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 )
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.
