Robert Sheppard: Petrarch 3 published a year ago

My Petrarch 3 was published a year ago today! It's still available too!
 

Petrarch 3 is Crater 36: buy here. Scroll down and find the publiscation.

The Complete Petrarchs of our time and poetics are splendid, but what happens if you dig down and realise version after version of just one sonnet (Petrarch’s third in this case), stuttering in repetition, re-staging it for voice and situation, from a Scouse dog at Christmas (see below) to Jimmy Savile beyond the grave; a twittersonnet or a lengthy semantic poetry translation; a French Symbolist version or a Middle English sonnet? This.

These poems came about writing a chapter on Peter Hughes’ and Tim Atkins’ Petrarch collecteds.See here (and read my notes on the Petrarch variations by Peter Hughes and Tim Atkins here, ).

Read the 'original' translation (if you see what I mean) and the doggie version here.

There’s even one in the style of Wayne Pratt here.

And you can watch me read some of my 'Petrarch' variations during a reading here.

BUT you’ll still need to buy the new unfolding/folding 'pamphlet' to access the additional delights of the BDSM Petrarch (see below), the mysterious 1401 sonnet (before Wyatt!), a semantic poetry translation in the style of Stefan Themerson, a twittersonnet, ‘Empty Diary 1327’, Jimmy Savile’s last love poem, a sonnet for a Babestation Babe, not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4 French Symboliste versions, and even a National Poetry Day poem. Versioning gone mad.

At the point I wrote these I guess I had no idea I'd move onto Milton, Wyatt, and Surrey; (see three of the 'Wyatts' here.

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue20/RobertSheppardBM20.html

takes you to what came next:  Hap:Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch (though the first, introductory, poem ‘Perhaps a Mishap’ is not a version of Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch).

Since it's been Charlotte Smith, the great Sussex miserablist sonneteer (see here).

The next step is possibly (since I've transitioned gender, textually speaking) EEB... 

Read the only review by Alan Baker here. And a response to the response (and a link to the response itself) of Martin Palmer here.

 

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to start this 'thing'

I have a post with some links about my sonnet writing here

I write about the completed 100 sonnets of The English Strain here. 

 

My 'English Strain' sonnets Hap:Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch is now published;

see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/10/robert-sheppard-hap-understudies-of.html
and is available from Knives Forks and Spoons here:

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/hap-understudies-of-thomas-wyatt-s-petrarch-by-robert-sheppard-26-pages

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/new-titles

Taking only the sonnets Wyatt ‘translated’ from Petrarch, but adding a few of my own, I’ve merged the historical Wyatt with his hysterical contemporary analogue, a reluctant civil servant of a corrupt administration.

Ten Years of Pages: One Post a Year

This is the Museum of Musical Instruments in Brussels where Veryon Weston performed on the Lutheal piano with Jennifer Cobbing and where Van Valckenborch claims, despite not having existed, to have witnessed the same (see 2014 choice number two below).

Here are posts (one a year) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Pages. Each is a little something I've missed so far in my last two retrospective posts:

2015 so far: It was great to 'rediscover' the two Looking North poems from 1987, which Patricia and I published as a Ship of Fools booklet at the time, with her paintings. (The text was written using the same photographs of Hackney, where we lived, that Patricia used to make the images). It was a shame that one of the two had to go from History or Sleep, my selected poems. Here's the de-selected poem:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/robert-sheppard-looking-north-1-re.html

2014: This year I virtually lived (ho, ho) on my blog, thinking through the implications of poetic form for a critical work, but I particularly like this post about writing about poetry and jazz (there's a lot here about an abandoned critical work on the strange and manifold relationships between poetry and jazz):

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/robert-sheppard-challenge-of-writing.html

Since it was a bumper year I'm going to pick a second, related post, on Veryan Weston, Patricia Farrell and Jennifer (Pike) Cobbing: oh, and the Weston-Cobbing show that the fictional poet Rene Van Valckenborch witnessed and wrote about! See image above.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/veryan-weston-patricia-farrell-jennifer.html


2013: It was good to exhibit (or re-exhibit) some of the prints Pete Clarke made using some poems and (increasingly) in collaboration with myself. Here's some from the Edge Hill exhibition:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/manifest-pete-clarke-and-robert-sheppard.html

2012: Pages from 'Poet' presents an abandoned conceptual piece (or was it a satire on such?), then called 'Poet' and later called 'Plunderhead', after a character I have now moved to another work (where he becomes a very naughty boy), 'Wiped Weblogs', my 'Empty Diaries 2001-14' sequence. I like the photos. I've no idea why they are so huge but I like the fact you can read all the titles of the books (some named in the text itself) and also the array of images above my desk (at the time of the photographs, a January evidenced by the Kylie Calendar). I must alos have been assembling the books to write my critical book on form. The books are still there.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/from-poet-work-in-regress.html

2011: A year dominated by my innovative sonnet posts, but this one about my trip to, and reading at, Amsterdam is a favourite, for its photos (memories) of reading with Richard Parker, Louis Armand, Jeff Hilson and Jane Lewty.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/amsterdam.html

2010: Another lean year, with a squeezing in of the Rene Van Valckenborch 'twitterodes' at the end of the year one a day (I don't think I knew how to 'schedule' them then, so I must have literally posted one a day.) Here's one of my favourite photographs of Brussels (which I couldn't find for my other re-posts of these) with its twitterode. I'm picking it because only one person has ever looked at it, according to the useful 'stats' that the blog acquired at some point around 2010, in fact.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/twitterode-16.html


2009: These selected posts haven't acknowledged my role as a Firminist, that is: as a member of the dedicated band of mostly Merseyside-based enthusiasts for the works of Malcolm Lowry. This acknowledges the first of our now annual meetings (with photos and links) which we hold around the Day of the Dead, although we have plans for 2015, bigger plans for 2016, but our biggest plans yet are for 2017, the anniversary of both Lowry's death in 1957 and the publication of Under the Volcano a decade before. My piece 'Malcolm Lowry's land', appears in the book published in 2009 (and it is now a footnote to Words Out of Time, whose proofs I am currently reading for publication by Knives, Forks and Spoons).

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/malcolm-lowry-from-mersey-to-world.html

2008: This year was (for the sake of a focussed set of guest posts) a lean one so there are only a few to choose from. However, the one by Tom Jenks is a good read. I didn't really know Tom then. Certainly I couldn't have foreseen I would be lucky enough to be co-supervising his PhD, nor that we would together be building the Luxembourgish poet Georg Bleinstein together and exchanging sausage gags. (Remember Tom: it's never too early in the day for a sausage!). Here it is.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/tom-jenks.html

2007: Not a bumper year, but this forgotten post surprised me. I called it a 'response to the Partly Writing 2006,' but added: 'I don't think, [ it] ever saw the light of day. I had wanted to include it as part of my inaugural, but cut it, and then recently I sent it to Susan Schultz for her collection of Rumsfeldisms. So here it is, crossing with a poetics of September 12.' It worries away at questions of 'borrowing' and 'transformation', issues that resurface in a more advanced way when I consider conceptual writing. I'd forgotten all about this post until now. So's everybody else.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/robert-sheppard-partly-writing-2006.html

2006: The launch of Hymns to the God in which My Typewriter Believes

Scott Thurston and I read above the Fly in the Loaf. Peter Griffiths took wonderful photographs (and he still does) and I offer an account of this Liverpool event. It's an early 'set list' post, in effect.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/robert-sheppard-hymns-to-god-in-which.html

2005: Jeff Hilson's Bird Bird http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2005/09/jeff-hilson-from-bird-bird.html

One of our best poets here with a substantial showing and a photo from the Poetry Buzz (Lawrence Upton and Rob Holloway are also visible in the photo.)

Other posts celebrating a decade of blogging are:


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-ten-posts-nothing-or.html

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

Robert Sheppard: My Work in News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries ed. Richard Parker

Richard Parker's News from Afar: Ezra Pound and Some Contemporary British Poetries is out!

 

“‘…the full shock of what a fascist s.o.b. Pound is caught up with me’—thus Charles Olson after one of his several encounters with Ezra Pound at St Elizabeths Hospital. Olson’s “shock” has continued to reverberate in the work of many British poets as they have sought to weigh the dazzling innovative force of Pound’s poetry against the rash brutality of his politics. This has been a difficult and contradictory legacy, but one which, as this fascinating collection of texts so amply demonstrates, has also proved a spur to some of Britain’s best experimental writers in ways that we are only now beginning to appreciate.” —Peter Nicholls

 More details and purchase details here.

Contributors include Harry Gilonis, Robert Hampson, Gavin Selerie, Keston Sutherland, Amy Evans, Mark Scroggins, Laura Kilbride, Juha Virtanen, David Vishnar, Tim Atkins.

I decided to respond to the Richard's request for a contribution to this book by having a go at versions and un-versions of Chinese poems by Li-Shang Yin that make use of the anonymous translations and the visual configuration of the Chinese characters, lineation and punctuation in the parallel text Three Hundred Poems of the T’ang Dynasty, possibly published in Hong Kong, which I bought in a charity shop. Further background and translations by A.C. Graham were consulted in eds. Cyril Birch and Dennis Keene, Anthology of Chinese Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. I wanted to testify to the continuing, but dispersed, presence of Poundian poetics in the broad understanding of contemporary ‘translation’ and spatial (rather than temporal) prosodies. Here is one of the poems from my contribution, 'The Li-Shang Yin Suite':

 

no name

Phoenix    tail    motif    hangs    on    scented    drapes

Around    your    greenblue    canopy    stitched    into    night.

Sly    peep    round    slice    of    moon    fan  –

Shy    voice    shushed    my    thunderous    retreat.    Now

Quiet    your    room    where    the    candle    droops.

How    far    can    your    pomegranate    blossom    scatter ?

I    tether    my    horse    to    river    willow

&   await    your    word    on    the    wind.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Fourteen of 14: 'Ending, with strong pressure towards epigram or witticism'

(Top: Scott Thurston and me at Hay; below: Anthony Mellors and me at Hay; photos: Anthony and Scott)

I have argued that the chief influences upon the contemporary innovative sonnet include the examples of Berrigan and Raworth, the radical conceptualism of Oulipo with its use of tailored ‘constraints’, and the postmodernist release of the form from the repression of modernism. I may be confused in this, having identified these also as influences on my own sequence. But there can be no doubt that there is another influence, post 2008, and that is The Reality Street Book itself. Hilson’s sequence was co-terminous with its production, indeed mentions it. Other sequences, possibly Monk’s, were written as the event of the anthology appeared on the horizon. Terry’s sequence missed the boat, having come to Hilson’s attention after Ken Edwards declared the hold full. Many sonnets (sequences or singles) have appeared after; Anthony Mellors’ The Gordon Brown Sonnets (2009), for example, continues the political edge found in so many of these sequences; Milton is the god of the innovative sonnet, not Shakespeare.

A mere flick through the anthology reveals visual sonnets, ghost sonnets where the shape of the sonnet is played with, along with others that expose the frame of the form, as outlined in part twelve of this lecture. There are prose sonnets, fairly conventionally lineated sonnets, Chinese sonnets and non-sonnets, some in sequences, many not, many more than I have time to deal with today. Anybody embarking on a sonnet today has the benefit of the anthology as a textbook of form(s). There are dangers in this, of imitation and derivation, rather than influence and deviation, of mere production, of ever-thinning effect and affect (or affectlessness), but these have been dangers throughout literary history of the prominence of any form. The same could have been said of Tottel’s Miscellany in 1560 which gave the world the exemplars Wyatt and Surrey.

I’m not bold enough to call time on the innovative sonnet, to declare that we have reached our 1610 – imagine declaring the whole show over in 1608, what a difference a year makes! – but I wonder what forms will emerge next. I think Hilson is right in seeing the attraction of the sonnet as a refinement of the draw to the sequentiality ingrained in British innovative practice, and the sonnet-sequence-like frame can be felt in many non-sonnet sequences, Scott Thurston’s Momentum (2008), for example, where the repeated stanza is quite different, but whose formal repetition facilitates variation and contrast as a formal constituent that becomes a kind of content in a way I have been arguing throughout these postings. (His Internal Rhyme (2010) has the same feel, though with poems that are more open in terms of reading, horizontally and vertically.) But no other traditional form (however torqued) furnishes the opportunity for this kind of innovation; the innovative sestina, for example, feels like a rolled out carpet, not a ‘little room’ that offers resistance to the impulse to unlimited expansion, a pliant, plastic pre-determined frame, through which the life of form may be lived convincingly, to make for us, forms of life. To make it re-new.

To quote Hilson’s formal articulation and dis-articulation: ‘I (line-break) fucking love you sonnets.’

****************************************************************************

Notes: As can be seen from the above, I wondered about trying to call a halt to the sonnet as an innovative form, but new ones keep coming. See the K. Silem Mohammed pieces in the Dworkin-Goldsmith anthology. Or here. Or get a peek at nine of the stunning stunted sonnets of Richard Parker at Intercapillary Space (which I heard read in Amsterdam; see posting for May 24th 2011). Since musing earlier on my own next creative moves, my contrafacts on Milton’s sonnets seem plausible and I also surprised myself by writing a half-pint sonnet, in the middle of a Quennet as a 7X7 syllabic structure. The Quennet (which I should have mentioned before now) is the sonnet-like structure invented by Raymond Queneau and used also by Philip Terry, Queneau’s translator, and by Rene Van Valckenborch, my creature.

Just a few thoughts on the Hay Poetry Jamboree itself. It was a celebratory occasion – and mine was the only excursion into critical prose and pose – and there was much good company in Scott and Anthony (as can be seen above), the organisers Lyndon Davies and John Goodby, participants Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Carrie Etter, John Freeman, Paul A.Green, Carol Watts, Zoe Skoulding, Maggie O’Sullivan, Ralph Hawkins (who had much to say about Berrigan) and Allen Fisher (who worried away at the formal designation ‘sonnet’), and audience members Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey, and many others, Steve, for example, who managed the electronics. Thanks to all.

For links to further posts on The Meaning of Form click here.

My 'Petrarch 3' is now in print, see here and here.

Note 2021. I couldn't have realised that my sonnet-mania would result in the three volume project 'The English Strain', which grew out of 'Petrarch 3' sequence, mentioned above. Read about Book One, The English Strain here and about Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’, it’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html

Book Three is called British Standards, and that is described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html

Amsterdam

I’m just back from a reading (and conference) in Amsterdam on Thursday 19th May at the ABC Treehouse in Voetboogstraat.

Part of the ‘Poetry and the Unpoetic Conference at the University of Amsterdam, I read with Jeff Hilson (reading from In the Assarts, his stunning collection), Jane Lewty (reading unpublished work including a great sequence about the Hilsborough Disaster), Louis Armand (reading from his new collection Letters from Ausland, which I enjoyed greatly), and Richard Parker reading a shuffled pile of new sonnets, which was excellent).

(Pictures above: Amsterdam, me impersonating a picture of myself on Jacket magazine (photo: Peter Barry, incidentally, the cause of my Jacket appearance!), Richard, Louis, Jane and Jeff.


I read both from Warrant Error and from Berlin Bursts (the latter I’m launching at a Shearsman reading soon), including this sonnet from the former:



for Patricia

The young couples in the crushed Amsterdam bar
dance to Barry White in the old-fashioned way

Later, aloft on Belgian beer, I murmur that I
love you, but then slip away, like the dancers,
into the night, knocking over bicycles chained
to bollards, and singing; into my reverie so far
in which we sit again drinking under the wooden ape

Almost human it grins at us both with more teeth
than the accordion it fumbles. This is all times
becoming a new time which is a now time
becoming all, a swoon through cracks in the paving

where vanished children crouch over hidden play.
Next day, a narrow canal house lips at its reflection;
we stand in front of it to stand for ourselves



Louis was alos carrying VLAK 2 / MAY 2011

edited by Louis Armand, Edmund Berrigan, Carol Watts, Ali Alizadeh, Stephan Delbos,
Jane Lewty, David Vichnar

ISSN 1804-512X
PRAGUE / NEW YORK / LONDON / MELBOURNE / PARIS / AMSTERDAM
http://www.vlakmagazine.com/

424 pages of new writing & visual art,


VLAK 2 is available from the Litteraria Pragensia Books website at:
http://litteraria.ff.cuni.cz/index.php?a=journals&j=1


(It includes a sequence by my fictional poet Rene Van Valckenborch as well as work by Louis and Jane).