ONE Billy Mills is the first off the blocks, as so often,
on his excellent blog. I link to it on my blog roll (whoever thought of
that term?); see to the right of this post.
Beginning, and offering links (you may have noticed
how much I like links, a habit from the days of assembling Twentieth Century
Blues), he notes ‘Robert
Sheppard’s Doubly Spoken Fire is, in part at least, the third
and final part of his ‘fictional poetry project’, the first two parts of which
I reviewed here and here (In
hindsight, I was far too dismissive of this book at the time).’ I liked his
harsh treatment of those volumes, and I like his ‘in part at least’, which is
true: this may have run the ‘fictional poetry project’ into the ground (or it
may not, I’ll cheekily hint, perhaps falsely) but there are lots of other bits.
Billy is forced to be descriptive as well as evaluative. I’ll say no more about
it, but simply thank Billy (I know how much work is involved in reviewing,
which may be the reason I do less of it), and give you the link to it:
I’ll add some more reviews, if there are any. In the
meantime, here’s an X feed tweeting the sayings of a talking mongoose, highly relevant
to my ‘Rectophonic Monologue’! Billy found this too. I guess I’ll have to
follow: (4) Gef the Mongoose (@gefbot) / X
(twitter.com)
Nearly everybody had long hair at the University of
East Anglia in 1974, even (or especially) the men, and Colin Scott was no different. (Here we are in my contemporary hand.)
He was different, though, in that he was older than the regular dishevelled
bunch (myself included), and had worked in the library service and (I think)
was quite content with the thought of returning to that noble profession after
studying History for three years. He was serious without being super-studious,
liked music, and we certainly attended some of the rock bands that toured the
campuses.
Before I move on from that reference to UEA concerts, I'd like to share an uncollected poem I wrote in 1976, and revised recently. I have dedicated it to Colin's memory because a. he might have been there (my diary mentions a mutual friend, and b. both the poem and Colin were lost (to me, not to themselves, of course) between the 1970s and now(ish).
Midnight
Air:
John
Martyn with Danny Thompson, June 12th 1976
i.m. Colin Scott, who may have been
there
Ocean
music flows over you
wailing
where waves break
back upon the
water’s edge
They
strike up on form
Full moon
rises to face you
accepting
droning chants and spells
that drown
the sense in magic
Somebody
slides through the windowpane
having
flown through the night
Cannabis
spiral cracks open the sound
and its diamond
shatters
each
shimmering fragment
a swirling
seawave at the end of unseen fingers
You rise
from the waters
in the midnight
air
1976/2021 (Of course, in the late 1970s, and later, Tony Parsons and I would sing 'May You Never', by John Martyn, a song that curiously leaves no space to breathe. Above is a video of JM and DT, as in the poem, and at the concert.)
I re-read my copious diaries during Covid lockdowns and was surprised
how much time I spent with Colin, going to concerts, drinking real ale,
throwing snowballs (those Norfolk winters!) and smoking perfumed cigarettes (!),
during my first year. I think he maturely organized the transportation of my
drunken form from the pub back to my room on my 19th birthday.
By
our second year Colin moved to a house near a pub called The Boundary with his
friend Jan. (It was he who is mentioned in my diary entry about the Martyn gig.) Whilst another UEA friend Trev Eales and I attended parties there
(somebody had a dog called ‘Dog’, I remember, which is emblematic of the
household, I think) we both saw less of Colin on a day-to-day basis. Trev remembers meeting Colin a lot on the bus to campus. Of course,
he also had a settled life in his native Swindon, friends would come to visit
him – and he returned to that (I think) after we’d all graduated. We kept in
touch for a while but, like so many, lost contact, through the moving of
addresses and the vicissitudes of life. He lost contact with Jan as well. (I kept in touch with Trev, as may be seen from this post: Pages: Trev Eales - photography and friendship (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) (And here is a post about my slightly later UEA studies in Creative Writing: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Some memories of the Creative Writing MA (cohort 1978-1979) at the University of East Anglia )
I never forgot Colin – and always wondered where he was.
There was a barman in Liverpool (where I had moved in 1997) of whom I remember
remarking to my wife, Patricia, ‘See that man? I reckon that’s what Colin Scott
looks like today!’ (The memory is interesting for the fact I didn’t need to
explain to Patricia who Colin was.)
He obviously hadn’t forgotten me either. At one of his
Positive Images meetings with the poet Leanne Bridgewater, probably in 2016, Colin
asked, giving it a long shot, whether she knew a poet called Rob Sheppard that
he was at university with. Leanne answered that she did. She and I had met a
number of times; she had been taught Creative Writing at Salford by my
ex-student Scott Thurston, and was part of the burgeoning creative and
experimental excitement that surrounded The Other Room readings in Manchester.
And so was I, from my outpost in Liverpool. (See one of her publications, here: 'adDICTIONARY' by Leanne Bridgewater (670 pages) | Knives Forks and Spo (knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk)
The highlight of my evening at the North by North-West
Enemies reading in February 2017 in Leeds was supposed to be my co-performing my
collaboration with Ian McMillan.
That was terrific (or a terrific experience, see the video above), but I left the evening more
overwhelmed by the fact that Leanne (who was also on the bill
see the video) led a small
dapper man from the shadows and introduced him as Colin. (He didn’t in the
least look like the man from the pub!) After a gap of 40 years, I don’t know
what we spoke about, ‘catch up and conversations’ my diary relates unhelpfully.
That wasn’t really the point: we were now in contact again, and I thank
Leanne for engineering this meeting, which proved so fruitful, meaningful, and
ultimately poignant. (On that evening, here: Pages: Ian McMillan and Robert Sheppard: Simultaneous Performance: Leeds Enemies (photo, video, set list and thoughts))
Our next meeting was also at a poetry reading and performance, but in
June 2017 – as part of Positive Images, co-organised by Colin. Patricia read as
well, Leanne compared, and I read too. I didn’t think Patricia and I went down
particularly well (I should have read my skits on Boris Johnson), but Leanne
was wonderful, playing the ukelele (and editing the video of the evening, which you may view above, and here's a post from nearer the time: Pages: Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell: Poetry from the Stage (Coventry) Saturday night ).
Colin was much in demand as an organiser (I’d yet to fully register the amount
of work he put into this vital community arts event) but we did get to talk
after, at least about Coventry, which was new to me. Here is Colin introducing the results of a poetry competition:
From then on, we corresponded regularly and he visited
a number of times, once briefly before a beer festival. He was also deeply into
CAMRA organisation, so real ale remained a (shared) constant among the decades
of change. (He liked dark beers, I like light ones. He liked folk music; I like jazz!) We went on to Lancaster to meet Trev one day, and also all three
convened around the time of my birthday, with Michelle (purveyor of fine chutneys, among other things.).
I found Colin contemplative and calm, after a busy
career in librarianship, and he was full of quaint anecdotes. (One time he told me about a library book that disappeared from the shelves for years, then suddenly re-appeared; another time, he announced he'd just read in The Guardian that the reason older people can't retain new facts is that their brains are literally full!) He is the only
person I know to have read Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, he always
had a copy of the latest Positive Images poetry anthology from Coventry, but
otherwise our conversations were not literary. He kept up his interest in
history, visiting battle sites, for example. We were leisurely and relaxed. He
never pushed an issue (though he must have been an effective committee man). He
remained an enthusiast for the railways (he was from Swindon, after all) and
sent me links about steam train excursions: I never got to show him Edge Hill
station, the oldest in England. The leisureliness of our meetings meant we left
whole areas of our lives unshared, unexplored, and possibly there was an
unexplained reticence on his part. Of course, Leanne was a constant
reference-point, our common factor, and his grief at her death was palpable and
deep. Here he is introducing the Positive Images memorial reading for Leanne (and you can watch the tribute readings that follow):
Late last year, just before Colin died, although he
was tired after a busy summer itinerary of travel, he was thinking about
another trip to Liverpool. That meet-up would have been an opportunity perhaps
to have explored new themes or to have examined his quirky memories afresh. (He
claimed there was a student called Jeff who lived on Trev’s corridor at UEA, a
guitarist in the Al Kooper mode; since nobody else could recall him, he became
a character of myth and mirth, reiterated in our frequent emails.)
Herein lies
my chief regret: I was really only starting to know him well, when he
was taken so suddenly from us. I’m glad I got to know him again, and I treasure
those meetings that redeemed time, collapsed decades, and reinforced friendship
and kindness as the only positive virtue in our somewhat dark times.
UNTITLED by Sarah-Clare Conlon and Robert Sheppard is
published in Blackbox Manifold 31. We’d like to thank the editors for
taking our fugitive piece in from the cold salt-spray.
I’m pleased to say that the text of ‘Untitled’ (I
know!) is now published in the latest edition of Blackbox Manifold. This
is a magazine I have been published in before, and you will find excerpts from
the series ‘Flight Risk’ as well as most of my re-versions of the sonnets of
Mary Robinson, but I don’t want to overload this post with links, so here’s just
one to the Robinson: Pages: My 'Tabitha and Thunderer'
is published in Blackbox Manifold (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
Here is the video of Clare and I reading the poem at
the Open Eye Gallery, down on the docks in Liverpool, a venue which almost
forced upon us the theme of ‘Riverine Thoughts’ or ‘Riparian Observation’, to
use two quotations from the poem that we might have used as titles. I’m glad we
didn’t!
featuring
poems by Kyle Booten, Daragh Breen, Mark Byers, Sarah-Clare Conlon & Robert
Sheppard, Hannah Copley, Michael Farrell, Adam Flint, Charlotte Geater, Paul A.
Green, Oli Hazzard, Nicki Heinen, Doug Jones, Joshua Jones, Jee Leong Koh,
Jazmine Linklater, Steve Noyes, Simon Perril, Flo Ray, Rahul Santhanam, Geoff
Sawers, Kashif Sharma-Patel, Gary Sloboda, Jedediah Smith, Adam Stokell, Kenny
Tanemura, John Wilkinson.
Adam
Piette reviews Kelvin Corcoran and V.R. "Bunny" Lang. Zoë Skoulding
reviews Ágnes Lehóczky. John Wilkinson reviews David Grundy & Sabeen
Chaudhry.
I have an
essay in this interesting book, Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics: Migratory
Texts and Transhistorical Methods, whose
focus is described as ‘Bergvall’s celebrated trilogy of interdisciplinary
medievalist texts and projects—Meddle English (2011), Drift (2014),
and Alisoun Sings (2019)—documents methods of reading and
making that are poetically and politically alert, critically and culturally
aware, linguistically attuned, and historically engaged.’ (I hadn’t quite
caught up with the last book of her trilogy, though I have written in detail on
the first, and I saw a Liverpool performance of the second, to which I make
reference.)
‘Drawing
on the wide-ranging body of criticism dedicated to Bergvall’s work and material
from Bergvall’s archive,’ the editors say, ‘together with newly commissioned
texts by scholars, theorists, linguists, translators, and poets, this book
situates the trilogy in relation to key themes including mixed temporalities;
interdisciplinarity and performance; art and activism; and the geopolitical,
psychosexual, and social complexities of subjectivity. It follows routes laid
down by the trilogy to move between the medieval past and our contemporary
moment to uncover new forms of encounter and exchange.’
Of course,
such summaries are only summaries, and the list of contents on the webpage, may
be accessed HERE:
My
contribution is entitled ‘Inventive Reworkings: Transformation and Translation in
Caroline Bergvall’s Meddle English’
and relates to work first began on this blog, which may be found here, Pages:
Robert Sheppard: Caroline Bergvall and Chaucer, which
developed, taking the work in one direction, into a half-chapter in my Meaning
of Form¸ see here, Pages:
Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form Bergvall and Moure, and pointing
towards this new, related, piece that appears in this book.
It's always
good to see an essay appearing in a recondite source, but it fills me with
chagrin to realise the price of the book, and my bewilderment at finding, yet
again, that if I want a hard copy of the book, I’ll have to buy one. If you are
wondering why I write less literary criticism than I used to, here’s two major
reasons. But at least my early thinking is alive in a rude and ruddy state, and
freely available, on this blog.
I have just finished reading Marion Turner’s huge and recent Chaucer: a European Life, which is a magisterial,
if slightly repetitive, life of Chaucer as a European agent, thinker and
writer (and land agent and customs officer), and this put right some of my ignorance about Chaucer (too late
for this piece, or the poem I mention below, of course). It cost me £4 in the Roy Castle
Cancer Shop. A very fine account of Chaucer's writing, the European influences on it, and his position as a professional administrator and diplomat (in modern terms). A great sense of the demotic, popular, and rooted (geographically) nature of The Canterbury Tales. (Turner sees Chaucer in spatial terms.) Chaucer as an apostle of unfinish (in my terms).
Here, in
another article, I am demonstrating what I took from Petrarch in my ‘English
Strain’ project, a parallel jump into the middle ages. While I was working on
Bergvall, I read a lot of Chaucer: it rubbed off in the sonnet I wrote for the ‘Petrarch
3’ part of The English Strain, which is yet another version of his
sonnet 3, this time into Middle English. Pages:
Practice-Led piece on 'Petrarch 3' from The English Strain published in
Translating Petrarch's Poetry (Legenda) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
takes you to my account of that book, AND a video reading of the sonnet,
performed in my best Neville Coghill! If my new book Doubly Stolen Fire plays
around with literary history, so does this poem. I claim to have written
the first sonnet in English in 1401 (i.e. just after Chaucer’s death).
Up yours Wyatt.
(I handle
his versions of Petrarch too.) The English Strain,
is available from Shearsman Books here:
That’s Steve on keyboards and myself on vocals and
harp. After a number of years off, we revived our New Year ‘concert’ at
Maggie’s party, December 2023, into 2024 by the time we recorded this. (We met
here in 2005!) This year, we had the pleasure of a keyboard in tune (which
meant I could play harp). As ever, Steve gets the phone out to film us after
we’ve been at it – hard, this year – very late, when I am vocally and
physically exhausted, and ready to stop. I stayed sitting down. (I’ll not link
to the 2016 video I’ve just found; my voice has clearly ‘gone’ on that one.)
This year we added new songs, though there are no rehearsals, including one of my favourites ever, Antonio
Carlos Jobim’s ‘Corcovada (Quiet Nights)’. Here's the recording of that: you can see that I'm battling the dance music in the adjacent room; hand over ear, I begin shakily, I can't hear the key. Again, I'm tired...
Here I am ruining my own 60th birthday with
a snippet of a performance of me on guitar/harp/vocals (ruining it for myself I
mean; I should have been chatting to guests):
I’ve never quite felt I’ve been recorded at the right
moment - although there are endless cassette recordings (and a reel-to-reel from the 1970s) of Little Albert Fly
from the 1990s that are OK: too late, too tired, too little. The version of
one of the Ern Malley poems lined up by David Whyte for an album of the Ern
Malley Orchestra might be the pristine recording, as it should.
Music is important to me as something I do (intermittently), something
I listen to (not nearly enough), and something I write about (occasionally but quite a lot). Those three areas are often
overlappingly distinct. I published a group of texts about music in this fine
anthology: Yesterday's Music Today, edited by Mike Ferguson and Rupert Loydell:
I have a plan to assemble a book totally concerned
with music. I might assemble a sample of earlier poems, including those in Yesterday's Music Today, both poems for musicians
(e.g., Philip Jeck (that’s here: Pages: Philip Jeck 2022
(robertsheppard.blogspot.com))), and about musicians
(a Ray Charles poem, for example, 'The Hippest Man on the Planet', originally from Liverpool Hugs and Kisses, but now out of print).
More
recently, in the last 10 months, I’ve been working on a long poem about the blues,
called ‘Crossing the Desert for the Blues’, which comes out of re-reading sudden-purchase
Paul Oliver’s marvellous The Story of the Blues, and was partly nurtured via
Tom Croft’s sessions at the Belvedere (there was one on NYE before we went to
the party to join Steve and his keyboard; it got me in the mood).
I have just written a poem about listening to Hendrix' 'Voodoo Child' during a radiotherapy session, my first poem of 2024 as it happens. This was about my treatment for prostate cancer in 2022. (Men: check yourselves: Check your risk in 30 seconds | Prostate Cancer UK))
I know I want to write about jazz,
too, but new jazz. When you ask folk what they like in jazz they say, for example, ‘Miles
Davis’ (so do I: poem here, also in Yesterday's Music Today: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Poetry and
Jazz and approaching Monk (Geraldine, not Thelonious))
or ‘John Coltrane’; they never say Rob Luft or Lakecia Benjamin (unless I’m
talking to my friend Jazz Ian – the clue’s in the name! – or Patricia). I want
to focus on contemporary players (possibly only women), but I don’t want to
write about their music, but through it, round and about it. I haven’t
found a method, for that’s what it needs, I feel. I'll probably choose a core of albums.
Likewise (see the last link above, again) I never managed to
get that critical book on poetry and jazz together. That’s a chimera haunting me. So be
it. Aldon Lynn Nielson does a fantastic job without me, and his recent book The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka is a fascinating account of all of AB's recordings.
As anybody
who knows anything about my work knows, I am keen on the writerly discourse of
poetics. This has been the subject of my academic work (see, e.g., ‘Poetics and
the Manifesto’, comparing the poetics of Pierre Joris and Adrian Clarke, here: Poetics and the
manifesto | Jacket2), an important part of my creative writing pedagogy
(see, e.g., my manifold links that I have provided students with, via this Pages
post:Pages:
SHOP TALK (TO) POETICS: about the forms of writing - presentation to MA
Creative Writing, Edge Hill University (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)), and
it is an integral part of my thinking as a writer. On occasions, I write
poetics for myself and others (while keeping a more fragmentary poetics journal going to capture
practical poetics alongside more abstract, conjectural and probing poetics).
Before
that I developed the associational paragraph style I used for that piece in ‘Pulse’,
a treatise on poetic rhythm that may be read, in part, here: https://www.tentacularmag.com/issue-5a/robert-sheppard.
It was produced by a strange method. The first draft was
made by ‘writing-through’ Tiger C. Roholt’s Groove:
A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014,
between August 2016-February 2017. Throughout this process, contingency is its
rhythm, a pulse that matches the varieties of montage, de-montage, that I
attempt in my own practice, with interruption as structure, with transformation
and transposition, formal resistance, creative linkage, ‘imperfect fit’,
near-perfect fit, all kinds of multi-form unfinish.
My most
recent piece (I will get round to it) perhaps moves between politics and
poetics in a way that surprised me. I sought – but didn’t complete – a poetics
writing-through of Mark Fisher’s
Capitalist Realism, a book I felt drawn to for its brevity, its cultural
focus and (since Fisher, like me, had moved from teaching in Further to Higher Education)
for its feeding off of that (shared) pedagogic experience.
'My Own Crisis' eschewed the paragraph units of the previous pieces, and I went for a more
impacted discourse, adding difficulty to the thinking. But then difficulty, or
people’s difficulty with difficulty, is part of the thematics.
I’m very
glad that the good folks at FUTCH (a journal much committed to that ‘creative-critical’
hybrid About | Futch Press) saw fit to publish this piece. And it may be read whole here, so I won’t
say any more about it.
Re-reading an intermediate set of notes (partly poetics, partly critical thinking) before posting this post, I realised that they not only fed into 'My Own Crisis', the post actually refers to writing it (due to the gap between writing the notes and typing them up for posting. Inconclusive as they are, they might be of interest; I need to return to them, I know, as I feel critical, creative and poetics muscles flexing; See here: Pages: From a Poetics Journal 2023: notes on two critical volumes: Betteridge and Kaufmann (robertsheppard.blogspot.com)
I think I'll take my winterval break from blogging for a few weeks.
I’m
pleased to say two poems from the last part of ‘The English Strain’ project,
British Standards have been published in Anthropocene. You may
read them here:
The second
poem is ‘After Image: Improvisation upon “Idealism” by Arthur Symons’, which
comes from the ‘After…’ poems that I amassed in serial attempts to end my three
volume trek through the English Petrarchan sonnet tradition, particularly the
end where the subject matter was tracking the hubris of brexit colliding with
the mismanagement of Covid. I wrote about this version at the time, here: Pages:
Should I write a fourth ‘book’ of The English Strain project?
(robertsheppard.blogspot.com). This one dates from early 2022, though this video dates from this afternoon, late 2023!
For the
record, I did finish the project, and it is great to publish in magazines a few of the poems
that weren’t published nearer the time of composition, particularly as there
remains no collecting volume to finish the job!
Read about
Book One of ‘The English Strain’, The English Strain here . Book Two, Bad Idea, is
talked abouthere. Both are available for
sale.
Bo (Boris
Johnson) appeared at the Covid Inquiry, and waffled and confirmed that he remembered that he couldn't remember anything. I watched it, in the knowledge that my friend was there watching it in person. I felt that some of
the poems I was writing at the time of Covid in British Standards – they
carry dates – might be offered as contemporary evidence, like Chris Whitty’s un-witty
diaries. This group of poems, that transpose some of the 1802-3 sonnets of
Wordsworth (though I added one using Shelley), and (as I’ve said here before)
they chart how the hubris of brexit (which I now choose to spell with a lower
case b) collided with the mismanagement of Covid. A few had accompanying
videos, only the Shelley differing from the printed text. A bit.
I left them here till 'the
end of the year', and today will do nicely as cut off date. (More details on British Standards may
be accessed at the end of this post.) They are now deleted, like
Number Ten whatsapp messages, though I've kept the videos here. So here's the remains: at the end I'll say some more about what evidence I shall continue to poetically gather, if Bo is ever returned to office.
Mine begins: 'Britain, the time is now to wean yourself from
hoarding fancy food or panic buying bog rolls.'...
Vanguard of Liberty, ye men of Kent
'Vanloads of libertines, playboys of Kent,' my transposition begins!
And, as promised, a Shelley transformation:
Political Greatness: an overdub of Shelley
25th May 2020 (all the dates are important to placing poems against 'evidence', as more 'evidence').
British
Standards is the
still-unpublished third part of my ‘English Strain’ project. There are loads of
posts on this blog about the process of writing them. ‘The
English Strain’ is in three books, two of them published so far, The English
Strain (Shearsman, 2021) and Bad Idea (Knives Forks and Spoons,
2021; see above). I talk about thinking I’d finished the project (I had a few more
poems to add, in fact, as I shall point out:
There are
lots of links to the other parts of the project. I was ‘doing’ Wordsworth (some
might say ‘doing Wordsworth in’!) in this first part of the British
Standards of the ‘English Strain’ project. (I’ve written about that a
lot on this blog, but here’s a handful of links specific to the 14 sonnets from
1803 by Wordsworth that got the Sheppard treatment, some of them with videos of
the poems, as above):
If Bo is ever returned to office I have this plan afoot: Pages: The Horrible Thought that Bo mioght be back: only The Bard could save me now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com). Actually, I've had a few more thoughts. On Boxing Day 2023 I read ALL of Shakespeare's Sonnets which, as that last post will tell you, I've have hidden away for possible use on the return of Bo (the post has some other crossovers between Bo and the Bard). But I think now that The Passionate Pilgrim might be the more appropriate vessel to transpose, for the following reasons: it was a pirate edition with Shakespeare's name on the cover. It does contain some of his works and versions of his works, even 2 sonnets from the later 1609 volume, BUT it has a lot of stuff clearly not by the Bard. Somehow this FAKE volume, padded out with printers' illustrations and blank pages, extra title pages, is somehow comparable to Bo's disposition towards, not just Shakespeare, BUT EVERYTHING. I wouldn't mind betting that if he ever did write that book about Shakespeare, one of his 'revelations' or 'discoveries' will be that he did indeed write all the poems in the book (20 of them).
