Robert Sheppard: Summer Reading and Summer Wear!

I introduce my three recent books (too many in one year, probably!) here: History or Sleep, Words Out of Time (there's a new review of that one here) and Unfinish (there's a new review of that here).

I also announce there my elegiac pamphlet The Drop.

And Scott Thurston’s surprise tribute volume for my 60^th birthday An Educated Desire (that’s why all those books were coming out, I remember now)! This book is also a kind of complement to the Sheppard Symposium to be held at Edge Hill next year, an event I am looking forward to, but which I will be only attending in the evening to read poems (I want the speakers to be able to express themselves freely about the work.) See here.

Then there are the very recent merch, ‘avantgarters’ from Zimzalla (see here), as well as a number of poems appearing in journals and magazines, chiefly (web-accessible), poems in The International Times (see here).

A short story in The Best British Short Stories 2016 (see here) makes me feel I ought to write some more fiction. (As did the payment for publication.). It's actually a part of Words Out Of Time (see here for a new review that quotes part of it).

Coming up soon are my 14 Petrarch variations (see here) and the critical volume The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry (see here for the hub-post for this project, tracing its development). The Portable Poetry Workshop, out in October, contains my chapter on radical and experimental forms. 

There are some other plans, the most concrete being the near-completion of the collaborative ‘European Union of Imaginary Authors’ project, which became so topical (and still is) during the Brexit days. See here for a hub-post.

I try not to blog in August. See you soon...

Robert Sheppard's Avant Garters on sale in the Zimzalla Avant-objects Series

Robert Sheppard doesn’t often design garters nor does he usually compose monostichs. But he saw a pair of eighteenth century garters in a Lancaster museum with mottos embroidered on them and thought he could produce monostichs (one line poems) for a modern pair. He hadn't thought of them actually being manufactured. Neither had he realised that this ancient garment/moral instrument had endured into the current age in wedding lingerie.

No matter: he offered the erotic poems to Tom Jenks for his Zimzalla series and Tom (ever the resourceful craftsman as he has proved with this varied series) set to work. You can just about read some of the words in the photo above.

This is the result:

Robert Sheppard – Avant Garters – poetic hosiery wrapped in gold paper and sealed with wax.

buy here or visit Zimzalla page here.

£6 within UK; £8 elsewhere.

Other recent and, frankly, more orthodox Sheppard publications (books of poems mostly) may be read about here.