ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote a transposition of one of Wordsworth's sonnets (read it here and on International Times)

ON THIS DAY 2020, as coronavirus began to rage, I wrote ‘England! The time is come when thou shouldst wean’ which was later published in International Times. 

But here’s the poem again, in case you missed it. It is a transposition of a poem by Wordsworth, one of a 'corona' of 14 that I wrote on those days 2020. It was written when Boris Johnson was in hospital. 

 England! The time is come when thou shouldst wean

Britain, the time is now to wean yourself from
hoarding fancy food or panic buying bog rolls.
It’s hard. Old routines are unsettled. Seedy spots
where you trespassed (camera phones in one hand),
idly watched at bridle-paths for meat-wagons
freighting broad-bodied flesh, are shut, policed
by drones. If in Italy, Spain, France, Germany,
they falter, how will proud Brexit Britain fare?
It lost the email inviting it to share with them.
We self-isolating ‘get well’ card rhymesters
(the abject position of the contemporary poet now,
according to the press, and even some bards;
we must soothe and smooth the national mood) gift
Bo our best wishes: Our prime hopes rest with you!

28^th March 2020

This was the video made at the time of the first posting. See here for that video of the text (along with another transposition thus published by International Times):

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Two transpositions of Wordsworth from British Standards published on International Times

Poem at ‘Poems of National Independence – Liberties with Wordsworth’ | IT (internationaltimes.it)

 I talk about the end of the Wordsworth series here: Pages: The last of my Wordsworth versions in 'British Standards' (Book Three of 'The English Strain') (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

This poem comes from British Standards, which you can read about here: Pages: The final sonnet transposition from John Clare (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

British Standards is the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project. You may read about the first book and second book here. Indeed, you may now buy them.

Book One, The English Strain is described here (on a post that was written before it gained its title!). 

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons; see here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

 

Here's my most recent poem in International Times: this time, Shelley gets the treatment! Pages: Another Shelley transposition from British Standards published in International Times (with original poem and video) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Written today: a fourth version of a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge (a love poem this time) temporary post with post-writing video!

On this blog I’ve documented ‘The English Strain’ as work has progressed, through to its current third book, British Standards, which today’s poem continues. 

For your guide, the ‘books’ of ‘The English Strain’ are:

1. The English Strain (Shearsman, published. See below.)

2. Bad Idea (Knives, Forks and Spoons, published; also see below).

3. British Standards (work in progress-regress, as this posting demonstrates).

There are two ways (at least!) of looking at the project: it either consists of accounts of the capering of Bo and Go and other clowns across the post-Brexit dogging site that newly independent ‘Bressex’ has become, or it’s the subtler story of the English strain of the sonnet form. I hope I will send readers back or away to the ‘originals’. Part of my poems’ meaning has to lie in intersectional readerliness between one of Hartley Coleridge’s sonnets, say, and mine. That’s one role of the reader here, although general knowledge of transposition will be enough to see what’s going on. I’m not dismissing tradition; I’m invoking it. Book one is called The English Strain: the project begins with Petrarch, picking up the ‘Brexit’ theme in a number of sonnets of my own, until Milton, Wyatt, Surrey, Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, provide the frames for me to hang my boots on. This continues in book two, Bad Idea, though there I stick to Shakespeare’s contemporary Michael Drayton, a fine sonneteer. I’ve spent almost as long on this project as on Twentieth Century Blues.

But here I am at its end, in the final corona. I am pleased to find Coleridge used Drayton (to whom he wrote a fine homage sonnet) as an epigraph to his poems, and I might use it as one for my poems.

I write, indite, I point, I raze, I quote,

I interline, I blot, correct, I note,

I make, allege, I imitate, I fain.

Though a quote from his letters also make an appearance as minor epigraph to the first three poems: ‘Politically speaking, I am much more a Tory than a Whig, and least of all, a Democrat.’ Letters, pp. 124-5. Indeed, one can see in the first three that he is not a red wall Tory (as I originally thought I’d make him) but the (illegitimate) son of one, living in the Lakes and occasionally visiting the Northern City represented by his Pops. (Hartley had his own Oedipal problems, of course.) But I find I can’t do the voice, as I actually said in the second poem in the sequence (or non-sequence, as it’s turning out!). I cannot ventriloquise the Tory voice without feeling queasy. In the third poem, I leave evidence that I actually abandoned it, and the sequence. Indeed, it is clear that the first three poems are, in fact, the first chapter, ‘The Idiot Bastard Son’, of a verse-novel on the life of ‘Hartley Coleridge’, that I am writing, even as I have abandoned it! I could call it ‘An Abandoned Untitled Verse-Novel on the life of Hartley Coleridge’. Though that is admittedly clumsy. (I’ve just finished reading my first contemporary verse-novel, the brilliant The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Everisto.) Certainly, it is in chapters. Obviously, it depends how it all develops.

 

Today’s poem took a strange ‘Valentine’ poem as model, whose premise I couldn’t quite ‘take’, and I made it more political, a bit. No, no; it’s not for me to say what the poem is about. I’m very clear on that in my work on poetics, so I’ll not try now. Patricia says I’ve managed to ‘transmute’ (was that the word?) the theme of failure. (Hartley’s big theme: though he didn’t do too badly: he just grew up with the examples of Dad, Wordsworth and Southey to contend with.) I’ll stop waffling: here’s the poem and a video of me reading it.

 

Chapter Two: Little H.C. Among a Prospect of Flowers

 

I loved thee once, when every thought of mine

To hope without hope, like this, you’d think
he was an Utopian Marxist! Despair
was a bigger deal then, I suppose. It
didn’t mean the feeling of running out of sonnets
before he’s finished funnelling neurodiversity into
its handy hip-flasks, or discovering Bo’s vaccine pub pass
will be an app for a phone he’ll never possess;
he’ll leave no data trail on his nocturnal rambles!
He calls her soul lovely, its stainless Sheffield shine;
she’ll never reach his love because he’s so pure
(but he’s no better than his dad with his crack whores
and rusty keys to all mythologies). This filthy sonnet
thinks about her every part and of his honeydripper
dripping over her kissy-wissy Daguerreotype.

27th March 2021

 This poem has changed considerably, though this version suffices. See a post on Good Friday (Petrarch's very special day) for a conclusion to my Hartley transpositions and to 'The English Strain' project as a whole. 

All the poems I am transposing come from Hartley Coleridge, Poems, Songs and Sonnets (Leeds: F. E. Bingley, 1833). Pre-Daguerreotype! Accessible online here:

Poems, songs and sonnets : Coleridge, Hartley, 1796-1849 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

They are also collected here: Coleridge, Hartley, Poem . London: Moxon, 1851 contains a lengthy memoir by his brother;

Poems : Coleridge, Hartley, 1796-1849 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

though I am using The Complete Poetical Works of Hartley Coleridge, ed. Ramsay Colles, London and New York: George Routledge and Co: 1908.

 Some sympathetic background reading may be found in Nicola Healey’s PhD:

Nicola Healey PhD thesis (st-andrews.ac.uk)

https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/787/NicolaHealeyPhDThesis.pdf?sequence=6

 And sympathetic background there should be: I am convinced that Hartley was autistic (which I have hinted at in today’s poem). He shows a number of giveaway characteristics, but I’ve no idea whether this is a commonplace identification, or my own alone.

 The first section of British Standards was finished late March 2020, just after the (first) lockdown was belatedly, fatally for some, announced. For this, I transposed poems from Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, and retitled them ‘Poems of National Independence’, and even more cheekily subtitled them, ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html . There are links to online publication of some of the poems too (as there are in most of these links).

 In the sequence of British Standards, after Wordsworth, there followed ‘14 Standards’, the lockdown poems (quite a few online now, some of those coming out in the States soon, and one in the current Tears in the Fence), and in turn, two additional ‘Double Standards’ about the now-departed Cum’s disgraceful lockdown infringements – I transposed a couple of Shelley’s sonnets – and his elitist refusal of apology and regret. See here for the ‘standards’ (and links to online publication): http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html . One of Hartley Coleridge’s was one of my models (as was a sonnet by his father about his birth!) in ’14 Standards’. (Little did I know at the time, by the way, though I had clocked Hartley’s sonnets were better than his father’s.) This current sequence, therefore, has a couple of echoes back into the body of the third book. Indeed, I might use a remark in one of Hartley’s letters as an epigraph to British Standards:

Have you read Wordsworth’s anti-railroad Sonnets? As Petrarch with all his Sonnets could never prevail on Laura to more than admire him, and I believe no man by Poetry ever won any woman that would not have run away with a Strolling Player, how could the Bard imagine or fancy that 14 lines, though each line were instinct with living fire like an Electric Telegraph, would mollify the philanthropic no-heart of a Railway Company? (Hartley Coleridge: 1847)

‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, interventions in the terrific sonnet sequence ‘Sappho and Phaon’ by Mary Robinson, followed, and they may be read about (with video) here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-transpositions-of-mary-robinsons.html

Then I turned to Keats. I had some trouble getting going; you can read about that struggle here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-overdub-understudy-version-of-keats.html

The Keats poems are called ‘Weird Syrup’. The first 7 are entitled ‘Contrafacts and Counterfactuals from Keats’, the last 7, ‘Curtal Song-Nets from Junkets’.

This post operates as a hub post about the Keats transpositions: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/11/weird-syrup-final-keats-variation.html 

Then I read more than I had hitherto of the brilliant poems of John Clare, for writing my ‘Unth(reading) Clare’ sequence. Read about it here:  Pages: The final sonnet transposition from John Clare (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

The intervallic ‘Shelley’ poems, of which another is recently published online here (Lift Not the Painted Veil | IT (internationaltimes.it) are discussed here in their own hub-post: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-occasional-transposition-of-shelley.html

As might be gathered from what I have said in this post (and others), British Standards, as a whole, presents transpositions of admired sonnets of the Romantic period, from William Bowles to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chronologically, they broadly lie between those of Charlotte Smith, which I’ve already worked on here, https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-english-strain-poems-overdubs-of.html and those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that I’ve also worked on, both of them in the final parts of Book One, The English Strain.

Here are two comprehensive posts to check out, each with further links to earlier stages of the project, the first that looks at Book One, The English Strain here (written after I’d completed it but before it found its title!).

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’; that’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html ).

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, so you may buy it HERE and NOW:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote 'One might believe that National Misery'

ON THIS DAY 2020, as coronavirus raged, I wrote ‘Great men have been among us; hands that penned’ which was later published on the Poetry and Covid website, here: Six Poems (poetryandcovid.com)

 Here’s the poem again, in case you missed it. It is a transposition of a poem by Wordsworth. Here's a new video. Most of the vids in this On This Day strand are those made on the day the poem was written. This one, which caught me on the hop, was made on 17th March THIS year!

One might believe that natural miseries

One might well believe that national misery
only blasted Britain, made it a void land
unfit for labour: rural workers dwell on
sofas, ordinary businessmen tap online.
Bright sun and breeze herd them to the weekend parks,
for their sensual pleasures, soothing flesh, no cares.
Myriads must work – against themselves. ‘No more
Brexit frenzy, no more drunken mirth!’ cries Bo.
The Great Libertarian has switched off the
lights!... This sonnet has been interrupted to
deliver the latest lockdown laughter to
your doorstep. Watch this spot while the Cum spumes: ‘Herd
immunity, protect the economy,
and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.’

25th March 2020

The Cum

This poem comes from British Standards, which you can read about here: Pages: The final sonnet transposition from John Clare (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 British Standards is the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project. You may read about the first book and second book here. Indeed, you may now buy them.

 Book One, The English Strain is described here (on a post that was written before it gained its title!).

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

 I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons; see here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

 

Another Shelley transposition from British Standards published in International Times (with original poem and video)

I have had another poem published in International Times. It tickles me every time that I am published in this online continuation of such an important organ of the political and aesthetic underground of the 1960s. If you don’t know it, its combination of archive material and new items (such as mine) is impressive. Thanks, as ever, to poetry editor Rupert Loydell.  

My poem is another of my transpositions of Shelley's sonnets that will appear in British Standards singly between the longer sections. There is a hub post (on which I detail the publication of these inter-sequence poems) here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-occasional-transposition-of-shelley.html

This poem recalls seeing a local leader from Birmingham saying her (black and Asian) constituents would not respond well to seeing British troops helping out in vaccine centres. The white guests (this was Newsnight) couldn't believe it. As often, these poems have proved prophetic.

It’s sometimes a good thing to be able to demonstrate the intuitive way in which the ‘original’ poems are transposed (I have long given up describing the process as ‘translation’), which can only be done by providing, in this case, the Shelley poem, and my ‘version’. Here it is:

Lift Not the Painted Veil | IT (internationaltimes.it)

 

This is a video of me reading the poem the day I wrote it. (The text may differ from the published one.)

One of my previous appearances in IT was a poem I had transposed from the Earl of Surrey. The transposition is again a political one; this time it was a poem about Trump. And again the Surrey poem is displayed next to the Sheppard version:

Direct Rule: In Peace with Foul Desire | IT (internationaltimes.it)

http://internationaltimes.it/direct-rule-in-peace-with-foul-desire/ 

All of these ‘versions’ and ‘transpositions’ and ‘unthreadings’ etc., are part of a larger three volume project called ‘The English Strain’, and some previous poems on IT (without ‘originals’) have come from other parts of the project. Here are links (and links to links) of other poems, chiefly from Book Two, Bad Idea, versions of Michael Drayton’s renaissance sonnets. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/robert-sheppard-two-more-poems-from-bad.html

And here: 

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-two-transpositions-of.html

Here are two comprehensive posts to check out, the first that looks at Book One, The English Strain here (written after I’d completed it but before it found its title!). 

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’; that’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html ).

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, so you may buy it HERE and NOW:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

 

ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote 'Great Men Have Been Among Us' for British Standards

ON THIS DAY 2020, as coronavirus began to rage, I wrote ‘Great men have been among us; hands that penned’ which was later published on the Poetry and Covid website, here: Six Poems (poetryandcovid.com)

 But here’s the poem again, in case you missed it. Perhaps for comfort (with the references to poets whose poems I had transposed before) I looked back, before looking ahead. Bo was still crying libertarian nonsense in the face of a pandemic. 

Great men have been among us; hands that penned

Now Viral Men have been among us, hands
unwashed, tongues speckled with disease,
I yearn for touchy-feely Drayton, Browning, Smith,
vain Surrey, wicked Wyatt, minatory Milton,
and the moral of their sonnets of selfhood,
environment and socius, transposed (by me!),
before this Age of Self-Isolation and social
distance, Bo’s ‘inalienable free-born right to go
to the pub’, reluctantly, frozen. France,
trussed in transnational infection-data exchange,
perpetual empty boulevards in lockdown, is all virus
and no genius. As Bo says: ‘We live in a land
of liberty, but we rule nothing out.’ Nothing
fills his want of the skilled low paid like nothing.

21st March 2020

This poem comes from British Standards, which you can read about here: Pages: The final sonnet transposition from John Clare (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

British Standards is the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project. You may read about the first book and second book here. Indeed, you may now buy them.

Book One, The English Strain is described here (on a post that was written before it gained its title!).

 There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons; see here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote 'Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour!' for British Standards

ON THIS DAY 2020, as coronavirus began to rage, I wrote ‘Milton...’ which was later published on the  New Boots and Pantocracy Website Postcards From Malthusia DAY EIGHTY-SIX: Robert Sheppard | new boots and pantisocracies (wordpress.com) (There are many fine poems there on the lockdown theme: and before that, like mine, the focus was Brexit!)

 But here’s the poem again, in case you missed it.

 

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour

Cummings, Britain hath no need of thee! You’ve
found your swamp to drain. Religiomaniacs,
fruit salad generals, poets laureate (no friends,
but I defend, like Milton), even your puppet’s
National Thrust, where, naked under heavens,
majestic sticks, in Lethean flood, stick – all are forfeit
to your ‘scientific’ elite: ‘complex contagions in a
thermoacoustic system’ reapplied as insecurity
from starter home to care home, neatly monetized.
The intelligent rich (a moron’s oxymoron) claim
only selfish men may raise us up, return to power. Free
Dom, self-isolation is your viral wet dream, of use,
your voice white noise in a Seeing Room’s drone.
Bo’s cheerful hand rests on your thoroughbred’s thigh.

16th March 2020 

This poem comes from British Standards, which you can read about here: Pages: The final sonnet transposition from John Clare (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

British Standards is the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project. You may read about the first book and second book here. Indeed, you may now buy them.

Book One, The English Strain is described here (on a post that was written before it gained its title!).

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons; see here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

ON THIS DAY 2020 I wrote 'O Friend, I Know Not which Way I must look (transposition of Wordsworth)

ON THIS DAY 2020, as coronavirus began to rage, I wrote ‘O Friend!...’ which was later published on the Poetry and Covid website, here: Six Poems (poetryandcovid.com) My poems are all dated (there are to be another 10 or so of these OTD 2020 poems over the next couple of months).

 But here’s the poem again, in case you missed it, less masked than Ms. Campbell, it is true. 

O Friend! I know not which way I must look

Parts of Bo want to look away (it wasn’t meant
to be like this!) comfort in the great oppression.
Dressing in a mask is just for show,
like Naomi Campbell’s empty airport hazmat chic!
The wealthiest among us are best protected.
The handyman and the cook have been laid off
below the sick pay threshold, to build up ‘herd
immunity’ in the herd, wheezing at sports events,
coughing in open libraries over closed books. Plain
thinking gives way to the Cum’s behavioural data,
predicting our supposed crisis fatigue, acceptable loss.
Bo prays we must ‘take it on the chin’ for the economy,
chants ‘Buller! Buller! Buller!’ as he rinses his trotters,
huffs back to his breathing, breeding, household.

13th March 2020

 Here is a video of me reading it on the day it was written (in draft). I make a few gestures too! 'Buller etc!' is the greeting which former members of the Bullingdon Club emit when they spot a fellow member (or a member with his member in a pig, of course.)

This poem comes from British Standards, which you can read about here: Pages: The final sonnet transposition from John Clare (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

British Standards is the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project. You may read about the first book and second book here. Indeed, you may now buy them.

Book One, The English Strain is described here (on a post that was written before it gained its title!).

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons; see here:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages