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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Sophie Poppmeier: 20th October 2020: I can hear the nosy interrogators demanding what they would never ask of a man, or ask with less intensity: What about her love life? Does she only talk to a mannequin – which isn’t true, it talks to me! – because she hasn’t got a man in her life?
The answer is not so unusual… In
fact so ‘usual’ (he was called Anton) that I’m not going to type these pages up
for you, me, or for anyone, least of all, for him.
Ditto:
having children…
I never really finished the anecdote about ‘the Bible’ in a previous entry. [See Pages: A Fictional Poet's Notebook (part 5) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)] Whatever is sketched out isn’t necessarily used. The story is bigger than the fiction. Petrarch never spoke of his wife or his sons, while Laura is centre-stage. In the sonnets. He was constructing an ethico-aesthetic object, not leaking his biography onto the page, like Bachman or somebody. (That’s unfair: Anne Sexton, then!)
23rd October 2020: On its own, the mannequin cannot speak, of course. (Though it might be learning to, it occurs to me.) Like dolls and toys I had as a child, they did not communicate, except through me. (See the toys of ‘Book 4 Poem 3’,online here.) That doesn’t mean I’m a ventriloquist at all. It means I’m ordaining speech, like a God whose creatures answer back! (There are examples of tricksters in certain fetishistic traditions, I know.)
Of course, a speaking mannequin is
still a long way from a co-author, however much it’s a collaborator.
I feel it is more than a device to
allow me to say something new. (That would be achieved by creating a fictional
poet, which is something I know about intimately, from the inside.) There is
genuine collaboration, in embryo, a mode that far exceeds looking at the mirror
and having a chat with a picture of yourself; that merely mimes every move of
your lips.
It is the opposite of ventriloquism.
It involves one listening, a deep listening, to the sounds in silence, the
speech in shutdown, lockdown, the living among the inorganic. Once the
frequency, wavelength, is established, only concentration can strengthen the
channel until the hissing turns into static, then into a signal, the noise
parts to allow a phatic message through. Once fine attunement is achieved, the
signal permits the message to be perceived, directly, clearly, though not
completely understood.
We’re nearly there, I feel.
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.
