I still get a frisson from being published in International Times. I feel like, retrospectively, I am being admitted into Bomb Culture or something from my precocious entry into the 'underground' as a teenager. (Appropriate, since this week it is 50 years since I met Tom Pickard, Barry MacSweeney, Pierre Joris, Paul Brown and others, when I recorded the first two reading at the Entreprise pub!). But, of course, International Times rages on, online, as a radical journal, and is very much worth reading. Rupert Loydell is poetry editor and he has published a number of poems of mine. (This link takes you to all the items I've contributed over the years: (https://internationaltimes.it/?s=Sheppard.))
This time Rupert has published an impacted little piece called 'pretend-sleep' which was written in November 2023, with the war in Ukraine and and with the asymmetrical killing in Gaza, very much in mind. Read the text online here: Pretend-Sleep | IT (internationaltimes.it)
But I also read it here:
