Slim volumes, rich pickings: poetry2Ks

Following a little off-blog abuse for my book choices, which is exactly what I hoped to inspire, here's my list of 10 favourite poetry collections from the last decade, all plucked from my own bookshelves rather than other lists...


De/compositions - W.D. Snodgrass (one of the best American poets of recent decades, this is a wonderfully entertaining book of bad, supposed early versions of great poems - witty and educational)
First Things When - Robert Rehder (American living in Switzerland, funny and profound)
The Invisible Kings - David Morley (pitch perfect)
These Days - Leontia Flynn (classic lively debut collection)
Dart - Alice Oswald (atmospheric exploration of a river from perhaps the decade's strongest emerging figure)
Mandelson, Mandelson - David Herd (Alexander Pope crossed with Frank O'Hara in the Age of Peter)
Tramp in Flame - Paul Farley (mature third collection syndrome)
The Drowned Book - SeanO'Brien (hard to choose between this and Downriver, to be honest)
Nelson and the Huruburu Bird - Mairead Byrne (Irish poet now in the US, fantastically hybridising before your eyes in this book)
Ideas Have Legs - Ian McMillan vs Andy Martin (a personal favourite as a book - meaning book as object, some strong McMillan poems combined with inventive design, accessible, funny but also moving and powerful)

I've not included anthologies in that list. Neil Astley's Staying Alive would be my essential anthology of the decade, though the 2nd most read is Legitimate Dangers, edited by Michael Dumanis and Cate Marvin, a great wedge of younger American poets I found far more exciting than, say, those anthologised in Bloodaxe's recent Voice Recognition.

Notes on the noughties...10 non-fiction books

Here's my second-list of 10 of my favourites from the noughties... all from the Robinson bookshelves... prose non-fiction, with some notes...

Like a Fiery Elephant, - Jonathan Coe (great biography of the fantastic B.S. Johnson)
Bringing It All Back Home - Ian Clayton (best book about loving music I've ever read)
Chronicles, Volume 1 - Bob Dylan (can't think what to say here it's so obvious)
Bass Culture - Lloyd Bradley (encyclopedic history of reggae)
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell (thinking without thinking)
Resilience Thinking - Brian Walker and David Salt (just search 'resilience' on this site to see why)
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (I like thinking with number as well as words)
17 - Bill Drummond ( entertaining art philosophy, my name in here somewhere as a member of The 17)
Getting to Maybe - Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman & Michael Quinn Patton (making the impossible happen, inspiring book on social change)
Rip It Up - Simon Reynolds (how post-punk changed the world, or bits of Britain anyway.)

Hmm, very blokey, very contradictory, glad I didn't list the books about northern soul (d'oh!) No wonder the supplements never ask, is it? I have read some of the books I should have on this list, but this are more my favourites. I spent the 80s and 90s reading about literature, art and theatre, honest.

Leaving (the first decade of) the 21st century: 10 favourite novels

Well, what with the papers being full of 'end of the decade' summaries, I've been scanning the shelves and my brain for a few lists with which to expose my narrow- and shallow-ness. Here's the first, 10 of my favourite novels published since 2000. (In no particular order, as they say on The X Factor, and missing out lots I wanted to list.)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
The Night Watch - Sarah Waters
The Lay of the Land - Richard Ford
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Peoples' Act of Love - James Meek
The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
The Damned United - David Peace
The Madolescents - Chrissie Glazebrook

Odd how many of them begin with 'The'. Don't know what that means!

Any appetite for a naked lunch?

I join the dots between things and look for patterns. I probably over-do it at times, but it’s how my brain works. Here’s my latest set of dots.

Firstly a phrase echoing from the IFACCA Summit, Shelagh Wrights’s diagnosis that the arts suffer from ‘dodgy advocacy’, ran through my thinking – actually more worrying – about some themes from the IPPR/RSA event about the future of the public sector in the North East I mentioned last week. Themes like the need to acknowledge the unworkability of current ways before innovation kicks in.

Then that connected up to an essay I found via Matthew Taylor blogging about ‘policy-based evidence making’ with the rather wonderful title of ‘On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research’. In it, Dr Eleonora Belfiore uses research around evidence for ‘the impact of the arts’, as a case study in bullshit, that mode of discourse which puts persuasion above accuracy, what she describes as an ‘indifference to how things really are’. (Just for the record I think she’s right in general, but rather harsh on the arts, coming across at times as the kind of academic who’d be happier just having cultural policy and no actual messy culture.)

I then wondered if the current collective mindset of the publicly-funded arts and cultural sector is open and self-critical enough often enough to imagine all possible futures. (I include in that the funders involved, including government.) Have we become too accustomed to growth? Do we still believe that someone somewhere will have a pot of money they need to use at just the right moment –? For all our needs? What might we have to give up to respond to climate change? There is strong evidence for the impact of the arts, more than Belfiore can admit for her argument I would suggest, but if we only look for the answers that are useful to us, do we make ourselves overly-reliant on those we’re making the case to? Don’t we have to strive for the moment William Burroughs called the naked lunch - 'a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork' – so we can start to move beyond it?

The final dot (never end on Burroughsian apocalyptic paranoia!) was catching up on the new series of The Thick of It, which is a lesson in the way political discourse has been perverted by language. It’s somehow missing something the first series and the specials had, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. (Maybe the loosened grip on power makes Malcolm something of an underdog, albeit one with horrible bark and bite?) It is still very funny though, especially if, like me, you think swearing can be grown up and funny.

Wrapped up in books

Well, it’s been quiet on here as the Family Robinson have been away on holiday – having fun to put the thought of this next week’s A Level and GCSE results out of our minds. Well, that’s what my wife and I were doing, not sure about the kids…

Anyway, after a day and a half of dealing with the things marked urgent, I thought I’d relax for a few minutes and create Arts Counselling’s first ‘annual feature’ and share with you my holiday reading.

The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland – entertaining tale told in epistolary and note form with an novel-within-a-novel that did make me laugh out loud, and then go back to rewatch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Read this and you’ll never go into Staples without thinking of it.

The Great Lover by Jill Dawson. Beautifully imagined story of the poet Rupert Brooke and a housemaid. The facts of Brooke’s youth and artistic circle are seamlessly woven into a picture switching between Brooke and the maid – who becomes so real you think she must have been a real person too. (Arts Council England gets some nice thanks for support whilst writing of this, by the way.)

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. A massive (though not as huge as his final book 2666) and massively lively story of the founders of the Mexican school of Visceral Realist poetry – apparently based on Bolano’s own youth in Mexico City. A bit like Kerouac’s Desolation Angels rewritten by Thomas Pynchon. A bit.

Cider with Roadies by Stuart Maconie. Not sure why I hadn’t read this before… forty-something man reminisces in humorous fashion about the punk and post-punk years growing up in the North West of England, it could have been written to give me a relaxing day. (Maconie grew up in Wigan, which is where the 113 bus that went past my childhood home went. He even worked for a while at Courtaulds like my Dad.) Warm, self-deprecating and fun, slipped down like a pint of Boddingtons.

The Masterpiece by Emile Zola. Don’t know why, felt like a bit of 19th Century French naturalism by the end of the fortnight. Suffice to say, you can’t get much further from Stuart Maconie’s good humour than Zola’s ‘never-going-to-end-well’ school of realism, but what better way to prepare for the return to work than a book about artists and their visions and travails.

I knew I was writing this for a reason: looking at this list they are all about one form of art or another, and the search for ways of making that manifest in society and in life. Hmm...

Back soon with some serious policy related stuff - just getting back in the swing.

Are you keeping calm and carrying on?

Nice story in The Guardian today about the spread of the poster you can see above – from Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland to the world…

You can read an account by one of the owners of Barter Books on her own blog too, which gives a bit more detail, including reference to the worst kind of approach to ‘intellectual property management’ by one of the copyists.

There’s something I love about this poster, something about it that captures an aspect of Englishness I cherish. (Just like Barter Books actually, a fantastic shop in an old railway station building.) There are times the Francophile in me wishes we were always jumping to the barricades and striking. But actually – perhaps as I get older? – I think there’s more to be said for persistence, stubbornness and simply cracking on and making sense of your part of the world in order to change the whole. It's very different from the 'stiff upper lip'. I could probably relate this to an acceptance of systems thinking and resilience if you really want, but time is short. (I will get back to resilience as promised but need to carve out a couple more hours!)

Obama - the North East arts connection

Whilst the UK waits with baited breath to see who will be crowned the next poet laureate (well, waits with a slightly bemused amusement, anyway: see here for just one example), Barack Obama has revived the practice of having an Inaugural Poet, in the shape of Elizabeth Alexander. What's more she's published - in the UK - by Northumberland-based international poetry phenomenon Bloodaxe Books, whose 30th birthday I wrote about in October. Elizabeth Alexander is one of a number of fine American poets published by Bloodaxe. You can read about her role in Obama's inauguration here. I just knew there had to be a connection between the new President and Arts Council England's RFOs...

It's good to see the new President including poetry in what is bound to be an emotional occasion. Perhaps the new laureate - whoever she or he is - could pop up in Parliament from time to time?

Bloodaxe and the helping hand

The day after National Poetry Day I spoke at the 30th birthday celebrations of Bloodaxe Books. Bloodaxe is, for me, absolutely classic example of the difference one or two stubborn, gifted, passionate and dedicated people can make in the arts. Neil Astley – the editorial vision of Bloodaxe since 1978 – and Simon Thirsk – who could be stereotyped as the marketing or business man but is also as passionate about poetry as Neil - have changed the face of contemporary poetry. They’ve published literally dozens of great writers. They’ve challenged many orthodoxies in the poetry worlds of both ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ or ‘experimental’ publishing and poetries. They’ve been criticised for cheapening poetry by putting together anthologies like Staying Alive that have sold tens of thousands of copies – anthologies full of ‘real poems for unreal times’. They have transformed the marketing and promotion of poetry. They continue to be at the forefront of publishing of international poetry in translation, and broke new ground early on with their impressive lists of women, black and Asian poets when that was unusual. (It was fitting that the event last week also marked the publication of the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets.) You’d have to be Neil to enjoy everyone of them, but that’s life.

And I'm glad to say they’ve done it all with consistent Arts Council and before that Northern Arts support. That’s allowed them to take chances, and to keep things in print that otherwise would have disappeared. Looking through my bookshelves the night before the event, to see what the oldest Bloodaxe book I had was (10 North Eastern Poets, 1980, available second-hand for anything between £4.46 and £103 according to Amazon!) I came across a poem by the great Czech poet Miroslav Holub that had a new relevance for me, it becoming some kind of - possibly ambiguous? - description of Arts Council activity…

A Helping Hand

We gave a helping hand to grass –
and it turned into corn.
We gave a helping hand to fire –
and it turned into a rocket.
Hesitatingly,
cautiously,
we give a helping hand
to people,
to some people…

Knives out for the imagination?

I was nervous the first time I met Carol Ann Duffy, when she performed at a literature festival I used to organise in Middlesbrough, in the mid 90s. It was because she was a big name on the circuit even then and had been a little demanding when we were arranging the reading. It wasn’t because I’d read poems such as ‘Education for Leisure’ and thought she might get out a bread knife and stab me.

Which is clearly what the people at exam board AQA think might happen with the fortunate young people who have to sit their exams. They received three complaints about the poem – which is a monologue by a young person who decides to carry a knife – and want all copies of it destroyed.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this idiocy. It misreads the poem entirely, though I guess you could say the poem makes the ‘mistake’ of inspiring if not sympathy with the carrier, at least insight into what might make someone carry a knife. It is not uncritical of its speaker though. Anyway, it’s the kind of poem that would be rich for exploration with young people. But they will have to get their exploration of knife crime from Romeo and Juliet instead. The power of the imagination is obviously still something to suspect.

Although this has had lots of baffled media coverage, and some comments from other writers, I have not seen any calls for other writers to pull their poems from AQA anthologies, or boycott the roadshows many pupils now attend. I know there may be both copyright and income implications but shouldn’t writers be responding to this direct and worrying censorship? They may be only three letters away from the shredder themselves. Perhaps others should join one of my heroes Adrian Mitchell in not allowing the use of his work in exams? Failing that, can I suggest schools who’ll be destroying books at least have some John Latham-style book burnings or chewing students can take part in?

(The only time I had a poem used in a GCSE-related book, the poor kids had to ‘compare and contrast’ a poem of mine called ‘Buttocks’ with ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost. I kid you not…)

More to life than books you know but not much more?

A couple of people thought I was actually reading Clement Greenberg and Frieze whilst on my holidays. As a family catchphrase has it: I might be daft - but I’m not stupid…

I will wind up gently, after two days of email threshing and thrashing, by sharing the books I did actually read on holiday, for no other reason than some people suggested it.

Bringing It All Back Home by Ian Daley. Fantastic book about music, life, class, identity and place – in particular Featherstone, West Yorkshire. Funny, poignant, stimulating, the last chapter made me weep and the rest made me go delving through my mp3 player. If you’ve ever liked music, or people, you should read this book, so that’s hopefully all of you - but I'm told it might help if you're male and the far side of 40.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon. Parallel future noir, set in an an Alaskan Jewish-homeland. Prose snappier than a fedora, proper thriller and emotional content too – very satisfying.

Then We Came To an End by Joshua Ferris. Had meant to get away from odd office behaviour on holiday, but this is all about people and their odd behaviour in the office as cutbacks loom and the pointlessness of their jobs dawns on them. (Obviously didn’t ring any bells at all with me…) Starts off funny and a little glib but builds. By the end I was describing it as Joseph Heller’s Something Happened for the web 2.0 age – and I love that book. Fittingly, there are some entertaining web promos. Start here.

The Rain before It Falls by Jonathan Coe. Slight detour from Coe’s usual style – wierdly enough reminded me of Maggie Farrell’s The Vanishing Trick of Esmee Lennox which I read on last year’s holiday. Bit over-written at times but eventually very engaging tale of love, daughters and mothers.

Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks by Christopher Brookmyre. Functional ‘quirky’ thriller I borrowed off my son as I’d run out of other books.

Ok, now it’s back to Westminster and Whitehall Weekly and normal service.

Anyone for a poetry reading instead of going shopping?

Matthew Taylor of the RSA predicts a rise in ‘post-consumerism’, given the economic downturn and general doom and gloom. He suggests a few trends that might catch hold as a result such as sustainable design and make do and mend. (He also predicts the rise of the vegetarian super chef, which is what I was doing 20 years ago – it never happened, at least not for me, alas…)

I like this idea. Here’s a few more arts-related suggestions for post-consumerist trends:

· People will buy musical instruments (perhaps using the Arts Council’s Take It Away scheme) and spend evenings playing music alone or together
· Music blogs and other digital downloads will make paying for music even more of a fetishistic hangover than it is now
· The older your tour t-shirt the more you’ll be respected
· Dancing will become the new gym membership
· Gallery going will become even more popular as a first date
· The live experience of theatre and music – perhaps the ultimate consumer item as once it’s over, you are (traditionally) left with nothing but memories, the experience having been consumed – will come to always include a free recording, either on cd/dvd as you leave or on-line.
· The women I know in book groups will stop buying books and just go straight to the wine.
· Freecycle will be as big as EBay (Ok, not strictly arts-related though you can probably get the odd instrument and good for props.)

On the other hand: I don’t think this means I have to stop buying cds and old records, does it...

Am I now too old to enjoy On The Road?

Here’s an interesting example of the dilemmas around how to encourage ‘participation’ – in this case, reading. Some of the major children’s publishers are suggesting adopting ‘age banding’. This means that books will display the recommended age range for readers. The theory is this guidance will make is easier for adults to buy books for children and young people, ‘signpost’ potential readers towards books they are more likely to enjoy, and thus encourage more children to read books and thereby increase our rather depressing child literacy rates. The big publishers and some writers support this approach. I imagine it might also appeal to grandparents and aunties and uncles, not to mention children used to unwrapping books they’re never going to read.

On the other hand, Phillip Pullman and many other leading children’s authors are asking for support for their protest at this. They feel the approach would be damaging to young readers, put some off books that might seem either ‘babyish’ or ‘too old’ according to their banding, and generally undermine individuality – as well as ignoring the intentions of many writers and illustrators to make their work matter to people of all ages. You can read their case, and join the protest if persuaded, at www.notoagebanding.org.

This looks like a classic example of good intentions being undermined by clumsy intervention that goes against the grain of what actually motivates people. Think of the books you might have missed if you paid more attention to banding than to design, the first pages, the blurb, your instinct, and so on. Why not adopt the ‘if you like that, try this’ technique as refined, in different ways by Amazon and last.fm? And whilst we’re at it, why not use that more widely right across the arts? I know they can get it horribly wrong, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

(Mind you, I do sometimes think some of the existential Penguin Classics I read as a teenager should have had a sticker on saying ‘You might actually be too young and hopeful for this. Lighten up and come back when you’re older.' And when I read the new 'scroll' edition of Kerouac's On The Road I did indeed wonder whether I was getting too old and grumpy for it...)

Generation Why?

Suddenly everything I read seems to be talking about Generation Y. I’ve just finished reading Peter Sheahan’s entertaining, thought-provoking but also rather irritating book Flip. Put simply this challenges you to think counter-intuitively and turn things on their head to find the way forward. This leads him to conclusions such as ‘Action precedes strategy’ and ‘There is no wisdom in crowds’. Essentially it’s about coping with accelerating pressures by not carrying on acting in the old ways. (I’ll come back to suggesting a couple of flips the arts might think about.) He is also a global speaker on Generation Y – and boy, does he remind you of this - and makes a great deal of his youth.

And the papers seem to have been full of it. I’ve never bought into ‘generations’, perhaps because I was born on the cusp of two – the 110th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Rimbaud being practically the last gasp of the baby boomers apparently, or a premature arrival of Generation X – and always thought they were simply journalistic stereotypes. (And like all stereotypes, not without some truth.)

I blamed the baby boomers for Thatcherism, and Generation X for grunge. Many people in the arts have perhaps always been Generation Y – portfolio careered, striving for work/life balance, more concerned with job satisfaction than salary, not accepting historical patterns etc. Do we, though, also share the potential for being forgetful of the past and complacent about things we may soon have to learn will not always carry on – like cheap global travel, relatively plentiful employment opportunities, social cohesion, cheap credit and economic stability?

Here Comes more of Everybody?

Anyone interested in finding out more about Clay Shirky’s thinking can now listen to a recording of his recent talk at the RSA. Stemming from his book it focuses on how, as he puts it, the digital realm is now ‘technologically boring enough to be socially interesting.’ He talks about Flash mobs and political protest, Facebook protest groups (though not the one called ‘The Arts Council needs a f***** slap’, strangely enough) - and how ‘organisation’ is changed, changed utterly. He’s an engaging speaker and admits to being a lapsed cyber-utopian, aware of the innocence or naivete of much of what’s said about the new networked, distributed world.

A number of reviews of HCE have linked it to Charles Leadbetter’s We Think. This seems to me much more guilty of idealistic enthusiasm, judging by the chapters I read when Charles made it available in draft. (I suspect Shirky would say he's still thinking about the technology a little too much.) Wikipedia is an interesting model of all sorts of things, but I couldn’t help muttering ‘but how do you make a living in this world?’ at a number of points. Anyway, his site has lots of interesting material - shared, for free - so have a look around.

Interestingly given my previous post, you can, for example, see Charles' notes for a talk about The Web and the Avant Garde. He doesn’t mention Joyce, but what the notes say about Guy Debord and Facebook make me think he may be a little too easily pleased. I can’t see that the fun loving Situationist would really have been busy collecting ‘friends’ and thinking it was a great advance in democratising the spectactle…

Would James Joyce be on Facebook?

One of my harmless habits is taking a bit of management speak I hear in a meeting or at a seminar and slipping it into a poem – sometimes there is something about odd bits of language that can spark a new thought. (This kind of thing sits well with my sampling approach, too.)

Yesterday I saw a book whose title at least reverses that sampling process. Clay Shirky’s new book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ is a look at 'the power of organising without organisations' in the new networked age. It sounds interesting in itself, but I was more drawn by the way his title is just the latest echo of an avant-garde. Here Comes Everybody (henceforth HCE) is a phrase from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, a recurring phrase related to the hero of this most difficult book. I have a battered paperback of Anthony Burgess’s book on Joyce, also called HCE. It was published the year after I was born. I also have, somewhere, a tape of The Wake’s 2nd album, HCE, which came out in late 1985, around the time I was puzzling though Finnegan’s Wake as a student in Paris. (The book is an interesting ‘textural’ experience, page by page, but I’ll admit to not really thinking I’ve ‘read’ it. The Wake’s New Order homages have not aged well according to the things I found on You Tube.) There’s also a great website of ‘writers on writing’ called HCE. There are no doubt other echoes.

My point is? The avant-garde and the business section may be more connected than we think. And artists have been predicting the present for a long time.