I Want To Tell You a Story, Are You Sitting Comfortably?

So, dear reader, it is the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness yet again. the garden centres are now displaying Christmas decorations and chocolate advent calendars are available in shops. Harvest festivals have come and gone and not only is everything safely gathered in , as the words of the hymn go, but it is put away, pickled, salted, frozen or generally preserved for the winter days ahead. I have yet to turn on the central heating, donning extra jumpers and warm slippers, instead. Every year I go through a phase of defying the elements. I nurture the wild notion that one day I will be able to last out until the first snows and if they keep coming earlier and earlier I might be able to. The dog days of Autumn always get me feeling nostalgic but also help me justify time spent writing and reading in bed because I am not wasting precious sunshine by remaining indoors.

Reading in sunlight however has always been a tiring occupation but I am now assured by those that have Kindles that reflection and bounced light is a thing of the past and that text is available despite all levels of sunshine intensities. Laying by the pool or on the beach reading has never been so available and easy. Holiday reading is now not bought at the air port but downloaded in some Internet Café in Malaga, Sorrento or Florida. No longer will the traveller have to frequent the aisles of W H Smith at the airport looking for a good read to take onto the plane, the Kindle can be slipped into the hold luggage along with the 3,000 books it is holding. It is a bit like taking the local library onto Easy Jet and whilst wonderfully life enhancing I don’t want to do it , not just yet, I want to feel the paper between my fingers.

I am no Luddite, I just have a paper fetish, I like a spine, a sense of weight. Don Quixote is fat and heavy and gave me a strong sense of accomplishment when I finished it. Not that I am suggesting we should measure books by the kilo but the physicality of the book adds to my experience of it. Where on a Kindle can you experience those wonderful hand crafted poetry chap books, the quality of the paper, the delight of vellum that adds to my reading pleasure. Hopefully such things will continue to exist long after pupils sit at their desk, browses the virtual school library and download their next book and the system logs and notes their choices automatically. I am sure the system could also be set so that only books at the pupil’s level of ability could be shown to them in the catalogue. I know we are not even far from a child reading out loud to their Kindle type notebook and the notebook halting and correcting them when they make a mistake perhaps sounding the word out so the pupil can make a correct stab at synthesis. No longer will there be children stacked and waiting to land with an adult so they can read to them. However where will be the warmth, the human contact and shared excitement of opening a book and looking through it, wondering what it might contain. Reading is not just a lone art it can be a shared experience.

Those children that have had a fun and warm fuzzy feeling from snuggling up to an adult and being read a story regularly, usually learn to read faster and maintain the habit of reading far into their adult life. I listened to a radio programme that was investigating the marketing of programmes to children such as Peppa Pig. The TV series immediately has the spin off of toys, DVDs, clothes, lunch boxes and books. Something that makes any child want to read is good but I wonder whether such marketing destroys something as wel,l in its ready packed consumer experience. I heard someone on the radio ( yes dear reader along with a paper fetish I am a Radio 4 groupie) talk about the fact that in some ways the art of the story was destroyed by the written word. That writing a story down fossilised it. In the era of the oral tradition stories were passed on and people would miss out the boring bits, extend and slightly tweak the exciting bits or add to the vividness of the setting. This process kept the story as an organic living thing that responded to its audiences’ interests, needs and lives. I am becoming involved in some story telling projects in schools and I find it fascinating how much, even very young children, want the opportunity to tell their story, to stand before a class and recount a story they have heard.

I am toying with the idea of getting someone to make me a story teller’s staff, one adult sized, one child sized. It is common practice for some story tellers to put on a special coat or cloak to give a visual prompt to the idea that now you are listening to a story. Allowing children to do the same thing is very empowering and very young children have no problem in telling the same story over and over again to each other adding their own little embellishments. You don’t have to be a Saxon elder huddled round the camp fire with other villagers to want to embellish and improve on the story of Beowulf to entertain and captivate your audience. A short incantation that children and adults say before telling a story can also be a great lead in to signal that now we are in the land of the imagination. “Let those that have ears to hear draw near and listen to my tale of a time when there were princes, princesses, animals that could talk and adventures to be had by those who were daring and brave,” is always a great attention grabber before you even launch into any fairy story. I have even used that tactic in another form when introducing children to poems especially ballads such as The Highwayman or The Listeners. I would never describe myself as a story teller but I am passionate about children being excited by them and sometimes you don’t need gadgetry, technology or devices to engage children with a story you just need the skills of one human being telling a story well to another and giving them the space and time to pass that story on to another. In such a way can the story thrive and grow and become part of the fabric of our society. The written word them becomes another doorway to a world children have already been excited by.

So much thought about stories and story telling is going on at Blogspot Towers. This also seems to be feeding into my poetry head and poetry tutor head as well so all things are useful that excite you about words.

If you want to listen to a consummate story teller listen to Eamon Kelly, a master of the art


I do know that momentous things are going on in the world, Gaddafi is dead, the European Market is wobbling, a Defence Minister is amazingly stupid …would you invite a friend to work and let them sit in on private meetings even when the higher management at work have specifically told you not to.. the man must have a blind spot the size of the House of Commons or an ego as large. Anything else …well all seems to be quiet and calm now at The Poetry Society, wounds may still be being licked but business as usual or rather as it should be seems to be being resumed. The small Dingly Dell that is the Poetry Village is more tranquil and no episode of Midsummer Murders will now be filmed there.

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.