A poem about Dante published in Junction Box (links)

I’m pleased to see that my poem ‘Thinking About Dante’ is published in Lyndon Davies’ excellent online magazine Junction Box. Here: https://glasfrynproject.org.uk/w/6712/robert-sheppard-thinking-about-dante/

 Thanks Lyn.

 I’m not the only one ‘thinking about Dante’ because this issue, number 16, is a special issue of the magazine to celebrate Dante’s 700^th anniversary. To read the rest of the magazine, it’s probably best to go to this page and navigate from it: https://glasfrynproject.org.uk/w/category/junction-box/

The other contributors are Pierre Joris, Fran Lock, Eléna Rivera, David Annwn, Allen Fisher, Ellen Dillon, Ian Brinton, Lee Duggan, Doug Jones, Scott Thurston, Angela Gardner,  Tom Jenks, Beth Greenhalgh, Philip Terry, Peter Hughes and David Rees, Steph Goodger, Simon Collings, Rebecca Chesney, montenegrofisher, David Rees Davies, Penny Hallas, Chris McCabe, Susan Adams, Robert Hampson, Tessa Waite, Peter Larkin, Nerys Williams, Graham Hartill, Stephen Emmerson, Frances Woodley, Steven Hitchins, Anthony Mellors, and Lyndon Davies.

I haven’t had a good look at it, but I will, and I’ll start with the editorial: https://glasfrynproject.org.uk/w/6776/editorial-lyndon-davies/

The request to respond to Dante arrived at a very difficult time for me. I’d just finished working on the three-volume English Strain project, which begins with versions of Petrarch and ends with Hartley Coleridge (and one supplementary version of Shelley’s long lost poem). I write all about that here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html

The last thing I wanted to do was plunge into another ‘transposition’, as I call my versions, and reading a review (in the Handyman, in the way the poem describes) of some of the anniversary volumes on Dante, I knew I wasn’t much drawn to him (putting your mates in Hell seems a much praticised rhetorical move of the era). I’d already decided I would never write another sonnet (!) and Philip Terry had already carved up the Inferno (he’s in Junction Box, too, by the way.) So I found myself drawn into speculation and memory, and massive disrespect (that’s probably a hangover from the sonneteering!).  

Here are two comprehensive posts to check out, each with further links to earlier stages of the sonnet project, the first that looks at Book One, The English Strain here (written after I’d completed it but before it found its title!).  There’s another post on Book Two, Bad Idea here .