A Day of Collaborations/ors (Liverpool Light Night)

Yesterday, a day of collaborations, without fully realising it. Until reflecting this morning.

It began with writing through some of Trev Eales' photographs in preparation for our collaboration. See here:
 
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/trev-eales-photography-and-friendship.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/robert-sheppard-talk-for-open-eye.html


Here's a random snippet:
 
he’s re-formed for

the music as

he reads the

hands on the

keys to find

where he is

or where he’s

being pushed

Later, I read more of EUOIA collaborator Alys Conran's brilliant first novel, Pigeon. It's grim, it's funny; it captures the nuances of bilingualism, and I haven't finished it. I seldom read a book where I don't want it to end. This is one. See here:


http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/meet-euioa-collaborators-alys-conran.html

Alys reading our collaboration in Bangor

Then it was out to the Liverpool Light Night, and to Bluecoat to look at the many paintings Pete Clarke has produced using my poem about the Liverpool car park fire, 'Arena Area':

parked in the park forever

a darkness that darkens the lungs
concentrated pitch

That's one of them in the Bluecoat studio: 'blistered skin...' it says...


Pete has collaborated with me (I have collaborated with him) on making a number of prints and paintings over the past decade and I posted images from our Edge Hill exhibition here and here. A later work for the Print Bienniel in Krakow may be viewed here and Pete's own website is here. One was a runner-up for the Adrian Henri Prize, and this year his work has been selected for the John Moores Painting Prize! Fingers crossed.

Then, from the very windows you see in this photo, I spotted Jo Blowers, watching a dance piece, with whom I have worked over many years. She'd been ill so it was great to see her out and about! And to talk.

Here's Jo performing (appropriately) at Bluecoat, a piece with a text by me (published in Unfinish). Some links to her work, our works:


http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/robert-sheppards-shutters-at-prelude-to.html

and https://robertsheppard.weebly.com/collaborations.html


Then we (Patricia, Philip Jeck and I) walked to the Belvedere and I checked that they had put up the poems about the place by Chris McCabe and myself (a collaboration of sorts) - and they had. (More of that later, I think.) The whole day being spent in the company of Patricia, my most consistent collaborator (and currently an author of a piece on my collaborations with Pete!), as well the other half of Ship of Fools. (And so much more.)


https://patriciafarrell.weebly.com/


Odd then that I should wake up to find a note I clearly made to myself the night before: 'Write a book about Frank Sinatra - and you.' I wonder what I meant.

I have a page on my website about my collaborations (outside of the EUOIA), here:


https://robertsheppard.weebly.com/collaborations.html

Read more about the collaborative project EUOIA here and here. All the collaborators are accessible via links here. More on Twitters here and here.

  

Twitters for a Lark launch at Bangor University 6th April 2018 (set list)

Twitters for Lark launch at Bangor University (as part of the Expanded Translation conference and project)

These are my notes, which I spoke from, extempore.

I am very happy tonight to be launching this collection (I think of it as that rather than as an anthology), Twitters for a Lark – this collection of co-created fictional European poets. And I’m thrilled I have so many of those co-creators here, in a sense coincidentally, at the Conference. Though not so coincidentally, given the conference!

But first I want to read three poems from a different project. There are three reasons for this, two of them connected to the European poets project, the first not.

I want to read from my versions of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch, because they are expanded translations, the theme of the conference, and because today is a special day in the Petrarchan calendar. On this date in 1327 he first espied Laura (she also is reported to have died on this day, etc….) That is the theme of my Petrarch 3 poems that (along with the work of others whom I have written about in my book The Meaning of Form) so exercised Peter Riley recently.(Peter Hughes talked about his Petrarch project in a paper that was largely on his Leopardi follows-up. Great stuff.)

But my reason –the second reason – for reading these are also that they are openly poems about Brexit. My ‘Wyatt’ is partly a servant of that first unstable Brexiteer Henry the Eighth, and also a kind of contemporary civil servant or a spy

I read Hap 5,6, and 13. More on that project here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/robert-sheppard-petrarch-sonnet-project.html

The third reason I read those poems was that, despite the name, the European Union of Imaginary Authors (the EUOIA) is not a Brexit project. Who could have predicted that my mild joke, my Belgian fictional poet, RVV, invented all of these poets in 2013 or so, would have become so politicised a concept, and that some of us (‘almost most’ as my poem says) learnt to love the EU too late, and that the EU failed to enamour itself to the slender ‘Many’. Nevertheless, I shamelessly argued in the blurb for Twitters, ‘If the right poets for the times don’t exist, then they have to be invented,’ though I did fess up: ‘Although devised before the neologism ‘Brexit’ was spat across the bitter political divide, this sample of 28 poets of the EUOIA … takes on new meanings in our contemporary world that is far from fictive, ‘fake news’ or not.’

Rene Van Valckenborch as a project: was about translations and exploring the author function, the way work constellates around a name… Meet Rene here.

EUOIA in it

and straight into the reading. More about collaboration than translation per se.

featuring my collaborators

Zoe Skoulding

James Byrne

Alys Conran

Philip Terry

Jeff Hilson

All the collaborators are accessible via links here.

and our creations:

Gurkan Arnavut (Cyprus)

Martina Markovic (Croatia)

Christofol Subira (Catalonia)

Paul Coppens (Belguim)

Ratsky Josef (Hungary)

Alys Conran

James Byrne (and Robert Sheppard)

Lily Robert-Foley

Robert

Zoe full of life: Zoepoetics

Haps led into reading with Zoe, an account of how she set the whole thing off, by suggesting we use my unused fictional poets; with James, who added a few new details about Martina; and with the wonderful Alys; the joys of collaborating with somebody one previously hadn’t know.

Philip and I decided we’d demonstrate our loose antonymic translation by me reading (slowly) Van Valckenborch’s quennets and Paul Coppens’ translations.

Philip Terry showing the audience the shape of the Qunnet form

Jeff and me: which I pre-visaged as a high-octane belter, but something else happened. We were reading in the School of Music, and there was an organ in the corner, that worked, and so, finding that Lily Robert-Foley could play keyboards, we enlisted her services, and she played pieces under each of our two poems, and they were considerably interrupted by the slow music (her own songs), slowing both of us down and punctuating and re-articulating the work (appropriate, I should say, because Ratsky is an organist-poet and the poems feature organ-related notions!) Simutaneous intersemiotic translation, in Sophie Collins’ terms.Many thanks to Lily!

after Jeff:

Thanks at the end to: Zoe for setting it off, Zoe and Jeff for including it in this conference, Zoe and Jeff and all the other poets for collaborating, and everybody for coming…

Thanks to Jeff for the photos...(That's why he isn't in them.)

This event was part of the ‘Expanded Translation’ Project. Read more here and here:

http://expanded-translation.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en

http://expanded-translation.bangor.ac.uk/conf/programme.php.en#friday

And read here Zoe Skoulding's response to Peter Riley's review of some 'expanded translations' (including my Petrarch 3), but it's also an account of the Bangor Conference at the whole research project: here.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here.  More on Twitters here and here. Updated link:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-ed-Twitters-for-a-Lark-p102839129

Read about the August 2017 Other Room Manchester reading of the EUOIA poets (pre-launch of Twitters) here. 

Read about the November 2017 mini-launch in Luton here.

And the Leicester (States of Independence) launch:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/launch-of-twitters-for-lark-at-2018.html

Read about the Manchester 2018 launch here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/twitters-for-launch-part-of-european.html

Meet the EUIOA collaborators: Alys Conran

With Alys Conran I created the poems of Cristofol Subira; more about him here.

Alys Conran is from north Wales, and spent several years living in Edinburgh and Barcelona. She speaks fluent Catalan and Spanish, note, as well as Welsh and English. She is the author of Pigeon (Parthian Books: 2016), the first novel to be published simultaneously in both English (original) and Welsh (translation), and this has made her well-known in Wales, and beyond, for both versions of the book. Her writing is found in numerous magazines including Stand, The Manchester Review, and The New Welsh Review. She is working on a second novel about the legacy of the Raj in contemporary British life. She is Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bangor University. Here we are reading our concise collaborative poems (we both wrote both poems but read one each, so you can’t see/hear who wrote what!). We had not met before this evening. But I hope we will meet again.

     

 Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own; they are collected now in Twitters for a Lark.  

More on Twitters here and here.

This collection marks a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Pelikan Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here ) Cristofol does make an appearance in that book too, in the diary of one of the translators of Van Valckenborch, Ms Dupuis.

  All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

EUOIA: Cristòfol Subira by Alys Conran and Robert Sheppard in Poetry Wales

The collaborations between Alys and myself have just been published in Poetry Wales Spring 2016, Volume 51: Number 3.

Cristòfol Subira was born in 1957 in Barcelona. He worked for many years as a street performer and living statue in the tourist districts of the city. Between 1980 and 2007, Subira produced four collections of poetry, alternately in Catalan and Spanish, but since then, his poetry has not appeared in print except for several unattributed poems inscribed on the paving of cul-de-sacs in Barcelona, recently acknowledged as his work. There was one doubtful sighting in Brussels in the summer of 2010, i.e. at the end of A Translated Man, where he appears.

It was fun working with Alys because we’d not met and she was game for my strange collaborative project. She is a very tight writer and she kept me in order. We did meet in 2015 and read the poems in Bangor. See my account of that here, and watch the embedded videos of us reading the two poems.

See also an account of the EUOIA’s previous appearance in Poetry Wales here.

EUOIA: Gelynion (Bangor Reading): Alys Conran, Robert Sheppard and others (set list) including Cristofol Subira

Alys Conran and I took part in the Bangor leg of the Enemies Project/Gelynion last night. See more details here.

Bangor: May Tues 26th at the Blue Sky Cafe: details of the venue and its great food and drink here.  

 

We created the works of the EUOIA Catalan poet

Cristòfol Subira (1957-)

 

Other pairings were:

Nia Davies and SJ Fowler
Zoë Skoulding and Eurig Salisbury
Joe Dunthorne and Rhys Trimble
Sophie McKeand and Fiona Cameron
Karen Owen and Sian Northey
Ifor Ap Glyn and Ghazal Mosadeq

The reading also featured a performance by Welsh folk musician Elan Mererid Rhys, who also accompanied SJ and Nia.

 

 

I began: Robert: The last time I read in this room I was a Belgian. I was billed as the creature who features in my book A Translated Man, Rene Van Valckenborch. It was all Zoe Skoulding’s fault. It was slightly embarrassing – I remember Rhys Trimble compering and he said, staring straight and ironically at me, ‘After the break we’re going to have a fake Belgian,’ – but it suited me fine: I was reading Van Valckenborch’s supposed poems anyway, the ones he wrote in Walloon and the quite different ones he wrote in Flemish.

Before he starts to disappear at the end of the book he invents his own poets, 27 of them for each member state of the EU; the EUOIA, the European Union of Imaginary Authors. I wrote a few of these for the book, but Zoe again made me re-visit the complete list when we were asked to compose a collaborative poem for the Manchester Camarade by Steven Fowler. Thus Gurkan Arnavut was born.

That tipped me over into the madness of doing the lot as a curated and co-created anthology, and I am pleased that Alys Conran has agreed to join me in co-creating the Catalan poet Cristòfol Subira. We’re going to read one poem each, one from his Spanish side, and one from his Catalan side (he is a weird mirror of Van Valckenborch in that sense only), and it’s appropriate to read them first in bilingual Wales. But we want to emphasise that we both wrote both poems.

And now Alys is going to tell you about our creature, the little we (or the world) know of him.    

Alys: Cristòfol Subira was born in 1957 in Barcelona. He worked for many years as a street performer and living statue in the tourist districts of the city. Between 1980 and 2007, Subira produced four collections of poetry, alternately in Catalan and Spanish, but since then, his poetry has not appeared in print except for several unattributed poems inscribed on the paving of cul-de-sacs in the city, recently acknowledged as his work. There was one doubtful sighting in Brussels in the summer of 2010.

 

Robert: Freeze Block Station (from the Spanish)

 

Alys: Performance Between Two Points (from the Catalan)

 

 

I want to thank Alys for playing along with the EUOIA project and for bringing her linguistically and rhythmical tightness to the project. I think we both felt we'd made Subira happen. The other readers were wonderful; here’s one to give you the feel for the evening, and to demonstrate inter-lingual imagining of a different kind by Ifor Ap Glyn and Ghazal Mosadeq.

 

 All the performances may be accessed here.

 Sophie McKeand and Fiona Cameron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJirFOPHuK0
Karen Owen and Sian Northey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-08J_iqWZZY
Ifor Ap Glyn and Ghazal Mosadeq https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMFTBB6k-hc
Robert Sheppard and Alys Conran https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVOfQEMoss4
Nia Davies, SJ Fowler and Elan Mererid Rhys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u827pCCzBiQ
Zoë Skoulding and Eurig Salisbury https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2_G9SukXvE
Joe Dunthorne and Rhys Trimble https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tC0luz3pIUM
Elan Mererid Rhys (solo) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Paq3P9ElV68

Subira was last heard of in my Shearsman book A Translated Man in Annemie Dupuis' dubious diary, which finishes off the book, and Van Valckenborch, and her. Which is why the 'sighting' is 'doubtful'.

 

Thursday 12 August 2010

I’m sitting in the dock, moist hand clinging to grimy rail. The courtroom of some Eastern European capital. Standing beside myself I know this is a dream.

         I’m accused of people-trafficking, but I don’t know why.

        Questioned through an interpreter, it strikes me. I have made up a fictional national poet– his name at least – by combining the forename and surname with the most diacritics in the language, the least vowels. But it’s also the name of a villain. The unshaven giant with the scar down his face whispering curses to a solicitor in a bursting shiny suit. The police must have found my notes, tangles of names.

          I realise the improbability of my alibi, the impossibility of communicating this. The interpreter squints at me, lost.

          I hear my name mispronounced by the judge in his frayed crimson gown. I am nudged to my feet. He looks through me.

Sophie Poppmeier of Austria, Erik Canderlinck of Belgium (Wallonia), Paul Coppens of Belgium (Flanders), Gurkan Arnavut of Cyprus, Jitka Průchová of the Czech Republic, Lucia Ciancaglini of Italy, Jurgita Zujūtė of Lithuania, Hubert Zuba of Malta, Maarten De Zoete of Holland, Trine Kragelund of Denmark, Cristòfol Subira of Spain (Catalunya). Yes, yes, stop there, at that one.

I wake in a spray of sweat.

Friday 13 August 2010

I laugh in a spray of sweat, swallowed by pillows, buoyed by the churned mattress.

Post-coital, soft and confessional, Cristòfol murmurs that he writes poems in Spanish as well as Catalan. Quite different ones, as it happens. I take a quick shower. I must avoid this again, affect indifference, even cruelty. I return rubbing my hair. When he presses into me, I bite his tongue. There’s blood.

It works.

Within hours I’m moved out. The stone dog on the corner of rue des Chartreux cocks its leg higher as I dip into the dark interior of a white car.

See here for more on the EUOIA.

www.theenemiesproject.com/gelynion