Sixteen Years of Blogging! (links to the best of the blog)

I’ve been blogging for 16 years! Today!

15 is undoubtedly a more significant number than 16 and, indeed, last year I selected some of the best posts of the previous 15 years, incorporating (via links, in what I call a ‘hub-post’) the extensive retrospective trawl I conducted on the 10^th anniversary of this ill-named activity. That hoard may be easily exhumed from last year’s ‘big 15’ post here:

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

I should like to select a few highlights from the last year, and a dreadful year it's been. Ten seems the right number. My practice of temporarily posting the latest poem from ‘The English Strain’ project (from the third book, British Standards, that I’ve been working on lately, and still am) makes the last year look quite sparse now, although the accumulating temporary posts do result in a few permanent posts pertaining to the section that has been completed, so it might be best to start with a couple of those. British Standards consists of ‘transpositions’ of Romantic sonnets, and in the last year this has resulted in:

 One: a detailed account of ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, interventions in the sonnet sequence ‘Sappho and Phaon’ by Mary Robinson, followed, and they may be read about (with a video; more about those later) here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-transpositions-of-mary-robinsons.html

 

Two: Overdubs of Keats! I had some trouble getting going; you can read about that struggle over the first poem of the sequence, here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-overdub-understudy-version-of-keats.html

 

Three: Bad Idea, book two of the ‘English Strain’ project, is now available and there is a post about this (along with many links to postings of poems from the book on internet sources, and videos, here: Pages: BAD IDEA (versions of Michael Drayton's Idea) available now from KFS (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Of course, the pandemic should be recorded here (it’s recorded or traced in the poems of British Standards, the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project, more fully). Four: I discovered, on buying a new laptop in December 2019, that I could make videos and, if short enough, they could be posted on this blog. This has become a regular part of my weekly ritual of writing a new ‘transposition’, BUT also when I look back at older poems, and write about them, I tend to read them quickly on video and post (often unseen). With no poetry readings at the moment, this seems apposite (though the practice started before the pandemic). So you may contrast my reading of virus (Spanish Flu) poem, ‘Empty Diary 1920’, written in 1993 or 4, with ‘Empty Diary 2020’, written in the year it relates to, about the contemporary virus:

Here  Pages: Robert Sheppard: Yes, like all the other poets, I have an old poem about a virus: Grippe Espagnole (from Empty Diaries)

and Five, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The last two Empty Diary poems are published on Stride

 

(that post gives you links to all the other ‘Empty Diary’ poems currently available online. Another sequence finished, incidentally.)

 Six: Although this ‘strand’ stretches past the temporal span of this selection, my multiple postings on the subject of ‘Collaboration’, which consisted of both explorations of my own efforts and drafts of a critical article on the subject, finished within this compass. The final post contains links to all 14 parts! See here: Pages: On Literary Collaboration part 14: some final thoughts and LINKS to all previous parts (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

I’ve had a fair amount of critical writings published during this year and I’ve posted about these. Theyt include:

Seven: An essay on Allen Fisher in his ‘Companion’ from Shearsman: here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Essay included in the NEW Allen Fisher Companion

Eight: My chapters ‘The British Poetry Revival’ and ‘Lee Harwood’ appear in the massive Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, read about it here: Pages: My two pieces (British Poetry Revival & Harwood) & editorial exhibit in CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH POETRY, 1960 – 2015 Edited by Görtschacher and Malcolm (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

Nine: Part criticism, part poetics, and in part featuring the poems themselves, I write about my opening sequence of ‘The English Strain’, ‘Petrarch 3’ (published as a Crater Press publication) in Translating Petrarch, here: Pages: Practice-Led piece on 'Petrarch 3' from The English Strain published in Translating Petrarch's Poetry (Legenda) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

Ten: My (yes, my) poems appeared in Philip Terry’s Penguin Book of Oulipo (a great thing to happen, even if I had to let my Belgian alter ego, if that’s what he is, Rene Van Valckenborch, take the strain!). Read about that here. (And tell me what you think Hannah Maes is showing her detectives on that blackboard! Answers not on a postcard: Pages: 'My' Quennets from A TRANSLATED MAN published in The Penguin Book of Oulipo (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

That’s enough to be inspecting! Thanks for reading everybody. Stay reading and watching. I shall be continuing to document the last parts of the third book of ‘The English Strain’ project, British Standards. Click onto the HOME button on the right and see what’s new.  

Robert Sheppard: My review of Adrian Clarke's Austerity Measures on Stride plus further notes, thoughts and links

My review of Adrian Clarke’s new book Austerity Measures is now up on Stride and I hope you will read it now. It is here.

On a personal note, this is the first piece of critical writing I’ve produced since finishing the grand slog of The Meaning of Form (see here for more on that volume of critical writing). That is, with the exception of the floating prose of Pulse, a sort of ‘treatise on metre’ that I am hoping will be published soon.

On another personal note, I have a poem dedicated to me in Adrian’s book and, by rights, I shouldn’t review the book, but I wanted to; I don’t know who else might and I regard Clarke as important (and somewhat neglected, though I don’t know why).  I simply ignored the poem in my account (though I like its references to 'C21 Blues'). I also ignored the poem dedicated to Patricia, which indeed is published on this blog here! Have a look: it gives an idea about how ‘austere’ Adrian's ‘measures’ are. There were plenty of other poems to deal with in their obdurately material insistence (along with their concomitant teasing indeterminacy)!

I have all of Adrian’s books on my desk at the moment and I’m surprised how many there are. Apart from the book reviewed, (see here) I’d check out the VEER website and look for Drastic Measures and Possession as starters. Or Excess Measures. If you don’t know the work. Here and here.

But there is one more example on Pages, from Adrian's 'Muzzle' here.

My earlier article on Adrian, ‘Colossal Fragments’ from Pages (as a print journal, 219-238, April 1994). Pages has been digitalised (see here) but I’ve also re-published that piece on this blog here. It was reprinted in my short critical volume Far Language here. But I also write about Clarke’s ‘creative linkage’ in The Poetry of Saying. See here.

But I haven’t written about his work recently (though there is a poetics piece dedicated to him in Berlin Bursts and I was surprised to find it still online in  the Singaporean magazine Softblow, here).

In the Stride review I wanted to present the work in its demanding delight without intervening critical discourse. (My one ‘reference’ to Guattari, whom I am currently re-reading, is heavily muted!)

So there are lots of places you can go to search out this work if you don’t know it, and plenty of books to buy (in addition to the new one). And there is one more link that will help you: I deal with Adrian’s poetics (in contrast to Pierre Joris’) here.

When I say in my review

Recently, I’ve read a lot of descriptions of rather mild excursions beyond the poetic normative as ‘experimental’, ‘innovative’, or ‘radical’, but very little measures up to Clarke’s excessive, austere, ghostly and (even) drastic measures…

I had a specific example in mind: a call for submissions for a magazine on Twitter that asked for collage work, cut-ups, surrealist writing, without irony! What we need, in Ranciere’s phrase, is something that will put the disruption back into montage! Adrian Clarke's work does that.

There is a second review, on Stride too, by Clark Allison, HERE.

Pages (first series) reissued entire with an interview on Jacket 2: Complete Index of all 5 series

This blog is called Pages because it was originally a blogzine continuation of the print magazine of that name. It still may be partly that, though it is more of a writer's or literary blog now (and is archived by the British Library as such).

Quick hits of the New British Poetry as they happened

I am pleased to say that the first series, which ran from 1988 to 1990, has been digitalised (by the energetic Manchester poet and critic Joey Francis) and is now available on Jacket 2 here. 

There is also a recent interview with me (again, conducted by Joey), where I talk about the project from the inside, though I stray into defining 'linguistically innovative poetry' and the experience of homelessness. Read that here.

Everything is linked from the Pages Reissues page. Click onto each individual 8 page issue. Thanks to Danny Snelson, the Master of Ceremonies at Jacket2.

When I started this blog I reprinted editorial matter from the second series of Pages and thought of this blog as the third series (see the links below).

But there's enough to keep most poetry-lovers quiet on the re-issue pages of Pages. Thanks to Scott Thurston for initiating this project, to Joey for doing the leg-work and the interviewing, and to Jacket 2 for seeing fit to make it available again, in all its (deliberate) lo-tech glory. 

The Poetry Foundation comments on the reissue, see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2018/07/jacket2-reissues-pages

Pages (first series) – index

1-8        Editorial; Allen Fisher; David Miller
9-16        Gilbert Adair; Gad Hollander
17-24        Ken Edwards; Andrew Lawson
25-32        John Seed; Adrian Clarke
33-40        Hanne Bramness; Michael Carlson
41-48        Sheila E. Murphy; Kelvin Corcoran; Harry Gilonis
49-56        ‘Beyond Revival’ editorial; Virginia Firnberg; David Chaloner
57-64        Rupert M Loydell; Lee Harwood; Robert Christian
65-72    ‘Theoretical Practice editorial; Responses: Adrian Clarke, Gilbert Adair, Andrew Lawson, Virginia Firnberg; Wayne Pratt (this is the issue where Adair coins the term 'linguistically innovative poetry'.
73-80    Stephen Oldfield; Valerie Pancucci
81-88    Alan Halsey; Peter Middleton
89-96    R G Hampson; Hazel Smith
97-104    Eviction Collage; Letter from Ken Edwards; Bob Cobbing; Chris Beckett
105-112    Richard Caddel; Catherine Walsh; Aiden Semmens
113-120    Patricia Farrell; Tom Raworth
121-128    Heywood Hadfield; Colin Simms
129-136    Sheppard, Letter to The Independent (which they published); Ralph Hawkins; Maggie O’Sullivan
137-144    James Keery; Peter Riley; Keith Jebb
145-152    Ian Davidson; John Wilkinson
153-160    Johan DeWitt; Michael Ayers
161-168    ‘Poor Fuckers’ editorial; Horst Bienek, trans. Harry Gilonis; Rod Mengham
169-176    Elaine Randell; Lawrence Upton
177-184    Ian Robinson; John Welch
185-192    Ulli Freer; Virginia Firnberg
193-200    Peter Ganick; Dennis Barone
201-208    Sheppard: review of Bob Perelman; Robert Creeley; John Muckle, review of Ian Davidson
209-216    Alex Alfred; David Barton
217-218    Floating Capital advert/apology for absence

Pages

resources for the linguistically innovative poetries

Series Two: April 1994-May 1998

Issues – full features by the named poet – short responses to the published work – extras – bibliographies of featured poets

Pages 219-238 Adrian Clarke

General editorial for the Series

Robert Sheppard

Out to Lunch (Ben Watson)

Pages 239-259 Ulli Freer

Scott Thurston

Patricia Farrell                                                                                              

Pages 260-279 Gilbert Adair

Allen Fisher

cris cheek

Pages 280-281 Eric Mottram

Special obit : Recording and Informing a Generation

Pages 282-300 Hazel Smith

Joy Wallace

Peter Manson

Pages 301-321 John Wilkinson

Drew Milne

NH Reeve

Pages 322-341 Cris Cheek

Peter Middleton

Pages 342-361 Peter Middleton

Gavin Selerie

Ira Lightman

Pages 362-380 Rod Mengham/Virginia Firnberg (no poems by either)

Critical Essays Issue

RS on Ulli Freer

John Wilkinson on Rod Mengham

Adrian Clarke on Virginia Firnberg

RS: ‘Linking the Unlinkable’ (poetics)

Pages 381-396 Ken Edwards

Kathleen Fraser

Robert Sheppard

Pages 397-420 Alan Halsey

Gavin Selerie

Tim Woods

Pages 421-445 Maggie O’Sullivan

Afterword to Pages, Second Series (re-posted at the end of post, here)

Lawrence Upton

*

Then, 2005, Pages became this blog. I attempted to carry on numbering the pages and frequently provided an index (for example here). These were superseded by the invention of links. But you see I was continuing to publish poets's works: Tony Trehy, Dee McMahon, Marianne Morris, Ian Davidson, for example.

Here is the editorial to Pages, Third Series. 

Afterword to Pages, Fourth Series, here. This is the 'end' of the Fourth Series: here. 

The Fifth Series of Pages was planned to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Group on October 21st 2009, and it did, here, but after that I began to treat this blog as a literary blog and I had long-ceased to attempt to carry on the numbering of the pages of Pages: it's not the digital way. I talk about the blog (as a blog) here in another interview that complements the new one with Joey Francis. 

Robert Sheppard: Twelve Years of Blogging

Yes, 12 years of blogging. 'New' technologies probably shouldn't acquire histories, but when I celebrated 10 years of blogging I decided to look back a bit, and I included this review with me about literary blogging. Read it here. This little block of raw links will take you to the posts I made trying to make lists of the best, my favourites, one for each year, the most neglected, etc... It's all quite fun:

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.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-plans-for-future.html

Certainly since then I've been blogging fairly furiously, but I have also started tweeting my content, and this has increased the number of hits. See www.twitter@microbius. There have been about 650 posts with 290,000 hits recorded (since 2010, when they began counting). Here are the most visited posts of all showing the number of hits (as of 2nd February 2017) with links:

Robert Sheppard on The Petrarch Boys: Peter Hughes... 20 Dec 2013	2220
Robert Sheppard: The Micropathology of the Sign Ho... 15 Sep 2014	1811
Robert Sheppard: Proposals by Allen Fisher 26 Nov 2013	1103
Robert Sheppard: Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat 29 Nov 2005	892
Robert Sheppard: All the Little Presses that Fly w... 24 Jan 2014	667
Robert Sheppard: A Guide to my new books and pamph... 21 Apr 2016	558
i.m. Dinesh Allirajah 10 Dec 2014	547
Clark Allison; Second online review of The Meaning... 8 Nov 2016	468
Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form Atkins' and H... 24 Sep 2016	402
Patricia Farrell: A BIG THANK YOU to contributors ... 18 Dec 2016	400

YET only 3 people have ever looked at this post here, one of Rene Van Valckenborch's 'twitterodes'!

Robert Sheppard: Blogging - 11 years of PAGES

I celebrated ten years of Pages with a series of posts outlining my favourite past posts, in various categories, whose links are shown below the picture of me trapped inside the blogosphere, flat against your screen (it would seem). Why not celebrate my eleven years of blogging by re-reading them? There's an interview with me too about Pages.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages.html

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.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-plans-for-future.html

The pre-history of the blog, as a print magazine, may be read here, on what was my first post (even though I moved it later):

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2005/02/editorial-to-third-series-robert.html

(It was also 20 years ago today that I was appointed at Edge Hill, though I took up the position on 1st April 1996. See here for celebrations of Creative Writing teaching at Edge Hill.)

Editorial to the third series: Robert Sheppard

Pages:

a blogzine of investigative, exploratory, avant-garde, innovative poetry and poetics edited by Robert Sheppard

I founded Pages in 1987 as a “quick hit of the New British poetry as it happens”, as Ken Edwards put it: 2 sheets of A4 folded to give 8 pages (numbered successively) of poetry, originally published monthly. During this time it published writers as well known as Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth, Bob Cobbing, Allen Fisher, David Miller, but also gave a showing to then lesser-known writers, such as James Keery, Rupert Loydell, Michael Ayres, and many more. The first series ended at Page 218.

In April 1994 the second series began: this time A4 (again with spartan production values). Each issue was to have focussed on a single author. Although it didn’t quite turn out like that (and it took a long time to complete its run, until May 1998, in fact) all twelve were featured, usually with text, an essay, and a commentary on the text by another: Adrian Clarke, Peter Middleton, Hazel Smith, cris cheek, Ken Edwards, John Wilkinson, Maggie 0’Sullivan, Virginia Firnberg, Alan Halsey, Ulli Freer, Gilbert Adair and Rod Mengham. They were picked as a group of established, but not much written about, writers. This series made sure that was no longer the case. The first series ended at Page 445.

This third series picks up on a long-standing small press tradition, that of utilising available technology and subverting it – if that isn’t putting it too dramatically -­­- to the needs to editing, and to work with its disadvantages and limitations: in this case, the blog format. Perhaps the fourth series might be a proper website, with graphics and audio links, and whatever the technology affords, but Pages has always been fairly spartan in its presentation, and I see this as a tradition. I will also continue the tradition of numbering each posting as though it were a page, as I did with Pages. The technology has outstripped my nomenclature, even the metaphorical use of ‘pages’ on the net.

Since 1998 when I reached the end of the second series I have been busy on a number of projects, completing and exceeding my creative endeavour Twentieth Century Blues, and also finishing a critical work called The Poetry of Saying, an account of British poetry since 1950, in which Pages has its small part to play, it's worth saying. I have also been submerged in the world of creative writing teaching. I feel the need to get back to being involved in the field of cultural production a bit more, and on my own terms. Thus Pages will be more intermittent, more personal, this series, although I hope to post something every month. I'm hoping to combine work by well-known and lesser known writers. I also hope its previous reputation will mean that a humble blog might be looked at by those interested in this area of work, though I doubt whether I’ll reach the splendid 250,000 hits that Ron Silliman has clocked up at Silliman's Blog. Do have a look if you haven't seen it; at http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com

Most of the contributions will be commissioned, but I will preserve the facility a blog offers for the posting of comments by readers.

Copyright of all works remains with the authors. This notice covers all subsequent postings on this site.

It seems appropriate to include the ‘Afterword’ that I wrote to the last series of Pages, if only to get myself back in the swing of ita all..

15th February 2005

Afterword to Pages, Second Series

Pages first appeared in July 1987 and has lived up to its simple name as a spartan magazine of exuberant work. The debates it has fostered have been taken up elsewhere and it has been a pleasure to be able to contribute to them. In particular, as I say above, the term "linguistically innovative poetry" spread, after having been coined by Gilbert Adair in the March 1988 issue of Pages, as a way of describing the kinds of poetry we then believed had been "operating since 1977" in "fragmentation and incoherence". The result had been a "public invisibility of the poetry" and "ditto of a theorising discourse" in Adair's words. The argument that all good poetry is linguistically innovative doesn't invalidate its particularity, but suggests that, like many such terms, its meaning is its use. Yet, as I said in the previous article, it has been used to speak of British Poetry Revival work as well as American language poetry in a way beyond Gilbert's use: a buzzword for a fuzzy set of poets outside his temporal and cultural determinants.

The conditions Adair identified as the post 1977 situation of the poetry - eg "decreasing publishing opportunities; wide gaps in continuations of public ... discussions; a one-way 'dialogue' with oppositions that largely expunge us, ... movement in a less visible, less real poetic community" - contrasts with Eric Mottram's celebratory survey of the earlier "British Poetry Revival 1960-1975", which catalogues reputations, achievements and opportunities. (See Hampson and Barry New British Poetries.) Yet this carries an appendix, dated 1978, which makes sorry reading: the story (again!) of the end of the Poetry Society Era. This was the "fragmented and incoherent" backdrop to the despair of the early 1980s, one matched by Allen Fisher's identification in his 1985 introduction to his Necessary Business essay of those wound-licking years as "a period of entrenchment and awe ... speaking in a considerably small room" (Spanner 25, p. 163).

The increasing willingness of poets since the mid 80s to operate theoretically, in terms of poetics and other theory, was a welcome change that seems not yet historical enough to assess. Magazines like Fragmente and Parataxis, and, earlier, Reality Studios, which lightened the dark years, promoted the "public discussion" of which Adair lamented the absence. The resurgence of poetry organising and publishing has been encouraging. (It is interesting to note that Wolfgang Gortschacher's Little Magazine Profiles broadly agrees with this chronology.)

Pages has had its place to play in this, and the second series, with its structured approach to 12 selected poets, proved an opportunity to explore empirically what "linguistically innovative" might mean. I had no idea it would take this long to reach the end of the process, and I would like to thank all the poets, critics, and readers who have made the whole thing possible. During this long time, conferences, discussions and publications have pushed arguments along. Possibly the very term "linguistically innovative" (which Adair never proffered as a Proper Noun anyway) has worn itself out. As I attempt to define it against the earlier British Poetry Revival work and American language poetry (see my "Negative Definitions" which appeared in Sulfur 42, 1998). I look with some hope to the day when it might be superseded, not necessarily by another cumbersome term, but with poetic work which will feel as fresh as the work Pages turned its attention to about a decade ago. There is evidence that this work is there, and it awaits its journals and publications. Reality Street's "Four Pack" series is showing the way.

Robert Sheppard 29 March 1998

Page 446

See the celebration ten years later of this blogzine's persistence, purpose and growth, beginning here.

2018: The first series of Pages has been digitalised: see here for access to that and an index of series two.