Burnt Journal 1965: the last one and the photograph of David Hynes (and a look back at the series, with links and vids)

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.

(c) D. Hynes, 2026

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

Robert Sheppard: Four Burnt Journal poems published on Litter (links)

I’m pleased to say I have four of my ‘Burnt Journal’ poems published on Alan Baker’s intermittent but active blogzine Litter, published by his Leafe Press.

You may read them here.

‘Burnt Journals’, like ‘Empty Diaries’, which they superficially resemble, come with dates attached, in this case: 1968, 1977 (twice!) and 1978. The poems are written as birthday poems, and the largest group published is in my book Berlin Bursts. (Two of them are also on this blog, ‘Burnt Journal 1924’ (the earliest, as it were), written for my father, and ‘Burnt Journal 1939’ for Lee Harwood. See here and here.) I find the writing of ‘occasional’ poems quite demanding, but the technique and materials I have used for this (non-) sequence often produces good results. Not always though (as with any series). The rough aim is to create a mirage, rather than a description, of the particular year: after all, the recipients won't remember it!

Method: I take the person’s birth year and turn to the relevant pages of Tom Phillips’ anthology The Postcard Century (it's arranged chronologically, 1900-2000) and write through/from the images until I have  amassed enough material to process/collage/work through, in ways as I described in my non-delivered ‘talk’ about my use of photographs, here. In a sense, this domesticates the techniques I used to write ‘Empty Diaries’ where I collected notes made from multiple sources over a long period of time. Here I’m not ashamed to acknowledge that some of the selecting has been undertaken by Phillips before me. And usually, these poems have to be produced quickly for events (as is the case with three out of the four here), as well as simply for the deadline/birthday!

The four presented on Litter are all for men, but that’s a coincidence of availability, the ones I had free to send, since others are for Geraldine Monk, Frances Presley, Mary Prestege…

‘Burnt Journal 1968’ was written for Simon Perril, and you may read about the occasion here. There’s more about Simon here too. (There’s quite a lot of material about Simon as poet and critic on this blog, and there are additional links in these.) This will be appearing in my little book of little poems, Micro Event Space to be published by Red Ceilings Press later this year.

‘Burnt Journal 1977’ (or rather the first and second) were written for Chris McCabe (who held a birthday do in the Ship and Mitre) and for James Byrne (who I think was not around for his actual birthday). I found there were enough photographs in the Phillips book for two poems.

The same with ‘Burnt Journal 1978’, because I’d used the same materials to write a very different birthday poem a few years before for Eleanor Rees (see here or here: Burnt Journal 1978). This new one, ‘Parade’ was written for my colleague, the novelist, short story-writer and biographer Rodge Glass, as a request for his birthday ‘do’, which is described here. I like that line about ‘Calculated misreadings of Adorno’.

Other ‘Burnt Journals’ available online include one for Frances Presley here, and one for Patricia Farrell, here. (The last one is newly revised.)   

  

I know what you’re thinking: what will I do when I face the first millennial? Answer: I don’t know. Maybe that’s when I’ll start my other un-written (non)series ‘Drowned Books’ using different materials!

Robert Sheppard: article in CLASP: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (my part in its downfall)

 

Last Saturday, in Leicester (see here), I picked up my contributor’s copy of Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s, edited by Robert Hampson and Ken Edwards. (Details here.) It’s the sort of book I would review – if I weren’t in it, in two senses: things I did and said pop up here and there, and I have my say in the short piece, ‘Took Chances in London Traffic’. It is itself supplementary to other works of mine, as I explain:

My critical book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry [Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011; see here] is really a hymn of praise to the poetry scene in London from the 1970s to the mid-1990s, just before I came to Liverpool. [Another] chapter ‘Informing the Nation: The Manifesto of the Poetry Society (1976)’ deals with the well-documented events at the Poetry Society (and with the poetics document mentioned in the title)…. My chapter ‘The Colony at the Heart of the Empire: Bob Cobbing and the Mid-1980s London Creative Environmenteart ’ outlines the readings and performances I witnessed or of which I kept evidence. It’s a fulsome but not comprehensive account,

I state carefully, emphasing that I didn’t attend every event, although I do have the benefit of the diaries I kept, the same used to write my autrebiographical Words Out of Time, (e.g., see here for my diary account of meeting Bob Cobbing for the first time, an event that is glossed in the book in general terms).

This is a fascinating book of reminiscences of the 1970s, although it understandably strays into the 1960s (‘The British Poetry Revival’, see here). John Lennon's white suit is glimpsed several times, but only one contributor spilt tea over it! It also strays into the 1980s. (I was told to narrate until 1985 and I did this scrupulously; I had to: I only arrived in London in late 1983!) But it also wanders into the 1990s: there’s anachronistic mention of the deliberately unnamed workshop/discussion group Patricia and I organised in Tooting (and our big parties are mentioned as well). In Valerie Soar’s wonderful piece, she remembers an epiphanic moment of watching Bob Cobbing performing at the Smallest Poetry Festival in the World, which was held in our very small Tooting council house (though in December 1994). This slippage is inevitable (as is the way contributors step outside the ring of the M25 to tell us of other matters in other places) but it might make it harder to write of the 1980s and 1990s as distinct eras (as they were).    

Of course, events around the Poetry Society are still up for debate, with Lawrence Upton (who wants to poke me in the eye for writing stuff like this, judging from his Basil Fawlty analogy!) on one side, Elaine Randell on the other, and Robert Vas Dias as the Piggy-in-the Middle. But the acrimony has abated, and I think we need to concentrate upon the creative work of that period and place.

John Muckle and I are the only two writers here who register a sense of not belonging to the ‘London scene’: both of us had wandered in from outside and both of us are at the end of the book, as the youngest contributors, and we recall the exclusivity of the scene that others don’t notice. They do register the gender bias, if that’s not a weak term for an almost complete absence of women, although Valerie, Paula Claire and Frances Presley offer strong accounts. It’s good to see Patricia Farrell’s role in SubVoicive acknowledged.   

So: it’s not a book I can review at all. (Also see this interview between Rupert Loydell and me which pitches two versions of London in the early 80s against one another.)

One last thing: it almost seems as though in our search for accuracy, some of us have dodged trying to reflect the necessary excitement that derived from being in the compression of 'London traffic'. It takes another outsider, Jeremy Reed in his Shearsman book I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Asa Benveniste and Trigram Press, to get it right: ‘There’s something about the stupendous momentum of London’s energies that locks you into capital affairs.’ That’s what Clasp is about!

This piece, along with others, on, of, or about poetics, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics. It seemed to contextualise the poetics documents from the 1980s that I was re-printing in the third part of that book. Details here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).