Retirement: Mine and Roy Bayfield's: Remix of Words Out of Time (set list)

Two years ago I retired. You can look back at my account of my ‘first day of freedom’, AND at my retirement ‘do’ rap. and my thoughts after a year, here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2018/09/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on-year-after.html

This year it was the turn of Roy Bayfield, (and of Ailsa Cox earlier in  the summer) who is also a member of the Poetry and Poetics Research Group, and whose poems I selected for my guest editorship of Stride (see here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-guest-editing-of-stride-magazine.html

This is the cover of the booklet of imaginary events put together for Roy's leaving do, in the style of the Edge Hill Arts Centre publicity!

I was invited by Cathy Butterworth to read something at his 'do' and I thought I’d read this introduction and then this re-mix from my book Words Out of Time. In the event it was too long so I read something else. But here it is:

Roy’s book Desire Paths: Real Walks to Nonreal Places (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2016) is a glorious exploration of – as it says on the tin – Nonreal Places. More on that book Here. 

Roy like me, is a South Coast poet: he comes from Portslade in East Sussex and I come from the next town along, Southwick in West Sussex.  I think it would take about 20 minutes to walk from the house where I grew up to the house where he grew up. In one paragraph he quotes me and explains the Southwick/Portslade dichotomy:

‘I don’t remember seeing Portslade on the radar screen…’ wrote Robert Sheppard in his chapbook The Given – a moment forgotten by the writer but remembered in a journal entry from an earlier decade. Robert was raised in Southwick, the town next to Portslade, and such dismissal is perhaps to be expected from the rival place, across the border in West Sussex. Admittedly, Portslade may not be on many people’s radars, at least not consciously so. (Bayfield 2016: 25)

He explains further:

As a child, the border between East and West Sussex, Portslade and Southwick, running at the back of our garden, defined by a footpath and a row of electricity pylons, seemed like such a line. Merely by virtue of being on the other side of the line, Southwick seemed slightly uncanny. (28)

I’d like to offer a special ‘Portslade/Southwick Remix’ of my text that Roy refers to, The Given, for Roy, and to wish him many psychogeographical explorations of uncanny nonplaces, wherever he may find them:

Portslade/Southwick Remix

I don’t remember going to the Grenada in Portland Road, Hove, don’t recall the film on show, and don’t remember, on the same day, seeing a play, or its plot, or its title. A frame set up, years later, by others. Coal dust on the doorframe, where the hood catches it. A dozen or so knapped flints pushed into the earth: a Roman road straight across the horses’ field, the wheat, the ridge of the Downs. Nazis machine-gun the cheese crates and screaming POWs leap up to their deaths. The pebbly beach beneath the Brighton B power station will do. An aluminium bowl of wasted food before which feeding is practised with moral intensity. I don’t remember the thunderstorm I watched from my window, lightning flashes over Southwick, flickering, striking ground. After the toad in the witness box, real policemen arrive to investigate stolen buttons, the wrecked foreign car. I don’t remember trying to buy This is Blues and finding the record sleeve contained only cardboard. I don’t remember tracking Radio 260 through the streets of Southwick, the ‘common’ English of the DJs, the warning that they’d cut up rough if we found them. The desire to write is the desire to write. I don’t remember reading The Day of the Triffids. I don’t remember watching colour TV. I don’t remember seeing Portslade on the radar screen, don’t remember the visit to HMS Collingwood. I don’t remember being shot at by somebody from a van. I remember the Ruby wine at the Romans, the way the barman would loll his tongue from the side of his mouth as he poured the soupy chemical liquid into Tony’s bottles. I don’t remember Doll and Arthur’s caravan at Selsey. I don’t remember getting a harmonica with Green Shield stamps. I don’t remember David’s bottled fish. I don’t remember Emerson Lake and Palmer playing a tribute to Hendrix at the Dome. I don’t remember seeing a band called Vomit. I don’t remember playing my tape of The Waste Land to an empty room. I don’t remember when poems became a currency. I don’t remember a girl called Annie flashing on Toby’s houseboat. I don’t remember writing a poem about Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop. I don’t remember the night that was not particularly memorable. I don’t remember the Scottish woman who helped me at Metal Box in Fishersgate. I don’t remember sitting in Southwick Rest Garden to read Wilfred Owen. I don’t remember dancing with a girl with a big nose whose brother was a surrealist. I don’t remember that I bought Bomb Culture the day I saw Country Joe and The Fish. I don’t remember Tony arriving at 15 Oakapple Road, Southwick, with a letter from Henri Chopin. I don’t remember the German sailor dead drunk on the steps of the Crown and Anchor. I don’t remember the clever-dick who wanted to know why the Newhaven-Dieppe crossings were more expensive than the Dover-Calais ones. I don’t remember seeing the Doctors of Madness again, not getting it the second time, that blue-haired zeitgeister Kid Strange. I don’t remember reading Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat in the swelter of ’76. I don’t remember Flatfoot at The Alhambra. I don’t remember the disco to celebrate Franco’s death. I don’t remember laughing at the statue of the past Mayor of Brighton. I don’t remember jumbling the verses of ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’, our first gig at the Burrell Arms in Shoreham. I don’t remember climbing Chanctonbury Ring, the moon rising, ensanguined, over charmed hills…

Remix July 2019: for Roy

This is not the first remix from Words Out of Time on this blog. I did a special remix as part of the eulogy to my mother (see here) and a presented continuation of the final part ‘Work’ to the day of my retirement, here. More on that here. Read my account of writing The Given, the part used for Roy’s remix here.  There are even some outtakes here, stretches of 'When' that didn't make the final edit, here. It is an extraordinary flexible text to form and re-form.

Words Out of Time is still in print and may be read about and purchased here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/05/robert-sheppard-words-out-of-time.html

So what did I read for Roy?

Well. I decided to play with his notion of Southwick being ‘uncanny’, and I more or less said what I’d already written as intro to the remix above, and then read one of the Charlotte Smith Sussex 'Brexit' sonnets or overdubs, ‘Composed during a walk on the Downs’. It may be read here, along with other poems from the sequence: It’s the second poem down: http://www.blazevox.org/BX%20Covers/BXspring19/Robert%20Sheppard%20-%20Spring19.pdf

It also seems appropriate to mention this poem because what did I do 50 years ago, according to my 1969 diary which I am blogging each day: 'In afternoon, went over Downs for a walk.'

I write about my sonnets generally here, and here and see here and here for more on my Petrarch obsession,which set this thing off. 

Robert Sheppard: How I selected History or Sleep: Selected Poems

I have been explaining quite a lot on this blog, here in particular, about the de-selection of poems from History or Sleep: Selected Poems, my second book of 2015, just out. More here, too.

I’ve said very little about the process of selection, though. I didn’t have a policy or guidelines, although, even while I was preparing the text of Complete Twentieth Century Blues in 2007 or thereabouts, I was compiling lists of candidates for a possible ‘selected poems’, and I found I had other, earlier, lists to add them to. These helped, because consensus over choices probably indicated the right ones to pick. I didn’t ask anybody else to help, not even Patricia, though Scott Thurston, when presented with the contents, rattled off a list of unrepresented works. ‘Space,’ was the excuse for most of the omissions.

I wanted to be representative of different works, styles and periods (!), as well as obviously showing what I imperfectly judged to be the best work. I favoured short pieces over long and (taking my cue from Peter Hughes’ Shearsman ‘Selected’) I wasn’t afraid to excerpt from longer sequences to increase representation. I had to.

The existence of Twentieth Century Blues caused a problem, given its structure. (Read about that here.) Let me explain why/how: All of my texts written 1990-2000 formed part of this time-based network of texts, ‘Twentieth Century Blues’, and some earlier ones were given membership of it at certain points. It was, to my surprise, published whole as Complete Twentieth Century Blues (2008), with poetics statements and a detailed index of its 75 parts and its 97 ‘strands’. (I might put this index on this blog at some point to indicate the mad intricacy of this scheme.) Strands of texts ran across the numbering. I described ‘Twentieth Century Blues’ as a

net/

            (k)not

- work(s)

(Indeed that glyph is the 14^th part of ‘Twentieth Century Blues’, the poem ‘Untitled’ in its entirety.) The way the strands work can be seen, if you have the index, in History or Sleep, in the ‘Empty Diary’ poems, both within the ‘Empty Diaries 1901-1990’ sequence and beyond. More obliquely, ‘Empty Diary 1990’ is also ‘Internal Exile II’. ‘The Materialisation of Soap 1947’ is the fourth ‘History of Sensation’; ‘Mesopotamia’ is the first in that strand, while ‘Killing Boxes’ is ‘Mesopotamia 2’, but it is also ‘Melting Borders 2’, and thus linked with both the poems of those titles (at least). And so on.

For the selection in this book, though, I thought it best to omit this numbering and the index, while acknowledging its role in the writing, and its uses to the reading, of the poems. And also to reduce the impeding of the reading process, if the reader is new to my work. It seemed better to present separate poems as discrete entities (although there are series there). 

The poems are arranged in broadly chronological order, and I’ve put a newly recovered poem up front, from 1983, ‘Round Midnight’, a poem about Stan Tracey playing Thelonious Monk. (See here.) It sets the tone. I’m also pleased that the book ends with one of Sophie Poppmeier’s supposed poems (fictional poems supposedly written by a fictional poet (see here and here for that on-going work!)): ‘Book 1 Poem 1’. In my end is her beginning (if that doesn’t sound too rude). (It does.) The book opens with chaos and invention; ends with changing one’s life.  

The appearance of a number of poems in both Tin Pan Arcadia and Complete Twentieth Century Blues allowed me to be more severe with their de-selection and this accounts both for selections (or the lack of them). These poems have been seen quite a lot.  

So what did I end up with? Well, this:

Round Midnight

One for William Carlos Williams

Returns

Strategies

Twin Poem

from The Hungry Years: an Unwriting

from Mesopotamia

The Materialisation of Soap 1947

Looking North 2

Internal Exile

Living Daylights

Coming Down from St George’s Hill

His Furious Skip

Three Poems by Wayne Pratt from The Penguin Book of British Parrots

The Magnetic Letter

Melting Borders

from Smokestack Lightning

from Killing Boxes

Fucking Time 56

from Empty Diaries 1901-1990

from The Lores

History or Sleep

Three Hundred Word Sonnets: from The Lores, Book 8; from Entries: Empty Diary 1996; Small Voice 1

The Push Up Combat Bikini: Empty Diary 2000

A Voice Without

Only the Eyes are Left

Parody and Pastoral

from Reading The Reader

National Security, Huyton 1940

Three Figures Climb

Erotic Elegy

Prison Camp Violin, Riga

from Berlin Bursts

from Warrant Error

Four Poems Against Death

Another Poem

Yet Another Poem

As Yet Untitled Poem

The Given, part one

from Arrival

Standing by

Fictional Poems from A Translated Man : from The Masks; from The Light; from EUOIA.

I hope that you will want to buy the whole thing. Here.

There is a review of the book, by Steve Waling, here. A set list of one of the launch readings and links to further reviews here.

November 1955

A frame set up, years later, by others. Outside of it there are voices, whispering. Empty landing, tall doors never shut, banging in any wind. The attic, its sloped tar-hair padding, muting all street sounds. On one page, attempts at painting, soaked blots, dried solid. Across the folio, words. A carpet of Daily Heralds for the blackened man to hump sacks upon through the house to the bunker at the back, in the garden. Coal dust on the doorframe, where the hood catches it. Chorusing thanks over pie-chart fractions. Crawl into the hole under the stairs where browned instructions from the Blitz still hang. Regard a patch called the Egg Field. A gold clock turns under a glass dome. A wasp pullover bobs with a ball by the airbrick. A bedroom, narrowing to this world. Chained from picture rails, oval portraits of tinted babies. Silk slung over banisters. 

from 'The Given', part one of Words Out of Time, available here. 

November 1955: Critical Tuning: Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing (footnote to Words Out of Time)

See here for my 'Critical Tuning: Radio Interference & Interruption as a Poetics for Writing', in VLAK Vol 1: Number 1: 2010. Scroll to pp. 62-66 of the pdf. This piece, along with others, on, of, or about poetics, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics. Details here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).  

This is also footnote to 'The Given', part one of Words Out of Time. See here. This is the introit to 'The Given':

I remember I re-

Member

A valve radio

Left on all day gathered

Electrical interference

From passing cars a crackle

Rising to a spitting and passing

Cars that are eternally

Past

Eternally passing

At the heart of things

This heartless

Irritation this re-

Iteration of the pure prosaic

Robert Sheppard: Words Out of Time Published

Buy it here.

Words Out of Time deforms and reforms a 'story' of my life as an othering, an ‘autrebiography’, in modes that include what I call ‘unwriting’, in this case working through and transforming diaries and journals. The Given tells it in four different ways, from a litany of what hasn’t been remembered (a reversal of Joe Brainard's 'I Remember'!) to an alphabetical disfigurement of its features. Arrival invents a demonic sibling, generated from the diaries, restlessly inhabiting lyrics, a short story, an essay and footnotes. Audiences have found it spooky; I do too. In When I go coolly conceptual with ‘With’, while ‘Words’ weaves abandoned (found) texts to shake up this history (another 'unwriting'); ‘Work’ distends temporality, reverses standard autobiography’s fascination with origins, slows down time to show how work works its way into a life. I'm pleased with the trext and I'm very pleased with the job Alec Newman has done on the book (particularly the way he uses the cover images as section headings inside).

This is what they said of part one The Given, when it was separately published by KFS (now o/p):

On one level this is one of the most accessible and readable works Sheppard has produced; it’s also one of the strangest in its quiet subversions and playfulness, its self-questioning and self-awareness.

Rupert Loydell

I should have read your book already and I liked everything about it.  There you are characteristically free of flash or reserve and it increases the sum of what can be written about I think.  And it’s funny.

Kelvin Corcoran

In this intricate work, the poet asks: ‘Why does experimental writing demand experimental reading?’ The answer lies partly in the way in which, by bearing witness to another’s reorganisation of self, one might also find oneself reorganised in new and surprising ways.

Scott Thurston

This is a compressed autobiography, but unlike most autobiographies, it doesn’t hide the fact that the life-story it tells is invented by the very language used to tell the story…This is an impressive piece of work, but it’s only one small piece of the output of this prolific and inventive writer, who is always looking for new ways to extend poetic expression, and whom most contemporary poets could learn something from.

                                             

Alan Baker

Read a sample (from Arrival) and buy online: £10 here.

Read my account of writing The Given here. 

And read another sample, from When here.Click for pdf.

There are even some outtakes here, stretches of 'When' that didn't make the final edit, here.

Here's a later review of it here.

Also edited from the book was this diagram of the dates that are referred to in this work, the plot rather than the story, as the Russian Formalists would have said. I love the span and the occasional specificity. The earliest date is a bit of a surprise. The October 1977 date is a bit of a tease, a grim red herring (work it out!)

500 BC ↔ 16^th Century ↔ 1549 ↔ 1800 ↔ 1899 ↔ 1916 ↔ 1920s ↔ 1930s ↔ 2 August 1931 ↔ 1940s ↔ 1950 ↔ 1955 ↔ 14 August 1956 ↔ 1958 ↔ 1959 ↔ 1960s ↔ 1960 ↔ 1965 ↔ 1967 ↔ 1968 ↔ 1970s ↔ 1971 ↔ 1973 ↔ 4.40 pm, Wednesday, 3 July 1974 ↔ 1974 ↔ 1976 ↔ 18 October 1977 ↔ 1981 ↔ 1985 ↔ 1987 ↔ 1998 ↔ 1999 ↔ 2008 ↔ 1 May 2009 ↔ 2009 ↔ 2010 ↔ 2011 ↔ 1 March 2012 ↔ 4 March 2012 ↔ 2012

↔ 2013

The hero awaiting a rival; if you scroll this image quickly it animates!

https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/words-out-of-time-by-robert-sheppard-108-pages

Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell: a book each published today; some thoughts and some reading

First, copies of my autrebiographies Words Out of Time arrived from Knives Forks and Spoons in time for my reading in Brighton, which will now become my hometown launch for it - and I hope to see Lee Harwood and Adrian Clarke and other friends there (and visit my mother in Southwick); then copies of Patricia's Space Completely Filled with Matter arrived from Veer. That looks very professional with fine reproduction values. That will be launched at the next Storm and Golden Sky on 29th May. So a double pleasure. I will blog about both books when I've more time after the Brighton trip. (That reading, my book, Patricia's folder, and Storm and Golden Sky are all featured on Pages.) Details of both books and how to obtain them soon! (Read my peice on writing part one, The Given, here.)

This comes on the back of much chatter about Salt publications slimming down its list. My Companion to Lee Harwood has disappeared, which is a shame, as has Tin Pan Arcadia, although that is republished in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, which is still on the catalogue (though I am not), but described as 'out of stock'. I am wondering whether the three paperback copies I have are the complete run of the paperback edition I mentioned some posts ago.(No: it can be bought second hand through booksellers associated with Amazon.)

Also in the post (I mean the mail) was the latest book by Derek Attridge which re-visits his The Singularity of Literature. I can see already that, however minimally I can do it, I will have to acknowedge it in my critical book, The Meaning of Form, which I think of as finished. Again, this is well-blogged about here, as is its debt to that essential book. There are a number of outtakes and thoughts on that to come.

It is also good to see (even an hour ago, here: http://tomraworth.com/notes/?p=5051) South Coast resident Tom Raworth blogging again.

The only thing these things have in common is that they incompletely change everything.

Robert Sheppard: Meeting Bob Cobbing

In 'Work' there appears the sentence: 'Groundhogs ticket in his pocket: Cobbing plays him "e".' This is a 'writing-through' of an entry that reads (and is enscripted) thus:

Diary Saturday November 3^rd, 1973

i got the tickets for the groundhogs before going to london

            in the afternoon I arrived at bob cobbing’s where he already had a girl student doing a thesis on language in art. his room was covered in papers and untidy. cobbing answered questions helpfully and played tapes including late stuff for radio 3 and a tape with peter finch of the ‘e’ part of his 5 vowel piece which is unfinished. showed us mss of it

            after miriam left, cobbing and i discussed other aspects of poetry today – making money, poets conference and during tea talked about eliot/pound/auden and jazz and school – he was a rebel teacher with nuttall. he knows tina fulker (!) and had a visit from lawrence upton that morning

            i finally left loaded with material at 9.00 after 6 hrs!

                                                                                                he’s agreed to help me put on a display of concrete poetry at school.

More on Bob here and our 2001 collaboration (which would have surprised and delighted my 1973 self) here.

Robert Sheppard: Work (from Words out of Time) in Blackbox Manifold 11

Read more of my autrebiographies, two parts ('Words' and 'Work'), which together with 'With' make up the third part of the book, called 'When' (it's the cool conceptual end of the project) which I have now decided to call Words Out of Time: autrebiographies and unwritings. (Buy it here.) More of that to come. These two parts appear in Blackbox Manifold 11 here. Just click for the pdf.

Blackbox Manifold 11 is a great issue. See here.

The new issue also features work by Louis Armand, Dan Beachy-Quick, Andrew Cox, Jen Degregorio, Mark Dow,

Valerie Duff, Giles Goodland, Anne Gorrick, Ben Hickman, Linda Kemp,

Burgess Needle, John Regan, Denise Riley, Gary

Sloboda, Simon Smith, Jeffrey Thomson, Philip Wilson, with an essay by

John Wilkinson on D.S. Marriott, and Adam Piette reviewing Alan

Halsey; _CUSP_, ed. Geraldine Monk; Helen Mort; John Birtwhistle;

David Kennedy and Christine Kennedy's Women's Experimental Poetry.

A later issue contains other work by me. 

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue20/RobertSheppardBM20.html

takes you to excerpts from what became Hap:Understudies of Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarch (though the first, introductory, poem ‘Perhaps a Mishap’ is not a version of Wyatt’s versions of Petrarch).

Robert Sheppard: Say When (outtake from Words Out of Time)

Outtake of ‘With’ from When, third part of Words Out of Time to be published in 2015 by Knives Forks and Spoons. (Buy here.)

 

Even though these sentences are cut from the long conceptual piece using old photographs (not the one above), I wanted to share it with anybody who might be interested. It was originally in 'With', the first part of 'When', itself the third set of autrebiographies.

A Christmas chaos with wrapping paper carpeting the afternoon. Sea crash with storm clouds. My mother’s buried in sand, but looks as though settled into lunar dust with determination. With determination, children scurry up the scree. My aunt as a young woman takes off her sunglasses and sits in one of the low metal folding-chairs with her full skirt covering it. My father with me on the golf course, watching me putt. My mother, with cardigan wrapped around shoulders, emerges from the rocks. Between the caravan and the Triumph Herald my mother rests with a cup of tea. My aunt bends low to greet her niece, with the bouquet still in her hands. The crowd of children peep round the hidden bridesmaids as my mother poses with my father. My father’s shadow reaches my mother’s feet as she clears up the roadside picnic with my uncle and aunt. The prow of The Victory with its giant anchor. Is my father part of this pyramid of bathers with the mountains of 1940s Hong Kong in mist? My father sporting a compact moustache stands with my mother under umbrellas before arches of granite. My father sporting a sunhat indoors cooks with my mother in the improvised kitchen. My mother with TREGUTH inscribed on the thatched cottage wall above her, distant. A ghost house with phantom children on the steps. My father with me on the boat, letting me think that I’m steering. My father is the only person at the table with wine in his hand, his honest eyes twinkling cheers among the tax dodgers and spivs. My mother having trouble with the caravan key. My grandmother and aunt smile the same smile, with my mother looking down, embarrassed. My cousin picks confetti from her hair with knees shaking around her. My mother with my grandmother at Windsor Castle, the wind blowing her hair awry. My mother as a giggling girl, my aunt as a smiling girl, with the tall woman, the toddler on the wooden horse taking my mother’s resistant hand. My friend and I stand uneasy in our robes, hats not designed for long hair, with 1977 degree scrolls in our hands. A strip of unknown Observer in RAF uniform with a stripe of decorations. My mother crouching on a rock in her swimming costume with only a painfully rocky walk to the sea-weedy shore. Ornamental garden with copper beech. A rainbow parachute billows with life on the runway at Shoreham. Blurred Labrador with a collar. Colour slide of wedding with one red coat. Mugshots of my mother with attempts at poses. The First & Last House in England with its joyless flag, my father’s hands in his pockets. My mother with my grandmother dwarfed by blossoms. With jumper over one shoulder, bag over the other, my mother strokes a cliff-top donkey between the eyes. My mother sits with me on the ship, my nose and cheek the only features under hair and out of beard. In the Polaroid, I look sidelong at my mother with the eyes of a celluloid murderer. Camera round my neck, I’m ready, my mother standing under the thatch, with my father’s arm across her shoulder. I stand on deck, my face still, with my hair a thick tangle. Snow above ankles, I submit to snowballing, with my mother and aunt laughing from the steps. On Hove Lagoon my father and I look back to my mother on the quay, as he rows us out with ease and care.

1^st March 2012

Robert Sheppard: another extract from Arrival (from Words Out of Time)

may be read here. On Lyndon Davies' excellent Junction Box. (The whole text may have been called VIDA: autrebiographies and unwritings, but this has changed to Words Out of Time).

New autrebiographical text from Arrival

Another part of my autrebiographies (the first part is available from Knives Forks and Spoons as The Given, the whole will be by KFS as Words Out of Time in 2015) is published on Stride here.

Launch of The Alchemist's Mind 17 November (set list)

REALITY STREET will be at the Small Publishers Fair on Friday 16-Saturday 17 November in London. (You can spot publisher Ken Edwards talking to Tony Frazer on the picture below.)

It takes place at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL, from 11am-7pm each day.

On the Saturday at 4pm Reality Street will be launching WHITE by Sean Pemberton and THE ALCHEMIST'S MIND, edited by David Miller.

The readers will be Sean Pemberton, Giles Goodland, Johan de Wit, Robert Sheppard.

My contribution is the opening passage of my autrebiography The Given. You know: the one that begins, ‘I don’t remember…’ (All the autebiographies are available here.)

Both these books will be on sale at the launch price of £10 each (retail price subsequently £15 and £13.50). Reality Street Supporters will get them free.

THE ALCHEMIST'S MIND:

A book of narrative prose by poets

An anthology edited by David Miller in collaboration with Ken Edwards. Contributors are: Barbara Guest, Lee Harwood, Ian Robinson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Robert Sheppard, Bernadette Mayer, Paul Buck, Lyn Hejinian, M J Weller, Brian Marley, Johan de Wit, John Levy, Vahni Capildeo, Paul Haines, Lawrence Fixel, Robert Lax, Fanny Howe, David Miller, Keith Waldrop, Giles Goodland, bpNichol, David Rattray, Guy Birchard, Will Petersen, Tom Lowenstein, Kristin Prevallet, Stephen Watts, Daphne Marlatt

Small Publishers Fair 2012

Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL

Friday 16th & Saturday 17th November, 11am to 7pm

The international fair celebrating books by contemporary artists, poets, writers, composers, book designers, and their publishers; together with a programme of readings and talks on Saturday.

For full details www.rgap.co.uk | email helenmitchell@inthefi elds.co.uk | tel 05603 689840 (standard landline charges)

Robert Sheppard Feature

There is currently a feature on my work at Litter magazine here


It contains excerpts from a new work, Arrival, an autrebiography of sorts, here.

There is a review of its predecessor, The Given (Knives Forks and Spoons) by Litter editor, Alan Baker here.


There is a re-print of Scott Thurston’s review of The Lores, part of Twentieth Century Blues, here.


Thanks Alan.

Robert Sheppard: Two booklets

Robert Sheppard

Two new booklets available

The Given (prose unwritings of autobiographical texts)

Looking thru' a Hole in the Wall (poems about Berlin with images by Patricia Farrell).


The Given may be purchased here
Read Rupert Loydell's review of it here
Berlin Bursts is available for £4 from

Ship of Fools
78 Nicander Road
Liverpool
L18 1HZ.

(cheques made out to R Sheppard)

You can also read about writing The Given below in the last post.

The Given will be launched on 30th September at Anthony Burgess House in Manchester : 7.00
(with Scott Thurston and Antony Rowland)

Robert Sheppard : Writing The Given

MATERIALS + PROCEDURE

an account of the writing of The Given (Knives Forks and Spoons: 2010), part one of the autrebiographies now collected by KFS as Words Out of Time in April 2015; buy here. (The Given is no longer available separately.) This piece, along with others, on, of, or about poetics, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics. Details here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).  

This work began as a project – out of an existential dilemma – to deal with particular MATERIALS: the piles of journals, diaries, and less categorisable autobiographical writings that I have accumulated since 1965 when they began, and that I have periodically attempted to use for writing. In its opting for PROCEDURE it is thus a conceptual project, but is perhaps not quite an example of ‘uncreative writing’ as that term has come to be used, but is a creative ‘unwriting’, to adapt a term I have used to describe my earlier texts refunctioned or re-moulded from others. Perhaps the work might be thought of as an ‘unwriting through’ of the MATERIALS, but such proliferation of terms is only useful if it assists a gloss on PROCEDURE.

Part one began with a simple notion: that I would list – in an ironic reference to Joe Brainard’s influential anaphoric I Remember – all the events that I did not remember as I read through these records anew. I anticipated a ten page work covering 34 years. Instead I amassed 34 pages but I only reached 1979 (the end of ‘The Hungry Years’ and the beginning of ‘The Drowning Years’ in my personal periodisation)! Before beginning this project I had an unjustified belief in the accuracy of my memory; now I felt like Confused of Hippo, whose words I used as an epigraph to that first draft:

When then I remember memory, memory itself is, through itself, present with itself: but when I remember forgetfulness, there are present both memory and forgetfulness; memory whereby I remember, forgetfulness which I remember. But what is forgetfulness, but the privation of memory? 1 (St. Augustine)

The re-discovery of a series of autobiographical fragments written in 1989, ‘Voices in White Noise’ provided a series of sharply delineated memories (some of them lost over the intervening 20 years) to counter the record of forgetfulness. I combined and selected from the two texts, using a stochastic method, aiming at concision and counterpoint, although the ‘I don’t remember’ sentences dominate. The simple PROCEDURE had thus begun to grasp the complexity of the MATERIALS with scant regard for autobiographical shape. The text is allowed to make its own history, to become the biography of a practice of writing rather than my autobiography, or ‘My Life’ to refer to the title of Lyn Hejinian’s text that had both inspired and hindered me over the years. So much for memory. (Part one is also published in The Alchemist's Mind  edited by David Miller - and I have also selected it as part of my Selected Poems: History or Sleep.)  

Part two has a simple PROCEDURE – to ask one (difficult) question of the ‘hero’ of the text after reading each page of the MATERIALS, an intensely written lengthy, detailed journal. It thus distorts the passage of time, since only 1979-1982 are ‘covered’ in this exhausting paragraph. Not all the questions were finally selected and the order again resists, but does not obliterate, temporal sequence.

Part three deals with the most transformative years of my journal writing and the most rapid development of my poetics. The PROCEDURE adopted is largely that used in writing Letter from the Blackstock Road, which was written during this period (1983-1993) and is referred to in the writing: the accumulation of text and the working of that through a stochastic method of using guided chance, liberated choice, dice and eye, hand and mind, a kind of improvised textual performance at the desk. 2

The final section posed different problems. The diaries which stretch from 1994-2009 (supplemented by a few notebooks) are written in a deliberately non-literary style and often record banalities. I decided to settle on the months of May – season of elections in particular – and to account for each one (we had now moved into ‘The Age of Irony’ and ‘September 12’). I was thinking of the ‘mayday’ strand (1997-99) of Twentieth Century Blues which intertextualises these writings.3 An early draft – one paragraph accounting for each May – appears in Erbacce 18 (2009), but I wanted to disrupt chronology further to allow the MATERIALS to speak in their own new-found voice, and did so by re-adopting the PROCEDURE of one of the ‘Mayday’ texts themselves, ‘Report on Seaport’, which was written around the 1997 General Election and whose MATERIALS (sentences) were arranged in alphabetical order. (This is referred to in the text and thus it describes its constraint.)

These writings, even down to finding a title, have been the most troublesome that I have attempted. (At one point I intended to interleave between the sections other writings: the autobiographical piece ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’, 4 the critical article ‘The Colony at the Heart of the Empire: Bob Cobbing and the Mid 1980s London Creative Environment’, 5 and the meditation ‘Critical Tuning: Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing’ 6.) As the text attests at various points, this is not my first attempt, nor my second, at such a project. Despite the boldness of PROCEDURE the processes of editing have been as arduous – if not more so – than in other, less conceptual unwritings.

The Given is reprinted and now only available as part of my autrebiography Words Out of Time: see here and here. But  it's all still there!

1. The Confessions of St. Augustine, Airmont: Clinton, 1969.
2. ‘Letter from the Blackstock Road’, in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, Salt: Cambridge, 2007: 48-58.
3. In Complete Twentieth Century Blues: ‘Report on Seaport, mayday 97’: 243-9, ‘A Dirty Poem and a Clean Poem for Roy Fisher, mayday 98’: 315-6; ‘The End of the Twentieth Century, mayday 99’: 331-50.
4. ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’ in eds. Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009.
5. In ed. Louis Armand, Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, Litteraria Pragensia: Prague, 2010.
6. Unpublished.