As many of my regular readers know, I worked in collaboration, over a
number of years, with a team of real writers, to create a lively and
entertaining body of work of fictional European poets.
Read more about the European Union
of Imaginary Authors here and here. All the collaborators are
accessible via links here.
Accompanied by biographical
notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their
own; they are collected now in Twitters
for a Lark, published by Shearsman.
This collection marks a continuation of the work I
ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet
René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated
Man (read an early account here;
the book is also available from Shearsman here ).
I see these two books as the first two parts of a fictional
poetry trilogy. So what will follow these? My ideas (as you'll see if you follow the other national holidays I've been trailing) waver between resurrecting Rene Van Valckenborch; trying to animate more work out of the 4 remaining poets I invented single-handed in A Translated Man who also feature in Twitters for a Lark (thus providing a LINK between the three parts); or (ignoring the link) diving into a completely different form of fictional poetry: the Manx modernists, the fictional 'Robert Sheppard', or (even) delving into time rather than space, and writing a historic fictional poetry. (I've no even fuzzy notion of how I would do this last one.) All options are capable of producing kitsch (though I've never been afraid of that) and need careful consideration. I will be posting more about future possibilities on Europe Day, next week.
