Friday, August 03, 2012

Robert Sheppard: Bad Poems for Bad People (for Sean Bonney)

My prose piece, ‘Bad Poems for Bad People!’ dedicated to Sean Bonney, may be read now at Intercapillary Space

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/robert-sheppard-bad-poems-for-bad-people.html

It is also republished, revised, in my Unfinish from Veer: see here.

(Photo: Bratislava 2012: a friend of Magritte's COW picture below, obviously, and clearly a bad person.)

This ‘manyfesto’ is a response to parts of Sean Bonney’s keynote at the Conversify Conference, Edinburgh, September 9-11 2011 (though not to the exemplary readings of Rimbaud therein, but in anticipation of the publication of Happiness). It was first performed as the finale to my Berlin Bursts reading at the Bluecoat’s Chapter & Verse literature festival, Liverpool, on October 16 2011. I have melted and re-formed quotations from the following into its forming action: Adorno, Auden, Badiou, Bad Prophets Err, Bonney, David Cameron, Clark Coolidge, Simon Critchley, Duckweed, flarf, W.S. Graham, Guattari, Simon Jarvis, Primo Levi, Angshuman Kar, Kruk, Marcuse, Meschonnic, Milton, Pasternak, Penny Lane Graffitist, John Rajchman, Rancière, David Toop, and two geopolitically-challenged ‘scallies’ from Wavertree, Liverpool. It’s also twinned by the paper I wrote and delivered at the conference, ‘Notes on Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry’, which I promised a number of people I’d publish online. This will have to substitute for the moment.

This text is published in final form in Unfinish published by Veer in 2016: here.