The book, now available in a paperback edition, can be purchased here.
There are some more details of this massive project there too, though the publication date given is wrong! It was April 15th 2008. I hope if you haven't got it you will consider playing a decade-long worth of catch up!
There are some more details of this massive project there too, though the publication date given is wrong! It was April 15th 2008. I hope if you haven't got it you will consider playing a decade-long worth of catch up!
Twentieth Century Blues was written between 1989-2000, and incorporated earlier texts when it needed to. I think of the book now as the first volume of a collected poems. In fact, the book in full is called Complete Twentieth Century Blues.
Twentieth Century Blues is a network (or ‘net/(k)not- work(s)’ as I called it) of texts that are interrelated
by 75 multilinear ‘strands’. That the project would seem open to the technology of
hyperlinks did not pass me by, and I would like to utilise this in future
presentations, although I conceived of the network’s design before this
possibility, or its now apposite metaphor, became available. Imagine the strands as links. ('Links in Ink' was actually the title of the evolving index that I published serially throughout the project's writing. Or it was the title by its end.)
One POETICS of Twentieth Century Blues may be read here
One POETICS of Twentieth Century Blues may be read here
Another, 'Linking the Unlinkable' (poetics of Twentieth
Century Blues)
here.
I can be seen reading some poems from Twentieth Century
Blues here as
part of the Other Room Readings in 2008. (On the first clip I read ‘A Dirty
Poem and Clean Poem for Roy Fisher’, ‘From a Stolen Book’ followed by a
selection from ‘Empty Diaries’, the sequence with which I continue on the
second video, if there is one through this link.)
The BIG book (I didn’t think there would ever be a big book)
collects some previous publications, like
Logos on Kimonos:
and some materials were displayed at the Ship of Fools
Exhibition last year, in this case, relating to the long poem ‘Schrage
Musik’.
 |
| There was also this display at the Bluecoat reading in 2008 on top of the piano! |
Todd Thorpe’s review of Twentieth
Century Blues may be read here.
Mark Scroggins’ book chapter on it may be read about here
Edward Larrissy's The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010, includes Simon Perril's compressed piece ‘High Late-Modernists or Postmodernists? Vanguard and Linguistically Innovative British Poetries since 1960’, which mentions Twentieth Century Blues in terms of the problems of the long poem.
Not everybody liked Twentieth Century Blues. Here’s account of a negative take by Andrew Duncan.
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/steve-spence-on-andrew-duncan-on.html
The accusation of being 'overheated' (the poem, not me; I can regulate my body temperature), probably relates to the sequence of 'Empty Diaries' (1900-2000) that runs through the project, and which is read from on the Other Room video. Here's one:
Flesh Mates on Dirty Errands
The accusation of being 'overheated' (the poem, not me; I can regulate my body temperature), probably relates to the sequence of 'Empty Diaries' (1900-2000) that runs through the project, and which is read from on the Other Room video. Here's one:
Flesh Mates on Dirty Errands
Empty Diary 1993
Fucking Time 3
Twentieth Century Blues 25
Her garters
hook his
bullseye
adorned for exposures
less human
than her
latex condom
mouth a
porn starlet
with a
strap-on
sexing her
second skin
bruised with
verbs that
frig their
nouns (his
anus flinches
at my
invasive breath
Gender
collusion, uneasy meat
October 1993
I clearly haven't learnt my lesson because I've extended the sequence out of Twentieth Century Blues (the only permitted extension of the strands noted in the multiple sub-titles, as above), as a sequence 2001-14, a corona of sonnets, but not part of the 100 sonnet book I'm thinking of calling Hap Hazard.
The first eight appeared in The Literateur. Find them here
or here. The final
six appeared in an edition of Blackbox Manifold. See
here. Here's part of one sonnet:
The 2015 one was published in India by Ranjit Hoskote at Poetry at Seagam. Empty Diary 2015
Fabulously fierce in Givenchy and Gucci guide women
transform technology yet at the age of 35 Zoë is in the best shape
of her life
she’s the faith healer who beat six neophytes
to death
during exorcism rituals Plunderhead’s
bundles of women’s
hair (his aggregate trophy) wriggle towards
daylight to
look at business life with a female gaze to see their
bodies
break down Fuckeye’s things flip out and up free gifts
red legs cut
from dancers perform mid-step across
the
Extended Mind he conducts along the entire length of his length
The 2015 one was published in India by Ranjit Hoskote at Poetry at Seagam. Empty Diary 2015
The 2016 Empty Diary was published in the special 50th issue
of Erbacce. See here. Empty Diary 2017 is as yet
unfinished, still tweaking it; I haven’t written 2018 yet (though I have written 2055, and 1327
for that matter!) So Twentieth Century Blues possesses this extensive pod.
The title of the book Twentieth Century Blues refers not to the kind of blues I have sung (and do, again, briefly, on the 'mythology of the blues poem, 'Smokestack Lightning', above), but to a kitschy Noel Coward song from 'Cavalcade'. Have a listen... Three versions: Noel Coward in a version from the 1950s; the song as featured in the 1933 - was it? - film; Marianne Faithfull in a Weimar version...
