Can you make money doing that?

‘What do you do?’ is a ridiculous question – you know it, I know it, everyone knows it … yet still here we all are, popping it into place like a little paint-peeled picket gate leading, hopefully, towards a lusher garden of conversation.

I have answered in many ways throughout my life. I’ve never actually had a proper job – instead questing my way through the incomplete map of existence since I graduated from university – so have been generally vexed by the query, not having a firm and satisfying response to give.

Over the last five years I’ve settled for ‘I’m a poet’. Two reactions follow in quick succession. The first is a gratifying kind of wonder, a pleasing look of surprise that reflects the quasi-magickal reputation a poet archetype conjures up. This is rapidly undone by the thudding materialism of a penetratingly suspicious ‘can you make money doing that?’

That’s how I think I look when when I tell people I’m a poet.

‘Can you make money doing that?’ Everyone says this. Absolutely everyone. I met a vicar last weekend. Someone you’d assume has their mind on higher questions of the spirit, rather than grubbing Mammon. Nope. ‘Can you make money doing that?’

I’ll leave you to debate in the comments *why* this is the first question that comes to people’s minds and what it says about all of us, but I will offer an answer that sidesteps the more basic practicalities the enquiry prods at.

There are three things that I think poets – well, this poet anyway – believe in.

1. That in any piece of writing the spaces you leave are filled by the reader’s consciousness and that completes the circuit.

2. That there’s a hidden layer of reality beyond the material world. It doesn’t matter if you call it the divine, collective unconsciousness or myth, it’s a really real thing, not a metaphor.

3. That if you craft the music contained in a piece of writing properly then the deepest meaning is felt and understood by the soul of the reader *before* their brain decodes and catches up.

I think everything good I’ve ever done has been true to these poetic tenets. All the artistic, unpaid things and all the commercial, paid very well things too. And that’s why ‘I’m a poet’ works for me as an answer.

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Speaking of money. Regularly readers of this Substack will know of my admiration for the artist and one-time money burner Bill Drummond – a man whose life’s creative endeavours have been true to his ‘stand on the outside looking further out’ rule. Regular readers will also know that I own a year of Bill Drummond’s life. His 44th year, between 1997 and 1998.

I ‘bought’ this year by supplying a fictional 1000 word explanation of what happened to him in those twelve months, (a narrative he can now use in his biography), alongside those from another 69 writers, each with a different year.

You are welcome to read the piece here. This is how AI would illustrate it.

Some context to the story … in 1997 / 1998 the UK had just got a new left-wing Prime Minister, Tony Blair, after years of depressing right-wing rule. Tony Blair decided to build a big dome in London to celebrate the upcoming millennium. Simultaneously Bill Drummond’s band, KLF, recorded a song called ‘Fuck The Millennium’ and did a performance in the Barbican Arts Centre in which they rolled around in wheelchairs whilst wearing horns. It was presented as an anti-comeback and one magazine review said ‘there was no press furore the next morning—merely the anticlimactic aftertaste left by 40-year-old men miming to a seven-year-old song ... 2K was unquestionably a failure.’

Simultaneously the KLF formed K2 Plant Hire Ltd with the aim of building a People’s Pyramid of 34,592 bricks, each containing 23 grams of human ashes. That project is ongoing, happening in Liverpool every November 23rd and you can submit your own ashes (wait until you’re dead) or that of loved one here.

That’s all very confusing I know but hopefully when you read my, entirely made up, year of Bill Drummond’s life you’ll be able to see how it all came about.

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There’s Brian Eno looking cute. During my TypoCircle talk in November I offered up my definition of art. Most people find this definition quite annoying, though perhaps not Brian Eno.

Here’s the definition … art is something deliberately made by a human which expands the consciousness of the species and which cannot be subsumed into capitalism.

Everything’s art nowadays, so nothing is. I suggest we need to reclaim the word and its magickal properties. Art needs to be *rare*.

Ok. So Jeff Koons customising a BMW? Not art. Someone you’ve never heard of selling a painting they’ve done? Not art. Mona Lisa? Not art. They’ve all involved a financial transaction at some point.

Chris Burden shutting himself in a locker for five days? Possibly art.

Etc. You get the picture. Feel free to disagree below.

Anyway, my good friend David Johnston – on his podcast Endless Vital Activity – posed this idea to Brian Eno – about fifteen minutes in – and Brian says ‘mm-mm’, which isn’t a *hard* disagree. Listen here.

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Which reminds me … the Henry Moore Institute is having a refurb and they wondered if I had any ideas of what could be done to their chaotic frontage whilst it’s all going on. Lean *in* to the clusterfuck aesthetic I say. Here’s some writing about scaffolding. Design by Studio Sutherl&. Click to enlarge.

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Another Studio Sutherl& design. I have one Language Consciousness Magick Romance poster from my TypoCircle talk to give away. I’ll send to the person with the most interesting comment on this post by the end of the week.

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Last year a few of us watched each solstice and equinox sunrise from the same spot on Hackney Marshes. We do it under the title ‘we don’t know what this is’ because not being certain about things is very very important. These gatherings are growing and growing, yesterday saw the marking of the spring equinox with an amazing crowd.

Here’s the piece I wrote for the first one and which appears each time. Maybe you can join us for the summer solstice appearance?

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Ok. Last bit. It’s another thing you might fancy reading and also a request for advice.

A year or so ago I created a physical installation for UKCEH. It was a collaboration with the brilliant artist Bryony Ella. I think the piece I wrote for this will work as a book, so I’m currently exploring designs.

The work is about the UK butterfly and moth database having its first dream. It’s about imagination and data and recording the world and animism and biodiversity loss and sad scientists and hope. I’d love to know what you think about it. You can read it here.

Request for advice after a picture of a data centre photographed in the way that data centres invariably are.

So generally the books I make get printed in editions of 100. That’s usually the most affordable. I have a few for sale on my website but it’s hard to get people to go there so mostly I give the bulk of them away for free. (Still not art though.)

If you’re able to take the time to read The Dataset’s Dream (and imagine it as a short, beautifully designed book because that’s what it’s going to be) I’d love to hear suggestions of where I could send it?

Feel free to email me directly.

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Here’s a poem about poetry being better than maths. The John is John Berryman and the Dylan is Dylan Thomas. Berryman was outside the hospital room when Thomas died. Berryman killed himself twenty or so years later.

Death – always a good career move for a poet. You can make a lot of money doing it.

1, 2, 1, 2  … this one’s called 
‘poetry’s more alive than maths’

The quality of oneness
the quality of twoness
cannever be found in 
granular mechanical mathematics.

His palms feel the freefall
before pushing the bridge
away		         John
goes in unsteerable solitude
to the singular river racing meaningless
like concrete at that height
the addition of fear of living
broken, then OFF.

Oneness.

You made an 18 straight whiskys
jerk of yourself again Dylan,
Berryman’s-sobering refrains
down antiseptic corridor stiffness
by your muttering morphine room,
18 straight whiskys will bugger
up your stomach but luckily
friends wait for dying friends.

Twoness.

Ohweare 	notbadat
mathematics
mathematics
isvery  	              badatus.

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I invent worlds, commercial campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. If you favour my ideas and style then please consider sharing my commercial website or my artistic website with the ambitious brand owners or sensitive artistic patrons in your life. I’m an independent practitioner and I do what I do through building partnerships.