Tombeau i.m. John Purdy, d. January 1976 (recovered poem)

Tombeau  

i.m. John Purdy, d. January 1976

 

Beside. The row of headstones. Pointing fingers. Sentences down the hedges. At me. First thick blank page of his body. Was found the sloped field. The record jumps inscriptions on the misty wet air walking straight. Straight. To nightsky sleep. Straight to the grave. Drunk whatever. You decide. When you are. Horrible series. Is. Is. Is right. He. Escaped no thing the continual face. To face these sayings depended on. On. The way back home from friendships he’d said dead. Nothing. To say your grave or mine on. Save a leaf on. Should not go wasted. Wait. You. Made us somewhat. What you. Are in cutting off my left. Elsewhat and here right. On time twice. Black head. Stone name. Myself to weep or do anything of that. Date of that. That attempt at verse never. Wanted to be. Never never faced. The road. To face. The marble language. Persists fleeting. Breath mobile. The treble breath trembles in ecstasy. Pulls you out of breath. On the breeze singing the bridges down below. Not to you. A valley of bungalows. Mention those. Grains. Shivering in the heart. The roof sinking cannabis. Was found. Glittering against. Tomorrow’s sky horses munch untethered in the field down home that mocks. ‘Flying’ on the Downs. But fifty years this grave I will ever grow. Full throated dynamite elegy so. Old pointing fingers. At me your energy. Again a fragment of something. Did you. He said. In every sentence. Try it. I write. It. On the wall looking straight. At you my tongue tires with. This wound against my lip. Lap of earth. Browned grass. Sunken. As though in your slumber you’ve turned

 

July 2002, recovered 2026

 

This poem, which was written during the time I wrote the poems collected in Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes (and in its prevalent prose style), was unpublished, ‘lost’ for a quarter of a century, in memory of a friend who died a quarter of a century before that. Assembling my archive for archiving (as it were) I have recovered, restored (to the book) and lightly revised the poem. I am posting it on the possible day he died, in mysterious circumstances, in Sussex. In 2009 I returned to this incident in my piece on Malcolm Lowry, who also died in the locality in mysterious circumstances. That text, ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’ is found in my Aquifer book Doubly Stolen Fire. See here:  https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/10/doubly-stolen-fire-new-book-of-hybrid.html.

Reviews of my book DOUBLY STOLEN FIRE

 If I found it difficult to describe my latest book, Doubly Stolen Fire, hiding behind the word ‘hybrid’, have a thought for poor reviewers (a trade I’ve indulged in to excess in the past: see bibliography: Full Bibliography - Robert Sheppard (weebly.com)). I eventually managed to find ways of doing it (for example, Pages: Doubly Stolen Fire (a new book of hybrid texts) is now OUT (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)), but it was always easier to deal with one part of it at a time (the bit about Malcolm Lowry, here: Pages: Launch of Doubly Stolen Fire at the Lowry Lounge 2023, Liverpool (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com); or the bit about the Ern Malley Hoax, there: Pages: Performance of the Ern Malley Orchestra and launch of Doubly Stolen Fire (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)). Tellingly, I seem to be launching it, chapter by chapter.

 

Buy the book straight from the publisher: HERE: Robert Sheppard: Doubly Stolen Fire – Glasfryn Project.

 

ONE Billy Mills is the first off the blocks, as so often, on his excellent blog. I link to it on my blog roll (whoever thought of that term?); see to the right of this post.

Beginning, and offering links (you may have noticed how much I like links, a habit from the days of assembling Twentieth Century Blues), he notes ‘Robert Sheppard’s Doubly Spoken Fire is, in part at least, the third and final part of his ‘fictional poetry project’, the first two parts of which I reviewed here and here (In hindsight, I was far too dismissive of this book at the time).’ I liked his harsh treatment of those volumes, and I like his ‘in part at least’, which is true: this may have run the ‘fictional poetry project’ into the ground (or it may not, I’ll cheekily hint, perhaps falsely) but there are lots of other bits. Billy is forced to be descriptive as well as evaluative. I’ll say no more about it, but simply thank Billy (I know how much work is involved in reviewing, which may be the reason I do less of it), and give you the link to it:

Recent Reading January 2024: A Review – Elliptical Movements (wordpress.com)

I’ll add some more reviews, if there are any. In the meantime, here’s an X feed tweeting the sayings of a talking mongoose, highly relevant to my ‘Rectophonic Monologue’! Billy found this too. I guess I’ll have to follow: (4) Gef the Mongoose (@gefbot) / X (twitter.com)

TWO A second review has been written by Rupert Loydell, and posted on the Tears in the Fence . It is a case of Rupert dishing up my own medicine to me. It's great fun, though: at Doubly Stolen Fire by Robert Sheppard (Aquifer) | Tears in the Fence

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Locating Robert Sheppard: books: Pages: Robert Sheppard: seeing what's in print and what's not!; email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter (or X): Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter ; latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

Doubly Stolen Fire (a new book of hybrid texts) is now OUT

My new book Doubly Stolen Fire is now available. Buy it straight from the publisher: HERE:Robert Sheppard: Doubly Stolen Fire – Glasfryn Project

Cost (plus postage and packing) UK £13; Europe £15.00; USA and the rest of the world £17.00 

To buy click here to pay by Paypal: https://glasfrynproject.org.uk/w/8459/robert-sheppard-doubly-stolen-fire/ 

or send a cheque - made out to Aquifer Books - to

Aquifer Books, Glasfryn, Llangattock, Powys, NP8 1PH

http://aquiferbooks.co.uk

It looks great, and I’d like to thank Lyndon Davies, the publisher of Aquifer, for his hard work, and recommend all the books he’s published to date. (See the website for a full account of his many activities: Glasfryn Project: a hub of literary/artistic activity in rural Powys )

Mixing and matching hybrid modes – memoir, essay, creative non-fiction, fiction, fictional poems, psychogeographical derives, footnotes, poetics and even jokes – Doubly Stolen Fire examines authorship, real, fictional, hoaxing, as well as my own, from multiple viewpoints.

Whether a woman named Anonymous, or a mongoose called Gef, a fictional Austrian poet whose lockdown diary records her poeticizing mannequin, or some version of me in 1979 tracking the paths taken by novelist Malcolm Lowry, the book hosts a cast of unstable actors. Yes, I know that means that I’m one of them, and I acknowledge my attack of total global amnesia in one of the many labyrinthine footnotes. The characters keep returning to the scenes of their literary crimes, Liverpool mainly, though their guilty fictions float out to Berlin, the Isle of Man, Sussex and even to Ern Malley’s Australia.

You can re-write the history of post-War British poetry if you listen to your mannequin, it seems. You can put in a call for ‘creative literary history’ and all manner of alternatives appear. You can make Larkin and his crew disappear! All this in a volume bulging with mercurial humour and wily wit, and crawling with my creatures! What more could you want?

Contents

 Introduction: by Jason Argleton (he’s a fictional poet; he seemed appropriate)

One

Anonymous (a true short short about meeting a woman of that name)

Doubly Stolen Fire in his Prosthetic Voice: The Ern Malley Hoax and Fictional Poems in Liverpool (an essay coming out of the difference between hoaxes and fictional poems, and about some Ern Malley celebrations in Liverpool)

Thirty Russell Road (essay-poem-collage-piece about a strange event on the Isle of Man in the 1930s; previously unpublished)

Vestigial Gestures: The Fictional Poetry Project (in which Sophie Poppmeier communicates with her mannequin and produces English language fictional poems from the 1950s to rival Larkin and That Lot; and then I meditate upon current and previous fictional poets (who have appeared in the two books mentioned below. But also check out the EUOIA website for details of them: European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) - Home (weebly.com) )

The Novel (not a novel but another short short about (not) writing a novel; a fable of (non) creativity.)

Two: Malcolm Lowry’s Land

The Lowry Lounge (a short poem concerning Lowry or the Lowryesque, short enough to read on video, as I do here):

Malcolm Lowry’s Land (an account of visiting Lowry’s grave in 1979, mediated through attempts at a poem on that subject written then and read in the ‘now’ of the poem, 2009; previously published in the pioneering LUP/Bluecoat volume Malcolm Lowry: From Mersey to the World)

 Cablegram to Dale St (a fantasy poem about Lowry and Liverpool)

 Circle of the City: following in the steps of Chapter Five (All of the pieces in Part Two have been performed at the annual Lowry Lounge events held in Liverpool every year: I write about those meetings AND about this poem, a recent one; there is a link to the text there too: Pages: Circle of the City published now on Osmosis/New book coming soon (robertsheppard.blogspot.com))

Read about the Liverpool launch of the book, here:  Pages: Launch of Doubly Stolen Fire at the Lowry Lounge 2023, Liverpool (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

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 Doubly Stolen Fire is a visionary glimpse into Robert Sheppard’s ‘inventory of the invented’. To begin with he is King Hoax, trickster offspring of Pessoa and Enderby with a smatter of W.C. Fields and Alfred Jarry. Curator of a fugitive archive of writings by and about imaginary authors, Sheppard is shapeshifter, saloon huckster, cabaret comedian, laugh out loud funny. The second part is a Firminist investigation into the Malcom Lowry labyrinth –psycho(somatic)geography, raw response, fragmented memory recovered. The work is imbued with loss, inky with fingerprints, words like haunted Kodaks.

so says Jeff Young, author of Ghost Town, A Liverpool Shadowplay

Robert Sheppard’s curiosity, brilliance and mischief are entwined as closely as ever in this gathering of poetry and prose. Continuing his excavations of poetry from perhaps-parallel universes, the first part explores the potentialities of fiction in and as poetry (or vice-versa), with the famous Ern Malley hoax as a touchstone for further inventions. In the context of this probing of authorial identities, the second part, with its focus on the apparently real Malcolm Lowry, shimmers with alternative possibilities. However, what holds the double construction of this book together is the character of Liverpool, its street names and gossip and half-heard stories haunting the fragmentary speculations that unfinish themselves, here and elsewhere at the same time. Behind the dissolving characters, there’s a committed sociality in Sheppard’s writing that makes it thoughtfully open to others as well as to language’s scintillating play of otherness.

so says Zoë Skoulding, author of A Marginal Sea

Here's me opening the box of books.

I write about the first launch of the book, at the Lowry Lounge 2023 here:  Pages: Launch of Doubly Stolen Fire at the Lowry Lounge 2023, Liverpool (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

This book is (or parts of it are) the third part of my ‘fictional poetry’ project. Although you don’t need to know them, they are also available, A Translated Man, which features the Belgian fictional poet Rene Van Valckenborch, and Twitters for a Lark, in which I collaborate with a number of other writers to create European poets. (See European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) - Home (weebly.com) for info on that; or see the two books here: Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard - A Translated Man and here: Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard (ed) - Twitters for a Lark, where you may buy those.

The availability of all my book-length publications may be accessed here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: seeing what's in print and what's not!

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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

 

Launch of Doubly Stolen Fire at the Lowry Lounge 2023, Liverpool (set list)

I launched my new book Doubly Stolen Fire as part of the Lowry Lounge at the Bluecoat, Liverpool on Saturday 28^th October. 

Full details of the book itself, and how you may buy it HERE: Robert Sheppard: Doubly Stolen Fire – Glasfryn Project .

 Aquifer – Glasfryn Project. 

 Cost (plus postage and packing) UK £13; Europe £15.00; USA and the rest of the world £17.00

 

Or, 

to buy click here to pay by Paypal: https://glasfrynproject.org.uk/w/8459/robert-sheppard-doubly-stolen-fire/

 

or send a cheque - made out to Aquifer Books - to

Aquifer Books, Glasfryn, Llangattock, Powys, NP8 1PH

 

http://aquiferbooks.co.uk

See my hubpost on the book here: Pages: Doubly Stolen Fire (a new book of hybrid texts) is now OUT (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

The Lounge started at the Bluecoat in the morning with a reading by me from Doubly Stolen Fire, originally subtitled reflections on authorship, real and imaginary, which includes my writings on Lowry. There were also be updates on other Lowry-related projects, including the new online archive in development, charting the arts centre’s 14-year (so far!) Lounge programme. In the afternoon, some folk walked to Hilbre Island on the Wirral. 

 

I write about a number of our previous meetings here: with links right back to 2009! Pages: The 2022 Lowry Lounge - a few thoughts (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

- Lowry online archive update, Bryan: progress so far. Do check it out: it's looking good:  https://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/library/malcolm-lowry

I talk about the book as a whole, here: Pages: Doubly Stolen Fire (a new book of hybrid texts) is now OUT (robertsheppard.blogspot.com), but here's roughly what I told the audience, with an indication of what poems I read:

Doubly Stolen Fire is a book about authorship and one of the authors I consider is Malcolm Lowry. All of the other authors are, in one way or another, imaginary, even myself. Of course, Lowry is not exempt from the practice of concocting what I call fictional authors, Sigbjorn Wilderness, and so on. The second ‘half’ of my book contains my various responses to Lowry’s work, life and geographies, and, as we shall see, Lowry, or rather this Lounge, features briefly in the first part, which is about imaginary authors, fictional poets and hoaxes. I'm not going to read from two long pieces, one which features the famous Ern Malley hoax of the 1940s, and the second which showcases the case of the extra extra clever talking Mongoose on the Isle of Man in the 1930s. I wonder whether Lowry knew of either of these hoaxes, particularly the latter, with his interest in the Isle of Man: it was the stuff of interwar tabloid journalism. These pieces worry away at my distinction between hoaxes, which are usually malign, and fictional poets or imaginary authors – and I have constructed many of these, as I’ll reveal, for my many sins, albeit in passing today – which are benign but haunting presences in the literary imagination. They can’t be un-imagined. But first, I want to read you a complete but short real non-fictional story about somebody who could have been fictional – but wasn't. You’ll also notice that Liverpool is a persistent background theme in what I’m reading.

I read ‘Anonymous’, p. 11

I could not but read this poem that I wrote for Bryan Biggs some years ago. It came out of meeting the only actual Consul (of one of the world’s poorest nations) that I’ve met. I found him conducting consular business at the bar of a pub, very Firmin-like. He whisked away passports as I approached. A working title for this fantasia was ‘The Consul on the Smithdown Road’. It’s now appropriately called…

‘The Lowry Lounge’, p. 55

 

We’re now in the Lowry half of the book, which consists of three poems and a reprint of the hybrid prose piece I wrote for the From the Mersey to the World volume, edited by Bryan and Helen. This is impossible to read an extract from: it consists of bits of a poem I wrote in 1979 on my pilgrimage to Lowry’s grave in Sussex, plus descriptions of photographs I took on that journey, and my commentary on the whole thing, written in 2009. The piece is called ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’. [Extra info: ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’ (an account of visiting Lowry’s grave in 1979, mediated through attempts at a poem on that subject written then and re-read in the ‘now’ of the poem, 2009; previously published in the pioneering LUP/Bluecoat volume Malcolm Lowry: From Mersey to the World. See a review of it: 47-Lowry-book-review.pdf ; it says: ‘Robert Sheppard’s moving account in "Malcolm Lowry’s land" of his pilgrimage from Liverpool, the place of Lowry’s birth (and Sheppard’s present home) to Ripe, the place of Lowry’s death, and back again.' Miguel Mota.)] If my 1979 walking poem never saw the light of day my ‘Circle of the City’ did. It’s a series of interrupted haiku (my ‘pops’ this time, my ‘haiku-movie’) written (and read here) in 2021 while following the Liverpool perambulation taken by sailor-revolutionary Sigbjørn and his shipowner father as described by Lowry in his unfinished novel, written in the mid-1930s, In Ballast to the White Sea. Their walk starts (and ends) at Exchange Flags and skirts the docks, walks very close to this building, and rests at a cinema to view a Russian revolutionary film. They discuss politics and their culpabilities in the deaths of others. Like Lowry, I take in the messages of the urban environment I pass through: street signs, adverts, t-shirt slogans. There are, oddly, both in Lowry’s novel and my poem, references to Herbert Melville’s Redburn. The Liverpool ‘guidebook’ Redburn carried was 50 years out of date. My ‘guidebook’ was Lowry’s novel, 90 years out of date!

I read ‘Circle of the City’: p. 66: [‘Circle of the City: following in the steps of Chapter Five’ (All of the pieces in Part Two have been performed at the annual Lowry Lounge events: I write about those meetings AND about this poem, a recent one; there is a link to the text there too: Pages: Circle of the City published now on Osmosis/New book coming soon (robertsheppard.blogspot.com))]

Lowry makes an unexpected, unscheduled appearance in the longest shaggy-dog story section of part one! I thought I was presenting my thoughts on my ‘fictional poetry project’ in the form of the lockdown diary of one of my creations: she has a talking mannequin, as you do, that starts spouting English poetry from the 1950s, a prophylactic to the poisonous ‘Movement Orthodoxy’. You’ll have to read her account in the book, which is on sale today. I also reflect on my most extensive ‘fictional poet’, René Van Valckenborch, a Belgian, who writes in both Flemish and French, and reflect on how ‘fictional poets’ feel so real to some readers that ‘if they had not been invented, they would have to exist’. Another important fact is that I wrote a ‘fictional’ introduction (something my new book also has!). Then this happened. It involves this Lowry Lounge intimately, and a copy of the Van Valckenborch book: A Translated Man. (Also on sale.) With this I shall finish.

I finally read ‘A Great Gift’: p. 48

Ailsa Cox, who had generously introduced me,  led the Q and A. I don't know whether it was nerves, or not, but I don't remember a single question (or my answers).

Thanks, Firminists and Bluecoat and Aquifer (Lyndon Davies) for a great day (at the end of a great week: another reading and a lecture/reading on poetics!).

The launch...

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Locating and contacting me: email: Please do not use my old Edge Hill one; it doesn’t work: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

Circle of the City published now on Osmosis/New book coming soon

I’m pleased to announce a couple of related things before I have a little summer break from blogging (and Twitter). One is the publication of a poem (today) and the other is the publication of a book (later).

The poem has been mentioned before on the blog, because it relates to the celebrations of the life, times and writings of Malcolm Lowry that are held every year in Liverpool. Indeed, it relates to this post about the 2021 celebration, here:  Pages: The Lowry Lounge 2021, Bluecoat, Liverpool (and my poem 'Circle of the City: following in the steps of Chapter Five') (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). On that you will find references to my poem ‘Circle of the City’, which I read in the Open Malc (ouch!) section and which I also describe in my book (more of that later!) thus:

This poem is a series of interrupted haiku written (or drafted) while following the walk taken by sailor-revolutionary Sigbjørn and his shipowner father as described (in both senses of the word) by Lowry in his unfinished novel, written in the mid-1930s, In Ballast to the White Sea (ed. P.A. McCarthy, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2014). Their Liverpool walk starts (and ends) at Exchange Flags and skirts the docks, the shopping centre, and rests at a cinema to view a Russian revolutionary film. They discuss politics generally and, more personally, their culpabilities in the deaths of others. Like Lowry, I take in the messages of the urban environment I pass through: street signs, adverts, t-shirt slogans. There are, oddly, both in Lowry’s chapter and my poem, references to Melville’s Redburn (1849). The Liverpool guidebook Redburn carried was 50 years out of date. My ‘guidebook’ was Lowry’s novel itself, Bodega and cinema both long gone. The poem was first performed at the 2021 Lowry Lounge, Saturday 30 October 2021, The Bluecoat, Liverpool [as described in the link above].

I am now pleased to say this is published today on the 'Featured Writing' section of the Osmosis website HERE:

 Robert Sheppard: Circle of the City: following in the steps of Chapter Five – OSMOSIS PRESS

 Thanks to all at Osmosis for selecting this. They publish 'Featured Writing' every Sunday, and books, of course, every now and then (as a press). Check them out: OSMOSIS PRESS – where writing shifts and spills across boundaries

[Updatde: the book was launched at the 2023 Lounge: Pages: Launch of Doubly Stolen Fire at the Lowry Lounge 2023, Liverpool (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and may be purchase via this link.]

The post above to the Lowry Lounge 2021 also presents links to some previous years’ meetings. Of course, that won’t let you link with the 2022 meeting, about which I had some thoughts here: Pages: The 2022 Lowry Lounge - a few thoughts (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). The 2023 meeting is in preparation: 28 October. A date for local diaries.

The poem is the final piece in my hybrid book Doubly Stolen Fire, which is subtitled ‘authorship imaginary and real’ and will be published by Aquifer Press, which is run by Lyndon Davies. The second half of the book is indeed about real authorship, since it contains my writings on Lowry, a handful of poems including today’s, and my prose piece ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’, which is a psychogeographical exploration of walking to Lowry’s grave in 1979, imaginatively re-tracing my textual steps 30 years later (it's a sort of 'reading through' of a poem I never published). 

The first book of the fictional poetry project, A Translated Man.

The first half of Doubly Stolen Fire is about imaginary authors and is, in essence, the third part of my imaginary authors project. Read about the published first two books of it here: EUOIA: European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) - Home (weebly.com). 

The second book of the fictional poetry project, Twitters for a Lark.

A long piece in Doubly Stolen Fire is culled from the lockdown diary of Sophie Poppmeier, my imaginary Austrian poet, who appears in each part. Pages: Reflections on Fictional Poetry and Fictional Poets (1 and hubpost for the sequence) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) BUT I also consider the Ern Malley Hoax, Pages: Robert Sheppard: My essay on Ern Malley and Fictional Poets appears in International Times, a famous talking visitor to the Isle of Man (not Lowry), a talking mannequin (of course) and a couple of other people who have lifted themselves into fiction. The writing weaves and matches and mixes hybrid modes: memoir, essay, creative non-fiction, fiction, fictional poems, psychogeographical derives, jokes and poetics. Oh, and a lot of footnotes!

Keep checking this blog for updates. And read my poem online as a taster (though there is no sample of the book that could be thought ‘typical’).  Nearly there! Here's me holding the proof copy:

 

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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