I’m very pleased that three pieces have been published by Litter: see here:
Robert Sheppard - Three Prose-Poems | Litter
They seem to work quite well together, though ‘The Wager’ was written after the other two, which belong to a cluster of prose pieces called ‘The Weekend of Miracles’, but ‘The Wager’ seems not out of place here. You’ll notice that the pieces are dubbed ‘Prose-Poems’, which both in my critical work (particularly with reference to the prose used by Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood) and in any delineation of my own work, is a term I’ve resisted. No, more than that: I don’t use it; I don’t see much use for it. I know the term is terribly popular at the moment, and there seems to be a lot of formal heart-searching, but I find this odd. I have simply thought of them as ‘poems’ or as ‘prose’ but never as the verbal hybrid. ‘The Ship’s Orchestra’ by Roy Fisher, or ‘The Old Bosham Birdwatch’ by Lee Harwood, or my own ‘Sudley’ (see below) seem to be ‘at home’ without the term, however unlocatable. I’m sure there is a phenomenological difference between reading a block of prose and a lineated poem, but I’m not sure what it is. In the late 1990s I wrote a kind of ‘lineated prose’ (as I called it), and both before that date (and after) I’ve written prose works like ‘The Cannibal Club’ and ‘Mesopotamia’ which are in prose (though they have an element of narrativity (and, at times, narrative) in them); but ‘Sudley’ (for example) doesn’t, and it’s sparing in these three new pieces, I think. Narrative is not the deciding factor, if one is needed, because my ‘verse-novel’ (out in November) can carry such things, and so does many a poem.
Nobody has commented much on my prose (I’m not talking about obvious non-fiction or fiction, of course), but I think there is something different from ‘poems’, by which I am knowingly, knottily, contradicting myself.
Healthily inconclusive as these remarks are, it just remains for me to thank Alan Baker for publishing this trio in Litter, and to point to online examples of, and references to, my past prose practices!
[Note: see this post form tomorrow, as it were, in response to yet another and, again different, kind of prose being published, in International Times this time: Pages: And now more prose is published in International Times (and I reflect on that too) .]
My book of prose Unfinish, published by Veer is still available, and I describe it here (in academic terms):
Pages: My REF statement describing my Veer volume UNFINISH
I advertise it here, and indicate how it may be purchased:
Pages: Robert Sheppard New Book Out: Unfinish - prose from Veer Books
Some examples from the book itself appeared in Otoliths here:
https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2015/01/robert-sheppard.html
And here’s the last state of my prose ‘Sudley’ which may one day be restored to its place in Unfinish:
Pages: Robert Sheppard: Sudley (remode of Sudley House)
An example of the 1990s lineated prose may be read here, ‘The Sacred Tanks of Dagenham’ from Twentieth Century Blues:
Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Sacred Tanks of Dagenham (re: History or Sleep, Selected Poems
An early example (printed here without italics) from the 1980s is the first two parts of ‘Schrage Musik’ from The Flashlight Sonata:
Pages:
Schrage Musik (1986) - for my father.
And there is a supplement to its last part, ‘Work’, here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/work-from-words-out-of-time-2017.html
Enjoy your poetry, prose, prose-poetry, and pieces, whatever you call them!
