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.
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
