‘An overdub of The Dancing Girl by Letitia Elizabeth Landon’ from British Standards is published online in The Nest issue of A) Glimpse) Of)

Founded in October 2009 by Dimitra Ioannou, A) GLIMPSE) OF) is an Athens based independent journal which publishes works by contemporary writers and artists in order to generate new narratives for the now. See here: https://aglimpseof.net/

What the ‘now’ constitutes now is the nesting-down of quarantine and lockdown, and the ‘Nest’ issue is presented as a strand which may be accessed here:

https://aglimpseof.net/category/the-nest-issue/

There are lots of responses by artists and writers to the issue (though only one I recognised, Amy McCauley, whose work I admire greatly), and I’m the latest in this strand.

Here: https://aglimpseof.net/2020/06/29/the-nest-issue-robert-sheppard/

My contribution, which I read on the short video above, is ‘An overdub of The Dancing Girl by Letitia Elizabeth Landon’, one of the ‘14 Standards’ from the section of that name in British Standards. Big thanks to Dimitra.


’14 Standards’ were all written in ‘lockdown’, and sometimes obliquely, and sometimes directly, refer to that event, though each is a version of a poem by a significant Romantic poet. This is the section of British Standards where the concentration on Brexit becomes dispersed.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL as she’s known) is pretty much recognised today, though I don’t know the work that well, though she has a large selection of sonnets in the anthology I’ve been working from, which I have read with interest and pleasure; it was quite difficult to choose a poem. There’s a recent biography too, and a slightly churlish review of it here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/24/lel-by-lucasta-miller-review-poet-letitia-elizabeth-landon .

The title about dancing got me thinking about my collaborations with dancer Jo Blowers. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/02/robert-sheppards-shutters-at-prelude-to.html for details of a piece called ‘Shutters’ from the 1990s that was revived a few years ago, and to which I allude here. More on work with Jo here and here. Of course, I’ve experimented with the form here, and the word ‘form’ is indeed the axis the poem spins on. Here’s LEL’s original for intertextual reading:

A light and joyous figure, one that seems 

As if the air were her own element;

Begirt with cheerful thoughts, and bringing back 

Old days, when nymphs upon Arcadian plains 

Made musical the wind, and in the sun 

Flash’d their bright cymbals and their whitest hands.

These were the days of poetry—the woods 

Were haunted with sweet shadows; and the caves 

Odorous with moss, and lit with shining spars,

Were homes where Naiades met some graceful youth

Beneath the moonlit heaven—all this is past; 

Ours is a darker and a sadder age; 

Heaven help us through it !—’tis a weary world 

The dust and ashes of a happier time. 

British Standards was begun in 2020, after Brexit Independence Day; the first section was finished late March, by which time we were already ‘nesting down’. For that first section, I transposed poems from part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, retitled ‘Poems of National Independence’, cheekily subtitled ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html

‘14 Standards’ (with links to other poems in the sequence) may be read about here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html

British Standards is Book Three of ‘The English Strain’ project. There are two comprehensive posts to check out, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here and another at Book Two, Bad Idea here . All these posts carry further links.

Second sonnet from 'Tabitha and Thunderer' temporarily posted here

The body of my current occupation, the ‘book’, British Standards, was begun in 2020, after Brexit Independence Day; the first section was finished late March. (An earlier version of a Shelley poem stands as ‘preface’.) For that first section, I transposed poems from part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, and retitled them ‘Poems of National Independence’, and even more cheekily subtitled them, ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html


Then followed ‘14 Standards’. I have now written two additional ‘Double Standards’ about the Cum’s disgraceful lockdown infringements and his elitist refusal of apology and regret. See here for all 16 standards! http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html


Now I’m moving onto ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, which is another projected sequence of 14 sonnets.


I’ve previously documented ‘The English Strain’ project as work progressed through its three books so far. There are two comprehensive posts to check out, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here and another at 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 )


Parts of Book One are still available in booklet form; look here and here:

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/hap-understudies-of-thomas-wyatt-s-petrarch-by-robert-sheppard-26-pages

Back to current concerns. ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ is a version of 14 of the passionate love sonnets of ‘Sappho and Phaon’ by Mary Robinson. Carol Rumens writes about this extraordinary sonnet sequence (and its author’s extraordinary life) here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/apr/12/sappho-phaon-mary-robinson

The whole sequence (as well as all the poems I transposed in ‘14 Standards’) may be found in Feldman, Paula, R., and Daniel Robinson. eds.  A Century of Sonnets. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, a fascinating and eye-opening anthology.

Here’s the poem, the second in the sequence of 14. I shall follow my previous practice of temporarily posting each poem as it’s written, and immediately reading it on video too. These are still in draft form, it is worth noting.

VIII Her Passion Increases


Why not in aching caresses I used to start
while my tangle of curls entangled him
in tangles of desire for these very curls
bare back shameful blush in vain pushes
through veins veiled in my vale no more 
a lyric professor of subjectivity I 
narrate my self bathed in sprinkled 
scorched source of song thrill
Go my Mamas with no papas shiver
your shoulders why must Thunderer’s stunted 
slaves slice through viral Liverpool streets vile
African Trade banners swaying while I
miraculate angles my heels force on him he’ll 
melt like Bo kicking fit on his office floor

28^th June 2020


If Bo can’t do a press briefing at least he can do a press up!

Why ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’? Tabitha was one of Mary Robinson’s pen names; the ‘Thunderer’ was a print by James Gillray that features Mary Robinson and her lover, Ban Tarleton, the Liverpudlian war criminal and slave owner, the tight-trousered ‘Thunderer’ of the title. You can see a fine reproduction of ‘The Thunderer’ by James Gillray here:

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw63182/The-thunderer-King-George-IV-Sir-Banastre-Tarleton-Bt

Look what Gillray's done with Mary!

The best place for more about Robinson is Byrne, Paula. Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson. London: Harper Perennial, 2005, which I am currently reading for the second time And there’s more than enough on Tarleton in Cameron, Gail, and Stan Crooke, Liverpool – Capital of the Slave Trade. Liverpool: Picton Press, 1992.

In today’s poem I allude to the fact that when he canvassed for a Liverpool seat in parliament on a pro-slavery ticket, part of his Boris Johnson-like campaigning was to have a pair of black boys carry a banner reading ‘Support the African Trade’, i.e., slavery. The two boys may have been freed slaves, or slaves still. The streets they walk in Liverpool are named, still named, after slave-owners.

Indeed, see me read a relevant poem from ‘14 Standards’ here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/my-latest-liverpool-brexit-virus.html

We will be seeing a lot more of him (and her). But the characters in the poem have their contemporary avatars too, though I’ve yet to work them out.

As might be gathered from what I have said, British Standards as a whole (not just the corona of ‘14 Standards’) aims to present transpositions of admired sonnets of the Romantic period, from William Bowles to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chronologically, they lie between those of Charlotte Smith, which I’ve already worked on here, https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-english-strain-poems-overdubs-of.html

and those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that I’ve also worked on, both of them in the final parts of Book One:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-non-disclosure.html

I contemplate the term ‘transposition’ at the end of the following post (that is mostly about collaboration, you can scroll past that bit). In determining that ‘transposition’ isn’t collaboration proper, so far as I’m concerned, I also demonstrate, if only for myself, that ‘transposition’ isn’t translation.

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on_27.html

Carol Rumens writes about my work, too, here, in The Guardian here. And see here for the subsequent book publication, Smart Devices: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/prison-camp-violin-riga-anthologised-in.html

Poem from 'Poems of National Independence' talking to the dead (Wordsworth) on STRIDE today

As part of the 'Talking to the Dead' feature on Stride magazine (which began with posts from 17th June 2020) I've contributed one of my 14 'Poems of National Independence', writings-through of Wordsworth's sonnets. This is one of the odd ones out in the sequence, in that it speaks back, writes back, talks to, the dead author, tracking his infamous revisionary poetics. It snuck up on me quite innocently. I was planning to 'transpose' this sonnet, which is about a silent black deportee from France, in a different way, but I discovered that I had two versions of the poem to work with. Fascinated by the differences, this poem emerged between the two authorised Wordsworth versions.

Read it on Stride here.

Watch me read it (best to see the text as well, it's not very oral, as it happens) above.

I transposed poems from a part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, and retitled them ‘Poems of National Independence’. I added the subtitle ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I’d only selected ones written 1802-3. Each carries Wordsworth's first line as its title, for identification. The poems are easy to find, though not always in the versions I have used. Wordsworth wrote over 500 sonnets; I’ve read about 100 of them this year.

https://jonathanbate.com/2020/02/03/late-wordsworth/

This blog post from Jonathan Bate, who was about to publish his Radical Wordsworth biography at the time I was writing the poems, is illuminating about the early vs. the late poems. This is relevant, since the poems I have selected are late revisions of early poems. 

Leader, Zachary. Revision and Romantic Authorship. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, and Wolfson, Susan J. Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, are also particularly good on Wordsworth's revisions. Wolfson is good at any time, of course, and a principal theoretical input to The Meaning of Form. (See here.) 

There is a general hubpost to all the other parts of this sequence and the way it links to other parts of 'The English Strain' project, and this 'Wordsworth' part of 'British Standards' here.

There are two posts about the background to the project: one that looks back at Book One, The English Strain here (to be published later this year) and another at Book Two, Bad Idea here .

I am delighted to report that two other poems from ‘Poems of National Independence’ (in British Standards) are published by International Times. Here they are with short laptop videos:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-two-transpositions-of.html

Robert Sheppard: 14 Standards from British Strandards is complete as one sonnet appears at the virtual WOW Festival 2020 (hub post)

Another part of my ‘English Strain’ project is finished as it moves beyond its third (and final) book. I’m pleased to say a poem from the book, which is entitled British Standards, is from the section called ’14 Standards’, has been published online as part of this year’s virtual WOW Festival ‘events’, in a collection of writings called ‘Lockdown, Unlocked’. I wrote it especially for Victor Merriman, who asked me for something. Many thanks to him.

My poem is here: https://www.wowfest.uk/wowfest19/499-an-overdub-of-the-vanity-of-national-grandeur.html

but his general introduction seems to have already been taken down.

For this showing I turned Bo back into Boris, for clarity, although I didn’t explain Coleridge’s two extraordinary neologisms. A ‘Psilosopher’ is a false philosophy; ‘suffictions’ are fake suppositions. John Thelwall was a radical as wsell as a sonneteer, which is why I choose his sonnet for the radical WOW Festival!

Here’s a video of me reading the sonnet, with Bo restored to his single ejaculatory syllable.  

This is a hub post for the ’14 Standards’ section of British Standards. No other poems have been published to date. (Though until about mid June my one about slavery and Liverpool place names (written before the drenching of hollow racist statues) will still be temporarily posted on this blog.) 

Read 'We had a female Passenger who came from Calais' as part of the the 'Talking to the Dead' feature on Stride here. I write about the poem and read it on video here.

Read 'An Overdub of Letitia Elizabeth Landon's The Dancing Girl here. Or about the poem (and hear/see another video) here.  

I’ve documented my progress to date in detail as ‘The English Strain’ progresses. There are two comprehensive posts to check out, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here  and another at 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 ) 

Parts of Book One are still available in booklet form, see below.

The preface to the third (and projected final) book British Standards. The preface is a version of Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’. The body of the book was begun in 2020, after Brexit Independence Day; the first section was finished late March. For that first section, I transposed poems from part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, retitled ‘Poems of National Independence’, cheekily subtitled ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html

All the poems I transposed in ’14 Standards’ may be found in Feldman, Paula, R., and Daniel Robinson. eds.  A Century of Sonnets. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, a fascinating and eye-opening anthology. I did not write these transpositions sequentially, and I used a variety of methods and forms, in order that they don’t conform to the pattern (or the narrative) of contiguous poems. The only one I chose to write was ‘The Vanity of National Grandeur’ because I knew which one was just the job for the WOW Festival. (Of course, a seeming pattern emerges: it will resemble you, and all that!). I hope you see how my perverse self-interrupting poetics works.

The 'Dominic Cummings' 'affair' prompted a pair of poems entitled 'Double Standards', which stands as a kind of coda to '14 Standards', both them overdubs of Shelley. 

I call these ‘transposed’ poems ‘Standards’, since the originals are part of our poetic repertoire. I’ve been listening to one of Anthony Braxton’s ‘Standards’ albums, on which he plays and transforms those communally malleable tunes dubbed ‘standards’ by jazz musicians. I refer directly to that in Standard 10. Hear an Anthony Braxton ‘standard’ here, indeed the ‘Recorda Me’ that I refer to in that poem, off of Braxton, Anthony. 23 Standards (Quartet) 2003, Leo Records, CD LR 402/405 (CD), 2004.

Or:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTkIx8fErYg

Braxton is still at it too: watch this: one of the only jazz concerts this year so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRYGqZifWCE

Second half here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=604&v=rJL_BwJh8TI&feature=emb_logo

I’m also thinking of the ‘standards’ that British locks and other devices conform to, with a hint of moral standards, of course.

Like a lot of the world during the weeks of writing them (6^th April-18^th May 2020), I had a pre-scripted lockdown life, which was quite useful. Given that the poems are often fragmented, they are perhaps less funny than previous ones. I only wanted to write indirectly about coronavirus, but some have turned into my ‘lockdown’ poems (because they are). Of course, the virus had already appeared thematically in ‘Poems of National Independence’, slowly creeping in until it had subsumed the Brexit theme.

As might be gathered from what I have said, British Standards as a whole (not just this corona) aims to present transpositions of sonnets of the Romantic period, from William Bowles to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chronologically, they lie between those of Charlotte Smith, which I’ve already worked on here, https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-english-strain-poems-overdubs-of.html

and those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that I’ve also worked on, both of them in the final parts of Book One:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-non-disclosure.html

There are quite a lot of poems from various past parts online. You can access six poems from Bad Idea, Book Two, here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-links-to-all-six-bad.html

Three sonnets from the last section of Bad Idea, ‘Idea’s Mirror’, may be accessed here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-3-sonnets-from-ideas.html

In ‘Petrarch 3’, the opening part of Book One, the transpositions are achieved by having 14 versions of one translation from Petrarch. This part of Book One, ‘Petrarch 3’, is published under that title. Another part is published as Hap which ab(uses) the sonnets of Thomas Wyatt. Both pamphlets are still available.

Look here and here for more on the Petrarch obsession/project, including how to purchase Petrarch 3 from Crater Press in its ‘fold out map’ edition.

Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, here:

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/hap-understudies-of-thomas-wyatt-s-petrarch-by-robert-sheppard-26-pages

or here:

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/new-titles

If you’re fed up with reading Hilary Mantel’s accounts of Wyatt (or Surrey for that matter), OR you can’t get enough of Henrician Terror, Hap is the book for you, and the link above will prove efficacious. Alec Newman is awaiting your order (there are other books of mine there, too, as well as the new out now)!

Two ‘Poems of National Independence’ have been published on International Times. Link here, via my short laptop videos:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-two-transpositions-of.html

I contemplate the term ‘transposition’ at the end of the following post (that is mostly about collaboration, you can scroll past that bit). In determining that ‘transposition’ isn’t collaboration proper, so far as I’m concerned, I also demonstrate, if only for myself, that ‘transposition’ isn’t translation.

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on_27.html

My latest Liverpool-Brexit-Virus-Slavery British Standard transposition (of Robert Southey)

I'm keeping this 'temporary post' up because it has taken on a fuller resonance giving the resurgence of Black Lives Matter (and particularly with the symbolic drenching of the Slaveowner in Bristol). We have loads of slavery-soaked place names in Liverpool; my poem offers two of them. To change them all would mean we wouldn't be able to find our ways around, but it might happen. My ‘English Strain’ project moves on into Book Three. I’ve documented my progress to date in detail.

There are two posts about the background to the project: one that looks back at Book One, The English Strain here and another at Book Two, Bad Idea here .

The third (and projected final) book is entitled British Standards. More about that here. 

Currently, I’m finishing the second part of Book Three, ‘14 Standards’. There is more on '14 Standards', now that's finished too, here.

All the poems I am transposing may be found in Feldman, Paula, R., and Daniel Robinson. eds.  A Century of Sonnets. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, a fascinating and eye-opening anthology. I am not writing the transpositions sequentially, and I am using a variety of methods and forms, in order that they don’t conform to the pattern (or the narrative) of contiguous poems. (Of course, a seeming pattern emerges: it will resemble you, and all that!) I am selecting each poem from my list so that I don’t know which poem is waiting to satisfy my urge to write the ‘next’ poem, as I think of it, getting up, or even earlier, lying in bed, or often, on bedding down the night before, after watching Newsnight. Like a lot of the world I have a pre-scripted life at the moment, which is quite useful. Given that they are fragmented, some of the poems – not all of them – are ‘difficult’, and difficult in different ways, they are perhaps less funny than previous ones. I only want to write indirectly about coronavirus, but some have turned into my ‘lockdown’ poems (because they are!). I hope you see how my perverse self-interrupting poetics works.

On to the last to be written. Of course, since it was the last, I knew in advance which one it was going to be: the only one left on the list, the gap formed of Robert Southey’s anti-slavery poem, a difficult one to negotiate. I somehow knew I wanted to deal with Liverpool’s legacy and one of Stephen’s books,

Cameron, Gail, and Stan Crooke, Liverpool – Capital of the Slave Trade. Liverpool: Picton Press, 1992,

was useful, especially the list of familiar street names named after slavers, as was, for the word ‘pro-sacchharites’ (or anti in the print), 

Godfrey, Richard and Mark Hallett. James Gillray: The Art of Caricature. London: Tate Publishing, 2001,

a catalogue to an exhibition we visited in 2001. Bum Boats! Tarleton married Mary Robinson, so it forms a link to what I plan to do next, which is a version of 14 of the sonnets from Mary Robinson's 'Sappho and Phaon', . This is another lockdown poem, really. I actually have twisted my ankle in the back yard, not on Tarleton. I’ve not been into the centre of Liverpool since March. I've removed the text but here's my reading of it. 

Standard 4

I think of these ‘transposed’ poems as ‘Standards’, as part of our poetic repertoire, or should be. Here's Southey's original, for you to see:

Poem Against the Slave Trade III

Oh he is worn with toil! the big drops run
Down his dark cheek; hold--hold thy merciless hand,
Pale tyrant! for beneath thy hard command
O'erwearied Nature sinks. The scorching Sun,
As pityless as proud Prosperity,
Darts on him his full beams; gasping he lies
Arraigning with his looks the patient skies,
While that inhuman trader lifts on high
The mangling scourge. Oh ye who at your ease
Sip the blood-sweeten'd beverage! thoughts like these
Haply ye scorn: I thank thee Gracious God!
That I do feel upon my cheek the glow
Of indignation, when beneath the rod
A sable brother writhes in silent woe.

I shall probably use this poem as the single 'example' at the start of '14 Standards'. That's a practice that I have adopted since the earliest parts of 'The English Strain'. 
 

Robert Sheppard: 'The Formal Splinter' published in HL Hix' Counterclaims (Dalkey Archive)

“Poetry makes nothing happen.”  “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”  Incessantly repeated, typically taken as truisms.  But are they true?  In this unique and timely anthology, H. L. Hix invites more than 150 contemporary poets and scholars to counter those claims.

The familiar pronouncements from Auden and Adorno, respectively, are, after all, a full human lifespan old, made at particular historical moments, in particular cultural contexts, and from particular subject positions.  Contributors to Counterclaims were asked, “What must or might be said now about poetry?”  Their answers sum to a broad and luminous vision of poetry: what it does, what it is, what it might be, what it shows us about ourselves, and they are presented in Hix’ new book from Dalkey Archive, Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back. (Read a good account of the book, by Clark Allison, here.) 

View COUNTERCLAIMS on:

Bookshop.org

Amazon

Powell’s

As yet it is not listed in the Dalkey Archive site, but will be. Its isbn is 9781628973310. See here:

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/

I am one of the contributors. It is good to share the pages with critical grand masters like Derek Attridge, poetics mentors like Charles Bernstein, admired poets like Forrest Gander, and friends and colleagues like Rupert Loydell and John Redmond – and all the other respondees whose thoughts I value, like Andrea Brady and Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Steph Burt and Pierre Joris. Then, there are the fascinating connective poetics introductions by Harvey Hix himself, and then don’t forget all the thinkers (mostly poets) whose work I don’t know (yet).

My contribution is a quotation from an essay of mine (chosen by Hix) and a short paragraph I wrote about form (no surprise that it is in the ‘Form’ section of the anthology). Hix then uploaded the response (and all the others) on his blog, which is on my blog roll to the right of this post, and which has moved on to a fresher sampling. Or use this link:  http://031454a.netsolhost.com/inquire/

My piece ‘The Formal Splinter’ (as I called it) was written in 2015, when I was working on my critical book, The Meaning of Form. I hadn’t quite gathered how to transpose the critical thinking (had under the sign of Derek Attridge) into poetics. Most of my thinking for that book may be accessed here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html. I write about form, forms and forming here.

‘The Formal Splinter’ appears on this blog, in a 500 word version, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/05/robert-sheppard-formal-splinter.html

Read the 200 word version, which is what appears in the book, here, as part of Harvey's poetics blog posting Inquire (here).

Another attempt to transpose the ‘formal’ turn into poetics is the piece on rhythm called Pulse, that appeared in part in Tentacular recently. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/robert-sheppard-pulse-all-rhythm.html

Robert Sheppard: Essay included in the NEW Allen Fisher Companion

The Allen Fisher Companion is out. Look here, or navigate the Shearsman site. 

This long-awaited collection of essays, edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek, gives a chance for Allen Fisher’s many admirers to study his work (both literary and visual) in depth with a group of experts. Contributors include Clive Bush, cris cheek, Collum Hazell, Steven Hitchins, Pierre Joris (twice), Paige Mitchell, Will Montgomery, Redell Olsen, William Rowe, Scott Thurston, Shamoon Zamir, Karen Mac Cormack, Marjorie Welish, Matt Hart and Rob Holloway. 

There is an online review of the book, by Simon Collings, on Tears in the Fence here. 

And me. My contribution is my essay ‘Apocalypse Then’, referring to the politics of the late 1970s, and subtitled ‘Between Place and Gravity', to suggest that this is an interesting way to contextualise Allen Fisher’s two major long poems, and sub-subtitled, ‘Technique and Technology’ to gesture towards my focus up his writing methods and results, and upon one of the themes of the work by Fisher that I treat: The Apocalyptic Sonnets (written in 1978 but now visible in part in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets).

The book looks great, and I look forward to reading it. I have written about Fisher in most of my book-length studies of poetry, from The Poetry of Saying to The Meaning of Form, as well as in a number of essays, and reviews, including this one. It may also be read in my collection of essays, When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, providing a different context. Also from Shearsman: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2011/02/two-new-books.html
Or here.

I write about Allen Fisher generally here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/11/allen-fisher-and-robert-sheppard.html


I write about later work, Proposals, here, in preparation for part of The Meaning of Form:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/11/proposals-by-allen-fisher.html


and about his poetics, Necessary Business here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/12/charles-bernstein-allen-fisher-and.html


For a similar sort of book, see The Robert Sheppard Companion, from Shearman:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-robert-sheppard-companion-ed-byrne.html