‘Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.’
For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries,
here are the places
And here is the hub-post to the research that went into the book:
I
have been writing a study of the forms of recent innovative poetries (mainly
British but with some international poets), which is underlined by a conception
of form itself, that emphasises form not as a vessel to contain its contents,
but as a readerly process of forming which is already meaningful, and which
brings the text into existence. I have been using this blog as a machine for
thinking through some of the implications of this, by posting early thoughts,
dry-runs, practice-led spin-offs, some recovered earlier texts, some discarded
passages, and even a few completed fragments of the book. Here’s a summary of
the main argument which lies behind many of the existing posts.
Instrumentalist
studies of literature abound, which offer readings in terms of
socio-historical, contextual issues, ‘issues’ of gender, sexuality, space,
place, spectrality, etc. However, to successfully engage in the reading of
poetry – and particularly the reading of ‘difficult’ contemporary poetry –
means to necessarily engage with the forms of the artifice employed and (at a
level of some remove) with the notion of ‘form’ itself. There are, of course,
readings of poetic form, but they either tend to cling to the vestigial
decencies of New Critical practice or are technical, as in most work on
prosody, which seems a descendent of even older philological scholarship.
The
study of what has come to be called ‘linguistically innovative poetry’ has not
been given to instrumentalist readings, as it happens, but there has yet to be
a study which combines the already close textual reading common within this
field with the work of the so-called New Formalist critics, who have
spearheaded a cleansing operation within the field of Romantic Studies, where
New Historicist and other contextual methods, once held sway over the corpus.
The leading theorist of this group, Susan J. Wolfson, states: ‘My deepest claim
is that language shaped by poetic form is not simply conscriptable as
information for other frameworks of analysis; the forms themselves demand a
specific kind of critical attention.’
My
approach derives from my axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation
of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form. Instead
of an historical reading of the kinds of alternative British poetries under the
label ‘linguistically innovative’ (my previous volumes The Poetry of Saying (Liverpool University Press, 2005; access its main thesis here) and
When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (Shearsman,
2011) offered this and more), this investigation
argues that the attention of any formal
study of contemporary poetry must be dual. It must focus on form in the
technical sense, on identifiable forms
in play (enjambment, line, rhythm, rhyme, etc.), and on form in a general, more performative sense, that prioritises
acts of forming and our apprehension
of their coming to form. Forms and forming I call this pair for ease.
Associating one with the other, Derek Attridge in The Singularity of Literature argues that form is the force that
stages a performance of any text: we need to apprehend ‘the eventness of the
literary work, which means that form needs to be understood verbally – as
‘taking form”, of “forming”, or even “loosing form”’, but he insists that the devices of artifice
‘are precisely what call forth the performative response’ of any engaged
reader, directly connected to the event of singularity which is the irruption
of an inventive otherness in our productive reading.
Both
types of form are capable of carrying a semantic or cognitive charge,
demonstrating that forms think. They contain or envelop meaning(s) of
knowledge(s) and might show how new meaning and (non-propositional) knowledge
might be formed and formulated. As such, aesthetic form carries a force
operating on the individual (or collective) reader or viewer, which – in the
case of poetry – means that the reader is the site where such meanings are
staged by form, so that reading is formulating form, and formulating it into
fluxing semantic and cognitive forms as a ‘performed mobility’. Wolfson even
writes that literature lovers ‘respond to forms as a kind of content’. Formal
considerations of both kinds (forms
and forming) are engaged by active
reading and enact meanings that moderate, exacerbate, subvert (and on rare
occasions reinforce) the kind of extractable meaning that Forrest-Thomson and
Attridge both decry as ‘paraphrase’. If apprehension of form is not, or not
only, a matter of collecting the devices of poetic artifice, of forms, but a question of entering into
the process by which the text finds form in our reading, as forming, there can be, strictly, no
paraphrase; indeed, paraphrase, a mode by which meaning is supposedly skimmed
off the surface of reading as a residue or even an essence, or worse, a
‘political’ slogan, is a violation of the processes of forms forming.
Paraphrase is amnesia of form.
Although
‘the vitality of reading for form is freedom from program and manifesto, from
any uniform discipline,’ as Wolfson has it, this volume will demonstrate how
‘issues’ may be read in literary works, ‘through’ form and not as an avoidance
of it. ‘Formalist’ has a bad press when it seems to imply autonomist or
aestheticist remove, but a poem is opened up to the world only through its
form. While there will be some contextual information presented, thinking about
poems and thinking about form, particularly through its evanescent cognitive
content, will be the main focus.
My
previous studies have taken historical and ethical approaches to these writers
and my criticism has always been informed (tacitly) by my own work as a poet,
and by my interest in poetics as a speculative writerly discourse. I have a
particular interest in the wily and even self-deceptive way writers talk to
themselves through poetics, and this requires a reading that does not reduce
its conjectural nature and function to intentional statements or ersatz
literary criticism. Poetics arises as an incidental activity of poets
throughout and will be addressed directly as text in several parts. Theorised
close reading might be a thumbnail description of my method. I have decided to
extend the range of my coverage of British poets and have not pursued some
writers (Tom Raworth and Iain Sinclair, for example) whose work I have analysed
in previous books and articles. Another aim of the book is to demonstrate the
formal range of linguistically innovative poetry.
Readers
of this book (and these posts) will find a challenging thesis about form (taken
dually as identifiable devices of form and processes of forming) that may well
influence their reading-processes on a permanent basis. This will be combined
with discussions of important British (and some other) poets, most of whom are
relatively well-known, others of whom are still emerging. The originality and
marketability of the book is that it combines a summary of formalist and
aestheticist thinking that is currently fashionable in one area of literary
studies (Romanticism) and applies it to another (contemporary poetry) which has
not hitherto been overly invaded by this mode of enquiry. It will therefore be
of interest to those studying literary theory as well as those studying
contemporary poetry. Its interest in form will draw in readers who are following
theorists as various as Derek Attridge, T.W. Adorno, as well as the New
Formalists and other aesthetic theorists, particularly those who argue the case
increasingly for a cognitive function in formal elements.
What
follows is a list of contents with raw links (and references to a number of
offline and print sources) to relevant pages on Pages. The final book will differ considerably from these passages,
but you could read through the posts to get a glimpse of the rough thinking. Or
scroll back through Pages’ pages until you reach August 2013. Or
dip and sample. Or even follow a link and lose yourself. (Indeed, scroll through later posts, such as this one here, which offers the final list of contents which differs, mainly in its ordering of chapters, from the one below.)
The Meaning of Form
Introduction: Form’s Mordant Eye
See
the above text and the first paragraph or two of this essay on John Seed:
Here
are some posts grappling with the question of the cognitive function of form
(some of which are linked to later chapters as well since this is a matter of
conclusions as well as introductions):
A 200 word version of the above post:
http://031454a.netsolhost.com/inquire/2015/02/03/robert-sheppard/
http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/robert-sheppard-tight-little-paragraph.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/torque-1-mindlanguage-technology.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/torque-1-mindlanguage-technology.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/robert-sheppard-joan-retallack.html
Here's a later post on Derek Attridge's The Work of Literature (2015) and its relevance to the theory of this project (ie, the content of the posts above).
Here's my first footnote to this chapter (and the last to the book).
Here's a footnote harking back to some 1981 meditations on 'formalist-humanism'.
Here's a mini-lecture and handout on 'form' that I use with literature and creative writing students.
See review of On Form by Angela Leighton, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Vol 3: No 1, March 2011: 63-66.
Here's a later post on Derek Attridge's The Work of Literature (2015) and its relevance to the theory of this project (ie, the content of the posts above).
Here's my first footnote to this chapter (and the last to the book).
Here's a footnote harking back to some 1981 meditations on 'formalist-humanism'.
Here's a mini-lecture and handout on 'form' that I use with literature and creative writing students.
See review of On Form by Angela Leighton, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Vol 3: No 1, March 2011: 63-66.
Chapter One: Convention and Constraint: Form in the
Innovative Sonnet Sequence
See the 14 posts under
that title that deliberately mime the structure of the sonnet. Very early
thinking, very playful. Here’s a sonnet made of links:
There is a post on the shift from the temporal to the spatial here. (This includes thoughts on Kamau Brathwaite included, about whose work I was considering writing about in this project.)
Chapter 2 Artifice, Artifact and Artificer: Veronica
Forrest-Thomson and Christopher Middleton
See ‘Linguistically
Wounded: The Poetical Scholarship of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’ in ed. Turley,
Richard Margraf, The Writer in the
Academy: Creative Interfrictions, Essays and Studies 2011. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011: 133-55.
[article, published] and parts of ‘Poetics
as Conjecture and Provocation: an inaugural lecture delivered on 13 March 2007
at Edge Hill University’,
New Writing. Vol 5: 1 (2008): 3-26. The 'Christopher Middleton' part of this chapter (to be removed from the final book) appears in the latest edition of The Wolf. It may be read here:
http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/images/RobertSheppardonChristopherMiddleton.pdf
http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/images/RobertSheppardonChristopherMiddleton.pdf
Chapter 3. Rosmarie Waldrop: Form, what one can work on
Some
introductory remarks about her poetics:
Chapter 4. The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic:
Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and John Seed
The following posts are on John Seed and relate to the practice of reading for form rather than to the theory (and are not parts of the book):
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-punctum-punctuation-and.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppsrd-john-seeds-lyric-poems.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-john-seed-englands.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-punctum-punctuation-and.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppsrd-john-seeds-lyric-poems.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-john-seed-englands.html
Chapter 5. Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and
Thought-Experiments in the Theatre of Semantic Poetry
See ‘Stefan Themerson and the Theatre of
Semantic Poetry’. in eds. Blaim, Ludmiły Gruszewskiej, and David,
Malcolm (eds.), Eseje o Współczesnej
Poezji Brytyjskiej i Irlandzkiej, Volume 5: Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego,Ludmi: 245-262.
An aside on Themerson's philosophy of 'aims of means' appears here.
Chapter 6. Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and
Peter Hughes’ Petrarch
Thoughts on ‘Petrarch 3’
(and some attention to my later many versions of this one sonnet):
Further thoughts, after both of the Petrarch projects had been published in full: Here.
Chapter 7. Geraldine Monk’s poetics and performance: Catching Form in the Act
Read these posts on
Monk’s poetics text Transubstantiation of
the Text:
These posts are on music
(and on an abandoned project on poetry and jazz) and on Monk’s collaborations
with Martin Archer and Julie Tippetts:
Chapter 8. Meddling the Medieval: Caroline Bergvall and Erín
Moire
A game of two halves:
Here's a one sentence quotation from Robert Kaufman on the cognitive aspects of lyric that arose of the discussion of Moure!
Chapter 9. The Making of the Book: Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher
On small presses (part
of my Keynote Talk to the Small Press conference in Salford,
which does not survive into the book):
On Bill Griffiths’ The Book of the Boat:
On Fisher’s Proposals:
Chapter 10. Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean
Bonney
A game of three halves
it seems:
Chapter 11 and Conclusion: Form, Forms and Forming and
the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney’s Sin Signs
The
Theory of Form, Autonomy and Art:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/robert-sheppard-if-form-knows-if-forms.html
Here's a footnote on interruption, disjunction, rupture, and possible distinctions between them.
Here's a footnote on interruption, disjunction, rupture, and possible distinctions between them.
On Barry MacSweeney’s
works of the 1970s:
Here's the final footnote to this chapter and to the book (as well as the first footnote to the Introduction.)
Blurbs for the book: read them here: http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-its.html
And here is the final ordering of the chapters, which differs from the above.
And finally...
Some of the thoughts that emerged from writing the book were channeled into Pulse: All a Rhythm. See part of that here.
For
a piece on the nature of POETICS read an early version of The Necessity of Poetics at
or
at
There is additionally a History of Poetics (in four parts) which was an abandoned part of an earlier project:
Part One: Poetics and Proto-Poetics
Part Two: Through and after Modernism
*
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