A Translated Man published

My new book A Translated Man is published. Here's the cover image (I think that is Rene Van Valckenborch himself.)

I have given this book over to my own invention, the fictional Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. Apparently writing in both Flemish and Walloon, and translated and edited by entities as shadowy (and dodgy) as himself, Van Valckenborch's split oeuvre derives from the linguistic and cultural divide within contemporary Belgium. By the time Van Valckenborch disappears into poetic silence he seems an enigma of his own making, a comic figure with tragic attributes, a mystery to all swept up in his apparition. When his story is finished he leaves behind the deliberately discontinuous evidence of a dual poetic adventure—one half siding with history and opting for a breathlessly recurring triplet verse, the other obsessing over place and space and restlessly and increasingly playing with experimental forms. Behind and within them all, I am extending my formal and referential range: from homages to film-makers to Twitterodes, from accounts of tribal masks to cuboid quennets, and poems about Belgium of course. Above all, I am exploring the limits of the author-function. This is an imaginary collection with real poems in it.


You can see further details here and buy it from here or from here or from here.
There is more about Van Valckenborch here and more about his creations here.

Conviction Politics

Posties brush up their
MaggieMaggieMaggie
chants move on to the Casa
to celebrate with ex-dockers

though taxed umbrella places
become public space
once more we are made
responsible for our own
vulnerability in excess

The history of the world
is the life-stories of its
greatest monomaniacs


10-16 April 2013

Manifest exhibition at Edge Hill University

Manifest
an exhibition of collaborative works by the poet Robert Sheppard and the artist Pete Clarke

April 11th -26th, 2013

The Arts Centre
Edge Hill
University

Here is a general view of the exhibition followed by a list of works in the exhibition.

MANIFEST:

Edge Hill University Arts Centre

Exhibition of the Collaborative works by the poet Robert Sheppard and the artist Pete Clarke


LIST OF WORKS

1. In mid seas stands a tower, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

2. Dead as a door step, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

3. Walled in a Lost City, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

4. A song that does not sing, 2013

Edition 1/7 Silkscreen and wood relief on somerset paper

5. TIRED SAD TOWERS, 2012

Edition 1/8 Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

6. Moving through the conventions

A/P Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

7. Tangled Scree, 2012

Edition 2/9 Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

8. MANIFEST, 2010

Edition 5/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

9. Tangled Scree, 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

10. Tangled Scree, 2011

Edition 1/10 Letterpress on somerset paper

11. THIS IS NOT GUILT [3], 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

12. THIS IS NOT GUILT [2], 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

13. LYRIC, 2010

Edition 5/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

14. ODE TO FORME, 2010

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

15. Invisible Cities, 2009

Oil, acrylic and screened text on constructed canvas

All works are for sale, framed or unframed, contact Pete for details

Pclarke2@uclan.ac.uk

Pete Clarke lives in Liverpool and is the MA Course Leader and Principal Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. He also makes paintings, prints and installations with the artist Georg Gartz from Cologne exploring collaborative strategies within contemporary practice questioning individuality, authorship and authenticity in a European context.

www.peteclarke.org.uk

Other works were shown on a continuous video presentation. It was a shame to see the exhibition being taken down, but the symposium I organised at Edge Hill on Literary Collaboration during the exhibition was a great success.

Here are images of a new collage work (number 1 above) which takes the phrase ‘Walled in a lost city’ from my work somewhere, but I don’t recognise it off-hand!

I was amusing myself with a reproduction of the wonderful Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos and made this translation of his poem about the Portuguese poet ‘Pessoa’, whose heteronyms (fictional poets) have obviously influenced my own recent obsessions, but whose name means ‘persona’, rather incredibly. I came up with the neologism ‘persong’ to deal with this concept. Pete has adapted the lineation of de Campos’ original and my version. Number 4 in catalogue.

That was a new work, as is ‘Moving through the Conventions’ that takes a part of a sentence from a very defamiliarised new text of mine from the ongoing prose collection, Unfinish, called ‘Venus and Adonis’. The full sentence by the way is: ‘I can see her moving through the conventions, solving crimes with the bristles that grow out of her chins.’ I’m glad Pete works selectively! Patricia Farrell (who took these photos in the exhibition) likes this one too. Number 6 in the catalogue.

The ‘Tangled Scree’ text has been shown before on the last post, but here are some details of that piece in situ. This is the re-working of a quennet and was shortlisted for the Adrian Henri Prize.

Finally, here are some more details of the ‘This is not Guilt’ series of prints.

Manifest Pete Clarke and Robert Sheppard

Manifest


an exhibition of collaborative works by the poet

Robert Sheppard

and the artist

Pete Clarke

April 11th -26th, 2013

Edge Hill University
St Helens Road
Ormskirk
Lancashire
L39 4QP


Featured was our piece that was shortlisted for the Adrian Henri Prize. Here are a few versions of that. The original poem is a quennet. Most of the text is visible in the second version.

Our first pieces were produced, quite qiuickly for the Poetry Beyond Text exhibitions, and all three texts come from A Translated Man, but you don't need to be thinking about the contexts of those 'fictional poems' to be following what's going on, formally.

Here are some photographs of more recent pieces, and details of pieces, taken by Patricia Farrell. The first features the 'This Not Grief' text which opens section of 'Reading the Reader' from Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes.

This is not guilt but grief

From now on she will be in quotation marks

She emptied herself out with good reason

He is left empty for no reason good or ill. Reading

her absence as a presence he bears witness

His testimony is as blank as an orphan’s. His testament is frozen sweat in solid steam

Here are two recent rather dark collages produced by Pete with more text from Hymns to the God, a square book that fits neatly into his pocket while he's working!

These did note feature in the exhibtion in the end.

Thatcher Dead

It's just been announced that Thatcher has died. I once said she was the most important influence on my poetry (half-jokingly); but I also said that I couldn't be really happy while she was alive. How appropriate she died on the day the Con-Dem government introduced more of its austerity measures, in part to demonise the very victims they are creating. As I type I can hear sanctimonious tones on the BBC downstairs.


Here’s part three of ‘Coming Down from St George’s Hill’ from Twentieth Century Blues


Democratic vista he parks the car
Then has to queue for the cashpoint
Whispering possessive St George’s
Somewhere above the embossed logo
Window tissue paper
And its history of pleasantly
Attired servants
In famous fables begun at this
Desk of irregular
Attic windows car door opens blonde
Hair spills into the gutter
He speaks in deadpan cockney learned
Of the East Sussex school of villainy
Creaming himself at Thatcher’s rush of
Active citizens revving up
Fumes and consumption’s vapour
Lists a pop capitalist
                                   transformed
A staggering dislocation of the
Cocktail effect gone defective
Electric against meshed frost
Produced by desire dreams
An act of love a realised cell
Phone interrupts you all right mate?
Giggle at least it stopped a repetition
Of his ardent administered dream


20 September-16 October 1988

And here is a verse from The Lores written in the mid-90s:

The Millennium Enterprise Zone layers
on layers of torn calendars that
wipe Thatcher’s solid dream trappings
below any diction a satirist
with no worship centre his
ears adjust to a future
of persistent sensations, lacking himself

And I used her own words in another poem in The Lores, where I begin with the name that I ised to denote that period: 'The  Drowning Years', which alludes to the book I was using as a source for those lines, Thatcher's own The Downing Street Years. As I put it in the bibliography to that poem: '

Thatcher, Margaret, The Downing Street Years (a condensation [thank God] of the book) in Today’s Best Nonfiction [sic], Reader’s Digest, 1994 – a volume I found lying outside my front gate during the summer of 1994, a veritable found text.' (Part of the layout is lost in the blog version. But all of these poems may be found in Complete Twentieth Century Blues from Salt.)

   

drowning years


I needed no interpreter spoke the same
language the complex romance of international trade

I liked living over the shop good
wishes from people who are suffering free

to pursue their own dreams arguments always
give one appetite true vice second thoughts

not everybody cheers the same thing I
was glued to the radio for news

we were not fatally wounded but a
totalitarian state with siege barriers of coal

I prayed fitfully revolution still to be
made our problem was presentation red roses

proved photogenic families were the government nemesis
of gain (one country      one system      ours

Zoe Skoulding - Gurkan Arnavut - Robert Sheppard - Enemies of the North

On Saturday I was too ill to read at The Enemies of the North reading in Manchester, organised by Steven Fowler (to whom many thanks for the invitation). And many thanks for pairing me with Zoe Skoulding, and thanks to Zoe for collaborating with me, and indeed, playing along with my interest in fictional poets. René Van Valckenborch is soon to be published in A Translated Man but various fictional poets of his (poets within poets) exist both inside and beyond the book (and can be found on the European Union of Imaginary Authors website). One was designed to have a walk on part in the book (he was meant to be a loose strand, a name without a reference, but that strand has now become a woven fabric). He is Gurkan Arnavut, a Turkish Cypriot, though living in the Cypriot part of the island. Zoe and I picked him for this collaboration, innocent of the impending financial indignities visited upon the citizens of that small nation. Watch Zoe introduce and read the poems beautifully. Because of the artifice of its construction, I like the single voice.

I’m really pleased with these. Thanks Zoe.

James Keery on my Bad Times



A road sign from the Age of the Movement

 Long ago, James Keery wrote a charming summary of my early career: ‘Robert Sheppard commenced operations just as Margaret Thatcher took command, and an uneven power struggle ensued…’ (PN Review 107, 1996.) I quote it on my ‘Criticism’ page of my recent website.

Here he is again, in PN Review 209, the current issue, reviewing my Shearsman critical volume When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry . Mrs T makes her appearance again, as he states: ‘Robert Sheppard has got it just right in this book.’ (Something in my shouts, ‘Stop there! That’ll do nicely.’) ‘An “episodic history” of a “poetic community” to which he has belonged since the advent of Margaret Thatcher, it is temperate, reflective – even, on its own individually negotiated terms, academic – yet unrepentant in its tribal loyalty. There isn’t a smug or mean-spirited word.’ He then delves more generally into the creative environment I was attempting to describe (digging up associations between the New Apocalypse and the British Poetry Revival, which is another story; this is an article rather than a review, and the better for it). You can read the first few paragraphs here.
I am particularly glad that he cross-refers to my poetry in Berlin Bursts ; pleased that he points out what he calls my ‘elegant trope’ of ‘human unfinish as the condition of our survival’. (It first occurs in Warrant Error  in lines that reference Pinkas Synagogue in Prague:

Stones leaning splinter through time
for those with no names
possess no death. You ex-
hume the ex-human in human unfinish

But the 'trope' is carried over into works in progress (I’m toying with Unfinish as the title of a new project.) Anyone who has read the article knows I am dodging his teasing equation of these thoughts ‘open to the “long perspectives” of which the Movement poets went in fear, but also a principled intelligence worthy of the Movement at its best’, but he catches the dying embers of my Levinasian ethicality (which pervades my earlier critical volume The Poetry of Saying (in which he will find deliberately mean-spirited words about the Movement!)). But I still believe my own words with which he concludes:
Remember: somewhere between the shifting screens of randomly generated computer text and the frost-blown epitaph sculpted onto a headstone for all times lies your responsibility.

It’s a shame I can’t remember where this is from! Thanks for finding it James.

I have two facts to put right. I did not take the photograph of Bob and Jennifer Cobbing referred to (Peter Manson did. See here for photos of his 1995 visit to Cobbing’s workshop, as well as a wealth of Cobbing materials.) Second: I certainly didn’t teach Bob how to use a computer! (That’s possibly Lawrence Upton.)