Burnt Journal 1965: the last one and the photograph of David Hynes (and a look back at the series, with links and vids)

Here is my final ‘Burnt Journal’ poem, written when David Hynes asked me to write him a birthday poem for his ‘significant’ birthday, and to read it at his party in the Casa in Liverpool in October 2025. I did so, David illuminating my page with the light on his phone!

David is a photographer, whose work I like a lot. When the poem was accepted by International Times or rather by the poetry editor, Rupert Loydell, Rupert and I began to discuss images to accompany it. The poem had already suggested a lead. Weirdly, and Tom Phillips notes something of this in his commentary on a couple of the images (see below), the photos were predominantly grim, and not the Swinging London 1965 images I’d imagined, or even hoped for. You’ll see that in the poem. In fact, some images suggested the relative isolation of Kirkby, where David and his siblings grew up. When Rupert was searching for photographs (would one of the Kinks work? No.) I wondered whether David had an image that might work, and asked him one night. He flicked his phone, scrolled through his photographs and discovered the one we finally used: ‘The Field of Forgotten Dreams’. I’ll say no more about it, or about the poem, but let you access both, now they are published in International Times:

HERE: poem and photograph may be read/viewed HERE: Burnt Journal 1965 | IT

Many thanks to Rupert Loydell and International Times, and to David for providing the image so promptly! Thumbnail below.

(c) D. Hynes, 2026

I’ve written a ‘number’ of poems in my ‘Burnt Journal’ non-sequence of poems. Modelled on the ‘Empty Diaries’ sequence (in a way), I have decided that I’ve written the last ‘Burnt Journal’ (as I’ve also written the last ‘Empty Diary’ and have vowed never to commit a sonnet again): this one for 1965. There’s enough of them, it strikes me. But I’d not – until today – realised just how many there were. Unlike the ‘Empty Diary’ sequence, which runs from 1901-2025 (with a 1372 (Petrarch) and a 2055 (cyberpunk) thrown in for bad measure), the ‘Burnt Journals’ do not faithfully track the ongoing passage of the years they name. They are occasional poems in the sense that the occasion is the birthday, or rather birth-year, of a friend. They all use the pages of Tom Phillips’ marvellous collection The Postcard Century which is a chronological collection of postcards. The book is useful in that the selection of year-based material is clearly pre-arranged. Originally, I thought of it as collecting for me what I’d had to scour image-sources for (pre-Internet) in the writing of ‘Empty Diaries’. (I had 90 sheets with the year on them and filled with data from many sources and then used the sheet for an improvised writing (mostly).) The occasions usually burst in upon me with little warning, so I’ve had to work quickly, clutching at the Phillips in haste.

In the picture above, you can see a copy of the Phillips, ready for use at any moment, behind me on the shelf!

But now it's time to block the growing automatism of the choice of material and move on, but not before chronicling what I've been up to so far, to date. 

I’d not thought how many of these poems there were. There are actually 21, which, as the number of the age of majority as it was, seems appropriate to birthday verses. I’d never ordered them either, other than in the (first?) six I published in Berlin Bursts in 2011 (asterisked below). 

Of course, there are a number of ways of assembling a full list: The order of the writing of the poems, or the order of the birth-years of my (mostly poet) friends? Taking the latter as a rule we get:

Burnt Journal 1924 for my father *

1929 for my mother *

1939 for Lee Harwood *

1944 for Allen Fisher *

1948 for Mary Prestidge (probably to remain unpublished: they don’t all ‘work’)

1949 for Gavin Selerie and Alan Halsey *

1952 for Geraldine Monk

1952 for Frances Presley

1952 for Cliff Yates

1955 for the 1955 Committee (friends, including me!)

1956 for Patricia Farrell

1965 for David Hynes (the subject of today’s post, the last in the series)

1968 for Simon Perril

1969 for Peter Manson *

1970 for Geraldine Roberts-Stone

1973 for Scott Thurston

1977 for James Byrne

1977 for Chris McCabe

1978 for Eleanor Rees

1978 for Rodge Glass

1979 for Sandeep Parmar (possibly to remain unpublished)

You will see that I had to use the same ‘material’ twice, even thrice, for some ‘years’. The two 1977 poems were written together, but the 1952 ones weren’t. In fact, by the time I was writing the poem for Cliff Yates I’d forgotten I’d used the material before, and came to it quite fresh. It’s – again – only today that I’ve noticed this.

I’ve also read them all through in the order arranged above. So far, I’ve only discussed process, and form (a number are sonnet-like structures). But they do relate to one another in terms of content (even to following Phillips’ clear decision to include as many postcards of Piccadilly Circus and Eros, which can be traced in my squinty borrowings). A weird snapshot of the year of birth of the dedicatee, which, of course, they can’t remember! Motifs recur, and a sense of the given year is presented, though it is often surrealised, rather than realised, as it were.  (I’ve never put any of them against their corresponding ‘Empty Diary’ poem, either, but that’s another possible tracking of my cockeyed world building.)

I’ve written about the sequence before on this blog, particularly whenever poems are published online, so I could link directly to the texts, and it would be good to mark the abandonment of the sequence (pushing me into a radical quandary if I need to produce another birthday poem anytime soon) by posting some links to some of the poems, in chronological order of their dates, here.

Burnt Journal 1924 Pages: for Claude Sheppard

Burnt Journal 1939: Pages: Robert Sheppard: For Lee Harwood Burnt Journal 1939 (from Berlin Bursts)

Burnt Journal 1949: for Gavin Selerie and Alan Halsey: Pages: Remembering Gavin Selerie and his laugh. I notice I have an oldish video of me reading the poem. Here:

Burnt Journal 1952: the one for Frances Presley (also on IT): Workless Washday: Burnt Journal 1952 | IT

Burnt Journal1952: the one for Cliff Yates:  https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/2022/12/robert-sheppard.html

Burnt Journal 1955: for my bunch of drinking friends, aged the same as me: Pages: Burnt Journal 1955 for the 1955 Committee (including me!)

Burnt Journal 1970 for Geraldine Roberts-Stone: Robert Sheppard sees the future in the past | Stride magazine. And here’s a video of me reading it fast enough to get it into a format short enough to post on the blog:

 

In ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ I wrote of ‘Empty Diaries’ and the then-unwritten ‘Burnt Journals’, but I had a third phantom series, ‘Drowned Books’. Maybe I should use that title for a new sequence. (‘Wiped Weblogs’ is a section of ‘Empty Diaries’ by the way!) Enough! More than Enough! For now! 'Lost Logbooks' is another possible title that came to me in the middle of the night!

The next (!) collaboration with David Hynes may be viewed on International Times, here: Martin Smith Quartet: Sunday Sessions at the Caledonia | IT

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com. Follow on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social

Eighteen Years of Blogging today!

Blogging is more than a publicity exercise for me. Although this blog started out as the extension of an earlier magazine, it is an instrument for thinking (and writing, as I explain below in relation to the sonnets I have now finished). It is even therapeutic in some strange way: I lose myself in the process and within the labyrinthine linkages it makes. (It took me a long time to realise this aspect matched the strands and links of my Twentieth Century Blues project. (See Pages: Twentieth Century Blues published ten years ago! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)) It is, clearly, a mode of publishing (which reflects its beginning as a blogzine). 

This year has been an odd one, not least of all for having radiotherapy in the summer and on-going hormone treatment for prostate cancer (get it checked, old lads out there, that's the most serious message of this post, believe me. I've never had a symptom. And here's the most important link today: Prostate Cancer UK | Prostate Cancer UK ). It hasn’t made much difference to my blogging (though I timed my annual summer break for those 20 radiotherapy sessions at the wonderful Clatterbridge in Aintree). 

I’m going to select 10 ‘areas’ with links for this year (but there's really 11!):

 1 The great work of the year was the co-editing of New Collected Poems by Lee Harwood. Here’s one post, about the launch, with a link to other links (there’s lots about Lee on the blog!)   Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems launched and on sale now (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

2 It was great to participate in the Cliff Yates @ 70 tribute and I write about that (and have links to the tribute, for which I wrote the introduction and submitted a specially-written poem) here: Pages: Cliff Yates at 70 : my parts in this celebration of his poetry and poetics (links to it) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). Andy and Alan did him proud - as we all should. 

 3 Good also to be asked by Lyndon Davies to provide poem and essay to the John James/Chris Torrance issue of Junction Box, here: Pages: The John James/Chris Torrance issue of Junction Box - plus my poem for, essay on, James (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I wrote for and about James, but I did have a fruitful suggestion for the Torrance part (that is, to reprint an interview with Torrance I read waiting for one of those radiotherapy appointments). 

 4 It’s grim to announce the deaths of friends (whether they are artists are not). But we lost two extremely creative friends in the last year and they are remembered here:

Philip Jeck: Pages: Philip Jeck 2022 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Alan Halsey: Pages: I.M. Alan Halsey: some thoughts, links, and a poem dedicated to him. (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 5 I continued publishing excerpts from British Standards (my transpositions of romantic sonnets) in magazines over this year and I provide links to them, BUT I also include on this blog short videos of those poems too. So here is a piece on transposing Wordsworth, which is also a homage to the brilliant work Phil Davenport is doing with homeless people using Wordsworth’s poems in a parallel way to me. (No, I am using them in a parallel way to him.) See: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Wordsworth’s Sonnets Transposed for the 21st Century appears on Zwiebelfish!

6 Keats got a similar treatment, and here are four posts, with videos, of work that appeared from the 14 sonnets I’ve tackled (or mangled, depending on your view of the project):

 Pages: Two more sonnets from British Standards (from Keats) in Tears in the Fence 75 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: A version of a Keats sonnet published on STRIDE today (links and video and context) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: Four more Keats' overdubs published online in LITTER (and videos here) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: THREE new sonnets from British Standards (overdubs of John Keats) appear in Shearsman 131 and 132 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 You’ll notice on the video I wear my Keats (life mask) with pride.

 7 John Clare got the same treatment in British Standards and here are the two posts about the publication of some of the resultant poems (again with videos): here:

Pages: My transposition of a sonnet by John Clare, from British Standards, is published on Beir Bua (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Four new versions of John Clare published in Talking About Strawberries (plus videos and links)

 

Here's my accidental 'poem-film', or is it 'film-poem' of one of those Clare transpositions.

These sonnets were all temporarily posted on this blog so blogging became part of the process of their becoming. (And, therefore, as I say above, of me.)

8 Talking of performing or reading, I did a reading (and would love to do more, if there are any organisers left after Covid!) at MMU’s English Futures conference in July 2022. Here’s my set list: Pages: My reading at the English Futures Saturday 9th July 2022 (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). It’s more of the Wordsworth transformations. I read a whole block to make absolutely clear what I was doing. 

9 I wrote about Fictional Poets (looking back at the two volumes I published of such work), beginning with a post here: Pages: Reflections on Fictional Poetry and Fictional Poets (1 and hubpost for the sequence) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and with links to the rest. I was also thinking through (even writing) a third part. I am quietly announcing here for the first time that a cleaned-up version of these posts will form parts of a book called Doubly Stolen Fire which will be published later this year.

10 Even before the eighteenth year of blogging began I was posting posts about having FINISHED the ‘English Strain’ project with its serial ‘final’ poems. It didn’t turn out that easy: these posts quite amusingly trace the process of closure, as I debate HOW and WHEN to end it. The final post here even contemplates starting it all up again, but decides against it (it is also the least consulted post of the four). Since the whole project was published and discussed on the blog (unlike other projects you won’t know about from reading these pages) it seems appropriate to cluster them together. I think they make interesting reading:

 Pages: Another 'final' poem of the English Strain sonnet project: looking eastwards and to the Ukraine (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Goodbye to Bo through the Medium of Jake Thackray’s masterpiece (not a book review) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Robert Sheppard: A final final poem for British Standards!

Pages: The Horrible Thought that Bo mioght be back: only The Bard could save me now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I’m saying goodbye to the sequence but I’m also saying goodbye to Bo (and to the sonnet: I’ll never return to the form! (He sez.))

One other thing (this isn’t point 11, believe me): I’ve also started this last year adding a set of addresses to every post (if I remember to do it!) That’s to make sure people can contact me. The other way of putting this is: don’t use my edgehill email address! I can’t access it. So:  

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Do follow me on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

The little block of four raw links below will take you to the posts I made after merely 10 years of blogging, trying to make lists of 1, the best posts, 2, my favourite posts (one for each year), 3, the most neglected posts, and, 4, my blogging plans for the (then) future. It was all quite fun, quite a lot of work, and is still interesting (even informative) to look at now. 

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-best-bits.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-one-post-year.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-ten-posts-nothing-or.htmlhttp://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-plans-for-future.html

 My annual accounts of blogging all link (up). In fact, they are a sort of guide to that year’s ‘best’ posts (though it’s only in my estimate). Here’s 14, 15,16 and 17 years…

Pages: Robert Sheppard: My 14 years of blogging

Pages: Fifteen Years of Blogging (A hubpost to all the hubposts and other goodies) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Sixteen Years of Blogging! (links to the best of the blog) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Seventeen Years of Blogging. A look back and the best of the last year (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

The pre-history of this blog, as a print magazine, may be read here, on what was my first post (even though I moved it later). I also outlined the complete run of the second series of Pages before it became a blogzine, and finally this blog. However, the first run of the print magazine is now online, at Jacket2 where it is hosted here. 

I.M. Alan Halsey: some thoughts, links, and a poem dedicated to him.

I am saddened to hear that Alan Halsey has died, and my heart goes out to Geraldine at this time.

 Alan was an important writer, and he’s one who has been important to me for a long time. In the early 1980s we conducted a long correspondence on poetics, after I’d featured his work in my early magazine Rock Drill. In Pages he was one of the 12 featured writers, and his work was accompanied by a long essay by Gavin Selerie on his work up to that time: Pages 397-420 Alan Halsey. (And a response to the work therein by Tim Woods. See here: Pages: Pages (first series) reissued entire with an interview on Jacket 2: Complete Index of all 5 series (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) )

 Of course, there was more work, much more work, after that, and the academic tone of the earlier work lightened (though he always remained bookish in the good sense, as befits his main occupation as a book dealer, who was of great use to my own self-education). That is: if satire is ‘lighter’ (which if I weren’t writing this so quickly, is a statement I’d want to stop and examine).

 

I didn’t really know him very well until he’d married Geraldine Monk and he lived not too far away in Sheffield, and they both stayed with us (once when a double-booking, Geraldine performing with Julie Tippetts, left them without a hotel!) – which was always fun. Much drink given, much taken. Lots of gossip and laughs…

 By this time Alan had branched out into visual poetry (is that the right term?) and music performance (is that the right term?). I remember a launch of Marginalian at the Text Festival in Bury and a performance of Juxtavoices in the Bluecoat (with no bar!). (Here’s a gallery: Alan Halsey (westhousebooks.co.uk))

 He has one piece on this blog, a charming gift for Patricia Farrell’s birthday, which I don’t believe is collected anywhere: See here: Pages: Alan Halsey: Those acrobats A and Z put on a show for Patricia's 60th (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) 

Oh, let’s not forget his incredible investigative editing of the three volumes of Bill Griffiths. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/03/bill-griffiths-collected-poems-launch.html

I never wrote on his work much, and indeed, only recently so (unless you count 3 poems dedicated to him, a bit on that below). I often found the work difficult, but always witty, even humorous (I adopted one of his techniques that he told my Edge Hill students about on a visit: keeping wordlists: ‘error/terror’; ‘rose/eros’ etc., that I used in Warrant Error – and its title is a blast of Halseyean logopoetry, it strikes me now.) But recently I did write in some detail about his collaborations with Kelvin Corcoran, first in a blogpost in the series about ‘collaboration’,

  Pages: Thoughts on Collaboration or Coauthorship 8: Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey's three books (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Then in a sharper review of the (then) latest collaboration Winterreisen,

 https://www.littermagazine.com/2020/02/review-wintereissen-by-kelvin-corcoran.html

And finally as part of a critical article on collaboration for English Studies that I write about here:

Pages: My piece on 'Collaboration' is published in The Yearbook of English Studies 2021 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 I think I quote these lines (from Halsey, not Kelvin) in all three pieces:

 

The poets shuffle out, bloody-eyed,

back to their caves in the anthologies

half a mile north of Neglect,

watched by Eng. Lit. lads on CCTV. (61)

 

That about sums up Alan’s attitude to the literary world, and to academia! As I say in the review of the book, ‘Those lines are typical of the sardonic humour, which usually jumps out like this, a bolt from the blue, and is one of the pleasures of reading Winterreisen.’ Do, if you haven’t.

 I want to point to one of the poems I wrote for Alan, as my tribute today (one of the others is shared in its dedication, and the third is a dud). Here it is, ‘The Hello Poem’, from my volume Berlin Bursts. 

The Hello Poem

 for Alan Halsey

 

Hello poem, it’s me again. I’m

the voice that lives upstairs. You

 

hear me reeling across my floor,

your ceiling, as I dance about my

 

affairs. And you about yours, not

miming my sound, un-

 

rhyming your eyes as they rise,

faltering, toward me, from the ground.

                                    *

Hello poem, it’s me again, the

other side of your world,

 

speaking long distance

straight

 

around your curve, racing

like a tycoon’s jet

 

to overtake the dawn

and possess tomorrow.

                                  *

Hello poem, it’s me again. You

ran away with yourself to

 

stage your new self’s forming. I am

the silence that inhabits your zero.

*

 

Locating Robert Sheppard

 email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com

website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com

latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.bogpot.com

My piece on 'Collaboration' is published in The Yearbook of English Studies 2021

The Yearbook of English Studies for 2021 examines contemporary poetry from Britain and Ireland. Edited by Samuel Rogers, the volume contains fourteen essays exploring a range of poetry from 1980 and the present.

 SEE HERE: http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Contemporary-British-Irish-Poetry

Permanent link: 

www.mhra.org.uk/publications/yes-51

The volume is organized into four sections. ‘Place, Identity, Environment’ contains discussions of Tony Conran, Raman Mundair, Geoffrey Hill, and Karen McCarthy Woolf. Attention is paid to questions of nationhood, cultural identity and ethnicity, the ethics of attention, and the pressing matter of climate change. In the second section, ‘Placing Language’, Rhys Trimble, Lesley Harrison, and Tom Pickard are compared; Gaelic poetry is explored via Meg Bateman, Ruaraidh MacThòmais, Rody Gorman, and others; an analysis of Catherine Walsh further underlines the connections to place afforded by language.

The third section, ‘Ways of Looking Back’, mediates between the contemporary and the past. This includes classical presences in Alice Oswald, parodic responses to Philip Larkin (no comment), and a consideration of the late Eavan Boland’s legacy. A fourth section showcases some of poetry’s ‘Forms of Meaning’, a Sheppardian title if ever there was!  Redell Olsen’s cross media lineage is traced to Sophie Robinson, Nisha Ramayya, and others. Ted Hughes is revisited via the epistolary tradition. Literary collaboration is approached through Kelvin Corcoran, Alan Halsey, S. J. Fowler, Prudence Chamberlain, and Camilla Nelson. {That’s my bit!} Finally, the complications of the contemporary lyric are examined in Zoë Skoulding’s work.

My chapter 'Doubling Up: Modes of Literary Collaboration in Contemporary British Innovative Poetry', is described in my abstract:

 Literary collaboration has become an important part of contemporary poetic practice in the last few years. Types of collaboration vary: Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have collaborated over many years; other pairings may be one-offs, as in the series of collaborative events (‘Enemies’ and 'Camarades') organized by S. J. Fowler. This discussion compares the Corcoran–Halsey texts with selections from the printed and online manifestations of Fowler's pairings, particularly with Prudence Chamberlain and Camilla Nelson. I engage with performance, though not with the broader sphere of cross-media collaboration. I ask whether it is possible to locate the kind of seamless collaboration that genuinely creates what some commentators call 'the third voice'; however dialogically it is produced, it produces a single entity, an imagined unitary subject position.

 Thanks Sam Rogers for editing this.

 My working method was quite a laborious one. Encouraged by the fact that I drafted some of the chapters of my book The Meaning of Form as posts on this blog (a hub-post to the many links is found here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks)) I decided to blog about ‘collaboration’, both in terms of my own literary collaborations (such as the recent pair of pamphlets with Bob Cobbing republished (in a box) by Veer here: Pages: COLLABORATIONS (Bob Cobbing - Robert Sheppard) published in a box by Veer - out now) and about my critical readings of the above named writers, and I assembled 14 posts (with links to one review on Stride and another on Litter related to it). You can find all that here:

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

Of course, the published piece is more economical (there are gains and losses in that). And it is accompanied by others’ works, which might be more interesting for you. If you have access to jstor you might find it here: Doubling Up: Modes of Literary Collaboration in Contemporary British Innovative Poetry on JSTOR

A subsequent piece, on Tim Atkins, I decided to write without recourse to the blog. In one situation this method was advantageous; in the other, it was less so (not for the reader, I trust, but for me, as writer!).

Nevertheless, the whole process of writing academic literary criticism is a little in question for me, given the effort required and the absence of reward (not even, on occasion, receiving a copy of the book). Perhaps I prefer the kinds of loose poetics/criticism I used for Pulse and developed in relation to The English Strain, all three volumes. (For the former, see here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: 'PULSE: All a Rhythm' published in Tentacular 5 (with links); for the latter, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/07/playing-my-part-in-new-defences-of.html). But then I do enjoy engaging with the difficulties of text and the intricacies of reading. 

 

 

A major part of my chapter concerns the contents of SJ Fowler's Nemeses, his selected collaborations. He seems to like the final thing: A note on : Robert Sheppard's brilliant essay on collaboration — SJ Fowler (stevenjfowler.com)

Thoughts on Collaboration or Coauthorship 8: Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey's three books

[All posts in this strand may be accessed via links on the first post, a hubpost, as I call it, here:

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

Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have co-authored three books so far.

Maybe that’s not quite correct. They have indeed collaborated on three books, but the first of them was, in fact, the kind of cross-media work I intend not to cover in my essay on literary collaboration. Halsey has a long history of producing collaged images (often with textual elements included) and his book Marginalien is his most consistent showing of this area of his work. Here’s something that gives an idea of its style.  

The note on the back of this handsome book You’re Thinking Tracts or Nations (produced by Halsey’s West House Books) informs us that for Corcoran’s 40^th birthday Halsey presented his friend with 14 ‘pictures’. Over the next 4 years (nothing speedy here!) Corcoran responded to them, producing, at first, ekphrastic responses that follow the images, but as the sequence goes on, Corcoran extends his range, involving imaginative leaps away from the ‘pictures’ into new areas. There is a sense throughout that Halsey’s images (which do combine archaic figuration with language and partial or fake hieroglyphics) evoke a primitive or alternative reality of ritual and fertility:

We wear animal heads inventing fields 

good good all around the fat time… (p. 24)

Of course, it is our political realities that are being negotiated. References to Arctic exploration mix with criticisms of the then Home Secretary Jack Straw. (The poems are dated 1997-2001.)


On the final page Corcoran addresses Halsey directly:

Alan, here are fourteen versions

of your thinking tracts or nations,

bright in deep border country

fourteen visions of your gift. (p. 48)

‘Versions’ and ‘visions’ is well put, since Corcoran has not slavishly reproduced the images in words (I am aware that that is impossible: ekphrasis must involve interpretation). They are ‘visions’ in the dual sense that they are visual, and also visionary in their construction of a magical (but not necessarily benign) reality. Somehow he brings to the surface a kind of primitive tribalism in modern life.


It’s an enjoyable book (which I have found instructive in the kinds of ‘squinting’ or ‘flashcarding’ ekphrasis that I practice, as I explain here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/01/robert-sheppard-talk-for-open-eye.html

But in terms of my (rather slowly-developing) essay, it’s closer to my working with Trev Eales than a true ‘co-authorship’. But remember: ‘In the literary field collaboration has become the term most commonly used to refer to coauthorship’. (Laird 2000: fn 1, p. 269) ‘Collaboration’ covers both cases.


A Horse That Runs (2015) is clearly a case of co-authorship. The book alternates 12 line stanzas by each poet (they are not attributed, but the poets address one another now and then, and this gives the game, for there is an element of ‘game’, away). The book’s subtitle is ‘To and Fro with Wallace Stevens’, which both describes the method of alternating dialogic composition and identifies its poetic focus, the life and works of the great American modernist (or was he, not Yeats, the last of the Romantics? Or was he a superannuated Symboliste stranded amongst the bonds and life insurance policies?). There is a narrative thread, involving Snowbird, a horse that ‘runs in dreams … his route pulsing over the Trent’ (n.p.) which reappears at various points, including at the poem’s end.


The Horse than Runs is also hilariously funny, with surreal visions and versions of Wallace Stevens, who is remote enough to seem even more rarefied than he was in his own time, if you insert him in ‘our’ reality:

Tap here for the metapoem. Departing Grand Central

we understand why Stevens never came to England

but, Kelvin, picture him in Harrogate dumbfounded by

the buns and starched aprons in Betty’s Tea Rooms. (np)

There is a clear sense of literary re-valuation going on too. Stevens perhaps, despite the casual racism, despite the hidebound existence, in his poems, and his poetics even, has more to offer than Pound. Such a view would have been heresy during British Poetry Revival days, and I suspect both Corcoran and Halsey once followed the Poundian line more closely; as did we all, I think. Anyway, here’s a question (both Pound and Stevens had their economics):

Who would you put your money on? Mr Pound or Mr Stevens?

your real, unmetaphorical money, your food, home and children. (np)

I don’t want to put too much uniformity of content or attitude upon the piece. One of the frequent traits of this kind of to and fro -ing coauthorship is (in my experience of practice but also of reading) is its diverse responsiveness. Betsy Warland and Daphne Martlett refer to ‘you my co-writer and co-reader’ when reflecting upon their collaboration, and that sense of co-reading is essential to the progress of such co-authored pieces. Each poet reads the other with care (but then possibly does his or her own thing in response. It’s not about continuing a narrative or argument; it eschews linearity.) Of course there are also stylistic traits that separate the poets: in this case, Kelvin has a smoother line, with less enjambment, whereas Alan favours enjambment and irregularity. (Look below at the hanging ‘and’ at the end of Halsey’s penultimate quoted verse.) Indeed, you get the feeling that two voices are in dialogue, although they are attempting to approximate a single discourse (as a reading experience for the reader, I mean). They are not achieving (neither should they) the ‘third voice’ of some theories of collaboration. (I have co-authored a poem in Twitters for a Lark with Kelvin. ( See here: https://euoia.weebly.com/ ) He produced a characteristic text and my job was to approximate his style and diction and lineation in the interests of ‘unity’. That doesn’t (have to) happen here.)


Alan Halsey brings the book to a kind of ‘rested totality’ (Zukofsky’s term) by pitching the world of things against the transformative objects and objectives of the imagination (a very Stevens thing to do) and to locate it in the immediate environment (not Key Point or wherever as in Stevens, but ‘Nether Edge’ in Sheffield), though even the ‘house’ is (suitably) a little neo-Platonic in its ontological status. The mythic but physically present horse (another Stevens ‘trick’) is also brought ‘home’. The poem ends (after about 30 pages):

There’s no end but whatever the state of things and 

whether the storm breaks or loses identity

the horse eventually comes home and the house

by which I mean this or any other house is not only

precisely where it was but where we imagined.

What other word could it end with, balanced with the other sense that the house is ‘precisely where it was’?  


Most recently, our co-navigators (travel is implied by the title of this new book) have co-authored Winterreisen. Newton-le-Willows: Knives Forks and Spoons, 2019. I have reviewed this book for Alan Baker’s excellent online journal Litter HERE

Please now read that review (since it is the continuation of the thoughts in this post.) It begins:

'This collaborative text is a co-authored dialogue. The indicative, but informal Ks or As before each verse or section, tell us who is speaking. However, Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey don’t adopt the practice of their former co-authored volume, A Horse That Runs (2015), where they address one another. Nor is there an attempt to fabricate a ‘third voice’, which is apparently the aim of some literary collaborators; they have no need to...' 

Robert Sheppard: Inaugural Lecture PART 4; Poems

Parts one and two and three (the last three days' posts) should be read before this final part

Poems [1]

don’t normally wear a suit       don’t normally wear a tie       not at a reading      (laughter)       not when I’m reading poems       that’s all      All poems        (single catcall from audience at disrobing)     I knew you’d say something       All poems stage their meanings at a critical remove from their occasions, sources, influences and poetics. Sometimes poems subvert such complex and lucid notions as ‘complexity’ and ‘lucidity’, to produce poems that are anything but complex and lucid in an attempt to re-define      those things       In any case, poems … run ahead of the conjectures we make      the conjectures run ahead of the poems at different times     I’m going to read     I’m going to turn this into a brief poetry reading       partly because I believe that the poetry reading is one of the provisional institutions of linguistically innovative poetry or whatever you want to call it       and one of the functions of it is to flog books       I thought I’d do that       I have some books here       and there’s one thing free       and also there’s something else that’s common with  poetry readings       that’s a      that’s a trip to the hostelry afterwards       I know there’s a bun-fight immediately after this       but there could be an after after       I think I will simply delegate the Buck I’ th’Vine as a possible       venue       so here are five poems       they’re all metapoems       they do what I was talking about       this is what I wrote for the Alan Halsey reading here as part of the series Ailsa (Cox) and I run from the writing department       I decided to do a kind of introduction for him       I kind of see this as you know when you go home and you find three answerphone messages from the same person      it also rhymes and       I tell students ‘rhyme is a crime’       but they never quite get the irony of me saying that       so I’ve got the maximum number of rhymes

The Hello Poem

for Alan Halsey

Hello poem, it’s me again. I’m

the voice that lives upstairs. You

hear me reeling across my floor,

your ceiling, as I dance about my

affairs. And you about yours, not

miming my sound, un-

rhyming your eyes as they rise,

faltering, toward me, from the ground.

                                    *

Hello poem, it’s me again, the

other side of your world,

speaking long distance

straight

around your curve, racing

like a tycoon’s jet

to overtake the dawn

and possess tomorrow.

                                    *

Hello poem, it’s me again. You

ran away with yourself to

stage your new self’s forming. I am

the silence that inhabits your zero.

this is a poem called

Another Poem

The scribe of the poem knows nothing

but he embodies every word you hold.

He’s not an original. He’s a solid

conduit, form rather than wave or

particle. He’s left-handed, and his block

fist covers every word once it’s formed.

The eyes he turns to us

in his mirror

            look away.

Careful not to smudge, he crouches low,

reversing the verse, furrowing his plough.

The poem tells of flowers and trees,

naming names you recognise from other

poems, but you could never make them out

in the wild. Did he say ‘Wild’? No,

he didn’t, as it happens. Neither did

the poem. You’re making it up. You think

it should be you alone and the words

agreeing to differ. But you watch his fist

pounding the lines: Snouts nuzzling the moon

grass or Gifting broken gusts. The poem

has barely recovered from his scratches, yet

you’re making to scribble links in its margins,

calming and charmless. Will you then tear

his calligraphy back, peel it off to leave

the wounded poem yours, a dripping pelt?

He fashions the final words. Waves of feeling rush

towards this hooded moment. His dream is to be power-

less as the endless poem.

                                                Then he

inscribes, in mirror-script: The scribe of this poem

knows it all

this is called ‘Not Another Poem’     partly because it’s in prose       and partly (laughs)        through exasperation       this actually       I made allusion to an essay I wrote on the avant-garde       this is also part of that       what I was attempting to do was  to write something that was neither poetry or prose nor a critical article but it’s a response to that book but I’m not sure you need to know that book

Not Another Poem

after Krzysztof Ziarek

Often I am permitted to return to a field. And it is full of forces

Something is happening here, saying whatever, but saying all the same. But not. The same there’s nothing to exchange. No need to

Forces don’t build in power. Or domination. A thoughtful, forceful relinquishing

Inside this field you are safe but not safe. All that is the world is not. The world. A bullet flies as the idea of a bullet (flies) but its trajectory is turned. To words like ‘sleet’ turning to ‘snow’. To slow. It is a bullet that stands. In relation to every new thing

Everything here is transformed, every thing (out there) interrupted. A snow-bullet  frozen mid-air becomes off-centre of a new constellation from where we see it transfigured our selves. What we think of it is the new thing

There’s more of it. And more and more of it in a different way there’s nothing. We can do with what we find here. It’s not stock. This is where. I want to make some thing. Something elsed, but disavowed – disallowed, even – in this

A carafe, That Is a blue guitar. Beyonding art

I don’t want to only make relations. I make. The gangly girl in black-framed glasses in my making. I make her trip back from her car to number 99 in her strappy party shoes to root out the Christmas present she has forgotten. Then I will make the thoughts she has as she returns

Outside of her there is domination. House numbers telephone wires. Humming with Power. Not poetry and the antinomies. Satellite navigation. Data shadow. Inside. They share the world is not escaped, but elsed

Empower me to be. So unpowered. In my relinquishment by distance not elevation to keep the saying unsaid. To speak against is to speak. Let me do it I need to do it but let me speak something elsed. From somewhere else. Of something

I have made something. For you. Now you are someone else

another poem which relates to a reading       this time I didn’t write it as an introduction       I wrote it the next day       when John James came here to read       he has the poem with the line ‘I beg you to free this boy’ and I introduced him with the words ‘I beg you to hear this boy’       so I took this up the next day whilst he was busily working with the second year students here I wrote the poem for him

As Yet Untitled Poem

for John James

I beg you to hear this boy. And hear him out.

His morning poem you’re in, now,

is neatly creased as a crisp new shirt, stiff-

backed and clipped on its cardboard torso, posed.

It trips you over the cat from the film you’ve never

seen, as you search for your spectacles.

I use my enormous brain to seek the signals

they emit. We are both The Prisoner

on this island, Crusoes of overlapping surveillance.

Sleep is where we’ve come from, a misty place                           

of drizzled desire and mordant fear. The fog has

lifted, real enough, for the expedition that must

set off for the explanation. Your house-

guest, a sort of vapour that

an opening door dispels, coughs his soft pardons.

Serious poetry is back in town:

the Unfinished Alba of the Unknown

Troubadour, whose vida is word for word. The

beloved of this lyric is the hero of that epic, where

sometimes I did seek, I beg you now to flee this boy.

and my final one       this final one comes from this sequence of metapoems       but it also belongs in the ‘September 12’       poem as well       I need to retreat behind here for the use of my hands[2]     it’s short

Reading ‘The Poem…’.

The poem sends itself from anywhere

to your little box there it replays it

over and over. No redial no recall.

Dead ears drop in your lap. Pause.

No reply possible, skip onto Message Two:

I can see the twin cathedrals twisting below.

I should keep this thing switched off it affects

the instruments it doesn’t matter now terror

has been hijacked by artifice. Commas cower

along Hope St as we torque above them

out of control spluttering towards the radio tower

full stop. That was your fake captain speaking

through me printing fear backwards through his script.

You receive my wild meaning in his spliced last words

thank you     (applause)       thank you

---

[1] I have attempted to transcribe the verbal introductions to these poems (in italics), which includes me reading and abandoning  prepared text (in ordinary type) before the lecture transforms into a poetry reading. I have borrowed a number of transcription conventions from the ‘talk poems’ of David Antin.

[2] I cupped my hands to make my voice more like an intercom as I read the italicised lines, and needed to rest my text on the lectern I had read the lecture from. During the poetry reading, after having removed my jacket and tie, I moved out into the audience, swaying and moving as I read, as is my custom, advancing some way up the aisle dividing the audience. So at the end of the performance I was back in the position I started from.