TONE POEM and my other poems about music (links)

I have been slowly writing poems ‘about’ (in my sense of ‘round and about’) MUSIC for some time now. In fact I’ve often written about music, as the links at the bottom of this post demonstrate. This is in some sense recompense for the last-minute failure of the Charms and Glitter project, which I have explained previously on this blog.

One sequence is ‘Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust’ which takes for theme recent jazz albums. (I was fed up with all those poems about Monk or Coltrane, great dead guys.) There are over 20 of these poems. The fact they started life as ‘interfering material’ for my Dante project shouldn’t devalue them, though there are a couple of references to paradise that remain. The music was only destined for Paradise and Purgatory, for there is no music in Hell. This pattern follows Dante, of course. They didn’t get used, but simply stood on their own as a peculiar exercise in audial ekphrasis. 

Perhaps one day there will be a book of music poems, perhaps destined to be called Easy Listening, somewhat ironically. I feature a few links to possible contents of that volume at the end of this post (which I keep updating). There are now THREE online magazines featuring pieces from 'Tone Poem', fourteen poems in all, which I think is just over half of the sequence.

1. Read poems reflecting on music by Ant Law and Alex Hitchcock, Fire! Orchestra, Brandee Younger, Lakecia Benjamin, and James Brandon Lewis from Tone Poem on Litter,

HERE: https://www.littermagazine.org/2025/11/robert-sheppard-poems-from-tone-poem.html

(Thanks to Alan Baker for taking these. He’s also asked me to supply links to the music itself, which I did and which you can access.)

2. Here is another set, four poems, this time responding to the music of Fergus McCready, Daniel Herskedal, Mário Laginha and Cecile McLaren Salvant. 

 (Thanks to Rupert Loydell and International Times.)

HERE: from Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust | IT

3. Here is a third set from Tone Poem, this time poems responding to recent albums by Samara Joy, Gretchen Parlato, Emma Rawicz, Micheal Wollny and Brad Mehldau (the last a very localised response to his 'Beatles' album, Your Mother Should Know. She really should, and she should know that these poems are 

HERE: five poems — Blood+Honey

Thanks to everybody at Blood+Honey, a very active (frequent) platform. 

JazzIan to whom the sequence is dedicated has been telling some of the musicians about the sequence and he's had positive responses from Ant Law and Mats Gustaffson (of The Fire! Orchestra). 

Brandee Younger (and her harp)!

A heap of earlier music poems appear in Yesterday's Music Today, edited by Mike Ferguson and Rupert Loydell: 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Poems in YESTERDAY'S MUSIC TODAY co-edited by Rupert Loydell & Mike Ferguson OUT

A poem for Philip Jeck appears here: Pages: Philip Jeck 2022 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

See here about the saga (perhaps it should be a rock opera) of Charms and Glitter: Pages: Whatever happened to the book Charms and Glitter? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) 

I write about the difference between the music I play, the music I listen to and the music I write about: Pages: More returns of Little Albert - the music I play, the music I listen to, the music I write about. 

Here's a piece on Stride about my 5 favourite songs to sing: it's not a poem, more of an annotated list: Five Favourite Songs I've Sung | Stride magazine