Robert Sheppard: The Necessity of Poetics 2: Definitions of Poetics

Metapoetics: Definitions of Poetics

(These are all happily online elsewhere on the Creative Critical website (with a new, 2021, introduction: https://creativecritical.net/gathering-from-the-past/

I reproduce the first few here only)

Poetics is the product of the process of reflection upon writings, and upon the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others, speculatively casting into the future.

Poetics is a discipline, though a flexible one.

Poetics is a discourse, though an intermittent mercurial one.

Poetics is a writer-centred, self-organising activity.

Poetics is a way of letting writers question what they think they know.

Poetics is a way of allowing creative writing dialogue with itself, beyond the monologic of commentary or reflection.

Poetics exists for oneself and for others, to produce, to quote Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘a permission to continue’. (DuPlessis 1990: 156)

... and dozens more for your delight here, right through to:

Poetics should be studied as such.

Poetics can stop being absorbed by the metalanguage of literary theory or criticism by asserting its own claims as a discourse, a language game with its own players, rules and purposes.

Poetics in hybrid, fragmentary, collage, playful, jokey, patapoetical, forms, avoids cooption into the explication of the writing that results.

Poetics’ function is both oriented towards, and in, new form.

*

Return to part one (and links to all 6 parts of this version of The Necessity of Poetics) here.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/robert-sheppard-necessity-of-poetics-1.html

Robert Sheppard: The Necessity of Poetics 1: The Identification of Poetics

the necessity of poetics

robert sheppard

ship of fools

liverpool

2011 edition

This piece, along with others, on, of, or about poetics, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics. Details here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).  

The Identification of Poetics

Despite the present prominence of the critic, it is to the poet we must turn for poetics. With few exceptions, those qualified to theorise about poetry are those who write it. And the most effective poetics take the form of an apologia for one particular style of writing – usually the poet’s own. The nature of the apologia can vary enormously – from the brusque practicality of Pound’s Don’ts to the introspective pondering of Valéry – but they are all stratagems of defence, and usually gain in polemical edge for being so. In addition to these qualities we find, in the finest poetics, a profound reserve before the fact of poetry, and a refusal to be dogmatic; after all, the great poems have usually broken laws. (Romer 1982: 63)

Thus opens Stephen Romer’s review of Jean-Claude Renard’s poetics with a matter-of-factness that perhaps does not allow for the force of resistance towards poetics (in this country anyway) and perhaps lacks a sense of the speculative nature of poetics itself, but it does acknowledge the kinds of irony and ambiguity that colour relations between poetics and poetry (and writing more generally).

I present next (in a later post and in the Pores version) a proliferation of definitions, deliberately miming poetics’ own refusal of laws and templates, a mode which I believe best captures the spirit and meaning of the enterprise, its excitements, incitements and its spirit of exploration and innovation (and its occasional excessiveness).
*
Read part two, the 'proliferation of definitions' referred to above, here.
Part three, on poetics as a  specific discourse, here.
Part four, some examples of poetics (and links to many more) here.

Part five, a flavour of poetics (of poetry, of fiction, of scriptwriting) here.

Part six, ‘Don’t explain’, explains why your shouldn’t explain, that poetics is not an expository discourse, but a speculative one, here.

Part seven is an abridged conclusion, and it contains the notes for all seven parts and a bibliography of works cited, here.

*
 (NB: It seems appropriate to begin posting this booklet on the 20th anniversary of my starting work at Edge Hill, since this work on poetics developed in my first years of teaching and researching there. April 1st was my first official day.)

Steve Spence on Andrew Duncan on Twentieth Century Blues

In his ‘Finding Your Own Way’, in part a review of A Poetry Boom 1990-2010 by Andrew Duncan (Shearsman, new), Steve Spence comments:

Someone he isn't so good on and who I think he massively underestimates is Robert Sheppard. He describes Sheppard's huge project, Twentieth Century Blues (a project similar in some ways to both the work of Lopez and Goodland) as being 'thoroughly unsuccessful, overheated, loud and repetitive'. He's not too keen on Sheppard's critical work either so I'm wondering if there isn't some sort of 'personality clash' going on here. Sheppard's wonderful collection Warrant Error is for me proof that it's still possible to write political poetry at all and political poetry at that which combines both an emotional response with a tight formalist quality which contains and 'skews' the anger. Reason and emotion in perfect balance I'd say, in a book which really makes the grade. I haven't read all of Twentieth Century Blues (a vast project) but I've been impressed with what I have read and also find Sheppard to be a useful and perceptive critic.

I find the terms of the attack and defence both interesting. (And wonder about 'unsuccess' and the criteria for its assessment.) It’s also interesting to reflect on Steve Spence’s ‘wondering’ about a ‘personality clash’ between Andrew and myself. I like Andrew though I don’t see him that often (but used to every week in London). He’s the least egoistical person I've met in the poetry world (which is saying something!). It would be easier if I could attribute his views to a 'personality clash', but I can’t, and won't. 

However, there is a larger point about writing criticism of contemporary poetry when one is an agent in the scene (and particularly when one is a poet as well as a critic). Michael Hamburger took the route of never writing on his contemporaries. That’s one way, but it leaves the contemporary off limits forever. So some of us plunge in (Andrew and me both, and Steve Spence) and attempt to write criticism. But what about when we attempt to write about each other? If I were now to write an even-mildly negative critique of Andrew’s poetry or disagree with some element of his criticism, (to suggest that his micro-scale assessments of individual poets are more cogent that his macro-judgements about scenes and decades, etc) would that not simply be read as some sort of revenge? Poetry. BOOM!

1990-2010: Literary histories often omit to mention my work (and that of the others Duncan and I write about). The period chosen is, of course, partly the period of Twentieth Century Blues. But it’s also the period in which I published (a quick check of publication dates) Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes and Warrant Error, to limit myself to poetry, and to pinpoint the example Spence proffers. I wonder if that is mentioned.

Here is Steve Spence's piece. And his earlier review of Warrant Error here.

Twentieth Century Blues may be bought here, Warrant Error here. All my projects may be sampled in my selected poems, History or Sleep, here.

Todd Thorpe’s review of  Twentieth Century Blues my be read here.

 


The POETICS of Twentieth Century Blues may be read here. (NB POETICS is going to be the subject of the next 7 posts on Pages, beginning 1st April.)

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form its various blurbs

I have not mentioned this critical book for a while on this blog, partly because I have been busy with the admin behind it, gathering permissions from authors and publishers, which has not been easy. But I have just delivered the final text (to Palgrave, US) and it seems appropriate to record that fact and to offer a reminder of its forthcomingness. (This also reminds me of the paratexts I will need to do, the index, for example. Those who have never written an academic book would be quite surprised how much work the author has to do, permissions to pay, etc. This is one reason why I hope this will be my last purely academic book on poetry.) 

I have just tried to describe the project in 50 words and then in 150 and then in keywords, and then myself in 50. Here they are:

This study treats the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both a summary introduction to contemporary theories of form, and through detailed readings of leading North American and British innovative poets, which show their forms to be a matter of both authorial design and readerly engagement.  

This study engages questions relating to the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories of form that will be of interest to anyone concerned with reading for form, and which focusses upon form as an engaged action rather than metrical frame or pattern, and with reference to the work of Susan Wolfson and Derek Attridge. Close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets, from Rosmarie Waldrop to Caroline Bergvall, Sean Bonney to Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson to Kenneth Goldsmith, Allen Fisher to Geraldine Monk, emphasise their forms to be a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement. They cover form on the page, form in performance, and form in physical book-making. The book ends with a consideration of what has been implicit throughout: the politically critical function of formal innovation, mediated through the theories of Adorno, Rancière and others.

keywords: form; innovation; formal innovation; linguistically innovative poetry; political form.

Robert Sheppard is a poet-critic and Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, UK. His The Poetry of Saying (LUP) was published in 2005, and he has written a monograph on Iain Sinclair and edited an essay collection on Lee Harwood. His Selected Poems is published by Shearsman.

A guide or hub-post, to the project, with links to some of its working notes and digressions and outtakes, may be accessed here.

For those who can buy the book, 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

Robert Sheppard: article in CLASP: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (my part in its downfall)

 

Last Saturday, in Leicester (see here), I picked up my contributor’s copy of Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s, edited by Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards. (Details here.) It’s the sort of book I would review – if I weren’t in it, in two senses: things I did and said pop up here and there, and I have my say in the short piece, ‘Took Chances in London Traffic’. It is itself supplementary to other works of mine, as I explain:

My critical book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry [Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011; see here] is really a hymn of praise to the poetry scene in London from the 1970s to the mid-1990s, just before I came to Liverpool. [Another] chapter ‘Informing the Nation: The Manifesto of the Poetry Society (1976)’ deals with the well-documented events at the Poetry Society (and with the poetics document mentioned in the title)…. My chapter ‘The Colony at the Heart of the Empire: Bob Cobbing and the Mid-1980s London Creative Environmenteart ’ outlines the readings and performances I witnessed or of which I kept evidence. It’s a fulsome but not comprehensive account,

I state carefully, emphasing that I didn’t attend every event, although I do have the benefit of the diaries I kept, the same used to write my autrebiographical Words Out of Time, (e.g., see here for my diary account of meeting Bob Cobbing for the first time, an event that is glossed in the book in general terms).

This is a fascinating book of reminiscences of the 1970s, although it understandably strays into the 1960s (‘The British Poetry Revival’, see here). John Lennon's white suit is glimpsed several times, but only one contributor spilt tea over it! It also strays into the 1980s. (I was told to narrate until 1985 and I did this scrupulously; I had to: I only arrived in London in late 1983!) But it also wanders into the 1990s: there’s anachronistic mention of the deliberately unnamed workshop/discussion group Patricia and I organised in Tooting (and our big parties are mentioned as well). In Valerie Soar’s wonderful piece, she remembers an epiphanic moment of watching Bob Cobbing performing at the Smallest Poetry Festival in the World, which was held in our very small Tooting council house (though in December 1994). This slippage is inevitable (as is the way contributors step outside the ring of the M25 to tell us of other matters in other places) but it might make it harder to write of the 1980s and 1990s as distinct eras (as they were).    

Of course, events around the Poetry Society are still up for debate, with Lawrence Upton (who wants to poke me in the eye for writing stuff like this, judging from his Basil Fawlty analogy!) on one side, Elaine Randell on the other, and Robert Vas Dias as the Piggy-in-the Middle. But the acrimony has abated, and I think we need to concentrate upon the creative work of that period and place.

John Muckle and I are the only two writers here who register a sense of not belonging to the ‘London scene’: both of us had wandered in from outside and both of us are at the end of the book, as the youngest contributors, and we recall the exclusivity of the scene that others don’t notice. They do register the gender bias, if that’s not a weak term for an almost complete absence of women, although Valerie, Paula Claire and Frances Presley offer strong accounts. It’s good to see Patricia Farrell’s role in SubVoicive acknowledged.   

So: it’s not a book I can review at all. (Also see this interview between Rupert Loydell and me which pitches two versions of London in the early 80s against one another.)

One last thing: it almost seems as though in our search for accuracy, some of us have dodged trying to reflect the necessary excitement that derived from being in the compression of 'London traffic'. It takes another outsider, Jeremy Reed in his Shearsman book I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Asa Benveniste and Trigram Press, to get it right: ‘There’s something about the stupendous momentum of London’s energies that locks you into capital affairs.’ That’s what Clasp is about!

This piece, along with others, on, of, or about poetics, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics. It seemed to contextualise the poetics documents from the 1980s that I was re-printing in the third part of that book. Details here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).  

Robert Sheppard and Nancy Gaffield Oystercatcher Launch at States of Independence (Leicester) set list and account

I was up and out, with Patricia, after she’d got Stephen ready for a day of work at the Museum, to Leicester, a journey I thought unnecessarily long, on the otherwise comfortable trains. Reading Groove by Tiger Roholt (2014). (What are the implications for poetic performance of his theses about direct and indirect description of nuance and affect?) Late, straight into Simon Perrril’s Shearsman launch reading. We crashed in, like Archilochus dropping his shield, while Simon did the business of ventriloquising the dead Neobulé. (The book Beneath is the brilliant sequel to the equally brilliant Archilocus on the Moon, which I write about at length here.)

All the wonderful people: Tony Frazer, Peter and Lynn Hughes, Andy Taylor and Rory Waterman (met for the first time), Gregory Woods (met for the first time sine the 1980s, but an old friend from UEA days; I published his first poem on 1983 in 1975ish, and we've both served the old place well), Shiela (Patricia’s sister, a real pleasant surprise, to whom Patricia told the rude penguin joke), Alan Baker (a particular interest of mine at the moment, see here), Sam, who published Alan’s big book, as modest as Alan, and, of course, my co-reader Nancy Gaffield, who was new to me.

Me reading. Photo: courtesy Andrew Taylor

Our Oystercatcher reading was introduced generously by Peter Hughes, and Nancy began with her Meridian, see here. The poem began, disarmingly, for a Sussex boy listening, with the word ‘Peacehaven’, the strangest one horse town in the country, but it’s on the line that Nancy is walking and recording in this poem. We got as far as Epping Forest: the ghost of Clare. Sinclair country. Which she is planning to walk with him. (I wonder if Iain’s seen Peacehaven?)

I was clear I couldn’t go straight in with The Drop, so my set list was:

 ‘Rainshine shivers on dull platforms’, a poem about the English Midlands, from ‘The English Poems’ in Warrant Error (and in Historyor Sleep). There was a Shearsman stall as well as an Oystercatcher one downstairs.

The Drop, both the short lyric ‘Standing By’ (see here) and ‘Of Crystal'. (See here for the book and here for its elegiac contexts, and a review by Alan Baker, here.)

I then turned the tables on the poem and read an excerpt from ‘The Given’, to be found in both Words Out of Time and History or Sleep. It seemed sensible to read from one sentence referring to my father to another, a 5 minute stretch, but I emphasised the comedy (and at least one person, Greg Woods, remembered the Occupied Hamburger Bar at UEA!).

Over, I bought a number of books: Nancy’s book, plus Sophie Mayer’s and Ralph Hawkins’ Oystercatchers, Jeremy Reed’s Asa Benveniste book, a Sandeep Parmar, a Simon Smith I seemed to have missed, and Alan Baker’s Bonnefoy translations.

And I picked up my contributor’s copy of Clasp: Late Modernist Poetry in London in the 1970s. We found a pub, the Swan and Rushes, and drank JHB (a beer eulogised in my poem ‘Sonnet (Fourteen Bars)’), and read little snatches, representations of our lives in London, including our (unnamed) Tooting Thursday evenings, our parties, and (of course) the Smallest Poetry Festival in the World in 1994. Patricia’s part in running the earliest Sub-Voicive readings is also recognized. But that’s another … post. Here.

Robert Sheppard: Poem in International Times: 'Avenge'

 A poem of mine, ‘Avenge’ has just been published in International Times (March 2016) illustrated by Nick Victor.
 

Read it here. (My previous contribution, 'Workless Washday: Burnt Journal 1952' for Frances Presley, was also illustrated by him. See here.)

Both poems are from my ongoing sonnets project, 'Avenge' from a sequence of 14 sonnets, which are what some musicians would call a 'contrafact' upon sonnets by Milton (guess which one from the title); the other is from a sequence of 'Twelves', mainly birthday poems and 'excitations' for friends.   

All my 'Overdubs' (as I eventually called them) from Milton are online and may be accessed here.

Trev Eales - photography and friendship

Saturday, I went to Lancaster to meet up with my friend Trev Eales, whom I’ve known for 42 years. (He has a couple of walk-on parts in my autrebiography, Words Out of Time.) We walked (and saw the snow-peaked caps of the Lake District from the Castle Mound), talked, ate and drank. Amid the vital and essential catching up, we returned to a casual remark I made on our last meeting in Lancaster – no time at my birthday party in November to pursue this – the idea of combining my words and his photographic images in some form. Trev’s work has two main strands, the landscape photography taken on those very hills we’d seen (‘Today would have been perfect up there,’ he sighed in the sunshine), and his paid work as a music festival photographer.

Trev also reviews festivals, including one here, where he takes in a show by the poet Luke Wright, a curious meeting of our worlds. (He was still raving about it over coffee on Saturday.)

On the festival side, the side I’m interested in most, are images of artists ranging from Ella Eyre (a particular favourite of Trev), Booker T, Baba Maal, Robert Plant, The Prodigy, Marina and the Diamonds, St Vincent, Arctic Monkeys to The Stones (in all their wrinkled glory). I hope you’ll think his eye quite exceptional. I do. There is an interview with him here, which shows how the photography grew of out his interest in music. (Indeed, we first met at a Thin Lizzy concert in October 1974 at UEA.) 

We don’t have very detailed plans of how we would work, but the intention is activated. And emails shall follow!

 Images are displayed on his website here, and on his supplementary flickr site here. Dwell on them!

Here is an account of some of our later plans. 

Robert Sheppard new book UNFINISH (a de-selected poetics piece)

Eight Notes

‘How everything one is thinking (at a specific moment in time) must (at all costs) be incorporated into the project,’ noted Benjamin. Everything? At all costs?

I’d expected something more knowing, something like Art and Language: a room of ‘abstract expressionist’ canvasses, a room of ‘Mondrian’, a room of ‘Richter’… but it wasn’t like that. It was unironically multiform. The canvas is a blank for Von Heyl. Or conversely it is full, and she empties it.

Novelisations of films that have never been made. Guide texts and unthreadings. Unreadings and unwritings.

Reconfiguration was part of the project (but). One text might be linked and combined with, absorbed into, another in subsequent ‘drawings in’ of the scheme. Overlaps, tangentials and autonomies. Abandoned. We intervene all the time

‘While the conceptualists plagiarise other people’s content, I plagiarise their forms,’ he said again, quoting his allegedly fictional poet. The interruption of abstractions and their real violence. ‘Something has to be formed and transformed or a concept stays the same,’ he said, for himself.

To set up an archive or ark that will collect all writings (and assimilations) and be adapted at various points for various purposes. Discontinued.

Could ‘Unfinish’ have been a possible title for the ‘project’, concentric open circles, drifting constellations of titles, endlessly reconfiguring? How are the conceptual and formal related? The procedural, the structural?

Every writing creates its own precursors. No end to tradition. No end to innovation. There is only an archive of attention out of which works are made, systematic or. Elsewise.

6 January 2014

Originally meant to mirror the 'Eight Theses' with which Unfinish opens, I cut these because of the implication that Unfinish might be the beginning of a 'project', as hinted at above, another 'Twentieth Century Blues' if I hadn't have drawn back from the abyss, or rather: from the concentric and overlapping diagrams I still have in my poetics journal. Instead, it is a record of a particular moment's gathering from that journal of ideas that seemed pertinent. Certainly I have set up a system of daily writing I call 'Ark and Archive', although that phrase also sank into The Drop to suggest something rather different and elegaic. I like these notes but don't regret dropping them from the book, which they might have confused rather than focussed. But, of course, they also recoil from the notion of a project, particularly in the mild revulsion about Benjamin. The reflection on Van Heyl is interesting, another suggestion that the paradigms of card-carrying postmodernism have (long?) shifted. The phrase 'archive of attention' is suggestive and useful for describing the writerly equipment suitable for the (on-going) job. This is poetics as I conceive it (and as I describe it elsewhere, here, for example.)

Unfinish is published by Veer: only £5. Buy it here and see more of the text. Read about it here.

Robert Sheppard New Book Out: Unfinish - prose from Veer Books

Yet Another New Book: Unfinish published by Veer: only £5.

Buy it here and see more of the text.

It contains 8 prose pieces:

‘Theses’, eight quotations to orient the book and introduce the theme of ‘human unfinish’ which appers also in Warrant Error and Berlin Bursts.

‘Bad Poems for Bad People!’, is a response to parts of Sean Bonney’s keynote at the Conversify Conference, Edinburgh, 9-11^th September 2011 (though not to the exemplary readings of Rimbaud therein, but in anticipation of the publication of Happiness, and certainly before the completion of his PhD on Amiri Baraka, which I had the pleasure to read in 2012). It was first performed as the finale to my Berlin Bursts reading at the Bluecoat’s Chapter & Verse literature festival, Liverpool, on 16^th October 2011. It was first published in Intercapillary Space at intercapillaryspace. blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/robert-sheppard-bad-poems-for-bad-people.html in 2012. It’s also twinned with the paper I wrote and delivered at the conference, ‘Notes on Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry’, which may be read on Pages blogzine, at robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk /2014/04/robert-sheppard-form-forms-and-forming.html.

‘Venus and Adonis’ is a compressed prose piece.

‘In Unadopted Space’ is a poem-essay on the nature of space (a theme I need to return to at some time).

‘Comrade Ivan Ivanovich’s Book of Solid Kremlins and Melting Cromlechs’ is a history of Russia since the Revolution, somewhat compressed.

‘Interlude’ is an interlude.

‘Portrait and Portals’ was published, with images by Patricia Farrell, on the online part of the anthology The Dark Would, edited by Phil Davenport, Manchester: Apple Pie Editions, 2013. Part of this has been adopted as the cover image, see above. For The Dark Would see here.

‘Excitation for Jo Blowers’ was first performed, in a performance text version, as a work-in-progress, at the Friends of cris cheek evening at the Bluecoat, Liverpool, 25^th June 2013, by Jo Blowers and Mary Prestidge (dance), and Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell (voice). More on work with Jo here and here.

Jo Blowers performing 'Excitation' at the Bluecoat in 2013

More books by me here

Peter Hughes, James Byrne and Robert Sheppard (set lists) Edge Hill reading 17th February 2016

On Wednesday 17th February, the Creative Writing Programme at Edge Hill University presented Peter Hughes with James Byrne and myself as support.

Peter Hughes is a poet and founding editor of Oystercatcher Press. His Selected Poems came out from Shearsman in 2013, who also publish a critical volume on his varied work. His versions of the complete sonnets of Petrarch, Quite Frankly, were published by Reality Street in 2015 to great acclaim. See this website. Peter read exclusively from this volume on the 17th. Read my account of his and Tim Atkins' translations from Petrarch here and here. (My own Petrarch project, which I kept to myself in the presence of the Master, can be read about here and there in the first of those two links, and read about and partly read, here.)

James Byrne read from his new book Everything Broken Up Dances (including the extrarordinary title poem) and I read from my newish book History or Sleep: Selected Poems and my new Oystercatcher, The Drop. As at the three previous 'launches' I read no poem that I'd previously read. Their set lists are here for Liverpool, here for Sheffield and here for the London Shearsman launch.  

Robert Sheppard (set list)

from History or Sleep

1. Returns 1
2. Coming Down from St. George's Hill 3
3. Empty Diaries: 1974, 1982, 1987, and 1990.
4. Prison Camp Violin, Riga
3. National Security 1940, Huyton (for Hugo Dachinger)
4. from Warrant Error: London

and from The Drop

Standing By (see here for text and context).

On 12th March I shall be reading the whole of The Drop at an Oystercatcher reading in Leicester. Info soon!

Carys Bray: Sweet Home republished

Now re-published by Cornerstone, this book of short stories was begun whilst Carys Bray was a student of the Creative Writing MA, which I tutor. Buy here. Or here.

And here Carys is answering questions about her Costa Prize shortlisted novel, A Song for Issy Bradley which was written as part of her PhD in Creative Writing at Edge Hill (with Ailsa Cox and myself) and has been a great critical success. I watched this again the other day and was deeply moved by it. And I'm glad she was here to witness my birthday (in the background)! I was also there for her local launch of her book in her favourite Southport bookshop here. (Earlier news here.)

Carys Bray's debut collection SWEET HOME won the Scott prize and selected stories were broadcast on BBC Radio Four Extra. Her first novel A SONG FOR ISSY BRADLEY was serialised on BBC Radio Four's Book at Bedtime and was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and the Desmond Elliott Prize. It won the Utah Book Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award.

Carys has a BA in Literature from The Open University and an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Edge Hill University. She lives in Southport in North West England with her husband and four children. Her second novel THE MUSEUM OF YOU will be published in June 2016. She is working on a third novel (keep up with her on her blog to the right of this post!).

Robert Sheppard: Blogging - 11 years of PAGES

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

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

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

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

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-ten-posts-nothing-or.html

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

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

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

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

Robert Sheppard's SHUTTERS at Prelude to INHABIT (at the Bluecoat) (set list)

It's What You Don't Say (That Counts) A Performance Inquiry Wed 3 Feb 2016 featured a performance of 'Shutters' featuring Jo Blowers (voice), Aleysha (voice) and Lizzie (movement) This was based on a text of that name that I wrote for Jo in 1992 and which we have revived over the years, but Jo and Aleysha read the text, which was effective and affective. It's a woman's voice, often, in the poem, which was written in response to the Victorian photographs of Lady Harwarden.

Liverpool Improvisation Collective (LIC) Jo Blowers, Andrea Buckley, Paula Hampson and Mary Prestidge, offered an insight into some of the key areas and concepts which they are initially exploring as part of the prelude to INHABIT, a programme for New Dance development at Bluecoat which launches in June 2016. 'Shutters' - the poem - was first published in Tin Pan Arcadia and in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, of which it is 'Blues 21'. In the stranding of the works of 'Twentieth Century Blues' it is also 'For Jo Blowers 1', 'Phallic Shrines 3', and 'World's Body 2'. It opens: Burnished fog of daylight fleshes my shoulder melts into my gaze metal bars to secure the night                  fall into the pit OUTSIDE harsh discriminations powder the air with your disappearance of light stolen from the city scabs of blood bejewel each breath On 27 May 1993 ‘Shutters’ was first performed (‘a movement based mixed-media work performed by six women. It includes voice, sound projections, steam and pyrotechnical images. It is about women, and the forms which have arisen out of the process of its making are both lyrical and violent’ (Jo Blowers)). The performers were Polly Hudson, Josephine Liesk, Tracey West (whose photograph was projected against the wall of Bluecoat), Eava-Mama Mutka, Fernada Amaral, Lisa Harley. Photography: Aeden Kelly. Nosepaint at Woodwork, Vauxhall Spring Gardens, London. I didn't take part in that one, either, but I did in some of the chamber performances that featured only Jo and myself. These were: 18th July 1993, at Vertical Images at The Victoria, in Mornington Place, London; and on 14 November 1995 (my 40th birthday), a Ship of Fools event at Falkland Arms, London, to launch the Ship of Fools The Book of British Soil (with Patricia Farrell). More on work with Jo here and here.

Lee Harwood Archive now ready for study at the British Library

Now available for study in the Manuscripts Reading Room at the British Library.

On-line catalogue: http://searcharchives.bl.uk

 

Collection ref number: Add MS 88998. Or just search 'Lee Harwood'.

 

The 'Browse this Collection' tab will bring up the hierarchical 'tree' of files which you can move around freely.

Michael Peverett's Six Notes on Lee may be read here. He lists these posts on Lee that I've written:

Review of the earlier part of the Collected Harwood:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2005/12/robert-sheppard-review-of-harwoods.html
Review of the later part of the Collected:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/robert-sheppard-review-of-harwoods.html
Three sequences in Morning Light (1998):
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/robert-sheppard-on-three-sequences-by.html
Review of The Orchid Boat:
http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202014/december2014/The%20Orchid%20Boat.htm
A short reflection on the above:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/robert-sheppard-review-of-lee-harwoods.html
Poem dedicated to Lee Harwood:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/robert-sheppard-for-lee-harwood-burnt.html
A laugh with Lee Harwood:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/robert-sheppard-laugh-with-lee-harwood.html
In Memoriam:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/lee-harwood-1939-2015-in-memoriam.html

Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Bob Cobbing: Sightings and Soundings

in honour of his 75^th birthday

This page (written 1995) was read at the Bob Cobbing Symposium in May 2015 as part of my talk 'Bobliography' (see here), breaking off at the end of the page, and moving on to other writings on (and with ) Cobbing:

 

1          Two Lessons

I visited Bob Cobbing, and thus met my first poet, on November 3 1973.  I was still at school, keen to put on an exhibition of concrete poetry.  I recognised this as the wilder edge of the new British poetry I had discovered through Horovitz’ anthology Children of Albion and Bill Butler’s Brighton bookshop.  In the school library there was, unaccountably, Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry.  Bob was in it.

When I arrived at Randolph Avenue to collect some hansjörg mayer posters, Bob was already talking to a student who was writing a thesis on language in visual art.  I listened as they talked and sounded some of the Shakespeare Kaku.  I remained mute, uncertain.  Bob played a tape of himself and Peter Finch performing e colony from the Five Vowels, a then incomplete project.  He showed us the work in progress.  I stayed for six hours literally learning the life of a poet.

Two lessons, one immediate, the other lasting:

 

  There was a world of poetry which did not hypostacise the Poem as a closed structure.  (I left burdened with booklets and off-prints from Cobbing’s own work and excerpts from Lee Harwood.)

  The importance of radical consistency for an artist: to refuse to mark out an aesthetic territory which is then colonised, but to move confidently on, to create structures, large and small, for continued experiment.

 

2          Selected Sightings and Jottings 1978 - 1994

Bob Cobbing, Bill Griffiths and Paul Burwell, May 10 1978: Public House Bookshop, Brighton.  ‘Two poets concerned with the discontinuity of language.  Yet even more concerned with the building up of the discontinuous, into new structures … the simplicity of Cobbing’s Alphabet of Fishes … it is what Cobbing does visually (typographically and otherwise) and vocally that gives a poem its complexity, its ‘art’ … bellowing like a walrus.’

King’s College, November 26 1981: ‘with Griffiths and Fencott.  He swigged from his own ‘secret supply’ and launched into an hour of completely new material’ to put a wedge into the bibliographic mentality that cannot distinguish between the ‘latest’ and the ‘last’.

Saturday, July 13 1985 (the rest of the world watching Live Aid):  Bob beneath a tree in Clerkenwell churchyard.  ‘SILLIWHIG’ he yelled, from the


The rest may be read

here.

This is the last chapter of Far Language and the last to be posted or linked-to here.

Link now to the new 'Introduction' and links to the contents of the book here.

And here are the chapter links to the original publication.

The (original) 'Introduction': here.
'Reading Prynne and Others': here.
'Far Language' (MacSweeney) here.
'Irregular Actions' (Allen Fisher) here.
'Timeless Identities' (Roy Fisher) here.
'Utopia Revisited' (John Ash) here.
'Flashlight Propositions' (Robert Sheppard's 1987 poetics) here.
'Education of Desire' (pedadgogic poetics) here.
'Commitment to Openness' (Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth) here.
'Poetic Sequencing and the New: Twentieth Century Blues' (poetics) here.
'Buoyant Readings' (J.H. Prynne, Bruce Andrews, Ken Edwards, Aaron Williamson and Gilbert Adair) here.
'Collosal Fragments' (Adrian Clarke) here.
'Tune Me Gold' (Maggie O'Sullivan here.
'Linking the Unlinkable' (poetics of Twentieth Century Blues) here.
'Adhesive Hymns' (Ulli Freer) here.
'Bob Cobbing: Soundings and Sightings' here.

 

Alan Baker: Links and Interview about Whether (KFS, 2015)

Read an email interview with Alan Baker, conducted by the WRI 2010 (The Art of Poetry: Land and Landscape) group at Edge Hill University (2015-16), via Robert Sheppard, the tutor.

The interview is largely about the pamphlet they were studying, Whether, which is available from Knives Forks and Spoons here.

We were wondering about your overall book title Whether. What is the purpose of the pun on ‘weather’?

The pun on “weather” – an obvious one I know – is because the poems are “about” climate and weather, but not directly. I wanted to express the general unease we all feel about this subject but to do it by making word-objects in the form of spells. I also wanted to express a general feeling we often have of wanting to take control of our world, but being limited by our own physical resources. So the poems are related to climate and weather, but not exclusively about that. I like to think the pun in the title expresses this uncertainty.

This conditional mode expressed by “whether” also sets the tone for "Week to View"; in that sequence I wanted to express how our perception of the world is contingent and dependent on chance.

How did you structure the poems in ‘Week to View’ and how much was left to chance, or collage?

I can tell you that I wrote this sequence in a single sitting while waiting for a delayed plane at Amsterdam airport. I started writing in diary mode; I’d stayed in a hotel, attended powerpoint presentations, and so on, so they all got into the poems. At the airport, I consciously responded to the various stimuli - announcements, adverts, a Golden Age centre (still not quite sure what that is), and my own random thoughts which were affected by being in Holland. I also had a notebook of previous jottings from which I lifted phrases and passages (I didn't make it all up at the same time - some of those notebook entries were a year or two old). "Heart disease wears a skirt too" was a headline in a women's magazine. By including it at that point in the poem, I wanted to replicate the sudden switches in attention which contemporary life forces on us, sometimes in a shocking way (the switch from TV adverts to a news report of some violent event for example). As is probably obvious, the poem isn’t a true cut-up; but neither is it too consciously structured; it’s more of an improvisation. Whenever I found myself getting into a fluent passage, I’d switch focus, or add in an unrelated piece of text – whatever my eye alighted on at the time (so introducing a large element of chance); this seems to be how people keep diaries, or diary-style blogs, by writing short passages on things that occur to them; these poems try to take that to another level.

The poems (particularly in ‘Week to View’) seem multi-voiced. Are there overheard voices, media clips, found material, etc. in there? How much is your own voice?

The question "How much is your own voice" is a good one, and difficult to answer. I don't really know, in terms of poetry, what my own voice is. Even apparently personal statements are forms of address in a poetic text. At the same time, there is a personal element to these poems, both to the tone and the content, a result, I think, of the work of the subconscious. What I find when writing this collage-based poetry is that I'm often surprised at what comes out, and how pertinent to my own life it is. As if the use of apparently impersonal collaged materials frees your unconscious; themes emerge, and preoccupations become apparent. I suppose this is the equivalent of the traditional idea of ‘the muse’, or of Jack Spicer’s “poetry by dictation”.

The poems certainly contain found materials – from adverts, headlines in magazines, marketing materials, work-related emails and so on. What I've done in these poems, particularly in “Week To View”, is to collage materials from various sources, including my own notebooks. Are these latter "my own voice"? My writings probably have evolved a distinctive style, but it's not the same as my speaking voice, or my tone when writing emails at work; it's a style evolved to write in notebooks, and is certainly, to some degree, borrowed from the style of other poets.

In writing poem 5 of ‘Thirteen Spells’, how did you arrange its various parts? How was it written?

I work in an office overlooking the railway tracks at Derby station, and part of this poem was jotted down while at work there - just observations from looking round the office. The lines "traffic lights turn icicles red", "the river’s dangerous eddies that seem beautiful in the dark" and "Hyundai containers line the tracks" were from notebook jottings (I like Hyundai, as it's so un-English - starting a word with "hy"). Part of my technique is to assemble all these bits of text, and to yoke them together using a form, like pouring metal into a mould; the form here, of course, is the Spell or Charm, and it allowed me bring all of the pieces together; as I said earlier, somehow using the form freed the subconscious to make associations between them.

We noticed repeated imperatives in ‘Thirteen Spells’ and wondered why you’d used so many to create their rhetorical shape?

I used so many imperatives, because that’s the poetic form of the spell. Traditional spells and charms use imperatives, as they're demanding that something happens ("Shrink like coal in a bucket",  etc). Traditional spells also name things, as if the act of naming gave the speaker some kind of power. So the Nine Herbs Charm names herbs:

This herb is called Cress ...  This is named Nettle

The things they named were everyday, banal things to people at the time. In my spells, I name things like the office water cooler, Hyundai containers and hot desks.

The spell and the diary provide the forms in "Whether". The "talking to yourself" mode, which people use for diaries, provided the form of address in "Week to View", and that dictated the voice to some degree.

How seriously should we take the ancient spoken and written forms of spells or charms in reading these pieces? How strong is ‘against’ in the title?

I take the traditional spells very seriously; too seriously to want to reproduce them as museum pieces. So, the poems are partly parody, which is one way of paying homage to the originals. The idea is to "make them new", in the way that the poet Peter Hughes has done with Petrarch - his lively and irreverent versions are created by imagining how Petrarch might write today. How would you speak if you were casting a spell now? i.e. if you were addressing something over which you have little control, in language which might help you believe you were mitigating its effects. The word “against” is strong in the sense that I envisage these poems as contemporary spells which may give some comfort in the face of large, impersonal forces, but, of course, it’s also ironic in that none of us believe in the efficacy of spells in the way medieval people did.

We liked the way the poems move from the everyday to the cosmic. How does that work for you?

It's difficult to address the 'cosmic' (in both the literal and metaphorical sense) without becoming hopelessly abstract (which may work in French, but not so well in English). So it's necessary to undercut and contrast the cosmic things with the everyday. This is something which collagic composition and its sudden switches enable you to do. I think it's part of the human condition to be caught between two worlds of the day-to-day and the cosmic / spiritual and for each to interrupt each other at inconvenient times.

Alan Baker blogs here, and runs the  magazine: LITTER here.

Steve Spence on Alan Baker’s Whether may be read here. And Ian Brinton on Whether here.

Alan Baker's reivew of The Drop by Robert Sheppard may be read here.