Revenge on Culture poem published in International Times, one poem with 2 others to comprise Three Poems of War. Videos, links, etc.

I’ve had another poem published on (or is it in?) International Times and, as ever, I would like to thank poetry editor Rupert Loydell for this. It’s very short, ‘Revenge on Culture’, and it is a response to a photograph called ‘Revenge on Culture’, one of Lee Miller’s ‘blitz’ photos. It is not the image reproduced in International Times. (I can’t post the actual image; I have become wary after having been pursued for copyright fees by a copyright holder of an image I used. Indeed, I have pruned these posts considerably. But that’s, as they say, another story, though I don’t think I’ll make it another post.)

I have, actually, combined this single poem, which you may read here, 

Revenge on Culture | IT

with two others, one of which also appeared on International Times, here:

Pretend-Sleep | IT

although the third one didn’t (though see post below).

Given that they are short poems I have recorded videos of them (at various times) and I intend to present all three now, as they are jointly titled, and will, I hope, be published together one day:

 

Three Poems of War

 

1 Revenge on Culture (after a photograph by Lee Miller)

Video:

 

Post/text: Revenge on Culture | IT

Background blogpost: this one!

 

2 Pretend-Sleep

 Video:

 

Post/text: Pretend-Sleep | IT

Background blogpost: Pages: 'Pretend-sleep' published in International Times

 

3 Broken  

Video:

Post/Background blogpost/text: Pages: Ark and Archive page 1,000 - keeping a daily practice of writing going (It’s part of a longer post about generative writing.)

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Here’s one of many posts about appearing in International Times: Pages: And now more prose is published in International Times (and I reflect on that too)., and this link takes you to all the pieces I have had in the magazine (although there are a few extraneous items in the list too!) : Sheppard | Search Results | IT

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

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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com. Follow on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social

TONE POEM and my other poems about music (links)

I have been slowly writing poems ‘about’ (in my sense of ‘round and about’) MUSIC for some time now. In fact I’ve often written about music, as the links at the bottom of this post demonstrate. 

One recent sequence is ‘Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust’ which takes for theme recent jazz albums. (I was fed up with all those poems about Monk or Coltrane, great dead guys.) There are over 20 of these poems. The fact they started life as ‘interfering material’ for my Dante project shouldn’t devalue them, though there are a couple of references to paradise that remain. (The music was only destined for Paradise and Purgatory, for there is no music in Hell. This pattern follows Dante, of course.) They didn’t get used, but simply stood on their own as a peculiar exercise in audial ekphrasis. 

Perhaps one day there will be a book of music poems, perhaps destined to be called Easy Listening, somewhat ironically. Perhaps. I feature a few links to possible contents of that volume at the end of this post (which I keep updating). There are now FOUR online magazines featuring pieces from 'Tone Poem', seventeen poems in all, which I think is well over half of the sequence.

1. Read poems reflecting on music by Ant Law and Alex Hitchcock, Fire! Orchestra, Brandee Younger, Lakecia Benjamin, and James Brandon Lewis from Tone Poem on Litter,

HERE: https://www.littermagazine.org/2025/11/robert-sheppard-poems-from-tone-poem.html

(Thanks to Alan Baker for taking these. He’s also asked me to supply links to the music itself, which I did and which you can access.)

2. Here is another set, four poems, this time responding to the music of Fergus McCready, Daniel Herskedal, Mário Laginha and Cecile McLaren Salvant. 

 (Thanks to Rupert Loydell and International Times.)

HERE: from Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust | IT

3. Here is a third set from Tone Poem, this time poems responding to recent albums by Samara Joy, Gretchen Parlato, Emma Rawicz, Micheal Wollny and Brad Mehldau (the last a very localised response to his 'Beatles' album, Your Mother Should Know. She really should, and she should know that these poems are 

HERE: five poems — Blood+Honey

Thanks to everybody at Blood+Honey, a very active (frequent) platform. 

4. Here is a fourth set from Tone Poem, this time responding to the music of Melissa Aldana, Don McCaslin and Miko Hazama. Three short poems.

HERE:  The Pi Review: from Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust, by Robert Sheppard

Thanks to Pi Review. 

JazzIan to whom the sequence is dedicated has been telling some of the musicians about the sequence and he's had positive responses from Ant Law and Mats Gustaffson (of The Fire! Orchestra). 

5. Here is a standalone poem about jazz (or is it about time?) that is NOT in the sequence Tone Poem. Entitled 'Martin Smith Quartet at the Caledonia, Sunday Afternoon Sessions' that is exactly who and what it is a response to. BUT it is accompanied by two photographs by David Hynes of one of those Sunday afternoons. And it is published by International Times on 13 June 2026.

HERE: Martin Smith Quartet: Sunday Sessions at the Caledonia | IT

Thanks editor Rupert Loydell. And thanks to David. 

One of the images, (c) David Hynes. Access the IT page above to see the other. (Note: David is not the photographer of Holme Fell.) Our previous collaboration in International Times may be viewed here: Pages: Burnt Journal 1965: the last one and the photograph of David Hynes (and a look back at the series, with links and vids) 

A heap of earlier music poems appear in Yesterday's Music Today, edited by Mike Ferguson and Rupert Loydell: 

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Poems in YESTERDAY'S MUSIC TODAY co-edited by Rupert Loydell & Mike Ferguson OUT

A poem for Philip Jeck appears here: Pages: Philip Jeck 2022 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

See here about the saga (perhaps it should be a rock opera) of Charms and Glitter: Pages: Whatever happened to the book Charms and Glitter? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) 

I write about the difference between the music I play, the music I listen to and the music I write about: Pages: More returns of Little Albert - the music I play, the music I listen to, the music I write about. 

Here's a piece on Stride about my 5 favourite songs to sing: it's not a poem, more of an annotated list: Five Favourite Songs I've Sung | Stride magazine

And now more prose is published in International Times (and I reflect on that too).

It never rains but it pours. This morning, I posted about my new prose pieces on Litter, which led me into a consideration of the varieties of non-fiction and non-non-fiction prose I have produced, with lots of links to online examples. That post may be read here: Pages: Three pieces of prose in Litter. Are they prose poems or not? In short, I back away ambivalently from the term ‘prose poetry’. 

As if in answer, but actually in further complication, I’ve had another prose piece published in International Times. Again, I must thank poetry editor Rupert Loydell for including this piece. It is entitled ‘A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie’. It's a piece written during the ceremony for the King’s Coronation last year (was it?). In a way it continues the tone of the last poem in British Standards; in another way it doesn’t. It is not based on sonnets, it is in prose, and it is a wild piece of satire, slightly more narrative than the pieces in Litter.  

It may be read here: A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie | IT.

I’ve sat on the piece for some while because the (not my) King has been receiving cancer treatment, and I thought the gesture potentially dubious. I had the same problem with the sonnets of British Standards when Bo(ris Johnson) was in hospital with Covid. If either of them had succumbed to illness (in a fatal sort of way) my poetry (or prose) would be buggered. Both recovered – and literary product may be released into the world without fear. So, roll on Britanocles the Great and Good (lines borrowed from Davenant, as lines were borrowed from Marvell; guess which poem of his? Hint below!).

My previous contribution to International Times may be read here (not prose, a poem about Ukraine and Gaza), with links to all the other writings I have published there, for which I am grateful. Pages: 'Pretend-sleep' published in International Times. There’s a video there, too.    

'Pretend-sleep' published in International Times

 I still get a frisson from being published in International Times. I feel like, retrospectively, I am being admitted into Bomb Culture or something from my precocious entry into the 'underground' as a teenager. (Appropriate, since this week it is 50 years since I met Tom Pickard, Barry MacSweeney, Pierre Joris, Paul Brown and others, when I recorded the first two reading at the Entreprise pub!). But, of course, International Times rages on, online, as a radical journal, and is very much worth reading. Rupert Loydell is poetry editor and he has published a number of poems of mine. (This link takes you to all the items I've contributed over the years: (https://internationaltimes.it/?s=Sheppard.))

This time Rupert has published an impacted little piece called 'pretend-sleep' which was written in November 2023, with the war in Ukraine and and with the asymmetrical killing in Gaza, very much in mind. Read the text online here: Pretend-Sleep | IT (internationaltimes.it)

But I also read it here: 

Patricia (Farrell) has also been published a lot in International Times too, and this is her most recent appearance: From looking like winter illegibly read | IT (internationaltimes.it)

Celebrations: the final poem of The English Strain project (the last of British Standards) is published today

Regular readers of this blog (there are some, I know) will know that between November 2021 and September 2022 I had a real problem ending the three volumes of my ‘English Strain’ project of (mainly) transposed sonnets, or rather I had problems finding traditional sonnets to help me finish off Boris Johnson, after the hubris of Brexit and the deadly incompetence of the Coronavirus pandemic, but various poems suggested themselves as models. Various 'last poems' gave way to the next 'last poem'. But eventually I stopped, and weaned myself from the method. (I'm cured now, and writing, and reading, other things.)  

I said goodbye to Bo(ris Johnson), once through the Medium of Jake Thackray’s masterpiece. That’s here: Pages: Goodbye to Bo through the Medium of Jake Thackray’s masterpiece (not a book review) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

But before that I’d said goodbye to Bo(ris), here, with a poem:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2022/08/final-extra-last-poem-of-english-strain.html

Then finally, in September 2022 the End of the Festival of Mourning for our late Empress of Bressex of ‘happy memory’, sent me back to the first poem of British Standards, my ‘England in 2019’ (unpublished so far), and its model, Shelley’s well-known ‘England in 1819’. I produced ‘After Sheppàrd After Shelley: England in 2022’. I posted it briefly (and temporarily) and wrote about its writing and its ceremonial occasion with some appropriate images of the tasteful ‘cargo-cult carvings’ that the peasantry produced for its happy memories. There are lots of links to my earlier parts of the project from this  blogpost.

It's here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A final final poem for British Standards! It’s worth a look; you can find a copy of Shelley’s poem, but not mine, until today!! As I wrote at the time: ‘If you think that the poem is too weird, here are some of the contributory images, from the “Grieve Watch” Twitter feed. (Elsewhere you will find videos of the rollerblader and read about people being arrested for hoisting up blank sheets of paper!)’.

Some of you will doubtless be pleased to hear that I have not written another last last last poem for the sequence, occasioned by the Coronation of King Charles III. No, but the poem I wrote last year appears today on International Times, a thoroughly appropriate destination for this poem, which may be read here: 

After Sheppàrd After Shelley: England in 2022 | IT (internationaltimes.it)

Thanks to Rupert Loydell for taking and timing this poem. 

In case you think I’m amiss in not celebrating the current royal and constitutional jollities, here is a photograph to remind us all of the new monarch’s endless capacity for judicious friendship. (Captions on a postcard to Hell, please.) You'll excuse me, if I turn to making some notes while watching today's ceremonies!

 The beginning of ‘the English Strain’ is best described here ( http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/04/robert-sheppard-petrarch-sonnet-project.html ) : that’s the first hundred, collected in the Shearsman book The English Strain. Then here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-bad-idea-and-reference-to-earlier.html - that’s Bad Idea, another 80+ sonnets (and the second book, published by Knives Forks and Spoons). 

The poem posted today completes the third book, British Standards. 

BRITISH STANDARDS is now available:  https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-British-Standards-p661920471

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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

Patricia Farrell: New work in International Times (and links and video)

Quite a large representational chunk has appeared from Patricia Farrell’s Rime in International Times, a work of visual and lexical poetry. 

from Rime 

From Rime – part one

From Crashed Anglia (Rime – part two)

From Coda: Without Reason (Rime – part three)

 Here: https://internationaltimes.it/from-rime/

More of Coda appears online on Abandoned Playground here: Poems by Patricia Farrell (theabandonedplayground.org)

 There is more in the second edition of the journal of the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group.

 

Patricia Farrell is a poet and visual artist.  Her most recent book publication is High Cut: My Model of No Criteria (Leafe Press, 2018). See here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/06/patricia-farrells-high-cut-my-model-of.html

Here are links to pages of her completely visual work, A Space Completely Filled with Matter https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2016/12/patricia-farrell-links-to-some-visual.html

which may be purchased in whole from Veer, here: https://www.veerbooks.com/Patricia-Farrell-A-SPACE-COMPLETELY-FILLED-WITH-MATTER

Patricia Farrell reads a selection of her earlier work here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pCqehHCwyk

And her collaboration with Helen Tookey may be seen here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/06/patricia-farrell-storm-reading-helen.html

 And our own collaborations, via our micro-press Ship of Fools, were featured here when we exhibited some of our works: Pages: Ship of Fools press Exhibition Edge Hill 2017: Hub post (links) and Introduction (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

The last time we collaborated in public we did this:Pages: Robert Sheppard and Patricia: The Passionate Nymph'/The Impassive Shepherd' : European Poetry Festival, Manchester 2019 (set list)

Don’t forget to check out Patricia’s website: Patricia Farrell - Home (weebly.com). 

 

 

'The Shepherd's Brow' (the final poem of British Standards (probably)) appears on International Times

The final poem, an 'Afterword' even, of British Standards – maybe – has been published on International Times (as have quite a few of my shorter poems from ‘the English Strain’ project). Thanks to poetry editor, Rupert Loydell, once again. 

I say ‘maybe’, not because I think I might write another book, the fourth, but because I wonder if our political moment will drag just one more poem about the body politic (or the Bo Politic) from me. That depends on the Sue Gray report, of course. Until then, this is the last. (See these posts for the ruminations on the fourth book or not: Pages: Should I write a fourth ‘book’ of The English Strain project? (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and Pages: No need for a fourth book of The English Strain, I've decided (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)).

 My poem, ‘The Shepherd’s Brow’, may be read here: https://internationaltimes.it/the-shepherds-brow-fronting-forked-lightning/

 I read it (with one stumble) on video here:

 

This poem, a version of a Gerard Manley Hopkins sonnet, which does actually mention having a dump, might have been the first poem of that attempted fourth book, but is currently the last one of the project. I write about it here (and offer Hopkins’ original text): Pages: No need for a fourth book of The English Strain, I've decided (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I like these poems appearing in IT because they often add fine illustrations, as they have today.  

One of my previous appearances in IT was a poem I had transposed from the Earl of Surrey, now part of the Shearsman volume, The English Strain. The transposition is again a political one; this time it was a poem about Trump. The Surrey poem is displayed next to the Sheppard version: Direct Rule: In Peace with Foul Desire | IT (internationaltimes.it)

From HAP: Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch | IT (internationaltimes.it) will take you to versions of Thomas Wyatt! (Just for balance). 

A number of  sonnets from Bad Idea were published in International Times. Here's a couple: Idea | IT (internationaltimes.it) And more: Sonnets from Bad Idea | IT (internationaltimes.it)These next ones are described as ‘Overdubs of Michael Drayton in the Voice of Idea, his Muse’, but are in fact the last three poems in the sequence, ‘Idea’s Mirror’ my supplement to ‘Bad Idea’. Together, the two sequences form the manuscript of ‘Bad Idea’, the second ‘book’ of ‘The English Strain’ project.

http://internationaltimes.it/overdubs-of-michael-drayton-in-the-voice-of-idea-his-muse/

 

This showing of just pre- and just post- 2019 Election poems is accompanied by Patricia Farrell’s fine illustration of a Techno-Dogging Site. I write about those three poems here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-3-sonnets-from-ideas.html

I write about ‘Idea’s Mirror’, the whole sequence, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html

 Read about the first two books (now both available) online.  

The English Strain here, which features sonnets from Petrarch (via the Symbolists) to EBB, and whose cover presents a composite image of the transposed poets (see cover above):  : 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. 

 

Here’s another piece from British Standards on IT. As I said, it’s sometimes a good thing to be able to demonstrate the intuitive way in which the ‘original’ poems are transposed (I have long given up describing the process as ‘translation’), which can only be done by providing, in this case, the Shelley sonnet, and my ‘version’. Here it is: Lift Not the Painted Veil | IT (internationaltimes.it) I'll read it to you as well, although this is a reading of a slightly earlier version of the poem (recorded the day I wrote it).

There's yet another 'final' poem to the sequence featured here: Pages: Another 'final' poem of the English Strain sonnet project: looking eastwards and to the Ukraine (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I reflect (FINALLY) on the end of this project here: Pages: If The English Strain is finished, what next? (Reflections and Loose Poetics) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Robert Sheppard: Two transpositions of Wordsworth from British Standards published on International Times

I am delighted to reveal that two poems from ‘Poems of National Independence’ (in British Standards, book three of ‘the English Strain’ project) have been published with customary alacrity by International Times (with a splendid lockdown image by Claire Palmer, above, who has illustrated some of my previous appearances on this august site). Here they are:

http://internationaltimes.it/poems-of-national-independence-liberties-with-wordsworth/

Here's the first of the two poems read by me:

That's the second poem read by me.

Thanks again to Rupert Loydell, poetry editor.

The lines about

the abject position of the contemporary poet now,
according to the press, and even some bards;
we must soothe and smooth the national mood,

are quite heartfelt; I hate all the talk about how we should turn to the salving power of poetry to uplift us in such demanding times (though I do understand the need to escape the ‘new normal’, which I take to be a different, and possibly more critical, strategy).

It’s an accident that I’ve hit Wordsworth’s 250^th birthday year and month with the first part of British Standards. I saw lockdown Grasmere on the local TV on his actual birthday: there was some surmise that he would have liked it as quiet as the town seemed. It was dead! I reckon Wordsworth would have liked a little more rural ‘industry’, as he might have put it. I have just read Jonathan Bate’s new biography Radical Wordsworth (I’ve finished re-reading The Prelude and the Wu biography of Hazlitt, and some of Hazlitt’s fine essays) and it’s a user-friendly account of the best part of Wordsworth’s career and life. He writes about the sonnets I have transposed quite a lot, particularly because they came about at a crucial period in Wordsworth’s life, 1802-3, during the Peace of Amiens, that allowed him (a bit like Bo) to visit his ‘other’ ‘French’ family. Read more about the sequence here: 

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-last-of-my-wordsworth-versions-in.html

The ‘English Strain’ project moves on in Book Three. I’ve documented my progress in detail. There are two comprehensive posts to check out, with links to other online poems, one that looks at Book One, The English Strain here , and another at Book Two, Bad Idea here . The final part of Bad Idea is called ‘Idea’s Mirror’, and that’s described here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-last-ideas-mirror-post-election-poem.html

You may read the two poems from Bad Idea on International Times here: http://internationaltimes.it/idea/