Catch me on TV this weekend

This week I finished another program for Marshall's own Studio 1 Community Access TV, "Let's have a kipple."

The title is based on an old joke/cartoon. Two ladies are sitting on a park bench, one asks, "Do you like Kipling?"

The other replies, "I don't know, I've never kippled."

Among poetry fans, "a kipple" has come to mean when you sit around with a few friends, open a few beers, and pass around the Complete Rudyard Kipling Verse and have everyone read their favorites.

What I'm doing in this broadcast is defend Kipling as the major poet of the modern English language, which believe it or not is rather controversial these days. Once Kipling was so popular that when he fell ill and was not expected to live, silent crowds of thousands of people stood vigil outside his home. Now he is relegated by many academics to the second tier of 20th century poets.

I talk a bit about Kipling by way of introduction and demolish certain charges against him one by one.

Then I read a few of his poems I think are important to the moral education of children, dedicated to my own children. I read: "If," "Hymn to Breaking Strain," "The Gods of the Copybook Headings," and "Natural Theology."

Then I finish off with the hilarious "Prodigal Son," and a couple from Kipling's series of poems on the history of England, from Roman times to his present. I may do the whole historical series in another program.

Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. Charter - 8 DTG - 35 Knology - 67