Three new(ish) sonnets have been published in International Times. They are described as ‘Overdubs of Michael Drayton in the Voice of Idea, his Muse’, but are in fact the last three poems in the sequence ‘Idea’s Mirror’, my supplement to ‘Bad Idea’. Together, the two sequences form the manuscript of ‘Bad Idea’, the second ‘book’ of ‘The English Strain’ project. These are the first to appear from ‘Idea’s Mirror’.
HERE!
This showing of just pre- and just post- 2019 Election poems is accompanied by Patricia Farrell’s fine illustration of a Techno-Dogging Site. News just in is that Michael Go will be opening the first post-Brexit dogging site (in Kent) on Independence Day. It has been announced that the new national sport (of sovereign global britain), dogging, will be organised by a new Government (sorry, People's) agency called The National Thrust.
You can see the three original Drayton poems I have transposed here (the last three 'Amours' poems):
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/michael-drayton-and-my-borrowings-from.html
Bad Idea is described fully (with links to other published poems from the work) here:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-bad-idea-and-reference-to-earlier.html
Idea’s Mirror is described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html
That post also contains some thoughts about the then possible shapes of any ‘English Strain’, book three. I think now it will include the Wordsworth option, and may involve versions, overdubs, understudies or transpositions of Romantic sonnets.
And you can look up another eight online poems from Bad Idea that may be accessed from this post:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/robert-sheppard-two-more-poems-from-bad.html
Thanks to Rupert Loydell, Stride and IT poetry editor, for taking them all.
[2021: I’m delighted to announce that Bad Idea is available NOW from Alec Newman’s excellent press Knives Forks and Spoons, with a cover design by Patricia Farrell. You may get it HERE: https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages ]
