Pages: 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.