This blog has now been running for ten years! In that time there have been at least
(It hit that target over Winterval 2014-15). A decade ago today I posted my first comments here. (But I find that my now abandoned blog Network of Experimental Writing Tutors (NEWT) was begun a few days earler on 8 February 2008:
This blog, though, began by positing itself as the editorial of a revised online version of my 1980s magazine PAGES:
It appears not to be the earliest post when you look at this blog now because I moved it to the top of the then currently viewable page after a week or so. But it was. (How technology changes and our relations to it. Look at this early 'index',
In 2008 I was interviewed about my blog, slightly bemused to find myself mooted as a 'literary blogger', when I thought of myself as no such thing. A short version of this appeared in print (ironically), but here's a longer version of it (with links added). It's quite instructive.
GH: Can we start talking about your Blog (which you set up in
February 2005). I notice some interesting discussions with Chris Hamilton-Emery
of Salt Publishing, for example; and quite a deal of discussions about
contemporary British poetry. These seem interesting discussions to have ‘out
there’ in the ‘virtual’ world.
RS: It’s interesting you call it a blog; I coined the term
‘blogzine’ – only to find Martin Stannard had used it before me as ‘blog-zine’
- to imply that I was appropriating a modern technology to use as a little
magazine (much as previous generations had borrowed office technologies such as
the duplicator and photocopier for such purposes). It was all quite modest and
I carried on the title (and pagination, with some difficulty) of my print
magazine
Pages, begun in 1987,
at
www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com
and proceeded to post its third and (recently) fourth series.
GH: You are
interested in exchange and discussion and, oddly, there’s little of that on
Pages.
RS: I discovered very early on that the ‘send a comment’ facility was
immediately filled with spam so I was forced to block that, unfortunately. The
magazine had, in its first two print series, been quietly influential, not
least of all in promoting the ugly little term ‘linguistically innovative
poetry’, by providing, in series one, the first use of the words (by Gilbert
Adair) and in the second series by presenting poetry, essays and poets’
statements under a ‘resources for the linguistically innovative poetries’
strapline. That last resources aspect was very important to me, and at first
the zine half dominated, but Mr Hyde’s blog-like influence took over, as I
began to present not just bits and pieces of critical books I was working on
(for example, the historical chapters from
The Poetry of Saying appear
there as a serial ‘History of the Other’, although I also found room for some
excluded material), but entries about
my being 50, reading
‘Smokestack Lightning’ to my friend’s blues band, and links to various web published works
of mine. The realisation that I could post photos only made it worse (or fun):
there’s even a photograph of
Django Reinhardt’s guitar! So it all become less
of a virtual discussion – my critical offcuts juxtaposed with the poetry and
prose of others – from Iain Sinclair and Bill Griffiths through to newcomers
like
Dee McMahon and
Alice Lenkiewicz, more of a blog, so I stopped it
(temporarily, but for longer than I’d intended). I also realised the process of
editing and posting could go on forever; the entries get less frequent. I wish
I could keep it up like Ron Silliman does on his excellent blog, but I don’t
have the time.
The current
fourth series is strictly going to be answers to a simple question: what’s been
going on in alternative forms of British poetry since 2000. My first ‘reply’ is
not a reply at all: it’s an edited version of
Chris Hamilton-Emery’s contribution to an email discussion list. That’s where virtual discussion is
meant to happen, isn’t it? But it seldom does. In the early days (1997) of the
British Poets’ list, for example, I remember printing off some of the splendid
answers critics like Marjorie Perloff and poets like John Wilkinson posted,
little mini-essays. But at some point they left off, perhaps disenchanted with
the medium or its processes. Disenchantment set in for me when I realised that
the same argument had started up for a second time; the list’s open-endedness offered
no conclusion, its supposedly linear ‘strands’ caught in some cyber-eternal
return – a little like blogs themselves. Coming back to
Pages, I decided
to post answers to that one crucial question, one I don’t know the answer to,
but whose answers will prove to be a resource for the future. Already
Adrian Clarke’s characteristic abrasive response to Hamilton-Emery has injected some
fire into the exchange. But it’s been going very slowly; I’ve lost the verve
for it, particularly as blogging has become so everyday.
GH: If we broaden out from that question: how do you view, and
indeed use, the creative space of the blog – you being both poet and critic?
RS: One of the private functions of
Pages was to teach
myself to read poetry on screen. I failed: I still can’t do it. I believe my
students can. One of the reasons I decided – against earlier prejudice – to
publish (now quite widely) on the web was seeing how readily my students used
it to access poems and poetry information, and I wanted a part of the action. The
production of links I found very liberating on
Pages, particularly where
I was drawing together a virtual collection of my work by merely pointing to
its locations. (Linkage is, of course, part of my poetics, and it’s part of the
very structure of my project
Twentieth Century Blues, which is a
pseudo-hyperlink of 75 titles and dozens of interrelated strands of
sub-titles!) I enjoyed posting disguised parts of critical books too: I am
aware that my literary criticism often exists – for economic reasons – outside
of the creative environment of the poetry world – and I wanted to make it
cheaply and immediately available to my creative peers. But currently I want it
to exist as a critical space
within that poetry world, in order to
affect
it, not just to
reflect it. Again I feel a responsibility to diminish
the blog aspect: the nonsensical furnishing of instant opinion or even trivia
that dominates the medium (or is it now a genre?).
I haven’t
theorised the use of webspace, like Hazel Smith, John Cayley and cris cheek
have done (the latter in a great PhD he did with me on writing technologies). I
don’t see a democratised informational utopia, but a simple tool, sometimes
creative, sometimes merely instrumental. But maybe in some ways my fumblings
with the technology are more interesting, precisely because I’m not an expert.
Indeed, I have a small but unjustified reputation as a technophobe: can’t
drive, don’t have a mobile phone, don’t use Powerpoint – but I do have a
blogzine and other web presences as part of my creative environment.
GH: And from the broad to the very narrow – there’s an
interesting comment you make online about not being a ‘binary opposition of the
avant-garde’. What’s that about, I wonder?
RS: To me that’s not narrow at all, but central to my role as a
poet-critic, while my blog – though more extensive than I remembered it when I
scrolled through yesterday – is only a narrow, or marginal concern. This
doesn’t mean I think it’s unimportant or that I have edited it haphazardly. I
haven’t. I’m proud of publishing the many poets and artists I have and of most
of my own contributions.
One element of our new cybernetic
creative environment is that I could Google that now-forgotten quote of mine
you’ve used and find its location in a way we couldn’t ten years ago; the very
words ‘blog’ and ‘Google’ would be meaningless (or carry other meanings, and
they are not recognised by my laptop, which still puts red wavy lines under
them).
Perhaps I’m
a cybernetic structure myself, because I have fallen into the binaries of
‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’ (or ‘linguistically innovative’) myself, but I
do seek to avoid them. My critical book at one level accepts this division
between the Movement Orthodoxy and its opposite(s) in a historical sense, but
it also theoretically poses the Levinasian distinction between a poetry of the
said and that of saying, one of ontological violence and closure, the other of
ineffable openness and evanescent eternality. They can’t operate as a binary,
since the openendness of the saying can only be embodied in the fixity of the
said. I am suspicious of my own critical concepts, though I am forced to use
them (on the blog and elsewhere). My unease with the blog and the nature of
discussion lists can be seen through those Levinasian lenses: the unending
saying of the cyber-discussion needs the fixity (even violence) of the
said of conclusiveness and closure, perhaps, but technologically and
experientially the media lack that. Imagine the horror of a poem that would
speak itself forever. Or a blog that would last a thousand years, with teams of
dynastic neophytes trained up for the job.
GH: Based on your critical and creative work, and using your
blog as a ‘sounding board’ perhaps: what would you consider some of the most
significant or, indeed, most interesting developments in contemporary British
and Irish poetry?
RS: Of course, this is the very
question I am posing my Pages contributors – I’m aiming to get a range.
The reason I am asking it is that I don’t know the answer! I’ve reached an
age where I’m not sure what younger (and sometimes older) writers are up to,
and I want to find out what others think. I suspect that within ‘linguistically
innovative poetry’, or whatever you want to call it, the influence of the
Performance Writing course that John Hall and Caroline Bergvall set up at
Dartington College of the Arts is widespread, particularly through a dispersal
of its staff and graduates nationwide: Mark Leahy, Dell Olsen and others. Their
expanded sense of the performative and visual aspects of language has revived
an interest in (old) concrete poetry but also in (new) cyber- and web-based
works: the two strands that meet utterly in the work of Maggie O’Sullivan, for
example. There is a visually oriented audience out there, and the ease of the
web as part of the (not just creative) environment has had something to do with
that. It’s not the direction I’m going creatively, so I’m interested in other
trends too. At the same time, print-on-demand technologies and selling books
over the web – the Salt and Shearsman approach that I have benefited from – has
made publication easier, and has particularly led to the production of major
collected poems – John James, Lee Harwood, David Chaloner – that allows us to
reinvestigate whole the oeuvres of major veteran figures in this scene,
and re-write our histories.
GH: You archive your blog? I’ve
recently spoken to Jamie Andrews of the British Library about archiving of
writers’ works generally. But a relative personal blog – what’s the archiving
purpose, in your mind? Personal? Personal reference? Community based?
RS: A blog archives itself, doesn’t
it, which, of course, is deceptive. I was talking to Los Glazier about the
marvellous Electronic Poetry Center
at Buffalo, and
he said that the University which hosts it could pull the plug at any moment.
The same could happen with any blog, but we behave as if it won’t. Look at all
the links on Pages that no longer work: dead-ends. I don’t think that
will make me save it, even now. However, when the great poet Bill Griffiths
died I saved a lot of the images from his web-site because I knew they would
go, and perhaps are not part of his archive held at Brunel University.
I think the poetry audio archive begun by Andrea Brady is not only a superb
resource for the future; it has a suggestive and relevant name: The Archive of
the Now. We’ve got to save that ‘now’ before it becomes a vanished ‘then’.
GH: And, of course, you discuss your
own poetry on your blog and link to pieces of it that happen to be online?
RS: I do. As I’ve said, I like
linking. Again, I want the zine to win out over the blog. Maybe I need to
separate these functions, but some readers might find this combination
charming, like the title of Jeff Nuttall’s magazine of the 1960s:
My Own Mag!
I miss not being able to point readers to my latest books, but I also distrust
the self-publicising aspect of this. Again, the reason I stopped.
GH: Let me be provocative: your blog
identity is out of date? So it’s the blog that’s taken over and the writer’s
real presence has disappeared? Or am I off base?
RS: Cyber-ageing is an accelerated process, isn’t it?
Cyberspacejunk litters the blogosphere, of course. What will it look like in
ten years time?
Identity is only the shadow of
existence, in any case. But too much of me was appearing on my blog! But the me
that is left is probably the me of 2005-6, when I was most furiously posting
the blog. (I did post the news that I’d been made a professor, by the way,
which is what you are thinking of. Incidentally, the fact that a lot of people emailed
me immediately to congratulate me taught me that there was an audience for the
blog!) Series four will not involve me at all. I was tempted to post a single
link to
Twentieth Century Blues, my most recent and biggest book, but I
won’t. My blog has always been less personal than Tom Raworth’s, for example,
where he more or less photographs his breakfast and posts it by lunchtime. It’s
fascinating.
GH: The blog is not all you do. In
fact, it is perhaps a minor part of your own creative and critical writing. But
do you think it has had any particular effect on your practice?
RS: Very minor. And a tool, not really a writing technology. I
thought maybe I could use the colour facility to write specifically for the
blog – I was looking at Jacques Roubaud’s multi-coloured and multi-voiced Kyrielle
– but I never did. I didn’t find it very creative, actually, since it was
difficult to format and indent etc., and I had doubts about people not being
able to read poetry online anyway. That’s one reason for the fourth series
being prose. Web-work can be liberating, but you also have a web magazine like Jacket,
whose editor, John Tranter, says: don’t send me stuff with indents and crazy
typefaces, I can’t handle it, and I don’t like it anyway, which is an
interesting counter-example to the technologico-utopianists, from one of the
technology’s earliest and consistent users.
Critically,
I was parcelling out bits and pieces of other work (my book on Iain Sinclair,
for example). Whereas the way I am using it is now: this question on what’s
happening in British poetry is as much a resource for me as for other people.
It’s going to be fascinating. I’m glad that your questions are prompting me to
get on with it! The fact that the blog was cited in Edge Hill University’s RAE entry, much to my
horror and against my will, also motivates me, although Pages blogzine
was meant to be a relief from the academic world and a re-connection with my
primary creative environment. I’m driven also by the fact that I am setting up
and co-editing a print academic journal on this poetry and realise that this
will mainly operate outside the poetry world again, reflecting it but
not influencing it, whereas Pages is within the creative environment.
GH: Your final thoughts: the creative environment of contemporary
British poetry? A community of difference? A conglomeration of similarities?
RS: I do think some of the old binaries have broken down. But I
am as suspicious of my distrust of the binaries as I am of the binaries
themselves. At the end of the last century there was a spate of critical works
and anthologies that I looked at for my historical chapters of The Poetry of
Saying, but which largely were left out on space grounds, but which found
their way onto the blogzine (to give a further example of its usefulness to my
critical project). These anthologies announced a true democracy in British
verse, kow-towing to various correctnesses, the end of the poetry wars, that
sort of thing. However, despite the consensual rhetoric, these anthologies
completely left out most of the writers in whom I am interested – the ones I’ve
named here so far, for example - and the various creative environments that
have sustained them, their reading series, their publishers, etc. I admire
figures like David Kennedy who can bestride a much larger compass of poetry,
but I say (to myself as much as anyone): beware the commentators who declare
their catholicity while secretly operating according to proscriptions which
they hide (not necessarily deliberately). Better the oppositional openness of
somebody like Don Paterson.
GH: Finally, when confronted with the term ‘creative
environment’ (as you have been, with apologies!), what springs to mind?
RS: I see concentric circles outside (and inside) the writer, of
activities and support systems. What Bourdieu calls the field of cultural
production, I suppose. Some parts are obvious: publishing, reviews, time,
peers, creative writing workshops even. Others are less obvious: poetry
readings, one’s Mum, bars of chocolate, or the coffee that fuelled my latest
non-sonnet sequence day after day. I see sustaining networks of communication
too, and blogs (zines or not), one’s own or others, are parts of that. Thinking
of
Pages I remember the
Poetry Buzz event for Allen Fisher’s 60thbirthday; I posted photos of the day and used them also as illustrations for
postings of work by performers from that day: readings for Allen at three
locations in London,
and on board the poetry bus that transported us. All very communal and under
the shadow of the July 2005 bombings in London
too.
There may be negative circles
too: time (again, appearing as a lack of it), a lack of appreciation of the
work by critics, peers, and – just as important – one’s employer, one’s family,
the cat. One’s reticence, one’s bad habits. At the moment, I am writing a
critical book on the speculative discourse of writerly poetics. In it, I
examine John Hall’s essay ‘Writing and Not Writing’ (it’s in Denise Riley’s
1992 edited volume: Poets on Writing) which is partly about the loss of
his creative environment: extrinsic economic necessity and intrinsic absorption
in teaching squeezed out modalities of writing, which turned into dull
reportage or professional writing. It’s a limit case of poetics, a gentle
horror story. It has a happy and instructive ending because Hall later returned
to writing a very different poetry precisely by being involved in the
deliberate development of a new creative environment at Dartington College
of the Arts (of which he was principal): the very performance writing that I
mentioned earlier.
