Readings this Autumn (set lists and comments)
During this autumn I have had, to my delight, six readings to perform, some full readings, others short contributions to larger events. (There were some earlier in the year too, bucking the post-Covid trend of fewer reading opportunities, though two of them were online, as was one earlier this year.) They are all quite different, with different work read, often from different books, or from no books (yet)! Sometimes with, or alongside Patricia Farrell, sometimes not.
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1. Liverpool 24th October 2024: for Liverpool Poetry Space hosted by The Open Eye Gallery (on the dockside).
I read with Mandy Coe (I don't know how I haven't met her before) and Maria Isakova-Bennett (who I have seen develop as a poet over the the last decade into a fine writer who always keeps the analogy of her visual art practice to the fore). Eleanor Rees was ill, unfortunately. So we had to add an extra 5 minutes to our readings.
I decided to launch British Standards (the first of two launches) and I read a bunch of Wordsworth 'transpositions', including this one:
. Then my version of Southey's 'Poem on the Slave Trade', which led, the slavery theme continuing, onto my versions of Mary Robinson, a few verses of 'Tabitha and Thunderer' (there was to be more of her at my November 12th London reading, see below); a bunch of John Clare; and the final final poem of the book, 'After Shelley' as I called it, slightly shortening its title.
This seemed to go down well. Lots of laughter I was informed by some friends in the sizeable audience. However, the set was designed for sudden swings of mood, so that we were suddenly thinking about slavery or Covid deaths amid the capering of Bo, as the hubris of Brexit hit the mismanagement of public health during the Pandemic.
The Cock Tavern, 23 Phoenix Rd, London NW1
Friday night, it was great to see so many old friends and comrades of our London days, all still thrusting and vital. Here's a brief itinerary of the evening, mainly launches.
Part One
Bob Cobbing/Robert Sheppard, Collaborations (Veer/Writers Forum): performed by Patricia Farrell and me. We read 'Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops', my 2001 collaboration with Cobbing. Thanks to Patricia for all the rehearsing and hoarse throats!
Karen MacCormack, Quaquaversal (Veer): a fascinating unwriting of an earlier text into non-existent words, which were then discovered (mostly) to mean something in other languages.
Steve McCaffery, Alice through the Working Class (Blazevox) (What a great title!) A wonderful or outwonderlandish version of Alice.
Ulli Freer, Transition Pulse (Veer): Ulli pulsed this way through this new text, somewhat bucolic in places, excellent as ever.
Although my Collaborations with Bob Cobbing was published by Veer in 2021, there wasn’t a launch (Covid, again) of this splendid box of pamphlets, reprints of Codes and Diodes and Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops from 1991 and 2001, respectively. On the box: Pages: COLLABORATIONS (Bob Cobbing - Robert Sheppard) published in a box by Veer - out now. There is an earlier performance on video here (somewhere in this Cobbing tribute: OR 35 | Bob Cobbing: a celebration | Videos |
Here's a very short video of me demonstrating how the 'box' of Collaborations is constituted. (The new Third ABC of Sound is similarly in a box.)
I read one part of my finely-designed Aquifer volume, Doubly Stolen Fire, introducing 'Malcolm Lowry's Land' with these words: ‘My book, Doubly Stolen Fire, which I’m so pleased Lyndon has published, is an exploration of various modes of authorship: actual and fictional. The last part, though, collects my contributions to the Liverpool celebrations of the Merseyside born author of Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry, [like this one 2024: Pages: The Lowry Lounge 2024 - an account and links] and I’m going to read most of one of these. It tracks a 1979 notebook which itself tracks my visit to Lowry’s grave in Sussex. [Holds it up]. It mimics Lowry’s own writerly methods as it re-narrates the notes for a long-abandoned poem.’
Details of the whole book: Pages: Reviews of my book DOUBLY STOLEN FIRE (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
This Zoom reading was of new and forthcoming collections by Sarah Crewe, Mélisande Fitzsimons, Allen Fisher as well as myself. More info at: Glasfryn Project. It was good to hear the other readers, and I had Sarah's book to hand, to follow her reading.
This reading took place at the Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH, hosted by Tony Frazer, publisher of Shearsman Books. The building has a painting of the religious sage painted by P. Louthenburg (the subject of one of Mary Robinson's finer earlier poems, and the designer of 'light shows' from when she was an actor). I noticed too late to tell the audience!
I read from British Standards but pointed to The Necessity of Poetics AND to my edition of the Selected Poems of Mary Robinson.
My notes and set list
I’m very greedy – but very grateful (to Tony) for Shearsman publishing three books this year. I will only read from one of them, but I’ll sketch links between them. The Necessity of Poetics, which collects various works on, of, about and around ‘poetics’ as a speculative and anticipatory writerly discourse, also contains a treatise on poetic rhythm, an inaugural lecture, notes on the meaning of form, and some ancient documents which stretch back to the 1980s and 90s, but it comes up to date with a couple of pieces on the poetics of the book I will be reading from, British Standards.
British Standards, book three of ‘The English Strain’ project, was completed in September 2022. Brexit was originally the continuing theme of the project, but in early 2020 the Pandemic intervened to alter its trajectory, although the government's enthusiasm for the former contributed to its tardiness in the face of the latter, as celebratory hubris collided with the failure of Johnson’s government (he’s called Bo in my poems) to take sensible public health measures. Formally speaking, these are transpositions of sonnets of the Romantic period (Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, but also Mary Robinson and Hartley Coleridge, and others, as you’ll hear), and I’m paying faithless homage to it.
I read three 'Wordsworth' poems. This one below (shown here from the pages of Shearsman magazine), and on video.
Then 'O Friend I know not which way I must look'. (See the other video above for a reading of it.) Followed by 'Vanguard of Liberty, Ye Men of Kent.'
Then a shift to Robert Southey and his 'Poem on the Slave Trade'.
After that, I said (more or less):
The third book launching today is my edition of the poems of Mary Robinson, which might seem a surprising departure for me, until it’s realised that I first came to her work through writing a transposition of her 1796 sonnet sequence ‘Sappho and Phaon’, an extraordinary work that (even at the time) was read as analogical of her relationship with Banastre Tarleton, Liverpool slaver referenced in the street name of the previous poem. I call them Tabitha and Thunderer, but Thunderer seems to become Boris Johnson at several points. Mary called herself ‘The English Sappho’ on occasions. My sequence is a corona, 14 sonnets, with a volta at which I’ll pause, to change the hapless narrative, to allow her, in Brexit-speak, to ‘take back control’. Sappho is hetereosexual in Ovid’s version of her life that Mary followed, though she has a troupe of women following her: they become the weather girls, registry girls and Mamas of this poem, written just after the first lockdown, summer 2020. Here is a video of me reading one of the sonnet-verses, the one which refers to Mary-Tabitha-Sappho having read Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' long before it was published.I finished with one of the 'final' final poems to the book: 'After Shelley, After Sheppard, which I wrote about when I wrote it, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A final final poem for British Standards! With pictures of some of the poem's weird contents.
Details of all three books: Pages: British Standards published by Shearsman - out now (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
5. Patricia and I had a very small part in From the Grooves of Vinyl at the Bluecoat on Saturday 16th November 2024 (Nobody said, but 15th November was Phil's birthday!)
As a tribute to Philip Jeck who died in 2022, the Bluecoat presented an evening of film and performance in celebration of the life and work of this remarkable composer and artist who wrought exquisite sounds from the worn grooves of old records. [I'm quoting the copy for the evening, and amending it.] An internationally renowned pioneer of experimental ‘turntablism’, he brought old record players and vinyl together with electronic effects to create expansive sonic landscapes.
Throughout his career Philip worked with dance and theatre makers, visual artists and musicians and composers across the musical spectrum and toured internationally. He was also a lover of poetry (he came to a lot of the readings I organised or gave.) Over three decades, his work was released and promoted by the experimental electronic music label, Touch.
Philip also had a long association with the Bluecoat and this special tribute included a screening of an excellent film by Gina Czarnecki of him performing in the intimate surroundings of a friend’s kitchen. (This was fascinating, not least of all because I was there, and have my own memories of that performance.)
There was also the launch of a double CD tribute to Philip collated by Touch, and performances from experimental composers Chandra Shukla (US), excellent sitar and electronics work, Benjamin Duvall and Andrew Hunt (Liverpool), who (Ben told me) have a complete album of work improvised with Phil in preparation. (They are half of the band Ex-Easter Island Head. Poets Patricia Farrell and Robert Sheppard briefly read (although Patricia ‘appeared’ via tape). The bar was open till 11pm, with a disco-banger DJ set from Bryan Biggs (and then off with Bryan to the Grapes for a last two).
Click here for further information on Touch, its work with Philip and his releases.
This was a moving evening, particularly when Bryan and Mary Prestidge introduced the event, and later, when Jon Wozencroft and Mike Harding from Touch introduced the new album (which I have bought and am much looking forward to). The music was inspiring, whether on film, tape or live.
Patricia’s poem was written especially for the event, and was untitled.
I introduced my piece, ‘Spectres of Breath’ with something like these words:
‘I’m going to read a text I wrote for Phil’s birthday in 2012. It comes out of a conversation we had about writing about music, music journalism in particular. About that time I was subscribing to The Wire – and I was particularly taken by the short reviews which tried to describe the nature and quality of certain musics in very few words. Partly mimicking this facility, possibly purloining the odd phrase here and there, and condensing descriptions and coining the odd neologism, I proceeded to compose a compilation album in words. It is not – even in the passage that mentions ‘styluses scraped’ – an attempt to describe Phil’s own music. After all it is a ‘compilation’, though the imaginary musicians of this imagined music are unnamed. As we reach side B (how could this not be a vinyl record?) the descriptions become more synaesthetic, relating to more senses than sound. I’m not being entirely serious, which is fitting since Phil was the funniest man I’ve ever known, as well as a musical genius.’
It seemed to go down well, particularly with the two guys from Touch, for whom such language is a constant torture! The poem may be read here, after my memoir of Philip: Pages:
Philip Jeck 2022. When I said ‘genius’ (Bryan
also used the word) I mean ‘genius’.
6: 2nd December : Online Reading by Paul Robert Mullen with Guests:
a landmark celebration of Paul Robert Mullen’s work as we launch it’s all come down to this, a powerful retrospective spanning 25 years of poetry and prose from one of contemporary and independent literature’s most distinctive voices. This special online event will bring together readers, writers, and fans for an unforgettable evening of live readings, conversation, and community.
Hosted by: Alan Parry, Editor-in-Chief, The Broken Spine
- Readings by Paul Robert Mullen: Experience selected works from it’s all come down to this as Paul takes us through his journey from 1999 to 2024, offering insights and reflections on his evolution as a poet. This he did through short poems and a long extract from a long poem 'Vinyl Redux'.
- Open Mic with Special Guests: specially invited readers offered an intimate chance to hear voices that resonate with Paul’s own approach to life and poetry. In my case, I decided (as I did when I last read 'with' Paul, pre-Covid, see here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Broken Spine reading, Southport (set list)) to read poems about music (possibly amassing towards a collection), and (I'm certain) influenced by his 'Vinyl Redux'. I read a few sections from 'Tone Poem: Starlight and Stardust', the sections relating to recent albums by Fred Hirsch, James Brandon Lewis, Brad Mehldau, Donny McCaslin, Shakti, and Miho Hazama's m_unit.
A fine ending to a mini-tour!
Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com NEW, note: follow me on Bluesky not on X , at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social
