Allen Fisher and Robert Sheppard/Sheppard on Fisher's work

On Tuesday Allen Fisher and I read at Edge Hill University. Photos above by Paige Mitchell. I was launching A Translated Man and Allen was reading a range of work. The week before I delivered a double lecture on Allen’s work to a joint open meeting of the Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge Hill and the MA in Creative Writing. The next day I decided to write a brief paragraph on the organisational principles of  Allen’s two big projects, before turning to the main thrust of a chapter I’m writing on Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher for my book on form. It grew so long I knew I would need to write it in full before I had any chance of abbreviating it. Obviously this introduction goes on too long for its intended context. Here it is in full. Now I can get back to writing about Fisher’s Proposals.

Although he has, as we shall see, worked at the level of the book as form, most characteristically Allen Fisher is concerned with the formal delineation of large-scale structural events, devising forms that are elastic enough to register local decisions regarding content (and its own forms) as they develop across expansive projects. This is noticeably true of his two long projects Place and Gravity as a Consequence of Shape and it is worth considering how these were conceived at the level of overall structure.

            Both were time-based. A ‘map …of approaches’ to Place, dated 1971, indicates 1980 as the year of its abandonment or completion. (Fisher 1980: 92-4; 99-101) Gravity (1982-2005) seems to have overshot the Millennium (I think that was to be its attempted limit) somewhat. Both consisted of a set number of parts. Place chiefly consists of five books of 100 pages each. The collected version of the text, Place of 2005, is almost an aberration.  Only one ‘approach’ in the ‘map’ is ‘considered void’, that is a chronological reading of these published books in order, although this is unavoidably what the 414 page collected volume offers. (Fisher 1980: 99) Working in the same small press milieu as Griffiths it seems likely that publication in smaller pamphlets (the favoured small press mode of the 1970s and 1980s) was a pragmatic constraint and Fisher may have been resigned to never expecting to see a collected edition (and made a formal virtue of this circumstance, as we shall see). The 750 pages of Gravity similarly appeared in fasicles, pamphlets and books before being collected, not in one volume, but in three: Gravity, 281 pages (2004), Entanglement, 287 pages (2004) and Leans, with 183 pages (2007). The formal parameters were less to do with books than was Place: the titles of the separate poems – there are 163 in the trilogy – derive from an alphabetical list of dances, ‘Accretion’ through to ‘Zip’, although the 163 poems taking some of these 188 titles do not appear in alphabetical order (and obviously not all titles are used). Partly this is to do with the fact that there is a second ordering system, more difficult to outline. A note to Gravity announces that some (again) of the poems of the project ‘were made directly or indirectly relative to the first fifteen pages’ of the notebook of William Blake; (Fisher 2004a: 271) the phrase ‘directly or indirectly’ works to destabilise assessment of its effects. Together the two systems as structural homologies are deliberately complex and unpredictable.[1]

            When it comes to considering the role of the reader in forming the texts of the two projects, again differences emerge. One result of the appearance of Place in contributory volumes may have been the half-pragmatic half-poetics model of reading. Fisher’s maintained that in the act of reading any passage the reader is positioned as ‘the loci of a point on a moving sphere’ with relation to the entire project, in the map of approaches. (Fisher 1980: 101). This means that any reader can join (and leave) the project at any point. (This is presumably why a sequential progress through the text is disapproved of.) One of the most cogent descriptions of Place is contained in Peter Barry’s term ‘content-specific’, which helps us to see that the different parts of the project, whether they be the open field notations of the first book of Place, or the oracular dramatic narratives of Unpolished Mirrors, are reactions to, readings of, sources listed in the ‘resources’ to each book. Place is therefore less a text about locality than and more a conceptual and intertextual project. However notational it appears, the text of a given passage is referring off-stage, as it were, to facts and theories contained in the notes. The texts point outwards and back again, because we read the texts in the light of the external information, re-read the information in the light of the experience of the poem, and possibly return to read the poem again. Fisher at one point describes this process quite explicitly:

             I read Pound who calls me to read Dante

            who gives me better sight to read Duncan

            who suggests I read Pound  (Fisher 2005: 46)

This is not simply the confession of an autodidact but the description of ‘content-specific’ reading, here figured with a circularity that is analogous to the operations of the lost rivers of London (the literature pertaining to which fills the ‘resources’): ‘the Thames it fed flood it/ and the more it flooded the more it cycled’. (Fisher 2005: 46) While I do not think every part of the project operates in this way (for the opening lines of this page, ‘I retraced my steps/ took the Ditch at Nine Elms’, sounds genuinely notational ) (Fisher 2005: 46) it is generally true that, as Barry says, ‘the text is … readerly in two senses: firstly, it is about reading, and secondly, it demands the reader’s sustained participatory engagement with its materials as well as with “the words on the page”.’ (Barry 1993: 199-200)

While the poems of Gravity as a Consequence of Shape contain ‘resources’, creative linkage, the operations of an accelerated collage, makes the ‘participatory engagement’ of the reader even more important, one made explicit in the poetics text written towards the beginning of the second project, Necessary Business. He generalises his own reading experience:

           

As a reader, I am involved in anticipation and retrospection, the virtual dimension brings into play my own activities and expectations, and the text’s openings and evocations into the complex of my memory and that memory presented as text. The patterns of connectedness bringing into this actualising my inventive memory with my own historical limitations of reading. (Fisher 1985: 213)

He wants to ‘encourage readers to find words mean as much as they can’ (236-7), by presenting a formally rich collage of particles, rather than presenting factual information. The reader’s powers of forming, their propensity towards conjoining the disjointed text: ‘The new pertinent poetry incites, it provides patterns of connectedness through its aesthetic function which create the process of production in me,’ (Fisher 1985: 165).[2] It is brilliantly present at certain points as here, a stanza from ‘Black Bottom’:

Her condition is diagnosed as leans

Record of her energy playback

is censored

marked ‘Unprofitable’

derived from a loss of orientation.

Her periodic pain moves out of cycle

A light-carried issue in a reposed,

proportional space

pierces snow. The Painter calls this Song.

She crosses the High Road

singing, so sure of her lover’s beauty

she is incapable of resentment.

These rational delights

bring her to carefully tidy the disorder

before the government search her apartment. (Fisher 2004a: 70)

This was Fisher’s default mode throughout the writing of Gravity as a Consequence of Shape. Teasing with transformations (periodic for period, for example), juxtaposing the lexes of medicine, capitalism, government coercion, and scientific language (which is used suggestively rather than accurately). Fragmentation, as in the line-breaks and irregular capitalised words and punctuation marks, works formally with narrativity and voice to construct a textual world replete with energetic utopian potential (those lines about love and resentment, for example) while threatened with censorship, and tinged with absurdity. ‘Loss of orientation’ is a good way to describe the way the creative linkage disjoins but conjoins at the same time. The reader feels these lines belong together but suspects the juxtapositions result from the yoking together of passages lifted from sources, or even ‘resources’, but they are not present enough for us to follow them outside the text, as Barry supposes of Place, but we have precisely to make these words mean as much as they can, but no more. The disorder cannot be as carefully tidied as a bedroom. 

*

Works Cited

Barry, Peter. ‘Allen Fisher and “content-specific” poetry’, in Hampson, R. and Barry, Peter, eds. The New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Fisher, Allen. Unpolished Mirrors Serial H. London: Spanner, 1980.

Fisher, Allen. Necessary Business. London: Spanner, 1985.

Fisher, Allen. Gravity. Cambridge: Salt, 2004a.

Fisher, Allen. Entanglement. Toronto: The Gig, 2004b.  

Fisher, Allen. Place. Hastings: Reality Street, 2005.

Fisher, Allen. Leans. Cambridge: Salt, 2007.

Read all the links to my work The Meaning of Form here.

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[1] My episode ‘Allen Fisher’s Apocalypse Then: Between Place and Gravity: Technique and Technology’ in When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (Exeter: Shearsman 2011) outlines these homologies in further detail.

[2] Fisher makes reference here to Mukarovsky’s aesthetic function in this piece, about which I write in detail in Chapter 8, ‘Creative Linkage’ in my The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005): 198-9. The aesthetic function is an openly formal entity: ‘Because it lacks unequivocal “content”, its aesthetic function becomes transparent and acts with the other functions.’ (Fisher 1985: 236)

The DeKoninck Tour Concludes

details above

(This is Rita by the way.)

Video of the last reading of the tour here:
http://otherroom.org/tag/robert-sheppard/

Carys Bray and Joanne Ashcroft book news

Carys Bray is one of the PhD students I share with Ailsa Cox and she has been writing her novel Here We Are Together with us for a while. We had no doubt that this was a brilliant piece of writing, at once lively, moving and satisfying as literary artefact. A good read too.

So it is great to be able to go public on the news that it has been taken up by Hutchinson and you can read about the book deal here. And look into the future here.

 Well done Carys!

It is also pleasing to announce that another PhD student JoanneAshcroft’s book Maps and Love Songs for Mina Loy won the Purple Moose Prize 2102 and that the book of these astonishing poems is finally available after some delay. She will be reading at the Blue Bus in London soon.

Well done Joanne!

Carys and Joanne both studied the MA at Edge Hill University with me. In fact they were the first cohort of the full time MA. This kind of news is what keeps one going. Thanks for the whiskey, Carys, and Joanne thanks for the Purple Moose (what else?) beer!

New autrebiographical text from Arrival

Another part of my autrebiographies (the first part is available from Knives Forks and Spoons as The Given, the whole will be by KFS as Words Out of Time in 2015) is published on Stride here.

Notes on the Poetics of Rosmarie Waldrop: Form

Rosmarie Waldrop, in her poetics, seldom mentions form, or rather, she is more likely to mention language as the determining obsession of her work. As she confesses of one poetics piece, ‘Language had taken the place of God’, though it is a central and absent place. (D, 183) The title of her early PhD thesis, Against Language? and the title of her mid-career selected poems, Another Language ¸both attest to a lasting conviction that language is her poetic focus, and to two complementary aspects of her poetics. Firstly, being ‘against language’ means that formal manipulation is paramount, as she argues of European experimental writers like Helmut Heissenbüttel to whom she is heir. It secondly means being dedicated to techniques of collage (‘the splice of life’ as she wittily calls it (D, 211)) and to processes of palimpsest-like ‘writing through’ or ‘writing back’ to master and mistress texts, as it were, that can only be conceptualised as formal actions, as simultaneous acts of finding form and losing form, as my work (after Derek Attridge) puts it. These processes result, quite precisely, in ‘another language’.

She has an amusing anecdote about content and form, derived from her own early practice. Finding that all her poems were ‘about’ her mother, she decided to embrace collage, only to find that the poems produced by such a formal process still seemed to be about her mother.  She quotes Tristan Tzara’s teasingly enigmatic conclusion to his instructions for making a Dada cut-up poem: ‘The poem will resemble you.’ (D, 173) She interpreted this inevitable thematic resemblance as permission for operational freedom: ‘This frees us to work on form, which is what one can work on.’ (D, 211) Content is either unavoidable, as unavoidable as a mother, or it emerges from formal manipulation and experimental processes.

She is clear about this in her poetics, but form often appears as a minor chord in her theoretical voicings, as though perhaps the argument had already been fought and won or that it is, in some sense, obvious. Yet it is still axiomatic. In her sceptical, self-questioning contribution to a colloquium on the ‘politics of form’ her tenth ‘thesis’ reads: ‘The poem will not work through its content, not through a message, which in any case would speak only to the already converted, but through its form.’ (173) It is not surprising that the ‘excursion’ that follows this ‘thesis’ quotes both Brecht on alienation techniques and defamiliarisation and Adorno on art’s formal separation from reality. (Note also that she is experimenting with the forms of poetics as she develops her poetics of form to keep it speculative and conjectural via ‘theses’ that are questioned or complicated by ‘excursions’.)

More surprising, are the literary exemplars displayed in her second ‘excursion’ to thesis 10, for she quotes a passage by Reznikoff from Testimony and (less surprisingly) Heissenbüttel’s ‘Final Solution’, a text that (other than its title) doesn’t offer its theme, reflecting, in Waldrop’s interpretation, post-War West Germany’s quiestist ignoring of the horrors of the Holocaust. The content works through its form: ‘Its power lies in the fact that the text does not state what it was “they”’ – the poem uses this pronoun for the unspeakable Nazis which implies the false division with ‘us’ – ‘thought of what it was they could get the people to be against’, i.e., the absent Jews. (D, 177) Perhaps to avoid an obsessiveness of theme, she does not use Reznikoff’s Holocaust is her Reznikoff exhibit, where the dry language of reportage is arranged, lineated and offered as an aesthetic text. She instead refers to Testimony, Reznikoff’s earlier work that adopts the same approach to documentary texts about the violence of nineteenth century America (notably, industrial accidents). This work, which will re-appear in my discussion of John Seed, is praised for the way ‘Reznikoff goes against our ex/pectation of empathy. He lets the flat language of the news note stand as is, but accumulates the instances into a testimony’. (D, 175-6) Although Waldrop does not draw out the formalist implications of these techniques, offering them as examples in which a Brechtian defamiliarisation is effected through an Adornoesque autonomy from social reality (thus operating as a critique of it), both texts work through form; indeed they are instances of where forms are made out of meanings. As she concludes of Heissenbüttel’s text: ‘Nothing but this circling around an unnamed middle,’ in this case the Holocaust, or rather complicit Germans’ suppressed or unspeakable reaction to it, ‘could convey so much ambivalence’. (D, 177) Formal circling (or textual deformation and/or transformation) leads to a new meaning (characteristically for Waldrop one of semantic and affective complexity: not a message but ambivalence). Forms made out of meaning then constitute a new meaning. Being ‘against language’ indeed suggests, and leads to, ‘another language’.

In ‘Form and Discontent’ Waldrop comments both on ‘form’ as we’ve traced it thus far and on ‘forms’, i.e., particularly usages. (I make much of this distinction in my on-going work on form, as you will see.) She speaks of ‘wild forms’ as an antidote to ‘organic’ form, and of contemporary formally investigative poetry ‘reversing’ the movement towards the organic. (D, 199) She traces a Romantic interest in form, much as my work elsewhere sketches out a history, though she prefers to concentrate on Goethe, say, rather than Schiller, and argues that in that broad aestheticist tradition ‘the form of the work’ came to be seen as ‘determined by its conception, is an “inner” form, which lies behind the surface of the actual work and must be felt rather than measured.’ (D, 199) For Waldrop, ‘form’ is suspect as a term because allied to such organicism, suggesting some power growing and hidden in the work. I have some sympathy with this caution but prefer to ally conceptions of ‘form’ with identifications of actual ‘forms’, wild or otherwise, to maintain a sense of the materiality of the text, while still being able to work with a more generalised notion of form. While I think she is wrong to believe that the notion that ‘The cluster of conception/ content/ meaning became primary and determined the form, the expression’ was as universal as she claims (D, 199), of course, the similar notorious remark, ‘Form is never more than an extension of content’ was central to mid-century New American Poetics (and 1960-70s British open field writing). It carried the joint imprimatur of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson, exponents of accelerated free verse. They were definitely thinking of improvisatory composition, perhaps in analogy with music or art where it might be appropriate to say that form is what results from activity during a performance or mark-making event, though the ‘translation’ into literary application adds a semantic element that relieves such a formulation of its radicality. The most coherent expression of ‘organic form’ as a free verse poetics is contained in Denise Levertov’s essay of that title, though Waldrop doesn’t tackle it head on (which I might at some point).

For Waldrop the worst aspects of this version of ‘organic’ form involve the elevation of metaphor as ‘the dominant rhetorical device’ (which I do not see as necessarily essential to an emphasis upon form, but then I do not take the ‘organic’ very seriously and never have). (D, 199) ‘Wild forms’ are her counter-examples to this tradition, since they ‘stress … the horizontal, the axis of composition’ rather than the metaphorical. (D, 196) She lists contemporary wild forms: an emphasis on the visual, as in Susan Howe’s work; an emphasis upon the mathematical, as in Jacques Roubaud’s Oulipean work; and an emphasis upon ‘discontinuity, leaps on the level of syntax, of logic, of grammar,’ as in writers as varied as Carla Harryman and Mei-mei Bersenbrugge. (D, 197) And, of course, in her own work. But ‘wild forms’ still involve formal (if transformational) manipulations, if only in their rejection of (development beyond) free verse.

Waldrop’s (and others’) attraction to prose forms involves a move away from organic form, this time not in terms of its content dictating form, or even of its supposed drive towards rhetorics of metaphor, but due to its dissociation with ‘voice’: ‘When “free verse” took a step away from meter, it was a step away from the oral’, she says (in contradiction to the ‘organic’ theories that tied it to voice). ‘The prose poem moves yet farther in this direction. Its sound and rhythm are subtler, less immediate, less “memorable”. If it counts, it counts words or sentences rather than stresses or syllables.’ (D, 264)

 Work Cited

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Dissonance (if you are interested). Tuscalosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005.    

Work Recommended

 Nikolai Duffy’s new Shearsman volume Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop is an excellent short exposition of Waldrop’s life and work as publisher, translator and writer. 

See all the links to The Meaning of Form here.  

Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, or 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

Review of Marvels of Lambeth (interviews with Allen Fisher by Andrew Duncan)

Read my review on Stride now.

Notes on Gerald L. Bruns: The Material of Poetry

Obviously I made use of Bruns' concept of the ‘fictional poem’ in writing the poems of Rene Van Valckenborch in A Translated Man, and quote the following as a footnote, ironically refuted by my invented editor: ‘Bruns says, in a suggestive passage: ‘To be sure, the difference between a poem in a novel and a poem in an anthology is apt to be empirically indiscernible. To speak strictly, a fictional poem would be a poem held in place less by literary history than by one of the categories that the logical world keeps in supply: conceptual models, possible worlds, speculative systems, hypothetical constructions in all their infinite variation – or maybe just whatever finds itself caught between quotation marks, as (what we call) “reality” often is.’ (105-6)

The only thing I agree with my fiction is that this is ‘suggestive’. As are other parts of The Material of Poetry, in ways that I think will be useful to my critical work on the forms of poetics and the poetics of form, and may help to draw the two themes together and also to ‘deal with’ conceptual poetry as a phenomenon. (This is to ignore most of the book, the wonderful chapter on the materiality of sound poetry, with its enjoyable CD!) ‘My idea is that what is philosophically interesting is a poem that is not self-evidently a poem but something that requires an argument, theory, or conceptual context as a condition of being experienced as a poem (or of being experienced at all), as if poetry were, as I think it is, a species of conceptual art, where the relation between theory and practice is a / two-way street. In reading a poem, one might experience a theory of what poetry is.’ (16-17) Written just before conceptual writing appeared (though he quotes Dan Graham on the final pages) this is an evocation of poetics (as I define it as a speculative, writerly activity) refunctioned as readerly conceptualisation. As form is its content, so theory is the poem. The interinanimation of theory and practice embodied in poetics (an embodiment that also dissolves that opposition in my reading) turns poetry itself into a species of poetics. (I have always made the point that all poems are models for themselves, that poetics is inherent in the poem, even if not articulated.) I suppose I have trouble with the force of the word ‘requires’ there, but that disquiet is off-set a little (no, a lot) by the final sentence with its emphasis upon experience and thus discovery of the theory in the text. The reader is, as Muriel Rukeyser says he or she is: a witness.

He brings it home (for me, to British innovative practice) by referring to Allen Fisher’s poetics, which is in part a subject of my proposed book (twice, in its current projected form). He says: ‘As the British poet Allen Fisher has pointed out, poets do not mindlessly write poems; they develop … ‘project schemas’ and ‘conceptual programs’ that give their poems (even improvised or experimental ones) a kind of reason.’ (17) He’s quoting ‘The Poetics of the Complexity Manifold’ by Fisher, on which I have a long footnote in When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry.) Bruns detects that philosophy (his problem not mine) will have to avoid the universal and embrace contingency in its engagement with poetry (and I’d say with poetics too). If these schema in poetry proffer a ‘reason’ to poetry (its conceptual core), Bruns asks: ‘What kind of reason exactly? Almost certainly it is one that appears historically from below rather than one that descends transcendentally from above – and one that arrives from the future and dovetails unexpectedly with what comes down to us from the past’. (This is strangely consonant with Derek Attridge’s notions of innovation.) The appearance of conceptual poetry might be one of those ‘reasons’, and one of the things that comes from the past; the Dan Graham piece is from the 1960s. (17) As Bruns says also: ‘The motto of art history is that anything is possible, but not everything is possible at every moment.’ (22) Could we substitute the word ‘poetics’ for ‘art history’ here? Possibly, because a few pages later he amplifies on this theme, with relation to the poetics of Steve McCaffery and quotes him: ‘ “Poetic research into the endless possibilities of language” means, anarchically, that anything goes. Nothing is forbidden or is to be stipulated in advance: The principles, rules, methods, or practices of writing (the ‘project schemas’ and ‘conceptual programs’) are to be invented as you go and discarded upon use.’ (24) After this little pronouncement, which sounds half-Paul Feyerabend and half-Lyotard on the Postmodern Condition, he quotes McCaffery himself; ‘I have no steady poetics’. (24) Of course, a poet like McCaffery may have a wobbling blancmange of a poetics, but no poetics is steady or it ceases to be poetics. After looking at Dan Graham’s ‘Schema March 1966’ – is the re-appearance of the word ‘schema’ coincidental? – which he calls ‘a poem machine’ for its schematic potentiality, he speaks of ‘poetry that reconceptualiszes itself in the process of being composed’; Fisher’s projects come to mind here in their process-showing more than some conceptual works which are often monolithic, but the point is: all poetry is conceptual poetry. More generally (and more usefully for my argument) he concludes: ‘The history of poetry is a history of the reconceptualization of poetry – and of language as well.’ This seems to be useful as a way of dealing with that qualified ‘anything goes’. ‘If poetry has a purpose, it is to keep history – and not just its own – from coming to an end.’ (all quotes here 113)

16th August 2013

Bruns, Gerald L. The Material of Poetry. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2005

Schrage Musik (1986) - for my father

Claude Herbert Sheppard 1924-2013

I read the following at my father's funeral at Worthing Crematorium, 1st August 2013

Most people don’t experience a singular event that defines their life. Claude did. It can be dated quite precisely: the night of 20th-21st January 1944. Half a century later to the day he, my mother, and I stood on a wind-swept Southwick beach looking out to sea and to my surprise – I’d remembered the date but his memory was notoriously bad – he remarked on the anniversary. This was the day when, at 19, he was transformed from an RAF rear-gunner in 102 Squadron – a dangerous position in a dangerous occupation in unglamorous Bomber Command – into a prisoner of war of the Nazis, itself a perilous situation. Perilous both at first, when the German Home Guard had to protect him from the anger of blitz-crazed Berliners on a U-Bahn platform, and at its chaotic end a year and a half later, when the Nazis melted away like feral ghosts, to leave an anarchic zone. Confused RAF fighters straffed columns of forced-marched POWs. A German farmer sheltered two escaped POWs – Claude and his friend Johnny – to hand-signal his way through the night, somehow telling the two hungry Englishmen that they never wanted Hitler. Claude escaped to Brussels, in time for parties and dancing in the street, and returned to Britain, via a debriefing to establish his identity, to a dull civilian life in Atlee’s far-from utopian Welfare Britain, whose founding Claude nevertheless supported. Claude remembered falling asleep on the upper deck of a bus, due to extended malnutrition, passengers unable to comprehend his condition.

No wonder he signed up again! For a shadowy few years, at one point romantically supping expensive wines that hoteliers had buried from the Nazis in Marseilles; at another, fighting communist insurgents in tropical Malaya in a forgotten campaign, during which his plane crashed and he broke his wrist. Until he finally left the Air Force, vowing never to fly again (one of the reasons I never flew in a plane until I was forty!). He’d already met Joan, my mother, apparently at a New Year’s dance in Brighton, rescued her from a drunken sailor, if we are to believe the stories, and married her in 1950. They look like film stars in the wedding photographs – some of you were there.

This was the beginning of his domestic life, his daily journeys – by bike and train and later by car – from Southwick to Newhaven Harbour. As a child I accompanied him when he worked Sunday overtime, driving along the seafront in the Triumph Mayflower (KOR 677), ‘Telstar’ playing on the car radio. The job was humdrum but with the occasional mystique that accrues to trains and ships, even cross-channel ferries. The small loving miracles of everyday life enveloped him. Southwick with its magnificent cricket club – three Saturday teams and a Sunday team! – suited him very well. He became a life member after services to it and of the adjacent social club he helped administer in his spare time. These and the Golf Club have sent fond messages in the last few days.

But the moment of that night in January 1944 played like an old 78, caught in a groove. He baled out at 20,000 feet, falling onto a burning city, ‘came down in complete darkness, knocked unconscious – woke up completely confused, imprisoned by Germans in cell overnight’, as Claude himself wrote around 2005 in some notes (never sent) for an aviation historian. You see, he’d baled out into World History, and he knew it. His account doesn’t mention trapping his foot in the cramped cockpit as he reversed it, the plane beginning to plunge, or the fact that he would repeat this trauma nightly in his single recurring dream, for at least 62 years, until dementia finally erased it. In the nursing home in recent years I expected him to revert to these war memories (as he started to do in health only in the 1970s when he located other survivors of that night, including the skipper, Reg.) But he didn’t: he sailed somewhere through the eternal calms of his domestic life of the early 1960s: more The Shadows than Glenn Miller, to put it in terms of his favourite musics.

Also in that account of his flying (10 ops) he related a ‘hair-raising incident’. Claude’s words again: ‘Coming home from an attack we were badly shot up and the skipper advised us to put our chutes on. We were standing by to bale out with the North Sea in front. One of our crew members had accidentally got hooked up with the chute lines and pulled the rip-chord…. He was holding the parachute in his arms. I often see his face (he corrected the word to ‘expression’). It must have been frighten….’ Here the fragment cuts off. Another take on the story ends: ‘He was a brave man.’ Claude told me he never saw the man again after this display of LMF (Lack of Moral Fibre).

Another part of the trauma was imprisonment in Stalag Luft III, a mobile life of forced marches into the chill of Poland and back into Germany. He taught himself and others accountancy (useful in Newhaven), including Johnny, later his best man. I don’t know a lot about this time. They lived on rotten potato peelings. One result of this was that Claude would never eat meat with gristle in, even fish with bones in! He always dressed well, perhaps in reaction to these months. Another result was more incongruous, even inexplicable: the rousing chorus of ‘Raus Raus!’ with which he would wake me in the morning as a child, in imitation of his German guards!

My childhood memories of my father are often images of the Mayflower-Telstar kind: his assembly of Airfix models of World War 2 aircraft with minute precision which I would clumsily hand-glide to land on the airstrip circled by train-track he’d screwed to a large sheet of hardboard; Claude reconstituting parts of ancient valve radios (another skill learnt in the RAF) to make new sets for me to listen to short wave stations from around the globe; the patio at Oakapple Road covered with cricket pads, whitewashed by him and drying, a mark of his captaincy; cricket coach trips to bluebell woods and pavilions with wooden boards, me rattling out bus tickets to the cricketer-passengers on the return journey. All of these tableaux of desirable innocence were played out under the shadow of that one event – though perhaps the rest of us couldn’t see it most of the time.

Although an essentially irascible man to the end, to me he was nothing less than gentle, tender even – though he was always disappointed at my reluctance, my refusal, to participate in any form of sport, my complete failure to follow his exemplary and sometimes excellent record as a lifelong sportsman: as boxer or footballer (before my time); as cricketer, golfer, snooker-player (in my memory). No tennis (he called it ‘an officer’s game’); no rugby (he never mentioned it). But it’s only now that I perceive his protectiveness towards me, though I’d always perceived (and resisted) his largesse, his generosity, again derived from wartime deprivation, I’m sure. Despite being an only child, I don’t think I was spoilt!

He was proud of my academic career, but my development as a writer might have been thought surprising to Claude. Strangely I never wrote that book on football he desperately suggested to me (though I am now telling his life story here, which he also slyly proposed). He was an avid but un-systematic reader – he’d tackle one of my childhood Biggles books as well as a block of Henry James – and only a few years ago he discussed with me DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers with an intensity worthy of a good undergraduate. He had a small library of books on wartime aviation and POW matters. He instinctively understood my 1986 poem Schräge Musik about World War 2 bombing and the world of dance band music (which was in the family), round about the first time he delightedly met his grand son Stephen. He spotted all the allusions despite the cut-up method of the text; and he gave me a couple of details which I smuggled into later printings of the poem. He also shyly confessed to having written a poem himself, on a troop ship during a particularly nasty storm in the Bay of Biscay in 1947. He could remember a verse and I wrote it down. I possess it somewhere.

Recent years saw his resilient endurance of what is perhaps misleadingly called a ‘fight’ against skin cancer. After his working life at Newhaven Harbour, capped by a rather clever move to an elevated post in his final three years, this clouded his retirement. Nevertheless, he enjoyed his vigorous golf and-snooker-playing and thorough home-improving years with my mother. And we shouldn’t forget the garden, which was maintained like that of a stately home. Given the extent of the surgery he underwent it is remarkable to think that he survived beyond his 89th birthday. He was a strong man. Antagonistic to doctors, he was nevertheless a grateful man. Like his comrade of years before, he was a brave man. Throughout this time, his self-sacrificial care for my mother stemmed from the same generosity I mentioned earlier. In short, he was a good man.

From RAF Records of bombing raids (complete with mis-spelling of my father's name):

LW227 DY-X

W/O R.G. Wilding - Pilot - PoW
Sgt J.L. Corrigan - FE - PoW
Sgt R.W. Chandler - PoW - NAV
Sgt J.C. Heap - BA - PoW
Sgt T.J. Buxton - WOp - PoW
WO2 F.F. Yeager RCAF - WOp - PoW
Sgt C.H. Shepperd - AG - PoW

20/01/1944 Berlin

'Standing By', my poem in his memory is now published with another poem as The Drop. See here.

My father (and mother and son) sitting in front of Patricia's Schrage Musik painting.

My eulogy for my mother (who died in 2018) may be read here. 

Sudley House for Scott Thurston

Sudley House


                                                                           for Scott Thurston (on his 40th birthday)


Suddenly you are inside the house. Standing in the old entrance. The garden hall or vestibule

The little Corot landscape’s here. All pictures domestic scale. The Holman Hunt propped on an easel. A magnifying glass swinging on its string

One painting shifted a little to the left to fit another in. The nightmare of George Holt’s handyman

Trade with Brazil. Not one image of this life
Florentine swelter. Crackling through the horse chestnut leaves. Crisp. Liquid electricity

Doric columns rise either side of the fireplace. The faint tinkle a chime. A tintinnabulation of the silence out of which a painting may be conjured

Into which it might disappear for the ambulant solitary in performance for a group walking

Far from the Paris Commune. A tornado of options. Poplars. As though time has ceased. Moments stretched. A loose bowelled cow flaps its flanks

A chiaroscuro whisper. We pick up. Each other’s senseless sense and fly with it. Enacted in that series of rooms (in which this was largely written

Rough of a sensibility. Bull’s spittle dribbles on stones. A rumour a promise. Unconfirmed broken. Autumn shiver. Beasts dung the tilled field. Fecund chill

Enter. Gainsborough over the fireplace. The last purchase. At 3000 guineas the most expensive

Moved in 1884 from Edge Hill. To overlook the Mersey. Holt extended the building. Died there 1896

Perspective distorts the carpet’s intention. Poems were written at this desk. Liberty spelt out. The tomb long open and the trees crouching for a peep inside

Tall windows: granite melody in a haze. The channel. Silt bank. Catches light from over the water. Wish for mist. On the distant Welsh hills. Or mountains. The single hammering at 1 o’clock you mistake for the butcher’s boy’s sharp bell

In the name of God silence pierced her side high and plaintive as a silken moth

Posed but never poised. A dreamy girl with a creamy neck. Ready for a ball or bell

‘Each cascade of time blushes me up for grief.’ A Punch and Judy hammering of the meridian. A porcelain jug full of bits. Bobs. You know the stuff. Things

A girl who has no servant to call remove the dying flowers their odour sickens her

‘I should know these things I don’t. I’m designed to be merely cherished. After death

Bookmarks mark. Wisdom, a crumple of promises clutched in sweat. The cobbler bangs out his unspoken love for her on the soles of her broken shoes

‘Byron might have imagined me! Or worse! Shelley would have mirrored me! But I’m tucked away that unique thing a fake! Insert me into the language of which I am composed

Trees weave. Time is a turning page, every quarter of an hour. Chime. A slow three-decker telling of empty dandy chairs lusting the wrong way round

The garden vestibule (again) ahead of you into the library where you stretch. How do tall shelves of books become a Library

At the sarcophagus your writing will be prophetic. What will be. When it is done

Unitarian, Liberal, Philanthropic

Someone will slouch in your creaking armchair and frown at your words. Its marbled blanks

Desiccated copy of Byron’s Poems. Dropping brown powder from its spine. Into your lap as you turn the pages. Curtained secrets. Of quiet decay. Exposed to light, crumples. Breathless, wind-chimes

You were looking for a remarkable symbol. Trudging the green lane. To the front doors you have already forgotten. A silver glow behind the nets. Illumines the desk upon which the bills were once paid

She holds a letter from the Dean. From that archive of illegible documents held in paint

Ribs blush over a riverine council. Of peasants. The drought. So perfect that any blemish would turn the day septic

The title sprinkled from this book. Tinkling. Angel dust flaking from the walls of a fresco. During a riot

Something. To be something. Must be darker than the darkness. Viol burns its madrigal. (While Hopkins is spat at by Holt’s stevedores

Out into a room which is not a room. The unseen inhabits the scene. Dwarfs the people. Undiminished not quite vulnerable. In the oil sketch. Measured chimes of human anthems

Weirs crash upon Venetian thoughts. She’s suddenly seen you. From the new entrance. Entranced fascination. Opening your hatch you admit much pleasure. Delirium soaks the tedium

Etiolated and brittle. Bristles of genre. (Remember lavender alive with bees swaying after the storm?) Floor bathed with light. An amber glow as it rises from polished boards soaking into scarlet walls

Somebody watches you from the balcony. A flicker of interest in your lack of interest. Your room a tumbling red cube for his pitching vertigo

Coleridge held that Unitarianism is not Christianity although some Unitarians are Christians – which ones? The window at this diagonal. Nine more steps. The morning room

‘Saw the child stamping and stamping on the ants. I wanted to cuff him

Trees, the slate-grey Mersey. Any industry at its shore is ‘ruralised by distance’ in the conceit. That other blue distance. Welsh mountains. Or hills

Slit the morning post beneath the woodblock variegations, the Pre-Raphaelite dazzle. The tinfoil-crackle tones of Tennyson and Browning

This morning’s lesson is the dust that rises from a beaten carpet. A knocked up bit of greatness. A hand on a keyboard, too many naturals. A fantasia in black and white

The temple (again)! Without even a Fra Fillipo Lippo wink at you. A startling eye looms in the magnifying lens. A falcon dives. Rips into the neck of the dove, this premature Transfiguration

Bays picked to shreds. She threads beads. Roses, the tiles at her bare feet. As though a wish could fall true on this marble. Breasts ghosted through thin robes. Poised as a sponge of poison squeezed into your limpid pool

Into the dining room. Pass the Italianate marble fireplace with the Holt crest

Schloss Rosenau. It’s an isle, an aisle even, of light. Sufficient to allow divinity or human majesty its approach. The radiance of patronage. A smeared palette. Or the palpitating shade which you cannot penetrate. They are not human enough: boy tensing his fishing rod, girl floating on collapse. Their scattered picnic. Crouching mendicants at some filthy game. Fawning before an oblivious consort

They scratched away the cracked sky to find Margate sun. The ‘lighthouse’ is a white-hot brushstroke a blemish on the skin of night. With what confidence could you mount those steps to the promise of a quayside?

Imagine that you have bought a painting. The painter requests you loan it to him. Early picture on which Turner spent six laborious days at the end of his life. But it came out with a whitened misty sky and a double rainbow. Spectral retribution. Painted over. Not over. When it returns the painting has darkened. Less lightning burst than rainbow. Obliterate the eye’s asperities

Look closely Cousin George the magnifying glass. The startling eye looms. The beginning of his interest in Surrealism. Reading to yourself. Reading yourself. A monstrous porthole

This rectangle, no larger than a servant’s mirror. The family’s wealth derived from shipping – the company Lamport & Holt

Black is a shade of white. Clouds sails sea-crest. Black-tipped gull comes to rest. In the rest. Say you are rendered. Wordless the memory of a memory of men. Loading a ship dreamt about, starkly

Peer into Bonington’s moment for as long as you dare

Look away. Listen. Tear the image as though it were rotten canvas. An old painting a dead sail. Turn away

The staircase hall beckons. Between two pairs of columns. You sense how the stairs’ course was altered. To face you. At last. Mount

Upstairs. Part the nets. If anyone is watching. With both your hands, either side. A triangle. Watch yourself from behind

This is the view they built here. The sloped lawn, the billowing trees. Afar: the same hills or mountains without features. A study

Framed tangle of light

Notes

‘Sudley House’ was realised as a guided tour/performance at Sudley House, Mossley Hill, Liverpool, in four shows on 6 and 12 November 2004, with Scott Thurston as second voice and presence. ('Someone will slouch in your creaking armchair and frown at your words.'/'Somebody watches you from the balcony.  A flicker of interest in your lack of interest. Your room a tumbling red cube for his pitching vertigo.') Props included recordings of Tennyson (1890) and my 1793 edition of Cowper’s Poems (Vol I). Read the history here. And an account of those 2004 performances here.

I would like to thank Scott; and Jane Duffy and Alex Kidson of the National Galleries of Merseyside for allowing me to act as Visiting Scholar to Sudley House, and to the latter for his whistle-stop private tour of the Emma Holt bequest. Thanks to all the staff at the House for making my writing visits so pleasant, and for the smooth running of the performances. I readily acknowledge monies from (the then) Edge Hill College of Higher Education School of Humanities and Arts Research Development Fund to enable this work to be developed in its original form. The performance text is available on Great Works at this link. Many thanks for Peter Philpott for publishing it. This new text was largely prompted by the re-hanging of the works and thus the rendering fictive of my movement instructions and narrative. ‘Cousin George’ is George Melly. There are several quotations melted and re-formed in the text, particularly Ruskin on Turner, but also Turner’s detractors.

This has been posted to celebrate Scott's 40th birthday. Happy Birthday. Watch him here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK5BlSqzCoQ

for Claude Sheppard

Burnt Journal 1924

for my father at 89; 2nd July


The city builds into sky, annexing uncharted
Everests. You hold the aerial photograph,
simplifying by geometry, distance, like Empire itself,
its Exhibition. Scots pipers grumble their way to Tut’s Tomb.

A moment frozen in butter! The sculpted disaster
of Jack Hobbs bowled out! Hungry kids lick his creamy pads,
dreaming of tiptoeing across Margate sands for their annual.
The nose of the bike’s side-car (hold on to your bonnet

Doris!) is an aeroplane of the motoring roads,
its spinning white-walls the prayer-wheels of modernity.
Hot-breathed from Colman’s, Imperialists funnel

the rustling throng into atmosphere for a Saturday night
broadcast from His Master’s Voice exhibit,
a dining room dominated by its cenotaph of sound.

Robert Sheppard

Robert Sheppard's A Translated Man published

My new book A Translated Man is published. Here's the cover image (I think that is Rene Van Valckenborch himself.)

I have given this book over to my own invention, the fictional Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. Apparently writing in both Flemish and Walloon, and translated and edited by entities as shadowy (and dodgy) as himself, Van Valckenborch's split oeuvre derives from the linguistic and cultural divide within contemporary Belgium. By the time Van Valckenborch disappears into poetic silence he seems an enigma of his own making, a comic figure with tragic attributes, a mystery to all swept up in his apparition. When his story is finished he leaves behind the deliberately discontinuous evidence of a dual poetic adventure—one half siding with history and opting for a breathlessly recurring triplet verse, the other obsessing over place and space and restlessly and increasingly playing with experimental forms. Behind and within them all, I am extending my formal and referential range: from homages to film-makers to Twitterodes, from accounts of tribal masks to cuboid quennets, and poems about Belgium of course. Above all, I am exploring the limits of the author-function. This is an imaginary collection with real poems in it.


You can see further details of this book and can buy it and related books here, or from here or from here. Or here.Updated link 2018:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-A-Translated-Man-p102839130

There is more about Van Valckenborch here and more about his creations here.

Manifest exhibition at Edge Hill University

Manifest
an exhibition of collaborative works by the poet Robert Sheppard and the artist Pete Clarke

April 11th -26th, 2013

The Arts Centre
Edge Hill
University

Here is a general view of the exhibition followed by a list of works in the exhibition.

MANIFEST:

Edge Hill University Arts Centre

Exhibition of the Collaborative works by the poet Robert Sheppard and the artist Pete Clarke. The works may be seen here.


LIST OF WORKS

1. In mid seas stands a tower, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

2. Dead as a door step, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

3. Walled in a Lost City, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

4. A song that does not sing, 2013

Edition 1/7 Silkscreen and wood relief on somerset paper

5. TIRED SAD TOWERS, 2012

Edition 1/8 Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

6. Moving through the conventions

A/P Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

7. Tangled Scree, 2012

Edition 2/9 Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

8. MANIFEST, 2010

Edition 5/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

9. Tangled Scree, 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

10. Tangled Scree, 2011

Edition 1/10 Letterpress on somerset paper

11. THIS IS NOT GUILT [3], 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

12. THIS IS NOT GUILT [2], 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

13. LYRIC, 2010

Edition 5/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

14. ODE TO FORME, 2010

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

15. Invisible Cities, 2009

Oil, acrylic and screened text on constructed canvas

All works are for sale, framed or unframed, contact Pete for details

Pclarke2@uclan.ac.uk

Pete Clarke lives in Liverpool and is the MA Course Leader and Principal Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. He also makes paintings, prints and installations with the artist Georg Gartz from Cologne exploring collaborative strategies within contemporary practice questioning individuality, authorship and authenticity in a European context.

www.peteclarke.org.uk

Other works were shown on a continuous video presentation. It was a shame to see the exhibition being taken down, but the symposium I organised at Edge Hill on Literary Collaboration during the exhibition was a great success.

Here are images of a new collage work (number 1 above) which takes the phrase ‘Walled in a lost city’ from my work somewhere, but I don’t recognise it off-hand!

I was amusing myself with a reproduction of the wonderful Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos and made this translation of his poem about the Portuguese poet ‘Pessoa’, whose heteronyms (fictional poets) have obviously influenced my own recent obsessions, but whose name means ‘persona’, rather incredibly. I came up with the neologism ‘persong’ to deal with this concept. Pete has adapted the lineation of de Campos’ original and my version. Number 4 in catalogue.

That was a new work, as is ‘Moving through the Conventions’ that takes a part of a sentence from a very defamiliarised new text of mine from the ongoing prose collection, Unfinish, called ‘Venus and Adonis’. The full sentence by the way is: ‘I can see her moving through the conventions, solving crimes with the bristles that grow out of her chins.’ I’m glad Pete works selectively! Patricia Farrell (who took these photos in the exhibition) likes this one too. Number 6 in the catalogue.

The ‘Tangled Scree’ text has been shown before on the last post, but here are some details of that piece in situ. This is the re-working of a quennet and was shortlisted for the Adrian Henri Prize.

Finally, here are some more details of the ‘This is not Guilt’ series of prints.

More here. Later images may be seen here.

Manifest Pete Clarke and Robert Sheppard

Manifest


an exhibition of collaborative works by the poet

Robert Sheppard

and the artist

Pete Clarke

April 11th -26th, 2013

Edge Hill University
St Helens Road
Ormskirk
Lancashire
L39 4QP


Featured was our piece that was shortlisted for the Adrian Henri Prize. Here are a few versions of that. The original poem is a quennet. Most of the text is visible in the second version.

Our first pieces were produced, quite qiuickly for the Poetry Beyond Text exhibitions, and all three texts come from A Translated Man, but you don't need to be thinking about the contexts of those 'fictional poems' to be following what's going on, formally.

Here are some photographs of more recent pieces, and details of pieces, taken by Patricia Farrell. The first features the 'This Not Grief' text which opens section of 'Reading the Reader' from Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes.

This is not guilt but grief

From now on she will be in quotation marks

She emptied herself out with good reason

He is left empty for no reason good or ill. Reading

her absence as a presence he bears witness

His testimony is as blank as an orphan’s. His testament is frozen sweat in solid steam

Here are two recent rather dark collages produced by Pete with more text from Hymns to the God, a square book that fits neatly into his pocket while he's working!

These did note feature in the exhibtion in the end. And there are later images here from a later collaboration.

Thatcher Dead

It's just been announced that Thatcher has died. I once said she was the most important influence on my poetry (half-jokingly); but I also said that I couldn't be really happy while she was alive. How appropriate she died on the day the Con-Dem government introduced more of its austerity measures, in part to demonise the very victims they are creating. As I type I can hear sanctimonious tones on the BBC downstairs.


Here’s part three of ‘Coming Down from St George’s Hill’ from Twentieth Century Blues


Democratic vista he parks the car
Then has to queue for the cashpoint
Whispering possessive St George’s
Somewhere above the embossed logo
Window tissue paper
And its history of pleasantly
Attired servants
In famous fables begun at this
Desk of irregular
Attic windows car door opens blonde
Hair spills into the gutter
He speaks in deadpan cockney learned
Of the East Sussex school of villainy
Creaming himself at Thatcher’s rush of
Active citizens revving up
Fumes and consumption’s vapour
Lists a pop capitalist
                                   transformed
A staggering dislocation of the
Cocktail effect gone defective
Electric against meshed frost
Produced by desire dreams
An act of love a realised cell
Phone interrupts you all right mate?
Giggle at least it stopped a repetition
Of his ardent administered dream


20 September-16 October 1988

And here is a verse from The Lores written in the mid-90s:

The Millennium Enterprise Zone layers
on layers of torn calendars that
wipe Thatcher’s solid dream trappings
below any diction a satirist
with no worship centre his
ears adjust to a future
of persistent sensations, lacking himself

And I used her own words in another poem in The Lores, where I begin with the name that I ised to denote that period: 'The  Drowning Years', which alludes to the book I was using as a source for those lines, Thatcher's own The Downing Street Years. As I put it in the bibliography to that poem: '

Thatcher, Margaret, The Downing Street Years (a condensation [thank God] of the book) in Today’s Best Nonfiction [sic], Reader’s Digest, 1994 – a volume I found lying outside my front gate during the summer of 1994, a veritable found text.' (All of these poems may be found in Complete Twentieth Century Blues from Salt.)

   

drowning years

I needed no interpreter spoke the same

language the complex romance of international trade

I liked living over the shop good

wishes from people who are suffering free

to pursue their own dreams arguments always

give one appetite true vice second thoughts

not everybody cheers the same thing I

was glued to the radio for news

we were not fatally wounded but a

totalitarian state with siege barriers of coal

I prayed fitfully revolution still to be

made our problem was presentation red roses

proved photogenic families were the government nemesis

of gain (one country      one system      ours

Zoe Skoulding - Gurkan Arnavut - Robert Sheppard - Enemies of the North

On Saturday I was too ill to read at The Enemies of the North reading in Manchester, organised by Steven Fowler (to whom many thanks for the invitation). And many thanks for pairing me with Zoe Skoulding, and thanks to Zoe for collaborating with me, and indeed, playing along with my interest in fictional poets. René Van Valckenborch is soon to be published in A Translated Man but various fictional poets of his (poets within poets) exist both inside and beyond the book (and can be found on the European Union of Imaginary Authors website). One was designed to have a walk on part in the book (he was meant to be a loose strand, a name without a reference, but that strand has now become a woven fabric). He is Gurkan Arnavut, a Turkish Cypriot, though living in the Cypriot part of the island. Zoe and I picked him for this collaboration, innocent of the impending financial indignities visited upon the citizens of that small nation. Watch Zoe introduce and read the poems beautifully. Because of the artifice of its construction, I like the single voice.

I’m really pleased with these. Thanks Zoe.

James Keery on Robert Sheppard's Bad Times



A road sign from the Age of the Movement

Long ago, James Keery wrote a charming summary of my early career: ‘Robert Sheppard commenced operations just as Margaret Thatcher took command, and an uneven power struggle ensued…’ (PN Review 107, 1996.) I quote it on my ‘Criticism’ page of my recent website.

Here he is again, in PN Review 209, the current issue, reviewing my Shearsman critical volume When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry . Mrs T makes her appearance again, as he states: ‘Robert Sheppard has got it just right in this book.’ (Something in my shouts, ‘Stop there! That’ll do nicely.’) ‘An “episodic history” of a “poetic community” to which he has belonged since the advent of Margaret Thatcher, it is temperate, reflective – even, on its own individually negotiated terms, academic – yet unrepentant in its tribal loyalty. There isn’t a smug or mean-spirited word.’ He then delves more generally into the creative environment I was attempting to describe (digging up associations between the New Apocalypse and the British Poetry Revival, which is another story; this is an article rather than a review, and the better for it). You can read the first few paragraphs here.
I am particularly glad that he cross-refers to my poetry in Berlin Bursts ; pleased that he points out what he calls my ‘elegant trope’ of ‘human unfinish as the condition of our survival’. (It first occurs in Warrant Error  in lines that reference Pinkas Synagogue in Prague:

Stones leaning splinter through time
for those with no names
possess no death. You ex-
hume the ex-human in human unfinish

But the 'trope' is carried over into works in progress (I’m toying with Unfinish as the title of a new project.) Anyone who has read the article knows I am dodging his teasing equation of these thoughts ‘open to the “long perspectives” of which the Movement poets went in fear, but also a principled intelligence worthy of the Movement at its best’, but he catches the dying embers of my Levinasian ethicality (which pervades my earlier critical volume The Poetry of Saying (in which he will find deliberately mean-spirited words about the Movement!)). But I still believe my own words with which he concludes:
Remember: somewhere between the shifting screens of randomly generated computer text and the frost-blown epitaph sculpted onto a headstone for all times lies your responsibility.

It’s a shame I can’t remember where this is from! Thanks for finding it James.

I have two facts to put right. I did not take the photograph of Bob and Jennifer Cobbing referred to (Peter Manson did. See here for photos of his 1995 visit to Cobbing’s workshop, as well as a wealth of Cobbing materials.) Second: I certainly didn’t teach Bob how to use a computer! (That’s possibly Lawrence Upton.)

Updated link to the book;

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

Patricia Farrell and Andrew Taylor Reading

Andrew Taylor and Patricia Farrell launched their new

collections of poetry at

The Ship and Mitre

Liverpool L3 2JH

on Saturday 23rd February

2 - 4 pm

Andrew’s Radio Mast Horizon and Patricia’s The Zechstein Sea are

both published by Shearsman Books

‘With a voice fresh and responsive, these poems’ chiselled lyricism

is firmly located in terms of time and space … Everything is in them, it

seems. Including us. At last Taylor’s impressive oeuvre is amassed for

the audience it deserves.’ (Robert Sheppard)

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/taylor.html

On Patricia's book: ‘Via encounters with the troubadour poet, Guillaume of Poitiers,

Friedrich Hölderlin and the contemporary goldsmith, Jivan Astfalck,

Farrell offers “new solutions/new songs” whilst “provoking new

lines of thought”.’ (Scott Thurston)

Patricia will be publishing a new book from Veer in late 2014. But until then, read Ian Seed's review of her book here.

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/farrell.html