This year it was the turn of Roy Bayfield, (and of Ailsa Cox earlier in the summer) who is also a
member of the Poetry and Poetics Research Group, and whose poems I selected for
my guest editorship of Stride (see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-guest-editing-of-stride-magazine.html
 |
| This is the cover of the booklet of imaginary events put together for Roy's leaving do, in the style of the Edge Hill Arts Centre publicity! |
I was invited by Cathy Butterworth to read something at his 'do' and I
thought I’d read this introduction and then this re-mix from my book Words Out of Time. In the event it was
too long so I read something else. But here it is:
Roy’s
book Desire Paths: Real Walks to Nonreal
Places (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2016) is a glorious exploration of – as
it says on the tin – Nonreal Places. More on that book Here.
Roy like me, is a South Coast
poet: he comes from Portslade in East Sussex and I come from the next town
along, Southwick in West Sussex. I think it would take about 20 minutes to
walk from the house where I grew up to the house where he grew up. In one
paragraph he quotes me and explains the Southwick/Portslade dichotomy:
‘I don’t remember seeing
Portslade on the radar screen…’ wrote Robert Sheppard in his chapbook The Given – a moment forgotten by the
writer but remembered in a journal entry from an earlier decade. Robert was
raised in Southwick, the town next to Portslade, and such dismissal is perhaps
to be expected from the rival place, across the border in West
Sussex. Admittedly, Portslade may not be on many people’s radars,
at least not consciously so. (Bayfield 2016: 25)
He explains further:
As a child, the border between
East and West Sussex, Portslade and Southwick,
running at the back of our garden, defined by a footpath and a row of
electricity pylons, seemed like such a line. Merely by virtue of being on the
other side of the line, Southwick seemed slightly uncanny. (28)
I’d like to offer a special ‘Portslade/Southwick Remix’ of
my text that Roy refers to, The Given, for Roy, and to wish him many
psychogeographical explorations of uncanny nonplaces, wherever he may find them:
Portslade/Southwick
Remix
I don’t remember
going to the Grenada
in Portland Road,
Hove, don’t recall the film on show, and don’t remember, on the same day,
seeing a play, or its plot, or its title. A frame set up, years later, by
others. Coal dust on the doorframe, where the hood catches it. A dozen or so
knapped flints pushed into the earth: a Roman road straight across the horses’
field, the wheat, the ridge of the Downs. Nazis
machine-gun the cheese crates and screaming POWs leap up to their deaths. The
pebbly beach beneath the Brighton B power station will do. An aluminium bowl of
wasted food before which feeding is practised with moral intensity. I don’t
remember the thunderstorm I watched from my window, lightning flashes over
Southwick, flickering, striking ground. After the toad in the witness box, real
policemen arrive to investigate stolen buttons, the wrecked foreign car. I
don’t remember trying to buy This is Blues and finding the record sleeve
contained only cardboard. I don’t remember tracking Radio 260 through the
streets of Southwick, the ‘common’ English of the DJs, the warning that they’d
cut up rough if we found them. The desire to write is the desire to write. I
don’t remember reading The Day of the Triffids. I don’t remember
watching colour TV. I don’t remember seeing Portslade on the radar screen,
don’t remember the visit to HMS Collingwood. I don’t remember being shot at by
somebody from a van. I remember the
Ruby wine at the Romans, the way the barman would loll his tongue from the side
of his mouth as he poured the soupy chemical liquid into Tony’s bottles. I
don’t remember Doll and Arthur’s caravan at Selsey. I don’t remember getting a
harmonica with Green Shield stamps. I don’t remember David’s bottled fish. I
don’t remember Emerson
Lake and Palmer playing a
tribute to Hendrix at the Dome. I don’t remember seeing a band called Vomit. I
don’t remember playing my tape of The Waste Land to an empty room. I
don’t remember when poems became a currency. I don’t remember a girl called
Annie flashing on Toby’s houseboat. I don’t remember writing a poem about Bill
Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop. I don’t remember the night that was not particularly
memorable. I don’t remember the Scottish woman who helped me at Metal Box in
Fishersgate. I don’t remember sitting in Southwick Rest
Garden to read Wilfred
Owen. I don’t remember dancing with a girl with a big nose whose brother was a
surrealist. I don’t remember that I bought Bomb Culture the day I saw
Country Joe and The Fish. I don’t remember Tony arriving at 15 Oakapple Road, Southwick, with a
letter from Henri Chopin. I don’t remember the German sailor dead drunk on the
steps of the Crown and Anchor. I don’t remember the clever-dick who wanted to
know why the Newhaven-Dieppe crossings were more expensive than the
Dover-Calais ones. I don’t remember seeing the Doctors of Madness again, not
getting it the second time, that blue-haired zeitgeister Kid Strange. I don’t
remember reading Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat in the swelter of ’76. I don’t
remember Flatfoot at The Alhambra. I don’t remember the disco to celebrate
Franco’s death. I don’t remember laughing at the statue of the past Mayor of
Brighton. I don’t remember jumbling the verses of ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’,
our first gig at the Burrell Arms in Shoreham. I don’t remember climbing
Chanctonbury Ring, the moon rising, ensanguined, over charmed hills…
Remix July 2019:
for Roy
This is not the first remix from Words Out of Time on this blog. I did a
special remix as part of the eulogy to my mother (see here) and a presented continuation
of the final part ‘Work’ to the day of my
retirement, here. More on that here. Read my account of writing The Given, the part used for Roy’s
remix here.
There are even some outtakes here, stretches of 'When' that didn't make the
final edit, here. It is an extraordinary flexible text to form and re-form.
Words Out of Time is still in print
and may be read about and purchased here:
Well. I decided to play with his
notion of Southwick being ‘uncanny’, and I more or less said what I’d already
written as intro to the remix above, and then read one of the Charlotte Smith Sussex
'Brexit' sonnets or overdubs, ‘Composed during a walk on the Downs’. It may be read here, along with
other poems from the sequence: It’s the second poem down: http://www.blazevox.org/BX%20Covers/BXspring19/Robert%20Sheppard%20-%20Spring19.pdf
It also seems appropriate to mention this poem because what did I do 50 years ago, according to my 1969 diary which I am blogging each day: 'In afternoon, went over Downs for a walk.'
It also seems appropriate to mention this poem because what did I do 50 years ago, according to my 1969 diary which I am blogging each day: 'In afternoon, went over Downs for a walk.'
