My
poem is here: https://www.wowfest.uk/wowfest19/499-an-overdub-of-the-vanity-of-national-grandeur.html
but his general introduction seems to have already been taken down.
For
this showing I turned Bo back into Boris, for clarity, although I didn’t
explain Coleridge’s two extraordinary neologisms. A ‘Psilosopher’ is a false
philosophy; ‘suffictions’ are fake suppositions. John Thelwall was a radical as
wsell as a sonneteer, which is why I choose his sonnet for the radical WOW
Festival!
Here’s
a video of me reading the sonnet, with Bo restored to his single ejaculatory syllable.
This
is a hub post for the ’14 Standards’ section of British Standards. No other poems have been published to date. (Though until about mid June my one about slavery and Liverpool place names (written before the drenching of hollow racist statues) will still be temporarily posted on this blog.)
Read 'We had a female Passenger who came from Calais' as part of the the 'Talking to the Dead' feature on Stride here. I write about the poem and read it on video here.
Read 'An Overdub of Letitia Elizabeth Landon's The Dancing Girl here. Or about the poem (and hear/see another video) here.
I’ve
documented my progress to date in detail as ‘The English Strain’ progresses. There
are two comprehensive posts to check out, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here and
another at Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The
final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’, it’s
described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html )
Parts
of Book One are still available in booklet form, see below.
The preface to the third (and projected final)
book British Standards. The preface is a version of Shelley’s ‘England
in 1819’. The body of the book was begun in 2020, after Brexit Independence Day;
the first section was finished late March. For that first section, I transposed
poems from part of Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to
National Independence and Liberty’, retitled ‘Poems of National
Independence’, cheekily subtitled ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about
that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html
All the poems I transposed in ’14 Standards’ may be found in Feldman, Paula, R., and Daniel Robinson. eds. A Century of Sonnets. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, a fascinating and eye-opening anthology. I did not write these transpositions sequentially, and I used a variety of methods and forms, in order that they don’t conform to the pattern (or the narrative) of contiguous poems. The only one I chose to write was ‘The Vanity of National Grandeur’ because I knew which one was just the job for the WOW Festival. (Of course, a seeming pattern emerges: it will resemble you, and all that!). I hope you see how my perverse self-interrupting poetics works.
The 'Dominic Cummings' 'affair' prompted a pair of poems entitled 'Double Standards', which stands as a kind of coda to '14 Standards', both them overdubs of Shelley.
I call these ‘transposed’ poems ‘Standards’, since the originals are part of our poetic repertoire. I’ve been listening to one of Anthony Braxton’s ‘Standards’ albums, on which he plays and transforms those communally malleable tunes dubbed ‘standards’ by jazz musicians. I refer directly to that in Standard 10. Hear an Anthony Braxton ‘standard’ here, indeed the ‘Recorda Me’ that I refer to in that poem, off of Braxton, Anthony. 23 Standards (Quartet) 2003, Leo Records, CD LR 402/405 (CD), 2004.
Braxton is still at it too: watch this: one of
the only jazz concerts this year so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRYGqZifWCE
Second half here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=604&v=rJL_BwJh8TI&feature=emb_logo
I’m also thinking of the ‘standards’ that
British locks and other devices conform to, with a hint of moral
standards, of course.
Like
a lot of the world during the weeks of writing them (6th April-18th
May 2020), I had a pre-scripted lockdown life, which was quite useful. Given that
the poems are often fragmented, they are perhaps less funny than previous ones.
I only wanted to write indirectly about coronavirus, but some have turned into
my ‘lockdown’ poems (because they are). Of course, the virus had already
appeared thematically in ‘Poems of National Independence’, slowly creeping in
until it had subsumed the Brexit theme.
As might be gathered from what I have said, British
Standards as a whole (not just this corona) aims to present transpositions
of sonnets of the Romantic period, from William Bowles to Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. Chronologically, they lie between those of Charlotte Smith,
which I’ve already worked on here, https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-english-strain-poems-overdubs-of.html
and those of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that
I’ve also worked on, both of them in the final parts of Book One:
There are quite a lot of poems from various past
parts online. You can access six poems from Bad Idea, Book Two, here:
Three sonnets from the last section of Bad Idea, ‘Idea’s Mirror’, may be
accessed here:
In ‘Petrarch 3’, the opening part of Book One,
the transpositions are achieved by having 14 versions of one translation from
Petrarch. This part of Book One, ‘Petrarch 3’, is published under that title.
Another part is published as Hap which ab(uses) the sonnets of Thomas
Wyatt. Both pamphlets are still available.
Look here and here for
more on the Petrarch obsession/project, including how to purchase Petrarch 3
from Crater Press in its ‘fold out map’ edition. I have
written in detail about the writing of Petrarch 3 (see https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/practice-led-piece-on-petrarch-3-from.html
)
Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch 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
or here:
or here:
If you’re fed up with reading Hilary Mantel’s
accounts of Wyatt (or Surrey for that matter), OR you can’t get enough of Henrician
Terror, Hap is the book for you, and the link above will prove
efficacious. Alec Newman is awaiting your order (there are other books of
mine there, too, as well as the new out now)!
Two ‘Poems of National Independence’ have been published on International Times. Link here, via my short laptop videos:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-two-transpositions-of.html
I contemplate the term ‘transposition’ at the end of the following post (that is mostly about collaboration, you can scroll past that bit). In determining that ‘transposition’ isn’t collaboration proper, so far as I’m concerned, I also demonstrate, if only for myself, that ‘transposition’ isn’t translation.
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on_27.html
