The Necessity of Poetics - out now!

 The Necessity of Poetics is now available: https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-The-Necessity-of-Poetics-p661888958

 

The Necessity of Poetics marks the moves I have made as a poet-critic around the notion of poetics in general, and the poetics of linguistically innovative poetry in particular, and my own poetics as an outcome of those. It traces those moves, but I also offer them to fellow poets, critics, and even, given my age, to literary historians. It incites and ignites and invites readers to identify poetics, to read poetics (as poetics, not as an impoverished literary criticism), to share poetics and, where appropriate, for readers who are also writers, to create poetics of their own. The book contains a definitive version of my well-known essay ‘The Necessity of Poetics’.

Also contained here is my experimental essay on poetic rhythm. Addressing the contemporary lack of discussion of the subject, ‘Pulse’ presents a new way of conceiving of metrical and non-metrical shape, rhythm as a form of consciousness, bringing together suggestive theory and the experiences of poets themselves. Abruptly changing gear from critic to poet, via poetics, I like to think that my poetic thinking is alive to the notion that poetic form is cognitive, that form knows something.

There are insights into the poetry and poetics of Christopher Middleton, Adrian Clarke, Pierre Joris, Maggie O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, Lee Harwood, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. I also dig into the processes of my own poems to come up with generalized conclusions about poetics and poesis, experimenting with new modes of creative-critical writing, as a practitioner and pedagogue of Creative Writing, in quite personal practice-led research. From a ‘radio-talk with no station to transmit it’ about radio as an analogy for poetry, to an ‘undelivered talk’ on photographic ekphrasis; from recent takes on my recent ‘English Strain’ sonnet project (whose third part is published simultaneously with this volume) to rare documents that take the reader back to the emerging linguistically innovative practices of the late 1980s, this volume presents a relentless and repeated advocacy for poetics as a genuine mode of thinking and writing. And poetics as an object of study in its own right.

 

CONTENTS (with three online samplers)

 

Introduction: Gathering from the Past

 

ONE

 

Poetics in Anticipation: Shifting an Imaginary, towards British Standards (recent aphoristic poetics)

Pulse: All a Rhythm (Sampler One: part of this unusual ‘treatise on metre’ may be read here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard)

The Formal Splinter (a condensed one page statement on cognition and ‘the meaning of form’, as in my critical book of that title)

A Voice Smears Across the Screen: Material Engagement with Form, Forms and Forming (a more discursive take on the meaning of form as cognition)

Hanging Out Inside Sonnets: A Text and Commentary (personal piece about my obsession with the sonnet frame)

‘Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro’: A derivative dérive into/out of Petrarch’s Sonnet 3 (a research as practice piece on my 14 versions of ‘Sonnet 3’ that set off the ‘English Strain’ sonnet project)

 

TWO

 

The Necessity of Poetics (my often-cited piece on the nature of poetics, with its list of definitions)

Speaking Differently: Poetics in the Twenty-first Century: Pierre Joris and Adrian Clarke, with reference to the poetics of Maggie O’Sullivan (a conventional critical essay on different writers' poetics)

Poetics as Conjecture and Provocation: an inaugural lecture delivered on 13^th March 2007 at Edge Hill University (which starts as history, proceeds as lecture, demonstrates poetics (mine and Christopher Middleton’s), and ends as a poetry reading)

Critical Tuning: Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing (a kind of radio talk)

Ekphrasis and Anti-Ekphrasis: Undelivered Talk for the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, for the Ideas Lab on Writing and Photography (a short talk I never delivered)

MATERIALS + PROCEDURE: an account of the writing of ‘The Given’ (Sampler 2: this short piece may be read here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2010/07/robert-sheppard-writing-given.html )

 

THREE 

 

Took Chances in London Traffic (a memoir of the London poetry scene of the 1980s, which contextualises the older pieces that follow, in a sort of reverse chronological order)

Negative Definitions: Talk for the SubVoicive Colloquium, London 1997

Linking the Unlinkable: ‘Why Do You Do What You Do?’ (The title answers the question in the subtitle)

Working the Work: notes towards and beyond Internal Exile (poetics)

Incite! and Ignite!: No one listens to poetry: SubVoicive Colloquium, 20^th July 1991, University of London (a cautionary examination of linguistically innovative poetry)

net/(k)not-//work(s) (a 1992 booklet of short pieces with interpollations)

                        Producing Now

                        Part One:

                        Poetic Sequencing and the New: Twentieth Century Blues (the poetics of that work)

                        Part Two:

                    New British Poetry in the Eighties (a brief survey from when Pages actually had pages!)

                        Re-Working the Work: Pausing for Breath (poetics)

                       Codes and Diodes are both Odes (homage to Bob Cobbing, poem as poetics)

                    Appendix: The Education of Desire (Sampler Three: this early pedagogic piece may be read here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/12/robert-sheppard-far-language-education.html )

 

You can’t live without all these ideas, can you?

Here are reviews of the book: Pages: Reviews of The Necessity of Poetics

Simultaneously, Shearsman is publishing my book of poems British Standards. See Pages: British Standards published by Shearsman - out now (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) 

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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  X: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / X; latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

My poetics piece 'My Own Crisis' is published by Futch

As anybody who knows anything about my work knows, I am keen on the writerly discourse of poetics. This has been the subject of my academic work (see, e.g., ‘Poetics and the Manifesto’, comparing the poetics of Pierre Joris and Adrian Clarke, here: Poetics and the manifesto | Jacket2), an important part of my creative writing pedagogy (see, e.g., my manifold links that I have provided students with, via this Pages post: Pages: SHOP TALK (TO) POETICS: about the forms of writing - presentation to MA Creative Writing, Edge Hill University (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)), and it is an integral part of my thinking as a writer. On occasions, I write poetics for myself and others (while keeping a more fragmentary poetics journal going to capture practical poetics alongside more abstract, conjectural and probing poetics). 

Probably the last big piece was the poetics behind the third part of my ‘English Strain’ project, British Standards. It could also be regarded as a ‘covid’ poetics, too. That piece may be read online here, Shifting an Imaginary: Poetics in Anticipation – New Defences of Poetry (nclacommunity.org).

Before that I developed the associational paragraph style I used for that piece in ‘Pulse’, a treatise on poetic rhythm that may be read, in part, here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard. It was produced by a strange method. The first draft was made by ‘writing-through’ Tiger C. Roholt’s Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014, between August 2016-February 2017. Throughout this process, contingency is its rhythm, a pulse that matches the varieties of montage, de-montage, that I attempt in my own practice, with interruption as structure, with transformation and transposition, formal resistance, creative linkage, ‘imperfect fit’, near-perfect fit, all kinds of multi-form unfinish.

So, it moved between creative prose and critical writing (say the ‘straight’ critical writing of The Meaning of Form. See here for that tome: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html ). It’s the sort of writing called Creative-Critical writing these days.  (There's a rougher piece that follows on from 'Pulse' here, which I notice not a lot of people have accessed: Pages: Re:Pulse – on pulse and Richard Andrews’ A Prosody of Free Verse: Explorations in Rhythm (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)) 

My most recent piece (I will get round to it) perhaps moves between politics and poetics in a way that surprised me. I sought – but didn’t complete – a poetics writing-through of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, a book I felt drawn to for its brevity, its cultural focus and (since Fisher, like me, had moved from teaching in Further to Higher Education) for its feeding off of that (shared) pedagogic experience.

'My Own Crisis' eschewed the paragraph units of the previous pieces, and I went for a more impacted discourse, adding difficulty to the thinking. But then difficulty, or people’s difficulty with difficulty, is part of the thematics.

Image by Patricia Farrell to accompany the piece. One of her recent paintings. (See Patricia Farrell - Home (weebly.com) )

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I’m very glad that the good folks at FUTCH (a journal much committed to that ‘creative-critical’ hybrid About | Futch Press) saw fit to publish this piece. And it may be read whole here, so I won’t say any more about it.

MY OWN CRISIS:  https://www.futchpress.info/post/my-own-crisis

Re-reading an intermediate set of notes (partly poetics, partly critical thinking) before posting this post, I realised that they not only fed into 'My Own Crisis', the post actually refers to writing it (due to the gap between writing the notes and typing them up for posting. Inconclusive as they are, they might be of interest; I need to return to them, I know, as I feel critical, creative and poetics muscles flexing; See here: Pages: From a Poetics Journal 2023: notes on two critical volumes: Betteridge and Kaufmann (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I think I'll take my winterval break from blogging for a few weeks. 

 

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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  (don’t use the Edge Hill email); website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter (or X): Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

 

Cliff Yates at 70 : my parts in this celebration of his poetry and poetics (links to it)

It doesn’t seem possible that Cliff Yates is 70! All that tiggerish classroom energy, all that boundless enthusiasm for the moment of poetry, all that unquenchable curiosity for life, seem so much the possession of youth that I have to pause and count the years.

Alan Baker and Andrew Taylor have now edited this tribute to him, CLIFF YATES @ 70, (see their preface here: Preface | Cliff Yates @ 70 (cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com)

with many poets offering their praise and their best wishes, from Poetry and Poetics stalwarts from Edge Hill, like Andrew himself, to Scott Thurston, Matt Fallaize and Angela Keaton, through to the big wide world poets, like Nick Power, Matt Welton and Kelvin Corcoran, and other names, like Pam Thompson that are new to me. Even his children are here, both writers in their own rights. A lot of the poems address Cliff directly, which seems right. A lot of us have attempted to write what Ian McMillan, in his tribute, calls a ‘Yatesy’ poem. There's also a video of Cliff reading (that wasn't there when I first blogged this!) Have a look at the tributes here: https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/

 

I was asked to contribute and I produced one of my birthday ‘Burnt Journal’ poems for him, one which I feel pretty pleased with: https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/2022/12/robert-sheppard.html

I was also asked to write an introduction, which I did. I was pretty pleased with that too. I think I got it right (I won’t repeat my assessment of Cliff’s work, because you may read that here: 

https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/2023/01/introduction-by-robert-sheppard_13.html

Introduction by Robert Sheppard | Cliff Yates @ 70 (cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com)

(These links keep changing as more posts are added, so if they don't work, use the one to the site : https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/

Cliff was one of the first poetry people I met when Patricia and I moved up to the North West in 1996 (oh yes, she’s here too, or at least I think she is, she's written Cliff a poem as though she were a Bulgarian), and I had seen some of his poems in magazines. Little was I to know that he would become one of the important members of the original Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge Hill University, which sounds a dull body, but we gave readings (Tate Gallery no less) and made a CD and generally helped each other as writers to become more like themselves.

Of course, Cliff was also a famous teacher of poetry well before I met him. Read about that here:

A few choice words from the guru | English and creative writing | The Guardian

Keep up with Cliff’s news. There’s a new Selected and New Poems on the way, for starters! :  Cliff Yates – poet & tutor (wordpress.com)

He also appears on this blog a few times too, with regards to the PPRG here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/11/going-privategoing-privateafterword-to.html

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/05/introduction-to-fifth-series-edge-hill.html

And with regard to his own poetry and poetics:

 https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-cliff-yates.html

Pages: 25 Edge Hill Poets: Cliff Yates (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 He even reviewed my The Poetry of Saying

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/06/cliff-yates-poetry-of-saying.html

AND he provided me with the word ‘provocation’ to focus my thoughts about writerly poetics, circa 2007.

Cliff and I are definitely due another meeting in Birmingham soon I hope.

I wrote that sentence this morning. This afternoon I came back from a walk to find an answerphone message for Patricia and me. From Cliff! He says he wants to say thanks and he wants to ‘catch up’. Yes, indeed, as Sy Oliver used to sing.

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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. Or you can phone me, like Cliff did.