit daft; these days, Matthew having been some years in Aberystwyth, it seems natural). One could of course reject any kind of localism and just be A Writer, but the administrative mechanics of the trade don't really work like that; where you live determines which arts body hands out the dosh for one thing. And people do like to have a pigeonhole to put you in.

So what if you move? At the moment I'm shuttling between Cardiff and Shetland, but from next year, though for family reasons involving a Very Old Cat, I will still have a Cardiff address as well, I'll be living in Shetland and visiting Cardiff. What am I then: a Shetland poet, a deracinated Welsh poet? If someone's work takes him from Birmingham to Swansea to Glasgow he can't be an English, Welsh and Scottish poet by turns, can he? How long does it take to become something, or stop being something?

Oddly enough I've always been fascinated by deracination and changing one's identity, and I know a lot of my friends, including several writers, have done it. Any views on the above?

Thought I'd post a freebie from the Later Selected



- ( behind cut )

And you can find another of my wallpaper samples at Michelle McGrane's Peony Moon blog here. I'm afraid it's another fatality, but what would you? It's what turns us poets on...

Arriving is always the same sweet mix of promises.
Leaving, well, you never know a person or a place
until you leave.
("Carl's Bar and Grill")
( more )

Salt's website is here

- and this is how the cover finally came out; I haven't scanned it in yet but the thumbnail version from Seren's website shows what I think is the one change, a sort of fade-effect on the words which I quite like.




Now we're trying to find an official launch date and a venue that costs sixpence-halfpenny - you'd think places would be reasonable, in these hard times, but it ain't necessarily so, apparently.

Haven't found any typos yet though I did find one factual error in the back cover blurb that someone, namely me, should have picked up on. Am hoping nobody will notice.

The Guardian book blog discussion on The Damned United took an interesting turn when Johnny Giles unexpectedly joined in, somewhat bitter about having been used as a character in an RPF. I could understand his point of view, to some extent, but then someone else posted this:

It's a prime example of "fan fiction" really, and as such leaves that uncomfortable taste in the mouth whenever the facts are glibly massaged and scenes and conversations written to fit a self-serving tale.

- and that "self-serving" got so far up my nose that I felt obliged to jump in and point out that fan fiction is no different from any other kind of fiction in not feeling constrained to stick to the bare facts. I daresay I shall regret it...