Looking
Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at,
and beyond the millennium. (delivered to the 'Anthology as Manifesto' conference at the University of Glasgow: more on that here, item 2: Pages: Three March readings up the North West coast (set lists))
‘The
End of the Twentieth Century’ is one of two acts of poetics committed as part
of my long network of texts, assembled 1989-2000, and collected under the title
Twentieth Century Blues: the first early on – crudely put – to get the
thing going, the second anticipating the manner and modes of its ending, and
with thoughts of a ‘beyond’. In the first I define Twentieth Century Blues formally
as a
net/
(k)not
- work(s)
a
glyph that guided its development and perhaps some of its poetic focus. It’s a net
that works itself into knots, with multiple titles and connecting strands, some
of them thematic, some of them formal, a few of them deliberate dead ends. They
are almost hyperlinks, conceived before I had heard of such things.
I
customarily define writerly poetics as: the products of the process of reflection upon writings, and
upon the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others, speculatively
and anticipatorily casting into the future. That’s precisely what ‘The End of
the Twentieth Century’ enacts. More
magisterially, Jerome Rothenberg, in the introduction to his book of poetics, Pre-Faces,
says, ‘The world we share, & our interplay with it, calls again & again
for discourse: in the case of Poets, the setting forth of a poetics… I’ve
attempted, like other poets so engaged, to create a new & coherent poetics
for our time.’ (Rothenberg, 1981: 3) Poetics is thus both for the primary
practitioner and for the wider poetry community.
Using
‘network theory’, gleaned from Caroline Levine’s 2015 book Forms which I’ve
only recently discovered, we might say Twentieth Century Blues joins
those networks that ‘are the forms that rupture or defy enclosed totalities and
allow us to understand border-crossing circulations and transmissions.’ (Levine
2015: 117). I hope so (and it was a shame such theory, like the internet,
wasn’t in existence when I conceived of the project.) ‘Networks are,’ Levine
writes, ‘capable of unending expansion: once there is a link between two nodes,
there is a network, and it can grow simply by linking to new nodes. Thus the
network form affords a certain infinite extensiveness. But, in practice, many
networks are limited,’ in the case of Twentieth Century Blues by the
millennium; the work was time-based and scheduled for completion or abandonment
at the end of the century, with ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ as a late staging
post towards that. In terms of network theory, The End of the Twentieth Century
is a node that pulls all the other strands together, through it, a great knotty
not-worky flow! Levine puts it thus: ‘a few important nodes are simultaneously part
of many large clusters.’ (Levine 2015: 126) All the strands pass through this
node but I won’t list all the titles when I perform it. While taking a
retrospective line, a taking-stock, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ is also –
as poetics should be – speculative and anticipatory, and I consider some
possible avenues of advance beyond the prescribed end of the project, the
end of the century, my own personal poems for the Millennium.
It
is no wonder that the anthology of that name Poems for the Millennium,
edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, particularly the second volume,
which I was then adapting for teaching, comes sharply into focus as an
education of my writing desires. I mention it as ‘a prospectus for reading’ at
one point. And it was – although I still haven’t followed all of its prospects.
Named
after a monumental sculpture of Joesph Beuys, ‘The End of the Twentieth
Century’ is a hybrid poem, lineated prose, an essay, a rant, a series of bad
jokes, a confession, a book review even, a string of allusions and quotations, a
poetics piece and an inescapable node of the networked project. This ‘text for
readers and writers’ as I call it, was written on the 1st May 1999 and read at
the English Research Day at Edge Hill University the following month. Now it
arrives at Glasgow, 25 years after composition, but still capable of generating
a few sparks, I hope. As Rothenberg himself says, ‘The main activity of my
poetics has involved … acts of presentation: assemblage & performance &
translation’. (Rothenberg 3). Certainly, in my case, in this text, the first
two of those, with a touch of the third.
I can’t perform the whole piece; we
join it at page 12 of its 19 pages…
(And I read, 'performed' would be a better word, the last pages of 'The End of the Twentieth Century', the full text of which may be found in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, which is still in print and available from Salt books (through its website, here: Complete Twentieth Century Blues, Robert Sheppard – Salt .)
NOTE: My 'paper', may be read in full here: Looking Back at
‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and
beyond the millennium | English Studies in Latin America: A Journal of Cultural
and Literary Criticism, from the online pages of English Studies of Latin
America, January 2026.
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