Linda Anderson, Rowland Bagnall, Jack Belloli, Andrea Brady,
Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Adrian Clarke, Emily Critchley and Eric
Langley, Michael Farrell, Khaled Hakim, Rob Halpern, David Hawkins, Peter
Hughes, Rich Ives, Lisa Kelly, Paul Muldoon, Daniel Morris, Jamie Osborn, Otto and Gisel, Tom Paine, Simon Perchik, Peter Riley, Peter Robinson, Dave
Shortt, Jeffrey Thomson, Scott Thurston, Jonty Tiplady, Iain Twiddy, Lawrence
Upton, with a review by Adam Piette of Barry MacSweeney, John James and Michael
O’Neill.
Particularly glad also to be associating with long-term
poetry comrades like Adrian,
Lawrence and Scott, and newer ones like Andrea and the Peters (Robinson and Hughes).
My contribution
is from Hap:Understudies
of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch (though the first, introductory, poem ‘Perhaps a
Mishap’ is not a version of Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch). The whole lot will
appear as a booklet from Knives, Forks and Spoons around September. It won’t
take very long to see they are much concerned with Brexit (and were mainly
written in early 2017, already history).
This is also one part of a longer sequence of sequences of sonnets that I
think I’m going to call The English
Strain , and features ‘overdubs, understudies and fortuities’ of Petrarch,
Milton, Surrey, Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as
Wyatt. A hundred poems, in fact.
I write about the completed 100 sonnets of The English Strain here.
I write about my sonnets generally here,
and here
and see here
and here for more on my Petrarch
obsession, which set this thing off, including how to purchase Petrarch 3
from Crater press in its 'map' edition.This is the only part available until this autumn.
The first review of Petrarch 3 by Alan Baker may be read on Litterbug, here. The second response, by Martin Palmer here. The third is by Peter Riley, who is also a Blackbox Manifold contributor. My response to it here includes a few remarks about the whole 'English Strain' project with links to other parts:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/03/peter-riley-on-my-petrarch-3-and-other.html
November 2018: My sonnets Hap:Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch is now published;
see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/10/robert-sheppard-hap-understudies-of.html
and is available from Knives Forks and Spoons here:
https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/hap-understudies-of-thomas-wyatt-s-petrarch-by-robert-sheppard-26-pages
https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/new-titles
