Tuesday, October 19, 2021

A Fictional Poet's Notebook (part 6)

 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)

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19th October 2020: Late to the notebook today, sorting through emails and responses to my ‘Book of Marvels’. The second edition has been reviewed (more than the first). ‘Pegging Putin’ pursues me, it appears. (My dose of Novichock has been already measured out and stored, by the apparatchiks of burlesque, if not the Russians. ‘The Russians are coming’, to quote myself.)

            It looks as though Berlin is heading for a second wave, the people tired, less compliant, but grudgingly masked.

            I put an old mask on Danny/i. Stuck it in the window. The stiff wave of a mannequin. A frozen gesture for the return of lockdown.

DANNY/i

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.

I have been writing a notebook to try to write her into the present, as it were, and I’m presenting most of it here, in instalments, like the text itself.

The first installment includes links to all the posts: Pages: A Fictional Poet's Notebook (entry one)(hubpost to other parts) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)