Covernote
THE BUCKET OF UNUSED IDEAS
by jem rolls
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This Covernote comprises
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1] A Covernote for The Bucket by the writer
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2] Bios Of The Creators
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COVERNOTE
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for an entirely new way of experiencing reading
you are offered
THE BUCKET OF UNUSED IDEAS
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yet i suggest you enter and immerse yourself in The Bucket
before you read this Covernote
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The Bucket
all my eggs in one cannon
a high high heap of powder
kept dry by the deeply devout dogma of decades
a very full load
my one-and-only shot
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The Bucket
700+ pieces
the product of over 40 years of writing
20 years of assembling and
8 years of conceiving
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yet almost none of this has been seen before
by anyone
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for well over twenty years i’ve
made a living purely from my poetry
every penny i live off has come from
the door-sales of poetry shows
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so, as a performance poet i’ve
fortunately
been able to completely avoid the world of
poetry publishing
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for the world of performance poetry was
and is
brimful of fascinating possibilities i have spent decades
feverishly pursuing
and living off
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yet, along the way, from 2005
i began to slowly assemble a mass of writings
some written decades before
which i started calling
The Bucket Of Unused Ideas
well before i knew what it was,
long before i understood its scale
and decades before i realised it might best be randomised
and could be a thing in its own right
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many of these were short, and epigrammatic,
and filed together to make them
easy to forage over the winter for a
new show in the summer
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while many were longer and more poetic and
for me then, unperformably so
yet many of them i returned to
month after month
year after year
goallessly working on them,
nudging them up, merging them,
and boiling the ideas and writing down
and again
and embellishing them and merging them
and again
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this was good
in that i was creating poems i liked
and that their writing gave me persistent challenges
and kept the writing mind alive
yet it was progressively more dissatisfying
that, as i had no use for them and
no-one ever saw them
they were punted into the long grass
time and time again, for years
and again, for years
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eventually, after well over ten years
in 2018 in Gokarna, India
frustrated by their growing number
and their notbadness
i decided to make a thing from them
to take the unusably poetic ideas
and the hundreds of one-liners and short pieces
and put them together in one enormous file
or poem
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this involved weeks of mornings
at the Shiva Ganga
fastidiously yet cheerfully
excavating my own archives
and went so well i decided to
look at the poems i had performed
in the 12 or so shows i had by then written and toured
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for i had many performance pieces
composed of wildly disparate lines and ideas
delivered at speed, high speed, and extreme speed
and i started to delve deep into all of these
looking for ideas, one-liners, verses
and possible short poems
and fragments of poems
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in all, i had a wonderful month
or maybe two
until i had a proto of this
sixteen and a half thousand words long
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furthermore
i had been considering the idea
of randomising discrete lines for decades
yet it was a great liberation when i saw
this mass of pieces
the proto-Bucket
needed no order
and would best be random
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and i soon judged that the best way to
present the ideas
to free them from each other
and allow them to become more than the sum of their parts
would be for them to be presented
one by one at random
swipeably
on a screen
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which would require an app or website
rather than a book
when i certainly didn’t want to bother with a book
or any of all that
anyhow
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could, i now wondered
this randomising of the
wildly disparate in content and form
be a successful marriage of
style and substance?
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and could this, i wondered
be that very rare thing, unique
another strong draw for me
that it might be a first
?
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after this covernote
there’ll be Substack posts explaining more about The Bucket
and its origins
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yet i really rather hope you’ll dive into the
writings for a while
before you look at the
other stuff
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and as for me, jem
i am a performance poet
and i never wanted anything to do with
published poetry
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my entire living, for decades,
has been the door, the gate
of my shows
no fees or grants
and no selling, well, anything
which must be close to unique
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i have never sold anything
not a poem or book or pamphlet
nor an item of merchandise
[there are caveats to this
yet its essentially true]
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so producing this, The Bucket
breaks the habit
and dogma
of a lifetime
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meanwhile i’ve not properly had a home since 2007
and i seem to have become a 21st century version of
that mythic figure
the nomadic poet
with a kind of annual trail
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all you need these days is
a laptop
a bank card and a
passport
while i own little but 50 shirts
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along the way i’ve had over 40 Five Star reviews
and probably over 200 Four Star
which partly explains how i’ve managed to
keep eating
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while this might well be the only thing i
ever publish
so i hope i’ve done it as well i could
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you are of course encouraged to share
share
and share again
its a whole new literary form
i’m not famous
we have little in the way of resources and
its not bad
enjoy
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jem
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THE BUCKET TEAM
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REBECCA SINGH
Rebecca is a storyteller, audio describer, actor, producer, and writer whose work spans film, theatre, digital narrative, and accessible media. Her practice focuses on innovative storytelling structures and inclusive design. She is the creator of the award-winning Canada’s Smallest Theatre and recently launched the Description Rich Story Hour podcast. She appeared on the Emmy-winning show “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Rebecca is the founder of Superior Description Services and has championed accessibility in the arts since 2011. She’s a contributor to the Routledge Handbook of Audio Description and publisher of the Lifting as We Climb series.
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NICK FOX-GIEG
Nick is an experimental animator in Toronto. His awards include SSHRC, Eyebeam, and Fulbright Fellowships, an Engadget Alternate Realities grant, and the jury prize for Best Animated Short at SXSW 2010. His videos have also been shown at the OIAF, Rotterdam, and TIFF festivals, at the Centre Pompidou, and on CBC TV; his XR work includes projects for the University of Waterloo, Google Creative Lab, and Framestore. Fox-Gieg holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a PhD from York University
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jem rolls
was born in Hemel Hempstead in 1962
fragments of his Bio are variously dispersed among a few of the 700+ pieces that are The Bucket... while some are in this Covernote
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