Eighteen Years of Blogging today!

Blogging is more than a publicity exercise for me. Although this blog started out as the extension of an earlier magazine, it is an instrument for thinking (and writing, as I explain below in relation to the sonnets I have now finished). It is even therapeutic in some strange way: I lose myself in the process and within the labyrinthine linkages it makes. (It took me a long time to realise this aspect matched the strands and links of my Twentieth Century Blues project. (See Pages: Twentieth Century Blues published ten years ago! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)) It is, clearly, a mode of publishing (which reflects its beginning as a blogzine). 

This year has been an odd one, not least of all for having radiotherapy in the summer and on-going hormone treatment for prostate cancer (get it checked, old lads out there, that's the most serious message of this post, believe me. I've never had a symptom. And here's the most important link today: Prostate Cancer UK | Prostate Cancer UK ). It hasn’t made much difference to my blogging (though I timed my annual summer break for those 20 radiotherapy sessions at the wonderful Clatterbridge in Aintree). 

I’m going to select 10 ‘areas’ with links for this year (but there's really 11!):

 1 The great work of the year was the co-editing of New Collected Poems by Lee Harwood. Here’s one post, about the launch, with a link to other links (there’s lots about Lee on the blog!)   Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems launched and on sale now (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

2 It was great to participate in the Cliff Yates @ 70 tribute and I write about that (and have links to the tribute, for which I wrote the introduction and submitted a specially-written poem) here: Pages: Cliff Yates at 70 : my parts in this celebration of his poetry and poetics (links to it) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). Andy and Alan did him proud - as we all should. 

 3 Good also to be asked by Lyndon Davies to provide poem and essay to the John James/Chris Torrance issue of Junction Box, here: Pages: The John James/Chris Torrance issue of Junction Box - plus my poem for, essay on, James (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I wrote for and about James, but I did have a fruitful suggestion for the Torrance part (that is, to reprint an interview with Torrance I read waiting for one of those radiotherapy appointments). 

 4 It’s grim to announce the deaths of friends (whether they are artists are not). But we lost two extremely creative friends in the last year and they are remembered here:

Philip Jeck: Pages: Philip Jeck 2022 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Alan Halsey: Pages: I.M. Alan Halsey: some thoughts, links, and a poem dedicated to him. (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 5 I continued publishing excerpts from British Standards (my transpositions of romantic sonnets) in magazines over this year and I provide links to them, BUT I also include on this blog short videos of those poems too. So here is a piece on transposing Wordsworth, which is also a homage to the brilliant work Phil Davenport is doing with homeless people using Wordsworth’s poems in a parallel way to me. (No, I am using them in a parallel way to him.) See: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Wordsworth’s Sonnets Transposed for the 21st Century appears on Zwiebelfish!

6 Keats got a similar treatment, and here are four posts, with videos, of work that appeared from the 14 sonnets I’ve tackled (or mangled, depending on your view of the project):

 Pages: Two more sonnets from British Standards (from Keats) in Tears in the Fence 75 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: A version of a Keats sonnet published on STRIDE today (links and video and context) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: Four more Keats' overdubs published online in LITTER (and videos here) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: THREE new sonnets from British Standards (overdubs of John Keats) appear in Shearsman 131 and 132 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 You’ll notice on the video I wear my Keats (life mask) with pride.

 7 John Clare got the same treatment in British Standards and here are the two posts about the publication of some of the resultant poems (again with videos): here:

Pages: My transposition of a sonnet by John Clare, from British Standards, is published on Beir Bua (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Four new versions of John Clare published in Talking About Strawberries (plus videos and links)

 

Here's my accidental 'poem-film', or is it 'film-poem' of one of those Clare transpositions.

These sonnets were all temporarily posted on this blog so blogging became part of the process of their becoming. (And, therefore, as I say above, of me.)

8 Talking of performing or reading, I did a reading (and would love to do more, if there are any organisers left after Covid!) at MMU’s English Futures conference in July 2022. Here’s my set list: Pages: My reading at the English Futures Saturday 9th July 2022 (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). It’s more of the Wordsworth transformations. I read a whole block to make absolutely clear what I was doing. 

9 I wrote about Fictional Poets (looking back at the two volumes I published of such work), beginning with a post here: Pages: Reflections on Fictional Poetry and Fictional Poets (1 and hubpost for the sequence) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and with links to the rest. I was also thinking through (even writing) a third part. I am quietly announcing here for the first time that a cleaned-up version of these posts will form parts of a book called Doubly Stolen Fire which will be published later this year.

10 Even before the eighteenth year of blogging began I was posting posts about having FINISHED the ‘English Strain’ project with its serial ‘final’ poems. It didn’t turn out that easy: these posts quite amusingly trace the process of closure, as I debate HOW and WHEN to end it. The final post here even contemplates starting it all up again, but decides against it (it is also the least consulted post of the four). Since the whole project was published and discussed on the blog (unlike other projects you won’t know about from reading these pages) it seems appropriate to cluster them together. I think they make interesting reading:

 Pages: Another 'final' poem of the English Strain sonnet project: looking eastwards and to the Ukraine (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Goodbye to Bo through the Medium of Jake Thackray’s masterpiece (not a book review) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Robert Sheppard: A final final poem for British Standards!

Pages: The Horrible Thought that Bo mioght be back: only The Bard could save me now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I’m saying goodbye to the sequence but I’m also saying goodbye to Bo (and to the sonnet: I’ll never return to the form! (He sez.))

One other thing (this isn’t point 11, believe me): I’ve also started this last year adding a set of addresses to every post (if I remember to do it!) That’s to make sure people can contact me. The other way of putting this is: don’t use my edgehill email address! I can’t access it. So:  

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Do follow me on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

The little block of four raw links below will take you to the posts I made after merely 10 years of blogging, trying to make lists of 1, the best posts, 2, my favourite posts (one for each year), 3, the most neglected posts, and, 4, my blogging plans for the (then) future. It was all quite fun, quite a lot of work, and is still interesting (even informative) to look at now. 

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-best-bits.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-one-post-year.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-ten-posts-nothing-or.htmlhttp://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-plans-for-future.html

 My annual accounts of blogging all link (up). In fact, they are a sort of guide to that year’s ‘best’ posts (though it’s only in my estimate). Here’s 14, 15,16 and 17 years…

Pages: Robert Sheppard: My 14 years of blogging

Pages: Fifteen Years of Blogging (A hubpost to all the hubposts and other goodies) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Sixteen Years of Blogging! (links to the best of the blog) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Seventeen Years of Blogging. A look back and the best of the last year (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

The pre-history of this blog, as a print magazine, may be read here, on what was my first post (even though I moved it later). I also outlined the complete run of the second series of Pages before it became a blogzine, and finally this blog. However, the first run of the print magazine is now online, at Jacket2 where it is hosted here. 

The John James/Chris Torrance issue of Junction Box - plus my poem for, essay on, James

John James was – is – one of my favourite poets, but you might not know it, from my published work, particularly as a critic. As a reviewer, I once hoisted the banner by ending a review of one of his minimal 1990s volumes with the words, ‘A Collected John James please!’, which was quoted years later by Simon Perril, introducing the Salt Companion to John James, when – indeed – there was a Collected Poems (published by Salt themselves), to which the contributors could make happy reference. This is latterly supplemented by Sarments, a new and selected poems from Shearsman.  

In my Berlin Bursts there is a poem ‘As Yet Untitled Poem’, that is dedicated to (is a homage to) John James, written on the day he was up Edge Hill talking to our students (the night before he’d read in the Rose Theatre, one of the many readings I organized at Edge Hill. 

JJ at Edge Hill, Collected Poems aloft

The more recent Edge Hill connection was through the anthology of poetry and poetics that James Byrne and I edited in my last year as a full time wage-slave, Atlantic Drift. We also asked him to read for us at the launch in the London Review of Books shop in January 2018. There’s a report here, and a video of most of one of one of his poems (with the missing words provided as text), shot by poet Jennie Byrne (see her work in some editions of Tears in the Fence): Pages: John James reading 'Baudelaire at Cebazan' (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

 

However, within weeks John was no longer with us, as I posted at the time, along with the text (and video) of ‘As Yet Untitled Poem’:  

 https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/05/im-john-james-and-my-poem-as-yet.html

Now we have to thank Lyndon Davies for producing an edition of Junction Box with a feature on the work of James, and I have to thank him for including my work.

 I particularly have to thank him, because I have two contributions to this feature, a new poem-sequence ‘Swift Songs for John James,’ and an essay ‘John James and Poetics: ‘A Theory of Poetry’. Thanks Lyndon.

Here is a reading of 'Late Advance to Bonheur', the first part (or poem) of the sequence on video. You will hear that I allude to that last meeting with John, and our walk along Museum Street, and to the anthology, and its student-interns:

the Atlantic Drift scrum

spiders ahead to leave us

pacing behind…

 

The remainder of the text may be read here: Robert Sheppard: ‘Swift Songs’ and Essay on James’ ‘A Theory of Poetry’ – Glasfryn Project

My essay also alludes to that last meeting, or rather, to the occasion of using John’s poem ‘A Theory of Poetry’, as the poet’s poetics in this anthology of poetry and poetics, a tricky move as the essay explores. As I say, ‘This was an inevitable choice for our anthology of poetry and poetics, since James was not given to statements of poetics, in the sense I have defined it in a number of places,’ but I’d forgotten about it, until I’d submitted the poem to Lyndon. I then revised it (only to find it had been revised before!), top and tailed it, and presented it in its final (I hope) form. (It could have been part of my critical volume When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry. http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2011/02/two-new-books.html.)

‘John James and Poetics: ‘A Theory of Poetry’ may be read here. I hope I have dealt with one of the most idiosyncratic, teasing, examples of poetics that I could find. HERE: Robert Sheppard: ‘Swift Songs’ and Essay on James’ ‘A Theory of Poetry’ – Glasfryn Project OR Microsoft Word - John James and Theory.docx (glasfrynproject.org.uk)

Do explore this special issue in total. Here is the editorial: Editorial to Issue 17: The John James / Chris Torrance Special – Glasfryn Project

Note Andrew Taylor talks about finding an uncollected poem by James, and Simon Smith provides another.

This is also an issue i.m. Chris Torrance, another Welsh poet, by adoption, who I had been reading an interview with, while waiting to have radiotherapy, and it occurred to me that the one with Peter Hodgkiss hadn’t been seen since the 1970s. I suggested it to Lyndon, and it’s good to see it here, with a few introductory words from Peter. HERE: Peter Hodgkiss: Interview with Chris Torrance for Poetry Information 1977 – Glasfryn Project

(I’ve also incidentally been re-reading William Rowe’s Three Lyric Poets, that also has a good chapter on Torrance’s work.) I only met Chris Torrance once, and that was at a reading by John James, so this issue of Junction Box seems ‘just right’ for me! 

 My last appearance in Junction Box was for the ‘Dante’ issue: see here: Pages: A poem about Dante published in Junction Box (links) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). But there were previous appearances too, which is gratifying. It’s a fine project; it’s more than a magazine, as you’ll discover if you roam through the site.

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

i.m. John James (and my poem 'As Yet Untitled Poem' for John James)

Sad to hear of the death of John James. We last saw him on this blog at the launch of Atlantic Drift in London in January, see here. He wasn't in the best of health then. Here's me watching him read.

But I also want to remember him at his reading at Edge Hill in 2005, as he is in this photograph, holding his Collected Poems aloft, and as he is addressed in this poem I wrote after he'd left the house with Patricia to talk to the students the morning after the reading. (It appears in Berlin Bursts.) He is an astonishing poet. I'm glad I taught his work to students, and I'm glad he's in Atlantic Drift. 


A certain kind of elegance has gone out of the world.  

As Yet Untitled Poem

for John James

I beg you to hear this boy. And hear him out.

His morning poem you’re in, now,

is neatly creased as a crisp new shirt, stiff-

backed and clipped on its cardboard torso, posed.

It trips you over the cat from the film you’ve never

seen, as you search for your spectacles.

I use my enormous brain to seek the signals

they emit. We are both The Prisoner

on this island, Crusoes of overlapping surveillance.

Sleep is where we’ve come from, captive, a misty place                            

of drizzled desire and mordant fear. The fog has

lifted, real enough, for the expedition that must

set off for the explanation. Your house-

guest, a sort of vapour that

an opening door dispels, coughs his soft pardons.

Serious poetry is back in town:

the Unfinished Alba of the Unknown

Troubadour, whose vida is word for word. The

beloved of this lyric is the hero of that epic, where

sometimes I did seek, I beg you now to flee this boy.

2005

Watch him reading 'Baudelaire at Cebazan' at the LRB here.

Atlantic Drift launch in London: 5th February 2018 (some photos and a few comments)

Event / Atlantic Drift: Andrea Brady, Sophie Collins and John James

You can see some other photographs AND some short videoes, HERE

@ the LRB Bookshop, Central London 5 February 2018

This turned out to be a splendid event with 3 fine readings, some good conversation, a chance to buy the book: here are some photos from the evening...

Andrea Brady taking a trans-Atlantic turn with some excellent new poems

John James reading both from the anthology and from beyond. He did read the teasing 'A Theory of Poetry' (it's anything but) in response to my introduction on poetics as a speculative writerly discourse...

Sophie Collins reading from the anthology and from new book, published this week, Who Is Mary Sue?

John James reading, me watching, Pete Clarke's cover design on the Edge Hill banners!

Atlantic Drift (Arc/Edge Hill University Press) is a new anthology featuring 24 poets from Britain, Ireland, the USA and Canada. It seeks to highlight both new and established writers from both sides of the Atlantic and in between, defining and redefining the various ...By developing a dialogue between English-speaking traditions, Atlantic Drift includes some of the most exceptional poetry and poetics written in the 21st century.

But also visit this page HERE for the various posts I've made concerning the book, its editing, including videos and photos. Or, outside London, follow this link to Arc’s website to buy, here.

Robert Sheppard: Inaugural Lecture PART 4; Poems

Parts one and two and three (the last three days' posts) should be read before this final part

Poems [1]

don’t normally wear a suit       don’t normally wear a tie       not at a reading      (laughter)       not when I’m reading poems       that’s all      All poems        (single catcall from audience at disrobing)     I knew you’d say something       All poems stage their meanings at a critical remove from their occasions, sources, influences and poetics. Sometimes poems subvert such complex and lucid notions as ‘complexity’ and ‘lucidity’, to produce poems that are anything but complex and lucid in an attempt to re-define      those things       In any case, poems … run ahead of the conjectures we make      the conjectures run ahead of the poems at different times     I’m going to read     I’m going to turn this into a brief poetry reading       partly because I believe that the poetry reading is one of the provisional institutions of linguistically innovative poetry or whatever you want to call it       and one of the functions of it is to flog books       I thought I’d do that       I have some books here       and there’s one thing free       and also there’s something else that’s common with  poetry readings       that’s a      that’s a trip to the hostelry afterwards       I know there’s a bun-fight immediately after this       but there could be an after after       I think I will simply delegate the Buck I’ th’Vine as a possible       venue       so here are five poems       they’re all metapoems       they do what I was talking about       this is what I wrote for the Alan Halsey reading here as part of the series Ailsa (Cox) and I run from the writing department       I decided to do a kind of introduction for him       I kind of see this as you know when you go home and you find three answerphone messages from the same person      it also rhymes and       I tell students ‘rhyme is a crime’       but they never quite get the irony of me saying that       so I’ve got the maximum number of rhymes

The Hello Poem

for Alan Halsey

Hello poem, it’s me again. I’m

the voice that lives upstairs. You

hear me reeling across my floor,

your ceiling, as I dance about my

affairs. And you about yours, not

miming my sound, un-

rhyming your eyes as they rise,

faltering, toward me, from the ground.

                                    *

Hello poem, it’s me again, the

other side of your world,

speaking long distance

straight

around your curve, racing

like a tycoon’s jet

to overtake the dawn

and possess tomorrow.

                                    *

Hello poem, it’s me again. You

ran away with yourself to

stage your new self’s forming. I am

the silence that inhabits your zero.

this is a poem called

Another Poem

The scribe of the poem knows nothing

but he embodies every word you hold.

He’s not an original. He’s a solid

conduit, form rather than wave or

particle. He’s left-handed, and his block

fist covers every word once it’s formed.

The eyes he turns to us

in his mirror

            look away.

Careful not to smudge, he crouches low,

reversing the verse, furrowing his plough.

The poem tells of flowers and trees,

naming names you recognise from other

poems, but you could never make them out

in the wild. Did he say ‘Wild’? No,

he didn’t, as it happens. Neither did

the poem. You’re making it up. You think

it should be you alone and the words

agreeing to differ. But you watch his fist

pounding the lines: Snouts nuzzling the moon

grass or Gifting broken gusts. The poem

has barely recovered from his scratches, yet

you’re making to scribble links in its margins,

calming and charmless. Will you then tear

his calligraphy back, peel it off to leave

the wounded poem yours, a dripping pelt?

He fashions the final words. Waves of feeling rush

towards this hooded moment. His dream is to be power-

less as the endless poem.

                                                Then he

inscribes, in mirror-script: The scribe of this poem

knows it all

this is called ‘Not Another Poem’     partly because it’s in prose       and partly (laughs)        through exasperation       this actually       I made allusion to an essay I wrote on the avant-garde       this is also part of that       what I was attempting to do was  to write something that was neither poetry or prose nor a critical article but it’s a response to that book but I’m not sure you need to know that book

Not Another Poem

after Krzysztof Ziarek

Often I am permitted to return to a field. And it is full of forces

Something is happening here, saying whatever, but saying all the same. But not. The same there’s nothing to exchange. No need to

Forces don’t build in power. Or domination. A thoughtful, forceful relinquishing

Inside this field you are safe but not safe. All that is the world is not. The world. A bullet flies as the idea of a bullet (flies) but its trajectory is turned. To words like ‘sleet’ turning to ‘snow’. To slow. It is a bullet that stands. In relation to every new thing

Everything here is transformed, every thing (out there) interrupted. A snow-bullet  frozen mid-air becomes off-centre of a new constellation from where we see it transfigured our selves. What we think of it is the new thing

There’s more of it. And more and more of it in a different way there’s nothing. We can do with what we find here. It’s not stock. This is where. I want to make some thing. Something elsed, but disavowed – disallowed, even – in this

A carafe, That Is a blue guitar. Beyonding art

I don’t want to only make relations. I make. The gangly girl in black-framed glasses in my making. I make her trip back from her car to number 99 in her strappy party shoes to root out the Christmas present she has forgotten. Then I will make the thoughts she has as she returns

Outside of her there is domination. House numbers telephone wires. Humming with Power. Not poetry and the antinomies. Satellite navigation. Data shadow. Inside. They share the world is not escaped, but elsed

Empower me to be. So unpowered. In my relinquishment by distance not elevation to keep the saying unsaid. To speak against is to speak. Let me do it I need to do it but let me speak something elsed. From somewhere else. Of something

I have made something. For you. Now you are someone else

another poem which relates to a reading       this time I didn’t write it as an introduction       I wrote it the next day       when John James came here to read       he has the poem with the line ‘I beg you to free this boy’ and I introduced him with the words ‘I beg you to hear this boy’       so I took this up the next day whilst he was busily working with the second year students here I wrote the poem for him

As Yet Untitled Poem

for John James

I beg you to hear this boy. And hear him out.

His morning poem you’re in, now,

is neatly creased as a crisp new shirt, stiff-

backed and clipped on its cardboard torso, posed.

It trips you over the cat from the film you’ve never

seen, as you search for your spectacles.

I use my enormous brain to seek the signals

they emit. We are both The Prisoner

on this island, Crusoes of overlapping surveillance.

Sleep is where we’ve come from, a misty place                           

of drizzled desire and mordant fear. The fog has

lifted, real enough, for the expedition that must

set off for the explanation. Your house-

guest, a sort of vapour that

an opening door dispels, coughs his soft pardons.

Serious poetry is back in town:

the Unfinished Alba of the Unknown

Troubadour, whose vida is word for word. The

beloved of this lyric is the hero of that epic, where

sometimes I did seek, I beg you now to flee this boy.

and my final one       this final one comes from this sequence of metapoems       but it also belongs in the ‘September 12’       poem as well       I need to retreat behind here for the use of my hands[2]     it’s short

Reading ‘The Poem…’.

The poem sends itself from anywhere

to your little box there it replays it

over and over. No redial no recall.

Dead ears drop in your lap. Pause.

No reply possible, skip onto Message Two:

I can see the twin cathedrals twisting below.

I should keep this thing switched off it affects

the instruments it doesn’t matter now terror

has been hijacked by artifice. Commas cower

along Hope St as we torque above them

out of control spluttering towards the radio tower

full stop. That was your fake captain speaking

through me printing fear backwards through his script.

You receive my wild meaning in his spliced last words

thank you     (applause)       thank you

---

[1] I have attempted to transcribe the verbal introductions to these poems (in italics), which includes me reading and abandoning  prepared text (in ordinary type) before the lecture transforms into a poetry reading. I have borrowed a number of transcription conventions from the ‘talk poems’ of David Antin.

[2] I cupped my hands to make my voice more like an intercom as I read the italicised lines, and needed to rest my text on the lectern I had read the lecture from. During the poetry reading, after having removed my jacket and tie, I moved out into the audience, swaying and moving as I read, as is my custom, advancing some way up the aisle dividing the audience. So at the end of the performance I was back in the position I started from.