Jonty Tiplady - Here ET rubs shoulders with Amy Winehouse, drowning polar bears sing, and the poet goes with his Mum to headbutt cacti. Here are not only the costs and exhilarations of our Googlised happiness, but the decline of America, a virtual phenomenolgy of pop music, a new type of literary tourette’s, the 20th century as it echoes in this, and some of the most explosively hilarious love poems ever written.

Jonty Tiplady, Zam Bonk Dip, Salt Publishing; Revised ed., 2010.




Jonty Tiplady’s prizewinning first collection Zam Bonk Dip is a must read for anyone keeping up with contemporary poetry. Awarded the 2009 Crashaw Prize, this book brings together “At the School of Metaphysics” and many other sought after Tiplady chapbooks. Zam Bonk Dip is a heartfreakingly necessary read, bringing poetry right into the age of internet addiction and ecological comedown, taking its cues as much from Larkin, Beckett, Lispector and Derrida as from Facebook, 80s’ TV, Donny Darko and Popeye. This is also a deeply sexy book, dealing as it does with the surprising and funny side to our internet-touched sex lives.
Tiplady’s poetry is a seriously popular and accessible blend, full of compulsive highs and lowbrow pleasures. Few books of poetry are as simultaneously funny and moving.
Here ET rubs shoulders with Amy Winehouse, drowning polar bears sing, and the poet goes with his Mum to headbutt cacti. Here are not only the costs and exhilarations of our Googlised happiness, but the decline of America, a virtual phenomenolgy of pop music, a new type of literary tourette’s, the 20th century as it echoes in this, and some of the most explosively hilarious love poems ever written.
Tiplady’s verse form transmutes and glissades as it needs to, becoming strikingly broken just as the heart telling it, and suitably dark as it takes in the still haunting vestiges of 9/11 (the jumbos and jumpers of the opening poem for example) and other worldwide seisms.
The work of Tiplady has quite rightly been heralded as something fresh and important. Look no further for the essential poetry of the twenty first century.


‘A poet whose engagement with 21st century culture (high, middlebrow, and low) exhibits a playfulness and clarity of language that has not been seen in Britain since the mid-70s volumes of Tom Raworth.’ —Tim Atkins


‘Jonty Tiplady’s is the least guarded and most engaging voice I’ve heard in years, and ZAM BONK DIP is, at the very least, as funny as poetry gets.’ —Peter Manson


‘Most things don’t hurt like they do inside, or sing like the love they must yet have of us. This book by the person Jonty Tiplady, patient and impetuous, wild and soft, disjointed and palatial, will: as fragile as our clarity itself.’ —Keston Sutherland






“No order here, and so no need.” Tiplady presides over a sequence of apparitions in each of the 10 parts to this pamphlet, each one an "error":

It's always time to sing again
careless soul. Error laughs error's socks
off, let's record everything in Sunshine Hotel.

Zam Bonk Dip’s errant and happy song exerts a pull which is a centrifugal and impalpable force, seeming to adhere to a world unseen or athwart us; and this coiling over and through the flesh of language presents an envelopment with no space for the restless phantoms of a world which an alternative, penetrating negativity might have laid out from above: the pull exerted haywires forwards and back.

Alight here, and see how it steps backwards.

Each Tiplady song advances its intricate sequence – subsuming proper nouns, more familiar rhetorical patterns, mis-usage. The result is a hollowed out writing given this form by scraps of transforming song which chase after each other in non-clarifying indistinction. This hollowness comes as a relief, for each joyful turn, haphazard rhyme or momentary crystallization of sense is focused and repelled by the run onwards, allowing a space to think the lines by which borders and passages are constructed in language, or the way in which they can be created and pulled apart or perhaps "bounced". - Edmund Hardyhttp://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/04/zam-bonk-dip.html




I've been intending to do this since 2011 or thereabouts but have prevaricated and excused and forlorned myself because I wanted to say how important for poetry Jonty's work is. I need to make a brief disclaimer, he and I correspond reasonably frequently and this may be seen as one of those mutual appreciation pieces. I used to worry about this kind of thing but, as have others, Jonty contacted me after I'd written about him in positive terms.
I couldn't get my brain around his material for a while and then some of Jonty's work appeared in Chris Goode's wonderful Better than Language anthology and I suddenly saw the 'light'. His work has now gone into a radically innovative and strategically important (crucial) orbit that holds out some hope for the future of the Poem. Before we get any further, the Trillionaires project is something we all need to mull over, not just for its quality but also because of its contribution to the scheme of things poetry-wise.
These claims may seem overblown and grandiose but I do believe (know) that the current malaise (which isn't fatal) is partly because the Poem has become far too poetic for its own good. There are poets with enormous talent who seem to be stuck in a number of ruts. The first of these is an over sensensitivity to the enormous weight of the past, the second is the very real damage that continues to be done by twentieth century modernist (and post-modernist and all the others) clichés that cloud the work of most and confirm (this is important) the reading public's view of the Poem as remote, elitist and Not for Them.
The Tiplady project (along with the work of Vanessa Place and John Bloomberg-Rissman) is about presenting an aleternative way of doing things. Jonty's written material mixes the demotic with the profound to produce genuinely satisfying 'effects' which undermine the standard tropes and conceits with something genuinely new that we all need to take notice of.
My inention here (as with some others) is to introduce the work to a wider range of readers and to celebrate (in the widest sense) the ongoing body of work. I'm going to use this page however to give some brief examples of what I mean:
ZAM BONK DIP
This was published by Barque Press in 2007, I bought it in 2009 and didn't like it because it seemed a bit mannered and far too clever for its own good. Because it's short, I did pay it some attention but decided that I'd be better off with the usual Late Modern suspects that I could see the point of. It wasn't until the Better than Language anthology in 2011 that I decided to re-read the ZAM poems and suddenly began to see what might be going on. The is the end of the third poem in the sequence:

     What I find in insider psyche, nothing grows fusty in this
     a tad, this tad of, this old giant tardis butterfly man.

I give this as the briefest example of the 'effects' described above. I haven't discussed these with Jonty but my take is that there's a dismantling of expectation, a norm or two that are being playfully undermined but nevertheless a saying of serious things.
Superanus
This was the poem that turned me around, made me smile and (metaphorically) punch the air in delight. It's fiercely intelligent, makes brilliant use of the language and creates an 'effect' that made me think again about the possibilities of the Poem. Here's the second half:

    Screwball addiction post-bling,
    post-gangsta-rap nothing.

    Nice to wonder about with you
    nice to stay fat,
    nice never truly to be a polygraph.

    Worth it that the woods be sovereign,
    what matters is that any of it
    happened at all
    the children a little fucked (concept to pop to sex) up
    and Formby in Albania like Big Bird to Catanou
    did quite well with that toaster.

    About now climate change arrives.

These are some of the most startling and breathtaking (Prynne terms) lines that I've come across, ever. Incidentally, George Formby was very popular in Albnia during the Hoxha regime as a an example of proletarian cheerfulness, no idea at all about Catanou.
The Undersong.
This piece of brilliance appeared in the second issue of the infuriating but essential Claudius App, it's read by the v talented Amy De'Ath and it's the kind of thing that we all should be doing, if we had the talent. In this increasingly distracting world, I know that it isn't easy to 'commit' to anything but the briefest moments of attention yet this will only take 8 minutes of your life and is as much a landmark as Sutherland's Odes, Jarvis' Night Office and V Place's Tagodia. For those that don't know, the original Sooty Show was a fifties tv programme for children featuring two glove puppets. The playful melancholy of the poem gives an additional bite/edge to the poem which is in marked contrast to other examples of absurd seriousness. Without getting too lit crit, its also a dream (vision) poem with a kind of disjointed coherence that Langland aimed for in Piers Plowman.
Trillionaires
All of this is poetry, all of this is a poem. A few months ago I wrote something insightful on bebrowed on the need for innovation and working across forms with others. Jonty is currently showing the rest of us how the poem can make use of what's known as new technologies in general and the interweb in particular. The only problem for me is that it's being produced at such a rate that I can't keep up with it.
(Moment of pretentious but brief rumination) I've spent some time over the last six months paying intermittent attention to medieval manuscripts and early modern emblem books. This has triggered for my collaborator and I much 'deep' speculation about how text and image may 'work' together. It grieves me to acknowledge that Trillionaires is a long way in front of our work to date. Those who may have any doubt of the oustanding merit of this material need only to glance at the text at 32 secs in Nothing is Over. The above is an attempt to give a flavour of Jonty's work. In other pages in this section I'll try and amplify what I mean. - http://www.arduity.com/poets/tiplady/index.html




For those who are not yet converted, Jonty Tiplady makes most ‘innovative’ poetry look tired, he is already establishing a new kind of arena that does the playful and the profound in equal measure and provides a quite scary coda to these tumultuous times. He’s foolishly agreed to answer questions on a piecemeal, step-by-step basis.
Why do poetry- what is it that attracts you both as a reader and a poet?
Here we go, on the fly, 03 February 2012: first of all, thanks for asking. Thank you for the question, I mean. It’s of course a good one. I’ll try to answer with some things I perhaps haven’t quite said or thought before, since otherwise why answer? I like your blog, by the way. It seems important that it exists. Thank you for it too. Why do poetry: I am not sure, first of all, I ever do. My first perhaps obscure instinct is to say poetry is not something I do, it’s something I try, for quite precise reasons, to undo. I have been writing poetry since 2007. Pretty much the first poems I wrote were published in Zam Bonk Dip, by Barque Press, in 2008. Things happened quickly. My name suddenly changed, or my ‘author’s name’ changed, from Jonathan to Jonty. Jonty is a sort of cartoon Viking nickname I’ve had from age zero. When I lived in Paris, nobody would call me Jonty. I was not gentil, I could not be for them (‘tu n’est pas gentil’). Perhaps when I write, then, it has something to do with a sort of fire I feel myself catch through gentleness. Being worthy of one’s name. Poetry is a making, a producing (poesis). But almost nothing attracts me as a reader of poetry except a desire shown to somehow gently ferociously unmake things, unproduce them: how to undo, deconjure, graze, grace, heartfreak, headbang, make impossibly pop. I feel more khoratic and motherly towards poetry than fatherly, and perhaps that has to do with names. I do believe in the magic of names, and that a lot of writers and poets write through or against their names. Amy De’Ath has just done a typically wonderful reading online of a poem called ‘The Undersong’ I wrote a few days ago. That happened for various reasons, but one was that I felt the words needed to belong to the other, that they had to be handed over. I don’t really listen to pop music now, not much anyway, it’s as if I can’t cathect in that direction anymore (same with football), but I used to a lot, and I’ve been thinking a bit about that Stone Roses song, ‘Don’t Stop’, which actually goes backwards. There is a ‘step backwards’ in the very first line of Zam Bonk Dip. I feel I had in mind a sort of beautiful reversal, what early Prynne almost calls a last most beautiful return, an unproducing, an undoing, a sort of peeling back which is impossible, and in which poetry might look as if it is becoming more effusive than ever (like now) but is actually as if singing in itself ripped to the outside of no longer needing to do. I imagine that poetry has always been that more than ever, and that nothing has changed, but also that everything has changed, and that what was always more than ever is now more than ever more than ever. I mean, we’ve run out space, and that changes everything, even poetry. If I am attracted to poetry still, it’s as a form of confrontational beauty or affirmation, needed, not needed now, because we no longer live in endless time, with endless resources. Take my poem, burn it, put it in your heart, but don’t buy it or read it, is that the effect I want? After the initial prosodic run on the fall of wall street in ‘The Undersong’, which is extended in other versions, my effort was pretty much to interrupt myself, like sticking smiley stickers all over a beautiful elephant. There is no more time to just want to go to the wind farm, we have to actually go there, even if we can’t. In fact, and still on the fly, unedited, to what extent should poetry now be a form of total ecological critique and nothing else, one that makes eco-poetics look like micro-marbles on the burning hull of a volcano? Should poetry be something like what Nicholas Royle would perhaps call a total veer? I’m influenced a lot by Nick Royle, his new book Veering, in some ways more than most poets. He’s one of my favourite poets in fact, and he doesn’t yet write ‘poetry’, as far as I can tell. I ask myself if poetry should not do or be a total critique of poems, and other poets. What would that look like? Is it socially bearable? Should it be? When? Do you know, John? The first premise leading nowhere seems to be: ‘capitalism is the problem’ — unless capital itself has been listened to, and poetry alone perhaps can’t do that. I am going fast here, but a lot of this is in the first part of OK KOSMOS, advertisement, avertissement, just now published on the truly beautiful The Claudius App 2. I am thinking at the moment a lot about how poets seem always to be plugged into something: either it’s a highly evolved caste-like digitalised form of Prynne-ism, for example, or a sort of hybrid zombie form of post-deconstruction; but really of course it’s all that and more, or could be. Why be plugged into just one current? Isn’t that an effacement of the state of the world anyway? Isn’t that just a career safe-guard, the sort of thing that makes everyone want to efface the state of the world, and just get a career and forget all about it anyway? Black out into dentistry, Marianne Morris says somewhere. If I don’t quite do poetry, it’s because I want to stay committed to this moment just before, a sort of zero-dimensional non-poetry I can’t know about, before I get fully plugged in to any one set of social facts and figures, which always happens anyway, but not always like this. This is perhaps what I’m starting to mean, in OK KOSMOS, by the ‘khorasatiric’. I want to stutter like a fractal miracle in language: ultimate trying. Definition by negation is not enough. Will this do to start? - https://bebrowed.wordpress.com/tag/zam-bonk-dip/


The World is For This: on the poetry of Jonty Tiplady:

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
- André Breton
Things make us happy. But this is not always true, and even if it is, emphatically true, what kind of ‘things’ are we talking about? Objects? Commodities? Beer? Holidays? Lovers? All these and more undoubtedly make our lives more complete than they otherwise would have been, regardless of whether that standard of completeness has been pre-programmed into our relations of exchange by those things themselves. Happiness can at least be decisively accounted for by things, especially commodities, because they provide what emotions and circumstance, bound by unflattering indeterminacy, cannot: a knowable and total cartography of desire, mapped out for us in every bus stop and chatroom, deftly legible in any situation in which we might find ourselves. But, this is not always true, and certain things are better at carrying off their thing-ness than others. Partly this has to do with function, or evacuated function, or simple crassness, that peculiar inability of a thing to justify its own existence; nevertheless, things do make us happy, especially things that use their thing-ness to re-create the conditions for their necessity whilst proposing their own superabundance of universal humanity. What avails a sense of idealized empathy from subjects otherwise incomplete, weakened or damaged by desire, is the complete thing, the bounded, constant, secret, composed thing, held out to us with all the sublime grace of macro-life, supernumerary, brilliant chrome, the miniature gestalt containing all the crucial elements of style and faith to make it the ideal companion, the soundtrack to our lives, gliding effortlessly along beside us & life in impeachable parallel design, offering. But we’re not even fucking subjects any more, and anyway, the preceding has already by its all-too-grandiose effort at categorization defied the truth of the elemental thing it wished to approach, which might better be apprehended as slightly as possible so as not to destabilize its delicate purity in the face of its ready-made dismissal as opium for the MTV masses, tin-pan alley manufactured nothing, the final, lowest common denominator dregs of mass production’s appropriation of the most stylistically abstract of the arts. The pop song can endure this flagrantly overwrought introduction because it is that thing of things, a thing which we love because it is both profoundly superficially like us - relentlessly complete and forever wanting - and profoundly dismissible as waste, superfluity, neon capital. We want it and we want it to make us happy and it does do that, if we want it to. 

 It does this, of course, by doing what the persistent use of the first person plural might do to any listener well-disposed to the fact that the universal proposals which Pop declaims are in suffering fact in gleaming denial of the evil truth of Pop hegemony as the suckers on the tentacles of global capital: by recklessly producing the desire to desire itself, claiming itself on your behalf, making its own particular, industry-standard brand of happiness the normative state of affairs for everything from bedroom politics to class warfare - Pop makes you its own happy. But that’s also bullshit, if you think about, or in fact actually listen to, a pop song (that you like). Thinking about pop songs is immensely difficult because the residue they leave is short-circuited, a kind of ‘self-destruct in 5 seconds’ sonic memory that only works by imparting the double dream of future listening bliss and the abject melancholy at the parallel objectification of the world that the pop song enacts (more on this melancholy later), and because, most importantly, they are emphatically not built to be thought about, or thought with, or thought on, or in fact done anything with except bopped, tranced, head-banged, slammed and smiled with. To. You can’t smile with Pop, you can’t even smile at Pop - it must be smiled to, because built into its silvery organs of transmission are not companionship or subjectivity but ruthless collectivity and the universal propaganda of love. Pop hates you and you love it back.

You are not the Pop Princess. You’re not even the pop princess. You’re a sham, a charlatan, a contestant, a by-stander, a listener. Pop’s most gloriously insipid achievement has been to clinically wipe off the face of the earth the act of listening, and in its place has produced the ersatz sublime of Pop satisfaction, deep, meaningful, recyclable, carbon neutral, cute. You love it. I love it. The truth of it is, of course, that it doesn’t matter what we do, what we love, because the best, most finely wrought pop songs appeal directly to the individual outside of the collective euphoria ‘we’ always assume they are supposed to document, perform or create, and if they didn’t then the sheer intensity of Pop’s innately huggable chrome robot of love wouldn’t produce such giddy affirmation in the pit of your stomach whilst simultaneously (or rather retroactively) revealing the condition of such intensity as intensity itself, with no other ground than that you desire to be affirmed by an Other which turns out to be the 99 pence you spent downloading the 256 kbps mp3 from iTunes. The stunning vacuity of the gargantuan mechanisms that pump Pop around the entire universe in the consistent futurity of 20-whatever is more than enough to render the immortality of children merely equal in duration to the ad segments audibly enforced by Spotify’s evil geniuses. Last year’s Facebook campaign to make a 1992 song by Rage Against the Machine Christmas number one in the face of the massively over-determined popular economics of the X-Factor favourite Joe McElderry was somewhat evacuated of its grass roots radicalism when it was pointed out that both franchises belong to the Sony BMG corporation, who would be doubling profits whoever won. Pop loves you, and you have to hate it back.

Things make us happy, but that happiness is radically contingent on the production of those things which are designed to make us happy, and to keep us, in a sense, the limiters rather than the arbiters of our own happiness. Self-regulation as Pop primacy. But I think that, actually, if we are trying to figure out something resembling a more rigorous happiness, which is what I think we have to do, or to figure out what kind of things might help us constitute that happiness, then we have to think about the conditions of reception at least as much, if not much, much more than, the conditions of production, and to think about how those conditions of reception might be able to impel a reading of Pop, or a pop reading, that tempers a stultifying and inertia-driven dialectic of the thing; not just that such conditions are always already built into this or that thing for pre-packaged digestion, but what we might choose to do with them, how we might decide to deploy the things we love to pre-empt or re-activate or re-recuperate or, perhaps most perilously of all, truly believe in what it is that Pop ineffably does, despite itself. A rigorous happiness needs to understand the things that make us happy and figure out why they must, and what we can do to actively account for them, not merely passively accept them as in fact negative fulfillment, but positive affirmation, in order to produce an affirmative viral humanity that could infect the very mass production of love as product placement, and in this sense make love itself a form of insurgent recuperation that would destabilize and militate against the truthfully and necessarily mendacious love of things. Reality (Poetry) must be constituted by our own investigations into the appeasement of un-reality which is the basis of the culture industry’s diurnal cartography.

One problem with this kind of untenable, flowery global cultural détournement might be summed up in the condition described by Adorno in section 48 of Minima Moralia:

In a phase when the subject is capitulating before the alienated predominance of things, his readiness to discover value or beauty everywhere shows the resignation both of his critical faculties and of the interpreting imagination inseparable from them. Those who find everything beautiful are now in danger of finding nothing beautiful. [Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2005), p.76.]

The passage continues, ‘The universality of beauty can communicate itself to the subject in no other way than in obsession with the particular’; but in ultra-modern real-live hyper life where the World itself, 50 years after first being sentimentally objectified by William Anders’ Earthrise photograph (a moment marked by Prynne in ‘The Ideal Star-Fighter’ and ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ and by Dorn, weirdly, before it happened, in ‘Song: The Astronauts’, among others) has become one enormous broadcast particular of Hooman planetary affairs, where can we locate the real particular? When every street corner is up for grabs in Google Street View, the elimination of distance realized by a joyous and efficient new barbarism, the instant of direct apprehension phased out by Skype sex and real-time warfare simulation, the virtual hegemony in apathetic overload makes Chat Roulette the new global larynx, perhaps attempting to find everything beautiful might hew our attention to the particular conditions of that everything in a positively utilitarian manner. A rigorous happiness might further start by realizing that any particular is now recuperated by generality and virtual categorization at Infinity speed and thus find worth and real live soft humanity by getting at it from the other direction, by going straight through Life, the Universe and Everything to where those abstracts constitute you, and consistently determine your happiness through things.

In 1985, for example, it is still possible to demand that ‘an account of almost everything, inside or out, in any given historical era, is hardly too small a goal for any art to embrace’, even if it is only possible for Stephen Rodefer to demand it. [See Stephen Rodefer, ‘Prologue to Language Doubling’, reproduced in Chicago Review (54:3), Winter 2009, pp.50-52 (originally published in Jimmy and Lucy’s House of “K” (4), June 1985, pp.74-76.)] Contemporary wranglings over the atomistic, physical or political efficacy of poetry seem still to be couched in terms of the art-life continuum, as if we hadn’t all sublimated that shit, like, 30 years ago, after someone clocked that being led into the hallowed halls of Life carrying the Art of the future on your backs for inspection by the great and generous Work in the sky wasn’t going to cut it for much longer. Transformational for whom? Well, the poet for a start. If you write something that changes your life, at least it changes your life, which is the most direct and stupid way of pointing out that Art and Life no longer matter in the sense of their substantial adherence to a world picture that has to be antithetical before it’s isomorphic, that fleshing out the polarities and relative elevations of the street song last on everybody’s lips just sets off the moving blocks and makes it harder for Mario to get to the end of the level. Comparing life and art, even without capitalization, does injustice to them both by abstracting them from either ‘works of art’ or ‘reality’; we become endlessly trapped amongst their competing claims to that which is already where we all are. You are, amongst a billion other things, the opposite of language personified. I’m not saying that the distinction is invalid as an historical discourse for understanding the dizzying chicanery of autonomy’s incessant critique and recuperation over the course of Art History - I’m just saying it doesn’t count any more. Recuperation in the age of digital reproduction has become so intensely rife that wherever it does not simply leave the most self-indulgent lethargic cynicism strewn like hipster blood across the spine of VICE magazine, it makes it the new beautiful - in various galleries in East London, to my endless joy, they call it institutional-critique-for-institutional-critique’s-sake-core. This beautiful cannot be distrusted simply because it happens to be fashioned out of the impacted URLs of a 1000 Tumblr accounts rather than gouache, any more than it can be praised for being truly integrated into actual life: what both of these mono-positions lack is a dialectic of passionate irony, apart from any sense of what it means to be contemporary. Any newbie’s doing praxis right now on MySpace, but good art is more real than it is yet possible to be, and we are not yet there, which is why reading poetry is the single most unrealistic thing I do; without it I would have no excess from which to fashion its perfected shadow opposite in later life. The issue is further complicated by the pernicious historical fact that art and life are peculiarly equivalent speculative constructs, as Oscar Wilde was fully aware when he wrote The Decay of Lying, leaving them prey to the aspersions of those who would have one infiltrate the other in order to prove that such interpenetration is not, after all, that desirable, like Bürger pulling out in distaste at his own theoretical climax, or Trotsky wagging his finger at Mayakovsky’s ashtrays made of human skulls (‘inconvenient and unhygienic’) in the revolutionary spirit of measure and moderation. ‘Life-praxis’, built on misguided abstract functions which it cannot fulfill, is then castigated not only for doing a bad job of importing revolution, but for daring to assume that it would be a possible outcome in the first place.

This is not the place (ha!) to get into a sticky discussion about the constitution of the first person plural, or the composition of the readership at large. I could make a cringing statement to the effect that the voice of culture distinguishes not those whom it embraces (didn’t I point that out earlier?), or perhaps make clear that even fewer people read theoretical accounts of avant-garde poetry (passionately not even masquerading as Positive Thinking) than read the poetry itself (if there is still such a thing. ha.), and that therefore the whole efficacy debate (which I realize at this point that I may or may not have invented for the purposes of this essay, or better yet be some flagrantly misremembered bullshit Jamelia Wigmore whispered to me in the pub on New Year’s Eve) is fried from the start because if you’re reading this, you already care, and are probably changing your mind, and therefore your experience, right now. But instead, I say we flip the whole shebang, and not just for metaphysical shits and giggles: what real, substantial, social effect does Life have on Poetry? What, in any case, is efficacious life? How is my life affecting Poetry? After all, a little art can solve a lot of problems, and usually does. Rodefer, in the piece quoted above, has more to say about self-help:

What is crucial is not the ingenuity of a verbal work, nor the meticulous care for detail, nor the working out of schema and intent, however much these may contribute, but something absolutely vital no matter what else is present. I mean that power to lift us out of our seats and keep us in them. Perhaps that old churchy purpose of literature to be uplifting is not so far off in a varied sense. To disclose, in short, a design and a vision which impel us to a greater apprehension of where we are situated as inhabitors [sic] of room on this globe, larger than we, and smaller than the universe. [Rodefer, ‘Prologue to Language Doubling.’]

So we can at least see that if poetry is still to compose, comprise and constitute us, wildly and beautifully, as we as readers of poetry surely feel we are so composed (even if it doesn’t always have to be wild and beautiful), that apprehending everything could not only be useful for qualifying and interrupting everything’s machinations on the real, but also for evincing and articulating that real as an essential component of every thing we passionately inhabit. [And thus, as Rodefer’s crucial neologism simultaneously suggests, inhibit.] I believe in poetry’s didactic promise to teach us how to love, for example, but more than that I believe in the necessary risk involved in saying, this time with only a residual trace of unwitting pathological irony embedded in my teeth, something that pathetic and stupidly bourgeois. When I say “us” I mean “me”. Me and Jonty.

Jonty Tiplady’s poetry takes what Pop proposes, mendaciously, coercively, and attempts to make it real, vulnerably live, and loveable. It can, after all, be real. We can, for the moment, really believe in the hook, verse and chorus, the rising minor key synthesizers of “Dear World and Everyone in it”, primed as it is for super-realisation of the fully-blown burgeoning reality of life composed around us, forging an intenser real from the cacophony of Pop-sexuality, Pop-social performance and Pop-cataloguing than any smarmy neo-Romantic blitzkrieg of luddite pretensions could ever believe possible, let alone confirm, let alone betray. Like AiDS-3D’s or Universal Swimsuit’s remixes of 90s dance hits, the poem achieves grace not by cynical or ironic citation, but by actually re-investing its material with the hope, or if there is to be a concession to at least a modicum of restraint, the wry hope, that the affirmatives of its lyric appeal might truly be believed, or at least trusted in until the poem either frowns in belated emo majesty or squirms in pathologically persuasive climax. The relentless anti-nostalgia in the form of a precise and presumably ever-accelerating hurtle into retro Technicolor futurity is couched in such endearing generosity it almost effaces the sustaining melancholy of the underlying drift:

So I believe, eleven, that since there / still must be some street corner soul, for example, some effects of it, the issue becomes not loss but the quality of these surviving effects as they / enigmatically insist out of and into that loss. Street corner soul was perhaps / always not what we think we now know it isn't anymore, which perhaps / means it now has a chance of still being more itself than it ever was, more / snappy and strange, which is to say less, always less. Yet anewly so. [Jonty Tiplady, Zam Bonk Dip (Cambridge: Salt, 2010), p.30]

Which, incidentally, is also how lost love operates, or is perhaps love translated into ‘different Google machine language’, the double rainbows of ‘darkest happiness’ proving by negation of non-affirmation that ‘life / isn't something we made up’, even though the parameters of the verse itself in a book like At the School of Metaphysics are a testament to that very composition. ‘Here I’m over pop, / which therefore rises falls again, like there is no absence only very weak / shades of presence down to the custard at your feet’ announces the first poem in this sequence, riffing on a heart-rendingly addictive materialism whilst declining to do much more than riff, thus betraying by that very succulent aphoristic approach the love of pop not lost but ‘always less’, and newly so. Here, love is distressingly like a box of chocolates which you’re never going to get, but which will instead be held in such careful, tender esteem that the possibility of its always being available to our sticky fingers might be at least forever sustained. About every poem’s end is a particularly hook-esque sign-off, recalling the distance between ourselves and the ‘brief dream’ we’ve just managed to occupy (or inhibit), a style seemingly distilled from the intensity of alienation even from those things we love too much, or especially so; the lyric subjects in ‘Madrock Gunned Down in Flowers’ and ‘For the Brazilian Rocket Queen’ are in themselves practically parallel in their worldly roving, ever hugging the surface of the earth without ever being fed into a machine for Wohnen or housing benefit. Parallel in the sense that they are about the very world they are passionate about, rather than buried inside it - their ‘furiously hopeful music’, a love of loving that might in some poets become emotional sycophancy, but which here is the absolutely necessary temporary structure for thinking the troublesome nature of ‘losing so much / especially zeros’, that bad negativity plumbed for all its image of emotional leverage that becomes actual emotional leverage when you realise that the description is not just wittily uncanny, but true.

Happiness in Tiplady’s poems is certainly true, however provisionally, and in fact perhaps radically and necessarily provisional; such a state is always under duress, must be worked at and maintained, is usually durational by dint of its intensity, however offensively charming. ‘Like tissue for some universal fucking soul beat’ the gags and splurges ‘get your human / ass night on’ by refusing death and the economy in favour of ‘abracafuckingsexdabra’ and singing the Google-future not as something so cynical as a pop-culture reference but as the enveloping ‘sound of bricks’ that is happiness itself, digitally dark and only blithely, deliciously conversational if the conversation happens to be Life and not resemble it. ‘It’s like when my room / resembles a hospital, my insides cry out, and / the thing seems to be the more happy I am’, at which point we meet face-to-face the damaged bedroom-pop utopianism that best characterizes the work of Tiplady’s that I’ve so far imbibed, an intensity of focus that over-stimulates happiness to a wild and pathological distress by believing in its own appeal for reconciliation. Thus ‘A happiness he cannot / face’ becomes the enduring site of a too-susceptible empathy, for Pop can contain and limit a kind of queer subversion mere local happiness can only dream of or dread, or in this case, both. Too much happiness is bad for the soul, it seems.

The melancholic carries the poems on a bed of tonics and dominants that can sustain the ‘brief dream’ for as long as it can, and no longer. ‘Those lava mice are scathing / about every poem’s end’ because they know that’s where we want to get to, finally, as the détourned image of real happiness, but must by necessity of song brush past in the time of reading, or as listening, you know that the more you play the song the less the pre-fabricated hooks are able to cope with the love you have for them, and will eventually buckle under the stress of your desire and become quotidian again. I think that same fear regulates the poems in At the School of Metaphysics: they dare not grip the rail too tightly for fear of the structural reprisal built into their code for loving. It is the curse and charm of the poetry, this parallelism noted above, and this choral flop, both part of a disconcerting vulnerability that is the truly antithetical informal device at play, ultimately deflecting the immortal chrome pretensions of the Pop Golem. However thinly veiled by the camp, affectionate slapstick of ‘I went with my Mum to headbutt a cactus’, the palpable weakness of the arbitrary, scattershot line speaks in Negative Capability without the caps, and, ‘Almost even too free and fair to want to / act as art at all’, both the pop analogy and Pop materialism are hereby dropped and subtly, almost insidiously, reinforced as the self-effacing labour the poetry accomplishes, despite its ersatz self:

Last but not / least, I believe, as the song says, that you are the only one to understand / why it is I will have to spend a lifetime saying the very opposite of what I / believe, which is that there is no such thing as cosmic pessimism because / there will be nobody there to feel it, unless there is somebody there to feel / it, or unless there is nobody or somebody here, now, to feel it. Are we not a / little this last glissade made colossal pop affirmation? [Zam Bonk Dip, p.31]

The opposite of what I believe is not thereby ignored and eliminated from the life of the poetry, relegated to some blasé ignorance where it could lie perniciously unobserved, but militates against the negation of itself by this willful, obtuse and ‘colossal’ affirmation. By shoring up everything against things, Tiplady’s poems proclaim a rigorously happy irruption into the damaged life that efficiently and sublimely determines the social reality that (the) poetry strives to realize and accomplish. The poetry and my vague sense of it remain, crushingly, bigger and more powerful than particular poems could ever hope to be. The question, to what extent this accomplishment might be altogether too exact to allow the poems to exist as anything more than affirmative pastiche, peeled off the ruptured artificial nostalgia to reveal: nostalgia, is itself the measure of their barely contained, humorous self-destruction; after all, suicide is painless. The risk of believing in what pop can do for you is the risk of believing Pop on face value. But mightn’t the poem’s question invite the glib rhetorical response: no, we’re not, we’re reading about it, however much we love to yearn and yearn to love better and more realistically; and doesn’t the fact that “there will be nobody there to feel it” smack uncomfortably of the kind of solipsistic utopian apocalypse that invites love of self to be the yardstick by which an already fantastical ‘we’ is ultimately measured, brushed up, squared, before finally being redeemed from the frailest of bourgeois miseries? Transformational for whom, indeed. Sitting comfortably, I opened my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life. When I say ‘me’, I mean ‘poetry’. Remarkably, that same ‘stunning vacuity’ that renders the intensity of Pop the shaky ground of its own enticing real is suddenly and breathlessly evinced by your desire to have your own life affirmed in poetry. ‘Dear World and Everyone in it’ does not just implicate you by association, it is, in a sense, your own composition, and thanks to Merleau-Ponty we have the proof:

The thing is nothing but a significance, the significant ‘thing’. Very well. But when I understand a thing, a picture for example, I do not here and now effect its synthesis, I come to it bringing my sensory fields and my perceptual field with me, and in the last resort I bring a schema of all possible being, a universal setting in relation to the world. At the heart of the subject himself we discovered, then, the presence of the world… [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), p.498.]

I bring in M-P not to kick-start a discussion of reading or reader-reception theory that would pop-up more subjects & objects than we could by this point possibly be real enough to render useful, but to further emphasize the universal settings we all save in our versions of real life to enable us to function at the level of fully-human. Readers of poetry know that some poets are ultimately better at providing themselves with an armory of succor and artifice than they are at providing them for the rest of us, which is the point at which self-identification kicks in to bridge the gap opened up by that very knowledge, a kind of generous readerly compensation for the poet’s (bad) superabundance of desire. Ultimate subjectivity is hard to come by, and harder still to keep from collapsing in on its own maximal designs, ours or theirs. But readers of poetry also know that everything is theirs by right, and that happiness involves the risk of attentiveness to every thing that could possibly threaten the opposite of what they believe. Or maybe I’ve just written myself into that conclusion because I want it to make me happy and it does do that, if I want it to. Either way, everything is too much for nothing except total joy. Human is a positive movement. - Joe Luna

http://fallopianyoutube.blogspot.com/2012/05/world-is-for-this-on-poetry-of-jonty.html

poems
Nympholepsy


THE DISCOURSE OF THE END OF THE WORLD NOW: AN INTERVIEW WITH JONTY TIPLADY (click link for PDF)


Petro-Pastoral in a Smouldering Era: Lana Del Rey’s ‘Mariners Apartment Complex’


HAPPINESS 4

From this orange point starting again rejecting
nothing. With Tippi’s fear of thunder. The laying
of a tiny sparrow near the baby’s pillow, or books
w/ cardboard covers of cardboard bought to
cardboard are published by hand in the street
painted by boys who stop being cardboard.
Something unpublished in the world unites and
does not break, and if it were the window of the
open bath? Beyond the comic boxes, everything
happening for the first time. What one believes not
in. A cluster that can never finish you. Or finish
and be in favour of happiness.
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/04/jonty-tiplady.html




Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land





Jonty Tiplady grew up in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, moving to London, Paris, then Brighton, where he received a PhD on Jacques Derrida. He has published 8 chapbooks of poetry, including 'Zam Bonk Dip' (Barque Press 2007) and 'At the School of Metaphysics' (Fly By Night 2008). He won the 2009 Crashaw Prize and currently lives in London.