Eighteen Years of Blogging today!

Blogging is more than a publicity exercise for me. Although this blog started out as the extension of an earlier magazine, it is an instrument for thinking (and writing, as I explain below in relation to the sonnets I have now finished). It is even therapeutic in some strange way: I lose myself in the process and within the labyrinthine linkages it makes. (It took me a long time to realise this aspect matched the strands and links of my Twentieth Century Blues project. (See Pages: Twentieth Century Blues published ten years ago! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)) It is, clearly, a mode of publishing (which reflects its beginning as a blogzine). 

This year has been an odd one, not least of all for having radiotherapy in the summer and on-going hormone treatment for prostate cancer (get it checked, old lads out there, that's the most serious message of this post, believe me. I've never had a symptom. And here's the most important link today: Prostate Cancer UK | Prostate Cancer UK ). It hasn’t made much difference to my blogging (though I timed my annual summer break for those 20 radiotherapy sessions at the wonderful Clatterbridge in Aintree). 

I’m going to select 10 ‘areas’ with links for this year (but there's really 11!):

 1 The great work of the year was the co-editing of New Collected Poems by Lee Harwood. Here’s one post, about the launch, with a link to other links (there’s lots about Lee on the blog!)   Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems launched and on sale now (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 

2 It was great to participate in the Cliff Yates @ 70 tribute and I write about that (and have links to the tribute, for which I wrote the introduction and submitted a specially-written poem) here: Pages: Cliff Yates at 70 : my parts in this celebration of his poetry and poetics (links to it) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). Andy and Alan did him proud - as we all should. 

 3 Good also to be asked by Lyndon Davies to provide poem and essay to the John James/Chris Torrance issue of Junction Box, here: Pages: The John James/Chris Torrance issue of Junction Box - plus my poem for, essay on, James (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). I wrote for and about James, but I did have a fruitful suggestion for the Torrance part (that is, to reprint an interview with Torrance I read waiting for one of those radiotherapy appointments). 

 4 It’s grim to announce the deaths of friends (whether they are artists are not). But we lost two extremely creative friends in the last year and they are remembered here:

Philip Jeck: Pages: Philip Jeck 2022 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Alan Halsey: Pages: I.M. Alan Halsey: some thoughts, links, and a poem dedicated to him. (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 5 I continued publishing excerpts from British Standards (my transpositions of romantic sonnets) in magazines over this year and I provide links to them, BUT I also include on this blog short videos of those poems too. So here is a piece on transposing Wordsworth, which is also a homage to the brilliant work Phil Davenport is doing with homeless people using Wordsworth’s poems in a parallel way to me. (No, I am using them in a parallel way to him.) See: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Wordsworth’s Sonnets Transposed for the 21st Century appears on Zwiebelfish!

6 Keats got a similar treatment, and here are four posts, with videos, of work that appeared from the 14 sonnets I’ve tackled (or mangled, depending on your view of the project):

 Pages: Two more sonnets from British Standards (from Keats) in Tears in the Fence 75 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: A version of a Keats sonnet published on STRIDE today (links and video and context) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: Four more Keats' overdubs published online in LITTER (and videos here) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Pages: THREE new sonnets from British Standards (overdubs of John Keats) appear in Shearsman 131 and 132 (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 You’ll notice on the video I wear my Keats (life mask) with pride.

 7 John Clare got the same treatment in British Standards and here are the two posts about the publication of some of the resultant poems (again with videos): here:

Pages: My transposition of a sonnet by John Clare, from British Standards, is published on Beir Bua (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Robert Sheppard: Four new versions of John Clare published in Talking About Strawberries (plus videos and links)

 

Here's my accidental 'poem-film', or is it 'film-poem' of one of those Clare transpositions.

These sonnets were all temporarily posted on this blog so blogging became part of the process of their becoming. (And, therefore, as I say above, of me.)

8 Talking of performing or reading, I did a reading (and would love to do more, if there are any organisers left after Covid!) at MMU’s English Futures conference in July 2022. Here’s my set list: Pages: My reading at the English Futures Saturday 9th July 2022 (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). It’s more of the Wordsworth transformations. I read a whole block to make absolutely clear what I was doing. 

9 I wrote about Fictional Poets (looking back at the two volumes I published of such work), beginning with a post here: Pages: Reflections on Fictional Poetry and Fictional Poets (1 and hubpost for the sequence) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and with links to the rest. I was also thinking through (even writing) a third part. I am quietly announcing here for the first time that a cleaned-up version of these posts will form parts of a book called Doubly Stolen Fire which will be published later this year.

10 Even before the eighteenth year of blogging began I was posting posts about having FINISHED the ‘English Strain’ project with its serial ‘final’ poems. It didn’t turn out that easy: these posts quite amusingly trace the process of closure, as I debate HOW and WHEN to end it. The final post here even contemplates starting it all up again, but decides against it (it is also the least consulted post of the four). Since the whole project was published and discussed on the blog (unlike other projects you won’t know about from reading these pages) it seems appropriate to cluster them together. I think they make interesting reading:

 Pages: Another 'final' poem of the English Strain sonnet project: looking eastwards and to the Ukraine (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Goodbye to Bo through the Medium of Jake Thackray’s masterpiece (not a book review) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Robert Sheppard: A final final poem for British Standards!

Pages: The Horrible Thought that Bo mioght be back: only The Bard could save me now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

I’m saying goodbye to the sequence but I’m also saying goodbye to Bo (and to the sonnet: I’ll never return to the form! (He sez.))

One other thing (this isn’t point 11, believe me): I’ve also started this last year adding a set of addresses to every post (if I remember to do it!) That’s to make sure people can contact me. The other way of putting this is: don’t use my edgehill email address! I can’t access it. So:  

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Do follow me on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

The little block of four raw links below will take you to the posts I made after merely 10 years of blogging, trying to make lists of 1, the best posts, 2, my favourite posts (one for each year), 3, the most neglected posts, and, 4, my blogging plans for the (then) future. It was all quite fun, quite a lot of work, and is still interesting (even informative) to look at now. 

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-best-bits.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-one-post-year.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-ten-posts-nothing-or.htmlhttp://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/ten-years-of-pages-plans-for-future.html

 My annual accounts of blogging all link (up). In fact, they are a sort of guide to that year’s ‘best’ posts (though it’s only in my estimate). Here’s 14, 15,16 and 17 years…

Pages: Robert Sheppard: My 14 years of blogging

Pages: Fifteen Years of Blogging (A hubpost to all the hubposts and other goodies) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Sixteen Years of Blogging! (links to the best of the blog) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Pages: Seventeen Years of Blogging. A look back and the best of the last year (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

The pre-history of this blog, as a print magazine, may be read here, on what was my first post (even though I moved it later). I also outlined the complete run of the second series of Pages before it became a blogzine, and finally this blog. However, the first run of the print magazine is now online, at Jacket2 where it is hosted here. 

Re:Pulse – on pulse and Richard Andrews’ A Prosody of Free Verse: Explorations in Rhythm

Re:Pulse – on pulse and Richard Andrews’ A Prosody of Free Verse: Explorations in Rhythm (New York, Oxford: Routledge, 2017). More about the author here: Richard Andrews

Re-pulse. I’ve not thought a lot formally about rhythm since writing ‘Pulse’. (This is a ‘treatise on metre’, or rather, on rhythm, and I write about it here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/robert-sheppard-pulse-all-rhythm.htmland an excerpt appears in Tentacular here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard) (I am hoping that someone will publish the whole of ‘Pulse’ at some point.)

Richard Andrews’ A Prosody of Free Verse brought me back to the subject, but didn’t convince me that I was wrong. It didn’t convince me that he was wrong, either, though I wasn’t convinced by his attempts to draw in several other ‘rhythmic’ disciplines, though he does consider ‘groove’ by the end (but not in the way Tiger Roholt managed it; my ‘Pulse’ is a writing-through of Roholt’s book Groove, an odd method, I know). The more specific he becomes, the less useful it seems. He elaborates elaborate schema for parsing rhythmic contours, and then suggests there’s little point in extensively using them. (He often gestures to areas of ‘further study’, indeed, there's a later book.) He seems to be describing a kind of well-behaved free verse very different from my own (or Lee Harwood’s, or Roy Fisher’s, or Maurice Scully’s, etc.).

 

To fill it an allograph

 

Of utter utterance

Caught through the aperture

 

Of belonging longing

To think a moon

 

Pressing close to kiss the earth

 

Rhythm, as in free verse, is additive, he tells us, which is fundamental to his thesis.

 

… event-sized shapes, both men in front,

loose ties around hot necks, the next clouds’

 

black rims fringed with greying and blueing,

she slows to light her cigarette, laconic,

 

steps to a kerb, leather bag over her

shoulder, it slaps her thigh, reminds her,

 

somewhere inside this body I’m happy, yes, she

walks across the ceiling with her red hair …

 

‘The opening line or lines of a free verse poem can set the template via which subsequent lines position themselves, both aurally and/or visually … one line provides the ground for the next, one strophe for the next, and so on…’ (a ‘so on’ that can include the super-cadences (my term, made up on the spot) of whole books, Pound, Whitman…) – ‘with the reverse operation that subsequent lines reflect back on the opening lines or strophes’. (68) Another good thing about this attempt is its refusal of traditional metrics to account for any of the rhythmic effects of what really happens in a free verse poem.

 

walks across the ceiling with her red hair,

 

negotiating reefs of felt under window clouds,

climbs the ringed bark

 

into a sky of river,

cools her wrinkled feet

 

Andrews writes of ‘pulse’ slightly differently from me: ‘Pulses are crucial in that they provide periodic markers; they establish anticipation and predictability’. (68) I’ve used Abrahams’ phenomenological readings of ‘anticipatory’ consciousness a little like this. (See page 3 of the online excerpt: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard) Pulse ‘has a foundational and often unheard or invisible function in free verse’. (69) Pulses ‘are not the same as beats’. (68) (I need to consider this distinction more. Andrews uses the plural often.)

 

There’s no end to it line-

Break its little one

 

The dead their own deity it’s

Best to offer tactile thanks

 

Twitching under

Fingerprinting pulse

 

‘Turns’, what I call (above) ‘line-/Break(s)’, ‘are more literal than in formal, metrical, verse. (104). They are ‘part of the form’ (104), ‘the turn is more significant because the articulation required is multifunctional. It joins two rhythmic phrases together (they are ‘articulated’) and also signals a shift that is, at the same time, rhythmic and syntactic’. (104)

 

– To think with particular and

Articular interruptions

 

Never to unthink skinned-in

Ecstasies in the poem that

 

Sees the world as well

As itself

 

I find his use of ‘turns’ suggestive, but we mustn’t think of this too closely as actual ‘turns’ (whether we relate it to dance, as Andrews does, or not).

 

To think through

The tune of the thing

 

Andrews’ use of Lanham’s ‘economics of attention’ – ‘it takes more attention to respond to free verse because the rhythmic framework is not “given”’ – is also suggestive (the telling adjective of my response). ‘If’ – note! – ‘the additive model is accepted … the reader or listener has to hold each line in isolation to those that follow and precede it’ etc (184). Thus the attention has to be greater, ‘getting to the heart of the creative compositional process’. (185)

 

To shiver with joy drive

Pattern against violence

 

The theory is ‘multimodal’, and the future is ‘to recognize how gesture, movement, choreography, music, sound and other modes are embodied in the ostensibly two-dimensional nature of the poem on the printed page … to show not only how the various modes (and their rhythmic impulses) inform the words on the page but how the words on the page evoke those very same modal dimensions.’ (186) Andrews looks as if he’s about to launch into speculations about hypertext but he brings it back to the page (or simple screen). (These final pages will bear some re-reading.)

 

Spectral email template

Pre-addressed to the dead one

 

One final plea: ‘A new prosody or multimodal notational system for rhythm can open up possibilities for poets, enabling them to see connections and affordances of which they were previously unaware.’ (192) It seems to me we should imagine such a system, assume the possibilities, and create connections and affordances that then may be seen – but possibly not measured. (I never use the term ‘free verse’ unless I can help it; ‘non-metrical’ verse at a pinch; ‘poem’ ordinarily of verse and (much) prose.)

Prosody as part of a poetics of anticipation (as we anticipate the next pulsation of sound and meaning). (Which is a summary of my Pulse, as well as of much of Andrews' work.)

A couple of times (I’ve lost the page references) Andrews writes of free verse ‘taking form’, which sounds like a gesture towards Derek Attridge’s sense of the literary (although Attridge only appears here as a prosodist). (I’m thinking of what I’ve written here https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2015/05/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-and.htmlAnd what I have long ago amassed here: http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2014/06/robert-sheppard-meaning-of-form-forms.html). Form as a gestural thing, as an active mode of forming in both the acts-events of writing and of reading. And pulse or rhythm is part of that.

NB The excerpts from my poems which interposed themselves as I typed up my response to Andrews from my poetics journal come from ‘Six Poems Against Death’ in Berlin Bursts (and ‘Five Poems Against Death’ in History or Sleep: Selected Poems) See here for both books (and others) : https://www.shearsman.com/store/Sheppard-Robert-c28271934

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Do follow me on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

Lee Harwood New Collected Poems launched and on sale now

The New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood is NOW available. HERE:  Lee Harwood - New Collected Poems (shearsman.com)

 

We launched it, a cast of thousands. Like all Shearsman launches, it was held in the Swedenborg Centre in Central London. In this case, on 10^th January, 2023…

Kelvin Corcoran invited a number of poets and publishers and poetry friends to read their favourite Harwood poem(s) – I was going to add ‘from the book’, though there are some poems in the book that nobody had seen!). (See here for more on that: Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems (2023) Some of the new things we found to put in it (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)). Indeed, I told the audience about the new goodies we'd found as Kelvin and I edited the volume and the restoration of poems had Lee removed (at various points, as we discovered.)

It was a well-attended affair with lots of people I hadn't seen for years, even decades. Michael Zand (one of those I'd not seen for years) said it was the kind of event that people definitely will remember for a long time. Our readers were 

Andy Brown

Ian Davidson

Carrie Etter

Rafe Harwood

Ric Hool

Maria Jastrzębska 

Tony Lopez

John Muckle

Frances Presley (also reading a poem chosen by

Gavin Selerie who couldn't be present)

Elaine Randell

Peter Robinson

Iain Sinclair

Frank Skinner

Simon Smith (and)

Janet Sutherland

Each reader brought something unique to the poems. Iain Sinclair commented on the charm of the reading by Lee's son, Rafe, so it seems appropriate to represent the evening with a photo of him reading. (If you are wondering, the Frank Skinner is the comedian, but he is also a poetry podcaster, and read Lee's 'One, Two, Three' well.) Thank you, all of you. Your spirit of generosity was palpable.   

Iain also made an interesting remark. He said he keeps Lee's books in Hastings, because they read differently  - the poems themselves change, beside the sea. I so want this to be true, but is this possible?  

If you would like to hear Lee read his own poems, this link includes a load of Harwood audio/video for you to enjoy: Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems: the best audio and video recordings (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Here's a Harwood hub-post, that links to the many Harwood materials on this blog, including a review of the 2004 Collected Poems which this new book replaces: Pages: Lee Harwood: 4 Poems (and a note on them) in Abandoned Playground, ahead of NEW COLLECTED POEMS edited Corcoran and Sheppard (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). 

A view of the book from the back! It's around 800 pages long by the way, a veritable brick of a volume.

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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

 

Cliff Yates at 70 : my parts in this celebration of his poetry and poetics (links to it)

It doesn’t seem possible that Cliff Yates is 70! All that tiggerish classroom energy, all that boundless enthusiasm for the moment of poetry, all that unquenchable curiosity for life, seem so much the possession of youth that I have to pause and count the years.

Alan Baker and Andrew Taylor have now edited this tribute to him, CLIFF YATES @ 70, (see their preface here: Preface | Cliff Yates @ 70 (cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com)

with many poets offering their praise and their best wishes, from Poetry and Poetics stalwarts from Edge Hill, like Andrew himself, to Scott Thurston, Matt Fallaize and Angela Keaton, through to the big wide world poets, like Nick Power, Matt Welton and Kelvin Corcoran, and other names, like Pam Thompson that are new to me. Even his children are here, both writers in their own rights. A lot of the poems address Cliff directly, which seems right. A lot of us have attempted to write what Ian McMillan, in his tribute, calls a ‘Yatesy’ poem. There's also a video of Cliff reading (that wasn't there when I first blogged this!) Have a look at the tributes here: https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/

 

I was asked to contribute and I produced one of my birthday ‘Burnt Journal’ poems for him, one which I feel pretty pleased with: https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/2022/12/robert-sheppard.html

I was also asked to write an introduction, which I did. I was pretty pleased with that too. I think I got it right (I won’t repeat my assessment of Cliff’s work, because you may read that here: 

https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/2023/01/introduction-by-robert-sheppard_13.html

Introduction by Robert Sheppard | Cliff Yates @ 70 (cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com)

(These links keep changing as more posts are added, so if they don't work, use the one to the site : https://cliffyatestribute.blogspot.com/

Cliff was one of the first poetry people I met when Patricia and I moved up to the North West in 1996 (oh yes, she’s here too, or at least I think she is, she's written Cliff a poem as though she were a Bulgarian), and I had seen some of his poems in magazines. Little was I to know that he would become one of the important members of the original Poetry and Poetics Research Group at Edge Hill University, which sounds a dull body, but we gave readings (Tate Gallery no less) and made a CD and generally helped each other as writers to become more like themselves.

Of course, Cliff was also a famous teacher of poetry well before I met him. Read about that here:

A few choice words from the guru | English and creative writing | The Guardian

Keep up with Cliff’s news. There’s a new Selected and New Poems on the way, for starters! :  Cliff Yates – poet & tutor (wordpress.com)

He also appears on this blog a few times too, with regards to the PPRG here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/11/going-privategoing-privateafterword-to.html

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/05/introduction-to-fifth-series-edge-hill.html

And with regard to his own poetry and poetics:

 https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-cliff-yates.html

Pages: 25 Edge Hill Poets: Cliff Yates (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 He even reviewed my The Poetry of Saying

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2009/06/cliff-yates-poetry-of-saying.html

AND he provided me with the word ‘provocation’ to focus my thoughts about writerly poetics, circa 2007.

Cliff and I are definitely due another meeting in Birmingham soon I hope.

I wrote that sentence this morning. This afternoon I came back from a walk to find an answerphone message for Patricia and me. From Cliff! He says he wants to say thanks and he wants to ‘catch up’. Yes, indeed, as Sy Oliver used to sing.

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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com. Or you can phone me, like Cliff did. 

The launch of New Collected Poems by Lee Harwood/Christmas Break

The New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood is NOW available. HERE:  Lee Harwood - New Collected Poems (shearsman.com)

 

It will definitely be available for the launch in early January, so keep looking, and also follow up on all the Harwood related materials on this blog, via a hub-post, here: Pages: Lee Harwood: 4 Poems (and a note on them) in Abandoned Playground, ahead of NEW COLLECTED POEMS edited Corcoran and Sheppard (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). This includes a load of Harwood audio/video for you to enjoy: Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems: the best audio and video recordings (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

 Until the publication/launch, I’m having a little break from the blog as I do every Christmas. So here’s the date to look forward to.

Like all Shearsman launches, it will be held at 7.30 in the Swedenborg Centre in Central London. In this case, on 10^th January, 2023…

Read all about it here: Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems launched and on sale now (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)

Kelvin Corcoran and I have invited a number of poets and publishers to read their favourite Harwood poem – I was going to add ‘from the book’, but a. that’s a non-sequitur and b. there are some poems in the book that people may not know (yet)! (See here for more on that: Pages: Lee Harwood New Collected Poems (2023) Some of the new things we found to put in it (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)).

Until then, have a lovely mid-winter break (or whatever it is you wish for this season).

*

Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

 

 

 

Lee Harwood New Collected Poems: the best audio and video recordings

The New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood is NOW available. HERE:  Lee Harwood - New Collected Poems (shearsman.com) 

I’m sure both Kelvin and I can ‘hear’ Lee Harwood ‘reading’ whenever we peruse a Harwood poem, even one we have not actually heard him speak. We can guess how he would have read it. This may be true of any writer, but it has been said before – most notably by William Rowe – that conversational (and often incomplete) segments are a kind of prosody in this work. Harwood signals it on the page, but this signalling cannot quite replace an actual audial, aural, experience of the work.  

‘There is a direct relationship between the compositional processes of a Lee Harwood poem and the way in which Lee Harwood the poet read his poetry,’ we say in our introduction to our New Collected Poems (though the words, and the thoughts, are Kelvin’s here). ‘Both work through an apparent simplicity which is typically intimated as the almost innocent disguise and disavowal of complexity and significance.  Through collage and various forms of declared and undeclared incompletion, the reader or listener is gently taken unknowingly into complex and charged moments of recognition …’ We add: ‘This fundamental feature makes hearing Lee Harwood read important,’ though that’s not anything we can obviously supply in our edition (a CD included or a set of web connections, a QR code would have been great). ‘Readings can be found on YouTube of varying technical proficiency.  The recordings in the British Library archive are extensive but not currently available online.’ (But, it is worth adding here, they will be!) The PennSound collection of readings is a major resource covering 40 years of Harwood’s poetry, and a guide to where other readings are available … The calm, measured, unostentatious delivery introduces the ambition and confidence of the poem. This is not a sort of coyness or false modesty but rather an acknowledgement of the scope and depth of the lyric as language at its most intense and meaningful.’

 I thought I’d spell that invitation out, and add my own.

 

The link Lee Harwood (upenn.edu) takes you to FOUR items containing Harwood reading:

ONE Lee Harwood and Ange Mlinko reading, St. Mark’s Church, NY, December 9, 1998

TWO The Chart Table, Lee Harwood: Poems 1965-2002.

This is the recording released as Rockdrill CD published by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Optic Nerve for Birkbeck College, 2004, and indeed the recordings stretch those years, the first item being from the Steam LP of 1965 and (used without permission, I note) ‘Animal Days’, at least, taken from the tape magazine 1983, Supranormal Cassettes, which I published in 1976 (a whole 20+ minutes of it). It’s a nice ‘selected poems’ (the texts also stretching across the years of recording! They are, in order, with tracking:

As Your Eyes Are Blue (3:47)

The Doomed Fleet (8:13)

Question of Geography (2:17)

Linen (1:52)

The Words (2:25)

Animal Days (5:55)

Qasida (3:49)

One, Two, Three (4:12)

You Essai. You O.K. (8:42)

Summer Solstice (3:12)

African Violets (5:37)

The Rowan Tree (4:32)

For Paul / Coming Out of Winter (1:28)

October Night (3:01)

Czech Dream (4:39)

Gorgeous (1:28)

Late Journeys (1:13)

The Wind Rises (4:32)

Salt Water (3:58)

Hampton Court Shelter (2:46)

THREE Reading at the Shearsman Reading Series at Swedenborg Hall, London, June 17, 2008

FOUR "Chanson Tzara" with Lee Harwood by Alexander Baker, 2012

Of course, Lee recorded for the audio resource The Archive of Now. His poems are located here:

This recording was made on 22 August 2005, at Lee's flat in Brighton.

• 'A Formal Portrait'
• 'A Late Journey'
• 'Classicism (Satie, Finlay & co.)'
• 'Coat of Arms on Wall in Ancient City'
• 'Forestry Work no. 1'
• 'Homage to Albert Ryder and Bill Corbett'
• 'Mirrors'
• 'Mother and Child in Restaurant Garden'
• 'Padham Harbour, Spring'
• 'Summer Solstice'
• 'The Joyous Lake'

 ANOTHER NICE SET IN FOUR VIDS Lee’s quietly assertive delivery caused some problems with recording, as you will find looking online elsewhere, particularly with video performances, where the microphone is positioned where the camera is (i.e. at a distance from Lee). Often one can see him, but you cannot hear him clearly. BUT the following recordings, from Sound Eye 2005, in Cork, probably recorded by cris cheek, are clear and entertaining, and are embedded from YouTube. Each is only a few minutes long. 

Part one begins with ‘As Your Eyes are Blue’ (p. 65)

 Lee Harwood-from Collected Poems-1/4 - YouTube

 

Part two consists of ‘Dream of Blue Paint’ (p. 633) and 'African Violets' (p. 562)

Lee Harwood-from Collected Poems-2/4 - YouTube

 

Part three begins with ‘The wind rises’ (p. 619)

Lee Harwood-from Collected Poems-3/4 - YouTube

 

Part four begins with ‘Hampton Court Shelter’ (p. 636)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TXPJll3JFE

or

Lee Harwood-from Collected Poems-4/4 - YouTube

 

If you work your way through these recordings, with our edition to hand, you will appreciate, I hope, what we have described above.

 My recordings of Lee, made by my friends John Purdy and Tony Parsons in 1976, were published as 1983 number 2, and I donated the master tapes to the National Sound Archive in the 1980s, BUT they have never appeared in the catalogues of the British Library. However, a copy of one of the cassettes (whose quality must have eroded) appears in the BL’s Cobbing Archive, and may be digitalised in the future.

Read about the BL Harwood and Cobbing archives here: Pages: POEMS IN PROGRESS : a new book of poets' drafts from the British Library (featuring Lee Harwood and Bob Cobbing) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

 More on New Collected Poets, and links to all posts about Lee Harwood on this blog, may be accessed via what I call a hub-post, here: Pages: Lee Harwood: 4 Poems (and a note on them) in Abandoned Playground, ahead of NEW COLLECTED POEMS edited Corcoran and Sheppard (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).

 

You may order New Collected Poems from Shearsman here: Lee Harwood - New Collected Poems (shearsman.com)

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Locating Robert Sheppard: email: robertsheppard39@gmail.com  website: www.robertsheppard.weebly.com Follow on Twitter: Robert Sheppard (@microbius) / Twitter  latest blogpost: www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com