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'):
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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.
