FINAL EXTRA: The last poem of The English Strain project is published on INTERNATIONAL TIMES

 

The comedy that was Bo (as opposed to the reality of Boris Johnson) is now over. Johnson, while he could be transformed into Bo, as indeed I was transforming sonnets into other forms and frames, was the gift that just kept on giving. I do not doubt, in the future, he will clumsily or carelessly and deliberately cause damage to our democracy and nation, as well as to individuals he will dispose of as he plunges through the undergrowth like a rogue elephant, but I won’t be pursuing him with my poetic blunderbuss. Perhaps he will return to writing: his memoirs, the crappy book on Shakespeare he has spent the advance of, or even his book about home furnishings. I’ve just heard a Tory MP on the radio refer to his ‘behavioral issues’, as though he was still the 'frozen child' of many years ago, though an ex-Tory MP called him a ‘wrong ‘un!’. He’s a rogue. Unfortunately, in Ukraine, he's a hero! (Though on the dancefloor, he's shit!)   

Of course, it had to end. Having to go out to support and defend his tricksterish ducking and diving, and face a volte face each day or even a U-turn immediately after their defence from his staunch officers (when they weren’t pissed out of their brains) was finally too much for some ministers, with some standards.

Talking of ‘standards’, British Standards, why did I not, why do I not still, write a sonnet (or a sequence!) to finish him off? A great Gillray balloon with a pin in it! Or the verbal equivalent of that video of him dancing at his wedding? Surely, even though the Decadents proved not to be ‘fruit-fly’ material, in Queneau’s sense, there would be some sonnet I could find to transfigure, torque, into a new shape to fit The Last of Bo into? 

You can read, if you want to, my provisional thinking on how to end the ‘English Strain’ project, or even whether to continue it into a FOURTH book! (Spoiler: the answer was No!) Here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/12/no-need-for-fourth-book-of-english.html

These sonnets, nearly all posted temporarily on this blog, have been conducted in public, if you like, because of their contemporaneous nature. Other projects are less visible until they are published. I talk about them here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2022/04/if-english-strain-is-finished-what-next.html. It is clear to me that a more combative approach will need to be taken to world politics generally, the 'Enough is Enough' movement, though this project was fun, and it was new for me, to take an entirely comic and satiric approach, though of course it was combined with the technique of 'transposition', which has sustained me through three books. I don't think I could have been so direct unless I was also being so indirect, if you see what I mean, if you can appreciate the generative tone between comic feeling and borrowed form.

I even thought an earlier poem, a transposition of a Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet, would be the final poem and it was published in International Times earlier this year as just that. See Here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-shepherds-brow-final-poem-of.html

Actually, I then made this more recent poem the final poem.

BUT NOW it too has been published in International Times, an appropriate venue for a finale of these political poems: ‘The final poem of British Standards, the third and final book of the ‘English Strain’ Project’, I announce before its subtitle: ‘Monitoring Adam Mickiewicz’ first Crimean Sonnet: The Ackerman Steppe’. Its actual title is ‘After-Shock’, the last of four ‘After’ poems at the end of the book.

Read it here: https://internationaltimes.it/aftershock/

I wrote about the poem here at the time I wrote it. See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2022/03/another-final-poem-of-english-strain.html

 where you find a video of me reading it in draft!  So here's a video of the final version, as published:

Thank you IT! And poetry editor Rupert Loydell. But of course that WASN'T the end at all. It nearly was, but one more poem revealed itself with the death of the Queen (did Bo kill her?) and the strange cargo cult reactions of the Great British Public. See here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A final final poem for British Standards!

  

‘British Standards is still best described here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html where you will find links to other on and off line appearances of parts of the book (and some other videos). I transpose sonnets by Wordsworth, Mary Robinson (more on her soon!), Shelley, both male Coleridges, John Clare, Hopkins, Arthur Symons, and others, as well as Keats. )

 ‘British Standards’ is also book three of a larger project of refunctioning traditional English sonnets, called ‘The English Strain’.

 Read about Book One of ‘The English Strain’, The English Strain:

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

 

Book Two, Bad Idea, is described here: 

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-bad-idea-and-reference-to-earlier.html

 

You can buy both of these published books together here: Pages: How to buy The English Strain books one and two together (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

[There was even a horrible chance of Bo returning to power in October 2022. I was ready, as you'll see here: Pages: The Horrible Thought that Bo mioght be back: only The Bard could save me now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and am ready, should he ever dare!]

No need for a fourth book of The English Strain, I've decided

Pages: Should I write a fourth ‘book’ of The English Strain project? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) In that post I tasked myself with writing a fourth book of my ‘English Strain’ project. In this post I shall explain why I don’t think I will be doing that!

I have immersed myself in the poetry of the 1890s, and in the period (via Ellman’s biography of Oscar Wilde, which I have been meaning to read since 1992, when Patricia bought the book). The poetry is not exceptional, though fascinating (I studied it at UEA on the Baudelaire to Eliot module with George Hyde) and I believe that the single one I have written, an overdub of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem of 1889, is sound. I spent some time looking at candidates, from Scouser Richard le Gallienne to Arthur Symons, to get the sickly flavour of that yellow decade and its decadence. The enervation was attractive and appropriate to our political realities in all sorts of ways. (Johnson is as careless and profligate as Wilde, it struck me.) The Hopkins was chosen as a kind of introduction to the decade.

http://www.sonnets.org/victoria.htm might have helped with finding other poems to overdub or transpose. The Penguin Poetry of the Nineties anthology (I have had the first edition since 1974, but now have the 1997 second edition, with more women poets and Wilde) would have been central.

But (with Patricia now back at Blue Room) I thought I’d leap in (only 3 days after waking up with the thought of this next book!). I identified 3 poets not in the Penguin anthology who seemed precursors to the real decadents (about whom I’d listened to on a ‘In Our Time’ programme the previous Thursday); there were to be Hopkins, Swinburne, and (most obviously) Wilde. I only got as far as the Hopkins. Here’s the original, one of his last poems and probably the only one of his with somebody having a shit in it! (Of course, you can be assured that my poem took that into account). I also re-read Will Daunt’s book on Hopkins in Lancashire, which came out of some MA work that that fine poet (Daunt I mean) did with me at Edge Hill: Daunt, Will. Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Lydiate Connections. Ormskirk: Ormskirk Imprint, 2019.

The shepherd's brow, fronting forked lightning, owns
The horror and the havoc and the glory
Of it. Angels fall, they are towers, from heaven—a story
Of just, majestical, and giant groans.
But man—we, scaffold of score brittle bones;
Who breathe, from groundlong babyhood to hoary
Age gasp; whose breath is our memento mori—
What bass is our viol for tragic tones?
He! Hand to mouth he lives, and voids with shame;
And, blazoned in however bold the name,
Man Jack the man is, just; his mate a hussy.
And I that die these deaths, that feed this flame,
That … in smooth spoons spy life’s masque mirrored: tame
My tempests there, my fire and fever fussy.

[Note: My version of this poem is now published online by the International Times, and may be read here: https://internationaltimes.it/the-shepherds-brow-fronting-forked-lightning/ ]

The jump from the 1840s to the 1880s is a incongruous one, if I only write this one and place it at the end of British Standards, which is what I currently plan to do. The poem itself foresees the demise of Bo – now openly called Johnson, the shine rubbed off – with the final ‘knife … in whose hand’? (My money’s on Sunak, though I’d like to see the whole avaricious crew go down.)

I enjoyed writing this poem (which you will forgive me for having posted on this blog for only a few days), enjoying my ‘overdub’ method, but I need to ‘end my solo before I’m done’ (as I often quote Miles). (The method could be used to unwrite New Lines (see Pages: A Fictional Poet's Notebook (part 10) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com); I might do that, a totally different project!)).

A fourth book of ‘The English Strain’ project? While my poetics often thinks about the reader (though I gesture towards ‘readers’ as the actual plural users of the text) I seldom think about readers as ‘consumers’ in the ‘poetry’ market, as people buying books with limited resources, with ever-diminishing marginal propensities to consume (A Level economics coming back there). I doubt if readers would want to read a fourth book (a third might be pushing it!), and it might be politic to move on. Soon.

Despite liking ‘The shepherd’s brow’ by Hopkins, would not further production be in danger of being merely that, if I were to version some of the sonnets of the period? There are 31 in the 1997 Poetry of the 1890s: Wratislaw, Robinson, Nadeau, Douglas, Henley, Dowson, Johnson, Symons, Gray, etc.. None has – unequivocally – the ‘fruit fly’ quality that Queneau talked about (he had Mallarme, of course). In fact, only Symons interests me much (as I suggest here:  Pages: Should I write a fourth ‘book’ of The English Strain project? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)). I possess a 1913 edition of his The Knave of Hearts, a copy once owned by Agnes Bedford, who I discovered (reading Peter Brooker’s book on the London Modernist avant garde) was a friend of either Olivia or Dorothy Shakespeare, Pound’s mother in law and his wife. She had written in pencil the original French of Symon’s translations of Verlaine. There’s something there, I think. (My Verlaine appears early in Book One: see here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Petrarch 3 published a year ago  but also here, about the book whose cover appears next: Pages: Practice-Led piece on 'Petrarch 3' from The English Strain published in Translating Petrarch's Poetry (Legenda) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)).

 Update July 2022: A final poem, ending the project at the end of book three, has been published in International Times, an appropriate venue for a finale of these political poems: ‘The final poem of British Standards, the third and final book of the ‘English Strain’ Project’, I announce before its subtitle: ‘Monitoring Adam Mickiewicz’ first Crimean Sonnet: The Ackerman Steppe’. Its actual title is ‘After-Shock’, the last of four ‘After’ poems at the end of the book.

Read it here: https://internationaltimes.it/aftershock/

Read about the first two books (now both available); The English Strain here, which features sonnets from Petrarch (via the Symbolists) to EBB, and whose cover (by Patricia Farrell) presents a composite image of the transposed poets, contrasting with the single image of Petrarch above it! : http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/04/robert-sheppard-petrarch-sonnet-project.html

and Bad Idea which features only versions of the sonnets of Michael Drayton, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-bad-idea-and-reference-to-earlier.html

and about the unpublished third book, British Standards, which features Romantic Era sonnets only: here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2021/04/transpositions-of-hartley-coleridge-end.html

The POETICS of the sequence, may be accessed here: Shifting an Imaginary: Poetics in Anticipation – New Defences of Poetry (nclacommunity.org). This piece is currently planned for inclusion in British Standards. 

Pages: Should I write a fourth ‘book’ of The English Strain project? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) lays out some of the thinking about book four which I am now rejecting!

In essence, two worries: that I might simply go into automatic 'production' mode, AND that the readership (such as it is) will be bored by 'more of the same'. The two are not unrelated.