A470 Articles and Debates

Peter Florence responds to Gillian Clarke’s article

Dear A470,

We have a few really good poets in Wales across several generations. We have one world–class storyteller, and at least one other who enjoys an astonishingly high international reputation in her art form We have great audiences and readers, who deserve the highest quality literature - oral and published. That the Arts Council of Wales Literature budget makes both poets and tellers available to their national constituency puts our schools and audiences way ahead of England and Scotland.

Unless the rules have changed for the worse, the money for Writers on Tour is given at the venue or promoters request. Maybe the public want to hear storytellers more than they want to HEAR writers? If many of these people are new audiences not seen at the grand institutions of Wales, then isn’t that wonderful?

Seniority within the Literary art form is a tricky issue - back right up there to Homer. How does the bard extend their art? Write it down in metre? Or maybe put a beat under the words to get people to dance while they’re listening? Rock’n’Roll is the new poetry is the new storytelling is the new baldric tradition. Experience at Hay suggests that audiences who love listening to writers debate and discuss texts also and equally enjoy the performances of lyricists, comedians, and storytellers who use language to articulate truths about the human condition. Storytelling, as every parent of a sleepy child knows, is a cradle-to-grave pleasure.

Gillian’s right: storytellers are not writers. But I think she’s understating what they are. They create their own stories, and make and remake them in their own words and with phenomenal linguistic skill and sometimes beauty. Their chosen medium is the voice and direct speech. Their art is the engagement of narratives with other people - "live". Perhaps the practice combines the forms of stand-up comedy and jazz. Printing the words isn’t the issue - although I would venture that there is a pretty fair equation between the artistic relevance of published versions of storytellers work and most poets’ idea of "performance".

I’ve been listening to writers speak in public for twenty-odd years. For my part, Tracie Morris, Chinua Achebe and Benjamin Zephaniah aside, I’ve never enjoyed any poet "reading" their own work as a performance, largely because their work has been written to be read intimately by a reader. There’s a mild biographical interest in hearing the creator’s own accent and timbre, but as an event, it is like having the art closed in front of you. As Gillian says "Books are private company, essential nourishment, crucial growing material, the stuff of education". What I’ve loved is hearing poets talk around their work - the secondary stuff that has enriched my reading of their writing. Ted Hughes, incidentally, made money the same way Alexander Pope did: selling collections to readers, and limited editions to collectors.

I wouldn’t dare hazard opinions about how to reorganize, again, the departments or budgets of the Arts Council of Wales. They and the Academi seem to be doing a thankless job pretty damned well at the moment. But it is odder than her "very odd" for Gillian to entail that the Academi should only be allowed to give money to its own members.

Whilst bursaries and training and Ty Newydd are essential support for creative development, neither the Academi nor the Arts Council has a brief "to meet writers’ problems". The Royal Literary Fund, enriched by the AA Milne-Disney bequest is there for exactly this kind of cash help. If the Literature budget, bravely and imaginatively, has begun to nurture access to a resurgent storytelling movement, then three cheers for the decision-makers for funding something we can be proud of. Don’t hive it off somewhere else: argue for more cash for the literary pot to develop it.

Yours aye,

Peter Florence