Dream Diary Wednesday 5 March 1975

Wednesday 5 March 1975 

I leave a house – somebody calls back that Chris has seen Maggie and that she’s very brown. Affronted that she hasn’t phoned I say, ‘I s’pose she’s been spending all her fucking time doing fucking nothing.’ When I get home Mum ushers me into the living room. Dad talking to Maggie. Suddenly we’re all in the hall. There’s a child. ‘What’s that?’ ‘That’s a child of C.P. Snow or Xwenpj Ulubaba. I’ve sort of adopted it.’ Mum mocks: ‘You won’t have to teach it to read.’ It is an insipid object.

            I want to get Maggie upstairs.

Dream Diary Sunday 2 March 1975

Sunday 2 March 1975 

Talking to Grandad in Kingston Lane. It’s the end. He’s going to Hospital to die. He is nervous. Talks of Ezra Pound. Grannie calls. He runs off, nearly falls, but is caught by somebody. Somebody says, ‘Thank God he’s gone!’ I object: the only grandfather I’ve got.

| Prize-giving at school. I journey home from UEA. We aren’t allowed to take photos during the pineapple part after, though we could before. David there.

|later in David’s room, a big hand-drawn picture of water where Dali is [i.e., a poster]. David throws a dart at Stephen. It lodges in Stephen’s hair. ‘That’s not funny!’ David laughs. I’m shocked but I say, ‘I thought it was!’

‘You would!

An introduction to the diary may be read here: Pages: Dream Diary 1975 Introduction to the project

Three March readings up the North West coast

ONE 

Although this has few details on it (and the event is looking for more readers) I will be reading a full (20 minute set) of poems as a retrospective of my writing, probably mainly reading from my selected poems History or Sleep with a new poem or two thrown in.

 Headline Poets – Featuring big names who push the form forward.

✅ 8 Open Mic Slots – Step up, whether it’s your first time or your fiftieth.

✅ Live Music – A guest musician closes the night with original sounds.

✅ Sell Your Work – Poets can bring books, zines, and merch to share.

✅ A Community That Gets It – No gimmicks, just words that matter.

Be Part of It

📅 First Event: March 19, 2025

📍 Venue: Royales, Lord Street, Southport

🕖 Time: 19:00 Sharp

🎟 Entry: Free

Secure your open mic slot now: paul.robert.mullen.1982@gmail.com

TWO

I am also reading for Mary Earnshaw's Birkdale readings Poets' Corner on Thursday 27th March, which will be fun, but it is fully booked (already!) so no point in relating the details. I shall be reading from my last three sonnet books (in a 10 minute slot), see below. 

THREE

I shall be talking about, and performing a part of, my poetics/poem 'The End of the Twentieth Century', from Twentieth Century Blues, at the Jerome Rothenberg conference at the University of Glasgow on 21 and 22 March. Details to follow, if I can find them.

 

Dream Diary Wednesday 26 February 1975

Wednesday 26 February 1975 

Dreamt of bare fields of Thundersbarrow Hill with white things (like burnt trees) across the dead earth. Something to do with chemicals.

My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing

I have just published a review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio in the 81^st edition of Tears in the Fence. I have published poems quite regularly in the magazine for a long time now, but I think this is the first time I have written a review for them. The review section is very good and it’s a nice place to appear. Despite having published a new book of (kind of) critical pieces in the last six months (The Necessity of Poetics) I have not written many reviews for a long time. (Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! ) Partly, this is the result of having moved from an early policy of book reviewing for magazines small and large (including New Statesman, TLS, PN Review) to writing academic literary criticism, which resulted in several books (not so much The Necessity of Poetics which largely collected disparate materials) but like The Poetry of Saying and The Meaning of Form. (Believe it or not I’ve only recently noticed that ‘The X of Y’ structure of these book titles! ‘I thought it was deliberate,’ Patricia opined. It wasn’t.)

Somehow, the thrill of writing reviews wore off. Perhaps I could do it in my sleep. Perhaps I regret not being paid (the New Statesman stuff was vital to our survival, I seem to remember, even though I had a full time job in FE). But I’ve seldom returned to it. Of course, my disenchantment with academic publishing is pretty high, too. A system where you’re lucky if you receive a pdf of your book title instead of the whole book, or where you have to buy a copy yourself is difficult to explain to friends in the pub. One said, ‘You need a better agent.’ (I didn’t like to tell him.) I don’t mind paying a bus fare but I don’t expect to have to build the bus first before I travel!

Another reason why I think I should review new poetry books (in particular) is that there is a shortage of reviewers out there (as I have discovered with my own latest, British Standards; I am thankful for Billy Mills’ tracing of its trajectory here: Two by Robert Sheppard: A Review – Elliptical Movements). And I feel I need to do my bit.

Now I have, with my account of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio which you will not be too surprised to hear is his follow-up to his masterful Dante’s Inferno! In short (and without repeating the review) it’s great fun and serious at the same time, an Oulipo wonder, using the constraint ‘Up to Date’, which he operates in a much more systematic way than I did in my ‘English Strain’ project; I have collaborated with Philip and have observed him at work. See here (Pages: Twitters for a Lark launch at Bangor University 6th April 2018 (set list)) and here (Pages: 'My' Quennets from A TRANSLATED MAN published in The Penguin Book of Oulipo) for our meetings, over the remains of my ‘fictional poets’ project (something close to Philip’s own heart!).

Details of Tears in the Fence 81 here: Tears in the Fence 81 is out! | Tears in the Fence

Anybody reading this blog carefully (is there such a being out there?) will perhaps notice that I was advancing my own ‘Dante’ project, which I rather flagrantly ‘abandoned’ in this post here: Pages: On abandoning my transposition of Dante: thoughts and extracts.

 

For the moment, the old text shall remain there but I might remove it, since I have (as I thought I would, and said so, on the post itself) found a way to ‘treat’ the text, submitting it to a ‘coherent deformation’, daily working through the 80 pp of notes with a method, not (it should be recorded) an Oulipo method. In fact, today yielded, probably roughly, and in need of further work, these lines:

 

 Lower down the

proscribed Covid stairwell, very finely done, ‘Oh,

you know, the plague!’ says Blake. ‘Let’s watch

“this metamorphosis of a malefactor.” Everything’s

one day about this man. You’ll write other

dimensions, you already have.’ The riding figure

disintegrates before any masks. The Poet muffles

his nose in human decomp, arriving like an olfactory

fester. He acts to bloat and gloop the great naked

blasphemer, knocking, who blasts flames,

sequenced backwards like this story, which is,

admittedly, unambiguous and coiled with serpents.

 

Blake is my Virgil, and Dante is ‘The Poet’. Blake was my Virgil, since I used his very lopsided coverage of the Commedia, for the object of the original ‘writing through’, which I have now returned to, partly because I’ve forgotten the ‘abandoned’ text (and have not looked back at it); I have, however, kept its title, Stars: a Comedy Machine, and one of its epigraphs is

                                    Thus the cause

                        Is not corrupted nature in yourselves,

                        But bad government that has turned the world

                        To evil.

                                                Purgatorio XVI

 

which I mention in my review of Philip’s work, plus his own version of these lines. I say, ‘In a version of lines in Dante from Canto XVI that I think of as central to the Commedia, Terry has:

 

                                    What I’m saying is that the

           

Present state of the world is caused predominantly

By one thing and one thing alone: bad leadership.’

 

Interestingly, he keeps this in focus as a major theme.

 

Talking of epigraphs, mine, to the third, HELL, part of my ‘commedia’ (it’s narrated in reverse, ‘sequenced backwards like this story’ as I ‘wrote’ this morning) is taken from Terry’s Inferno:

 

 Capital divides

                                                            and rules     its kingdom

                                                Like a greedy spoilt dictator,

 

though I might choose another from his Inferno.

My own version is thus much taken with Terry’s. In fact I might have abandoned my version much sooner, since the very existence of his version threw mine into doubt. But Philip encouraged me to continue: as an Oulipean there can never be enough versions of the text for him (so long as he doesn’t have to write them all, I suspect!).

 I agreed to review the book in order to deal with it (and I knew it would be as funny as I found the first volume, though more poignant). I’m glad I did. It’s been useful for seeing what he’s up to, what I’m up to, and it might very well propel me to write further reviews for whoever wants them. It gets the news out there. There is always this blog, too, for further thoughts.  

*

Previous appearances in Tears in the Fence are recorded here, the first 2 links carrying details of poems printed from the aforesaidmentioned ‘English Strain’ project, with videos of me reading some of these poems. Thanks again to editor David Caddy for taking these works and the new review! 

Pages: Two new poems from British Standards published in Tears in the Fence 73

Pages: Two more sonnets from British Standards (from Keats) in Tears in the Fence 75

Pages: Robert Sheppard: 'Between' a poem for Roy Fisher published in Tears in the Fence

Dream Diary Friday 21 February 1975

Friday 21 February 1975

I ask Trev back to my room for coffee after a concert but he has to get his coffee cup beforehand.

            Dreamt how to pronounce Buñuel [spelt ‘Bruñel’]

Looking back at 20 years blogging: the best posts 2005-2025 (with links)

I wrote here, in yesterday's post, about my 20 years of blogging (Pages: 20 Years of Blogging - some thoughts about my over 1500 posts) which it is probably best to read before this catalogue of best bits.

I have intuitively selected a few of the best posts on my blog, with no operative criteria, other than personal taste, looking at it with the decision of the moment of selection. I know that I have left some splendid pieces out (they don't ALL contain my work, especially in the early years), and I seem to have favoured my critical output over my creative works. I have shied away from flagging longer stretches of critical, poetics or creative work that has subsequently been published, but neither have I featured posts which are barely more than adverts for publications. On a different day, a different choice. But here it is, a series of soft landings on posts from the last twenty years of blogging (or, I suspect, the first twenty years of blogging). I hope you find something of value.

2005

I found a lot of posts that have, more or less, got lost. All of these are essays, probably outtakes from my book The Poetry of Saying. 

Pages: A History of the Other: Part One: Robert Sheppard

Pages: Robert Sheppard: New Memories: Allen Fisher's Gravity as a Consequence of Shape

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Bob Cobbing and Concrete Poetry

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Looking Back at Place and Open Field Poetics

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Review of Harwood's Collected Poems

Bill Griffiths sent me six of his (still) uncollected short stories. Here’s the first:

Pages: Bill Griffiths: Ghost Stories 1: TOMMY

 

2006

Here’s another ‘essay’, probably an outtake or early draft of my book Iain Sinclair or of some other piece:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Everything Connects: The Social Poetics of Iain Sinclair

2007

This was a lost text, a short paper for the ‘Partly Writing’ conference in 2006:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Partly Writing 2006

 

2008

This year I only published responses to the ‘state of poetry today’, still thinking of the blog as the third series of my magazine Pages. Here’s two: 

Pages: Tom Jenks

Pages: Adrian Clarke

 

2009

This is first of 4 posts on poetics. By this time I have started to link, so you will see the links to the other posts:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Poetics 1: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

 

2010

Pages: Twitterode 16

2011 

This is video of a performance I gave in 2008. I was only aware of the video in 2011: It’s ‘Smokestack Lightning’ with the 1990s tech I’d used for its first performances:

Pages: Robert Sheppard at the Bluecoat 2008

Again, a hubpost, the first of 14 (of course) posts about the innovative sonnet, that found their ways into my critical book The Meaning of Form: 

Pages: The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: One of 14

 

2012

 Mention of my least-noticed book, three short stories:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Only Life (book of short stories)

 

2013

In Memory of my Father:

Pages: Claude Herbert Sheppard 1924-2013

An earlier essay that got cannibalized for other writings, so that I thought it a shame not to share its original published form in this space: 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Charles Bernstein, Allen Fisher and the poetic thinking that results

Pete Clarke and I exhibited our collaborations at Edge Hill. This is one of many posts about working with Pete: 

Pages: Manifest exhibition at Edge Hill University

 

2014

The Meaning of Form was more or less drafted on this blog, and this is the hubpost. Not only does it tell you about the book and its formalist features, it sends you off to various posts on various writers (Geraldine Monk, Caroline Bergvall, e.g.) covered in the final work.

Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks)

This piece fed into a different piece:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Objectivism and John Seed: Reznikoff, Shelley and the Peterloo Massacre

A jolly post with photos about one of our annual ‘Lowry Lounges’, most of them covered on this blog, this one featuring the year Iain Sinclair came to talk to us about Lowry. I interviewed:

Pages: Malcolm Lowry & Iain Sinclair in Liverpool: In Ballast to the White Sea (Lowry Lounge 2014)

 

2015

Some thoughts about form and a reading of Attridge’s book, a follow-up to his The Singularity of Literature which was so influential on my The Meaning of Form.

Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature

A pedagogic piece (Creative Writing):

Pages: Robert Sheppard: How to Produce Conceptual Writing

A pedagogic piece (English Literature):

Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form: minilecture

The travails of selecting my poems for History or Sleep. Links to some of poems deselected like a candidate to an election whose WhatsApp messages have become public!:   

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Selected Poems (History or Sleep) - the de-selected poems

 

2016

Very important to my critical and (to a certain extent) creative thinking has been the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson (she has a chapter of her own in The Meaning of Form) and here I have a few words to say about the re-print of her major work: 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Response to Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Poetic Artifice back in print at last

Here’s evidence of one of the celebratory parts of the blog, a hub-post for the various celebrations of Patricia Farrell’s 60^th birthday, poems and homages and (even) a DJ radio programme:

Pages: December 1956 Patricia Farrell Celebrations (Introduction and Index to all posts for her)

 

2017

This year saw a couple of celebrations of my work, and here’s an introduction (with a video of me reading from Hap) at the Robert Sheppard Symposium held on 8 March (with links to other readings):

Pages: The post- Robert Sheppard Symposium poetry reading: videos (set list) and my reading

Around the same time as the Symposium Edge Hill sponsored an exhibition of the Ship and Fools publications that Patricia and I have edited over the years. There are a lot of posts, but this one takes you to the rest. Not all my photos are clear, but you can get a feel of the occasion:

Pages: Ship of Fools press Exhibition Edge Hill 2017: Hub post (links) and Introduction

 Here’s a representative video from the many collaborative readings organized by Stephen Fowler, Ian McMillan and me, blowing like hell:

 Pages: Ian McMillan and Robert Sheppard text and video of February's perfomance now available on 3 am

 From my ‘retirement do’, a text of thanks to colleagues, past and present:

 Pages: Robert Sheppard: My 'Leaving Rap' for my retirement 'do'

 

2018

 

James Byrne and I were justly proud of our anthology Atlantic Drift – and here’s the launch: 

Pages: Atlantic Drift launch in London: 5th February 2018 (some photos and a few comments)

Something had to be selected about my involvement with the Ern Malley Orchestra: here’s an account of David Whyte’s first Liverpool event:

Pages: Ern Malley 1918-1943: Celebrating the centenary in his place of birth Liverpool (set list)

IM my mother:

Pages: i.m. Joan Winifred Sheppard (1929-2018). Actually, this is the post I meant: Pages: Eulogy i.m. Joan Sheppard

This is really an outtake from a critical book (and parts of it probably go back to my PhD!) , but I posted this to celebrate the re-publication of HMS Little Fox by Lee Harwood, a reading his extraordinary notebook poem ‘The Long Black Veil’:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: HMS Little Fox by Lee Harwood republished (My reading of 'The Long Black Veil')

 

2019

Coming out of the symposium emerged the ‘book’: The Robert Sheppard Companion. Here’s an account of its launch: 

Pages: The launch of The Robert Sheppard Companion (set list)

Here’s a comic account of my micro-launches of my book of micro-poems Micro Event Space in micro spaces:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Micro Event Space launched in a series of micro-readings in micro event spaces

I.M.:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Thoughts i.m. Sean Bonney (links to writings on his work)

Oddly, I’ve not selected many posts to do with my writing, so here’s one, a long post thinking in public about what I would do next:

Pages: My last 'Idea's Mirror' post-election poem transposed from Michael Drayton's sonnets (the end of The English Strain book 2)

 

2020

 

Another long critical piece, on collaboration, was trialed here on the blog, with lots of thinking about how I collaborate integrated into it, if digressions are ‘integrated’: Here’s post one with links to the rest:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Thughts on Collaboration 1: Introduction

IM

Pages: Robert Sheppard: in memoriam Lawrence Upton

 

2021

 

Here’s my part in celebrating the anniversary of Shelley’s poetics piece ‘The Defence of Poetry’. I introduce parts of my poetics piece ‘Poetics in Anticipation’, which was later published in The Necessity of Poetics:

Pages: Playing my Part in the New Defences of Poetry project (the poetics of British Standards: Shifting an Imaginary: Poetics in Anticipation

I was jogged to remember my MA days at UEA by events – and memories flooded forth: 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Some memories of the Creative Writing MA (cohort 1978-1979) at the University of East Anglia

 

2022

 

One of my posts about the development of ‘The English Strain’ project, and more so, how to end it, particularly if Bo(ris Johnson) was to return to public life. Should I be ready to write yet more sonnets?

Pages: The Horrible Thought that Bo mioght be back: only The Bard could save me now!

 

Another I.m.

Pages: Philip Jeck 2022

 

2023

 A celebration of a wonderful poet-friend:

Pages: Cliff Yates at 70 : my parts in this celebration of his poetry and poetics (links to it)

 One of a number of posts about the Collected Harwood that Kelvin Corcoran and I edited, this one about the launch event, which went very well:

 Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems launched and on sale now

 

2024

 

This post is about two things (both described in the subject line here:

 Pages: How Twitter developed my poetry and why I'm leaving X

 News of an anthology I ended up in, looking back to the 1980s and 1990s:

 Pages: Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry - some thoughts

 This post, detailing readings in autumn 2024, will send for many others featuring ‘The English Strain’ project:

Pages: Details of Readings this Autumn (set lists and comments)

 

2025 (so far!)

 

I became quite reflective here on writing ‘prose’ when some might call it ‘prose-poetry’:

Pages: Three pieces of prose in Litter. Are they prose poems or not?

Onwards!

20 Years of Blogging - some thoughts about my over 1500 posts

I began blogging 20 years ago today. In my diary for 15 February 2015 (also the anniversary of my 1996 interview at Edge Hill!) I wrote: ‘Up to work, and playing with the Blog. To make Pages again. It’s fun, and shouldn’t be too much work. It might make me learn to read text on screen! Evening: read Poetry and Theory. (Saw a job at UEA – 9 years since my interview at Edge Hill, exactly.) First posting on Pages! (third series).’

 

This is that first post. Pages: Editorial to the third series: Robert Sheppard. It was moved by me from its original posting because I was trying to adapt the reverse posting of posts with the forward thrust of a magazine. Pages was the name of the magazine I ran in two series, one from 1987. This first series ran from 1987 onwards, and is archived on Jacket 2 by Joey Francis, accessible here, Pages, 1987–1990 (ed. Robert Sheppard) | Jacket2, and there is an interview with me specifically about the magazine here: On Pages | Jacket2.

 

Series Two ran from April 1994-May 1998, has yet to be archived, but I made the point of listing its contents here, Pages: Pages (first series) reissued entire with an interview on Jacket 2: Complete Index of all 5 series.  

Print Pages published many of the rising generation of British poets, Adrian Clarke, Gilbert Adair, David Miller and Maggie O’Sullivan, through to some well-known poets from Robert Creeley and Bob Cobbing, through to Allen Fisher and Ulli Freer.

Two decades ago, then, I was venturing on a ‘blogzine’ as I called it, and I did publish others, poets such as Allen Fisher and Lawrence Upton, Marianne Morris and others, along (even as late as 2015 or so, 25 Poets from Edge Hill, such as Alice Lenkiewicz and Joanne Ashcroft, BUT gradually the sense of running a blogzine turned into the clear notion that it was a ‘literary blog’, and it was archived by the British Library as such (now offline since the infamous cyberattack).

 What I felt about the blog and about literary blogging as that became a thing, is registered in this interview with me conducted by Graeme Harper, that dynamo of the Creative Writing world of the early 2000s! (It is longer than the published version and is quite illuminating.) Pages: Ten Years of Pages.

 Remember, although there are photos on the blog, when they appear on early posts – here’s the earliest, 2005, accompanying the poems of Dee McMahon (Pages: Dee McMahon: Three Poems) – they were often added later. Artwork followed: here’s the earliest work of Patricia Farrell on my blog: Pages: Patricia Farrell: Tomorrow's Attack Objects Talk. Videos were added later, ‘embedded’ was the word, but were always taken from YouTube and Vimeo (and some were taken down, unfortunately, leaving blank spaces on posts!). But homemade videos, short ones of around a minute (excellent for the sonnets I was transposing at the time) only came in 2020! This reading of a poem from Berlin Bursts and History or Sleep, ‘Prison Camp Violin, Riga’ appeared as a Guardian Poem of the Week, selected by Carol Rumens, and was collected in her anthology Smart Devices. To commemorate that exposure, this post with video seems to have been my first: Pages: 'Prison Camp Violin, Riga' anthologised in Carol Rumens' 'Guardian Poem' book Smart Devices.

 

My other innovation was the invention of what I call the hub-post, that is a post that links to others, sometimes because it is the first entry of a series of entries, (Pages: Robert Sheppard: Thughts on Collaboration 1: Introduction) and sometimes to link to more disparate posts. I also took it on myself to record ‘set lists’ of readings, usually turning an announcement of a gig into a reflective post after the event. This one seemed important, because it was my first reading after the Covid crisis, which impacted on my blog largely through the temporary posting of my British Standards sonnets (usually with vids): Pages: My reading at the English Futures Saturday 9th July 2022 (set list). Fortunately, there have been other post-Covid readings, but they took a long time to reach the richness and fulness that was evident by Autumn of 2024: Pages: Details of Readings this Autumn (set lists and comments). (There are five videos on that post!)

When I’d been posting for ten years I had quite an extensive trawl back into the archive, and I looked back with some delight on what I’d been doing here. This is, incidentally, a hubpost to the other posts on the first ten years:  Pages: Ten Years of Pages: The Best Bits. And I’ve kept going, posting annually, as in this one posted yesterday: Pages: My 20th year of blogging: links to favourites!.

 There are now 1500 posts on the blog. I have statistics for the most looked-at of them, but (as I noted some years ago) they are skewed by the often phenomenal ‘attacks’ (there is no other word) that some posts receive, hundreds of hits in a few minutes. Blogger statistics used also to tell me where my posts were being read (usually UK and US) but Russia popped up there as well, and I conjectured some activity by Russian bloggers or activists. Whether or not I’m right, that’s a lot of posts to look back at, and a lot of time to cover and recover. (Here I listed the most read posts to date: Pages: Robert Sheppard: 13 Years of Blogging: Links to Posts.)

 My desire to make Pages a magazine seems arcane, although blog technology has been used successfully by a number of magazines, Stride, Litter and The Abandoned Playground. But I was flying blind in those quite early days. (The first blog may have dated from 1994.) It’s also interesting to note how the language of the blogger has developed (from ‘blog’ itself from ‘weblog’ – you couldn’t use ‘w’ at the start of a name because it would have been read as an URL – through to cyberattack or even URL itself, not to mention my idiolectic neologism ‘hub-post’). In 1995, say, none of those words was current. (And other words and phrases, like ‘surfing the net’ have vanished, and sound archaic!) 

I wondered 10 years ago, 10 years into this blogging caper, what the effect of ‘new’ technology becoming ‘old’ would be? In short, is blogging out of date? Is it already dead, as of December 2017, according to the New York Times. Is microblogging the future, or Substack? Should I move over to that, and leave this old leviathan stranded in cyberspace like space-junk. Should today be the day of my last post? It was worth pausing to consider alternatives, but I don’t see a viable one. I don’t want to monetise my writing; I don’t want to issue a Newsletter, or condemn myself to regular (and focused) reportage. The decision to use microblogging as a pointer to these posts seems entirely wise. (There is a recent post here about my creative use of microblogging, and my abrupt move from X to Bluesky here: Pages: How Twitter developed my poetry and why I'm leaving X.) So here I am, and I’m set to continue it. In fact I hijacked my own possibility of giving up, by – this year – publishing my 1975 dream diary. I’ve scheduled posts up to January 1976, sorry, I mean: 2026! It’s too late to stop now.

Blogging is an integral part of my much of my thinking. The Meaning of Form was drafted on this platform (see this hubpost on that book: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks). Some of the prose that ended up in Doubly Stolen Fire, the rough drafts of Sophie Poppmeier’s Diary, were first aired here: Pages: Reflections on Fictional Poetry and Fictional Poets (1 and hubpost for the sequence). The sonnets of the ‘English Strain’ project were all temporarily posted on the day they were written, and afterwards the surrounding contextualizing prose was re-moulded as a commentary on the progress of the project. (Here’s one such post that gathers news of the progress of the third volume: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project).) I think out loud here quite a lot, but on other occasions I don’t. ‘The English Strain’ was produced in public (partly because the poems were about current affairs), whereas I didn’t post my essay on rhythm in poetry, ‘Pulse’, although I did link to the online publication of parts of it. I haven’t indicated much about my slowly-growing cluster of poems about music, or a manuscript called ‘Flight Risk’. The use of the blog is selective, and chiefly reserved for occasions when the blog itself generates or helps to generate critical or creative work. But I also use it for more personal purposes, for my 60^th birthday, for example, or for Patricia’s, for talking about any singing I might do, or for remembering the operation on my polyps: Pages: POLYPS! It’s a comic video.  

The third and final post on the last twenty years is going to be an inventory of the posts I think have been the most important.  

My 20th year of blogging: links to favourites!

I will have been blogging for 20 years (to the day) tomorrow. Since celebrating the tenth anniversary with four long posts, I have every year selected a number of that year’s posts to indicate, describe and link to. This I shall do here, again, a day ahead of a consideration of that 20 year expanse, and what it means for me. (That post will eventually be linked to here: Pages: 20 Years of Blogging - some thoughts about my over 1500 posts.) 

What I intend to do is to highlight what I think are the most important/best/more interesting posts, from my point of view.

One post concerns social media itself: I came off Twitter or X in the autumn and I both explained why, AND itemized some of the ways being on Twitter was directly generative for my writing, the so-called ‘Twitterodes’ in particular: Pages: How Twitter developed my poetry and why I'm leaving X. (I’m now on BlueSky: do follow me there. I am at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social and I have 1.8K followers and I follow 517)

During this year I have published three books, and I talk about them (AND tell you how to purchase them) in several posts.

British Standards: I describe it here: Pages: British Standards published by Shearsman - out now and there are reviews of it responded to (and linked to) here: Pages: Reviews of British Standards

 

The Necessity of Poetics: I describe it here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! and there are reviews of it responded to (and linked to) here: Pages: Reviews of The Necessity of Poetics

 

The Selected Poems of Mary Robinson: I describe it here: Pages: My edition of the Selected Poems of Mary Robinson is out now! and there are reviews of it responded to (and linked to) here: Pages: Reviews of my edition of the Selected Poems of Mary Robinson.

 

Partly on account of the books described above, I did a mini tour in the Autumn, (I called it my ‘Eras’ tour, because the work covered was wide), which I announced and then described in this long post: Pages: Details of Readings this Autumn (set lists and comments). There are also a number of videos on this post, not of the readings, but of poems that were performed.

 As some of you may know I keep a diary (with gaps it has run from 1965 until today and it was used as the basis for Words Out of Time). What I also kept in 1975 was a dream diary and I have been posting the entries exactly 50 years after. What on earth one might DO with half a century old dreams remains unclear, as I explain in the introduction to the project, here: Pages: Dream Diary 1975 Introduction to the project. Here’s a random example:  Pages: Dream Diary Sunday 19 January 1975.

One of my ‘Empty Diary’ poems appeared in a Broken Sleep anthology, Masculinties; see here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: an 'Empty Diary' poem in the Broken Sleep MASCULINITY anthology.  I was happily included in another anthology, Arcadian Rustbelt, and you can read about the 1980s generation it represented (and my part in its downfall, I’m tempted to add!) here: Pages: Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry - some thoughts.

 

Who would not want to remember The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World, from 1994, the last year and last month of that ‘Rustbelt’ generation, as it happens? Pages: Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994.

 One of the longer posts of the last year was this one, on abandoning a long project – put crudely – to narrate Dante’s Divine Comedy backwards. I include the working notes as I have assembled them, and the text as far as I got before deciding to jump ship. However, I am currently re-moulding the material and I think there will be a final text. If I am successful in this endeavour, I shall probably delete the text of the poem, but not the notes. But for now, it is here:  Pages: On abandoning my transposition of Dante: thoughts and extracts.

Two posts reporting published work in online journals, also contain reflections of my writing of prose, by which I mean not my critical or reviewing work, but my creative prose that isn’t fiction either: the material some might be pleased to call ‘prose poetry’. (I’m not pleased to call it that.) This second post links to the first:  Pages: And now more prose is published in International Times (and I reflect on that too).

The Lowry Lounge this year was a good one, one I enjoyed, partly because I wasn’t performing or chairing for once. There was a great talk on Adrian Henri and The Day of the Dead paintings/poems/songs: Pages: The Lowry Lounge 2024 - an account and links.

Scott Thurston’s Inaugural Lecture, Kinepoetics, is featured here in video form in full, with my notes for my Introduction, here: Pages: Scott Thurston's Inaugural Lecture: KINEPOETICS March 2024 (video + my introduction).

 And, finally, here for circularity is last year’s post on the posts of my 19^th year: Pages: 19 Years of Blogging: links to the last year's best posts and comments on the year.

It’s relatively easy to decide on which posts to feature from 12 months of activity, BUT what should I do about 20 years? Do I trust my ‘favourites’ from 10 years ago, and then perhaps pick one or two from each of the ‘yearly’ posts since. Or shall I say I’ll post 20 links to posts about x, y and z, which was the method I used 10 years ago. At the time of writing this, I am unsure, but you’ll find out tomorrow. LINK TO BE ADDED HERE!