Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Jason Argleton

With Jason Argleton I created some of the poems of the Austrian fictional poet Sophie Poppmeier. You can read more about her at these posts:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/robert-sheppard-euoia-sophie.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/robert-sheppard-euoia-sophie-poppmeier_6.html

She has her own web page here: euoia

However, Jason is himself fictional, a foil for some of Sophie’s notorious Book Two, which contained sexually explicit poems. None of these poems actually exist, but the hush that accompanies even their mention is deafening, and can be heard from Vienna to Berlin. ‘Argleton’ appears also in the name of the North Western university that  Hróbjartur Ríkeyjarson af Dvala (himself unreal) worked at. In fact ‘Argleton’ appeared in Google maps at some point, right next to Edge Hill University. It was appropriate that he should be named after this fictional (accidental) town. He seems to have been one of my students at Edge Hill, where his final dissertation was a comparative study of the poetry of Ern Malley and Bob McCorkle. He is pursuing practice-led graduate studies on Ossianism. Poems have appeared in various magazines, including Pages. The mention of Ern Malley is appropriate because last night I met up with a composer/musician who wants to celebrate Ern's 100th birthday. He was born in Liverpool, as 'Robert Sheppard''s poem in Twitters tells us.

That poem, realer than he himself, may be read here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/25-edge-hill-poets-jason-argleton.html

Here’s even listed on my list of Edge Hill poets, but then so is one real collaborator:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/twenty-five-years-of-creative-writing.html

Working in collaboration with a team of real writers, I've created a lively and entertaining anthology of fictional European poets.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here.

There is no resultant ‘Europoem’, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of the poems’ production, the richness of a continent. The works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical, from traditional lyricism to the experimental. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.  

More on Twitters here and here. 

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here )

 All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.