Today, I’ve reached – and filled – page 1,000 of ‘Ark and Archive’. This (usually, ideally) daily writing I’ve been adding to, literally, with no breaks, since 2013, I think. (I have all the sheets still, but don’t want to disturb them!) Usually, I write through, about, around, of, or springboard from, images, originally those in Peter Hans Feldmann’s book of photographic images, Voyeur. I’ve worked through two editions (which means some images are encountered twice, but not quite in the same order).
From this mass of images I can make poems, if I wish,
but I can also simply use the method (if that’s what it is) to stay ‘writing fit’.
(The practice began well before ‘Ark and Archive’ in daily writings in prose:
we demanded daily writings of our students, ‘free writing’ we called it, that
it seemed impertinent not to do so oneself, and I would often read mine to
students as examples.) ‘Ark and Archive’, though, is not in prose;
double-spaced, the 1,000 pages are in lines, proto-poems. Occasionally, there
have been focused batches of work in the body of the flow: the as yet unused ‘Scotland
Road’ notes, or for certain ‘Empty Diary’ poems or ‘Burnt Journal’ poems, but
they also yield prose: the prose pieces in ‘The Weekend of Miracles’ came from
these pages. The poetry sequence ‘The Working Week’, in Micro-Event Space was
culled almost unchanged, I seem to remember. Here's one part, complete:
The opening poem-let of my treatise on metre, ‘Pulse’,
now happily collected in my critical-poetics book The Necessity of Poetics,
is also lifted from my serial passage through Voyeur, with little change
from the flow of my writing, appropriately on the nature of flow itself,
backboned by poetic ‘pulse’:
Two women
come
splashing towards us with the breaking
waves,
holding hands, laughing,
neat
in their single-piece bathing suits,
hair
awry in the wind
that
combs the waves. There is ‘pulse’ here,
there
is even ‘groove’, if we were to re-
construct
the scene as pure sound. A wave crest
beyond
them, a little horizon, pours over
its
own rim, cresting, and readies itself
to
dash past the thighs of these dancers
and
crash at their feet as they land on the
seaweedy
littoral.
Also, particular poems have (in an emergency) been
culled from just one entry. The 2024 New Year poem ‘Broken’ was ‘found’ within
minutes for our annual card! It appears in this video (and I think it will form
poem 3 of a mini-sequence, ‘Three Poems of War’; it's not very seasonal!):
I'm aware that these pieces of writing are quite realist, but I also use the 'machine' of 'Ark and Archive' for more disrupted writing. ('The Drop', for example, one of the first.) The current material is made, taken from, looking at,
through, beyond, deeply into, images in The Guardian, a pleasing
by-product of my resuming to read newspapers as and when. I'm hoping it won't make the result too 'topical'.
Lying at the back of this process, along with creative writing practice, was the practical poetics of Peter Redgrove (one of the earliest poets I read, by the way), as related by Neil Roberts in his biography Lucid Dreamer, though I do not refine ‘images’ and ‘motifs’ through stages like Redgrove. I’m more of a ludic dreamer, I suppose, and a materialist, although I do write the daily passage in rough before adding it – as I said, with no indication of break – to what has accumulated before. I should also say that after writing each, I read back over the last three pages (that might be up to 10 writings), and revise in the usual way.
Until, now, I’ve arrived at page 1,000. This has always been my aim. Oddly that page’s ending coincides with the end of today’s passage (relating to an image of a 500 year old tree, perhaps a reminder of all the paper I’ve consumed; I couldn’t imagine doing this electronically). That means I could stop there. Here. Today. But I won’t. The method has been so productive, alongside other methods (none of my sonnets, my versions of Dante, or my forthcoming ‘verse-novel’ Elle were produced using ‘Ark and Archive’) that I see no reason to stop. Here, raw, is a reading of that thousandth page:
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I write about the Christmas card poem above here: Pages: Merry Christmas Cards (thoughts on hard copy and digital versions). ‘Ark and Archive’ is mentioned in this 2022 post, wondering what I might write after the ‘English Strain’ project, Pages: If The English Strain is finished, what next? (Reflections and Loose Poetics), but otherwise is curiously absent from this blog!
Micro Event Space is detailed here: Pages: Robert Sheppard's Micro Event Space is published by Red Ceilings Press NOW.
The Necessity of Poetics may be purchased here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now!
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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com NEW: Follow on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social
