Thursday 30th January 1969

Number One: Albatross, Fleetwood Mac.

Saturday 25th January 1969:

Bought 2 45’s in Brighton.

Robert Sheppard: My review of Adrian Clarke's Austerity Measures on Stride plus further notes, thoughts and links

My review of Adrian Clarke’s new book Austerity Measures is now up on Stride and I hope you will read it now. It is here.

On a personal note, this is the first piece of critical writing I’ve produced since finishing the grand slog of The Meaning of Form (see here for more on that volume of critical writing). That is, with the exception of the floating prose of Pulse, a sort of ‘treatise on metre’ that I am hoping will be published soon.

On another personal note, I have a poem dedicated to me in Adrian’s book and, by rights, I shouldn’t review the book, but I wanted to; I don’t know who else might and I regard Clarke as important (and somewhat neglected, though I don’t know why).  I simply ignored the poem in my account (though I like its references to 'C21 Blues'). I also ignored the poem dedicated to Patricia, which indeed is published on this blog here! Have a look: it gives an idea about how ‘austere’ Adrian's ‘measures’ are. There were plenty of other poems to deal with in their obdurately material insistence (along with their concomitant teasing indeterminacy)!

I have all of Adrian’s books on my desk at the moment and I’m surprised how many there are. Apart from the book reviewed, (see here) I’d check out the VEER website and look for Drastic Measures and Possession as starters. Or Excess Measures. If you don’t know the work. Here and here.

But there is one more example on Pages, from Adrian's 'Muzzle' here.

My earlier article on Adrian, ‘Colossal Fragments’ from Pages (as a print journal, 219-238, April 1994). Pages has been digitalised (see here) but I’ve also re-published that piece on this blog here. It was reprinted in my short critical volume Far Language here. But I also write about Clarke’s ‘creative linkage’ in The Poetry of Saying. See here.

But I haven’t written about his work recently (though there is a poetics piece dedicated to him in Berlin Bursts and I was surprised to find it still online in  the Singaporean magazine Softblow, here).

In the Stride review I wanted to present the work in its demanding delight without intervening critical discourse. (My one ‘reference’ to Guattari, whom I am currently re-reading, is heavily muted!)

So there are lots of places you can go to search out this work if you don’t know it, and plenty of books to buy (in addition to the new one). And there is one more link that will help you: I deal with Adrian’s poetics (in contrast to Pierre Joris’) here.

When I say in my review

Recently, I’ve read a lot of descriptions of rather mild excursions beyond the poetic normative as ‘experimental’, ‘innovative’, or ‘radical’, but very little measures up to Clarke’s excessive, austere, ghostly and (even) drastic measures…

I had a specific example in mind: a call for submissions for a magazine on Twitter that asked for collage work, cut-ups, surrealist writing, without irony! What we need, in Ranciere’s phrase, is something that will put the disruption back into montage! Adrian Clarke's work does that.

There is a second review, on Stride too, by Clark Allison, HERE.

Friday 24th January 1969:

Received QSL from Radio Denmark.

Thursday 23rd January 1969:

Number One: Albatross, Fleetwood Mac.

Sent QSL to Kuwait Broadcasting Service.

A second review of HAP by Clark Allison on Stride

A second review of HAP has appeared on Stride. You may read it here. It is by Clark Allison: he says:

Sheppard is taking his cue from the tumultuous and indeed dangerous days of Henry VIII’s Tudor regime with Thomas Cromwell acting as Chamberlain or chief minister until he met his untimely demise. Wyatt was rumoured to have had an affair with Anne Boleyn and endured a spell of detention in the Tower of London for alleged treason and died young though seemingly not suspiciously.

What the reader of this perceptive review doesn't know is that Clark has fallen into the routine of emailling me about nearly all of my temporary postings (on this blog) of the latest poems from 'The English Strain' project, so that we are in a kind of loose dialogue about its progress. It's nice to see him taking stock of an earlier part of the project. Thanks Clark!

See here about how to purchase the book HAP: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch  Knives, Forks and Spoons Press   23 pages   £6.50, December 2018, from KFS:


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

You can read about the whole ‘English Strain’ project in a post that has links to some other accounts, and earlier parts, of this work: here. 

Clark's own poetry appeared on this blog when it was more of a blogzine. See here for his
'Mind’s Eye' : https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2005/12/clark-allison-minds-eye.html

Steve Spence has reviewed the book on Litter.

here. And there's a third review from The Journal here.

Here’s another 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) 

Monday 20th January 1969:

Changed pictures on my wall. Radio info on door.

Sunday 19th January 1969:

Nanny and Auntie Joyce came. Used up last of film.

Saturday 18th January 1969:

John and I hope to make tape for Radio Veronica, the first Pirate.

Thursday 16th January 1969:

Number One: Marmalade: Ob la di, Ob la da.

Robert Sheppard: Old and New poems published in Molly Bloom 18 (and MB2!)

https://mollybloompoetry.weebly.com/

Molly Bloom 18 https://mollybloom18.weebly.com

is out (so is Issue 2 again!) Let the editor Aidan Semmens, explain this conundrum:

Since its inception as an online magazine in 2013, Molly Bloom has been living a lie, at least an implicit one. The implication, if not the overt statement, was that Molly as a printed magazine was born and died with the first issue, in November 1980. Recently, however, going through a box of old pamphlets and magazines left more or less forgotten in the attic, I came across the hard evidence that this was not the case. For there was a surely rare copy of Molly Bloom no.2, a duplicated, hand-stapled issue put together in May 1982 by my good friend Ged Lawson.

As I’ve explained to Aidan (who I met with Ged, who was also a friend of mine in Norwich at the time), I thought it odd, when I looked at the first issue online, because I had clear memories of being in it. I was wrong; for I was in this mysterious Issue 2, and I too came across a copy of it recently, assembling the bibliography with Chris Madden, for the Robert Sheppard Companion. As Aidan continues to explain:

Having launched Molly Bloom online with a reappearance of most of the contents of the first print issue, it seems only right now to bring the work from the second to the light of the online world, where most if not all of it now appears for the first time. Peter Riley's ‘Weekend’ is newly edited by him; the rest appears here exactly as it did in 1982, while some of the poets included then also provide new work exclusive to this online issue.

As I do. ‘Of Appearances: Of a Naked World’ was a 1981 collision between phenomenology (which I have recently returned to in my critical-creative piece Pulse) and objectivism, which as a critic has also re-occupied me recently (see my piece on John Seed, who is also a contributor to the new Molly Bloom here). See here: https://mollybloom18.weebly.com/robert-sheppard1.html

For my own new invited contribution to the new Molly I decided to send my recent condensing (into prose, like a haibun, but with a desire to juxtapose the three 17 syllable sentences into a paragraph) the best of the haiku I was writing about a year ago. (I write about three of them here.)This piece seems somehow to be consonant with the earlier poems. Read them here:
https://mollybloom18.weebly.com/robert-sheppard.html

I will reprint here, the slightly-revised version ‘Of Appearances: of a Naked World’ to demonstrate how I edited it for publication in Returns (published in 1985). And also because the text was a near-candidate for inclusion in my selected poems History or Sleep. I hope you enjoy either or both versions.

OF APPEARANCES: OF A NAKED WORLD

                        (pub: Returns. Southsea: Textures, 1985)

Purple
                & deep pink
along the ridge of dusk

                                & below
                the ranked squares of latticed
                factory windows, each lit

                The hard exterior
of appearances

                fading

                The flesh of night

it may well be
this obvious, but can never be

simple


*


Men singing in the factory
its blocks of light
fractured upon the river's surface

Moon
its lesser light also there
ruptured
healing

                in fluid uncertainty,

full. Men singing

in the factory: unseen voices
under the waste of the sky
& its slow moon



*


The brittle
transformations of
settled snow

affirm, deny

a river glazed
with ice
glinting

shattered light

frozen steam
on opaque glass
in the bathroom

spiked nebula

arctic
fur


*


Flesh-in-firelight
moving upon a body

clothed in a way of
being looked at

touching

the pulse
under the skin

touched

something in the speechless
coming across the horizon

of a naked world


*


black touching

statues

shining

eye

empty streets, emptied

flowing

mouth place

dirty snow


*


Black tyres
peeling
hissing strips
trace-trails
from the wet road

The shift
workers
exchange places
bolting to
safety, risk

Surfacing
from the other
element
a pair of amphibious
​blind eyes

1981

Tuesday 14th January 1969:

Did propaganda raid in our class.

[Note: I've no idea what that means.]

Monday 13th January 1969:

Saw Till Death Us Do Part. John came.

Sunday 12th January 1969:

John has a new tape recorder.

Thursday 9th January 1969:

Exams may not take place.

Wednesday 8th January 1969;

May have exam next week.

Tuesday 7th January 1969:

Back to school. Kicked Mr Parkinson in the nose in Rugby.

Sunday 5th January 1969:

Number One: Scaffold: Lily the Pink.

(See here for more fiftieth anniversary stuff, in this case the 50 years since the Mersey Sound collection in 2017)

Saturday 4th January 1969:

Redid the above tape. Started to write story about it.

Robert Sheppard and Thomas Ingmire (with others) exhibition video of the books

As posted here, one of my poems, ‘Synovial Joints’ has been … I was almost going to say ‘set to music’, which is both true and untrue. It has been calligraphed (if there is such a term) by Thomas Ingmire. I sent Thomas my poem 'Synovial Joints' (named after the Steve Coleman album) and it may be read here. It is one of my 'Overdubs of Milton' which I talk about here.The poem (and one page of Thomas' calligraphy) appears across a folio of the San Francisco magazine AMBUSH, issue 6 (They have a website here.)

And the exhibition this work is in is on display NOW. Part of the poster giving the details is from that collaboration, but that may be seen on this (as far as I can tell, silent) gallery video (ours is the first book here to have its pages turned, but I’m followed by Geraldine Monk and others). Do have a look.

The poetry readings that were a part of the exhibition opening may also be accessed here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B00efd_w2Ew  jack hirschman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvmW90zZfAs  dean rader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jUjGlzmvxs  li-young lee

You can also see our previous collaboration: both poem ('Afghanistan') and image/text here. 

And, again, the video link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPkEQ_YS1Y

Friday 3rd January 1969:

Went down John’s. We did an OB (outside broadcast) in the graveyard.

Thursday 2nd January 1969:

John came up. He has bought ‘Albatross’ by Fleetwood Mac.

Wednesday 1st January 1969:

Went down John’s.