Remembering The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World 3rd December 1994

Saturday 3^rd December 1994: The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World

It’s 30 years ago today that Patricia and I (with Stephen advertised as ‘domestic ambient noise’) held The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World at our tiny house in Lessingham Ave in Tooting. We were famed for holding ridiculously large parties in this confined space (on one occasion the patio doors burst), but in 1994 we wanted to hold a lengthy poetry reading as the focus for the party. The South Bank that year were holding what they were pleased to call The Biggest Poetry Festival in the World. Unable to compete, we decided to go the other way. Stephen drew a version of the big festival image for our image. Patricia silk-screened t-shirts and this remains the only ‘record’ of the event. (See below.) Nobody was photographed; nothing was audio or video recorded. We also assembled a booklet from pages provided by (most) of the participants (cover again being Stephen’s image in black and white). Copies of that are probably floating around. (I have one at least.)

Although the centrepoint of the festival was the Cobbing-Upton performance to end it, it is worth recalling and recording all the poets who read (note the paucity of women readers, typical of the era). My diary entry reads:

 ‘

The event was a great success, I feel, too much so: I fear there have been smaller.

Reading. Part 1: Me (reading The Lores book one), Harry Gilonis, Lawrence Upton, John Seed, speedy Miles Champion, Patricia Farrell, John Cayley, A.W. Kindness.

Part 2: Bob Cobbing, Johan DeWit, John Welch, Scott Thurston, Martha Kapos, Ian Robinson, Robert Vas Dias, Out to Lunch (Ben Watson).

Part 3: Gavin Selerie, , Robert Hampson, Ken Edwards, Adrian Clarke, Simon Smith, Ulli Freer, and – Lawrence Upton and Bob Cobbing, with the unforgettable mid-performance (anti)dedication, ‘This is for Andrew Duncan!’ who was there. (He’d written something negative about Bob.)

Went on until [w, x, y, z, and an unknown lady] were thrown out.

A good time was had by all, or most, I hope and suspect.

’

The Upton/Cobbing piece took up the warning about ‘domestic ambient noise’ (I think Stephen did try to MC the event at one point!) as the title of their collaboration, their first for some years. They'd fallen out and I forced them to talk to one another at a Writers Forum workshop. (I sent Bob upstairs where I knew Lawrence was alone - or the other way round, I can't remember - and when we all re-ascended after a refuelling break, they were chatting away!) Nobody knew at this point that this collaborative project would extend to 300 booklets! Commonly known later as DAN, it's one of the wonders of concrete and sound poetry.

‘The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World’, by the way, is slated to be the final line of my new work on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

(This is an image of two houses in Lessingham Avenue, possibly ours the one on the left.) 

Completely coincidentally the anthology Arcadian Rustbelt edited by Andrew Duncan and John Goodby has been published, and I will post about it when the book is on the publisher's website (Waterloo Press). (But until then check out the blog of that name on my Blogroll.) In response to my contributor's copies, I wrote to the editors something which is relevant to this post: 'I have a post coming up about the Smallest Poetry In the World (which Andrew, you attended). Such a gesture of rejection (the South Bank was holding the BIGGEST at the time) now seems of a piece with your chronology: December 3rd 1994 being pretty much the end of the 'period' of the book [1980-1994!] (Some of the contributors read.) It also coincides with my The Necessity of Poetics, which in its third part, reprints a number of hidden 'poetics pieces' (not critical texts) from the period (and a little after).' (On The Necessity see here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now!)

Here are some internal links to posts that contain references to some of the participants in the Festival. Presence or absence doesn’t constitute a value judgement, simply a check on what’s posted.

Part 1: Me (reading The Lores from Twentieth Century Blues) Pages: Robert Sheppard: thirty years since Twentieth Century Blues was begun, 20 since it ended, and future plans), Harry Gilonis, Pages: Ten Years of Pages: The Best Bits Lawrence Upton, Pages: Robert Sheppard: in memoriam Lawrence Upton John Seed, Pages: Robert Sheppard: Punctum, Punctuation and the Poetics of Space in John Seed’s Objectivism, Patricia Farrell: Pages: Patricia Farrell: Links to some visual work, John Cayley (right at the end:) Pages: Robert Sheppard: A History of the Other (final installment).

Part 2: Bob Cobbing, Pages: Robert Sheppard: My Bob Cobbing 'Archive',  Scott Thurston Pages: Scott Thurston's Inaugural Lecture: KINEPOETICS March 2024 (video + my introduction), Robert Vas Dias, Pages: Robert Sheppard: article in CLASP: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (my part in its downfall).

Part 3: Gavin Selerie, Pages: Remembering Gavin Selerie and his laugh, Robert Hampson, Pages: Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Robert Hampson, Adrian Clarke Pages: Robert Sheppard: My review of Adrian Clarke's Austerity Measures on Stride plus further notes, thoughts and links, Ulli Freer Pages: Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Adhesive Hymns (Ulli Freer) , and – Lawrence Upton and Bob Cobbing’s Domestic Ambient Noise: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Bob Cobbing: Two Sequences.  

This post, also on John Seed, has a little about Lessingham Avenue and John’s poem written after another of our famous parties: Pages: Robert Sheppard: John Seed: England’s derelict archive circa 1990. At the end of the post.  

Online reading for the Runnymede International Literature Festival (set list)

Runnymede International Literature Festival 13–22 March 2024

This year’s festival began with an online event curated by Robert Hampson, with readings by Cat Chong, and the Liverpool-based poets  Sarah Crewe and Robert Sheppard on Wednesday 13 March.

I enjoyed reading, and enjoyed Cat's and Sarah's reading, but I would have enjoyed a live reading more, and missed people, books and drinks - but no matter. Here's some notes I made for my bit of the reading.

I have been working on transpositions of canonical English sonnets for some years (I’ve finished now) and they have been published as The English Strain (See here: Robert Sheppard - The English Strain (shearsman.com) and Bad Idea. A third volume of versions of Romantic sonnets (see here: Pages: ‘An overdub of The Dancing Girl by Letitia Elizabeth Landon’ from British Standards is published online in The Nest issue of A) Glimpse) Of) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) will be published by Shearsman (that's breaking news by the way), but I going to read from the middle book BAD Idea where I took Michael Drayton’s 1619 sonnet sequence Idea (Idea is the ideal woman of the sequence) and used it to pay homage to Drayton, but also to tell the parliamentary story of brexit. Here’s Drayton’s most famous sonnet undone and redone by me! Bo is Johnson and The Cum is Cummings… 

I then read 'Since there’s no help…'

As you can hear (I continued) I was in danger of running out of poems, so I added a coda. Written in a different mode, but now spoken by Idea herself, 'Idea’s Mirror' utilizes some of the sonnets Drayton dumped along his way to his final version. There’s 14 of them, written around and during the 2019 election, 'Idea’s Mirror' (These are both from Bad Idea which I wrote about here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: links to all SIX Bad Idea poems (Drayton versions) on Stride (with Drayton's originals) and you may buy here: 'Bad Idea' by Robert Sheppard (102 pages) | Knives Forks and Spo (knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk))

 

 

Now for more recent work, I said. This is a poem I wrote in November: I read 'Pretend-sleep'.

Here’s another short one, a response to a wartime photograph by Lee Miller. Both photograph and poem are called ‘Revenge on Culture’.

Staying with photographs: this long poem was published in The Long Poem Magazine and is based on the photographs that Tricia Porter took of ‘the area’ called then Liverpool 8. I’ve since been in touch with Tricia Porter and was interested that when the photos were originally exhibited, they were accompanied by poetic prose texts (which she sent me). I saw them in an exhibition at the Bluecoat. And I’ve used the catalogue… 

I write about this piece in some detail, with one of the photos, here: Pages: My poem THE AREA is published in The Long Poem Magazine number 30 (background and links) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I'm going to finish with something different. I’m assembling poems about music and this is a new one. It came out of the experience of having radiotherapy to the accompaniment of a music radio station. This piece of music was a surprise! I read the poem 'Radio Therapy' (two words, I emphasised, since the audience could not see the text.)

*

The rest of the festival featured poets from Royal Holloway’s Poetic Practice programme and Poetics Research Centre and themes related to the Words from the Wild exhibition. 

There were also two in-person events at Royal Holloway’s Egham campus, curated by Caroline Harris and Briony Hughes . An evening of poetry film and sound art on Monday 18 March in the Event Space (next to the Exhibition Gallery in the Davison Building) featured premieres from Susie Campbell and Hen Campbell and Tanicia Pratt, sound from Rowan Evans and Will Montgomery, plus Zakia Carpenter-Hall and Hannah Harding.  

 

On Friday 22 March, there were readings in the exhibition itself, linked to its different sections, including by Camilla Nelson and Caroline Harris. That would look to be the photograph above.

 

Robert Sheppard: Essay included in the NEW Allen Fisher Companion

The Allen Fisher Companion is out. Look here, or navigate the Shearsman site. 

This long-awaited collection of essays, edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek, gives a chance for Allen Fisher’s many admirers to study his work (both literary and visual) in depth with a group of experts. Contributors include Clive Bush, cris cheek, Collum Hazell, Steven Hitchins, Pierre Joris (twice), Paige Mitchell, Will Montgomery, Redell Olsen, William Rowe, Scott Thurston, Shamoon Zamir, Karen Mac Cormack, Marjorie Welish, Matt Hart and Rob Holloway. 

There is an online review of the book, by Simon Collings, on Tears in the Fence here. It quotes a pertinent remark of mine on Fisher's method. 

And me. My contribution is my essay ‘Apocalypse Then’, referring to the politics of the late 1970s, and subtitled ‘Between Place and Gravity', to suggest that this is an interesting way to contextualise Allen Fisher’s two major long poems, and sub-subtitled, ‘Technique and Technology’ to gesture towards my focus up his writing methods and results, and upon one of the themes of the work by Fisher that I treat: The Apocalyptic Sonnets (written in 1978 but now visible in part in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets).

The book looks great, and I look forward to reading it. I have written about Fisher in most of my book-length studies of poetry, from The Poetry of Saying to The Meaning of Form, as well as in a number of essays, and reviews, including this one. It may also be read in my collection of essays, When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, providing a different context. Also from Shearsman: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2011/02/two-new-books.html
Or here.

I write about Allen Fisher generally here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/11/allen-fisher-and-robert-sheppard.html


I write about later work, Proposals, here, in preparation for part of The Meaning of Form:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/11/proposals-by-allen-fisher.html


and about his poetics, Necessary Business here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2013/12/charles-bernstein-allen-fisher-and.html


For a similar sort of book, see The Robert Sheppard Companion, from Shearman:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-robert-sheppard-companion-ed-byrne.html

Thoughts on Collaboration 5: Literary Collaboration part two

Note: all posts in this 'Collaboration' strand may be accessed via this link to the hubpost here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html

Steven (SJ) Fowler at Dragon Hall

The Enemies Project was started in 2010 by the poet and events curator S J Fowler. He is the second Mr Collaboration. He has organised over 600 events across Britain, and beyond, and, has according to the project’s website, involved over a 1000 poets, writers and artists. ( https://www.theenemiesproject.com/ accessed 20^th January 2020). Typically events have involved the pairing of poets (and others). They will have had a limited time to prepare their performance, usually working over email to agree a text. The understanding is that the work is especially written for the event, or is, at least, recent. There has been some funding to commission a few of the performances, particularly on regional tours. Some poets (SJ Fowler himself and Tom Jenks, for example) have collaborated regularly; others, say Scott Thurston and Simona Nastac did not meet until the evening of the performance (Manchester 2019), although they did (unusually) have time for a rehearsal and sound-check. Often there is less preparation. The format is actually quite a standard cabaret arrangement; each act performs for less than 10 minutes. There have been tours of particular areas (the South West, the North West and Wales; I was at some of the last two), other ‘Camarade’ events, as they are also sometimes called, often at the Rich Mix arts venue in East London, and even a student ‘Camarade’, involving pairs of Creative Writing students from different centres, from James Byrne’s Edge Hill University to Fowler’s own Kingston University. The European (and Nordic) Poetry Festival follows the same format, but involves pairings of British and European (or Nordic) poets. Readers have included well known figures such as Ian McMillan and Iain Sinclair, as well as emerging poets, such as Joanne Ashcroft or Jazmine Linklater, with a tendency towards the innovative or experimental end of British poetry. The performers tend to be young, with the odd old bastard (me!) thrown in for good measure (and so I have to struggle on my ruined feet to mount the stage). Outside London, venues range from events halls (such as the Anthony Burgess Centre in Manchester or Dragon Hall in Norwich) to converted pie factories in Leeds, from traditional outstairs rooms of English pubs to modern Welsh cafes.  The work that results (and this is where my EUOIA work is different, as I shall show in the next post) is often ephemeral, sometimes does not get collected in subsequent volumes, although SJ Fowler himself has assembled two volumes of his collaboratively-written texts for the page. (As I write, the second volume has not arrived yet.) All performances are vidoed and catalogued on the website. Of course, elements of performance may occur: readers in the crowd, the use of props (an orange squeezed to smithereens), projected video on screen, etc.



I have been very pleased to be involved with these events (thanks Steven!) and I’d like to describe all of them (excluding for a moment my fictional poet work, the EUOIA, which had its showings (and origins) at some of these Camarades!)



Working very fast, Jeff Hilson and I wrote ‘Honda Hands’ for the 2012 Rich Mix Collaboration. The performance may be seen and heard here. I really enjoyed this one and we still need to publish the text whole. Part of it appeared in an edition of Vlak but some lines (or verses, even) were missing. Later, I would collaborate again with Jeff. In both cases, we wrote a certain number of lines each. The necessity of performance means that the division of labour was visible. It was almost as though a collaborative text was turned back into a dialogue (a fact worth pondering in the work of others, for my essay).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFnA5PasOOs


With Robert Hampson I wrote Liverpool Hugs and Kisses (published in 2015). See here for details and video. Unfortunately, I was ill so I wasn’t able to read it at the Rich Mix. That's Chris Gutkind being me. This is a pamphlet (still in print) of separate poems about my adopted, and Robert’s familial, home city. Out of my work in it, I only really like the poem about Ray Charles playing the London Road Odeon in 1964. (I wasn’t there!).

I was really honoured to be paired with Ian McMillan. (We have more than a poetry world connection. The man who started him writing poetry was my old colleague from Surrey, Rob Brown, who, incidentally, was responsible for one of the revivals of my music career.) We were quite a wow for two old blokes in jumpers. The text is available here. Or rather our texts in their intertwinedness, may be read on 3am Magazine. These two improvisational texts were written simultaneously between the hours of 19.00-20.00 on Monday 23rd January 2017, one in Liverpool, the other in Barnsley. https://youtu.be/ouxaFZKyDeg

And then subject to simultaneous rendition at the Leeds North by North West at the Wharf Chambers, Leeds on February 9th 2017. It was a hit or miss technique, but we pulled it off, by sheer force of the audacity of its anarchistic method.

As part of the European Poetry Festival, in April 2018, in Manchester, I was paired with the Lithuanian poet (and translator) Rimas Uzgiris. (He was a real Lithuanian, unlike my fictional ones. We wrote one poem for the event in Manchester, and an account of the event, more on Rimas, and a video of our short poem, see here. We began, without a plan, other than we’d write 4 lines each. I hadn’t met him before the reading, but he was a gentle, generous man, and we got on well (if only for that short time). He was happy to publish the poem on this blogzine, here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=Av1O1u1M530&feature=emb_logo



Patricia Farrell and I have not often worked on textual collaborations, but here's one from April 2019, our versions of Marlowe and Raleigh's 'Shepherd' 'collaboration'. Oddly, even though we live together, we used email to exchange our verses, one each, through the transformations of these originals (guided by Burgess’ brilliant A Dead Man in Deptford; the reading was at the Anthony Burgess Centre, Manchester).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=zh6v5Mi14LI&feature=emb_logo

I also wrote a collaborative text with Zoe Skoulding for a Camarade. That’s almost another story, and it’s certainly another post.

Remember: all posts in this 'Collaboration' strand may be accessed via this link to the hubpost here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html

Meet the EUOIA Collaborators: Robert Hampson

With Robert Hampson I created the Romanian poems of Mirela Nemoianu for Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors. You can read more about Mirela  here.

Robert Hampson FEA, FRSA was Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, from 2000 to 2016. He was educated at King's College, London, and the University of Toronto.He gained his BA and PhD from King's College, London, and his MA from Toronto (which he attended as the result of the award of a Commonwealth Scholarship). He was Director of the MA in Creative Writing 2016-17. He is currently Distinguished Teaching and Research Fellow.

Robert has an international reputation as a Conrad scholar and critic. His books on Conrad include Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992), Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (Palgrave, 2000) and Conrad's Secrets (Palgrave, 2013). Cross-Cultural Encounters was described in The Year's Work in English Studies (2002) as 'the outstanding contribution to Conrad scholarship this year', while Conrad's Secrets was described, in The Year's Work in English Studies (2013), as 'arguably the most striking and inventive contribution to Conrad scholarship in 2012' and, by the Times Literary Supplement, as 'an indispensable resource for specialists and enthusiasts alike'. He has also edited various works by Conrad ('Heart of Darkness', Lord Jim and Victory) and was the editor of The Conradian (1989-96). He has recently co-edited Conrad and Language (Edinburgh, 2016) with Katherine Baxter; he has also co-edited two collections of essays on Ford Madox Ford - Ford Madox Ford: A Re Assessment (Rodopi, 2002) and Ford Madox Ford and Modernity (Rodopi, 2003) - and works by Kipling and Rider Haggard. In January 2015, he was elected Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK). Conrad's Secrets was the recipient of the Adam Gillon Award from the Joseph Conrad Society of America (2015) for best book on Conrad. In 2017 the Joseph Conrad society of America awarded him the Ian P. Watt Prize for Excellence in Conrad Scholarship for his lifetime's work on Conrad.

In addition to his work on Conrad, he has had a long-term involvement with contemporary innovative poetry as editor, critic and practitioner. He co-edited the magazine Alembic during the 1970s, and he and Peter Barry co-edited the pioneering collection of essays The New British poetries: The scope of the possible (Manchester University press, 1993). He co-edited Frank O'Hara Now (Liverpool University Press, 2010) with Will Montgomery and Clasp: late modernist poetry in London in the 1970s (Shearsman, 2016) with Ken Edwards. His own most recent poetry publications include Assembled Fugitives: Selected Poems 1973-1998 (Stride, 2000), the legendary Seaport (Shearsman, 2008), an explanation of colours (Veer, 2010), and sonnets 4 sophie (pushtika, 2015). Reworked Disasters (Knivesforksand spoons, 2013) was long-listed for the Forward Prize. He collaborated (with Robert Sheppard) on Liverpool (hugs) and kisses (2015). Read that collaboration with Robert, here

Watch him read his new sonnets here. 

There is information about the FOR ROBERT anthology published on his retirement here.

Read more about the European Union of Imaginary Authors here and here. 

More on Twitters for a Lark here and here. See also A Translated Man ( an early account here; the book is also available from Shearsman here.)

 All the collaborators are introduced at links available here.

An Anthology for Robert (Hampson) link

An Anthology for Robert : digital edition

June 2017 RHUL Poetics Research Centre Electric Crinolines Editions.

Here's a link to the digital edition:

https://indd.adobe.com/view/f4f65fa1-970f-467f-8cd0-48405e21d73b

I have a poem 'Hap Hazard' in it, the last of my Wyatt sonnets, with a nod to Robert's re-workings of Shakespeare's, hence my reference to his 'Shakespearean Drag'.

Watch him read them here, and me reading some of my Wyatt poems here.


Other contributors include Wills Montgomery and Rowe, Harry Gilonis, Frances Presley, Carol Watts, Paula Claire, Simon Smith, Nisha Ramayya, Peter Barry, Adrian Clarke, Scott Thurston, Peter Middleton, Sophie Robinson and many many more... There are some prose pieces too, including a memoir by one of Robert's oldest friends, Ken Edwards...

Well done Redell Olsen for getting this together. In secret, I believe!

Oh yes, he's retiring... Not shy, but retiring...

Robert Sheppard: A Laugh with Lee Harwood

This little talk was delivered at the ‘Wine, Canapés and Laughter’ afternoon to celebrate the life of Lee Harwood, organised by his children Rafe and Rowan, in Brighton on 20^th August 2015. There were about 130 people present, an alarming number of them poets. 

 

Friends of Lee Harwood

I want you to imagine Lee sitting alone at any desk you imagine him sitting at, late at night, a recently poured and quite decent glass of single malt to hand, and his finger poised over the controls of a CD player. When he is ready, perhaps a sip or two in, he releases the sound and sits back to savour the experience.

What do you imagine he will hear? Erik Satie? Thelonious Monk? Some unpronounceable Greek diva foisted on him by Kelvin Corcoran!?

No; it’s an old BBC recording of Listen with Mother. As the programme progresses, Lee smiles, chuckles, and finally is roaring with laughter, at this partly nostalgic, partly camp, but wholly comic, reprise of the radiophonic simplicities (or sublimities) of the 1950s. He will continue laughing long after the CD finishes. Let us leave him there, ‘sitting comfortably’, full of mirth, and perhaps contemplating a second malt.

Lee smiling

Laughter –this afternoon’s elected purpose – runs in the family. The last time I read with Lee was at a Blue Bus reading in London a couple of years ago. Rowan was there. Some way into my reading she started to laugh. In the interval I asked her what she was laughing at. She replied that she suddenly noticed that Lee and I were both wearing what I think she called ‘the poets’ uniform’, since we were – Lee more elegantly than I, of course – in almost identical blue shirts and blue jeans. That’s why I adopted this outlandish motley this afternoon. [Indicates self and points at Rafe Harwood similarly attired, though he with Harwoodian waste-coat.]

I have many memories of Lee as a friend, but most obdurately refuse to come to the surface for rediffusion. They are in denial. So it is best that I turn to my role as a critic of his work, but even this is replete with personal association. In December, I posted this unexpected and complex aside on my blog (from this post):

 

I had a strange thought working on Lee Harwood's work: during the time I write about him, I kind of feel that I am in communication with the man himself. I mean this literally. In periods of work I don't feel the necessity to phone him or write to him, and it's a surprise to find that I haven't, because I feel it's already happening. Perhaps it's a personal by-product of an effect William Rowe describes in his Three Lyric Poets: 'When Harwood explores intimacies of feeling almost too delicate for the voice to sustain, he deploys the hesitancies and gaps of everyday speech, the places where meaning breaks down into the sheer lapse of lived time.’ (p. 7)

The piece I was writing I call ‘The Gentle Art of Collage’. I’ve been rightly admonished by Peter Robinson for saying that Lee’s poetry forces the reader to co-create it, and my title is my way of atoning for this misattribution of coercion to the poetics of gentle persuasion.

I want to finish by reading a poem that I have often used – and Robert Hampson tells me he’s also used – to demonstrate as many Harwoodian qualities as possible in one poem. Extended in its title, ‘One, Two, Three’ is an invitation to the reader to gently assemble its 3 parts, and in it last line to assemble the elements of each part.

Lee used to refer to this poem as ‘that poem you seem to like’, as though he wasn’t convinced of its qualities (or mine!), but to me it perfectly articulates a unique set of contrasts that Lee himself called his ‘puritan-cavalier routine’. Between intimacy of address and distance from the separated other; between the seductions of artifice and the realities of the life-world; between focussed detail and sudden jumps and gentle juxtapositions; and in particular, in this poem, between historical knowledge and present experience, between horror and delight.

Are you sitting – standing – comfortably? Then I’ll begin….

[then I read 'One, Two, Three', a poem easily found in Selecteds and the Collected] 
 

Robert Sheppard 20^th August 2015

Tom Raworth was mainly outside the building - I was inside! - but took some photographs: here. And here.

My i.m. with links to other Lee Harwood posts may be read here. Nicholas Johnson's obits may be accessed here.

Poems i.m. may be read here. And others here.

Robert Hampson: synthetic feed

4 cris cheek


accounts diverge
to continue
missing you already
a thousand miles
(not exactly)
that pause, that gesture
that half-begunwas it expensive
there was no opposition
changing names
to protect confidentiality
shift patterns
write the night
when I was younger
delivering papers
ten white & ten manila
we can’t afford it
working round the house
we need to talk
5 years (was it)
envelopes for Melanie
another survival
that was the scary part
all the responsibility
of the finance
the negotiable freedoms
of double-page spreads
(to be continued)


sulphur occurs
catch the drift
destroying the evidence
as good as a mile
not exactly
text & textiles
missing sentences
tell your fortune
what was lost
names changed
for domestic purposes
coming home
through variable weather
every girl was blonde
we didn’t get the message
legal documents
continually reconfigured
crated up & loaded
was it expressive
5 summers
in her white hat
match in hand
that was the scary part
all that effort
to chill dissent
registration scrawled
on the driver’s visor
starts a new page

Robert Hampson has at least two books of poetry out: Assembled Fugitives (from Stride), and Seaport, an account of Liverpool that has attracted some interest locally. See also his work with Robert Sheppard, Liverpool Hugs and Kisses here. He is also a Conrad scholar and a critic of contemporary poetry.

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