Saturday, April 04, 2020

Robert Sheppard: 'PULSE: All a Rhythm' published in Tentacular 5 (with links)

I am pleased to say that an excerpt from my prose processual poetics-critical piece, Pulse: All a Rhythm, has been published in Tentacular 5 (more about this issue and the magazine below).




Pulse is a ‘treatise on metre’ which was produced by a strange method. The first draft of this piece was made by ‘writing-through’ Tiger C. Roholt’s Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014, between August 2016-February 2017. Throughout this process, contingency is its rhythm, a pulse that matches the varieties of montage, de-montage, that I attempt in my own practice, with interruption as structure, with transformation and transposition, formal resistance, creative linkage, ‘imperfect fit’, near-perfect fit, all kinds of multi-form unfinish. Later drafts were subject to the usual processes of revision and editing, in the light of that poetics.    

Its subject? Rhythm. Not metre – rhythm: pulse, surge, the ‘sound-mind’, which becomes ‘rhythmizing consciousness’ as chance throws theoretical materials my way to sharpen my vocabulary. It is an extension of the critical work (though it is not itself a critical work) in my The Meaning of Form. (See here for that tome: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html ) It’s also about cognition.

Pulse is HERE: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard

The whole of Pulse has yet to be published.   

Issue 5, Spring 2020, is edited by Jonathan Catherall with guest editors Flo Sunnen and Dylan Williams - spring 2020. See here. www.tentacularmag.com – and my thanks got to all three! And congratulations on the issue.

There is an editorial here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/elsewhere-blog/issue-5-is-here

which is contained in one of the interesting ‘extras’ on this well-thought-out online magazine, the ‘Elsewhere’ blog feature, though that word does a disservice to the quality of the pieces here. (Find that Robert Hampson piece on the British Poetry Revival.) See: https://www.tentacularmag.com/elsewhere/

In a previous issue, Patricia Farrell’s ‘Handshoe’ may be read here:  https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-4a/patricia-farrell