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!