a blogzine of investigative, exploratory, avant-garde, innovative poetry and poetics edited by Robert Sheppard
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Monday 30th June 1969:
French oral exam. Mrs Reed falls over!!!!!!! (Elsewhere in
diary: Mrs Reed is a Roman Catholic, and she has strange ideas. Fat, and old,
she is eccentric.)
Friday, June 28, 2019
Saturday 28th June 1969:
Jumble Sale, 2 45s.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Thursday 26th June 1969:
EXAMS.
Maths, English.
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Robert Sheppard: An Abandoned Poetics Response to The Robert Sheppard Companion
Form. Re-form, not reform. De-form, un-form, in-form, out-form. Etc.
All the
forms of forming.
All forms
of forming. Not just Form, not ever form, but forms.
Not just
forms, but all the forming and re-forming the social can form.
‘Poetry is
the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings)
of form.’
An
hypothesis. An hypothesis to live by?
If tradition is made longer by this persistence, does it not
simultaneously become attenuated, an ever-lengthening strand beaten, almost, to
airy thinness?
The verbs are all active, though the life they describe
seems mainly passive from the inside.
Though
maybe like reading itself, it is both action and event, something the insider
does and yet it is simultaneously something done to them.
Tradition,
life, reading: forms of form forming.
The hinged door swings. Pressure.
Once he
thought language might be his content. It can’t be form.
If Olson
looks less clear that’s because it’s not been seen clearly, the practice that
is, not the poetics.
Appeals to
the reader (in a poem) are not of themselves social; they have to be made so.
To respond to the call of the social, with the difficult,
the half-thought. Unfinish, I suppose.
On two
sides of an equation (or some relating or copulative principle), stand the
‘matter of history’ and the ‘manner of poetry’, the writer (this writer, situated in time and space)
rests, both slippery platforms sliding under him, and (in peril) away from one
another.
I read a young poet promising that, when he is old, he’ll
show generosity toward younger poets, acknowledge their ‘difference’, from his senior
‘privileged’ position.
There’s at
least one bold assumption that the poet betrays there.
Note: This was an attempted
‘writing-through’ of The Robert Sheppard
Companion (eds. James Byrne and Christopher Madden, Bristol: Shearsman, 2019), using the same
method I’d used for Pulse: It’s
All a Rhythm, which I hope will be published soon as a pamphlet. (And which I shall be presenting to the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group on Thursday.) This critical writing-through, though, was doomed to abandonment, of course, but not before I’d
written the above, in response to Charles Bernstein’s ‘Preface’ and the
beginning of James Byrne’s ‘Introduction’. The first paragraph I copied into my
poetics notebook, probably for its pithy (if obscure) reiterations of the hypothesis of my
critical book The Meaning of Form in
Contemporary Innovative Poetry (New
York: Palgrave, 2016), which I quote: ‘Poetry is the
investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of
form.’ (Sheppard 2016: 4) There's more on that book on this blog: see here. The rest of the text I’ve just recovered (I found it on the back of a draft of a poem) and thought enough of it
to place it here.
There is a hubpost for The Robert Sheppard Companion here, with links to
buying the book, and to another response, which is more general and in the
manner of thanks to the authors. Thanks again to the authors!
Wednesday 25th June 1969:
EXAMS.
Geography, Science.
Monday, June 24, 2019
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Jamie Toy's Versopolis essay: Moving but also Staying the Same: Crisis, Poetry and the Temporality of Brexit
My project Bad Idea is a re-working of Michael Drayton’s
sequence Idea; that’s 64 poems. I’ve been at it
since July 2018, writing one a week (more or less). But not only writing them.
The poems don't just disappear, as Toy suggests. Rather, they have a habit of re-appearing! Either online in magazines or in print.
The most recent print instalment of it in print is Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch which 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
I’m posting the poems temporarily, so there is only ever one
at a time on this blog, once a week at the moment. You'll find one hereabouts (click onto Home). Jamie Toy writes about that periodicity here, in Versopolis : https://www.versopolis.com/arts/to-read/792/moving-but-also-staying-the-same
Toy is a poet currently living in London, whose work has featured in
the RiPPLE anthology of poetry and has spoken as part of the Kingston
Writers Centre on multiple occasions. His research field involves
avant-garde and contemporary poetics in relation to political crises
today and technology. Most interestingly, he says:
A poem does not only slow down
time, but it also slows language down and summons its presence in the face of
an other. As Paul Virilio writes, ‘speed finally allows us to close the
gap between physics and metaphysics’. That is, Sheppard’s verses, ‘start
again’ every time they are posted and taken down, replaced by another in the
series. For Sheppard, time, namely temporality, is the method in which we may
approach the historicity and the instantaneity of our
current crises, closing the gap between the very physical and material
implications of Brexit with the very metaphysical and symbolic implications of
Europe and Britain’s
relationship.
All that is true, very true, but it is also part of my
physical, procedural, method to date the poems, and to (temporarily) blog them, as I've said, but there's more to it: I use the rhythm of
posting and uploading to break from writing the poem, usually accomplished in
the morning, started (say) at 9.00 and being finished usually by 12.00. Reading
the poem to Patricia when she comes in (from work in the old days, from
volunteering in the current days) is also part of the ritual, one that goes
back to the writing of the transposed sonnets in Hap (see below for links).
(There are plenty of other goodies in/on Versopolis here: https://www.versopolis.com/about )
The most recent print instalment of it in print is Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch which 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
I am pleased to say I have six poems published in BlazeVOX 19, edited by Geoffrey Gatza,
four of them poems from ‘The English Strain’ project, versions of the Sussex
sonneteer Charlotte Smith, called Elegaic
Sonnets. You may get straight to the pages here:
Another from this part, another Charlotte Smith variation may
be read in Smithereens 2, on page 15:
Links to a number of the published poems from Non Disclosure Agreement (the last part
of the proposed book of The English Strain, working on EBB)
may be accessed here:
Some older ‘English Strain’ poems, using Milton's sonnets, may be found here:
You know, if you’ve seen those temporary posts, that
you may read about the whole ‘English Strain’ project in a post that has links
to some other accounts, and earlier parts, of this work: here. That was 100 poems long. I write about my sonnets generally here,
and here
and see here
and here for more on my Petrarch
obsession, which ‘The English Strain’ project into motion.
Monday 23rd June 1969:
EXAMS.
Maths, English.
Saturday, June 22, 2019
Friday, June 21, 2019
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Thursday 19th June 1969:
Number One: The Ballad
of John and Yoko, The Beatles.
Revision.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Monday, June 17, 2019
Tuesday 17th June 1969:
EXAM.
Biology.
Revision.
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Saturday, June 15, 2019
Friday, June 14, 2019
Thursday 14th June 1979 (for a change)
Yesterday I got Veronica
Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice out
of the library. I shall be delving into this soon.
Journal, Thursday 14th June
1979
Saturday 14th June 1969:
Got reply from my jumble sale story. (Too good.) Went on
beach with John.
Thursday, June 13, 2019
Friday 13th (underlined) June 1969:
Revision.
Wednesday, June 12, 2019
Thursday 12th June 1969:
Revision.
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
Monday, June 10, 2019
Sunday, June 09, 2019
Saturday, June 08, 2019
Robert Sheppard: Twittersonnet published in NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems ed. Philip Rowland
I am pleased to say that I have a very strange (short) sound poem
in NOON: An Anthology of Short Poems, edited by Philip Rowland,
which presents a carefully arranged and strikingly diverse selection of poems
from the issues of NOON: journal of the short poem that appeared in
Japan between 2004 and 2017.
Focusing on poems of less than fourteen lines,
Philip Rowland has assembled a richly suggestive, renga-like chain of over two
hundred poems by almost half as many poets, at the same time showcasing, he says, 'some of
the most interesting minimalist poetry being written in English today'. Nice cover!
My contribution is one of my ‘twittersonnets’, ‘hammerhead’,
and it's one of three published in Issue 12 of Noon,, ‘hammerhead’,
‘lucretius’ and ‘micrographia’. They were written for the ‘Life is Short’ day
at Bluecoat, Liverpool in November 2015. (See here).
I write about them here:
The original twittersonnet (and other twitterodes) may be
found in the works of René Van Valckenborch in my A Translated Man (Shearsman, 2013) and the second in my Petrarch 3 (Crater Press, 2016). The
(then) constraint of 140 characters was distributed across the 14 (8+6) line
frame of the sonnet, 10 characters or spaces per line. You can
see the original here:
More publishing news. All of my new ‘Twittersonnets’, including the one in NOON:
An Anthology of Short Poems, will be published shortly in
my small, limited edition of short poems, Micro Event Space coming from Red Ceilings Press.(Notice that word 'shortly'.)
Click here
to read Philip Rowland’s Introduction to the anthology, plus a full list of
contributors to the anthology.
The book is published by Isobar Press. https://isobarpress.com/
Click here
to buy it from Amazon in Japan;
click here
to buy from Amazon in the UK;
click here
to buy from Amazon in the US.
Friday, June 07, 2019
Saturday 7th June 1969:
Got loads of records. Moonlight
Serenade. etc…………………….
Thursday, June 06, 2019
Wednesday, June 05, 2019
Tuesday, June 04, 2019
Monday, June 03, 2019
Sunday, June 02, 2019
Saturday, June 01, 2019
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