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: 16th February 2021: Something quite different has occurred. I’d wondered about the provenance of Danny/i. It seemed old (though not wise!). I went searching across its surfaces, across its bald head, across the fixed rouge lips, under its stiff chin, and, lower, fingering its crevasses (or lack of them), polishing the suggestive androgynous mound of its crotch, as though sex might erupt, but it didn’t. I dismantled it, limb by limb; and, between one forearm and upper arm, in the cross-section of its supposed elbow, I found the words Debenhams 1955. Google elucidated the mystery; Danny/i was an English mannequin from a department store (that had found its way to the fashionable retro boutique where I rescued it).
‘That would explain the English,’ I
said (in English), as I reassembled Danny/i. It seemed unfair to leave the
creature in bits.
Every person has a book in them,
we’re told. Perhaps every mannequin contains an anthology, having been dressed
in so many guises.
This is what happened, over the last
few weeks.
Now I realised that Danny/i had been
talking English for longer than I had imagined. I attuned my ear to the words
that came from its tight lips with increasing clarity amongst the steady
fluency, a clarity and fluency I could barely match in my fevered
transcription. This was no longer collaboration (if it ever had been); it was
dictation. When I realised that Danny/i was reciting the same ‘book’ (as I
thought it) over and over, I could often wait until the next iteration to
complete any given utterance. Like a loop, the voice continued, until I had
finished transcription (and I typed it up as I went along). Although I needed
to tidy the transcription – working out what might be a title and what belonged
to the text, what was an author’s name and what was an epigraph – the whole
manuscript was eventually assembled. (We were confined to our homes again at
this time.)
Danny/i fell silent.
From that moment on, it became an unspeaking
prop again. (I’d dressed it in an old suit to make it look like Harry Lime in The
Third Man: I thought it might make it more English-speaking.) It would
become nothing but a mannequin for my favourite fabrics.
I emailed translator Jason Argleton,my English language guardian, and asked him to look at the document. All I
wanted of him at this stage was to Anglicise my American spelling and give a broad
evaluation of Danny/i’s ‘project’.
We spoke over Zoom and he stunned
me. Jason affirmed that this was a poetry anthology I’d written down – and he
suggested some changes to lineation and stanza division – and, as dated by
transcription, and by quick assessment of style, it seemed to be an anthology
from the 1950s.
I told him the story, adding the
date of 1955 that I’d found stamped on Danny/i.
‘That’s about right.’
Jason asked to talk to Danny/i – and
I placed it in front of the laptop camera, and felt (for the first time)
suddenly stupid. How could this obdurate, battered, pinky-wood entity have
produced such a thing? It said nothing. I was a fraud. I’d made everything up.
Danny/i was clearly going to give
none of its, or my, secrets away. Jason, also embarrassed perhaps with his
level of credulity, shyly turned from the screen. I turned Danny/i and his
expressionless stare, away, off screen.
I moved it back to the window, put
its paper Napoleon hat back on its head, and it fixed its painted eyes on the
apartments opposite. A cat yawned on its cushion. A man wrestled with a bendy
plastic curtain rail. A woman leant precipitously from an open window in a vain
attempt to clean it.
The ordinary day brought me back to
the ordinary day, but Jason was still there. His voice urged, and I returned to
face his on-screen face.
‘Do you know what this is?’
‘An anthology of poems, of some
kind. By different poets, fictional I shouldn’t doubt, given our pedigree!’
He laughed, but the screen froze,
and left him, a stark Francis Bacon face with a laptronica glitch voice. For a
moment.
He returned, as whole as he’d ever
be, as the elective ghost of my machine.
Although I lost a word here and
there, Zoom managed to allow him to tell me a detailed story that still doesn’t
explain much.
Argleton showed the manuscript to
his ‘mentor’ (I suspect he meant Sheppard), a so-called ‘expert’ on English
poetry, who suggested that – despite the situation in which the words were
‘gathered or produced’ – the anthology was a genuine mid-fifties text, and was
probably traceable via academic channels and databases. It wasn’t, Jason added.
In short, this was the ‘real thing’,
more than that: it was an anti-anthology to the favoured collection of the era,
an anti-voice to the master-voice.
I’d read a fair amount of English
language poetry, but when I examine it – Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Eyleen Myles
– they turn out to be American. I’d always thought the British very dull –
duller still since Brexit too! – and their showing in the EUOIA, until Shexit,
wasn’t particularly impressive.
So when Argleton began to lecture me
on ‘Movement’ poetry (he’d ceased to be friendly Jason as he slipped into role)
I was lost.
‘A Movement. Are they like the ’49
group in Vienna?’
‘Not at all!’ he said, laughing.
‘The opposite!’
‘Or the Fiftiers generation in
Holland, then?
‘No, no, no. Forget “movement” in
that sense!’
Example by example, he led me to an
understanding of what his mentor calls ‘The Movement Orthodoxy’, the pervasive
stink that infuses and curdles much British poetry to this day. The empirical
lyric of social comprehension.
‘So Danny/i’s anthology is the
Movement’s anti-movement?’
‘More like the anti-Movement
movement’s anthology.’
I let this go. ‘When was it
published?’
‘It wasn’t. That’s the point. This
is wholly new, yet distinctly old. It’s not a copy of the “Maverick’s”
anthology of a few years later, the official opposition. This one’s not
in the historical record, not real.’
‘But the poems are,’ I protested.
‘The poems are,’ he agreed, ‘but the
poets aren’t.’
‘We’ve been there before,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ He adopted what I supposed
was his teaching voice, the one you use to summarise the day’s lecture. ‘By
whatever method you’ve made this manuscript appear’ – I didn’t like the
inference here – ‘it is a clear response, a re-writing, poem by poem, of the
1956 New Lines anthology. It wittily shows the road not taken in British
poetry at that time, by fictively showing that road extremely well-lit and
broad. Depending on when it was produced’ – that tone again – ‘it’s either a
temporal-spatial transposition or an act of alternative history. Out of the
mouths of innocent mannequins comes a truth that is not real, an unfolding
that…’
I stopped listening to him.
‘What should I do with it, then?’
He buffered. Open mouthed, with a
circle turning before it, he said nothing for ten minutes. Then I closed him
down, checked my emails (none), and slapped the lid shut.
Danny/i darkened in the grey window
against a silver sky. Now the detectives were on the case, it was exercising
its right to silence. I knew it would never speak to me again.
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. There is only one more installment.
The first
installment includes links to all the posts:
