Friday 5 December 1975
Dave (of Frank and Dave [student poets]) said he’d put
the handle of his ping pong bat up Judith’s c**t which was very long.
An introduction to the diary may be read here: Pages: Dream Diary 1975 Introduction to the project
Friday, December 05, 2025
Dream Diary Friday 5 December 1975
Thursday, December 04, 2025
Revisiting the British Poetry Revival/Pierre Joris this Saturday 10-5
II am talking (and reading poetry) at this. I found these details online and discovered it seems to be a public event. Find the Royal Holloway rooms in Senate House. Pierre Joris and The British Poetry Revival
6 December 2025: Senate House, University
of London, WC1E 7HU
(Stewart House, Room 1 – the Royal
Holloway suite accessed through Senate House)
10.00-1.00: Revisiting the British Poetry
Revival
10.10- 11.15
Professor Robert Sheppard, ‘Looking at the British
Poetry Revival Again’
Dr Carl Kears, ‘Bill Griffiths and the Phoenix in
Seaham’
3.20+ On Pierre Joris
Ending with poetry from Allen Fisher, Geraldine monk and myself.
The event is in the Royal Holloway suite of rooms in
the University of London Senate House. Confusingly, access is through Senate
House (not through Stewart House).
It is in the same building as Senate House Library.
You pass the reception desk in the lobby and go up the flight of stairs to the
first floor - and then turn left.
| 10am-5pm. | Revisiting the British Poetry Revival: Conference on the British Poetry Revival; afternoon sessions commemorate the work of poet Pierre Joris. Speakers include Robert Sheppard, Andrew Duncan, Carl Kears, Will Rowe, Peter Middleton, Allen Fisher and Nicole Peyrafitte, plus film from Colin Stills and a reading by Geraldine Monk. | Senate House, Malet Street, Bloomsbury WC1E 7HU. | Free, no booking required. |
Sunday, November 30, 2025
ELLE: A VERSE NOVEL is now published
My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is now published by Broken Sleep Books
Details for ORDER:
Elle: A Verse Novel by Robert Sheppard is a fierce, densely layered détournement, refashioning Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour through splices, warpings, and an unnerving overlay of 1960s Brighton scandal onto a surrealist template. Blending procedural method with pulp volatility, Sheppard mines and retools the idioms of violence, sex, media, and myth, threading the ghosts of Buñuel, Jeff Keen, and the tabloid unconscious into a shattered, many-voiced delirium. The book is both critique and enactment of representation: a work pursued by its maker, stalked by its forms, and shadowed by Christine. Elle is a hauntological lyric, a summoning that won’t let the archive lie still.
Thanks to Aaron Kent and Broken Sleep for publishing this 'wild card' contribution.
Here's a video of me reading, very briefly, the opening lines (after the 'Preface'):
_book_cover.jpeg)
I write about the project here in some detail, including a video of my initial process: Pages: My Verse Novel ELLE is excerpted in Shuddhashar 37: Surrealist Poetry edition
And there is an extract here: Elle: a verse novel - শুদ্ধস্বর
David Spittle writes: ‘Collapsing collage into writerly montage, Robert Sheppard’s utterly unique creation inhales its smudged histories of Brighton newspaper ink until the seedy banality of crime and commerce – laced with counter-cultural artists and surrealist drama – becomes a visionary disorientation of troubling desire.
Fitfully lighting a fuse for pulp alchemy, the dislocations of Sheppard’s experimental verse-novel reimagines a scandalous chapter of sex and violence as a redemptive book for, and of, linguistic transformation. Writing through Joseph Kessel’s novel, Belle de Jour (1928), Sheppard’s mulched and dexterous composition invokes a host of guardian influences: Tom Phillips’ miraculous collage-project Humument, the melting plastic frenzies of Jeff Keen’s stop motion films, and the busy scrutiny of Iain Sinclair’s occultations of time and place…all jostle in the shadowy streets and anachronistic absurdities of Brighton’s strange vortex. However, regardless of such coordinates, it belongs only to that rare and wonderful vein of books that have no obvious antecedent; a beguiling milestone for the orphaned anti-traditions of all that wander through that curious designation: sui generis.
A cheap paperback and the incriminating link of a Pontiac, a misremembered poet and washing-machine tycoon, l’amour fou and The Blue Gardenia Club…all are framed and re-framed as talismanic clues towards a mystery that’s only ever resolved in the present of its reading. Unlike anything else, this is poetry as séance, trance, farce, and delirious hearsay; it is the intoxicated remembrance of a lost film that changes with each retelling and yet, beneath or beyond that telling, the propulsive dream of its significance remains - a fixed magnetism around which the patterned filings circle. Lose yourself in it and retrace the steps you never took, this is a poem that understands that any convulsion of desire is part of a greater game of absence.’
As I write in the Introduction: The turn to the ‘verse-novel’, however ironical, reflects yet another, late, act of transformation, the translation to ‘verse’, a term I seldom use. These procedures and processes are well described by Derek Attridge in his The Work of Literature (2015) when he tells us: ‘The coming-into-being of the work of art is … both an act and an event: it’s something the artist does … and something that happens to the artist.’ This work has been hard labour but it has manifested itself before and within me, almost without me.
Monday, November 24, 2025
Dream Diary Monday 24 November 1975
Monday 24 November 1975
Sitting in a crowded room on a sofa with Maggie. She
leans back and my arm gets trapped around her. She says, ‘Was that
intentional?’
‘No;
it happened automatically, by accident.’
I go to
find Howard. I get out of the big building via the cellar bar. I have to crawl
along a tube. I say to the manager, ‘I’ll have to find the other way out with Maggie.’
I say ‘Good evening.’ I race back to find Maggie.
We
come out of a public bog together. I open the door. MM is there. ‘A bender!’ I
scream, closing the door. I try to lock him out but he’s locked me in! I make a
run for it. Howard goes round the bogs with him. I return to Maggie. Walking
under a walkway as at UEA [famously], I see the other Howard from Barrow.
‘Baaa!’
I say but he doesn’t laugh, doesn’t respond, and I pass. He’s sulking with his
girl friend from Keswick. [Not the town but a teacher training college in
Norwich.] When I get to Maggie, she’s talking to Steve. I join in. He’s embarrassed.
Tuesday, November 18, 2025
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Dream Diary Sunday 16 November 1975
Sunday 16 November 1975
People running round in rings in opposite directions.
Perhaps through the air. Trevor K and Roger Daltry and all of The WHO. Music
from Litzomania. I say to Roger Daltry, ‘Watch out for him, he’s ugly!’
Friday, November 14, 2025
Burnt Journal 1955 for the 1955 Committee (including me!)
Burnt
Journal 1955
for the
1955 Committee: Nick Cuddihy, Len Davies, Keith Jones, Frank Walton – and me
1
‘From
the grime and muddle of 1955 … the public is invited to lift its eyes towards
1974. Look; there is an electric or diesel (or, just possibly, atomic) train
pulling silently, briskly competitive, smog-free, out of the glistening
chromium of the new King’s Cross. This is the stuff to give a government which
likes to seem forward-looking.’ The Economist, 1955.
2
The National
rocket stands like a candle,
its flame
at the wrong end
: a
popping expulsion
of exhaust.
Nestled in its regal nose:
explosives,
atomic
or
hydrogen. Beneath its black sky,
the London
bus orbits Eros again and
again,
Piccadilly Circusing under
the
flashing ad for Gordon’s Gin.
The city
is nine million eyes behind
3-D specs,
winking at the circum-
ambulatory
dizziness of a ‘certain gentleman’
who ‘quite
forgot himself’, as he’ll explain
to the
disgusted officers who arrest him.
It’s two
healthy cheers for the bicycles
rallying round
the rallies! Bike-polo
on the
green, tents pitched at decent
intervals,
as a smiling engine huffs
into the
country Halt, dispatching parcels
for our
birthdays, our bucolic futures
of polio
inoculations and hot running water.
You stand
around the rim of the casino table,
licensed.
The other men look like farmers
stretching
over a railing to examine plump pigs.
The woman
in furs simpers in expectation, red
handbag
bulging with dollars. She’s as restless
as Kim
Philby denying he’s The Third Man.
All you
see on this billiard-table green are
chips
piled unsteadily on neat squares –
the ITV pilot
of Double Your Money, or
a Pathé
News clip of Monte Carlo.
Nowhere special,
a native
policeman coaxes
the
colony’s traffic, one
small
child
on a
tricycle. Pedestrians shuffle, truncheoned
towards
the camps, the casual castrations.
Rumours of
Mau Mau hiding amidst the Carpet
Gardens at
Eastbourne are ready to pull
the rug
from under them all.
3
Four or
five men of around 70
sit over
real ales in a simulacral pub
furnished
with bits and bobs
from an
old first-class carriage,
to recall
the worst train-rides
of their
youths.
We’re still
awaiting
the arrival of a real
‘forward-looking’
government.
May 4,
2025
The simulcral pub is real!
This poem is for the members of the 1955 Committee (including me). I am the youngest and I am posting this poem on my 70th birthday, for ‘Burnt Journals’ are birthday poems and I generally use the postcards featured, and arranged year-by-year, in Tom Phillips’ The Postcard Century. There’s a whole load of them, though this one is slightly different.
Part one is a quotation I gleaned from Peter Hennessy’s Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties, and comes from an edition of The Economist of that year.
Part three is a version of the 'committee', sitting in The Mayflower. (See image above.)
Part two is more like the other ‘Burnt Journals’; it uses postcard
images from 1955: the aim has been to provide a surreal version of the
year, looking mischievously at images, misreading them deliberately, making
stuff up (while importing historical knowledge into it: the Mau Mau in Kenya,
the broadcasting of Double Your Money on the new ITV channel, the publication of
the first James Bond novel, Philby’s refutation, etc. Again, stuff from
Hennessy’s book). I hope you enjoy it.
1st November 2015:
2
3
4
5
6
7
Pages: November 1955 & Empty Diary 1955
8
9
10th
11
12
13
14th November : posted
2015:
Pages: November 14th 1955; 'Tombland: How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth'
Here's the 1955 'committee in session 3 years ago: Pages: The 1955 Committee (and others) 2022.
And what happened 10 years ago? This: Pages: An Educated Desire - For Robert Sheppard at Sixty (KFS; published 14th November 2015).
'Burnt Journals' of various kinds have been published over the years and they are, as I said, birthday poems. Here's a link to a link of one I wrote for Frances Presley, so far not collected: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Poem in International Times.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
FIVE Favourite Songs I've Sung : they're on Stride
My contribution to Stride's feature FIVE was to write about the FIVE FAVOURITE SONGS I’VE SUNG, which is literally what the piece is, an illustrated list.
It may be read HERE: Five Favourite Songs I've Sung | Stride magazine
1. Robert Johnson’s ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’
2. Traditional: ‘The Gower Wassail’
It's not my desert island discs, by the way, but a chance to reflect, within the allotted wordcount (which was extremely tight) on the different situations in which I have sung music. There is a video of me performing number 4, here, the second one on this post: Pages: More returns of Little Albert - the music I play, the music I listen to, the music I write about.
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Dream Diary Tuesday 11 November 1975
Tuesday 11 November 1975
Maggie and I in separate single beds.
I draw them
together and we’re one.
Monday, November 10, 2025
Dream Diary Monday 10 November 1975
Monday 10 November 1975
Howard and I at a dance in big hall. The guys who hit us
[a real attack on us one night] were there.
Howard meets one and kisses him.
‘Bloody
queers! Queer-bashing!’
‘There’s
nothing wrong with being queer,’ I cry.
‘Another
one!!’
We
run.
Friday, November 07, 2025
Dream Diary Friday 7 November 1975
Friday 7 November 1975
I recognise I’m in Eastbourne. Maggie and I, and we
start to walk home. We go into Marks and Spencers. A man asks Maggie about her
menstruation. She says ‘My horns are all right!’
We
ask a local from the station.
‘There’s
Peacehaven over there, but they never do any work. Try Newhaven.’
In
the shop, many nude women with pubic hair and big penises (clits).
I know I’m dreaming in my dream. I want to tell Josie about it.
An introduction to the diary may be read here: Pages: Dream Diary 1975 Introduction to the project
Monday, November 03, 2025
TONE POEM and my other poems about music
I have been slowly writing poems ‘about’ (in my sense of ‘round and about’) MUSIC for some time now. In fact I’ve often written about music, as the links below suggest. This is in some sense recompense for the last-minute failure of the Charms and Glitter project, which I have explained previously on this blog.
One sequence is ‘Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust’ which takes for theme recent jazz albums. (I was fed up with all those poems about Monk or Coltrane.) There are over 20 of these poems. The fact they started life as ‘interfering material’ for my Dante project shouldn’t devalue them, though there are a couple of references to paradise that remain. The music was only destined for Paradise and Purgatory, for there is no music in Hell. This pattern follows Dante, of course. They didn’t get used, but simply stood on their own as a peculiar exercise in audial ekphrasis. Perhaps one day there will be a book of music poems, perhaps destined to be called Easy Listening, somewhat ironically. I feature a few links to possible contents of that volume below.
Read poems reflecting on music by Ant Law and Alex Hitchcock, Fire! Orchestra, Brandee Younger, Lakecia Benjamin, and James Brandon Lewis from Tone Poem on Litter,
HERE: https://www.littermagazine.org/2025/11/robert-sheppard-poems-from-tone-poem.html
(Thanks to Alan Baker for taking these. He’s also asked me to supply links to the music itself,
so I have.)
Here is another set, four poems, this time responding to the music of Fergus McCready, Daniel Herskedal, Mário Laginha and Cecile McLaren Salvant,
Brandee Younger (and her harp)!
A heap of
earlier music poems appear in Yesterday's Music Today, edited by
Mike Ferguson and Rupert Loydell:
A poem for Philip Jeck appears here: Pages: Philip Jeck 2022 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
See here about the saga (perhaps it should be a rock opera) of Charms and Glitter: Pages: Whatever happened to the book Charms and Glitter? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
I write about the difference between the music I play, the music I listen to and the music I write about: Pages: More returns of Little Albert - the music I play, the music I listen to, the music I write about. There will be a further piece on Stride soon about my 5 favourite songs to sing.
Thursday, October 30, 2025
My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is published by Broken Sleep Books
My new book Elle: A Verse Novel is now published by Broken Sleep Books
Details for ORDER:
Elle: A
Verse Novel by
Robert Sheppard is a fierce, densely layered détournement, refashioning Joseph
Kessel’s Belle de Jour through splices, warpings, and an
unnerving overlay of 1960s Brighton scandal onto a surrealist template.
Blending procedural method with pulp volatility, Sheppard mines and retools the
idioms of violence, sex, media, and myth, threading the ghosts of Buñuel, Jeff
Keen, and the tabloid unconscious into a shattered, many-voiced delirium. The
book is both critique and enactment of representation: a work pursued by its
maker, stalked by its forms, and shadowed by Christine. Elle is a
hauntological lyric, a summoning that won’t let the archive lie still.
I
write about the project here in some detail, including a video of my initial process: Pages:
My Verse Novel ELLE is excerpted in Shuddhashar 37: Surrealist Poetry edition
And there is an extract here: Elle: a verse novel - শুদ্ধস্বর
David Spittle writes: ‘Collapsing collage into writerly montage, Robert Sheppard’s utterly unique creation inhales its smudged histories of Brighton newspaper ink until the seedy banality of crime and commerce – laced with counter-cultural artists and surrealist drama – becomes a visionary disorientation of troubling desire.
Fitfully
lighting a fuse for pulp alchemy, the dislocations of Sheppard’s experimental
verse-novel reimagines a scandalous chapter of sex and violence as a redemptive
book for, and of, linguistic transformation. Writing through Joseph
Kessel’s novel, Belle de Jour (1928), Sheppard’s mulched and
dexterous composition invokes a host of guardian influences: Tom Phillips’
miraculous collage-project Humument, the melting plastic frenzies
of Jeff Keen’s stop motion films, and the busy scrutiny of Iain Sinclair’s
occultations of time and place…all jostle in the shadowy streets and
anachronistic absurdities of Brighton’s strange vortex. However, regardless of such
coordinates, it belongs only to that rare and wonderful vein of books that
have no obvious antecedent; a beguiling milestone for the orphaned
anti-traditions of all that wander through that curious designation: sui
generis.
A
cheap paperback and the incriminating link of a Pontiac, a misremembered poet
and washing-machine tycoon, l’amour fou and The Blue Gardenia
Club…all are framed and re-framed as talismanic clues towards a mystery that’s
only ever resolved in the present of its reading. Unlike anything else, this is
poetry as séance, trance, farce, and delirious hearsay; it is the intoxicated
remembrance of a lost film that changes with each retelling and yet, beneath or
beyond that telling, the propulsive dream of its significance remains - a fixed
magnetism around which the patterned filings circle. Lose yourself in it and
retrace the steps you never took, this is a poem that understands that any
convulsion of desire is part of a greater game of absence.’
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Dream Diary Wednesday 29 October 1975
Wednesday 29 October 1975
Some kind of convention. Walking in the room. (The little fence along Middle Road.)
The woman comes on stage to ANNOUNCE next singer BUT
she starts singing hoarsely. Far away, off the back, the man plays a gentle
accompaniment. They play for a bit. It is pathetic.
Also John and Mick come up to Norwich with me. They
see many moments of frivolity.
I go
to the bog and hanging up there are the legs and torso of a plastic model which
talked to me about escaping from Russia.
Wednesday, October 22, 2025
My DEFLATED EGO on Stride (a mini essay on my creative summer torpor)
Introduction to my DEFLATED EGO
Rupert Loydell asked me, over the summer, if I’d participate in his second set of ‘DEFLATED EGO’ (the capital letters seem quite necessary to me). He caught me at the right moment. I was restless, listless even, and in need of a holiday that was never going to arrive. Even taking a few days off never quite works for me. Indeed, far from being a holiday, writing this piece was a busman’s holiday, at best. Writing about not writing. But with the suggestive title and the brief – ‘You are welcome to choose your own approach, be that self-interview, review, manifesto, contextual/social material, statement of poetics, personal comment, or whatever', - I was propelled into imaginative boredom. This is another way of saying that I was hamming it up. After all, I got down to the writing he requested with enthusiasm!
However, I
think the short piece does have something to say about the self-absorption of
writers (and this writer, in particular) and it hints that anti-poetics or
non-poetics or apoetics (to use Charles Bernstein’s term) is always lurking
within poetics, as indeed non-creation is latent in creation, and we are always
creating on the edge of not creating. Or no longer creating.
You may
read it here:
Extras and Notes
I write about anti-poetics with regard to John Hall’s essay on ‘Not Writing’ in Bad Times that Made for Good Poetry (see here: Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard - When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry).
I make
reference to my daily writing ‘machine’, Ark and Archive, in the EGO
piece, but there is more about it here: Pages: Ark and Archive page 1,000 -
keeping a daily practice of writing going.
The
‘fictional poet project’ that I refer to is best accessed here: European
Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) - Home, along with the three volumes that record it,
particularly Doubly Stolen Fire, which is mentioned in passing.
My
abandonment – and then recovery – of the ‘Dante project’, ‘Stars’, is detailed
here, in the blogpost directly referred to in the piece: Pages: On abandoning my
transposition of Dante: thoughts and extracts .
Here's some of the others I've enjoyed:
Peter Finch: Deflated Ego 10: Peter Finch on Peter Finch | Stride magazine
H.L. Hix: Deflated Ego 12: H.L Hix on H.L. Hix | Stride magazine
Eileen Tabios: Deflated Ego 14: Eileen Tabios | Stride magazine (though not deflated enough for my tastes).
Andrew Taylor: Deflated Ego 16: Andrew Taylor | Stride magazine
Sheila Murphy: Deflated Ego 17: Sheila Murphy on Sheila Murphy | Stride magazine (she's not deflated though!)
Paul Hetherington: Deflated Ego 19: Paul Hetherington on Paul Hetherington | Stride magazine (interesting poetics, but some inflation clearly visible!)
Dream Diary Wednesday 22 October 1975
Wednesday 22 October 1975
In a large room with this girl whose birthday it is as
well. Large house in Oakapple Road. I think we dance. Guests arrive. Tim was
squirming on the floor. Maybe drunk. ‘It’s that guy’s birthday tomorrow,’ I say.
I think of David and Stephen.
Another dream before that, establishing identity of
girl. [That’s comment.] Elaine.
View from window in Oakapple Road (as it is now)
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Dream Diary Sunday 19 October 1975
Sunday 19 October 1975
Dancing with a girl. She increased in size and was
fat. Disco.
In the morning still there, knackered sitting down
with other boys.
The girls – unknackered – rush out.
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Dream Diary Tuesday 14 October 1975
Tuesday 14 October 1975
With (Aunt) Marjorie, taking Geraldine to optician. Her eyes are very bad, we’re told. Geraldine turns into Trudy and I attack her. Rip off her blouse. Bra and body beneath. She says: ‘Everybody’s at university, except Paulus.’ I turn. Paulus is there. I get up and Trevor K and Terry are there.
Then I see Micheal with a haircut and feel embarrassed
about not seeing him [before].
Friday, October 10, 2025
Dream Diary Friday 10 October 1975
Friday 10 October 1975
At 15 Oakapple with Mother and Grannie. Suddenly [Great] Aunt Gina appeared and walking down road with Auntie Gina and Aunt Olive. Both of them were born in 1885 and therefore liked D.H. Lawrence.
The classic 1970s Penguin design of Lawrence's books. I had many.
Sunday, October 05, 2025
The British Poetry Revival again: 11 June 1965: Lee Harwood and John Ashbery write a poem together
[This piece continues a strand of posts that were posted in August, beginning here: Pages: How the British Poetry Revival appears in one history of its times: Dominic Sandbrook’s White Heat. I am researching towards a paper on the subject to be delivered in December.]
The
British Poetry Revival arose in a period when, as David Porter, taking a
retrospective view, wrote in Arts Alive Merseyside magazine in March
1973: ‘a lot of people who didn’t know they could write poetry met up with a
lot of people who didn’t know they could listen to poetry. Each encouraged the other.’
The central event is sometimes taken to be the poetry incarnation held at the
Albert Hall 11 June 1965, and it is this date, though not just this event, upon
which I want to focus. What started me on this quest was a simple question:
where was Lee Harwood on that eventful evening? I'll come back to that. You
could also ask: where was x y or z from our current roster of major figures?
The answer is that they were mostly very young, perhaps too young, to participate.
(Less generously, one could say the wrong people took part.)
Concentrating
on the date it is interesting to note that two British poets were celebrating
their birthdays: Roy Fisher was 35 and Iain Sinclair was 18, the latter of
interest because he was a prime mover in 1995 of a re gathering of the Royal
Albert Hall energies. Fisher was preoccupied at that time with his job in
teacher education, I believe. His fulsome bibliography assembled by the
redoubtable Derek Slade shows no poems were written between November and June
1965, i.e. until the summer vacation period, when he produced a number of poems
including three of his very best, ‘The Thing about Joe Sullivan’ in July, ‘For Realism’
between June and August, and ‘The Memorial Fountain’ in August. This burst was
prelude to his three-year writing block, of course, but he was busy far away
from the Albert Hall. (Christopher Middleton, one of our finest writers, was
already in a kind of voluntary exile, celebrated his 41st birthday on the 10
June.)
To
complete the birthday honours, it is worth noting that Lee Harwood, the
youngest of this grouping, had passed his 26th birthday less than a
week before the Albert Hall gig, on 6 June, and Allen Ginsberg, the star and
catalyst of the Albert Hall event had celebrated his 39th birthday
by getting drunk (OK) and stripping naked (less OK) at a party and embracing an
embarrassed John Lennon. A few days later he held an impromptu reading at
Better Books, then managed by Barry Miles, and at the same venue a few days
later still the plot was hatched for the Albert Hall gig on 11 June. (
Where
was Lee Harwood on 11 June 1965? He was on a train with John Ashbery,
travelling between Paris and Grenoble; his poem ‘Train poem – a collaboration’
was written with Ashbery and it provides place and time. The two lovers (we
assume) were en route to Switzerland with its rivers and mountains that appear
in Ashbery’s 1966 collection Rivers and Mountains and the similar rivers
and mountains of Harwood’s 1966 collection The Man with Blue Eyes. (xix
of Certain Prose). I recall Lee presenting
poems from both books – I forget where – and being asked why both poets refer
to narcissi, and was it symbolic? It was not, Lee replied: they were simply
looking at the same flowers! Tony Lopez in his article, ‘The White Room in the
New York Schoolhouse’ convincingly argues that the Blue Eyes volume is a
‘second generation New York book’ (77), and that the exchange between Harwood
and Ashbery amounts to ‘ a collaborative practise that goes beyond “Train
Poem”’, (80). The result, in other poems, is ‘a construction that does not
eschew narrative but which is nonetheless discontinuous and unable to be assimilated
into a coherent whole’ (82), but he concedes that ‘Train Poem’ is ‘much closer
to French surrealist practise than any of the other poems’ (77), that practice
being, of course, a version of the famous to and fro ‘exquisite corpse’ game.
A
more contemporary formulation, that of Holly A.
Laird, in her study Female Coauthors, states: certain coauthors ‘ “double” the activities of reading and
writing, for both of them read and write each other. They “double” for each
other, mirroring each other’s sameness and differences. And they double back on
each other’s writing, rewriting themselves and the other, making their
text a “polylogue”.’ (204)
This neatly defines the process that produced the poem, and suggests the final
product is a polyphonic lyric. Any
co-authored text makes and leaves a linguistic trail coherent enough to be
regarded as a single discourse. ‘The coming-into-being of the work of art,’
Derek Attridge argues, in terms that fully admit of the complexity of
coauthorship, ‘is both an act and an event: it’s
something the artist does (or a number of artists do in a collaborative
process) and something that happens to the artist (or artists)’. (2015:
220) These words I’ve used before to introduce strictly formalist readings, but
today I’m going to offer a processual reading, courtesy of the British Library
publication Poems in Progress: Drafts from Master Poets, edited by
Alexandra Ault and Laura Walker, to show, in a non-psychological sense, what
happened to Harwood and Ashbery, as artistic acts became an event (even if it
was simply to pass the time and even as the poem, to which I’d not given much
attention until I was co-editing Harwood’s New Collected Poems) is not
the greatest of poems or collaborations.
Ault and
Walker present a manuscript version of the text; they state ‘it is difficult to
distinguish between the handwriting of the two poets’ (94). To my eye, this is
true. At first I thought the whole manuscript is in Harwood’s hand. Perhaps this
is possibly a fair copy, tellingly with no corrections, and one characteristic
Harwood misspelling (‘caress’ with two r’s). Judging from the unevenness of
line, it is evidentially written on a train. Interlinear space decreases to
accommodate the poem on one sheet. On the verso, we’re told, Harwood writes:
‘Both our script – so alike: & this by chance & a real though pleasant
surprise’. (94) He acknowledges coauthorship, shared inscription, the chance
procedure, and his confidence in the poem in one sentence.
He later
types the poem up, adding the title, but first testing ‘jointpoem’ as a title
before rejecting it. He clearly states, ‘by John Ashbery & lee (sic)
Harwood’, though this ascription does not appear in any book reprinting of the
poem. There are scribbles around the title; I think they are the magazines the
poem was submitted to, or published in: Berrigan’s C is struck through. However,
and perhaps oddly, given the fact of this doubling writing producing a
polylogue, Harwood underlines Ashbery’s lines, so we know, simply put, who
wrote what. Auly and Walker state ‘Their poetic exchange is not a simple arrangement
in which each poet wrote a single line before passing pen and paper across to
the other. The authorship switches playfully within lines,’ unlike a classic
exquisite corpse, ‘as the poem, which has a restless, surreal quality, abruptly
shifts grammatically and tonally’ (93). Restless switching and shifting does
seem to describe the feeling of the poem as well as its progress and process, an
act and an event, a formal improvisation with no option of revising its
content, or a formal act-event that leaves little chance of settled content or
meaning. Its form, its recorded ‘forming’, in this case, is its only meaning,
as it gathers semantic and even vaguely referential elements, and then scatters
them in switching doubling creation.
What
follows is a reading, perhaps too fulsome to make an interesting paper, and is
better suited to the page or screen, what I have spontaneously dubbed a
‘processual reading’. Harwood’s title is important. ‘Train poem’ allows a
reader to imagine a point of view travelling: perhaps what we see are things
spotted out the window. If it were simply ‘jointpoem’ we might not allow
ourselves this naturalisation of the text. ‘A collaboration’ affords us a sense
that ‘both of’ the authors ‘read and write each other’, but we have no access
(until now) to the details of this situation, but we cannot ignore it. The dash
between the two parts suggests an equivalence between focus and forming, as it
were. Here’s the poem as it finally appeared:
Train poem – A collaboration
dog
daisies poppies metal knitting
needles snail eyes backward
and then discord the
records-file
prehensile tankers and block
which way the stage perimeter
OK
block again greenhill rears
upward mutinous
‘back!’ So until January
telegraphs twitching north to
so and so
and a handkerchief slowly
chopping heaves
‘ne nous fâchons pas’ so that
the houses
laughing in your eyes nearer
the bang
let a forest caress unlace the
instant
lovecog – did you really
understand what I meant by that?
the farmyard in an uproar of
freed peasants’ cough
drops ah the old dogs at the window
but my love for you outgrew
the shed
tools in disorderly heaps and
wasps
a beam sagging into twisted
visions of nowhere
and at this the small engine
appeared from the siding
to inspect the phantoms and
slowly disappear.
This is how Harwood’s
typescript appears:
Train poem – A collaboration
dog daisies poppies metal
knitting
needles snail eyes backward
and then discord the
records-file
prehensile tankers and block
which way the stage perimeter
OK
block again greenhill rears upward
mutinous
‘back!’ So until January
telegraphs twitching north
to so and so
and a handkerchief slowly chopping
heaves
‘ne nous fachons pas’ so
that the houses
laughing in your eyes nearer
the bang
let a forest carress unlace
the instant
lovecog – did you really
understand what I meant by that?
the farmyard in an uproar of
freed peasants’ cough
drops ah the old dogs at the window
but my love for you outgrew
the shed
tools in disorderly heaps and
wasps
a beam sagging into twisted
visions of nowhere
and at this the small engine
appeared from the siding
to
inspect the phantoms and slowly disappear.
Train poem – A collaboration
The eventual title was Harwood’s, as we have seen; so were the first few words:
dog daisies poppies
Wildflowers. In fact the first two lines of the manuscript version of the poem uses space differently (much like some of Harwood’s later poems in Landscapes):
dog daisies poppies metal knitting
needles snail eyes backward
This might be accidental, but it separates certain words (and the phantom canine at word one is dismissed) and provides a prosody of reading, as it were. But let us follow the collaborative breaks.
metal
Ashbery interjects, disrupting
the bucolic connotations of the floral nouns with the inorganic. Harwood
responds
knitting
and the obvious word association
needles
is supplied by Ashbery, perhaps taking us back to metal, but providing continuity with Harwood’s contribution. At this point in the poem, the exchange is rapid, and deliberately abrasive, almost adversarial:
needles snail eyes backward
and then discord the
records-file
prehensile tankers and block
‘needles’ segues ‘snail eyes’, perhaps hinting at protruding ‘snail eyes’ as varieties of needles, but refusing the semantic hinge with ‘knitting’. The trajectory of the poem is ever-forwards. Indeed, after this passage, the individual passages become longer, and Ashbery’s contributions are exclusively at the end of the lines (‘the farmyard in an uproar of freed peasants’ cough drops ah the old dogs at the window’ is one (very long) line). This suggests the poets fall into a rhythm (or even that they were literally playing the exquisite corpse, though no one seems to have folded over the paper, But before we reach that point we have to negotiate Ashbery’s ‘backward’, which is bewildering, but is countered by Harwood’s short blast of projective energy to move us forward, narrative’s favourite device: ‘and then’. And then what? ‘Discord’ Ashbery replies, as if more chaos were needed at this point. ‘The records-file’ could be a deliberate rejoinder to chaos, although the whole line (which is not, remember, the unit of composition) ‘and then discord the records-file’ seems to suggest disorder or disorderliness rather than order. ‘Prehensile’ could allow order to appear, be grasped even, though a hanging adjective, which is what Ashbery leaves here, is an obvious invitation to not state the obvious (claws, hands, etc,) but to provide a surreal non-sequitur: ‘tankers’. (The name of the game ‘exquisite corpse’ is based on the creation of a similarly incongruous noun phrase during collaboration, I believe.) Whatever the tankers are, and whether or not Harwood spotted one of its varieties out of the train window, the notion that they are prehensile, i.e., animate, or, as earlier, organic, suggests the kind of nightmarish science fiction cyborg scenario that is immediately blocked by the next phrase that the coauthors produce together:
and
block
which way
though the full cluster of
words
which way the stage perimeter
OK
block again
suggests that it is the spatial that is blocked this time (Harwood echoing Ashbery’s use of the word). A ‘stage’ as a performance space must have a ‘perimeter (OK?)’ we might rewrite the line. Edges block, the poem that seems to refuse the notion of boundaries and edges, seems also to be saying (or is made to say?). Or the readers, naturalising until they scream or steam with frustration, pieces it together to ‘say’:
greenhill rears upward
mutinous
‘back!’
This similarly presents a possibly observed eruption, via the train’s movement, of a green hill into view (‘greenhill’ is a very Beat collocation, infrequently evidenced in Harwood’s writing by the mid-1960s, as in ‘jointpoem’) ‘upward’ in Ashbery’s initial conformational word-choice, deflated by the ‘mutinous’ reversal that Harwood continues: ‘back’! This first quotation or speech in the piece is quite dramatic. Grammar has been loose until this point, but Ashbery reads the exclamation mark as not just a mark of exclamation but as a grammatical boundary, a fullstop, and he takes the opportunity for a new sentence, indeed, an emphatically new narrative perspective, however temporarily held. Again Harwood and Ashbery initially work in narrative cohesiveness, in a narrational tone:
So
until January
telegraphs twitching north to so and so
The ‘so’ is subtly brought
back into use, but telegraphs (those along the railway line, presumably, for
this is a ‘train poem’) may twitch, but not northwards. (To remain with
the writerly situation, the two poets are travelling south, and January, from
the point of view of June was months away. The poem (in its annotated version)
moves into a visibly to-and froing pattern, and with it an increasing sense of
disruption, what we might be forgiven for calling ‘block’ and ‘discord’, to use
words already encountered.
and a handkerchief slowly chopping
heaves
‘ne
nous fachons pas’ so that the houses
laughing in your eyes nearer the
bang
let a forest carress unlace
the instant
lovecog – did you really
understand what I meant by that?
A
truncated observation: ‘and a handkerchief slowly’ leaves its adverb hanging to
catch Ashbery’s adjective + noun as it arrives: chopping heaves. ‘A handkerchief slowly chopping heaves’
suggests a convulsive action, the ‘slowly’ jarring against the unlikely
chopping and heaving. Of course, faced with a literal exercise in surrealism,
with the clash of imagery, not unlike Lautréamont’s famous ‘chance meeting of
an umbrella and a sewing-machine on an operating table’, we cannot resolve the
imagery, and occasionally the grammar works towards indeterminacy. (The problem
of a lot of ‘surrealist’ poetry is that it does not formally disrupt the
conventions of language but simply presents sharp representations of visual
surrealist juxtapositions. As Harwood was to write in 1975: ‘The awkwardness,
and failure, of the earlier British Surrealists of the 1930s and 1940s, David
Gascoyne and others, is only too obvious.’ ‘A handkerchief slowly chopping
heaves’ is not completely non-visual, but the linguistic contradiction
within it, frustrates the visual imagination, as well as inciting it.
The
following line is linguistic in a different way, being partly in French (though
the circumflex accent is missing): ‘ “ne nous fachons pas” so that the
houses’. The French means ‘Let’s not get angry’, the ‘so’ (again)
suggesting a grammatical connection with what follows that does not materialise
(a feature of Dada more than surrealism, one could argue). Unless the French is
a reference to the police comedy film due to be released the following year,
the
phrase seems to be demotic, perhaps even colloquial, possibly overheard on the train; it is minatory, as was the other instance of direct speech: ‘back!’.
‘ne nous fachons pas’ so
that the houses
laughing in your eyes nearer the bang
At this point, the rhythm of mutual detournement is established: this game of one ‘player’ tripping up the other (involvement in such collaborations inform my readings here). Is Ashbery working from a source now, perhaps leafing through a book? Possibly his parts of the lines
So
until January
telegraphs twitching north
to so and so
and a handkerchief slowly chopping
heaves
‘ne nous fachons pas’ so that the houses
sound like dis-contiguous
excerpts from another discourse, decontextualised found text. Imagine a
possible context for just one of the phrases: ‘The landlords relinquished
control so that the houses might be made available to the populace.’ The same
might be said of other phrases of Ashbery, in particular, but this reading is
merely conjectural. ‘Laughing in your eyes’ is ambiguous. Is it an equivalent
of ‘laughter in your eyes’, or ‘laughing eyes’ in which case it becomes (or
could be read as) an address to Ashbury, after all, the ‘man with blue eyes’?
‘Nearer the bang’ also has sexual connotations, though vague, of intimacy and
orgasm. ‘Let a forest carress’ (sic), while being a faint echo of ‘Let’s not
get angry’, introduces a pathetic fallacy landscape. This is answered by
another phrase ‘unlace the instant’ which combines intimacy (the archaic
but teasing feminised dis-habilitation of unlacing, combined with the
suddenness of the actual moment of travelling, the actual moment of writing.
This only applies if we read ‘the instant’ as a noun. We have seen that the
line is no unit of composition or comprehension in this poem and, as we read
on, the word operates, in the unfolding of the temporality of the
poem-production, as an adjective modifying Harwood’s neologism: ‘lovecog’. This
colocation is the central pivot of the poem. Throughout the text there are
references (e.g. ‘prehensile tankers’) to mechanical-organic hybrids. This is
yet another, the ultimate abstract noun combined with the essential component
part of any mobile mechanism. (A friend, Michael Egan, suggests it’s simply the
heart.) ‘Cog’ feels very physical, a single syllable suggestively combined with
another. Love makes the world go round; so do cogs, answers the materialist. ‘Instant/
lovecog’ suggests a swift ‘quickie’.
Previously,
in another article on collaboration, I derided Wayne Kostenbaum’s homoerotic
contention that: ‘When two men write together, they indulge in double talk …
engage in metaphorical sexual intercourse,’(Moussin 4) However, in this single
example, I concur that this seems so; the lines read as a textual ‘come on’,
rebuffed by Ashbery’s uncharacteristically lengthy, and prosaic riposte: ‘did
you really understand what I meant by that? (It is the longest sentence in
the text.) It suggests that Ashbery really did understand what Harwood meant by
that. It is almost spoken through the 4th wall of the stage of the poem,
ventriloquising the lovecogist , while deflecting his approach.
The question – a challenge –is unanswered as Harwood
responds with a complete change of ‘scene’. The rural environment of the’
farmyard’ is animated by its ‘uproar of freed peasants’. It is a scene of
successful rebellion, or even revolution, sliding the discourse onto the level
of the socio-political, reminding us
perhaps of the final invocation of Harwood’s ‘Cable St.’ of the year before:’
‘O Prince your days are done/the Revolution’s come.’ (P55)
Ashbery will have none of this. One of the poets, I’m guessing Ashbery, from inspecting the manuscript, provided an apostrophe to the word ‘peasants’ to prevent the poem from escaping into this politicised scenario (later Harwood poems would offer such narrative fragments, glimpses of imagined lives), one more example of collaborative twisting and turning.
the farmyard in an uproar of
freed peasants’ cough
drops
is an abrupt switch from Harwood’s proletarian-peasant perspective, one is tempted to say, to Ashbery’s more patrician point of view. Of course, the peasantry will be diseased with cough- related illnesses, and surrealist medicine is delivered imaginatively through a surrealist poesis! I am aware this is a desperate overreading of the two poets’ politics, but Harwood then contributes the brief ejaculation ‘ah’ – the shortest utterance in the verbal exchange – which suggests mild surprise or deep disappointment, as though he’s defeated, or deflated (after all, his ‘lovecog’ has been deflected). To reanimate the flow we find ‘the old dogs at the window’, furtively threatening in their unlocatable specificity. But Lee Harwood has not got the message, for he responds with a nakedly confessional praise, that might easily appear in other love poems from The Man with Blue Eyes, such as ‘Rain journal: London: June 65’.
but my love for you outgrew
the shed
tools in disorderly heaps and
wasps
a beam sagging into twisted
visions of nowhere
How less erotic to say ‘but my
love for you outgrew the shed’, than, for example, ‘but my love for you
envelops my heart like a warm tide’ which is what one might have read here.
Again, one suspects, but can never prove, this derives from glances through the
train window, but anything might have stood in to deflect a passionate
approach, and to present a surprising juxtaposition, but how unsexy seems that
shed! The notion of outgrowing the shed again combines the organic (growth)
with the constructed (shed), unless one reads it in the sense of obsolescence,
as when a child, perhaps, outgrows a plaything or activity as a stage in its
development.
Harwood understands the institution of the shed, as a
former monumental mason’s mate, and he offers the phrase ‘tools in disorderly
heaps’ to concretize the image of the shed’s interior. ‘And wasps’ quips Ashbery,
suddenly recalling, or experiencing, an unpleasantness of summer. Ashbery’s
poems often use his memories or bits of experience which then filter into the
poems as though he himself were a kind of organic surrealist collage. ‘A beam
sagging’ might be thought as a further reference to the shed, on Harwood's
part, but sheds don't characteristically have beams, as a barn might, but the
riposte Ashbery supplies suggests that sagging motions torque into twisting,
but the line is not unlike a quotation from a translation of a bad surrealist
poem, in the context utterly appropriate:
a beam sagging into twisted
visions of nowhere
The combination of the
specific and concrete ‘beam’ with the abstract and negative unlocatable
‘visions’ is peculiarly affective, and suggestive. It is also near-conclusive in
tone as the poets progress towards the end of their poem, possibly agreeing
that the single side of the sheet of paper reproduced by Ault and Walker is the
physical constraint of the text.
I
suspect they feel the end of this collaboration approaching (as I feel this
overblown, literal -minded close reading approaching its end): I also suspect
they agreed to write one complete last line each. They need to bring the train
(poem) into the station (possibly literally, as their journey ends). Indeed,
this analogy is apposite since Harwood delivers his final full line, and writes
‘and at this the small engine appeared from the siding’, It's clearly, or seems
to be, derived from sense data from the journey, which probably lasted over 3
hours. (Sidings are characteristically near, but not in, stations.) It is an
insignificant ‘side’ event, perhaps one observed simultaneously with its
writing.
Ashbery knows, as the writer of the final line, it
behoves him to provide poetic closure, or to avoid it: ‘to inspect the
phantoms and slowly disappear.’ Inspection might well be the activity in
the siding, but here grammatically the engine itself appears to deliver its own
inspection, although it is inspecting the phantasmal, an eruption of the weird
and uncanny. This final line provides a curtain call which is also a phantasmic
dissolution of the scene (their train journey) and the text (their
collaboration); it significantly provides the single conclusive full stop of
the collaboration.
This reading contains more naturalisation than I usually
allow myself. I have found little to note formally about the poem, particularly
in terms of structure, which seems to derive from the rhythm of collaboration
and its interruptions, and possibly from the constraint of the poets filling a
single sheet of paper. But my straying from my customary formalism is not a
matter of providing a text with a context, but of exploring the recordable
material conditions of its actual production, its ‘forming’ if you like, accounted
for in the title of the poem and in the dating and placing of the poem at its
end. This seems more significant than what is normally implied by the word context
and it needs a new concept to describe its operations, possibly something like ‘in-text’,
but perhaps that is for a different occasion.
Works Cited
Attridge, Derek, The Work
of Literature (Oxford: OUP: 2015)
Ault, Alexandra, and Laura Walker, eds., Poems in Progress: Drafts from Master Poets (London: British Library, 2022.)
Holly A. Laird, Female Coauthors (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 269, fn 1.
Andrew Mossin, Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in ‘New American’ Poetry (New York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2010), p. 4.
Pattison, Neil, Reitha Pattison, and Luke Roberts, Certain Prose of The English Intelligencer. (Cambridge: Mountain, 2012)
Porter, David, in arts alive merseyside free magazine March 1973.
An original set of posts on the British Poetry Revival begin here:
Pages:
Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other: Part two. This
feeds off my book The Poetry of Saying which in turn fed off my PhD.
I revisited the subject to write ‘The British Poetry Revival, 1960-1978’, in Görtschacher and Malcolm, eds. A Companion to British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015, Hoboken and Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2021: 235-243, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Return to the British Poetry Revival 1960-78
And reflect on it here: Pages: My two pieces (British Poetry Revival & Harwood) & editorial exhibit in CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH POETRY, 1960 – 2015 Edited by Görtschacher and Malcolm
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