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| Michael Drayton with laurels |
Donald
Tusk
I have now ‘finished’ the second book of my The English Strain project (see below
for the first and for more details), which is entitled Bad Idea. It is a re-working, a transposition, if you will, of the whole of Michael Drayton’s sequence Idea; that’s 64 poems (with the addition
of its ‘Address to the Reader of these Sonnets’). I’ve been at it since July 2018,
one a week (more or less), now for over a year. Now I have run out of sonnets!
Hub Post
Fortunately some ‘Bad Idea’ poems may be read online, so
I’ll offer the links to these first. I’m pleased to say three poems appear appropriately in Monitor on Racism. Patricia Farrell’s
two images of Bo accompany them. Thanks to Monica at Monitor. Find the poems and images here:
Four
consecutive poems from
Bad Idea (XLV-XLVIII)
are published together in
International
Times. Thanks to poetry editor Rupert Loydell.
HERE
I
write about those here:
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| Not so happy in power |
There are some 'Bad Idea' poems published in
Tears in the Fence 70; see
here.
I am pleased that Tony Frazer has selected a
group of five sonnets from Bad Idea for Shearsman 121 and 122; see here.
On
IT, I have two
new poems from
Bad Idea Poem LV was written on 1
st August
2019 and concerns ‘Booster Bo, turbocharged with active verbs’ getting elected
as leader of the party. Poem LVI, written a week later, is in the voice of one
of the true Yeoman of Kent, who, after Brexit, will be tasked with both the
defence of the newly liberated realm, and custodianship of the Dogging Sites. Go straight to the poems here:
Two more sonnets from Bad
Idea appear on International Times. They
are L
VII, which is about Bo (Boris Johnson) and his ‘vision’ of the world, and
LVIII, which features the various carves-up of the nation pending if Bo takes
us out of the EU. Idea appears in each poem, as its muse.
Another 5 poems from Bad Idea may be
found here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/five-more-poems-from-bad-idea-published.htm
On 8th October 2019 I started writing the sequel to
Bad Idea entitled
Idea's Mirror. Three poems (actually the last in the sequence) were published in
International Times, see
here.
As you can see, they are poems ‘about’ Brexit (as are some of
the first book of ‘The English Strain’, to be called
The English Strain). The idea of
Bad Idea originally was that it would pass through Brexitday and
onto the other side, where it might gather some positivities. (I’m not even
hinting here that post-Brexitactuality will have any positive effects at all.) Here's a post written 'in the thick of it', as I considered Brexit (and particularly the position of Labour under Corbyn):
Pages: Robert Sheppard: My latest write-through of Michael Drayton's IDEA (remains of temporary Brexmas post)
For a while it has been clear that I was running out of the
poems at my weekly rate of progress, although the Flexibretension (and Bo’s
extremist ‘do or die in a ditch’ deadline) runs to 31st October 2019
(‘the eve of the Day of the Dead’ as one of my poems notes, Lowryesquely). Now it looks like an election may follow in November or December, after the
dreadful proroguing, ‘for those rogues have prorogued the
no-deal clock’, as I put it in poem 61. But of course, that all changed on 24th
September, while I was writing the last poem of the sequence. As I put it as
introduction to the temporary posting of that week's poem on Pages:
I’m typing this at 10.27 a.m. on
Tuesday 24th September, not my usual ‘Bad Idea’ day, but I read the
whole sequence through last night and plunged in. I wanted to write it before a
decision about the legality of Prorouging is announced in three (actually it’s
now one) minutes’ time. I wanted the [party] conferences to be in motion so we
leave the whole sequence at a moment of indecision, an unrested untotality of
unfinish, Brexit still not clearly decided for, or against. Hanging – for the
next poetic possibilities. I realise the importance to the country, but that
doesn’t stop me having thoughts about formal possibilities. However, with
transposition, the decisions are not merely formal. Are they?
So I am faced with how to proceed. And how to proceed when
the political events that I seem to be tracking, tracing, are moving so
quickly. The Supreme Court ruling (whose result was unexpected) has thrown
another spanner in the works of Brexit (which I imagined would be well-finished
by the time I ran out of sonnets as I have).
I called a summit of Drayton’s ‘thrice-three Muses’ to
discuss possibilities but they didn’t show, like Bo at a press conference! I’ll have to think it through
myself. What I’ve done before is to source more sonnets, like a greengrocer after a no-deal Brexit searching out the last Spanish lettuce!
Musing on the train to Manchester
some months back, and in the pub, waiting for Scott Thurston, I settled upon
some post-revolutionary reactionary sonnets of Wordsworth, 1802-3. About 24 of
them.
Wordsworth may not help much (although there are poems about
Kent, where the Dogging
Sites of Brexit Britain,
and Farage, come from! There’s potential in that. ‘Lie back and think of Nigel!’
‘After Brexit the only meat we’ll get is each others’ bodies,’ she purred:
‘Let’s go dogging!’ It’s one of the themes that was picked up in the first
book, but when Go was appointed to Rural Affairs, which surely is a dogging
agency, this theme ran and ran. Here’s a Christmas message from him!
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| Following Go's instructions for people to become 'more active in the environment' |
I have also located
more of Drayton’s ‘Idea’ poems
not included
in the 1619 edition, 12 of them, and I thought I might use them as a now
necessary appendix to ‘Bad Idea’ itself, and also use however many I need of
the 1595 edition’s poems (the ones not preserved in the 1619, obviously). I’ve
sorted them but I’m not satisfied with them. Too many of them are dedicatory
sonnets. Or text-book Petrarchan exercises. They are, by nature, not as good as
the ones in the 1619 edition. Scholars agree. (I might post this selection on
this blog at some point if I don’t use them. I am less sure I won’t now after
the Supreme Court ruling. Everything seems up in the air.)
In another poetics scenario, I thought I might move back
reflectively through the sequence I have written as befits the title
Idea’s Broken Mirror (derived from
Drayton’s original title for the sonnets,
Ideas
Mirrour). I could make use of
both
my versions of Drayton’s poems and his originals, as we move backwards, as week
by week models. (The predecessor of this lies at the beginning of
The English Strain: the multiple
versions of one Petrarch sonnet in
Petrarch 3,
published by Crater. See
here.)
The mirror is
broken so it would have
to offer a more fragmentary view (not necessarily textually) and it will not be
necessary to progress from 63 back to 1 in its entirety. So when would the
break off point be? It could be anywhere I wanted it, or where history
dictates: perhaps at Brexit or some other crux point, an election maybe. The
sequence might be only 4 poems or 63.
This personal flexi(br)extension is useful to the uncertain
progression, to the need to respond to national chaos, and to the need (simply)
to stop at some point. This (and the extra Drayton sonnet idea, or some
combination of them, it strikes me now) would form a coherent annexe to ‘Bad Idea’, if needed, in
a way that the Wordsworth option doesn’t. However, the idea of using a different
verse form is inviting. As I describe now.
At one point, I envisaged these next poems as being more
like my 100 word sonnets (I might even take up that form again, which I talk about
here,
and which I invented 25 years ago, my diaries remind me) in that they might be
impacted, unpunctuated, multiply coherent rather than unitarily narrative,
rather like ‘Break Out’ in
The English
Strain, book one, the first 'Brexit' sequence.
I more recently invented a half-pint sonnet, two
versions, the syllabic and the 50 word isoverbalist (word-count) one. I shall
check up on these minimal beauties too, though I suspect they will be just too
minimal for what I have in mind. Oddly I checked sonnet 63 and found that it was exactly 100 words long: the kind of serendipity I pick up on
creatively. Sometimes.
On the other hand, Idea’s
Broken Mirror or Idea’s Mirror could be narrated from the point of view of Idea herself,
obviously stripped of her Platonic and Petrarchan idealism. My Charlotte Smith
versions (see below) represented my comic ‘becoming-female’ as a narrator.
Perhaps here it would not be so comic. They need to reflect BACK on the poems
as they already exist but they need to absorb the developing political epic of
Brexit, and they should project forwards. (The extra Drayton sonnets option
could achieve that too, obviously.) Throughout Bad Idea Idea has been trying to get a word in, and when she does,
she’s often quoting Rosi Braidotti's Deleuzoguattarrianism, though she has developed certain human
traits also (a certain plumpness and a love of gin, especially on Ladies’ Day).
Perhaps she has no need of them now.
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| Idea at Ladies' Day, Aintree (face obscured by newspaper with the latest Brexit news) |
As ever, of course, these thumbnails (one definition of
poetics) are not blueprints. I’ve
already backed away from this plan and that, and then come back to it. (See
here on the nature of poetics as a speculative writerly discourse:
Idea herself has had something to say on the shortage of
sonnets. In an early
Bad Idea sonnet
she notes sardonically, sitting in a bar in her ripped jeans,
News just in:
Article 50
may be extended to delay no-deal
(or even Brexit)!
Idea stretches her denim on a
barstool, eyes the TV, thinks:
I can see it all: he’ll eye up Daniel’s Delia next,
covet more sonnets to stockpile through this mess!
(i.e., a no-deal Brexit). But Samuel Daniel’s Delia
is not as complex as Drayton’s work. But it’s still there.
Wordsworth might be a better option, I think in a different frame
of mind: just leap out of the Renaissance into the Romantics.
Whatever I decide next, Wordsworth is potentially waiting for a new turn for the third book of The English
Strain – though that thought is unthinkable in two senses: both of the
post-Brexit world with which it would deal, and the thought of writing a third
book of transposed sonnets! Somewhere the sonnets of John Clare lurk as final
possibilities. Or quennets rising out of them like sparrows from the nest. Then
it’s done….
Though I’d have my homework to do, as I have had with
Petrarch, Milton, Wyatt, Surrey,
Smith, Barrett Browning and Drayton. And maybe even Shelley. Why Shelley?
Perhaps Shelley could act an an ironic introduction to the
Wordsworth sonnets. (Also I have already transposed ‘Ozymandias’ in Warrant Error, a poem about history for
my historian son Stephen.)
You can see I am not clear which way it will go.
Or indeed when I will start working on it. ALL the sequences
I have produced for the ‘English Strain’ project so far have involved a break
between sequences, both for fatigue and research. Having now written the
longest set of transpositions on one author, it’s clear that the break should
be substantial, but it can’t be that long if it’s to track Brexit. A short prorogue
may be more than enough of an hiatus.
Scott Thurston’s review of Elena Rivera’s Scaffolding also pointed to a fraternal
enterprise, a copy of which I have purchased and shelved to read in that hiatus which, it is
clear to me now, is opening up at this point. Read Scott here:
I also want to record my thanks to Clark Allison who has
responded by email to every temporary
posting of these poems, right back to Hap
at least.
*
Back to Bad Idea and touchy Micky: he was very grumpy about
his lack of visibility and patronage as a poet, and Bad Idea reflects that now and then. Recent research has rather
revised the Victorian view of him (only a paragon of virtue could write
Drayton’s verse). Here he is in court, touchy in a very different sense, and in a very different court from the Royal one he wanted to be summoned to!
She ‘did
hold up her clothes unto her navel before Mr Michael Drayton and … she clapt
her hand on her privy part and said it was a sound and a good one, and that the
said Mr Drayton did then also lay his hand upon it and stroked it and said that
it was a good one’. Suspicion of Incontinency: London Consistory Court proceedings, 8th
March 1627
(Source: Capp, Bernard. “The Poet and the Bawdy Court:
Michael Drayton and the Lodging-House World in Early Stuart London.” Seventeenth
Century 10 (1995): 27–37.)
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| Guilty! |
Poor old misunderstood Drayton is somewhat out of print at the
moment, though I have found a ‘Poly-Olbion’ project online (the whole epic is online,
which is refreshing and exhausting), and this fine sonnet sequence ‘Idea’ (the
1619 version) is also available online; have a look at both, the latter being:
This is also the source (
http://www.luminarium.org/)
for much more of Drayton’s poetry, including the ‘extra’ sonnets I located for
possible further transpositions.
I am using
Tuley, Mark. ed. Elizabethan
Sonnet Cycles: Five Major Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles: by Samuel Daniel, Michael
Drayton, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. Crescent
Moon Publishing, Maidstone: Kent,
2010,
a careless book that even misses one sonnet out!
In fact, I’ve also bought
Evans, Maurice, ed. Revised by Roy J. Booth. Eizabethan Sonnets. London
and North Clarendon: Phoenix
Paperback, 2003,
a careful book that includes the 1619 Idea entire (with original orthography) and has some notes. BUT not
so careful that it doesn’t have the typo I have made mischevious use of in one of my poems:
‘This anthology mistypes my chosen verb ‘eternize’./ A new word enters the
language as I enternize you!’
Brink, Jean R.
Michael Drayton Revisited.
Boston: Twayne, 1990, has also proved extremely useful in giving an overview of
Drayton’s career and voluminous works, and questioning a lot of the unsupported
assumptions that still circulate about his poetry (particularly about
identifications of ‘Idea’ Not that I don't mind wild speculation. In Poem LIII I note:
‘If Shakespeare’s dark lady was born a
Sheppard,
then I would hope to hook more than a
goldfish
hanging over these railings for her to
pass.’
which is a cheeky reference to somebody's shit theory that Shakespeare's Dark Lady was Jane Davenant, (nee Sheppard), mother of William, and whose father was a Robert Sheppard).
You may read about the whole ‘English Strain’ project in a
post that has links to some other accounts, and earlier parts, of this work:
here. That was 100 poems long. The most
recent instalment of it to appear is
Hap:
Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch is available from Knives Forks
and Spoons here:
I write about my sonnets generally
here,
and
here
and see
here
and
here for more on my Petrarch obsession
(the first part
Petrarch 3 is still
available from Crater) which kick-started ‘The English Strain’ project into
motion.
There are more excerpts from The English Strain in The Robert Sheppard Companion, and some critical writings on my sonnets.
Three more overdubs of the Sussex poems of Charlotte Smith (from
the first ‘book’ of the work) have been published at Anthropocene, an online platform run by Charlie Baylis. The first,
‘To the River Adur’ features a line or two from a letter from Lee Harwood. The
second, ‘Written at a Church-yard in Middleton in Sussex’ is an overdub of Smith’s
most famous poem (of that title), and ‘The sea-view’ which is a fully
gender-bending Brexit-madness poem from later in the 14 part sequence.
You can go straight to them, here:
I am pleased to say I have six poems published in BlazeVOX 19, edited by Geoffrey Gatza,
four of them poems from ‘The English Strain’ project, also transpositions of Charlotte
Smith sonnets. You may get straight
to the pages here:
Another Charlotte Smith variation may
be read in Smithereens 2, on page 15:
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| Charlotte Smith |
Links to a number of the published poems from Non Disclosure Agreement (the last part
of the proposed first book of The English
Strain) may be accessed here:
Some older ‘English Strain’ poems (from the first ‘book’) may
be found here:
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| Brexit Office |
Read the first review of Bad Idea, by Alan Baker,
in Litter here: Review
- "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard |
Litter (littermagazine.com)
Read the second, by Clark Allison, here, on the Tears in
the Fence website: HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/
Read the third review, by Steve Hanon, in the Manchester
Review of Books, here:
Pages:
BAD IDEA reviewed by Steve Hanson in The Manchester Review of Books (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
