ON THIS DAY 2020, coronavirus had taken hold and what we thought of as THE lockdown was unfolding. I wrote my response to it all as one of my ‘14 Standards’, using Romantic poems (deliberately arranged out of order of composition). This is my poem ‘Ozymandias’, based upon the Horace Smith poem that was written alongside Shelley’s as a contest. I write about both Shelley and Smith’s poem (AND my own earlier attempt to version Shelley’s poem): here: Pages: My occasional transposition of Shelley' s 'Ozymandias' appears and disappears (hub post) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
This poem, along with another four sonnets from ’14 Standards’, have been published in the handsome American print magazine The Café Review, which is edited by Steve Luttrell.
They are Overdubs of ‘Written at Killarney, July 29th 1800, by Mary Tight’ (sic: should be Tighe!), of ‘Ozymandias by Horace Smith’; of ‘Written in the Workhouse by Thomas Hood’; of ‘When lovers’ lips from kissing disunite by Charles Tennyson Turner; and of ‘Long time a child, and still a child by Hartley Coleridge.
All in The Café Review Volume 32, Spring 2021: pp. 24-28.
It may appear odd to say so, but my 'Standards' allude both to the title of my book, British Standards, and to Anthony Braxton's 'Standards' albums and concerts, which do to the 'standards' of the jazz catalogue what I hoped to do to their Romantic poetry equivalents! My account
of ‘14 Standards’ as a sequence is here:
Here are two
videos, one of the version of the Thomas Hood sonnet, the other of one of Hartley Coleridge's,
recorded when they were written (the texts read may still have been drafts).
The magazine The Café Review may be read about here: The Cafe Review – a quarterly journal of poetry, art and reviews that is based in Portland, Maine and has been published for over twenty-five years.
And there will be full details of this issue here eventually. At the last check it was carrying details of the previous issue. (It’s a big site, worth checking out in any case!)
This is a British slanted issue, with new poems by Robert Hampson, Peter Robinson, Jeff Hilson, Peter Finch and Clive Fencott, among others (I have still to read it properly).
Thanks,
Steve, for asking, and for putting me in this great company.
'14 Standards' is part of a larger, now-completed transposition project, British Standards which may be read about here: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I also write there about my later return to Hartley Coleridge's excellent sonnets as my way of ending the book, and the whole 'The English Strain' project they come from.
