Headline
Poets – Featuring big names who push the form forward.
This
month: TIM ALLEN (who was brilliant!)
Tim Allen
lived for many years in Plymouth working as a primary school teacher. For two
decades he helped, through the magazine Terrible Work and the
Language Club reading series, to establish a vibrant poetry community. A
Democracy of Poisons, one of a number of recent volumes, is a sequence
of prose poems, is Tim Allen’s third Shearsman book and his first completed
work following a move to Lancashire where he has been heavily involved with
the avant wing of the North-West poetry scene, co-hosting the .
The texts run parallel with the years of Austerity leading to Brexit and its
fall-out, issues internalised here before resurfacing within new narrative
contexts and scenarios in which modern cultural history competes with
autobiographical conflict to be transported elsewhere by the chimera of
language. Motifs arising from the perspective of age and change echo, but
sparsely; what really unites the poems is a cruel humour, as often
self-directed as aimed at the democracy of poisons. Weird writing,
funny too.
Next readings in this series, include Sarah Crewe and Maria
Isakova-Bennett at least.
Check for future details! We are currently looking for a new venue. But, in the meantime:
Also for your Merseyside poetry diary: European
Poetry Festival, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool: Sunday 6th July 2025:
3-5 Free, drop in (North West poets and European poets in collaboration. Usually
fascinating.) I'll be collaborating...
Blogging is more than a publicity exercise for me. Although this blog started out as the extension of an earlier magazine, it is an instrument for thinking (and writing, as I explain below in relation to the sonnets I have now finished). It is even therapeutic in some strange way: I lose myself in the process and within the labyrinthine linkages it makes. (It took me a long time to realise this aspect matched the strands and links of my Twentieth Century Blues project. (See Pages: Twentieth Century Blues published ten years ago! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)) It is, clearly, a mode of publishing (which reflects its beginning as a blogzine).
This year has been an odd one, not least of all for having
radiotherapy in the summer and on-going hormone treatment for prostate cancer (get it
checked, old lads out there, that's the most serious message of this post, believe me. I've never had a symptom. And here's the most important link today: Prostate Cancer UK | Prostate Cancer UK ). It hasn’t made much difference to my blogging
(though I timed my annual summer break for those 20 radiotherapy sessions at the
wonderful Clatterbridge in Aintree).
I’m going to select 10 ‘areas’ with
links for this year (but there's really 11!):
4 It’s grim to announce the deaths of
friends (whether they are artists are not). But we lost two extremely creative
friends in the last year and they are remembered here:
5 I continued publishing excerpts from British
Standards (my transpositions of romantic sonnets) in magazines over this year and I provide links to them, BUT I also include on this blog short videos of those
poems too. So here is a piece on transposing Wordsworth, which is also a homage
to the brilliant work Phil Davenport is doing with homeless people using
Wordsworth’s poems in a parallel way to me. (No, I am using them in a parallel way to him.) See: Pages:
Robert Sheppard: Wordsworth’s Sonnets Transposed for the 21st Century appears
on Zwiebelfish!
6 Keats got a similar treatment, and here are four posts,
with videos, of work that appeared from the 14 sonnets I’ve tackled (or
mangled, depending on your view of the project):
You’ll notice on the video I wear my Keats (life mask) with
pride.
7 John Clare got the same treatment in British
Standards and here are the two posts about the publication of some of the
resultant poems (again with videos): here:
Here's my accidental 'poem-film', or is it 'film-poem' of one of those Clare transpositions.
These sonnets were all temporarily posted on this blog so blogging became part of the process of their becoming. (And, therefore, as I say above, of me.)
9 I wrote about Fictional Poets (looking back at the
two volumes I published of such work), beginning with a post here: Pages:
Reflections on Fictional Poetry and Fictional Poets (1 and hubpost for the
sequence) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and with
links to the rest. I was also thinking through (even writing) a third part. I am quietly announcing here for the first time that a cleaned-up version of these posts will form parts of a book called Doubly Stolen Fire which will be published later this year.
10 Even before the eighteenth year of blogging began I
was posting posts about having FINISHED the ‘English Strain’ project with its serial ‘final’
poems. It didn’t turn out that easy: these posts quite amusingly trace the process of closure, as I debate HOW and
WHEN to end it. The final post here even contemplates starting it all up again,
but decides against it (it is also the least consulted post of the four). Since the whole project was published and discussed on
the blog (unlike other projects you won’t know about from reading these pages)
it seems appropriate to cluster them together. I think they make interesting reading:
I’m saying goodbye to the sequence but I’m also saying
goodbye to Bo (and to the sonnet: I’ll never return to the form! (He sez.))
One other thing (this
isn’t point 11, believe me): I’ve also started this last year adding a set of
addresses to every post (if I remember to do it!) That’s to make sure people can contact
me. The other way of putting this is: don’t use my edgehill email address! I
can’t access it. So:
The little block of four raw links below will take you to the posts I made after merely 10 years of blogging, trying to make lists of 1, the best posts, 2, my favourite posts (one for each year), 3, the most neglected posts, and, 4, my blogging plans for the (then) future. It was all quite fun, quite a lot of work, and is still interesting (even informative) to look at now.
My annual accounts of blogging all link (up). In fact, they are a sort of guide to that year’s ‘best’ posts (though it’s only in my estimate). Here’s 14, 15,16 and 17 years…
The
pre-history of this blog, as a print magazine, may be read here,
on what was my first post (even though I moved it later). I also outlined the complete run of the second series of Pages before it became a blogzine, and finally this blog. However,
the first run of the print magazine is now online, at Jacket2 where it is hosted here.
The Hi Zero Reading series in Brighton was, judging from my one trip
there, a very successful sequence of events.It was a monthly evening of poetry
readings that took place at the Hope and Ruin, 2011–2020. Organised by Joe
Luna, the one I attended was a rambunctious affair, with an audience that
responded in a fashion more akin to stand up or open mic. Quite different, in
fact, from SubVoicive in London in the 1980s, or Storm and Golden Sky inLiverpool, co-organised by me, until 2017. The work presented, though, was (to
use the shorthand) linguistically innovative, and also an offshoot of Sussex
University. (The name of the series, of course, alludes to Cambridge poetry.) The
whole is now archived
HERE: you can find the poster for each event, plus recordings of many of
them: Hi Zero | Index.
I'm pleased to say that Patricia and I read at the launch of The Broken Spine, a new magazine of poetry and photography, edited by Paul Mullen (a former MA Creative Writing Student at Edge Hill) and Alan Parry, who I met for the first time. Both editors read, as did David Hanlon, David Welshe, Rob Edge (also ex-Edge Hill), Elisabeth Horan, Mary Earnshaw. There was music to end, from Paul, Micayl, Leonic Jakobi, and possibly others. I'm reconstructing the names from Twitter, where videos of most performances are posted (see@BrokenSpineArts on Twitter). Website: here.
I have just realized the whole of my reading is on the
Twitter feed, but here is the set list. Knowing there was going to be some music
and knowing that Paul was interested in music (I saw his duo Little Wing about
10 years ago) I put together a little set about music. I'm unlikely to repeat this particular order.
Patricia
Farrell read from her Logic for Little Girls, which is also forthcoming
from Knives Forks and Spoons.
[And now, 2022, the Broken Spine editors have asked for videos of the contributions to Issue One. I must have read this one. And here it is. It can also be found on the BS TikTok site, my debut on the platform!]
14th October: A splendid reading, by both of these poets; also the day Patricia's book was reviewed in Stride, here. Details here. Here they are in The Lion after!
Courtesy of Leanne Bridgewater and Colin Scott, Patricia and I read in Coventry
Poetry from the stage, poetry night in Coventry
at Albany Theatre on Saturday 3 June (7pm - 10pm)
The night promised
what Leanne called ‘a massive twist of taste, from an infusion of
Indian dancers, various poetry voices, maybe some visual screening, topped with
a pro-disability stance, featuring two poetry plays from Shaun Fallows and
Jackie Hagan’, the last of whom topped the bill.
I sold one copy (which
wasn’t bad because they weren’t on display) to Raef Boylan who runs Here Comes Everybody. See here…
Patricia read ‘(From
within) a narrow vase’.
It was good to talk to friends old and new after... Although yet again the unthinkable is unfolding on the TV set in the bar. I'm glad I'd read from the sequence 'Warrant Error'.
Simon Perril read at the Arts Centre, Edge Hill University, on the 16th: a wonderful evening of poetry and visuals. He's carrying one of them below!
Simon Perril was born in 1968 and lives in Oakham, Rutland. His poetry collections include Nitrate (Salt) and A Clutch of Odes (Oystercatcher Press). He has written widely on contemporary poetry and poetics, and edited The Salt Companion to John James (Salt). He teaches at De Montfort University, Leicester, and loves silent movies and noisy music. And cats.
"My poetry roots go back to discovering the New American Poetry of the 50s and 60s and the "British Poetry Revival" of the 60s and 70s pretty much simultaneously, thanks to local book dealers in Cambridge, and the alternative academy that was Compendium bookshop in Camden, London. Reading the work of Iain Sinclair and Tom Raworth was particularly influential early on, and it didn't take long to find other contemporary 'linguistically innovative' poets as a student at Cambridge College of Art and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University).”
Recent books are the related Archilochus on the Moon (Bristol: Shearsman, 2014) and Between (Bristol: Shearsman, 2016)), both of which Simon read from. Before the evening he aired a new poetics piece for my MA group.
The first half featured winners of the Rhiannon Evans Poetry Award: Joanne Ashcroft, Laura Tickle, Sarah Billington, Steve Fletcher and Jessica Tillings, all of whom read well. Four of them are featured on Pages. See here for posts to 25 Years of Creative Writing at Edge Hill:
All the wonderful people: Tony Frazer, Peter and Lynn
Hughes, Andy Taylor and Rory Waterman (met for the first time), Gregory Woods
(met for the first time sine the 1980s, but an old friend from UEA days; I
published his first poem on 1983 in
1975ish, and we've both served the old place well), Shiela (Patricia’s sister, a real pleasant surprise, to whom Patricia
told the rude penguin joke), Alan Baker (a particular interest of mine at the
moment, see here), Sam, who published Alan’s big book, as modest as Alan, and,
of course, my co-reader Nancy Gaffield, who was new to me.
Me reading. Photo: courtesy Andrew Taylor
Our Oystercatcher reading was introduced generously by Peter
Hughes, and Nancy began with her Meridian, see
here. The poem began, disarmingly, for a Sussex
boy listening, with the word ‘Peacehaven’, the strangest one horse town in the country,
but it’s on the line that Nancy
is walking and recording in this poem. We got as far as Epping
Forest: the ghost of Clare. Sinclair country. Which she is planning to walk with him. (I wonder if Iain’s
seen Peacehaven?)
I was clear I couldn’t go straight in with The Drop, so my set list was:
‘Rainshine shivers on
dull platforms’, a poem about the English Midlands, from ‘The English Poems’ in Warrant Error (and in Historyor Sleep). There was a Shearsman stall as well as an Oystercatcher one
downstairs.
The Drop, both the
short lyric ‘Standing By’ (see here) and ‘Of Crystal'. (See here for the book
and here for its elegiac contexts, and a review by Alan Baker, here.)
I then turned the tables on the poem and read an excerpt
from ‘The Given’, to be found in both Words Out of
Time and History or Sleep. It
seemed sensible to read from one sentence referring to my father to another, a
5 minute stretch, but I emphasised the comedy (and at least one person, Greg
Woods, remembered the Occupied Hamburger Bar at UEA!).
Over, I bought a number of books: Nancy’s book, plus Sophie
Mayer’s and Ralph Hawkins’ Oystercatchers, Jeremy Reed’s Asa Benveniste book, a
Sandeep Parmar, a Simon Smith I seemed to have missed, and Alan Baker’s Bonnefoy
translations.
And I picked up my contributor’s copy of Clasp: Late Modernist Poetry in London in the 1970s. We
found a pub, the Swan and Rushes, and drank JHB (a beer eulogised in my poem
‘Sonnet (Fourteen Bars)’), and read little snatches, representations of our
lives in London, including our (unnamed) Tooting Thursday evenings, our
parties, and (of course) the Smallest Poetry Festival in the World in 1994.
Patricia’s part in running the earliest Sub-Voicive readings is also
recognized. But that’s another … post. Here.
On Wednesday 17th February, the Creative Writing Programme at Edge Hill University presented Peter Hughes with James Byrne and myself as support.
Peter Hughes is a poet and founding editor of Oystercatcher Press. His Selected Poems came out from Shearsman in 2013, who also publish a critical volume on his varied work. His versions of the complete sonnets of Petrarch, Quite Frankly, were published by Reality Street in 2015 to great acclaim. See this website. Peter read exclusively from this volume on the 17th. Read my account of his and Tim Atkins' translations from Petrarch here and here. (My own Petrarch project, which I kept to myself in the presence of the Master, can be read about here and there in the first of those two links, and read about and partly read, here.)
James Byrne read from his new book Everything Broken Up Dances (including the extrarordinary title poem) and I read from my newish bookHistory or Sleep: Selected Poemsand my new Oystercatcher, The Drop. As at the three previous 'launches' I read no poem that I'd previously read. Their set lists are here for Liverpool, here for Sheffield and here for the London Shearsman launch.
1. Returns 1
2. Coming Down from St. George's Hill 3
3. Empty Diaries: 1974, 1982, 1987, and 1990.
4. Prison Camp Violin, Riga
3. National Security 1940, Huyton (for Hugo Dachinger)
4. from Warrant Error: London
Just over year ago today I read at the University of Liverpool in the Miriam Allott series, and it was put online, here. (Not sure it remains there.) The set list and an account of the reading may be read here. I knew it was being filmed so I was on my worst behaviour. But on good form, I think. Here's the list again to help navigating the video if you only want to watch a bit. Set List
from Berlin Bursts
A Voice Without (which may be read here, among other texts) Yet Another Poem (a draft may be read here)
from Warrant Error:
Poems 1-5 from ‘September 12’ 5 Poems from ‘Out of Nowhere’ (some of these)
from Berlin Bursts
The first 4 ‘Poems Against Death’.
From ‘Petrarch 3: a derivative derive for Tim Atkins and Peter Hughes after Harry Mathews and Nicholas Moore (See a different set list here), now the first 'line' of the super-sonnet The Song Nets.
The ‘original’ Petrarch translation
(Read it in its original place for its original purpose here.)
Iron Maiden (sub-dom poem) Pet (doggie poem; here) Petrak: The First English Sonnet, Good Friday 4001 Now then now then and now (the ‘Jimmy Savile' poem; you could hear a pin drop) twittersonnet (after Rene Van Valckenborch; read his twittersonnet and twitterodes here. And of my own later use of the form here) Vow
VE Day 1985 (after Wayne Pratt)
robert sheppard: the tweets of microbius: life is short at bluecoat, liverpool (november 15th 2015):
part of being human: a festival of the humanities
curated by professor ailsa cox
this was a celebration of all things small and perfectly formed, from the hadron to the haiku, the boson to the butterfly. activities include talks, exhibitions and hands-on workshops on how we perceive and capture moments in time; on miniature objects and microscopic creatures; and on the short form in the arts and literature.
i read the 'tweets of microbius', twittersonnets. the tweet versions of these twittersonnets may be found on microbius’ twitterfeed: https://twitter.com/microbius.
the form was invented by the invented rene van valckenborch and all of his twitterodes (the originals) may be read here. or click onto 2010 to the right of this post and you'll betaken to them all, AND individual posts with photos. worth a look. read them in my (or his) the translated man (shearsman 2013). see here.
this is the last tweet, complete with images!
micrographia
hooke's flea
flee from
the flea u
nder the g
lass: furr
y legs and
tufted tu
sks; preci
se menace/
look at ho
oke’s full
stop: scuf
fed flares
, a furred
black sun
hooke's fullstop
Who would have thought they'd end up illuminated at blackpool: see here.
Alys Conran and I took part in the Bangor leg of the Enemies Project/Gelynion last night. See more details here.
Bangor: May Tues 26th at the Blue Sky Cafe: details of the venue and its great food and drink here.
We created the works of the EUOIA Catalan poet
Cristòfol Subira (1957-)
Other pairings were:
Nia Davies and SJ Fowler
Zoë Skoulding and Eurig Salisbury
Joe Dunthorne and Rhys Trimble
Sophie McKeand and Fiona Cameron
Karen Owen and Sian Northey
Ifor Ap Glyn and Ghazal Mosadeq
The reading also featured a performance by Welsh folk musician Elan Mererid Rhys, who also accompanied SJ and Nia.
I began: Robert: The last time I read in this room I was a Belgian. I was billed as the creature who features in my book A Translated Man, Rene Van Valckenborch.It was all Zoe Skoulding’s fault. It was slightly embarrassing – I
remember Rhys Trimble compering and he said, staring straight and ironically at
me, ‘After the break we’re going to have a fake Belgian,’ – but it suited me
fine: I was reading Van Valckenborch’s supposed poems anyway, the ones he wrote
in Walloon and the quite different ones he wrote in Flemish.
Before he starts to disappear at the end of the book he
invents his own poets, 27 of them for
each member state of the EU; the EUOIA, the European Union of Imaginary
Authors. I wrote a few of these for the book, but Zoe again made me re-visit
the complete list when we were asked to compose a collaborative poem for the
Manchester Camarade by Steven Fowler. Thus Gurkan Arnavut was born.
That tipped me over into the madness of doing the lot as a
curated and co-created anthology, and I am pleased that Alys Conran has agreed to join me in co-creating the Catalan poet Cristòfol Subira.
We’re going to read one poem each, one from his Spanish side, and one from his
Catalan side (he is a weird mirror of Van Valckenborch in that sense only), and
it’s appropriate to read them first in bilingual Wales. But we want to emphasise that we both wrote both poems.
And now Alys is going to tell you about our creature, the
little we (or the world) know of him.
Alys: Cristòfol Subira was born in 1957 in Barcelona. He worked for many years as a
street performer and living statue in the tourist districts of the city.
Between 1980 and 2007, Subira produced four collections of poetry,
alternately in Catalan and Spanish, but since then, his poetry has
not appeared in print except for several unattributed poems inscribed on
the paving of cul-de-sacs in the city, recently acknowledged as his work.
There was one doubtful sighting in Brussels
in the summer of 2010.
Robert: Freeze Block
Station (from the
Spanish)
Alys: Performance
Between Two Points (from the
Catalan)
I want to thank Alys for playing along with the EUOIA project and for bringing her linguistically and rhythmical tightness to the project. I think we both felt we'd made Subira happen. The other readers were wonderful; here’s one to give you the
feel for the evening, and to demonstrate inter-lingual imagining of a different
kind by Ifor Ap Glyn and Ghazal Mosadeq.
Subira was last heard of in my Shearsman book A Translated Manin Annemie Dupuis' dubious diary, which finishes off the book, and Van Valckenborch, and her. Which is why the 'sighting' is 'doubtful'.
Thursday 12 August 2010
I’m sitting in the dock, moist hand clinging to grimy rail. The courtroom of some Eastern European capital. Standing beside myself I know this is a dream.
I’m accused of people-trafficking, but I don’t know why.
Questioned through an interpreter, it strikes me. I have made up a fictional national poet– his name at least – by combining the forename and surname with the most diacritics in the language, the least vowels. But it’s also the name of a villain. The unshaven giant with the scar down his face whispering curses to a solicitor in a bursting shiny suit. The police must have found my notes, tangles of names.
I realise the improbability of my alibi, the impossibility of communicating this. The interpreter squints at me, lost.
I hear my name mispronounced by the judge in his frayed crimson gown. I am nudged to my feet. He looks through me.
Sophie Poppmeier of Austria, Erik Canderlinck of Belgium (Wallonia), Paul Coppens of Belgium (Flanders),Gurkan Arnavut of Cyprus, Jitka Průchová of the Czech Republic, Lucia Ciancaglini of Italy, Jurgita Zujūtė of Lithuania, Hubert Zuba of Malta, Maarten De Zoete of Holland, Trine Kragelund of Denmark, Cristòfol Subira of Spain (Catalunya). Yes, yes, stop there, at that one.
I wake in a spray of sweat.
Friday 13 August 2010
I laugh in a spray of sweat, swallowed by pillows, buoyed by the churned mattress.
Post-coital, soft and confessional, Cristòfol murmurs that he writes poems in Spanish as well as Catalan. Quite different ones, as it happens. I take a quick shower. I must avoid this again, affect indifference, even cruelty. I return rubbing my hair. When he presses into me, I bite his tongue. There’s blood.
It works.
Within hours I’m moved out. The stone dog on the corner of rue des Chartreux cocks its leg higher as I dip into the dark interior of a white car.
