TONE POEM and my other poems about music (links)

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 at the bottom of this post demonstrate. 

One recent 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, great dead guys.) 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. Perhaps. I feature a few links to possible contents of that volume at the end of this post (which I keep updating). There are now FOUR online magazines featuring pieces from 'Tone Poem', seventeen poems in all, which I think is well over half of the sequence.

1. 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, which I did and which you can access.)

2. Here is another set, four poems, this time responding to the music of Fergus McCready, Daniel Herskedal, Mário Laginha and Cecile McLaren Salvant. 

 (Thanks to Rupert Loydell and International Times.)

HERE: from Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust | IT

3. Here is a third set from Tone Poem, this time poems responding to recent albums by Samara Joy, Gretchen Parlato, Emma Rawicz, Micheal Wollny and Brad Mehldau (the last a very localised response to his 'Beatles' album, Your Mother Should Know. She really should, and she should know that these poems are 

HERE: five poems — Blood+Honey

Thanks to everybody at Blood+Honey, a very active (frequent) platform. 

4. Here is a fourth set from Tone Poem, this time responding to the music of Melissa Aldana, Don McCaslin and Miko Hazama. Three short poems.

HERE:  The Pi Review: from Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust, by Robert Sheppard

Thanks to Pi Review. 

JazzIan to whom the sequence is dedicated has been telling some of the musicians about the sequence and he's had positive responses from Ant Law and Mats Gustaffson (of The Fire! Orchestra). 

5. Here is a standalone poem about jazz (or is it about time?) that is NOT in the sequence Tone Poem. Entitled 'Martin Smith Quartet at the Caledonia, Sunday Afternoon Sessions' that is exactly who and what it is a response to. BUT it is accompanied by two photographs by David Hynes of one of those Sunday afternoons. And it is published by International Times on 13 June 2026.

HERE: Martin Smith Quartet: Sunday Sessions at the Caledonia | IT

Thanks editor Rupert Loydell. And thanks to David. 

One of the images, (c) David Hynes. Access the IT page above to see the other. (Note: David is not the photographer of Holme Fell.) Our previous collaboration in International Times may be viewed here: Pages: Burnt Journal 1965: the last one and the photograph of David Hynes (and a look back at the series, with links and vids) 

A heap of earlier music poems appear in Yesterday's Music Today, edited by Mike Ferguson and Rupert Loydell: 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Poems in YESTERDAY'S MUSIC TODAY co-edited by Rupert Loydell & Mike Ferguson OUT

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. 

Here's a piece on Stride about my 5 favourite songs to sing: it's not a poem, more of an annotated list: Five Favourite Songs I've Sung | Stride magazine

Whatever happened to the book Charms and Glitter?

Some of you may have seen advertised a book, Charms and Glitter, carrying photographs by Trev Eales and poems by myself. Let me explain what happened to it. 

I’ve known Trev since we met at a Thin Lizzy concert at UEA in October 1974. In the intervening years, Trev had taken up photography, specalising in images of concerts and festivals, and of the Cumbrian landscape. See: Lomogon Stories: Trev Eales · Lomography. And:  treveales photos on Flickr | Flickr . I talk about how we came to collaborate in recent years, here Pages: Trev Eales - photography and friendship (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and I outline some of our early plans (in a piece on my own relationship to photography, which is more extensive than I’d thought): Pages: Robert Sheppard: Talk for the Open Eye Gallery on Poetry and Photography December 2016 . In a weird prefiguration of the fate of the ‘Charms and Glitter’ project itself, I never actually delivered this ‘talk’; I was ill.

In the end, the ‘project’ resulted in a large lavish book, with 62 full page colour illustrations and 62 poems, also printed in a colour that derived from the photographs. This thing was to be sold at £50 hardback and £30 paperback. I joked to friends that if they didn’t have a coffee table, they’d have to acquire one before taking delivery of such a beauty. The publisher was pleased. The photographer was pleased. The poet was pleased. We communicated with The Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool about a possible launch for the book. Then the pandemic hit, engulfed the world (and, incidentally, engulfed the very world of music performance and spectacle that the book was trying to reflect and even celebrate).

This slowed things up. A handful of proof copies were produced for publisher, photographer and poet to approve. They approved. Then: meltdown. In July 2020, Trev discovered that, although he was the copyright holder, he was deemed to have licensed the rights to the photographs jointly to a festival organization and to the respective festivals he had attended, in exchange for a press card, although he had never signed a contract (which, in the circular logic of these things, was why he didn’t know of this arrangement); the non-signing (indeed, the non-offering) did not exonerate him from the effects of those transferred rights. This summary of the situation doesn't quite capture the piecemeal means by which we garnered this truth. All three of us realised that we could not proceed (and the gathering of rights from numerous festival organisations seemed too complex to contemplate). We are all still friends. No one made a mistake.

So, those of you who spotted an advert for the book have seen a phantom.

Of course, the poems exist (so do the photographs), but the book doesn’t. I looked again at the texts and I realised that many of the poems simply do not ‘work’ on their own (they were not designed to do so, and I didn’t want to see them in print without the photographs). But, me being me, I realised that there was a shorter set there, of revised, re-ordered, re-sequenced poems, and I have re-worked ‘Charms and Glitter’ into Sound on the Lip of Silence: from the photographs of Trev Eales. This consists of an introduction, ‘Driving the Spectacle’, which re-works some of the poems about performance generally (though they lose their identifications with particular performers), a main chunk, ‘The New Charm’, which identifies the artists, from Jack White to Debbie Harry, and a coda, called ‘Crowding it Out (for Trev)’, which is (now) a poem about Trev as the captor of these vanished spectral beasts. I have yet to publish any parts of this, as it still goes through the relentless revision-mill I reserve for my poems. Even today, in preparing this post, I restored ‘IAMDDB’ to this 20 pp sequence. Here are three poems that I’ve now removed, partly because they repeat points made already in the revised piece, but not because they only ‘work’ with their equivalent photographs. Let’s call these

Where Spots Funnel Beams

1 Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters


Mouth astonishment at
whatever descends through
the music from
the other side
of music silent
underbelly of delight

                 His hands
think a chord
only to turn it
inside out



2 Ray BLK


Her dreads flip
down her oil-swirl
jacket as she

cruciforms
a chorus into
icy air –

minute particulars
of joy squeeze
beneath her furrows

though her smile
is a mask

she is about to
burst through

                  drop
    of her shoulders
    would drop her
    into rhythm



3 Anne-Marie

Watch
her breath – sharp intakes,
ecstatic out-
takes – shaking the daisies.

Ignore
their chains, stay
with the breathing. Let it

become visible
without trying to place
the words. Vibrate

with her vocal chords,
follow the
contour of melody;

lift yourself into
song, and back again,
into invisible audition.

(Here's another poem. 'Wilko Johnson', which I added to these pages on the announcement of his death. This one survives into 'Sound on the Lip of Silence: Pages: I.m. Wilko Johnson (poem, video, thoughts) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com),

*

You may have noticed that this isn’t exactly ‘my’ music, but that was the appeal of the project actually. I’m not even a festival goer, like Trev, though we did both go to the aborted Hope and Glory Festival in the centre of Liverpool, he to work, me to regard the overcrowding with horror. (On reflection, this trip was another prefiguration of the fate of the project.) 

In a recent interview I decided to list ten artists I’d been listening to. Only one is included in the original ‘Charms and Glitter’ project. Can you guess which one? They are: Ellen Andrea Wang, Byron Wallen, Harish Raghavan, Immanuel Wilkins, Mary Halvorson, Kurt Elling, Scott Walker, Richard Thompson, Tori Freestone, and Rudresh Mahanthappa.

Robert Sheppard: The Broken Spine reading, Southport (set list)

I'm pleased to say that Patricia and I read at the launch of The Broken Spine, a new magazine of poetry and photography, edited by Paul Mullen (a former MA Creative Writing Student at Edge Hill) and Alan Parry, who I met for the first time. Both editors read, as did David Hanlon, David Welshe, Rob Edge (also ex-Edge Hill), Elisabeth Horan, Mary Earnshaw. There was music to end, from Paul, Micayl, Leonic Jakobi, and possibly others. I'm reconstructing the names from Twitter, where videos of most performances are posted (see @BrokenSpineArts on Twitter). Website: here.  

I have just realized the whole of my reading is on the Twitter feed, but here is the set list. Knowing there was going to be some music and knowing that Paul was interested in music (I saw his duo Little Wing about 10 years ago) I put together a little set about music. I'm unlikely to repeat this particular order. 

1.     ‘Round Midnight’, the first poem in History or Sleep, my selected poems, see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/12/stan-tracey-im.html

2.     ‘Prison Camp Violin, Riga’, from History or Sleep and Berlin Bursts and anthologized in the Carcanet anthology Smart Devices. The right analogy was to call it my 'hit single'. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/07/robert-sheppard-my-prison-camp-violin.html and here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/prison-camp-violin-riga-anthologised-in.html

3.     ‘The Hippest Man to Walk the Planet’, a poem about Ray Charles, from Liverpool (Hugs and) Kisses (with Robert Hampson). See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/01/robert-hampson-and-robert-sheppard.html

4.     ‘Beefore or Never’, the piece commissioned for the Captain Beefheart Weekend at the Bluecoat in 2017. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/11/robert-sheppard-reading-at-doped-in.html

5.     I then read two galleries from the Charms and Glitter project, music poems which accompany the poems of Trev Eales. See here: Pages: Whatever happened to the book Charms and Glitter? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

6.     I finished with one of the ‘Poems of National Independence’, part of British Standards, which was addressed to Trev Eales (and recalls our trip to see the Who in 1976) -https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/02/real-beginning-of-new-series-of.html

Patricia Farrell read from her Logic for Little Girls, which is also forthcoming from Knives Forks and Spoons.

[And now, 2022, the Broken Spine editors have asked for videos of the contributions to Issue One. I must have read this one. And here it is. It can also be found on the BS TikTok site, my debut on the platform!]

Robert Sheppard: thirty years since Twentieth Century Blues was begun, 20 since it ended, and future plans

A double anniversary: I began my long network of texts Twentieth Century Blues on 28^th December 1989 and I sort of ended it on 28^th December 1999, in that on that day I decided to stop extending the cumbersome strands and interconnections of the text – see some of the posts on this ‘network’ below – and resolved to write one last poem (an ‘Empty Diary’ for 2000 that I called ‘The Push Up Combat Bikini’). That’s what I did.

In December 1989 I wrote in my journal, after some poetics notes that appeared, spruced up, here :

… world events move fast, at least in Romania they do. Too fast to use in a poem, the situation changing hour by hour. An acceleration of history, certainly not its end… 

as would have been the current neo-liberal thinking. I also found a way of writing to keep up with ‘events’, with the poem I wrote the following day, on 28^th December, ‘Melting Borders’, which became the preface to Twentieth Century Blues.

Those buckets of blood there are the president’s property;

they reek of recent history, but have nothing to do

with what has become your fault; leakages

of household gas that punch too-distant disaster-holes

in the indifferent sky…

I write about the book that this project became here:

 https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/05/twentieth-century-blues-published-ten.html

And here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/07/robert-sheppard-twentieth-century-blues.html

One POETICS of Twentieth Century Blues may be read here .

Another, ‘Linking the Unlinkable’, is found  here.

I wrote about ending the network (or k(not)-net-work), on December 1999 (the last entry of a journal, as it happens):

Half an hour to go to end C20th Blues. Even a quick look through this journal shows the moments of crisis in its development, a moment in 1993 when I worried about inclusions and exclusions, and its great initial moment when I saw Europe (correctly) changing its political and cultural configuration and wondering about the influx of the culture. The Rothenberg/Joris, as I say in the piece itself, goes some way towards dealing with that. But what a different era, when I wrote of walking down the street and of sensing everything against you, the great Tory-Capitalist machine. Now, irony guides me more; Tony Blair wants to make GMT into Greenwich Election Time on the Internet. Thatcher changed human consciousness. He wants to control time. Time Lord.   

The Age of Irony was succeeding The Drowning Years, just as we have given way to Warrant Error (Era?) and then The Age of Immiseration (where we still are. In Bad Idea I think I’ve replaced irony with slapstick).

Twentieth Century Blues is written about by others (particularly Mark Scroggins) in The Robert Sheppard Companion: see here.

It seems appropriate to quote these diary entries that the time I am just finishing posting my 1969 diary daily: 50, 30 and 20 years all laid out! (Forty years was mentioned last month on this blog.) (See

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/12/introduction-to-letts-schoolboys-diary.html )

You may still buy the 2008 publication (all 300+ pages of it) Complete Twentieth Century Blues from SALT here:

https://www.saltpublishing.com/collections/author-sheppard-robert/products/complete-twentieth-century-blues-9781844715916

Or navigate their website to their Robert Sheppard page. It is a sort of ‘Collected Poems, Volume One’.

I like to think of today as ‘Twentieth Century Blues Day’, but I don’t expect others to remember it! But it is a day when I customarily ponder my poems (though that could be said of every day!). 

The second book of ‘The English Strain’ project, Bad Idea (which consists of ‘Bad Idea’ and ‘Idea’s Mirror’) is now complete (see here

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-bad-idea-and-reference-to-earlier.html

and here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html )

I have a couple of other projects to get on with (including a neglected batch of microfictions), and I hope to return to critical writing on a piece about collaboration (and I will also put some energy into posting about my own collaborations as a warm up). Indeed, following on from my EUOIA work, the collaborative work in Twitters for a Lark,

(see here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/11/robert-sheppard-with-others-twitters.html

and here:

https://euoia.weebly.com/ ),

I need to get round to its announced third part (announced by Zoe Skoulding at the start of her contribution to the Companion!). I’ve a few ideas relating to my involvement with Ern Malley events and fictional poets generally, and perhaps about the Isle of Man (possibly linked loosely to my Firminist involvement concerning Malc Lowry). But those ideas never seem to resolve into resolve, as it were.

As ever: more reading.