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,
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.
