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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

The Only Life

My first booklet of short stories is out. The Only Life

Three short stories about poets.

His fictional poets begat fictional poems, of course, which lie as fragments of greater wholes, marvellous or ludicrous, in teasing virtuality. These stories – their styles range from the clipped short-short to the expansive experimental – give us the world as only a poet could, as kinds of poem, for our delight and horror. But in writing only of poets he writes of everything else. The fog of history and the steam of sex are intermingled in these intricate, absorbing and often funny, poignant stories.

‘A classic triptych of moods and movements, forensic, sharp-elbowed, with a ripeness you can taste. Sheppard's prose curves elegantly between ease and disease, live ghosts and city shadows. Borgesian, teasing, wise.’

- Iain Sinclair

This book is available to buy for £5 from http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk ( or as
part of its 3 for £10 deal: and I recommend recent books by Ken Edwards and Adrian Clarke).

Labels: Sheppard, short stories

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Even the Bad Times are Good: Rupert Loydell & Robert Sheppard

A conversation/interview, spring boarding off my Shearsman book of essays When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardWBT.html

and including excursions into the Poetry Society 1976, Sinclair, Bomb Culture, Bob Cobbing, young poets in Britain, poetics and Conceptual Writing, and a little on my own work!

Posted now on Stride

at
http://www.stridebooks.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202012/Jan%202012/rupertandrobertint.htm

or follow the links from

www.stridemagazine.co.uk

Robert Sheppard

Labels: Sheppard

Sunday, November 06, 2011

Robert Sheppard at the Bluecoat 2008

Here is a reading (courtesy of poet-cameraman Ade Jackson) of a reading I did at the Bluecoat Arts Centre to launch Twentieth Century Blues in 2008. Reminded by the fact that I read there again a couple of weeks ago, I decided to post this version of the first 'Blues', 'Smokestack Lightning', in which I used some carpet tapes I'd made in the early 1990s for a SubVoicive reading.

There is a also a sound version of it here, made soon after, which uses the second verse paragraph. Ekleksographia Wave Two, ed. Philip Davenport at http://www.eklesographia.ahadadabooks.com/ March 2010, at
http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/davenport/authors/robert_sheppard.html

The text for the Bluecoat version which isn't (deliberately) clear is drawn from the first verse paragraph of the poem.

from Smokestack Lightning
a mythology of the blues

for Tony Parsons

Twentieth Century Blues 1
History of Sensation 5

Let it all go. As I sing I drive my
dynamite for some strange machine
of this nearly spent century;
the big city calls its sinful
numbers heaven. My fast rolling
kisses are for the stern
lady, dodging me, back of the beat.
Our harp player’s dead - when Pete
told me, we laughed. A quick shimmy
was Elzadie’s goodnight; buttons and
belt loosening, Arvella’s swift farewell.
Pete’s 12 string steam whistle leaves town;
I want you to take my place in this song.
Elzadie lifted her hem and smiled, as he
tuned to an open chord. Bending G on the E,
the dog jumped into the horn as
the KC moaned, with a mocking beauty
mating rabbit foot dreams. Arvella slumped in
the shade, feeling contempt, thinking: give me
the train’s shake. Sweat rolled off
transport as delight, a nervous fix
in this thief’s paradise of form and
necessity possessed by devils. He’d
rehearsed all morning, restless,
couldn’t wait to start again, to howl
out, temporal and grounded, ‘We’ll never
get out of these blues alive’ -
above the frets, trembling. Inside:
shared diction, dancing voices, mojo stomping,
good book palms together in prayer. At night
she wedges the chair against the door,
feels evil thrashing outside the room,
but can’t connect the pose of his
arpeggio muscles above her, de-tuning
slackening; sings down the phone:
‘Take my lonesome love in hand.’
Dancing with her to the juke band,
his tense fingers practise chord shapes
up and down her spine; to be a real person:
a girl adjusting her skirt, singing Twentieth
Century Blues, a pearl on her lips, - her devil
astride two chairs, playing slide
with a Coca-Cola bottle. She
is about to say something over the
gossamer telegraph line, to survive
his strong hands rambling through.

Kid Bailey’s the name I travel with, kidding
around: the name on the only phonograph;
walked up to the shop window, the glitter
of the diamond-fretted Dobro a death squad
tuning up. My handkerchief shields
the chord shapes from
your thieving eyes. Just pull the razor
and shave him. The gun in the guitar case was
no use - jealous man stepped up to Charley
as if to ask for Pony, retuned. Bill-
boards tell women what
to be: a circle of music-stands
dreaming thrills, dancing the Shimmy-She-Wobble -
some guy called it a dry fuck -
the guitar dances too, spins
above Charley’s head. I could see
my own rapt reflection in the shine,
an invisible piano whose pedals are moody
bendings. Love my suitcase and the road....

I can be seen reading some poems from Twentieth Century Blues at http://otherroom.org/videos/%e2%80%94-or-2-june-2008-videosas part of the Other Room Readings in 2008. (On the first clip I read ‘A Dirty Poem and Clean Poem for Roy Fisher’, ‘From a Stolen Book’ followed by a selection from ‘Empty Diaries’, the sequence with which I continues on the second video.)

Complete Twentieth Century Blues is available from Salt Publications and the full text of 'Smokestack Lightning' is available also in the earlier Salt volume Tin Pan Arcadia.

Labels: Sheppard

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Fourteen of 14: 'Ending, with strong pressure towards epigram or witticism'

(Top: Scott Thurston and me at Hay; below: Anthony Mellors and me at Hay; photos: Anthony and Scott)

I have argued that the chief influences upon the contemporary innovative sonnet include the examples of Berrigan and Raworth, the radical conceptualism of Oulipo with its use of tailored ‘constraints’, and the postmodernist release of the form from the repression of modernism. I may be confused in this, having identified these also as influences on my own sequence. But there can be no doubt that there is another influence, post 2008, and that is The Reality Street Book itself. Hilson’s sequence was co-terminous with its production, indeed mentions it. Other sequences, possibly Monk’s, were written as the event of the anthology appeared on the horizon. Terry’s sequence missed the boat, having come to Hilson’s attention after Ken Edwards declared the hold full. Many sonnets (sequences or singles) have appeared after; Anthony Mellors’ The Gordon Brown Sonnets (2009), for example, continues the political edge found in so many of these sequences; Milton is the god of the innovative sonnet, not Shakespeare.

A mere flick through the anthology reveals visual sonnets, ghost sonnets where the shape of the sonnet is played with, along with others that expose the frame of the form, as outlined in part twelve of this lecture. There are prose sonnets, fairly conventionally lineated sonnets, Chinese sonnets and non-sonnets, some in sequences, many not, many more than I have time to deal with today. Anybody embarking on a sonnet today has the benefit of the anthology as a textbook of form(s). There are dangers in this, of imitation and derivation, rather than influence and deviation, of mere production, of ever-thinning effect and affect (or affectlessness), but these have been dangers throughout literary history of the prominence of any form. The same could have been said of Tottel’s Miscellany in 1560 which gave the world the exemplars Wyatt and Surrey.

I’m not bold enough to call time on the innovative sonnet, to declare that we have reached our 1610 – imagine declaring the whole show over in 1608, what a difference a year makes! – but I wonder what forms will emerge next. I think Hilson is right in seeing the attraction of the sonnet as a refinement of the draw to the sequentiality ingrained in British innovative practice, and the sonnet-sequence-like frame can be felt in many non-sonnet sequences, Scott Thurston’s Momentum (2008), for example, where the repeated stanza is quite different, but whose formal repetition facilitates variation and contrast as a formal constituent that becomes a kind of content in a way I have been arguing throughout these postings. (His Internal Rhyme (2010) has the same feel, though with poems that are more open in terms of reading, horizontally and vertically.) But no other traditional form (however torqued) furnishes the opportunity for this kind of innovation; the innovative sestina, for example, feels like a rolled out carpet, not a ‘little room’ that offers resistance to the impulse to unlimited expansion, a pliant, plastic pre-determined frame, through which the life of form may be lived convincingly, to make for us, forms of life. To make it re-new.

To quote Hilson’s formal articulation and dis-articulation: ‘I (line-break) fucking love you sonnets.’

****************************************************************************

Final Notes: As can be seen from the above, I wondered about trying to call a halt to the sonnet as an innovative form, but new ones keep coming. See the K. Silem Mohammed pieces in the Dworkin-Goldsmith anthology. Or here. Or get a peek at nine of the stunning stunted sonnets of Richard Parker at Intercapillary Space (which I heard read in Amsterdam; see posting for May 24th 2011). Since musing earlier on my own next creative moves, my contrafacts on Milton’s sonnets seem plausible and I also surprised myself by writing a half-pint sonnet, in the middle of a Quennet as a 7X7 syllabic structure. The Quennet (which I should have mentioned before now) is the sonnet-like structure invented by Raymond Queneau and used also by Philip Terry, Queneau’s translator, and by Rene Van Valckenborch, my creature.

Just a few thoughts on the Hay Poetry Jamboree itself. It was a celebratory occasion – and mine was the only excursion into critical prose and pose – and there was much good company in Scott and Anthony (as can be seen above), the organisers Lyndon Davies and John Goodby, participants Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Carrie Etter, John Freeman, Paul A.Green, Carol Watts, Zoe Skoulding, Maggie O’Sullivan, Ralph Hawkins (who had much to say about Berrigan) and Allen Fisher (who worried away at the formal designation ‘sonnet’), and audience members Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey, and many others, Steve, for example, who managed the electronics. Thanks to all.

Labels: Amsterdam, form, Philip Terry, Richard Parker, Sheppard, sonnets, Van Valkenborch

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Thirteen of 14: Three Sonnetized Accounts

I’d like to show three of my sonnets from Warrant Error, from across the sequences, but having in common an intertext in Shelley’s marvellous meditation upon political terror and time, ‘Ozymandias’:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Shelley’s sonnet might be thought innovative in that it strains against the restraining order of the form, while making a new form with its insistent improvisatory utterances (we know it was written quickly, against the clock in fact). My forms attempt to make new forms and meanings through allusions and borrowings (sometimes of resonant single words) from the poems, but also have their own foci. The intense logopoeia of the second derives from the puns I collected and from the quotations, not only from Shelley but from Arendt and Deleuze (at least) as well. The third poem refers to the metronome in the image above (a photograph taken and manipulated by Patricia Farrell).

Carpets woven with jargon surrender
monkey ground level realism pumps
a Kalashinikov before the gold cupola
a tight wrinkled lip of double-stitch

Every night you fall asleep invaded
by this market target couch drill

an embedded journo pillowed on gas
buys a free full monster with an
empty promise your night vision
goggles catch the first line of his
collateral excised scribble ‘barging

in on targets..’ struggling with his war
poem the dark god of his sonnets
freeze framed death tools downed

29 March 2003

They scoured the news and erased the story
The liar the witness and the lawyer

The hand that mocked us scarred
Or scared soured the newscasts
Their oblique attacks now roar overhead
The naives are restless during the rapid raids

Compassion is one of the passions
After a regular
Tory system of lower tax nothing beside remains

Species solidarity and its dispersal
In this borrowed shell function as love but
This is the real thing as she
Bends towards him
Not to be unworthy of what happens to them both

for Stephen

The red metronome on Letná hill
sways like a lucky drunkard
on its pedestal above the spires
a restless reminder of rust and wreck.
Or an antique windscreen wiper

describing its arc
upon a plane of smear and rain-wash
heroic in a monochrome movie, tinted red

With each wipe across the screen
the determined visage of the driver clears.
It’s Josef Stalin the giant blocks with his pocks
long blown to shatters but he’s still there

waving yes and no
to anyone who can see him

Labels: form, Sheppard, sonnets

Monday, July 25, 2011

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Twelve of 14: Put them in the Margins

Sophie Robinson above; see her blog here.

Sophie Robinson is the youngest poet in the anthology, as she is also in Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference, where she describes her attitude to innovation: ‘I don’t believe that an experimental poetics must necessarily be devoid of emotion, sentiment, biography, self-expression, &c’, and she names Frank O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer as two ‘cherished’ exemplars (the latter being one of the most accomplished of post-Berrigan sonneteers). Nevertheless her 10 poem sequence ‘geometries’ is one of the obviously radical texts in the Reality Street Book, in that it plays visually with the sonnet form. In this she is not alone: there are many texts in the book making formal play in ways in which the frame becomes its own content, and many of these ways are defined in terms of visual rather than verbal or metrical innovation. Allusions to the frame occur in Bob Cobbing’s concrete poetry inkscape ‘Sunnet’, where the white space of the Petrachan turn becomes the horizon on the landscape (or inkscape) hinted at in the title. (frontispiece) The moon is caught in May Ellen Solt’s ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’, where the empty grids of lunar cartography pun with the divisions of the Petrachan sonnet. David Miller’s sequence of horizontal Chinese brushstrokes (‘Untitled (Visual Sonnet)’ each is called) obviously mimes the frame of the sonnet, but also, with their varying thickness, texture and curves, they hint at the varying content that is carried across the traditional sonnet sequence, here represented by the uniqueness of Chinese brush-work. Jen Bervin’s conceptual writing project ‘Nets’ (the title itself cuts the word ‘sonnets’ down to size) presents Shakespeare’s Sonnets in greyscale and highlights certain words to configure a new text over them. This is a much-used technique (John Gibbens uses it for ‘Underscore’ here), but it rare to leave the original text legible alongside (under) the variations to foreground their material; like Terry, Bervin operates upon the most canonical sonnets. Paul Dutton’s ‘so’net’ sequences uses anagrams on, and other words derived from ‘sonnet’ – as does Keith Jebb in his title ‘tonnes’ – to contrast a text that hovers between sense (‘on sense sonnets not sent to text’) and non-sense and pure sound concrete poetry for performance. Visual recognition of ‘sonnetness’ is important to the aesthetic effect of these examples, which in various ways involve the simultaneous use and unravelling of the historical frame of the sonnet (and by extension many of the meanings that have accrued to it), to turn the adventures of its form into its own subject while embodying its latest adventures in formal investigation and innovation.

Robinson’s ‘Geometries’ takes the frame of the sonnet and makes it square, more radically than Hilson’s but less consistently formal than the above examples, utilising the justified margins of the WP package to ensure a ‘geometry’ that has nothing to do with metrical contour or word count or the temporality of delivery. The resultant squares work against our reading patterns; continuous margins suggest the forms and conventions of prose. The 14 lines are ‘stretched’ in ways unrelated to notions of lineation or layout, open field or otherwise. (I have unfortunately not been able to reproduce that effect here; the absence of this formal adjustment demonstrates just how significant, even signifying, this is. Wihtout this formal constraint the poem below looks wrong, but unavoidable.) However, Robinson’s reluctance to abandon reference and significance, let alone the personal, rather than undermining this formal play, creates a tension between reading for form (which is unavoidable in these geometries, particularly when 3 words ‘arms and head’ become one, for example) and reading to catch the teasing but often angry voices of the poems, one of which has a literal lower case ‘i’ recommended by Kathleen Fraser to represent its reduced subjectivity (at the start of a line where most of the other lines carry a capital), although the inverted commas point to its artifice also:

Beauty is nothing is nothing is a
Gently disgusting residue of all
That burps and smiles & life is terrible &
Holds back & swallows itself whilst 25
Birds that might’ve perched on your arms&head
Can now fly in expanded air and yeah
the autumn’s going to need you w/
head like a broken toy & got no stable
‘i’ got no stable now all is fluttering
Around & the boredom of death O how
We breathe you out like blah sad & longing
For an airy exchange amongst urgent
Squeaky-clean majorities & CITY BOYS
Those smug wankers we put them in the margins.

The margins into which mainstream culture is ‘put’ are in some sense the margins of this poem, but the voice is angry enough here, however unstable the ego. If ‘Beauty is nothing’, a ‘disgusting residue’, at least it is ‘gentle’. Terrible life consumes itself, the boredom of death results in meaningless ‘blah’ and the ‘sad & longing’ mourning that lies behind this immediate anger (the poems are bitterly elegiac). Only the birds (which appear in other ‘geometries’) offer transcendence, an ‘airy exchange’ that is longed for.

The true liberation here is formal. These poems are prosodically arbitrary, constitute even an ‘aprosody’ (as Agamben puts it rather suggestively in what is virtually an aside on the poetry of Caproni). Yet they are still forms which work by de-forming accepted reading assumptions in the ways I’ve just described. Perhaps they register the gradual re-forming of contemporary forms of poetry from the temporal axis to the spatial axis.

(Robinson has just finished a residency at the V and A. Details here.)

Labels: form, Sheppard, sonnets, Sophie Robinson

Sunday, July 24, 2011

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Eleven of 14: Sonnets and Other Ghosts

Women are often said to have been disenfranchised by the courtly conventions of the love sonnet, its content patriarchal, its form in need of reclaiming. Women innovative writers have maintained a suspicion of the form, particularly through its assertion in the courtly love tradition, of a male ego. ‘Our sonnet … seems different,’ writes Kathleen Fraser hopefully. ‘It has a small i in it instead of a big one.’ But she is also aware that forms carry near-indelible meanings as much as contents, and that ‘perhaps any sonnet at all is a big i. That’s something I have to fear.’

The history of the sonnet furnishes important examples of female sonneteers, such as Charlotte Smith or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and in fact, the earliest sonnet sequence in English was written by a woman, although it took a religious theme rather than an amorous one: 21 sonnets by Anne Lock composed in 1559. ‘Her ear is faultless – better than Surrey’s’, remarks Spiller.

One of the best contemporary sequences excerpted in The Reality Street Book, Geraldine Monk’s Ghost and Other Sonnets, shows no Electra complex before the form, and indeed emphasises the (usually unrhymed) Shakespearean couplet by printing it as a separate stanza. It often operates as the ‘epigram or witticism’ that the form of the frame imposes: ‘Strange ones this token is for you./ If you’ve danced with me you must be true,’ the last poem ends, rhyming but not utilising regular metre. Ghost and Other Sonnets is often about ghosts (‘strange ones’) and often (as at its end) about the demands of the other. (As often in sequences, they are also about many other matters, topology or domestic anger, for example.) Of course, the sonnet frame is a kind of ghost form and its subject matter haunts it as a kind of other of form, ‘Ghost of her ghosts’ as one poem puts it. This haunting necessitates Monk subduing her characteristic textual and performative exuberance in deference to the frame; the internal pressure this causes results in 66 poems of concentrated power. As Spiller says of Milton, but it applies to Monk too: ‘The sonnet is still the place where Desire confronts its Other, and in a small room fixity is given to the restlessness of being.’ These confronted others may be ourselves in mirrors (the ghost of our ghosts), as when ‘his face staring at/His face’: ‘Each/ Passenger waving at their doppelganger/ Each not knowing which is for real’. Or, as when the letter box rattles repeatedly, the other is an imagined ghost: ‘Seeing nobody in repeat tires the heart:/ Out-fears the stranger stranger’ (where the word occurs once as adjective, second as noun). One sonnet deals with the ‘stranger stranger’ in a powerful way, moving from a familiar situation to questions of otherly encounter that one might rather avoid, through to nightmarish horror:

What makes you look in at the
Exact window where someone is
Looking out? Inexplicable encounters
Traduce unknowns with wary
Other. What is behind that sticky girl one
Step stunningly away from heaven? Tossed.
A thing of beauty in a room so ordinary.
Mindless kicks. Burns. Bite hard words
Mocking back-broke loveliness. Ape
Ghosts. Rape-ghosts reel on little
One. Well below a Restoration rake-hell
Humans shouldn’t figure. Let alone … let alone …

Neglected screams in a field of unwashed forks.
Far crying buried in gust of shush-love.

A barely human (ape) rape has occurred amidst this ordinary scene against ‘stunning’ ‘beauty’ and ‘loveliness’ (together the words suggest a woman is violated by ‘rape-ghosts’), though it might only be sexual stimulation, ‘tossing’. ‘Mindless kicks’ suggests gratuitous sexual play as well as violence, or both. Lamentation is obscured by the intimate but threatening ‘shush-love’ that both extinguishes love and could also signify the love of an unhealthy secrecy. The poem is the more powerful for not revealing its content in a narrative unfolding, but through an excess of compressed and detailed violent imagery.

The form fixes the restlessness in each sonnet in this sequence, until it launches us into the next. No wonder we need the familiar bumpers of a rhyming couplet to bring this formal trajectory to rest. We are told: ‘If you’ve danced with me you must be true,’ that is, not a fable or a fiction, but also we are ‘true’, i.e. held in fidelity to the spell of these forms.

Labels: form, Geraldine Monk, Sheppard, sonnets