Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: S.J. Fowler

With S.J. Fowler I created the Swedish poems of Kajsa Bergstrom for Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors. You can read more about Kajsa, here, indeed it is a longer biographical note than we had room to print in the book! Steven is one of the two poets (the other being Rupert Loydell) who deserve the name Mr Collaboration, in Steven's case for his organising of many poets in collaboration, under many titles. Indeed, this project began at one of his Enemies readings, when he paired Zoe Skoulding and myself. 

S. J. Fowler is a poet and artist. He works in the modernist and avant-garde traditions, across poetry, fiction, theatre, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance. He has published various collections of poetry and text, and been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, and others. He has been translated into 21 languages and performed at venues across the world, from Mexico City to Erbil, Beijing to Tbilisi. He is the poetry editor of 3:am magazine, Lecturer at Kingston University, teaches at Tate Modern and is the curator of the Enemies project.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

More on Twitters for a Lark here and here. See also A Translated Man ( an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here, as are a number of my recent works.)

  All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Allen Fisher

With Allen Fisher I created the poems of the Finnish poet Minna Kararkkainen for Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors. She is a scientist-poet.

Allen Fisher is a poet, painter and art historian, lives in Hereford. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has over 150 single-author publications to his name. In 2016, he published Imperfect Fit: Aesthetics, Facture and Perception from the University of Alabama, the complete poetry of Gravity as a consequence of shape and a second edition of the collected PLACE books of poetry from Reality Street Editions, and a reprint of Ideas of the culture dreamed of was published by The Literary Pocket Book.

See a part of Gravity that wasn't collected here, where it first appeared, on Pages. And my piece on Gravity here. One of many articles I've written. I write about his book Proposals here, complete with photographs of the images and text.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

More on Twitters for a Lark here and here. See also A Translated Man ( an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here, as are a number of my recent works.)

  All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA collaborators: Patricia Farrell

With Patricia Farrell I created the poems of Ivaylo Dimitri for the anthology Twitters for a Lark. AND he designed the cover! You can read the little there is to know about him here.

Patricia Farrell lives in Liverpool. She is a poet and visual artist. She co-organised the SubVoicive reading series in London in the 1980s and was a member of the arts group New River Project.  She has collaborated with other writers and artists, most notably Robert Sheppard, as well the installation artist Jivan Astfalck, on the project B*twixst, and with Jennifer Cobbing, and Veryan Weston on the dance piece, A Space Completely Filled with Matter.  (London: Veer Books, 2015) Her work is published in a range of magazines and collections, including A New Tonal Language in the Reality Street‘4 pack’ series, as well as individual pamphlets: most recently, Seven Bays of Spirituality (Knives Forks and Spoons Press). She completed a PhD thesis in 2011 on poetic artifice in philosophical writing.  Her collection, The Zechstein Sea, was published by Shearsman Books in 2013.

There are lots of links to her website and works here

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/december-1956-patricia-farrell.html

and to her other collaborative work on the North by North West Tour last year:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/patrica-farrell-her-north-by-north-west.html

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

More on Twitters for a Lark here and here. See also A Translated Man ( an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here, as are a number of my recent works.)

  All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA collaborators: Anamaría Crowe Serrano

Anamaría Crowe Serrano is an Irish poet and translator of Spanish and Italian to English. As well as having been anthologised and published widely in journals in Ireland and abroad, publications include KALEIDOgraph, written with Nina Karacosta (corrupt press, 2017), ^onwords and ^upwords (Shearsman, 2016), one columbus leap (corrupt press, 2011), Femispheres (Shearsman, 2008), and Paso Doble (Empirìa, 2006), written with Italian poet Annamaria Ferramosca.

She and Damir Sodan are now the only contributors to the project that I have not met, though I hope I shall one day. I asked her on board because she'd conducted an incisive interview with me about A Translated Man. For you see, Twitters marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here ) More about her here!

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here.

More on Twitters for a Lark  here and here.

All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA collaborators: Kelvin Corcoran

With Kelvin Corcoran, whom I have known since the 1980s, I created the poems of Eua Ionnou for Twitters for a Lark. You can read more about her here.

Kelvin is well-known for his obsession with Greece, of course, and the temptation was too much, and he had to invent a Greek, and the poem was just right. His author page here will direct you to his books, including a volume of all the Greek poems together, For the Greek Spring. His new Longbarrow pamphlet, Article 50, is very good. 

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

More on Twitters here and here.

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here ) Kelvin now lives in Brussels and needs to keep an eye over his shoulder for Rene. Judging from Rene's Twitterfeed, he's back in action, and back in Belguim.

  All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUIOA collaborators: Alys Conran

With Alys Conran I created the poems of Cristofol Subira; more about him here.

Alys Conran is from north Wales, and spent several years living in Edinburgh and Barcelona. She speaks fluent Catalan and Spanish, note, as well as Welsh and English. She is the author of Pigeon (Parthian Books: 2016), the first novel to be published simultaneously in both English (original) and Welsh (translation), and this has made her well-known in Wales, and beyond, for both versions of the book. Her writing is found in numerous magazines including Stand, The Manchester Review, and The New Welsh Review. She is working on a second novel about the legacy of the Raj in contemporary British life. She is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bangor University. Here we are reading our concise collaborative poems (we both wrote both poems but read one each, so you can’t see/hear who wrote what!). We had not met before this evening. But I hope we will meet again.

     

 Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.  

More on Twitters here and here.

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Pelikan Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here ) Cristofol does make an appearance in that book too, in the diary of one of the translators of Van Valckenborch, Ms Dupuis.

  All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: James Byrne

With James Byrne I created the poems of Martina Marković (1982-). You can read more about her here.

James Byrne’s most recent book of poems is Everything Broken Up Dances, published in 2015 by Tupelo. He is Senior Lecturer in poetry at Edge Hill University, where he and I were colleagues and collaborators on more than this Croatian poet. (For example, the anthology Atlantic Drift which was published by Arc and EHUP, and which may be read about here.) James was also a moving force behind the Sheppard Symposium (more of that later this year). Here he is reading at that event:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/reading-from-sheppard-symposium-james.html

This Wikipedia Page is pretty much up to date, and gives a good sense of James's international range and profile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Byrne_(poet)

As is his Edge Hill page:

https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/creativewriting/staff/james-byrne/

During our time at Edge Hill we shared a lot of good things (times) and other things (and times) and I trust we will continue to collaborate and plot. And lift a few more beers…As we are here to celebrate, not Twitters, but Atlantic Drift...

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

There is no resultant ‘Europoem’, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of the poems’ production, the richness of a continent. The works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical, from traditional lyricism to the experimental. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.  

More on Twitters here and here.

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here )

 All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Alan Baker

With Alan Baker I created the poems of ABC Remič, who was supposedly born in Lubljana in 1958 in what was then Yugoslavia. You can read more about her here.

Alan is still an underrated writer, I feel. I have taught his work, though: read this interview with my students about his work in Whether,

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/alan-baker-links-and-interview-about.html

He took part in The Other Room reading for the EUOIA, one of my guests who travelled quite a distance to be there in Manchester, for which I am most grateful.

 http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/euoia-night-august-reading-at-other.html

Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and now lives in Nottingham, where he runs Leafe Press. His collected poems were published by Skysill Press as Variations on Painting a Room in 2011, and his most recent collections are all this air and matter (Oystercatcher) and Whether (KFS). He has translated the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy and Abdellatif Laâbi. Sections of The Book of Random Access can be found in Great Works, The Hamilton Stone Review, and on his own blog, Litterbug.

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.

Here’s his own recent solo foray into fictional poetry.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/alan-baker-not-euoia-ja-torres.html

Working in collaboration with a team of real writers, Robert Sheppard has created a lively and entertaining anthology of fictional European poets.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

There is no resultant ‘Europoem’, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of the poems’ production, the richness of a continent. The works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical, from traditional lyricism to the experimental. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.  

More on Twitters here and here. 

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here )

  All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Joanne Ashcroft

With Joanne Ashcroft I created the poems of Matus Dobres. You can read more about him here.

Joanne Ashcroft has poems published in The Wolf and Litter. Her first pamphlet was published by Knives Forks and Spoons press. She won the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize in 2013 and her pamphlet Maps and Love Songs for Mina Loy is published by Seren. She is currently a research student at Edge Hill University where she is working on sound rich poetry, which combines literary study, poetics and creative work. She writes:  Sound-rich poetry is fully aware of itself as an indissoluble union of speech and writing working along a spectrum, with sound as its life force and to which every aspect of the poem refers back.

She took part in the Mina Loy reading at Bluecoat here.

Recent poetic work, often outtakes of her PhD work, has appeared in various magazines, and she is often asked to do readings (she and I collaborated on a poem for my volume of collaborative fictional poems). She is neatly ensconced as part of the Manchester reading series Peter Barlow’s Cigarette.

She often writes about sound rich poetry on her blog (see the blogroll to the right of this post) and she is now one of the organisers of Peter Barlow’s Cigarette, a Manchester reading series.

http://joanneashcroft.weebly.com/joannes-blog

She has featured on Pages before, and she and I  may be watched reading our Dobres poems, here.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-north-by-north-west-poetry-tour-in_20.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/euoia-matus-dobres-poems-robert.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/reading-from-sheppard-symposium-joanne.html

Working in collaboration with a team of real writers, Robert Sheppard has created a lively and entertaining anthology of fictional European poets.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

There is no resultant ‘Europoem’, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of the poems’ production, the richness of a continent. The works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical, from traditional lyricism to the experimental. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.  

More on Twitters here and here.

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here )

  All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Jason Argleton

With Jason Argleton I created some of the poems of the Austrian fictional poet Sophie Poppmeier. You can read more about her at these posts:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/robert-sheppard-euoia-sophie.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/robert-sheppard-euoia-sophie-poppmeier_6.html

She has her own web page here: euoia

However, Jason is himself fictional, a foil for some of Sophie’s notorious Book Two, which contained sexually explicit poems. None of these poems actually exist, but the hush that accompanies even their mention is deafening, and can be heard from Vienna to Berlin. ‘Argleton’ appears also in the name of the North Western university that  Hróbjartur Ríkeyjarson af Dvala (himself unreal) worked at. In fact ‘Argleton’ appeared in Google maps at some point, right next to Edge Hill University. It was appropriate that he should be named after this fictional (accidental) town. He seems to have been one of my students at Edge Hill, where his final dissertation was a comparative study of the poetry of Ern Malley and Bob McCorkle. He is pursuing practice-led graduate studies on Ossianism. Poems have appeared in various magazines, including Pages. The mention of Ern Malley is appropriate because last night I met up with a composer/musician who wants to celebrate Ern's 100th birthday. He was born in Liverpool, as 'Robert Sheppard''s poem in Twitters tells us.

That poem, realer than he himself, may be read here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/25-edge-hill-poets-jason-argleton.html

Here’s even listed on my list of Edge Hill poets, but then so is one real collaborator:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/twenty-five-years-of-creative-writing.html

Working in collaboration with a team of real writers, I've created a lively and entertaining anthology of fictional European poets.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here.

There is no resultant ‘Europoem’, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of the poems’ production, the richness of a continent. The works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical, from traditional lyricism to the experimental. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.  

More on Twitters here and here. 

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here )

 All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: General Intro and Hub post

As many people know, I worked in collaboration, over a number of years, with a team of real writers, to create a lively and entertaining body of work of fictional European poets.

You can read more about the resultant European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

I have introduced all of the fictional poets on this blog (here) but I have not introduced the collaborators (although some of them, too, are fictional!). So I am going to post one introduction at a time until I have done them all. They are a varied and impressive bunch and I am eternally grateful for their good humour, patience and brilliance. As I wrote to them all when we were finished: ‘I would like to thank all of my collaborators, who have pooled their sovereignty, as it were, and constructed poems and people in so many different, educative and exhilarating ways.’

So here links to all the posts will be:

Jason Argleton here.
Joanne Ashcroft here.
Alan Baker here.
James Byrne here.
Alys Conran here.
Kelvin Corcoran here.
Anamaria Crowe Serrano here.
Patricia Farrell here. 
Allen Fisher here. 
SJ Fowler here
God's Rude Wireless here 
Robert Hampson here
Jeff Hilson here
Tom Jenks   here
Frances Kruk here
Rupert Loydell here

They are mounting up now and I'll be finished on the last day of the month. Here's some raw links to be attended to later!

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-euoia-collaborators-steve-mccaffery.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-euioa-collaborators-eirikur-orn.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-euoia-collaborators-sandeep-parmar.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-euoia-collaborators-simon-perril.html

Jessica Pujol i Duran here

Zoe Skoulding here

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-collaborators-damir-sodan.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-euoia-collaborators-scott-thurston.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-euoia-collaborators-philip-terry.html

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-final-and-most-important-euoia.html

The poems are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.

 More on Twitters here and, where you may also find how you may purchase it. Updated link:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-ed-Twitters-for-a-Lark-p102839129

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (also available from Shearsman here )

Read about the November 2017 mini-launch in Luton here.

And the Leicester (States of Independence) launch:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/launch-of-twitters-for-lark-at-2018.html

Read about the Bangor launch here.

Read about the Manchester 2018 launch here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/twitters-for-launch-part-of-european.html

I have a hazy notion that there shall be a third part of this fictional poet project, but I am unclear what that should look like yet. Watch this space (and in the meantime buy the first two books)!

If you think I'm bonkers with the EUOIA, try Jennifer Walshe's invention of an Irish musical avant-garde with Aisteach (here).

Atlantic Drift: an online review by Steven Waling

On Write Out Loud may be read here. I'm particularly pleased Steve focuses on the poetics as well as the poetry.

Thanks Steve.

Robert Sheppard; Mini set list: Rodge's party

Even a little reading is a reading: even a private reading is a reading.

Rodge Glass invited a number of writers (Alan Bissett, his wife, whose name I didn't catch, Billy Cowan, Caroline Bird, me, James Byrne, in that order) to read. Everybody was positive and succinct.

Happy Birthday!

I'd asked what he wanted. He said: 'Oh, something mid-lifey, Brexity'. He got it:

'Parade: Burnt Journal 1978', for him, specially written; plus 3 of the recent sonnets, 2 Wyatts,

'Hap 13' about the 'almost most' who voted Remain.
'Hap 15' which does have a line about 'mid-life crisis'...,

and 'Sea View'. I spoke of how post-Brexit will leave Britain a huge dogging site run by Michael Gove: he spoke recently, walking into my tropes, of wanting to 'get people more active in the environment'. I said - judging from some Twitterfeeds - they already are! 'Little Bo Peep' of the poem is a Sussex dogger (or he says he is; I take people at their word: Trump, Boris Johnson, all of them....I entertained. I haven't mastered pausing to let people laugh (a new experience for me).

I write about the Earl of Surrey sonnets here . See here for one reference to my last sequence, which 'Sea View' comes from, feeding off of the sonnets of Charlotte Smith.

Rupert Loydell: How do we use autobiographical material

in the twenty-first century? Rupert answers this question well, and he quotes some of my poetics, which is gratifying (and I hope useful): 

 http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-13/process-remix-juxtaposition-assemblage-and-selection

The piece sent me back to the 'conversation' Rupert and I conducted via email, that may be read here. They seem to overlap in terms of poetics. 

Rupert is one of my fine collaborators on Twitters for a Lark, and he has conducted another interview with our creation, Hermes...  here.

See the hub post about the book here.

Atlantic Drift launch in London: 5th February 2018 (some photos and a few comments)

Event / Atlantic Drift: Andrea Brady, Sophie Collins and John James

You can see some other photographs AND some short videoes, HERE

@ the LRB Bookshop, Central London 5 February 2018

This turned out to be a splendid event with 3 fine readings, some good conversation, a chance to buy the book: here are some photos from the evening...

Andrea Brady taking a trans-Atlantic turn with some excellent new poems

John James reading both from the anthology and from beyond. He did read the teasing 'A Theory of Poetry' (it's anything but) in response to my introduction on poetics as a speculative writerly discourse...

Sophie Collins reading from the anthology and from new book, published this week, Who Is Mary Sue?

John James reading, me watching, Pete Clarke's cover design on the Edge Hill banners!

Atlantic Drift (Arc/Edge Hill University Press) is a new anthology featuring 24 poets from Britain, Ireland, the USA and Canada. It seeks to highlight both new and established writers from both sides of the Atlantic and in between, defining and redefining the various ...By developing a dialogue between English-speaking traditions, Atlantic Drift includes some of the most exceptional poetry and poetics written in the 21st century.

But also visit this page HERE for the various posts I've made concerning the book, its editing, including videos and photos. Or, outside London, follow this link to Arc’s website to buy, here.

Robert Sheppard: Petrarch 3 published a year ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Little Albert returns for one night only

Here's Steve and me taking some tentative steps with Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day'. Our only rehearsals are actually playing at Maggi's New Year's (and other) parties, i.e., performing. Here we are at about 3.30 in the morning!

‘My Funny Valentine’, recorded croakily after too many hours singing, and a version of ‘Motherless Child Blues’ recorded earlier in the evening, in summer, 2015 may be viewed here.

New Year 2013 we also recorded ‘Motherless Child Blues’, this time BEFORE Maggi’s piano had been re-tuned. Here!

Steve was the keyboard player and founder member of the Liverpool band The High Five in the 1980s and his latest band is gigging under the name Cat Sundies. I was the singer and harmonica player of Little Albert Fly. No expense was spared when Tony Parsons and I played the Shakespeare's Head in Hove: they didn't pay. But here's a sideways photo of me and Tony in 1977 or 1978, taken by M. Foy.

Tony and I may be glimpsed here when he was fifty performing 'Motherless Child Blues' with me reading a bit of my poem 'Smokestack Lightning', in 2006. I also performed the poem as a song-piece at the Bluecoat in 2008: You can access that here. The event was filmed by musician and poet Ade Jackson, who has worked with Steve. Small world!

Twitters for a Lark: First Review!

It's a review of sorts. Rupert Loydell is one of my fine collaborators, so he has conducted an interview with our creation, Hermes...  here. He's not being entirely honest (Hermes, not Rupert), since, as far as I can see, he openly campaigned to replace me as President of the EUOIA (and he was the only EUOIA poet to think Brexit was a good idea).

I am pleased to say the the whole EUOIA anthology, Twitters for a Lark appears from Shearsman. 

See the hub post about the book here.