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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26th October 2020: Poems. It is at a point like this, where I most importantly claim to be alive, that I’m not visibly alive at all.
Not
a set of aesthetic possibilities, but a cluster of impossibilities.
I write myself out of
existence.
A fictional poet is something to be.
A fictional poet’s oeuvre is
a moveable quantity, ranging from nothing to everything. Some of
the Luxembourgish poets invented by Georg Bleinstein don’t exhibit text at all.
Erwin Wertheim has only one poem (excluded from the EUOIA anthology but online here!). Rene Van
Valckenborch presents a book-load of selected poems, leaving phantom
limbs of verse, aching. Even Ern Malley (yes, I’ve heard of him!) presents his complete,
if limited, oeuvre. (See here).
So far, beyond some general
descriptions of my style, I have a small number of solidly verifiable poems.
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.
