Patricia Farrell and Robert Sheppard at the European Poetry Festival, Liverpool, October 2026

We’ve taken part in another of Steven Fowler’s European Poetry Festivals, this one in Liverpool, at the Open Eye Gallery on October 4^th 2026. 

Featuring Anna Luňáková and Michael Sutton / Hannah Kaip and Lenni Sanders / Thor Magnus Tangeras and Stephen Sunderland / Elspeth Mclean and Julia Rose Lewis / Patricia Farrell and Robert Sheppard / Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler / Pauline Rowe and Kate Deegan-Munro for Maria Isakova-Bennett (mostly in the image above)

All videos and some photos up here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/liverpool26

I’ve been involved in many of these readings, going back as far as 2013ish, I think. See links to other years below. Because of a series of mishaps (which I won’t bore you with) I ended up paired domestically, as it were, with Patricia, with about 24 hours to compose (collate would be a better word) our piece. We did it and the video is here.

 

Waterfront Impromptu

 

Robert: It’s the beginning of the university year, but the story is different this time. This year, there is universal fighting and bloodshed among the students. One man attempts to counter the violence by showing a film which consists of a series of blank screens. He sits proudly in the audience but it soon becomes clear that the audience is bored. There’s more fighting. Two women are ejected, covered in blood, their own and each other’s. The situation in Ormskirk is hopeless.

 

Patricia:

 

sense knocking over the ladder

holding pigheaded to the economy of the immanent

imminent from masks to masquerades

logical pictures/ limits of the sayable

I gift you this cogito

or another monkey that they then may ape

throwing a few lively spanners

turns all philosophy homesick

you would be a fool not to assume/ as you have come to predict

your experience of

we look at the cheeseboard and the cheeses ‘behave’ as they ‘should’

but grate one through the slits// it doesn’t split

it splits the world it doesn’t split in

live as if/ each luncheon is your last

search for the short-beaked echidna

find ‘you might also like music for plants’

nothing/ nothing// I have transcended nothing

I’m chucking back the cucumber

won’t do nothing till I get a grape

 

Robert: He takes the film on the train to Liverpool, a place of relative peace. He is able to show his blank-screen-film at the Open Eye, or some other municipal venue, and is satisfied with the technical and general arrangements. However, he is still aggrieved and is planning ways to return to his beloved Ormskirk after he has shown the film. His friends and colleagues who have helped make the film gather around him. They discuss all sorts of arrangements, but they become more and move involving, excessive, given that Ormskirk is only thirty minutes away on a regular suburban metro rail line.

 

Patricia:

 

particulate I watch myself in all directions

waving hello and god be with you as I pass

if the universe is infinite/ then I cannot be unique

beyond the pale// the happly and unhapply fellows

I have no idea what an animal is

but one day in A&E in mid-November

I discovered my inner squirrel

a thought which is nice enough to hold

though not ergonomically designed to stand on a shelf

I am not a plant

coelacanth is the risen fish// consciousness is a red herring

for cogito ergo sum say aaargh!

 

Robert: We knew the day would proceed nicely, and we’d grasp the nettle of its stingy pleasures. ‘They can self-repair in a way I don’t quite understand!’ said the angel, of his wings, as we carried him back to our humble hut. ‘You’ll be safe with us,’ we said, ignoring him and feeling rather distinguished that a celestial being should appear in our midst, albeit accidentally. We laid him on the temporary bed we used when hunting, and we gave him a little brandy from one of our hipflasks. We were quite inebriated, but we knew even then that nobody would believe our stories when we recited them in the tavern. Once comfortable, the angel folded his injured wings about him and slept for many hours. An angel’s radiance, even while asleep, is a very fine thing indeed. We sat around the supernal creature as around a brazier in winter and our faces drank his spirit. We were blessed, without a prayer or a wing (except his, of course; otherwise he looked like one of us)! We felt warmth inside, a generosity to all the creatures of the earth, a feeling that everything was possible, and that ‘everything’ was all right, here and everywhere, now and forever. The angel awoke! He unfurled his spiky wings, and snapped his jaws, spangling the air with his sharp breath.

 

Patricia:

 

the universe all at once upon a time// the entire DVD

to be a player/ but have no drive

this is dedicated to all of us who hate the sun

sing to me

the perfect animal/ the fear of the lord

if pigeons can invent their own religions// which they can

you couldn’t make this up/ I didn’t

Maquillage/ Maskirovka// painted mouth

this is fun I said/ with the desire to be as difficult as Wittgenstein

Gesamtkunstwerk Gotterdammerung

I don’t need a biscuit!

 

Robert: Somehow the arrival of all his extensive extended family has to be factored into the filmmaker’s plans. He longs for the simple countrified bloodshed of the disorganized campus in Ormskirk and quite forgets his film. After all, it is nothing but a sequence of blank screens, with no sound, no dialogue. The violence begins to make sense, as he realizes that the film needs the audience uproar to make the film, complete and impure.

 

Patricia:

 

letting yourself evaporate

leaving your body in space

the bricks I laid// met/ unparalleled // indifference

a spiritual tomato has left these images

the tomato to which I am distantly related

the map or grid that picks your meaning

containing your own dismemberment// projected inside a camera obscura//

or I could play accordion outside Liverpool Central Station

killing the last bird of paradise in a fit of euthanasia

hiding the feathers under the floorboards

as I have wrestled poodles and lost

I have a mind to put my shoes on the table

more like a child/ or a chimp/ or a lunatic

how far am I prepared to go to rescue reality

drifting in the watches of the night

 

(Rico appearing as though by magic at the word 'chimp'.)

Patricia Farrell and Robert Sheppard     

 

It was a very jolly affair, as so often, and it was good to talk to Anna and Lennie in the pub afterwards. As well as Chris McCabe and Tom Jenks and Steve himself. (The latter performed their 2001 Proverbs which is a hoot.) I was also happy to offload some copies of Holme Fell to the Open Eye bookshop (see here: Pages: TREV EALES AND ROBERT SHEPPARD: HOLME FELL: a sample of landscapes PUBLISHED NOW!) It's a photography gallery.

As I said above Patricia and I (in different combinations and with each other) have been involved in collaborations organized by Steve over many years, Patricia even going on a North West Tour in 2017 (I think it was).

Here’s a previous Open Eye reading:

Pages: The Liverpool Camarade at Open Eye Gallery : May 2023: the videos of my collaboration with Sarah-Clare Conlon

My collaborative volume of fictional (European) poets Twitters for a Lark was launched at one of these events:

Pages: Twitters for a Launch part of the European Poetry Festival Manchester April 13th (set list)

I enjoyed this one with Rimas Uzgiris too. (There’s our text too)

Pages: Rimas Uzgiris and Robert Sheppard: collaborative poem 'Unreadable Expressions': text and video and notes

And Patricia and I have collaborated before, here:  Pages: Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell: Collaborating as part of the Manchester European Camarade: April 2019

Images and videos used by permission of SJ Fowler. 

‘Prose Poems’, Ian Seed and Max Jacob: extended thoughts before writing a short review

‘Prose Poems’, Ian Seed and Max Jacob: extended thoughts before writing a short review

I am about to review two Ian Seed books for Tears in the Fence but first I wanted to think about ‘prose’ as opposed to ‘poetry’ more generally, thoughts that come out of re-reading all of Ian’s earlier books (which aren’t by any means all in prose!) including his translations of Max Jacob, and about thinking a little about my own research and creative practice. (See Author, Translator Poet | Prose Poems, Essays, Editor, Tutor | Ian Seed Author Translator)

 

You see, I’ve never used the word ‘prose-poem’. It has always suggested a mode of writing that is verbally ‘lyrical’ but lacking in poetic artifice. It never seemed to be adequate to the prose writings of Roy Fisher or Lee Harwood, for example, that I have examined elsewhere and in detail. Stephen Fredman’s term ‘poets’ prose’ seemed quite useful some years ago, and it certainly deals with a strand of US writing that evades the terms ‘poetry’, ‘prose poetry’, ‘essay’, ‘experimental writing’ and – finally – ‘autobiography’ or ‘fiction’. ‘Beyond category,’ as Duke Ellington put it in a different context. 

In my own practice, unless I am writing ‘fiction’ (openly, in my book of short stories, The Only Life but there are elements of ‘fiction’ in the prose of Holme Fell and in other books), I simply call such works ‘prose’ or – unhelpfully for these cogitations – ‘poems’. Certainly the lineated prose of the final pages of Twentieth Century Blues I think of as poetry, simply. I do not think of them as categorically different from other poems. ‘Hybrid’ is a term that I accept and ignore in equal measures. It’s useful to describe mixed modes and category-evading productions but still suggests inherited characteristics.

‘Prose poetry’ has never been a part of my vocabulary, then. Of course, it’s very popular now: it’s got its own Penguin Book, as it were, with a wide range of examples in that, but it still seems to me to be a pejorative term used to tame the uses of language that a linguistically and formally innovative poetics might want to explore and explode. Is the term used to exclude more interesting experiments in prose, to favour writing that is ‘verbally “lyrical” but lacking in poetic artifice’, to repeat my suspicious definition above? I would not consider any of my poems to be prose poems, in prose or not. I perhaps have most in mind my new ‘Wormholes’ prose lying on the desk here under Ian’s books, but it could equally apply to much earlier works such as the 1986 prose of Schrage Musik; see Pages: Schrage Musik (1986) - for my father . I sometimes call them ‘prose pieces’. That’s as far as I’d go. And I suspect Roy Fisher or Lee Harwood would never have used the term. I know Lee would never have used the term. At one point, I remember, he called his writings ‘texts’, but afterwards retreated from that, probably sniffing the academic aura around that term. I think I recall him saying that he used the term as the French used it.

In fact, I’m not sure I’d be examining this distinction at all (since I don’t use it or find it insightful, as both practitioner or critic) if I hadn’t set myself the task of reviewing these recent books of Ian Seed, books which, as I write, I have not read, although I have seen some excerpts in magazines, and had the pleasure of seeing Ian read some of them at the Bluecoat in Liverpool, in giving the Matt Simpson Annual Reading, organised by the new Liverpool Poetry Space, on 1 September 2026 (I’m writing this on the 17^th of that month). A goodly proportion of Ian’s work has been ‘prose poetry’ (I’m quoting him now, from the reading.)

A subsidiary question about whether these prose pieces are ‘flash fiction’ or ‘micro-fictions’ could complicate the situation even more, and I must admit I find it interesting, even amusing, that Ian went to work at the University of Chester which already had a specialism in the subject, courtesy of Ashley Chantler, and I see that Ian had no problem with publishing his prose pieces within that context! I suspect a pragmatist sensibility.

I don’t want to enter these overlapping definitional debates in my short review (and I don’t want to find myself reflecting on my own past (or future!) work). In fact, I don’t need to, because Ian Seed has been quite specific (and was at the Matt Simpson Reading) about his antecedents: French prose poetry writers of the pre-surrealist era, particularly Reverdy and Max Jacob. (Late August I had also been drawn to re-thinking that era and those productions, via Edouard Glissant’s writings on Saint-John Perse, for my own future work. Of wanting to get the strength of prose syntax back in the writing. That is a deep subtext of this meditation, but again, I want to exclude my own poetics from the task in hand; I could be in danger of spreading my thinking too widely, and ending up completely blocked!)

For a time I thought I might include Ian’s translation of The Dice Cup by Max Jacob (Wakefield Press, 2022) in my review, but excluded it on grounds of coherence, and because I couldn’t judge the translations, other than to say that they read really well (there are some turgid alternatives online). And they do. They are prosy, fable-like, often, surreal (but not surreal enough for the surrealists), funny, weird, dreamlike, seemingly autobiographical at times, sometimes deliberately inconclusive or inconsequential. They occasionally allude to other ‘prose-poems’. They were not what I expected. In fact, of anything I’d read before, they reminded me of the stories of Danil Kharms (here we go, straight into the arms of the genre we are trying to evade!). Here’s two:

Small Poem

I REMEMBER MY playroom. The muslin curtains on the window patterned with white trimmings. I tried to find the alphabet in them, and when I could make out the letters I would transform them into imagined drawings. H., a man sitting; B., the arch of a bridge over a river. In the room were several chests with open flowers lightly sculpted into their wood. But what I liked best were two balls on columns I could see behind the curtains and which I thought of as the heads of puppets I wasn’t allowed to play with.

Titleless

THE GLASS BOX was painted in pink and in a way that one would think it was made of mahogany. The jewellery inside had been stolen, then put back, but by whom? ‘What do you think?’ my mother said. I looked at the jewels: several clasps, some decorated with stone, others with small watercolours. ‘I think it’s the thief insulting us! He’s giving us back our jewels because they’re worth nothing. I would have done exactly the same.’ ‘That thief is an honest man,’ said my mother, ‘while you…’

(There are some more of these translations by Ian Seed from The Dice Cup here: Translations from 'The Dice Cup')

I am having difficulty describing them, even as I’ve read them all. ‘Small Poem’ could be a memory; ‘Titleless’ couldn’t be. As texts, they seem to go where they want to, and they are as long or short as they want to be. Some texts are even rows of disconnected aphorisms, and could well have come from a text such as Roy Fisher’s The Cut Pages. (Which is a text I’d hope no one would call a ‘prose poem’.)

 

[After a reflective walk around Greenbank lake.] Before I move on to Jacob’s poetics, I feel it’s important to state that, despite my disdain, if that’s what it is, about the ‘prose poem’ as a term, I do recognise, with my wonky and slightly battered reader-response theory hat on, that generic expectations do affect reading. That calling my Elle: a verse novel, for example, sets up generic expectations, even if they are ultimately rejected, or modified. Calling something ‘flash fiction’, ‘prose poem’, 'prose piece’, ‘poem’, ‘poets’ prose’ will alter a response to the object, as conventions of reading drawn from a knowledge of fiction or poetry (even if slight or incorrect) will influence reception to a greater or lesser extent. For myself, reading Max Jacob’s ‘prose poems’ it was a shock to find some of them quite coherently narrative (even if bizarre events are recounted), though others were less cohesive. The biggest shock was that they did move between readerly expectations, and that they were not like previous French ‘poems in prose’ I’d encountered.

Seed warns us that Jacob’s poetics ‘can come across as paradoxical’ (xvii). ‘The prose poem “transplants” components of reality into a realm where we can “situate” those components in relation to one another, offering us alternative versions of reality, which is in any case not something fixed and stable…’ (xviii) He was antagonistic towards ‘the fable of the kind produced by Charles Baudelaire or Stephane Mallarme… and above all from the “romantic disorder” of Arthur Rimbaud.’ (xviii) Far from their symbolist aesthetics he insisted on ‘clarity, specificity, and concreteness of language’. (xix) As we can see above. There is no ‘poetic’ language. His title The Dice Cup alludes to Mallarme’s famous ‘throw of the dice’ experiment and title. Nobody suggests what Jacob meant by this title. Could he be saying that, although he was interested in chance, he was more interested in the creation of that chance, not through its ‘throw’ but in the solid, stable (temporary) container of that chaos, before it is thrown? More interested in the dancer than the dance, to Yeatsify it? I don’t know, but that’s what it might suggest to me. ‘Make concrete!’ as Jacob says elsewhere. (xxiii) But, of course, you shake the (Jacobian) cup before the (Mallarmean) throw. (I am consulting the cup in my game of Script-o-gram, whose egg timer I am currently using to assist each morning’s free writing; one day I might use its multiple dice with letters on them to create texts. If I do, I will think back to Jacob’s dice cup as I shake my own!)

Jacob himself was aware of his modernist milieu (check his life story out; these words come from 1943): ‘I set myself to seizing data from the unconscious in every possible manner: words in freedom [the futurists’ term], chance associations of ideas [surrealism], night dreams and daydreams, hallucinations, etc…’ (7) That need not contrast with the ‘clarity’, situatedness, that he favours as the prose poem’s ‘style’.   

I have, as I said, re-read the earlier books of Ian Seed, and I am alerted to the fact that there is another ‘voice’ in the poem-poems (as it were): a floaty, vaguely New York poetic of disruption and jump-cutting that is largely absent from the prose. However, he disarmingly points out in an introduction to a long poem in The Long Poem Magazine 34 (Winter 2025) that it could just as easily have been presented as prose. This suggests that the two sides of his writing, in recent times, have grown closer, but I will reserve judgement on that for the review. I suspect that is too easy to say.

What occupies me now is the sense that Jacob’s poetics of the prose poem certainly does influence Seed’s poetics of his prose poems. (This means I need not worry too much about the wider concerns I have been offloading in this piece.) The tension between exploring contents of ‘night dreams and daydreams, hallucinations, etc…’ and the need for formal ‘clarity, specificity, and concreteness of language’ that we find in Jacob, is taken on in significantly different ways by Seed. (Don’t you wish people wouldn’t use ‘etc’ like Jacob does here? I’ve no idea what he might have thought necessarily followed from his list!). And that is what I want to follow up (briefly) in my short review (much shorter than this post, as it turns out!)  

    

 I reflect upon my renewed activity of reviewing here: Pages: My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing