Dream Diary 1975 Introduction to the project

 

Dream Diary 1975: Introduction

 

Napoleon reportedly said that if you wanted to understand a man then you needed to look at the world in the year he was twenty. I like to think that Andre Breton might have said, a century later, that if you want to understand a person you need to look at the dreams they had when they were twenty. Although I think Nappy has it, what I am going to post, throughout 2025, are my dreams from the year 1975, during which I was twenty. I’m not entirely sure why I want to do this. The little Letts Diary, its spine split from the effort of typing it up, sits by the laptop now, and it offers a secret, not-quite-private counterpart to the ‘daytime’ 1975 diary, one which I used to write my ‘autrebiography’, Words Out Of Time. (See here for details: Pages: My REF description of my book Words Out of Time: autrebiographies and unwritings ) In fact, the entry for Sunday 7 December 1975 finds its way into it, and the unforgettable dialogue from Monday 10 February 1975 was used in the sound collage that introduces the second issue (1976) of my tape magazine 1983. But apart from these surfacings the rest has remained unused. Possibly I was going to use the dream images for poems (probably I did, there are a couple of references to a poem ‘Vision’) and it does carry a sort-of title at its end: the solipsist’s headparty. There are occasional attempts to note repeated motifs, but I’ve not typed up much of this ‘explanatory’ matter.

It is a fascinating project – though I am aware that, contrary to an actual remark of Andre Breton, who says we love telling each other our dreams, there is nothing more boring than somebody else’s dreams. (Both facts are true, I think!) I shall risk that. After all, I don’t expect anyone to read them all. What I think I love about the dreams is their complete uselessness. An obsolete psychology is not worth examining, of course. The language is simple, note-like transcriptions, with a simple vocabulary (‘big’-‘small’ appears frequently), and no attempt at polish, along with certain assumptions. Place names (curiously focused on the Sussex part of my life, not the excitements of university in Norwich) offer atmosphere. People are named with an assumed understanding of the person’s character. (I’ve changed some names. I’m also surprised about how many of the persons named I’m still in touch with.)   

The process of posting these entries contains the irony that something so private, and 50 years old, is made public on the world wide web, on their meaningless fiftieth anniversaries.

Whether I ‘do’ anything with them is another question, or are they going to just simply escape, as did my similar ‘daytime’ project of posting my 1969 diary here in 2019? See here: Pages: Introduction to Letts Schoolboys Diary 1969. Some of the entries read like Ian Seed’s wonderful prose poems, re-written by somebody with basic language skills and no sense of literary style. In a sense, they were reminders for texts that never materialised, for ‘a book of dreampoems’ as the text says, and to ‘do’ anything with them now is quite a different task. For in only a few cases do I retain a memory of the dream itself. I have an open mind about them. Just to check, as I write this, I wondered whether I wrote any introductory matter to match the solipsist’s headparty at the text’s conclusion, and I found this as evidence of intent on the diary’s fly-leaf: ‘in which i will record my dreams / coincidences and other strange things [these ‘things’ don’t survive January] possibly (but not necessarily) for use in literary form later’. It is just possible that ‘later’ has finally arrived!

9^th December 2024

The first post for 1 January 2025: Pages: Dream Diary 1975 Wednesday 1 January 1975

Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry - some thoughts

Some comments on Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, edited by Andrew Duncan and John Goodby, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2024: See details for purchase here:

: https://waterloopress.co.uk/books/arcadian-rustbelt-2024/

The publisher or the editors describe the book thus, and list its contributors:

Rolling back the Motion/Morrison-Poetry Review-Faber clampdown, Arcadian Rustbelt operates on the principle that ‘if you’re indicted, you’re invited’, collecting formally innovative and radical poets who emerged after 1980 but before 1994: David Annwn, Michael Ayres, Elisabeth Bletsoe, Adrian Clarke, Kelvin Corcoran, Ian Davidson, Andrew Duncan, Harry Gilonis, John Goodby, Paul Green, Khaled Hakim, Graham Hartill, Nicki Jackowska, Keith Jafrate, Elizabeth James, Daniel Lane, Andrew Lawson, D.S. Marriott, Anthony Mellors, Rod Mengham, Kevin Nolan, Val Pancucci, Frances Presley, David Rees, Robert Sheppard, Simon Smith, Vittoria Vaughan, and Nigel Wheale. 

Passing over the mildly inappropriate Mid-western Hellenism of its title, I pass to its subtitle to find out where I’m being placed now: ‘The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry’. Grandchildren of Albion, then? This is not the first time. In 1988 I’m represented (by passages that ended up in Twentieth Century Blues) in the ‘some new poets’ section of the anthology The New British Poetry and in 1991 in the anthology I co-edited (with Adrian Clarke), Floating Capital: new poetry from London. Both anthologies are mentioned (with others) in the introduction to Arcadian Rustbelt as anthologies of the era. The era. This anthology is not like those old Penguin anthologies Poetry of the Thirties and – more grudgingly –Forties in attempting to present the poetry of the era, but poetry by poets who ‘emerged’ (how can you emerge into an Underground?) between the years 1980 and 1994. (My idio-temporality calls 1979-1997 ‘The Drowning Years’, a corruption of Thatcher’s autobiography The Downing Street Years.) My contribution was written 1994, bang on. The ‘Smallest Poetry Festival in the World’, which was held in December 1994, featured some of the London-based contributors, and represents neatly the end of the period, even down to a symbolic chucking out in the early hours of a couple of the anthology’s contributors! Wild times! Pages: Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994.

If we take the 1969 Penguin anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain, edited by Michael Horovitz as a cornucopia of the first generation, or Eric Mottram’s term ‘British Poetry Revival’ as indicative, where does that leave Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Denise Riley, or others? Pages: Robert Sheppard: Return to the British Poetry Revival 1960-78 . I suppose I’ve always thought of them as a second generation, and ‘us’ as the third. I’ve always thought 1996 the beginning of another generation, marked by the development of ‘Performance Writing’. In other moods, I have less interest in these ‘generations’ and prefer to trace continuities of formal practices across these quite short periods of time. I should say that I’m pleased to be here, and in some good company, though not always the company I’d imagined at the time under the smaller umbrella ‘linguistic innovative poetry’, but no matter; most of us were a generation (ish).

It is ‘a world whose very existence influential people denied’; I tried to do my bit, writing reviews for New Statesman and the TLS, entryism of a radical kind (though I principally reviewed poetry of the first generation). Eric Mottram told me that they’d get rid of me: and they did (but not before I supplied this Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Commitment to Openness (Roy Fisher, Harwood, Raworth) and this, Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Timeless Identities (Roy Fisher), and (one day) my splendidly satirical ‘They Fuck You Up’ from the New Statesman about post-Larkin poets will be rolled out again). Andrew Crozier’s seminal ‘Thrills and Frills’ essay on what I later called ‘The Movement Orthodoxy’ (and which is a cornerpiece of an opening chapter of The Poetry of Saying (2005, but based on my 1979-1988 PhD); see here Pages: Cliff Yates: The Poetry of Saying) is offered as evidence of the club that people were refusing to join. I think this is largely true. Which constitutes a real difference with the first Underground. I was always impressed that Lee Harwood, for example, just didn’t bother with these ‘mainstream’ writers; perhaps the second generation were wiser to need to define against, more manifestly manifestic (as it were). Even so, did ‘young poets leave the mainstream’, or did they never go near it?

I’ve often thought the occurrences at The Poetry Society in 1977 presented a sad backdrop to the 1980s, and often said so, as here, in my review of Peter Barry’s excellent Poetry Wars: Jacket 31 - October 2006 - Robert Sheppard: «Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court» by Peter Barry. The 1980s Poetry Review (journal of the Society) is derided for its safeness, for its retreat into the orthodoxy. This is presented as analogous to Thatcherism, which seems, at this distance, to be fair, and I said so at the time. My ‘statement’, published in Arcadian Rustbelt begins: ‘In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when asked about the “greatest influence” on my poetry, I would answer “Margaret Thatcher”; it was only partly a joke.’ These were the Drowning Years indeed. ‘The great silence’ of being outside the mainstream, we are told by the editors in their introduction, ‘allowed something fragile, almost inaudible, to achieve a spectacular growth’, which is one of their more utopian formulations.

 My ‘statement’ continues: ‘I carried this mash-up of the poetics and theory of Forrest-Thomson, Shklovsky, Adorno, Marcuse, Barthes, and others, around as a prophylactic against both “The Movement Orthodoxy” in poetry and “Thatcherism” in politics. It was both an anticipatory poetics for my own writing, and the sketch of a theory of the poetry of the era. This is its clearest, tight-arsed form, as it appeared in Floating Capital in 1991:  

 

Poetry must extend the inherited paradigms of ‘poetry’; that this can be accomplished by delaying, or even attempting to eradicate, a reader’s process of naturalisation; that new forms of poetic artifice and formalist techniques should be used to defamiliarize the dominant reality principle in order to operate a critique of it; and that poetry can use indeterminacy and discontinuity to fragment and reconstitute text to make new connections so as to inaugurate fresh perceptions, not merely mime the disruption of capitalist production. The reader thus becomes an active co-producer of these writers’ texts, and subjectivity becomes a question of linguistic position, not of self-expression or narration. Reading this work can be an education of activated desire, not its neutralisation by means of a passive recognition.’

 

This statement within my statement also appears (more than once!) in the third part of my recent book The Necessity of Poetics, which collects some documents from the 1980s and 1990s, which make interesting reading placed alongside the anthology (I even comment on my poem included there). (See here: Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard - When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry) It includes ‘Took Chances in London Traffic’ (a memoir of the London poetry scene of the 1980s), ‘Negative Definitions: Talk for the SubVoicive Colloquium, London 1997’, ‘Linking the Unlinkable’, ‘Working the Work (poetics)’, ‘Incite! and Ignite!: No one listens to poetry: SubVoicive Colloquium, July 1991, University of London (a cautionary examination of linguistically innovative poetry), and net/(k)not-//work(s), a 1992 booklet of short pieces offered with interpollations, including ‘New British Poetry in the Eighties’.

Apparently, there was a ‘poetry boom’ in the 1990s that brought all this to an end. While it is true that most of the poets here began to publish books in that decade, the ‘boom’ must have passed me by, and there is no recognition of this in the 1990s pieces published in The Necessity of Poetics.

The editors rightly criticise the absence of women writers (reflected in the anthology).

* 

I have yet to read the contents cover to cover, but I will, and it might very well open up that decade in a way quite contrary to my formulations above, and in the documents referred to above, though it’s more likely to modify my view of the era in its details. I have a friend who is urging me to write a lyric essay of my memories (I am quite useful, in that I was on to the first generation of the British Underground quite early, while still at school, and that does serve me well in reminiscences.)

A few comments on my contributing poem, just for the record. I was surprised at the choice of ‘Living Daylights’. It appeared in History or Sleep, my selected poems, and also as part of Twentieth Century Blues. It was a 1994 remode of a 1987-1988 poem ‘Daylight Robbery’, published in my first book of that title, from Stride in 1990. (It had appeared as a Ship of Fools pamphlet in 1989.) It wasn’t written 1991 as the anthology claims. I’ll also pass over the health warning that ‘the depersonalised may not be the true’. This enigmatic formulation appears in the introduction to my poem, but also in the main body of the book’s introduction.

 

It seems so long ago (and the controversy, such as it was, is narrated in ‘Incite! and Ignite!: No one listens to poetry’) but I remoded the long, difficult poem ‘Daylight Robbery’ into another difficult, but not so long, poem called ‘Living Daylights’, that was presented in isoverbalist (word count) verses (derived arbitrarily from a verse of another contemporary poem). The rhythm that imposes slows the poem down, I thought, and still think – and improves readerly reception. You’ll have to buy the anthology or History or Sleep to read the poem, and to buy The Necessity of Poetics to read ‘Incite! and Ignite!’, which traces my (temporary) loss of faith in the poetics expounded in my ‘tight-arsed’ statement above.

Yes, buy the anthology and slot these poets back into literary history (something I have been trying to do in my critical work for decades, of course).

And check out the ‘Arcadian Rustbelt’ blog (see my blogroll to the right of this post) for Andrew Duncan’s takes on rustbelty matters and arcadian follow-ups!  

Update 2025: Billy Mills' take on the anthology is interesting: Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry, Andrew Duncan, John Goodby (eds): A Review – Elliptical Movements.

Andrew Duncan talks to Alan Baker about the book, here: Interview with Andrew Duncan, co-editor of "Arcadian Rustbelt" | Litter

Merry Christmas Cards (thoughts on hard copy and digital versions)

'Addressing Xmas cards,' I wrote in my diary yesterday. 'It is odd. Much as I like sending and receiving Christmas cards to and from old friends, it is alarming jus how many "new" friends - I mean of the last 20 years or so - I don't have postal addresses for, that I only communicate with digitally. There is a clear digital cut-off point in the first few years of the century.' (Also there is a reluctance to give a postal address. Again this seems odd: I knew some addresses by heart of poets who were publishers right up to the end of the last century: only I. S.  does this now. (See, even I'm playing into this by reverting to his initials!)).

So here in the video is this year's card: Patricia's image and my poem (I had to provide it very quickly: it's carved from my daily writing called 'Ark and Archive' (I have reach 960 pages of it to date!). 

HAPPY CHRISTMAS to those who will receive this card physically and those who can now access car and image and poem digitally. (Usually our cards are New Year cards: this one, singularly, seems Christmassy. 

  

On abandoning my transposition of Dante: thoughts and extracts

It came to me in a flash in April 2024: write a version, or transposition, of Dante’s Divine Comedy BACKWARDS, from Paradise back to normal life. The rest of the plans came more slowly, as notes in my Red Notebook testify. I won’t trace the movement of these ideas too thoroughly: I’ll simply give a précis of procedure and progress. Dante would be a version of me, Sheppàrd by name, who appears twice in British Standards. My Beatrice would be Benjamin/Klee’s ‘Angel of History’ (pictured above). Virgil would be William Blake, for my basic notes were produced ‘writing-through’ his wonderful illustrations to Dante, composed at the end of his life, and having the advantage of stepping pretty lightly through the more doctrinal ‘Paradiso’. Like Milton (who was slated to be Statius in this retelling) Blake was of the Devil’s Party. I read as many versions of Dante as I could find: Cary’s (I had an 1847 edition I bought at a jumble sale in August 1972! A similar edition pictured below), CH Sisson’s, Alistair Gray’s, Robin Kirkpatrick’s Inferno, and other looser texts: Philip Terry’s Dante’s Inferno (I’ll return to that), Adrian Clarke’s ‘Paradise Gardens’, Bruce Andrews’ Lip Service, Amiri Baraka’s ‘from The System of Dante’s Hell’, and a load of background books. I ended up quite knowledgeable on the subject.

Some way into the preparatory process, by dint of some synchronicity, Philip Terry wrote to tell me he’d written his follow-up Purgatorio. I despaired, until I realised I wasn’t proposing anything like his brilliant work, which was strictly Oulipean. I have since reviewed his book, for Tears in the Fence (Spring 2025 edition; see here: Pages: My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing ). With something like 84 pages of notes, produced slowly, one Blake ‘image’ a day, I was ready to write the thing. I would not have what I have always called ‘interfering’ material: I’d have ‘informing’ material. Working with the writings-through, I needed to mix in some political philosophy, some wonderful phrases and collocations from Cary’s Miltonic version of the comedy, and, Alighieri’s Your Uncle, it would all come together! A rich absurd allegory for our times. It was to be (to quote from the unprocessed notes) a ‘comedy machine’. Epigrams were prepared. An earlier poem, which I wrote for the ‘Dante’ edition of the online magazine Junction Box, in 2021, offered itself as an introduction, and a guide to the tone and style. (I still approve of this poem, by the way.) Issue 16 Dante Page 1 – Glasfryn Project

But, not unlike Belacqua in Beckett’s stunning early story (another piece of ‘background’, ‘Dante and the Lobster’), I was more or less ‘stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward.’ ‘All he had to do,’ Beckett explains, ‘was to follow her step by step.’ ‘Her’ being Beatrice, of course: my Angel of History. Perhaps it was the precision with which I had envisioned the whole as a whole, perhaps I didn’t find it hard enough, resistant to my garrulousness and productivity – but it fell to pieces on me.  A quotation from Derrida which I came across in my re-reading of Derek Attridge's The Work of Literature (see my first encounter here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature) describes the singularity involved in reading (and what is my method of 'transposition' but a mode of 'reading'?). 'Reading must give itself up to this uniqueness, take it on board, keep it in mind, take account of it. But for that ... you have to sign in your turn, write something else which responds or corresponds in an equally singular, which it to say irreducible, irreplaceable, "new" way.' (Attridge 2015: 138) There was not enough response or correspondence in my approach, perhaps.

I should say it’s been great fun. ‘Trump?’ ‘No, did you?’ Blake and Sheppàrd say at one point, as they Derek and Clive their way through the circles, running back from the summer of 2024 to, sort of ‘midlife’, December 3^rd 1994, when the almost-legendary Smallest Poetry Festival in the World was held. (See my post here: Pages: Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994) Sheppàrd can’t remember a thing, after crossing Lethe; unlike Dante he won’t be able to report back to the people of the earth. When Blake tries to instruct him, he learns nothing!

In one of my notes I worried about whether, if you base a text upon another, particularly one with an alien or even repugnant content, do you inevitably carry something over from the original, like a germ or a virus or a glitch, that still operates in ways one might not be able to anticipate, in ways of which one might not approve? It’s a sobering thought, though surely my experience in writing the three books of transpositions of sonnets in ‘the English Strain’ project, suggests the virus may be inoculated (or transformed into comedy: laughter, as Blake and Sheppàrd discover, is the best medicine). But then maybe the answer is simpler, and lies in those THREE volumes (pictured below, though one is hiding! Links here: Pages: New book British Standards completes the 'English Strain' project: all 3 books available ). I’m through with ‘transposition’ as a method: done! In April perhaps I should have said to myself, ‘That would have been a good idea five years ago. Let’s move on.’ (In fact on that day, I also had another idea: writing a kind of memoir via an Alphabet of Poets.)

I am posting my ‘fragments of an attempted writing’ which I have now deliberately curtailed, though I decided to jump forward and write the last part (which was almost in complete form anyway). I like what I have written, but doubt whether I would like a whole book of this stuff, unmotivated as it seems on reflection. But all is not lost. Two other writings have come out of the ferment. I half-intended my long poem ‘The Palisaded Ditch’ as an accompanying text to ‘Stars’

 (‘God made the sliding bricks of the gateway,

but Mankind built the bands crossing the

scorched earthenware ground with words:

here a cathedral with owl eyes, there

a castle of pure flame, capped in a psilocybin glans,

two shuttlecocks colliding in the lane.’);

 

and my ‘Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust’, a sequence of jazz poems, dedicated to Jazz Ian Perry, began life as ‘interfering’ materials, but it took on a life of its own, though even in its opening lines you can see my mind was dwelling in the upper levels of Paradise:

‘it’s not Sam Rivers

            playing ‘Beatrice’ like a paradisal theme tune

                        haunting though that would be:

            it’s ‘Starlight’

            played by Fred Hersch

 

constellations of high notes from woody keys’.

 

The poem ‘Thinking About Dante’ stands alone in 2024, just as it did in 2021 when I wrote it. Perhaps I should have heeded these lines from it:

 

                                              He

sits in the pub thinking about Dante,

his visions, decides to write

(but knows he won’t) eternal versions of

his tercet Commedia:

‘midway through the Black Forest Gateau

I threw up over you! Such things move

the moon and the stars and the sun!’

(I was thinking of Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via’, of course.) Yes, all is not lost. I know enough of my own procedures to wager that my voluminous notes won’t simply be tossed into my non-existent archive. Watch some other space.  

29^th November 2024

Stars: A Comedy Machine

 

                                    Thus the cause

                        Is not corrupted nature in yourselves,

                        But bad government that has turned the world

                        To evil.

 

                                                Purgatorio XVI

 

                                    As a fir tree

                        Upward from bough to bough less amply spreads,

                        This one’s tapered upside down, so no one

                        (I think) may climb it.

                                                Purgatorio XXII

The introduction is the 2021 poem 'Thinking About Dante' (which may be read here: 

Robert Sheppard: Thinking About Dante – Glasfryn Project)

 

[UPDATE 7 March 2025: As I say in the post about the review of Philip Terry's Dante's Purgatorio, (see here: Pages: My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing) and as I ponder above, I have returned to the original notes of the project, and submitted them to a 'coherent deformation' (a slightly different technique for each cantica) and am pretty certain, as I move through those 80 pages of notes, that I will have some sort of text, or draft of a text, at the end of the process(ing). It feels right, then, to remove this abandoned version, to make way, eventually, for a new text, a better text, a more distanciated text - though I have kept the Ur-story of The Poet (I've dropped the explicitly named Sheppard), Blake, The Angel of History, travelling backwards through the story intact, possibly even the return to Tooting. This might be buried in the new 'narrative', but I think it will still guide the writing, and most of the reading (I should think). As I write, I have written the first two cantiche, which are quite short (Blake's choices of canti to illustrate still guides the focus and size of the project), and I am currently about half way through the daily writing, one processed page per day. When I reach the end, I shall be able to see what has happened, and can proceed as necessary. But I am confident of a final text appearing. I don't want readers to compare it with the 'original', as they might think of it. For me, borrowing Blake's engraver's vocabulary, I shall call it a 'state', just a stage on the way. (I don't want to read it either, at least, not until I've finished the daily writing, which is a quite quick activity by the way.) I have decided (I think) to keep the title, the epigraphs, and the positioning of 'Thinking About Dante' as an introduction to the whole. I hope to finish the writing by April, which will be the anniversary of the flash of inspiration I relate at the top of this post. Even after abandonment I continued to read my Dante Alighieri. The Vision; or Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. trans. Henry Francis Cary. London; Henry G. Bohn, 1847, a canto a day, and my array of Dante books and translations and versions and transpositions still line the shelf above my desk, though the spine of the Cary is hanging lose, and the stretch has been augmented by Philip Terry's new Purgatorio. I knew somewhere inside that I hadn't finished. I don't abandon much. Or if I do, the 'idea' comes back in a different, but related, form.] 

]  

Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994

Saturday 3^rd December 1994: The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World

It’s 30 years ago today that Patricia and I (with Stephen advertised as ‘domestic ambient noise’) held The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World at our tiny house in Lessingham Ave in Tooting. We were famed for holding ridiculously large parties in this confined space (on one occasion the patio doors burst), but in 1994 we wanted to hold a lengthy poetry reading as the focus for the party. The South Bank that year were holding what they were pleased to call The Biggest Poetry Festival in the World. Unable to compete, we decided to go the other way. Stephen drew a version of the big festival image for our image. Patricia silk-screened t-shirts and this remains the only ‘record’ of the event. (See below.) Nobody was photographed; nothing was audio or video recorded. We also assembled a booklet from pages provided by (most) of the participants (cover again being Stephen’s image in black and white). Copies of that are probably floating around. (I have one at least.)

Although the centrepoint of the festival was the Cobbing-Upton performance to end it, it is worth recalling and recording all the poets who read (note the paucity of women readers, typical of the era). My diary entry reads:

 ‘

The event was a great success, I feel, too much so: I fear there have been smaller.

Reading. Part 1: Me (reading The Lores book one), Harry Gilonis, Lawrence Upton, John Seed, speedy Miles Champion, Patricia Farrell, John Cayley, A.W. Kindness.

Part 2: Bob Cobbing, Johan DeWit, John Welch, Scott Thurston, Martha Kapos, Ian Robinson, Robert Vas Dias, Out to Lunch (Ben Watson).

Part 3: Gavin Selerie, , Robert Hampson, Ken Edwards, Adrian Clarke, Simon Smith, Ulli Freer, and – Lawrence Upton and Bob Cobbing, with the unforgettable mid-performance (anti)dedication, ‘This is for Andrew Duncan!’ who was there. (He’d written something negative about Bob.)

Went on until [w, x, y, z, and an unknown lady] were thrown out.

A good time was had by all, or most, I hope and suspect.

’

The Upton/Cobbing piece took up the warning about ‘domestic ambient noise’ (I think Stephen did try to MC the event at one point!) as the title of their collaboration, their first for some years. They'd fallen out and I forced them to talk to one another at a Writers Forum workshop. (I sent Bob upstairs where I knew Lawrence was alone - or the other way round, I can't remember - and when we all re-ascended after a refuelling break, they were chatting away!) Nobody knew at this point that this collaborative project would extend to 300 booklets! Commonly known later as DAN, it's one of the wonders of concrete and sound poetry.

‘The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World’, by the way, is slated to be the final line of my new work on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

(This is an image of two houses in Lessingham Avenue, possibly ours the one on the left.) 

Completely coincidentally the anthology Arcadian Rustbelt edited by Andrew Duncan and John Goodby has been published, and I will post about it when the book is on the publisher's website (Waterloo Press). (But until then check out the blog of that name on my Blogroll.) In response to my contributor's copies, I wrote to the editors something which is relevant to this post: 'I have a post coming up about the Smallest Poetry In the World (which Andrew, you attended). Such a gesture of rejection (the South Bank was holding the BIGGEST at the time) now seems of a piece with your chronology: December 3rd 1994 being pretty much the end of the 'period' of the book [1980-1994!] (Some of the contributors read.) It also coincides with my The Necessity of Poetics, which in its third part, reprints a number of hidden 'poetics pieces' (not critical texts) from the period (and a little after).' (On The Necessity see here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now!)

Here are some internal links to posts that contain references to some of the participants in the Festival. Presence or absence doesn’t constitute a value judgement, simply a check on what’s posted.

Part 1: Me (reading The Lores from Twentieth Century Blues) Pages: Robert Sheppard: thirty years since Twentieth Century Blues was begun, 20 since it ended, and future plans), Harry Gilonis, Pages: Ten Years of Pages: The Best Bits Lawrence Upton, Pages: Robert Sheppard: in memoriam Lawrence Upton John Seed, Pages: Robert Sheppard: Punctum, Punctuation and the Poetics of Space in John Seed’s Objectivism, Patricia Farrell: Pages: Patricia Farrell: Links to some visual work, John Cayley (right at the end:) Pages: Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other (final installment).

Part 2: Bob Cobbing, Pages: Robert Sheppard: My Bob Cobbing 'Archive',  Scott Thurston Pages: Scott Thurston's Inaugural Lecture: KINEPOETICS March 2024 (video + my introduction), Robert Vas Dias, Pages: Robert Sheppard: article in CLASP: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (my part in its downfall).

Part 3: Gavin Selerie, Pages: Remembering Gavin Selerie and his laugh, Robert Hampson, Pages: Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Robert Hampson, Adrian Clarke Pages: Robert Sheppard: My review of Adrian Clarke's Austerity Measures on Stride plus further notes, thoughts and links, Ulli Freer Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Adhesive Hymns (Ulli Freer) , and – Lawrence Upton and Bob Cobbing’s Domestic Ambient Noise: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Bob Cobbing: Two Sequences.  

This post, also on John Seed, has a little about Lessingham Avenue and John’s poem written after another of our famous parties: Pages: Robert Sheppard: John Seed: England’s derelict archive circa 1990. At the end of the post.  

The Lowry Lounge 2024 - an account and links

The Lowry Lounge 2024. I wasn’t looking forward to it, too many other things (readings) going on, but felt enthusiastic once Patricia and I were on our traditional way to the Bluecoat in Liverpool. (I’d also decided I would read ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’ at/on my online reading on Wednesday; see Pages: Details of Readings this Autumn.) And I was justified because Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs (the central Firminists) had spent a lot of time and energy to compensate for limited funding this year. Since it was The Day of the Dead, this year focused on that, and upon its appearance (a weak word for its omnipresence) in Under the Volcano.

 The Mexican altar from 2009 (the first Lowry Lounge: Pages: Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World) was re-envisaged (we brought a Hell Bunker golf ball, the Lowry beer bottle from 2009 and other bits and bobs; but I didn’t want to take leave of the notebook from my 1979 visit to Lowry’s grave!).

[Helen Tookey's photo of the altar upon which she spent much time]

Then in honour of the late John Hyatt (punk musician, visual artist and educator), who I liked very much, we watched his ‘backwards’ version, ‘resurrection’ he’d say, of the final chapter of Under the Volcano. (I’d embedded it on this blog, in my account of the 2018 Lounge: Pages: The 2018 Lowry Lounge in Liverpool and on the Wirral (including the Open Malc) (set list)). It occurred to me that my recent plan to narrate Dante’s Divine Comedy ‘backwards’ might have been unconsciously influenced by it. Might as well make it conscious. We saw some other of John’s contributions to the Lounge. What impressed me was the way he was able to re-imagine Lowry; I’ve long thought I’ve nothing more to say (or do), that the Lowry section of Doubly Stolen Fire was my final word. John Hyatt’s example suggests that that is not necessarily so. (See an account of last year, when I launched the book: Pages: Launch of Doubly Stolen Fire at the Lowry Lounge 2023, Liverpool (set list).)

'The Resurrection of Geoffrey Firmin' 2018. Oddly we watched a different video to this one, but it was the same performance!

Colin Dilnot talked about the Day of the Dead and found a solitary reference to Eisenstein’s epic filming in Mexico. Which we watched an edited version of. He also informed us that the novel sets Day of the Dead 1938 on a Sunday: it was a Wednesday! And Lowry and Jan didn’t arrive in Mexico for the first time on the Day itself (as we would be briskly informed in the Powell documentary we saw later). But a day or two before. (It strikes me now, perhaps on the Sunday before the Wednesday?) Death Day follows: 

 Lunch in the thriving Bluecoat with fellow-Firminist Ailsa, and Tim, catching up a little, before the afternoon session was called.

Bryan and Catherine Marcangeli talked about Adrian Henri’s early ‘The Entry of Christ into Liverpool’ (poem – painting (on hessian!) – performance) and the late ‘Day of the Dead in Hope St.’ (poem – paintings and studies – performance only planned), 1998. So, I thought, we were here in Liverpool when Henri raised the dead (with Lowry coming out of the Phil: I hope he wasn’t too disappointed with the beer). It was good to chat with Catherine who is only intermittently in Liverpool. (But she was here for Mersey Poets events in 2017: Pages: Celebration of 50 Years of The Mersey Sound (readings and pop up reading by Roger McGough) (set list).) Here's the Liverpool Scene with Henri, performing the poem. 

An Open Malc with Alan Peters blowing harp and singing a bit of Adrian’s ‘Day of the Dead’ poem, which he’d scribbled down as it was displayed (thus giving it the scratch performance that Adrian never achieved). Now I appreciate the inter-art aspects of Henri’s work, I’m I much bigger fan than I’ve been, seeing, as I did, the Mersy poets’ fame as a bit of a blanket over the rest of The British Poetry Revival – but I see now that that was never their intention, though it was an unintended consequence of that fame and notoriety. I know I’m rattling away from the theme, but it’s worth to add that Alan performed and toured with Henri at some point.

Helen Tookey read some more beautiful passages from her forthcoming book on/about/out of/round and about Lowry. More about that when it’s out, I think. In the meantime, here's the New Brighton plaque for Lowry, with the quote selected by Helen. 

 A showing of Tristram Powell’s 1960s documentary on Lowry followed. (Meeting the film maker himself a few years ago was a privilege. He died earlier this year, after a legendary career in film and TV. Rough Passage was his first feature in 1967: it's worth it to hear the dreadful John Davenport, who elsewhere accuses Lowry of being an onanist, here calls him 'a little tipsy Delilah'!) I can't the video or Tristram's website. 

The traditional toast to Lowry and (this year) to John: mescal, of course!

A final photo of me at the Lyceum Day of the Dead crazy golf bid accompanied a farewell to us all until next year.

Jeremy Lowry (yes, he is), Cian Quayle, Helen and Patricia and I had a quick scope of the crazy golf ‘course’ between a beer at the Post Office and a hearty meal at the Greek Taverna… 

An image of Messers Lowry and Sheppard...

Reviews of my edition of the Selected Poems of Mary Robinson

I’m pleased to say there has been a first review of my Shearsman edition of Mary Robinson’s poems, by MC Caseley in the very solid online magazine Litter, which I link to in my ‘blogroll’, and which I recommend. (For example, there’s a great review of Sarah Crewe’s brilliant new book, which I saw her reading from last night, and I’ll be sharing an online reading with her next week!).

Back to Mary. I particularly liked MC Caseley’s paragraph on ‘Sappho and Phaon’, which he (correctly) regards as the masterwork here, and says, ‘Much of the value of this collection and reassessment, however, must rest on her sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon, published in 1796, the first such since the Renaissance. This is undoubtedly powerful and revolutionary, taking freely from Pope and Ovid, but imposing a narrative frame around the events.’ (This seems more succinct than my introduction.) He continues, ‘In her introduction, Robinson also places Sappho among the other lovers traditionally associated with the sonnet form, such as Petrarch and Laura – a confident act of rewriting and appropriation,’ which is also nicely put. He calls my introduction ‘helpful and comprehensive’, which is gratifying. MC Caseley finds the early work too Augustan and Mary’s epic ‘The Progress of Liberty’ too Wordsworthian, but these reflect, of course, the poetic paradigms she worked between. I think there is a case for ‘The Progress of Liberty’, but it is good to see this review of my considerable and (I must admit) slightly surprising labours, particularly this week in which I have finally seen the three portraits of Mary Robinson in the Wallace Collection! So, thanks to MC Caseley and to Alan Baker, the editor of Litter.

Read the whole review HERE:  Review - The Selected Poems of Mary Robinson | Litter

The book may be purchased HERE: Mary Robinson - Selected Poems (shearsman.com) 

 

There’s quite a lot about Robinson on this blog, too, branching from a hubpost, here:  Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1

It’s worth saying I got ‘into’ Mary Robinson during the composition of my transpositions of Romantic sonnets, and ‘Sappho and Phaon’, which, as I say, Caseley rightly sees as a highlight of her work (which is voluminous), was subject to my satirical method in ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’. It’s a parody in some ways of the Ovid-Pope-Robinson narrative of Sappho and her obsessive love for hapless Phaon, but I refused to follow the sequence's tragic ending. Tabitha/Mary/Sappho takes back control of the plot, and the poem, and ‘Thunderer’/Phaon (and dare I say /Boris Johnson) is rebuffed, big time. I write about my poem here, Pages: My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post), a post posted seemingly well before this present volume was a twinkle in Shearsman editor Tony Frazer’s eye.

He suggested the task to me, after spotting ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ in the manuscript of British Standards, which he has also published. (See here: Pages: British Standards published by Shearsman - out now; this post has full contents and a video of a sample poem.) I dithered for a while (not being a critic of Romantic literature, but having read a fair bit, not least of all in preparing British Standards) - and then said 'Yes!'

it's all come down to this by Paul Robert Mullen is out, with an introduction by me.

it’s all come down to this: a retrospective (1999–2024) [the publisher tells us] is the defining collection from Paul Robert Mullen, brought to life by The Broken Spine with the expert editorial touch of Alan Parry. This anthology gathers over two decades of Mullen’s poetry, offering a deeply personal yet universal meditation on identity, memory, and the passage of time.

 

I provided an introduction to this volume.

Mullen’s sparse, emotionally charged style has been celebrated for its honesty and craft, with poems that weave through themes of separation, reflection, and rediscovery. [The publisher continues.] The collection spans his earliest work, such as Issues, Tissues & the Senseless Comic, to newer, unreleased writings in rags of light. With a voice that remains unflinchingly authentic, Mullen captures moments of longing, heartbreak, and resolution that will resonate with readers of contemporary poetry. 

it’s all come down to this may be purchased it here:

https://thebrokenspine.co.uk/product/itsallcomedowntothismullen/

it's all come down to this: a retrospective [selected poems & writings 1999-2024] - Paul Robert Mullen –

While I was musing on the introduction, or rather about how to write it, I came upon an interesting distinction between 'song' and 'story' by the German poet Lutz Seiler, and I wrote about the quotation here: Pages: On a passage of Lutz Seiler and a lift from Billy Mills. It led me down certain paths, away from Paul's book. Later, I integrated this quotation into my introduction to to it's all come down to this, which begins with these words:

I find the contemporary German lyric poet Lutz Seiler puts the matter better than I could: ‘“Everyone has only one song,” said the writer Paul Bowles in one of his last interviews. (He was also a musician.) You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound.’ This seems an apt way of talking about the poems of Paul Robert Mullen, where what he calls ‘a lifetime between two covers’ is transmuted into a song, a song that is intensely personal, though not necessarily flagrantly autobiographical, or where autobiography has become song, a distant echo of fact. Mullen no longer tells the story: he offers us that condensed sound, that song, that story of the sound of the poem. That is its artifice, of course, which I shall be examining below. However, it is worth dwelling on the musical analogy. Like Seiler, commenting on Bowles, I can say ‘Mullen is also a musician,’ one who I have seen perform (and I possess his entertaining CD Alchemy in the Garden). Although I will pursue the metaphor of ‘song’ in relation to Mullen – he writes much of music as part of that story of his life – it is important that he never confuses a song lyric for a poem (or vice versa). His songs are another story, and music is only part – an important part, as I shall show – of the story of his verse.

It's a distinction that carries on into the poems (and a little prose) that I examine in more detail in my response to Paul’s considerable collection of his work. And I conclude: ‘These are the ‘writings’ of the subtitle: ‘selected poems and writings 1999-2024’, a title and dating that reminds us that that story that Mullen has lived is a long one. The sounds that he has made during, and from, that life, are often exquisite and always truly affective.’

But to read the rest of the introduction and (more importantly!) the rest of the book, you'll have to buy it here: https://thebrokenspine.co.uk/product/itsallcomedowntothismullen/

it's all come down to this: a retrospective [selected poems & writings 1999-2024] - Paul Robert Mullen –

 

 Here's author, publisher and introducer mulling over matters literary.