I RETIRED 3 YEARS AGO

 I’m going to go on about this again. Here are two posts on my retirement, three years ago. The first includes my ‘rap’ at leaving, a text I performed at my leaving ‘do’ (a good way to get out of the ‘speech! speech!’ trap), which looks back over the previous 20 or so years: 

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/09/robert-sheppard-my-leaving-rap-for-my.html

The second is an account of my gadding about town with Patricia on my first day of freedom, a freedom that seems all the more poignant following lockdown and the easing out of lockdown that we are still living through. It would be freedom indeed to walk down Bold Street now (which I haven’t visited since March):  

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/09/is-that-lump-sum-in-your-pocket-or-are.html

On the second anniversary I wrote of how I’d returned to Edge Hill for Roy Bayfield’s ‘do’ and took part in a little reading for him

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/09/retirement-mine-and-roy-bayfields-remix.html

with my ‘Portslade/Southwick Remix’ from Words Out Of Time which in the end I didn’t read (but I talk about that text and the ‘Sussex’ poems that I did).

Sticking with that text, my ‘autrebiography’, there are links to the ‘Words Out Of Time’ update, where I brought the final poem ‘Work’ (which is deliberately incomplete in the published book) up to the end of my ‘work’ period, to the eve of my ‘retirement’, here.

Words Out Of Time may be read about here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/05/robert-sheppard-words-out-of-time.html

Here are thoughts after only a year:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on-year-after.html

Indeed, there I decide that I am not ‘retired’ at all, but a ‘full time writer’. Lockdown and the virus have taught me that my desire to simply stay at home and read and write has been delivered to me in the luxury extra long play edition. Only: can we move on now? please! Joking aside, I think I’ve been able to deal with it better than if I’d been still at work. I can’t imagine how I would have functioned as a teacher via Zoom; I’ve only used it to talk to Scott Thurston and with my colleagues at Bangor University, where I am still external examiner, my now one remaining ‘professional’ commitment, since my brilliant PhD students Adam Hampton and Joanne Ashcroft have completed. Of course, I’ve been writing a lot under these conditions. ‘Poems of National Independence: liberties with Wordsworth’ hit the lockdown head-on, their theme moderating from Brexit into Virus, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html

‘14 Standards’ were written out of sequence, appropriately, during the timelessness and emptiness of lockdown. I have written two additional ‘Double Standards’ about the Cum’s disgraceful lockdown infringements and his elitist refusal of apology and regret, the single event that has led to breakdown in trust in the government (as if Brexit hadn’t done that). See here for all 16 standards! http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html . And now ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ is complete, and I have moved onto Keats. See surrounding temporary posts early September 2020 for the end of one and the false starts and tentative beginnings of the next.

I have been blogging temporarily about these writings but not about others: in terms of this blog, there are more hidden writings than displayed (and that hidden includes poetry, fiction, poetics and criticism). The (con)temporary nature of ‘the English Strain’ project is important to me, hence the immediate and temporary blogging. Indeed, I am glad to report that the first two parts are to be published soon, as two books. (There are readable posts on Book One here and another on Book Two, here . They also contain links to published excerpts from the work, and some of my practical poetics.)

Retirement: Mine and Roy Bayfield's: Remix of Words Out of Time (set list)

Two years ago I retired. You can look back at my account of my ‘first day of freedom’, AND at my retirement ‘do’ rap. and my thoughts after a year, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on-year-after.html

This year it was the turn of Roy Bayfield, (and of Ailsa Cox earlier in  the summer) who is also a member of the Poetry and Poetics Research Group, and whose poems I selected for my guest editorship of Stride (see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-guest-editing-of-stride-magazine.html

This is the cover of the booklet of imaginary events put together for Roy's leaving do, in the style of the Edge Hill Arts Centre publicity!

I was invited by Cathy Butterworth to read something at his 'do' and I thought I’d read this introduction and then this re-mix from my book Words Out of Time. In the event it was too long so I read something else. But here it is:

Roy’s book Desire Paths: Real Walks to Nonreal Places (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2016) is a glorious exploration of – as it says on the tin – Nonreal Places. More on that book Here. 

Roy like me, is a South Coast poet: he comes from Portslade in East Sussex and I come from the next town along, Southwick in West Sussex.  I think it would take about 20 minutes to walk from the house where I grew up to the house where he grew up. In one paragraph he quotes me and explains the Southwick/Portslade dichotomy:

‘I don’t remember seeing Portslade on the radar screen…’ wrote Robert Sheppard in his chapbook The Given – a moment forgotten by the writer but remembered in a journal entry from an earlier decade. Robert was raised in Southwick, the town next to Portslade, and such dismissal is perhaps to be expected from the rival place, across the border in West Sussex. Admittedly, Portslade may not be on many people’s radars, at least not consciously so. (Bayfield 2016: 25)

He explains further:

As a child, the border between East and West Sussex, Portslade and Southwick, running at the back of our garden, defined by a footpath and a row of electricity pylons, seemed like such a line. Merely by virtue of being on the other side of the line, Southwick seemed slightly uncanny. (28)

I’d like to offer a special ‘Portslade/Southwick Remix’ of my text that Roy refers to, The Given, for Roy, and to wish him many psychogeographical explorations of uncanny nonplaces, wherever he may find them:

Portslade/Southwick Remix

I don’t remember going to the Grenada in Portland Road, Hove, don’t recall the film on show, and don’t remember, on the same day, seeing a play, or its plot, or its title. A frame set up, years later, by others. Coal dust on the doorframe, where the hood catches it. A dozen or so knapped flints pushed into the earth: a Roman road straight across the horses’ field, the wheat, the ridge of the Downs. Nazis machine-gun the cheese crates and screaming POWs leap up to their deaths. The pebbly beach beneath the Brighton B power station will do. An aluminium bowl of wasted food before which feeding is practised with moral intensity. I don’t remember the thunderstorm I watched from my window, lightning flashes over Southwick, flickering, striking ground. After the toad in the witness box, real policemen arrive to investigate stolen buttons, the wrecked foreign car. I don’t remember trying to buy This is Blues and finding the record sleeve contained only cardboard. I don’t remember tracking Radio 260 through the streets of Southwick, the ‘common’ English of the DJs, the warning that they’d cut up rough if we found them. The desire to write is the desire to write. I don’t remember reading The Day of the Triffids. I don’t remember watching colour TV. I don’t remember seeing Portslade on the radar screen, don’t remember the visit to HMS Collingwood. I don’t remember being shot at by somebody from a van. I remember the Ruby wine at the Romans, the way the barman would loll his tongue from the side of his mouth as he poured the soupy chemical liquid into Tony’s bottles. I don’t remember Doll and Arthur’s caravan at Selsey. I don’t remember getting a harmonica with Green Shield stamps. I don’t remember David’s bottled fish. I don’t remember Emerson Lake and Palmer playing a tribute to Hendrix at the Dome. I don’t remember seeing a band called Vomit. I don’t remember playing my tape of The Waste Land to an empty room. I don’t remember when poems became a currency. I don’t remember a girl called Annie flashing on Toby’s houseboat. I don’t remember writing a poem about Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop. I don’t remember the night that was not particularly memorable. I don’t remember the Scottish woman who helped me at Metal Box in Fishersgate. I don’t remember sitting in Southwick Rest Garden to read Wilfred Owen. I don’t remember dancing with a girl with a big nose whose brother was a surrealist. I don’t remember that I bought Bomb Culture the day I saw Country Joe and The Fish. I don’t remember Tony arriving at 15 Oakapple Road, Southwick, with a letter from Henri Chopin. I don’t remember the German sailor dead drunk on the steps of the Crown and Anchor. I don’t remember the clever-dick who wanted to know why the Newhaven-Dieppe crossings were more expensive than the Dover-Calais ones. I don’t remember seeing the Doctors of Madness again, not getting it the second time, that blue-haired zeitgeister Kid Strange. I don’t remember reading Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat in the swelter of ’76. I don’t remember Flatfoot at The Alhambra. I don’t remember the disco to celebrate Franco’s death. I don’t remember laughing at the statue of the past Mayor of Brighton. I don’t remember jumbling the verses of ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’, our first gig at the Burrell Arms in Shoreham. I don’t remember climbing Chanctonbury Ring, the moon rising, ensanguined, over charmed hills…

Remix July 2019: for Roy

This is not the first remix from Words Out of Time on this blog. I did a special remix as part of the eulogy to my mother (see here) and a presented continuation of the final part ‘Work’ to the day of my retirement, here. More on that here. Read my account of writing The Given, the part used for Roy’s remix here.  There are even some outtakes here, stretches of 'When' that didn't make the final edit, here. It is an extraordinary flexible text to form and re-form.

Words Out of Time is still in print and may be read about and purchased here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/05/robert-sheppard-words-out-of-time.html

So what did I read for Roy?

Well. I decided to play with his notion of Southwick being ‘uncanny’, and I more or less said what I’d already written as intro to the remix above, and then read one of the Charlotte Smith Sussex 'Brexit' sonnets or overdubs, ‘Composed during a walk on the Downs’. It may be read here, along with other poems from the sequence: It’s the second poem down: http://www.blazevox.org/BX%20Covers/BXspring19/Robert%20Sheppard%20-%20Spring19.pdf

It also seems appropriate to mention this poem because what did I do 50 years ago, according to my 1969 diary which I am blogging each day: 'In afternoon, went over Downs for a walk.'

I write about my sonnets generally here, and here and see here and here for more on my Petrarch obsession,which set this thing off. 

Robert Sheppard: Roy Bayfield’s new book Desire Paths: Real Walks to Nonreal Places

Edge Hill colleague Roy Bayfield’s new book Desire Paths: Real Walks to Nonreal Places (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2016) is a glorious exploration of Nonreal Places. As the publishers say: 'Among the book’s many characters and diversions are Wetherspoons, Capt. Picard, the Navy Cut sailor, the buried ‘Spirit of Brighton’, Wendy Craig, Harrods, Buddhism’s Six Realms of Desire, ‘Things to Do...’ tourist brochures, Argleton redux, the abyss, strip-lynchets, punk residues, Milton Keynes, multiple identities and an inkling of what the future may hold for thoughtful walkers.' - See more here and here.

 He has had a little influence on my EUOIA project of nonreal poets in that his discovery of Argleton (see here) fed into my borrowing his Argleton University as a place for the Frislandic poet Hróbjartur Ríkeyjarson af Dvala to work for a while (Frisland, like Argleton, turned up on maps in the past) and in the name of the nonreal Edge Hill student Jason Argleton. (For the EUIOA, see here).

Roy comes from Portslade (in Sussex on the South Coast). In one bit he quotes me and explains the Southwick/Portslade conflict thus:

‘I don’t remember seeing Portslade on the radar screen…’ wrote Robert Sheppard in his chapbook The Given – a moment forgotten by the writer but remembered in a journal entry from an earlier decade. Robert was raised in Southwick, the town next to Portslade, and such dismissal is perhaps to be expected from the rival place, across the border in West Sussex. Admittedly, Portslade may not be on many people’s radars, at least not consciously so. (Bayfield 2016: 25)

Later after explaining that the face on John Player’s cigarettes was a man from Portslade (so what! we in Southwick say, John Cowper Powys lived here; actually they don’t, nobody cares!) he explains further:

As a child, the border between East and West Sussex, Portslade and Southwick, running at the back of our garden, defined by a footpath and a row of electricity pylons, seemed like such a line. Merely by virtue of being on the other side of the line, Southwick seemed slightly uncanny. (28)

Perhaps I could write, ‘As a child I remembered that the East seemed like East Germany because it meant stepping back into an older generation by visiting grandparents as we crossed the border in the bus.’ But I like the idea of Southwick being uncanny. I do my best: here's the full passage Roy quotes from:

I don’t remember seeing Portslade on the radar screen, don’t remember the visit to HMS Collingwood. Inside the cupboard there are scribbled weather-charts. I don’t remember writing a list of stories I’d written. I don’t remember being shot at by somebody from a van. I don’t remember the good programme about Lenin on the radio. I don’t remember debating nuclear warfare in English. I don’t remember Kathy getting too close for comfort. I don’t remember the day Frank Sinatra retired. I remember the Ruby wine at the Romans, the way the barman would loll his tongue from the side of his mouth as he poured the soupy chemical liquid into Tony’s bottles. I don’t remember Doll and Arthur’s caravan at Selsey. I don’t remember witnessing Hitler’s last will and testament. I don’t remember arguing about Fats Waller. I don’t remember trying to define a book. I don’t remember writing a history of the avant-garde. I don’t remember recording Son House off the radio. I don’t remember thinking the prints of Blake ugly when I saw them at the British Museum. I don’t remember when I started writing poetry. I don’t remember getting a harmonica with Green Shield stamps. Or sea and sand with nothing familiar, perhaps a tent of evangelists.           

            I don’t remember David’s bottled fish.... 

The Given is reprinted and only available as part of my autrebiography Words Out of Time: see here and here. Read my account of writing The Given here.

Where I write about space, place and ambulation is in my prose piece, 'In Adopted Space' in Unfinish. Details here. Its first review from Steve Waling here. 

Here's Roy's response