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 3rd 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!
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’
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.
29th 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.]
]
