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
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
