More on achieving great art for everyone

Here's what I wrote for Arts Council England's consultation microsite, as mentioned previously. It's the first of a series of think pieces they are commissioning from various opinionated people to keep the debate lively.

I've been privileged to spend much of the last year debating how to achieve great art for everyone, so this consultation period is very exciting, and not a little nerve-wracking. I feel very attached to it, even though I am one of the people leaving the Arts Council in March and my colleagues will take our work forward. I want to highlight two areas where responses might be especially useful to them, although there are many more ideas in the consultation worthy of deep consideration.

Firstly, the need for shared purpose around a set of clear goals, delivered by collaborative effort with the whole sector and beyond, is powerfully articulated. If funders and arts organisation and partners can get behind the things that unify them and focus on making the sector more productive and resilient, we will all benefit. I welcome the goals - but they will undoubtedly be improved further with input.

By focusing on our collective impact as a sector, having a shared 'big picture' to refer to when things get fraught, we can, perhaps paradoxically, give each other more 'space', worry less about irritating detail, and generally be more forgiving and less adversarial. (Does that sound like a truism about a marriage? Perhaps that's not coincidental.)

Secondly, there are important ideas here about how funding is invested. Proposals are made such as fixed term funding for organisations and greater use of 'strategic commissioning'. This opens up an urgent conversation, which the experiences and views of 'the funded' will shape. The model of either regular or project funding, plus the fabled and rather obscure 'managed funds' is now neither flexible nor strategic enough.

I would urge colleagues to expand the suite of investment mechanisms to include loans for organisations, tools such as Own Art and Take it away that encourage individuals to spend their own money on art at full cost, and much more funding than at present invested in building arts businesses to a point where they have a range of reliable income sources. It is vital that new talent is supported, but it is equally important they do not become as dependent and over-focused on Arts Council funding as some of their elders. The sector, however, will need to grapple with a deeply ingrained instinct to look for 'support' rather than 'income' or 'investment', and the implications of changing the paradigm.

Shared purpose does not, then, mean there will be no challenges and differences. It's our diversity that makes shared purpose so productive, not adopting a single way of doing things, I believe. So share your thoughts. I hope the team who've toiled so painstakingly so far, are given an equally big task reading your consultation responses.

Prime suspect for nonsense

You know, I meant to hit the New Year blogging, and have had several things I wanted to point out/at on here last week, but the snow and some pressing issues rather stole the hours away. I'll try and make up for it this week.

Next time someone tells you that there's less need for a focus on diversity because even the people who don't really get it at least now know 'the rules', or that diversity is 'an add on' to their real arts work and just a burdensome Arts Council box to tick - I'm not making this up for effect, people do say this stuff! - remind them of Lynda La Plante's recent and widely-reported comments. (Overseas readers: she wrote a half decent tv series once, Prime Suspect, and has been banging out crooks with heart and police dramas with diminishing returns ever since.) As reported here by the BBC and here by the Telegraph, she feels excluded by the politically correct BBC and that commissioners would 'rather read a little Muslim boy's script' than one by her. “If my name were Usafi Iqbadal and I was 19, then they’d probably bring me in and talk,” said La Plante, apparently.

Well, that made me give three cheers for the BBC - or it would if it were absolutely true. Or if these comments were the last we ever heard of La Plante. Unfortunately I suspect neither is quite the case. Although the range of voices heard on the BBC is broader than it was, there is still a tendency to commission a relatively small set of old faithfuls. It seems very easy to use the same people over and over. (More noticeable, of course, when the person is some way from the tv norm - Griff Rhys Jones doesn't stand out in the same way as even Alan Bennett.)

The theatre has seen a number of precocious debuts of late, it must be time for some new talent, new voices on tv too. How did Griff Rhys Jones corner so many markets, for instance? Most urgently, perhaps, we need to hear the stories and imaginings of those who are most often represented by phantasms - young Muslim men, amongst them, but not exclusively.

The diversifiying of the arts workforce and of the stories the nation tells each other still has a long way to go. Have a look at the comments on some of the other coverage of La Plante's comments and you can see why. Look at the tv schedules and you can see the nonsense of La Plante's comments. If I was a commissioner at the BBC, I'd be forcing her to collaborate with Shazia Mirza, on a comedy drama.

(Hmm, maybe that's why I'm not a commissioner at the BBC...)

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.

A thought on writing

'But why this urge to speak things, rather than make do with observing them? Where does it come from, this compulsion writers have to turn into words everything that touches them or holds their attention? Would it not be more sensible to prune and look after those trees, before describing them? But both the one and the other are necessary. Once men thought that uttering the true name of a god conferred full power over him: the priests were accordingly careful to keep it to themselves. There was a profound truth in this belief. Whoever seizes a landscape, a moment, a light, with suitable words, cures them - provisionally, at least - of this malady where everything dissolves, disappears, escapes us. Where do they go, all these moments, these lives, and our life? A beautiful poem, a well-wrought phrase keeps them, encloses them, gives shape to what is no more than vapour and cannot be grasped. In that way a person, without being entirely mistaken, perhaps, can believe he is somewhat less alien in the world, somewhat less helpless in the face of time's brilliant stratagems.'

That's a quote from a prose-poem I was reading earlier today, by Phillipe Jaccottet, translated by Jennie Feldman and Stephen Romer. It's from a great Anvil Press anthology, Into The Deep Street, Seven Modern French Poets. My favourite phrase there is even better in French, due to the wonder of the reflexive verb, 'sans se tromper completement, peut-etre'.

Why it needs to be 'for everyone'?

Just because I like it and want to share it, here’s another quote from Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘Desert Islands’. I suppose you might say art where he says literature.

‘The essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. At the same time, its destiny is subject to those human conditions that make mythology possible. Mythology is not simply willed into existence, and the peoples of the earth quickly ensured they would no longer understand their own myths. It is at this very moment literature begins. Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them or reproduce them.’

Are there really no innocent songs?

One of the speakers who caused the most breaktime-buzz at the IFACCA World Summit was Stojan Pelko, the State Secretary in the Slovenian Ministry of Culture. After a tour-de-force of Minister-as-tourism-advocate from the Jamaican Minister of Culture, this was a totally different kettle of fish. There may be other State Secretaries who end by exploring a metaphor from Gilles Deleuze, but I’ve missed them so far.

His topic was whether cultural diversity was the source of world peace or the root of all conflict. Coming from a part of the former Yugoslavia, as he put it, once you have known poets shooting from the hills it is hard to see culture as therapy or something than can overrule ‘real power’. Using a devasting clip from Goran Markovic’s The Tour, he suggested that in global capitalism ‘there are no innocent songs’, and that the discontinuities of history - where old certainties break down - are where the universalities emerge. (Certainly at that point, this seemed a world away from the ‘dodgy advocacy’ I mentioned yesterday, and suggests a positive outcome to recession.)

Where the arts could be ‘real arms’, Pelko argued, was in creating what he called ‘subterranean solidarities’ – by encouraging a sense of non-identity with the collective where people became ‘raw, free and vulnerable’. (As opposed, I take it, to the security of common identity and values that can, in extremis, lead to intolerance.)

He then concluded by exploring the central images of a short text by Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desert Islands’. (You can find this on Scribd here. It’s a very short essay and well worth reading - and not as difficult as much of his later work.) At the time this simply resonated as a metaphor, and I’ve yet to have chance to read the full text of Pelko’s talk, so I may have misinterpreted things. Deleuze sets out how islands are of two sorts, which I think now may be both two kinds of cultures, but also apply to different strands of artistic practice. There are he says, continental islands, ‘accidental, derived islands… separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture; they survive the absorption of what once contained them’ and oceanic islands that ‘are originary, essential islands…display a genuine organism.’ (There’s no suggestion one is better than another.)

Deleuze says ‘Continental islands serve as a reminder that the sea is on top of the earth, taking advantage of the slightest sagging in the highest structures; oceanic islands, that the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength to punch through the surface.’ That speaks to me of tradition and innovation, of growth and decay, of the power relations within culture over time. This is where Pelko seemed to take his talk, suggesting a need to ‘become the stranger’ on the desert island, before moving from solitary to solidarity, in the knowledge that songs will not save alone but must be seen in relation to real power. As he said, quoting Delueze in French, ‘il faut l’imagination collectif…’

Metaphors defy the need for practical conclusions, so I’m going to refrain from drawing any right now. I’ll end with an amusing and provoking quote from Deleuze’s essay Stojan Pelko didn’t refer to, but I’ve written down for future use as the epigram to a poem:

‘That England is populated will always come as a surprise; humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents’.

Did I really help save the short story?

In 2002, in a cafe in Newcastle, myself, Claire Malcolm of New Writing North, Kate Griffin, then Arts Council England North East Literature Office, and writer Margaret Wilkinson spent a happy hour drinking coffee and eating cake whilst thinking how to promote the short story. (Margaret having raised the issue of how few outlets there were.) By the end of the meeting we'd decided not to do something simple like start and fund a magazine, or give grants to writers of stories. We had, instead, decided the only thing which might possibly work was a Save Our Short Story campaign - an urgent campaign to protect an endangered species.

We began with an Emergency Summit of writers, editors and publishers in Newcastle. (This had the longest lunch of any Emergency Summit ever as I made the mistake of taking participants to the restaurant of the then newly opened BALTIC, where the service was - later!- notoriously slow.) We then followed it up with research, publicity, events, anthlogies, stories you could get by email and so on, bringing on more and more supporters including writers such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. Kate and Claire put huge amounts of time into it, and one day Kate and I were able to celebrate have the mick taken out of us in the TLS. (Small measures of success, I know...)

The Campaign grew and grew and in due course we passed it onto the Book Trust and Scottish Book Trust who moved it onto another level again, introducing the BBC National Short Story Award, amongst other things. You can read all about it here.

So I was really pleased to read James Lasdun's lead article for The Guardian today about the flourishing of the short story internationally, including renewed interest from publishers, and some exciting sounding new writers. I'm not claiming much credit for the Campaign, of course, but I do look back and think we played a role in promoting the art of the story and bringing it to people's attention in a fresh and arresting way. It started with a writer (Margaret, who is a fine exponent of the craft) describing an issue, committed people putting their heads together and then identifying some concrete actions for change, supported by a strong coalition of passionate people - in the face of some saying either there was no problem, or that you couldn't change things given the way publishing had gone. Whether the blossoming of short stories is merely cyclical only time will tell, but I think the current health shows you can change what seems permanent.

Wednesday Word of the Week: 'Collaboration'

The internal working space we have as part our intranet is called 'Collaborate'. It helps us share knowledge and work together. That's not why I've picked this word. It's because since Christmas my outside-work collaborative muscles have been getting some exercise preparing for my activity holiday next week - working with three other writers based in North East England (Andy Croft, Linda France and W.N.Herbert) and four Bulgarian poets (Kristin Dimitrov, Georgi Gospodinov, Nadya Radulova and VBV) to create a book of our poems for Bulgaria. Naturally we created a blog some time a go to help track our collaboration. And naturally, as some of us love a good or even a bad pun, we called it Blogaria. You can follow the process so far at http://uk-bgtranslations.blogspot.com. (Next week I'll either be posting less or more because I'll be on leave in Velingrad.)

The word collaborate (see wikipedia definition here ) is often used in the arts of course. It's interesting to note the emphasis put on equality and the likely deliberate absence of leadership in the collaborative process. It's also interesting that it has a paradoxical or negative meaning too of 'cooperating treasonably', perhaps where there is a power disparity. This is important for artistic collaboration. If I got too hung up on the status or brilliance of some of my Bulgarian collaborators it would probably inhibit the process. It's a word to be treated with respect though - something profound happens in collaboration, to do with the devotion of one's one skills and self to something else that is no longer 'yours' - although you still need to own it. If you can't do that, or are paying lipservice, treason may slip in somewhere.

Adrian Mitchell

I was really saddened to hear today that Adrian Mitchell had passed away. You can read a short biog and see him performing, including the poem he will always be remembered for, To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam), on Bloodaxe's news page.

Adrian was one of the poets that inspired me to become serious about writing, and helped shaped the way I was serious about it. When I was a 6th former, the village library acquired a copy of For Beauty Douglas, his collected poems up to 1979, and it probably spent more time in my bedroom than it did in the library. It helped confirm in me that writing, performance, and art more broadly - it is full of reference to other artforms, as well as a love of life in general - could connect to people and try and change things. This was poetry that was funny, angry, political, sexy, loving, anarchic, committed and not content to sit in the corner being admired.

When I started a poetry magazine I sent the first issue to Adrian. He wrote back with advice, encouragement, a drawing of an elephant which was almost part of his signature, and a poem for me to publish. (We also began exchanging quotes from Kenneth Patchen, a joint passion.) When Yorkshire Arts turned me down for a grant because the literature panel weren't convinced of the quality, I sent them a snotty letter saying if it was good enough for Adrian Mitchell it should be good enough for them! I met him a number of times, at readings, and he was a lovely, kind and gentle man. It did always feel to me like meeting a hero. I was also proud to be included in the anthology of British socialist poetry he co-edited with Andy Croft, Red Sky at Night. His work continued to develop and his Blakean socialism and his distress at the mess some humans make of the world ran through some fine books of what we will now have to call 'late poems'. But he remained essentially an optimist. We're all the poorer for his departure.

Why have I been so quiet?

It was of course foolhardy and poor planning to introduce Wednesday Word of the Week just before going on leave, and locking myself away in a friend's flat in Whitby to do some writing and editing. I had a week away from family, work, email, tv and only turned on the blackberry to check the football scores on Tuesday night. I'm slightly relieved to say I don't have to delete that bit to the left of here that says I am also a poet, or change the tense of the verb, as I managed to do a lot of writing.

Whether any of it sees the light of day, especially in book form, remains to be seen, of course. I've felt my Arts Council role has ruled me out of going back to fine publishers of my books such as Flambard, who we fund regularly in the North East. Given my national responsibilities now that probably also applies to RFOs elsewhere in the country. And I've never managed to nab a non-subsidised poetry publisher - of which there are precious few, of course. (Insert your own ironic aside about people who had funding withdrawn here: .) This has led to new work appearing mainly in anthologies such as this and this, and emerging from projects such as the ongoing North East-Bulgaria link which led to A Balkan Exchange last year. Clearly this has been a bigger sacrifice for me than it has for the world of poetry, and I don't lose any sleep over it - I've been getting my buzz in other ways. At least it gives me at least one thing in common with the great Irish poet Michael Longley, who went twelve years without publishing before retiring from the Arts Council of Ireland and beginning an amazing - and happily long - 'late period'.

The best thing about last week, as I think about it now, a day and a half back into work, was being able to engage with language without having to talk or listen to other people, to shape it to my own ends, or the ends of my imagination. When my kids were smaller and asked what I did at work I used to say I talked and listened and thought. (They added 'Have meetings and do emails.') I once listed all the decisions, large and small I was asked to make in a day - as part of trying to get better at both delegating and deciding - and found it was literally dozens. That takes up a lot of energy, and can make the useful space in your head shrink. (I decompressed from my retreat at an international seminar on commissioning opera, at The Sage Gateshead at the weekend. No easy way back for me!)

Anyway, I really meant to explain the silence here last week, and to recommend occasional silence to you. The really good news for you is I've decided to spare you any of the poems I wrote last week.

Are we now post-black or just post-election?

Continuing the Obama theme just till the weekend...

Novelist Diran Adebayo is a member of the Arts Council's National Council. Every now and again I get to spend time with National Council and, whilst marvelling at how Diran looks cool in a pinstripe suit while I look like an 'Executive', I always find he's got a stimulating take on things. He 'spotted' Barack Obama early on, and has now written a great piece on his website about why he likes him so much, and the highly debatable concept of 'post-black'. I am going to think whether I can become 'post-white' - although if I get many more grey hairs I will certainly eventually achieve 'post-ginger'.

Further proof, if it were needed, that novelists can do more than make stuff up comes from academics at the LSE and Manchester Universities, as reported in the Telegraph. Apparently novels like The Kite Runner are better at informing the public about development issues than reports. Who'd have thought?

(Andrew Taylor, the Artful Manager, also talks about Obama's arts policies - didn't you just know he had some - and good taste in advisors, with Michael Chabon amongst others on the committee.)

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…

Are novelists more important than MPs?

Do artists carry more weight than people who spend their time directly involving in politics, either as MPs, or campaigners? I ask the question because I was interested to see that the New Statesman, in promoting their 'No Place for Children' campaign ask us to join Monica Ali, Philip Pullman and Nick Hornby in signing a petition, rather than, say, Diane Abbott or Dame Mary Marsh. Whether it's fair or not, I don't know, but it does suggest that certain artists and writers are perceived as seeing things more clearly and speaking with a particular type of authority.

In this case, the writers involved are definitely showing more wisdom and humanity than government policy and practice. The petition calls on the government to stop locking children up in detention centres for immigration reasons. The government has only recently committed to implementing the UN Convention on the rights of the child in full. Now they need to actually stop detaining children, often for long periods in inadequate conditions. It shouldn't take the imagination of a novelist to work that out. You can read articles by a number of writers and actors who have visited detention centres on the New Statesman site, just in case you need some help working out whether innocent children should be locked up or not.