I am saddened to hear of the death of John Seed, a good friend and an underrated poet. I knew him best in the 1990s in London, where we would meet to discuss politics, history (note his ‘other’ career as a historian, and his Marx for the Perplexed has nurtured me often from my naïve perplexity), and (of course) poetry and poetics. And academic life. (He was one of those who encouraged me to try to get (back) into teaching in HE.) He was an attendee at the many events we held in London, including the (near) legendary Smallest Poetry Festival in the World in 1994 (and he wrote one of his more nebulous pieces after one of these parties).
We also collaborated on Transit Depots/Empty Diaries (with John Seed [text] and Patricia Farrell [images]), London: Ship of Fools, 1993, now a rare book. One of these poems, ‘Empty Diary 1926’, is featured in one of the posts that follow.
His poetry ranged from the Objectivist lyrical to the Objectivist
collagist (i.e., from Oppen to Reznikoff) and I wrote about most of it, both in
my book The Meaning of Form and in a series of articles, AND some of the
early working notes of these (with the usual asides and digressions) appeared
on this blog.
I am thinking of Kath and any other family there might be (I stayed with John at his mother’s home in Durham, but they were in London, in a weird swap of locations.) Today is the funeral, which I am unable to attend.
This post announces my essay in the rather good Poetry and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism:
Pages:
Robert Sheppard: Essay on John Seed in Poetry and Praxis 'After' Objectivism
This post deals with the Objectivist lyric inheritance in his early poems (a New and Selectedis available from Shearsman, as are other of his books: Seed, John).
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppsrd-john-seeds-lyric-poems.html
But there are even earlier poems! Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819 was a ‘lost’ manuscript and was published by Intercapillary Spaces in 2013, and is a poem from 1973, about the Peterloo Massacre (before he’d read Shelley on the subject, interestingly). I write about it here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-objectivism-and-john.html
Here I write about John Seed’s poetics, using Objectivist ideas and Barthes’ notion of the ‘punctum’ (a connection John makes himself):
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-punctum-punctuation-and.html
Slightly earlier posts (in preparation for his appearance in The Meaning of Form as a foil to conceptual writing, which the kind of citational work John was pursuing in Pictures from Mayhew (and later works) superficially resembles) are here:
A poem
from Seed’s Pictures from Mayhew was published on this
blogzine, here.
John was a great critic of Thatcherism and Industrial Decline and Poverty. His view of ‘England’ both as a historian (a Marxist critic of the Manchester bourgeoisie, and also of Liverpool (I’ve still got one of his articles on William Roscoe)) and as a poet were central to his 1980s and 1990s work, which I write about here. This has ‘Empty Diary 1926’ appended to it:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-john-seed-englands.html
Finally, he is remembered as one of the attendees of the 1994 Smallest Poetry Festival in the World, in a quite recent post:
Pages: Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994
All in all, there’s a lot here about the various aspects of John’s work. I’m pleased to have covered most of it.
I’m sad too, when I think of a passage in Words Out of Time where I remark: ‘John Seed starts up a conversation that was interrupted 12, 23 years ago, was it?’ The next part of that rare conversation has been silenced forever.
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