The little block of four raw links below will take you to the posts I made after merely 10 years of blogging, trying to make lists of 1, the best, 2, my favourites (one for each year), 3, the most neglected, etc., and, 4, plans for the (then) future. It was all quite fun, quite a lot of work, and is still fun to look at now.
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-best-bits.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-one-post-year.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-ten-posts-nothing-or.htmlhttp://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-plans-for-future.html
Pages: Robert Sheppard: My 14 years of blogging
Pages: Sixteen Years of Blogging!
(links to the best of the blog) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Many of my posts in the past year concerned ‘The English Strain’ project, both the two published books and the, as yet, unpublished third volume that is often featured on this blog, indeed, in a sense, written on the blog. And why not? Tracing the hubris of Brexit hitting the curse of Coronavirus (as we used to call it), and the capering of my comic creation Bo, in sonnets short enough for the little videos I can make with my new(er) laptop, seemed to demand temporary publication, though there are some longer posts left up, which are actually versions of those temporary posts, for example, this one,
which narrates my ‘transpositions’ of John Clare’s sonnets. This post celebrates the publication of all of the 'Tabitha and Thunderer' poems from British Standards: Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer' is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) Here's a video of the first verse:
I thought the Clare poems might be the end of the project, but it wasn’t, because I moved onto the surprisingly accomplished sonnets of Hartley Coleridge:
This post records the end of ‘The English Strain’ (book three), though not quite, because I wondered about writing a FOURTH book, and I muse on that possibility:
Pages: Should I write a fourth ‘book’ of The English Strain project? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
only to reject that, here:
Pages: No need for a fourth book of The English Strain, I've decided (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Though you will see that I’ve written one last poem (and there might be another if Bo actually resigns!) and here’s a post to celebrate that last work being published on International Times: Pages: 'The Shepherd's Brow' (the final poem of British Standards (probably)) appears on International Times (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) There’s two videos on that one.
Meanwhile the first two books The English Strain and Bad Idea were published and were reviewed:
By Steve Hanson here
By Billy Mills here
Pages: A review by Billy Mills of 'The English Strain' and 'Bad Idea' (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
By Alan Baker here
There are others. Before we leave ‘The English Strain’, here is a post about some online texts (and videos) of me reading my wild takes on John Keats, which you may read and see:
Two works of poetics (relating to the transpositions of sonnets) were published separately, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: My Poetics of the Sonnet in 'The English Strain' / excerpt from 'Idea's Mirror' in The Lincoln Review
and here: Pages: Playing my Part in the New Defences of Poetry project (the poetics of British Standards: Shifting an Imaginary: Poetics in Anticipation (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) . These are both links to further links.
Away from that project, I have announced when other texts appear in magazines, and here are a couple of online ones to link to:
‘Flight Risk’ was published by The Mechanics’ Institute (on line): Pages: Robert Sheppard: A new poem 'Flight Risk' published today on MIRAonline
Another poem from the same sequence as ‘Flight Risk’, which is called ‘Adversarial Stoppage’, was published here: Pages: The Poem ‘Adversarial Stoppage’ from FLIGHT RISK is published in Mercurius (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
An academic piece on literary collaboration was published this year: 'Doubling Up: Modes of Literary Collaboration in Contemporary British Innovative Poetry', Pages: My piece on 'Collaboration' is published in The Yearbook of English Studies 2021 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
Older works made their reappearance, first a wonderful BOXED reprint of my own collaborations with Bob Cobbing, from Veer: Pages: COLLABORATIONS (Bob Cobbing - Robert Sheppard) published in a box by Veer - out now . And an even older piece, from 1980, appeared in an anthology celebrating the country house: my much-reprinted ‘The Blickling Hall Poem’ was rolled out again: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A poem published in Hollow Palaces: An Anthology of Modern Country House Poems .
Also taking me back was a short piece on my time on UEA’s MA in Creative Writing in the late 1970s: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Some memories of the Creative Writing MA (cohort 1978-1979) at the University of East Anglia .I happily got back in touch with one of my old classmates through this post (which I updated with some information on her).
Another
blast from the past was my typing up of a poetics journal entry from 1983.
Originally for a poetics volume, I think I’ll leave it here, online, with its
little introduction: Pages: Robert Sheppard: ‘So, now to
the poetics’: from a Journal Entry, 22nd December 1983 .
My only in-person reading of the year was videoed, a collaboration with Joanne Ashcroft, as part of the European Poetry Festival in September: Pages: Untitled by Joanne Ashcroft and Robert Sheppard performed at the European Camarade 2021(video and links)
Recent stirrings on the ‘fictional poet’ front (I am attempting a third ‘volume’) are recorded here: Pages: A Fictional Poet's Notebook (entry one)(hubpost to other parts) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Looking forward, I introduce Lee Harwood’s New Collected Poems (which I am editing with Kelvin Corcoran) and introduce a small selection of poems from it for Daniele Pantano’s Abandoned Playground magazine. It includes a couple of Harwood poems that have not been seen for a while:
AND, last and not least, is the silliest post of the 17th year. It is another video, this time not of a poem (my sonnets are just short enough for me to record them and post them), but of my polyps:
Pages: POLYPS
(robertsheppard.blogspot.com)).
