Sudley House for Scott Thurston

Sudley House


                                                                           for Scott Thurston (on his 40th birthday)


Suddenly you are inside the house. Standing in the old entrance. The garden hall or vestibule

The little Corot landscape’s here. All pictures domestic scale. The Holman Hunt propped on an easel. A magnifying glass swinging on its string

One painting shifted a little to the left to fit another in. The nightmare of George Holt’s handyman

Trade with Brazil. Not one image of this life
Florentine swelter. Crackling through the horse chestnut leaves. Crisp. Liquid electricity

Doric columns rise either side of the fireplace. The faint tinkle a chime. A tintinnabulation of the silence out of which a painting may be conjured

Into which it might disappear for the ambulant solitary in performance for a group walking

Far from the Paris Commune. A tornado of options. Poplars. As though time has ceased. Moments stretched. A loose bowelled cow flaps its flanks

A chiaroscuro whisper. We pick up. Each other’s senseless sense and fly with it. Enacted in that series of rooms (in which this was largely written

Rough of a sensibility. Bull’s spittle dribbles on stones. A rumour a promise. Unconfirmed broken. Autumn shiver. Beasts dung the tilled field. Fecund chill

Enter. Gainsborough over the fireplace. The last purchase. At 3000 guineas the most expensive

Moved in 1884 from Edge Hill. To overlook the Mersey. Holt extended the building. Died there 1896

Perspective distorts the carpet’s intention. Poems were written at this desk. Liberty spelt out. The tomb long open and the trees crouching for a peep inside

Tall windows: granite melody in a haze. The channel. Silt bank. Catches light from over the water. Wish for mist. On the distant Welsh hills. Or mountains. The single hammering at 1 o’clock you mistake for the butcher’s boy’s sharp bell

In the name of God silence pierced her side high and plaintive as a silken moth

Posed but never poised. A dreamy girl with a creamy neck. Ready for a ball or bell

‘Each cascade of time blushes me up for grief.’ A Punch and Judy hammering of the meridian. A porcelain jug full of bits. Bobs. You know the stuff. Things

A girl who has no servant to call remove the dying flowers their odour sickens her

‘I should know these things I don’t. I’m designed to be merely cherished. After death

Bookmarks mark. Wisdom, a crumple of promises clutched in sweat. The cobbler bangs out his unspoken love for her on the soles of her broken shoes

‘Byron might have imagined me! Or worse! Shelley would have mirrored me! But I’m tucked away that unique thing a fake! Insert me into the language of which I am composed

Trees weave. Time is a turning page, every quarter of an hour. Chime. A slow three-decker telling of empty dandy chairs lusting the wrong way round

The garden vestibule (again) ahead of you into the library where you stretch. How do tall shelves of books become a Library

At the sarcophagus your writing will be prophetic. What will be. When it is done

Unitarian, Liberal, Philanthropic

Someone will slouch in your creaking armchair and frown at your words. Its marbled blanks

Desiccated copy of Byron’s Poems. Dropping brown powder from its spine. Into your lap as you turn the pages. Curtained secrets. Of quiet decay. Exposed to light, crumples. Breathless, wind-chimes

You were looking for a remarkable symbol. Trudging the green lane. To the front doors you have already forgotten. A silver glow behind the nets. Illumines the desk upon which the bills were once paid

She holds a letter from the Dean. From that archive of illegible documents held in paint

Ribs blush over a riverine council. Of peasants. The drought. So perfect that any blemish would turn the day septic

The title sprinkled from this book. Tinkling. Angel dust flaking from the walls of a fresco. During a riot

Something. To be something. Must be darker than the darkness. Viol burns its madrigal. (While Hopkins is spat at by Holt’s stevedores

Out into a room which is not a room. The unseen inhabits the scene. Dwarfs the people. Undiminished not quite vulnerable. In the oil sketch. Measured chimes of human anthems

Weirs crash upon Venetian thoughts. She’s suddenly seen you. From the new entrance. Entranced fascination. Opening your hatch you admit much pleasure. Delirium soaks the tedium

Etiolated and brittle. Bristles of genre. (Remember lavender alive with bees swaying after the storm?) Floor bathed with light. An amber glow as it rises from polished boards soaking into scarlet walls

Somebody watches you from the balcony. A flicker of interest in your lack of interest. Your room a tumbling red cube for his pitching vertigo

Coleridge held that Unitarianism is not Christianity although some Unitarians are Christians – which ones? The window at this diagonal. Nine more steps. The morning room

‘Saw the child stamping and stamping on the ants. I wanted to cuff him

Trees, the slate-grey Mersey. Any industry at its shore is ‘ruralised by distance’ in the conceit. That other blue distance. Welsh mountains. Or hills

Slit the morning post beneath the woodblock variegations, the Pre-Raphaelite dazzle. The tinfoil-crackle tones of Tennyson and Browning

This morning’s lesson is the dust that rises from a beaten carpet. A knocked up bit of greatness. A hand on a keyboard, too many naturals. A fantasia in black and white

The temple (again)! Without even a Fra Fillipo Lippo wink at you. A startling eye looms in the magnifying lens. A falcon dives. Rips into the neck of the dove, this premature Transfiguration

Bays picked to shreds. She threads beads. Roses, the tiles at her bare feet. As though a wish could fall true on this marble. Breasts ghosted through thin robes. Poised as a sponge of poison squeezed into your limpid pool

Into the dining room. Pass the Italianate marble fireplace with the Holt crest

Schloss Rosenau. It’s an isle, an aisle even, of light. Sufficient to allow divinity or human majesty its approach. The radiance of patronage. A smeared palette. Or the palpitating shade which you cannot penetrate. They are not human enough: boy tensing his fishing rod, girl floating on collapse. Their scattered picnic. Crouching mendicants at some filthy game. Fawning before an oblivious consort

They scratched away the cracked sky to find Margate sun. The ‘lighthouse’ is a white-hot brushstroke a blemish on the skin of night. With what confidence could you mount those steps to the promise of a quayside?

Imagine that you have bought a painting. The painter requests you loan it to him. Early picture on which Turner spent six laborious days at the end of his life. But it came out with a whitened misty sky and a double rainbow. Spectral retribution. Painted over. Not over. When it returns the painting has darkened. Less lightning burst than rainbow. Obliterate the eye’s asperities

Look closely Cousin George the magnifying glass. The startling eye looms. The beginning of his interest in Surrealism. Reading to yourself. Reading yourself. A monstrous porthole

This rectangle, no larger than a servant’s mirror. The family’s wealth derived from shipping – the company Lamport & Holt

Black is a shade of white. Clouds sails sea-crest. Black-tipped gull comes to rest. In the rest. Say you are rendered. Wordless the memory of a memory of men. Loading a ship dreamt about, starkly

Peer into Bonington’s moment for as long as you dare

Look away. Listen. Tear the image as though it were rotten canvas. An old painting a dead sail. Turn away

The staircase hall beckons. Between two pairs of columns. You sense how the stairs’ course was altered. To face you. At last. Mount

Upstairs. Part the nets. If anyone is watching. With both your hands, either side. A triangle. Watch yourself from behind

This is the view they built here. The sloped lawn, the billowing trees. Afar: the same hills or mountains without features. A study

Framed tangle of light

Notes

‘Sudley House’ was realised as a guided tour/performance at Sudley House, Mossley Hill, Liverpool, in four shows on 6 and 12 November 2004, with Scott Thurston as second voice and presence. ('Someone will slouch in your creaking armchair and frown at your words.'/'Somebody watches you from the balcony.  A flicker of interest in your lack of interest. Your room a tumbling red cube for his pitching vertigo.') Props included recordings of Tennyson (1890) and my 1793 edition of Cowper’s Poems (Vol I). Read the history here. And an account of those 2004 performances here.

I would like to thank Scott; and Jane Duffy and Alex Kidson of the National Galleries of Merseyside for allowing me to act as Visiting Scholar to Sudley House, and to the latter for his whistle-stop private tour of the Emma Holt bequest. Thanks to all the staff at the House for making my writing visits so pleasant, and for the smooth running of the performances. I readily acknowledge monies from (the then) Edge Hill College of Higher Education School of Humanities and Arts Research Development Fund to enable this work to be developed in its original form. The performance text is available on Great Works at this link. Many thanks for Peter Philpott for publishing it. This new text was largely prompted by the re-hanging of the works and thus the rendering fictive of my movement instructions and narrative. ‘Cousin George’ is George Melly. There are several quotations melted and re-formed in the text, particularly Ruskin on Turner, but also Turner’s detractors.

This has been posted to celebrate Scott's 40th birthday. Happy Birthday. Watch him here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK5BlSqzCoQ

for Claude Sheppard

Burnt Journal 1924

for my father at 89; 2nd July


The city builds into sky, annexing uncharted
Everests. You hold the aerial photograph,
simplifying by geometry, distance, like Empire itself,
its Exhibition. Scots pipers grumble their way to Tut’s Tomb.

A moment frozen in butter! The sculpted disaster
of Jack Hobbs bowled out! Hungry kids lick his creamy pads,
dreaming of tiptoeing across Margate sands for their annual.
The nose of the bike’s side-car (hold on to your bonnet

Doris!) is an aeroplane of the motoring roads,
its spinning white-walls the prayer-wheels of modernity.
Hot-breathed from Colman’s, Imperialists funnel

the rustling throng into atmosphere for a Saturday night
broadcast from His Master’s Voice exhibit,
a dining room dominated by its cenotaph of sound.

Robert Sheppard

Robert Sheppard's A Translated Man published

My new book A Translated Man is published. Here's the cover image (I think that is Rene Van Valckenborch himself.)

I have given this book over to my own invention, the fictional Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. Apparently writing in both Flemish and Walloon, and translated and edited by entities as shadowy (and dodgy) as himself, Van Valckenborch's split oeuvre derives from the linguistic and cultural divide within contemporary Belgium. By the time Van Valckenborch disappears into poetic silence he seems an enigma of his own making, a comic figure with tragic attributes, a mystery to all swept up in his apparition. When his story is finished he leaves behind the deliberately discontinuous evidence of a dual poetic adventure—one half siding with history and opting for a breathlessly recurring triplet verse, the other obsessing over place and space and restlessly and increasingly playing with experimental forms. Behind and within them all, I am extending my formal and referential range: from homages to film-makers to Twitterodes, from accounts of tribal masks to cuboid quennets, and poems about Belgium of course. Above all, I am exploring the limits of the author-function. This is an imaginary collection with real poems in it.


You can see further details of this book and can buy it and related books here, or from here or from here. Or here.Updated link 2018:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-A-Translated-Man-p102839130

There is more about Van Valckenborch here and more about his creations here.

Manifest exhibition at Edge Hill University

Manifest
an exhibition of collaborative works by the poet Robert Sheppard and the artist Pete Clarke

April 11th -26th, 2013

The Arts Centre
Edge Hill
University

Here is a general view of the exhibition followed by a list of works in the exhibition.

MANIFEST:

Edge Hill University Arts Centre

Exhibition of the Collaborative works by the poet Robert Sheppard and the artist Pete Clarke. The works may be seen here.


LIST OF WORKS

1. In mid seas stands a tower, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

2. Dead as a door step, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

3. Walled in a Lost City, 2013

Mixed media/collage on card

4. A song that does not sing, 2013

Edition 1/7 Silkscreen and wood relief on somerset paper

5. TIRED SAD TOWERS, 2012

Edition 1/8 Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

6. Moving through the conventions

A/P Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

7. Tangled Scree, 2012

Edition 2/9 Letterpress and wood relief on somerset paper

8. MANIFEST, 2010

Edition 5/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

9. Tangled Scree, 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

10. Tangled Scree, 2011

Edition 1/10 Letterpress on somerset paper

11. THIS IS NOT GUILT [3], 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

12. THIS IS NOT GUILT [2], 2011

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

13. LYRIC, 2010

Edition 5/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

14. ODE TO FORME, 2010

Edition 1/10 Silkscreen and Letterpress on somerset paper

15. Invisible Cities, 2009

Oil, acrylic and screened text on constructed canvas

All works are for sale, framed or unframed, contact Pete for details

Pclarke2@uclan.ac.uk

Pete Clarke lives in Liverpool and is the MA Course Leader and Principal Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire, Preston. He also makes paintings, prints and installations with the artist Georg Gartz from Cologne exploring collaborative strategies within contemporary practice questioning individuality, authorship and authenticity in a European context.

www.peteclarke.org.uk

Other works were shown on a continuous video presentation. It was a shame to see the exhibition being taken down, but the symposium I organised at Edge Hill on Literary Collaboration during the exhibition was a great success.

Here are images of a new collage work (number 1 above) which takes the phrase ‘Walled in a lost city’ from my work somewhere, but I don’t recognise it off-hand!

I was amusing myself with a reproduction of the wonderful Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos and made this translation of his poem about the Portuguese poet ‘Pessoa’, whose heteronyms (fictional poets) have obviously influenced my own recent obsessions, but whose name means ‘persona’, rather incredibly. I came up with the neologism ‘persong’ to deal with this concept. Pete has adapted the lineation of de Campos’ original and my version. Number 4 in catalogue.

That was a new work, as is ‘Moving through the Conventions’ that takes a part of a sentence from a very defamiliarised new text of mine from the ongoing prose collection, Unfinish, called ‘Venus and Adonis’. The full sentence by the way is: ‘I can see her moving through the conventions, solving crimes with the bristles that grow out of her chins.’ I’m glad Pete works selectively! Patricia Farrell (who took these photos in the exhibition) likes this one too. Number 6 in the catalogue.

The ‘Tangled Scree’ text has been shown before on the last post, but here are some details of that piece in situ. This is the re-working of a quennet and was shortlisted for the Adrian Henri Prize.

Finally, here are some more details of the ‘This is not Guilt’ series of prints.

More here. Later images may be seen here.

Manifest Pete Clarke and Robert Sheppard

Manifest


an exhibition of collaborative works by the poet

Robert Sheppard

and the artist

Pete Clarke

April 11th -26th, 2013

Edge Hill University
St Helens Road
Ormskirk
Lancashire
L39 4QP


Featured was our piece that was shortlisted for the Adrian Henri Prize. Here are a few versions of that. The original poem is a quennet. Most of the text is visible in the second version.

Our first pieces were produced, quite qiuickly for the Poetry Beyond Text exhibitions, and all three texts come from A Translated Man, but you don't need to be thinking about the contexts of those 'fictional poems' to be following what's going on, formally.

Here are some photographs of more recent pieces, and details of pieces, taken by Patricia Farrell. The first features the 'This Not Grief' text which opens section of 'Reading the Reader' from Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes.

This is not guilt but grief

From now on she will be in quotation marks

She emptied herself out with good reason

He is left empty for no reason good or ill. Reading

her absence as a presence he bears witness

His testimony is as blank as an orphan’s. His testament is frozen sweat in solid steam

Here are two recent rather dark collages produced by Pete with more text from Hymns to the God, a square book that fits neatly into his pocket while he's working!

These did note feature in the exhibtion in the end. And there are later images here from a later collaboration.

Thatcher Dead

It's just been announced that Thatcher has died. I once said she was the most important influence on my poetry (half-jokingly); but I also said that I couldn't be really happy while she was alive. How appropriate she died on the day the Con-Dem government introduced more of its austerity measures, in part to demonise the very victims they are creating. As I type I can hear sanctimonious tones on the BBC downstairs.


Here’s part three of ‘Coming Down from St George’s Hill’ from Twentieth Century Blues


Democratic vista he parks the car
Then has to queue for the cashpoint
Whispering possessive St George’s
Somewhere above the embossed logo
Window tissue paper
And its history of pleasantly
Attired servants
In famous fables begun at this
Desk of irregular
Attic windows car door opens blonde
Hair spills into the gutter
He speaks in deadpan cockney learned
Of the East Sussex school of villainy
Creaming himself at Thatcher’s rush of
Active citizens revving up
Fumes and consumption’s vapour
Lists a pop capitalist
                                   transformed
A staggering dislocation of the
Cocktail effect gone defective
Electric against meshed frost
Produced by desire dreams
An act of love a realised cell
Phone interrupts you all right mate?
Giggle at least it stopped a repetition
Of his ardent administered dream


20 September-16 October 1988

And here is a verse from The Lores written in the mid-90s:

The Millennium Enterprise Zone layers
on layers of torn calendars that
wipe Thatcher’s solid dream trappings
below any diction a satirist
with no worship centre his
ears adjust to a future
of persistent sensations, lacking himself

And I used her own words in another poem in The Lores, where I begin with the name that I ised to denote that period: 'The  Drowning Years', which alludes to the book I was using as a source for those lines, Thatcher's own The Downing Street Years. As I put it in the bibliography to that poem: '

Thatcher, Margaret, The Downing Street Years (a condensation [thank God] of the book) in Today’s Best Nonfiction [sic], Reader’s Digest, 1994 – a volume I found lying outside my front gate during the summer of 1994, a veritable found text.' (All of these poems may be found in Complete Twentieth Century Blues from Salt.)

   

drowning years

I needed no interpreter spoke the same

language the complex romance of international trade

I liked living over the shop good

wishes from people who are suffering free

to pursue their own dreams arguments always

give one appetite true vice second thoughts

not everybody cheers the same thing I

was glued to the radio for news

we were not fatally wounded but a

totalitarian state with siege barriers of coal

I prayed fitfully revolution still to be

made our problem was presentation red roses

proved photogenic families were the government nemesis

of gain (one country      one system      ours

Zoe Skoulding - Gurkan Arnavut - Robert Sheppard - Enemies of the North

On Saturday I was too ill to read at The Enemies of the North reading in Manchester, organised by Steven Fowler (to whom many thanks for the invitation). And many thanks for pairing me with Zoe Skoulding, and thanks to Zoe for collaborating with me, and indeed, playing along with my interest in fictional poets. René Van Valckenborch is soon to be published in A Translated Man but various fictional poets of his (poets within poets) exist both inside and beyond the book (and can be found on the European Union of Imaginary Authors website). One was designed to have a walk on part in the book (he was meant to be a loose strand, a name without a reference, but that strand has now become a woven fabric). He is Gurkan Arnavut, a Turkish Cypriot, though living in the Cypriot part of the island. Zoe and I picked him for this collaboration, innocent of the impending financial indignities visited upon the citizens of that small nation. Watch Zoe introduce and read the poems beautifully. Because of the artifice of its construction, I like the single voice.

I’m really pleased with these. Thanks Zoe.

James Keery on Robert Sheppard's Bad Times



A road sign from the Age of the Movement

Long ago, James Keery wrote a charming summary of my early career: ‘Robert Sheppard commenced operations just as Margaret Thatcher took command, and an uneven power struggle ensued…’ (PN Review 107, 1996.) I quote it on my ‘Criticism’ page of my recent website.

Here he is again, in PN Review 209, the current issue, reviewing my Shearsman critical volume When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry . Mrs T makes her appearance again, as he states: ‘Robert Sheppard has got it just right in this book.’ (Something in my shouts, ‘Stop there! That’ll do nicely.’) ‘An “episodic history” of a “poetic community” to which he has belonged since the advent of Margaret Thatcher, it is temperate, reflective – even, on its own individually negotiated terms, academic – yet unrepentant in its tribal loyalty. There isn’t a smug or mean-spirited word.’ He then delves more generally into the creative environment I was attempting to describe (digging up associations between the New Apocalypse and the British Poetry Revival, which is another story; this is an article rather than a review, and the better for it). You can read the first few paragraphs here.
I am particularly glad that he cross-refers to my poetry in Berlin Bursts ; pleased that he points out what he calls my ‘elegant trope’ of ‘human unfinish as the condition of our survival’. (It first occurs in Warrant Error  in lines that reference Pinkas Synagogue in Prague:

Stones leaning splinter through time
for those with no names
possess no death. You ex-
hume the ex-human in human unfinish

But the 'trope' is carried over into works in progress (I’m toying with Unfinish as the title of a new project.) Anyone who has read the article knows I am dodging his teasing equation of these thoughts ‘open to the “long perspectives” of which the Movement poets went in fear, but also a principled intelligence worthy of the Movement at its best’, but he catches the dying embers of my Levinasian ethicality (which pervades my earlier critical volume The Poetry of Saying (in which he will find deliberately mean-spirited words about the Movement!)). But I still believe my own words with which he concludes:
Remember: somewhere between the shifting screens of randomly generated computer text and the frost-blown epitaph sculpted onto a headstone for all times lies your responsibility.

It’s a shame I can’t remember where this is from! Thanks for finding it James.

I have two facts to put right. I did not take the photograph of Bob and Jennifer Cobbing referred to (Peter Manson did. See here for photos of his 1995 visit to Cobbing’s workshop, as well as a wealth of Cobbing materials.) Second: I certainly didn’t teach Bob how to use a computer! (That’s possibly Lawrence Upton.)

Updated link to the book;

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-When-Bad-Times-Made-for-Good-Poetry-p102839133

Patricia Farrell and Andrew Taylor Reading

Andrew Taylor and Patricia Farrell launched their new

collections of poetry at

The Ship and Mitre

Liverpool L3 2JH

on Saturday 23rd February

2 - 4 pm

Andrew’s Radio Mast Horizon and Patricia’s The Zechstein Sea are

both published by Shearsman Books

‘With a voice fresh and responsive, these poems’ chiselled lyricism

is firmly located in terms of time and space … Everything is in them, it

seems. Including us. At last Taylor’s impressive oeuvre is amassed for

the audience it deserves.’ (Robert Sheppard)

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/taylor.html

On Patricia's book: ‘Via encounters with the troubadour poet, Guillaume of Poitiers,

Friedrich Hölderlin and the contemporary goldsmith, Jivan Astfalck,

Farrell offers “new solutions/new songs” whilst “provoking new

lines of thought”.’ (Scott Thurston)

Patricia will be publishing a new book from Veer in late 2014. But until then, read Ian Seed's review of her book here.

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/farrell.html

Patricia Farrell's The Zechstein Sea - out now!

Patricia's new book is out. Details below, but check out her new webpage if you haven't seen it here. Hear some of the poems read on the Archive of the Now here.

 

 

 Patricia Farrell: The Zechstein Sea

Published 15 January 2013 TODAY

 

"Patricia Farrell's latest collection engages in an extended thought experiment to test the philosophical veracity of language. Needless to say, language is found wanting, yet in these extraordinary enquiries something desirable is recovered. If 'the things I see when I read aren't real,' this investigation into subjects as diverse as scale, orientation, colour, light, time, animals, angels and death offers a complex and sceptical vision of a world in which 'there is only movement.' Via encounters with the troubadour poet Guillaume of Poitiers, Friedrich Hölderlin and the contemporary goldsmith Jivan Astfalck, Farrell offers 'new solutions / new songs,' whilst 'provoking new lines of thought.' This challenging work might make us feel 'hardly more than poets and not who we really are' but who cares when 'tongue play makes sense like this'?"
—Scott Thurston

 

Patricia Farrell lives in Liverpool. She is a poet and visual artist. She co-organised the SubVoicive reading series in London in the 1980s and was a member of the arts group New River Project. She has collaborated with other writers and artists, most notably Robert Sheppard, as well the installation artist Jivan Astfalck, on the project B*twixst, and with Jennifer Cobbing, and Veryan Weston on the dance piece, A Space Completely Filled with Matter. Her work is published in a range of magazines and collections, including A New Tonal language in the Reality Street "4 pack"' series, as well as individual pamphlets: most recently, Seven Bays of Spirituality (Knives Forks and Spoons Press). She completed a PhD thesis in 2011 on poetic artifice in philosophical writing.

 

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2013/farrell.html

 Read Ian Seed's review: here.

 

Singing in 2013: Motherless Child Blues

For about six New Year’s Eves now Steve and I have met up to improvise rough 'barrelhouse' piano and vocal jazz, blues and standards at Maggi Williams’ legendary parties upon the family’s increasingly out of tune piano (I can’t use my blues harps with this machine). Steve was the keyboard player and founder member of the Liverpool band The High Five in the 1980s and his latest band is gigging under the name Cat Sundies. We meet in pubs throughout the year, casually, and discuss the set, but otherwise it’s made up as we go. This song, Steve’s piano work and my rendition of lyrics lifted from the 1931 Barbecue Bob classic ‘Motherless Child’. It was somewhat later that usual, drink had been taken, and friends can be heard uttering ‘Steve’s turned up, so Robert’s happy,’ and ‘They’re reunited!’ as they take leave of the party! I did some jazz scatting and vocalese after this, prompted by Ian Perry’s Christmas present, a Kurt Elling CD. No trace of that influence here; a straight Joe Turnerish blues shout above the noise of the party.

Happy New Year Steve, Happy New Year everyone!


As I put it in Twenieth Century Blues 53 (Midnight Ride 2, Smokestack Lightning 2, Unwritings 7): 'This romance surrounds you, this late century blues in an unplayable pack of quotations in quotes; crude effects play oddments’ tricks. They’ve got another bill, poisons of crimes, looking from musician to musician, transposing keys: a guerrilla tactic somebody’s aching fingers will track and hammer to death, night after day after night.'


This is rather different from my performance of 'Smokestack Lightning' here.

Bob Cobbing and Robert Sheppard: Blatent Blather and Virulent Whoops

As part of the interest generated by the tenth anniversary of Cobbing's death, I have been involved in a number of events.

Firstly, I have revived Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops, my 2001 collaboration with Bob at a reading/performance at Flat Time Gallery in Peckham, London, on the afternoon (2-5) of Sunday 14th October, where Patricia Farrell and I performed it. Jennifer Cobbing, Anna Barham, Julika Gittner, Heather Phillipson also performed or displayed work. It was a great day. See more about Flat Time here.

Then THE OTHER ROOM presented BOB COBBING: A CELEBRATION with CLIVE FENCOTT, an ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE OF ABC IN SOUND on Tuesday 23rd October 2012, 7pm at The Castle Hotel, Manchester M4 1LE. The video below is from that performance. See

www.otherroom.org

for further videos of the event.




The text may be read here.

[Both my collaborations with Bob are back in print. See Pages: COLLABORATIONS (Bob Cobbing - Robert Sheppard) published in a box by Veer - out now ]

The third event involves the co-editing of a special issue of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. Out soon.

Allen Fisher Symposium

ALLEN FISHER SYMPOSIUM


NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY, 23RD; 24TH NOVEMBER 2012

Allen Fisher Reading

23rd Nov 2012, 6pm

Gallery North, City Campus, Northumbria University

Poet and painter Allen Fisher read from his work as part of Northumbria University's Allen Fisher Symposium, reading a range of work old and new. Allen's performance was accompanied by short readings from Ira Lightman (empassioned song and dual-voiced poem) and Sophie Robinson (empassioned political verse).

Allen Fisher Symposium

24th Nov 2012, 10.30 to 5.30

Sutherland Building, City Campus, Northumbria University

Speakers included Peter Barry, Ian Davidson, Peter Garratt, Robert Hampson, Ira Lightman, Ann Matthews, Sophie Robinson, Robert Sheppard, Harriet Tarlo, Rhys Trimble. Papers were  followed by a Q&A/discussion with Allen Fisher, which included a moving account of Fisher's helpers and shapers.

I talked about his recent text Proposals. I concluded: 'In apprehending Proposals, the viewer and reader are one and the same and the formal complexity that results from imperfect fit requires the same readerly energies of a will towards coherence and logic evoked earlier that is formally undermined by the work.' (A version of the talk may be read here, and here is a piece on Fisher's poetics.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ALCHEMIST'S MIND:

A book of narrative prose by poets

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

Small Publishers Fair 2012

Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL

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

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

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

Malcolm Lowry and David Markson event

I am took part in the annual Lowry Lounge event at the Bluecoat in Liverpool on Saturday 28th October (as near to the Day of the Dead as we can get). I talked about the work of Lowry scholar David Markson and his extraordinary postmodern novels.

Lowry: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/350045/Malcolm-Lowry

Markson on Lowry and Dyaln Thomas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqIIPHY-co


The Lowry Lounge

The Bluecoat’s annual celebration of Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry (author of the classic Under the Volcano) comprises a psychogeographical walking tour of Liverpool with artist Colin Dilnot and an afternoon at the Bluecoat including the launch of The Firminist No 3, an occasional journal of all things Lowry, performances, talks and music.

Out on the Lowry walk with Colin Dilnot pointing out the branch of Austin Reed referred to in the newly discovered and soon to be published 'lost' novel of Lowry: Ballast to the White Sea.

from 'Poet' (a work in regress)

Poet makes his writing practice material, inventorying every printed book he can see as he sits at his laptop. On the desk. Along the shelf. In the big box behind. A composite self-portrait with no self. Feeds it to Twitter, title by title. Until he sees at last, the most satisfying thing, saved for the final tweet. Neat in its crimson bag, the pristine leather-bound fine-paper notebook that Poet has not dared to write in since buying it a decade before, in Florence. A bibliography of a work he’ll never write.

On Poet's desk:

Tears in the Fence 55
Benjamin’s Illuminations
David Ter-Oganyan

(Uncovering a few more books on his desk:)

Meredith’s Modern Love
Poet’s 2012 diary
Poet’s dictionary (with its gifts of ‘ithyphallus’, ‘mallemaroking’, ‘rounceval’)
Anthony Rudolf's and Colin Wiggins’ Kitaj in the Aura of Cézanne and Other Masters

Looking along the shelf above Poet's desk; (in a pile, top to bottom):

Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Voyeur
Ingrid Schaffner’s The Essential Joseph Cornell
John Seed’s Collected Poems and a single volume of his Pictures from Mayhew
Pete Clarke’s Letters to Language
Paul Evans’ True Grit and Prokofiev’s Concerto

(Then upright, left to right:)

Scott Thurston’s Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk
Monk’s Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text
Michael Hamburger’s The Truth of Poetry
Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager
Huntsperger’s Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry
Bernstein’s The Politics of Form
Rawes’ Romanticism and Form
Milton’s Paradise Lost. Poem, in Twelve Books. The seventeenth edition, Dublin, Printed for
A. Ewing, W. and W. Smith and P. Wilson, 1765
Wood’s Literature and the Taste of Knowledge
Watten’s The Constructivist Moment
René Van Valckenborch’s Vache
Mousley’s Towards a New Literary Humanism
Denise Riley’s Poets on Writing
Susan Wolfson’s Formal Charges
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
Lemon and Reis’ Russian Formalist Criticism
Derek Attridge’s The Singularity of Literature
Joughin and Malpas’ The New Aestheticism
József Attila’s Eszmélet
Angela Leighton’s On Form
Art Matters by Peter de Bolla
Louis Armand’s Avant-Post
Allan Sekula’s Polonia and Other Fables
Language Alive 2
Radnóti Miklós’ Naptár
Peter Barry’s English in Practice
Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension
Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Foto
Ian Davidson’s Into Thick Hair
From: Tracey Traces by Jeff Hilson
Mukařovský’s Aesthetic Function
Christopher Middleton’s Selected Writings
The Plantin-Moretus Museum Visitors’ Guide
Wolfson and Brown’s Reading for Form
Leech’s Linguistic Guide to English Poetry
Christopher Middleton’s Selected Writings

In the big box behind Poet:

Sean Bonney’s Happiness
Chris McCabe’s The Borrowed NotebookShakespeare’s Sonnets
John Goodby’s Illennium
Philip Kuhn’s Boltzmann’s Constant & the Black Body Spectrum
Gareth Farmer’s Mock into the Brazen Day
Matthew Welton’s We needed coffee but we’d got ourselves convinced that the later we left it
the better it would taste, and, as the country grew flatter and the roads became quiet and dusk began to colour the sky, you could guess from the way we retuned the radio and unfolded the map or commented on the view that the tang of determination had overtaken our thoughts, and when, fidgety and untalkative but almost home, we drew up outside the all-night restaurant, it felt like we might just stay in the car, listening to the engine and the gentle sound of the wind
Vahni Capildeo’s No Traveller Returns
Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry
Jeff Hilson’s In the Assarts
Michael Zand’s Lion
Chris McCabe’s Zeppelins
Louis Armand’s Letters from Ausland
Simon Perrel’s Nitrate
David Markson’s This is Not a Novel
Philip Terry’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Peter Gillies and Rupert Loydell’s A Music Box of Snakes
Lucy Harvest Clarke’s Silveronda
Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference
Scott Thurston’s On Being Circular
Andrea Brady’s Vacation of a Lifetime

plus the notebook described last in the text (not a ‘printed book’ at all, actually). Disturbed by the act of writing, the volumes are no longer configured as they are described here, Poet wants you to know. Tumbling down from the shelves as they’re touched. Re-stacked in reverse order. This portrait already a history.

Free Pussy Riot!

do it

Robert Sheppard: Bad Poems for Bad People (for Sean Bonney)

My prose piece, ‘Bad Poems for Bad People!’ dedicated to Sean Bonney, may be read now at Intercapillary Space

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/robert-sheppard-bad-poems-for-bad-people.html

It is also republished, revised, in my Unfinish from Veer: see here.

(Photo: Bratislava 2012: a friend of Magritte's COW picture below, obviously, and clearly a bad person.)

This ‘manyfesto’ is a response to parts of Sean Bonney’s keynote at the Conversify Conference, Edinburgh, September 9-11 2011 (though not to the exemplary readings of Rimbaud therein, but in anticipation of the publication of Happiness). It was first performed as the finale to my Berlin Bursts reading at the Bluecoat’s Chapter & Verse literature festival, Liverpool, on October 16 2011. I have melted and re-formed quotations from the following into its forming action: Adorno, Auden, Badiou, Bad Prophets Err, Bonney, David Cameron, Clark Coolidge, Simon Critchley, Duckweed, flarf, W.S. Graham, Guattari, Simon Jarvis, Primo Levi, Angshuman Kar, Kruk, Marcuse, Meschonnic, Milton, Pasternak, Penny Lane Graffitist, John Rajchman, Rancière, David Toop, and two geopolitically-challenged ‘scallies’ from Wavertree, Liverpool. It’s also twinned by the paper I wrote and delivered at the conference, ‘Notes on Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry’, which I promised a number of people I’d publish online. This will have to substitute for the moment.

This text is published in final form in Unfinish published by Veer in 2016: here.

Rene Van Valckenborch links

Links to the fictional poems of Rene Van Valckenborch by Robert Sheppard

The ‘whole’ oeuvre of René Van Valckenborch is surrounded by mystery, perhaps of his own making. Published in fugitive publications in places as far apart as Cape Town and Montreal over the last decade, the poems of this Belgian are composed in Flemish and Walloon, and the stylistic divide between the two sets seems to reflect the societal and linguistic divide of his troubled nation (although he never refers to this fact). The two translators, Annemie Dupuis and Martin Krol, worked independently of one another at first. Their subsequent meeting, marriage and removal to Brussels form such an incredible tale that they have occasionally been accused of manufacturing the controversy of Mr Van Valckenborch’s discovery, of fabricating their translations and of inventing their author. But in fact they are ‘fictional poems’, a category defined by Gerald L. Bruns. ‘To speak strictly, a fictional poem would be a poem held in place less by literary history than by one of the categories that the logical world keeps in supply: conceptual models, possible worlds, speculative systems, hypothetical constructions in all their infinite variation – or maybe just whatever finds itself caught between quotation marks, as (what we call) “reality” often is.’

Read Eric Canderlinck’s introduction here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/introducing-rene-vanvalckenborch.html


Read early poems (both in Walloon and Flemish) here:

http://www.theadirondackreview.com/VanValckenborch.html


Watch Patricia Farrell and I perform part of ‘Background Pleasures’, one of VanValckenborch’s poems from the Walloon:

http://vimeo.com/13739658

More Walloon poems, this time from Van Valckenborch's versions of Ovid:

http://holdfirepress.wordpress.com


Read and listen to the Walloon ‘Cow’ poems, his final Walloon poems, perhaps written in the same spirit as Magritte, when he entered and quickly departed, his ‘Periode Vache’ (see an example at the top of this. Isn't he adorable?):

http://theclaudiusapp.com/3-sheppard.html

text

http://theclaudiusapp.com/3-amp.html

audiofile


Read a piece of Van Valckenborch’s critical prose (not to be included in the collected Van Valckenborch project), an account of the cinema of forgotten Belgian film-maker Paul Coppens:


http://lyndondavies.co.uk/w/655/robert-sheppard-frozen-cuts-of-light-the-scratch-cinema-of-paul-coppens/


Turning to the poems supposedly in Flemish, read ‘Van Valckenborch’s Cube’:

http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/issuethree/authors/sheppard.pdf


Read his Twitter feed at

http://twitter.com/VanValckenborch

or read all 100 collected together and then some separately with photographs (after the link to his ‘Cube’) here on Pages at

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2010_12_01_archive.html


See some of the collaborative prints made with Pete Clarke using poems from the Van Valckenborch project at

http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/events-in-may-june/manifest/

and, more clearly, at

http://www.poetrybeyondtext.org/clarke-sheppard.html


Read Dylan Harris’ account of a close encounter with the enigma himself:

http://dylanharris.org/prose/poetry/rvv.shtml


Other texts have appeared in print in Tears in the Fence AND, Sunfish, Roundyhouse, VLAK, Form & Fontanelles and Poetry Wales. The whole project is intended for publication in 2013.

The whole thing may be bought as A Translated Man here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-A-Translated-Man-p102839130

Then came Twitters for a Lark

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-ed-Twitters-for-a-Lark-p102839129

Robert Sheppard and Jeff Hilson at Maintenant Camarade III

Jeff Hilson and I have been working on a collaboration called 'Honda Hands'. On Saturday  we read the first 5 verses at the third Mantenant Camarade organised by the incredible Steven Folwer at the Rich Mix, near Brick Lane, London. All the other readings are are available too and can been seen in adjacent places to this video. Thanks again to Steven and to Jeff for their hard work. We hope you will enjoy this truly egregious work.