Outside the established, metropolitan-style literary festivals, small cultural initiatives are the lifeblood of our country
I live and work in London, and have done for years. This makes me inescapably a member of the metropolitan literati, an abused minority. Still, if you're based in London, especially during this great recession, your perspective on culture, finance and society is, perforce, a highly privileged one.
Never mind the Olympics. London continues to enjoy an economic and cultural microclimate. On a good day it can feel like the best of times. Bars and restaurants are busy. Browsers crowd the city's book stores. In the evening, the West End flourishes, tides of concert-goers flow in and out of Covent Garden, the South Bank and the Wigmore Hall, and visiting Martians would have to pinch themselves to connect the city's life with what they might have read in the newspapers about the recession.
Of course, it's an illusion. These are the worst of times. The country is hopelessly broke, with deteriorating public finances. The arts are being squeezed (or neglected) as never before. Book publishing is in crisis. The minute you leave London, you discover a world burdened by debt, cuts, decay, and stagnation.
The UK, however, is an extraordinarily resilient society, with age-old powers of adaptability. As this recession shows no sign of lifting, I've begun to notice that it's culture (the thing to which politicians pay lipservice, but have no time or resources for) which is keeping Britain's battered communities alive, especially outside the south east of England.
Last week, for instance, I visited Manchester at the invitation of the Scribble literary festival.
Most festivals (Bath, Edinburgh, Buxton, Hay, etc) essentially replicate a metropolitan literary experience, in a tent or church hall. But Scribble, which gets together in the Friends Meeting House, is rather different. It's much more hands-on, populist, and down-to-earth; much less "literary".
Scribble is the brainchild of Rick Walker from Cartwheel, an arts organisation which was established in 1984. Based in Heywood, this impressive arts organisation works across Greater Manchester, providing nearly 500 sessions last year, of which some 350 were creative writing workshops.
A vibrant symbol of grass-roots creativity in hard times, Scribble has somehow promoted personal contact with more than 40,000 people, through the festival and its quarterly magazine, either live or in print.
This is multiculturalism at its best. In my polyglot audience were writers from Mirpur in north-east Pakistan, from Nigeria, India and Britain. Afterwards, I met Shamshad Khan, who is wonderfully symbolic of an emergent new literary culture. Born in Manchester, Khan is a young poet whose "mother's tongue" is Urdu, but she writes in English and is published by the innovative East Anglian independent, Salt. Benjamin Zephaniah should be pleased. He has said that he "prayed to the god of poetry that [Khan's] work would be put into print."
Khan's poetry has also featured on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. At the Scribble event, Khan was promoting her new collection, Megalomaniac, a slim volume that signals the arrival of a passionate new voice.
In the past, Scribble has been funded mainly by the Big Lottery Fund and the Arts Council of England, but it's now nearing the end of its current three-year phase, and the future is uncertain.
Not that you'd know it. On the day I attended, the place was rocking. The evening session saw some extraordinary performances by young people from Leeds and Manchester: displays not just of verbal gymnastics and the feats of memory, but the enjoyment of language and the testing of poetic conventions, sometimes to breaking point.
One common worry– about the dumbing down of culture and language through the IT revolution – often crops up at festivals, but not here. There was no evidence of dumbing down among Scribble's digital generation. In fact, the reverse. What I found in the workshop sessions surrounding the main events, was vivid evidence of writers and performers competing fiercely, as artists always have, for audiences' attention, and yes, remuneration.
Shirley May, director of Young Identity, an umbrella group for young writers in Manchester, especially those from Moss Side and Longsight, made the point with some passion that, small though the rewards might be, some of her students were opting to become poets and performers rather than study law at university.
And here's the digital dividend. The Arts Council may be in retreat. The coalition government's public sector cuts may be striking at the bone-marrow of the Manchester community. There may, in short, be virtually no money or resources available. But still, through the internet all kinds of small cultural initiatives are flourishing like tiny, but vital, blood transfusions within the body politic throughout the region.
In the past, I have been rather sceptical about feel-good phrases like "the creative economy". But, during my visit, the local Arts Council literature relationship manager, Alison Boyle, made a powerful case for dynamic local initiatives. Boyle, who develops literature for the Arts Council across the north east of England, says: "Advocating for the future pubic funding of the arts is something everyone can do. You don't need to be a writer to understand that 14p per week coming out of your pocket for publicly funded art is worth it."
Fine words, matched with enhanced creativity. Northerners will say, "Where's the surprise? This is what we do." Yes, indeed. Here in Manchester, in the midst of the Scribble festival, I caught a glimpse of a vivid, more vigorous, and intellectually richer, society renewed by a democratised literary culture, plugged into the world wide web. With any luck, it will not be snuffed out by Mr Osborne's war on the national deficit.
via Books: Poetry | guardian.co.uk
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