Net-Kipple and My Secret Life at The Dump.

I have not blogged during August and late July because it is the summer holidays and I had set myself the task of catching up on the novel, some poems and reading for my next Poetry School Course on Point of View.

I did this but not necessarily as much as I would have wished to. Why not? Because I got distracted. By what you may ask dear reader? And I will reply by saying, nothing much.

I am a great follower of tangents; I can go off on one quite easily. Tangents present an opportunity to find out all manner of things I don’t really have to know. The things I don’t have to know, I tell myself, may be precisely those things I might find useful one day, like the piece of string, the AA battery (power status unknown) , the small blunt blue crayon, found at the back of a kitchen drawer. The small detritus (detriti?) of knowing could one day prove useful or at the very least help my team win at Quiz night at the local pub.

I spent some time this summer trying to throw away or give to charity shops items and books I did not need or use any more. The men at my local Refuse Recycling Centre started to call me by my first name and enquire if I was moving house, so frequent were my visits. Even whilst at the dump, I kept spotting other people’s items in skips I longed to rescue and take home, so profligate did their abandonment seem.

I exercised restraint; I hurled black bags away like a champion shot putter. I assuaged my guilt and environmental consciousness by advertising things on the local Freecycle web site and four big bags of novels went to The British Heart Foundation. Old mice chewed discards extracted from my garden shed, however, were piled into the back of the Clio and ejected from my life.

I have written about kipple before, as Philip K Dick coined it and at the end of the blog given you a scene from the novel ( Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep..which was adapted into the film Bladerunner) in which he writes about it.

I can recognise that stuff can gather around us in an almost sinister way, it mounts up without serving any useful purpose. Yet still I can watch ‘Life of Grime’ and empathise slightly with the man who allows newspapers to stack up over the years, the woman who rescues old battered dolls to a point where she has only one seat she can sit in, the twins who never let a milk bottle escape from the house.

This is, in the extreme, a psychiatric condition I know but I nurture the seeds of this in my own life. I have stuff therefore I am. By stuff I don’t mean a rampant display of materialism but those items that are generated just by being. There must be an existential angst associated with identity and things we surround ourselves with, both intentionally and unintentionally.

Do Facebook friends sometimes count as kipple? Those with over a 2,000 such friends can only be intent on self advertising and serious networking in order to achieve an end. They must have realised very early on that the word friend means something totally different on this site. Does the use of the word kipple now have to be extended to cover all forms of internet accumulation? Is there net-kipple? Is this blog just another example of net-kipple, something that just hangs in the ether once read or even without being read and takes up some notion of space ( but not as we know it Jim)?

I was astounded when I cleaned my browsing history out, how many sites I had visited in the space of just a month. My browsing history was leaning heavily towards kipplisation. I now set my history time span to just one day and even that can, at times, produce visits that seem randomly bizarre.

I needed to research mortuaries in St Petersburg for my novel and that alone generated twenty four sites and pages examined. The physical ability to wander tangentially by following links probably increases exponentially the detritus in my computer’s cache. If things that accumulate randomly on my computer were translated into paper I would have to camp out in the garden and give the whole house over to them.

I have been editing some poems and fiction recently and realised how much kipple can accumulate in the written language. Do I need that word, does the reader need that word, that paragraph, how much wordage have I accumulated because I can rather than because I need to?

The old adage of ‘show not tell’ can leave you giddy with loss but there are also words that build up without the writer’s conscious intent. I have word ‘tics’ that accumulate and which my brain strangely doesn’t even seem to register, there are probably some in this blog post, in fact I know there must be some.

Not all poets and writers choose to use the short punchy sentence. The lyricism of the longer line or sentence can serve the writer’s individual voice better but I am trying to discipline myself to recognise what I need rather than what I think I need. I am also working harder at seeing the things that by constant presence become unseen. I am sure the elderly twins don’t see their thousands of milk bottles in the same way others see them. Perceiving and seeing are two different things, the former being ties in more closely to the vagaries of emotional reasoning.

The era of the assiduous editor who lovingly trawls through every line and sends his or her notes to the poet or writer is a luxury many publishers cannot afford, especially in the small independent presses. This then makes the role of writer as editor even more crucial and highlights the importance of ongoing workshops for writers and their access to good feedback from knowledgeable individuals. I suspect quite a few Arts Council grants are in part used to pay for such feedback.

Now if I could de-kipple more easily in life I wouldn’t be on first name terms with the men at the dump. However I embrace and am thankful for all those good souls out there who give me feedback on my work and allow me to see my ‘stuff’ as others see it.


Extract from
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
J.R.Isidore explaining kipple to Pris

- Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
- I see.
- There's the First Law of Kipple, "Kipple drives out non-kipple." Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody there to fight the kipple.
- So it has taken over completely. Now I understand.
- Your place, here, this apartment you've picked - it's too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But -
- But what?
- We can't win.
- Why not?
- No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and non-kipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization. Except of course for the upward climb of Wilber Mercer.

'Don't Ask What Poetry Can Do for You, Ask What.....'

I spent last week end at the Ledbury Poetry Festival and closed the festival with Joy of Six. I was put up by a lovely local family who made myself and a fellow Sixer more than welcome. I never ceased to be amazed at the kindness of strangers (she says taking a Blanche Dubois pose) who are willing to invite poets into their homes, we are a strange breed often with stranger habits and yet these good souls open their homes to us; so three cheers for all the unsung heroes who put up poets all over the country.

Ledbury is a great festival with a healthy ‘broad church’ of poets from pink fairy ladies enticing children in to create poetry cup cakes, to full-on performance such as the Anti Poet, to Anthony Thwaite, who would not feel aggrieved at being described as not the 'Anti-poet'. The resident poet for the Festival was Ian Duhig who produced some really interesting work as a result of that residency. One of the stars for me was Helen Mort reading from her new pamphlet the 'Lie of the Land' especially a sequence of poems about the Miners strike in 1984 and in particular the Battle of Orgreave. She talks about where this sequence ‘Scab’ comes from on her own blog here so I won’t reinvent the wheel by outlining its background suffice it to say she drew in part on her experience of watching a re-make documentary film made by Jeremy Deller. It was a good reading, in fact I was so slow out of the starting blocks at the end I missed buying a copy of the pamphlet as it sold out in a flurry of eager poetry punters.

I found listening to this sequence engendered a mix of emotions; my uncle was a miner but significantly a Nottinghamshire miner. Mention the Nottinghamshire miners in some parts of South Wales, County Durham or Yorkshire and they may well spit in your face for what was seen as their treachery in not coming out on strike in 84. In fact I happened to mention that my uncle was a miner when once doing a reading in South Wales and when the penny dropped that he was a Nottinghamshire miner the air went distinctly frosty. If you listen to these audio memoirs of Nottinghamshire miners you can hear the very real dilemma these Nottinghamshire miners found themselves in as their region had balloted not to join the strike and they eventually formed their own union.

By then my uncle had died in his fifties of cancer and silicosis brought on by years at the pit. I don’t know whether he would have ever crossed a picket line if he had still been working but I tend to think he wouldn’t have, not because I want to have a ‘rosy’ PC view of my families socialist credentials but because he would have hated to be called a scab by anyone, in those mining communities that word holds such enormous power and baggage that it still has the ability to separate whole families to this day.

As a couple they both understood what the cohesive power of a trade union could achieve. My aunt, his wife, was one of the first female shop steward at the Players cigarette factory and she had fought long and hard not only for female representation in the union but for better pay and conditions for female workers. I listened for years to her tales and my mother’s tales (she also worked there before she married) of the conditions in that factory for women in the thirties and forties. I wrote a sequence of poems about her experience and my mother's using an old copy of the regulations issued by the employers at that time. It was part of the way of thinking for them that a union was the surest safeguard against exploitation.

Thankfully the coal dust made the decision for my uncle before he had to face the dilemma of whether to come out on strike and now all the pits have gone in Nottinghamshire and the slag heap from the pit that you could see from my aunt and uncle’s house is now greened over and part of a new park.

So to rewind, I found Helen Mort’s sequence very moving and also very exciting because it managed to combine real poetry with social commentary without becoming polemic which it can so often do. I wonder whether poetry on the whole has tended to offload strong social commentary onto the singer song writers these days. Poetry in the past has always been at the fore front of political and social commentary and in many other countries throughout the world it still is. If we English (and I am being specific here) write about it we often dress it up in irony or satire , this is a well established tradition, political views should only be inferred from poems. Perhaps poets (and I include myself in this) are a little afraid of appearing a little too self-righteous because poetry is supposed to show not tell, is supposed to somehow remain unsullied by the poets own strongly held views. These views are meant to be inferred by how the poet writes or the subject matter the poet chooses. Palestinian poets, Balkan poets, North Korean poets, all poets who have written poems of direct confrontation that have made them at risk of imprisonment or worse, they have created work of great courage, probing the status quo. Around the world words are important as they carry the weight of certain freedoms.

Here in the UK , well probably in Western societies in the main, we can write whatever we like within the current laws against slander, libel , racism and sexual discrimination and very little happens. Consequences are minimal, even Ezra Pound is still regarded as within the poetry ‘church’ despite his fascism and racism; he even wrote that his imprisonment was conducive to writing, with unwanted visitors kept from his door and a place assigned to him for his writing. The Welsh, Scots and Irish have produced twentieth and twenty-first century poets who were and are formed and informed by their political context, political freedoms are still a burning issue and continue to influence poetry. Sometimes I long for a bit more passion and fire in English poetry at present. Of course I know there are a number of poets who have written poems that contain aspects of real ‘social blood and guts’ without resorting to rant but they seem to be few and far between. Of the ‘bigger’ names’ , Farley, Tony Harrison and Armitage can pull out the political stops in a beautifully crafted way when they put their minds to it. Sometimes I want to feel that a poem is really important to the poet, that it comes from a passionate place, that if they didn’t create the poem they would be eaten up by the need to write it.

The governance of the Poetry Society is still up for debate and an EGM may help or hinder the better running of that society. A lot of poets or those interested in poetry have been tweeting, blogging, Facebooking, emailing, Youtubing and generally addressing the issues from various viewpoints. To take a step back I find it healthy that people want to take their freedoms and their rights seriously, that those currently in power are questioned and held accountable and that people are passionate about how poetry can best be made a thriving part of society . However I doubt whether how anyone votes at the EGM will resonate down through the years as strongly as the outcomes of votes for the Miners Strike in 84. There may be a bit of finger pointing, general bitchiness for a while and some may come out of the whole affair worse or better than they went into it. If the whole edifice comes tumbling down then it will be difficult for a number of people but not for as many as a local factory closing, as has happened near me. Poets will continue to write, some will get published and a few will be read and the best of them may be remembered into the next generation and perhaps beyond. I suppose to misquote Kennedy the question is ‘Don't ask what poetry can do for you but what poetry can do for society’. Writing poems about what really matters most to people in their lives, be that emotionally, socially or politically, may be a small part of that doing.

Caesar's Wife and Elvis Wander Betterton Street.

I have been quiet for a while as things to do and the amount of time available seem to have somehow got out of sync and an hour for Peter has been robbed to pay Paul and the blog got well and truly mugged. So I make up for that now by assuring you dear reader that I may be gone but you have not been forgotten entirely.
Of course the buzz in the poetry world at the moment or in small parts of it at least is about The Poetry Society and what is transpiring there. What is truly transpiring I have no idea, one can simply go on the facts; The Chairman of the board Peter Carpenter has resigned, the president Jo Shapcott has resigned, the Finance Officer Paul Ranford and the Director Judith Palmer have also resigned. No one at the Poetry Society has clearly stated why there has been a spate of resignation leaving it to blogs, Facebook and general gossip to make the rounds all of which contains some clear facts, some innuendo, some considered speculation and some wild allegations. Some has been anonymous; some from those well placed to know what is going on, although those two groups are not mutually exclusive.
Kate Clanchy is organising a petition to call for an EGM to address the concerns Poetry Society Members have and the Society itself has announced a meeting on the 22nd July to address the way forward and future plans for the Society. There is a big Arts Council grant at stake here, although it is doubtful if that will just disappear in a puff of smoke should the furore become even more public and vitriolic. However public funds for poetry have been slashed in other areas, so the Arts Council will want to know that they are not casting their bread upon decidedly choppy if not stormy waters.
I left the Poetry Society last year to join English Pen, which fights for the rights of writers, journalists and poets who are in countries where free speech is a very precious commodity. I would have liked to have remained a member but I couldn’t afford both. However I am a tax payer so as such I do have a stake in how public funds are spent. I would be suspicious of money being poured into any organisation, particularly one that is also a registered Charity where key figures have resigned, there is obvious unrest amongst members and the board is doing a heavy spin on lets look to the future rather than past events. If a public company acted like that I would not be comfortable about my widow’s mite going into their coffers without some public, reasonable debate in which I could hear all sides of the situations and place the flurry of resignations in context.If someone rattled a charity tin in front of me and I knew the charity was experiencing such difficulties then I would think twice before dropping a coin into the box.
It may be that everything comes down to personality clashes, it may come down to a clash of deeply held opposing views about how the Poetry Society should promote poetry, it may be due to genuine misunderstandings, it may be down to some kind of power struggle between various factions. It is probably a mix of all of these yet none of these reasons is beyond debate, especially in a publicly funded charity.
There may well be a clear divide about certain things but the trustees have to be seen to be even-handed and part of the facilitation of a solution rather than the source of the problem. The very name trustee implies a person in which we have full trust.No one will ever agree how £360,000 pounds can best be spent to encourage and support poetry in the UK. However the Arts Council by its actions in supporting The Poetry Society to this financial extent whilst closing the door in the face of other poetry organisations have clearly made a statement about the best use of the public purse. Those negotiations as far as I know have not yet been completed and I will want to know what questions the Arts Council have asked the Poetry Society about their organisation, the management, the board and the cohesive support they have for their current state of being, let alone their future plans. The money is obviously being given on the basis of specific goals they intend to achieve and have put in writing; anything else would be a reckless use of public money. What assurances can the board and the management give to the Arts Council that they are in a position to put in place strategies to achieve those goals with the support of the majority of its members and its current team (two of which, Board Chairman and Director are only temporary placements). They may be very well placed, they may not but they have to be seen to be at least striving to be in that place.
I have been a public activist all my life, I have a stake in society and in any government that seeks to run it. I vote at all levels of government and encourage others to do so. Whether or not I am a member of the Poetry Society is irrelevant, I still have a stake in any organisation or charity which seeks public funding by the democratically elected government. I expect such organisations to be as open and transparent as I would wish my government to be. That is not always possible, the law sometimes is used to protect those who might be harmed by such transparency but there has to be a very good reason why the behaviour and views of people in a publicly funded organisation is not accountable to the public as well as its members and to the trustees. I would hope that reasons for people’s resignation are clearly stated and are open and honest. It may be that their view of a situation is at odds with other views but any organisation should be robust and healthy enough to withstand even the harshest of critics and be able to counter the arguments with measured and clear ripostes Such good reasons for this not happening may well exist, they may not. I cannot believe poetry needs to go down the Murdoch and Gigg’s road of gagging but if it does then it should state clearly why it does and if it does.

There may be an element that believe that today’s news is tomorrows chip-paper and that simply keeping a dignified silence will eventually lead to the situation returning to a relative normal and business as usual status. An EGM or a GM may well not bring forth a solution it may even inflame the situation, if not handled well, but I hope the Arts Council are keeping a close eye on events and attending those meetings because other Arts and Poetry organisations have lost out spectacularly to keep HMS Poetry Society afloat and if the ship is actually holed below the water line and slowly sinking under the weight of either apathy or gainsayers to its current policies and management styles then I for one would withhold any payment until the situation is clearer and as a tax payer I shall be writing to the Chair of the Arts Council to that effect. This may well cause hardship and pain now but other organisations in the Arts have had to face such times and I don’t think The Poetry Society should be immune from the same sort of close scrutiny other organisations have had to bear. Woolly goals such as promoting and supporting poetry and poets can avoid the question of the way something is done. The ethos of clear, decisive and fair management and substantial support from the board and members has to be seen to be in operation. Caesar’s wife has to be above suspicion but has to be seen to be so.The Poetry Society has done some amazingly good things for poetry and poets and I hope it continues to do so in a way that all can support whole heartedly, if not that, then in a way the majority can embrace whole heartedly, that's the way it goes in a democratic society. Poetry will survive come what may, I think it is not a delicate flower , more a spectacular beautiful tenacious weed that can grow out of street pavements and on wastelands but lets not get to a situation when the poetry gets trampled under foot in the wrangling for what is best for it.

And here is a bit of music to end on from the king that might be appropriate

Let’s hope it all doesn’t all end up like this.

Tag wrestling: Eurovision versus Emily Dickinson and Mozart

I am in post Eurovision Song Contest mode. I always think it is a little like watching a car crash involving loads of people from a variety of countries squashing into buses that career into each other and then observing who will help out who. Mid Europeans, Balkans, ex Russian countries, Scandinavians there is no end to how each country's ‘voting panel’ rise to the challenge of ensuring old grudges are born out, alliances confirmed and the odd song shambles its way through the wreckage to win. This year Azerbaijan won, which is still fairly oil rich so staging the fest next year won’t put a dent in their balance of payments. Indeed perhaps the various juries bore in mind who could afford to run it when voting. No point voting for a country that hasn’t got a couple of goats to rub together when the Continent’s whole press descend and demand running water, flush toilets and MacDonalds, not to mention a stage big enough to accommodate a small army. At least this year there would uni-cycles and Jedwood to ensure the ridiculous continued to be represented.

I have been working on two poems at the moment, one of which sprung out of the BBC call for submissions for a poem about one of the pieces being performed at this years proms. I noticed Mahler’s Ninth was being performed and as I have a very particular memory associated with that piece I thought I would have a go. Memory is such a tricky thing and writing about a piece of music can either start pushing you down the autobiographical route or as I was tempted down the path of locating the piece in the biographical life of the composer. Mahler’s Ninth was his last full symphony, a work he never got to hear performed, dying in his forties before it could be played by an orchestra. I presume that Mahler must have heard it all in his head but in that I may be influenced by scenes from Amadeus where Mozart is dictating his great Requiem mass to Salieri… the notes were merely written down as a form of dictation from everything he could hear in his head, each instrument each musical line. I think I have been overly influenced by films when I think of how great composers work. This scene from Amadeus has always stuck in my head, such a beautifully crafted piece of writing and acting and comes close to getting under the skin of how great art is not just made but lives almost like an overwhelming animal inside one person.

A friend has a short story collection called True North. The story which the collection is named for is loosely based on the pianist Glen Gould and is well worth a read at how fiction and music can weave together.Gould's playing and interpretation of Bach is world renowned and it is interesting to see some of the traits displayed in the portrayal of Mozart in Amadeus is reflected a little in Glenn Gould’s quixotic approachto music. I am not saying that Gould was in any way close to Mozart on genius but that sometimes there is a passion, a talent so trapped inside the frailness of a human body that there is almost sensory overload. It takes discipline to compose and play well but it takes a dark fire to drive that discipline beyond mere magnificent to sublime. I suppose the old understanding of the word sublime as something transcendent is interesting.

Music has this way of expressing its genius in a way beyond itself, it can be externalised in an instrument or an orchestra. A writer, however, only has the same currency as the medium he works in to try and convey something beyond words.
It was interesting at Wordfest at Cambridge that Hisham Matar said after his talk and reading that it is always difficult to explain how one writes using the same medium as the art itself.

Musicians have been inspired by words for centuries; the earliest Latin masses inspired a musical interpretation in plainsong and later was a source of inspiration for many composers in great choral works. Poems have often been set to music by great composers but making that exchange a two way street is always difficult. Writing a poem about music has to rely on the evocation of something beyond words that engages with how a piece of music operates in the human psyche but which still has to be captured by them. Therein lies the skill.

The fascinating chill that music leaves
Is Earth's corroboration
Of Ecstasy's impediment --
'Tis Rapture's germination
In timid and tumultuous soil
A fine -- estranging creature --
To something upper wooing us
But not to our Creator –

Emily Dickinson

One of the best poems I know about music and what it can do is by Philip Levine about Charlie Parker. Personally I think Levine and Dickinson are singing the same song but in two part harmony.

Call It Music by Philip Levine

Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song
in my own breath. I'm alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
"Bird Flight," Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
"Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas,
it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain
had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird
could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what
he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes,
shook his head, and barked like a dog--just once--
and then Howard McGhee took his arm and assured him
he'd be OK. I know this because Howard told me
years later that he thought Bird could
lie down in the hotel room they shared, sleep
for an hour or more, and waken as himself.
The perfect sunlight angles into my little room
above Willow Street. I listen to my breath
come and go and try to catch its curious taste,
part milk, part iron, part blood, as it passes
from me into the world. This is not me,
this is automatic, this entering and exiting,
my body's essential occupation without which
I am a thing. The whole process has a name,
a word I don't know, an elegant word not
in English or Yiddish or Spanish, a word
that means nothing to me. Howard truly believed
what he said that day when he steered
Parker into a cab and drove the silent miles
beside him while the bright world
unfurled around them: filling stations, stands
of fruits and vegetables, a kiosk selling trinkets
from Mexico and the Philippines. It was all
so actual and Western, it was a new creation
coming into being, like the music of Charlie Parker
someone later called "glad," though that day
I would have said silent, "the silent music
of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing.
He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights
to their room, got his boots off, and went out
to let him sleep as the afternoon entered
the history of darkness. I'm not judging
Howard, he did better than I could have
now or then. Then I was 19, working
on the loading docks at Railway Express
coming day by day into the damaged body
of a man while I sang into the filthy air
the Yiddish drinking songs my Zadie taught me
before his breath failed. Now Howard is gone,
eleven long years gone, the sweet voice silenced.
"The subtle bridge between Eldridge and Navarro,"
they later wrote, all that rising passion
a footnote to others. I remember in '85
walking the halls of Cass Tech, the high school
where he taught after his performing days,
when suddenly he took my left hand in his
two hands to tell me it all worked out
for the best. Maybe he'd gotten religion,
maybe he knew how little time was left,
maybe that day he was just worn down
by my questions about Parker. To him Bird
was truly Charlie Parker, a man, a silent note
going out forever on the breath of genius
which now I hear soaring above my own breath
as this bright morning fades into afternoon.
Music, I'll call it music. It's what we need
as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds
blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean,
the calm and endless one I've still to cross.