The Necessity of Poetics - out now!

 The Necessity of Poetics is now available: https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-The-Necessity-of-Poetics-p661888958

 

The Necessity of Poetics marks the moves I have made as a poet-critic around the notion of poetics in general, and the poetics of linguistically innovative poetry in particular, and my own poetics as an outcome of those. It traces those moves, but I also offer them to fellow poets, critics, and even, given my age, to literary historians. It incites and ignites and invites readers to identify poetics, to read poetics (as poetics, not as an impoverished literary criticism), to share poetics and, where appropriate, for readers who are also writers, to create poetics of their own. The book contains a definitive version of my well-known essay ‘The Necessity of Poetics’.

Also contained here is my experimental essay on poetic rhythm. Addressing the contemporary lack of discussion of the subject, ‘Pulse’ presents a new way of conceiving of metrical and non-metrical shape, rhythm as a form of consciousness, bringing together suggestive theory and the experiences of poets themselves. Abruptly changing gear from critic to poet, via poetics, I like to think that my poetic thinking is alive to the notion that poetic form is cognitive, that form knows something.

There are insights into the poetry and poetics of Christopher Middleton, Adrian Clarke, Pierre Joris, Maggie O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. I also dig into the processes of my own poems to come up with generalized conclusions about poetics and poesis, experimenting with new modes of creative-critical writing, as a practitioner and pedagogue of Creative Writing, in quite personal practice-led research. From a ‘radio-talk with no station to transmit it’ about radio as an analogy for poetry, to an ‘undelivered talk’ on photographic ekphrasis; from recent takes on my recent ‘English Strain’ sonnet project (whose third part is published simultaneously with this volume) to rare documents that take the reader back to the emerging linguistically innovative practices of the late 1980s, this volume presents a relentless and repeated advocacy for poetics as a genuine mode of thinking and writing. And poetics as an object of study in its own right.

 

CONTENTS (with three online samplers)

 

Introduction: Gathering from the Past

 

ONE

 

Poetics in Anticipation: Shifting an Imaginary, towards British Standards (recent aphoristic poetics)

Pulse: All a Rhythm (Sampler One: part of this unusual ‘treatise on metre’ may be read here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard)

The Formal Splinter (a condensed one page statement on cognition and ‘the meaning of form’, as in my critical book of that title)

A Voice Smears Across the Screen: Material Engagement with Form, Forms and Forming (a more discursive take on the meaning of form as cognition)

Hanging Out Inside Sonnets: A Text and Commentary (personal piece about my obsession with the sonnet frame)

‘Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro’: A derivative dérive into/out of Petrarch’s Sonnet 3 (a research as practice piece on my 14 versions of ‘Sonnet 3’ that set off the ‘English Strain’ sonnet project)

 

TWO

 

The Necessity of Poetics (my often-cited piece on the nature of poetics, with its list of definitions)

Speaking Differently: Poetics in the Twenty-first Century: Pierre Joris and Adrian Clarke, with reference to the poetics of Maggie O’Sullivan (a conventional critical essay on different writers' poetics)

Poetics as Conjecture and Provocation: an inaugural lecture delivered on 13^th March 2007 at Edge Hill University (which starts as history, proceeds as lecture, demonstrates poetics (mine and Christopher Middleton’s), and ends as a poetry reading)

Critical Tuning: Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing (a kind of radio talk)

Ekphrasis and Anti-Ekphrasis: Undelivered Talk for the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, for the Ideas Lab on Writing and Photography (a short talk I never delivered)

MATERIALS + PROCEDURE: an account of the writing of ‘The Given’ (Sampler 2: this short piece may be read here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2010/07/robert-sheppard-writing-given.html )

 

THREE 

 

Took Chances in London Traffic (a memoir of the London poetry scene of the 1980s, which contextualises the older pieces that follow, in a sort of reverse chronological order)

Negative Definitions: Talk for the SubVoicive Colloquium, London 1997

Linking the Unlinkable: ‘Why Do You Do What You Do?’ (The title answers the question in the subtitle)

Working the Work: notes towards and beyond Internal Exile (poetics)

Incite! and Ignite!: No one listens to poetry: SubVoicive Colloquium, 20^th July 1991, University of London (a cautionary examination of linguistically innovative poetry)

net/(k)not-//work(s) (a 1992 booklet of short pieces with interpollations)

                        Producing Now

                        Part One:

                        Poetic Sequencing and the New: Twentieth Century Blues (the poetics of that work)

                        Part Two:

                    New British Poetry in the Eighties (a brief survey from when Pages actually had pages!)

                        Re-Working the Work: Pausing for Breath (poetics)

                       Codes and Diodes are both Odes (homage to Bob Cobbing, poem as poetics)

                    Appendix: The Education of Desire (Sampler Three: this early pedagogic piece may be read here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/12/robert-sheppard-far-language-education.html )

 

You can’t live without all these ideas, can you?

Here are reviews of the book: Pages: Reviews of The Necessity of Poetics

Simultaneously, Shearsman is publishing my book of poems British Standards. See Pages: British Standards published by Shearsman - out now (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) 

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Locating Robert Sheppard: books: Pages: Robert Sheppard: seeing what's in print and what's not!; email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on  X: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / X; latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

British Standards published by Shearsman - out now

 BRITISH STANDARDS is now available:  https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-British-Standards-p661920471

 

At one level, the poems in my new book British Standards are what I call transpositions of Romantic era sonnets that pay homage to the exuberance and variety of that tradition, whether through examples of well-known poets, from Wordsworth to Clare, or through those of lesser-known practitioners, Mary Robinson to Hartley Coleridge. At another level, these transpositions chart the recent national banana-skin slippage from the hubris of brexit to the mismanagement of Covid (including the privations and solitudes of lockdown), with Bo at the helm. At both levels, they are satirical and funny, whether British Standard dogging sites are introduced as the sole brexit benefit, or ‘our’ hapless prime minister stumbles from indiscretion to disgrace. Between the levels, they vibrate with implication, rock with savage laughter (mine, but hopefully yours too).

Comments on the two previous parts of ‘The English Strain’ project, The English Strain and Bad Idea:

‘Among contemporary poets, only Sheppard could have achieved this unlikely synthesis; his poetry is learned, scholarly, satirical, outrageous and innovative as well as – most importantly – political.’ Alan Baker, Litter

‘This book is the sound a man of enlightenment and renaissance makes as he sees the long rich curve of knowledge – our real ‘heritage’ – being flushed clean down a political shitter…It is utterly brilliant.’ Steve Hanson, Manchester Review of Books

‘Sheppard is able to form activist responses to the times through which we live without sacrificing his linguistic range.’ James Byrne, The Robert Sheppard Companion

‘Sheppard posits … a translational mode that is open, fluid, permissive, voracious and, above all, creative.’ Tom Jenks, The Robert Sheppard Companion

Contents 

Preface: England in 2019 (a transposition of Shelley)

Poems of National Independence: liberties with Wordsworth     

Double Standards 1: Political Greatness, dub of Shelley

14 Standards (featuring 14 different Romantic poets)

Double Standards 2: Big Data and Little Bo, dub of Shelley

Tabitha and Thunderer: Interventions in Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon

Ozymandias: a dub of Shelley

Weird Syrup:

part 1: Contrafacts and Counterfactuals from Keats

part 2: Curtal Song-Nets from Junkets

Lift not the Painted Veil: an overdub of Shelley

Unth(reading) Clare, versions of John Clare

Astral Zen Knickers: excessively silly overdub of Shelley’s ‘To Wordsworth’

Partly from Hartley (Coleridge): two double sonnets

To Laughter: a last overdub of Shelley

After Laughter (three ‘After’ poems, deriving from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Symons and Adam Mickiewicz, to land the book, as it were)

         

Many of these poems are commented on on this blog (indeed, most were posted temporarily on it). Here are three relevant long posts: 

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html

Pages: The last of my Wordsworth versions in 'British Standards' (Book Three of 'The English Strain') (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I also got into the habit of reading them on short videos that are featured in some of these posts, but here’s one to keep you entertained. This is a version of a sonnet by John Clare. It accidentally turned into an art movie!

 

Here’s some more videos: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/12/poetic-evidence-for-covid-enquiry-from.html

Finally, 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

 

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: books: Pages: Robert Sheppard: seeing what's in print and what's not!; email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on X: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / X; latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

 

The Proof is in the Post (not the pudding!)

 

I can never muster the enthusiasm that I see in the faces of younger writers with their earliest books, as they open a box of books. We didn't have videos in those days (very little film of linguistically innovative poets at all, which is why I loved posting videos of the 'English Strain' poems as I wrote them, see below). I have still some proof reading to do and then British Standards and The Necessity of Poetics will both be available from Shearsman. In fact, they (and all my other books) are advertised and ready for order here anyway: Sheppard, Robert (shearsman.com)). 

This video shows me juggling with Keats, both with one of his sonnets, and, in performance, with his life mask. Enjoy. You may get British Standards here  Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard - When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, (despite the title on the link, and you can read how it felt in the middle of compsing these most contemporary of poems, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: 14 Standards from British Strandards is complete as one sonnet appears at the virtual WOW Festival 2020 (hub post) 

British Standards (Shearsman) is on the horizon over which the Tories have slipped (cover reveal)

 BRITISH STANDARDS is now available:  https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-British-Standards-p661920471

 Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) will take you to a post (with videos) in which I consider the whole project, although it wasn't quite as finished as I thought it was, as I explained in a later post: Pages: The Horrible Thought that Bo mioght be back: only The Bard could save me now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). 

Poetry Upstairs at the Melville reading 25th June 2024 (set list)

(Set list) I opened by saying something like this: 'About two weeks ago I was putting this set together - and I thought to read from the first two books out of three of (mainly) transpositions of traditional sonnets - Wyatt to Drayton, Charlotte Smith to Mary Robinson. They take for theme the caperings of a character called Bo, and deal with the hubris of brexit colliding with the mismangement of Covid. I've copies for sale. [I was referring to the 'English Strain' project, specifically to the two books currently in print: see  Pages: Poetic Evidence for the COVID Inquiry from British Standards (temporary post, with videos) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) ; this is, with its videos, an alternative 'reading'.] BUT I realised that a) most people by this date would be exhausted with UK politics, and b) I don't want the poems to be thought electioneering.

SO I'm only going to read just one sonnet, not a transposition at all, but an elegy for Lee Harwood, who I know was a favourite poet of Ric's, and read in this series, several times, I think.'

I read 'The Evening Star', from The English Strain (see Pages: My THE ENGLISH STRAIN is published today by Shearsman (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

I then read two long poems that I deliberately wrote (partly) to get sonnets out of my system. Composed in very different means at the same time, they are probably both 'about' cognition and recognition. 

The first was 'The Area', which has appeared in The Long Poem Magazine (which I write about here, 'Pages: My poem THE AREA is published in The Long Poem Magazine number 30 (background and links) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) ).

The second was 'As a Rule', as yet unpublished. 

I sampled a short poem from Doubly Stolen Fire, my most recent self-penned book. This was 'The Lowry Lounge'. A surprisingly large number of the attentive audience (I asked them!) had read Under the Volcano. (See Pages: Doubly Stolen Fire (a new book of hybrid texts) is now OUT (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). The book was published locally, and the publisher, Lyndon Davies, was present. 

(Video of 'The Lowry Lounge')

I finished with a new(ish) poem called 'Radio Therapy', half a poem about radiotherapy and half a poem about Jimi Hendrix' 'Voodoo Child' (as it is now spelt), heard on the radio during radiotherapy (hence the title). 

It was a wonderful atmosphere, it was good to see old friends, and read to unknown people. It's a great series, too, if you are local. (Phone number above.)

My fellow readers were:

Abigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish and Japanese, broadcast on BBC and RTÉ Radio, and widely published in journals and anthologies. Her first collection, Jinx, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2018. Her second collection, I Think We're Alone Now, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023. She is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Cardiff University. And: Gareth Writer-Davies is from Brecon, Wales. Publications include: Bodies, Cry Baby (2017) Indigo Dreams, The Lover's Pinch (2018) The End (2019) Wysg (2022) Arenig Press.

My edition of the Selected Poems of Mary Robinson is out now!

The Selected Poems of Mary Robinson is now out from Shearsman – edited by me!

Publisher’s details HERE: Mary Robinson - Selected Poems (shearsman.com) 

The publisher's sample of the book may be read here: mary-robinson-selected-poems-sampler.pdf (cdn-website.com)

 

Mary Robinson was born in 1758 in Bristol, and was a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist and actor. Tutored by both Garrick and Sheridan, she had a short but dazzling career on the London stage, where she was spotted by the young Prince Regent and became his mistress. The resultant scandal was hot gossip and salacious news, brought to a new reading public by the institution of the daily paper, for which, ironically, Robinson would later write.

 

Although she had always written, her main literary career dates from a serious accident in 1783, which left her permanently disabled. In the 1790s, she produced most of her best work, with an ever-accelerating productivity, in verse and fiction, until her death in 1800 (she wrote 70 poems in that last year). Once associated with fashionable Della Cruscan poetry, in the final years of her life she was in contact with S.T. Coleridge and William Godwin, representatives of vanguards in both politics and literature. After her death, her work suffered from an almost-complete obscurity, aided and abetted by Victorian revulsion at her scandalous past. This position has now changed, and there has been considerable interest in her life, her writing, and the connection between the two, in recent years. (My fuller life may be read here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 2: The Life of Mary Robinson (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).)

The range of Robinson’s poetic work is astonishing: from impassioned lyrics to ‘Lyrical Tales’, from sonnets to odes, from political poetry, reacting both for and against the French Revolution, to representations of various outsider figures (slaves, madmen and political exiles), from jocular parodies of contemporary ‘Grub Street’ writers to satires on the callousness of the rich, fashionable and famous. Whether speaking or writing in her own voice (serially bidding farewell to her cropped haired lover from Liverpool, Tarleton) or in the voice of others (dramatising the distress of Marie Antoinette, for instance) she was a poetic innovator, as capable as handling Popean couplets as the freshest blank verse.

 

I’ve tried to select the best of Mary Robinson’s poetry for a general audience, while attempting to demonstrate the range of her work. I include the complete text of Sappho and Phaon (1796), which was the first sonnet sequence to be published in English since the Renaissance, and which I first encountered writing ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ for the British Standards part of my ‘English Strain’ project, which will also be published by Shearman. I write about it here: Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer' is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I relate her late work, particularly the forceful political blank verse epic ‘The Progress of Liberty’, to the emergence of the first generation of Romantics, upon whom she was a notable influence.

Here I read one of the sonnets that I 'used' for 'Tabitha and Thunderer', from Sappho and Phaon, poem eight. 

The working and thinking notes for my ‘life’ and my ‘introduction’ (and some of my choices for selection and de-selection) begin in a strand of posts from the hubpost here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). It might be thought a little odd that I would edit such a volume, but, after having written ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, subtitled ‘an intervention in the work of Mary Robinson’, I found myself, at Tony Frazer’s urging, embarking on this editorial project. Having just completed the editing with Kelvin Corcoran of the New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood, I might have needed a rest – but fools rush in! I’m glad I’ve done it, as a poet selecting another poet, partly as a critic, but not a critic of Romantic poetry (although after researching for, and writing, British Standards I did a lot of reading on the Romantics, focusing on their sonnets, which included Robinson, left out Blake and Byron, but was a real education, as it happens). I write about British Standards as it progressed here:  Pages: Robert Sheppard: 14 Standards from British Strandards is complete as one sonnet appears at the virtual WOW Festival 2020 (hub post).

British Standards will be out soon(ish). But back to Mary Robinson: Mary Robinson - Selected Poems (shearsman.com). She's not going to smile until you buy this book!

 

On a passage of Lutz Seiler and a lift from Billy Mills

I find the contemporary German lyric poet Lutz Seiler puts the matter better than I could:

'Everyone has only one song,’ said the writer Paul Bowles in one of his last interviews. (He was also a musician.) You recognise the song by its sound. The sound forms in the instrument we ourselves have become over time. Before every poem comes the story we have lived. The poem catches the sound of it. Rather than narrating the story, it narrates its sound. More than anything, ‘Everyone has only one song’ means that everyone has a song, and ‘only one’ means it’s their own song. The search for it can take a long time. Years of eavesdropping on the melodies of others – good to listen in to, but is it your own particular song? You could say: the poem is something that, of necessity, asserts itself through the life of its author, it is his song, his faith in an ‘absolute rhythm’ that is his own personal rhythm.

Lutz Seiler 2023: 97 

Seiler, Lutz. trans. Martyn Crucefix. In Case of Loss. Sheffield, London, New York: And Other Stories, 2023. Lutz Seiler | And Other Stories

 

I have been thinking a lot about this quotation from Lutz Seiler’s excellent new book of poetics, memoir and an odd kind of creative literary criticism (I mean he writes about other poets’ work from the point of view of a fellow-creative practitioner.) I’ve liked his work a long time, and read his work in translation by Tony Frazer. I hid my admiration behind the supposed admiration of my fictional poet Sophie Poppmeier! Indeed, she wrote a poem for him, that I dedicated to Tony Frazer. (It is in Twitters for a Lark but also here online: Robert Sheppard - A Festschrift for Tony Frazer (weebly.com)). What I think of this passage is that it strikes me with the power of truth, such that I am going to use it to structure my introduction to the work of Paul Robert Mullen that I am writing (see here for more on him: Meet The Author – A Deep Dive with Paul Robert Mullen – Animal Heart Press). It fits well with Paul’s development, and (I think) many other lyric poets. I can even mime the piece by appending parenthetically ‘(He is also a musician)’ at some point, but that’s not the big point. The problem is, however useful it might be for describing other poets’ works, I don’t think it applies to me! My invention of Sophie Poppmeier almost proves that. But nevertheless, it speaks to me. You will see that I’ve cut it off before I quote his explanation of ‘absolute rhythm’: it is, of course, a lift from Ezra Pound’s imagist manifesto, and sends us back to that area and era. I do use that a little in my ‘treatise on metre’, ‘Pulse’, that will be published in August in my The Necessity of Poetics volume, but that’s another avenue.

Coming back to the passage, the central statement for me is that ‘Rather than narrating the story, it [the poetry] narrates its sound.’ I DO like that sense of the debunking of narrative, or rather its displacement from the oxymoronic ‘narration of the story’ to the metaphoric ‘narration of the song’ of the story, the sound of the story. ‘Song’ suggests a condensing of the ‘story’ (again an echo of Pound, just where I’d prefer it not to appear), a shorter, purer music distilled from the narrative (we imagine a novel or autobiography at this point, I think, representing what such a ‘narrative’ could be, but remember Seiler tells us we’re still narrating a song!).

Perhaps what slightly unnerves me is the nearness the argument has to all that stuff about ‘finding one’s voice’, when I’ve preferred to think of ‘losing one’s voice’, or losing one voice to become the plural (voices) that we all are. Even Seiler has to remind himself (and us) that ‘“Everyone has only one song” means that everyone has a song, and ‘only one’ means it’s their own song,’ to interpret the Paul Bowles away from the implication that there’s only one song per person (I think of those blues singers that seemed to literally only have one song). Seiler doesn’t mean that – and I doubt that Bowles meant that too, otherwise we’d all be writing the same poem over and over. (I also recognise the distanciated truth of that sometimes, but that’s about another problem: obsession, forgetfulness, the need to say something again.) No, Seiler asserts: it’s our own song. As long as that’s not about developing a USP or a gimmick (eg ‘Let’s wear space suits when we perform,’ like the completely-forgotten band the Sputniks! Where did that story come from after all these years? The story of my life, of course, the only one I might only narrate the song of, without it ever being a ‘song of myself’, but ‘from myself’).

Before I start repeating myself, as they say, ‘my self’ as I often say, I must conclude that this passage by Seiler is rich with implication, much of it useful (particularly to my critical task in hand), but it has some unintended consequences that Seiler himself recognises. I also doubt it can be applied (un-detourned, unadorned) to my work, or perhaps only to my works that may be described as lyric. Looking for quotes for the back of my other upcoming volume British Standards I came upon this by Billy Mills about the preceding 2 books of the ‘English Strain’ project:

There is some inevitable tension between Sheppard the ‘avant-garde’ linguistically innovative poet and Sheppard the apparently insatiable sonneteer, a tension that he addresses head on in Sonnet XLII of the ‘Idea’ sequence:

 

Some like my multiform methods,

and commend my social poetics.

Some say I’m a funny old translator,

‘expanded’ like a supersized codpiece.

Some that I excel in explicit vitality….

 

Reading this sends the diligent reader back to these lines from one of the ‘original’ sonnets near the beginning of The English Strain, in a poem addressed to the memory of Lee Harwood:

 

I searched everywhere for your letter

that I know says something like You’ve

got a special language for poetry,

Robert, and I haven’t. I didn’t find it [it’s worth adding, I still haven’t!]
but I’m trying to lose that language now.

For me, this attempt to lose his ‘special language’ through the ‘strange ventriloquism’ of versioning is perhaps the most interesting part of these two books. When the politics pales, as politics always will in the end, we are left with some wonderful patterns of sound. Take, for example, the first four lines of the Drayton version just quoted: [I've just found this cheeky video of 'The Michael Drayton Companion' made at the time I had just published the book.]

Some say I’m a funny old translator,

‘expanded’ like a supersized codpiece.

Some that I excel in explicit vitality.

But others call this strange ventriloquism…

Other readers may place the stresses differently, in an attempt to force the lines to match the rhythm of an iambic metronome, but I’m taken with the idea of a kind of mad ballad metre being imposed on the sonnet form. More interestingly, the patterns of assonance and consonance that Sheppard weaves here, primarily the sibilant alliteration and the predominance of short vowels in stressed positions, with an exception for that vital ‘strange’ marks a kind of departure for Sheppard, a move away from his ‘special language’ towards something of a new departure. (The whole is on his excellent ‘Elliptical Movements’, permanently linked to in my ‘blogroll’ to the right of this post!)

That’s probably a long way from where this post started, and the Mills quotation came in during the process of writing this piece. Ah! there’s another issue: finding the song in the process of narrating the song, and maybe there are a thousand ways to make the connection with the narrative of one’s life. Connection within that (welcome) ‘tension’ Billy identifies, and that potential ‘new departure’ he detects. Always a question for poetics. (Here’s my most recent: MY OWN CRISIS:  https://www.futchpress.info/post/my-own-crisis, and my comments on that: Pages: My poetics piece 'My Own Crisis' is published by Futch (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

31 May 2024

Update: Paul's book is now published; details here, with my now complete introduction:  

https://thebrokenspine.co.uk/product/itsallcomedowntothismullen/

it's all come down to this: a retrospective [selected poems & writings 1999-2024] - Paul Robert Mullen –

Reading Upstairs in Abergavenny 25th June 2024

 

Poetry Upstairs at The Melville Centre for the Arts

Pen-Y-Pound, Abergavenny, Wales, NP7 5UD        Phone: 01873 853167

2024 Reading Series

Tuesday  25th June 7pm. Information on this has moved to:                                               

 Pages: Poetry Upstairs at the Melville reading 25th June 2024 (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)