The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Eight of 14: My Own Sonnets

(Image: that's me at Hay reading Philip Terry's sonnets as part of the lecture. Geraldine Monk's book folded on the desk before me. Photo: John Goodby)

POETICS. My first sonnet was an Oulipo offshoot, though I didn’t know it at the time, 1978. ‘Pataphysical Sonnet’ was formed from the examples of the combinatory ‘Thousand Billion Sonnets’ of Queneau and the ‘irrational sonnets’ (using pi to determine stanza shape and rhyme) of Jacques Bens both of which I found in the New Writing from France Penguin anthology.

G – The Pataphysical Sonnet
Returns to the bedroom, out of his head,
Out of tunes fragments come rocking his bed
Between order and chaos, freedom and …?
Ever, I see my order’s rule in the edge
Riff between sound and silence. Out of hand
The moon in June security has led
So boot if at all to the point of dead
Hope for happiness. Beyond the land
Every sea must ordain its religions in the edge.
Priscilla leaps from bed and surveys her life
Plus belle qu’une poubelle (just) in a cold sweat.
A certain kind of order, edge-of-knife,
provokes her (13 is unlucky) strife.
DADA was here, but I have no regret.

in Dedicated to you but you weren’t listening (London: Writers Forum, 1979)

The first few words of each line were drawn from the titles of music by The Soft Machine, to which it paid homage. The poem uses the rhyme scheme of one of the Bens poems and I worked out that my name furnished an acrostic in reversed 6+8, a device I used (without the accidental clinamen I adopted here) in Twentieth Century Blues, when I returned to the sonnet over a decade later. Meanwhile, I’d enjoyed teaching the form, particularly where coherent but variable units formed parts of a more or less coherent but differentiated whole or extension, and slowly this formal intelligence permeated the poetics of sequences I was writing.

Most recently my poetics journal articulates this in terms of the tension between two modes of organisation:

The isolate poem as the construction of a centrifugal engine, pulling itself together to centre its energies in nodes of impacted attention, supported by a vocabulary of completion wholeness closure structure shape. The danger of saying or doing only one thing…

Or the centripetal: a sense of continuation dispersal openness unfinish

processual structure with evolving forms or even entropic systems…WORD. I’ve also felt drawn to creating my own structures for sonnets, and I’m proud of having invented the 100 word sonnet in Twentieth Century Blues. Actually, I didn’t invent it; it came from a serendipitous misreading of an Adrian Clarke sonnet with a two word title and 14 lines of 7 words. Adrian hadn’t noticed that that added up to 100 but I wrote a number, eschewing punctuation and using a centre margin (a form that seems to drive the long lines to vertical completion).

LINE. By the time I began Warrant Error, which appears in the Hilson anthology, I had abandoned word count and devised a 2/3/4/5 sonnet stanza, a form which offered 24 combinations. I have since found that Andrew Crozier used the form in the 1980s (?) . Warrant Error was influenced by Berrigan (I thought of modelling them on his and calling them ‘The Poems’, a title used by Berrigan within the poems). But I’d also written on Raworth’s sonnets by then (and on Allen Fisher’s Apocalyptic Sonnets from the 1970s), Adrian was writing his own Skeleton Sonnets and Ken Edwards was publishing parts of his 8+6. Something was in the air. Believing with Rosmarie Waldrop that ‘collage is the splice of life’, I found the ‘little rooms’ of my shifting stanza forms ideal for forming works from the mass of material I was collecting (by 2003 various takes on the War on Terror, human unfinish and other subjects!). As ever with collage, the formal action and the pre-determined shapes meant a lot of the poems gathered their content through formal working. I wrote 100 poems in all, in 4 sets of 24, with 4 extras. I’ll present some in a later posting.

CHARACTER. My Belgian alter-ego Rene Van Valckenborch, more modish and technologically advanced than I, has used Twitter to write his Twitterodes, but the first (or is it the last) is a (Petrarchan) ‘twittersonnet’: 14 lines of 10 characters instead of syllables. (They are here on Pages, November and December 2010; click on those dates to the right.)

SYLLABLE. I have an unused form, adapted from Pierre Alferi’s sequence OXO: 7 lines of 7 syllables, though I call it the half pint sonnet (perhaps in deference to these straightened times). Place a proportional Petrarchan break after line 4, add a one syllable title to bring the count to 50 (which suggests a sequence of 50 of them). I haven’t used this form yet, and there’s another question nagging at me: isn’t it time to stop writing all these sonnets? I’m a great believer in Miles Davis’ advice: ‘End your solo before you’re done’, that is, before every bitter drop has been squeezed from the (arguably) desiccated form. While there’s still life in it.


(NOTES: The title of this posting is meant to allude to Jeff Nuttall’s journal: ‘My Own Mag’, by the way, but the resonance is muted. These last two heading-paragraphs were written for the Hay on Wye lecture but weren’t used due to time constraints. I feel it very unlikely that I will write the syllabic half-pint sonnets now, but I have a notion to do one (last?) sonnet sequence, perhaps based on Milton’s 24 sonnets and perhaps called ‘Bad Sonnets for Bad People’, or that’s what I’m telling myself in my poetics journal today. I am also revising this lecture into a strictly literary-critical chapter for a monograph on Form (ennobled by the capital); that too is feeding into a stirring desire to write a completely different kind of (non-)sequence. I’m also reading the anthology Against Expression, the anthology of conceptual writing, edited by Craid Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, which contains one brilliant tour de force using anagrams from Shakespeare: K. Silem Mohammad’s ‘Sonnagrams’.

I was also reminded in reading the anthology of Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter’s Issue 1 of 2008. It's very large (warning: it’s a pdf of over 7000 pages but the link I tried to insert here doesn't work, but I found it through ubuweb), and it contains a poem by me, ‘Small-scale lives and low alarms’; well, it has my name under it but a nice computer program called Erica wrote it. I sought it out again and have plans to ‘do something with it’. I’ve alphabeticalised it for a start. It looks like this now:


- , , ? ? ? a a A a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a b b b B b b b b b c c C c c c c d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d dd e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e ee e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e f f f f g g g g g h H h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h i i i i i I i i i i i i i i i i i i j k k l l l l l l l ll l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l m m M m m m m m m m n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o p p p P r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s S S s S s s s s S S s s s s t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t T t t t t t t T t t t t t t u u u u u u u u u v v v w w w w w w x x y y y y y y y z zMaybe that doesn’t quite do it justice. But worst of all I noticed that this poem (it’s at p. 35) is actually a kind of sonnet; it has 14 marginalised lines.

The ‘Pataphysical Sonnet’ above was only alluded to (dismissively) at Hay on Wye, but I thought to recover it here to see what it looked like. It seems relevant now to all the projects I have been looking at and describing here.

OK. Back to the lecture: In the next four sections (my daily postings), I’m going to be looking at the four contemporary British sequences as promised in the last posting, asking questions about how the frame of the sonnet is used to facilitate aesthetic encounter, how the poems individually and in sequence take form and make form.)

2018: There is a later post about my sonnet writing here.And about my published Petrarch 3 here. See three of my 'Wyatts' here. And 

 

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

takes you to excerpts from a later project, 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), which is part of a larger 100 poem sequence The English Strain.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Seven of 14

Fourteen British innovative sonnet sequences written in the 21st century and featured in excerpt in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets presented chronologically:

1. Giles Goodland A Spy in the House of Years (2001): a conceptual documentary project formed by 14 (acknowledged) quotations from each year of the twentieth century.

2. Adrian Clarke Skeleton Sonnets (2002/2006): structured by word count and/or phrasal clusters avoiding syntactic cohesion, these collages require readerly forming, exhibit suspicion of the many classic sonnets alluded to.

3. Ken Edwards Eight + Six (2003): formal variety is the rule, restlessly working through political and aesthetic concerns but obsessively dealing with the ‘I’ that appears almost concurrently with the sonnet form.

4. Ian Davidson Harsh (2003): ‘the harshness intentional’, abutted in long lined relentless found material sonnets, often angry with political and social realities.

5. Tony Lopez Assembly Point D (2004): a conceptual sequence using found materials, prodigal with its (unacknowledged) sources like Berrigan, deliberately affectless and cool like Raworth.

6. Carol Watts brass, running (2006): focussed on the year 1391, using Chaucer as intertext, these sonnets, richly sutured, form a woman’s life from fragments.

7. Robert Hampson Reworked Disasters or: Next checking out the Chapmans’ Goya (2008?): riffing on Keats’ sonnet on Chapman’s Homer, each poem is addressed to an artist, and alludes to the Chapman Brothers’ violent art work and relating that to repressive state apparatuses.

8. Keith Jebb tonnes (2008) – the title an anagram of ‘sonnet’ – balances political statement (‘tony is a fascist’) with formal play ‘[this line is missing]’, where the latter defamiliarises the former.

9. Richard Makin Rift Designs (2008): balances a diaristic impulse (the narrating I) with a textual dispersion that owes something to Raworth.

10. Tim Atkins Petrarch (2008): an ongoing project to ‘translate’ all of Petrarch’s work using seven different techniques. Funny and poignant, conceptual and cool, I predict this work, produced as a practice-led PhD, is going to be important.

11. Chris McCabe The Transmidland Liverpool to London Express (2008): a lively sequence tracing the contrasts between McCabe’s two cities (and mine).

12. Sophie Robinson geometries (2008);

13. Geraldine Monk Ghost & Other Sonnets (2009);

14. Jeff Hilson In the Assarts (2010): see later postings (each will be discussed in detail).


(Note: Remember this lists sequences, and so many fine sonneteers get left out. Also there are more than 14 sequences in the anthology and here are more left out of the lecture: Johan de Wit: Palm Stories (2008), Kelvin Corcoran sequences in Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (with Alan Halsey) (2001), Harry Gilonis North Hills (2008) and Piers Hugill From II Canzoniere: A Songbook 1 (2009?).)

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Six of 14: Fleet Negotiations

Tom Raworth’s sonnets 'Eternal Sections' (all 153 of them, one fewer than Shakespeare’s) owe to Berrigan’s, though the tone of excess and the use of repetition across the sequence is eschewed in favour of affectlessness. They use one of Berrigan’s techniques exclusively: the ‘juggling’ of separate lines as in the Joe Brainard collage homage, but they often seem to use only one source each; they are similar through formal means not through content. I’ve written about these 14 liners a number of times, including in my book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry.

Here is a ‘sonnet’ of extracts:

1. Raworth has made a poem, not attempted to reconstruct an experience.

2. He rearranged the lines in such a way that few traces of the ‘context’ remain.

3. A recognizable semantic field, but its syntactical connections are unclear.

4. Not by its statement, but through its technique, the collision and conflict of creative linkage.

5. As Raworth transforms his materials, he sabotages intentionality.

6. If they are ‘sonnets’ they exhibit a volta in nearly every line.

7.

even though the jazz feeling
the collaborative aspects
make a significant statement
until we’re all happy
the artificial sound of tape
from one block to another
edits real fast
individual moments
layering and moulding
approaches to their instruments
where he could burn
wandering across
type time dimension
keys, tempos, etc.

8. Raworth’s fleet negotiation of material, which almost by-passes the reader’s ability to process it, exposes the saidness of the text to an openness of performance, a saying.

9. The difficulty of this poem is precisely troublesome, and is more troublesome the more precise our attempted readings become.

10. To know that they are fragments does not lessen the will to coherence and cohesion.

11. An orchestration of interruptions, a percussive and hinged punctuation of themselves. They are empty and full.

12. The poems cohere more by a reading of their formal means than by attempting to chart the semantics.

13. They turn content to form, and turn form into the content that is read.

‘Fourteen

was the length I’ve been happy with for a while,’ says Raworth.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Five of 14: The Code of the West De-coded

One of the pleasures of Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets is that we read them as form. Part of this comes from the fact that the major, but not the sole, technique – collage – is foregrounded and becomes the formal theme of our reading. They are ‘built rather than written’ Ron Padgett says, quoting Berrigan; he used glue. One sonnet is a complete re-arrangement of another line by line. In poetry, repetition usually provides thematic emphasis although (in choral and anaphoric instances) it can provide musicality and structural form. But in Berrigan’s Sonnets, ‘Dear Marge, hello. It is 5.15 a.m.’ is pleasurably encountered four times; it is one of the instances where form is made from meanings. But we also encounter variations entangled with other variations. ‘Dear Chris, hello. It is 5.15 a. m./ I rage in a blue shirt at a brown desk' is just one appearance of stark colours attached to various objects across the 88 poems. Later we read ‘my dream a crumpled horn/my dream DEAR CHRIS, hello. It is 5:15 a.m./The academy of my dreams is opening its doors’; this last sentence is a repeated (mis-)quotation from Ashbery. (73) ‘My dream DEAR CHRIS hello. It is 3:17 a.m. ‘(74), leads to the valedictory ventriloquism of Prospero’s renunciation in ‘A Final Sonnet’ (for Chris):

I’ll break
My staff bury it certain fathoms in the earth
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
It is 5:15 a.m. Dear Chris, hello.

(The spacing is inaccurate in this posting.)

We track these phrases “‘taking form”, “forming”, “loosing form” in Derek Attridge’s words, and finally making form. But the wildness of collage is undertaken in the ‘little room’ of the sonnet to concentrated effect. The very repetition of the sonnet sequence contains the repetitions and variations we find within each poem and we experience the traditional sonnet pleasure of aesthetic encounter with an overall structural rhythm (however staccato in this instance) of presentation and silence, presence and absence, like listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations all the way through. The frames take form, form before our eyes from fragments, and loose form (one ‘sonnet’ bears little resemblance to the frame). ‘The line enjambments, the twisting of syntax, the “push-pull” of meaning, the abrupt changes of tone, the dislocation of punctuation, the fading in and out of prosody, the intentional misuse of parts of speech, the aesthetic decisions as to when to accept the results of a chance operation or to discard them,’ as Ron Padgett inventorizes the inventions of the sequence, –‘these should not be overlooked in favour of colourful subject matter, a subject matter that (like Shakespeare’s) involves a love-triangle. Never mind the sex, or the Libbie Rifkin line that the poems were motivated by Berrigan ingratiating himself before the first Generation New York school through homage, quotation and obliteration. (Remember that Gerard Malanga photo with Ashbery? Berrigan has his hand over Ashbery’s face!) Whatever the concern with ‘the micropolitics of the New York poetry scene’ The Sonnets are ‘a series of “machines”, selections from found materials organized by the mechanics of Berrigan’s inspiration,’ notes Renny Pritikin. One inspiration was the work of his friends. One sonnet opens: ‘In Joe Brainard’s collage its white arrow,’ (14) but collage effects (cut up) interrupt the poem at this point (the lines are clearly re-arranged, or juggled because another sonnet presents the ‘correct’ version.) He plundered Brainard’s journal, he cut up his own poems, including traditional and parodic sonnets, and was influenced by the whole eclectic ‘tradition’ of Dada-New York art practice that could be accessed in the early sixties, including the chance procedures of Cage. No wonder ‘his method is notable for its combination of intuitive and arbitrary procedures’. All this contributes to the sequence’s glorious self-referring quality. The sheer power of this often casually constructed sequence probably derives from the casual belatedness of Berrigan’s position. When Frank O’Hara began a poem ‘It is 12:10 in New York’ it probably was. By the time Berrigan is cutting up text, it wasn’t ‘5.15’ or whatever. We know that Berrigan was drawing structural homologies from science, Whitehead’s process philosophy in particular. But this relativity of time appears as an arguable encoding of space-time at the structural level of collage which, I argue, is not simply form at all, since it is the subject of the poems. They are sonnets about sonnets taking form, loosing form, finding form, making themselves in front of us. I know of no other sonnet sequence where we feel the excitement of its forming as we per-form it on our reading.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Four of 14: Convention and Constraint

The attraction of the sonnet sequence for British linguistically innovative poets is that it provides a perfect answer to the tension between the long poem and the lyric.‘Linguistically innovative poets seem on the whole to opt for the sequence over the stand-alone sonnet and I think this can be explained by their historical preference for the accumulative and speculative poetic “project” as opposed to the singularity and poise of the discreet lyric,’ writes Jeff Hilson in his introduction to the Reality Street Book of Sonnets. This is true though perhaps he is denigrating lyric poise a little too much. (anthol 16) While there is a contemporary push towards the long poem, particularly in the sequence form that Jack Spicer called the serial poem, there is a contrary pull not only towards the lyric (which is another story) but towards various techniques of constraint and limitation, one seen in its strictest shape in the work of the Oulipo, who innovated widely, even wildly, with sonnets, and in other procedural and conceptual poetics. The Oulipo insist on the distinction between conventions which are sanctioned by tradition (one of the reasons for the frequent return to the sonnet in literary history is for the continuity and authority afforded by simply plugging into previous manifestations of the form) and constraints which are freshly invented for the occasion, and of which innovative sonnets provide a prime example. The sonnet is the one stanza form, with its internal divisions, that may translate into free verse: it is a visibly recognisable form. The sonnet provides a consolidating restraint for the practice of non-metrical poetry, which risks dispersion in long poetry projects, and the innovative sonnet can be put beside other alternative structurings: prose poetry, isoverbalism, concrete poetry and other spatial practices. However, as it always has, the sonnet sequence offers a flexible vehicle for extension and contrast.

It is hard to imagine Roy Fisher or Lee Harwood writing sonnets in the sixties, even though Harwood mixed with New York poets known to favour the form; an early poem praises Edwin Denby. Edwin Morgan’s brilliant ‘Glasgow Sonnets’ (1973) are not innovative in the sense I propose here despite coming from Morgan’s most restlessly innovative collection, From Glasgow to Saturn. Gavin Selerie’s sequences of the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed isolated and out of place among the free and open forms abundant in the London scene. When he ventriloquises Goethe, ‘I’m used to carving from a whole block/ and now, it seems, I need to use glue’, (p. 9 Tilting) he expresses the contrast of writing longer forms to the fiddly small object-poem. Peter Riley and John Welch offer equally isolated examples of sonnets in the 1980s. Paul Evans’ ‘Two Sonnets’ (1979) indeed used glue, and are cut-up sonnets – matching innovation with tradition – but read now as a part of his drift to an inexplicable traditionalism, the kind of formalism of which I’m not speaking here. (See my edition of his work for Shearsman).

There are three practices that permitted the innovative sonnet sequence since as collected in Hilson’s anthology: Berrigan, Raworth and the Oulipo. As Hilson himself says: ‘It’s no exaggeration to say that Berrigan’s poems have been responsible for something of a latter-day sonnet renaissance amongst linguistically innovative poets’, including for an early moment Evans and most recently John Goodby, in his 2010 Illennium. (11) Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets had been anthologised regularly but were out of print until Penguin published a definitive edition in 2000. Collage in form, there was plenty of glue in evidence; Berrigan contrasted his sonnets to his ‘open’ poems. (nice 79)

Around 1986 Tom Raworth abandoned open sequences and wrote 14 line poems, the first 42 published as ‘Sentenced to Death’ in Visible Shivers in 1987. The continuing and concluding 111, written between 1988 and 1990 were published in 1993 as Eternal Sections. More glue: more collage.

The already mentioned Oulipo interest in sonnets, in Queneau’s Thousand Billion Sonnets and in other numerically ordained sequences such as Jacques Roubaud’s Some Thing Black, may have fed into the innovative sonnet craze of our own day, as they rode alongside other Oulipo works – prose texts by Calvino and Perec – which became domesticated in Britain from the late 1980s onwards.

Finally the force of postmodernist play to release the historically-repressed form cannot be underestimated. The sonnet revival was bound to happen. Modernists reviled the form. Williams said ‘All sonnets say the same thing of no importance,’ by which he was negatively confirming my more affirmative sense that forms think because form thinks. But the formal torquing of innovative sonnets ensures that they do not say the same thing, because formal constraints are not ordained conventions.

Note: e.e. cummings and Rilke apart, Williams’ friend Louis Zukofsky was busily writing ‘A 7’ in the 1930s, entuning Marx (and later Spinoza) in sonnets with mathematical values placed upon repetition that prefigures the Oulipo.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Three of 14: Sonnet Mania

Historically the sonnet is the perfectly formed bastard child of Occidental troubadour ballads, and it comes to early maturity and fecundity in the hands of Petrarch in the fourteenth century, whose name we now give to one of the two characteristic forms of the sonnet, the 14 lines in the proportion of 8 to six, with a volta or turn at line eight. The form came into English through the adaptations of Petrach by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth century, (See his portrait above and poems here.) . The fame of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and whose name is given to the form where the turn moves to the concluding couplet of the poem, obscures the widespread practice of the sonnet in its heyday between 1580 and 1610. It reached the level of a craze in the 1590s, following the posthumous publication of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591) which, according to Jonathan Bate played a ‘foundational role’ in the craze. Some of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ were published unauthorised during the craze; others may have been written later, but Shakespeare (or his publisher) waited until the theatres were closed by plague in 1609 to prepare a full volume. The sonnet has remained a popular form with a dip in its use during the eighteenth century and its virtual prohibition under Modernism, a fact to which I shall return.

‘We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes’, writes John Donne (no mean sonneteer himself), punning on the original meaning of stanza as room, and pointing out, by analogy with architecture, the sonnets neatness as form. A ‘prescribed form’ whose ‘duration as well as the structure of the whole poem is predetermined,’ as Michael Spiller puts it, the sonnet is asymmetrical like the haiku, the turn torques the discourse after midpoint. In its 8+6 (octet and sestet) form, Spiller says, ‘The verbal recognition of’ what may have originally been ‘(a) musical alteration is first of all syntactic: a new sentence at the change, or perhaps a medial pause in a long sentence. But this in turn begets a conceptual alteration, turning proportionality of lengths into consequentiality of thought. Six to eight as conclusion is to proposition, or as development and summing up is to statement.’ Even in this abstract frame one can see how this form at least thinks, in terms of its predisposition to contentual structure: ‘consequentiality of thought’. One can even see that form here is a kind of content. Spiller adds, underlying this point, turning to the other major sonnet frame: ‘When the final couplet became popular in English sonnet-writing, the alternative 4+4+4+2 grouping emerges, to drive British poets into a rhyming couplet ending, with strong pressure towards epigram or witticism.’ Bate summarises the difference in effect: ‘Whereas the Italian style favoured a single thought with a turn in the middle, the English encouraged more playful variation: three thrusts and twist in the tail. The very form offered an incentive to multiplication and digression that encouraged sonnets to be expressions of their authors’ wit and ingenuity as much as – perhaps more than – outpourings of their real feelings.’ The sonneteers at least ‘respond(ed) to forms as a kind of content’ (as Wolfson puts it).

The sonnet became a courtly form, first as ‘the voice of the articulate citizens of the city states’ of Italy, and in England through the ‘courtly makers’ as Puttenham calls Wyatt and Surrey : ‘They greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar Poesie,’ he opined. ‘Wyatt and Surrey created an intimate relationship between the arts of courtship and courtiership. This made it possible to read apparent love poems as coded bids for patronage and preferment at court.’ Every courtier was expected to bash out a sonnet.

Petrarch’s longing poems for Laura, Surrey’s for Geraldine, Sidney’s for Stella, all place their ‘pleading or praising or lamenting’ narrators as heirs to a Neoplatonic ethos, ‘that love is at once the most dislocating of human feelings and the one which most strongly impels the heart to “gentilezza”, that quality at the centre of ideal courtly behaviour’, whereas real courtly behaviour and its actual sonneteers gave a ‘performance’ of wit: ‘One is performing for an audience, moving in and out of a series of poses, and watching one’s own performance … The aim is not truth, but delight.’ It did not delight all who beheld this ‘behaviour’: When the Earl of Essex should have been concentrating upon Irish genocide as bidden by his sovereign at the height of sonnet-mania, Henry Wootten complained that he ‘spent his time “evaporat(ing) his thoughts in a sonnet”.’ It is ironical that this last vestige of English chivalric behaviour died when Essex’s courtly plot ended ignominiously in his execution. His reading for form, we might say, with irony but not without some justification, was fatal!

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Two of 14: Forms and Forming

If poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form, then the investigation of form itself is of paramount importance and comes with a certain methodological liberty and verve: ‘The vitality of reading for form is freedom from program and manifesto, from any uniform discipline,’ says leading new formalist Susan J. Wolfson. Indeed, this formalism has been fighting against instrumentalist readings of literature, the kind of quasi-sociology that passes for a lot of English teaching still. As Wolfson says: ‘My deepest claim is that language shaped by poetic form is not simply conscriptable as information for other frameworks of analysis; the forms themselves demand a specific kind of critical attention.’

I want to argue that the attention of any formal study of contemporary poetry must be dual. It must focus on form in the technical sense, on identifiable forms in play, the ones identified by Veronica Forrest-Thomson in her prescient Poetic Artifice as enjambment, line, rhythm, rhyme, etc., and on form in a general, more performative sense, that prioritises acts of forming and our apprehension of their coming to form. Forms and forming I call this pair for ease. Associating one with the other, Derek Attridge argues that form is the force that stages a performance of any text: we need to apprehend ‘the eventness of the literary work, which means that form needs to be understood verbally – as ‘taking form” of “forming”, or even “loosing form”', but he insists that the devices of artifice ‘are precisely what call forth the performative response’ of any engaged reader, directly connected to the event of singularity which is the irruption of an inventive otherness in our productive reading.

Both types of form are capable of carrying a semantic or cognitive charge, demonstrating that forms think. They contain or envelop meaning(s) of knowledge(s) and might demonstrate how new meaning and (non-propositional) knowledge might be formed and formulated. As such, aesthetic form carries a force operating on the individual (or collective) reader or viewer, which – in the case of poetry – means that the reader is the site where such meanings are staged by form, so that reading is formulating form, and formulating it into fluxing semantic and cognitive forms as a ‘performed mobility’. Wolfson even writes that literature lovers ‘respond to forms as a kind of content’. Formal considerations of both kinds (forms and forming) are engaged by active reading and enact meanings that moderate, exacerbate, subvert (or on rare occasions reinforce) the kind of extractable meaning that Forrest-Thomson and Attridge both decry as ‘paraphrase’. Paraphrase is amnesia of form.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: One of 14

This lecture was delivered at the Hay Poetry Jamboree 2011 at the Oriel Contemporary Art Gallery, Salem Chapel, Bell Bank, Hay on Wye on June 4th 2011. The organisers were John Goodby (who also took the above shot) and Lyndon Davies (whose website http://lyndondavies.co.uk/ is linked to below). See also Van Valckenborch's latest prose on Lyndon's magazine Junction Box.

Here are some links to photos of the event and here is the lecture. It is in 14 parts, in deference to the sonnet, and I will post the parts one a day for the next fortnight, also with gestures toward the form.

One of 14
This lecture is in 14 parts, in homage to, and in parody of, the sonnet, which is its subject. It therefore formally encodes the ambivalence towards the form found in the sonnet-like and sonnet-aspirant and sonnet-deviant productions of its most recent avant-garde practitioners and pasticheurs (many of them collected in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, which appeared in 2008, edited by an admirable collector and producer of the species, Jeff Hilson). In drawing attention to the central defining numerical feature of its structure this ‘sonnet-lecture’ is emblematically drawing attention to form itself, and to notions of forms and forming with which I am currently working as a critic. The sonnet seems an obvious place to ask questions of such a kind, because the forms of individual poems are formed within (or at least in readerly expectation of, or in relation to) a particular (and historically determined and available) form. My use here of ‘forms’ to refer to the shapes of individual poems, of ‘forming’ to refer to the process by which a literary work happens, and of ‘form’ to refer to the quasi-Platonic form of the sonnet in general, I hope, is enough to warrant my interest in, and my dwelling upon, such formal questions, in what otherwise could have been an uninhibited romp through the undoubted glories of the innovative sonnet. I shall be asking questions, sometimes theoretical, sometimes speculative, about form in general, and certain forms in particular; I shall be focussing briefly upon the sonnet sequences of Berrigan, Raworth, Jeff Hilson, Philip Terry, Geraldine Monk and Sophie Robinson.

As a poet I’ve innovated in the sonnet form in ways I’d like to share in the hope that I’ve got things to say from the inside, as it were. About 136 of my poems – to my surprise – might be considered sonnets and certain others take 14 lines to exhaust themselves. This brief sortie into ‘practice-led research’ is cognate with another of my interests, the discourse of poetics as a writerly and speculative twin to practice, and as a new object of study for criticism itself. Hilson’s anthology alone indicates that the recent pull towards the sonnet has been international but I shall be mainly concentrating upon British linguistically innovative poetry.

Here are raw links to the posts, arranged themselves as a sonnet:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-one-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-two-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-three-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-four-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-five-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-six-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-seven-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-eight-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-nine-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-ten-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-eleven-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-twelve-of-14.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-thirteen-of.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/innovative-sonnet-sequence-fourteen-of.html

Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, in which there is a chapter on the innovative sonnet, or who can order it for libraries, here are the places

UK http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319340449

US http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319340449

Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meaning-Contemporary-Innovative-Poetry-Poetics/dp/toc/3319340441

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).

Poetry Beyond Text

Pete Clarke and I are just back from a day trip to Edinburgh to see the Poetry Beyond Text project opening at the Scottish Poetry Library. We have some work in this exhibition, and there is plenty of good work to see, online if you can’t get there. Check out the Guy Begbie-Lawrence Upton collaboration for something quite different.


Also check out the review of Berlin Bursts on Stride

TWO NEW BOOKS

BERLIN BURSTS (poems)

These new poems feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard’s local Capital of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act At the centre of the collection is 'Six Poems Against Death' whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.

Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called Sheppard's Complete Twentieth Century Blues 'a major poem of serious intent'; Alan Baker in Litter called Warrant Error 'political poetry of the first order', and John Muckle wrote of ‘this brilliant, disquieting book.’

"Robert Sheppard . . . composed a few words around Liverpool's status as City of Culture. 'Their shit's verdure but that's OK/ This isn't a nature poem.' Sheppard's near twenty-year epic, Complete Twentieth Century Blues, outweighed the Ringo returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break the teeth. The city averted its eyes . . . As if it were the poet's fault that we want our meat pre-chewed." —Iain Sinclair

Order from the Shearsman online store and read more:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-Berlin-Bursts-p102839131

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-When-Bad-Times-Made-for-Good-Poetry-p102839133

A Passion for the Real

After Solomon Nikritin’s The People’s Court (1934)


Both of his fists
locked

over the spread pages
of the stiff book,

sporting a smock
of black smoke

across the stage
upon which I will make

no show, he
is the People playing

its part. His guards
glance aslant

from the table’s skirting
shadow. His clerk

is a fog of fingers
fixing his script with prompts.

But his deputy
twists round:

extemporal knocks
on the door

which yet may quicken all
of our exits.


Read a review at http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2011/May%202011/KleinzahlerSheppard.htm

WHEN BAD TIMES MADE FOR GOOD POETRY (criticism)

This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. Episodes cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; he also writes individual chapters on the poetry and poetics of Allen Fisher, Tom Raworth, Iain Sinclair, John Hall, Ken Edwards, and Maggie O'Sullivan.

"A landmark study." —Benjamin Keatinge reviewing The Poetry of Saying in The European English Messenger

Order from the Shearsman online store and read more here.

Contents

Introduction: The Life of the Writing

1 Informing the Nation: The Manifesto of the Poetry Society (1976)

2 Allen Fisher’s Apocalypse Then: Between Place and Gravity: Technique and Technology

3 John Hall: The Price of Houses the Cost of Food: The Poetics of Not Writing

4 ‘Whose lives does the government affect?’: looking back at Tom Raworth’s ‘West Wind’

5 When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry: Iain Sinclair’s Autistic Poses

6 Ken Edwards’ The WE Expression

7 The Colony at the Heart of the Empire: Bob Cobbing and the Mid 1980s London Creative Environment

8 Beyond Anxiety: Legacy or Miscegenation

9 Poetry and Ethics: The Saying and the Said in Tom Raworth’s Eternal Sections

10 Talk: The Poetics of Maggie O’Sullivan

11 Facture and Fracture: Resisting the Total in Allen Fisher’s Gravity as a Consequence of Shape

12 Everything Connects: The Cultural Poetics of Iain Sinclair

Epilogue: What I regret about the poetry scene at the moment




from the Introduction: The Life of the Writing

I have long held the view that the power of poetry is precisely that it both reveals itself – its poetic artifice is its undeniable facticity laid bare – and conceals itself, leaving the reader feeling that he or she has not finished, could indeed never finish, the work of reading. The text is inexhaustible in terms of both form and content and in terms of the unstable relationship between them. The writer is also strangely both present – as artificer – and simultaneously absent, from the poem; once the poem is read the only agent in or around the text is the reader. Any poem is thus a site of human unfinish twice over. I have long suspected that under, within or around, the language of a poem, lies another language, or aspect of language, perhaps a rhythmical energy, that is not reducible to discourse. As such, the poem seems to withdraw from social and historical comprehension, but this is only apparent. On occasions these aspects of otherness suggest alternative readings of reality, and reading poetry becomes an imaginative and transformative act, with political and ethical import. Poems evoke in the attentive reader a permanent state of potential astonishment. Analysis does not distil that thrill; it turns it to knowledge, something communal (and historical, because subject to change and revision), to be shared.

Van Valckenborch's Cube

Read another work supposedly by Rene Van Valckenborch and supposedly translated from the Flemish (side of his double oeuvre) by Martin Krol on the excellent Ekleksographia webzine, as part of the post-Oulipo issue edited by Philip Terry. Read the introduction to the quennets and follow the link to the poems themselves (a pdf).

Happy New Year! (They ended up in this book.)

Twitterodes

Twitterodes
for my followers and for the
followers of my followers

■ 100 (twittersonnet)

bearded ev
ergreen ov
erflowing
a craggy c

astle wall
/bag of ce
ment flat
ened and b

roken on t
ramlines t
o leave du

st/bike bu
ckled wher
e it hangs


■ 99 piggybacking girls round the monument/NEPTUNE stamping his horses (a café steals his water thunder)/black tooth windows/ladies sipping ORVAL ■ 98 a moorhen and fluffed chick stand on the girder wet webs safe from tidal flow/all motion is relative/cannot be seen beyond their conception ■ 97 Time dies. Oak leaves spread at water-level. As many roofs on display as at a roofers’ convention. How many maps to deal with a given space? ■ 96 time at the heart of space is movement/the rear of the fish restaurant lurching into the river/the empty boat with outboard bobbing/creaking ■ 95 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/cannot be seen beyond their conception hoisted from river/sagging over the waterline on the bend ■ 94 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/analysis destroyed the solidity of this fisherman’s house/sagging over the waterline on the bend ■ 93 she’s reading a book to remind her how a saint should act or:/a critique of space high above the Botermarkt/halo or crown/a forlorn corner ■ 92 chancels with bats’ wings architecture out of Hell creating the illusion of time/cars parked like odd shoes lined up under a hat-stand/blent ■ 91 green ironwork crawls up the side of the building/mental and social at once/over the way where I park my bike/Ghent where I have never lived ■ 90 his arm with hands in pockets of gesture among parcels of space/mustard gas forest seeps across paths of ice/his lowered head a wan pellicle ■ 89 faces constructed by background (interference)/bodies shudder into ice-floe paint-flick a texture of rainbow lemon and tree blot/in creases ■ 88 stroll through a world of scratches slashing burning grounded by the medium without message sinking into its impositions/fingerflicking ■ 87 past her snarl windows across the canal she tightens her open cup leotard adjusts crotchless crotch lets the world pass brushing her breasts ■ 86 something fishy about the body/head grafted from myth/curved to the tree that sways behind its back/no arms or branches but toes and roots ■ 85 the bushes look like huddled hedgehogs with their backs turned/how many maps might be needed to deal with this given space to code or decode ■ 84 the code is more deceptive than the thing when the thing is an acorn on a column or an empty plaque embossed with graffiti ■ 83 thru’ marble arch tarpaulin on which Magritte’s curtain-building is opening on flat summer skies (behind which dreams the renovating palace) ■ 82 cloven hooves aloft double breath spout/a floating medium latticed with lacy rippled contrast/class war ■ 81 the subject cannot do without the object pleading in the language of things: of handsized bricks/cut glass/cones conjured from flat tiles ■ 80 objects swamped by facts or/spitting into a little cup/ejaculations/measured by money/wishing well full of best wishes/vacant inscriptions ■ 79 patiently sit all day arms folded head bent into space complete with vanishing point spewing a lip-moulded stream of eternal spittle ■ 78 sliced buildings profess professions/professors abstract perspective inscribing human relations across the square/crowds gawp/clouds glower ■ 77 ODE TO DIVERSITY/gilded trinkets tumbling down the face of the Museum of Amnesia/Hindu woman miming destitution with anguished fists: kerbed ■ 76 laboured place/floral bolts into wood/a dragon sheered through/hand raised (swordless)/shield shielding nothing/ruthless eyes & hacked nose ■ 75 inside the frame resembles everything else/repetitious spaces repeated within repeating scenes of the Markt selling itself to itself/outside ■ 74 rows of lights under gables compose the square/a statue does not know that it is one/issuing orders or delivering blessings/texture blooms ■ 73 a set of real operations made the man in a kagoul bend over to examine the dog’s arse/another set made the dog-cobbles-bollards-street-city ■ 72 stone dog cocking a leg against the corner bollard rue de Chartreux monumentalising this quotidian moment fleeting active yet still on guard ■ 71 each pinnacle pinched with gestures/hands spread, legs tossed, torsos twisted, heads bent/no faces under hats to challenge a scythe of cloud ■ 70 ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’/ICI OÙ PAUL VERLAINE BLESSA ARTHUR RIMBAUD D’UN COUP DE REVOLVER ■ 69 story twists as the narrator turns (blue pen marks on his thigh/some eye sorts this out/foliage entwines marble) turns to caress the hidden ■ 68 he appeared from the skies (an hour or so ago) skin scaly oily carbuncular and craterous unshaven/pores collecting the grit of this world ■ 67 leaf tickles founder’s ear/hand around shoulder/above finny cloak that superhumanises/bleached face adorned with felt-tip moustaches/and me ■ 66 projective space for projectile voicings projected onto you as responsibility’s double breath ■ 65 put this back on the map: (t)race the webbed salute/the contorted leap (fixed)/the water breath against a rhythm of cars-trees-lampposts ■ 64 punch up on a pinpoint squalid flailing in a narrative that covers its tracks like a map of porous borders on the point of being torn into ■ 63 which map’s he on/giving his game away escapes the arcade with jacket over shoulder scowling/invisibility unplotted/a post-it in a phone box ■ 62 as quick as mind he sleeps in a chair curved like a wave carrying his outdoor dreams hands folded liver spotted the city map ■ 61 un soldat inconnu competing with discourses to travel to a ring of growling gryphons holding up the dish of flame for een onbekende soldaat ■ 60 aloft column beyond gilded fringe Léopold heading up clouds/below gold extracted from the c(o)re of the 1831 constitution ■ 59 Function as ornament. A choice of walls packages the day. You could talk excrescence into style. Figures twisted into narrative stall. ■ 58 figures twisted into narrative move as soon as you near bleed from eye sockets rumble into your body space (Johan Muyle) ■ 57 this writing is not a body/stumps along beside rails (cracked dish carries its flame) steps on grass scratches head/this body isn’t writing ■ 56 ‘because the world is in colour’ (explains Abbas): the black and white bride marries the corpse in the photo they hold next to her ■ 55 salmon brick house on the rise beyond the canal too low to register upon whatever it is that records windows punctured with Flemish darkness ■ 54 a pagan flap of wings and tangle of talons over a body frozen and erected to the status of myth/beyond the wire cupped tulips multiple arch ■ 53 macro glass in its flat and curved space varieties abutted/micro figurative dummy catching the taint of the city on its greening skin ■ 52 the day is occurring to itself we walk into it and I think with the back of my head facing it ■ 51 I’m the man under the hedge arch looking at the dome of Le Botanique/you are the one who sees me beyond the lily pond framed by your looking ■ 50 I’m a lamppost man a lawn corpse man a pigeon man a straight path man a modernist man a hedge twig man a UFO flash in the dark trees man ■ 49 pulsions of perfect embodiedness the roof steps into cloud masturbating a place in blacked-out childhood forever under construction ■ 48 inscribed in me: me at the attic window the space of me looking out over Lievestraat and the cellar window peeping at passers’ ankles knees ■ 47 glass buildings in non-utile shapes refract each other narrowing sky spoutspray steaming below/hoisted man washes his way around the curves ■ 46 BETWEEN sagging leaves and crouching fur/soft feet and hard cobbles/canopied shade and light so naked it is invisible/WEAVES TIME’S QUESTION ■ 45 horsechestnuthands wave over water/internationalbrickwork leads to the fountain/waterspouthalo behind the vigilstatue/THINK: where are we ■ 44 column sprouting/horns of a devil//or family tree as gurgling/gargoyles//the impression of feet/on the cobbles prints unreadable/history ■ 43 rotate to landscape: shadowed archway a reservoir of ink or/pitch sky with horizon of bricklight/crabplants scuttling wherever’s up ■ 42 heraldic ensigns horizonless on the thick glass of the windows of the Huys der Liefde/pulled inside out a house of Lipsius/Montanus/Ortelius ■ 41 unseatable throne? ■ 40 rhinolalia muzzle nudges for a broken song ■ 39 aloft surveying all that isn’t his mistaken for shirtless carving beside stirring gauze that screens the equine statue/its doubtful gestures ■ 38 reclusive Balthasar’s golden compass grips the globe crippled inky fingers measure the surface of maps the ridges of print on finest paper ■ 37 the marvellous is awkward/scribbling among Plantin’s shelves dialoguing with categories the moment’s historian shot through with knowledge ■ 36 produce this house as you move through it reading the print and map rooms navigating your history thinking about what’s not present/leaning ■ 35 Plantin’s image rises from brickwork latticed windows like uncut sheets: proofread the bookish house looking inward to its garden ■ 34 of the material where material is stone as solid as stone should be between praxis and representation: lion propped up on its human fist ■ 33 moss on the bark of the tree like green light it may go around the world we live it and we think it and it thinks us in its living ■ 32 scowling Christ with sword and scales the twisted Host a print of the Spanish Fury identities fixed throwntogetherness without scatter ■ 31 letters reversed on milky window absent depth unmarked by time and drainpipes spewing tendrillar wires that sing Latvia Estonia Finland ■ 30 frame the red window frame which frames the curved cream underbelly of the stairs and the varnished wood banisters which follow them ■ 29 spatial scales stepped roofs encounter flows of flags abstractions of maps tides of information against waves of nostalgia catching light ■ 28 space outwith place where roofs meet sky: on false chimneys or high points: gold eagle/alert fox/be-piked yeoman/mariner shading his eyes ■ 27 silver crown midpoint over iron gateway a compression point funnelling people: space-time coordinate for inter-species solidarity ■ 26 the segmented reflection of the outer window ghosted its ornate patterns of authority its relative position beyond glass in focal illusion ■ 25 a priori steps of Antwerp station where people produce (carrying pushchairs lifting children hauling rucksacks) pause by marble pillars/noon ■ 24 flat planes of faces curve as intervals in negative distance a single red flag flutters on a window ledge white motif curled shyly away ■ 23 three men in sou’westers tend towards the Swiss poster promising ‘More than meets the eye’ in English/bent one way-street sign arrowing ■ 22 lateral shots of words past floral baskets gilded cornices irregularly stepped balconies café parasols the logos of international exchange ■ 21 guild houses round the Markt surface cut to the depths of the manifesto: shoulder to shoulder their tight asperities ■ 20 sculpted sleep as lids are moulded shut/a masturbator’s grip upon the mayoral scroll LEONARD VANDENHECKE ■ 19 tensions in space not forms cut into (our) time they are floating not waiting striking out not enduring ■ 18 the closer you get the less there is (approach as an eye) abrupt delineations that are read as shaded building bricks on a 2D matrix ■ 17 crouch under the ledge upon which the knight stretches an overstepping toe the space and scope left for the roughed in/beyond genealogy ■ 16 rows of knives scissors for variation a syntax of blades behind the window of the coutellerie a razor’s discrimination between flesh and air ■ 15 synchronic pan: Flemish with crane aloft/an ice façade drips/to fore: fountain where Calder mobile swings like a sail but dances in time ■ 14 decompartmentalisation of externals: glass for clouds and girders blossoming style on the superface/for depth: old perfume old iron ■ 13 fixed point or vortex/canopied ingress egress/the solidity of glass held by black wrought ironwork a cage for shoppers musical instruments ■ 12 tactical formations of repetition: conical trees amid scratched bark plane/hedges and gangly stems/garbage urns/pools of dust turds in sand ■ 11 brickwork syntax with wide cement connectives hanging there and/or sculpted there heraldic and abstracted the shell of the shell ■ 10 more an homunculus bent knees whorish pelvic stretch: the curved water pipe up his arse launches a parabola his eternal stream completes ■ 9 not botticellian scalloped arrival dispersal of piss-steam piddle-trickle the smallest statue of illiberality in the world ■ 8 blue wall pixellated in close-up winged with cracking paintwork steps down which mythic characters chase in contiguity/coincidence/overload ■ 7 nose into perspective (skip with a rope on the roof) smell basket of flowers red and purple synthesised into the spaces you sniff out ■ 6 a slash across a speckled sky/the slope of the roof/the tilt of an eye//time full of now perspective ■ 5 not the heavy timbers of the shadowy door but the saints poised for studied martyrdom in slanted sunlight tinting ingress ■ 4 De Grote Markt/carve supernal genealogies onto each spatial container/or: float them there as if by human intention ■ 3 Doric Bourse time makes KNACK space in place of crossing experience with body lurching motorbike at rest against wall of bleached exchange ■ 2 spire at dusk spearing vapour trails a lone gull gliding above the pinnacle of Europe flecked wash over clenched dark buildings ■1 breathing water spout against an irradiated dusk ripple ■ 0 tweets @ www.twitter.com/Van Valckenborch 2009-2008

Still on www.twitter.com/VanValckenborch

Twitterode 98

■ 98 a moorhen and fluffed chick stand on the girder wet webs safe from tidal flow/all motion is relative/cannot be seen beyond their conception

Twitterode 95

■ 95 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/cannot be seen beyond their conception hoisted from river/sagging over the waterline on the bend

Twitterode 94

■ 94 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/analysis destroyed the solidity of this fisherman’s house/sagging over the waterline on the bend

Twitterode 83

■ 83 thru’ marble arch tarpaulin on which Magritte’s curtain-building is opening on flat summer skies (behind which dreams the renovating palace)

Twitterodes 79 and 80

■ 80 objects swamped by facts or/spitting into a little cup/ejaculations/measured by money/wishing well full of best wishes/vacant inscriptions ■ 79 patiently sit all day arms folded head bent into space complete with vanishing point spewing a lip-moulded stream of eternal spittle

Twitterodes 72 and 73

■ 73 a set of real operations made the man in a kagoul bend over to examine the dog’s arse/another set made the dog-cobbles-bollards-street-city ■ 72 stone dog cocking a leg against the corner bollard rue de Chartreux monumentalising this quotidian moment fleeting active yet still on guard

Twitterode 70

■ 70 ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’/ICI OÙ PAUL VERLAINE BLESSA ARTHUR RIMBAUD D’UN COUP DE REVOLVER

Twitterode 63 and a possible sighting

■ 63 which map’s he on/giving his game away escapes the arcade with jacket over shoulder scowling/invisibility unplotted/a post-it in a phone box


Does this image actually show the author?

Dylan Harris, author of the excellent Antwerp (Wurm Press, 2010), reckons he's had an encounter with Mr Van Valckenborch on his travels. Read his account at

http://dylanharris.org/prose/poetry/rvv.shtml

Twitterodes 60 & 61

■ 61 un soldat inconnu competing with discourses to travel to a ring of growling gryphons holding up the dish of flame for een onbekende soldaat ■ 60 aloft column beyond gilded fringe Léopold heading up clouds/below gold extracted from the c(o)re of the 1831 constitution

twitterodes 35-42

42 heraldic ensigns horizonless on the thick glass of the windows of the Huys der Liefde/pulled inside out a house of Lipsius/Montanus/Ortelius ■ 41 unseatable throne? ■ 40 rhinolalia muzzle nudges for a broken song ■ 39 aloft surveying all that isn’t his mistaken for shirtless carving beside stirring gauze that screens the equine statue/its doubtful gestures ■ 38 reclusive Balthasar’s golden compass grips the globe crippled inky fingers measure the surface of maps the ridges of print on finest paper ■ 37 the marvellous is awkward/scribbling among Plantin’s shelves dialoguing with categories the moment’s historian shot through with knowledge ■ 36 produce this house as you move through it reading the print and map rooms navigating your history thinking about what’s not present/leaning ■ 35 Plantin’s image rises from brickwork latticed windows like uncut sheets: proofread the bookish house looking inward to its garden

Twitterode 30

■ 30 frame the red window frame which frames the curved cream underbelly of the stairs and the varnished wood banisters which follow them



(Read the stream as it appears on Twitter here. There are less than 10 posts left, until it reaches 100.)

Twitterode 20

■ 20 sculpted sleep as lids are moulded shut/a masturbator’s grip upon the mayoral scroll LEONARD VANDENHECKE ■

Twitterode 16

■ 16 rows of knives scissors for variation a syntax of blades behind the window of the coutellerie a razor’s discrimination between flesh and air

Twitterodes 13-15

■ 15 synchronic pan: Flemish with crane aloft/an ice façade drips/to fore: fountain where Calder mobile swings like a sail but dances in time ■ 14 decompartmentalisation of externals: glass for clouds and girders blossoming style on the superface/for depth: old perfume old iron ■ 13 fixed point or vortex/canopied ingress egress/the solidity of glass held by black wrought ironwork a cage for shoppers musical instruments

Twitterode 11

■ 11 brickwork syntax with wide cement connectives hanging there and/or sculpted there heraldic and abstracted the shell of the shell

Twitterodes 9 & 10

■ 10 more an homunculus bent knees whorish pelvic stretch: the curved water pipe up his arse launches a parabola his eternal stream completes ■ 9 not botticellian scalloped arrival dispersal of piss-steam piddle-trickle the smallest statue of illiberality in the world

Read Rene's Twitter Trickle (twitterodes)

at www.twitter.com/VanValckenborch

(his Flemish half, translated by Martin Krol) (They ended up in this book.)