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Monday, January 02, 2023

Cliff Yates at 70 : my parts in this celebration of his poetry and poetics (links to it)

It doesn’t seem possible that Cliff Yates is 70! All that tiggerish classroom energy, all that boundless enthusiasm for the moment of poetry, all that unquenchable curiosity for life, seem so much the possession of youth that I have to pause and count the years.

Alan Baker and Andrew Taylor have now edited this tribute to him, CLIFF YATES @ 70, (see their preface here: Preface | Cliff Yates @ 70 (cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com)

with many poets offering their praise and their best wishes, from Poetry and Poetics stalwarts from Edge Hill, like Andrew himself, to Scott Thurston, Matt Fallaize and Angela Keaton, through to the big wide world poets, like Nick Power, Matt Welton and Kelvin Corcoran, and other names, like Pam Thompson that are new to me. Even his children are here, both writers in their own rights. A lot of the poems address Cliff directly, which seems right. A lot of us have attempted to write what Ian McMillan, in his tribute, calls a ‘Yatesy’ poem. There's also a video of Cliff reading (that wasn't there when I first blogged this!) Have a look at the tributes here: https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/

I was asked to contribute and I produced one of my birthday ‘Burnt Journal’ poems for him, one which I feel pretty pleased with: https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/2022/12/robert-sheppard.html

I was also asked to write an introduction, which I did. I was pretty pleased with that too. I think I got it right (I won’t repeat my assessment of Cliff’s work, because you may read that here:

https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/2023/01/introduction-by-robert-sheppard_13.html

Introduction by Robert Sheppard | Cliff Yates @ 70 (cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com)

(These links keep changing as more posts are added, so if they don't work, use the one to the site : https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/

Cliff was one of the first poetry people I met when Patricia and I moved up to the North West in 1996 (oh yes, she’s here too, or at least I think she is, she's written Cliff a poem as though she were a Bulgarian), and I had seen some of his poems in magazines. Little was I to know that he would become one of the important members of the original Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge Hill University, which sounds a dull body, but we gave readings (Tate Gallery no less) and made a CD and generally helped each other as writers to become more like themselves.

Of course, Cliff was also a famous teacher of poetry well before I met him. Read about that here:

A few choice words from the guru | English and creative writing | The Guardian

Keep up with Cliff’s news. There’s a new Selected and New Poems on the way, for starters! : Cliff Yates – poet & tutor (wordpress.com)

He also appears on this blog a few times too, with regards to the PPRG here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/11/going-privategoing-privateafterword-to.html

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/05/introduction-to-fifth-series-edge-hill.html

And with regard to his own poetry and poetics:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-cliff-yates.html

Pages: 25 Edge Hill Poets: Cliff Yates (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

He even reviewed my The Poetry of Saying

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/06/cliff-yates-poetry-of-saying.html

AND he provided me with the word ‘provocation’ to focus my thoughts about writerly poetics, circa 2007.

Cliff and I are definitely due another meeting in Birmingham soon I hope.

I wrote that sentence this morning. This afternoon I came back from a walk to find an answerphone message for Patricia and me. From Cliff! He says he wants to say thanks and he wants to ‘catch up’. Yes, indeed, as Sy Oliver used to sing.

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com. Or you can phone me, like Cliff did.

Monday, September 16, 2019

Andrew Taylor: Robert Sheppard and the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group on Litter

Up on Litter now is ‘“Isn't it time somebody wrote all this down”: Robert Sheppard and The Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group, 1999-2013.’ This is a generous account of the PPRG, focussing on the years the author Andrew Taylor was a member, but nevertheless acknowledging that this poetics anti-workshop is still going (strong: there is a new publication on its way). There are some nice photos too, of our meetings and publications. Thanks for the article Andy.

Read it here.

Cliff Yates and Andrew Taylor talking at the 'Going Public' open meetings of the PPRG 2009

It is a detailed piece on its history, much of it I'd forgotten, and my only concerns are that it might mythologise what should remain historicised: the attempts we made to define the nature of poetics (see here) were crucial, both in terms of defining the discourse and defining OUR discourses. It is good to recall that the PPRG is still operative. There's a meeting next week!

Andrew Taylor and others at the Symposium

A version of this article was presented at the Robert Sheppard Symposium at Edge Hill University, 8th March 2017. (More about that here.)

Details of The Robert Sheppard Companion which came out of the symposium may be read here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-robert-sheppard-companion-ed-byrne.html

Pages goes back almost as far as the PPRG. Here’s an early post about it with some links:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/11/going-privategoing-privateafterword-to.html

Here’s some thoughts on the group here, which I think I posted after including the thoughts in an email to Andy; he quotes some of it: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2017/09/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on-edge-hill.html

And don’t forget that this summer I guest-edited Stride and exclusively featured the current members of the PPRG. See here for an account of that with links to all the items.

In a nice neat symmetry, there are also four new poems by original PPRG member Cliff Yates in Litter too: here: http://leafepress.com/litter13/yates/yates.html

My last appearance in Litter was four ‘Burnt Journal’ poems, birthday poems for poet friends: http://leafepress.com/litter12/sheppard/sheppard.html

Litter also carries the first review of my Micro Event Space here.

Sunday, March 11, 2018

Launch of Twitters for a Lark at 2018 States of Independence (set list)/Simon Perrril launch

We (Patricia and I) journeyed to Leicester for the 2018 States of Independence bookfair and reading event at DeMontfort University, Saturday 11th March.

They have a website (http://www.statesofindependence.co.uk).

I have an account of our last visit two years ago which I thoroughly enjoyed, to read for an Oystercatcher event (http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/robert-sheppard-and-nancy-gaffield.html). It’s a great day out in its own right.

Apart from the travel, which could detain this account - only to say the unscheduled long journey back between Derby and Crewe, in a single carriage train full of drunks (at 8.00?) was not really a highlight - this year's event was most enjoyable.

We arrived in time for a quick chat with Tony Frazer, and to suggest he came in to watch Simon and myself reading.

We were there to launch Twitters for a Lark. As many will know, I worked in collaboration, over a number of years, with a team of real writers, to create a lively and entertaining body of work of fictional European poets. Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. All the collaborators, Patricia and Simon included, are accessible via links 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, published by Tony's Shearsman. More on Twitters here and here.

This collection marked a continuation of the work I ventriloquised through my solo creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (read an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here ). And, as I began my (our) reading, I explained how the new project emerged from the first book, when Van Valckenborch invented the EUOIA ('Belgian dolls!' I quipped) and read

(set list)

1. 'Book 4 Poem 1' by Sophie Poppmeier, which is dedicated to Tony Frazer, who was there. (Hence my insistence. He doesn't like to leave the book stall.)

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Robert Sheppard: Empty Diary 2016 published in the 50th edition of Erbacce

I have just (actually it appeared a while ago but the copy has only just reached me) been published in the special 50^th edition of Erbacce, edited by Andrew Taylor (see here and here) and Alan Corkish.

They were both students of mine, as were a number of the invited poets for this special celebratory edition: Natasha Borton (who has featured on Pages a couple of times here and here), Rick Lee, Ursula Hurley, and Jacqui Dunne, among many others!

They have published ‘Empty Diary 2016: Send in the Worms’.

Empty Diaries is a long sequence that ran through Twentieth Century Blues and into the current century's poems: 1901- and ongoing (again after a break of a decade)! The first eight of Wiped Weblogs: ED 2001-14 appeared in The Literateur. Find them here or here. The final six appeared in a wonderful edition of Blackbox Manifold. See here.

The 2015 one has a touch of the bossa nova about it: see here: Empty Diary 2015

Empty Diary 2016 has a touch of doing the boss a favour about it! It’s a 100 word sonnet (see here for more on that form) but I cheat since the compound word ‘polysexual-Trumptrampled-sissyslut-feminization’, supposedly from the lexis of BDSM, is used at one point, and counts as one. But to read the rest of this exploration of contemporary sexuality, you will have to buy a copy of Erbacce 50.

Visit the website: http://www.erbacce.com/

Another sequence of 100 word sonnets, 'Breakout' is in preparation. There is one in Robert Hampson's Purge.

I’m currently thinking about writing Empty Diary 2017.Thinking with lines like:

It’s strange to feel him writing through me once more

after some years of, if not autonomy, random indication,

Google-sculpting skin-flicks and outtakes of Chicklit.

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

Reading from the Sheppard Symposium: Andrew Taylor

Here is another video from the Sheppard Symposium evening reading. It’s Andrew Taylor reading the two 'Soup' poems he wrote for me and some other non-soup-related pieces.

My own reading from ‘Break Out’ and the work in progress ‘Hap: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch’ may be viewed here:

Robert Sheppard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob3q0OrMZcU

and here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-post-robert-sheppard-symposium.html

Links to all the other readings from that evening may be read at the second of those links too.

Read about the Sheppard Symposium itself here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-robert-sheppard-symposium-my.html

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Andrew Taylor: Trains and White Fields (for Patricia Farrell)

Trains and White Fields

for Patricia Farrell

Up here

against the window

rain pelts

the white has remained

fluorescent

Space enough to sleep

white dots on blue

Tailor made blinds in a rainbow of colours

are available

Cold tea

slightly milky

remnants

in a Whittard mug

leftover from the 90s

a Northern Line greeting

the archive remains

Painting winter hollow the fields an empty sight

the hills are like sorrow

Mike Lawson's ‘Christ in the Wilderness’

bubble wrapped stored

Up here

music

transports

[acknowledgements to Brett Anderson]

Patricia reading at Blackburne House; photo (c) Andrew Taylor.

Andrew Taylor is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He previously worked at Edge Hill University with Patricia Farrell. On occasion, they would share a train journey to Ormskirk and the walk to the university. Often they would talk about poetry and art. They also shared time together as members of the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group. Once they went to Tate Liverpool with creative writing students. They also launched their debut poetry collections together in Liverpool. See here for that event!

More on Andrew Taylor from those Poetry and Poetics Research Group 1 days here (with poetry) and here (with poetics). And his website for up to date information here.

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

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Robert Sheppard and Nancy Gaffield Oystercatcher Launch at States of Independence (Leicester) set list and account

I was up and out, with Patricia, after she’d got Stephen ready for a day of work at the Museum, to Leicester, a journey I thought unnecessarily long, on the otherwise comfortable trains. Reading Groove by Tiger Roholt (2014). (What are the implications for poetic performance of his theses about direct and indirect description of nuance and affect?) Late, straight into Simon Perrril’s Shearsman launch reading. We crashed in, like Archilochus dropping his shield, while Simon did the business of ventriloquising the dead Neobulé. (The book Beneath is the brilliant sequel to the equally brilliant Archilocus on the Moon, which I write about at length here.)

All the wonderful people: Tony Frazer, Peter and Lynn Hughes, Andy Taylor and Rory Waterman (met for the first time), Gregory Woods (met for the first time sine the 1980s, but an old friend from UEA days; I published his first poem on 1983 in 1975ish, and we've both served the old place well), Shiela (Patricia’s sister, a real pleasant surprise, to whom Patricia told the rude penguin joke), Alan Baker (a particular interest of mine at the moment, see here), Sam, who published Alan’s big book, as modest as Alan, and, of course, my co-reader Nancy Gaffield, who was new to me.

Me reading. Photo: courtesy Andrew Taylor

Our Oystercatcher reading was introduced generously by Peter Hughes, and Nancy began with her Meridian, see here. The poem began, disarmingly, for a Sussex boy listening, with the word ‘Peacehaven’, the strangest one horse town in the country, but it’s on the line that Nancy is walking and recording in this poem. We got as far as Epping Forest: the ghost of Clare. Sinclair country. Which she is planning to walk with him. (I wonder if Iain’s seen Peacehaven?)

I was clear I couldn’t go straight in with The Drop, so my set list was:

‘Rainshine shivers on dull platforms’, a poem about the English Midlands, from ‘The English Poems’ in Warrant Error (and in Historyor Sleep). There was a Shearsman stall as well as an Oystercatcher one downstairs.

The Drop, both the short lyric ‘Standing By’ (see here) and ‘Of Crystal'. (See here for the book and here for its elegiac contexts, and a review by Alan Baker, here.)

I then turned the tables on the poem and read an excerpt from ‘The Given’, to be found in both Words Out of Time and History or Sleep. It seemed sensible to read from one sentence referring to my father to another, a 5 minute stretch, but I emphasised the comedy (and at least one person, Greg Woods, remembered the Occupied Hamburger Bar at UEA!).

Over, I bought a number of books: Nancy’s book, plus Sophie Mayer’s and Ralph Hawkins’ Oystercatchers, Jeremy Reed’s Asa Benveniste book, a Sandeep Parmar, a Simon Smith I seemed to have missed, and Alan Baker’s Bonnefoy translations.

And I picked up my contributor’s copy of Clasp: Late Modernist Poetry in London in the 1970s. We found a pub, the Swan and Rushes, and drank JHB (a beer eulogised in my poem ‘Sonnet (Fourteen Bars)’), and read little snatches, representations of our lives in London, including our (unnamed) Tooting Thursday evenings, our parties, and (of course) the Smallest Poetry Festival in the World in 1994. Patricia’s part in running the earliest Sub-Voicive readings is also recognized. But that’s another … post. Here.

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Patricia Farrell and Andrew Taylor Reading

Andrew Taylor and Patricia Farrell launched their new

collections of poetry at

The Ship and Mitre

Liverpool L3 2JH

on Saturday 23rd February

2 - 4 pm

Andrew’s Radio Mast Horizon and Patricia’s The Zechstein Sea are

both published by Shearsman Books

‘With a voice fresh and responsive, these poems’ chiselled lyricism

is firmly located in terms of time and space … Everything is in them, it

seems. Including us. At last Taylor’s impressive oeuvre is amassed for

the audience it deserves.’ (Robert Sheppard)

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/taylor.html

On Patricia's book: ‘Via encounters with the troubadour poet, Guillaume of Poitiers,

Friedrich Hölderlin and the contemporary goldsmith, Jivan Astfalck,

Farrell offers “new solutions/new songs” whilst “provoking new

lines of thought”.’ (Scott Thurston)

Patricia will be publishing a new book from Veer in late 2014. But until then, read Ian Seed's review of her book here.

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/farrell.html

Friday, October 16, 2009

Talks: Cliff Yates and Andrew Taylor

Photograph of Cliff (left) and Andy (right) answering audience questions courtesy of Scott Thurston

Andrew Taylor spoke of how a poetics is never finished just because a document of poetics is complete, but continues to evolve, in his case developing his sense of a topologiocally-inscribed 'Poetics of Absence' (a formal presentation of which is contained in Rupert Loydell's excellent Salt poetics anthology Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh, which we were also launching).
Cliff Yates outlined his development from a poet who writes about experiences to a poet who allowed the writing of the poem, in the act of writing, to become the experience. (Again, see his contribution to the Salt anthology.) More recent pieces explore a translatorese-ish estrangement of language, refracted through broken forms such as pseudo-pantoums.

Both are founder members of the group, which first met on 21st October 1999.

Details of the next two talks evenings may be found here.

Read Cliff's review of The Poetry of Saying by Robert Sheppard here.

posted by Robert Sheppard @ 5:45 AM

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Introducing Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor reading at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool as part of an Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group group reading as a warm up to Allen Fisher (visible, seated left), at a Neon Highway event organised by editor and PPRG member Alice Lenkiewicz. photo: Andrew Taylor.

Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor and founder of erbacce and erbacce press. He has had six collections of poetry published to-date. The latest, Make Some Noise is published by Original Plus. An e-book is forthcoming from Differentia Press. Recent poems have appeared in journals and e-zines such as Calliope Nerve, The Exuberant Ashtray, Willows Wept Review and Full of Crow. Poetics - ‘A Poetics of Absence – part one’ has appeared in Otoliths and is re-published in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos, ed. Rupert Loydell, (Salt), which we are launching soon.He has a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from Edge Hill University

He has a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from Edge Hill University.

See his blog here.

A Poetics of Absence Part II

The Permission to Continue

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
to rest unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

A life's work? Writing after the fact

tasked to reflect from tower block
balconies

like an empty colour slide I'm black and white inside

Industrial heartland wasteland
regeneration the smell of the docks
college of further education
of higher education

university status university

poetics as exploration

poetics as continuance

When I sleep alone I hear the sound of your breathing

re-visitation evokes memories
If I stand here long enough will you appear?

Such diversions – they test Take Courage

Wars. It's the forgetting. The peril of loss.

Without trace
a red double-decker bus sits idle
in the middle of the street a blackbird hello blackbird
stands amongst the debris

A visit to Test Place
River now merely penthouse background
we consume much more nowadays
the boats carry shit
or sightseeing passengers

Bates Salve cures wounds & sores

Stops, station buffets, road links

to walk the river's edge at twilight
offers new perspective
watch the greyness fade

Poetics as memory
Poetics as provider

London's outmoded DNA –
workmen's cafés, dingy pubs –
disappears. If anything survives from
post-war newsreels of civic improvement, it is
heritaged, squeezed between commas.

Liverpool your public land too
is being sold to private developers

place [your] feet in the deep tracks they make

poetics for now

Because we love to look at them [the stars]
we hope maybe they love to look at us

across such landscapes fairy lights predict
the glow

poetics says: look back, look forward, look straight ahead and cross the page.

follow Mail Train lines
Queens Park and Kensal Green

company alters routine
morning making
matters better
resting after exercise

poetics as investigation
poetics as sound

such sweet piano chords
the melody weaves a quiet voice

poetics as consolidation

The recovery of a memory is a present day
activity. It's not the past. Memory occurs in the present.

It should all become clear

from Cumbrian mountains to York stone pavements

the letter K carved
an indication

I don't know why I am tied to the winter

exit from Bankside
point me towards Eros

All through the storm, the frost, and the snow,
Death on our black horizon pulses clear

off the route
and mast head of the evening paper

I idle the thoughts of Woking

Last night I dreamt that outside Melling Church
I told you that I still loved you

Poetry as lifesaver as life giver

To A Fox II
Autumn falls lanes
drop darkness
hedgerows trimmed
fields ploughed

in preparation

Roadside awareness
flash of white
twilight nocturne image
of a moment

nice moment actually, dusk was falling,

lovely watery sunset which was very enigmatic
amongst the overgrown runway strip......
also managed to locate abandoned buildings
that formed the old hospital site on the airfield
in amongst some woods......very, very scary though.
En-route accompanied
chatter of engine whistle
of rack scratched inside
journey reinterpretation

Sleek tell-tale signs

Unhexed through lanes
a darkened memory
trimmed hedgerows
ploughed fields an escape route

(With thanks to Antony Harding)

Signboards: old type of writing

Transparency adaptation
siren insight

intersection and sodium highlights
present a few streets away

Future plans

every so often
it all becomes clear

source a manipulation
an epic example

context over content
such tasteful digitized blurs

Why Do You Come Here When You Know It Makes Things Hard For Me?

Ever presence followed
like the first star that guides
as night falls

across the hills and into
the bay the turbines stand
firm as that

day the wind ate my face
icily from the end of
the pier

These tracks that lead
to you lay cold while
steam rises

from railway station waiting
rooms this moment this
passing where

does it come from?

***

To here knows when
phased like worn tape
through patio

doors washed cars
stood path bound soap
pools gathered

capturing the light
through the orchard
where memories

are fixed as the day
you stood photographed
in the white

of your wedding dress

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