EUOIA Night August reading at The Other Room: Report and Future Plans (set list)

Last night, the Other Room celebrated the European Union of Imaginary Authors, with readings in person and on video.We are told that the EUOIA is the brainchild of Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, whose double Flemish and Walloon oeuvre can be read about here. But who believes that? Read more about the European Union (of Imaginary Authors) here and here.

Conceived as a continuation of the fictional poems Robert Sheppard ventriloquised through the bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch in his A Translated Man (2013), the complete 28 poets of the EUOIA (European Union of Imaginary Authors) which we will only have time to sample take on a variety of new meanings in Brexit Britain. This collaborative work will be published before Brexit 'happens' as an anthology by Shearsman Books. (We are at the proof-stage with that.) Mostly conceived before Brexit, you can discover how Brexit became Shexit, as 'Robert Sheppard', the UK poet, becomes fictional, optional and expelled.


Working in collaboration with other writers, Sheppard creates a stylistically various programme of these European writers, whose works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical. History may not be argued away by the fictive. Accompanied by biographies of varying detail and plausibility, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own. There is no resultant ‘Europoem’ style, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of their production. All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

I’d like to publicly thank everybody for making this EUOIA night a memorable one. I think everybody played their strange parts of being half or wholly someone else! Those of you on video added to the occasion by suggesting elsewheres (though two were filmed in Norfolk and one in the very (lovely) space we were performing in).

I did feel the reality of the poems that were read, particularly to hear them read by single voices. That choice worked I think, because it smoothed out the collaborations: in a lot of cases I was listening and trying to remember what I wrote and what the other had written, and I often couldn't. One measure of success.

I think I was right to hold back on the Brexit aspects. Not only because my versions of Wyatt and Surrey have been taking that head on, but because this is a project that pre-dates Brexit (though the word enters the last collaboration I did, with Steve McCaffery), its politics is of the contextual kind, when history surrounds an event and changes its meaning.

The Other Room is one of the great 'provisional institutions' of radical poetry (that's Charles Bernstein's term) and I feel honoured to have appeared there again. It is a collaborative enterprise, as this project has been, soon to be an anthology, Twitters for a Lark .

On that: I have the proofs now and I will turn to them as soon as I've come down from proofreading Atlantic Drift. (Not just from ecstasy but from the last minute labour!) I noticed a few inconsistencies (even while I was reading!).

Here’s the set list and some notes I made to help me speak to the audience

Intro from Tom Jenks

Intro to Van Valckenborch and the EUOIA.

Robert Sheppard: read 5 EUOIA poems from A Translated Man

I went back to my list (or his) and decided to write the lot starting with these 5 whose works I wrote on my own. Sophie Poppmeier as example from Twitters for a Lark: I read her 3 poems and said a little about her life. (Much more here and here)

An account of collaboration (and why collaboration)

with Jason Argleton, Joanne Ashcroft, Alan Baker, James Byrne, Alys Conran, Kelvin Corcoran, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Patricia Farrell, S. J. Fowler, Allen Fisher, Robert Hampson, Jeff Hilson, God’s Rude Wireless, Tom Jenks, Frances Kruk, Rupert Loydell, Steve McCaffery, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Sandeep Parmar, Simon Perril, Jèssica Pujol i Duran, Zoë Skoulding, Damir Šodan, Philip Terry, Scott Thurston, René Van Valckenborch

‘I would like to thank all of my collaborators, who have pooled their sovereignty, as it were, and constructed poems and people in so many different, educative and exhilarating ways.’

This will be published soon as Twitters for a Lark

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

Cover by Ivalyo Dimitrov (who will be reading tonight)

An account of collaboration

Robert and Patricia Farrell (two voice performance): Bulgaria: Ivaylo Dimitrov (1979-)

Behind Into Beyond

For the next part of the evening I asked my collaborators to read our work in a single voice; after all, most of the collaborations were about creating a single voice amid varied company:

Joanne Ashcroft: Slovakia: Matúš Dobeš (1959-)

                        'Roasting One's Chestnuts' and 'As I Drank Double Espressos'

Read Joanne's hopes for the evening here. And see our previous attempt to animate our creature, Matus Dobres of Slovakia here, and read about this fictional poet and find links to his texts here. 

Tom Jenks: from the Biographical Note of Luxembourrg’s Georg Bleinstein. He has an interesting life (some of it still to come) and you can trace that life, with the help of embedded vidoes (Group Captain Carol Vorderman, sausages, that sort of thing), here. 

Scott Thurston: Malta: Hubert Zuba (1964-2015)

AND OUT.

S.J. Fowler: Video: Sweden, Kajsa Bergström (1956-)

BREAK

Jeff Hilson: Video: Hungary, Ratsky József (1970-)

Alan Baker: Slovenia, A.B.C. Remič (1958-)

If I Were...

Slovenia (excerpt)

Allen Fisher: Finland: Minna Kärkkäinen (1974-)

Small Choruses on Mars

Explanation of EUOIA and ‘Shexit’ as shadow of Brexit (see here for my playing around on this blog with that idea)

Robert Sheppard: UK (I am also a fictional poet)

                        Ern Malley Suite

An explanation how the island of Frisland nudged into the project. If fictional poets, why not fictional land-masses? Eirikur's suggestion...

Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl: Video: Frisland: Hróbjartur Ríkeyjarson af Dvala (1948- )

Koans of sweet pig Brenda and the escape from Frisland

Robert Sheppard: Fragments of the Ancient Tale of Queen Brenda and the Settling of Frisland (here’s a clip, as it were):

Bjorn my best Beserker born of bears

Feels no fear on Frisland’s fishless shore;

He bursts forth bearing crests of bear and boar

And peels the flesh from living men leaving

Sweetmeats and stinking gore hanging from gates,

And widows’ wombs torn free like bloody bladders,

And children’s brains bashed pretty hard.

Concluding remarks by Tom Jenks^...

 The EUOIA Other Room reading is now available here.

And here's my last reading at The Other Room, where I read the Flemish poems of Rene Van Valckenborch: https://otherroom.org/videos/or-43-sandeep-parmar-robert-sheppard-rachel-smith-videos/

The book may be bought here: http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/product/6460-robert-sheppard-ed---twitters-for-a-lark

* Here are some later events:

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

And the Leicester (States of Independence) launch:

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

Read about the Bangor launch here.

Read about the Manchester 2018 launch here:

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

The Firminists: The Malcolm Lowry Conference: 70 Years On (a few thoughts)

The annual Malcolm Lowry celebrations oraganised by the Firiminists this special year included Under the Volcano, 70 Years On: A Malcolm Lowry Conference based at Liverpool John Moores University and Bluecoat, Liverpool. Firminist Helen Tookey worked hard on this side of things. 

It opened with a passionate and eloquent keynote address: ‘Lowry’s kindred spirits: 70 years and still counting’, Sherrill Grace (Professor Emerita, University of British Columbia) but I don't have the energy to precis every paper, but just to record how high the quality was. (Note: December 2017: Sherrill's paper did send me off to read Timothy Findley, a great Canadian novelist; I obtained Headhunter, which I found a great read, and one of the best evocations of madness in my experience of literature.)

Sherill Grace talking about Lowry and Timothy Findley (on her screen with cat Ezra as she speaks)

 This year’s Lowry celebrations commemorated not the Day of the Dead, as usual, but Lowry’s 100^th birthday and 70 years since the publication of Under the Volcano. This year the Firminists decided an academic conference with a commissioned art work would replace the annual Lowry Lounge and it was a great success. Over the years I’ve recorded it variously on this blog here here and here.

Scholarship at its very best (and I am a poet-critic, never a scholar) involves a care and attention to the text, and an admirable collective responsibility to the community. Friendship over decades and – in the case of Malcolm Lowry – the strange comfort afforded by the professional acknowledgement that readers either ‘get’ Lowry or they don’t. These scholars and enthusiasts do. As they edit and evaluate, they make Lowry.

And the Firminists this year succeeded again in their aim to bring Lowry back to Liverpool.

Lots of good work from Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey this year.

See postings of previous years' festivities here, here and here. With lots of good photos! And visit Firminist Colin Dilnot's detailed Lowry website The Nineteenth Hole here.) Here's a bit more on Helen too.


One always learns about something new at these events, whether (this year) the novels of Timothy Findley or the TV documentary maker, Tristram Powell (with whom I chatted a bit). See a clip from his Lowry documentary Rough Passage here

Here's a link to the performance pieces written for the weekend:

http://www.thelighthouseinvitesthestorm.com/

Poster from our first year!

Tom Beau (my poem for Tom Raworth along with others' in Blackbox Manifold) and links to my other tributes

Blackbox Manifold has another fine issue out, number 18, this time with a special section of poems and prose to the memory of Tom Raworth; see the list of contributors below. I haven't read it all yet. But it's here.

My poem 'Tom Beau' is one of the contributions: here.

Earlier this year, I posted three pieces for Tom and linked to some even earlier pieces.

I have written critically of Tom's work a great deal but here's a relaxed take on his extraordinary 14 liners.

But read a decidedly unrelaxed 'On Tom Raworth: The Speed of Writing and the Poetics of What is to One Side' here.

And see my 1999 poem for him from Twentieth Century Blues, posted I.M. here.

But there's more (these posts and links were put of a tribute I put together here on Pages some months ago). How about a passage from my abandoned novel Thelma here which features Tom Raworth as a character? Thelma was my Scouse version of Breton's Nadja!

Tom Beau indeed. He'll be missed... He is missed!

The main section of Blackbox Manifold has work by:

Zohar Atkins, Louis Armand, Alan Baker, Charlie Baylis, James Coghill, Helen Charman, Aidan Coleman, John Goodby, Dominic Hale, Caleb Klaces, Daisy Lafarge, Robert Lietz, Medbh Mcguckian, Anthony Madrid, Kate Noakes, Mary Noonan, Karl O'Hanlon, Dan Raphael, Cal Revely-Calder, Aidan Semmens (who edited the Molly Bloom trubutes to Raworth), Paige Smeaton, Cherry Smyth, David Wheatley, and John Wilkinson.

The Tom Raworth memorial features work by:

Astrid Alben, Dorothy Alexander, Louis Armand, Kate Behrens, Charles Bernstein & Ted Greenwald,  Iain Britton, Robert Burton, Sara Crangle, John Latta, Ed Luker, Colin Lee Marshall, Drew Milne, Joseph Minden, Daniella Moritz, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Philip Byron Oakes, Ian Patterson, John Regan, Denise Riley, Peter Robinson, Kerrin Sharpe, Peter Jay Shippy, Ken Taylor, Jonty Tiplady, Lawrence Upton, Corey Wakeling, John Wilkinson. And me.

There is poetry by eight Chinese women poets translated by Eleanor Goodman. John Wilkinson reviews Poems by Verity Spott & Timonthy Thornton. Adam Piette reviews Keston Sutherland, Shara McCallum, Alan Halsey and Tara Bergin.
   

Redoubtable editors Alex Houen & Adam Piette, thanks for this issue.

Martin Palmer on Petrarch 3

Read Martin Palmer's thoughtful response to my Petrarch 3 here.

He asks some pertinent questions about the effect of what we write when it hits individual readers. He says:

I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think it was Sheppard's original intention to give me work about love that didn't upset me. I might be wrong, but I think he just wanted to write good poetry. Well, he's done both, just in case you wanted to know, and I think it's a welcome change.

Petrarch 3 is still available (see pinned post to the right of this one) and I write about my ongoing sonnets here.

See here and here and here and here for more on my Petrarch obsession/project, including how to purchase it from Crater press.Read the 'original' translation (if you see what I mean) and the doggie version here. One respondee to Martin's blog post said she'd like to read the 'dog' sonnet. There it is: woof!

 

Thanks Martin.

Charles Bernstein on Robert Sheppard's 'aesthetic justice'

Watch a very short clip here:

https://media.sas.upenn.edu/app/public/watch.php?file_id=210403

(This video was played at the Sheppard Symposium, earlier this year.)

Robert Sheppard: Poems in Poetry at Sangam (edited by Ranjit Hoskote)

I am pleased to say I have been published in Ranjit Hoskote’s special poetry editorialship of the Indian online journal Poetry at Sangam. See here for the July 2017 edition with links to all contributors plus Ranjit’s Curatorial note.

In his note, Ranjit Hoskote says: ‘These marvellous writers re-affirm that poetry, at its best, is a protest against fossilised habits of thought, against the instrumentalisation of language by slogan, formula, cliché; against the amnesia, the fragmentation of attention, and the constriction of sensibility that are encouraged by the demagogues and hypnagogues who dominate public life. Sheppard, Robert Sheppard, Byrne, James Byrne, Srilata, K. Srilata, Edwards, Rhian Edwards, Miller, Alice Miller, and Sagar, Arun Sagar, reclaim memory, time and intensity of focus for us, their readers – and these are immensely precious gifts.’ I hope that I live up to that.(The links above take you to their contributions and biographies.)

I decided, partly because I’d checked the format of presentation to provide a selection of six discrete poems, but they do form a nice set, one I could imagine reading together one day. They are:

 

The Fugger of Wonderful Black Words

One of my Milton’s ‘overdubs’, dedicated to Tim Atkins, a sonnet. Another one here: ‘Avenge’, another sonnet, a contrafact on Milton’s ‘Avenge O Lord…’, featuring elements concerning the (female) Yasidi resistance to IS. And another here:

https://stridemagazine.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/overdubs.html

from Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch

This is fairly new, again sonnets, but from a sequence, recently been published in International Times here… They are what they say they are, but Wyatt appears in them as himself and as his modern analogue, a foreign office spy on a secret pre-Brexit mission…

Empty Diary 2015

Empty Diaries was a long sequence that ran through Twentieth Century Blues and into the current century: 2001-14. The first eight appeared in The Literateur. Unfortunately a magazine now offline (or do I mean, completely disappeared?) However, the final six happily appeared in a wonderful edition of Blackbox Manifold. See here. This 2015 one has a touch of the bonna nova about it.

Burnt Journal 1978

This is from a series of birthday poems, in this case for the Liverpool poet Eleanor Rees.

Full stop ahead

A response to the art of William Kentridge, a brilliant exhibition at Bluecoat in Liverpool.

Quennet for the Artist Pete Clarke

A piece that Pete used for the print that was a runner up for the Adrian Henri Prize a few years ago. See here and here and here for more images and links. 

Ranjit Hoskote, whom I met, as he suggests, in a pub in Liverpool (this one, about which he has waxed lyrical here) after his wonderful biennial talk-poetry reading, is a poet, cultural theorist and curator. His collections of poetry include Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems 1985-2005 (Penguin, 2006) and Die Ankunft der Vögel (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2006). His translation of the 14th-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded has been published as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics, 2011). He is the editor of Dom Moraes: Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics, 2012), the first annotated critical edition of a major Anglophone Indian poet’s work. Hoskote’s poems have been published in many anthologies. Hoskote has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including the 7th Gwangju Biennale (Korea, 2008); he curated India’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale, under the title ‘Everyone Agrees: It’s About to Explode’ (2011).

New Poems by Ranjit Hoskote (from the July 2017 Issue itself)

Natural History
The Swimming Pool

Robert Sheppard: Working on 2 anthologies at the same time: Atlantic Drift and Twitters for a Lark

I mentioned in these posts that I was writing the blurb-matter for one of the two anthologies I am editing at the moment, that one being the fake anthology of fictional poets (the EUOIA poets who may be read about here), which is called Twitters for a Lark and which is scheduled for publication by Shearsman. I speak of it here, but of course, there is the other anthology, Atlantic Drift: an anthology of poetry and poetics which I am editing with James Byrne.

What is the connection between the two? Oddly, quite a lot. Obviously all the editorial tasks of proof reading and preparation are similar. But I have realised that there are a few poets in common. I don’t mean my fictional poets, of course, but the collaborators that I have been working with on one, appear as themselves in the other: Allen Fisher, Steven Fowler and Zoe Skoulding are in both volumes. My co-editor of one, James, is a collaborator for the other. Both publishers are called Tony.

Yes, I’d love to say that the fictional poets were more difficult to deal with than the real ones, but neither group has been difficult in any way. And we have been helped by a group of interns at Edge Hill University Press. Although, thinking about it, there is a fictional intern to the EUOIA, the poet Jason Argleton, also of Edge Hill, according to his biography in Twitters. There's a poem of his here. So he must be real (in some sense).

Another connection is that both books are scheduled to be celebrated in the same week, one at the Edinburgh Book Festival, the other at The Other Room in Manchester. I’m sure you can work out which one is which, but just to say that I’m hoping many EUOIA collaborators will appear in Manchester. (Note: 9th September: See here for an account of that evening.)

Of course, the poets in one anthology are more than welcome to turn up for the launch of the other, though (rising to the Bob McCorkle aspects of the project) the appearance of a posse of EUOIA poets in Edinburgh might prove a fissure in the substance of reality that we might not survive.

Here’s what we have about Twitters for a Lark so far.

Here’s what we have about Atlantic Drift so far.

In other news: Atlantic Drift: A Transatlantic Anthology of Poetry & Poetics (co-edited by James Byrne and Robert Sheppard), EHUP & Arc Publications, 2017, is now OUT! See here:

https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/james-byrne-atlantic-drift-an-anthology-of-poetry-and-poetics-567

Joey Frances on the Robert Sheppard Symposium (conference report)

Here:

https://poetry.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/biip.40/

Frances, J., (2017). Robert Sheppard Symposium. It's in the online version of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, now edited by Scott Thurston and Gareth Farmer

Thanks Joey for such a comprehensive account of the papers that, as you say, I deliberately absented myself from, in a fury of aspirin and headache metaphors!

More on the Symposium itself here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-robert-sheppard-symposium-my.html

In the evening following there was a reading by some of the most prominent poets in the UK: Allen Fisher, Robert Hampson, Zoe Skoulding, Antony Rowland, Patricia Farrell, Nikolai Duffy, Rhys Trimble, Natasha Borton, Scott Thurston, Andrew Taylor and others. See here for videos of their readings (and mine).
 
Visit the hub post to take you to all the posts concerning the Ship of Fools exhibition which documented the publishing of Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell, alongside the sympsosium here. Lots of images.

There are also some photos of conference sessions taken by Rob Edge here. You can see them all thinking. 

Joey also mentions the KFS festscrift An Educated Desire that is available here, along with a sample and a list of contributors. 

That really is enough about me! One thing I need to do is get back to the interview Joey is conducting with me about Pages in its original print form. 

Atlantic Drift: pre-ordering and sign up

Follow the link to Arc’s website: https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/james-byrne-atlantic-drift-an-anthology-of-poetry-and-poetics-567

You can pre-order the book there!

Stay tuned with our Twitter and Facebook

In other news: Atlantic Drift: A Transatlantic Anthology of Poetry & Poetics (co-edited by James Byrne and Robert Sheppard), EHUP & Arc Publications, 2017, is now OUT! See here:

https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/james-byrne-atlantic-drift-an-anthology-of-poetry-and-poetics-567

Robert Sheppard: writing blurb-matter for Twitters for a Lark (EUOIA anthology)

I have today (Sunday) been working on the blurb-matter for one of the two anthologies I am editing at the moment, this one being the fake anthology of fictional poets (the EUOIA poets), which is called Twitters for a Lark and which is scheduled for publication by Shearsman. Here’s what we have about the book so far. More about the EUOIA here.  Read 'Robert Sheppard''s resignation speech (!) from the EUOIA here. And Hermes' ungrateful response here.

Somehow, although I have been doing other things, this seems to have taken the whole day. Trying to be brief. Trying to explain the conceit of the book, its accidental post-Brexit (or are we pre-Brexit?) context. Trying to locate quotations that give a flavour of my work, without too much detail. It’s not easy, but I have at least done enough that I will post it on my blog, scheduled for a couple of days’ time. Here goes:

Conceived as a continuation  of the fictional poems Robert Sheppard ventriloquised through the bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch in his A Translated Man (2013), the complete 28 poets of the EUOIA (European Union of Imaginary Authors) presented here take on a variety of new meanings in Brexit Britain. [sentence too long]

Working in collaboration with other writers, Sheppard creates a stylistically various anthology of these European writers, whose works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical. History may not be argued away by the fictive. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own. There is no resultant ‘Europoem’ style, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of their production.

[I've already reversed the order of those two paragraphs.]

Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called Sheppard’s work Complete Twentieth Century Blues ‘a major poem of serious intent’. Alan Baker in Litter dubbed Warrant Error ‘political poetry of the first order’.

On A Translated Man

Urgent, melancholy, whimsical, hard-bitten, the voice of Sheppard/Van Valckenborch is also a force of rackety elegance which revels in the production of richly imaged often surreal phrase-extravaganzas…This is a dazzling addition to Sheppard’s oeuvre, witty, poignant, and endlessly entertaining.

Lyndon Davies, Poetry Wales

Robert Sheppard is now as Belgian as moules-frites and Herman Van Rompuy.

Tom Jenks, Tears in the Fence

On History or Sleep

Robert Sheppard’s selected poems from Shearsman Books, History or Sleep, is threaded with a sense of the other. Not ‘The Other’ with its sense of a doppleganger but the other which exists in a type of absence, an ‘autrebiography’ or ‘unwritings’. ….Sheppard’s poetry-frame sets up that haunting … {and what was becomes seamlessly what is and the ‘punched hollows’ of the gone are filled with a lyric intensity that twists ‘into a thin-throated flower’ that ‘wavers in the vibrant gulf.} probably omit the last part? 

Ian Brinton, Tears in the Fence

Since Robert Sheppard’s previous volume of fictional poems, A Translated Man (Shearsman, 2013), new creative work has appeared: an autobiography, Words Out of Time (KFS, 2015), a book of experimental prose, Unfinish (Veer, 2015), and his selected poems History or Sleep (Shearsman, 2015). His critical volume, The Meaning of Form was published by Palgrave in 2016. With James Byrne he edits Atlantic Drift: an anthology of poetry and poetics (EHUP/Arc, 2017). He is a professor at Edge Hill University, where in 2017 a symposium was held on his work. He lives in Liverpool.

Atlantic Drift : the back cover, the contents, poetics

Here's the full cover, with the the left hand panel of Pete Clarke's diptych which we have adopted for the back and front cover.

This also lists the poets selected for the first time, a public unveiling of the 24 poets. Each is represented by a generous selection of poetry, PLUS a piece of poetics, sometimes directly related to the poems, sometimes more general. In a sense, the poetics constitutes a second anthology (if only in my head), one that demonstrates what I have said (in this book, on this blog, and elsewhere about poetics as a speculative, writerly discourse). See here for my takes on poetics....

Follow our team of social mediators:

https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/university-press/poetsreveal/
 

To purchase a copy of Atlantic Drift follow the link to Arc Publications’ website: https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/james-byrne-atlantic-drift-an-anthology-of-poetry-and-poetics-567

An Anthology for Robert (Hampson) link

An Anthology for Robert : digital edition

June 2017 RHUL Poetics Research Centre Electric Crinolines Editions.

Here's a link to the digital edition:

https://indd.adobe.com/view/f4f65fa1-970f-467f-8cd0-48405e21d73b

I have a poem 'Hap Hazard' in it, the last of my Wyatt sonnets, with a nod to Robert's re-workings of Shakespeare's, hence my reference to his 'Shakespearean Drag'.

Watch him read them here, and me reading some of my Wyatt poems here.


Other contributors include Wills Montgomery and Rowe, Harry Gilonis, Frances Presley, Carol Watts, Paula Claire, Simon Smith, Nisha Ramayya, Peter Barry, Adrian Clarke, Scott Thurston, Peter Middleton, Sophie Robinson and many many more... There are some prose pieces too, including a memoir by one of Robert's oldest friends, Ken Edwards...

Well done Redell Olsen for getting this together. In secret, I believe!

Oh yes, he's retiring... Not shy, but retiring...

Set me Free (At the Grave of Asa Benveniste)

I've been posting my latest versions of the Earl of Surrey's sonnets as I write them, because of the topicality of their subjects. But I've only left them up temporarily, during the composition process. I posted no more than 4 at any one time on the blog. So Set Me Free - one of the poems - has been and gone, but I want one revision to be acknowledged. The poem originally carried a reference:

Or up Hepstonstall’s winds with Benveniste or crashing below Hebden’s floodline.

Unfortunately this mention of Asa disappeared from the poem in the next draft. (But he's not out of mind.) That day it's 'about' was the one when we, editors and interns, went to visit Arc about the anthology Atlantic Drift. I did place a stone on the grave, in the Jewish fashion, and read one of his poems. (Asa of course was a friend of the legendary printer-publisher of Arc, Tony Ward.) Photograph taken by the excellent young poet Brendan Quinn. On the coach back James Byrne read Roy Fisher's poem 'At the Grave of Asa Benveniste'). We were there. 

Atlantic Drift : front cover image by Pete Clarke

Here is the cover of Atlantic Drift the anthology of trans-Atlantic poetry and poetics James Byrne and I have edited, which is to be the second book published by Edge Hill University Press, in association with Arc, the well-known poetry publishers.

This image is by Pete Clarke, the painter I have worked with in collaboration, see here and here and here for more images and links.  We think it is striking. Soon I shall start mentioning its contents. (Of course, I am editing two anthologies at the moment, one of fictional poets and this one, of real poets. For the former check here. See here for more on the EUOIA.)

To purchase a copy of Atlantic Drift follow the link to Arc Publications’ website: https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/james-byrne-atlantic-drift-an-anthology-of-poetry-and-poetics-567

Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell: Poetry from the Stage (Coventry) Saturday night

Courtesy of Leanne Bridgewater and Colin Scott, Patricia and I read in Coventry

Poetry from the stage, poetry night in Coventry at Albany Theatre on Saturday 3 June (7pm - 10pm)

The night promised what Leanne called ‘a massive  twist of taste, from an infusion of Indian dancers, various poetry voices, maybe some visual screening, topped with a pro-disability stance, featuring two poetry plays from Shaun Fallows and Jackie Hagan’, the last of whom topped the bill.

Edited highlights of the evening. (I am caught reading 'Rainshine...') Poetry from the stage, Albany Theatre Sat 3rd June '17 (youtube.com)

The city alive to the roaring engines and burning rubber of the Moto Fest, the Albany Theatre alive to that ‘variety’ Leanne mentioned.

I read: 

‘Rainshine…’,

‘London’

‘Afghanistan’

‘for Stephen’

‘Berline Bursts’

‘Prison Camp Violin, Riga’,

all from History or Sleep. Purchase details here: http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/category/1023-sheppard-robert/product/5743-robert-sheppard---history-or-sleep---selected-poems. See various posts on my blog Pages about the selection  here. The first review may be read here.

I sold one copy (which wasn’t bad because they weren’t on display) to Raef Boylan who runs Here Comes Everybody. See here…

Patricia read ‘(From within) a narrow vase’.

 It was good to talk to friends old and new after... Although yet again the unthinkable is unfolding on the TV set in the bar. I'm glad I'd read from the sequence 'Warrant Error'.