Thursday, December 17, 2015

Robert Sheppard: Sheffeld University Reading with Corless-Smith and Houen (set list)

On Wednesday 16th December 2015 I read with Martin Corless-Smith and Alex Houen in an event organized by the Centre for Poetry and Poetics, School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, most particularly by Adam Piette, in Lecture Theatre 5 in the Diamond.

Martin Corless-Smith was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. He has published 6 collections of poetry (including the most recent Bitter Green) and one novel, This Fatal Looking Glass. He is Professor of English at Boise State University.

Alex Houen is author of the poetry chapbook Rouge States (Oystercatcher, 2014) and has another one (co-written with Geoff Gilbert) entitled Hold West forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing. He’s published poems in various journals, including PN Review, The Wolf, Shearsman Magazine, 3AM (forthcoming), Molly Bloom, Free Verse, and Visual Verse. He co-edits (with Adam Piette) the online poetry magazine Blackbox Manifold, and teaches Modern Literature in the English Faculty, and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge.

Both fine and different poets (and different from me too) so it was a rich reading with a great audience; and time spent with the readers, Adam and Geraldine Monk and Alan Halsey a pleasure.

I read from History or Sleep, not replicating any of the poems from my Storm and Golden Sky reading (see here):

‘Round Midnight’ (see text here)
‘Twin Poem’
‘His Furious Skip’
‘Empty Diaries’ : 1926 and 1936
from Warrant Error
            ‘Steam from the nostrils of the nervous engine’
            ‘Whose body crackles with self-quotation’
            ‘Through slatted blinds you spy another’
            ‘for Stephen’ (see the poem at the end of the post here; see the photo of the metronome mentioned in the poem at the top of the post)
            ‘for Patricia’
‘As Yet Untitled Poem’
‘The Lion Returns’ (a new poem)

More here.

You can watch a slightly earlier reading here