December 2023 Update:
I left them here till 'the end of the year', and today will do nicely as cut off date. (More details on British Standards may be accessed at the end of this post.) They are now deleted, like Number Ten whatsapp messages, though I've kept the videos here. So here's the remains: at the end I'll say some more about what evidence I shall continue to poetically gather, if Bo is ever returned to office.
From Poems
of National Independence
liberties with Wordsworth: from British Standards
Brexit:
Toussaint, the most unhappy man of
men!
Flat-Battery Bo, rusticated man’s man!' the poem begins!
13th
March 2020
One might believe that natural miseries
England! The time is come when thou
shouldst wean
Mine begins: 'Britain, the time is now to wean yourself from
hoarding fancy food or panic buying bog rolls.'...
Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent
'Vanloads of libertines, playboys of Kent,' my transposition begins!
Political Greatness: an overdub of Shelley
25th May 2020 (all the dates are important to placing poems against 'evidence', as more 'evidence').
British Standards is the still-unpublished third part of my ‘English Strain’ project. There are loads of posts on this blog about the process of writing them. ‘The English Strain’ is in three books, two of them published so far, The English Strain (Shearsman, 2021) and Bad Idea (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2021; see above). I talk about thinking I’d finished the project (I had a few more poems to add, in fact, as I shall point out:
https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html
There are lots of links to the other parts of the project. I was ‘doing’ Wordsworth (some might say ‘doing Wordsworth in’!) in this first part of the British Standards of the ‘English Strain’ project. (I’ve written about that a lot on this blog, but here’s a handful of links specific to the 14 sonnets from 1803 by Wordsworth that got the Sheppard treatment, some of them with videos of the poems, as above):
