Celebrate EUROPE DAY with the European Union of Imaginary Authors! (And plans for future European fictional poets!)

Celebrate EUROPE DAY with the European Union of Imaginary Authors! Who else?

Read more about the EUOIA here and here. All the collaborators are accessible via links here. The EUOIA Other Room reading from last August is now available here.

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, nearly all of whom celebrate Europe Day.(Hermes is the unstable genius who doesn't.)

Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grew in vividness until they seemed to possess lives of their own, as worked on them; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark, published by Shearsman.   

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 ). (Read three of his 'Twitterodes'  here.  But what of a third part? My sense of neatness summons a trilogy!

Following the dissolution of the EUOIA (European Union Of Imaginary Authors) in 2017, the four remaining poets, who feature in both A Translated Man and Twitters for a Lark (Sophie Poppmeier, Trine Krugeland, Jurgita Zujute and Jitka Prochova), the fifth being the deceased Lucia Cianglini (all five have pages on the EUOIA website (here )), decide to collaborate on a continuation of Cianglini’s work in progress at the time of her death by hanging. This poem & features in both books and is an anaphoric poem marked by the use of the ampersand in lines one and two of its three line stanza.

Their poem will be entitled & and &amp..

Jurgita Zujute (having been the president of the dissolved EUOIA) calls them together and Trine Krugeland (being a conceptual writer) coordinates the effort. The other two participate with them. (Poppmeier is the fictional poet with the most worked-out ‘life’ (see here ), and was – and could still be – the sole focus of the third part of the trilogy, if this option doesn’t bear fruit, or is significantly altered.)

Their method (not mine, of course) is to take the first ‘book’ of &; (I have written, but not published, this poem) and to continue a new poem from it, in collaboration, one line each in turn (four poets and a three-line stanza makes for a particular kind of pattern, of course): here’s an example from Book 5, about the ampersand spotted in Cork that set her poem (and mine) off:

& an ampersand ghosted on the wall over from the coffee shop

is a hollow in a headlock with nothing to say to us

& there’s too much for the mind to do each second

Using these lines as an epigraph, a guide, the idea (Krugeland’s, obviously) is that the piece should be infinite: that they continue for as long as they can, replacing anyone who leaves their group (currently thought to be provisionally called EUGE (European Union of Generative Experimenters)) with another, and so on, forever, &, &.

The first 4 poets are women but they are not fixed in that as a permanent arrangement (but they are openly receptive to trans women, the influence of Poppmeier, no doubt); the only proviso is that four poets at any one time continue the work forever (and that the Estonian EUOIA wrecker Hermes be refused admission). Borrowing from OULIPO, they declare that the poem may only ever be deemed ‘complete’ rather than simply ‘suspended’ (they envisage such lacunae caused by the inevitable wars in Europe they see Brexit and Russian aggression prefiguring), by the simultaneous suicide of the four serving poets, by hanging, to reflect Cianglini’s death, and these lines in ‘Book One’ about not being able to fashion an ampersand:

& it looped around itself again

& again

                        as though it might accidentally hang itself (or me)

That, of course, would be part of an extensive (though by no means lengthy) plan for a publication (translated by the fictional ‘Robert Sheppard’, of course) that would also be extensive (though by no means lengthy), possibly only pamphlet length. Like Oulipo again, and like some of the work in the first two books, the fragment will stand for the whole, but in this case it will be potentially existing in the future, whereas fragmentation was used previously to suggest an unobtainable currently-existing plenitude (designed to reflect the real situation of reading a voluminous foreign-language oeuvre in limited excerpted translation). It would launch my creatures into futurity.

They might assemble their text online, like Eric Chevillard’s daily L’Autofictif , (see my blog roll, right) which I learnt about at the Edge Hill conference at which I also learnt about collaboration theory (which I need to re-read, pretty obviously).

But I'm also looking at more Elizabethan sonnet sequences to 'overdub', so I need to prioritise. That's another 'European project: see here. And, you never know, I might never get round to the above...

Robert Sheppard: Brexit sonnet sequence 'Breakout' published

I'm pleased to say that my 5 sonnet sequence 'Breakout', written soon after the Brexit Referendum, has been published. I aimed for a magazine first printing and an anthology re-print, but delays in the magazine meant that they were published rather closer than I'd anticipated. No matter, I don't think that the readerships will overlap much. 

The magazine is A Restricted View Form Under the Hedge (what a title! what badges!! what marvellous paper-quality!!!). You can access it here. 

The anthology is The Other Room 10, the last anthology celebrating the last year of the Manchester reading series of that name and for sale at its last event (see above). You can access it here.

See here about my not making that event and here for details about the reading I conducted during that final year (a celebration of the European Union of Imaginary Authors; I include a set list, details of my collaborators and fellow-performers, and links). See its own website on which most videos of the readings are housed, here.  

'Breakout' was also the first poem-sequence I read at the Sheppard Symposium reading. So here it is again:

It's here again if you have trouble. Robert Sheppard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob3q0OrMZcU

Thanks to the spiny little creature rolled into a little ball and the guys basking in alterity beyond the door of Otherness for publishing the poems!

There's other stuff about sonnets here and here. The latter is about the 100 sonnet book-length manuscript that 'Breakout' forms part.

I have, however, in the first poem, replaced the word 'autistic' with 'autarkic', a word whose presence I owe to the eloquence of our current foreign secretary. Nazanin is still in an Iranian jail (he'd say 'Persian gaol') but I got a word out of him (to use against him). And it's a good word too, whereas the word for a mode of neurological atypicality is the wrong one. 

My continuing 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.

Rimas Uzgiris and Robert Sheppard: collaborative poem 'Unreadable Expressions': text and video and notes

from the European Poetry Festival Reading in Manchester, April 2018 

Rimas Uzgiris is a poet, translator, editor and critic. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, AGNI, Atlanta Review, Iowa Review, Quiddity, Hudson Review, Vilnius Review and other journals. He is translation editor and primary translator of How the Earth Carries Us: New Lithuanian Poets, and translator of Caravan Lullabies by Ilzė Butkutė, Crystal: Selected Poems by Judita Vaičiūnaitė (forthcoming from Pica Pica Press) and of Then What: Selected Poems by Gintaras Grajauskas (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Newark University, and teaches translation at Vilnius University. He has received a Fulbright Scholar Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship, and the Poetry Spring 2016 Award for his translations of Lithuanian poetry into other languages. Read more here and here. His translation of Gintaras Grajauskas' Then What was published by Bloodaxe Books the day before we read, quite magically. Look here for that book.

Robert Sheppard runs this blog and it features many of his projects, but he also has a website here.

The video of us reading the poem (above) may also be accessed here

as can all the videos of the Manchester evening, including the Twitters for a Lark launch.

Here is the poem:

Unreadable Expressions

1

Amid the hubbub, nothing may be 

Heard, so nothing is said.

The silence is itself an answer. 

Looking down from above, unperturbed,

Giving a caressing smile and 

A thumbs-up, I mimed

A happiness that was not all show,

Swifts weaving patterns in the sky,

Standing by the pond with its rustling

Rushes, moorhens in hiding,

Then ducks land hard like rivets driven

To hold the fragile scenery in place.

For this is life on the hoof, without hooves,

Bolting for the open, but bolted to the floor.

If only I could break the metaphysical bank

But my body lies mortgaged to the bone. 

2

The shock I received switching the radio on

With a sudsy washing up thumb

Made me jump as if good news had come

So I turned to the window to peek at the sun

And the black and white cat was stealthily

Treading along the narrow wall,

Each paw placed precisely

To avoid the chinks, prevent the fall.

You showed me your thermal fingernails:

They go purple when cold, red when hot,

The setting sun if we swiftly set our sails,

An iris in the garden, sticking to the plot.

3

Bored with each other, bored with the game (we are playing with

Household objects, candles, coins, spectacles, snuff-boxes). 

Look at this statuette, something from Greece, Athena, I’m guessing, 

It says on the base, a god of small things indeed. The clouds hiccup in her sky.

Unreadable expressions on their faces, unspeakable words at their lips,

The couple rests, unaware of each other it seems, but we don’t believe that!

There must be something more, murmurs down below. Dig through dust-devils 

Under sofas and chairs: small change, yellow petals, chop sticks, flies.

At last we come to rest, off-loaded into the foyer where foreign dignitaries

Are unaware of disruption to the well-oiled baton-wielding administration.

The foreigners bear us trinkets, adoring our surprise. Batons, battened hatches, batons...

We’d like to say we’re sorry, but our smiles are painted on. 

*

Rimas Uzgiris and Robert Sheppard in their caps and with their real smiles.

Read about the Manchester 2018 Twitters for a Lark launch here, with video.

More on Twitters here and here.

Celebrate Poland’s Constitution Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Jaroslav Biay

Celebrate Poland’s Constitution Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Jaroslav Biay who was co-created by myself and Anamaria Crowe Seranno. A most extraordinary creature, I must say. And a most satisfying collaboration.

See here for more on Anamaria and here for more on Jaroslav.

As many of my regular readers 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.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. All the collaborators are accessible via links 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, published by Shearsman.   

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 ).

I see these two books as the first two parts of a fictional poetry trilogy. So what will follow these? My ideas (as you'll see if you follow the other national holidays I've been trailing) waver between resurrecting Rene Van Valckenborch; trying to animate more work out of the 4 remaining poets I invented single-handed in A Translated Man who also feature in Twitters for a Lark (thus providing a LINK between the three parts); or (ignoring the link) diving into a completely different form of fictional poetry: the Manx modernists, the fictional 'Robert Sheppard', or (even) delving into time rather than space, and writing a historic fictional poetry. (I've no even fuzzy notion of how I would do this last one.) All options are capable of producing kitsch (though I've never been afraid of that) and need careful consideration. I will be posting more about future possibilities on Europe Day, next week.

Celebrate Holland’s King's Birthday with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Maarten De Zoute

Celebrate Holland’s King's Birthday with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Maarten De Zoute who was co-created by myself and an online cut up engine, God's Rude Wireless.

See here for more on Maarten and here is a second poem we wrote (which was left out of the book for space reasons): It seemed only right to cut my own creations first before cutting anything written by a collaborator. For I worked in collaboration, over a number of years, with a team of real writers, to create this lively and entertaining body of work of fictional European poets.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. All the collaborators are accessible via links 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, published by Shearsman.  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 ).

I see these two books as the first two parts of a fictional poetry trilogy. Not sure what I should do next though, even though I have a few pointers. I'm only just getting over the spate of launches. Access links to these, and all Twitters news, here.

Celebrate St George’s Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Robert Sheppard who was created by the real Robert Sheppard

Celebrate St George’s Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Robert Sheppard who was created by the real Robert Sheppard. Both English.

See here for more on the real one and here for more on the fictional one he became, by the end of the process of writing the EUOIA project! This includes the full version of the bibliographical note that Patricia Farrell wrote for the project (that was shortened for the book publication).

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. All the collaborators are accessible via links here.

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

More on Twitters here and here. 

I see these two books as the first two parts of a fictional poetry trilogy. Perhaps the third part should involve the fictional Robert Sheppard...I did announce in Twentieth Century Blues that I would fragment into many personalities and that seems to have been echoed by the problematics of the EUOIA. I have a parenthetical phrase in the introduction to Twitters that says '(himself one of the fictional poets by the time the project concluded)', which I think is quite neat, and points towards realising something like the scenario mooted in Twentieth Century Blues. Though I actually doubt I've the energy to carry that off to its conclusion. But I do want to write a 'third part'.

Robert Sheppard: Two more Overdubs on Stride

Black Edge:

http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/overdubs.html

Song Nets:

http://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/overdubs_21.html

The whole non-sequence of my versions of Milton's sonnets ('overdubs') may be read here.

The Last Other Room (Manchester) 18th April 2018

It was all going so well; we were sitting on the Manchester train, pulling out of Lime Street, having decided to give the Whitworth a go before the final TOR, and I settled down to my Baraka Blues People, when Patricia's phone rang. I could hear it was something serious and it was about our son. And we were just pulling into Liverpool South Parkway. Where we got off... and never made the above gig.

I want to express my gratitude to the dynamic trio who organised these readings, Scott, Tom and James, and my personal debt to them as a a frequent reader (but infrequent attendee; it often clashed with MA teaching).I read from Twentieth Century Blues 10 years ago; performed my collaboration with Bob Cobbing (Patricia being Bob!) at the Cobbing evening; read the Van Valckenborch works from A Translated Man; and last August conducted the EUOIA reading. There are posts on this blog throughout featuring set lists and embodied videos or links.

 The EUOIA Other Room reading from last August is now available here.

Twitters for a Launch part of the European Poetry Festival Manchester April 13th (set list)

Twitters for a Launch part of the European Poetry Festival Manchester April 13^th

at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation :

In addition to the European Camarade there were readings from European Union of Imaginary Author poets with me, but mainly featuring my collaborators

Patricia Farrell

SJ Fowler

Tom Jenks

Joanne Ashcroft

Scott Thurston

James Byrne

Sandeep Parmar

and our creations:

Ivalyo Dimitrov (Bulgaria)

Kasja Bergstrom (Sweden)

Georg Bleinstein (Luxembourg)

Matus Dobres (Slovakia)

Hubert Zuba (Malta)

Martina Markovic (Croatia)

Carte-Vitale (French resident)

I introduced the event, using this 'script':

I decided to write the poems of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (the EUOIA) long before I thought it would feature as part of a European Union of REAL Authors festival, for which, many thanks to Steven Fowler, MC extraordinaire of the Camarades. I decided to write them long before the ugly neologism (now not so neo) BREXIT arrived to complicate the project – and give to it a fresh political edge. If the right poets for the times don’t exist, it seems, then they have to be invented.

I decided to write these poems – working through a list of 28 imaginary poets drawn up for another project – collaboratively, to ensure the variety that such a project deserves. I took my lead from the collaborators: they chose the country and poet and often wrote the biographies that are sprinkled among the biographies of the real poets in this newly published volume Twitters for a Lark which we are launching tonight – and which I am hoping you will want to buy. Some of the poems were first devised for Camarades of various kinds, so that again makes tonight pertinent.

I decided in performance that, apart from a number of two-voiced pieces, the results of the processes of collaboration – the production of a third voice, as collaboration theory suggests, and in our case, the production of persons and personas and pessaos to inhabit that voice – demanded that a single voice should render the single and singular poems, which is not the characteristic practice of collaborative performance. So remember that everything you hear was produced collaboratively between my seven guests and myself, although you may hear only one voice, and not a lot of me. That means tonight, in this section, there are 15 poets reading, not all of them real.

Then Patricia Farrell and I performed a simultaneous two voiced piece by Ivalyo Dimitrov (Bulgaria). Then SJ Fowler and I read ‘Flak’ by Kasja Bergstrom (Sweden), Steven first poem, me the second. Tom Jenks and I performed a simultaneous 2 voiced verision of the single enigmatic poem by Georg Bleinstein (Luxembourg). Matus Dobres (Slovakia) was next up, with Joanne Ashcroft reading the single poem.

Scott Thurston read the single poem of Hubert Zuba (Malta). (Scott was carrying evidence of Zuba’s demise, but this was not revealed to the public, a bit like the evidence surrounding Scripal’s poisoning.) James Byrne and I read ‘Memorials’ by  Martina Markovic (Croatia), James number 7; me 26. Sandeep Parmar read the single long poem by Carte-Vitale (French resident).

Watch it all here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQv2UZRMLsg

or here:

Read more about the European Poetry Festival here:

https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/

All the videos are to be found here: 

https://www.youtube.com/user/fowlerpoetry/videos

and embedded on the website with some pictures too

Most of the evening's performers

https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/manchester

At the Manchester gig I was also collaborating with a real Lithuanian poet Rimas Uzgiris, https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/rimas-uzgiris

which I thought went well.You may see that here.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. All the collaborators are accessible via links here.

This will probably be the last Twitters for a Lark launch reading. 

Read about the August 2017 Other Room Manchester reading of the EUOIA poets (pre-launch of Twitters) 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.

More on Twitters here and

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

Twitters for a Lark launch at Bangor University 6th April 2018 (set list)

Twitters for Lark launch at Bangor University (as part of the Expanded Translation conference and project)

These are my notes, which I spoke from, extempore.

I am very happy tonight to be launching this collection (I think of it as that rather than as an anthology), Twitters for a Lark – this collection of co-created fictional European poets. And I’m thrilled I have so many of those co-creators here, in a sense coincidentally, at the Conference. Though not so coincidentally, given the conference!

But first I want to read three poems from a different project. There are three reasons for this, two of them connected to the European poets project, the first not.

I want to read from my versions of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch, because they are expanded translations, the theme of the conference, and because today is a special day in the Petrarchan calendar. On this date in 1327 he first espied Laura (she also is reported to have died on this day, etc….) That is the theme of my Petrarch 3 poems that (along with the work of others whom I have written about in my book The Meaning of Form) so exercised Peter Riley recently.(Peter Hughes talked about his Petrarch project in a paper that was largely on his Leopardi follows-up. Great stuff.)

But my reason –the second reason – for reading these are also that they are openly poems about Brexit. My ‘Wyatt’ is partly a servant of that first unstable Brexiteer Henry the Eighth, and also a kind of contemporary civil servant or a spy

I read Hap 5,6, and 13. More on that project here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/robert-sheppard-petrarch-sonnet-project.html

The third reason I read those poems was that, despite the name, the European Union of Imaginary Authors (the EUOIA) is not a Brexit project. Who could have predicted that my mild joke, my Belgian fictional poet, RVV, invented all of these poets in 2013 or so, would have become so politicised a concept, and that some of us (‘almost most’ as my poem says) learnt to love the EU too late, and that the EU failed to enamour itself to the slender ‘Many’. Nevertheless, I shamelessly argued in the blurb for Twitters, ‘If the right poets for the times don’t exist, then they have to be invented,’ though I did fess up: ‘Although devised before the neologism ‘Brexit’ was spat across the bitter political divide, this sample of 28 poets of the EUOIA … takes on new meanings in our contemporary world that is far from fictive, ‘fake news’ or not.’

Rene Van Valckenborch as a project: was about translations and exploring the author function, the way work constellates around a name… Meet Rene here.

EUOIA in it

and straight into the reading. More about collaboration than translation per se.

featuring my collaborators

Zoe Skoulding

James Byrne

Alys Conran

Philip Terry

Jeff Hilson

All the collaborators are accessible via links here.

and our creations:

Gurkan Arnavut (Cyprus)

Martina Markovic (Croatia)

Christofol Subira (Catalonia)

Paul Coppens (Belguim)

Ratsky Josef (Hungary)

Alys Conran

James Byrne (and Robert Sheppard)

Lily Robert-Foley

Robert

Zoe full of life: Zoepoetics

Haps led into reading with Zoe, an account of how she set the whole thing off, by suggesting we use my unused fictional poets; with James, who added a few new details about Martina; and with the wonderful Alys; the joys of collaborating with somebody one previously hadn’t know.

Philip and I decided we’d demonstrate our loose antonymic translation by me reading (slowly) Van Valckenborch’s quennets and Paul Coppens’ translations.

Philip Terry showing the audience the shape of the Qunnet form

Jeff and me: which I pre-visaged as a high-octane belter, but something else happened. We were reading in the School of Music, and there was an organ in the corner, that worked, and so, finding that Lily Robert-Foley could play keyboards, we enlisted her services, and she played pieces under each of our two poems, and they were considerably interrupted by the slow music (her own songs), slowing both of us down and punctuating and re-articulating the work (appropriate, I should say, because Ratsky is an organist-poet and the poems feature organ-related notions!) Simutaneous intersemiotic translation, in Sophie Collins’ terms.Many thanks to Lily!

after Jeff:

Thanks at the end to: Zoe for setting it off, Zoe and Jeff for including it in this conference, Zoe and Jeff and all the other poets for collaborating, and everybody for coming…

Thanks to Jeff for the photos...(That's why he isn't in them.)

This event was part of the ‘Expanded Translation’ Project. Read more here and here:

http://expanded-translation.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en

http://expanded-translation.bangor.ac.uk/conf/programme.php.en#friday

And read here Zoe Skoulding's response to Peter Riley's review of some 'expanded translations' (including my Petrarch 3), but it's also an account of the Bangor Conference at the whole research project: here.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here.  More on Twitters here and here. Updated link:

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

Read about the August 2017 Other Room Manchester reading of the EUOIA poets (pre-launch of Twitters) 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 Manchester 2018 launch here:

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

Robert Sheppard: the Petrarch sonnet project finished with poem 100

I have made a habit of posting my topical sonnets as they were written. They are versions of versions of Petrarch, largely. They start with Petrarch 3. See here and here and here and here for more on my Petrarch obsession/project, including how to purchase Petrarch 3 from Crater press in its 'map' edition. Read the 'original' translation (if you see what I mean) and a doggie version here. (Today is 6th April, the day Petrarch claimed to have first spotted Laura, and the day she died 21 years later.)

In 'It's Nothing', my failed attempt to 'write the self', the word 'Brexit' appears for the first time, as though the themes of the poems that follow erupted into the sequences almost by accident.

The Thomas Wyatt poems will be published soon by Knives Forks and Spoons. 'Brexit' is now a firm theme. Here's a HAP: 
 
from Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch. 

I write about the versions of the Earl of Surrey's sonnets which followed here , where I also explain that the poems were temporarily posted on this blog for about a week each, partly because I was often commenting on contemporary events, like Boris' gaffes, and I wanted to serve an immediate audience. Here's one touching on Trump's 'trans ban' and upon the macho version of diplomacy that seems to prevail in the White House. I held it back from publication as it became a veritable thicket of scare-quotes to show I wasn't expressing the opinions involved. That's also why I published it with the 'original' because comparison clearly shows what I'm doing, I hope, at:
http://internationaltimes.it/direct-rule-in-peace-with-foul-desire 

Other poems figure post-Brexit Britain as a huge dogging site, run by Micheal Gove at 'Rural Affairs'. (As I said the poems pick up themes as they go, and ti emerged out of one of the Wyatt poems.)


See here for one reference to the following sequence, feeding off of the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, and featuring Boris' then most recent gaffe. 

Bringing the total of sonnets to 100 I've used 14 of EEB's exquisite 'Poems from the Portuguese'. I pondered 'Brazilian Sonnets' as a title, using some bossa nova tropes (another 'theme', though perhaps 'motif' is a better term to label these repetitions and variations), but that ended up as the title of the first seven. I regard the title (which came to me in a flash) as peculiarly apposite: I'd read that one of our leading (Tory) politicians has a Non Disclosure Agreement with one (or more?) of his lovers; the second poem is about the President's Club outrage - the girls had to sign such an agreement. In a sense Robert and EB Browning had a mutual non-disclsoure agreement during their courtship. (That's another suggested scenario too: Mistress Elizabeth receives gentlemen callers in Wimpole St, who have to perform beastly acts, possibly taking on the persona of the dog Flush (see Virginia Woolf's fine biography of this hound) I activated that possibility, mildly (for me) in a couple of the poems. Woof). Read their love letters! The second group of seven (out of fourteen) are like the earlier 'Direct Rule' Surrey poems in that they are overdubbed by another voice.

 

Links to a number of the published poems from Non Disclosure Agreement may be accessed here.

Some of my related OVERDUBS, a non-sequence of versions of Milton’s sonnets have been published online. They may ALL be accessed here.

I would like to thank Clark Allison for following my temporary posts and responding by email to every poem, and was honest about his responses to these satirical outrages.

EBB's most famous one. I didn't touch it

Of what does the project - I'm thinking of calling it The English Strain - consist?

Petrarch 3
Overdubs from Milton
two sonnets for Lee Harwood
It's Nothing
breakout
Hap: Understudies of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Petrarch
Surrey with the Fringe on Top
Elegaic Sonnets
Non Disclosure Agreement

See Peter Riley. Like Father Ted, he says: Down with this sort of thing! Here.

'Even putting it on Twitter won’t get Bo and Go or Fox and Dox

to RT it or DM me,' 

My poem The Soul’s Rialto Hath its Merchandise contains the lines:

‘The fundamental unit of post-Brexit trade

will be American Boneless Pork Rectums!’

I've got  the image to prove it! 

It will be a Boneless Pork Rectum and Eat it Britain after 'Bregsit' (new pronunciation), rather than the Cake and Eat It one on offer. 

Book One of ‘The English Strain’ project, The English Strain, is available from Shearsman Books here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 

Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, HERE:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Read the first review, by Alan Baker in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

And now there's a second review of both books, here, from Clark Allison, here; https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/