Saturday, February 27, 2021

Two new poems from British Standards published in Tears in the Fence 73

 My copy of Tears in the Fence 73 has arrived. 

Copies are now available at https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward . I have a couple of related poems published here. Thanks to David Caddy for selecting and thereby juxtaposing them for this outing. 

They are both from (different parts) of British Standards, the third book of ‘The English Strain project. One is my re-writing of Shelley’s canonical ‘Ozymandias’. You may read about my lengthy encounters with this text here: Pages: My occasional transposition of Shelley' s 'Ozymandias' appears and disappears (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). Such encounters pre-date our contemporary engagements with public statuary and their unsavoury pasts, but my transposition of one of Southey’s poems about slavery brings us closer to home, not to Southey’s slavery-rich Bristol, but to contemporary (or lockdown one) Liverpool. Just so you know, Bold was a slaver, as was Tarleton. One Tarleton family member appears in ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’: see here Pages: My Transpositions of Mary Robinson's sonnets 'Tabitha and Thunderer' are now complete (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) though this poem comes from the stylistically various set ’14 Standards’, which I write about here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: 14 Standards from British Strandards is complete as one sonnet appears at the virtual WOW Festival 2020 (hub post).  

 


Me reading 'Poem on the Slave Trade' the day it was written. Around that time I posted this: Pages: My latest Liverpool-Brexit-Virus-Slavery British Standard transposition (of Robert Southey) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

You can connect to all the news about the project as a whole, here: Pages: My THE ENGLISH STRAIN is published today by Shearsman (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

Tears in the Fence 73 (73! imagine!) features poetry, prose poetry, multlilingual poetry, translations, flash fiction and fiction from: Mark Russell, Neha Maqsood, Penny Hope, Mandy Pannett, John Freeman, Sandra Galton, Wioletta Greg translated by Maria Jastrzębska and Anna Blasiak, Peter Dent, Alison Lock, Caitlin Stobie, Jeffrey Graessley, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, L. Kiew, Mohammad Razai, Alex Barr, Michael Farrell, Olivia Tuck, Paul Rossiter, John Goodby, Maurice Scully, Tim Allen, Lucy Maxwell Scott, Anna-May Laugher, Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, Mélisande Fitzsimons, Marcia Hindson, Oliver Dixon, Gwen Sayers, Beth Davyson, Steve Spence, Valerie Bridge, S.J. Litherland, Karen Downs-Barton, Frances Presley, Mark Dickinson, Alison Brackenbury, Phil Williams, Rhea Seren Phillips, Oliver Southall, Sarah Salway and Sarah Watkinson.



 

The critical section consists of Louise Buchler’s Editorial, Jeremy Hilton on Hart Crane, Jeremy Reed on Denise Riley, Mandy Pannett on Sascha A. Akhtar, Geraldine Clarkson, Robert Hampson on Jeanne Heuving, Andrew Duncan on Molly Vogel, Clark Allison on Robin Fulton Macpherson, Walter Perrie, A.L. Kennedy, Guy Russell on Lesley Harrison, Alejandra Pizarnik, Mark Prendergast on Mercè Rodoreda, Siân Thomas on Susie Campbell, Steve Spence on the Plymouth Poetry Scene, David Caddy on Stephanie Burt’s Callimachus, Richard Scholar’s Émigrés, Ric Hool on Mélisande Fitzsimons, and Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 8.

 Tears in the Fence | an independent, international literary magazine

I've appeared in Tears in the Fence a lot over the last 25 (?) years, and here are some of my other appearances and/or responses to the issues: 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: 'Between' a poem for Roy Fisher published in Tears in the Fence

 Pages: Robert Sheppard and Anamaria Crowe Serrano (Jaroslav Bialy and update on my EUOIA collaborative project) Tears in the Fence

Pages: Robert Sheppard sonnets from Bad Idea published in Tears in the Fence 70

Pages: Robet Sheppard: 3 poems to the memory of Lee Harwood in Tears in the Fence (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)


Thursday, February 25, 2021

The final sonnet transposition from John Clare (thinking about the set of 14) (hub post)

On this blog I’ve documented ‘The English Strain’ project as work has progressed, through to its current third book, British Standards, and I've now [I'm updating this on 4th March 2021] finished my transpositions of the brilliant sonnets of John Clare, a sequence I shall entitle ‘Unthreading Clare’ or ‘Unth(reading) Clare’, if that doesn't seem too arch. I will also record here where poems from that ‘corona’ are published as a hub post. 

Hub Post

The 'Clare' poem ‘What a night’ appears as a film-poem (really one of my short weekly videos) on the Writers Kingston Online project: Pages: A lo-fi lockdown videopoem: An overdub of John Clare's sonnet 'What a night!' posted as part of Writers Kingston Online (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

Hopefully, others will follow and you will be directed to them from here.


For your guide, the ‘books’ of ‘The English Strain’ are:

1. The English Strain (Shearsman, now published. See below.)

2. Bad Idea (Knives, Forks and Spoons, officially out April, but available now; also see below).

3. British Standards (work in progress, as of this posting)

There are two ways of looking at the project: as an account of the capering of Bo and Go and other clowns across the post-Brexit dogging site that newly independent ‘Bressex’ has become, or the subtler story of the English strain of the sonnet form. I hope I will send readers back or away to the ‘originals’. Part of my poems’ meaning has to lie in intersectional reading between one of Clare’s sonnets, say, and mine. That’s one role of the reader here, although general knowledge of transposition will be enough to see what’s going on. I’m not dismissing tradition; I’m invoking it. Book one is called The English Strain: the project begins with Petrarch, picking up the ‘Brexit’ theme in a number of sonnets of my own, until Milton, Wyatt, Surrey, Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Barratt Browning, provide the frames for me to hang my boots on. 

This continues in book two, Bad Idea, though there I stick to Shakespeare’s contemporary Michael Drayton, a fine sonneteer. I’ve spent almost as long on this project as on Twentieth Century Blues.          

Here are two comprehensive posts to check out, the first that looks at Book One, The English Strain here (written before it gained its title!).

There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here . (The final part of Bad Idea is slightly different; called ‘Idea’s Mirror’; that’s described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html ).

I am delighted to say that Book One, The English Strain is available from Shearsman; see here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6

 


I am also delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is available from Knives Forks and Spoons, so you may buy it HERE and NOW:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

 


Back to (or onto) Book Three - and my responses to John Clare as an important part of it.


‘Unth(reading) Clare’ poem 14, the final one, is currently unpublished (It was here for a little while.) . It was another mad one, where Clare becomes an anti-vaxxer (through insanity), but it is faithful to Clare’s tenderly-observed poem about the gypsy camp in Epping forest near the asylum. Here’s Clare’s poem, and a link to Carol Rumens account of the poem.

Poem of the week: The Gipsy Camp | John Clare | The Guardian

The Gipsy Camp 

The snow falls deep; the Forest lies alone:
The boy goes hasty for his load of brakes,
Then thinks upon the fire and hurries back;
The Gipsy knocks his hands and tucks them up,
And seeks his squalid camp, half hid in snow,
Beneath the oak, which breaks away the wind,
And bushes close, with snow like hovel warm:
There stinking mutton roasts upon the coals,
And the half roasted dog squats close and rubs,
Then feels the heat too strong and goes aloof;
He watches well, but none a bit can spare,
And vainly waits the morsel thrown away:
’Tis thus they live – a picture to the place;
A quiet, pilfering, unprotected race.

These 'mad' sonnets at the end of 'Unth(reading) Clare' I've called the 'Don Juan Sonnets', which will be explained a little later. It ends with the conspiracy theory line: 'Bill Gates pilfers profit from my Don Juan' , an allusion to the ridiculous notion that a microchip is included in every vaccine.  

In these last few 'mad' poems, I make reference here to Clare’s famous walk from Epping Forest to his home in Northborough, of which he wrote a remarkable memoir. This features in many accounts of Clare (or mythologies of him, perhaps I should say), including Sinclair’s Edge of Orison (about which I was a bit sniffy in my critical book on Sinclair, unnecessarily it strikes me now), and Andrew Kötting’s film.

You can watch Kötting’s film about John Clare here: BY OUR SELVES MASTER STEREO on Vimeo

I’m interested in Clare’s music collecting, and that enters one poem, though minimally: Clare played the fiddle and could notate anything that he could play on the instrument – and often did. (Critics seem more interested in settings of his poems to his own music, not the same thing.) But here’s a beautiful and not much perused video rendition from ‘Hertfordbristolman’. You can play it while you read the rest of this post!



Two John Clare hornpipes - YouTube

John Clare’s poems haven’t proved as easy to transpose as I first imagined, since they are so unmetaphorically direct and sensually replete. Here is what I wrote in my journal (adapted a little) on 9th December 2020, to get me going:

Clare has posed problems. I have selected 15 possible sonnets (there are dozens of other possible sonnets, but needs must be) and they form a nice corona. But I can’t think of how I might utilise them, which is why I thought, again, last night, to return to Wordsworth (later political poems, even his dreadful ones on capital punishment, one of Brexit’s hidden prizes, I am sure). But it seems retrograde, an evasion of Clare, even though the Wordsworth poems are well-suited to the sudden last-ditch Brexit madness that has re-emerged with all the 2016 arguments intact… 

Clare, in the asylum, wrote ‘as’ Byron, in a text called ‘Don Juan’; at the same time, he also claimed not to be Byron, since the poem says: ‘I think myself as great a bard as Byron’. (He’s right.) He was the author of ‘Don Juan’, if we take the text he called ‘Don Juan’ to be ‘Don Juan’. Could I transpose the chosen sonnets into a mode that derives, not from Byron himself, but from Clare’s satirical mode in ‘Don Juan’, which is certainly consonant with my variations of EBB in Book One?

I feel protective about Clare, even more so than in the case of Mary Robinson, (see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-transpositions-of-mary-robinsons.html

) because Clare’s achievements are not yet recognised fully, and there is no consensus over the oeuvre, a corpus, a mini-canon, bar a few well-known poems. Hence very few of the sonnets I’ve selected from Bate’s anthology appear in the Major Works!...

Kövesi quotes Gadamer on the fusing of horizons in writers who ‘transpose’ (my term for what I’m up to) Clare into their own times and terms. This he thinks is fair game for the ‘creative’ writer, but he seems dead against it in the practice of critics who impose a method. (I remember teaching new historicism, which I thought was useful to understand Iain Sinclair’s work (see here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Everything Connects: The Social Poetics of Iain Sinclair )  but not so good to follow in its own right.)

I finally got round to the ‘Don Juan’ front in the final three, separated into a ‘part two’ in a way I thought I might avoid; sane poems/mad poems.

Poetics often works like this for me, perversely: I propose something, and immediately do something different. Even: the opposite. I knew I might have to return to ‘Don Juan’, but not namecheck this in the final two words of the sequence. The follies of Brexit and Bo’s abandoned ‘Gerontocidal Yuletide rules’ demand a satirical voice, rather than the poetics of dispersed subjectivities among people and animals, though I’ve enjoyed that aspect of Clare, and in my versions (taking my ‘own’ work down uncharacteristic channels). ‘Don Juan’ probably damages the ‘beauties’, as they would have said in the 1820s, of the originals. So far from ‘Clare’ taking the project’s final poems from Book Three into a post-Brexit (even post-virus?) world with a new tone, I adopted his borrowed ‘Don Juan’ voice to deal with Bo and Go and their deals and dealings, and to bring the sequence to a conclusion.

OR [I find myself characteristically flim-flamming in poetics dialectics] I imagined the first x poems might be mainly one thing; the last x could be, for example, Sheppardian quennets (as I’d long planned for the end of this Project); but that didn’t happen! Everything was fluid, but it became a little late in the sequence for Oulipean forms to re-assert themselves.

 


After I had completed seven of these projected 14, I wrote the following in my poetics journal:           

18th January 2021: Writing yesterday’s diary I reflected upon ‘plagues’ (Shakespeare’s and our own) and how they are negotiated by writing (and whether, as I’d assumed, wrongly in the case of plague-response, but probably right in the case of the Spanish ’Flu …, that art did not reflect previous plagues). The thought that such a production might be shunned. Will we want novels set in lockdown (X threatens one)? Or, when will we want one? Not immediately.

And so, as I reflect upon the final 7 ‘Clare’ sonnets, it is worth bearing this fact in mind… The other thought that strikes me is that the ‘final 7’ need not be sectioned off from the first. That is a pattern of The English Strain (the book) that is repeated in Keats’, but – hey! – it doesn’t have to be repeated for this set. The 14 poems I’ve selected don’t separate in any way (and I want no phony division such as ‘sane’ poems and ‘mad’ ones. Or even punctuated and unpunctuated (since that is responsive, or would seem to be, to literary politics regarding Clare’s ‘revisions’)). How do I feel about 1-7?

(Read them. [Snuffling noises for several minutes.])

Fine as they are, they neither feel like a ‘grouping’, nor do they not. It think it best to simply continue with them.

Brexit bequeathed Bressex [the post-Brexit nation state: possibly an Anglo Saxon kingdom with no Celtic colonies…]. They are not going to start re-writing all our laws or bring back hanging yet (not within the writing-span of the English Strain project). Yet neither will The Virus be ‘over’. In fact, it might never be ‘over’ in the sense of the WHO declaring the disease eradicated (like polio was, last year). So, it looks like neither will ‘end’, not with bang or whimper, at all. Any British glory (the vaccine) is declared the ‘result’ of Brexit. And yet the phenomenal (highest in the world some weeks) death rate (even as infection rates are falling, even on Merseyside) will slowly abate. There’s no end to Bo and Go either. These poems need to leave that world without concluding it. Not all war novels end with the Armistice. [It strikes me now, none do.] What I’ve been wanting all along is a way to hint at (rather than expound) some positive projections for the future. And utopianism (vaguely riffing on Bloch), ‘prefigured the never-/believed in the un-(yet)- /known’, miming the Not Yet of Bloch and the difference between often empty belief and necessarily incomplete knowledge ([see] the quote from Dirty Bertie [Russell] in [one of the]‘Curtail… [Song Nets from Junkets]’).

Maybe it might be good to roll out of Bressex and Coronavirus as themes, in the arms of a loosely-defined ecologically-minded awareness of ‘Ecocide’, as in Dave [Whyte]’s book – but muted, muted, muted… As with all the poems anyway, there’s the leading reading of Clare’s poems (though that ‘leading’ is heavily willed. It’s a choice to have streets of ‘peeling/NHS rainbows from last spring’ rather than Clare’s blankets of snow transforming the fields the shepherds think they know so well).

Let it go, let it roll – with the same periodicity… 

Note how I rejected the 'mad poem' theme, and adopted it. Typical again of poetics as a partly self-deceptive, developmental discourse. To finish British Standards I was also tempted to write some ‘euro-sonnets’, Baudelaire – Mallarme – Rimbaud – Verlaine – but I know I must adhere to the ‘End your solo before you’re done’ principle of Miles Davis. Though I’ve gone on so long, it’s more likely to require Miles’ exasperated plea to Coltrane after one 45 minute solo: ‘Take the saxophone out of your mouth!’

So: what's next?

What I did do was to make a list of all the possible plans for the continuation of the sequences, to see what felt good. Back to the journal, an entry for 25th January 2021:

I have investigated various ‘endings’ of ‘The English Strain’ project. Stop at Clare. Or add one Shelley. Find another 14 ‘standards’ (possibly in clumps: 4433: 4 by Hartley Coleridge, 4 by Rossetti, 3 by Tennyson Turner, etc). Or ‘Laura to Petrarch’. Or Rossetti’s early Ur text of ‘The House of Love’, 16 poems. Or 2 Byrons. Or any other, listed above.

Maybe that’s all I need: the knowledge of the existence of ‘other’ plans to bring the thing to rest (because Covid won’t be ‘over’ by March, when Clare runs out), a variety of exit plans to neither fret over nor add to… 

Clare ran out in February, actually! I have recently decided to write a Shelley interlude as I have between each sequence and add another 14 poems to end British Standards and to turn to the very accomplished sonnets of Hartley Coleridge. The more one looks, the more accomplished he seems. I have selected the poems from his 1833 collection. I have a collection of his letters, which I am reading. This allows the project to extend into summer, at least. But I am not sure how I shall ‘place’ him, or whether I shall invent some scenarios for him. I toyed with the title ‘Partly Coleridge’ for a bit. The Labour Party seems to have escaped this work since Jeremy was buried, and Kier Starmer doesn’t appear at all. Maybe he’ll say something worth satirizing! I don’t think he will, though: he reminds me of a Madame Tussards of himself. I might make my narrator a Red Wall Tory (since HC himself was a Tory and an acclaimed anti-Democrat).


So it’s onwards, but near I’m the end. You have two volumes to be getting on with, while I finish these. I might not hurry, but I shall continue the posting of the poems here (that’s all become a part of the ritual of producing these poems, as well as a way of dealing with their contemporary content). It is, I can tell you, quite invigorating to write poems that I don’t engender in this way.  

I began work on the book British Standards in pre-Covid 2020, but post-Brexit Independence Day. Both of those ‘issues’ are important to it. And the first remains so, even with the fact that several vaccines are on their way, and have been delivered into your author’s aching arm, though they now have to fight against a stronger strain of the virus, the ‘English Strain’ one might even call it, though I take no pleasure in that pun (and less in ‘the Liverpool Strain’ that appeared briefly in the news. That caused my one lockdown breakdown).

The first section of British Standards was finished late March 2020, just after the (first) lockdown was belatedly, fatally for some, announced. For this, I transposed poems from Wordsworth’s ‘Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty’, and retitled them ‘Poems of National Independence’, and even more cheekily subtitled them, ‘liberties with Wordsworth’. I write about that sequence here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html . There are links to online publication of some of the poems too (as there are in many of these links).


Then followed ‘14 Standards’, the lockdown poems (quite a few online now, some of those coming out in the States soon, and one in Tears in the Fence 73\:Pages: Two new poems from British Standards published in Tears in the Fence 73 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) , and in turn, two additional ‘Double Standards’ about the now-departed Cum’s disgraceful lockdown infringements – I transposed a couple of Shelley’s sonnets – and his elitist refusal of apology and regret. See here for all 16 ‘standards’ (and links to online publication): http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/05/robert-sheppard-14-standards-from.html . Shelley’s poems are threaded singly through British Standards, 
as 'preface', and between each section. Another Shelley transposition, of ‘Ozymandias’ this time, may be read about here (this post is the hub post, as I call it, for these dispersed versions of Shelley, one out now, also in Tears in the Fence, to form a pair of poems about the legacy of slavery):

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-occasional-transposition-of-shelley.html


 ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, interventions in the sonnet sequence ‘Sappho and Phaon’ by Mary Robinson, followed, and they may be read about (with video) here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-transpositions-of-mary-robinsons.html

 Then I turned to Keats. I had some trouble getting going; you can read about that struggle here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-overdub-understudy-version-of-keats.html

The Keats poems are called ‘Weird Syrup’. The first 7 are entitled ‘Contrafacts and Counterfactuals from Keats’, the last 7, ‘Curtal Song-Nets from Junkets’.


This post operates as a hub post about the Keats transpositions: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/11/weird-syrup-final-keats-variation.html 

As might be gathered from what I have said in this post, British Standards, as a whole, presents transpositions of admired sonnets of the Romantic period, from William Bowles to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chronologically, they broadly 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, The English Strain, out tomorrow, but available now:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-non-disclosure.html

 



Friday, February 19, 2021

My THE ENGLISH STRAIN is published today by Shearsman

Hurrah! The English Strain is published today by Shearsman, available here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934?offset=6


‘Enraptured by the versioning bug,’ I confess, of my 14 variations of Petrarch’s third sonnet, ‘Petrarch 3’, which kick the book off, ‘I was off on one.’ With some comic verve, I hope, I refunction some of the finest sonneteers, Petrarch himself, and those of ‘The English Strain’ project which gives this book (and wider project) its title: Wyatt and Surrey, ‘the first reformers’ of English poetry, and John Milton, exemplary political poet. None is safe from my comedic appropriations of their works and days. 

It’s quite a new tone for me. Lock up your sonnets! My Wyatt spies for a British foreign office that fluxes between the Henrician court and Tory high command, post-Referendum. Surrey is a chinless wonder of aristocratic chivalry, the marvel of the French killing fields (and contemporary Norfolk dogging sites). Mordant humour and irony continue in my ‘trans translations’ of the two major women sonneteers: of Charlotte Smith, the Petrarch of Petworth, witnessing strange happenings on the Downs, and Barrett Browning, Mistress Elizabeth of her Wimpole Street penthouse and the clued-up ‘mistress’ of a clownish politician. 

The dominant satirical theme, the national strain surrounding that once novel word ‘Brexit’, is almost picked up casually in the sequence ‘It’s Nothing’, where I deliberately fail in the attempt to speak in my own voice. I’m more at home in my homemade 100-word sonnets, as I nail Brexit in a neat couplet: ‘they’ve got our country back for us/ and now they want it for themselves’. (Isn’t that more and more true?) As you read this book, be warned: between poetic worlds, between sonnet and transposition, big laughs and little truths are lying in wait for you. There’s 100 of them. 

To be clear, the parts of ‘The English Strain’ project are:

1. this book, The English Strain (out today);

2. Bad Idea (Knives, Forks and Spoons, officially out April, but also available now; see below)

3. British Standards (work in progress).

A useful review, by Alan Baker, of Petrarch 3, which set the whole project off, may be read on Litterbug, here. I write about 'Petrarch 3' here:  Pages: Practice-Led piece on 'Petrarch 3' from The English Strain published in Translating Petrarch's Poetry (Legenda) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Tom Jenks wrote of one of the sequences published today: ‘Sheppard uses Wyatt in the way Wyatt used Petrarch: as a means of producing a new work of literature that is linked to, but not bound by, the original… Sheppard here expands further the boundaries of translation, the transposition of historical events to contemporary circumstances being not just incidental to the translation process, but an act of translation itself… Sheppard’s poetics of translation can be aligned with those of Borges, Benjamin, and Bernstein, who all regard translation as something more than a functional service to the reader. This view of translation admits a constellation of methods, strategies, tactics, and techniques disallowed by more conventional approaches. Sheppard posits, both in theory and in practice, a translational mode that is open, fluid, permissive, voracious and, above all, creative.’

This post describes The English Strain here (before it gained its title!).

The Journal concludes: ‘I have yet to read a better, more succinct, more ribald analysis of the mishap of Brexit.’             

Geraldine Monk in The Robert Sheppard Companion informs us: ‘Sheppard’s writing is rough, rude, quirky, serious, learned, and never afraid to be humorous. In short it is as irreverent as it is relevant.’

Here are three representative poems from the book, read by me. The first is 'The Lion Returns', from 'It's Nothing', the section where I speak in 'my own' voice. (Twigger warning: This may make you nostalgic for the pub.)

 


The second is a transposition of a sonnet by Charlotte Smith, '


Number three comes for near the end of the book, where I transpose a sonnet from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese'. 


I write about the ‘transpositions’ of Charlotte Smith, ‘Elegiac Sonnets’, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/more-english-strain-poems-overdubs-of.html 

A few of the ‘Elegiac Sonnets’ may be read here: Robert Sheppard - Spring19 (blazevox.org)

I write about my ‘transpositions’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Non-Disclosure Agreement’, here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-non-disclosure.html

A few of the poems may be read here: Robert Sheppard (weebly.com)

I am delighted to say that Book Two, Bad Idea is also available from Knives Forks and Spoons NOW:  https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/bad-idea-by-robert-sheppard-102-pages

Read about it here  and here: Pages: BAD IDEA (versions of Michael Drayton's Idea) available now from KFS (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)


British Standards is still being written. Here’s a post about getting it going: Pages: Real beginning of new series of 'liberties' taken with Wordsworth's sonnets (temporary post of The English Strain' series) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Covers of the book are by Patricia Farrell. The cover of The English Strain features the features of Petrarch, Milton, Wyatt, Surrey, Smith and Browning (it has her eyes). We attempted a further image, with me added, which we didn’t use. Here it is!

 

Read the first review of The English Strain, by Alan Baker, in Litter here: Review - "The English Strain" and "Bad Idea" by Robert Sheppard | Litter (littermagazine.com)

 Read the second, by Clark Allison, here, on the Tears in the Fence website: HERE: https://tearsinthefence.com/2021/04/27/the-english-strain-shearsman-books-by-robert-sheppard-bad-idea-kfs-press-by-robert-sheppard/

 

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Robert Sheppard: A new poem 'Flight Risk' published today on MIRAonline

I’m very pleased that a new long poem, ‘Flight Risk’ is now published on MIRAonline, that is, the online version of The Mechanics’ Institute Review.

You may read it here, and watch me read the first twenty lines on video, here: FLIGHT RISK by Robert Sheppard – MIR Online

 

‘Fight Risk’ is part of a longer manuscript of similar poems – oblique, teasing, transactional – that I have been writing over the last few years. 

Companion poems (I mean, poems from the same cluster) include a long six part poem (or is it a long poem?) ‘The Accordion Book’ that appears in the second issue of that vital online magazine edited by Colin Herd, Adjacent Pineapple. My poem, here;

‘The Accordion Book’ is a long and deliberately involuted poem, dealing with perception, art and (in places) cognitive extension…. 

The first four also appear in The Robert Sheppard Companion. See here.

 


The 23rd issue of Blackbox Manifold carries two more, ‘Hammer Glow’ and ‘The Listening Table’, and you can go straight to them here. Check the magazine out here: http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/ 

These poems were composed by a slow method quite different from the ‘transpositions’ of ‘The English Strain’ project, which is filling Pages at the moment, since one book is now out, another is out later this week, and I’m temporarily posting poems from its third part here; see here: Pages: BAD IDEA (versions of Michael Drayton's Idea) available now from KFS (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) ).

 

Monday, February 15, 2021

Sixteen Years of Blogging! (links to the best of the blog)



I’ve been blogging for 16 years! Today!

15 is undoubtedly a more significant number than 16 and, indeed, last year I selected some of the best posts of the previous 15 years, incorporating (via links, in what I call a ‘hub-post’) the extensive retrospective trawl I conducted on the 10th anniversary of this ill-named activity. That hoard may be easily exhumed from last year’s ‘big 15’ post here:

Pages: Fifteen Years of Blogging (A hubpost to all the hubposts and other goodies) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I should like to select a few highlights from the last year, and a dreadful year it's been. Ten seems the right number. My practice of temporarily posting the latest poem from ‘The English Strain’ project (from the third book, British Standards, that I’ve been working on lately, and still am) makes the last year look quite sparse now, although the accumulating temporary posts do result in a few permanent posts pertaining to the section that has been completed, so it might be best to start with a couple of those. British Standards consists of ‘transpositions’ of Romantic sonnets, and in the last year this has resulted in:


 One: a detailed account of ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’, interventions in the sonnet sequence ‘Sappho and Phaon’ by Mary Robinson, followed, and they may be read about (with a video; more about those later) here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/my-transpositions-of-mary-robinsons.html

 


Two: Overdubs of Keats! I had some trouble getting going; you can read about that struggle over the first poem of the sequence, here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-overdub-understudy-version-of-keats.html

 


Three: Bad Idea, book two of the ‘English Strain’ project, is now available and there is a post about this (along with many links to postings of poems from the book on internet sources, and videos, here: Pages: BAD IDEA (versions of Michael Drayton's Idea) available now from KFS (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Of course, the pandemic should be recorded here (it’s recorded or traced in the poems of British Standards, the third book of the ‘English Strain’ project, more fully). Four: I discovered, on buying a new laptop in December 2019, that I could make videos and, if short enough, they could be posted on this blog. This has become a regular part of my weekly ritual of writing a new ‘transposition’, BUT also when I look back at older poems, and write about them, I tend to read them quickly on video and post (often unseen). With no poetry readings at the moment, this seems apposite (though the practice started before the pandemic). So you may contrast my reading of virus (Spanish Flu) poem, ‘Empty Diary 1920’, written in 1993 or 4, with ‘Empty Diary 2020’, written in the year it relates to, about the contemporary virus:

Here  Pages: Robert Sheppard: Yes, like all the other poets, I have an old poem about a virus: Grippe Espagnole (from Empty Diaries)

and Five, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The last two Empty Diary poems are published on Stride

 


(that post gives you links to all the other ‘Empty Diary’ poems currently available online. Another sequence finished, incidentally.)

 Six: Although this ‘strand’ stretches past the temporal span of this selection, my multiple postings on the subject of ‘Collaboration’, which consisted of both explorations of my own efforts and drafts of a critical article on the subject, finished within this compass. The final post contains links to all 14 parts! See here: Pages: On Literary Collaboration part 14: some final thoughts and LINKS to all previous parts (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 


I’ve had a fair amount of critical writings published during this year and I’ve posted about these. Theyt include:

Seven: An essay on Allen Fisher in his ‘Companion’ from Shearsman: here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Essay included in the NEW Allen Fisher Companion


Eight: My chapters ‘The British Poetry Revival’ and ‘Lee Harwood’ appear in the massive Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, read about it here: Pages: My two pieces (British Poetry Revival & Harwood) & editorial exhibit in CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AND IRISH POETRY, 1960 – 2015 Edited by Görtschacher and Malcolm (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 


Nine: Part criticism, part poetics, and in part featuring the poems themselves, I write about my opening sequence of ‘The English Strain’, ‘Petrarch 3’ (published as a Crater Press publication) in Translating Petrarch, here: Pages: Practice-Led piece on 'Petrarch 3' from The English Strain published in Translating Petrarch's Poetry (Legenda) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 


Ten: My (yes, my) poems appeared in Philip Terry’s Penguin Book of Oulipo (a great thing to happen, even if I had to let my Belgian alter ego, if that’s what he is, Rene Van Valckenborch, take the strain!). Read about that here. (And tell me what you think Hannah Maes is showing her detectives on that blackboard! Answers not on a postcard: Pages: 'My' Quennets from A TRANSLATED MAN published in The Penguin Book of Oulipo (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 


That’s enough to be inspecting! Thanks for reading everybody. Stay reading and watching. I shall be continuing to document the last parts of the third book of ‘The English Strain’ project, British Standards. Click onto the HOME button on the right and see what’s new.