I have been posting these Pages for two years now. It’s time for rest and reflection. The aim of this series was to present a BLOGZINE, to utilise the technology of the blog to produce a little magazine (in the same way that 1960s mimeos mags appropriated the office duplicator). In effect, something different happened: I produced a hybrid form, combining the personal on-going reportage (but I hope not the customary chatter) of the blog, with the compendious embrace of the magazine. There’s nothing wrong in that; it’s simply what’s happened.
As you can see from the Index below, I have published many writers other than myself. I am particularly proud to have presented some new writers here (which has always been the aim of Pages). But I am less sure about the photo of Django’s guitar, or some of my own contributions! They remind me of that Radio 2 programme where John Dankworth and Cleo Laine invite friends into their house; again, there’s nothing wrong in that.
The arrival of photographs has made a difference to the blogzine, of course, and it was particularly good to record the Allen Fisher Poetry Buzz in some detail. Photographs seem so much more suited to the medium than poems!
One of the things I thought might happen (to me) through the experience of editing the third series is that I might learn better to read poetic texts (particularly ones which fill more than a frame) on screen. This hasn’t happened. I still find this difficult and, if research tells us that it is 25% less effective to proof-read on screen than on paper, then there must be a similar loss of clarity when faced with a literary text (I am not talking about web-works, written especially for the medium, of course).
That makes me wonder whether I might devise something more statement-based in the future, for the fourth series. I am going to rest this blogzine, perhaps until July 2007, which would be the twentieth anniversary of the first fascicle edition of Pages! (I’ve a few ideas, constellated around my interest in poetics as a speculative writerly discourse – I am currently thinking about this for my inaugural lecture – but I haven’t settled upon a specific project.)
Watch this space – and meanwhile have a look again at those Sinclair poems or Dee MacMahon’s two contributions, or that Oppen thing, follow that link to those poems you didn’t read the first time round, or give Scott Thurston another chance….
(If you are really quick you can buy some earlier Pages from Alan Halsey Books at
Alan Halsey / West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1HN
email
alan@nethedge.demon.co.uk
web
www.westhousebooks.co.uk
Sheppard (Robert) ed. Pages. A miscellany of early issues, from both the first and second series: 1987-88: 1-8, 17-24, 25-32, 33-40, 49-56, 57-64, 65-72, 73-80, 89-96, 91-104 (sic), 105-112, 113-120, 129-136. Contribs. incl. A.Fisher, Miller, Edwards, Seed, Clarke, Chaloner, Cobbing, Caddel, Raworth, Hawkins & O'Sullivan. Together w/ a few unnumbered pages, supplements, etc.
The collection £10!)
Robert Sheppard
Pages Third Series: Blogzine 2005-7
© The Authors, Artists and Photographers named, 2005, 2006, 2007
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Friday, February 02, 2007
Robert Sheppard: Corseted in his cross-hairs
‘September 12’ (the sequence) is made up of ‘sonnets’ written in 2003-4. Numbers one to 12 appeared in Shearsman magazine and numbers one to six may be read at the Shearsman site:
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/magazine/back_issues/shearsman67_68/sheppard.html
Number 7 was posted here on Page 526 (December 2006), but here’s the rest, and links to the rest:
8
Corseted in his cross-hairs for her caveman pockets,
something goes off in her hand and something
goes very dark. He’s a mission to come on her open
territory. She prays upside down as he plays God
away on business, fingering her laptop trigger
Done for a whore’s breakfast she loads herself into
his strip-search vest as he sprays his self with love
She’s fashioning his new long range out of her wide
world vagina flicked across her dead lover’s finger,
slapped on his goggles in the rubble action replay
and spilling generation funds on the saintly dust. He
pushes his Big Picture into her head. She blows it
away. Then he rewinds to the comic Big Bang:
blistering flesh bursts like a blown-up condom
9
Intervene in err… history impure terror full stop
incognito explodes his own cover at what
he plans to do thinking makes him happen stop
follow the line tightly packed hips sway the crowd
He’s a burnt-out f-f-f-fuck-box ah! you’ll waltz
across his set, the CCTV-free short-cut alley stop
His tongue tingles like a um fuse then onto
the triad his poisoned tube is pointing stop
fast-forward to where he fear-fucks a corpse
in a transfer-tube marked import stop
read in five or in the sand-pit he plays
with an imaginary uh friend no no enemy stop
like the ‘child he never was’ his pit-bull strung
up before the erm… next war started?
10
Spiked footsteps, pierced by sound,
push love, wheels turning, through his body
His stutter slot trips a new paw-print stage
of psychotic re-enactment, aloft with 9/11
footage on the scorched hooves of history
Heavenly transport hums on dirty wires.
Flecks drip onto his battery fan Look! flick
the stale sweat of his pre-emptive terror
breezing a brass tiger to his florid cheeks
(the shifting voice of my thumbnail pause
What am I err… for? Echoic c-c-c-cave-cell
or self, I splutter anti-matter, the deep mu-mu-mutter of auto-interrogation, self-torture. I am.
Useless to stop anything believe me leave me
11
The shutter-stop tricks a new poor print. Staged,
the evidence takes off a lie of your own, a bleachy
kiss that strips the warts too much
A chord and a whip? Behold your deformed back! In
the inflammatory century blown in promissory notes
rabid-eyed in a drama of primed monster photo-ops,
they option the past. Irony’s out with an old sunk ally,
tongs of love un-gripped by the sane divorce to sever
Several darts are lighter. They teach restrictions
to heavenly gaudy statesmen. They re-locate
a new sense shelved for their new wharf outing,
the extraordinary City, where they channel hate
calibrate consumption’s sub-limits on the caking of a
horlicks, the binding gossip of conscript kickers
12
no
supreme
court
waves
checks
on
migrants
plotting
whose
brave
facelets
onto
identity
theft
This last one should be centred on the page. More or less the remainder of the 24 may be read on Jacket magazine at
http://jacketmagazine.com/32/sheppard-sonnets.html
The first 7 may also be heard on The Archive of the Now, at
www.archiveofthenow.com
The final group (17-24) will also be available on a CD of work by the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Group.
The poetics of the September 12 project, ‘Rattling the Bones’, may be read at Softblow www.sofblow.com/robertsheppard.html and
The second set of 24 from the project is entitled ‘Burying Bad News’ (but I am also considering ‘Burying Good News’ as a title) and the third, which I finished in December 2006, is called (for the moment at least) ‘Emergency Renditions 2006’. None of these has been published so far. The fourth set is in preparation. Arithmetically astute readers will have noted that that means there will be 96 poems. I have also written 4 floating sonnets (if they are sonnets) to round the number up. I believe this to be my best work to date. See Page 528 for Simon DeDeo’s take on September 12 (link), which encourages me in this, at:
http://rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/2007/01/robert-shepphard-15.html
Page 531
http://www.shearsman.com/pages/magazine/back_issues/shearsman67_68/sheppard.html
Number 7 was posted here on Page 526 (December 2006), but here’s the rest, and links to the rest:
8
Corseted in his cross-hairs for her caveman pockets,
something goes off in her hand and something
goes very dark. He’s a mission to come on her open
territory. She prays upside down as he plays God
away on business, fingering her laptop trigger
Done for a whore’s breakfast she loads herself into
his strip-search vest as he sprays his self with love
She’s fashioning his new long range out of her wide
world vagina flicked across her dead lover’s finger,
slapped on his goggles in the rubble action replay
and spilling generation funds on the saintly dust. He
pushes his Big Picture into her head. She blows it
away. Then he rewinds to the comic Big Bang:
blistering flesh bursts like a blown-up condom
9
Intervene in err… history impure terror full stop
incognito explodes his own cover at what
he plans to do thinking makes him happen stop
follow the line tightly packed hips sway the crowd
He’s a burnt-out f-f-f-fuck-box ah! you’ll waltz
across his set, the CCTV-free short-cut alley stop
His tongue tingles like a um fuse then onto
the triad his poisoned tube is pointing stop
fast-forward to where he fear-fucks a corpse
in a transfer-tube marked import stop
read in five or in the sand-pit he plays
with an imaginary uh friend no no enemy stop
like the ‘child he never was’ his pit-bull strung
up before the erm… next war started?
10
Spiked footsteps, pierced by sound,
push love, wheels turning, through his body
His stutter slot trips a new paw-print stage
of psychotic re-enactment, aloft with 9/11
footage on the scorched hooves of history
Heavenly transport hums on dirty wires.
Flecks drip onto his battery fan Look! flick
the stale sweat of his pre-emptive terror
breezing a brass tiger to his florid cheeks
(the shifting voice of my thumbnail pause
What am I err… for? Echoic c-c-c-cave-cell
or self, I splutter anti-matter, the deep mu-mu-mutter of auto-interrogation, self-torture. I am.
Useless to stop anything believe me leave me
11
The shutter-stop tricks a new poor print. Staged,
the evidence takes off a lie of your own, a bleachy
kiss that strips the warts too much
A chord and a whip? Behold your deformed back! In
the inflammatory century blown in promissory notes
rabid-eyed in a drama of primed monster photo-ops,
they option the past. Irony’s out with an old sunk ally,
tongs of love un-gripped by the sane divorce to sever
Several darts are lighter. They teach restrictions
to heavenly gaudy statesmen. They re-locate
a new sense shelved for their new wharf outing,
the extraordinary City, where they channel hate
calibrate consumption’s sub-limits on the caking of a
horlicks, the binding gossip of conscript kickers
12
no
supreme
court
waves
checks
on
migrants
plotting
whose
brave
facelets
onto
identity
theft
This last one should be centred on the page. More or less the remainder of the 24 may be read on Jacket magazine at
http://jacketmagazine.com/32/sheppard-sonnets.html
The first 7 may also be heard on The Archive of the Now, at
www.archiveofthenow.com
The final group (17-24) will also be available on a CD of work by the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Group.
The poetics of the September 12 project, ‘Rattling the Bones’, may be read at Softblow www.sofblow.com/robertsheppard.html and
The second set of 24 from the project is entitled ‘Burying Bad News’ (but I am also considering ‘Burying Good News’ as a title) and the third, which I finished in December 2006, is called (for the moment at least) ‘Emergency Renditions 2006’. None of these has been published so far. The fourth set is in preparation. Arithmetically astute readers will have noted that that means there will be 96 poems. I have also written 4 floating sonnets (if they are sonnets) to round the number up. I believe this to be my best work to date. See Page 528 for Simon DeDeo’s take on September 12 (link), which encourages me in this, at:
http://rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/2007/01/robert-shepphard-15.html
Page 531
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