I am pleased to say that my ‘Tabitha and Thunderer:
Interventions in Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon’ is published in issue
27 (imagine! that many!) of Blackbox Manifold. The magazine site may be found here,
and it looks to be a splendid issue. Well done, and thanks, Adam and Alex (again!). E
Josh Allsop, Iain Britton, Geoffrey Brock translating Sandra Santana, James Coghill, Belinda Cooke translating Marina Tsvetaeva, Katy Evans-Bush, Adam Flint, Charlotte Geater, John Goodby & David Annwn translating Emmy Hennings, Jane Goldman, Clive Gresswell, Dimitra Ioannou, Hannah Levene, Claire Nashar, Burgess Needle, Simon Perril, Barnaby Smith, Adam Strauss and Ruth Wiggins. Adam Piette reviews John Balaban, John Ashbery, Maggie O'Sullivan, Jane Goldman, Ken Edwards.
My verses – the sonnets build to make a poem – may be
read here:
Blackbox Manifold - Robert Sheppard (sheffield.ac.uk)
The first verse-sonnet, beginning
Why when my stare turns Thunderer
into sugar does he melt desire back
into himself why his shadow stains
the warshipped streets…,
These verses in Blackbox Blackbox Manifold - Robert Sheppard (sheffield.ac.uk) constitute the first 8 ‘lines’ of a corona of sonnets, leaving the final 6 out of that showing. There is a volta at this point, as with all good sonnets, which represents the intervention in my ‘intervention’ of my own voice, the bit in italics. I publish the rest of the poem here:
Tabitha is thin disguise for my she-voice!
She’s not going to throw herself from
the Leucadian Rock for Thunderer, a rake
lifted from Gillray and dropped over
tight-trousered war-criminal slaver-gambler Tarleton,
because of his one ‘low caprice’! Clockwork logic
ordains multiple faintings and frequent droppings-dead!
Perdita, re-thread the rhymes through this season’s muslin.
I take back control of Sappho’s voice
her lyre in my steady hand tremulous vibration
It holds my sovereign breath
a little trauma to trigger controlled delirium
I take back control of Sappho’s form
the ninth gem in my corona turns its glitter silver
A chorus of gulls caws coronas of pain
above the cliffs towards Beachy Head
(that reads like one of chalky Charlie-Girl’s
props!) Cheer up my cheerleading girls
I take back control of The English Sappho
Androgynous desire made him my neatest explosion
his receding hairline his testosteronic myth
breeding the virus along our ‘haunted beach’
My frown’s wedged over the slits of my eyes
The fateful vessel rocks at Brighton pier
Britain I quit your pebbly Brexscinded shore
sucking itself off like Matthew Arnold
I’ve taken back control of English poetry
My heroines transfigure into bigger
‘Maid is he’ may be just a typo
but it transports him beyond timid curiosity
He’s rubbing himself on fraying silk
with his beauteous arm in ‘that gay bower’
an ebony cage rigged for saccharine slavery
bent over a Turkish poufeé in pleasure’s torture
and there’s really nothing poetry can do about it
I want to suck his face off like a cartoon
The sweetest bud pines open for the bee O
women let’s take back control of poetic justice
Let’s share his manhole like rats and superheroine
Our practised touch is enough to shrink his balls
It’s not whether to wear the strap on
It’s which shaft I’ll select to shift his excessive joy
Abyssinian Maid follow me from this beach
to where clouds bled blue by thin sky puff your fame
He visualised a seaside dome of pleasure here
with egg nog ale and what the butler saw but
I heard your chants warbled like a Fado queen
Follow me out of lockdown and we’ll play again
sweet echoes’ passing resemblance to nothing
He damns poetic language for its lack of control
He bites my tongue I slip it bleeding deep in his mouth
to demusicate ‘debate’ about Brexsanguinated Britain
I take back control of poetic artifice
struggle with its corsetry to achieve strange beauty
Lend me your dulcimer and I’ll pluck its metaphor
to compose one more sonnet about the sonnet that isn’t
Come women from my nine-a-side
scrum down on the bed each crumple
crumples uniquely zig zag round
the aura of Erato her avatar bore this
for several nights as ceremony
we take back the Euro trophy a spray
of princely lilies as stalks flip leaves over
pitted visages the woman who isn’t there
is a labour of light shaped like herself
throwing her shoulder for us to weep on
with slight shudders and stifled moans
the sprinkler on the showerhead droops
and drips pearls that patter the pat
apologies of his vanishing pity. Pity
Dizzy with passion not testing my eyes
eyeballing a smug eagle as it poses
lofty against a final sunset I muse why
would anyone mummify a crocodile
using leaves ripped from my Beauties
To be human is to be dishevelled
Down below I see a stream of living lust
spawned from Poseidon into the waves
he wanks white horses under Bo’s White Cliffs
to put me off perishing from this precipice
He dives seals liars into pelagic lairs I must
take back love’s dread control and plunge into
the pool that masks initial touching
and find the designated place to make love
20th June – 8th August 2020
Let’s hear that last ‘verse’ again, shall we?
‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ forms part of the third volume of ‘The English Strain’ project, of ‘transposed’ poems from the English sonnet tradition. This text is one of the lesser-known works. Sappho and Phaon – 44 sonnets – was the first narrative sonnet sequence since the Renaissance, the work of Mary Robinson, published in 1796. It tells of a heterosexual relationship in Sappho’s life, one that led to her anguished suicide, a fate which I (and my revitalised narrator) have refused to follow!
Why the title ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’? Tabitha Bramble was one of Robinson’s pen names, the ‘English Sappho’ another, to add to her many disreputable nicknames, such as ‘Perdita’, after the role she played on stage (with her lover, Prince George, becoming ‘Florizel’ in the celebrity media of the times). ‘The Thunderer’ was a print by James Gillray (another of his images is referred to above) that features Robinson and her lover, Banastre (posh, but pronounced like a railing down some stairs) Tarleton, the Liverpudlian gambler, warrior and Member of Parliament (or debtor, war criminal and slave owner).
Mary (pictured above) was an abolitionist at the year she died (1800), by which time she had stopped moving in louche company, becoming first a Foxian Whig (and lover of Charles Fox) and eventually mixing in radical and literary circles, knowing both William Godwin and Coleridge, for example. Read my 'Life' of Mary here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 2: The Life of Mary Robinson (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
I
have an extensive post on ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ and on Mary Robinson here:
which also features more images, videos and links!
Book Three of 'The English Strain', from which ‘Tabitha and Thunderer’ comes, is called British Standards. Unpublished as a book, it is best described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html where you will find links to other magazine appearances of parts of the book, where I transpose sonnets by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and others…
Read about Book One of ‘The English Strain’, The English Strain here . Parts of that book appeared in a previous issue of Blackbox Manifold, here;
Book
Two of 'The English Strain', Bad Idea, is talked about here .
You can buy both published books so far, here: Pages:
How to buy The English Strain books one and two together
(robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
