ReViews 8: Gap Gardening: Selected Poems by Rosmarie Waldrop

 You can access all the other Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

Gap Gardening: Selected Poems (edited by Nikolai Duffy with the author)

Rosmarie Waldrop

New Directions

232 pages 

[This is the last ReView in the series. This piece was originally published as ‘Rosmarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening’, The Wolf 34, December 2016. Of course, I had written about some of her work in The Meaning of Form, but here I wanted to introduce the general reader to her work, without too much cogitation on ‘form’, the obsession of the moment, that moment and, I should admit, this moment too! Well, my  moment. I possibly wrote the whole in one day. Here's a prefatory post about Waldrop and form: Pages: Notes on the Poetics of Rosmarie Waldrop: Form]

Rosmarie Waldrop is unique in American poetry for being so European. Located at the heart of Language Poetry (though she predates, and her work is a precursor for, it) she nevertheless maintains connections with European writing (chiefly French and German language poetry) through the act of translating it into English. Just as she has maintained her Austrian accent, her poetry has maintained a European tinge. Nevertheless, the formal narrative of her development is in line with certain paradigm shifts in American poetry and poetics and the result is one of the most distinctive bodies of work of recent years. There was a smaller selected poems, Another Language, some years ago, but this new book, Gap Gardening, is substantial. Co-edited with Nikolai Duffy, the author of Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop (Bristol: Shearsman, 2013), an invaluable guide to the work, Gap Gardening samples every period of her writing life, and shows that, now in her eighties, Waldrop’s formally investigative strategies continue.       

The early work is lyrical in a general modernist way. The Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger was published by major publisher Random House in 1972, and her poem ‘Between’ introduces her recurring sense of the liminal, here expressed in first person free verse, but also with abrupt uses of enjambement and rapid changes of focus that are (to borrow from the poem itself) not quite at home with the aesthetic of the time:

 

I’m not quite at home

on either side of the Atlantic

I’m not irritated the fish

kept me

a home makes you forget (6)

 

‘Irritated’ strikes a discordant note here, though so does ‘fish’. The dissonance caused by the syntactic indeterminacy between these elements as negotiated by enjambement unbalances the reader; this uncertainty suggests her later poetics. With a poem dedicated to Jabès and another ventriloquising Hölderlin, the focus is European, a cultural rather than personal ‘betweenness’ which is important to her. 

At the time she was also plugging away at a PhD which was published as Against Language? ‘dissatisfaction with language’ as theme and as impulse towards experiments in twentieth century poetry. (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) It was a taxonomy of the variety of techniques used by European experimental writers, like the German Helmut Heissenbüttel. This analytical approach was to pay dividends for Waldrop’s developing poetics, because it probably taught her how to conceptualise the use of particular techniques at the level of form (and not at the level of content or authorial intention). What I mean is that she would henceforth work by project or in book length serial form, which, although quite common in the New American Poetry, she would assimilate and develop as a much stricter formally investigative tool. Once a form or a frame was established, she would run various materials (whether her own words or the appropriated language of others) through that system and the resultant texts would be (and mean) the results of the occasion of her actions. She would not be expressing herself. Which is not to say she is ‘Against Expression’ in the manner of the contemporary conceptual poets, Kenneth Goldsmith and associates, but that content is never more than an extension of form.

This sounds counter-intuitive but Waldrop has a simple explanatory fiction on this subject. Some of her earlier poems (later poems, it turns out, too!) concern her complex relationship with her mother. Resorting to the liberating technique of collage (Waldrop often quips that collage is the ‘splice of life’) she found the resulting cut-up poems were still about her mother. The moral of the story is that despite (or perhaps because of) the use of a distanciating technique, the concerns of an author will show through. This explains the mysterious remark of Tristan Tzara when he offered a recipe for collage or cut-up during the First World War; he stated that the resultant work would resemble the assemblagist. Similiarly, Waldrop’s poems are not empty forms, but gather their contents as they develop, and (almost paradoxically) are some of the most intensely reflective writings we have on gender, history, science, and many other ‘themes’. Her PhD studies and her acquaintanceship with some of the members of the French Oulipo group – at whatever stage in this process they were discovered – must have encouraged her in the belief that formal constraints of various kinds are actually productive of potential meanings. Later American Language Poetry practices (the numerological obsessiveness of Ron Silliman, for example) must also have encouraged her (while we must recognise her influence upon them).

Her breakthrough volume, The Road is Everywhere, or Stop this Body, was published in 1978 by the small press Open Places. Waldrop’s ‘breakthough’ is a formal one; it would be some years before she would be published by a large press once more. This book appeared about the time the Language movement was beginning to be first noticed (in an under-the-radar way), and the influence here (as I insist above) goes both ways. Syntactic indeterminacy is no longer a stylistic ploy to deflect readerly continuity but a structural device to articulate and disarticulate reading at the same time, extending over a long series of short poems. The lines are hinged, so that line A syntactically coheres with B, and line B coheres with C (but A doesn’t with C). The poems were written during a car commute and the semiotics of the ‘road’ journey (there are literal road signs in the text) and the flows and disruptions of the travelling (female) ‘body’ are played against one another in this model of linguistic celerity. Nothing rests. (It is curious that the title is articulated by a single comma; the poems aren’t.)

 

200 miles of nerve per hour with the guardrails down

can churn the intermittent

shapes into sheer

bodies touch there’s no

question why

my tongue on your

speed leaps ahead of

he will come on a stallion

he will come on the power and

fury of wind (30)

 

Questions of language and movement are raised throughout, but in a speedy, mutating discourse that mimes the incidental and moving perceptual registering of American highway travel: ‘outlines/ into threshold’. (20) This is an impressive formal achievement and one that had a lasting effect on the work of one British poet, Adrian Clarke.

There is a simple narrative concerning Waldrop’s development that is refuted by the selection of Gap Gardening and that is that she gave up writing lineated poetry and took to permanently writing a species of prose. This isn’t true, but it is true that the major formal innovation in her work has been her prose experiments, which were first published in the 1987 volume Reproduction of Profiles and collected with the later Lawn of Excluded Middle and Reluctant Gravities in the trilogy Curves to the Apple (2006). (She was again published by a large press, New Directions.) Judging from anthologies and critical work one may say this is presumed her masterpiece, though later experiments in this mode develop beyond it. She knew what she was losing and gaining by her decision to write prose. The impedimenta of lyric poetry are dispensed with and the cooler propositional grace of philosophic writing is entertained as style. Again this is consistent with, and is partly predictive of, a perceived move in American (and other) poetry, towards what the critic Stephen Fredman calls ‘poet’s prose’, an ugly term no more satisfactory than prose poetry. In short, the syntactic play of the lineated work is turned inside out. Syntax comes back into play as the rhythmic as well as the semantic organising principle of the flow and surge of prose; the spatial splice of enjambment is replaced by an often invisible switch mid-sentence, that allows Waldrop to not just jump from one subject to another, but to formally rupture discourses, and to use invisible thread to stitch scraps together into beautifully-relaxed prose rhythms. Violation of method does not result in violent rupture. (Compare her measured prose with the similarly collagic work of Bruce Andrews, for example.)

But what is she stitching together? It is here that her sense that all writing is palimpsestic – that beneath the surface of any writing lies the years, decades, centuries of writings that inform it. Conversely, she provides a new palimpsestic layer as she ‘writes through’ (or over)  other texts (a lesson probably learnt from translation practices that must always be kinds of writing through, though here adopted to works in one language). Perhaps the most famous are her sinuous and humorous writings-through of (and writing-back to) Wittgenstein. Of course, this revelation of method could ruin the effect of first reading the text, in which the initial naturalisation might be that we are overhearing the slightly oblique language of an arguing couple, but somehow this knowledge enhances a sophisticated reading at a number of levels. This is an arguing couple but is it also allows the palimpsestic traces of Wittgenstein through, here with his insistence that the meaning of a word is its use. The ease and poise of voice, the pattern of dialogic exchange or lack of exchange, (‘I thought … you said’) carries the reader. (76) The first sentence of ‘Feverish Propositions’ demonstrates quite clearly how the intervening splicing produces evocative non-sequitur:

YOU TOLD ME, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself. (76)     

Comedy matches philosophic despair but questions about the nature of language, as ever in Waldrop, are to the fore. Wittgenstein wrote most of his works as propositions, wonderful material for this formal method of making propositional language feverish, making masculine language feminist. As the ‘Prologue’ to Reluctant Gravities (1999) puts it, talking around the gender dynamic at play in many of these prose works,

The difference of our sex, says one voice, saves us from humiliation. It makes me shiver, says the other. Your voice drops stones into feelings to sound their depth. Then warmth is truncated to war. But I’d like to fall back into simplicity as into a featherbed. (90)

This, like the previous quotation, is a complete paragraph (taking the role of the stanza in the same way the sentence takes over the function of line). Elegant, mysterious (‘The page lures the voice with a promise of wood blossoming’ (91)), beautiful, subsequent experimentation with the poetics of the sentence, in works like the more linguistically-focussed Split Infinites (1998) or Blindsight (2003), play with sentence barriers to create flow and impediment, boundary and bleed, within the now-familiar paragraph-unit. 

Here I work towards. A kind of elegy. Here a strange ceiling. ‘Earth fills his mouth.’ I would look at you. And write you. A spell but slack at the edge. And in the door where I stand your voice goes. Hollow. (163)

This is one paragraph-unit from ‘Hölderlin Hybrids’, feeding out of the German poet’s works (and signalling back to her earliest poems) in Blindsight , a collection which intensifies the processes of reading-through art objects and poetic texts, from Joseph Cornell’s boxes to the texts of Mallarmé and Stein. The latter receives a rare pastiche as homage: ‘Plenty of space plenty of ordinary plenty of present’, which collapses space into time. (180)

            Waldrop’s most recent individual volume, Driven to Abstraction (2010), plays with notions of infinity and limitlessness at one end, and the microscopic at the other, the scientific in one guise, the religious in another. It is like some raging theology of the absolute (although it’s more about absolute zero): ‘Nothing. Zero. Absence of things, of signs.’ (222). ‘And the rabbis?’ ‘So It’s Nothing’ opens. ‘In spite of the void in the beginning, not inclined to discuss it.’ (225) Drawn, a note tells us, from the volume Signifying Nothing, the Semiotics of Zero by Brian Rothman, one can see just how far the interrogative, formally investigative strategies of Waldrop’s prose have taken her, of how the language may be torqued in several directions, towards the conversational and towards the essayist, but always with a certain mystery that suggests the linguistic mysticism of Jabès (which also returns us to her early poems, and to her complementary work as a translator of writers like Jabès).

             Woven between these developing prose works have been a number of other collage texts, and the most interesting of them find Waldrop at her most American, in Shorter American Memory (1988) and A Key into the Language of America (1994). The first of these books, according to a note, is ‘derived from sources collected in Henry Beston’s American Memory’, obviously an historical anthology or miscellany published in 1937. (103) Waldrop’s ‘Shorter’ hints that her book is an abridgement, and in a sense it is, but in the spirit of collage the history presented is a condensed radical re-organisation of the early history of America, to emphasise its wildness and religiosity:

Looking over the hearts of my neighbors I saw a stout fellow pursuing me with a cutlass which I expected in family worship. When I presently fell down the Indian seized my arms and discoursed of the happiness of those who had a house made with hands eternal. (105)

However, this piece, taking one source only and de-forming it and re-forming it, seems less transformative than the more philosophic prose texts, but it is effective in defamiliarsing a familiar story. A Key into the Language of America is formally a more hybrid affair, with its lineated lists and lyric passages, one of the many returns and partial returns to poetry writing per se. More disruptive than Shorter American Memory, it juxtaposes different lineations and layouts as it processes the text of a primer on Native American language (and possibly other sources). Words are defined, histories are told, and a plangent lyric voice ends each of its sections, in this case with a surreal sexual frisson:

nostalgia figured

in bruised shins

and loss

loss of eternity

in triplicate

such that my kness

could come apart

and tell

their seeds (131)

            Gap Gardening offers us the various works of one of the most remarkable writers of our time. Returning to the texts again, they offer up radically different facets; they exemplify the fact that reading is a continual return, an event that both happens to us and is an act that we must perform; the openness of these texts allows us to perform them towards perpetuity.

 Robert Sheppard

31^st October 2016  

 

ReView 5: Angela Leighton: On Form, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word

You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

Angela Leighton On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 288pp. 

[This more academic review was first published as ‘Angela Leighton’s On Form’, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 3 (1), March 2011. Some of it fed directly into my critical volume The Meaning of Form. See here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks) Other parts didn’t.]

Angela Leighton has the benefit of coming relatively late to a debate about form that has been raging in some areas of literary studies (chiefly Romanticism) for some years, and in her book she judiciously accounts for her immediate predecessors’ works: Wolfson’s Formal Charges (1997), Bollas’ Art Matters (2001), Attridge’s magisterial The Singularity of Literature (2004), and Wood’s Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005). (It is perhaps symptomatic of the state of current British criticism that theorists associated with innovative poetry are not within her scope. But then, this area of criticism has not been taken up by critics of radical poetry.) Her book offers useful readings of the history of the term ‘form’ and of aesthetic criticism and of its relationship to poetry since the Romantics and Tennyson, with useful foci upon Pater and Vernon Lee, Woolf and Yeats.

She adopts a multiple distinction found also in the earlier studies, one which I take to be at its simplest a distinction between ‘form’ as devicehood and forms and ‘forming’ as a constitutive act of readerly reception. She explains: ‘Form can signify both the finished object, the art form in its completion, or the parts that make up its technical apparatus. It can signify a visionary apparition in the mind, or the real, physical properties of a work. In addition, it can suggest the force that drives to completion.’ She offers a brief historical reading of aestheticist thought since Kant, focussing on the notions of form and force. The refinements of Schiller are singled out as the source for many later definitions and tropic play: ‘Schiller fidgets’ she says, with the term form, ‘trying out grammatical alternatives: “form-drive”, “formal qualities”… as if to push the noun into new shapes, new “forms”. So the “play-drive” of art is a “form-drive”, a wish to make forms, and that leads to a notion of “living form”,’ a phrase often used to introduce dynamic impulse into the arguments. When such notions are picked up by Coleridge, as ‘forma efformans’ [forming form] form has ‘become not a body but an agent. It forms.

Leaving aside considerations of the relationship between beauty and truth in post-Romantic thought, which culminates in Pater’s purist awareness that ‘form…shuts in beauty and shuts out truth’, Leighton draws out the ambiguities of Clive Bell’s and Roger Fry’s Modernist mantra of ‘significant form’, which is usually taken as a plea for the autonomy of the artwork but actually ‘registers the contrary pressure of significance, and therefore the stress of incompatibles being brought together’, content and form. It echoes recent arguments that form signifies and has semantic and cognitive value, that artificial devices are meaningful (Charles Bernstein revising Forrest-Thomson, for example). Mid-century thinkers Henri Focillon and Suzanne Langer are shown synthesising views that ‘form … is not a fixed shape to be seen, but the shape of a choice to be made’. Leighton notes of Langer’s Feeling and Form: 

 ‘Form and Feeling’ would once have been a contradiction, but it is now a hybrid, rather like… ‘living form’ which, like Schiller’s original, or Coleridge’s ‘forma efformans’, or Focillon’s ‘life of forms’, insists on life at the heart of form…She thus continues the project … of wresting form away from the museum of untouchable … art forms, and giving it back to the human beings who make or perceive it,

 

thus preparing the way for an aesthetic theory that has at its centre the receptiveness and response of the user of the artwork, even the responsibility of, or to, forms (as Barthes says) that ‘suggests that form stops us in our tracks of thinking, and asserts itself in that moment of stillness’. Form discovers us as we discover it.

            If ‘form is not a matter of correct technique; it is a force of creativity generally’, how should we approach it critically? Leighton answers the question for her own book, which negotiates her chosen texts with a scrupulousness and subtlety that derives from her aesthetic tradition and also, I would like to believe, from her own sensitivity to form as a poet. She derives her methodology from her immediate precursors. She quotes Attridge’s verbal adjustments, ‘taking form’, ‘losing form’, and the one I favour, ‘forming’, with approval of their distension of temporality and of attention, and comments, ‘Thus we catch form in the act.’ Once we espy this rare entity, she wonders ‘what kind of criticism could be devoted to’ these dynamic formulations of form? She takes from Bolla and Wood the cognitive imperative the former formulated: ‘Perhaps to think of form as a way of knowing, not as an object of knowledge, might be the beginning of the answer.’  She also inherits from her forebears the cautious tone and tentative suggestiveness that seems the hallmark of this (necessarily?) conjectural mode of thinking. ‘Being willing to listen to the strange things that are said’ by form (28) prepares us for a state of alertness to alterity but seems strangely disarming at once.

Had she considered Simon Jarvis’ ‘Prosody as Cognition’ essay or Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager she might have found cognate theorists interested in more radial poetries, but the book is what we have in any case and she offers illuminating readings of Douglas Oliver, W.S. Graham and Roy Fisher (who are arguably within the ‘linguistically innovative’ umbrella) but also writes about Geoffrey Hill, Anne Stevenson and Heather McHugh, among others. In many ways it is refreshing to see a range of poetries considered together and when they are meeting under the sign of form then much must be well. Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.

Oliver is present as a poetic commentator upon Celan, a link from British shores to both European culture and to the horrors conducted upon Continental Europe during the War. She is snappily apt when she rejects post-Adorno pleas for the eloquence of a silenced post-Holocaust poetry, and shows how Pater’s condition of music is approached by Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ as aestheticism at its most engaged, if we may put it thus. The figure of the ‘urn’ is uncannily traced throughout this book, whether embodied in the well-wrought urn the New Criticism borrowed from Donne or the supernal isolate one they ventriloquized after Keats, or in cracked ones in Henry James’ fiction, or in the funerary urns in Roy Fisher’s comic transportation of post-cremation ashes (up the ramp of a car-repair shop, onto the garden, its residual fragments to be binned, re-incinerated, and eventually lifted ‘clear of Sheffield/ and over the North Sea’ in his ‘They Came Home’).Oliver’s poem on Celan is analysed for the way it proves that ‘the aestheticist “urn” is always in danger of becoming a purely ceremonial container of the past, a bland appeaser of guilt and a museum-piece in the memory’.

Leighton traces another persistent trope connecting notions of ‘form’ to notions of ‘nothing’; to be an aesthetic writer is to articulate form but to say nothing, as Oscar Wilde and others assert. But ‘nothing’ (appearing so pertinently in her chapter on Wallace Stevens not just in the present-absent artefact-being ‘snowman’) is an inheritance of the formal tradition, in her reading. Again Fisher – a poet whose abandoned ‘Collected Poems 1968’ were called ‘the ghost of a paper bag’ – harbours a mania for ‘true nothing’ as the true content of poetry. Realist depiction is famously and persistently ‘nondescript’ for Fisher, present as its own negation. One of a number of recent critics to pick up on Fisher’s non-metaphysical obsession with the dead, Leighton is particularly good at showing how Fisher fills the urn of remembrance with the nothing-doings of the dead. On the other hand, W.S. Graham is obsessed with events of forming when he considers the sea in ‘The Nightfishing’, but also with nothing or Nobody when he turns to modes of address to absent addressees in the self-reflexive later work. ‘The Constructed Space’ of the poem of that title could just as easily be the formed space or the empty space across which poetry forms itself as a listening mouth, as it were. In all these texts, Leighton concludes, ‘the aestheticist programme of deflecting matter into form, message into style, is reiterated in different ways’.       

            This summary is not able to chart the way that an obsessive set of themes (images even) recurs across the programme she outlines. Hers is less of an objective account, more a knowing surrender to, and witness account of, her encounters with these thinkers and (in the second part of the book) with contemporary poets. She has much in common with others in this tradition of thinking in adopting a conjectural, elusive or allusive approach to defining form: ‘To regard form, not as a shape, an object, or technique, but as a “charge”, with all its headlong, economic, even judicial connotations, is to release it from stasis. Form does not stay still; in many senses, it “charges”’. Onwards.

 

Robert Sheppard

ReViews 3: The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews & Statements by Allen Fisher

You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews & Statements by Allen Fisher, edited by Andrew Duncan, Shearsman Books. 

[This review was first published as ‘The Marvels of Lambeth’ (Allen Fisher), Stride (web), August 2013]

Some books of literary interviews make perfect sense on their own. By coincidence on my desk I have Scott Thurston’s quartet of interviews with four women poets, Talking Poetics, alongside this new book of statements and interviews by Allen Fisher, The Marvels of Lambeth. Thurston’s volume uses interviews conducted knowingly for the purpose of the book, but he fastidiously footnotes everything necessary and there are useful bibliographies at the back. You could learn a lot about the work of these writers from the interviews and paratexts alone. The Marvels of Lambeth doesn’t operate like that at all. I doubt whether a new reader should start here. (I’d advise waiting for The Portable Allen Fisher volume out later this year from Shearsman.) Part of this has to do with editing. Andrew Duncan, a fine poet and exhaustive commentator on innovative British poetry, is the editor and chief interviewer. Unlike Thurston, he is hands-off with footnotes, although he does pop up now and then with italicised parenthetical remarks, a little like Basil Fawlty arriving at your restaurant table just as you are about to taste the starter.

Actually, the starter to this volume is a playful cut-up text ‘Preface by Sir Aylmer Firebrace to original 1909 Everyman Edition of Prosyncel’. This won’t help much either. Fisher scholars like me know that Prosyncel was a teasing volume from the mid-70s which presented cross-sections of Fisher’s 37 creative projects of the time. More usefully, at the end of this book are sections taken from Prosyncel about the by no means straightforward structure of the long loco-specific project Place that Fisher wrote in the 1970s. The earliest statements, talks and interviews date from the 1970s, with Eric Mottram, Peter Barry and Ken Edwards (heavyweights all three). There is only one from the 1980s, with Adrian Clarke, when Fisher had begun his other long project Gravity as a Consequence of Shape. (Place was published entire by Reality Street in 2005 and is 414 pages long; Gravity as a Consequence of Shape, whose title enacts its interest in morphology, its tendency to pattern-making and textual distortion, was written between 1982 and 2005 and its total 750 pages are now available as a trilogy: Gravity and Leans from Salt and Entanglement from The Gig. They are alternative places for the newcomer to start, though there are other projects to check out, including Fisher’s visual art practice which is increasingly impacting upon his writing.) Many of the other interviews – with Scott Thurston, Victoria Sheppard, and those with Duncan – date from around the end of the period of work on Gravity. What you get is snapshots of forty years of development from the conceptual poetics of 1973 (Fisher was involved with a Fluxus offshoot, Fluxshoe) to his mature poetics of imperfect fit and confidence in lack (to which I shall return). Between, you perceive him wrestling with the question of procedural writing and responsibility: should one intervene in writing systems one has set up or not. The later poetics involves setting up systems (via multiple quotations and writing) and interventions (to sometimes sculpt the material and sometimes to disrupt it, or to do both), in order to constantly surprise himself and the reader, to activate the reader and make him or her productive with the text. Cutting, cut-up, and collage have always seemed slightly inadequate words for what Fisher now calls ‘imperfect fit’, which suggests that his ‘collaging’ is not a synonym for ‘quilting’, but you have to start with those terms to explain the workings of the work. (I came up with the term ‘creative linkage’ in my own poetics and critical work to show how texts like Fisher’s are simultaneously disjoined and enjoined.) He speaks of an attitude he calls in a recent poetics piece ‘confidence in lack’, a kind of update of Keats’ negative capability that allows the writer (and possibly the reader, if they absorb the poetics as readerly action) to admit disparity, dissonance, and noise to the poem. In the interview with Scott Thurston, Fisher describes this cautiously in a more homely metaphor borrowed from Charles Olson: ‘I’d also say something like leave the dirt on…. That, of course, also means because we’re all artificers, we don’t leave all the dirt on. It’s very selective about that, but you’re putting signifiers in which indicate lapse or change.’

There is much to comment on in these exchanges, which I don’t have room for here. Scientific ideas are entertained as contents or structural homologies for the work; poetic community and publishing become important, and important as extensions of one another. One interview is specifically about performance. Another is on creative process (you can almost hear the files being rustled open for the interviewer to peer inside). Duncan and Fisher in their exchanges range freely over most of this territory, but occasionally focus upon particular texts, so that his theory of ‘riming’ is demonstrated for the reader, for example.

For me, Fisher’s early involvement with Fluxus is of some contemporary interest. There is much discussion these days about ‘conceptual writing’; it is interesting to see the term being freely entertained (and finally discarded, or more accurately, absorbed into a growing poetics of processual advancement). Fisher discusses this in terms that I’m sure he would not disagree with now: ‘The meaning of my art is the use it may have. Cage’s sense of utility. A way of helping out, as well as the fact that all art, every act in life is a political act.’  ‘But that isn’t conceptual,’ the interviewer, the possibly pseudonymous R.A.C. Kiss, cuts in. ‘I didn’t say it was,’ Fisher concludes the interview, decisively, but also humorously as he dodges questions and thinks out loud (as he continues to do throughout the years of interrogatory discourse documented here, still with this characteristic humour). In a later interview with Duncan, Fisher talks about his spanner in the works poetics of self-interruption and compares it to the sudden ‘honking’ of Albert Ayler’s free jazz. ‘I’m just wondering if I should footnote Albert Ayler,’ muses Duncan. ‘In what way?’ Fisher asks, not following the editorial imperative. Duncan explains: ‘There is a famous paradox, which is that if you set out to explain your poetry by explaining bits, you rapidly end up with 80 pages of prose to one page of poetry. And you realise, This was not the right way to go at all! A lot of people reading this have no idea who Albert Ayler was.’ ‘No I know,’ Fisher replies, seeming to get it, but then with the typical excitement that Fisher shows for ideas and art manifestations, he’s off on one: ‘Except, you know there’s a new box set coming out?... I think it’s about 8 CDs, it’s the whole of his work.’ At its best, this book captures Fisher’s infectious enthusiasm, ceaseless curiosity, for ‘all art and every act in life’. In a funny sort of way, it’s this that best ‘explains’ the multi-referentiality of his work (though more footnotes might still have been useful).

Robert Sheppard

I've written about Allen Fisher on this blog a lot: here's one substantial post: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Proposals by Allen Fisher 

ReViews Number 2: three books by Tom Raworth

Here's the second review I'm republishing on this blog. You can access all the Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

Glancing Off 

Tom Raworth, As When: A Selection. Ed. Miles Champion. Manchester: Carcanet, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN 978 1 78410 033 0, £14.99.

Tom Raworth, XIVLiners. Brighton: Sancho Panza, 2014. 224 pp. ISBN 978 1 910501 00 9, £10.

Tom Raworth, Structure from Motion. Washington DC: Edge, 2015. 75pp. ISBN 978 1 890311 44 5.

[This review was first published as ‘Glancing Off’ (Raworth), Poetry Salzburg Review 28, Autumn 2015, and was an attempt to write casually about Tom Raworth’s work, i.e., to not to try to theorise it too much, apart from what I could remember from writing about the work in The Poetry of Saying and elsewhere. Hence my opening sentence. Here's another elsewhere, with further elsewheres: Pages: Tom Beau (my poem for Tom Raworth along with others' in Blackbox Manifold) and links to my other tributes]

 

 

Elsewhere, I write about Tom Raworth’s work as an exemplar of a ‘poetry of saying’, with its eternally signifying play, its lack of closure. I contrast this with ‘the poetry of the said’, which involves fixity (the dreariness of anecdotage, in particular). But the two qualities are deeply intertwined: even slippery Raworth poems demand the fixity of reprinting them again and again in the same words, as in his As When: A Selection and two attendant volumes, XIVLiners and Structure from Motion, the last containing recent work. While I believe my thesis still, as literary critical description and writerly poetics, it doesn’t help new readers of these poems much. You need to ‘get’ them first, otherwise the critical concepts are simply a shield, its terms jargon to fend off unmediated encounter. 

I probably first read Raworth in the Penguin Modern Poets series in the trio Ashbery, Harwood, Raworth. Ashbery then was not the eminent figure he is today; I found the poems playful and enigmatic. Harwood I’d already read (and later worked on his poetry). But there was something in Raworth’s notational, throwaway, skeletal, constantly shifting writing (the lack of punctuation and the insistent lower case the only constants) that I felt was escaping me, not like the difficulties one has in reading the effervescent but deep resonances of Rilke or Celan, for example, but something more basic: like having registered X out of the corner of my eye but not quite seeing it wholly or clearly enough. Sufferers from migraines get used to something like this – and so do readers of Raworth, who have to accept a certain negative capability, to return to a state where we don’t know anything. As Raworth said, in an interview quoted in Miles Champion’s detailed biblio-biographic introduction to As When: ‘I really have no sense of questing for knowledge... My idea is to go the other way... And to be completely empty and see what sounds.’ And so, it seems to me, must the reader. As Raworth says in the creative work itself: ‘not rejecting knowledge but what (as in research) passes for knowledge and is but an illusion. the words (knowledge, intelligent, etc.) must be redefined, or new words coined.’  

Part of this has to do with the lack of method – or disarming simplicity of method. Early works simply add new lines to past lines until they stop. Olson spoke of one perception leading immediately to another, but we find not just perceptions (they could be puns or linguistic coinages, plenty of over-heard or found language, not to mention diagrams or doodles). One early poem enacts its own telling and simply happens in a situated on-going process:

 

I made this pact, intelligence

shall not replace intuition, sitting here

my hand cold on the typewriter

 

Later works juggle within line limits, as I shall show. But the poesis is always intuitive, one intuition leading to the next. Raworth is very seldom procedural (and when he is, the procedure is only used once). Apprehension of a poetry of saying can only come after a successful aesthetic encounter with the work, in the ‘event-act’ of reading, as Derek Attridge calls it, intuition before tuition.

As When is a selection that stretches Raworth’s whole career, from the early sixties until now, but is by no means even in coverage. The first half of the book presents a clear narrative of Raworth’s development of perceptual registers of life’s odd simultaneity, though not necessarily its complexity. ‘Morning’ and ‘Three’ enact domestic life as semi-orchestrated chaos. Anybody who looks after children will recognise: ‘smell of shit when i lift him he knocks the book from my hand’, the first of 7 action-packed lines of ‘Three’ that end with the temporary harmony of ‘they go down the hall all carrying something’. I say ‘not complexity’, because complexity implies order and Raworth’s poems share something with the contemporaneous anarchistic epistemology of Paul Feyerabend with its ‘anything goes’ and his stand ‘against method’. When perceptions are adjoined by fantasy and linguistic games, as in the playful opening of ‘Wedding Day’ (‘noise of a ring sliding onto a finger’), the very poem in which he made the ‘pact’ regarding intuition, though with whom is not clear, the reader has to go with the unknown flow (or not). To read the work as a witty super-charged stream of consciousness isn’t a bad way in. My students often say this and I then encourage them to develop a better sense of stream, because consciousness co-exists with other streamed qualities. Fragmentary fictional scenarios are just as likely to jump into view (‘we were leaving on a journey by slow aeroplane’) as the perceptions of our poet at stool, where the anticipated stream probably isn’t consciousness:

 

between my legs i read

 

levi stra

                        origina

            quality clo

 

                                    leaning too far forward

            into a patch of sunlight,

 

or his wide-eyed quotidian but peculiarly inessential queries (‘where do all the cigarette ends go?’), or even his accurate registering of language in production, as in the voice (in ‘Love Poem’) that begins: ‘there have been so many other men in my pause life’. Humour, of course, is what carries the reader here; there is something in the human covenant that grants humour and wit exclusive rights over our intellect (it is an intellectual function that undermines itself).

I want to dwell on ‘gone to lunch back in five minutes’, the opening section of ‘The University of Essex’. Raworth was briefly student and staff member there, after years away from education and its fossilized ‘knowledge’, though the poem itself suggests he registers his distance still, as in the third line’s ‘no and no’:

 

night closed in on my letter of resignation

out in the square one of my threads had broken loose

the language i used was no and no 

while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills

 

occasionally the metabolism alters

and lines no longer come express

waiting for you what muscles work me

which hold me down below my head?

 

it is a long coat and van on the horizon

a bird that vanishes        the Arabic

i learn from observation is how to break the line

 

(genius creates surprises : the metropolitan

police band singing ‘bless this house’

 

as the filmed extractor fans inflate the house with steam

 

Many of these early poems abound with questions about self (as in the speculation about metabolism and muscles) but a growing area of enquiry is about writing itself. In this poem questions about the line are both existential and technical for the poet. A sketchy sense of location, though often surreal in its detail, as in the ambiguous threads in the equally ambiguous square, segues into the astonishing vision of the police band, in a parenthetical aside that opens but doesn’t close before the final, sinister, image. Although it offers what looks like closure, this phrase cannot be held responsible, as it were, for the almost liminal consciousness (not arranged in a ‘stream’) of dislocated yellow, hammers and drills.

In the 1970s the poems become more self-conscious with Raworth’s self-confessed stretching towards the long poem, and some of the longer poem sequences seem to be deliberately ‘tracking’ – to use the title of one of them – its possibilities: ‘the connections (or connectives) no longer work – so how to build the long poem everyone is straining for?’ he asks. However, he isn’t about to commit The Four Quartets. He answers his own question with a poetics statement that he characteristically partly registers as a question and places in parentheses: ‘(the synopsis is enough for a quick mind now (result of film?) – you can’t pad out the book).’  Implicit is celerity of mind as writerly and readerly modes, the montage techniques of Jean-Luc Godard or Jeff Keen being the apposite filmic analogies. ‘Tracking (notes)’ itself is a serial poem-and-prose piece that juggles poetics and ‘philosophy’ (the remarks on ‘knowledge’ quoted earlier come from this work), as when Raworth usefully tells us ‘the true direction is always glancing off’, presented alongside examples of that ‘glancing’ itself: ‘saddle of hare?’ one section reads entirely, as if questioning collective nounhood. Another sequence, ‘Stag Skull Mounted’, a notational diary poem, tracks its own (eventual) failure as method, its exhaustion: the final entry is ‘this trick doesn’t work’, at which point the process must be abandoned. As a later interview has it, which modifies and extends the metaphor of ‘glancing off’: ‘At the back there is always the hope that there are other people ... other minds, who will recognize something that they thought was to one side or not real. I hope that my poems will show them that it is real, that it does exist.’

One aspect of Raworth’s work that we don’t get in As When is most of the long poems that Raworth did achieve in the late 1970s and early 1980s (they are literally long in their short-lined, occasionally one word, measures down the page) like Writing and Catacoustics, since Champion, probably wisely, didn’t want to excerpt. (They can be found in the 2003 Carcanet Collected Poems.) This is the perfect form for an on-going, digressive tracking of ‘anything goes’, an additive non-method, but is a rollercoaster for the reader who must stay with it, understanding or not. This process is also reflected in Raworth’s famous ‘quick mind’ recitation style. However, Champion selects ‘West Wind’, the poem I think of as the last of this series, and a personal favourite, because it combines the perceptual and linguistic play of earlier work with a political commitment that derives (accidentally?) from having been written during the 1983 British election when Raworth’s mother was in hospital. It combines social observation recorded nowhere else (‘if I can’t take the dog in/ I won’t vote’), with savage political comment about Thatcher (‘handbag’). The Falklands War is brilliantly equated with poverty at home and ‘the state as/ the status/ quo’: 

 

puffs of unrelated news

restore

our former glory

which apparently

was a global servant class

too poor

to see the crown jewels

 

Yet these quotations from the flow do violence to the experience of the tickertape flicker of the poem’s progress, jumping and cutting, from these moments of political acuity to perceptually disturbing data, such as ‘fragments/ of black spider motion’ with which the poem ends. To Raworth’s question, ‘result of film?’ we must answer, ‘Yes.’

Another deliberate gap in the Champion selection is the extraordinary series of 211 fourteen line poems that Raworth wrote between about 1986 and the mid-1990s, but these are published collectively in XIVLiners for the first time. Beautifully designed, with one poem per page, we can savour each in isolation, in this pocket-book edition. If we are invited by the book’s title to think of them as sonnets, then the punning cover, Raworth’s own, showing 14 ocean liners, gently pushes away from that identification, with a joking raspberry of a foghorn. If they are sonnets, as I’ve said elsewhere, then they display a volta (the ‘turn’ that occurs asymmetrically at some point, usually after line 8 or 10 in the traditional sonnet frame) after every line. In contrast to the additive long poems, these lyrics are ‘juggled’, the constraint of the frame allowing for tight combinational play, but no less intuitive for that. Although Raworth always confounds identifications, many of the poems seem to be assembled from one source, by taking fragments from a text and putting back the often enigmatic fragments in a new order, to present a ‘glancing off’ meaning that was not present in the original, a kind of literary cubism. There is no typical poem but it is helpful to take an example:         

 

tear away whole sections

of what is good

bags of camel’s hair

a blue that carries further

the unlikeness of dusk and chaos

crossing a stream

where tributaries enter a river

you can’t wait for science

to drain that space of wet earth dry

the face seemed to lack contour

nothing is left but a vast expanse

deep grooves of habit

trodden into the soil

under a full moon crossed by a vulture

 

It doesn’t matter that the source is a geography book (and it might not help to identify it). What matters is that the syntactic indeterminacy of the piece, the difficulties we have making sense of it (we are hard-wired for that, and can’t just leave it alone), create a kind of unfinishable reading. Is line 2 connected to line 3, thus changing the meaning? What kind of ‘face’ is it? ‘Deep grooves of habit’ might be metaphorical rather than real but they are still ‘trodden into the soil’, in a location ‘under a full moon’ that promises nocturnal rest, but the ‘vulture’ in the last line seems ominous, despite the ordinary specificity of ‘camel’s hair’, ‘stream’, ‘tributaries’ and ‘river’. The semantic field traceable between these words even allows you to say what the poem is ‘about’, what matter they encircle. But none of the poems seems to close; indeed, they read differently on re-encounter. You can’t remember them, often.  This is what I mean by a ‘poetry of saying’: the poems inaugurate an eternality of utterance (one of their first printings was entitled ‘Eternal Sections’). This book could remain in and out of your pocket forever.

This vertiginous negative capability, best learnt with these fourteen liners, is necessary in encountering Raworth’s recent work, represented in the final pages of As When and in Structure from Motion, a title that suggests its poetics. The long poem ‘Got On’ which appears in both books, is a strikingly new departure, its stuttering lineation impeding reading and offering almost aggressive resistance: ‘fuck the friendly image’ it begins before collecting as much of what is glancing off as it can: names, fragments of speech, political analysis, and even the headline-like: ‘hearings reveal ineffable blood warmth’. (I admit to be still reading this text.) ‘Spear Shaking’, in contrast, is an egregious and technically-adroit example of Raworth’s one-off procedural works, using a technique that the Oulipo calls ‘The Chimera’, but which, in Raworth’s witty ways, is more like the ‘one song to the tune of another’ game on the Radio 4 anti-panel show ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’ (an analogy that is appropriate to the very English nature of Raworth’s humour). Richard III’s most famous speech (as re-diffused by Shakespeare) is populated with items from a keyword-list used by the US security services to track online chatter, but we can still discern the lilt of the original: ‘Now is the power outrage of our weapons cache/ Made toxic jihad by this breach of threat.’ This contemporary map of fears is an appropriate example to round off this review of over sixty years of intuitive and intelligent exploration of periphery vision, of showing where the action is, beyond ‘knowledge’.

 

Robert Sheppard

July 2015

ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)

I am going to post eight reviews written a number of years ago and published in now difficult to come by volumes. This post will also form a hubpost to access the other seven when they are all posted.

 Here's the first anyway, on this page! Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4, Winter 2010, eds. Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger. ISSN 2152-9841.

Number 2: Three books of poetry by Tom Raworth: Pages: ReViews Number 2: three books by Tom Raworth

Number 3: The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews and Statements by Allen Fisher: Pages: ReViews 3: The Marvels of Lambeth: Interviews & Statements by Allen Fisher

Number 4: The Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton: Pages: ReView 4: An Andrew Crozier Reader, ed. Ian Brinton

Number 5: On Form by Angela Leighton: Pages: ReView 5: Angela Leighton: On Form, Aestheticism and the Legacy of a Word

Number 6: On Christopher Middleton: Pages: ReView 6: Artifice and Artificers: The Meaning of Form in the Work of Christopher Middleton

Number 7: On Julie Tippetts and Juxtavoices: Pages: ReViews 7: Julie Tippetts, Martin Archer and Juxtavoices (CDs)

Number 8 (the final ReView): On Rosmarie Waldrop's Gap Gardening : Pages: ReViews 8: Gap Gardening: Selected Poems by Rosmarie Waldrop

[This first review was the shortest, I think. and was published as ‘Mimeo Memes’ (Mimeo Mimeo), Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 4 (1), March 2012.]

The fourth edition of Mimeo Mimeo – a magazine with an associated blog at 

www.mimeomimeo.blogspot.com [still there, 2026] 

 – celebrates the little magazines and small presses of the British Poetry Revival. Brief editorial matter puts this ‘movement’ in the past tense and one contributor, Ken Edwards, wonders at the temporal limits of this term. It was propagated (though not originated) by Eric Mottram, and he was quite clear: it ended in 1975. (What happened during the last twenty years of his life?) We are subjected to three of Mottram’s letters and one postcard to Jeff Nuttall from mid-period BPR (1966) which Mottram uses to record his experiences of American culture on an exchange year: he is exposed to everything from Sun Ra to youth culture (‘Dylan, Bob not Thomas’, he explains slyly, alluding to Nuttall’s respect for the poetic 1940s). He meets Rothenberg and Blackburn, and others. But his main ire is vented against Ambit magazine back home for its editorial meddling in the publication of Nuttall’s poems.

            Editorial independence is the raison d’etre of small presses, by contrast, and veteran publisher Ken Edwards offers a succinct overview of British poet-led activity such as Gael Turnbull’s Migrant or Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum, presses which took chances and generally didn’t meddle. The nostalgic whiff of browned paper and faint ink, the tear of rusty staples on the palms, is evoked by such bibliographic openheartedness (for those who were around), and the democratic device of the list presents publishers and poets on a level playing field for once. Edwards updates us into an era in which his own Reality Street has lost ‘Editions’ from its title but has gained Print On Demand and the internet (two major printing technologies not otherwise examined here).

            In a generous interview Tom Raworth skips around Outburst, Matrix, Goliard, Cape Goliard and other publishing enterprises he was involved with, reminding us that poets, in order to get publishing to happen, would have to learn to typeset, collect type, etc. The spirit of cooperation between poets and between publishers (often the same people of course) was essential: Piero Heliczer and Asa Benveniste are both mentioned in this respect, along with Raworth’s associate Barry Hall who carried on longer than Raworth running a small press (Goliard) in association with a larger one (Cape) until he could stand the compromise no longer. Hall walked out (literally) on the print room and never returned.

            In another interview, Trevor Winkfield is dragged through the past by the insistent Miles Champion (a discoverer of many a dark corner of our lost publishing legacies), from his early interest in Schwitters (he buys the Stefan Themerson book with pocket money although Gaberbocchus, Themerson’s press, is not commented on further), through to discovering Ashbery and Mathews in London and editing his own magazine Juillard. His off-hand account of giving copies away and his sense that a magazine has a limited life span – it’s over once you’ve published everybody who interests you, the magazine a personal anthology – is a sober reminder of the sheer non-commercial and eclectic nature of some editing.

            The third interview, with poet-publisher (and much more) David Meltzer, opens: ‘What do you want to know?’ It’s a good question. We pass through interesting territory, about listening to recordings of poetry (another story really, Dylan, not Bob, this time). There’s a pitch for Kenneth Patchen’s reputation. There’s one curious comment about small press publishing that sounds as though it ought to be true: ‘There’s always this inverse ratio between a really beautiful book and generally crappy poetry.’ Drop into the archive, as Richard Price does in his piece, and you’ll find that there are very few absolutes like this. Price worries over definitions (and therefore bibliographic exclusions) that he and David Miller devised for an authoritative survey of little magazines, concerning periodicity and the extent of commerciality. Encounter with its CIA funding makes an alarming case study. Despite these concerns there is much wisdom in the piece in reminding us that there is a real history of 1940s and 1960s poetry in magazine archives, and that magazines often achieve posthumous success (and fame) outweighing their contemporary failure. How many of us, while regularly acknowledging the importance of them, have seen a copy of Migrant or early copies of AND (Bob Cobbing’s magazine that managed 11 issues during his long life-time, and one or two posthumous ones, which again raises problems for the inventors of inventories and taxonomies)? Price also reminds us of how editing plays a strong role in subsequent careers, Raworth’s not least of all. Bill Griffiths, more than most, integrated writing and publishing, and Alan Halsey writes of the way some of Griffiths’ works transmogrify between ‘editions’. (I have two copies of his Spook Book with completely different contents!) This kind of playful processual necessity makes for a bibliographic nightmare which Halsey had to live through, co-editing the Reality Street Early Collected Poems, and his account here re-dresses the balance of the loss of the sheer physical trace of Griffiths on the original low-tech booklets and fascicles, in favour of uniform type, in that otherwise wonderful volume. [See below for more on Bill Griffiths.]

            Another poet-publisher who appears throughout several accounts is Asa Benveniste of Trigram Press. Indeed, the issue opens with his Kabbalistic poetics essay ‘Language: Enemy, Pursuit,’ (1980) which feels out of place until you realise that ‘the black fire on white Fire’ of letter-press printing is part of his poesis, as he faces the bareness of word, the metaphysics of type, watching all that language falling to pieces, then thrown back together as a page of a book. I returned to Benveniste’s excellent selected poems Throw Out the Life Line Lay Out the Corse (1983) and wondered whether the impaction of the sequence ‘Dense Lens’ derived not just from a reading of Zukofsky but from the experience of typesetting sections of A for Trigram.

            Mimeo Mimeo 4 traces not just a fashionable materiality but (something that could survive the e-book revolution) the extraordinary author-designer-publisher-printer relationship (even if conducted within one person), the means by which books (and occasionally the poems in them) come into being. This extended poesis of the physical medium ultimately leads outwards into communities of readers (elites and wide networks alike) and in doing so makes innovative contemporary poetries signal their very contemporaneity.

Robert Sheppard

I write about Bill Griffiths' self-publication(s) here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: small presses part two: Bill Griffiths The Book of the Boat and Collected Poems and Sequences

 

Tears in the Fence 82 Reviews Reviews Reviews

I have two reviews in the latest Tears in the Fence:  

‘Poetry’s Geographies: A Transatlantic Anthology of Translations, eds. Kathleen M. Heeden and Zoë Skoulding, Tears in the Fence 82: Autumn 2025

‘A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric: essays on the poetry of Maurice Scully, ed. Kenneth Keating, Tears in the Fence 82: Autumn 2025

This is to add to the review in the previous issue:

 ‘Dante’s Purgatory [sic] by Philip Terry’, Tears in the Fence 81: Spring 2025.

I wrote about this sudden spate of reviewing some few posts ago, and I’m pleased here to be reviewing two outstanding books (an innovative book of translations and translators’ poetics and a fine book of essays on the excellent Maurice Scully, whose recent death was a horrible surprise).

 The reviews section, which has now grown to half the contents of the magazine is excellent and, when you add to that the ongoing reviews on its website, it is one of the most comprehensive cluster of (mainly) poetry reviews in the UK. It’s good to be part of it (my poetry has appeared for decades in the magazine, but this is a different enterprise, and involves a lot more work than the writing of many poems!

There are lots of other goodies in the issue as well: The critical section alone consists of the Editorial by David Caddy, Robert Sheppard on A Line Of Tiny Zeros In The Fabric, Robert Hampson on Andrew Duncan’s Beautiful Feelings, Chris Turnbull on Jennifer Spector, Guy Russell on Dominic Hand, Mandy Pannett on J.R. Carpenter, Andrew Duncan on New German Poetry, Nadezhda Vikulina on Caroline Clark, Peter Oswald on Paul Stubbs, Mandy Pannett on Lynne Wycherley, Andrew Duncan on Rachel Mann, Keith Jebb on W.N. Herbert, Steve Spence on Arcadian Rustbelt, Robert Sheppard on Poetry’s Geographies, Steve Spence on Plymouth Language Club, Keith Jebb on Frances Presley, Morag Kiziewicz ‘s Electric Blue 17, Notes On Contributors, David Caddy’s Afterword.

Two items here are particularly pleasing:

Steve Spence, ‘Arcadian Rustbelt – the Second Generation of British Underground Poetry’, Tears in the Fence 82, Autumn 2025.

David Caddy, review of Mary Robinson’s Selected Poems edited by Robert Sheppard in ‘Afterword’, Tears in the Fence 82, Autumn 2025.  

Steve Spence has some nice words to say about my work in this anthology, and about my work generally. Modesty forbids I quote it (though it might end up on the back of a book sometime).

David Caddy (who is the editor of Tears in the Fence) has a nice account of my edition of Robinson’s Selected Poems, which now has two reviews to its name.

Tears in the Fence may be bought and subscribed to here: Pay/Subscribe/Donate | Tears in the Fence, and see here: Tears in the Fence 82 is out! | Tears in the Fence

* 

My thoughts on reviewing are collected here: Pages: My Tears’ review of Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio and my own Dante project revived – plus thoughts on reviewing

I write about Arcadian Rustbelt and my part in it, here: Pages: Arcadian Rustbelt: The Second Generation of British Underground Poetry - some thoughts

The reviews of Mary Robinson are commented upon here: Pages: Reviews of my edition of the Selected Poems of Mary Robinson

More on Mary’s book here: Pages: Selecting for a Selected: The Poems of Mary Robinson 1

 

Here’s a random post (one of many) to catalogue my poetry contributions to Tears in the Fence: Pages: Two more sonnets from British Standards (from Keats) in Tears in the Fence 75. This one has videos of me reading two of the chosen poems.

Reviews of The Necessity of Poetics

1. I'm pleased to say there has been a first review of The Necessity of Poetics, by Rupert Loydell, in Tears in the Fence. I suspect, as it is reviewed, and I hope it is reviewed widely (it's provocative enough I think), it will furnish different responses, with differing emphases, and it might look as though the reviewers were reading different books. That's because it's a miscellany rather than a unified volume like The Poetry of Saying or The Meaning of Form. It's also not a straight literary critical volume. Rupert writes from the point of view of a teacher of creative writing who is interested in nurturing poetics as a speculative and anticipatory writerly discourse in his students, who, as Rupert says, have been subjected to two of the pieces collected in the book. Of course, he responds in other ways too. It's a refreshing and personal (or professional) response. 

It may be read here: The Necessity of Poetics by Robert Sheppard (Shearsman Books) | Tears in the Fence. 

Or, alternately, it may be read here:Aspirational uses of Poetry | Stride magazine 

2. I'm pleased to say that there is a second review, by Billy Mills, on his blog, Elliptical Movements which gives a sense of the range of the book, whilst bringing it close to the notion of poetics. I see now that it is a particularly difficult book to review since it's so bitty (on purpose). It is 'a rich compendium of his writings on the subject of poetics.' Overwhelmed by that richness, he concludes: 'You need to read the book to get it all. It’s an invigorating read and a salutary reminder that the best writing doesn’t exist to confirm your biases, but to challenge them.' 

Billy does track what he calls the 'excellent "Pulse: All a Rhythm", one of the most interesting things on verbal music I’ve read in a long time;' it is gratifying to hear positive feedback on this quite recent piece, and a favourite of mine. 'Memory is another thread that runs through the book,' he notes, sensitive to the retrospective glances at past poetics, and past decades, while the book clearly moves towards the future, poetics being speculative and anticipatory. 

Read Billy's review here: Two by Robert Sheppard: A Review – Elliptical Movements 

3. Here’s a third review of The Necessity of Poetics, a long academic piece that has been written with great care and attention, for which I am grateful. Citationally it is called:

Kemp, L., (2025) “Book Review: Robert Sheppard, The Necessity of Poetics (2024)”, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 17(1).

Here: doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/bip.18564.

You can also download it.

Firstly, it defines poetics, then moves onto the book, descriptively. Then a passage that made me smile a great deal: 

The provisional is important for Sheppard’s thinking of, in and about poetics; we may reflect on Sheppard’s long-running Pages blog where he muses on forthcoming reviews of this book.⁶ Encountering this during the writing of this review I find myself pre-empting Sheppard’s reflections on my review and make my claim now that even this review is provisional. Sheppard will reflect on my review following its online publication and his reflections will be incorporated into his corpus of poetics and in doing so change the ongoing reception of this review. Another example of the ways poetics can operate as the provisional in the context of a poet’s writing.

Kemp is right, of course, I am reflecting upon her review, not so much in this response, but for the future, when I will doubtless move (my) poetics on. The detail here is astonishing, and I realise the multi-facetedness of the book (or ‘jumble’ if you don’t like it, of course) spreads in a number of directions. Linda Kemp summarises:  ‘What this book achieves is threefold. Firstly, there is insight into the workings-out of Sheppard’s poetry or at least the outworkings he has chosen to share. Secondly, there is a significant contribution to the discourse of poetics for the innovative and experimental practice of poetry. Thirdly, an important contribution this book makes to the field and practice of poetry is the historical positionality in and through which this milieu of poetry practice is situated.’  I don’t know about ‘insight’, ‘significant’ and ‘important’ (that’s not for me to say), but this review covers the whole field of the book, and I’ll take that word that appears here doubly, ‘contribution’. I want the book to contribute, to be of use to others. And for that folk need to read it. (Details below.) 

I describe the full contents of the volume here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

It may be purchased here: https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-The-Necessity-of-Poetics-p661888958