Runnymede International Literature Festival 13–22 March 2024
This year’s festival began with an online event curated by Robert Hampson, with readings by Cat Chong, and the Liverpool-based poets Sarah Crewe and Robert Sheppard on Wednesday 13 March.
I enjoyed reading, and enjoyed Cat's and Sarah's reading, but I would have enjoyed a live reading more, and missed people, books and drinks - but no matter. Here's some notes I made for my bit of the reading.
I have been working on transpositions of canonical English sonnets for some years (I’ve finished now) and they have been published as The English Strain (See here: Robert Sheppard - The English Strain (shearsman.com) and Bad Idea. A third volume of versions of Romantic sonnets (see here: Pages: ‘An overdub of The Dancing Girl by Letitia Elizabeth Landon’ from British Standards is published online in The Nest issue of A) Glimpse) Of) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) will be published by Shearsman (that's breaking news by the way), but I going to read from the middle book BAD Idea where I took Michael Drayton’s 1619 sonnet sequence Idea (Idea is the ideal woman of the sequence) and used it to pay homage to Drayton, but also to tell the parliamentary story of brexit. Here’s Drayton’s most famous sonnet undone and redone by me! Bo is Johnson and The Cum is Cummings…
I then read 'Since there’s no help…'
As you can hear (I continued) I was in danger of running out of poems, so I added a coda. Written in a different mode, but now spoken by Idea herself, 'Idea’s Mirror' utilizes some of the sonnets Drayton dumped along his way to his final version. There’s 14 of them, written around and during the 2019 election, 'Idea’s Mirror' (These are both from Bad Idea which I wrote about here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: links to all SIX Bad Idea poems (Drayton versions) on Stride (with Drayton's originals) and you may buy here: 'Bad Idea' by Robert Sheppard (102 pages) | Knives Forks and Spo (knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk))
Now for more recent work, I said. This is a poem I wrote in November: I read 'Pretend-sleep'.
Here’s another short one, a response to a wartime photograph by Lee Miller. Both photograph and poem are called ‘Revenge on Culture’.
Staying
with photographs: this long poem was published in The Long Poem Magazine
and is based
on the photographs that Tricia Porter took of ‘the area’ called then Liverpool
8. I’ve since been in touch with Tricia Porter and was interested that when
the photos were originally exhibited, they were accompanied by poetic prose texts
(which she sent me). I saw them in an exhibition at the Bluecoat. And I’ve used
the catalogue…
I write about this piece in some detail, with one of the photos, here: Pages: My poem THE AREA is published in The Long Poem Magazine number 30 (background and links) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
I'm going to finish with something different. I’m
assembling poems about music and this is a new one. It came out of the
experience of having radiotherapy to the accompaniment of a music radio
station. This piece of music was a surprise! I read the poem 'Radio Therapy' (two
words, I emphasised, since the audience could not see the text.)
*
The rest of the festival featured poets from Royal Holloway’s Poetic Practice programme and Poetics Research Centre and themes related to the Words from the Wild exhibition.
There were also two in-person events at Royal Holloway’s Egham campus, curated by Caroline Harris and Briony Hughes . An evening of poetry film and sound art on Monday 18 March in the Event Space (next to the Exhibition Gallery in the Davison Building) featured premieres from Susie Campbell and Hen Campbell and Tanicia Pratt, sound from Rowan Evans and Will Montgomery, plus Zakia Carpenter-Hall and Hannah Harding.
On Friday 22 March, there were readings in the exhibition itself, linked to its different sections, including by Camilla Nelson and Caroline Harris. That would look to be the photograph above.
