Tuesday, September 29, 2020

'My' Quennets from A TRANSLATED MAN published in The Penguin Book of Oulipo

Rene Van Valckenborch (see here for his credentials: https://euoia.weebly.com/rene-van-valckenborch.html) talks to Robert Sheppard, as part of an occasional series of interviews, conducted when he turns up 'out of nowhere', like Bob McCorkle in Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake on my doorstep. (Thank God I'm not allowed to invite him in, thinks Sheppard.) 


VV: I’m pleased to announce that I have some of my quennets published in The Penguin Book of Oulipo. https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-penguin-book-of-oulipo/philip-terry/9780241378427

 RS: That’s great news! That means I’ve got some poems in there too!

 VV: Well, not quite. They only appear under my name.

 RS: What!? I invented you. You’re a fictional poet like Alvaro De Campos or Simon Armitage!

 VV: Well, that’s what they appear as in the book. Me and Perec and Roubaud. We’re like that! (Intimates his fingers on big stubby hand.)

 RS: But it was part of my fictional poets project. You were part one … https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/07/celebrate-belgiums-independence-day.html


VV: … and inventor of part two, ‘the co-created fictional poets of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA)’. https://euoia.weebly.com/ That’s what it says in Twitters for a Lark https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/11/robert-sheppard-with-others-twitters.html

 


RS: But the project is mine, and all your poems are mine. Everybody knows that!

 VV: The readers of the Penguin Book won’t! (Chuckles.)

 RS: I remember now. Philip Terry phoned me and said that he wanted to publish your, my, quennets in the book, and he thought it would be funny to publish them under your name. I suppose that makes you the clinamen of the collection.

 VV: Quite! So you agreed then?

 RS: In a way, yes. Of course, I’m delighted. But I doubt whether he thought he’d conjured you up from the mists of time, like a bad dream. Do you still drink that de Koninck mud-water?

 VV: It’s revenge, my revenge. Because you and Philip Terry decided to write those antonymic translations of my quennets. You don’t know how negative that felt!

 RS: It was one of the highlights of Twitters for a Lark: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/04/twitters-for-lark-launch-at-bangor.html

 VV: I noticed you read them together.

 


RS: I also read the original quennets (the ones in the anthology) at the Bluecoat and performed them as a poetry reading-mime within an invisible cube. Quite a novel act-event.

 VV: So you ripped off Marcel Marceau as well as me, then? AND, don’t forget, you appeared as me at the North Wales Poetry Festival, didn’t you?

RS: (Bashful.) As an Englishman, I couldn’t possibly comment on that circumstance.  (See ttps://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/12/reflections-on-translated-man-last.html )

VV: It's my name on the poster, not yours. Now, at last, I’m vindicated with this, possibly my most out-there appearance to date. I feel myself stirring, if you’ll pardon the expression...

RS: … I don’t …

VV: ... cracking the old poetic bone. It’s been a long time. Ten years since my supposed ‘disappearance’.

RS: (Carefully) Where did you go, then? There was a rumour you were writing in German.

VV: Ha! That title The Salad in the Wardrobe was a joke, dummy.

RS: Good to hear it. But don’t get any ideas. Talking about coming back won’t get you into part three.

VV: Oh, there’s a part three planned, is there? How do you want me, darling? Flemish or Walloon?

RS: Cease your waffle, Belgian. I might work on Sophie Poppmeier, give her a little more reality. I might get her to collaborate with a mannequin. (See here for her elaborate biography: https://euoia.weebly.com/sophie-poppmeier-1981--austria.html )

VV: I made her up too, though, remember?

RS: I said you did, though I cooked up her burlesque performances. On the other hand, I might include my new work on the talking mongoose of the Isle of Man. Or Ern Malley, even, now I’ve been singing in the Ern Malley Orchestra. http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/03/ern-malley-1918-1943-celebrating_14.html

VV: But Malley’s a fake!

RS: So are you. Didn’t you recently tweet, ‘It’s not my death I’ve faked, but my whole life’?

VV: Yes. I was feeling bad that day. Veerle Baertens won’t answer my letters, emails or Tweets. But the arrival of The Penguin Book cheered me up no end. It meant, poetry-wise, at least, that I am Somebody.

RS: (Silence)

 


VV: Hello? Are you still there?

 RS: You mean, you’ve been writing to Veerle Baetens? Again?


The Penguin Book has just arrived this afternoon, a big fat book, with lots of Oulipean standards (Queneau, Perec, Roubaud, Mathews), but also lots of precursors (such as Stefan Themerson, for whom I have advocated) and post-Oulipeans, such as Tom Jenks (ditto). There is a helpful and alphabetical introduction by Philip Terry. The paperback is out in November.    

See here for my earliest encounter – one might say, pre-encounter – with the Oulipo: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-eight-of-14.html

 and here for my co-presence with Jacques Roubaud in Translating Petrarch’s Poetry , my article on writing my 'Oulipean' Petrarch 3. Here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/practice-led-piece-on-petrarch-3-from.html .

 

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Robert Sheppard: 4 Poems from BAD IDEA published in M58

My project ‘The English Strain’ has progressed through to its third book, but only Books One and Two are complete, and, indeed, will be published soon.

I’m pleased to announce that four more of the poems from book two, BAD IDEA, have been published by Andy Taylor in his online magazine M58. Although visual poetries are a speciality for this magazine, it also carries fair amount of lexical poetry, such as these of mine. Read the poems here: https://www.m58.co.uk/post/630041255274004480/four-from-robert-sheppard

I write about Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea called ‘Idea’s Mirror’ is described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html ) These links will point you towards other online excerpts from Bad Idea and details about its writing. Do read more.


 

In short, it is worth pointing out that Bad Idea are transpositions of sonnets from Michael Drayton’s 1619 sonnet sequence Idea (Idea is the woman addressed in the poems, like Petrarch’s Laura.) The poems take a head on approach to the follies of Brexit. (No wonder I’m still at work on Book Three!)

 In poem 13 here, I deal with the very issue of transposition (‘scribbling over’) as I call it. Poem 17 is a meditation on Time, transposed to be about the Brexit timetable. Poem 18 was a problematic poem (I mean Drayton’s original was, because it was a poem about … numbers!) In poem 20 the person ‘Rut’ appears from other poems, where he is identified as a Tory MP and sexual predator, whose identity was (still is?) unknown. All four are quite difficult poems, not the most obvious in the sequence, and deserve their platform together.  Here's Poem 17, read by me.


 

 I am delighted to say that Book Two is due for publication soon, Bad Idea from Knives Forks and Spoons. Here’s an early draft of the cover, constructed by Patricia Farrell.


Here is a comprehensive post on the sequences that constitute Book One, The English Strain here .

Book One of ‘The English Strain’ project, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman Books here:

 

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, HERE:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages


Friday, September 18, 2020

Robert Sheppard: SIX poems from British Standards published as part of the Poetry and Covid Project (links, context and videos)


I began work on the book I am thinking of calling British Standards in pre-Covid 2020, but post-Brexit 'Independence Day'. Both ‘issues’ are important, but Coronavirus (to give it its more ‘poetic’ name, given that a ring of sonnets, usually seven or fourteen, like mine, is called a corona) dominates at various points (from March to August 2020, really).

I discovered the Poetry and Covid Project (see here https://poetryandcovid.com/) quite late in their deliveries (but that meant my poems were oven ready, unlike Brexit, to add to the mix). I never wanted to produce ‘Covid’ Poetry or ‘Lockdown Lyrics’ but that is, inevitably, what these early parts of British Standards, in part, because of their socio-political focus, turn out to be.

I am pleased to say that three of the former and three of the latter have been selected for the website and they may be read here: https://poetryandcovid.com/2020/09/18/five-poems-2/ (They say it's 'Five Poems' but there are actually six.)

The first section of British Standards, containing these ‘covid’ poems, was completed late March. For this, I transposed poems from Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, and retitled them ‘Poems of National Independence’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html


Then followed ‘14 Standards’, the lockdown poems, which are arranged non-chronologically, something I’d pre-decided for formal reasons, but which reflected the timeless quality of lockdown quite well! I write about this section here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html . There are links to online publication of other poems too, via these links. 



Here is a video of me reading (chanting) the Wordsworth transposition, ‘O Friend! I Know Not which way I must look’, written on 13th March.

 


Here is a video of me reading the first ‘Standard’, an overdub of ‘To the River Tweed’ by William Lisle Bowles, written on 27th April but revised on 13th May. 👍 👍👍👍

 


The Project, funded by the AHRC, and led at Plymouth University, by Anthony Caleshu, and led at Nottingham Trent, by Rory Waterman, (thanks, guys) asks the question, ‘What role is poetry playing during COVID-19?’ They explain:

Our project proposes the writing, exchange, publication and discussion of poetry as a significant cultural response, benefiting the wellbeing of people from around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. We invite you to join the conversation, to submit your own poems or to nominate others which speak to the idea of contemporary and/or historical pandemics. 

Every day, we’ll be featuring a new poem from our inbox, and each month we’ll feature new writing from one of the world’s leading poets as they think through their predicaments, find in language a way to connect to others, and offer and seek solace and consolation.

Do have a look. https://poetryandcovid.com/

Also, as to my sense of what poetry can do, or not, see here, for an earlier sonnet from ‘National Grandeur’, and my commentary on this issue: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-two-transpositions-of.html

An unpublished poetics piece, ‘Shifting an Imaginary: Poetics in Anticipation’ deals with the question: ‘A compassionate world, inspired by the great sacrifices of NHS frontline staff? Or…’ 

 


 Where did you find that beer, Mark, during lockdown? 

 

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Practice-Led piece on 'Petrarch 3' from The English Strain published in Translating Petrarch's Poetry (Legenda)

I have a ‘practice-led’ essay in this wondrous volume, Translating Petrarch's Poetry: L’Aura del Petrarca from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century, edited by Carole Birkan-Berz, Guillaume Coatalen and Thomas Vuong, and published now by Legenda ISBN: 978-1-781886-63-2 (hardback)  RRP £75, $99, €85. (Ouch! Try to get a library copy.)

 This is an expensive academic hardback, but a paperback is due next year, ISBN: 978-1-781886-64-9.

And, ISBN: 978-1-781886-65-6, JSTOR ebook, is available… 


See here for the Legenda/MHRA page for full details (and contents) of the book:

http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Translating-Petrarchs-Poetry

Ranging through five centuries of translations, adaptations and imitations of Petrarch, the father of Humanism, this transcultural, transdisciplinary study considers the echoes of this major figure, whose reach goes beyond borders, eras and literary genres to resonate singularly into our times and in our own resonating ears. 

I'm pleased to be share these pages with one of my literary heroes, Jacques Roubaud, and his ‘Elements of the History of the Sonnet from its Italian Sources: Formal Aspects’. His axoim 'All sonnets are sonnets by Petrarch' is provocative for my own 'sonnets'. 

The rest of the book is grand too. There are chapters on the French and Spanish reception of Petrarch (the latter involving a Portuguese working in Peru!), as well as on illustrations to, and musical settings of, the text. I enjoyed the chapter on brother and sister team of the de Scuderys, he who abridged the sonnets like Reader's Digest and she who novelised (and satirised) Petrarch's and Laura's married life. The French tried to claim him as ... well ... French. There's a good chapter on Tim Atkins and Emmanuel Hocquard, and another on Geoffrey Hill. I am expecting the book to inform the rest of my Petrarchan project, ‘The English Strain’, which I’ll explain after I say a little more about this book and my part in it.  

Tim Atkins’ piece on his Complete Petrarch is also here, which is appropriate, since I owe a debt to him (and Peter Hughes), though they must be exonerated from blame. Let me explain.

My ‘“Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro”: A Derivative Dérive into/out of Petrarch’s Sonnet 3’, in Translating Petrarch's Poetry: L’Aura del Petrarca from the Quattrocento to the 21st Century, ed. by Carole Birkan-Berz, Guillaume Coatalen and Thomas Vuong, Transcript, 8 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020), to give it its full citation, if that helps with locating it, is an account of my writing the transpositions (as I now think of them) of my Oulipo-inspired variations of a single Petrarch sonnet, after making a ‘translation’ of a Petrarch sonnet to help me write a chapter on Peter Hughes’ and Tim Atkins’ full jobs on the Man, in The Meaning of Form (see here http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/09/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-in_19.html

) and finding myself drawn into the wonderful world of versioning. (There are 7 of the 14 poems complete in the piece, too.) It was quite a new thing for me, and with it came a new tone. In the process, I discovered my inner Byron and Steve Bell!

As I say in the piece:

Petrarch was pretty clear that translation implied more than faithful reproduction of linguistic features. He warned, utilising a conventional metaphor for translation drawn from apiculture, ‘Take care … that the nectar does not remain in you in the same state as when you gathered it; bees would have no credit unless they transformed it into something different and better.’ This essay involves attempting to trace the transformations involved in the writing of fourteen variations on a ‘translation’ I made of the third sonnet of Petrarch, Petrarch 3, a partly conceptual, partly expressive, sonnet sequence, made under the sign of Oulipo, but informed by earlier poetic interests of my own, even early poems. It is at once impersonal and personal. It is, arguably, both hugely derivative and original, though that last judgement is beyond the scope of my poetics as I define it as a ‘speculative, writerly discourse’…As a poet-critic, I believe that my literary criticism must inform my poetics – the mercurial writerly conversation that I have with myself in my journal, with others in explicit poetics pieces, and perhaps in this piece I am writing now – but I do not know how particularly, hence my use of the verb ‘attempting’ above… The creative story I … tell is one that criss-crosses poetics, literary criticism, translation and creative writing itself, and may reveal something about modes of transformation and translational processes.

 Read my ‘original’ translation (of Petrarch’s third sonnet) and a Scouse doggie Christmas version here.

See here for my first encounters with Hughes and Atkins and with the single poem I produced. You can read here about the famous map-format publication of Petrarch 3 from Crater Press   here and here . It is still available.

The version in the style of Wayne Pratt (one of my ‘early poems’ referred to above, and which I write about in the article, and Atkins mentions in his) may be read here with a short video of me reading the sonnet, less than a minute:  http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-from-english-strain-ve.html

The final poem in the sequence (and a farewell to Laura’s aura, or so I thought) may be read here:  http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/09/robert-sheppard-from-petrarch-3.html

Here’s a rare outtake: the semiotic fringe removed from one of the poems:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/07/robert-sheppard-petrarch-3-semiotic.html

 

Here I am seen reading 'The First English Sonnet 1401', the joke being 'I' got there before Wyatt and Surrey (and Chaucer; dig my Neville Coghill impersonation)!

Read the first review of Petrarch 3  here. The second review of the publication may be read here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/martin-palmer-on-petrarch-3.html

Peter Riley considers it sternly here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/03/peter-riley-on-my-petrarch-3-and-other.html

Petrarch 3 is, as I say above, separately available from Crater Press Press   here and here but it now forms the first part of a much longer set of transpositions of ‘English’ sonnets, ‘The English Strain’, the first book of which, The English Strain, will be published by Shearsman later this year.

The English Strain is described here and as is Book Two, Bad Idea here . Parts of Book Three, British Standards, upon which I am currently engaged, are covered here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html

And here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html

That one workaday translation of Petrarch set off something huge. From the essay itself you will find how randomly it was ‘chosen’. But I also keep coming back to it. My first 'Keats' transposition takes me back to Peter Hughes' project to spur on my own: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-overdub-understudy-version-of-keats.html

‘Take care … that the nectar does not remain in you in the same state as when you gathered it; bees would have no credit unless they transformed it into something different and better.’ Pet. 

Book One of ‘The English Strain’ project, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman Books here: 

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, HERE:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages


Monday, September 14, 2020

A version of Keats' poem on Leigh Hunt's release from prison: Bo is committed to prison (counterfactual poem)


I’m thinking of calling the new poems ‘Weird Syrup: contrafacts and counterfactuals from Keats’, and 'Written on the Day that Mr Bo was Committed to Prison' is a counterfactual (though possibly predictive?): the arrest of Bo on charges of being a liar. It’s a version of Keats’ ‘Written on the Day that Mr Leigh Hunt Left Prison’, and I resisted a serious poem on actual political prisoners (in Belarus, for example) and reversed the polarities of the original. I utilise some of Hunt’s offending words which landed him in prison as a political journalist. So, Bo shares one profession with Hunt; another with the Prince Regent. Brandon Lewis, of course, said: "Yes, this does break international law in a very specific and limited way". We have a government of brazen outlaws. No, I’ll save that thought for another experiment. Oh yes, I find the increased use of the phrase ‘the 4 nations of the United Kingdom' galling. I can actually only count 3. Surely Northern Ireland is not a nation, either for Unionists (obviously) or Republicans (even more obviously). I've removed the poem now, but I thought I'd leave this manic phot and the new contrafactual Government slogan.

SHIT – SHOWER – SHIRT: 

BRITAIN’S BACK TO WORK

(22 September: Sorry, abandon that slogan!)

Book One of ‘The English Strain’ project, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman Books here:

 

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, HERE:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Three poems from Weird Syrup: Overdubs of sonnets from John Keats and ‘Sheppard's lively readings of them’ on video, as they are described there, appear on Parmenar. Read them and hear them here: 

https://www.pamenarpress.com/post/robert-sheppard

Sunday, September 13, 2020

an overdub, an understudy, a version, of Keat’s most famous sonnet (and then a further version)

I have begun to write what I call 'contrafacts and counterfactuals' to some sonnets of Keats. This post (or rather posts) tells the story of how I began that task, and I also describe the larger project, the 'English Strain project', to which it belongs. This is an attempt at an overdub, an understudy, a version, of Keat’s most famous sonnet, which is first, rejected, then rescued, and amended. Thus: 

On Looking Again into Peter Hughes’s Petrarch (draft)


I’ve travelled a lot in Norfolk; I’ve seen
toffs with their guns eating their own packed lunches
in the pubs; bitten by the snippy crabs of Cromer
and the nippy Arctic winds of King’s Lynn; I’ve seen
threadbare Teddy Boys in Norwich Market (1975);
but never did I find a tattered fairground
blaring Stupid Cupid through a distorted tannoy
till I heard sly-eyed Hughes loud and clear; and I felt
like a consultant consulting the world’s worst piles;
or like watching Eric Morecambe on the telly
with his trembling glasses, stretching over a fence
on little un-Grecian Ern’s shoulders: and I’d hoot
at Eric’s wide-eyed speechless leer, as he beheld
unseen teams of nudists bouncing their balls.

20th August 2020


I wrote this poem on auto-pilot. The lines came to me and I saw the poem and its effects laid out before me as though it had already been written. In some senses it had: it transfers to Keats’ ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, the technique of much of ‘The English Strain’ project (versions of canonical sonnets) and it returns me to the poetics of ‘Petrarch 3’, the first part, which arose out of some literary critical writing I was doing on Peter’s ‘Petrarch’ (and Tim Atkins’ too; see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/12/robert-sheppard-on-petrarch-boys-peter.html). I like the poem but, like Roy Fisher, I distrust the poem in its (apparent) hour of success. Hadn’t my ghostly production of ‘Ozymandias’ turned the project (as though it itself was an enormous sonnet corona) so that it could not turn back to this sort of thing? Yes. I’d already decided that. I’d been looking at some poems of Robert Duncan, ‘derivative’ (his word) of Dante’s sonnets, which weren’t sonnets at all. (I mean they possessed none of the determinants of sonnethood; not even 14 lines.) And that throws it open to respond to a selection of Keats’ sonnets in an original way (possibly under the title ‘Weird Syrup’), vaguely thinking ahead to John Clare’s sonnets (which I am thinking of transposing into quennets) and the end of this project. In other words, to leave the hitherto guiding formal constraint (what’s left of it) behind. ‘14 Standards’ had me exercising my formal muscle, so that each poem was a different sonnety shape. And I’d almost left the Brexit theme, with its National Dogging Sites, behind with Wordsworth, up his knees in Kentish fluid!

 In short, I have developed a ‘technique’, a mode, that can take any sonnet by any writer, and transpose it (even here, where there is no approach to Brexit or Coronavirus). I am not programmatically wedded to formal innovation or investigation, but I need to prefer my will to my ease here, and push on, investigatively, formally. I have 14 sonnets by Keats selected, or randomly arranged (there are, oddly, 14 sonnets embedded in the selection of Keats’ letters, in Gittings’ edition), and ‘Chapman’s Homer’ isn’t one of them. I point you also to Robert Hampson’s work on that sonnet. Of course, I could use it alone as a model for 14 poems, replicating the work of ‘Petrarch 14’, but that seems inadequate, though suggestive! (On Looking Again into Tim Atkins’ Petrarch; On Looking Again into Petrarch’s Petrarch; On Listening Again to Dusty Springfield; On First Listening to Harish Raghavan’s Calls to Action; On Looking Again into the Shed at the bottom of the garden; On Looking Again at Boris Johnson’s Brexit; On Looking Again into the Dominic Cummings’ Eyesight; On Looking into Trump’s Tax Records…) In an Oulipean way it is, as it should be, potentially (I typed ‘poetentially’) plenitudinous. But I’ve three volumes of this stuff anyway (that’s over 200 poems!) and it needs to turn away from former models, but perhaps back towards contemporary political and social events. (The slippage back to the 1970s, as here, is there in ‘Petrarch 3’, in my versions of Charlotte Smith’s Sussex sonnets, and in one of the Wordsworth overdubs. That mention of ‘former models’ sounds coincidentally slightly sleazy!)

I think I shall have my cake and eat it (why not? It’s a very Brexity concept, as earlier poems suggested, where I used that as a title) as I have by turning ‘Ozymandias’ into a ghost of itself (and by offering my 2007 version of it, ‘for Stephen’, as an extra, in the notes to the notes). I might print this new poem as a footnote to my Keats variations, a phantom limb (rather than Keats’ ‘living hand’) sticking out and providing fake sensations, a false reading on the poetentiometer!  

UPDATE (two days later): Then this happened. As I was revising the half-abandoned poem, I half rescued it, as I continued to work on it, and ended up with (again) partly: a poem that looks remarkably like what I was intending to do: a poem coming out of a sonnet, which is not itself a sonnet. I also explicitly added a Brexit theme. (Upupdate: these posts are usually temporary, so while I am keeping the body of this post, I have removed the poem, which, formally speaking is 14 set of couplets. I read the revised version on the video, though. It is still called 

On Looking Again into Peter Hughes’s Petrarch

I’ve travelled a lot in North
Norfolk too etc etc

20th-22nd August 2020


  


 
The poem is not only set in the territory featured in Peter’s poems (which I did know, and travel a lot in, during my UEA 1970s and early 80s); it is also the site of a spectacular local vote for Brexit. So formally and thematically, this version is tougher, and belongs to British Standards, which is the working title of the part of the project to which these 'Weird Syrup' are planned, although it does dislodge the plans I’d devised for tackling Keats. Critics writing about Keats (because they don’t understand the nature of poetics as an anticipatory writerly discourse) are surprised that his letters indicate, for example, that one day he renounces writing epic, and the next day he takes it up again, but in a different way. I understand that. And I understand that writing what I wrote (above) and what I’m writing now, is part of the process. As is the blogging of these drafts each time. (It is not just because the poems are generally topical, but it is a part of the ritual of producing them. It is, we could say, part of the writing.) 

As I worked on the poem (and perchance into my hands came a CD with Stupid Cupid on it, I mean, literally, without me remembering that a man in a pub had once burnt it for me, there it was in a pile while I was searching for Tori Freestone or Ambrose Akimusire!) I wondered whether Keats and his sonnets might entirely defeat me, that I might be only able to this one. What a spur to do them – or to do something different! (23rd August 2020)

This is a hub post for ALL of my versions of Keats (You can see that I was able to accmplish 14 of them!) Pages: Weird Syrup: The final Keats variation: a (premature) farewell to satire as a strand in British Standards (temporary post with video) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

The book I am thinking of calling British Standards was begun in 2020, after Brexit Independence Day; the first section was finished late March. For its first section, I transposed poems from part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, and retitled them ‘Poems of National Independence’, and even more cheekily subtitled them, ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html

Then followed ‘14 Standards’, and in turn, two additional ‘Double Standards’ about the Cum’s disgraceful lockdown infringements, and his elitist refusal of apology and regret. See here for information on all 16 ‘standards’: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html . There are links to online publication of some of the poems too. 

I’ve documented ‘The English Strain’ project as work progressed through its three books so far. There are two comprehensive posts to check out, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here and another at Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’, it’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html )

Book One of ‘The English Strain’ project, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman Books here:

 

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, HERE:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Meanwhile parts of Book One are still available in booklet form; look here for Petrarch 3, which is also co-dedicated to Peter Hughes (for it was partly his work that got this whole project going) in its fold-out map format, and here for Hap: 

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

As might be gathered from what I have said, British Standards as a whole (not just the corona of ‘14 Standards’) aims to present transpositions of admired sonnets of the Romantic period, from William Bowles to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, stopping off at Keats on the way. Chronologically, they lie between those of Charlotte Smith, which I’ve already worked on here, https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-english-strain-poems-overdubs-of.html

and those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that I’ve also worked on, both of them in the final parts of Book One:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-non-disclosure.html

Friday, September 11, 2020

My occasional transposition of Shelley' s 'Ozymandias' appears and disappears (hub post)

 My ‘book’ British Standards, which is part of the larger ‘English Strain’ project, threads transpositions of Shelley through itself. (Rather: I thread them through!)  British Standards was begun in 2020, after Brexit Independence Day; the first section was finished late March. For its first section, I transposed poems from part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, and retitled them ‘Poems of National Independence’, and even more cheekily subtitled them, ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html

But this was prefaced with a single poem from 2019, called ‘England in 2019’, a version of Shelley’s prophetic ‘England in 1819’.


Then followed ‘14 Standards’, and in turn, two additional ‘Double Standards’ about the Cum’s disgraceful lockdown infringements, and his elitist refusal of apology and regret. ‘Double Standard’ consists of two more variations of Shelley, put into the stanza shape of ‘Ode to the West Wind’, which is a unique fourteen line shape. See here for all 16 ‘standards’: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html . 

There are links to online publication of some of the poems too, but none of the Shelley transpositions yet. When they are, this will form a hubpost for them.

Before I detail 'Ozymandias', I'll list any other Shelley transpositions in print:

Lift Not the Painted Veil | IT (internationaltimes.it) is what it says on the link, although it does contain the text of the original poem. But here, I read it on video: Pages: Another Shelley transposition from British Standards published in International Times (with original poem and video) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)


'Ozymandias: an overdub of Shelley' appears in Tears in the Fence 73, February 2021. Here's the story of its composition.

After finishing ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, which is a version of 14 of the passionate love sonnets of ‘Sappho and Phaon’ by Mary Robinson (1796) (see here), I returned to Shelley. Returned in three senses. Firstly, I have attempted to write a version of ‘Ozymandias’ for 'the English Strain', ‘Oxymandius’, using this Oulipo technique (whose name I can never recall), once before, but failed, since the constraint was not motivated. Secondly, I have versioned the poem written simultaneously as Shelley’s, Horace Smith’s sonnet (sometimes also called ‘Ozymandias’), in ’14 Standards’. Thirdly (as I explain in my note to my ‘Standard’) I had already written a sonnet version of Ozymandias, my ‘for Stephen’ of 2007, which you may read in a moment.

However, the toppling of statues raised the question again, and I felt I had an opening into this subject, with the Oulipo constraint of the absent poem operating as an analogy for the both the vanishing statues of owners and the disappeared spaces of slaves. (This is continuing the slavery theme of ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ and my ‘Standards’ version of one of Southey’s anti-slavery sonnets, which also appears in Tears in the Fence 73.) It’s in the air; it’s on the streets in Liverpool: the empty plinth of Huskisson on Prince’s Drive, that I refer to here; the replete slave-name streets (dozens of them!) in Liverpool.

Here is the note to ’14 Standards’ (which I refer to below):

Horace Smith’s sonnet was written at the same time as Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. Both were published in Hunt’s Examiner during 1818. Guy Davenport points out that the poem, which appears as ‘Ozymandias’ in Feldman and Robinson, was originally entitled ‘On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below’, and comments, ‘Shelley called his “Ozymandias”. Genius may also be knowing how to title a poem.’ (Davenport 1984: 281). However, Smith’s spectacle of the ‘annihilated’ London of futurity is a memorable vision not shared by Shelley’s poem (Davenport shows how much Shelley took from Smith). This partly explains my choice of this ‘Ozymandias’, but my poem ‘for Stephen’, written in 2007, is already a transposition of Shelley'sjustly more famous sonnet:


The red metronome on Letná hill 
sways like a lucky drunkard 
on its pedestal above the spires 
a restless reminder of rust and wreck. 
Or an antique windscreen wiper 

describing its arc 
upon a plane of smear and rain-wash 
heroic in a monochrome movie, tinted red 

With each wipe across the screen 
the determined visage of the driver clears. 
It’s Josef Stalin the giant blocks with his pocks 
long blown to shatters but he’s still there 

waving yes and no 
to anyone who can see him (Warrant Error: 112)



I write more about my poem here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-thirteen-of.html . This post reminds me that I have written another poem that alludes to 'Ozymandis' (which is also included on this 2011 post). 

You can read about, and buy, Warrant Error, here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-Warrant-Error-p102839132

and here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/12/warrant-error-unredacted-report-from.html 

I’ve documented whole three book ‘English Strain’ project as work progressed through its three books so far. There are two comprehensive posts to check out, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here and another at Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’, it’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html ) 

Book One of ‘The English Strain’ project, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman Books here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, HERE:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Wednesday, September 09, 2020

My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post)

 

I have now finished ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, the latest portion of the ‘book’ I have been planning to call British Standards. This is part of the larger ‘English Strain’ project, earlier parts of which will be published whole soon. British Standards was begun in 2020, after Brexit Independence Day; the first section was finished late March. (I'm a bit worried people might get 'The English Strain' (the whole) confused with the part, 'British Standards' and am considering this naming of parts). Blackbox Manifold - Robert Sheppard (sheffield.ac.uk) takes you to the first 8 of the 14 verses. 

Whatever I finally call it, for its first section, I transposed poems from part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, and retitled them ‘Poems of National Independence’, and even more cheekily subtitled them, ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html

Then followed ‘14 Standards’, and in turn, two additional ‘Double Standards’ about the Cum’s disgraceful lockdown infringements, and his elitist refusal of apology and regret. See here for all 16 ‘standards’: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html . There are links to online publication of some of the poems too.

Which brings us to the latest section, ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, which is a version of 14 of the passionate love sonnets of ‘Sappho and Phaon’ by Mary Robinson (1796): these ones in fact, which gives the narrative of her sequence in summary:

IV Sappho Discovers Her Passion
VIII Her Passion Increases
IX Laments the Volatility of Phaon
XIII She Endeavours to Fascinate Him
XV Phaon Awakes
XVIII To Phaon
XIX Suspects His Constancy
XXIII Sappho’s Conjectures (with XXII Phaon Forsakes Her)
XXV To Phaon
XXX Bids Farewell to Lesbos
XXXII Dreams of a Rival
XXXVI Her Confirmed Despair
XXXIX To the Muses
XLIII Her Reflections on the Leucadian Rock Before She Perishes

I'm going to arrange its 14 parts as verses of a long poem, rather than making it a sequence of sonnets. That seems better for the flow (or lack of it). {The first eight 'stanzas' will be published in Blackbox Manifold in early 2022}

I’ve already said, in the rapid ‘turn’ verse, the ninth one (about which I also said, in excised lines,

The ninth sonnet of a corona 
should deliver a volta like 
a generous gallon of White Rat 
on the lockdown step…), 

I write ‘I take back control of Sappho’s voice’ and ‘I take back control of Sappho’s form’, so ‘let’s take back control of poetic justice’, and – then – ‘poetic artifice’, shouldn’t be too much of surprise. Or to find Sappho’s women ‘taking back the trophy’ (the Muses are a nine-a-side all-female team now) and finally Perdita taking back control (of Perdita, for Perdita). Full stop (though there are few full stops in the poem!) 

Here I am reading two verses in draft form (I have revised a little), and still carrying the titles as though they were single poems. (I can't upload videos long enough to carry more than a verse each!)



Note to this last verse: A scrap of a strip of papyrus torn from the middle of a column of verse by Sappho was used to mummify a crocodile. In such ways the canon grows. 

 Also: ‘Others say that, in the vicinity of the rocks at Athenian Kolonos, Poseidon, falling asleep, had an emission of semen, and a horse Skuphios came out, who is also called Skîrônîtês [‘the one of the White Rock’],’ sez the Scholia to Lycophron 766, but I think Poseidon was fully awake and knocking one out deliberately, the big wanker.

Why have I called the sequence ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’? Tabitha was one of Mary Robinson’s feeblest pen names (Perdita and the English Sappho others); the ‘Thunderer’ was a print by James Gillray that features Mary Robinson and her lover, Banastre Tarleton, the Liverpudlian war criminal and slave owner, the far-too tight-trousered ‘Thunderer’ of the title. You can see a fine reproduction of ‘The Thunderer’ here:

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw63182/The-thunderer-King-George-IV-Sir-Banastre-Tarleton-Bt

This official site does not list Mary as one of the ‘sitters’. She’s ‘sitting’, all right, painfully, on that ‘Whiriligig’ (prostitute) pole. The lily flower-head is the Prince of Wales, Mary’s previous lover, suitably cuckolded.

 

Carol Rumens writes about this extraordinary sonnet sequence (and its author’s extraordinary life as poet, novelist, actor, lover and feminist) here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/apr/12/sappho-phaon-mary-robinson

 The whole sequence (as well as all the poems I transposed in ‘14 Standards’) may be found generously in Feldman, Paula, R., and Daniel Robinson. eds.  A Century of Sonnets. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, a fascinating and eye-opening anthology.

The best place for a detailed life of Robinson is Byrne, Paula. Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson. London: Harper Perennial, 2005, which I have read twice recently. There’s more than enough on Tarleton in Cameron, Gail, and Stan Crooke, Liverpool – Capital of the Slave Trade. Liverpool: Picton Press, 1992. As I’ve gone on with the poem, there’s less on Tarleton and the slave trade; he bowed out of the sequence, as he bowed in, ushered by the Black Lives Matter protests. Mary was an abolitionist at the time she died (1800), by which time she had also stopped moving in louche company, becoming first a Foxian Whig (and lover of Fox) and eventually mixing in literary circles, knowing William Godwin and Coleridge, for example. The latter appears in a late verse, after she had 'taken back control' of the discourse.  

My life of Mary Robinson is here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 2: The Life of Mary Robinson (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I’ve also read a weird scholarly print on demand edition of the second volume of Robinson’s posthumous poems, Robinson, Mary. The Poetical Works of the Late Mrs. Mary Robinson, Volume 2. London: Richard Phillips, 1806 Scholar Select facsimile reprintnp: nd. (I hold it up to the camera in the second video, as evidence of Mary's 'beauties'.) The narrative poems, influenced by Wordsworth and Coleridge, but also influencing them, just at the end of her shortened life, are very good. As are a handful of her frequently anthologised poems. And ‘Sappho and Phaon’ of course, the first narrative sonnet sequence since the Renaissance.

I’ve documented ‘The English Strain’ project as work progressed through its three books so far. There are two comprehensive posts to check out, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here and another at Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’, it’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html )

However, the big news is that Book One and Book Two are due for publication soon, The English Strain from Shearsman, and Bad Idea from Knives Forks and Spoons.

Parts of Book One are still available in booklet form; look here for Petrarch 3 in its fold-out map format, and here for Hap:

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

As might be gathered from what I have said, British Standards (as I call it) aims to present transpositions of admired sonnets of the Romantic period, from William Bowles to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chronologically, they lie between those of Charlotte Smith, which I’ve already worked on here, https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-english-strain-poems-overdubs-of.html

and those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that I’ve also worked on, both of them in the final parts of Book One:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-non-disclosure.html

 

‘Transposition’ (in preference to ‘translation’, even to ‘intralingual translation’ in Jakobson’s suggestive term) is borrowed from Rosi Braidotti. In her musicological derivation, it’s an ‘in-between space of zigzagging and of crossing: nonlinear and chaotic’. (Braidotti 2011: 226). ‘Transposable moves,’ in genetics, she explains, ‘appear to proceed by leaps and bounds and are ruled by chance, but they are not deprived of their logic.’ (Braidotti 2011: 226) 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: My Poetics of the Sonnet in 'The English Strain' / excerpt from 'Idea's Mirror' in The Lincoln Review

Book One of ‘The English Strain’ project, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman Books here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, HERE:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages