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Friday, August 09, 2024

The Necessity of Poetics - out now!

The Necessity of Poetics is now available: https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-The-Necessity-of-Poetics-p661888958

The Necessity of Poetics marks the moves I have made as a poet-critic around the notion of poetics in general, and the poetics of linguistically innovative poetry in particular, and my own poetics as an outcome of those. It traces those moves, but I also offer them to fellow poets, critics, and even, given my age, to literary historians. It incites and ignites and invites readers to identify poetics, to read poetics (as poetics, not as an impoverished literary criticism), to share poetics and, where appropriate, for readers who are also writers, to create poetics of their own. The book contains a definitive version of my well-known essay ‘The Necessity of Poetics’.

Also contained here is my experimental essay on poetic rhythm. Addressing the contemporary lack of discussion of the subject, ‘Pulse’ presents a new way of conceiving of metrical and non-metrical shape, rhythm as a form of consciousness, bringing together suggestive theory and the experiences of poets themselves. Abruptly changing gear from critic to poet, via poetics, I like to think that my poetic thinking is alive to the notion that poetic form is cognitive, that form knows something.

There are insights into the poetry and poetics of Christopher Middleton, Adrian Clarke, Pierre Joris, Maggie O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. I also dig into the processes of my own poems to come up with generalized conclusions about poetics and poesis, experimenting with new modes of creative-critical writing, as a practitioner and pedagogue of Creative Writing, in quite personal practice-led research. From a ‘radio-talk with no station to transmit it’ about radio as an analogy for poetry, to an ‘undelivered talk’ on photographic ekphrasis; from recent takes on my recent ‘English Strain’ sonnet project (whose third part is published simultaneously with this volume) to rare documents that take the reader back to the emerging linguistically innovative practices of the late 1980s, this volume presents a relentless and repeated advocacy for poetics as a genuine mode of thinking and writing. And poetics as an object of study in its own right.

CONTENTS (with three online samplers)

Introduction: Gathering from the Past

ONE

Poetics in Anticipation: Shifting an Imaginary, towards British Standards (recent aphoristic poetics)

Pulse: All a Rhythm (Sampler One: part of this unusual ‘treatise on metre’ may be read here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard)

The Formal Splinter (a condensed one page statement on cognition and ‘the meaning of form’, as in my critical book of that title)

A Voice Smears Across the Screen: Material Engagement with Form, Forms and Forming (a more discursive take on the meaning of form as cognition)

Hanging Out Inside Sonnets: A Text and Commentary (personal piece about my obsession with the sonnet frame)

‘Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro’: A derivative dérive into/out of Petrarch’s Sonnet 3 (a research as practice piece on my 14 versions of ‘Sonnet 3’ that set off the ‘English Strain’ sonnet project)

TWO

The Necessity of Poetics (my often-cited piece on the nature of poetics, with its list of definitions)

Speaking Differently: Poetics in the Twenty-first Century: Pierre Joris and Adrian Clarke, with reference to the poetics of Maggie O’Sullivan (a conventional critical essay on different writers' poetics)

Poetics as Conjecture and Provocation: an inaugural lecture delivered on 13^th March 2007 at Edge Hill University (which starts as history, proceeds as lecture, demonstrates poetics (mine and Christopher Middleton’s), and ends as a poetry reading)

Critical Tuning: Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing (a kind of radio talk)

Ekphrasis and Anti-Ekphrasis: Undelivered Talk for the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, for the Ideas Lab on Writing and Photography (a short talk I never delivered)

MATERIALS + PROCEDURE: an account of the writing of ‘The Given’ (Sampler 2: this short piece may be read here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2010/07/robert-sheppard-writing-given.html )

THREE

Took Chances in London Traffic (a memoir of the London poetry scene of the 1980s, which contextualises the older pieces that follow, in a sort of reverse chronological order)

Negative Definitions: Talk for the SubVoicive Colloquium, London 1997

Linking the Unlinkable: ‘Why Do You Do What You Do?’ (The title answers the question in the subtitle)

Working the Work: notes towards and beyond Internal Exile (poetics)

Incite! and Ignite!: No one listens to poetry: SubVoicive Colloquium, 20^th July 1991, University of London (a cautionary examination of linguistically innovative poetry)

net/(k)not-//work(s) (a 1992 booklet of short pieces with interpollations)

Producing Now

Part One:

Poetic Sequencing and the New: Twentieth Century Blues (the poetics of that work)

Part Two:

New British Poetry in the Eighties (a brief survey from when Pages actually had pages!)

Re-Working the Work: Pausing for Breath (poetics)

Codes and Diodes are both Odes (homage to Bob Cobbing, poem as poetics)

Appendix: The Education of Desire (Sampler Three: this early pedagogic piece may be read here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/12/robert-sheppard-far-language-education.html )

You can’t live without all these ideas, can you?

Here are reviews of the book: Pages: Reviews of The Necessity of Poetics

Simultaneously, Shearsman is publishing my book of poems British Standards. See Pages: British Standards published by Shearsman - out now (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Locating Robert Sheppard: books: Pages: Robert Sheppard: seeing what's in print and what's not!; email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on X: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / X; latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

Thursday, September 02, 2021

COLLABORATIONS (Bob Cobbing - Robert Sheppard) published in a box by Veer - out now

Out now from Veer. Two booklets and a card introduction in a box! HERE

“Reprints of two collaborations between sympathetic but rather different disturbers of the poetic peace. As detailed in Sheppard’s illuminating Introduction, the first – Codes and Diodes - started with his poem for Cobbing’s 67th birthday; after another a year later Cobbing’s reworked response followed within days. Occasional exchanges continued till Christmas 1990 in the form of “flick-book ekphrasis”, cut-up and collage. - Sheppard:

Early in the alphabet the
Surprises began where the
Unknown linguist housed Francophone
Rattles
In the sewer music

Cobbing: Elongated words flying furred against Francophone forms. “Juxi! Splelp! Ajax out!” These imps stage the dark world of the sewer.

Ten years on, over three months, a second, more intensive set of exchanges – Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops - was effected by post; a loose three-line form accommodated homophonic strings, associative leaps, puns, pure sound and even plain statement; printed and handwritten text, diagram, score and image being interrupted by a shaggy dog story of meetings repeatedly foiled by missed calls. From

m(over) –

as(to)nish

(you)ngsters

invention takes off apparently unstoppably through to an enigmatic conclusion '(end)uring freedom / in / (fin)ite j(us)tice'. Most of the personal pronouns appear in brackets like parts of mysterious encrypted messages still afloat on the relentless swirls of language."
- Adrian Clarke

Veer Publications 093 & 094 [ISBN: 978-1-911567-24-0, 978-1-911567-25-7 & 978-1-911567-26-4 (boxed set)] 205mms x 285mms size. 34 & 34 & 4 pages. 2021. £13.00 (+ p&p).

Go here to purchase and read more: Bob Cobbing - Robert Sheppard - Collaborations - Veer Books

You may see me demonstrating how the box opens and the books spill out here!

The box format is appropriate to the fact that the first text in Codes and Diodes was also an introduction to Cobbing huge box publication Processual, one of Cobbing’s most important works. We just carried on from there. Here's one of my poems from that book, 'Verse and Perverse are Both Verses'.

As I write of the second pamphlet here, in the introductory three page essay included with this publication:

My second co-authored piece with Cobbing, Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops, conceived as a whole from the beginning, unlike its predecessor, falls into [the category of to and froing collaboration] (though falling into any category at all was clearly something that we were intending to avoid). The exchanges were conducted ‘to and fro’, via the post, between July and October 2001. I remember that Bob suggested that it was about time we wrote another collaboration at some point, and we must have discussed it at one of our still quite frequent meetings, even though I was living in Liverpool by the turn of the century. We established only one rule: we would each write 3 lines (or groups of 3 lines), then post the results to the other for response and continuation. One working title was ‘Over to You’.

A video of Patricia Farrell and I reading a revival of the text at The Other Room is visible on The Other Room website. (See video here: https://otherroom.org/videos/or-35-bob-cobbing-a-celebration/)

I write about Cobbing a number of times on this blog; see here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/05/bob-cobbings-abc-in-sound-republished.html

and here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/09/robert-sheppard-my-bob-cobbing-archive.html

Soon after finishing Blatant Blather/Virulent Whoops I found myself with the sad task of writing Bob’s obituary for The Guardian (which may be read here: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/oct/07/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries

I also write about collaboration in general (see here

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html

My previous prose book from Veer, Unfinish, my be read about and bought here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/03/robert-sheppard-new-book-out-unfinish.html

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Robert Sheppard: My review of Adrian Clarke's Austerity Measures on Stride plus further notes, thoughts and links

My review of Adrian Clarke’s new book Austerity Measures is now up on Stride and I hope you will read it now. It is here.

On a personal note, this is the first piece of critical writing I’ve produced since finishing the grand slog of The Meaning of Form (see here for more on that volume of critical writing). That is, with the exception of the floating prose of Pulse, a sort of ‘treatise on metre’ that I am hoping will be published soon.

On another personal note, I have a poem dedicated to me in Adrian’s book and, by rights, I shouldn’t review the book, but I wanted to; I don’t know who else might and I regard Clarke as important (and somewhat neglected, though I don’t know why). I simply ignored the poem in my account (though I like its references to 'C21 Blues'). I also ignored the poem dedicated to Patricia, which indeed is published on this blog here! Have a look: it gives an idea about how ‘austere’ Adrian's ‘measures’ are. There were plenty of other poems to deal with in their obdurately material insistence (along with their concomitant teasing indeterminacy)!

I have all of Adrian’s books on my desk at the moment and I’m surprised how many there are. Apart from the book reviewed, (see here) I’d check out the VEER website and look for Drastic Measures and Possession as starters. Or Excess Measures. If you don’t know the work. Here and here.

But there is one more example on Pages, from Adrian's 'Muzzle' here.

My earlier article on Adrian, ‘Colossal Fragments’ from Pages (as a print journal, 219-238, April 1994). Pages has been digitalised (see here) but I’ve also re-published that piece on this blog here. It was reprinted in my short critical volume Far Language here. But I also write about Clarke’s ‘creative linkage’ in The Poetry of Saying. See here.

But I haven’t written about his work recently (though there is a poetics piece dedicated to him in Berlin Bursts and I was surprised to find it still online in the Singaporean magazine Softblow, here).

In the Stride review I wanted to present the work in its demanding delight without intervening critical discourse. (My one ‘reference’ to Guattari, whom I am currently re-reading, is heavily muted!)

So there are lots of places you can go to search out this work if you don’t know it, and plenty of books to buy (in addition to the new one). And there is one more link that will help you: I deal with Adrian’s poetics (in contrast to Pierre Joris’) here.

When I say in my review

Recently, I’ve read a lot of descriptions of rather mild excursions beyond the poetic normative as ‘experimental’, ‘innovative’, or ‘radical’, but very little measures up to Clarke’s excessive, austere, ghostly and (even) drastic measures…

I had a specific example in mind: a call for submissions for a magazine on Twitter that asked for collage work, cut-ups, surrealist writing, without irony! What we need, in Ranciere’s phrase, is something that will put the disruption back into montage! Adrian Clarke's work does that.

There is a second review, on Stride too, by Clark Allison, HERE.

Sunday, December 04, 2016

Adrian Clarke: An Austerity Measure for Patricia’s Birthday

rat cat

King action

misplaced one

-way arrow

static disrupts

the fabulist

off course

Leviathan beached

Babelish nonplussed

at the

crossroads tongues

glossing origins

too old

to hunt

Visit the Patricia Farrell Celebrations Hub Post (with links to all the rest) here.

Thursday, September 01, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The sonnets I write

My acquaintanceship with the innovative sonnet is a long one. I am represented in Jeff Hilson’s anthology Reality Street Book of Sonnets (2008), which puts an excerpt from Warrant Error (2009), my book of 100 innovative sonnets concerned, as the title suggests, with the so-called ‘War on Terror’ of the early twenty-first century, alongside many others, from Ted Berrigan and Tom Raworth, through to my contemporaries Tim Atkins and Adrian Clarke. But my use of innovative sonnet forms, which usually means sonnet aspirant, sonnet approximate and sonnet deviant forms, poems that would not qualify as sonnets under the usual normative ‘classroom’ description, harks back to earlier work.

I write about the innovative sonnet in The Meaning of Form, in a chapter that is a much revised version of the 14 part rambling Hay-on-Wye lecture on the (Petrarchan) sonnet that I posted here via a sonnet frame of links!

Indeed, my long network TwentiethCentury Blues (2008) contains many 14 line poems and I even invented a new form, the 100 word sonnet (a two word ‘title’ is followed by 14 lines of 7 words each, centre margined, as in my example, below), which hailed from noticing this structure in one of Adrian Clarke’s isoverbalist poems of the 1990s, which he had not recognised as such, and adapting it for my poems and sequences. Coincidentally, I have returned to this form this summer, one dictated by a lack of punctuation and caesura and that develops a rhythmic celerity amid linguistic mix, in writing some poems that brood upon the disastrous vote of Britain to ‘Brexit’ the European Union, the Turkish coup, post-truth politics, and the self-immolation of the Labour Party. All that stuff.

In my journal I note of these: ‘The impaction suits the claustrophobia of political oppression, and make a wonderful contrast to ‘It’s Nothing’ (my 14 domestic-realist sonnets: 'Last Look', appeared in The International Times: here). A largely rhythmic celerity and linguistic mix, with occasional passages of normative discourse, though dictated by context (place in the flow and the effects of enjambement). That’s the poetics. It’s a poetics that gestures and doesn’t gesture at the same time, interruption and connectivity balanced. The frame of the sonnet also now and again becomes not just a ‘frame’, but it pivotal for dividing the flow into semantically organisable stretches, whether normative or – as is more normal – not.’

Here is one of the ones from the 1990s, one that didn’t get into History or Sleep, my selected poems, here, though it’s still available in TwentiethCentury Blues.

Small Voice 2

for Tim Woods

Twentieth Century Blues 39

For Scott Thurston 3

Hundred 3.10

Turns 8

lightness blooms

do not interrogate the taillamps’s eradicated drone

voice within vision musicates, released ears entune

its captive turn, the others no longer

fixed in the totality of permanent waste

this pleasure animates a knot of rapturous

ruptures mass graces follow me dirt from

itself: erotic or aesthetic it prises each

permission without distinction tinkles in shivered delight

We don’t live in Utopia but glimpsed

it for one moment: the daily catastrophe

anchors an epic ethos in liminal illumination,

audial; orchestration of things covered by

a grating the ‘utensils’ remain compound;

windows spring black roses in en-

visaged articulation

June-July 1997

Indeed, an essay I’m writing at the moment, ‘Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro’: A derivative dérive into/out of Petrarch’s Sonnet 3, is in some senses a poetics for my on-going project of making a sequence of innovative sonnet sequences, including Petrarch 3 (the poet and publisher Richard Parker, who has taken on Petrarch 3, declared this to be a ‘corona of coronas’ when we were talking about it). It’s what I was toying calling Song Nets but I decided against it. (See here and here about Petrarch 3).

My predilection for the sonnet may be found even earlier, as I say in the Hay-on-Wye lecture. The opening poem of my first non-self-published booklet, Dedicated to you but you weren’t listening (1979) is also a sonnet of sorts. Using titles from recordings by the seminal British band Soft Machine as the start of each line (the book’s title is also one of their compositions) the poem claims, in its subtitle, to be ‘influenced’ by the sonnets of Raymond Queneau and Jacques Bens, two members of Oulipo. In fact, in 1978 when I wrote the poems, like most Britons, I knew little of the Oulipo, other than what I had picked up via the fortuitous possession of Simon Watson Taylor’s French Writing Today, which anthologised both poets. Detailed knowledge of the Oulipo evaded me until the mid-1980s, but the construction of innovative sonnets is obviously rooted deep in my practice, and the memory of my first brush with three of Queneau’s ‘Thousand Billion Sonnets’, for example, and Bens’ mathematical use of pi as a determinant of rhyme-schemes, must have lain dormant.

'Petrarch 3' is now in print, see here and here.

So I have a number of sonnet-like forms (including several not listed here) and I am amassing a collection. The English Strain.

I read some at Raygun Gramophone at the Everyman Bistro on September 15^th. I read the new 100 word sonnets and ended with some from Warrant Error. See here for set list.

Note: See another recent sonnet in International Times here:

http://internationaltimes.it/avenge

(‘Avenge’, another sonnet, a contrafact on Milton’s ‘Avenge O Lord…’, and featuring elements concerning the (female) Yasidi resistance to IS, is not from 'It's Nothing', but belongs to a connected sequence, 'Overdubs'.)

See three of Thomas Wyatt here. And there:

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue20/RobertSheppardBM20.html

These come from Hap:Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch (though the first, introductory, poem ‘Perhaps a Mishap’ is not a version of Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch). All part of The English Strain.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Bob Cobbing's ABC in SOUND: a new edition from Veer with an introduction by me

'This 8th edition of Bob Cobbing’s 1965 ground-breaking polylingual sonic abecedary unites Jennifer Pike Cobbing’s cover design for its original publication as Sound Poems with the typeset text of later printings and a new introduction by Robert Sheppard which investigates its character, pre-history and subsequent realisations in performance.' (Adrian Clarke)

Veer Publication 067 [ISBN: 978-1-907088-76-6]
A5 size. 72 pages. March 2015. £6.00

Buy it here.

My introduction begins:

Bob Cobbing’s ABC in Sound is the nearest thing we have in English to Kurt Schwitters’ Ur-Sonate (1923) which it resembles in being an extended, structured text, designed for sound poetry performance, although the mode of structuring is not musical, like Schwitters’ ‘sonata’, but fundamentally lexical, in being based upon the alphabet. As such it resembles various non-concrete alphabet poems (see, for example, Peter Mayer’s anthology Alphabetical and Letter Poems), but the alphabet is more often, though not exclusively, a cause of alliteration and consonance, less an occasion for semantic or logical ordering. Cris cheek calls it ‘a plurilingual abecedarian tour de force’.

My footnotes contain some web links which, of course, work better on this platform. They are

The present location of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop version of the ABC, and state is: ‘In the BBC Sound Archive on tape TRW 6373: “ABC in Sound: Alphabet Poetry (o o-Montage). 3 reels: 1: Makeup; 2: Premaster: 3: Sono-Montage. Completed programme inserts (master).”, although it exists in several archives of electro-acoustic music. (from
http://wiki.delia-derbyshire.net/wiki/An_ABC_in_Sound. (accessed 5th October 2014)

Cobbing's extended performance called ‘Variations on a Theme of Tan’ (and other works) may be heard at http://www.ubu.com/sound/cobbing.html (accessed 5th October 2014)

A group reading of the ABC at The Other Room, Manchester in 2012 may be accessed at http://vimeo.com/52068018.

Four individual performances of the ABC by Jennifer Cobbing made in 2013 may be seen at these sites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_qI7btPNAU;

http://vimeo.com/53839869;

http://vimeo.com/96296733;

https://www.youtube.com/user/jeffhilson1 (all accessed 5th October 2014)

I write about the Third ABC in Sound here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2005/03/robert-sheppard-bob-cobbing-two.html

and more generally about Bob Cobbing's work here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2005/03/robert-sheppard-bob-cobbing-and.html

and about the recent symposium on Cobbing's work here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/robert-sheppard-bobliography-make.html

My book from Veer, Unfinish, may be accessed here.

Sunday, May 03, 2015

Robert Sheppard: Hi Zero Reading: Brighton Launch of Words Out of Time (Set list)

Tuesday 28^th April: Words Out of Time arrived from KFS. Re-crafted my reading. Patricia’s Space Filled Entirely with Matter arrived from Veer. A double private launch. See here.

Wednesday 29^th April: A journey to Brighton, desperately reading Derek Attridge’s new The Work of Literature for The Meaning of Form, an odd prelude to my Hi Zero reading. (See here on that book.)To Southwick to see my mother. My leg not behaving, back in Brighton I walked slowly to the Hope and Ruin which was, as I’d guessed, the old Hope and Anchor near the Clock Tower (which I checked on for my mother to be able to report its continued good health; ghost of the second Virgin Records shop forever on that corner: dark interior, black cushions, headphones). I recognised Joe Luna from his photograph in The Wire and met Francesca Lisette, who read good work well (as did Chloe Lancaster). Lee Harwood arrived, Adrian Clarke, my old school-friend Michael Foy, and sister and brother in law, Vicky and John. But other than a couple of other faces from The Wire, and a poet DJ, who was identified after he thanked me for the reading, I knew none of the predominantly young, vibrant, and responsive audience. Response included laughter, cheering, clapping and whooping. The reading was recorded and later (2022) archived, here:https://www.hizero.org/readings/33.

I read the following ‘set’:

As warm up: the ‘Berlin Bursts’ sequence (minus 'Friedhof' poem at the end, a de-selection for/from my ‘Selected’). Read them here.

A selection of texts from Words Out of Time, which I told the audience I was delighted to read since it referenced Brighton, ‘where I come from’, I explained simply.

from The Given part 1 (The ‘I Don’t Remember’ passages); from : ‘I don’t remember David’s bottled fish. I don’t remember Emerson Lake and Palmer playing a tribute to Hendrix, a week after his death,’ through to ‘I don’t remember jumbling the verses of “Travelling Riverside Blues”, our first gig. I don’t remember that Bob Cobbing still wore knitted ties. I don’t remember Jeff Nuttall saying, “This place is death!” as we cabbed it through Norwich. I don’t remember that William Empson had wind.’ At least Michael could remember what I didn’t remember (‘a girl called Annie flashing her tits on Toby’s houseboat’, though he didn’t), and ‘I don’t remember laughing at the statue of the past Mayor of Brighton, with Tony, Tony Lopez and Lee Harwood,’ refers to one day in the 1970s that Lee might remember. But the text is really about the vagaries of memory (I think, also it does build up an (inaccurate) picture of my self. Autre-biogrphy. Read my piece on The Given here.

from Arrival. I examined the background and read one of the two introductory poems:

you limp towards the matinee idol who

mimes my part waiting by the War Memorial

with his flashlight and his notebook

(The following day, visiting my mother again, I read the poem aloud by the War Memorial on Southwick Green, thus giving the book its Southwick launch, to (appropriately) no-one. The poem may be read at the end of this excerpt from Arrival here.)

I read one passage of the prose: ‘ “I’ll forget them not,” he promised, things like Hendrix’s The Cry of Love. I showed him patterns for my needlework. “Stuff the hall,” he said, “we could always dance in the streets.” He sniffed me as I laid a hot water bottle on his wound,’ through to the terrifying (at least for me): ‘After her death I brought a terrible silence with me into every room and I carried her expression like a scar.’

I read the poems, ‘the flickering carriages of the London train’ (a partial translation of Pasternak and a partial allusion to Henry Vaughan) and the final poem down to:

‘His little green men can zip back to his childhood

Zap him Abduct him Adopt him

I want to suck fossils with my dead gums

And speak in a language as slow as geology

So slow you’ll only hear a low o-o-o-o!’

By contrast I read the two versions from Ovid’s Tristia that Van Valckenborch wrote in A Translated Man. This rather tarty reading ended with the appropriate plea:

dear naso

i’ve a scriptorium

scratching out scrolls

by the lisping adriatic i wonder if you’d care

to send me a skinful a bit more a-

more please do it like dean martin does

artificial effortless

and with whinging and whining off stage

I did it like dean martin did

artificial effortless slightly tarty

and with whinging and wineing off stage

(actually there was no whinging!)

Read all about the venue and the regular poets, organisers and associates in April’s issue of The Wire: NOISE POETS. See here: http://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/374, and hear here:

http://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/listen_brighton-noise-poetry-recordings

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell: a book each published today; some thoughts and some reading

First, copies of my autrebiographies Words Out of Time arrived from Knives Forks and Spoons in time for my reading in Brighton, which will now become my hometown launch for it - and I hope to see Lee Harwood and Adrian Clarke and other friends there (and visit my mother in Southwick); then copies of Patricia's Space Completely Filled with Matter arrived from Veer. That looks very professional with fine reproduction values. That will be launched at the next Storm and Golden Sky on 29th May. So a double pleasure. I will blog about both books when I've more time after the Brighton trip. (That reading, my book, Patricia's folder, and Storm and Golden Sky are all featured on Pages.) Details of both books and how to obtain them soon! (Read my peice on writing part one, The Given, here.)

This comes on the back of much chatter about Salt publications slimming down its list. My Companion to Lee Harwood has disappeared, which is a shame, as has Tin Pan Arcadia, although that is republished in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, which is still on the catalogue (though I am not), but described as 'out of stock'. I am wondering whether the three paperback copies I have are the complete run of the paperback edition I mentioned some posts ago.(No: it can be bought second hand through booksellers associated with Amazon.)

Also in the post (I mean the mail) was the latest book by Derek Attridge which re-visits his The Singularity of Literature. I can see already that, however minimally I can do it, I will have to acknowedge it in my critical book, The Meaning of Form, which I think of as finished. Again, this is well-blogged about here, as is its debt to that essential book. There are a number of outtakes and thoughts on that to come.

It is also good to see (even an hour ago, here: http://tomraworth.com/notes/?p=5051) South Coast resident Tom Raworth blogging again.

The only thing these things have in common is that they incompletely change everything.

Pages