As part of the interest generated by the tenth anniversary of Cobbing's death, I have been involved in a number of events.
Firstly, I have revived Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops, my 2001 collaboration with Bob at a reading/performance at Flat Time Gallery in Peckham, London, on the afternoon (2-5) of Sunday 14th October, where Patricia Farrell and I performed it. Jennifer Cobbing, Anna Barham, Julika Gittner, Heather Phillipson also performed or displayed work. It was a great day. See more about Flat Time here.
Then THE OTHER ROOM presented BOB COBBING: A CELEBRATION with CLIVE FENCOTT, an ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE OF ABC IN SOUND on Tuesday 23rd October 2012, 7pm at The Castle Hotel, Manchester M4 1LE. The video below is from that performance. See
Gallery North, City Campus, Northumbria University
Poet and painter Allen Fisher read from his work as part of Northumbria University's Allen Fisher Symposium, reading a range of work old and new. Allen's performance was accompanied by short readings from Ira Lightman (empassioned song and dual-voiced poem) and Sophie Robinson (empassioned political verse).
Allen Fisher Symposium
24th Nov 2012, 10.30 to 5.30
Sutherland Building, City Campus, Northumbria University
Speakers included Peter Barry, Ian Davidson, Peter Garratt, Robert Hampson, Ira Lightman, Ann Matthews, Sophie Robinson, Robert Sheppard, Harriet Tarlo, Rhys Trimble. Papers were followed by a Q&A/discussion with Allen Fisher, which included a moving account of Fisher's helpers and shapers.
I talked about his recent text Proposals. I concluded: 'In apprehending Proposals, the viewer and reader are one and the same and the formal complexity that results from imperfect fit requires the same readerly energies of a will towards coherence and logic evoked earlier that is formally undermined by the work.' (A version of the talk may be read here, and here is a piece on Fisher's poetics.)
REALITY STREET will be at the Small Publishers Fair on
Friday 16-Saturday 17 November in London. (You can spot publisher Ken Edwards talking to Tony Frazer on the picture below.)
It takes place at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R
4RL, from 11am-7pm each day.
On the Saturday at 4pm Reality Street will be launching
WHITE by Sean Pemberton and THE ALCHEMIST'S MIND, edited by David Miller.
The readers will be Sean Pemberton, Giles Goodland, Johan
de Wit, Robert Sheppard.
My contribution is the opening passage of my
autrebiography The Given. You know:
the one that begins, ‘I don’t remember…’ (All the autebiographies are available here.)
Both these books will be on sale at the launch price of
£10 each (retail price subsequently £15 and £13.50). Reality Street Supporters
will get them free.
THE ALCHEMIST'S MIND:
A book of narrative prose by poets
An anthology edited by David Miller in collaboration with
Ken Edwards. Contributors are: Barbara Guest, Lee Harwood, Ian Robinson,
Rosmarie Waldrop, Robert Sheppard, Bernadette Mayer, Paul Buck, Lyn Hejinian, M
J Weller, Brian Marley, Johan de Wit, John Levy, Vahni Capildeo, Paul Haines,
Lawrence Fixel, Robert Lax, Fanny Howe, David Miller, Keith Waldrop, Giles
Goodland, bpNichol, David Rattray, Guy Birchard, Will Petersen, Tom Lowenstein,
Kristin Prevallet, Stephen Watts, Daphne Marlatt
Small Publishers Fair 2012
Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL
Friday 16th & Saturday 17th November, 11am to 7pm
The international fair celebrating books by
contemporary artists, poets, writers, composers, book designers, and their publishers; together with a programme of
readings and talks on Saturday.
For full details www.rgap.co.uk| email
helenmitchell@inthefi elds.co.uk | tel 05603 689840 (standard landline
charges)
I am took part in the annual Lowry Lounge event at the Bluecoat in Liverpool on Saturday 28th October (as near to the Day of the Dead as we can get). I talked about the work of Lowry scholar David Markson and his extraordinary postmodern novels.
The Bluecoat’s annual celebration of Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry (author of the classic Under the Volcano) comprises a psychogeographical walking tour of Liverpool with artist Colin Dilnot and an afternoon at the Bluecoat including the launch of The Firminist No 3, an occasional journal of all things Lowry, performances, talks and music.
Out on the Lowry walk with Colin Dilnot pointing out the branch of Austin Reed referred to in the newly discovered and soon to be published 'lost' novel of Lowry: Ballast to the White Sea.
Poet makes his writing practice material, inventorying every printed book he can see as he sits at his laptop. On the desk. Along the shelf. In the big box behind. A composite self-portrait with no self. Feeds it to Twitter, title by title. Until he sees at last, the most satisfying thing, saved for the final tweet. Neat in its crimson bag, the pristine leather-bound fine-paper notebook that Poet has not dared to write in since buying it a decade before, in Florence. A bibliography of a work he’ll never write.
On Poet's desk: Tears in the Fence 55 Benjamin’s Illuminations David Ter-Oganyan
(Uncovering a few more books on his desk:) Meredith’s Modern Love Poet’s 2012 diary Poet’s dictionary (with its gifts of ‘ithyphallus’, ‘mallemaroking’, ‘rounceval’) Anthony Rudolf's and Colin Wiggins’ Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters Looking along the shelf above Poet's desk; (in a pile, top to bottom): Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Voyeur Ingrid Schaffner’s The Essential Joseph Cornell John Seed’s Collected Poems and a single volume of his Pictures from Mayhew Pete Clarke’s Letters to Language Paul Evans’ True Grit and Prokofiev’s Concerto (Then upright, left to right:) Scott Thurston’s Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk Monk’s Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text Michael Hamburger’s The Truth of Poetry Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager Huntsperger’s Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry Bernstein’s The Politics of Form Rawes’ Romanticism and Form Milton’s Paradise Lost. Poem, in Twelve Books. The seventeenth edition, Dublin, Printed for A. Ewing, W. and W. Smith and P. Wilson, 1765 Wood’s Literature and the Taste of Knowledge Watten’s The Constructivist Moment René Van Valckenborch’s Vache Mousley’s Towards a New Literary Humanism Denise Riley’s Poets on Writing Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Lemon and Reis’ Russian Formalist Criticism Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature Joughin and Malpas’ The New Aestheticism József Attila’s Eszmélet Angela Leighton’s On Form Art Matters by Peter de Bolla Louis Armand’s Avant-Post Allan Sekula’s Polonia and Other Fables Language Alive 2 Radnóti Miklós’ Naptár Peter Barry’s English in Practice Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Foto Ian Davidson’s Into Thick Hair From: Tracey Traces by Jeff Hilson Mukařovský’s Aesthetic Function Christopher Middleton’s Selected Writings The Plantin-Moretus Museum Visitors’ Guide Wolfson and Brown’s Reading for Form Leech’s Linguistic Guide to English Poetry Christopher Middleton’s Selected Writings
In the big box behind Poet: Sean Bonney’s Happiness Chris McCabe’s The Borrowed NotebookShakespeare’s Sonnets John Goodby’s Illennium Philip Kuhn’s Boltzmann’s Constant & the Black Body Spectrum Gareth Farmer’s Mock into the Brazen Day Matthew Welton’s We needed coffee but we’d got ourselves convinced that the later we left it the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we retuned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind Vahni Capildeo’s No Traveller Returns Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry Jeff Hilson’s In the Assarts Michael Zand’s Lion Chris McCabe’s Zeppelins Louis Armand’s Letters from Ausland Simon Perrel’s Nitrate David Markson’s This is Not a Novel Philip Terry’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets Peter Gillies and Rupert Loydell’s A Music Box of Snakes Lucy Harvest Clarke’s Silveronda Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference Scott Thurston’s On Being Circular Andrea Brady’s Vacation of a Lifetime
plus the notebook described last in the text (not a ‘printed book’ at all, actually). Disturbed by the act of writing, the volumes are no longer configured as they are described here, Poet wants you to know. Tumbling down from the shelves as they’re touched. Re-stacked in reverse order. This portrait already a history.
It is also republished, revised, in my Unfinish from Veer: see here.
(Photo: Bratislava 2012: a friend of Magritte's COW picture below, obviously, and clearly a bad person.)
This ‘manyfesto’ is a response to parts of Sean Bonney’s keynote at the Conversify Conference, Edinburgh, September 9-11 2011 (though not to the exemplary readings of Rimbaud therein, but in anticipation of the publication of Happiness). It was first performed as the finale to my Berlin Bursts reading at the Bluecoat’s Chapter & Verse literature festival, Liverpool, on October 16 2011. I have melted and re-formed quotations from the following into its forming action: Adorno, Auden, Badiou, Bad Prophets Err, Bonney, David Cameron, Clark Coolidge, Simon Critchley, Duckweed, flarf, W.S. Graham, Guattari, Simon Jarvis, Primo Levi, Angshuman Kar, Kruk, Marcuse, Meschonnic, Milton, Pasternak, Penny Lane Graffitist, John Rajchman, Rancière, David Toop, and two geopolitically-challenged ‘scallies’ from Wavertree, Liverpool. It’s also twinned by the paper I wrote and delivered at the conference, ‘Notes on Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry’, which I promised a number of people I’d publish online. This will have to substitute for the moment.
This text is published in final form in Unfinish published by Veer in 2016: here.
Links to the fictional poems of Rene Van Valckenborch by Robert Sheppard
The ‘whole’ oeuvre of René Van Valckenborch is surrounded by mystery, perhaps of his own making. Published in fugitive publications in places as far apart as Cape Town and Montreal over the last decade, the poems of this Belgian are composed in Flemish and Walloon, and the stylistic divide between the two sets seems to reflect the societal and linguistic divide of his troubled nation (although he never refers to this fact). The two translators, Annemie Dupuis and Martin Krol, worked independently of one another at first. Their subsequent meeting, marriage and removal to Brussels form such an incredible tale that they have occasionally been accused of manufacturing the controversy of Mr Van Valckenborch’s discovery, of fabricating their translations and of inventing their author. But in fact they are ‘fictional poems’, a category defined by Gerald L. Bruns. ‘To speak strictly, a fictional poem would be a poem held in place less by literary history than by one of the categories that the logical world keeps in supply: conceptual models, possible worlds, speculative systems, hypothetical constructions in all their infinite variation – or maybe just whatever finds itself caught between quotation marks, as (what we call) “reality” often is.’
Read and listen to the Walloon ‘Cow’ poems, his final Walloon poems, perhaps written in the same spirit as Magritte, when he entered and quickly departed, his ‘Periode Vache’ (see an example at the top of this. Isn't he adorable?):
Read a piece of Van Valckenborch’s critical prose (not to be included in the collected Van Valckenborch project), an account of the cinema of forgotten Belgian film-maker Paul Coppens:
Other texts have appeared in print in Tears in the Fence AND, Sunfish, Roundyhouse, VLAK, Form & Fontanelles and Poetry Wales. The whole project is intended for publication in 2013.
The whole thing may be bought as A Translated Man here:
Jeff Hilson and I have been working on a collaboration called 'Honda Hands'. On Saturday we read the first 5 verses at the third Mantenant Camarade organised by the incredible Steven Folwer at the Rich Mix, near Brick Lane, London. All the other readings are are available too and can been seen in adjacent places to this video. Thanks again to Steven and to Jeff for their hard work. We hope you will enjoy this truly egregious work.
My first booklet of short stories is out. The Only Life
Three short stories about poets.
His fictional poets begat fictional poems, of course, which lie as fragments of greater wholes, marvellous or ludicrous, in teasing virtuality. These stories – their styles range from the clipped short-short to the expansive experimental – give us the world as only a poet could, as kinds of poem, for our delight and horror. But in writing only of poets he writes of everything else. The fog of history and the steam of sex are intermingled in these intricate, absorbing and often funny, poignant stories.
‘A classic triptych of moods and movements, forensic, sharp-elbowed, with a ripeness you can taste. Sheppard's prose curves elegantly between ease and disease, live ghosts and city shadows. Borgesian, teasing, wise.’
- Iain Sinclair
This book is available to buy for £5 from http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk ( or as
part of its 3 for £10 deal: and I recommend recent books by Ken Edwards and Adrian Clarke).
and including excursions into the Poetry Society 1976, Sinclair, Bomb Culture, Bob Cobbing, young poets in Britain, poetics and Conceptual Writing, and a little on my own work!
Here is a reading (courtesy of poet-cameraman Ade Jackson) of a reading I did at the Bluecoat Arts Centre to launch Twentieth Century Blues in 2008. Reminded by the fact that I read there again a couple of weeks ago, I decided to post this version of the first 'Blues', 'Smokestack Lightning', in which I used some carpet tapes I'd made in the early 1990s for a SubVoicive reading.
The text for the Bluecoat version which isn't (deliberately) clear is drawn from the first verse paragraph of the poem.
from Smokestack Lightning a mythology of the blues
for Tony Parsons
Twentieth Century Blues 1
History of Sensation 5
Let it all go. As I sing I drive my
dynamite for some strange machine
of this nearly spent century;
the big city calls its sinful
numbers heaven. My fast rolling
kisses are for the stern
lady, dodging me, back of the beat.
Our harp player’s dead - when Pete
told me, we laughed. A quick shimmy
was Elzadie’s goodnight; buttons and
belt loosening, Arvella’s swift farewell.
Pete’s 12 string steam whistle leaves town;
I want you to take my place in this song.
Elzadie lifted her hem and smiled, as he
tuned to an open chord. Bending G on the E,
the dog jumped into the horn as
the KC moaned, with a mocking beauty
mating rabbit foot dreams. Arvella slumped in
the shade, feeling contempt, thinking: give me
the train’s shake. Sweat rolled off
transport as delight, a nervous fix
in this thief’s paradise of form and
necessity possessed by devils. He’d
rehearsed all morning, restless,
couldn’t wait to start again, to howl
out, temporal and grounded, ‘We’ll never
get out of these blues alive’ -
above the frets, trembling. Inside:
shared diction, dancing voices, mojo stomping,
good book palms together in prayer. At night
she wedges the chair against the door,
feels evil thrashing outside the room,
but can’t connect the pose of his
arpeggio muscles above her, de-tuning
slackening; sings down the phone:
‘Take my lonesome love in hand.’
Dancing with her to the juke band,
his tense fingers practise chord shapes
up and down her spine; to be a real person:
a girl adjusting her skirt, singing Twentieth
Century Blues, a pearl on her lips, - her devil
astride two chairs, playing slide
with a Coca-Cola bottle. She
is about to say something over the
gossamer telegraph line, to survive
his strong hands rambling through.
Kid Bailey’s the name I travel with, kidding
around: the name on the only phonograph;
walked up to the shop window, the glitter
of the diamond-fretted Dobro a death squad
tuning up. My handkerchief shields
the chord shapes from
your thieving eyes. Just pull the razor
and shave him. The gun in the guitar case was
no use - jealous man stepped up to Charley
as if to ask for Pony, retuned. Bill-
boards tell women what
to be: a circle of music-stands
dreaming thrills, dancing the Shimmy-She-Wobble -
some guy called it a dry fuck -
the guitar dances too, spins
above Charley’s head. I could see
my own rapt reflection in the shine,
an invisible piano whose pedals are moody
bendings. Love my suitcase and the road....
I can be seen reading some poems from Twentieth Century Blues at http://otherroom.org/videos/%e2%80%94-or-2-june-2008-videosas part of the Other Room Readings in 2008. (On the first clip I read ‘A Dirty Poem and Clean Poem for Roy Fisher’, ‘From a Stolen Book’ followed by a selection from ‘Empty Diaries’, the sequence with which I continues on the second video.)
I can also be seen trying to read the poem along to the blues band, The Blind Lemons, here.
(Top: Scott Thurston and me at Hay; below: Anthony Mellors and me at Hay; photos: Anthony and Scott)
I have argued that the chief influences upon the contemporary innovative sonnet include the examples of Berrigan and Raworth, the radical conceptualism of Oulipo with its use of tailored ‘constraints’, and the postmodernist release of the form from the repression of modernism. I may be confused in this, having identified these also as influences on my own sequence. But there can be no doubt that there is another influence, post 2008, and that is The Reality Street Book itself. Hilson’s sequence was co-terminous with its production, indeed mentions it. Other sequences, possibly Monk’s, were written as the event of the anthology appeared on the horizon. Terry’s sequence missed the boat, having come to Hilson’s attention after Ken Edwards declared the hold full. Many sonnets (sequences or singles) have appeared after; Anthony Mellors’ The Gordon Brown Sonnets (2009), for example, continues the political edge found in so many of these sequences; Milton is the god of the innovative sonnet, not Shakespeare.
A mere flick through the anthology reveals visual sonnets, ghost sonnets where the shape of the sonnet is played with, along with others that expose the frame of the form, as outlined in part twelve of this lecture. There are prose sonnets, fairly conventionally lineated sonnets, Chinese sonnets and non-sonnets, some in sequences, many not, many more than I have time to deal with today. Anybody embarking on a sonnet today has the benefit of the anthology as a textbook of form(s). There are dangers in this, of imitation and derivation, rather than influence and deviation, of mere production, of ever-thinning effect and affect (or affectlessness), but these have been dangers throughout literary history of the prominence of any form. The same could have been said of Tottel’s Miscellany in 1560 which gave the world the exemplars Wyatt and Surrey.
I’m not bold enough to call time on the innovative sonnet, to declare that we have reached our 1610 – imagine declaring the whole show over in 1608, what a difference a year makes! – but I wonder what forms will emerge next. I think Hilson is right in seeing the attraction of the sonnet as a refinement of the draw to the sequentiality ingrained in British innovative practice, and the sonnet-sequence-like frame can be felt in many non-sonnet sequences, Scott Thurston’s Momentum (2008), for example, where the repeated stanza is quite different, but whose formal repetition facilitates variation and contrast as a formal constituent that becomes a kind of content in a way I have been arguing throughout these postings. (His Internal Rhyme (2010) has the same feel, though with poems that are more open in terms of reading, horizontally and vertically.) But no other traditional form (however torqued) furnishes the opportunity for this kind of innovation; the innovative sestina, for example, feels like a rolled out carpet, not a ‘little room’ that offers resistance to the impulse to unlimited expansion, a pliant, plastic pre-determined frame, through which the life of form may be lived convincingly, to make for us, forms of life. To make it re-new.
To quote Hilson’s formal articulation and dis-articulation: ‘I (line-break) fucking love you sonnets.’
Notes: As can be seen from the above, I wondered about trying to call a halt to the sonnet as an innovative form, but new ones keep coming. See the K. Silem Mohammed pieces in the Dworkin-Goldsmith anthology. Or here. Or get a peek at nine of the stunning stunted sonnets of Richard Parker at Intercapillary Space (which I heard read in Amsterdam; see posting for May 24th 2011). Since musing earlier on my own next creative moves, my contrafacts on Milton’s sonnets seem plausible and I also surprised myself by writing a half-pint sonnet, in the middle of a Quennet as a 7X7 syllabic structure. The Quennet (which I should have mentioned before now) is the sonnet-like structure invented by Raymond Queneau and used also by Philip Terry, Queneau’s translator, and by Rene Van Valckenborch, my creature.
Just a few thoughts on the Hay Poetry Jamboree itself. It was a celebratory occasion – and mine was the only excursion into critical prose and pose – and there was much good company in Scott and Anthony (as can be seen above), the organisers Lyndon Davies and John Goodby, participants Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Carrie Etter, John Freeman, Paul A.Green, Carol Watts, Zoe Skoulding, Maggie O’Sullivan, Ralph Hawkins (who had much to say about Berrigan) and Allen Fisher (who worried away at the formal designation ‘sonnet’), and audience members Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey, and many others, Steve, for example, who managed the electronics. Thanks to all.
For links to further posts on The Meaning of Form click here.
My 'Petrarch 3' is now in print, see here
and here.
Note 2021. I couldn't have realised that my sonnet-mania would result in the three volume project 'The English Strain', which grew out of 'Petrarch 3' sequence, mentioned above. Read about Book One, The English Strain hereand about Book Two, Bad Idea here. (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’, it’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html
I’d like to show three of my sonnets from Warrant Error, from across the sequences, but having in common an intertext in Shelley’s marvellous meditation upon political terror and time, ‘Ozymandias’:
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away".
Shelley’s sonnet might be thought innovative in that it strains against the restraining order of the form, while making a new form with its insistent improvisatory utterances (we know it was written quickly, against the clock in fact). My forms attempt to make new forms and meanings through allusions and borrowings (sometimes of resonant single words) from the poems, but also have their own foci. The intense logopoeia of the second derives from the puns I collected and from the quotations, not only from Shelley but from Arendt and Deleuze (at least) as well. The third poem refers to the metronome in the image above (a photograph taken and manipulated by Patricia Farrell).
Carpets woven with jargon surrender monkey ground level realism pumps a Kalashinikov before the gold cupola a tight wrinkled lip of double-stitch
Every night you fall asleep invaded by this market target couch drill
an embedded journo pillowed on gas buys a free full monster with an empty promise your night vision goggles catch the first line of his collateral excised scribble ‘barging
in on targets..’ struggling with his war poem the dark god of his sonnets freeze framed death tools downed
29 March 2003
They scoured the news and erased the story The liar the witness and the lawyer
The hand that mocked us scarred Or scared soured the newscasts Their oblique attacks now roar overhead The naives are restless during the rapid raids
Compassion is one of the passions After a regular Tory system of lower tax nothing beside remains
Species solidarity and its dispersal In this borrowed shell function as love but This is the real thing as she Bends towards him Not to be unworthy of what happens to them both
for Stephen
The red metronome on Letná hill sways like a lucky drunkard on its pedestal above the spires a restless reminder of rust and wreck. Or an antique windscreen wiper
describing its arc upon a plane of smear and rain-wash heroic in a monochrome movie, tinted red
With each wipe across the screen the determined visage of the driver clears. It’s Josef Stalin the giant blocks with his pocks long blown to shatters but he’s still there
Sophie Robinson is the youngest poet in the anthology, as she is also in Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference, where she describes her attitude to innovation: ‘I don’t believe that an experimental poetics must necessarily be devoid of emotion, sentiment, biography, self-expression, &c’, and she names Frank O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer as two ‘cherished’ exemplars (the latter being one of the most accomplished of post-Berrigan sonneteers). Nevertheless her 10 poem sequence ‘geometries’ is one of the obviously radical texts in the Reality Street Book, in that it plays visually with the sonnet form. In this she is not alone: there are many texts in the book making formal play in ways in which the frame becomes its own content, and many of these ways are defined in terms of visual rather than verbal or metrical innovation. Allusions to the frame occur in Bob Cobbing’s concrete poetry inkscape ‘Sunnet’, where the white space of the Petrachan turn becomes the horizon on the landscape (or inkscape) hinted at in the title. (frontispiece) The moon is caught in May Ellen Solt’s ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’, where the empty grids of lunar cartography pun with the divisions of the Petrachan sonnet. David Miller’s sequence of horizontal Chinese brushstrokes (‘Untitled (Visual Sonnet)’ each is called) obviously mimes the frame of the sonnet, but also, with their varying thickness, texture and curves, they hint at the varying content that is carried across the traditional sonnet sequence, here represented by the uniqueness of Chinese brush-work. Jen Bervin’s conceptual writing project ‘Nets’ (the title itself cuts the word ‘sonnets’ down to size) presents Shakespeare’s Sonnets in greyscale and highlights certain words to configure a new text over them. This is a much-used technique (John Gibbens uses it for ‘Underscore’ here), but it rare to leave the original text legible alongside (under) the variations to foreground their material; like Terry, Bervin operates upon the most canonical sonnets. Paul Dutton’s ‘so’net’ sequences uses anagrams on, and other words derived from ‘sonnet’ – as does Keith Jebb in his title ‘tonnes’ – to contrast a text that hovers between sense (‘on sense sonnets not sent to text’) and non-sense and pure sound concrete poetry for performance. Visual recognition of ‘sonnetness’ is important to the aesthetic effect of these examples, which in various ways involve the simultaneous use and unravelling of the historical frame of the sonnet (and by extension many of the meanings that have accrued to it), to turn the adventures of its form into its own subject while embodying its latest adventures in formal investigation and innovation.
Robinson’s ‘Geometries’ takes the frame of the sonnet and makes it square, more radically than Hilson’s but less consistently formal than the above examples, utilising the justified margins of the WP package to ensure a ‘geometry’ that has nothing to do with metrical contour or word count or the temporality of delivery. The resultant squares work against our reading patterns; continuous margins suggest the forms and conventions of prose. The 14 lines are ‘stretched’ in ways unrelated to notions of lineation or layout, open field or otherwise. (I have unfortunately not been able to reproduce that effect here; the absence of this formal adjustment demonstrates just how significant, even signifying, this is. Wihtout this formal constraint the poem below looks wrong, but unavoidable.) However, Robinson’s reluctance to abandon reference and significance, let alone the personal, rather than undermining this formal play, creates a tension between reading for form (which is unavoidable in these geometries, particularly when 3 words ‘arms and head’ become one, for example) and reading to catch the teasing but often angry voices of the poems, one of which has a literal lower case ‘i’ recommended by Kathleen Fraser to represent its reduced subjectivity (at the start of a line where most of the other lines carry a capital), although the inverted commas point to its artifice also:
Beauty is nothing is nothing is a
Gently disgusting residue of all
That burps and smiles & life is terrible &
Holds back & swallows itself whilst 25
Birds that might’ve perched on your arms&head
Can now fly in expanded air and yeah
the autumn’s going to need you w/
head like a broken toy & got no stable
‘i’ got no stable now all is fluttering
Around & the boredom of death O how
We breathe you out like blah sad & longing
For an airy exchange amongst urgent
Squeaky-clean majorities & CITY BOYS
Those smug wankers we put them in the margins.
The margins into which mainstream culture is ‘put’ are in some sense the margins of this poem, but the voice is angry enough here, however unstable the ego. If ‘Beauty is nothing’, a ‘disgusting residue’, at least it is ‘gentle’. Terrible life consumes itself, the boredom of death results in meaningless ‘blah’ and the ‘sad & longing’ mourning that lies behind this immediate anger (the poems are bitterly elegiac). Only the birds (which appear in other ‘geometries’) offer transcendence, an ‘airy exchange’ that is longed for.
The true liberation here is formal. These poems are prosodically arbitrary, constitute even an ‘aprosody’ (as Agamben puts it rather suggestively in what is virtually an aside on the poetry of Caproni). Yet they are still forms which work by de-forming accepted reading assumptions in the ways I’ve just described. Perhaps they register the gradual re-forming of contemporary forms of poetry from the temporal axis to the spatial axis.
Women are often said to have been disenfranchised by the courtly conventions of the love sonnet, its content patriarchal, its form in need of reclaiming. Women innovative writers have maintained a suspicion of the form, particularly through its assertion in the courtly love tradition, of a male ego. ‘Our sonnet … seems different,’ writes Kathleen Fraser hopefully. ‘It has a small i in it instead of a big one.’ But she is also aware that forms carry near-indelible meanings as much as contents, and that ‘perhaps any sonnet at all is a big i. That’s something I have to fear.’
The history of the sonnet furnishes important examples of female sonneteers, such as Charlotte Smith or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and in fact, the earliest sonnet sequence in English was written by a woman, although it took a religious theme rather than an amorous one: 21 sonnets by Anne Lock composed in 1559. ‘Her ear is faultless – better than Surrey’s’, remarks Spiller.
One of the best contemporary sequences excerpted in The Reality Street Book, Geraldine Monk’s Ghost and Other Sonnets, shows no Electra complex before the form, and indeed emphasises the (usually unrhymed) Shakespearean couplet by printing it as a separate stanza. It often operates as the ‘epigram or witticism’ that the form of the frame imposes: ‘Strange ones this token is for you./ If you’ve danced with me you must be true,’ the last poem ends, rhyming but not utilising regular metre. Ghost and Other Sonnets is often about ghosts (‘strange ones’) and often (as at its end) about the demands of the other. (As often in sequences, they are also about many other matters, topology or domestic anger, for example.) Of course, the sonnet frame is a kind of ghost form and its subject matter haunts it as a kind of other of form, ‘Ghost of her ghosts’ as one poem puts it. This haunting necessitates Monk subduing her characteristic textual and performative exuberance in deference to the frame; the internal pressure this causes results in 66 poems of concentrated power. As Spiller says of Milton, but it applies to Monk too: ‘The sonnet is still the place where Desire confronts its Other, and in a small room fixity is given to the restlessness of being.’ These confronted others may be ourselves in mirrors (the ghost of our ghosts), as when ‘his face staring at/His face’: ‘Each/ Passenger waving at their doppelganger/ Each not knowing which is for real’. Or, as when the letter box rattles repeatedly, the other is an imagined ghost: ‘Seeing nobody in repeat tires the heart:/ Out-fears the stranger stranger’ (where the word occurs once as adjective, second as noun). One sonnet deals with the ‘stranger stranger’ in a powerful way, moving from a familiar situation to questions of otherly encounter that one might rather avoid, through to nightmarish horror:
What makes you look in at the
Exact window where someone is
Looking out? Inexplicable encounters
Traduce unknowns with wary
Other. What is behind that sticky girl one
Step stunningly away from heaven? Tossed.
A thing of beauty in a room so ordinary.
Mindless kicks. Burns. Bite hard words
Mocking back-broke loveliness. Ape
Ghosts. Rape-ghosts reel on little
One. Well below a Restoration rake-hell
Humans shouldn’t figure. Let alone … let alone …
Neglected screams in a field of unwashed forks.
Far crying buried in gust of shush-love.
A barely human (ape) rape has occurred amidst this ordinary scene against ‘stunning’ ‘beauty’ and ‘loveliness’ (together the words suggest a woman is violated by ‘rape-ghosts’), though it might only be sexual stimulation, ‘tossing’. ‘Mindless kicks’ suggests gratuitous sexual play as well as violence, or both. Lamentation is obscured by the intimate but threatening ‘shush-love’ that both extinguishes love and could also signify the love of an unhealthy secrecy. The poem is the more powerful for not revealing its content in a narrative unfolding, but through an excess of compressed and detailed violent imagery.
The form fixes the restlessness in each sonnet in this sequence, until it launches us into the next. No wonder we need the familiar bumpers of a rhyming couplet to bring this formal trajectory to rest. We are told: ‘If you’ve danced with me you must be true,’ that is, not a fable or a fiction, but also we are ‘true’, i.e. held in fidelity to the spell of these forms.
(This is Terry speaking about the sonnets at Edge Hill University to the Poetry and Poetics Research Group earlier this year.)
In a nutshell, Shakespeare’s ‘argument’ and one of Philip Terry’s major techniques are both exemplified by the respective first lines of their sequences. In Shakespeare’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets (!) the theme of carpe diem is expressed in terms of the threat and regret of vanishing potential beauty (‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’), whereas Philip Terry’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets opens with a comic echo of that ‘desire’, an epigrammatic imperative of our postmodern age of ageless celebrities enhanced by cosmetic mummification or permanent genetic modification: ‘Clone Kylie.’ However parodic they might be, Shakespeare’s central theme of the impermanence of beauty shows through these poems: ‘We test the best non-surgical skin fixers/ With time’s injurious hand,’ begins another poem. (At least they aren’t tested on animals!) A further version of this sonnet, number 63 of Shakespeare’s, which originally opened, ‘Against my love shall be, as I am now,/ With Time’s injurious hand crusht and o’erworn’, becomes in Terry’s adaptation: ‘Against my love shall be an immense ballroom,/ With time’s injurious hand jive’. Anyone can see that Terry is ‘updating’ the sonnet with regards to the entropic nature of Time, but not everybody knows that ‘Up to Date’ is one of the simpler Oulipo constraints. These poems are also examples of the ‘Chimera’ constraint where one text is filled with the vocabulary of an alien one. Terry has taken on most of Shakespeare’s sonnets (some in multiple versions), with a variety of techniques, which owes much to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style in which one event is re-narrated endlessly and to Harry Mathews’ ‘Trial Impressions’ in which one Dowland song is re-versioned. (When questioned on my ‘favourite’ poem, I cite this example from Mathews.) My exposition could turn into a list of the Oulipo techniques Terry has used (but Terry provides his own. See also his own account of the project here). More important than enumeration is the fact that built into the Oulipo venture is the ‘clinamen’, the Lucretian swerve that throws an irrational spanner into the rational literary work, in short, something that fucks up the system. I asked Terry recently what his clinamen was; he replied, ‘I don’t use any of the constraints consistently.’ System does a duck-rabbit flip into invention.
Here is a straightforward but irresistible re-writing of a well-known sonnet, one also taken on by Harryette Mullen in the Reality Street anthology. Already parodic in Shakespeare’s hands of the worst rhetoric of the sonnet craze, sonnet 130, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, re-appears in Mullen’s versions as: ‘My honeybunch’s peepers are nothing like neon’ and ‘My Mickey Mouse ears are nothing like sonar’. (I always think of Nicholas Moore’s Spleen when I see this level of versioning.) And, of course, Shakespeare elsewhere gently mocks one of the seven ages of man: ‘the lover/ Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad/ Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.’ For Terry, then, the demand is to be particularly inventive and to aim lower than the brows:
My mistress’ eyesores are nothing like stalagmites;
Copper is not as green as her teeth.
If sodium be white, why then her brie is blue;
If hairs be wires, pylons grow on her head.
I have seen rot, dry and wet,
But no such rot as I see in her cheeks;
And in some petrol is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I can’t stand her jabbering,
The dentist’s drill hath a far more pleasing sound.
I never saw her get off her fat arse
Except to go and stuff her face.
And yet, while I hate her, I can’t let go,
I’m in deep shit, like those dudes in the Inferno.
All of the poems exist against their Ur-text; the ‘by heaven’ of Shakespeare’s final couplet becomes the antonymic reference to Hell in the version. The originals are de-formed, they loose form in the restless versionings of Terry’s book, and the new form that emerges in our encounter with the page is actually the perceived and received difference between the original (or what is recalled of it, or what it assumed of it) and the version. Form keeps the meanings spinning. The version never quite feels the final word, the total content, but a manifestation of a formal choice that could have been otherwise. After all, the Oulipo is a workshop of potential literature.
(Jeff Hilson reading from In the Assarts in Amsterdam earlier this year)
If Berrigan’s sonnets are about themselves, Hilson’s In The Assarts are sonnets that take as burden the history of the form, including Berrigan’s. The excessive brio, the collagic inconsequentiality, the use of strategic repetition and variation, are indebted to Berrigan, but many of the poems are haunted by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the narrator uneasily identifies with him. All these points are demonstrated in poem 32 (out of the 71):
When I grow up I want to be I Thomas Wyatt & hang around the stately homes of England. I am not in this dance the little necks of England slipp’d & crown’d so long Anne Boleyn you spoil’d my holiday theory of value. How to explain the flowers to I Thomas Wyatt when I was rescu’d by her falling head on my moustache. O Anne Boleyn was there room in the room that you room’d in?
The concluding question (a couplet) is one of Berrigan’s most famous repetitions, itself a repetition of one of Gertrude Stein’s own repetitions. Of course, the room here may be the cell Boleyn is confined to before beheading, an act comically referred to, or the space of the sonnet itself. Wyatt ‘seems to have become involved with’ Boleyn at Court around 1525 ‘until warned off by the obvious infatuation of Henry VIII with her’, and indeed he wrote her love poems in prison (as Spiller says). The ‘holiday theory of value’ seems to hint at the leisured luxury of the court, which her death ‘spoil’d’ by complication. The sonnet is a courtly form in both ideal and real senses: ‘O Anne Boleyn I made your head/ into an Italian sonnet’ poem 34 boasts or laments.
The ‘terrible terrible assarts’ of the title refer to forest clearances (with attendant dispossession) to create the ‘lovely moats’ and the ‘shiny turret(s)’ of courtly tat. ‘Farewell, Love, and all they lawns forever,’ Wyatt is misquoted in the epigraph to the sequence, a posthumous slip of his tongue which equates love with court more materially than his original word ‘laws’ (not ‘lawns’). But this is a cleared landscape (‘yr grim square poems’ suggest a topological equivalence) that depends upon language for its construction; ‘look at my dead misspelt horse’ is yet another of the sequence’s studied imperfections, badnesses. Grammatical de-cohesion is another. These cleared spaces fill with the detritus of the modern world, often in transformative sequence: outdated pop stars Donovan, the Kinks, Mike Oldfield, appear in what looks like a decontextualised autobiographical pageant. In a knowingly post-Language poetry environment (‘my home is in thy American tree/ (language realism poesie’)) anything can happen; Wyatt is confused with James Bond (presumably playing on the fact that Wyatt may have spied for Henry): ‘O to go to London to recreate 1966’, or: ‘that’s the sound of Cromwell kissing/ not a genuine face’. In the beautiful Veer edition of 2010 the poems are indeed square on square pages, the faux-renaissance typeface materially emphasising anachronism and misfit: is it King Stephen or Stephen King who is described thus: ‘he was the worst Bond my lord.’
These external intertextual references of uncertain value and the Berriganesque intratextuality are the semantic shapes (again form can be made with meanings and hints at meanings) which make these poems form in our cumulative encounter with their reiterations. Unstable content is draped parodically across the ghostly historical frames of the 14 lines, and forms can be made even with mistakes and bad lines. As another epigraph to the book states: If ‘a poet comes across with “perfect” sonnet after “perfect” sonnet for any length of time, a sonnet sequence is a bore’. We are never bored in the assarts.
(Image: that's me at Hay reading Philip Terry's sonnets as part of the lecture. Geraldine Monk's book folded on the desk before me. Photo: John Goodby)
POETICS. My first sonnet was an Oulipo offshoot, though I didn’t know it at the time, 1978. ‘Pataphysical Sonnet’ was formed from the examples of the combinatory ‘Thousand Billion Sonnets’ of Queneau and the ‘irrational sonnets’ (using pi to determine stanza shape and rhyme) of Jacques Bens both of which I found in the New Writing from France Penguin anthology.
G – The Pataphysical Sonnet
Returns to the bedroom, out of his head,
Out of tunes fragments come rocking his bed
Between order and chaos, freedom and …?
Ever, I see my order’s rule in the edge
Riff between sound and silence. Out of hand
The moon in June security has led
So boot if at all to the point of dead
Hope for happiness. Beyond the land
Every sea must ordain its religions in the edge.
Priscilla leaps from bed and surveys her life
Plus belle qu’une poubelle (just) in a cold sweat.
A certain kind of order, edge-of-knife,
provokes her (13 is unlucky) strife.
DADA was here, but I have no regret.
in Dedicated to you but you weren’t listening (London: Writers Forum, 1979)
The first few words of each line were drawn from the titles of music by The Soft Machine, to which it paid homage. The poem uses the rhyme scheme of one of the Bens poems and I worked out that my name furnished an acrostic in reversed 6+8, a device I used (without the accidental clinamen I adopted here) in Twentieth Century Blues, when I returned to the sonnet over a decade later. Meanwhile, I’d enjoyed teaching the form, particularly where coherent but variable units formed parts of a more or less coherent but differentiated whole or extension, and slowly this formal intelligence permeated the poetics of sequences I was writing.
Most recently my poetics journal articulates this in terms of the tension between two modes of organisation:
The isolate poem as the construction of a centrifugal engine, pulling itself together to centre its energies in nodes of impacted attention, supported by a vocabulary of completion wholeness closure structure shape. The danger of saying or doing only one thing…
Or the centripetal: a sense of continuation dispersal openness unfinish
processual structure with evolving forms or even entropic systems…WORD. I’ve also felt drawn to creating my own structures for sonnets, and I’m proud of having invented the 100 word sonnet in Twentieth Century Blues. Actually, I didn’t invent it; it came from a serendipitous misreading of an Adrian Clarke sonnet with a two word title and 14 lines of 7 words. Adrian hadn’t noticed that that added up to 100 but I wrote a number, eschewing punctuation and using a centre margin (a form that seems to drive the long lines to vertical completion).
LINE. By the time I began Warrant Error, which appears in the Hilson anthology, I had abandoned word count and devised a 2/3/4/5 sonnet stanza, a form which offered 24 combinations. I have since found that Andrew Crozier used the form in the 1980s (?) . Warrant Error was influenced by Berrigan (I thought of modelling them on his and calling them ‘The Poems’, a title used by Berrigan within the poems). But I’d also written on Raworth’s sonnets by then (and on Allen Fisher’s Apocalyptic Sonnets from the 1970s), Adrian was writing his own Skeleton Sonnets and Ken Edwards was publishing parts of his 8+6. Something was in the air. Believing with Rosmarie Waldrop that ‘collage is the splice of life’, I found the ‘little rooms’ of my shifting stanza forms ideal for forming works from the mass of material I was collecting (by 2003 various takes on the War on Terror, human unfinish and other subjects!). As ever with collage, the formal action and the pre-determined shapes meant a lot of the poems gathered their content through formal working. I wrote 100 poems in all, in 4 sets of 24, with 4 extras. I’ll present some in a later posting.
CHARACTER. My Belgian alter-ego Rene Van Valckenborch, more modish and technologically advanced than I, has used Twitter to write his Twitterodes, but the first (or is it the last) is a (Petrarchan) ‘twittersonnet’: 14 lines of 10 characters instead of syllables. (They are here on Pages, November and December 2010; click on those dates to the right.)
SYLLABLE. I have an unused form, adapted from Pierre Alferi’s sequence OXO: 7 lines of 7 syllables, though I call it the half pint sonnet (perhaps in deference to these straightened times). Place a proportional Petrarchan break after line 4, add a one syllable title to bring the count to 50 (which suggests a sequence of 50 of them). I haven’t used this form yet, and there’s another question nagging at me: isn’t it time to stop writing all these sonnets? I’m a great believer in Miles Davis’ advice: ‘End your solo before you’re done’, that is, before every bitter drop has been squeezed from the (arguably) desiccated form. While there’s still life in it.
(NOTES: The title of this posting is meant to allude to Jeff Nuttall’s journal: ‘My Own Mag’, by the way, but the resonance is muted. These last two heading-paragraphs were written for the Hay on Wye lecture but weren’t used due to time constraints. I feel it very unlikely that I will write the syllabic half-pint sonnets now, but I have a notion to do one (last?) sonnet sequence, perhaps based on Milton’s 24 sonnets and perhaps called ‘Bad Sonnets for Bad People’, or that’s what I’m telling myself in my poetics journal today. I am also revising this lecture into a strictly literary-critical chapter for a monograph on Form (ennobled by the capital); that too is feeding into a stirring desire to write a completely different kind of (non-)sequence. I’m also reading the anthology Against Expression, the anthology of conceptual writing, edited by Craid Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, which contains one brilliant tour de force using anagrams from Shakespeare: K. Silem Mohammad’s ‘Sonnagrams’.
I was also reminded in reading the anthology of Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter’s Issue 1 of 2008. It's very large (warning: it’s a pdf of over 7000 pages but the link I tried to insert here doesn't work, but I found it through ubuweb), and it contains a poem by me, ‘Small-scale lives and low alarms’; well, it has my name under it but a nice computer program called Erica wrote it. I sought it out again and have plans to ‘do something with it’. I’ve alphabeticalised it for a start. It looks like this now:
- , , ? ? ? a a A a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a b b b B b b b b b c c C c c c c d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d dd e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e ee e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e f f f f g g g g g h H h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h i i i i i I i i i i i i i i i i i i j k k l l l l l l l ll l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l m m M m m m m m m m n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o p p p P r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s S S s S s s s s S S s s s s t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t T t t t t t t T t t t t t t u u u u u u u u u v v v w w w w w w x x y y y y y y y z zMaybe that doesn’t quite do it justice. But worst of all I noticed that this poem (it’s at p. 35) is actually a kind of sonnet; it has 14 marginalised lines.
The ‘Pataphysical Sonnet’ above was only alluded to (dismissively) at Hay on Wye, but I thought to recover it here to see what it looked like. It seems relevant now to all the projects I have been looking at and describing here.
OK. Back to the lecture: In the next four sections (my daily postings), I’m going to be looking at the four contemporary British sequences as promised in the last posting, asking questions about how the frame of the sonnet is used to facilitate aesthetic encounter, how the poems individually and in sequence take form and make form.)
2018: There is a later post about my sonnet writing here.And about my published Petrarch 3 here. See three of my 'Wyatts' here. And
takes you to excerpts from a later project, 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), which is part of a larger 100 poem sequence The English Strain.
