Dream Diary Monday 7 April 1975

Monday 7 April 1975 

Maggie is haunted by Steve. She comes to me for protection from him.

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

Dream Diary Wednesday 26 March 1975

Wednesday 26 March 1975 

Being shown round a public school. I realise ETON could also be spelt EATEN. There were Inca Indians there in the interior of the Rococo building. The new queen leads out the old queen from behind, her hands on her firm, proud breasts, into a room where she will die. She is beautiful.

(Vision) [a poem of the era]

Dream Diary Tuesday 25 March 1975

Tuesday 25 March 1975 

Chris and I share a room. A whole load of UEA arrive for a party. We leave. Lennon [ah! Him again!] has gone bald and argues politics amicably.

            We’re on a yacht and remember the party and rush back along the bank different ways. He finds it and returns. Everything is okay.

            Later by the swimming pool of the boat, I stand naked with a girl in just knickers. I pull them off and we jump in!

 

Robert Sheppard Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium.

Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium. (delivered to the 'Anthology as Manifesto' conference at the University of Glasgow: more on that here, item 2: Pages: Three March readings up the North West coast (set lists))

‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ is one of two acts of poetics committed as part of my long network of texts, assembled 1989-2000, and collected under the title Twentieth Century Blues: the first early on – crudely put – to get the thing going, the second anticipating the manner and modes of its ending, and with thoughts of a ‘beyond’. In the first I define Twentieth Century Blues formally as a

net/

          (k)not

 

- work(s)

a glyph that guided its development and perhaps some of its poetic focus. It’s a net that works itself into knots, with multiple titles and connecting strands, some of them thematic, some of them formal, a few of them deliberate dead ends. They are almost hyperlinks, conceived before I had heard of such things.

I customarily define writerly poetics as: the products of the process of reflection upon writings, and upon the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others, speculatively and anticipatorily casting into the future. That’s precisely what ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ enacts. More magisterially, Jerome Rothenberg, in the introduction to his book of poetics, Pre-Faces, says, ‘The world we share, & our interplay with it, calls again & again for discourse: in the case of Poets, the setting forth of a poetics… I’ve attempted, like other poets so engaged, to create a new & coherent poetics for our time.’ (Rothenberg, 1981: 3) Poetics is thus both for the primary practitioner and for the wider poetry community.

Using ‘network theory’, gleaned from Caroline Levine’s 2015 book Forms which I’ve only recently discovered, we might say Twentieth Century Blues joins those networks that ‘are the forms that rupture or defy enclosed totalities and allow us to understand border-crossing circulations and transmissions.’ (Levine 2015: 117). I hope so (and it was a shame such theory, like the internet, wasn’t in existence when I conceived of the project.) ‘Networks are,’ Levine writes, ‘capable of unending expansion: once there is a link between two nodes, there is a network, and it can grow simply by linking to new nodes. Thus the network form affords a certain infinite extensiveness. But, in practice, many networks are limited,’ in the case of Twentieth Century Blues by the millennium; the work was time-based and scheduled for completion or abandonment at the end of the century, with ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ as a late staging post towards that. In terms of network theory, The End of the Twentieth Century is a node that pulls all the other strands together, through it, a great knotty not-worky flow! Levine puts it thus: ‘a few important nodes are simultaneously part of many large clusters.’ (Levine 2015: 126) All the strands pass through this node but I won’t list all the titles when I perform it. While taking a retrospective line, a taking-stock, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ is also – as poetics should be – speculative and anticipatory, and I consider some possible avenues of advance beyond the prescribed end of the project, the end of the century, my own personal poems for the Millennium.

It is no wonder that the anthology of that name Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, particularly the second volume, which I was then adapting for teaching, comes sharply into focus as an education of my writing desires. I mention it as ‘a prospectus for reading’ at one point. And it was – although I still haven’t followed all of its prospects.

Named after a monumental sculpture of Joesph Beuys, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ is a hybrid poem, lineated prose, an essay, a rant, a series of bad jokes, a confession, a book review even, a string of allusions and quotations, a poetics piece and an inescapable node of the networked project. This ‘text for readers and writers’ as I call it, was written on the 1st May 1999 and read at the English Research Day at Edge Hill University the following month. Now it arrives at Glasgow, 25 years after composition, but still capable of generating a few sparks, I hope. As Rothenberg himself says, ‘The main activity of my poetics has involved … acts of presentation: assemblage & performance & translation’. (Rothenberg 3). Certainly, in my case, in this text, the first two of those, with a touch of the third.

I can’t perform the whole piece; we join it at page 12 of its 19 pages…

(And I read, 'performed' would be a better word, the last pages of 'The End of the Twentieth Century', the full text of which may be found in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, which is still in print and available from Salt books (through its website, here:  Complete Twentieth Century Blues, Robert Sheppard – Salt .)

i.m. John Seed (with links to posts on his work)

 I am saddened to hear of the death of John Seed, a good friend and an underrated poet. I knew him best in the 1990s in London, where we would meet to discuss politics, history (note his ‘other’ career as a historian, and his Marx for the Perplexed has nurtured me often from my naïve perplexity), and (of course) poetry and poetics. And academic life. (He was one of those who encouraged me to try to get (back) into teaching in HE.) He was an attendee at the many events we held in London, including the (near) legendary Smallest Poetry Festival in the World in 1994 (and he wrote one of his more nebulous pieces after one of these parties).

We also collaborated on Transit Depots/Empty Diaries (with John Seed [text] and Patricia Farrell [images]), London: Ship of Fools, 1993, now a rare book. One of these poems, ‘Empty Diary 1926’, is featured in one of the posts that follow.

 

(John reading at the 2005 Poetry Buzz.)

His poetry ranged from the Objectivist lyrical to the Objectivist collagist (i.e., from Oppen to Reznikoff) and I wrote about most of it, both in my book The Meaning of Form and in a series of articles, AND some of the early working notes of these (with the usual asides and digressions) appeared on this blog.  

I am thinking of Kath and any other family there might be (I stayed with John at his mother’s home in Durham, but they were in London, in a weird swap of locations.) Today is the funeral, which I am unable to attend.

This post announces my essay in the rather good Poetry and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism: 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Essay on John Seed in Poetry and Praxis 'After' Objectivism

This post deals with the Objectivist lyric inheritance in his early poems (a New and Selectedis available from Shearsman, as are other of his books: Seed, John).

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppsrd-john-seeds-lyric-poems.html 

But there are even earlier poems! Manchester: August 16^th & 17^th 1819  was a ‘lost’ manuscript and was published by Intercapillary Spaces in 2013, and is a poem from 1973, about the Peterloo Massacre (before he’d read Shelley on the subject, interestingly). I write about it here: 

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-objectivism-and-john.html

Here I write about John Seed’s poetics, using Objectivist ideas and Barthes’ notion of the ‘punctum’ (a connection John makes himself):

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-punctum-punctuation-and.html

Slightly earlier posts (in preparation for his appearance in The Meaning of Form as a foil to conceptual writing, which the kind of citational work John was pursuing in Pictures from Mayhew (and later works) superficially resembles) are here:

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Poetic Form as Forms of Meaning: Base Material and the Signet of Form in John Seed’s Pictures from Mayhew

A poem from Seed’s Pictures from Mayhew was published on this blogzine, here.

John was a great critic of Thatcherism and Industrial Decline and Poverty. His view of ‘England’ both as a historian (a Marxist critic of the Manchester bourgeoisie, and also of Liverpool (I’ve still got one of his articles on William Roscoe)) and as a poet were central to his 1980s and 1990s work, which I write about here. This has ‘Empty Diary 1926’ appended to it: 

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/robert-sheppard-john-seed-englands.html

Finally, he is remembered as one of the attendees of the 1994 Smallest Poetry Festival in the World, in a quite recent post:

Pages: Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994           

All in all, there’s a lot here about the various aspects of John’s work. I’m pleased to have covered most of it.

I’m sad too, when I think of a passage in Words Out of Time where I remark: ‘John Seed starts up a conversation that was interrupted 12, 23 years ago, was it?’ The next part of that rare conversation has been silenced forever. 

Dream Diary Wednesday 12 March 1975

Wednesday 12 March 1975 

Picasso – old, balding man, was welding gold bars into works of art. He makes me an amulet. He signs his name and writes something on a piece of paper. The doctor says there’s no hope; he is dying. But I’ve still got my amulet!

Dream Diary Tuesday 11 March 1975

Tuesday 11 March 1975 

A [illegible: priest?]. A village in the 17^th Century. You can tell Norwich by its owl, painted on the door of the old barn dedicated to medical supplies. I went over to look at the old altar. Why do people like to see this old decade and not the living church?

            The long Norwich express [train]. Mafia plotting on board. They realise the driver can’t leave his seat at a halt. The best time to smuggle – Dope –

            Later me looking for a bog on the train, its inside like a Jumbo Jet. People going for baths. Wide winding staircases.

            Later still. At bar, holding up drunken person. Later he pursues me along road in car. I promise I won’t tell her. He has a piece of cotton dangling from the car.

           

yeah!

Dream Diary Sunday 9 March 1975

Sunday 9 March 1975 

Top of Hill Farm Way and Oakapple [Road]. A copy of The Sun in my hand. All the articles are about dancing. Requel Welch must be older than 21. Tea and biscuits on a tray will be ready soon. A vision of 15 Oakapple from exterior.

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 (set lists)

ONE 

This was part of a two monthly poetry evening at the above venue, that I will be helping out with in the coming months. I was the headline act and I read a full (20 minute set) of poems as a retrospective of my writing, reading from my selected poems History or Sleep. I read the selection I made there of my other book, Warrant Error. It seemed to go down well, and I was pleased to see Adam Hampton there, who wrote on this sequence in The Robert Sheppard Companion. He also read in one of the open mic slots. Just for the record the upcoming dates are 21/5 (with Tim Allen), 16/7 (with Sarah Crewe), 17/9 (with Maria Isakova-Bennett) and 19/11 (undecided) this year. I'll leave the details here:  

 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.

✅ 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

📍 Venue: Royales, Lord Street, Southport

🎟 Entry: Free

Secure your open mic slot now: paul.robert.mullen.1982@gmail.com (note all those full stops!)

TWO

I read my poetics/poem 'The End of the Twentieth Century' (1999), from Twentieth Century Blues, at the Jerome Rothenberg Conference at the University of Glasgow on 22 March. 

The text of the introduction, where I talk about the network structure of Twentieth Century Blues, is (going to be) posted on this blog.

The conference was a great success, I thought. My little bit was requested by one of the organisers, Jeffrey C. Robinson. (I first met Jeffrey when he drove Jerome Rothenberg and his wife Diane on a reading tour, and all three stayed with Patricia and I, another great occasion.) I also talked about teaching Creative Writing with Scott Thurston, using Rothenberg and Joris' Poems for the Millennium (my poetics/poem also features a 'reading' of that anthology.    

Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium may be read here:Pages: Robert Sheppard Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium.  

 

THREE

I also read for Mary Earnshaw's Ainsdale readings Poets' Corner on Thursday 27th March, which was fun, and it was fully booked! Good responsive audience in a great venue (recommended for food and drink and bikes!) I read from British Standards : versions of Wordsworth (4), John Clare (4) and a single silly Shelley one, 'Astro Zen Knickers'. 

Photos of the event by the well-known Crosby photographer Ron Davies of: me; Eleanor reading to the room; Alison, Paul Mullen, me and David; me again.  

Here are a number of videos of me reading the poems, which, although not recordings of last night, will give you some idea of how they were performed. (These vids were made largely on the days I wrote the poems, and do differ a wee bit from the published versions.)

 The above is my version (transposition) of Wordsworth's 'One Might Believe'...

The above is my version of Clare's 'I Love to see the Old Heath's Withered Brake'...

The above is my version of Shelley's 'To Wordsworth', an address to a fallen hero, as is mine.

More on British Standards here, from the period when I wrote it: Pages: Transpositions of Hartley Coleridge: the end of British Standards (and of The English Strain project). It feels like ageing news now, and I need to read new work soon. 

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!