I have long thought that the EUOIA project, the European Union of Imaginary Authors, would require another title for eventual publication, that the wonderful gift of those Five Vowels (echoes of Bob Cobbing, echoing Rimbaud, intertextualising in an unintended way with Christian Bok's Euonia) would confuse. I have chosen
Twitters for a Lark
This is, in fact, the last line of the contribution of the fictional 'Robert Sheppard' (see here for his life story), and is (currently) the last line of the anthology (bar the appendix). But with Shexit looming it is possible that he might end up in an appendix of his own, too! (More on shameful Shexit goings-on here.) See more on the poets of the EUOIA here (a hub post containing links) and here (on the newly updated EUOIA website, containing videos and a full list of collaborators).
I have also written a short note to describe the project (although I think it will need a more fulsome 'introduction', a fictive one, of course):
The European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) was invented
by the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch for A
Different Space, his last project before his disappearance in 2010. Van
Valckenborch, who made no attempt to conceal his constructedness, supposedly asked
one poet from each of the EU states to write him a poem, in response to a
quotation from Henri Lefevre about space, which was then scheduled to be
translated into Flemish (or occasionally French) via robot (online) translators
and the resultant poem ‘finalised’ by Van Valckenborch before intended presentation
on this website. Only five such ‘translations’ by these poets – who are themselves
fictional poets – appear at the end of Van Valckenborch’s collection A Translated Man (Shearsman 2013) authored
by Robert Sheppard. Sheppard, who from 2010-16, was President of the EUOIA, undertook
to ‘translate’ the work of the remaining 23 EU poets as a collaborative
enterprise, making use of the full list of poets drawn up but not used in the
writing of A Translated Man. (Croatia
joined in the intervening years, pushing the number to 28.) In 2016, as the
project reached its concluding translations, the British EU Referendum in
favour of Brexit led to a mirror exclusion in the EUOIA, and ‘Sheppard’
(himself one of the fictional European poets by this time) was expelled in a ‘Shexit’
coup (as it was aptly called by Scott Thurston), and replaced by the fictional
poet Hermes. A Translated Man and Twitters for a Lark are the first two
parts of an intended trilogy of fictional poems.
I am
pleased to announce that Shearsman Books will be publishing the EUOIA anthology.
It will be called Twitters for a Lark but will not appear in June or July, in time for
the EUOIA evening at The Other Room, Manchester. But here's the cover:
