Some way into the preparatory process, by dint of some synchronicity, Philip Terry wrote to tell me he’d written his follow-up Purgatorio. I despaired, until I realised I wasn’t proposing anything like his brilliant work, which was strictly Oulipean. I have since reviewed his book, for Tears in the Fence (Spring 2025 edition). With something like 84 pages of notes, produced slowly, one Blake ‘image’ a day, I was ready to write the thing. (See image below.) I would not have what I have always called ‘interfering’ material: I’d have ‘informing’ material. Working with the writings-through, I needed to mix in some political philosophy, some wonderful phrases and collocations from Cary’s Miltonic version of the comedy, and, Alighieri’s Your Uncle, it would all come together! A rich absurd allegory for our times. It was to be (to quote from the unprocessed notes) a ‘comedy machine’. Epigrams were prepared. An earlier poem, which I wrote for the ‘Dante’ edition of the online magazine Junction Box, in 2021, offered itself as an introduction, and a guide to the tone and style. (I still approve of this poem, by the way.) Issue 16 Dante Page 1 – Glasfryn Project
But, not unlike Belacqua in Beckett’s stunning early story (another piece of ‘background’, ‘Dante and the Lobster’), I was more or less ‘stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward.’ ‘All he had to do,’ Beckett explains, ‘was to follow her step by step.’ ‘Her’ being Beatrice, of course: my Angel of History. Perhaps it was the precision with which I had envisioned the whole as a whole, perhaps I didn’t find it hard enough, resistant to my garrulousness and productivity – but it fell to pieces on me. A quotation from Derrida which I came across in my re-reading of Derek Attridge's The Work of Literature (see my first encounter here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature) describes the singularity involved in reading (and what is my method of 'transposition' but a mode of 'reading'?). 'Reading must give itself up to this uniqueness, take it on board, keep it in mind, take account of it. But for that ... you have to sign in your turn, write something else which responds or corresponds in an equally singular, which it to say irreducible, irreplaceable, "new" way.' (Attridge 2015: 138) There was not enough response or correspondence in my approach, perhaps.
I should say it’s been great fun. ‘Trump?’ ‘No, did you?’ Blake and Sheppàrd say at one point, as they Derek and Clive their way through the circles, running back from the summer of 2024 to, sort of ‘midlife’, December 3rd 1994, when the almost-legendary Smallest Poetry Festival in the World was held. (See my post here: Pages: Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994) Sheppàrd can’t remember a thing, after crossing Lethe; unlike Dante he won’t be able to report back to the people of the earth. When Blake tries to instruct him, he learns nothing!
I am posting my ‘fragments of an attempted writing’ which I have now deliberately curtailed, though I decided to jump forward and write the last part (which was almost in complete form anyway). I like what I have written, but doubt whether I would like a whole book of this stuff, unmotivated as it seems on reflection. But all is not lost. Two other writings have come out of the ferment. I half-intended my long poem ‘The Palisaded Ditch’ as an accompanying text to ‘Stars’
but Mankind built the bands crossing the
scorched earthenware ground with words:
here a cathedral with owl eyes, there
a castle of pure flame, capped in a psilocybin glans,
two shuttlecocks colliding in the lane.’);
and my ‘Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust’, a sequence of jazz poems, dedicated to Jazz Ian Perry, began life as ‘interfering’ materials, but it took on a life of its own, though even in its opening lines you can see my mind was dwelling in the upper levels of Paradise:
‘it’s not Sam Rivers
playing ‘Beatrice’ like a paradisal theme tune
haunting though that would be:
it’s ‘Starlight’
played by Fred Hersch
constellations of high notes from woody keys’.
The poem ‘Thinking About Dante’ stands alone in 2024,
just as it did in 2021 when I wrote it. Perhaps I should have heeded these
lines from it:
He
sits in the pub thinking about Dante,
his visions, decides to write
(but knows he won’t) eternal versions of
his tercet Commedia:
‘midway through the Black Forest Gateau
I threw up over you! Such things move
the moon and the stars and the sun!’
(I was thinking of Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via’, of course.) Yes, all is not lost. I know enough of my own procedures to wager that my voluminous notes won’t simply be tossed into my non-existent archive. Watch some other space.
29th November 2024
Stars: A Comedy Machine
Thus
the cause
Is
not corrupted nature in yourselves,
But
bad government that has turned the world
To
evil.
Purgatorio
XVI
As
a fir tree
Upward
from bough to bough less amply spreads,
This
one’s tapered upside down, so no one
(I think) may climb it.
Purgatorio
XXII
The introduction is the 2021 poem 'Thinking About Dante' (which may be read here:
Robert
Sheppard: Thinking About Dante – Glasfryn Project)
Cantica One
let’s
start all over stars
Bruce
Andrews
(31 32)
stars, winking
at the joke, through the Empyrean
not
falling like glide bombs and phosphorus
over
Ukraine, or like dead drones dropping onto Gaza
but fixed
and waiting, as Sheppàrd waits, summer 2024
for the
predicted Aurora Borealis to show
that, only
if photographed, glows a purple haze
across the
flat reproduced sky, a perfection
never
finished
outside of
recorded artifice it is vaporous
a wispy
milky streak across the ‘heavens’
the sun’s
colourless cough over the moon’s rich grin
and
failing to see even that version of it
through
the glare of the city’s lights he
returns to
this multiform unwinding in
multiple
dimensions, his imperfect Vision
in
inadequate language
undeceived,
unlike those drunken watchers
for the
northern lights who, following a deceptive
purple
glow through the Liverpool streets
find only
the corporate neon of their local Premier Inn
under a
comfy Hypnos blanket of thick cloud
at last he
descends from this Luminous Doughnut
though not
a lot is clear yet, as if within
each
portion is trapped a bit of uncertain
paradise: the
ghost of the Angel of History
who sees
one single catastrophe which keeps
piling wreck
upon wreck; a spectre of
a warrior
from one such wreckage as a storm
blows from
the edge of futurity; a swan
caught up in
his own wings by the tornado
of the
Angel’s fateful omnivision
further down,
naked figures fall around
like the
lustful on a bouncy castle
at an open
air orgy, singing wordlessly
to Ellen
Andrea Wang’s ‘Closeness’, the music
gliding
from the resonant bole of her double bass
into the swelling
womb for the singer’s baby. They’re
adoring
the Angel, and one kneels on a snot-green
picnic
rug, arms outstretched, long yellow hair
like a
1960s folk singer about to deliver a sensitive
ballad to some
floored stoners. A
fleur-de-lys
flies off in the storm, baby angels
with duck
faces flap below, and the sun
and the moon
and the stars (of course) drop away to
the tune
of ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’
‘here,
silent as you are, I know your doubt
and gladly
will I loosen the knot’, promises the Angel
‘this
storm called progress – we’ll run it in regress
for you
alone’
(30)
a tree pours liquid bark down the page
it seems to Sheppàrd, and The Angel of History
wags his finger at him: you’re not yet conscious,
you’ve not yet become! nagging
as he crouches, unable to bear
the vertiginous waterfall of flowing light
a post-alcoholic tropic glare, dense im-
penetrable blaze! Sheppàrd leafs through
the paradisal protocols, checking out
the river: is it safe to drink from, or to sink in, as
the Angel says it is? The roses mentioned
in passing are here, falling from the tree
as though from the spangled firmament itself
but visive sprites tease him, half-hidden
in its shadows, and remembrance of their twitching
smiles will dispossess his spirit of itself
something’s not right. Unequal to his theme
he can feel divinity as sun on a slave’s back
but the place seems half-built, a holiday chalet
in 1970s Spain, a huddle of workmen
fussing in the shade. Later
the inevitable district magistrate with his scroll
waits for the English hooligans to be manhandled
towards his judgements, guilty of soiling
the river of light. This hooded allegory of
deportation
from vintage pages of The News of the World clears
Sheppàrd tastes pure light, to exceed our human
feasts on clearing vision, all his laughter
on that bloomy shore excessive and expelled
9th November 2024
(28)
Nobodaddy clambers over the garden wall
like a Chad, raises one hand as if to say
‘imparadise my soul!’ or ‘immiserate the peasants’
humans dissolve
into miniature columns of dust, but angels
wave from their circles. There
is meant to be singing, but nobody
opens their mouths. There’s
meant to be irrepressible darted light,
scintillating fires, every sparkle
shivering to new blaze
but everybody’s eyes are wide open
what faces fix these tight lips, void eyes
wingèd moony coquettes
with lightly rouged cheeks and delicate kohl lashes
even the ghost of a flea is tricked into this
hegemony, as silent note is to its meaningless metre
eternal circles within temporal circles of Sheppàrd’s
looking, gently turning; there wheeled about a point
a circle of fire, pure to the spark of truth
that knows happiness has route in seeing
18th November 2024
(25)
they approach one another like astronaut
and cosmonaut on the Orbital Space Station
floating in their suits of fire, not one more full
of hope than the other, one red swirl
the next lauded in blue. They greet
like Freemasons about to shake recognisant hands, one
open palmed, the other drawing back with two fingers
raised
two fingers curled, but they never touch, never
look the other in the eye. One has flushed
cheeks and compassionate mien, the other furious
focused eyes, fiery brow, curled hair, mean. Sheppàrd
floats, space-walking in the pale rainbow lightning
that flashes invigorate with hope, almost innocent
from this encounter, drawing him in. If I were him
(and
I am) I wouldn’t trust either of these supranational
egomaniacs, with scripted ‘hope’ of joy to come
and catechistic ‘verities’, but he gravitates towards
their negotiating hands, looking from side to side
for vanishing sign of the Angel of History
as he’s blinded by false resplendence. Pods or eggs
pull all creatures in downward gravity
of their own beliefs, exploiting fissures in surface
reality. Bursting like the stone
from a split avocado, the one who wrote the histories
in which he is loved (events like beads now
committed to memory) drops
from a furling splash of juice, falling
where boss-eyed lovers also fail to touch
and where venerating venerables kneel
astonished children at bedtime prayers interrupted
by an everyday miracle of this new effulgence. Stars
circle the encounters like flowerheads
plucked and grafted in cruel artifice. They fail
to grasp the constellation and in the song
and dance they comingle to the accompaniment
of Ambrose Akinmusire’s ‘Yesss’
for their soaring unescorted lofty flight. If one
of them gets the giggles – this is a
comedy! – they’d collapse through
watery space into a gloopy pool of poop
21st November 2024
(24a)
under the egg-edged off-white of celestial light
out of a crimson pod, a blaze of
comet splendour bursts around the Angel of History
thrice it wheels, as the bearded one appears
beard flowing into the flow that floats him
beneath them with so human a song it resounds
in all the spheres: Kurt Elling’s vocalise-poem
‘Stay’, its soft fluencies entuning trauma
a tricksy clue saved for the music round
in one colossal hand he grips a key
like that of a dungeon door or deep vault
of la Banca del Paradiso. Compassion
floods his spaced-out eyes, his lips
aquiver to form his first quizmaster question
in Sheppàrd’s specialist subject, the primordial
phenomenon of Nero; he warns: ‘Only the Sophist
would want room for his wit!’ Inquisitorial angels
flit below, arms half-swimming, their borrowed carol
weaving variously, half-imploring, amid cool sparks
and sprinkled sacred dews, robes trailing into
mermen tails. The Angel could be
drowning though he attempts to remain buoyant
‘whoever does not hope for the un-hoped-for
will not find it.’ So breathes this flame of love
(the pen passes on here and leaves a blank)
armed in silence, as hope never guarantees
Sheppàrd stands steady for his starter for ten
24th November 2024
(24b)
the Angel of History’s paper-coil hands
cloud out as he raises them
like so many finger puppet Hugo Balls
they melt into celestial action and angels
spin like a hot-rod speedometer in
its own volition. ‘These mismatched eyes,’ he says
as he squints beyond Sheppàrd’s soft shoulder
‘are not your Paradise!’ Sheppàrd mimics
his gesture, fingers splayed, which he
suspects causes everything to revolve
around them, even the bare sketchy shapes
funnelling closer in the rush, their benediction
opening with pliant song (‘I Own the Night’)
but he knows he causes nothing
to happen, not even love, as he turns
to the Angel, frowning. His face gives
nothing away: futurity
is the swinging sign
above the
No Future Night Club and the destiny
of humankind
seems nothing. His scrolly hair
like
curlers of scriptural chronicle
catches in
the churning carousel wind, his
chicken
feet swept free of the spectral ground
through which Sheppàrd fears that he must plummet
26th November 2024
Epigraphs for etc… and some notes (excluding the many pages of writing-through of Blake’s illustrations to Dante)
Cantica Two
asterisks
for cat’s
eyes
in acoustic
reunion
on
the
spectral highway
Adrian
Clarke
Cantica Three
Capital
divides
and
rules its kingdom
Like
a greedy spoilt dictator.
Philip
Terry
… and so from Circle Two Sheppàrd now ascends
to the Circle Line, changes at Monument, walking
the long tube to Bank, and slithers down
the familiar track, all snake and no ladders, to
Tooting Broadway, near the southern end of the
Northern
as though he has commuted
from The Angel to Tooting and then
suddenly, he recognises where he is
on the crowd-cramped platform heading towards the exit
for life has unleashed so many wage-slaves
as he rides the long escalator towards the city’s
musty breeze above, stepping up to speed his rise
and remembers once seeing Martin Carthy here
crashing down the escalator opposite
guitar in hand, from his gig at the Selkirk
and Sheppàrd feels fresh regret at ‘the shipwreck
of the singular’. Later he’ll write:
I burst out
into daylight and street corner bustle
as I approached the kerb, inhaled
the petrol and grit of London
and awaited the traffic at the Broadway to stop
this was a dream, and I knew, in the middle of
my life, in the midst of life, that I was returning
to the living: to bitter work and restorative friends
to the tiny garden city house with Patricia and
Stephen
to make the final domestic and ambient arrangements
for
what we would conduct there (as we head off to
Chillerton Road swings in late autumn dusk)
The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World
2024
