Dream Diary Tuesday 29 July 1975

 Tuesday 29 July 1975

 Dreamt of the stone on the bust in Dali’s [real painting] ‘The Triangular Hour’. It had fallen off. 

Dream Diary Friday 25 July 1975

Friday 25 July 1975 

Dreamt of Maggie being executed for murder. I offered to be the defence.

Dream Diary Saturday 19 July 1975

Saturday 19 July 1975 

The milkman calls at Tony’s. We all hide in the front room because we haven’t got any money. The milkman stares through the window, sees us. Tony’s mother goes to the window. ‘Let me frighten him!’

            She talks to a man at the window. ‘I’ll be out tonight.’

Dream Diary Friday 18 July 1975

Friday 18 July 1975 

We locked Eric Mosrite in a room with a horse and forgot him – and he eats part of the horse. Bones sticking out. [EM was an imaginary director of Supranormal Cassettes that produced 1983; he was sometimes useful, but was more a joke figure.]

An introduction to the diary may be read here: Pages: Dream Diary 1975 Introduction to the project

Dream Diary Thursday 26 June 1975

Thursday 26 June 1975 

Sort of bus. Deirdre Burton (the concrete poet) gets on. Goes to top [deck]. I’m trapped on the lower deck by something/somebody I don’t like. Finally when I get up, Bob Cobbing has finished performing.

            I fly across Horsham field on an umbrella. When I finally reach ground Nora is on a platform above me with friends, saying ‘I’m worried, I’m worried’ over and over again.

[Deirdre Burton was a concrete poet and lecturer in linguistics at UEA at the time. I did go to talk to her about sound poetry. There's almost a month's gap now until the next installment.] 

Ark and Archive page 1,000 - keeping a daily practice of writing going

Today, I’ve reached – and filled – page 1,000 of ‘Ark and Archive’. This (usually, ideally) daily writing I’ve been adding to, literally, with no breaks, since 2013, I think. (I have all the sheets still, but don’t want to disturb them!) Usually, I write through, about, around, of, or springboard from, images, originally those in Peter Hans Feldmann’s book of photographic images, Voyeur. I’ve worked through two editions (which means some images are encountered twice, but not quite in the same order).

From this mass of images I can make poems, if I wish, but I can also simply use the method (if that’s what it is) to stay ‘writing fit’. (The practice began well before ‘Ark and Archive’ in daily writings in prose: we demanded daily writings of our students, ‘free writing’ we called it, that it seemed impertinent not to do so oneself, and I would often read mine to students as examples.) ‘Ark and Archive’, though, is not in prose; double-spaced, the 1,000 pages are in lines, proto-poems. Occasionally, there have been focused batches of work in the body of the flow: the as yet unused ‘Scotland Road’ notes, or for certain ‘Empty Diary’ poems or ‘Burnt Journal’ poems, but they also yield prose: the prose pieces in ‘The Weekend of Miracles’ came from these pages. The poetry sequence ‘The Working Week’, in Micro-Event Space was culled almost unchanged, I seem to remember. Here's one part, complete: 

 

The opening poem-let of my treatise on metre, ‘Pulse’, now happily collected in my critical-poetics book The Necessity of Poetics, is also lifted from my serial passage through Voyeur, with little change from the flow of my writing, appropriately on the nature of flow itself, backboned by poetic ‘pulse’:

 

Two women

                        come splashing towards us with the breaking

                        waves, holding hands, laughing,

                        neat in their single-piece bathing suits,

                        hair awry in the wind

                        that combs the waves. There is ‘pulse’ here,

                        there is even ‘groove’, if we were to re-

                        construct the scene as pure sound. A wave crest

                        beyond them, a little horizon, pours over

                        its own rim, cresting, and readies itself

                        to dash past the thighs of these dancers

                        and crash at their feet as they land on the

                        seaweedy littoral.

 

Also, particular poems have (in an emergency) been culled from just one entry. The 2024 New Year poem ‘Broken’ was ‘found’ within minutes for our annual card! It appears in this video (and I think it will form poem 3 of a mini-sequence, ‘Three Poems of War’; it's not very seasonal!):

 

I'm aware that these pieces of writing are quite realist, but I also use the 'machine' of 'Ark and Archive' for more disrupted writing. ('The Drop', for example, one of the first.) The current material is made, taken from, looking at, through, beyond, deeply into, images in The Guardian, a pleasing by-product of my resuming to read newspapers as and when. I'm hoping it won't make the result too 'topical'. 

Lying at the back of this process, along with creative writing practice, was the practical poetics of Peter Redgrove (one of the earliest poets I read, by the way), as related by Neil Roberts in his biography Lucid Dreamer, though I do not refine ‘images’ and ‘motifs’ through stages like Redgrove. I’m more of a ludic dreamer, I suppose, and a materialist, although I do write the daily passage in rough before adding it – as I said, with no indication of break – to what has accumulated before. I should also say that after writing each, I read back over the last three pages (that might be up to 10 writings), and revise in the usual way. 

Until, now, I’ve arrived at page 1,000. This has always been my aim. Oddly that page’s ending coincides with the end of today’s passage (relating to an image of a 500 year old tree, perhaps a reminder of all the paper I’ve consumed; I couldn’t imagine doing this electronically). That means I could stop there. Here. Today. But I won’t. The method has been so productive, alongside other methods (none of my sonnets, my versions of Dante, or my forthcoming ‘verse-novel’ Elle were produced using ‘Ark and Archive’) that I see no reason to stop. Here, raw, is a reading of that thousandth page:

I’m rather pleased it’s not particularly remarkable, quite prose-like, in fact.

*

I write about the Christmas card poem above here: Pages: Merry Christmas Cards (thoughts on hard copy and digital versions). ‘Ark and Archive’ is mentioned in this 2022 post, wondering what I might write after the ‘English Strain’ project, Pages: If The English Strain is finished, what next? (Reflections and Loose Poetics), but otherwise is curiously absent from this blog!

Micro Event Space is detailed here: Pages: Robert Sheppard's Micro Event Space is published by Red Ceilings Press NOW.

The Necessity of Poetics may be purchased here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now!

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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com; website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com NEW: Follow on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/robertsheppard.bsky.social

Dream Diary Wednesday 18 June 1975

Wednesday 18 June 1975 

Dreamt of Vic Sage seminar – I said I couldn’t reconcile the fact that Eliot wrote ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ and Four Quartets.

Dream Diary Friday 13 June 1975

Friday 13 June 1975 

Walking along road. At corner, church on one side, David’s house on the other. I go to door. Music from church starts up. I get religiose feeling, wondering at the coincidence. All David’s family are dressed in rags and refuse to acknowledge David, rimless square glasses. Moles on face.  I try to get in.

Next with some limp lady. Trying to fuck her. Through glass in wall I still see David’s family. I close curtains. Moving back to joys of knickers, people keep walking in to butter bread. I am annoyed. No, it was poets they brought in to butter. Tennyson.

Taking part in The European Poetry Festival : Liverpool July 6th 2025 at Open Eye Gallery

NOTE: Our poem is to be published in Austria soon. For now, here's the running order and some links. All the videos of the whole festival are online now!

European Poetry Festival : Liverpool 

July 6th 2025 at Open Eye Gallery

3pm and Free Entry

19 Mann Island, Liverpool L3 1BP openeye.org.uk

Book your free ticket here! eventbrite.co.uk/e/european-poetry-festival-liverpool-tickets-1254623144599, or: 

European Poetry Festival: Liverpool Tickets, Sun, Jul 6, 2025 at 3:00 PM | Eventbrite

A brilliant afternoon of live poetry including some of the most exciting poets from Austria, Norway, Romania, Scotland and the North West England. What's the format? Pairs of poets present brand new works of live literature, made for the day, and drawing upon the local Liverpudlian poetry scene as well as visiting poets. Supported by the Liverpool Poetry Space programme, this is the last event of the European Poetry Festival for 2025! (Check the other gigs: EPF 2025 — European Poetry Festival. Featuring

Thomas Ballhausen and Robert Sheppard (and we're well underway with our collaboration!)

Lena Chilari and Michael Sutton 

Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler

Endre Ruset and Stephen Sunderland 

Julia Rose Lewis and Alec Newman

Carolyn Hashimoto and Sarah-Clare Conlon 

Lenni Sanders and David Spittle

Sarah Dawson and Andrew Taylor

Another event in partnership with Liverpool Poetry Space. Event curated by SJ Fowler and Chris McCabe. 

SJ Fowler has, of course, presented many collaborative readings, and I have had the pleasure of taking part in many of them. I have collected some of them (they are always videoed and archived online) here on my website: Collaborations - Robert Sheppard. (Scroll to the end.) 

On this blog, also I have featured a number of these events. Two years ago Sarah-Clare Conlon, who is back this year too, and I collaborated on our exploration of the River Mersey. I write about that, present the video, and indicate the text's publication, here, Pages: The Liverpool Camarade at Open Eye Gallery : May 2023: the videos of my collaboration with Sarah-Clare Conlon, and here Pages: UNTITLED by Sarah-Clare Conlon and Robert Sheppard is published in Blackbox Manifold 31.

That was the first Liverpool Camarade since 2015, about which I wrote here: Pages: Liverpool Camarade 2015: general introduction (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) with videos, of course. I was deep in the writing of what became the collaborative anthology Twitters for a Lark at that time. But now we have real  European writers.

However, this reading in Leeds in February 2017 was one of my favourites. Patricia (Farrell) was on tour and I joined her for this one gig, where I collaborated, quite explosively, with Ian McMillan. Here's an account: Pages: Ian McMillan and Robert Sheppard: Simultaneous Performance: Leeds Enemies (photo, video, set list and thoughts), and here's the video:

Largely featuring S.J. Fowler's passion for 'collaboration', I wrote a critical piece on literary collaborations (‘Doubling Up: Modes of Literary Collaboration in Contemporary British Innovative Poetry’, in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. by Samuel Rogers (Yearbook of English Studies, 51.1 (2021)), 247–64). But in preparation for it, I assembled a strand of posts on this blog, about collaboration as an art, with asides on my own collaborations, beginning here, with a hubpost: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Thughts on Collaboration 1: Introduction. Not all my collaborations have been literary of course. 

Dream Diary Saturday 7 June 1975

Saturday 7 June 1975 

I go back to 15 Oakapple after being at Tony’s for a time. Louis instead of John and we’re in my old bedroom and Louis taps on window (despite the fact we don’t want to wake Mum and Dad) and quotes King Lear. He’s got an evil sensation. I get it too and run forth from the room screaming. Foetus in the cupboard (something to do with childhood, adoption). I think Mum and Dad are in my room now and Mum screams horribly. I rush in, crying ‘Mummy.’ She is screaming like in orgasm or childbirth. Dad still asleep. I go to her. Her eyes open. ‘Mummy I’ve come home.’

A not-too-bad bit of dream: Tony has deodorant, perfume and pretends (over clothes) to roll it

onto neck, moves lower, uttering ‘Ah darling!’ (imaginary words for a lover kissing him). Moves bottle lower till he reaches genitals. Noise of sucking off. I wonder how he knows what it sounds like. Funny.

 

Also Mum tells me to eat a big dinner since I haven’t been eating.

 

Second nightmare. Several of us are on a cycling holiday. We are staying in a weird house – very aristocratic. A servant says, ‘They’re mad. They don’t leave us alone.’ I cared all the time. I’ve got a room of my own. But with others. Big baby Calibans.   

Dream Diary Tuesday 3 June 1975

Tuesday 3 June 1975 

Four of us – Frank, Elaine, Me and a fictional Polynesian mixed race person – looking for Derek Mahon. I keep trying to make it with Elaine to no avail. Derek was with William Blake and we were looking for that letter. We realise he’d be 214 but we know it’s humanly possible and that nobody wheels him about!

I kissed Elaine by a wall.

Dream Diary Sunday 1 June 1975

Sunday 1 June 1975 

D. was looking through some Tea-cards.

They were explaining dreams.

Dad didn’t like part of it and blocked his ears and humming.  

            I try to stop him, telling him that dreams and reality have to work in harmony.

(Introduction for book of dreampoems [I noted]; this got used on the tape-collage introducing my tape cassette magazine 1983)

An introduction to the diary may be read here: Pages: Dream Diary 1975 Introduction to the project

From My Journal: On Form (again) and Caroline Levine’s Forms

From My Journal: On Form and Caroline Levine’s Forms 

I have been partly re-tracing the theoretical steps that led towards, into, and out beyond the writing of my book The Meaning of Form (as I call it, though the title continues with the keywording essential to modern scholarship) in Contemporary Innovative Poetry (Palgrave 2016). I bought a copy of Caroline Levine’s Forms (Princeton 2015) and hoped it would provide further thoughts. It did, but not quite in the way I’d expected, or hoped. This is not a review of the book, which I have utilised for a different (related) purpose. In some ways I don’t get beyond the first fence, and keep falling over it again and again. Before I get to Levine, though, I mulled over a few exemplary passages in Derek Attridge’s work (principally) that I’d missed in The Meaning of Form and in The Poetry of Saying, and perhaps in ‘Pulse’. Some, of course, were published after the completion of those works. 

1st November 2024 from Doctor Zhivago:... ‘That art always serves beauty, and beauty is the happiness of having form, while form is the organic key to existence, for every living thing must have form in order to exist, and thus art, including tragic art, is an account of the happiness of existing’. (p.406)

8th November 2024: Derek Attridge, Singularity of Literature:... ‘The formally innovative work, the one that most estranges itself from its reader, makes the most sharply challenging (which is not to say the most profound) ethical demand. Formal innovation (of this sort that matters in literature) is a testing of the operations of meaning, and is therefore a kind of ethical experiment.’ And it goes on pp. 130-31.

I seem to have missed this useful passage which suggests a better term (which I have used before) than ‘linguistically’ innovative, and (more importantly) this passage is the link between The Poetry of Saying (LUP, 2005) and The Meaning of Form. [And sounds a minatory note!]

10th November 2024: I read Attridge’s description of two ways of reading, and thought: that's the distinction between the said of the saying (‘turning the event into an object’ and ‘to preserve the event as an event’). I looked at the footnote. Attridge calls it Levinas’ ‘related distinction’. Another missing link, on p. 40 of J.M. Coetzee…

21st November 2024: ‘autrebiography,’ I now see, I took from Coetzee, from Attridge’s book on same [and used it as a description/subtitle of my autobiographical book Words Out of Time].

24th November 2024: ‘I would also include [under ‘form’] the meanings of the words and sentences, for once we conceive of the work as an event, meaning becomes an occurrence, not a substance or abstraction. Meanings unfold, intertwine, fade, echo, clash... What is called “form” is one aspect of this moving complex, inseparable from what is traditionally called “content”.’

This seems succinct, more so, than other explanations by Derek Attridge. In this case from page 29 of Moving Words.

‘Some literary theorists’ –  I’m not one of those, but I could be implicated here [Attridge did witness and question my 1999 paper on Levinas and Tom Raworth at Salford, later to appear in When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry] – ‘have tried to employ Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said to argue for the non-conceptual, event-like nature of the artwork – something of a distortion of Levinas’s thought, but useful in itself.’ (The Work of Literature p. 89.)

‘The feelings that form part of the peculiarly literary response are not direct responses to content, but are always mediated by form: they are coloured by the pleasure we take in the representation itself, in the language whereby the emotional response is invited. (The Work of Literature p.85)

December 23rd 2024: Reading Creeley’s The Finger at The Handyman yesterday afternoon: ‘Here forms have possibility.’ p 63.

 

January the 5th 2025: I've been reading Forms and I’m not happy with Caroline Levine’s leap from – first – ‘form’ to ‘forms’ without a sense of what/who does the forming, and then not happy with – second – her leap (of faith?) from ‘forms’ to ‘social formations’, which she claims share the same properties. I'm unconvinced so far.

Also her sense of ‘form’ as relating to wholes (although I do like her sense of the collision of ‘forms’ in social interaction; she's good on that). But what about forms that don't behave in this way?

For example, in Carruthers’ Stave Sightings we find this about Joan Retallack’s 5uite: ‘If it is formalist ... it enters into form with contingency, boldly uncertain about form and inquiring of new critical and textual formations.’ p.129

 January 6th 2025: Levine does not, quite, make an equation between aesthetic and social ‘forms’. I’m fine with her saying ‘a new formalism will have to take account of the temporal patterns of art and life as organising and shaping, yes, but also as plural and colliding, jumbled and constantly altered.’ p .81 She allows for the loosening of what I thought was a tight analogy. ‘Forms do organise us, but on a daily basis we are organised at once by multiple social, political biological, and aesthetic rhythms, each imposing a different order and following a different logic. They do not work together [my emphasis], and so in the end are not able to impose a single coherent order on experience.’ p. 80-81.

But in the beginning of the argument, they do work together, when there is still the jump from an account of form/s that doesn’t take account of the processes of forming in the readily act/event as posited by Attridge, so it still offers an analogy between all forms.

I must say I approve of her account of social forms, of dealing with conflicting ‘institutions’ that collide and re-form in various ways. What that has to do with enjambement in Robert Creeley really isn't clear (she rejects what she says the ‘new formalism’ does which is to suggest fractured form = fractured society, though her reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is near to this, though redeemed by her conclusion as quoted above).

(She confuses ‘rhythm’ with ‘metre’. Don’t they all? See ‘Pulse’.)

I’m being promised to be shown ‘how unlike forms encounter one another’, on page 93, so perhaps I'll read more before accounting for her argument any further.

Gender, we’re told, ‘is more like a literary form’. p. 94. It’s that ‘like’!

January 7th 2025: I’m asking for a smaller but deeper account of ‘form’, more or less that of Attridge which is not – note – the formalism of the new formalists. The theory is very good (I’ve already realised how her chapter ‘Network’ provides some focus for talking about Twentieth Century Blues, which I had to (I’ve been up making notes this morning) [This was for the Jerome Rothenberg celebration at which I introduced and read a poetics piece about that particularly networky poem.]). But, suddenly, in the final chapter we find reference to ‘formalist cultural studies’ p. 132 (already a contradiction in terms) and remarks like ‘it is constructed and stylized, and it is hardly free of ideology or narrative artifice.’ p. 133 That’s FORM, as I understand it: limited but deep (which is not to negate social forms, but are they the same? Even Levine says they’re not, however ‘like’ they are). The form she does look at – in that final chapter – is the much maligned, overlooked form: plot, which she relates (as how could you not?) to social forms. (And she does use Russian Formalist terms at one point!) What about ‘construction’ or ‘stylization’? Whatever the case, I expect an excellent reading (of The Wire which I saw some episodes of, partially).

If, in networking, ‘kinship is not the same as the city streets’ p. 144, then surely racism is not the same – or even like – metre?

For Levine, ‘Knowing Forms’ (p. 147-50) means ‘social forms’. And her readings, particularly of Bleak House and The Wire are brilliant. It’s just that the use of ‘form’ or more often ‘forms’ doesn't allow for real plasticity, for ‘forming’. Indeed her sense of the ‘crisscrossing forms that produce social experience’ p.148 is a.) excellent, and b.) more flexible than her ‘formalist’ (in my sense) readings. She rushes to the social, realises (to quote Jagoda) that ‘Every political ecology... is a precarious, tottering structure’ p. 148 of ‘the unexpected effects of clashes among wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks’ p.149 and leave form and forming behind in forms and formations.

18th May 2025: Back to Levine, after having used her chapter ‘Network’ for my description of the forms and forming of Twentieth Century Blues for my Glasgow lecture, and back to her preface, to find the point where she originally collects an area of critical attention for herself in the ‘organisations and arrangements which were the main means by which power worked: politics was a matter of imposing order on the world’. p. x She then adds, ‘It never occurred to me not to call these ordering principles forms,’ p. x, though she confesses ‘It took me a long while to realise that this use of the term was not intuitive to other literary critics,’ – indeed! –‘who typically equated form with genre, also form as an exclusive domain of aesthetics.’ p. xi. The simplifying notion of ‘equating’, the narrowing of ‘exclusive’, the blunt use of ‘genre’, and the suggestion of rarified specialisation in ‘aesthetics’, leads one away from the notion of form-as-forming in the act-event of encounter, (to reduce Attridge to a few buzzwords). There are other ways of conceiving form, perhaps no less counter-intuitive than her own, for she equates form with societal forces which is my continual argument with her otherwise brilliant book, which, after a gap of some months, I am rereading.

(There is a parallel in her treatment of history. She opposes views that treasure the otherness of the past. I’m reminded of a half-forgotten quotation from Jerome McGann about how the alien perspectives of the past in a past work of art operate as kinds of critique on the present world. Levine’s view is that – crudely put – a feminist might be responding to past oppressions to learn lessons for the present. I actually favour both views: at different times in different ways either approach might yield insight. My recent readings and rewritings of Dante have furnished me with many a perspective so different from our common present day morality, the punishments of what William Empson calls the ‘torture monster’, for example, yet there are other times when it feels as though the punishment of a hypocrite, for example, makes perfect modern sense and one would wish for something of the justice dealt out across the cornices for our modern world. Both perspectives guard against one another in my resultant text of Stars.)

19th May 2025: When Levine puts it like this, I concur: ‘How should we understand the relationship between the literary and political forms?’ she asks, thus keeping the two distinct. And I agree that ‘I consider ways in which literary and social forms come into contact and affect one another, without presuming one is the ground or cause of the other,’ is a good strategy for avoiding a simplistic equation and false consequentiality between the two, which is helped by her awareness of the general instability of social organisations and disorganisations – but why they are called forms – amid a discussion of form – still eludes me. p. 22. An awareness of ‘the many different shapes and patterns that constitute political, cultural, and social experience’ seems exemplary. p. 17. ‘The interaction of forms’ seems a stronger and more useful focus than her focus on form itself. I should follow its arguments again but realise their detachment from where I am (starting (out) again).

 One of the first things I have done to re-engage with the tracking of form (and my sense that it engages with the social) was to read Will Montgomery’s Short Form American Poetry, which deals with familiar territory such as the work of Oppen and Creeley. (His first sentence is like the voice of the sirens to me: ‘This is a book about poetic form.’) I enjoyed the book, learnt a lot, but in the present context, I noted, in his introduction, references to – quotations from – Tom Eyers’ Speculative Formalism. (A sirenic title for me!) Googling threw up this interesting review of Levine’s book by Eyers himself: 

Tom Eyers – The Revenge of Form: Review of C. Levine’s “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network” – b2o: boundary 2 online

Pause to read it, here, perhaps, gentle reader.

What I have fumbled over, above, he glides over. I think the review is a dry-run for at least part of his introduction to the book Montgomery quotes from, Speculative Formalism, which I have on order, is somewhere in the post, and which I shall absorb, perhaps at leisure. (After all, this theoretical twitching is carried out between work as a poet.) But I do note that Eyers, in the review, questions Levine’s thesis, in more theoretically-astute ways than my own. ‘This apparent commensurability between literary and social forms’ – it’s that Faultline again – ‘may well be the result of a prior incommensurability, one that exists as a condition of possibility for the very distinctiveness of the forms in question, no matter how much they be said to intertwine all the way down… It is these latter, knotty, theoretical problems that the book under review doesn’t quite get to grips with, as deeply impressive as it otherwise is.’ Again: ‘how, precisely, one specific class of forms – literary forms – gain purchase on those other forms that jostle for attention?’

‘ “Forms are at work everywhere,” Levine declares, not quite an answer to that question, a declaration questioned by Eyers: ‘But hasn’t a crucial question been elided here? Even as Levine celebrates the ‘dissolving’ of the barrier between text and context, she presumably wouldn’t wish to claim that there is, as a result, absolutely no distinction to be made between the words that make up Brontë’s narrative, and the arrangements of space that are her referent. Presuming this much, we are still to learn how it is that these two very different things are to be explained according to the same, now highly capacious, perhaps too capacious, definition of ‘form’. Even more importantly, how do these different forms come to relate to one another at all? To use a now unfashionable parlance, what is the theory of reference that underpins Levine’s account?’

Is his answer to concentrate on form? we might ask. Yes and No. ‘The temptation to be avoided … is a retreat into form, the foregrounding of reassuringly abstract figures or techniques at the expense of political salience and social relevance. But equally troublesome would be the assumption that abstraction and formality are inherently apolitical and ahistorical.’ But a concentration on form, as the act-event of forming , need not retreat in this way, as Attridge is very clear to make out, and the thinking of Adorno, for one, which Eyers mentions, and which I attempt to use in the last chapter of The Meaning of Form, on the poetry of Barry McSweeney, is a powerful way of approaching history and form. And the theory of Veronica Forrest-Thomson always comes rushing back at such times.

For now, I must leave alone Eyers’ thinking. I am at the edge of knowing.

*

I write about the related theses of The Poetry of Saying and The Meaning of Form here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Poetry of Saying: The Point of Poetry: Ethics, Dialogue and Form, and here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and Weblinks). There are some updates on my encounters with Attridge here:  Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature. I tangle with, tango with, Adorno’s aesthetics here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Form, Forms and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry

‘Pulse’ is to be found in my recent The Necessity of Poetics: here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now!

 

My use of Levine’s ‘Network’ chapter partly resulted in this ‘Introduction’, here: Pages: Robert Sheppard Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium. NOTE: My paper, may be read in full here: Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium | English Studies in Latin America: A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, from the online pages of English Studies of Latin America, January 2026.

My ‘Dante’ project Stars, is written about here: Pages: On abandoning my transposition of Dante: thoughts and extracts. I didn’t abandon it, as the first posting of this piece suggested.

 

Dream Diary Saturday 17 May 1975

Saturday 17 May 1975 

Davros from Dr Who was turning David into a moron.

            David a willing partner. Fixing a device (like a jeweller’s piece) to his glasses eyepiece.

            No fooling. [a quote from Frank Zappa.]

Dream Diary Friday 16 May 1975

Friday 16 May 1975 

Vic Sage giving lecture in big hall. Mr Parrott comes in saying, ‘Sorry Vic. It’s an official strike.’

            The girls want to take off their BRAS in protest. Flat-chested.

            Somebody said make essays in original style.

Broken Spine Readings, Southport : May 21 : featuring Tim Allen

Broken Spine Readings

Every 2 months

Second gig!

Headline Poets – Featuring big names who push the form forward.

This month: TIM ALLEN (who was brilliant!)

Tim Allen lived for many years in Plymouth working as a primary school teacher. For two decades he helped, through the magazine Terrible Work and the Language Club reading series, to establish a vibrant poetry community. A Democracy of Poisons, one of a number of recent volumes, is a sequence of prose poems, is Tim Allen’s third Shearsman book and his first completed work following a move to Lancashire where he has been heavily involved with the avant wing of the North-West poetry scene, co-hosting the . The texts run parallel with the years of Austerity leading to Brexit and its fall-out, issues internalised here before resurfacing within new narrative contexts and scenarios in which modern cultural history competes with autobiographical conflict to be transported elsewhere by the chimera of language. Motifs arising from the perspective of age and change echo, but sparsely; what really unites the poems is a cruel humour, as often self-directed as aimed at the democracy of poisons. Weird writing, funny too. 

Next readings in this series, include Sarah Crewe and Maria Isakova-Bennett at least.

Check for future details! We are currently looking for a new venue. But, in the meantime: 

Also for your Merseyside poetry diary: European Poetry Festival, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool: Sunday 6^th July 2025: 3-5 Free, drop in (North West poets and European poets in collaboration. Usually fascinating.) I'll be collaborating...

Details : Liverpool 2025 - July 6th — European Poetry Festival

Dream Diary Wednesday 7 May 1975

Wednesday 7 May 1975 

Lots of little houseboat type huts. Frank lives in one. I am a stranger in the country. They’re writing poems to Grandad. We go to pub. A group starts. They play ‘Angie’. Music stops like a record being taken off, and starts again. Tony laughs at the flat singing, wide gaps between his teeth. Frank and us are known for having DOPE on us. Dave and Frank carry a gigantic dope leaf each.

A girl comes along as we’re heading along a road to Horsham [Norwich] to MY room. Last one says, ‘You’ll drop in on Grandpa, won’t you?’ He won’t like me. Visions of bars and got me home.

Dream Diary Sunday 4 May 1975

Sunday 4 May 1975 

Big party up King’s Road (opposite [looks like] Rita’s). Big bus standing outside. And a loveable little black woman with me. Something about travelling on the bus.

            Crossing a river, where rails are at Portslade Station, in search of the woman.

An introduction to the diary may be read here: Pages: Dream Diary 1975 Introduction to the project

Dream Diary Wednesday 30 April 1975

Wednesday 30 April 1975 

Dreamt that I saw Ian Richmond [Eco Party SU leader at UEA] and gang picnicking in Church Lane, Southwick.

            I talked for a while.

            Telling them that I live there.

 

Poem on Stride's Algorithmic Prayers: ‘Pumpkin McPumpkin Face’

Rupert Loydell invited a number of writers to submit a poem or prose poem or short text for publication in Stride magazine, online: Stride magazine, responding to this sculpture by Diemut Strebe, ‘The Prayer’.

It is an eternal generative AI Prayer Machine! (It shows how AI can be used creatively and originally, instead of programming it to write substitute human novels or visualise Trump as a Superhero, or other banalities.)  

 There are various responses so far, including Rupert’s own, Algorithmic Prayers: Religious belief is a small installation | Stride magazine, Patricia Farrell’s  Algorithmic Prayers: The apparatus as designed | Stride magazine, and Ian Seed’s Algorithmic Prayers: the breath that has been | Stride magazine. They are being posted in March and April 2025. 

Now it’s my turn, and my poem may be read at Algorithmic Prayers: deliver us | Stride magazine. Here's a bit of it, read by me, with effaced FACE effect: 

 

This text, ‘Pumpkin McPumpkin Face’ I describe as ‘responding to The Prayer by Diemut Strebe: featuring some words and phrases banned by the Trump team and its algorithm.’ Here’s the first line: ‘Orange Pumpkin, deliver us from Activism McActivism Face.’

I like Rupert's invitations to participate in special features on Stride, or sometimes in pamphlet form, like this one: Pages: Nerve Damage ed Rupert Loydell now out (responses to Witkin).