As anybody who knows anything about my work knows, I am keen on the writerly discourse of poetics. This has been the subject of my academic work (see, e.g., ‘Poetics and the Manifesto’, comparing the poetics of Pierre Joris and Adrian Clarke, here: Poetics and the manifesto | Jacket2), an important part of my creative writing pedagogy (see, e.g., my manifold links that I have provided students with, via this Pages post: Pages: SHOP TALK (TO) POETICS: about the forms of writing - presentation to MA Creative Writing, Edge Hill University (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)), and it is an integral part of my thinking as a writer. On occasions, I write poetics for myself and others (while keeping a more fragmentary poetics journal going to capture practical poetics alongside more abstract, conjectural and probing poetics).
Probably the last big piece was the poetics behind the third part of my ‘English Strain’ project, British Standards. It could also be regarded as a ‘covid’ poetics, too. That piece may be read online here, Shifting an Imaginary: Poetics in Anticipation – New Defences of Poetry (nclacommunity.org).
Before that I developed the associational paragraph style I used for that piece in ‘Pulse’, a treatise on poetic rhythm that may be read, in part, here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard. It was produced by a strange method. The first draft was made by ‘writing-through’ Tiger C. Roholt’s Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014, between August 2016-February 2017. Throughout this process, contingency is its rhythm, a pulse that matches the varieties of montage, de-montage, that I attempt in my own practice, with interruption as structure, with transformation and transposition, formal resistance, creative linkage, ‘imperfect fit’, near-perfect fit, all kinds of multi-form unfinish.
So, it moved between creative prose and critical writing (say the ‘straight’ critical writing of The Meaning of Form. See here for that tome: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html ). It’s the sort of writing called Creative-Critical writing these days. (There's a rougher piece that follows on from 'Pulse' here, which I notice not a lot of people have accessed: Pages: Re:Pulse – on pulse and Richard Andrews’ A Prosody of Free Verse: Explorations in Rhythm (robertsheppard.blogspot.com))
My most recent piece (I will get round to it) perhaps moves between politics and poetics in a way that surprised me. I sought – but didn’t complete – a poetics writing-through of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, a book I felt drawn to for its brevity, its cultural focus and (since Fisher, like me, had moved from teaching in Further to Higher Education) for its feeding off of that (shared) pedagogic experience.
'My Own Crisis' eschewed the paragraph units of the previous pieces, and I went for a more impacted discourse, adding difficulty to the thinking. But then difficulty, or people’s difficulty with difficulty, is part of the thematics.
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I’m very glad that the good folks at FUTCH (a journal much committed to that ‘creative-critical’ hybrid About | Futch Press) saw fit to publish this piece. And it may be read whole here, so I won’t say any more about it.
MY OWN CRISIS: https://www.futchpress.
I think I'll take my winterval break from blogging for a few weeks.
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