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!
