ReViews Number 2: three books by Tom Raworth

Here's the second review I'm republishing on this blog. You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

Glancing Off 

Tom Raworth, As When: A Selection. Ed. Miles Champion. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN 978 1 78410 033 0, £14.99.

Tom Raworth, XIVLiners. Brighton: Sancho Panza, 2014. 224 pp. ISBN 978 1 910501 00 9, £10.

Tom Raworth, Structure from Motion. Washington DC: Edge, 2015. 75pp. ISBN 978 1 890311 44 5.

[This review was first published as ‘Glancing Off’ (Raworth), Poetry Salzburg Review 28, Autumn 2015, and was an attempt to write casually about Tom Raworth’s work, i.e., to not to try to theorise it too much, apart from what I could remember from writing about the work in The Poetry of Saying and elsewhere. Hence my opening sentence. Here's another elsewhere, with further elsewheres: Pages: Tom Beau (my poem for Tom Raworth along with others' in Blackbox Manifold) and links to my other tributes]

 

 

Elsewhere, I write about Tom Raworth’s work as an exemplar of a ‘poetry of saying’, with its eternally signifying play, its lack of closure. I contrast this with ‘the poetry of the said’, which involves fixity (the dreariness of anecdotage, in particular). But the two qualities are deeply intertwined: even slippery Raworth poems demand the fixity of reprinting them again and again in the same words, as in his As When: A Selection and two attendant volumes, XIVLiners and Structure from Motion, the last containing recent work. While I believe my thesis still, as literary critical description and writerly poetics, it doesn’t help new readers of these poems much. You need to ‘get’ them first, otherwise the critical concepts are simply a shield, its terms jargon to fend off unmediated encounter. 

I probably first read Raworth in the Penguin Modern Poets series in the trio Ashbery, Harwood, Raworth. Ashbery then was not the eminent figure he is today; I found the poems playful and enigmatic. Harwood I’d already read (and later worked on his poetry). But there was something in Raworth’s notational, throwaway, skeletal, constantly shifting writing (the lack of punctuation and the insistent lower case the only constants) that I felt was escaping me, not like the difficulties one has in reading the effervescent but deep resonances of Rilke or Celan, for example, but something more basic: like having registered X out of the corner of my eye but not quite seeing it wholly or clearly enough. Sufferers from migraines get used to something like this – and so do readers of Raworth, who have to accept a certain negative capability, to return to a state where we don’t know anything. As Raworth said, in an interview quoted in Miles Champion’s detailed biblio-biographic introduction to As When: ‘I really have no sense of questing for knowledge... My idea is to go the other way... And to be completely empty and see what sounds.’ And so, it seems to me, must the reader. As Raworth says in the creative work itself: ‘not rejecting knowledge but what (as in research) passes for knowledge and is but an illusion. the words (knowledge, intelligent, etc.) must be redefined, or new words coined.’  

Part of this has to do with the lack of method – or disarming simplicity of method. Early works simply add new lines to past lines until they stop. Olson spoke of one perception leading immediately to another, but we find not just perceptions (they could be puns or linguistic coinages, plenty of over-heard or found language, not to mention diagrams or doodles). One early poem enacts its own telling and simply happens in a situated on-going process:

 

I made this pact, intelligence

shall not replace intuition, sitting here

my hand cold on the typewriter

 

Later works juggle within line limits, as I shall show. But the poesis is always intuitive, one intuition leading to the next. Raworth is very seldom procedural (and when he is, the procedure is only used once). Apprehension of a poetry of saying can only come after a successful aesthetic encounter with the work, in the ‘event-act’ of reading, as Derek Attridge calls it, intuition before tuition.

As When is a selection that stretches Raworth’s whole career, from the early sixties until now, but is by no means even in coverage. The first half of the book presents a clear narrative of Raworth’s development of perceptual registers of life’s odd simultaneity, though not necessarily its complexity. ‘Morning’ and ‘Three’ enact domestic life as semi-orchestrated chaos. Anybody who looks after children will recognise: ‘smell of shit when i lift him he knocks the book from my hand’, the first of 7 action-packed lines of ‘Three’ that end with the temporary harmony of ‘they go down the hall all carrying something’. I say ‘not complexity’, because complexity implies order and Raworth’s poems share something with the contemporaneous anarchistic epistemology of Paul Feyerabend with its ‘anything goes’ and his stand ‘against method’. When perceptions are adjoined by fantasy and linguistic games, as in the playful opening of ‘Wedding Day’ (‘noise of a ring sliding onto a finger’), the very poem in which he made the ‘pact’ regarding intuition, though with whom is not clear, the reader has to go with the unknown flow (or not). To read the work as a witty super-charged stream of consciousness isn’t a bad way in. My students often say this and I then encourage them to develop a better sense of stream, because consciousness co-exists with other streamed qualities. Fragmentary fictional scenarios are just as likely to jump into view (‘we were leaving on a journey by slow aeroplane’) as the perceptions of our poet at stool, where the anticipated stream probably isn’t consciousness:

 

between my legs i read

 

levi stra

                        origina

            quality clo

 

                                    leaning too far forward

            into a patch of sunlight,

 

or his wide-eyed quotidian but peculiarly inessential queries (‘where do all the cigarette ends go?’), or even his accurate registering of language in production, as in the voice (in ‘Love Poem’) that begins: ‘there have been so many other men in my pause life’. Humour, of course, is what carries the reader here; there is something in the human covenant that grants humour and wit exclusive rights over our intellect (it is an intellectual function that undermines itself).

I want to dwell on ‘gone to lunch back in five minutes’, the opening section of ‘The University of Essex’. Raworth was briefly student and staff member there, after years away from education and its fossilized ‘knowledge’, though the poem itself suggests he registers his distance still, as in the third line’s ‘no and no’:

 

night closed in on my letter of resignation

out in the square one of my threads had broken loose

the language i used was no and no 

while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills

 

occasionally the metabolism alters

and lines no longer come express

waiting for you what muscles work me

which hold me down below my head?

 

it is a long coat and van on the horizon

a bird that vanishes        the Arabic

i learn from observation is how to break the line

 

(genius creates surprises : the metropolitan

police band singing ‘bless this house’

 

as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam

 

Many of these early poems abound with questions about self (as in the speculation about metabolism and muscles) but a growing area of enquiry is about writing itself. In this poem questions about the line are both existential and technical for the poet. A sketchy sense of location, though often surreal in its detail, as in the ambiguous threads in the equally ambiguous square, segues into the astonishing vision of the police band, in a parenthetical aside that opens but doesn’t close before the final, sinister, image. Although it offers what looks like closure, this phrase cannot be held responsible, as it were, for the almost liminal consciousness (not arranged in a ‘stream’) of dislocated yellow, hammers and drills.

In the 1970s the poems become more self-conscious with Raworth’s self-confessed stretching towards the long poem, and some of the longer poem sequences seem to be deliberately ‘tracking’ – to use the title of one of them – its possibilities: ‘the connections (or connectives) no longer work – so how to build the long poem everyone is straining for?’ he asks. However, he isn’t about to commit The Four Quartets. He answers his own question with a poetics statement that he characteristically partly registers as a question and places in parentheses: ‘(the synopsis is enough for a quick mind now (result of film?) – you can’t pad out the book).’  Implicit is celerity of mind as writerly and readerly modes, the montage techniques of Jean-Luc Godard or Jeff Keen being the apposite filmic analogies. ‘Tracking (notes)’ itself is a serial poem-and-prose piece that juggles poetics and ‘philosophy’ (the remarks on ‘knowledge’ quoted earlier come from this work), as when Raworth usefully tells us ‘the true direction is always glancing off’, presented alongside examples of that ‘glancing’ itself: ‘saddle of hare?’ one section reads entirely, as if questioning collective nounhood. Another sequence, ‘Stag Skull Mounted’, a notational diary poem, tracks its own (eventual) failure as method, its exhaustion: the final entry is ‘this trick doesn’t work’, at which point the process must be abandoned. As a later interview has it, which modifies and extends the metaphor of ‘glancing off’: ‘At the back there is always the hope that there are other people ... other minds, who will recognize something that they thought was to one side or not real. I hope that my poems will show them that it is real, that it does exist.’

One aspect of Raworth’s work that we don’t get in As When is most of the long poems that Raworth did achieve in the late 1970s and early 1980s (they are literally long in their short-lined, occasionally one word, measures down the page) like Writing and Catacoustics, since Champion, probably wisely, didn’t want to excerpt. (They can be found in the 2003 Carcanet Collected Poems.) This is the perfect form for an on-going, digressive tracking of ‘anything goes’, an additive non-method, but is a rollercoaster for the reader who must stay with it, understanding or not. This process is also reflected in Raworth’s famous ‘quick mind’ recitation style. However, Champion selects ‘West Wind’, the poem I think of as the last of this series, and a personal favourite, because it combines the perceptual and linguistic play of earlier work with a political commitment that derives (accidentally?) from having been written during the 1983 British election when Raworth’s mother was in hospital. It combines social observation recorded nowhere else (‘if I can’t take the dog in/ I won’t vote’), with savage political comment about Thatcher (‘handbag’). The Falklands War is brilliantly equated with poverty at home and ‘the state as/ the status/ quo’: 

 

puffs of unrelated news

restore

our former glory

which apparently

was a global servant class

too poor

to see the crown jewels

 

Yet these quotations from the flow do violence to the experience of the tickertape flicker of the poem’s progress, jumping and cutting, from these moments of political acuity to perceptually disturbing data, such as ‘fragments/ of black spider motion’ with which the poem ends. To Raworth’s question, ‘result of film?’ we must answer, ‘Yes.’

Another deliberate gap in the Champion selection is the extraordinary series of 211 fourteen line poems that Raworth wrote between about 1986 and the mid-1990s, but these are published collectively in XIVLiners for the first time. Beautifully designed, with one poem per page, we can savour each in isolation, in this pocket-book edition. If we are invited by the book’s title to think of them as sonnets, then the punning cover, Raworth’s own, showing 14 ocean liners, gently pushes away from that identification, with a joking raspberry of a foghorn. If they are sonnets, as I’ve said elsewhere, then they display a volta (the ‘turn’ that occurs asymmetrically at some point, usually after line 8 or 10 in the traditional sonnet frame) after every line. In contrast to the additive long poems, these lyrics are ‘juggled’, the constraint of the frame allowing for tight combinational play, but no less intuitive for that. Although Raworth always confounds identifications, many of the poems seem to be assembled from one source, by taking fragments from a text and putting back the often enigmatic fragments in a new order, to present a ‘glancing off’ meaning that was not present in the original, a kind of literary cubism. There is no typical poem but it is helpful to take an example:         

 

tear away whole sections

of what is good

bags of camel’s hair

a blue that carries further

the unlikeness of dusk and chaos

crossing a stream

where tributaries enter a river

you can’t wait for science

to drain that space of wet earth dry

the face seemed to lack contour

nothing is left but a vast expanse

deep grooves of habit

trodden into the soil

under a full moon crossed by a vulture

 

It doesn’t matter that the source is a geography book (and it might not help to identify it). What matters is that the syntactic indeterminacy of the piece, the difficulties we have making sense of it (we are hard-wired for that, and can’t just leave it alone), create a kind of unfinishable reading. Is line 2 connected to line 3, thus changing the meaning? What kind of ‘face’ is it? ‘Deep grooves of habit’ might be metaphorical rather than real but they are still ‘trodden into the soil’, in a location ‘under a full moon’ that promises nocturnal rest, but the ‘vulture’ in the last line seems ominous, despite the ordinary specificity of ‘camel’s hair’, ‘stream’, ‘tributaries’ and ‘river’. The semantic field traceable between these words even allows you to say what the poem is ‘about’, what matter they encircle. But none of the poems seems to close; indeed, they read differently on re-encounter. You can’t remember them, often.  This is what I mean by a ‘poetry of saying’: the poems inaugurate an eternality of utterance (one of their first printings was entitled ‘Eternal Sections’). This book could remain in and out of your pocket forever.

This vertiginous negative capability, best learnt with these fourteen liners, is necessary in encountering Raworth’s recent work, represented in the final pages of As When and in Structure from Motion, a title that suggests its poetics. The long poem ‘Got On’ which appears in both books, is a strikingly new departure, its stuttering lineation impeding reading and offering almost aggressive resistance: ‘fuck the friendly image’ it begins before collecting as much of what is glancing off as it can: names, fragments of speech, political analysis, and even the headline-like: ‘hearings reveal ineffable blood warmth’. (I admit to be still reading this text.) ‘Spear Shaking’, in contrast, is an egregious and technically-adroit example of Raworth’s one-off procedural works, using a technique that the Oulipo calls ‘The Chimera’, but which, in Raworth’s witty ways, is more like the ‘one song to the tune of another’ game on the Radio 4 anti-panel show ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’ (an analogy that is appropriate to the very English nature of Raworth’s humour). Richard III’s most famous speech (as re-diffused by Shakespeare) is populated with items from a keyword-list used by the US security services to track online chatter, but we can still discern the lilt of the original: ‘Now is the power outrage of our weapons cache/ Made toxic jihad by this breach of threat.’ This contemporary map of fears is an appropriate example to round off this review of over sixty years of intuitive and intelligent exploration of periphery vision, of showing where the action is, beyond ‘knowledge’.

 

Robert Sheppard

July 2015

ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

I am going to post eight reviews written a number of years ago and published in now difficult to come by volumes. This post will also form a hubpost to access the other seven when they are all posted.

 Here's the first anyway: 

Mimeo Mimeo 4, Winter 2010, eds. Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger. ISSN 2152-9841.

[This review was the shortest, I think. and was published as ‘Mimeo Memes’ (Mimeo Mimeo), Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 4 (1), March 2012.]

The fourth edition of Mimeo Mimeo – a magazine with an associated blog at 

www.mimeomimeo.blogspot.com [still there, 2026] 

 – celebrates the little magazines and small presses of the British Poetry Revival. Brief editorial matter puts this ‘movement’ in the past tense and one contributor, Ken Edwards, wonders at the temporal limits of this term. It was propagated (though not originated) by Eric Mottram, and he was quite clear: it ended in 1975. (What happened during the last twenty years of his life?) We are subjected to three of Mottram’s letters and one postcard to Jeff Nuttall from mid-period BPR (1966) which Mottram uses to record his experiences of American culture on an exchange year: he is exposed to everything from Sun Ra to youth culture (‘Dylan, Bob not Thomas’, he explains slyly, alluding to Nuttall’s respect for the poetic 1940s). He meets Rothenberg and Blackburn, and others. But his main ire is vented against Ambit magazine back home for its editorial meddling in the publication of Nuttall’s poems.

            Editorial independence is the raison d’etre of small presses, by contrast, and veteran publisher Ken Edwards offers a succinct overview of British poet-led activity such as Gael Turnbull’s Migrant or Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum, presses which took chances and generally didn’t meddle. The nostalgic whiff of browned paper and faint ink, the tear of rusty staples on the palms, is evoked by such bibliographic openheartedness (for those who were around), and the democratic device of the list presents publishers and poets on a level playing field for once. Edwards updates us into an era in which his own Reality Street has lost ‘Editions’ from its title but has gained Print On Demand and the internet (two major printing technologies not otherwise examined here).

            In a generous interview Tom Raworth skips around Outburst, Matrix, Goliard, Cape Goliard and other publishing enterprises he was involved with, reminding us that poets, in order to get publishing to happen, would have to learn to typeset, collect type, etc. The spirit of cooperation between poets and between publishers (often the same people of course) was essential: Piero Heliczer and Asa Benveniste are both mentioned in this respect, along with Raworth’s associate Barry Hall who carried on longer than Raworth running a small press (Goliard) in association with a larger one (Cape) until he could stand the compromise no longer. Hall walked out (literally) on the print room and never returned.

            In another interview, Trevor Winkfield is dragged through the past by the insistent Miles Champion (a discoverer of many a dark corner of our lost publishing legacies), from his early interest in Schwitters (he buys the Stefan Themerson book with pocket money although Gaberbocchus, Themerson’s press, is not commented on further), through to discovering Ashbery and Mathews in London and editing his own magazine Juillard. His off-hand account of giving copies away and his sense that a magazine has a limited life span – it’s over once you’ve published everybody who interests you, the magazine a personal anthology – is a sober reminder of the sheer non-commercial and eclectic nature of some editing.

            The third interview, with poet-publisher (and much more) David Meltzer, opens: ‘What do you want to know?’ It’s a good question. We pass through interesting territory, about listening to recordings of poetry (another story really, Dylan, not Bob, this time). There’s a pitch for Kenneth Patchen’s reputation. There’s one curious comment about small press publishing that sounds as though it ought to be true: ‘There’s always this inverse ratio between a really beautiful book and generally crappy poetry.’ Drop into the archive, as Richard Price does in his piece, and you’ll find that there are very few absolutes like this. Price worries over definitions (and therefore bibliographic exclusions) that he and David Miller devised for an authoritative survey of little magazines, concerning periodicity and the extent of commerciality. Encounter with its CIA funding makes an alarming case study. Despite these concerns there is much wisdom in the piece in reminding us that there is a real history of 1940s and 1960s poetry in magazine archives, and that magazines often achieve posthumous success (and fame) outweighing their contemporary failure. How many of us, while regularly acknowledging the importance of them, have seen a copy of Migrant or early copies of AND (Bob Cobbing’s magazine that managed 11 issues during his long life-time, and one or two posthumous ones, which again raises problems for the inventors of inventories and taxonomies)? Price also reminds us of how editing plays a strong role in subsequent careers, Raworth’s not least of all. Bill Griffiths, more than most, integrated writing and publishing, and Alan Halsey writes of the way some of Griffiths’ works transmogrify between ‘editions’. (I have two copies of his Spook Book with completely different contents!) This kind of playful processual necessity makes for a bibliographic nightmare which Halsey had to live through, co-editing the Reality Street Early Collected Poems, and his account here re-dresses the balance of the loss of the sheer physical trace of Griffiths on the original low-tech booklets and fascicles, in favour of uniform type, in that otherwise wonderful volume. [See below for more on Bill Griffiths.]

            Another poet-publisher who appears throughout several accounts is Asa Benveniste of Trigram Press. Indeed, the issue opens with his Kabbalistic poetics essay ‘Language: Enemy, Pursuit,’ (1980) which feels out of place until you realise that ‘the black fire on white Fire’ of letter-press printing is part of his poesis, as he faces the bareness of word, the metaphysics of type, watching all that language falling to pieces, then thrown back together as a page of a book. I returned to Benveniste’s excellent selected poems Throw Out the Life Line Lay Out the Corse (1983) and wondered whether the impaction of the sequence ‘Dense Lens’ derived not just from a reading of Zukofsky but from the experience of typesetting sections of A for Trigram.

            Mimeo Mimeo 4 traces not just a fashionable materiality but (something that could survive the e-book revolution) the extraordinary author-designer-publisher-printer relationship (even if conducted within one person), the means by which books (and occasionally the poems in them) come into being. This extended poesis of the physical medium ultimately leads outwards into communities of readers (elites and wide networks alike) and in doing so makes innovative contemporary poetries signal their very contemporaneity.

Robert Sheppard

I write about Bill Griffiths' self-publication(s) here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: small presses part two: Bill Griffiths The Book of the Boat and Collected Poems and Sequences

 

A Review of Peter Finch’s The Literary Business in Tears in the Fence AND the poetry of John Tripp.

Tears in the Fence 84 is out and I have a review of The Literary Business by Peter Finch (Parthian, 2025) in it. More of that in a moment. This issue is shot through with the elegiac: the lives of JH Prynne, Jeremy Hooker, and Ric Hool are remembered. A review of Frances Presley recalls her recalling (re-calling) of Gavin Selerie and Anthony Mellors. Another review of Frances' work is offered in memory of Tilla Brading. (As I type these names I realise I knew them all. See below.) But these are just first impressions. I see I've got a poem or two by Kelvin Corcoran to look forward, and Mark Goodwin's work jumps off the page... 

 

DETAILS HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/ (for a while)

 

SUBSCRIBE HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward/

Now to John Tripp.

In my review I comment: ‘I know I will return to the book for further reference.’ And I will again, but the first effect of the book, after I'd filed my copy, was to notice the poetry of John Tripp. As I say, responding to Finch’s chapter entitled ‘John Tripp’: ‘John Tripp helped Finch’s early publishing, and with that arduous reviewing [in the editing of Second Aeon]. He otherwise exhibited “excess, diatribe, antisocial drink-driven outrage, minor larceny, insulting conduct”, but was a fine poet (making the final Penguin Modern Poets even though ‘his work is now fading fast into the dust of the last century’). Finch matches his account with two fine memorial poems of his own for “JT”.’ This sent me hunting, not for the man himself (a picture of him in a sombrero accompanies the chapter, and he bears a considerable resemblance to comedian Roy Hudd, even in the photograph below!) but for the poems.

I bought his Selected Poems published by Seren in 1989, three years after his death. I wasn’t disappointed. The mood is often grim, the Wales he commemorates is a rainy land that imperialism has scraped the veneer from, though time and again he recreates events of Welsh history in imagistic form, and not Welsh history only: ‘young men skewered and skulls smashed-in by butts./It is Flint, Culloden, Connemara.’ The tone is elegiac (that word again), bitter, but never hopeless (unless he’s talking about himself, but that’s self-dramatising). Despite the ubiquitous rain (‘There is downpour, always,/ as the carriages inch into Newport’ the first poem opens!) the familial home offers: ‘In summer a shock orange sunball/ shatters the trellis.’  

‘The Lost Girls’ is a meditation upon ‘maids and skivvies’ abused by their employers; he presents one: ‘the thrust of an empire behind him,/ the confidence of rich stags’. I particularly liked the final contribution, ‘Living Under Thatcher’, a sequence of 10 poems: ‘The old man asks for free burnt crackling/ off the cold pork, and is refused.’ That seems the apposite image for the era. There’s more to say about Tripp (the poems about David Jones, about Turner, about other writers, about the Second World War) but I’ll leave it for now. And recommend others to discover (or re-discover) his work.    

 

My previous review for Tears (and poems) are referred to here:  https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/02/one-review-and-two-poems-in-tears-in.html

(I have been a long-time contributor to the magazine, as a creative writer, but have recently taken to writing reviews, which I enjoy, and which I regard as pretty important to the life of the poetry scene, as I say here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2025/02/my-tears-review-of-philip-terrys-dantes.html 

I appear in the book for Ric Hool, mentioned here; there is also a video of one of his last songs: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2026/01/tributes-to-ric-hool-included-in.html

I remember Gavin Selerie here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/08/remembering-gavin-selerie-and-his-laugh.htm

 

 

 

Launch of Holme Fell (and three other volumes) Bluecoat 8 July 2026 (set list)

You may know that my new poetry book, Holme Fell: a sample of landscapes, a collaboration with the photographer Trev Eales, is now published. (There are lots of posts here.) This hardback volume consists of many colour photographs and texts, beautifully presented to enhance the double reading and viewing experience. The images and texts exist in a loose symbiosis, with parallel truths and connecting paths between them. As I said last night: 'The poems are responses to the photographs rather than to the landscape itself. Landscapes have boundaries; photographs have borders.' 

Ian McMillan on Bluesky: ‘So good to experience this meeting of poetry and photography by@robertsheppard.bsky.social and Trev Eales from the always exciting Knives Forks and Spoons Press. “A crackle of purple twiglets/against ice-blue mountains, blue clouds:”’

 

Details here:

Holme Fell : Robert Sheppard (author), : 9781916590243 : Blackwell's

I’ve found that everyone who has seen the book is deeply impressed. I’ve tried to convey its physicality in the video on this blogpost:

 Pages: TREV EALES AND ROBERT SHEPPARD: HOLME FELL: a sample of landscapes PUBLISHED NOW!

Wed 8 Jul, 7-8.30pm: Trev (showing the images) and me (reading) took part in an evening of live poetry with James Byrne, Jesse Hill, and Chris McCabe. Supported by Liverpool Poetry Space, this event brought together four distinctive voices, each presenting live readings of new and recent work in an intimate setting. Books were for sale! I now have each of the auhtors' books. 

About the readers and books

James Byrne launches his new collection The Banality of Power, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, published by Broken Sleep Books.

Jesse Hill is a transdisciplinary researcher and poet, creating ecologically-rooted projects shaped by seasonal cycles and our queer relationship with the breathing world. They teach Creative Writing at Edge Hill University whilst working on their PhD. A new book is out from Broken Sleep Books, Seedwork (On Breaking Open).

Chris McCabe‘s work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. He’s the author of six poetry collections - the latest in Hedonism from Nine Arches Press, described by The Guardian as showing ‘the full muscle and gristle of lived language.

Trev Eales & Robert Sheppard

It was a great evening, and I've little energy to describe: how Trev and I showed the images and text; how Jesse read from her new Broken Sleep book Seedwork (On Breaking Open), a calendar of the year, relating to self-discovery concerning ecology and sexuality and the connections between; how Chris read from Hedonism poems about Europe, plus some new poems about Europe, and his and our relation to it; how James effortlessly read quite grim material regarding corporate and societal evil as an organised inhuman and inhumane nexus...

I usually include a set-list, but this one is simply the numbers of the poems I read from the book. If you have the book it might make some sense: 

Holme Fell 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18, Hodge Close 2, 3, 4, Holme Fell 27, 28.

We all sold books. This Liverpool Poetry Space is a damned good idea. I was there at the preliminary stages.   

June 1976 Memories of Empson, Spender, Gascoyne and Rickword at the University of East Anglia

It is June 1976. The famously hot summer had yet to peak in all its scorching glory, and the university year was drawing to a close. (The suntan I acquired, Norman Talbot’s shorts and a memory of Judy Gascoyne trying to cool herself in the lecture theatre, testify to the rising heat). I was at the end of my second year at the University of East Anglia, and I had been a student on Eric Homberger’s contemporary poetry course. We studied Larkin, Hughes, Hill, Kinsella, and others I cannot recall. I wrote an essay comparing Peter Redgrove, whose work I was keen on, and whose Sons of My Skin I had already reviewed in Poetry Information 14 the previous year, favourably to ‘the savage Mr Ted Hughes’, as Christopher Middleton calls him. I also gave a class paper on Philip Larkin that Dr. Homberger liked, and he’d even offered to let me read his work in progress, which became the very engaging work on poetry from the 1940s to the 1970s, The Art of the Real, which was published in 1977. (I was too embarrassed to take up the offer. I've just re-read the book, particularly as I noticed it begins with an account of Louis MacNeice, whose work I have just been re-reading! His account of Hughes is devastating.)

The Henfield Writing Fellow that year was David Plante. I got to know him a little bit, attended a couple of his workshops and was much taken by his fiction writing. Plante was also a friend of Stephen Spender (as related in his book of diaries, A London Life). I think it was Plante who organised this mini-conference on the Poets of the 1930s. Homberger’s seminar group was invited. I attended, and I wrote the following account, valuable because this event doesn’t appear in the Plante diaries, or in the second volume of John Haffenden’s monumental biography of William Empson, or in Spender’s published diaries. I suspect it’s not in the biography of David Gascoyne either, but I haven’t checked that yet. 

I attended the reception and watched the video interviews that occurred the following day, relayed to a lecture theatre, as I hint here. I’ve no idea where the interviews are now. I know that the one with George Oppen, which I transcribed here, had disappeared by the time John Seed went searching for it decades ago. Comments in [square] brackets are twenty-first century interpolations.

 

Sunday 27th June 1976: The Reception

Last night we [Trev Eales and I] got pissed [no change there then, in 50 years] and saw George Melly, who was very entertaining, if that’s not an insult. Nice to hear old jazz songs, including that [obscene] one I used to sing around school about six years ago....

This evening I went to a reception for the 1930s poets. When I arrived in the Senior Common Room, I found a group of faculty huddled up in a corner and felt suddenly very embarrassed. Norman Talbot [visiting Australian poet] – attired in bohemian Australian shorts, came and chatted for a while as the room filled up. Helen McNeil appeared out of nowhere and introduced me as a ‘student and poet’ (which I was rather chuffed by) to David Gascoyne and Stephen Spender, the poems of whom I’ve been reading today whilst accumulating a bright RED suntan. Eventually I got cornered by Spender, Dr. Homberger and two German students (and later, the only other guy from the seminar group to turn up [Sandy?]). More or less we listened to the bard talking about teaching students in Florida who were ‘functionally illiterate’ and a play on Hitler he was writing. He got going about Germany in 1932 and Christopher Isherwood and the response to political murder in a liberal society. Masses of faculty had arrived, including the Vice Chancellor and Edgell Rickword who was a geriatric [the young can be so unkind], and William Empson who had no Mandarin beard but had the wind, and was wandering about like a halfwit all over the place. The guy from the seminar group and I really wanted to talk to Gascoyne, but the poets and hosts went off for a meal, and we went down to the bar to talk about contemporary poetry, Jeff Nuttall, Paul Brown, Redgrove, Hughes, Bob Cobbing. 

Tuesday 29th June 1976

 

The Interviews

 Yesterday – apart from a brief visit to see Vic [Sage] I spent the afternoon watching the half hour videotape interviews [relayed to a lecture theatre].

One. William Epsom interviewed by Helen McNeil and Vic and Lorna Sage. Apparently Empson was annoyed about being filmed, was extremely rude and demanded more money. [I think I remember Vic saying he was also annoyed at not talking directly to students.] Mostly he was asked about his critical works; he was asked about Milton and propaganda, but he had forgotten what he said in Milton’s God. He was asked about his poetry, about his notes. Yes, he thought they were obscure and needed explaining. He saw nothing wrong at all in this, and wished other poets would do the same; an insistence upon Meaning, always.

Two. Stephen Spender interviewed by Dr Eric Homberger, Malcolm Bradbury, and Stephen Spender's friend David Plante. He spoke of the 1930s more coherently than the others, as he had done to us the previous evening. He has a very strong sense – he's a diarist and autobiographer – of what happened during that decade but he – more than anybody else – dislikes the idea of being a 1930s generation writer, but is insistent of the fact that he has been writing since. He also appears to be a totally unselfconscious person. [MacNeice and Plante report the complete opposite.] He kept saying that he didn’t think about what he did, from planning the interview or leading an open homosexual life in the 1930s with a soldier. Perhaps he doesn’t think... enough!

3 Edgell Rickword – he’s the man I’ve never heard of. He’s not a complete geriatric but he's blind, which makes things difficult for him. Interviewed by Bradbury and Homberger. It appears he wrote a lot in the 1920s, one poem in 1938, ‘To the Wife of a Non-Interventionist’. He appears mainly to have been an astute critic and publisher. He couldn’t be drawn out into answering the questions. His mind was slow. Possibly apprehensive. Bradbury quoted a long passage about Eliot’s technique and physiology of sensation, for his comment, which he half did. I’m not sure he understood what he had written all those years ago. [He was one of Eliot’s first appreciative critics.] I was reminded of something in one of Pound’s last cantos, ‘a brown husk that is blown across the marshes…’ etc. Sad.

4 David Gascoyne. I’d been watching the [preceding] interviews with Mrs Gascoyne, but [at this point] she went off with him to the studios. If I remember correctly David Gascoyne has been in mental institutions but I think that his wife holds him together. In fact, most of the wives do. A lecturer from Fine Arts and Music and Helen McNeil asked him yes/no questions for ages and then it stopped. He got chatty about Benjamin Peret towards the end. He had his first volume of poems published when he was 16, a novel at 17, and imported surrealism singlehandedly when he was only 19. An impressive achievement, though surrealism proves limited, and he was excommunicated like Eluard for joining the Communist Party.

 

The Reading

Later on, the reading – chairpersoned by Anthony Thwaite – began with William Epsom removing his teeth and reading ‘Just a Smack at Auden’, a villanelle, and another poem. He was very witty about his own obscurity and about the poems, about how Auden liked ‘Just a Smack…’.

David Gascoyne read next, a number of surrealist things, one for Yves Tanguy, parts of ‘Holderlin’s Madness’ and a poem from the 1930s, ‘New Year’s Day 1940’, which was appropriate. Despite being asked to read his later work he read nothing from ‘Night Thoughts’.

William Empson then read three pieces by Edgell Rickword, praising them and describing one as slight(!), always concerned for the meaning of the poetry, and saying how he felt dissatisfied with the meaning implied from other readings of his own work. Thwaite then read the 1938 poem [‘To the Wife…’] which I appreciated and could hear better after Empson’s mumble. Rarely am I moved by political poems, but I was by this. Though it was hardly great poetry. [My view at the time, of course.]

Finally Spender read poems, including ‘The Pylon’, but also a recent poem about the 1930s. Each poet was applauded loudly and for quite some time.

Then they were all lined up for … questions, one from Brian [now the comedian Arthur] Smith, and two from X, who said something silly about ‘Did you consider yourself mad revolutionaries? And nobody’s got rickets and we've got the NHS and, well. if you look now at Spain...’ etc, etc, etc. I was muttering ‘Bloody Fascist!’ but everybody was laughing. Spender said something about sometimes they were mad and sometimes they were revolutionaries, and Thwaite said, ‘You sound like a man from the 1950s’ which I roared at. An applause and then it was finished. I’m glad Edgell Rickword spoke at question time because he was beginning to look like a stuffed dummy on display like an old Victorian dinner jacket.

 

1976

[Notes: I make use of David Plante’s diary in one of my posts upon the British Poetry Revival, here: Pages: British Poetry Revival/New British Poetry: David Plante on Nikos Stangos' editing

 And I have other (later) memories of studying at UEA here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Some memories of the Creative Writing MA (cohort 1978-1979) at the University of East Anglia

And there is even more on June 1976 at UEA, and a recovered and revised early poem of mine, and memories of my friend Colin Scott from those days: Pages: A Positive Virtue: memories of Colin Scott, a friend from UEA days rediscovered.]

New poem in THE LONG POEM MAGAZINE (and in LITTER); and a blogpost on process

I am pleased to say that I have made another appearance in the excellent The Long Poem Magazine, a periodical I enjoy reading very much. It is interesting to see writers (of quite different kinds) who do something so unpopular as writing poems committing acts that create something even less popular: writing long poems.

 This time it is the first half of a poem called ‘The Palisaded Ditch’ and it is a sort of ‘history of the world in numerous maps’, as I put it. To the readers of the magazine I explained it thus, in the prose introductions that contributors are compelled to write: ‘It is the much-edited result of a process of daily “writing-through” of a deluxe book of the history of maps. I normally name my “sources”, but in this case, my common practice of squinting, misreading, and distorting the material renders this unnecessary. I didn’t know it would result in a poem… But something of the same level tone was maintained throughout these daily engagements and they appeared to accumulate… Reading the poem today it feels uncannily appropriate for a world of “strong men” carving up “spheres of influence”: in particular, the despotic slavering over the map of Greenland.’

The Long Poem Magazine may be read about here: ISSUE 35 – Long Poem Magazine. And purchased here: Shop and subscribe | Long Poem Magazine. 

As I said, this is about half of the poem. Its second half may be read here on Litter magazine:  Robert Sheppard - Poem | Litter. 

Thanks to the editors of the two magazines!

That’ll get you from

 

‘That stretch of wavy grey [which]

is the river,’

 

through to

 

‘Tributaries claw[ing] their ways toward the

greenish patches,’

 

with which it ends.

I ALSO write about the processes I used to write both 'The Palisaded Ditch' and my previous poem in Long Poem Magazine, 'The Area', here: Robert Sheppard: Ark and Archive: description of a process | Long Poem Magazine

I write about that previous appearance in The Long Poem Magazine with my sequence called ‘The Area’ here: Pages: My poem THE AREA is published in The Long Poem Magazine number 30 (background and links), which put me in happy communication with the photographer Tricia Porter.

 

TREV EALES AND ROBERT SHEPPARD: HOLME FELL: a sample of landscapes PUBLISHED NOW!

I’m pleased to say my new book is available. Holme Fell: a sample of landscapes, a collaboration with the photographer Trev Eales, is the most sumptuous and well-designed book of which I have been a part. Hats off to Alec Newman of Knives Forks and Spoons Press for his design and publishing skills. And to Trev for his photographs, of course. It consists of many colour photographs and texts, beautifully presented to enhance the double reading and viewing experience. The images and texts exist in a loose symbiosis, with parallel truths and connecting paths between them.  

Ian McMillan on Bluesky praised the book: ‘So good to experience this meeting of poetry and photography by @robertsheppard.bsky.social and Trev Eales from the always exciting Knives Forks and Spoons Press. “A crackle of purple twiglets/against ice-blue mountains, blue clouds:”’

Sean Street on Bluesky wrote:' This sumptuous book of poems and photographs by @robertsheppard.bsky.social & Trev Eales has many strata & is a beautiful, rich, moving testament to the marks human life makes on landscape.'

I’ve found that everyone who has seen the book is deeply impressed, and I’ve sold a number already, particularly on the basis of the full-page colour photographs, and the ‘feel’ of the book in their hands. It’s not quite a coffee-table book so you won’t have to buy a coffee-table to go under it, but it ‘looks superb’. Details here: 

Holme Fell: A Sample of Landscapes: Amazon.co.uk: Sheppard, Robert, Eales, Trev: 9781916590243: Books

(Knives Forks and Spoons sell through Amazon, amongst others, but you can order any KFS book through your local bookseller.) Waterstones:

Holme Fell by Robert Sheppard, Trev Eales | Waterstones

NOTE: The book is retailing for £25. Do not pay more (Amazon as of today has a weirdly inflated price that the publisher is trying to alter!!!!!! 08/06/2026)

Blackwell's has it right too: Holme Fell : Robert Sheppard (author), : 9781916590243 : Blackwell's

Let’s a say a little more about the book as a whole. Holme Fell is a ‘sample of landscapes’ in two senses. Firstly, as a series of photographs of Holme Fell, with a focus on Hodge Close, the old slate quarry, at its centre. The images present the sublimity of the landscape in spectacular weather, but remind us that beauty and post-industrial sites are not mutually exclusive. Secondly, as a sequence of poetry and prose that reacts to the photographs themselves, and through which are also woven some historical accounts of quarrying along with the prose narrative of a contemporary architect escaping her responsibilities but questioning the nature of things as she encounters them. ‘Hodge Close’ poems operate as an inner section of ‘Holme Fell’, landscape within a landscape, a poem within the poem.

You know who I am, but who is Trev Eales? He lives in south Cumbria, and location has long fed his passion for landscape photography. During autumn and winter, if the weather is ‘interesting’, he is often found wandering the Lakeland fells hoping that the changing light and colours will present a photographic opportunity.  He is also a music photographer (and reviewer) who has shot for various festivals and other events, largely in the summer. I have known Trev for over half a century: we were students together at university in Norwich.

I have been posting on this blog some of the images and texts, though they don’t give an impression of the integrated book design. However, I do read some of the poems on video, and one of the posts contains an account of a journey to Holme Fell that is not in the book itself. They begin here: Pages: Trev Eales and Robert Sheppard HOLME FELL: a Sample of Landscapes Number One, with links to the rest, six in all. 

 Here's a parting image that stretches across a folio in the book, as seen in the video!