Wednesday 26 March 1975
Being shown round a public school. I realise ETON
could also be spelt EATEN. There were Inca Indians there in the interior of the
Rococo building. The new queen leads out the old queen from behind, her hands
on her firm, proud breasts, into a room where she will die. She is beautiful.
(Vision) [a
poem of the era]
Tuesday 25 March 1975
Chris and I share a room. A whole load of UEA arrive
for a party. We leave. Lennon [ah! Him again!] has gone bald and argues
politics amicably.
We’re
on a yacht and remember the party and rush back along the bank different ways. He
finds it and returns. Everything is okay.
Later
by the swimming pool of the boat, I stand naked with a girl in just knickers. I
pull them off and we jump in!
Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium. (delivered to the 'Anthology as Manifesto' conference at the University of Glasgow: more on that here, item 2: Pages: Three March readings up the North West coast (set lists))
‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ is one of two acts of poetics committed as part of my long network of texts, assembled 1989-2000, and collected under the title Twentieth Century Blues: the first early on – crudely put – to get the thing going, the second anticipating the manner and modes of its ending, and with thoughts of a ‘beyond’. In the first I define Twentieth Century Blues formally as a
net/
(k)not
- work(s)
a glyph that guided its development and perhaps some of its poetic focus. It’s a net that works itself into knots, with multiple titles and connecting strands, some of them thematic, some of them formal, a few of them deliberate dead ends. They are almost hyperlinks, conceived before I had heard of such things.
I customarily define writerly poetics as: the products of the process of reflection upon writings, and upon the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others, speculatively and anticipatorily casting into the future. That’s precisely what ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ enacts. More magisterially, Jerome Rothenberg, in the introduction to his book of poetics, Pre-Faces, says, ‘The world we share, & our interplay with it, calls again & again for discourse: in the case of Poets, the setting forth of a poetics… I’ve attempted, like other poets so engaged, to create a new & coherent poetics for our time.’ (Rothenberg, 1981: 3) Poetics is thus both for the primary practitioner and for the wider poetry community.
Using ‘network theory’, gleaned from Caroline Levine’s 2015 book Forms which I’ve only recently discovered, we might say Twentieth Century Blues joins those networks that ‘are the forms that rupture or defy enclosed totalities and allow us to understand border-crossing circulations and transmissions.’ (Levine 2015: 117). I hope so (and it was a shame such theory, like the internet, wasn’t in existence when I conceived of the project.) ‘Networks are,’ Levine writes, ‘capable of unending expansion: once there is a link between two nodes, there is a network, and it can grow simply by linking to new nodes. Thus the network form affords a certain infinite extensiveness. But, in practice, many networks are limited,’ in the case of Twentieth Century Blues by the millennium; the work was time-based and scheduled for completion or abandonment at the end of the century, with ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ as a late staging post towards that. In terms of network theory, The End of the Twentieth Century is a node that pulls all the other strands together, through it, a great knotty not-worky flow! Levine puts it thus: ‘a few important nodes are simultaneously part of many large clusters.’ (Levine 2015: 126) All the strands pass through this node but I won’t list all the titles when I perform it. While taking a retrospective line, a taking-stock, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ is also – as poetics should be – speculative and anticipatory, and I consider some possible avenues of advance beyond the prescribed end of the project, the end of the century, my own personal poems for the Millennium.
It is no wonder that the anthology of that name Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, particularly the second volume, which I was then adapting for teaching, comes sharply into focus as an education of my writing desires. I mention it as ‘a prospectus for reading’ at one point. And it was – although I still haven’t followed all of its prospects.
Named
after a monumental sculpture of Joesph Beuys, ‘The End of the Twentieth
Century’ is a hybrid poem, lineated prose, an essay, a rant, a series of bad
jokes, a confession, a book review even, a string of allusions and quotations, a
poetics piece and an inescapable node of the networked project. This ‘text for
readers and writers’ as I call it, was written on the 1st May 1999 and read at
the English Research Day at Edge Hill University the following month. Now it
arrives at Glasgow, 25 years after composition, but still capable of generating
a few sparks, I hope. As Rothenberg himself says, ‘The main activity of my
poetics has involved … acts of presentation: assemblage & performance &
translation’. (Rothenberg 3). Certainly, in my case, in this text, the first
two of those, with a touch of the third.
I can’t perform the whole piece; we
join it at page 12 of its 19 pages…
I am saddened to hear of the death of John Seed, a good friend and an underrated poet. I knew him best in the 1990s in London, where we would meet to discuss politics, history (note his ‘other’ career as a historian, and his Marx for the Perplexed has nurtured me often from my naïve perplexity), and (of course) poetry and poetics. And academic life. (He was one of those who encouraged me to try to get (back) into teaching in HE.) He was an attendee at the many events we held in London, including the (near) legendary Smallest Poetry Festival in the World in 1994 (and he wrote one of his more nebulous pieces after one of these parties).
We also collaborated on Transit Depots/Empty Diaries (with John Seed [text] and Patricia Farrell [images]), London: Ship of Fools, 1993, now a rare book. One of these poems, ‘Empty Diary 1926’, is featured in one of the posts that follow.
His poetry ranged from the Objectivist lyrical to the Objectivist
collagist (i.e., from Oppen to Reznikoff) and I wrote about most of it, both in
my book The Meaning of Form and in a series of articles, AND some of the
early working notes of these (with the usual asides and digressions) appeared
on this blog.
I am thinking of Kath and any other family there might be (I stayed with John at his mother’s home in Durham, but they were in London, in a weird swap of locations.) Today is the funeral, which I am unable to attend.
This post announces my essay in the rather good Poetry and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism:
Pages:
Robert Sheppard: Essay on John Seed in Poetry and Praxis 'After' Objectivism
This post deals with the Objectivist lyric inheritance in his early poems (a New and Selectedis available from Shearsman, as are other of his books: Seed, John).
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppsrd-john-seeds-lyric-poems.html
But there are even earlier poems! Manchester: August 16th & 17th 1819 was a ‘lost’ manuscript and was published by Intercapillary Spaces in 2013, and is a poem from 1973, about the Peterloo Massacre (before he’d read Shelley on the subject, interestingly). I write about it here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-objectivism-and-john.html
Here I write about John Seed’s poetics, using Objectivist ideas and Barthes’ notion of the ‘punctum’ (a connection John makes himself):
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-punctum-punctuation-and.html
Slightly earlier posts (in preparation for his appearance in The Meaning of Form as a foil to conceptual writing, which the kind of citational work John was pursuing in Pictures from Mayhew (and later works) superficially resembles) are here:
A poem
from Seed’s Pictures from Mayhew was published on this
blogzine, here.
John was a great critic of Thatcherism and Industrial Decline and Poverty. His view of ‘England’ both as a historian (a Marxist critic of the Manchester bourgeoisie, and also of Liverpool (I’ve still got one of his articles on William Roscoe)) and as a poet were central to his 1980s and 1990s work, which I write about here. This has ‘Empty Diary 1926’ appended to it:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-john-seed-englands.html
Finally, he is remembered as one of the attendees of the 1994 Smallest Poetry Festival in the World, in a quite recent post:
Pages: Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994
All in all, there’s a lot here about the various aspects of John’s work. I’m pleased to have covered most of it.
I’m sad too, when I think of a passage in Words Out of Time where I remark: ‘John Seed starts up a conversation that was interrupted 12, 23 years ago, was it?’ The next part of that rare conversation has been silenced forever.
Wednesday 12 March 1975
Picasso – old, balding man, was welding gold bars into
works of art. He makes me an amulet. He signs his name and writes something on
a piece of paper. The doctor says there’s no hope; he is dying. But I’ve still
got my amulet!
Tuesday 11 March 1975
A [illegible: priest?]. A village in the 17th
Century. You can tell Norwich by its owl, painted on the door of the old barn
dedicated to medical supplies. I went over to look at the old altar. Why do
people like to see this old decade and not the living church?
The
long Norwich express [train]. Mafia plotting on board. They realise the driver
can’t leave his seat at a halt. The best time to smuggle – Dope –
Later
me looking for a bog on the train, its inside like a Jumbo Jet. People going
for baths. Wide winding staircases.
Later
still. At bar, holding up drunken person. Later he pursues me along road in
car. I promise I won’t tell her. He has a piece of cotton dangling from the
car.
yeah!
Sunday 9 March 1975
Top of Hill Farm Way and Oakapple [Road]. A copy of The Sun in my hand. All the articles are about dancing. Requel Welch must be older than 21. Tea and biscuits on a tray will be ready soon. A vision of 15 Oakapple from exterior.