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!     

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). With something like 84 pages of notes, produced slowly, one Blake ‘image’ a day, I was ready to write the thing. (See image below.) 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)

 

Cantica One

 

                              let’s start all over stars

                                                Bruce Andrews

 

(31 32)

stars, winking at the joke, through the Empyrean

not falling like glide bombs and phosphorus

over Ukraine, or like dead drones dropping onto Gaza

but fixed and waiting, as Sheppàrd waits, summer 2024

for the predicted Aurora Borealis to show

that, only if photographed, glows a purple haze

across the flat reproduced sky, a perfection

never finished

outside of recorded artifice it is vaporous

a wispy milky streak across the ‘heavens’

the sun’s colourless cough over the moon’s rich grin

and failing to see even that version of it

through the glare of the city’s lights he

returns to this multiform unwinding in

multiple dimensions, his imperfect Vision

in inadequate language

undeceived, unlike those drunken watchers

for the northern lights who, following a deceptive

purple glow through the Liverpool streets

find only the corporate neon of their local Premier Inn

under a comfy Hypnos blanket of thick cloud

at last he descends from this Luminous Doughnut

though not a lot is clear yet, as if within

each portion is trapped a bit of uncertain

paradise: the ghost of the Angel of History

who sees one single catastrophe which keeps

piling wreck upon wreck; a spectre of

a warrior from one such wreckage as a storm

blows from the edge of futurity; a swan

caught up in his own wings by the tornado

of the Angel’s fateful omnivision

further down, naked figures fall around

like the lustful on a bouncy castle

at an open air orgy, singing wordlessly

to Ellen Andrea Wang’s ‘Closeness’, the music

gliding from the resonant bole of her double bass

into the swelling womb for the singer’s baby. They’re

adoring the Angel, and one kneels on a snot-green

picnic rug, arms outstretched, long yellow hair

like a 1960s folk singer about to deliver a sensitive

ballad to some floored stoners. A

fleur-de-lys flies off in the storm, baby angels

with duck faces flap below, and the sun

and the moon and the stars (of course) drop away to

the tune of ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’

‘here, silent as you are, I know your doubt

and gladly will I loosen the knot’, promises the Angel

‘this storm called progress – we’ll run it in regress

for you alone’  

 

(30)

a tree pours liquid bark down the page

it seems to Sheppàrd, and The Angel of History

wags his finger at him: you’re not yet conscious,

you’ve not yet become! nagging

as he crouches, unable to bear

the vertiginous waterfall of flowing light

a post-alcoholic tropic glare, dense im-

penetrable blaze! Sheppàrd leafs through

the paradisal protocols, checking out

the river: is it safe to drink from, or to sink in, as

the Angel says it is? The roses mentioned

in passing are here, falling from the tree

as though from the spangled firmament itself

but visive sprites tease him, half-hidden

in its shadows, and remembrance of their twitching

smiles will dispossess his spirit of itself

something’s not right. Unequal to his theme

he can feel divinity as sun on a slave’s back

but the place seems half-built, a holiday chalet

in 1970s Spain, a huddle of workmen

fussing in the shade. Later

the inevitable district magistrate with his scroll

waits for the English hooligans to be manhandled

towards his judgements, guilty of soiling

the river of light. This hooded allegory of deportation

from vintage pages of The News of the World clears

Sheppàrd tastes pure light, to exceed our human

feasts on clearing vision, all his laughter

on that bloomy shore excessive and expelled

 

9th November 2024

 

 

(28)

Nobodaddy clambers over the garden wall

like a Chad, raises one hand as if to say

‘imparadise my soul!’ or ‘immiserate the peasants’

humans dissolve

into miniature columns of dust, but angels

wave from their circles. There

is meant to be singing, but nobody

opens their mouths. There’s

meant to be irrepressible darted light,

scintillating fires, every sparkle

shivering to new blaze

but everybody’s eyes are wide open

what faces fix these tight lips, void eyes

wingèd moony coquettes

with lightly rouged cheeks and delicate kohl lashes

even the ghost of a flea is tricked into this

hegemony, as silent note is to its meaningless metre

eternal circles within temporal circles of Sheppàrd’s

looking, gently turning; there wheeled about a point

a circle of fire, pure to the spark of truth

that knows happiness has route in seeing

 

18^th November 2024

 

 

(25)

they approach one another like astronaut

and cosmonaut on the Orbital Space Station

floating in their suits of fire, not one more full

of hope than the other, one red swirl

the next lauded in blue. They greet

like Freemasons about to shake recognisant hands, one

open palmed, the other drawing back with two fingers raised

two fingers curled, but they never touch, never

look the other in the eye. One has flushed

cheeks and compassionate mien, the other furious

focused eyes, fiery brow, curled hair, mean. Sheppàrd

floats, space-walking in the pale rainbow lightning

that flashes invigorate with hope, almost innocent

from this encounter, drawing him in. If I were him (and

I am) I wouldn’t trust either of these supranational

egomaniacs, with scripted ‘hope’ of joy to come

and catechistic ‘verities’, but he gravitates towards

their negotiating hands, looking from side to side

for vanishing sign of the Angel of History

as he’s blinded by false resplendence. Pods or eggs

pull all creatures in downward gravity

of their own beliefs, exploiting fissures in surface

reality. Bursting like the stone

from a split avocado, the one who wrote the histories

in which he is loved (events like beads now

committed to memory) drops

from a furling splash of juice, falling

where boss-eyed lovers also fail to touch

and where venerating venerables kneel

astonished children at bedtime prayers interrupted

by an everyday miracle of this new effulgence. Stars

circle the encounters like flowerheads

plucked and grafted in cruel artifice. They fail

to grasp the constellation and in the song

and dance they comingle to the accompaniment

of Ambrose Akinmusire’s ‘Yesss’

for their soaring unescorted lofty flight. If one

of them gets the giggles – this is a

comedy! – they’d collapse through

watery space into a gloopy pool of poop

 

21^st November 2024  

 

 

(24a)

under the egg-edged off-white of celestial light

out of a crimson pod, a blaze of

comet splendour bursts around the Angel of History

thrice it wheels, as the bearded one appears

beard flowing into the flow that floats him

beneath them with so human a song it resounds

in all the spheres: Kurt Elling’s vocalise-poem

‘Stay’, its soft fluencies entuning trauma

a tricksy clue saved for the music round

in one colossal hand he grips a key

like that of a dungeon door or deep vault

of la Banca del Paradiso. Compassion

floods his spaced-out eyes, his lips

aquiver to form his first quizmaster question

in Sheppàrd’s specialist subject, the primordial

phenomenon of Nero; he warns: ‘Only the Sophist

would want room for his wit!’ Inquisitorial angels

flit below, arms half-swimming, their borrowed carol

weaving variously, half-imploring, amid cool sparks

and sprinkled sacred dews, robes trailing into

mermen tails. The Angel could be

drowning though he attempts to remain buoyant

‘whoever does not hope for the un-hoped-for

will not find it.’ So breathes this flame of love

(the pen passes on here and leaves a blank)

armed in silence, as hope never guarantees

Sheppàrd stands steady for his starter for ten

 

24^th November 2024

 

 

(24b)

the Angel of History’s paper-coil hands

cloud out as he raises them

like so many finger puppet Hugo Balls

they melt into celestial action and angels

spin like a hot-rod speedometer in

its own volition. ‘These mismatched eyes,’ he says

as he squints beyond Sheppàrd’s soft shoulder

‘are not your Paradise!’ Sheppàrd mimics

his gesture, fingers splayed, which he

suspects causes everything to revolve

around them, even the bare sketchy shapes

funnelling closer in the rush, their benediction

opening with pliant song (‘I Own the Night’)

but he knows he causes nothing

to happen, not even love, as he turns

to the Angel, frowning. His face gives

nothing away: futurity is the swinging sign

above the No Future Night Club and the destiny

of humankind seems nothing. His scrolly hair

like curlers of scriptural chronicle

catches in the churning carousel wind, his

chicken feet swept free of the spectral ground

through which Sheppàrd fears that he must plummet

 

26^th November 2024

 

Epigraphs for etc… and some notes (excluding the many pages of writing-through of Blake’s illustrations to Dante)

 

Cantica Two

 

                              asterisks for cat’s

                                    eyes in acoustic

                                    reunion on

                                    the spectral highway

 

                                                Adrian Clarke

Cantica Three

 

                              Capital divides

                                                and rules     its kingdom

                                    Like a greedy spoilt dictator.

 

                                                Philip Terry

 

 (notes and drafts of 2 of the final Canto of Cantica Three of Stars, i.e., the end of the work)

 

… and so from Circle Two Sheppàrd now ascends

to the Circle Line, changes at Monument, walking

the long tube to Bank, and slithers down

the familiar track, all snake and no ladders, to

Tooting Broadway, near the southern end of the Northern

as though he has commuted

from The Angel to Tooting and then

suddenly, he recognises where he is

on the crowd-cramped platform heading towards the exit

for life has unleashed so many wage-slaves

as he rides the long escalator towards the city’s

musty breeze above, stepping up to speed his rise

and remembers once seeing Martin Carthy here

crashing down the escalator opposite

guitar in hand, from his gig at the Selkirk

and Sheppàrd feels fresh regret at ‘the shipwreck

of the singular’. Later he’ll write:

                                                       I burst out

into daylight and street corner bustle

as I approached the kerb, inhaled

the petrol and grit of London

and awaited the traffic at the Broadway to stop

this was a dream, and I knew, in the middle of

my life, in the midst of life, that I was returning

to the living: to bitter work and restorative friends

to the tiny garden city house with Patricia and Stephen

to make the final domestic and ambient arrangements for

what we would conduct there (as we head off to

Chillerton Road swings in late autumn dusk)

The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World

 

2024