Conceived as a
continuation of the fictional poems Robert Sheppard ventriloquised through the
bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch in his A Translated Man (2013),
the complete 28 poets of the EUOIA (European Union of Imaginary Authors)
which we will only have time to sample take on a variety of new meanings in Brexit Britain. This
collaborative work will be published before Brexit 'happens' as an anthology by Shearsman
Books. (We are at the proof-stage with that.) Mostly conceived before Brexit,
you can discover how Brexit became Shexit, as 'Robert Sheppard', the UK poet, becomes
fictional, optional and expelled.Working in collaboration with other writers, Sheppard creates a stylistically various programme of these European writers, whose works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical. History may not be argued away by the fictive. Accompanied by biographies of varying detail and plausibility, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own. There is no resultant ‘Europoem’ style, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of their production. All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.
I’d like to publicly thank everybody for making this EUOIA night a memorable one. I think everybody played their strange parts of being half or wholly someone else! Those of you on video added to the occasion by suggesting elsewheres (though two were filmed in Norfolk and one in the very (lovely) space we were performing in).
I did feel the reality of the
poems that were read, particularly to hear them read by single voices. That
choice worked I think, because it smoothed out the collaborations: in a lot of
cases I was listening and trying to remember what I wrote and what the other
had written, and I often couldn't. One measure of success.
I think I was right to hold
back on the Brexit aspects. Not only because my versions of Wyatt and Surrey have been taking that head on, but because this is
a project that pre-dates Brexit (though the word enters the last collaboration
I did, with Steve McCaffery), its politics is of the contextual kind, when
history surrounds an event and changes its meaning.
The Other Room is one of the
great 'provisional institutions' of radical poetry (that's Charles Bernstein's
term) and I feel honoured to have appeared there again. It is a collaborative
enterprise, as this project has been, soon to be an anthology, Twitters for a Lark .
On that: I have the proofs now and I will turn to them as
soon as I've come down from proofreading Atlantic
Drift. (Not just from ecstasy but from the last minute labour!) I noticed a
few inconsistencies (even while I was reading!).
Here’s the set list and some notes I made to help me speak
to the audience
Intro from Tom Jenks
Intro to Van Valckenborch and the EUOIA.
Robert Sheppard: read 5 EUOIA poems from A Translated Man
I went back to my list (or his) and decided to write the lot
starting with these 5 whose works I wrote on my own. Sophie Poppmeier as
example from Twitters for a Lark: I
read her 3 poems and said a little about her life. (Much more here and here)
An account of collaboration (and why collaboration)
with Jason Argleton, Joanne
Ashcroft, Alan Baker, James Byrne, Alys Conran, Kelvin Corcoran, Anamaría Crowe
Serrano, Patricia Farrell, S. J.
Fowler, Allen Fisher, Robert Hampson, Jeff Hilson, God’s Rude Wireless, Tom Jenks, Frances Kruk, Rupert
Loydell, Steve McCaffery, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Sandeep Parmar, Simon Perril, Jèssica Pujol i Duran, Zoë
Skoulding, Damir Šodan, Philip Terry, Scott Thurston, René Van Valckenborch
‘I would like to thank all of my collaborators, who have
pooled their sovereignty, as it were, and constructed poems and people in so
many different, educative and exhilarating ways.’
This will be published soon as Twitters for a Lark
 |
| Cover by Ivalyo Dimitrov (who will be reading tonight) |
An account of collaboration
Robert and Patricia Farrell (two
voice performance): Bulgaria:
Ivaylo Dimitrov (1979-)
Behind Into Beyond
For the next part of the evening I asked my collaborators to
read our work in a single voice; after all, most of the collaborations were
about creating a single voice amid varied company:
Joanne Ashcroft: Slovakia: Matúš Dobeš (1959-)
'Roasting
One's Chestnuts' and 'As I Drank Double Espressos'
Read Joanne's hopes for the evening here. And see our previous attempt to animate our creature, Matus Dobres of Slovakia here, and read about this fictional poet and find links to his texts here.
Tom Jenks: from the Biographical Note of Luxembourrg’s Georg
Bleinstein. He has an interesting life
(some of it still to come) and you can trace that life, with the help of
embedded vidoes (Group Captain Carol Vorderman, sausages, that sort of
thing), here.
Scott Thurston: Malta: Hubert
Zuba (1964-2015)
AND OUT.
S.J. Fowler: Video: Sweden,
Kajsa Bergström (1956-)
BREAK
Jeff Hilson: Video: Hungary, Ratsky József (1970-)
Alan Baker: Slovenia,
A.B.C. Remič (1958-)
If I Were...
Slovenia (excerpt)
Allen Fisher: Finland: Minna Kärkkäinen (1974-)
Small Choruses on Mars
Explanation of EUOIA and ‘Shexit’
as shadow of Brexit (see here for my playing around on this blog with that
idea)
Robert Sheppard: UK (I am also a
fictional poet)
Ern Malley Suite
An explanation how the island of Frisland nudged into the project. If
fictional poets, why not fictional land-masses? Eirikur's suggestion...
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Video: Frisland: Hróbjartur
Ríkeyjarson af Dvala (1948- )
Koans of
sweet pig Brenda and the escape from Frisland
Robert Sheppard: Fragments
of the Ancient Tale of Queen Brenda and the Settling of Frisland (here’s a
clip, as it were):
Bjorn my best Beserker born of
bears
Feels no fear on Frisland’s
fishless shore;
He bursts forth bearing crests of
bear and boar
And peels the flesh from living
men leaving
Sweetmeats and stinking gore
hanging from gates,
And widows’ wombs torn free like
bloody bladders,
And children’s brains bashed
pretty hard.
Concluding remarks by Tom Jenks...
And here's my last reading at The Other Room, where I read the Flemish poems of Rene Van Valckenborch: https://otherroom.org/videos/or-43-sandeep-parmar-robert-sheppard-rachel-smith-videos/
The book may be bought here: http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/product/6460-robert-sheppard-ed---twitters-for-a-lark
* Here are some later events:
Read about the November 2017
mini-launch in Luton here.
And the Leicester (States of Independence) launch:
Read about the Bangor
launch
here.
Read about the Manchester 2018
launch here:
