Saturday, October 27, 2018

Robert Sheppard Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt's Petrarch published NOW

My pamphlet Hap:Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch is now published and is available from Knives Forks and Spoons here:


https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/hap-understudies-of-thomas-wyatt-s-petrarch-by-robert-sheppard-26-pages

or:

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/new-titles


Taking only the sonnets Wyatt ‘translated’ from Petrarch, but adding a few of my own, I merge the historical Wyatt with his hysterical contemporary analogue, a reluctant civil servant of a corrupt administration. His world fluxes between Henrician terror,  administered by Cromwell, and something like our own reality, administered from inside Boris Johnson’s foreign office, itself already a history of misrule.

Tom Jenks writes of the book: ‘We need our ghosts more than ever. Robert Sheppard rouses Sir Thomas Wyatt, pioneering English sonneteer, from unquiet slumber and drops him blinking into Brexit Britain. Tudor insider, rumoured lover of Anne Boleyn, Wyatt now plies his poetic trade in the dysfunctional dynasty of Theresa May, a court characterised by its surfeit of jesters. Informed but not limited by its origins, HAP is a work of wit, verve and skill, doing to Wyatt what Wyatt did to Petrarch: recontextualising and rebooting by transformative translation. This book should be shot into space as a record of our interesting times, preferably in Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s trouser pocket.’ 

Read the first review, by Steve Spence, here. And the second, by Clark Allison here.And the third, which appeared in The Journal (unknown reviewer): here. Here's a fourth one: Prince, D.A. ‘Hap by Robert Sheppard’, on Sphinx: Poetry Pamphlet Reviews and Features: https://www.sphinxreview.co.uk/index.php/946-robert-sheppard-hap-understudies-of-thomas-wyatt-s-petrarch (2020) 



These sonnets are from a larger grouping called The English Strain. I write about them here

And about my sonnets generally here, and here . See here and here for more on my Petrarch obsession, which set this thing off, including how to purchase the first part of The English Strain, that is: Petrarch 3 from Crater press in its ‘map’ edition.


That's the frontispiece of his book, not mine. The design of my cover is by Patricia Farrell.

Sunday, October 21, 2018

The 2018 Lowry Lounge in Liverpool and on the Wirral (including the Open Malc) (set list)

This year's annual celebration of Merseyside writer Malcolm Lowry, our ninth, took place on Saturday 27 October in Birkenhead and at Bluecoat in Liverpool!

• 2-4pm at the Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead
• 6-9pm at Bluecoat (Sandon Room)

At the Williamson, Firminists Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs gave an illustrated introduction to the writer, not far from where he sailed on his first adventure in 1927, and Alan Dunn presented Lowry artwork in the cafe. (As ever, I never got across the river, though Patricia and I did visit the Mersey to look over to where Lowry would have sailed from.)


The second part of the Lounge was at Bluecoat, where there was a screening of The Lighthouse Invites the Storm, a film of a music performance commissioned last year from artists Alan Dunn, Martin Heslop and Jeff Young that reconnected Lowry with his New Brighton birthplace, and was developed in collaboration with retired seafarers from Wallasey. It was a collage of the two performances last year. Fascinating, because I only saw the Bluecoat version.

An illustrated talk by Mark Goodall, 'Symphony of Scorpions: Malcolm Lowry and Modern Jazz', examined the relationship between jazz and Lowry’s writings, paying particular attention to the work of British Jazz composer and writer Graham Collier (1937-2011). Good stuff. I went home and played a lot of Bix into the night, including Lowry's favourite break from 'Swingin' the Blues'. 

This was followed by an ‘Open Malc’ session, with musical, poetic and other live contributions. (It wasn't really 'open', but it was 'Malc', as I said in my introduction.) from the floor, made in response to Lowry. The evening concluded with a volcanic disco and the customary toast to Wirral’s greatest writer.



Robert Sheppard: I was MCing, but I also read first; nobody wants to 'go first', so I kicked us off, with ‘The Malcolm Lowry Lounge’, which may be read here, and a new poem especially written for tonight called ‘Cablegram to Dale St’. (I want to use these two poems to sandwich my ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’ prose piece and construct a Lowry suite one day.) 

 John Hyatt and Thalia Styxguitar and voice: ‘The Resurrection of Geoffrey Firmin. Hyatt is writing Under the Volcano backwards! Video here:
 

Patricia Farrell – Porcelain and Volcano reading. Patricia Farrell is a poet and visual artist. Her latest publication is High Cut from Leafe Press.  In 2011 she completed a PhD thesis titled 'Philosophical Artifice: an Enquiry with Relation to Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense'. Her piece explored Deleuze’s exploration of intoxication (he writes about Lowry).

Chris McCabe: Poet, writer, playwright, librarian and drinker. His novel, Dedalus is published by Henningham Family Press and he read a section that mentions Lowry, plus a short divinatory text for ML.

Mary Morgans read a moving letter she found tucked into a copy of Hear Us Oh Lord… by Lowry.

Helen Tookey – read a poem ‘Boat’. She has a book from Carcanet and another on the way soon. She is one of the Firminists and edited Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World with Bryan Biggs. 

James Byrne is a poet and editor and he has two books up-coming: his responses to the etchings of Goya (from Arc) and a selection of his work, translated into Spanish. And, as you would have heard, he is internationally engaged as a writer (in this case with the Mexican landscape that Lowry knew, about which he has written a splendid poem). 

Al ‘Bluesman’ Peters, is a Blues Singer/Word Slinger, but he’s also a Liverpool musical legend, and trumpet player. But no trumpet that night! But he got us all singing! Nice blues harp.

Mark Goddall is definitely a Firminst since he edits our occasional journal The Firminist. As you can see above, he is a critic and cultural commentator across a number of art and non-art practices, but on Saturday he sang his jaunty song ‘Malcolm Lowry’. 

Ailsa Cox is a short story writer and critic and has written critically on Lowry’s fiction, but, perhaps more importantly, Lowry’s work has informed many of her stories. Her The Real Louise is published by Headland. She is also one of the original Firminists. Her story about a Malcolm Lowry conference in Vancouver was moving and precise.
Then a toast of meszcal! All hands on the record decks!! Over for the year!!! It was a low-key year, between big events, I suspect. 

(Some of these texts may be appearing in The Firminist which may well appear ahead of next year's lounge.)
The Bluecoat's Bryan Biggs and the ghostly presence of Lowry. Photo: Helen Tookey)

Accounts of previous years' events (including the first in 2009!) may be read here:

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Some poems in Shearsman and back to the Mina Loy day/exhibition

I've had two new poems from the 'It's Nothing' sequence from The English Strain published in Shearsman 117/8, guest-edited by Kelvin Corcoran, to whom, many thanks. One of the poems, 'Useless Landscape' was written for the 'Modern Women' day a the Bluecoat in 2016, organised by Sandeep Parmar, to whom the poem is dedicated, and it mentions Melissa Gordon's 'Fallible Space', an installation (which she has just re-created and which is accompanied by a booklet containing the poems from that Bluecoat day, but I've no details of that yet.)

I detailed the Bluecoat day here and there is a post from Joanne Ashcroft too:






Here you can see images and Melissa's installation: 

And her website : www.melissagordon.info


I write about the completed 100 sonnets of The English Strain hereAnd about my sonnets generally here, and here and see here and here for more on my Petrarch obsession, which set this thing off, including how to purchase Petrarch 3 from Crater press in its ‘map’ edition.

My sonnets Hap:Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch is now published;

see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/10/robert-sheppard-hap-understudies-of.html
and is available from Knives Forks and Spoons here:

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/hap-understudies-of-thomas-wyatt-s-petrarch-by-robert-sheppard-26-pages

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/new-titles


I have some new 'English Strain' poems online in Molly Bloom, Aidan Semmens' fine  magazine. Here:

https://mollybloompoetry.weebly.com/
https://mollybloompoetry.weebly.com/robert-sheppard.html

He has chosen ones from
NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT: Overdubs of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. 

There are more excerpts from 'It's Nothing' coming up in PN Review ...

Wednesday, October 03, 2018

Robert Sheppard: HMS Little Fox by Lee Harwood republished (My reading of 'The Long Black Veil')



I gave Tony Frazer a hand with the proofreading of this new book, but it was more of a minor editorial job when we faced dilemmas like these. I wrote to Tony:

p. 18

The paragraph/verse beginning

In the morning we go for a drive…

This looks like prose in the Oasis, but it appears lineated in Collected, as verse. I believe this latter is wrong and that it is actually prose, or should be. We’d need a look at the manuscript to decide this, but see what you think! It could be either, though the tone is closer to the texture of the prose, AND very little of the verse is punctuated in the poem. Only the prose. As this passage is. (Compare to the ‘At night… passage on p. 16 on the Oasis.)

p. 22; those two lines ‘…we finally begin to fall asleep…’ I think that’s prose too, if you look at Oasis p. 19, not lineated (or it is by accident of reaching the right margin…) Again it is punctuated.

Tony has made the good decision to stay close to the original publication, but has corrected obvious mistakes, typos, etc.

You can buy the book here. £9.99

A Reading of Complexity: Lee Harwood's The Long Black Veil from his volume HMS Little Fox 

‘Harwood knows the uses of discontinuity, of partial description, of tangents whose vector energies can be gripped by the imagination, working to cohere information and feeling out of an interior coherence of the poetic action,’ writes Eric Mottram, of Lee Harwood’s work of the 1970s, and this description is particularly apt to the 12 part ‘notebook’ written between 1970 and 1972, The Long Black Veil,  which Harwood described as ‘the end-product, the “flower” of my work to date’, and which is the opening poem of the newly republished HMS Little Fox. With its Olsonian notation – actually, it well exceeds Maximus in its notational sparseness, what Harwood called his ‘puritan’ side – and its appropriation of the ideogrammic method of juxtaposition, it is Harwood’s longest meditation upon erotic obsession, yet it is also a quest for the ‘comprehension of process’, to quote the poem’s epigraph from Ezra Pound. Such process is another Olsonian inheritance (reaching back to the philosophy of Whitehead). It is a quest enacted through memory (‘What have we left/from all this?’); Harwood explains the temporal organization of his poem: ‘One actuality in time set by (beside) another, causing waves to go between the two’. Yet the image he proffers of memory, in this most self-contradictory of his poems – he describes it as both process and product – contradicts the possibility of that comforting simultaneity. The image, borrowed from Borges, of a pile of coins, each representing a memory of the preceding memory, shows ‘how our memory distorts and simplifies events the further we move from them’.

                        two years passed     ‘Oh Jung’
                        the cycles not repeated
                        only the insistence 

This distinction between vital insistence and dead repetition exists in a tense relationship with actual memory. The questor figure from earlier texts has learnt that memory is not just a series of surprising recollections but is both contained and refracted through process and mutability. Memory is paradoxical, cannot be resolved into the singularity of narrative. There is a strong desire to feel ‘totally in one place’, though this is undercut: ‘the dream echoed again and again ... in many places’.
            The ‘Oh Jung’ above is itself a reiterated insistence carried over from a quotation in the immediately preceding passage.
                                    ‘Concepts promise protection
                        from experience.
                                                The spirit does
                        not dwell in concepts.  Oh Jung.’
  (Joanne Kyger - DESECHEO NOTEBOOK)
   
There can be no sheltering from experience in conceptualisations, in intellectual systems of knowledge, even in this, the most allusive and literary of Harwood’s works, despite it being the most trenchantly unpoetic, in its lack of euphony, metaphor, or other elements of poetic artifice and content. The ‘Preface’ ends:

But what of the essence of this?  ‘Oh Jung's’ insistences.  The Sufi story of the famous River that tried to cross the desert, but only crossed the sands as   water ‘in the arms of the wind’, nameless but  
                  
The Sufi parable, truncated so abruptly, demonstrates that movement or process always involves surprising metamorphoses.  Repetitions also undergo metamorphosis at their reappearances; this involves a continual defamiliarization.  The theme turns rather than re-turns.  The repetitions are both structuring the text and yet decentring it thematically as it progresses, in a dialectic of repetition and surprise.
            Book One plays with the distance between word and thing, unhappy nominalism a reflector of existential distance.  ‘How I ache now’ is equivalent to the ‘endless skies/ that ache too much’ that appear several lines later.  Despite the alienation, nature is suffused with longing.  The text is hesitant, constantly revising itself.  ‘It’s light/ I mean your body’. But the body also is the constant referent of Book One amid the general failure of reference (‘the words?    how can they...’) and the ‘distance’ between lover and lover, and the ‘unbearable distance’ of the ‘endless skies’. ‘Your body, yes     I'm talking about it/ at last     I mean this is the discovery.’ Yet there can be no purposeful inventory of bodily elements.  The book ends:
           
            dawn - light - body - words - raven - skies - ache- distance - valley - sun - silos - farms - ridges -  creek - each other - birds - wind
                        The Flight - BA 591          
These are the nouns of the first half of the section - an alienating inventory of what is irrecoverably lost.  The flight number is yet another sign of the reality of distance.  What survives this distance, as always in Harwood’s poetry, is an enigmatic impression, a moment from a love-affair that has been frustrated: a cinematic sequence, frozen in the frame.

                        you stop and half turn
                        to tell me...
                        that doesn't matter
                        but your look
                        and this picture I have
                        and at this distance          

            This is one version of what Harwood calls ‘the dream’: ‘anything that goes on in my head, whether it be thoughts or imaginings, day-dreams or sleep dreams.  They all give pictures of “the possible”, and that is exactly their value.’ The ‘dream’, though, is only articulated in this poem through the mediation of the transcriptions of real events, most importantly the recording of the events of a precarious love affair and its aftermath and memories.   ‘I hold you to me in a small room - the night air so heavy.  Inside “the dream”...’  And, as we have seen, the ‘dream’ recurs again and again in different locations, linking them by paradigmatic connection.
            One possible version of ‘the dream’ harks back to, is nostalgic for, the fictions of his earlier work in The White Room, yet they are now unnecessary evasions of the real that is emphatically celebrated in the notebook (mostly in journal-like passages which depict travels with the lover around North America, and which I will be passing over in this piece in the interests of economy) and in its new-found ‘straight-talking’ diction. Unlike the early fictions,

                        There’s no steamer bringing you to me
                        up-river at the hill-station
                        No long white dress on the verandah
                        It is...
                        I hold you.     isn’t this enough?    
        
The landscape becomes prey to the pathetic fallacy, as in his earliest successful poem, ‘As Your Eyes Are Blue’, is ‘only a description of my love for you’. The reiterated depictions of the lover’s body turns upon both her presence and her absence, affected by the complexities of the situation: the poem’s title, a haunting country and western song by Lefty Frizzell (which I used to play and sing!), weirdly narrated from the point of view of an executed man, hints that the relationship is adulterous (he is framed for a murder but will not proffer as his defence the fact he was with ‘his best friend’s wife’). In fact, the woman of the poem was Bobbie Louise Hawkins, the novelist with whom Harwood did in fact live with for some years in the 1980s. (In the parallel with the song, the ‘best friend’ would have been Robert Creeley, as Creeley himself told me, much to my surprise when I was interviewing him. I left that bit out of the printed interview.) But that lies in the future of this poem, as it were. (Also it is worth noting that the notational style was not one that Harwood would return to in such detail ever again. The ‘failure’, as Harwood thought it, of his ‘Notes of a Post Office Clerk’, the follow-up to this poem, would confirm that.)
In Book Six - mid-way through the text - ‘the questions of complexity’ are dealt with most fully. Harwood quotes E.M. Forster’s obituary for Andre Gide which praises Gide for transmitting much of ‘life’s complexity, and the delight, the duty of registering that complexity and of conveying it’. Complexity is the twentieth-century existential condition. It is in using Jung's essay ‘Marriage as a Psychological Relationship’ that Harwood develops both a theory for a constantly decentring process in his work which suggested a structural homology for the ‘comprehension of process’, and a model for human relationships.

             The distinctions

                        ‘Oh, Jung’ (1875-1961) on ‘Marriage...’ (1925)

                        The container and the contained
                        not or­
                        one within the other
                        a continual shifting    and that both ways
                        - more a flow - from the simplicity to the complexity,
                        ‘unconscious’ to conscious,
                                                              and then back again?
                        and the move always with difficulty, and pain          a pleasure   
  
           
In Jung's theory of marriage, the container is a complex character, the contained simple and psychologically dependent upon the other. There are pleasurable but also painful resolutions between them as the container looks in vain for his or her level of complexity in the partner, whose simplicity is also disrupted by the search. The contained, however, comes to accept his or her position and becomes acutely aware of the necessity for self-fulfilment. Harwood subverts the underlying submissive-dominant polarity of Jung’s essay, with his emphatic ‘and’ which suggests that the roles are interchangeable, dynamic and discontinuous. The relationship in the poem, it must be recalled, is also far from a ‘marriage’ in conventional terms.
With such mutability, process is both a mode of consciousness and a mode of communication: 

                         not so much a repetition
                        but a moving around a point, a line
                        - like a backbone - and that too moving
(on)                         
Part of the function of the ‘backbone’ moving around a (moving) point is that there should be no single point of view, that it should be ‘complex’.  The ‘straight-talking’ of certain parts of the poem do not contradict the elaborate but not poetic artifice of others.  They are, to have recourse to the concepts of quantum physics, complementarities: mutually exclusive positions that support one another, echoed later in the text: ‘Yes and No’. Yet the most explicit model of this ‘moving/ (on)’ in the poem is

                        yang and yin
                        light and dark        

which is accompanied by a drawing of the ‘yang and yin’ Taoist emblem. 

add

At one level this is a re-statement of the passage above on marriage where the two partners are in a dialectical but equitable harmony. Yet the earnest unities of Taoism are undercut - complemented - by an all-too worldly, weary, quotation from Stendhal in which Julien Sorel's love, and by implication, our narrator’s, is described as ‘still another name for ambition’.
            The poem offers multiple models of experience, many ways of approaching complexity; the instability of the lover and the erotic becomes the paradoxical centre of the poem as he is balanced between love and ambition, and marriage and adultery..
            Jung furnished the introduction to Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching, from which Harwood quotes, incompletely, in Book Six. 

                        BEFORE COMPLETION                   Wei Chi/64
                        But if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing,
                        Gets his tail in the water,
                        There is nothing that would further.   

‘This hexagram,’ the commentary to the I Ching explains, predicts a ‘hopeful outlook’; it ‘indicates a time when the transition from disorder to order is not yet completed’. (It also explains where the title of the volume comes from, though this fact does not explain its meaning.)
            The poem continues with a not entirely convincing image of the transformation of the lover.  ‘Complexity’ includes a transformative, as well as merely linear, process, catalysis, to use Harwood’s metaphor in other poems.

                                                 in the half light ...
                        A minotaur? a cat? tiger?           Her face
                        a metamorphosis     seen     at once     many times.
                        Our powers generating...         

‘Book Twelve: California Journal’ brings about a full ravelling of the complexities of earlier books, yet focuses upon the lover. It is ironic to centre oneself in decentring, abandoned to the openness of the ‘dream’ that evokes possibility, but constantly returns to the lover, to pitch one time against another, only to find the farthest memories metamorphosed in the vagaries of recollection. When the continual shifting of place and movement, of change and exchange, and of dream and the here and now, come to fulfilment in an extraordinarily powerful piece of prose, it is not a resolution.

Making love, the final blocks clear.  My body taken into her body completely, and then her body into my body....

She anoints my wrists
the anointment a ritual like the sweetening of the body before burial, before our parting.  My not realising the completeness of this until now....

The ritual   of - repeated again - No.  We make love  -  to each other  -  in turn.  The body glowing, dizzy,...   walking through clouds.  The faces transformed again.

She puts the bead bracelet around my wrist      

The ritual is a necessary insistence, not a casual repetition, which involves characteristic transformation and metamorphosis.  As in a near-contemporary poem, ‘One, Two, Three’ there is a ritual exchange. ‘She accepts the objects - the stone, the orange blossom./She gives the objects - the whittled twig, the dried seed pod.’ The love-making is complete in both the sense that it has reached a certain stage of intensity; but it may also be a final act with its funereal equation of ‘before burial’ and ‘before our parting’: so the ‘completeness’ of the anointing is not comprehended at the time.  The poem ends with what might be a simple imperative or the fragment of a larger utterance, ‘lie naked upon the bed’, which returns to the unstable, dynamic insistence of human sexual relationships. But the pervasive ‘dream’ and its echoes ensure that the story will never be a simple one, that the text's end will never be definitively conclusive.

               In the face of ‘a multiplicity of approaches’, as Harwood puts it, there can only be a relativistic discourse, the polyphonizing of a lyric impulse and the dispersal of narrative energies. ‘The Long Black Veil’, the longest poem in HMS Little Fox, is an act of such dispersal, a recognition that ‘each of us lives at the intersection of many of these... language elements.’ The 12 ‘books’ are, with their Poundian precision and erotic uncertainty, Harwood’s mutability cantos. Out of these elements, like postmodern science, it is ‘producing not the known, but the unknown’, as Lyotard puts it; like a lover, it always returns to the known, to find it changed, even in memory or language.

My review of Collected Poems in two parts here and here. On later works here; on recent works here. And an earlier gift to him here. A later 'Laugh' with Lee Harwood may be read here.

And news of the British Library Harwood Archive here.

HMS Little Fox reappears, with some updated corrections in New Collected Poems : see Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems: the best audio and video recordings (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Monday, October 01, 2018

Robert Sheppard: Essay on John Seed in Poetry and Praxis 'After' Objectivism



Details here:

Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism



Editor(s): 

Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism is an important contribution to our understanding of a movement that refused to be labeled a movement. It will be useful for students of modernist and postmodern poetics interested in the evolution of issues first addressed in Zukofsky’s foundational essays, ‘Program: Objectivists 1931’ and ‘Sincerity and Objectification,’ and in the various formal innovations launched by the practitioners. This is a new look at Objectivism’s influence and, equally, a look at the problematic nature of influence in general.”—Michael Davidson, author, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics 


Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism examines late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.

Contributors: 

Rae Armantrout, Julie Carr, Amy De’Ath, Jeff Derksen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Graham Foust, Alan Golding, Jeanne Heuving, Ruth Jennison, David Lau, Steve McCaffery, Mark McMorris, Chris Nealon, Jenny Penberthy, and me.

My piece is on John Seed. The whole book (I have only read the introduction so far) is geared towards the relationship of 'Objectivism' to current literary production.) 

John Seed reading at the Poetry Buzz, 2005

I have written critically about John Seed on this blog, here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-punctum-punctuation-and.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppsrd-john-seeds-lyric-poems.html 
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-john-seed-englands.html

A poem from Seed's Pictures from Mayhew was published on this blogzine, here.

And there are transcripts of a great George Oppen interview 1973 that I made decades ago, here.