I’m pleased to announce that another four of my ‘transpositions’ of the poems of John Clare (‘Unth(reading) Clare’ I call them) have been published on the Canadian webzine Talking About Strawberries All the Time. What a great title, and it’s an enterprising magazine too, edited by Malcolm Curtis. Thanks, Malcolm, for including these poems. The magazine may be found here: http://talkingaboutstrawberries.blogspot.com/
During the third (unpublished) volume of my ‘English Strain’ project I have been re-writing, transposing, unthreading (I have a variety of terms) sonnets from the English Romantic tradition. That’s one way of looking at them. The other is to say they are poems about Brexit and Coronavirus. But in these four poems (and the other ten from the ‘Unth(reading) Clare section) I have been working with John Clare’s sonnets as my raw material. I found these sympathetic, and I had not known Clare’s work well before. I loved the work, actually, and adopted a quieter, more sympathetic, voice for some of my versions. Perhaps only Mary Robinson’s work I knew less, and I’m making up for that by editing a volume of her poems! Compare with Wordsworth here: Pages: The last of my Wordsworth versions in 'British Standards' (Book Three of 'The English Strain') (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)and Keats here (with more videos) : https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2022/04/four-more-keats-overdubs-published.html
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-final-sonnet-transposition-from.html
ONE: ‘De
Wint! I would not..’ (De Wint was a painter who knew Clare.)
TWO: ‘Black
grows the southern sky’ (the titles use the first line of Clare’s poem so
readers may find the ‘originals’) is read here:
THREE: My lo-fi videopoem of ‘What a Night’ I ‘ve already written about here… (It was all an accident, but it looks good.)
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-lo-fi-lockdown-videopoem-overdub-of.html
'What a night' is also here still, as part of SJ Fowler’s videopoem archive at Kingston University, but also on YouTube:
- #10 Robert Sheppard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AzKg4Mee5s
FOUR: ‘The
oddling bush’, which comments on Clare’s odd term ‘oddling’!
British Standards, as I
said, not yet a book, but finished (or so I kept thinking, see the final link
below!): see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html.
They are all versions of Romantic Era sonnets, Wordsworth to Coleridge,
including Clare, of course. I write about the last of them here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2022/09/robert-sheppard-final-final-poem-for.html
