Some of these posts have been incorporated into a prose chapter of my 2023 book, Doubly Stolen Fire, which you may read about, and purchase, here: Pages: Doubly Stolen Fire (a new book of hybrid texts) is now OUT (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
*
Sophie Poppmeier: 18th October 2020: I am writing myself into being, again, for I have done this a number of times, or so I’ve been written.
Somewhere somebody is deciding I
have a thing about feet or that I am a vegetarian. (Neither is the case.) Somewhere
somebody is cooking up unsuitable boyfriends who, at a stroke of a pen, become
husbands, and, at a further stroke of the pen, become ex-husbands. That would
be an arranged marriage of a particular literary kind.
I talked once to a woman who worked
on a long running TV series, almost a soap opera, and she said they had a book
called ‘The Bible’, in which all the details of the places and people in the
narratives were spelt out at great length. For example, at the town’s top hotel
(at which new characters often stayed as they were introduced to plot-lines)
there was a rifle range out the back: not one episode, not one panning shot,
not one overheard gunshot, not one sly reference, alluded to the rifle range.
Was it there or not, in the monumental background fiction that was being
constructed?
Called away by my bowels.
I am becoming more of a Berliner every day, inspecting my evacuations.
Sophie
Poppmeier is one of the ‘fictional poets’ of my European Union of Imaginary
Authors project, and she appears both in Twitters for a Lark and A Translated
Man (both Shearsman book). The EUOIA website which describes both the
project as a whole (here: European Union of
Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) - Home (weebly.com) ) and contains a page about
her (here: Sophie
Poppmeier (1981-) Austria - European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA)
(weebly.com) ). Two relevant posts about her burlesque work may be
read here and here.
A poem from Book 4 may be read online here.
