I write about my first recovered poem (and a couple of others that predate them) in the previous post, here: Pages: Recovered poems from the 1980s - part one (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) The reason the three I’m posting are different is that they represent a particular kind of abandonment: the abandonment of a mode of writing that comes from perceived poetic development, to use my more usual language, to changes in my poetics. From the sort of poetics I was writing here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: ‘So, now to the poetics’: from a Journal Entry, 22nd December 1983, to the sort of thing I would write only a few years later, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: (Flashlight) Propositions (poetics). This poem, ‘The Mystery Towers’ belongs to the 1985-6 period of rapid transition, and was lost, tossed aside as I fled. Somewhere before ‘Schrage Musik’ and other long poems. Here it is:
He and the picture?
His image
Stays with you between
The glass towers. It watches
Her, instead of guarding the disused
Shadows in the doorways, sits
Opposite her image, sliding
The facts. It is as though she
Does not exist, gaps
In the sentences the
Reader hears in the rhetoric of
Crystal moments; she watches
Her younger self laughing:
A first person insufficiently
Pluralized and filled with
The most innocuous writing.
All sound from the world we
Lived in once: a frost-
Glittered piano chord. And
Blanks from another age turn
To oracle and prophesy.
My life: I can remember
Almost nothing. The darkened
Mystery Towers remain a real mystery.
5th July 1986
There are touches of Ashbery in that opening question. I think I did cannibalise some of these lines (they seem familiar when I read them!) For the ‘Mystery [to] remain a real mystery’, I’m going to tell you about the mystery towers in the next post. Here it is, with a third recovered poem: Pages: Recovered poem from the 1980s - number two (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) In three days' time! Until then you've got the first poem to look back at. Pages: Recovered poems from the 1980s - part one (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com
