I am pleased to say that four sonnets from Weird Syrup: Contrafacts and Counterfactuals from John Keats (part of the ‘British Standards’ volume of The English Strain project) have appeared on Litter, a very fine online journal They are ‘overdubs’ of relatively well-known Keats poems.
Thanks to editor Alan Baker. (More on him here: Pages: Alan Baker's Journal of Enlightened Panic (and the EUOIA poets) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com))
Each has an accompanying video here, recording the completion of their first drafts, and which were posted briefly at those times, as part of a ritual of writing them. Therefore they all differ slightly from the final poems that appear on Litter. But they give a good sense of the texts’ first manifestations than updates would! (And the Keats life-mask has had a bit of an accident!)
Written
on the Day that Mr Bo was Committed to Prison
Times
Radio drones its truth to
power
itself. Bo’s shut away,
violator
of his word, yet in his flattered
state all’s a lark…
Great
Spirits Now on Earth are Sojourning
Vile
men have been among us
Bo
brushes tousled straw
Eyes
watery weak he who
On
Chequers plain drops
Good
Kosciusko, thy great name alone
Bo,
your bright syllable
pops
like corn,
sprays
us with beneficent
seed,
amid
‘collective forbearance’. ..
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
Bo’s body and spirit weak
though morality weighs light
on a sleepless night
‘negotiating’
lockdown Liverpool’s
hardship fund…
I wrote about the 14 Keats variations here: Pages: Weird Syrup: The final Keats variation: a (premature) farewell to satire as a strand in British Standards (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
There are three more Keats versions (and videos!) online here: https://www.pamenarpress.com/post/robert-sheppard
There is another that may be accessed here, published recently on Stride: Pages: A version of a Keats sonnet published on STRIDE today (links and video and context) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). There is a video of me reading the poem here too.
I recently had another two of these Keats poems in Tears in the Fence. There's a link to that publication, and two more videos here: Pages: Two more sonnets from British Standards (from Keats) in Tears in the Fence 75 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
There are more poems in Shearsman magazine too.
I write about the 14 Keats sonnets I wrote here: Pages: Weird Syrup: The final Keats variation: a (premature) farewell to satire as a strand in British Standards (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
These Keats poems come from a manuscript called ‘British Standards’. 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. I transpose sonnets by Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Shelley, both male Coleridges and others, as well as Keats.
‘British Standards’ is also book three of a larger project of refunctioning traditional English sonnets, called ‘The English Strain’. These two links (which link to other links) will inform you about the project. I note that I was beginning this investigation of the sonnet around 2011, so that's almost the same length of time as Twentieth Century Blues. I wrote about innovative sonnets here all that time ago. Fourteen posts (!) on the sonnet begin here: Pages: The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: One of 14 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Read about Book One of ‘The English Strain’, The English Strain here .
Book Two, Bad
Idea, is talked about here .
You can buy both of these published books so far, here: Pages: How to buy The English
Strain books one and two together (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
