[This is the last post in this sequence. The rest may be accessed from here: Pages: Reflections on Fictional Poetry and Fictional Poets (1 and hubpost for the sequence) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) What is noticeable is the change in world politics in the time I posted these extracts. They were pre-posted before Russia violated Ukraine, and I'll repeat it again: Sophie Poppmeier refers to her dirty burlesque performance called 'Pegging Putin', performed by her Angela Merkin persona, using her uniformed mannequin (see below) as a prop. Imagine her now performing in blue and yellow. See here: Pages: A Fictional Poet's Notebook (part 3) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
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)
Now back to the last post:]
If Van Valckenborch (who has a
whole page here: Rene Van Valckenborch - European
Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) (weebly.com) were to re-appear, he would have a
legitimate complaint, against those readers, and me, who encourage thinking
only about the fictional poets’ biographies (see last post), when what he would
want to say (and A Translated Man exemplifies this to an extent) is that
he would like his poems to be read as poems. There is no reason to
suspect the poets of the EUOIA and EUGE, or even Different Lines, would
disagree. Whatever their ontological status, and even as they supposedly divide
into two bodies of work, along Belgium’s linguistic lines, his poems can be
read in relative autonomy to the fiction in which they are deployed (one which
includes the deceptions of fictional editor and fictional translators).
One
of the translators, Annemie Dupuis, conducts a vain search for Van
Valckenborch, a man they have never met, which she records in a diary
reproduced at the end of A Translated Man. In it she expresses what
might be the enduring equivocation of the project. On 12 August 2010 she dreams
that she is in a foreign court (but also dreams that she is in a dream). ‘I’m
accused of people-trafficking,’ she admits, but only slowly realises why. ‘I
have made up a fictional national poet – his name at least – by combining the
forename and surname with the most diacritics in the language, the least
vowels.’ This is also the name of a criminal, ‘an unshaven giant’ who is
present in court. ‘I realise the improbability of my alibi,’ such as it is, and
it is beyond her professional skills to plead her case: ‘The interpreter
squints at me, lost’. ‘I hear my name mispronounced by the judge in his frayed
crimson gown. I am nudged to my feet. He looks through me,’ we are told, but
instead of receiving a sentence for trafficking, she lists a roll-call of EUOIA
poets, beginning with Sophie Poppmeier. It could be an admission of previous
offences, but it also opens my project towards books two and, now, part three.
She dismisses herself from her crime and its possible punishment by waking up.
I read this now as an allegory concerning the ethics of fictional poet-making.
As Erwin Wertheim once asked: ‘One voice torn into two./ Or two sewn into one?’
(All the poets of the EUOIA are listed (with videos)
here: The Poets - European Union of
Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) (weebly.com))
His French investigation of the world of things, his Flemish exploration of space, to pick two consciously constructed poetics, are both serious and genuine, if not real. He would plead – as he cannot – to be read as a poet with two poetics. (Read Eric Canderlinck’s introduction to A Translated Man here.) I would plead for these fictional poems to be read as real poems. Commentators are very good on my framing fictions, but tend not to take the poems seriously. They are!
As Van Valckenborch says, in an unpublished note, ‘On the one (French) hand, a vectoral poetics, “timely” as well as “thingly”, in rolling and tumbling unpunctuated tercets. Metrics as breakage. Language is not the horizon of thought; enigmatic things are. On the other (Flemish) hand, geography investigated in forms that use spatial devices on the page. Levels of attention to human interaction through slowing down the method and means of representation. A retardational ethics.’ (Again, his page is invaluable should you find any value in him at all: Rene Van Valckenborch - European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) (weebly.com))
It is part of my understanding of poetics (if not his) that the poems may do any other number of things of which I might (he might) be unaware. This occurs at the moment when the act-event of the writing is filtered through the acts-events of actual and various readings. Rather than propagating, diffusing or dissipating new fictional poets, I want to direct readers back to the stark challenge of my existing fictional poems, authored and co-authored. Tbey are enough. No more are needed. The circus animals are indeed deserting.
You may wonder whether you may ever allow fictional poets to exist enough to really read them, so that the poems come alive. The first readers of Ossian or Ern Malley (See here: Pages: Ern Malley 1918-1943: Celebrating the centenary in his place of birth Liverpool (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) would have told you that you can. They feel so alive that they may not be picked out of the fabric of disbelief, even after irrevocable proof. These readers think only this of their authors, and of their works: If they had not been invented, they would have to exist.
For Sophie Poppmeier’s lockdown journal, begin here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/10/a-fictional-poets-notebook-entry.html
A related piece begins here: Pages: One Off Episode: Transient Global Amnesia and the Fictional Poetry Project (EUOIA and all that) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
All these entries may be
thought of as the working notes towards the third book of my fictional poets
project, after A Translated Man and Twitters for a
Lark, which has its own website, EUOIA: European
Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) - Home (weebly.com) ; this contains a page about
Poppmeier too: Sophie Poppmeier (1981-) Austria -
European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) (weebly.com) ) I have no idea whether this
will appear in print as a third book, but I'm working on that
assumption.
Books
one and two are described here: Pages: Celebrate Belgium’s
Independence Day with European Union of Imaginary Authors poet Paul Coppens and
with Rene Van Valckenborch (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
These six posts (actually outtakes of a longer work called ‘Vestigial Gestures’, with text and footnotes combined) are now finished and we hope you found them of interest. They push my thinking ahead, and makes way and waves for the proposed third volume of fictional poet(ries), Doubly Stolen Fire, which will not be a collection of fictional poets, but meditations upon authorship, imaginary and real. You have read excerpts from the ‘imaginary’ half. The ‘real’ authorship will concern Malcolm Lowry and his writings.
[Actually, there is a further post, written after these: Pages: A further thought on fictional poetry and imaginary authors (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) 26th March 2022.
