Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

It Was All A (Bad) Dream

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:12:05 GMT

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?

View Poll: It Was All A Dream

An unwanted writing course

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:06:09 GMT

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?

Catherine Fisher story online

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:37:28 GMT

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....

Dept of Granfalloons

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:07:33 GMT

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...

Letters of Note

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:15:08 GMT

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.

Well, that explains a lot

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:18:41 GMT

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.

Andersen the Angst King

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:18:22 GMT

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.

One problem with it is the need to keep in mind that what seems like a sad ending to us may not have been so to him. Byatt cites The Little Mermaid, in which, despite her suffering, the mermaid does not gain her prince – "in the Grimms' bounded and wonderful world, she would have gained her prince". Well, maybe, but if you read the story carefully, it becomes clear that her love for the prince is secondary: what she really wants is an immortal soul, which she can gain by marrying a human. At the end of the story she has a hope of gaining it in another way, and as far as Andersen's concerned, that is a happy ending. (It's even, in a way, a proto-feminist ending, for she is offered the hope of gaining her dream by her own efforts, via "good deeds" rather than simply marrying it.)

Most people have had their emotional withers wrung by some story of Andersen's in childhood. I can't say I was massively moved by the mermaid myself, mainly because I thought the prince a dull fellow not worth suffering for, especially when you could be having high old times in a palace under the sea, which sounded far more fun. My emotional nemesis, or one of them, was the Little Match Girl, dying of hypothermia on New Year's Eve. And that of course is also a happy ending in Andersen's terms; she goes to heaven with her dead, but loving, grandmother, who appears to her in a vision. You or I, reading as adults, would say she was hallucinating with cold and hunger. As a child I didn't think that; I thought it was All True, but the promise of heaven at the end was no comfort at all, which is interesting. I wasn't brought up as an atheist (not as a churchgoer either, but I didn't actually conclude there was no such place until well after I read Andersen). Yet what got through to me in the story's ending was the death, not the resurrection, which could in no way mitigate it.

Andersen certainly does hurt, more than most other authors children are liable to encounter, but I'm not sure he writes to hurt, so much as to convey what hurt feels like and solicit sympathy for it. I suppose in his time there really were children begging and selling matches on the streets of Copenhagen, and if one person hurrying home stopped and took some notice of one because they'd read this story, I daresay he'd have felt vindicated; ditto if some misfit child took courage from what happened to the ugly duckling. Usually though, there is no such simple correlation: there is pain, there is loneliness and loss, and sometimes people make things better by responding to it with understanding and sometimes the splinter of ice in the heart prevents that. It is tears, in the Snow Queen, that melt the splinter and restore Kay to full humanity, and in The Girl who Trod on a Loaf it is sympathy from someone who hears Inga's story that frees her from hell. I think Andersen must have believed that the sharing of grief had some redemptive power. It's interesting that he solicits, and gets, this sympathy not just for people but also for non-human or inanimate characters like the Fir Tree and the Tin Soldier, cherished and then abandoned.

You could argue that he is anthropomorphising, in that he gives them feelings they can't have had, but I think it's less that he projects humanity on to them and more that he sees himself in them. As Byatt points out, he is the duckling, the tin soldier, the fir tree, to a massive extent; he inhabits whatever is alienated or rejected as if it were his natural home. He writes, I think, out of hurt, a territory in which he felt very much at home, in an attempt to provide a map of it to readers for whom it is a foreign country.

Name ten women poets? Eeeezy....

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:57:50 GMT

- 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

National Poetry Day

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:01:40 GMT

- 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

Marketing books

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:32:05 GMT

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.

Cheating's quicker

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:02:02 GMT

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.

shifting and awake
blurring at the edges
with nothing to lose
At how many harbours
did the victim
take comfort
remembering old times

wavering and seeking
fading slowly
with any wind that blows
How many times
did our neighbour
ask his way
and never catch up

wary and nameless
fading slowly
with empty hands
For whose sake
did the other
come singing
when the world was new

flickering and unseeing
trying to recall
with something missing
In how many places
did the witness
go without luggage
all through his life

scared and restless
across the water
with any wind that blows
Out of whose dream
did the god
leave his home
where he knew no-one

wary and altered
not understanding
with no words left
Where in the end
did the lost man
look for love
talking to himself

penniless and seeking
blurring at the edges
with sun on his face
Under what skies
did the refugee
unlearn his past
and miss his turning

Back to the analyst's couch

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:55:16 GMT

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.

… most of the readers I have met in the course of my former employment (teaching creative writing at university) also wanted to be writers, as do most of the folk I meet at poetry readings –this is why open mic sessions were invented. With students too, you got this "I don’t want to do analysis, that just ruins the magic" attitude, but they didn’t get the option; it was part of the course. And many of them, encouraged at school to concentrate on what the writing said and what feelings it aroused in them, were at sea when asked to write about how it actually worked. I recall asking a group of first years how they thought the writer of a story had managed to persuade them to sympathise with the criminal instead of the policeman. No ideas. I then got them to think about the use of the criminal as the point-of-view character and how hard it actually is to see through someone’s eyes and not feel in some way on their side. One lad’s mouth dropped open: "Do you mean she did that on purpose?" It was very much news to them that writers were such cunning so-and-sos; that they were in the business of manipulating the readers' reactions and would choose things like tense, point-of-view, location etc, with that in mind. Now, as fledgling writers it was worth a lot to them to realise that they too could do that sort of thing, but I think it's also worth something to non-writing readers to be aware of it. After all, it isn't only writers of fiction who daily manipulate others' emotions and beliefs by means of language.

There's part of a poem here by David Harsent, "The Goodwife's Tale", which I've always found very moving. Because of "the issues"; because it talks about women raped in war? I don't think so. I've read plenty of factual accounts of that without thinking much more than "what a shame". What does it in this poem is Harsent's use of negation and repetition in the voice that speaks the poem, the woman's constant refrain of "they touched her, they didn't touch me, I wasn't touched" making it clear she was, very much so, but is in denial about it (for the blogger is surely wrong when he says the poem "is spoken by a woman who has escaped rape"). The fractured, fragile syntax helps too; it's all part of the carefully constructed voice that makes this poem happen to a person into whose skin you could imagine yourself.

Now sure, subject matter also counts; it's difficult to get massively involved in the most beautiful writing if it doesn't seem to be about anything that matters much. But if style alone won't do it, neither will subject matter, however cutting-edge and issue-laden; if Harsent's poem were linguistically on the "war is bad and you shouldn't rape people" level, it could be as true and "relevant" as it likes, it would still make no impact. And whatever readers think they are reacting to in the poem, IMO it's basically his skill that is working their feelings. One might say, again, that this doesn't matter to the reader, who just wants his or her emotional withers wrung and doesn't care how it's done, but here's where I'd disagree, not from my experience as a writer but as a reader, of fan fiction. I like the angsty stuff, and I know who can give me my fix, but because I also know how they're doing it, I have read and enjoyed work I would never have otherwise thought of, simply because I can trust such and such a writer to deliver.

That happens in litfic too, but not always. Sometimes an innate reader prejudice is very hard to shift, and we all have them. I always feel guilty when I decide not to buy or read a book because the subject matter doesn't appeal; I didn't read Kate Clanchy's Newborn because I didn't fancy an entire collection about early motherhood (been there, done it). But I know that as a writer I would want the chance to convince the reader by craft, so I should really try to overcome such reactions. Too many books, too little time…

One reading down, one to go...

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:21:58 GMT

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!

Small cinema and interesting film

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:00:02 GMT

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.

A grand day out in Edinburgh

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:45:41 GMT

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
i.m. John Richard Pugh, 1921-2008

On the outskirts of town, we passed a dead factory,
windows all gone and the light pouring through,
airy and bright, a red-brick filigree.

At a disused halt, the edge of the platform
had blurred back to grass, and willowherb grew
through gaps in the flags and the crumbling asphalt.

And crossing the bridge, the stretches of mudflat
shone like lead sheets as the tide withdrew,
not looking as if it were planning a comeback

to float the bleached boat, an empty ribcage,
bones standing out as old men's do
when appetite's gone and flesh is wreckage.

Rust in the scrapyard was engraving
on heaps of silver and black and blue
some cryptic message to do with leaving,

and sunlight’s morse sent answering flashes
off broken windscreens, a code he once knew.
Ciphers read clear, when you travel with ashes.

Nationality of writers: what will I be?

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:33:36 GMT

(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?

Free samples!

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:06:37 GMT

Thought I'd post a freebie from the Later Selected

-

Times Like Places

There are times like places: there is weather
the shape of moments. Dark afternoons
by a fire are Craster in the rain
and a pub they happened on, unlooked-for
and welcoming, while a North Sea gale
spat spume at the rattling windows.

And most August middays can take him
to the village in Sachsen-Anhalt,
its windows shuttered against the sun
and a hen sleeping in the dusty road,
the day they picked cherries in a garden
so quiet, they could hear each other breathe.

Nor can he ever be on a ferry,
looking back at a boat's wake, and not think
of the still, glassy morning off the Hook,
when it dawned on him they didn't talk
in sentences any more: didn't need to,
each knowing what the other would say.

The worst was Aberdeen, when they walked
the length of Union Street not speaking,
choking up, glancing sideways at each other,
but never at the same time. Black cats
and windy bridges bring it all back,
eyes stinging. Yet even this memory

is dear to him, now that no place or weather
or time of day can happen to them both.
On clear winter nights, he scans the sky
for Orion's three-starred belt, remembering
whose arms warmed him, the cold night
he first saw it, who told him its name.

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...

In Transit; review of How to Fall by Karen Annesen (Salt 2009)

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:42:01 GMT

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")

Karen Annesen, a poet born in one country, living in another and seemingly travelling in as many more as she can manage, chooses a quote from Gaston Bachelard to preface this collection: "Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads." It's extremely apposite, given the number of poems here which are on the road from one place to another, set in railway stations, trains, roadside cafés, hotels, places where people are in transit or, at best, temporarily settled and still aware of living in a transient moment:

This seems like a return-
the taste of salt in the air
tells your bones this is home.
There are six more days.
("Driving Cornwall")

People reading in that Eng Lit way and "looking for the symbolism" sometimes automatically assume that everything is code for relationships and that physical journeys are symbolic of emotional ones, but it isn't really as simple as that. It's more a natural association: at the most literal level, people who travel a lot do tend to have more transient relationships, and indeed the break-up of a relationship can itself set one travelling.

People on the move also hear a lot of fragmentary conversations and witness decontextualized acts that hint at immense back-stories. Annesen is very good at tip-of-the-iceberg poems which are haunted by the seven-eighths of the story we shall never know, like the past of the man in "Domestic Fire". Sometimes the back-story, so delicately hinted at, can be partly guessed, as when the woman in "Via London", waiting at a station, notices passing lives;

I blink hard to forget the blue-eyed baby
gliding by in her pram.

But often, questions like how things got to this particular point remain unanswered, and the poems are the more universal and rich in possibility for that. The strange, dreamlike journey of "An Error of Timing" resonates as if it were one's own:

Turn back
ask directions of the man
selling melons
at the side of the road.
He doesn't know,
but says the melons are ripe.
The woman with the baby
signs to keep going
until you reach the sea.

Annesen is a quiet user of language, lucid rather than pyrotechnic; her language often achieves a terrific stillness and intensity that stays in the mind. How quietly, and memorably, extreme emotion is conveyed at the end of "Stirring":

A wooden table lies
between them and if his hands

would only halfway cross it,
her clothes might find their way to grass.

In her fingers, the petal
bruises now to mauve.

And how the choice of a detail and an image, in "Here, Now", creates the sense of an emigré assimilating into a new culture:

Gardens I called yards
the pushing at the door
opening
only when I stopped.

One thing that generally anchors the previously rootless, both emotionally and physically, is parenthood. But Annesen's poem to her daughter, "Filling Mia", is not so anchored that she has forgotten the essential transience of things. It is an injunction to live in the moment, to keep and save moments against the future (that cherry on the cover is, amongst other things, a good reminder that "carpe diem" does not mean seize the day, but pluck it, like a fruit), and its ending carries the same barb as that of "Driving Cornwall":

Open your mouth,
let us fill you
with a walk along the quay,
fifty sailboats tipping their sails,
crabs in a bucket,
cakes by the beach at the caravan café.

There are hungers coming.
These days will always be there
jumbled together –
crabs and skies and sails
and I will not.

This collection is cumulative in its effect; the voice grows stronger and more characteristic the more you read. Bernard O'Donoghue, on the back cover, calls her a poet of the very first order, and he isn't wrong.

Salt's website is here

Well, it's out

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:37:43 GMT

- 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.

Damn, why do we get involved?

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:31:36 GMT

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...

Unst diary 2

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:14:17 GMT

June 21st

Walked to Norwick.
This is the second most northerly beach in the British Isles (the most northerly is Skaw, but that isn't as pretty). Norwick is in a very small agricultural settlement in a coastal valley and is absurdly peaceful. I defy anyone not to feel laid-back there. It's also the name of a hymn tune, composed by a minister who was living there at the time. Apparently most of those who sing it think it's a misprint for Norwich. Ah well.

There was a tame lamb there, in a field by the roadside, who baaed loudly to tell us he wanted chatting to and feeding some clover. You meet a lot of these in spring and summer.

As you see, we got around to uploading some photos. They're in the gallery Shetland 2009. The wayside flowers I mentioned in the last instalment are among them.

And it was the longest day. Unst is far north enough that at that time of year, the sun doesn't set; it passes across the north still visible. This feels really weird to me, because of the shorthand they tell you at school; the sun is never in the north, night is dark, etc etc. I was trying to figure out the direction I was headed in and getting it wrong, because I was automatically thinking that's the sun so it must be the west.... not at midnight it wasn't!

Not

This is what doesn't happen:
near midnight, and the Sun
resplendent, having passed
unsetting through the west,
proceeds across the north,
unmaking, in his path,
dark and direction, all
we thought we learned at school.

Livin' in the shaddah of the bomb: Review of Anne Berkeley’s The Men From Praga (Salt 2009)

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:32:25 GMT

Back in the 60s there was, in the BBC Radio comedy series Round the Horne, a character called Michael Bane, a skit on M. Caine, played by Hugh Paddick (trust me, it’s possible) who would complain, in thick cockney, of the futility of "livin’ in the shaddah of the bomb".

Born in 1950, I too grew up in the shaddah of the bomb, and until I read this book, I didn't realise how little documented that particular childhood was in poetry, nor how strange it must seem to those who have not had to seriously wonder, as children, if someone would press a red button and end the world. "I lived in fear of the Bomb" (from "Yellow Sun, Green Grass") is literally true for children of the Cold War; not all the time, nor to the exclusion of the normal business of childhood, but it was a real fear and has surfaced surprisingly seldom in poetry. And when it does, it generally comes from the side of protest, from those who were busy marching with CND symbols and negotiating with their mothers for posters of Castro on the bedroom wall (guilty, m'lud). But the father of this book's protagonist was aircrew, one of those for whom the bomb signified strength and safety, as the father himself, though often absent at work, does for the child, so her attitude is interestingly conflicted ("Heaven'd/weep at what my father knew" ("Nav Rad").

In the first half, titled "Co-ordinates", we are mostly in the mind and voice of this child, playing with cap-guns and working out ways to kill the local bully while her elders test more deadly weapons. Being a child, her fear of rats in the basement is always more urgent than the shaddah of the bomb, yet adult concerns leach through into the child's world of let's-pretend:

When the weather clears
I will look for letters
in the hollow
of the old conker tree

Sputnik will track me
so I wear a big hat
to hide my face
from the man-made moon.
("Russkis")

The child's-eye view is sharply observed. Readers who are old enough will find many rueful reminiscences, like the intolerance of fifties adults for anything they considered slang ("you're not supposed to say bike/ it's bicycle", from "My Mother's Migraines"), while readers of any generation could react to the child's whole-body shock on first hearing her father's plane take off close by ("Olympus Mk 301")

I lay on the ground and howled.
The grass itself was shaking in the awful wind.

The adult response to this exhibition of terror, as far as the child can recall, is more or less what one would expect at the time ("Was I smacked? I expect so") and the remembering child is philosophical about it in a very fifties way which comes as something of a relief after some of the obsessively self-pitying child's eye poems of recent decades. It was what parents did at the time; you could whinge on about it in poem after poem, or you could just grow up.

And grow up is just what the voice does in the second half of the book, "Trajectories". It is fascinating, in fact, to see how the child's eye becomes an adult eye, equally imaginative but more conscious. The child who transformed innocent footprints into clues in "Russkis" is essentially the same person in "Chamber of Horrors £2 extra", where waxworks take on a life of their own, or the brilliant "Britannia", where reality and metaphor blur their borders completely:

Careful not to soil her dainty Ferragamos,
the grand piano moves discreetly through the herbaceous border[…]

It's not what it was, she says, the vulgar new building,
every year the path to the lily pond more overgrown-
a negotiation of unripened blackberries and birtwistle.

One of the pleasures of the second half is watching motifs swim back from the first, transformed by the newly adult viewpoint. I know some readers who always start with the title poem; they'll be puzzled if they do it here, because the whole point of the "Men from Praga" is that they are unexceptional, fishermen on the Vistula, and though language still separates the narrator from the scene, they are foreign not alien, a curiosity rather than mythologically threatening like the "Russkis" of part 1. This technique is most powerfully used in "River", another poem where subject and metaphor are more or less interchangeable and the father of part 1 is seen in a new light.

I haven't even mentioned the consistently sharp wit, so evident in the wonderful series of translations of "Baudelaire's Pipe". This is a collection constantly fresh and surprising: unsentimental, keen-eyed, unashamedly intelligent and erudite without being inaccessible.

Unst diary: 1

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:06:04 GMT

Just got back from holiday in Shetland, most of which was not in fact so much holiday as sorting out new house. But the first week was a genuine holiday, in Shetland's most northerly isle of Unst, which isn't where the house is. I was taking notes, in a disconnected sort of way, and occasionally in verse, so here some of them are:

June 20

It's a long time since I was up here so early in the year, and I'd forgotten what a display the wild flowers make. They can be pretty awesome at any time of year, but this seems to be when yellow predominates - you do get a lot of red campion, but mostly it's shades of yellow and orange, from the pale primrose-like tormentil, which is four petals close to the ground, through the brighter yellow of flag iris and the gold of vetch and silverweed to the orange mimulus. And any field not currently cultivated or sheep-grazed is a mass of buttercups.There is good reason to think that the map outline in RLS's Treasure Island is based on Unst; RLS knew the place because his father and uncle built lighthouses up here.

TREASURE ISLAND

No profit in buttercups, more's the pity,
or many a field on Unst
would yield a fortune.

As for the profusion of gold in the wayside ditches, it makes me think of the mediaeval Irish poem about some hopeful poet's patron: ("If all the leaves of autumn were gold, and the foam of each wave silver, Fionn would still give it all away")

SPENDTHRIFT

Fionn must have passed this way,
that profligate man
with a hole in his pocket,
for all along the ditch
gleams the yellow coin
of trefoil, tormentil, ragwort.

The exception to the yellow is the Keen of Hamar, a hillside where the chemicals in the soil favour purples and mauves. I say soil.... well, there's hardly any; its geological name is serpentine debris and from just a short way off, it resembles a moon landscape, grey-brown and seemingly barren. But just walk it looking down at the ground, and all manner of tiny, exquisite alpine plants become obvious, including one that grows nowhere else in the world, Edmondston's mouse-ear chickweed. Thomas Edmondston, a local lad from a family of scientists and folklorists, was 12 when he discovered and named this plant. He was 19 when he published his first book, on the flora of Shetland, and at the age of 20, in 1846, he was appointed Professor of Botany at Anderson's University in Glasgow (now the University of Strathclyde). By now he was in regular correspondence with Charles Darwin and was offered the position of naturalist on board HMS Herald, on a journey retracing the voyage of HMS Beagle. While disembarking from a boat on the coast of South America, he was killed by an accidentally discharged gun, still aged 20. You couldn't make it up. Here's his chickweed, in situ:

Review of Chasing Dean: Surfing America's Hurricane States, by Tom Anderson (Summersdale 2009)

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:36:06 GMT

This is an odyssey of two friends. Tom is a keen surfer who hasn't let his career interfere with his obsession; in fact by writing books in a surfing context he's managed to marry them to some extent. Dr Marc Rhys, once just as keen, has been sidetracked into academic success and delivering papers on baffling scientific matters at prestigious conferences. But they meet in 2006 with an aim: to travel America's east coast hoping for the perfect surfing waves created by a hurricane swell. It's the right season, with some potential hurricanes on the way, including a promising one called Dean; they can only hope it won't disappoint.

Hoping for a category 5 hurricane does of course raise some moral questions, and the dark side of their quest is not ignored. The description of their time in New Orleans is in fact one of the most gripping episodes, when they become aware of both the elemental power of wind and waves and the unquenchability of the human spirit. The observation is sharp and shrewd:

A couple of miles further over we crossed into those less affluent neighbourhoods, heading south towards St Bernard and the Lower Ninth Ward – the places that hadn't had the same opportunities for evacuation and recovery. Skeleton warehouses lined France Road, alongside ruined shopping malls. More rubble followed, which was once someone's home – a veranda in tatters. The residents had moved to a caravan with a lifebelt tied cautiously to the rear. […] some of the empty and abandoned properties had been spray-painted with macabre statements which nobody had yet bothered to erase, 'Has been searched' or 'Dead body inside'.

He's also more informative on the practical human results of Katrina than much reportage I have read; I didn't know, for instance, that when survivors were herded into the Superdome all drugs, including prescribed medication, were confiscated, so that, as his informant puts it, "schizophrenics and all sorts were running wild". The degree of paranoia still evident in those he meets, many of whom do seem sincerely to believe that the whole thing was orchestrated to kill off poor people, is both surprising and understandable, to him and us.

Dark side notwithstanding, the quest is about elemental joy, the sheer pleasure of moving with wind and waves, and here his writing is really effective. I don't surf; I can't even swim, and even so he manages to get across the exhilaration he feels. I think one reason he succeeds is that he doesn't stop to explain technical terms; if you know them, fine, if you don't, you can tag along breathlessly in his wake and pick it up as you go along. It worked for me, anyway:

Duck-diving, I peered down a breaking wave, through the pitching barrel. I felt the vortex and the pull of the lip wanting to drag me back, and then heard the noise, a moving, echoing torque. It was the most enthralling sound on earth, the acoustics of water.

When the writing is energised by the quest, it is really strong. I think it's true that in some of the very early chapters, before he gets to what really interests him, it is less so. Writing of waves, weather systems or friendship he is always sharp, but at odd moments early on, when something interests him less, the language and observation are more perfunctory, and you get dud phrases like "an oasis of unspoilt greenery". But this is rare, and gets rarer as the quest takes hold. The first few chapters are perfectly readable, but not unputdownable. Persevere and you'll soon find it does get an unbreakable hold on you, rather as the quest for Dean did on him.

Chasing Dean is here on amazon.uk.

Review of Ghosts and Lightning

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:03:41 GMT

A novel review this time:

Ghosts and Lightning, by Trevor Byrne, Canongate 2009

Denny Cullen, 21st-century Dubliner at university in Wales, thinks he's left home, but home isn't finished with him yet. Called back for his mother's funeral, he soon seems to be back in the groove, with relatives and friends who are going nowhere fast and doing nothing much (though, this being Dublin, they do it with considerable wit and inventiveness).

His sister Paula senses a ghost in the house she and Denny are allowing to go to rack and ruin; it might be her alcohol-fuelled imagination but then again it might be composed of memories of their dead mother, their absent father, the brothers from whom they are estranged and much other baggage. Before Denny can move on, he needs to decide which bits of his past he wants to leave behind, and which he needs to take with him. Though this is very much a novel of a young man in 21st-century Dublin, he is also a man with a sense of a long historical and mythological past (and his surname is no accident).

One reason this novel lives so vividly for the reader is the liveliness and realism of its voices. Denny's friends and family constantly come alive off the page: the insanely brave Paula, Uncle Victor the long-term book-borrower, gentle Pajo the emaciated recovering drug-addict with Buddhist tendencies ("he's mad into this kind o thing; life after death, ghosts, yetis, any and all religions. Basically anything there's fuck all proof for, Pajo'll believe it.")

Both fulcrum and observer, Denny himself is a joy of a voice. He is sardonically honest about himself:

Probably why I can't get a job, some witch's hex. Well, that or the fact I never filled out them forms at the FAS office

but also endlessly imaginative, as when he describes his friend Maggit having second thoughts about something he's stolen:

And wha about the kid who owned it? Is he not gonna miss it?
Maggit thinks about this. He looks into the bag again, like he might o robbed the answer as well by accident.

or when, travelling west, he finds himself overwhelmed by a sense of history:

… Dungloe, Annagary, Glencolumbkille. Never even heard o those places before, never mind been to them, and yet I dunno why, it all seems dead familiar. Mad that, isn't it? This feelin I get that nothing is new, not really.

There are a lot of very funny scenes in this novel – the car being constantly turned upside down, the funeral dominated by a priestly speech impediment. The variation of pace is remarkable too, from frenetic to leisurely and back, but above all the register of language, which accommodates colloquial and lyrical effortlessly. It's a terrifically assured and likeable debut.