I am
pleased to say that an excerpt from my prose processual poetics-critical piece,
Pulse: All a Rhythm, has been published in Tentacular 5 (more
about this issue and the magazine below).
Pulse is a ‘treatise on metre’
which was produced by a strange method. The first draft of this piece
was made by ‘writing-through’ Tiger C. Roholt’s Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. New York and London:
Bloomsbury, 2014, between August 2016-February 2017. Throughout this process, contingency
is its rhythm, a pulse that matches the varieties of montage, de-montage, that
I attempt in my own practice, with interruption as structure, with
transformation and transposition, formal resistance, creative linkage,
‘imperfect fit’, near-perfect fit, all kinds of multi-form unfinish. Later
drafts were subject to the usual processes of revision and editing, in the light
of that poetics.
Its
subject? Rhythm. Not metre – rhythm: pulse, surge, the ‘sound-mind’, which
becomes ‘rhythmizing consciousness’ as chance throws theoretical materials my way to sharpen my vocabulary. It is an
extension of the critical work (though it is not itself a critical work) in my The
Meaning of Form. (See here for that tome: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html
) It’s also about cognition.
The whole
of Pulse is due for publication as a booklet from Like This Press.
Issue 5,
Spring 2020, is edited by Jonathan Catherall with guest editors Flo Sunnen and
Dylan Williams - spring 2020. See here. www.tentacularmag.com – and my thanks got to all
three! And congratulations on the issue.
which is
contained in one of the interesting ‘extras’ on this well-thought-out online
magazine, the ‘Elsewhere’ blog feature, though that word does a disservice to
the quality of the pieces here. (Find that Robert Hampson piece on the British
Poetry Revival.) See: https://www.tentacularmag.com/elsewhere/
And an
excerpt from Charms and Glitter,my poetry-photo collaboration
with Trev Eales (which is due for publication by Knives, Forks and Spoons
within days) may be read and seen, here:
You
need to have read at least my previous post (here) and the link to my review of
SJ Fowler and 54 others: Nemeses: Selected
Collaborations of SJ Fowler, 2014-2019. HTVN Press, 2019 (here) before you
read this. Better still, is to follow all posts in
this ‘Collaboration’ strand; they may be accessed via links on the first post,
a hubpost, as I call it, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html
Nemeses
carries
two prose ‘explanations’, the first short and introductory, the second more
reflective. The first is entitled ‘A Note on How the Collaborations have been
revealed’. Unlike me, Fowler’s not wasting time interrogating the word
‘collaboration’. Which is just as well, given the range of activities
that he has undertaken under its umbrella. Indeed, that is his major concern
here, his worries about trying to stage on the page, not just texts, but the
performances they were often written for, or out of. Remember, some of the
texts are post-performance notes. This worries Fowler: he is content to offer
‘a new work, at the very least an iteration or spawn of the collaboration that
inspired it’, which offers a performative and an organic metaphor for the ‘new
work’. (His use of the word ‘inspired’ is a surprising choice, perhaps
shorthand, but it causes problems later.) But he is worried that some might be
not inspired at all; he hopes they are ‘not a shadow of that, not a dead
trace’. He admits to having to omit certain live performances that won’t fit in
the book. My review proves that he has produced spawns not shadows. (If you are
going to mix metaphors, mince them.) On the other hand, he is clear his book is probably unique,
with its cross-art explorations. But poetry is the starting point, he insists.
In a parenthesis, he defines poetry (or the ‘language arts’) as ‘something language
referent used for a primary purpose other than information or literal
communication’ (a distant, clumsy relative of Wittgenstein’s comment in Zettel
that a poem, while it uses the language of information, is ‘not used in the
language-game of giving information’, a fragment which so energised Veronica
Forrest-Thomson). But, more germane to my current theme, he talks of poetry, in
these works ‘emerging with film, music, sculpture,’ etc. A formulation
that might be contrasted with a sense of collaboration as ‘merging’. Emerging
not merging. (p. 9) Co-emergence. He
offers one definition: ‘… collaboration is a way of learning, and a way of
being a writer’. (p. 10) Learning, for the collaborators, could be positive or
negative in terms of results (though all learning is arguably positive,
whatever the results). As a way of being a writer, it’s a novel and learningful
way of being so, guiding the emerging without merging. The
essay at the end of the book is entitled ‘A Nemetic Poetics, or Being Happy
Alone in Company’, which, in its very name, pitches challenge (Nemesis) against the creative joy of collaboration, which is necessarily
communal (although Fowler himself still clearly feels solitude in that
situation). This piece divides between the personal (what collaboration does
for Fowler) and the textual (the nature of what is produced via the modes of
collaboration employed). However,
he rejects the argument that writing is a particularly lonely activity.
It is a cliché of the profession. (But, writing as I am at home, with Patricia
downstairs drawing, and Stephen in the next room, drinking his way through the
morning, I’m not lonely at all. I would hate one of those Yaddo-type
weeks in solitude writing, but neither am I a café writer.) ‘Everything
that requires concentration is lonely,’ states Fowler, and I think I agree.
(279) But ‘The usual monoculture of poetry is a stereotype responsible for quite
a good deal of bad poetry,’ by which I take him to mean that the still-prevalent
idea of the solitary genius leads to a particular kind of self-based poetry, or
model of poetry: ‘ “popular” poetry is now resting upon a strong biographical
context…’ (279). Poetry is quicker to write than a novel (Discuss!) but that’s
not the main point. ‘Poetry is lonely because of the very specific 21st
century milieu. Poetry is out of these times… It is a thing without market
force, which allows it to create weird contextual manipulations of what quality
is’ and requires concentration (from readers and writers). (279) This is
perhaps a recasting of traditional arguments about the autonomy of the art
object, the kind of thing that you find in Adorno and Marcuse (see here for
some of that aestheticshttps://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html And
here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/05/robert-sheppard-further-notes-on.html ):
it is beyond the clutch of capitalism in its unusual self-definitions of
quality. This is sometimes thought of as the source of the critical function of
a poem (in this case). But Fowler doesn’t follow this argument. Instead, he
argues that ‘we are in an era when everybody’s brain is morphed by rapidity’.
(279). He doesn’t bemoan this. ‘This is not necessarily a bad thing,’ (it’s
just the way we are in our post-postmodernity, one might say, though Fowler, wisely,
avoids this term; see here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/05/robert-sheppard-supplanting-postmodern.html ).
‘But it is bad for good poetry,’ presumably because the morphed brains of poets
are trying to work in a no-longer-sustainable solitary concentration on
something with weird qualities. Fowler doesn’t recommend slowing down, on an
analogy with slow food, for example. ‘The world has changed and the poem can only
change so much.’ (280) There’s a minimal catch up possible on the poem’s part. I
don’t think Fowler is arguing for a golden era when age and poem worked in
harmony. Indeed, that myth of such a golden age is found throughout the history
of literature. I’ve been tracking the Renaissance and now the Romantics, in my
‘English Strain’ project, and the sense of poetry’s alienation from one’s age
is felt throughout, is almost a cliché. ‘The world is too much with us,’
complains Wordsworth. Poetry’s critical distance (perhaps its formal distance;
see here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/robert-sheppard-formal-splinter.html) could be regarded
as its strength, its critical function, but that isn’t a common thought, and it
isn’t one entertained by Fowler. In short, whatever you do as a poet,
‘no one can care’. (280) That’s not a Sinatra-like chorus of ‘No One Cares’. No
one can care – because of (let’s use Fowler’s word as shorthand)
societal ‘rapidity’. Fowler surmises that this is OK, and could even be how we
measure success: there’s no one here! But it’s lonely and, although academia
might support one (does it?), on one hand you’re ‘unable to swallow the
anti-intellectual and sentimental thrust that dominates’, but you’re ‘stuffed’.
‘What can one reasonably expect? To write difficult, strange, hermetic, coded,
weird books and expect them to appeal to readers?’ (280) It’s just ‘funny’ to
say so, Fowler concludes. (280) It is. What
do I expect? Gentle reader, digression alert! I am still genuinely surprised
that anybody is interested in my work. Which is not to say, on occasions, I
don’t wonder why this or that poem isn’t more read or talked about. I suppose I
am different from the younger poets one hears about, who won’t do a reading for
less than £300, or who Tweet about their one day being gracious to younger
writers when they are venerable, as though fame and position were now
permanently assured for them (remember Nicholas Moore, George Barker, even Alex
Comfort. I can hear voices asking: who?)… I never thought there would be
a general audience, certainly no money. I grew up in the aftermath of the British
Poetry Revival’s early days. I prepared for penury and obscurity on the basis
of poets I met (Bob Cobbing, Lee Harwood, Paul Brown): I never learnt to drive;
I eventually sought out an occupation to support me (English and Communications
teaching in FE; the HE Creative Writing came later, after a different revolution,
which has been successful in dragging some writing back from scripts of
self-disclosure (pat on the back). Steven Fowler now teaches in HE, accomplishing the same.). I suppose
I am a bit surprised to find some of the revered figures of the ‘underground’
still under the ground (despite a number of us undertaking scholarly work). But
part of post-postmodern rapidity has destroyed the concentration necessary for
the historical spade-work required (though the recovery of women writers over
that last 35 years shows it’s possible). I think I
genuinely believe that literary works can have efficacy (at the level of form)
that is truly liberational. To take my recent ‘Poems of National Independence’,
I take it that the satire about Brexit is on the surface, but the real
aesthetic work, the lastingly moving part of the experience, lies in the
act-event of the reception of the formal distance between Wordsworth’s
original ‘Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!’ and my ‘Flat-Battery Bo, rusticated man’s man!’ That’s
where I locate the active, eventful innovation. (See here for more on that latest creative work: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/02/real-beginning-of-new-series-of.htmlBut more on my poetics and literary theory,
for it is both:Here'. While I’m at it, here’s another meditation on the poetics of form: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-if-form-knows-if-forms.html
Finding
poetry by a circuitous route (Steven has told me about this) Fowler asks the
unusual questions. One of them, ‘Why don’t poets do collaborations?’ he has
answered, in some ways, by organising Enemies. In other ways (as I say in my
review of the book) he leaves concealed (mercifully, in some ways) all the
collaborators’ separate poetics of collaboration. But we do get his. He notes, rather oddly:
‘I have proofed my concept with others, forming
transitory but generous communities which have supported the making of
challenging and complex work, live, and
it has taken me on an extraordinary personal journey.’ ‘Challenging and
complex’ tells us that this collaborative work conforms to the definitions of
poetry he offers above. He admits, also, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that the whole
endeavour is ‘selfish’: ‘I have somehow mitigated defeat in my other works by
constantly working with others … collaborating has left me smug’! (I couldn't resist that photo above!) Working
with others mitigates defeat. I wonder if that only applies to working with
writers he regards as ‘better’ than himself? Not necessarily: there is the
proofing of its concept with others that is the ‘thing’. This is a different
notion from whether they are ‘friends’, these ‘enemies’, these ‘nemeses’; he
notes he has a variety of everyday relationships with his collaborators. Again,
isn’t this just because writing is so often not considered collaboratively?
Think of any combinations of musicians in any field, and collaboration is non-controversial. Not necessarily easy, but normal, matter-of-fact, everyday... Before Fowler moves
onto a more introductory focus (introducing types of collaboration in the book)
he again repeats his definition of (innovative) poetry above, and has a final
word on collaboration, which oddly reverts to the more conventional statements
that one can make about it, whilst still acknowledging the ‘selfish’ edge to
proceedings: ‘Collaborations are a means of friendship,
yes, and they are an innately social act of writing’, particularly ‘live’, one
might usefully add, ‘one that replaces the unknowable inspiration of the solo
piece with the equally vital and viable suggestion or genesis of another active presence
in the world.’ I shall come
back to these formulations. ‘But they are really just about ourselves. Collaborations
are really just mirrors rather than procreations.’ (283) This is a little odd.
Is ‘inspiration’ (not a word I use as either appropriate to solo or collaborative
writing) only relative to solo production? It would appear so. It is not less
‘vital and viable’ than collaboration – nor more so – but collaboration is a
mirror, a reflection, of ourselves, in this formulation. Are solo
‘procreations’ inspired creations, equal but different? Fowler assigns equal
vitality to the two modes of literary production but the metaphors seem to
favour the solo mode. I suspect some
confusion here (and it might be mine!). ‘Inspiration’ is the problem. His dismissive conclusion, ‘I mix
my metaphors to not mention wanking and poetry in the same sentence,’ seems to
deflect from this minor aporia, but I can’t say I know what that means,
precisely, either. Solo ‘procreations’ I suppose? I don’t think I
recognise this model in the collaborations I’ve undertaken. To me, the main
thing has been (this is another cliché) to produce something I could not have
produced by other means, and with the ‘vital and viable suggestion or
genesis of another active presence in the world’. It’s something that feels like
growth. It’s something akin to the mental enlargement that one experiences in
active reading: and that may be because ‘reading’ (co-reading) is precisely a
necessary part of the process, possibly the essential part of the process. Like listening in free
improvised music. Deep listening. (This is an important consideration.) To be contunued! All posts in this ‘Collaboration’ strand may
be accessed via links on the first post, a hubpost, as I call it, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html
All
posts in this ‘Collaboration’ strand may be accessed via links on the first
post, a hubpost, as I call it, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html If
you jump back to ‘Thoughts on Collaboration’ 5 and 6 you may read about The
Enemies Project, curated by SJ Fowler. Part 5, about 'Enemies' and my part in
them (with videos), may be accessed here. Part
six is a round up of my own literary collaborations in Twitters for a Lark:
poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (the EUOIA), which formed
parts of a number of ‘Enemies’ gigs; see here. Here is an example of
a collaboration between Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler. It is an hiliariously funny
guide to life after Brexit. Perhaps you’ve already seen it. It’s less part of
my ‘Thoughts on Collaboration’, and more of an interlude between parts 5 and 6.
I witnessed this performance, April, 2019, but it is unfortunately not
documented in Nemeses. ‘Next slide please Harry!’
Steven
Fowler comments on my earlier posts about collaboration here:
More
recently, I have written a review of SJ Fowler and 54
others: Nemeses: Selected Collaborations of SJ Fowler, 2014-2019. HTVN
Press, 2019. Please read that review before moving on to what I have witten below. Thanks
to Rupert Loydell at Stride for publishing it.
It was, as you will
have just read, not an easy book to review, and I really couldn’t do justice to
the richness of the contents, though I had a good go! In terms of the longer
piece I am writing on collaboration, I think it will be useful to look at other
collaborations than the ones I focus on in the review. After all, I am very clear
that I want to focus upon ‘literary collaboration’ rather than collaboration
across media, not because I am committed only to that, which I hope is clear
from the range of my own creative collaborations, but because an 8,000 word
essay can only hope to examine three collaborations at most.
Another ‘problem’ –
it’s not a problem, of course, but a delight! – is that Steven Fowler
collaborates with many European writers. Indeed, it looks as though the
European Poetry Festivals he has organised for the last few years are taking
over from the more UK-focussed ‘Enemies’, while using a similar format. (See
here for the latest: https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/ It's been postponed by the you-know-what until an optimistic October.)
The streak of
internationalism in all of Fowler’s work has intensified since Brexit. (Our
collaboration in Twitters for a Lark was to invent a Swedish poet: he
now consorts with real ones!) But the book I am writing the essay for is
clearly going to be a survey of British poetry, so I will have to limit
my approach (a bit).
What I want to do in
the next post in this strand is to examine the poetics of collaboration at play,
which I outline but I don’t examine in my review. Indeed, I say: ‘I want to
leave the poetics to one side and plunge into two sample offerings.’ Now, I
want to return to those poetics. One paragraph I wrote I thought was
potentially useful in my critical examination:
In reading literary collaboration on the page,
the reader often has recourse to a peculiar binary refocusing that feels like a
lack of focus. That’s because the flow of the writing is continually
interrupted by itself, by the switch between writers. (Imagine two drivers
switching at the wheel of a truck, without stopping.) In some cases, where the
dialogue is not visible, you stop trying to guess who wrote what. This, I believe,
is a sign of success. It hasn’t achieved a third voice (a term which is based
on identity of writers not on the identity of writing), but it could be said to
leave a linguistic trail coherent enough to regard as a single discourse.
I’m
sure some version of this paragraph, in its way, a bit of a summary of much
that I have said (in these 12000 words so far!), will appear in my piece. One
problem, though: I can’t find any origin for the idea about collaboration
producing a ‘third voice’. I know Laura Tansey used it at the Edge Hill
conference I write about in Thoughts 7, but I don’t recall, neither do my notes
indicate, a source.
All
posts in this ‘Collaboration’ strand, including those posted after this one was posted, may be accessed via links on the hubpost here:
My ‘English Strain’ project has sped on, given the rapidity
of production in the last few weeks. Poem one was written in the very different
world of the first week of February; this last poem is being written on the
last day of March. There are two posts about the background to the project: one
that looks back at Book One, The English Strainhereand another at Book Two,
Bad Idea here.
The
manuscripts of both books are ready for publication. Both submitted.
The third
book is entitled British Standards. Its preface
is a version of Shelley’s ‘England in 1819’ (obviously retitled ‘England in
2019’), written in October of that year, whereas the body of the book was begun
in 2020, after Independence Day.
For the first section, I have used poems from a part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’,
retitled ‘Poems of National Independence’, and subtitled ‘liberties with
Wordsworth’, which is what I have taken. I’ve selected ones written 1802-3, around the Peace of Amiens, when he returned to France, briefly. Each
carries the first line as a 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 in the last three months or so.
This blog post from Jonathan Bate, who is about to publish a Wordsworth
biography (which I have on order, but it’s going to be a little late for this initial
writing of my project, I know) is illuminating about the early vs. the late
poems. This is relevant, since the poems I have used are late revisions
of early poems. That’s a further twist, about which much has been
written, I know: which is why one poem We had a female Passenger who came from Calais deals with the
finding of two versions of the poem I’d selected:
In your fidgety revisions, she’s ‘a fellow-passenger…
from Calais’ (tracking today’s trafficking route);
‘gaudy in array’ you wrote, though ‘spotless’ is
nobler, this ‘Negro woman’ now ‘white-robed’
in your neo-Netflix pot of time.
‘Pot of time’ is very cheeky, I know. For some reason, I’d imagined that
Wordsworth’s revisionary poetics was limited to The Prelude, but it
pervades his publishing history.
My poems present a vision of post-Brexit Britain, which is now overtaken
by the coronavirus, which was hardly an issue when I began this ‘corona’,
though it does get a mention, even in poem 2. Maybe ‘overtaken’ overstates it:
it mingles with it (in all kinds of ironic ways). I’m also going to leave the poems posted a little longer than I do
usually, though they are still temporary.
Patricia Farrell's representation of a Techno-Dogging Site (December 2019)
This is the last poem of
the 14. It mutes (hopefully extinguishes) the dogging theme, but it’s there. As you know, the
National Thrust (formerly the Department for Rural Affairs) has opened a number
– the government says 40, but it’s nearer zero, like their pre-Nightingale hospitals
– of new dogging sites. Most were ready for Independence Day (31st
January 2020), and several were the new Techno Dogging sites promised in the
Conservative Party Manifesto. Ever since the current Chancellor of the Dogging
Sites of Lancaster was at Rural Affairs, around the time he issued his famous Christmas
Message in 2018, anticipation has been growing, but it's all on hold now. Read it again here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/12/christmas-message-from-right-hon-m-go.html .
Pre-social distancing
Of course, now all
the dogging sites are shut. (You couldn’t make it up: they are shut. The
national press made much of an online message cancelling one dogging meeting in the Midlands.
You will see that self-distancing is practised by my men of Kent.)
Vanguard of
Liberty, ye men of Kent
Vanloads of
libertines, playboys of Kent, you once set your
calcic frowns against France’s toothless
coast! Now’s the time to prove you’re
rock hard tarts! Let Gillray’s Bum-Boats dump the
last of your hops. Those French hear your
brave woodland shouts for show as you roam, single,
in self-distancing self-love; they watch your glistening
lance throb in your
(well-washed) hand, as you film an isolated maiden
in a mask. (It’s a nurse!) No partying now:
we’re ramping up mass testing, damping down individual
urges. In breathless Bo’s Britain, each
stay-indoors chartered street is mothballed
in his notional socialism.
31st
March 2020
The last phrase I’m particularly
proud of. Let’s say no more. This post will be permanent, though the poem will
disappear, to leave a hub post. (That will catalogue any publications, with
links, particularly if they appear on line.)
The Gillray is
reproduced here. I saw it in Wu, Duncan, ed. Romanticism: an anthology. Third
edition. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
EBB is clearly
a BDSM freak with her dog (and slave Robert Browning) locked in that top floor flat.
(‘Knock here for Latin lessons with Mistress Elizabeth’). She's also a Tory minister's 'mistress'. Four more poems have appeared in print recently: see here:
I’m thinking
of the poems I ‘transpose’, and the ones I plan to process, as ‘Standards’ in two senses: I have been listening to Anthony Braxton’s ‘Standards’ albums, where he plays those
communally malleable tunes dubbed ‘standards’ by jazz musicians, but I’m also
thinking of the ‘standards’ that British locks and other devices conform to,
which seem, incidentally, to have survived the supposed uniformity of 40 years
of EU Regulations, and which Bo and others will doubtless champion, along with Imperial
Measures and £.s.d. Oh, and hanging.
Hear an
Anthony Braxton ‘standard’ above, or here:
In a piece to be posted soon, on ‘collaboration’, I
was moved to make a remark about ‘the meaning of form’ and I found myself
reflecting upon ‘The English Strain’ as a whole, contrasting the formal and the
content. You can read the ‘collaboration’ strand from here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html
I genuinely
believe [I wrote] that literary works can have efficacy (at the level of form)
that is truly liberational. To take my recent ‘Poems of National Independence’,
I take it that the satire about Brexit is on the surface, but the real aesthetic
work, the lastingly moving part of the experience, lies in the act-event of the
reception of the formal distance between Wordsworth’s original ‘Toussaint, the most
unhappy man of men!’ and my ‘Flat-Battery Bo, rusticated man’s man!’ That’s where I locate
the active, eventful innovation.
In fact, the address to the reader that begins Book
Two, already states a similar case, basically a version of the first sentence
(and axiom) of The Meaning of Form:
I hang out inside these sonnets, punching
echoes into new shape, because I take
poetry as the investigation
of complexity through the means of form.
You can
access six poems, transpositions from Michael Drayton, see above, from Bad Idea here:
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. (It’s also where the dogging
in Kent theme began: he lived in, was banished in, his wife possibly played
around in, Kent. Both pamphlets are still available.
Look here and here for more on my 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 (Does. Tin.
On. It. The. What. Says) is available from Knives Forks and Spoons here:
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, I also demonstrate that
‘transposition’ isn’t translation, even of the fashionable, ‘expanded’, kind.
I’m not only working on this sequence, by the way: my
website is updated annually with life, writing, collaborations, criticism (by
and on), etc. here: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com
