Apart from a term in 1979 teaching contemporary British
poetry at UEA, I began teaching in Higher Education in 1996 at the then Edge
Hill College of Higher Education as a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative
Writing. I have recently retired from the now Edge Hill University as a
Professor of Poetry and Poetics. I have seen a lot of change since 1996,
although one constant, except in title, is that I was appointed as tutor of the
then MA in Writing Studies, though by the end I was Programme Leader of the MA
in Creative Writing. All these changes of nomenclature – a sort of St
Petersberg-Petrograd-Leningrad slippage – reveals the unceasing, anxious search
for novelty and status, as well as the need for exactitude, in the profession.
I arrived as a linguistically innovative poet and left as
one, more or less intact. That name, label, will do, as well as the
institutional ones I’ve outlined. Such a term operates with correlatives, such
as the British Poetry Revival, Underground Poetry, non-Mainstream Poetry,
experimental poetry, concrete poetry, language poetry, performance writing,
certain types of eco-poetics, and conceptual poetry (and there are more terms) –
I am today happy with them all to roughly denote areas of operation in terms of
poetry and poetics. I’ll stay with ‘innovative’ as a shorthand because it is
used in the symposium’s title. I won’t have time to shift through these
distinctions, which I have dealt with in my work as a literary critic, perhaps
more in The Poetry of Saying: British
Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000 than in the recent The Meaning of Form which takes it as a
given, and concentrates upon its acts of forming. I no longer define this
practice against a perceived centre,
or post-Movement Orthodoxy, which operates in the way Althusser says ideology
does, though I am not one of those who thinks the divisions between mainstream
and its Others have broken down, though they are admittedly more porous. I’ve
been less concerned with this issue, because criticism has had to share 21
years with the unbelievable strain of balancing teaching, pedagogy, empty
administration, and my own creative writing ‘practice’. I do not have time for
poems that, quite literally, make me ill to read or listen to them, when I want
to concentrate on my own writing, which I will also mainly leave to one side
today. The day will finish with a reading and I hope to give some sense of what
I do as a poet by showing it, rather than talking about it.
Let’s stick with names. When I arrived, for my students, I
was Rob. Since I was made a Professor – rather too neatly halfway through my
employment, in 2006 – my students think of me, initially at least, until they
get to know me – as Professor Sheppard. They probably don’t realise that being
a professor in a teaching-heavy and administratively-burdened institution
doesn’t equate to power, or even influence. Or, in my case, as the institution
grew, my diminishing influence,
particularly in arguments concerning the nature of practice-led research which
I have not been consulted upon for nearly a decade. Perhaps I missed the truth
that one has to advocate for the nature of the subject repeatedly, that battles
won one year are lost the next. What I call the ‘scribbly ceiling’ – the clear
lack of senior managers or heads of department from a Creative Writing
background – is probably responsible for….
(The Tesco woman arrived and we unpacked the shopping. Many
bananas. Ostrich. Tins of sardines. The Thursday Chicken. The thought that the
above won’t do, that it's another cough over the sink. I think I need to get stuck straight in. None
of the above is wrong, as such, but it won’t do. As an account of the effects
of 21 years at Edge Hill it partly works; as an introduction to my subject, if
only I knew what that was, it doesn’t help. I hope somebody will find substance here: it's a true account. The remarks about the ‘scribbly ceiling’ are particularly
pertinent. Except where the department only consists of Creative Writing, or of
practice-led subjects, I bet there are few HODs from a Writing background if
the other subjects are English or History or Film Studies.)
Below are four very condensed accounts of poetics through the ages:
Part One: Poetics and
Proto-Poetics
Part Two: Through and
after Modernism
Part Three: North American
Poetics
Part Four: Some British Poetics
http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-poetics-4-some-british.html)
Also read The Necessity of Poetics here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/robert-sheppard-necessity-of-poetics-1.html
Also read The Necessity of Poetics here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/robert-sheppard-necessity-of-poetics-1.html
And my Inaugural Lecture here, which I seem to be re-tracing
in the abandoned piece above.
Read all parts of this draft of a keynote (or is it a Key
Chord?):
Keynote Part one here:
Keynote Part two here:
Keynote Part three:
Keynote Part four:
Keynote Part five:
