Modifiers & Indistinctions: Jonty Tiplady's 'Zam Bonk Dip'

(Barque 2007)

“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 Hardy
 
 

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