I enjoyed reading, and enjoyed Cat's and Sarah's reading, but I would have enjoyed a live reading more, but no matter. Here's some notes I made for my part.
Now for more recent work, I said. This is a poem I wrote in November: I read 'Pretend-sleep'.
Here’s another short one, a response to a wartime
photograph by Lee Miller. Both photograph and poem are called ‘Revenge on
Culture’.
Staying
with photographs: this long poem was published in The Long Poem Magazine
and is based
on the photographs that Tricia Porter took of ‘the area’ called then Liverpool
8. I’ve since been in touch with Tricia Porter and was interested that when
the photos were originally exhibited, they were accompanied by poetic prose texts
(which she sent me). I saw them in an exhibition at the Bluecoat. And I’ve used
the catalogue…
I'm going to finish with something different. I’m
assembling poems about music and this is a new one. It came out of the
experience of having radiotherapy to the accompaniment of a music radio
station. This piece of music was a surprise! I read the poem 'Radio Therapy' (two
words, I emphasised, since the audience could not see the text.)
*
The rest of the festival features poets from Royal Holloway’s Poetic Practice programme and Poetics Research Centre and themes related to the Words from the Wild exhibition. For record, here are the details posted.
There are also two in-person events at Royal Holloway’s Egham campus, curated by Caroline Harris and Briony Hughes . An evening of poetry film and sound art on Monday 18 March in the Event Space (next to the Exhibition Gallery in the Davison Building; 6.30pm) features premieres fromSusie Campbell and Hen Campbell andTanicia Pratt, sound fromRowan Evans andWill Montgomery, plus Zakia Carpenter-Hall and Hannah Harding.
On Friday 22 March, there will be readings in the exhibition itself, linked to its different sections, including by Camilla Nelson and Caroline Harris, from 6.30pm.
These two events are not ticketed – all are welcome to come along on the day. See here for location and access. Feel free to arrive early and browse the exhibition beforehand.
I’m pleased to say that I have a poem in the new
Broken Sleep anthology, Masculinity, edited by Rick Dove, Aaron Kent and
Stuart McPherson, to whom, many thanks. It is one of the more egregious examples from the egregious ‘sequence’,
‘Empty Diaries’, ‘Gooner, Going, Gone: Empty Diary 2022’. I read it at my recent Peter Barlow’s
Cigarette reading (See here for the reaction to it: Pages:
Robert Sheppard and two others at Peter Barlow's Cigarette 24th October 2023
(set list)) Usually narrated from the point of view of a woman,
each of these now-annual 'Empty Diary' poems focusses on sexual politics (though sometimes just sex and
sometimes just politics, occasionally neither), I write about the sequence (1901-1990, which first appeared in a
1992 book of that title, and later as the ‘spine’ of Twentieth Century Blues)
here: Pages:
Robert Sheppard: The last two Empty Diary poems are published on Stride
: and I include links to earlier poems, and videos of the 2019 and 2020 poems which
precede this one. This poem is unusual in being narrated by a man. And what a man, a gooner no less.
This anthology (there are too many contributors to
list here, may be purchased at:
‘Masculinity:
an anthology of modern voices’, the publisher says, ‘is a book of poetry
which aims to showcase the diversity of what it means to be a man and what it
means to embrace its multitudes. These poems emphasise that masculinity is not
a monolithic concept, but a dynamic, evolving force that can be shaped by culture,
society, and personal experiences. Including poetry from Andrew McMillan, Ian
Duhig, Michael Pedersen, Andre Bagoo, Pádraig Ó Tuama and [many] more, [and it's good to see friends like Andrew, Daniele Pantano, David Ward, Gregory Woods and others there] this is
a powerful, visceral reminder that masculinity is so much more than the sum of
its parts, and a call to open up a dialogue about masculinity that is
inclusive, progressive, and affirming.’
I approve
of this, though I’m pretty sure my poem, which is about super-toxic incel
masculinity, which I (suppose I) satirise, is not at all 'affirming', and shouldn't be. My narrator rather literally plays
with the ‘sum of his parts’! (The 'Empty Diary' for 2023 is about a conspiracy theorist;
what shall I ‘do’ this year? No answers on a postcard please: something will
offer itself, I don’t doubt!)
I’ve been blogging for 19 years (today). In recent
years, on this anniversary, I have looked back at the posts that have enlivened me, have been looked
at a lot, and (even) have not been looked at all! I started this mode of
reviewing on the tenth anniversary, and all those posts (and the annual posts
in the last ten years of blogging) were presented as links, in last year’s 18th
year post. I think this year, I’ll simply point to that post as a guide to all
the others. Do have a look, but don’t get lost in the labyrinth.
Blogging is meant to be a posting of the instant, but
I’ve never thought of Pages as ephemeral, as Twitter or X are, for
example. As those posts will indicate I set this blog up in 2005 as an attempt
to continue my print magazine Pages as a ‘blogzine’, but gradually it
turned into a blog, but with the proviso that I see many of the posts as of
permanent import (I can’t say ‘importance’, for only others may judge that).
But the various posts on Iain Sinclair, for example, add up to something,
critically speaking. Or those that led up to my book The Meaning of Form. Some
posts are essays, some a spattering of links to other posts, and (during the
writing and temporary blogging of the poems of ‘The English Strain’) I learnt to
delete posts or to edit them after posting for a short time only. The writing of
those poems (but not of others, note) was very public (because the poems were
public, and demanded an immediate audience).
Nineteen is an odd number, in all
sorts of ways. Maybe the 20th year will be an occasion of looking
back at the WHOLE blog, so I am going to limit myself to this past year to
point out posts I would suggest readers re-visit or visit for the first time.
This blog (and some other blogspot blogs) seem not to
be favoured by my Norton security. I look at my own blog and it warns
me: ‘Dangerous Web Page Blocked!’ I just ignore it, because it doesn’t make
sense to me. I’ve not noted interference or strange changes – except via the
strange bot hits that catapult random posts into thousands of supposed ‘hits’;
I suspect they are Russian, because of the sheer number of hits that derived
from there (though Blogger no longer provides that sort of geographical information).
I’ve always suspected my mention of Pussy Riot started that off. But that’s a
different animal to the Norton warning. Clearly it doesn’t stop people looking
at the blog, and people with other security systems are not affected. One
friend said he received the warning on his phone but not on his laptop. If
anyone can explain this (in simple terms) do let me know!
I intend to pick out the best of last year’s posts,
but first I should say a few things about the last year. Last year’s post
mentions the radiotherapy and hormone treatment I’d been receiving, the one
intense and quick, the second distributive and slow. It’s gone pretty well, and
I’m as active as I used to be. The following posts will confirm readings, music
performances, and some travel. If you meet me you’ll note that I’m often
wearing the little Man of Men design that Prostate UK sports. (I think it is a
design masterpiece: I’ve even got the socks and beanie!) See here for their
work and their warnings and their wonders: Prostate
Cancer UK | Prostate Cancer UK. Men, here’s the Risk
Checker:Check
your risk in 30 seconds | Prostate Cancer UK.
I am
pleased to say that guest editor David Spittle has selected some work of mine
for the special ‘Surrealist’ edition of the Bangladeshi magazine Shuddhashar. Or is it called FreeVoice - one word, like that?
Explore
this issue, number 37 in full: Surrealist
Poetry. Or follow
the links below.
It is a
long time since I’ve thought about surrealism, but then again it isn’t. By
that, I mean that, although I haven’t pronounced on the subject much, it’s
never gone away. (Not quite true either, see Poetics, Robert Sheppard (lincolnreview.org)In any case, it came back with a mighty thud, when I started to
write Elle.
Anyway,
the first four chapters of Elle may be read HERE: Elle: a
verse novel
Other
contributors include a brief description of their allegiance/connection to
surrealism and I thought that my ‘introduction’ to my excerpt (it’s a long
excerpt) which I’d sent would suffice (it is a long introduction!). It’s
not there on the magazine. In fact, it is the intended ‘afterward’ of the verse-novel.
Here’s a shortened version of it:
‘Sharp gas lips under her flesh
suddenly white in the hallway
Watching
the early films of Jeff Keen, see Jeff
Keen aka Dr Gaz | Jeff Keen. I noted the repeated appearance of what I
thought of as ‘the pink auto’; I had read somewhere that this Pontiac
Parisienne belonged to a nightclub owner in Brighton in the UK. Keen continued
to use footage of this automobile throughout the 1960s, though I think he only
borrowed its gangsterish gleam for an afternoon’s shoot, to make the 11-minute
black and white silent 8 mm film Breakout (1962). (This isn’t it, but is a useful sample of Keen's approach:
)The
incongruity of seeing this mammoth American car on film squeezing past the
familiar Clock Tower in Brighton (my local South Coast city as I remember it
vaguely from the early 1960s) was most impressive, if uncanny. It was not until
I read Richard Davenport Hines’ An English Affair (2013), about the
nefarious goings-on of cabinet minister John Profumo, that I linked the car,
which was mentioned in passing, and the films of Jeff Keen, which I knew, with
a precursor scandal of the Profumo debacle, and its Brighton setting. It was a
sordid story concerning a Conservative MP and washing machine importer, John
Bloom, and Christine Holford, the wife of the nightclub and Pontiac owner. The
result was that, in 1963, a jealous and taunted Harvey Holford murdered
Christine Holford, spitefully shooting her in the genitals. The subsequent
trial and the minimal sentence Holford received – before an all-male jury –
leaves a bad taste in any aesthetic appetite that desires to utilise this
material.
But I did
want to utilise this material and I did want to make the link to the
extraordinary films made by Jeff Keen, who I met on a couple of occasions, even
visiting his Brighton flat with Lee Harwood; I remember a column – no other
word for it, it reached the high ceiling – of Marvel comics, which he used as
raw material in his later Blatz! movies. I felt that my raw
material would have to include Keen’s work, the car, its murderous owner, his
victim wife, as well as a favourite and iconic film of the era, Luis Buñuel’s Belle
de Jour (1967), presented here in visual summary, as it were:
Notably,
this surrealist masterpiece of the sixties is based upon realist pulp from
1928: Buñuel hated Joseph Kessel’s moralistic and misogynist novel of that
title, in which a woman is condemned for her secret sexual desires (as was
Christine Holford with her more public affairs and flirtations). The film is
not a parody or pastiche of its model; it’s perversely faithful to its twisted
but conventional morality. The novel was perfect material for post-surrealist
transformation. In 1969, an English translation by Geoffrey Wagner from 1962
was rushed into a second paperback edition with a picture of a simpering
Catherine Deneuve on the cover, a 75p charity shop purchase.
Uncertain
how I would approach and proceed with these materials, I decided to work on my
copy of the novel with an analogous disrespect to that shown by Buñuel: I
treated Belle de Jour using the technique I have always called ‘Tom
Phillipsing’, finding new linguistic content in this old novel, as Phillips had
with A Human Monument, as he transformed it into the bubble texts of The
Humument (ignoring for a moment the brilliant visual side of the work!).
There is something of gentle gathering, enclosing, about the method, which is
absent from the tearing violations of the superficially similar cut-up
technique. Both are versions of collage, or montage, of course. 'Here's the book, and here's the method,' as I say on this 5 second video!
At some
point during this slow process (one page Tom Phillipsed a day, 140 pages), I
watched Daniel Farson’s British ATV television programme Living for Kicks (1960)
which partly took as its theme the teenage clientele of the Whiskey a Go-Go
milk bar (such pre-Clockwork Orange innocence!) near The Clock Tower in
Brighton. Watch it here:
I already
knew that this establishment was part of the entertainment complex run by
Harvey Holford: upstairs lay the more exclusive Blue Gardenia and Calypso clubs
(where alcohol was served). Farson’s documentary (the old Soho soak feigns
shock at teenagers snogging and disdaining marriage) features an intelligent
and knowing interview with a proto-Beat poet called Royston Ellis, whose name
was familiar to me, but not from my knowledge of British underground
poetry of the 1960s, which I’d foolishly thought comprehensive. In fact, the
name was literally floating before me in Ye Cracke pub where, after lockdown, I
regularly met a group of Liverpool friends (the informal 1955 Committee). On
the mirror under which we often sat is an engraved commemoration of a joint
poetry-music gig by Royston Ellis and John Lennon in Liverpool in 1960.
One
afternoon I suddenly noticed the memorial to this performance, seen above. (It's disputed whether Ellis is the 'Paperback Writer' of the song, but he did write books on pre-Beatles music.) Something was
happening here, I felt, to speed this project along; I conceived of
superimposing the shadowy Brighton reality upon my distorted version of
Buñuel’s Ur-text. Both narratives involve a jealous murderer. I replaced
Kessel’s names, Buñuel’s dramatis personae, with the names of the
participants in the Brighton tragedy: acquaintances and lovers of the fatal
couple (Thatcher, Hatcher, Bloom, Cresteef), and employees and habitués of the
night clubs (Corvell and Bubbles and Squeak), with the addition of the artist
figures Jeff Keen and Royston Ellis, and a few necessary others. (Not all of
them appear in this first extract, of course.) ‘Elle’ was the Tom Phillipsed ‘Belle’
persona of Kessel’s anti-heroine, the titular haunting (but who is
‘she’?). I transposed place names from Paris to Brighton without irony. The text passed through many stages of transformation (‘states’ an
engraver might have called them), both mechanical – I made use of the ‘dictate’
and ‘read as’ functions on my laptop – and deliberative: my choices were quite
conscious, though guided by procedure. The process was my old friend, the stochastic.
Then I revised the text in an intuitive way, unrecognisable in this latest (and
perhaps not yet completed) form on Shuddhashar.
https://www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk/places/clubs/clubs-3) I sought to introduce the main actors into a drama not quite theirs,
and not quite mine, either. I wished to liberate them, albeit imaginatively,
from history. I like to think that Keen and Ellis become the positive creative
energies to transform this loathsome narrative towards different endings – or
none. Those transformations are not just a matter of form, but of a forming of
its matters, its matters of fact, and its matters of fiction.
The turn
to the ‘verse-novel’, however ironical, reflects yet another, late, act of
transformation, the sudden switch to ‘verse’, a term I seldom use…’
So back to today. Just as
Bunuel hated Kessel’s work I think I disapprove of the ‘verse-novel' – and,
like Bunuel using Kessel, that’s just why I’ve 'written' one. I was somewhat relieved, when I witnessed
Jen Calleja reading Vehicle: a verse novel to discover that it wasn’t,
in fact, a ‘verse-novel’. (I did enjoy, though, Bernadine Evaristo’s The
Emperor’s Babe, so maybe it’s the idea of the verse-novel that trips me up;
I don’t like the term ‘prose-poetry’ either, but I'm a big fan of Ian Seed!).
Here’s a full
list of the articles/poems/prose/images in this wonderful edition, with links to each:
Thanks to
David and thanks to all at Shuddhashar. Shuddhashar is an exiled
Bangladeshi publishing house with this magazine, and is currently based in
Norway. Shuddhashar received the 2016 Jeri Laber International Freedom to
Publish Award, given to publishers outside the United States who demonstrate
courage despite restrictions on freedom of expression. They are brave people
indeed, if you follow their publishing history, which is really a testament to their activism.
Billy Mills is the first off the blocks, as so often,
on his excellent blog. I link to it on my blog roll (whoever thought of
that term?); see to the right of this post.
Beginning, and offering links (you may have noticed
how much I like links, a habit from the days of assembling Twentieth Century
Blues), he notes ‘Robert
Sheppard’s Doubly Spoken Fire is, in part at least, the third
and final part of his ‘fictional poetry project’, the first two parts of which
I reviewed here and here (In
hindsight, I was far too dismissive of this book at the time).’ I liked his
harsh treatment of those volumes, and I like his ‘in part at least’, which is
true: this may have run the ‘fictional poetry project’ into the ground (or it
may not, I’ll cheekily hint, perhaps falsely) but there are lots of other bits.
Billy is forced to be descriptive as well as evaluative. I’ll say no more about
it, but simply thank Billy (I know how much work is involved in reviewing,
which may be the reason I do less of it), and give you the link to it:
I’ll add some more reviews, if there are any. In the
meantime, here’s an X feed tweeting the sayings of a talking mongoose, highly relevant
to my ‘Rectophonic Monologue’! Billy found this too. I guess I’ll have to
follow: (4) Gef the Mongoose (@gefbot) / X
(twitter.com)
Nearly everybody had long hair at the University of
East Anglia in 1974, even (or especially) the men, and Colin Scott was no different. (Here we are in my contemporary hand.)
He was different, though, in that he was older than the regular dishevelled
bunch (myself included), and had worked in the library service and (I think)
was quite content with the thought of returning to that noble profession after
studying History for three years. He was serious without being super-studious,
liked music, and we certainly attended some of the rock bands that toured the
campuses.
Before I move on from that reference to UEA concerts, I'd like to share an uncollected poem I wrote in 1976, and revised recently. I have dedicated it to Colin's memory because a. he might have been there (my diary mentions a mutual friend, and b. both the poem and Colin were lost (to me, not to themselves, of course) between the 1970s and now(ish).
Midnight
Air:
John
Martyn with Danny Thompson, June 12th 1976
i.m. Colin Scott, who may have been
there
Ocean
music flows over you
wailing
where waves break
back upon the
water’s edge
They
strike up on form
Full moon
rises to face you
accepting
droning chants and spells
that drown
the sense in magic
Somebody
slides through the windowpane
having
flown through the night
Cannabis
spiral cracks open the sound
and its diamond
shatters
each
shimmering fragment
a swirling
seawave at the end of unseen fingers
You rise
from the waters
in the midnight
air
1976/2021 (Of course, in the late 1970s, and later, Tony Parsons and I would sing 'May You Never', by John Martyn, a song that curiously leaves no space to breathe. Above is a video of JM and DT, as in the poem, and at the concert.)
I re-read my copious diaries during Covid lockdowns and was surprised
how much time I spent with Colin, going to concerts, drinking real ale,
throwing snowballs (those Norfolk winters!) and smoking perfumed cigarettes (!),
during my first year. I think he maturely organized the transportation of my
drunken form from the pub back to my room on my 19th birthday.
By
our second year Colin moved to a house near a pub called The Boundary with his
friend Jan. (It was he who is mentioned in my diary entry about the Martyn gig.) Whilst another UEA friend Trev Eales and I attended parties there
(somebody had a dog called ‘Dog’, I remember, which is emblematic of the
household, I think) we both saw less of Colin on a day-to-day basis. Trev remembers meeting Colin a lot on the bus to campus. Of course,
he also had a settled life in his native Swindon, friends would come to visit
him – and he returned to that (I think) after we’d all graduated. We kept in
touch for a while but, like so many, lost contact, through the moving of
addresses and the vicissitudes of life. He lost contact with Jan as well. (I kept in touch with Trev, as may be seen from this post: Pages: Trev Eales - photography and friendship (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) (And here is a post about my slightly later UEA studies in Creative Writing: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Some memories of the Creative Writing MA (cohort 1978-1979) at the University of East Anglia )
I never forgot Colin – and always wondered where he was.
There was a barman in Liverpool (where I had moved in 1997) of whom I remember
remarking to my wife, Patricia, ‘See that man? I reckon that’s what Colin Scott
looks like today!’ (The memory is interesting for the fact I didn’t need to
explain to Patricia who Colin was.)
He obviously hadn’t forgotten me either. At one of his
Positive Images meetings with the poet Leanne Bridgewater, probably in 2016, Colin
asked, giving it a long shot, whether she knew a poet called Rob Sheppard that
he was at university with. Leanne answered that she did. She and I had met a
number of times; she had been taught Creative Writing at Salford by my
ex-student Scott Thurston, and was part of the burgeoning creative and
experimental excitement that surrounded The Other Room readings in Manchester.
And so was I, from my outpost in Liverpool. (See one of her publications, here: 'adDICTIONARY' by Leanne Bridgewater (670 pages) | Knives Forks and Spo (knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk)
The highlight of my evening at the North by North-West
Enemies reading in February 2017 in Leeds was supposed to be my co-performing my
collaboration with Ian McMillan.
That was terrific (or a terrific experience, see the video above), but I left the evening more
overwhelmed by the fact that Leanne (who was also on the bill
see the video) led a small
dapper man from the shadows and introduced him as Colin. (He didn’t in the
least look like the man from the pub!) After a gap of 40 years, I don’t know
what we spoke about, ‘catch up and conversations’ my diary relates unhelpfully.
That wasn’t really the point: we were now in contact again, and I thank
Leanne for engineering this meeting, which proved so fruitful, meaningful, and
ultimately poignant. (On that evening, here: Pages: Ian McMillan and Robert Sheppard: Simultaneous Performance: Leeds Enemies (photo, video, set list and thoughts))
Our next meeting was also at a poetry reading and performance, but in
June 2017 – as part of Positive Images, co-organised by Colin. Patricia read as
well, Leanne compared, and I read too. I didn’t think Patricia and I went down
particularly well (I should have read my skits on Boris Johnson), but Leanne
was wonderful, playing the ukelele (and editing the video of the evening, which you may view above, and here's a post from nearer the time: Pages: Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell: Poetry from the Stage (Coventry) Saturday night ).
Colin was much in demand as an organiser (I’d yet to fully register the amount
of work he put into this vital community arts event) but we did get to talk
after, at least about Coventry, which was new to me. Here is Colin introducing the results of a poetry competition:
From then on, we corresponded regularly and he visited
a number of times, once briefly before a beer festival. He was also deeply into
CAMRA organisation, so real ale remained a (shared) constant among the decades
of change. (He liked dark beers, I like light ones. He liked folk music; I like jazz!) We went on to Lancaster to meet Trev one day, and also all three
convened around the time of my birthday, with Michelle (purveyor of fine chutneys, among other things.).
I found Colin contemplative and calm, after a busy
career in librarianship, and he was full of quaint anecdotes. (One time he told me about a library book that disappeared from the shelves for years, then suddenly re-appeared; another time, he announced he'd just read in The Guardian that the reason older people can't retain new facts is that their brains are literally full!) He is the only
person I know to have read Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, he always
had a copy of the latest Positive Images poetry anthology from Coventry, but
otherwise our conversations were not literary. He kept up his interest in
history, visiting battle sites, for example. We were leisurely and relaxed. He
never pushed an issue (though he must have been an effective committee man). He
remained an enthusiast for the railways (he was from Swindon, after all) and
sent me links about steam train excursions: I never got to show him Edge Hill
station, the oldest in England. The leisureliness of our meetings meant we left
whole areas of our lives unshared, unexplored, and possibly there was an
unexplained reticence on his part. Of course, Leanne was a constant
reference-point, our common factor, and his grief at her death was palpable and
deep. Here he is introducing the Positive Images memorial reading for Leanne (and you can watch the tribute readings that follow):
Late last year, just before Colin died, although he
was tired after a busy summer itinerary of travel, he was thinking about
another trip to Liverpool. That meet-up would have been an opportunity perhaps
to have explored new themes or to have examined his quirky memories afresh. (He
claimed there was a student called Jeff who lived on Trev’s corridor at UEA, a
guitarist in the Al Kooper mode; since nobody else could recall him, he became
a character of myth and mirth, reiterated in our frequent emails.)
Herein lies
my chief regret: I was really only starting to know him well, when he
was taken so suddenly from us. I’m glad I got to know him again, and I treasure
those meetings that redeemed time, collapsed decades, and reinforced friendship
and kindness as the only positive virtue in our somewhat dark times.