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.
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Dream Diary Wednesday 26 February 1975
Saturday, February 22, 2025
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 81st 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
Friday, February 21, 2025
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’]
Sunday, February 16, 2025
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:
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
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
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.
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 60th 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
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’:
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:
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:
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:
I was jogged to remember my MA days at UEA by events – and memories flooded forth:
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.
2023
Pages:
Cliff Yates at 70 : my parts in this celebration of his poetry and poetics
(links to it)
2024
This post is about two things (both described in the subject
line here:
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!
Saturday, February 15, 2025
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).
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!.
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 60th 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.
Friday, February 14, 2025
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.
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.
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.
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!
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