The Only Life

2012-01-25T17:17:00.003Z

My first booklet of short stories is out. The Only Life

Three short stories about poets.

His fictional poets begat fictional poems, of course, which lie as fragments of greater wholes, marvellous or ludicrous, in teasing virtuality. These stories – their styles range from the clipped short-short to the expansive experimental – give us the world as only a poet could, as kinds of poem, for our delight and horror. But in writing only of poets he writes of everything else. The fog of history and the steam of sex are intermingled in these intricate, absorbing and often funny, poignant stories.

‘A classic triptych of moods and movements, forensic, sharp-elbowed, with a ripeness you can taste. Sheppard's prose curves elegantly between ease and disease, live ghosts and city shadows. Borgesian, teasing, wise.’

- Iain Sinclair

This book is available to buy for £5 from http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk ( or as
part of its 3 for £10 deal: and I recommend recent books by Ken Edwards and Adrian Clarke).

Even the Bad Times are Good: Rupert Loydell & Robert Sheppard

2012-01-12T16:15:00.001Z

A conversation/interview, spring boarding off my Shearsman book of essays When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardWBT.html

and including excursions into the Poetry Society 1976, Sinclair, Bomb Culture, Bob Cobbing, young poets in Britain, poetics and Conceptual Writing, and a little on my own work!

Posted now on Stride

at
http://www.stridebooks.co.uk/Stride%20mag%202012/Jan%202012/rupertandrobertint.htm

or follow the links from

www.stridemagazine.co.uk

Robert Sheppard

Robert Sheppard at the Bluecoat 2008

2011-11-06T15:35:00.007Z

Here is a reading (courtesy of poet-cameraman Ade Jackson) of a reading I did at the Bluecoat Arts Centre to launch Twentieth Century Blues in 2008. Reminded by the fact that I read there again a couple of weeks ago, I decided to post this version of the first 'Blues', 'Smokestack Lightning', in which I used some carpet tapes I'd made in the early 1990s for a SubVoicive reading.

There is a also a sound version of it here, made soon after, which uses the second verse paragraph. Ekleksographia Wave Two, ed. Philip Davenport at http://www.eklesographia.ahadadabooks.com/ March 2010, at
http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/davenport/authors/robert_sheppard.html

The text for the Bluecoat version which isn't (deliberately) clear is drawn from the first verse paragraph of the poem.

from Smokestack Lightning
a mythology of the blues

for Tony Parsons

Twentieth Century Blues 1
History of Sensation 5

Let it all go. As I sing I drive my
dynamite for some strange machine
of this nearly spent century;
the big city calls its sinful
numbers heaven. My fast rolling
kisses are for the stern
lady, dodging me, back of the beat.
Our harp player’s dead - when Pete
told me, we laughed. A quick shimmy
was Elzadie’s goodnight; buttons and
belt loosening, Arvella’s swift farewell.
Pete’s 12 string steam whistle leaves town;
I want you to take my place in this song.
Elzadie lifted her hem and smiled, as he
tuned to an open chord. Bending G on the E,
the dog jumped into the horn as
the KC moaned, with a mocking beauty
mating rabbit foot dreams. Arvella slumped in
the shade, feeling contempt, thinking: give me
the train’s shake. Sweat rolled off
transport as delight, a nervous fix
in this thief’s paradise of form and
necessity possessed by devils. He’d
rehearsed all morning, restless,
couldn’t wait to start again, to howl
out, temporal and grounded, ‘We’ll never
get out of these blues alive’ -
above the frets, trembling. Inside:
shared diction, dancing voices, mojo stomping,
good book palms together in prayer. At night
she wedges the chair against the door,
feels evil thrashing outside the room,
but can’t connect the pose of his
arpeggio muscles above her, de-tuning
slackening; sings down the phone:
‘Take my lonesome love in hand.’
Dancing with her to the juke band,
his tense fingers practise chord shapes
up and down her spine; to be a real person:
a girl adjusting her skirt, singing Twentieth
Century Blues, a pearl on her lips, - her devil
astride two chairs, playing slide
with a Coca-Cola bottle. She
is about to say something over the
gossamer telegraph line, to survive
his strong hands rambling through.

Kid Bailey’s the name I travel with, kidding
around: the name on the only phonograph;
walked up to the shop window, the glitter
of the diamond-fretted Dobro a death squad
tuning up. My handkerchief shields
the chord shapes from
your thieving eyes. Just pull the razor
and shave him. The gun in the guitar case was
no use - jealous man stepped up to Charley
as if to ask for Pony, retuned. Bill-
boards tell women what
to be: a circle of music-stands
dreaming thrills, dancing the Shimmy-She-Wobble -
some guy called it a dry fuck -
the guitar dances too, spins
above Charley’s head. I could see
my own rapt reflection in the shine,
an invisible piano whose pedals are moody
bendings. Love my suitcase and the road....

I can be seen reading some poems from Twentieth Century Blues at http://otherroom.org/videos/%e2%80%94-or-2-june-2008-videosas part of the Other Room Readings in 2008. (On the first clip I read ‘A Dirty Poem and Clean Poem for Roy Fisher’, ‘From a Stolen Book’ followed by a selection from ‘Empty Diaries’, the sequence with which I continues on the second video.)

Complete Twentieth Century Blues is available from Salt Publications and the full text of 'Smokestack Lightning' is available also in the earlier Salt volume Tin Pan Arcadia.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Fourteen of 14: 'Ending, with strong pressure towards epigram or witticism'

2011-07-27T11:49:00.006+01:00

(Top: Scott Thurston and me at Hay; below: Anthony Mellors and me at Hay; photos: Anthony and Scott)

I have argued that the chief influences upon the contemporary innovative sonnet include the examples of Berrigan and Raworth, the radical conceptualism of Oulipo with its use of tailored ‘constraints’, and the postmodernist release of the form from the repression of modernism. I may be confused in this, having identified these also as influences on my own sequence. But there can be no doubt that there is another influence, post 2008, and that is The Reality Street Book itself. Hilson’s sequence was co-terminous with its production, indeed mentions it. Other sequences, possibly Monk’s, were written as the event of the anthology appeared on the horizon. Terry’s sequence missed the boat, having come to Hilson’s attention after Ken Edwards declared the hold full. Many sonnets (sequences or singles) have appeared after; Anthony Mellors’ The Gordon Brown Sonnets (2009), for example, continues the political edge found in so many of these sequences; Milton is the god of the innovative sonnet, not Shakespeare.

A mere flick through the anthology reveals visual sonnets, ghost sonnets where the shape of the sonnet is played with, along with others that expose the frame of the form, as outlined in part twelve of this lecture. There are prose sonnets, fairly conventionally lineated sonnets, Chinese sonnets and non-sonnets, some in sequences, many not, many more than I have time to deal with today. Anybody embarking on a sonnet today has the benefit of the anthology as a textbook of form(s). There are dangers in this, of imitation and derivation, rather than influence and deviation, of mere production, of ever-thinning effect and affect (or affectlessness), but these have been dangers throughout literary history of the prominence of any form. The same could have been said of Tottel’s Miscellany in 1560 which gave the world the exemplars Wyatt and Surrey.

I’m not bold enough to call time on the innovative sonnet, to declare that we have reached our 1610 – imagine declaring the whole show over in 1608, what a difference a year makes! – but I wonder what forms will emerge next. I think Hilson is right in seeing the attraction of the sonnet as a refinement of the draw to the sequentiality ingrained in British innovative practice, and the sonnet-sequence-like frame can be felt in many non-sonnet sequences, Scott Thurston’s Momentum (2008), for example, where the repeated stanza is quite different, but whose formal repetition facilitates variation and contrast as a formal constituent that becomes a kind of content in a way I have been arguing throughout these postings. (His Internal Rhyme (2010) has the same feel, though with poems that are more open in terms of reading, horizontally and vertically.) But no other traditional form (however torqued) furnishes the opportunity for this kind of innovation; the innovative sestina, for example, feels like a rolled out carpet, not a ‘little room’ that offers resistance to the impulse to unlimited expansion, a pliant, plastic pre-determined frame, through which the life of form may be lived convincingly, to make for us, forms of life. To make it re-new.

To quote Hilson’s formal articulation and dis-articulation: ‘I (line-break) fucking love you sonnets.’

****************************************************************************

Final Notes: As can be seen from the above, I wondered about trying to call a halt to the sonnet as an innovative form, but new ones keep coming. See the K. Silem Mohammed pieces in the Dworkin-Goldsmith anthology. Or here. Or get a peek at nine of the stunning stunted sonnets of Richard Parker at Intercapillary Space (which I heard read in Amsterdam; see posting for May 24th 2011). Since musing earlier on my own next creative moves, my contrafacts on Milton’s sonnets seem plausible and I also surprised myself by writing a half-pint sonnet, in the middle of a Quennet as a 7X7 syllabic structure. The Quennet (which I should have mentioned before now) is the sonnet-like structure invented by Raymond Queneau and used also by Philip Terry, Queneau’s translator, and by Rene Van Valckenborch, my creature.

Just a few thoughts on the Hay Poetry Jamboree itself. It was a celebratory occasion – and mine was the only excursion into critical prose and pose – and there was much good company in Scott and Anthony (as can be seen above), the organisers Lyndon Davies and John Goodby, participants Gavin Selerie, Frances Presley, Carrie Etter, John Freeman, Paul A.Green, Carol Watts, Zoe Skoulding, Maggie O’Sullivan, Ralph Hawkins (who had much to say about Berrigan) and Allen Fisher (who worried away at the formal designation ‘sonnet’), and audience members Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey, and many others, Steve, for example, who managed the electronics. Thanks to all.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Thirteen of 14: Three Sonnetized Accounts

2011-07-26T09:18:00.005+01:00

I’d like to show three of my sonnets from Warrant Error, from across the sequences, but having in common an intertext in Shelley’s marvellous meditation upon political terror and time, ‘Ozymandias’:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Shelley’s sonnet might be thought innovative in that it strains against the restraining order of the form, while making a new form with its insistent improvisatory utterances (we know it was written quickly, against the clock in fact). My forms attempt to make new forms and meanings through allusions and borrowings (sometimes of resonant single words) from the poems, but also have their own foci. The intense logopoeia of the second derives from the puns I collected and from the quotations, not only from Shelley but from Arendt and Deleuze (at least) as well. The third poem refers to the metronome in the image above (a photograph taken and manipulated by Patricia Farrell).

Carpets woven with jargon surrender
monkey ground level realism pumps
a Kalashinikov before the gold cupola
a tight wrinkled lip of double-stitch

Every night you fall asleep invaded
by this market target couch drill

an embedded journo pillowed on gas
buys a free full monster with an
empty promise your night vision
goggles catch the first line of his
collateral excised scribble ‘barging

in on targets..’ struggling with his war
poem the dark god of his sonnets
freeze framed death tools downed

29 March 2003

They scoured the news and erased the story
The liar the witness and the lawyer

The hand that mocked us scarred
Or scared soured the newscasts
Their oblique attacks now roar overhead
The naives are restless during the rapid raids

Compassion is one of the passions
After a regular
Tory system of lower tax nothing beside remains

Species solidarity and its dispersal
In this borrowed shell function as love but
This is the real thing as she
Bends towards him
Not to be unworthy of what happens to them both

for Stephen

The red metronome on Letná hill
sways like a lucky drunkard
on its pedestal above the spires
a restless reminder of rust and wreck.
Or an antique windscreen wiper

describing its arc
upon a plane of smear and rain-wash
heroic in a monochrome movie, tinted red

With each wipe across the screen
the determined visage of the driver clears.
It’s Josef Stalin the giant blocks with his pocks
long blown to shatters but he’s still there

waving yes and no
to anyone who can see him

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Twelve of 14: Put them in the Margins

2011-07-25T11:15:00.008+01:00

Sophie Robinson above; see her blog here.

Sophie Robinson is the youngest poet in the anthology, as she is also in Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference, where she describes her attitude to innovation: ‘I don’t believe that an experimental poetics must necessarily be devoid of emotion, sentiment, biography, self-expression, &c’, and she names Frank O’Hara and Bernadette Mayer as two ‘cherished’ exemplars (the latter being one of the most accomplished of post-Berrigan sonneteers). Nevertheless her 10 poem sequence ‘geometries’ is one of the obviously radical texts in the Reality Street Book, in that it plays visually with the sonnet form. In this she is not alone: there are many texts in the book making formal play in ways in which the frame becomes its own content, and many of these ways are defined in terms of visual rather than verbal or metrical innovation. Allusions to the frame occur in Bob Cobbing’s concrete poetry inkscape ‘Sunnet’, where the white space of the Petrachan turn becomes the horizon on the landscape (or inkscape) hinted at in the title. (frontispiece) The moon is caught in May Ellen Solt’s ‘Moon Shot Sonnet’, where the empty grids of lunar cartography pun with the divisions of the Petrachan sonnet. David Miller’s sequence of horizontal Chinese brushstrokes (‘Untitled (Visual Sonnet)’ each is called) obviously mimes the frame of the sonnet, but also, with their varying thickness, texture and curves, they hint at the varying content that is carried across the traditional sonnet sequence, here represented by the uniqueness of Chinese brush-work. Jen Bervin’s conceptual writing project ‘Nets’ (the title itself cuts the word ‘sonnets’ down to size) presents Shakespeare’s Sonnets in greyscale and highlights certain words to configure a new text over them. This is a much-used technique (John Gibbens uses it for ‘Underscore’ here), but it rare to leave the original text legible alongside (under) the variations to foreground their material; like Terry, Bervin operates upon the most canonical sonnets. Paul Dutton’s ‘so’net’ sequences uses anagrams on, and other words derived from ‘sonnet’ – as does Keith Jebb in his title ‘tonnes’ – to contrast a text that hovers between sense (‘on sense sonnets not sent to text’) and non-sense and pure sound concrete poetry for performance. Visual recognition of ‘sonnetness’ is important to the aesthetic effect of these examples, which in various ways involve the simultaneous use and unravelling of the historical frame of the sonnet (and by extension many of the meanings that have accrued to it), to turn the adventures of its form into its own subject while embodying its latest adventures in formal investigation and innovation.

Robinson’s ‘Geometries’ takes the frame of the sonnet and makes it square, more radically than Hilson’s but less consistently formal than the above examples, utilising the justified margins of the WP package to ensure a ‘geometry’ that has nothing to do with metrical contour or word count or the temporality of delivery. The resultant squares work against our reading patterns; continuous margins suggest the forms and conventions of prose. The 14 lines are ‘stretched’ in ways unrelated to notions of lineation or layout, open field or otherwise. (I have unfortunately not been able to reproduce that effect here; the absence of this formal adjustment demonstrates just how significant, even signifying, this is. Wihtout this formal constraint the poem below looks wrong, but unavoidable.) However, Robinson’s reluctance to abandon reference and significance, let alone the personal, rather than undermining this formal play, creates a tension between reading for form (which is unavoidable in these geometries, particularly when 3 words ‘arms and head’ become one, for example) and reading to catch the teasing but often angry voices of the poems, one of which has a literal lower case ‘i’ recommended by Kathleen Fraser to represent its reduced subjectivity (at the start of a line where most of the other lines carry a capital), although the inverted commas point to its artifice also:

Beauty is nothing is nothing is a
Gently disgusting residue of all
That burps and smiles & life is terrible &
Holds back & swallows itself whilst 25
Birds that might’ve perched on your arms&head
Can now fly in expanded air and yeah
the autumn’s going to need you w/
head like a broken toy & got no stable
‘i’ got no stable now all is fluttering
Around & the boredom of death O how
We breathe you out like blah sad & longing
For an airy exchange amongst urgent
Squeaky-clean majorities & CITY BOYS
Those smug wankers we put them in the margins.

The margins into which mainstream culture is ‘put’ are in some sense the margins of this poem, but the voice is angry enough here, however unstable the ego. If ‘Beauty is nothing’, a ‘disgusting residue’, at least it is ‘gentle’. Terrible life consumes itself, the boredom of death results in meaningless ‘blah’ and the ‘sad & longing’ mourning that lies behind this immediate anger (the poems are bitterly elegiac). Only the birds (which appear in other ‘geometries’) offer transcendence, an ‘airy exchange’ that is longed for.

The true liberation here is formal. These poems are prosodically arbitrary, constitute even an ‘aprosody’ (as Agamben puts it rather suggestively in what is virtually an aside on the poetry of Caproni). Yet they are still forms which work by de-forming accepted reading assumptions in the ways I’ve just described. Perhaps they register the gradual re-forming of contemporary forms of poetry from the temporal axis to the spatial axis.

(Robinson has just finished a residency at the V and A. Details here.)

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Eleven of 14: Sonnets and Other Ghosts

2011-07-24T10:46:00.006+01:00

Women are often said to have been disenfranchised by the courtly conventions of the love sonnet, its content patriarchal, its form in need of reclaiming. Women innovative writers have maintained a suspicion of the form, particularly through its assertion in the courtly love tradition, of a male ego. ‘Our sonnet … seems different,’ writes Kathleen Fraser hopefully. ‘It has a small i in it instead of a big one.’ But she is also aware that forms carry near-indelible meanings as much as contents, and that ‘perhaps any sonnet at all is a big i. That’s something I have to fear.’

The history of the sonnet furnishes important examples of female sonneteers, such as Charlotte Smith or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and in fact, the earliest sonnet sequence in English was written by a woman, although it took a religious theme rather than an amorous one: 21 sonnets by Anne Lock composed in 1559. ‘Her ear is faultless – better than Surrey’s’, remarks Spiller.

One of the best contemporary sequences excerpted in The Reality Street Book, Geraldine Monk’s Ghost and Other Sonnets, shows no Electra complex before the form, and indeed emphasises the (usually unrhymed) Shakespearean couplet by printing it as a separate stanza. It often operates as the ‘epigram or witticism’ that the form of the frame imposes: ‘Strange ones this token is for you./ If you’ve danced with me you must be true,’ the last poem ends, rhyming but not utilising regular metre. Ghost and Other Sonnets is often about ghosts (‘strange ones’) and often (as at its end) about the demands of the other. (As often in sequences, they are also about many other matters, topology or domestic anger, for example.) Of course, the sonnet frame is a kind of ghost form and its subject matter haunts it as a kind of other of form, ‘Ghost of her ghosts’ as one poem puts it. This haunting necessitates Monk subduing her characteristic textual and performative exuberance in deference to the frame; the internal pressure this causes results in 66 poems of concentrated power. As Spiller says of Milton, but it applies to Monk too: ‘The sonnet is still the place where Desire confronts its Other, and in a small room fixity is given to the restlessness of being.’ These confronted others may be ourselves in mirrors (the ghost of our ghosts), as when ‘his face staring at/His face’: ‘Each/ Passenger waving at their doppelganger/ Each not knowing which is for real’. Or, as when the letter box rattles repeatedly, the other is an imagined ghost: ‘Seeing nobody in repeat tires the heart:/ Out-fears the stranger stranger’ (where the word occurs once as adjective, second as noun). One sonnet deals with the ‘stranger stranger’ in a powerful way, moving from a familiar situation to questions of otherly encounter that one might rather avoid, through to nightmarish horror:

What makes you look in at the
Exact window where someone is
Looking out? Inexplicable encounters
Traduce unknowns with wary
Other. What is behind that sticky girl one
Step stunningly away from heaven? Tossed.
A thing of beauty in a room so ordinary.
Mindless kicks. Burns. Bite hard words
Mocking back-broke loveliness. Ape
Ghosts. Rape-ghosts reel on little
One. Well below a Restoration rake-hell
Humans shouldn’t figure. Let alone … let alone …

Neglected screams in a field of unwashed forks.
Far crying buried in gust of shush-love.

A barely human (ape) rape has occurred amidst this ordinary scene against ‘stunning’ ‘beauty’ and ‘loveliness’ (together the words suggest a woman is violated by ‘rape-ghosts’), though it might only be sexual stimulation, ‘tossing’. ‘Mindless kicks’ suggests gratuitous sexual play as well as violence, or both. Lamentation is obscured by the intimate but threatening ‘shush-love’ that both extinguishes love and could also signify the love of an unhealthy secrecy. The poem is the more powerful for not revealing its content in a narrative unfolding, but through an excess of compressed and detailed violent imagery.

The form fixes the restlessness in each sonnet in this sequence, until it launches us into the next. No wonder we need the familiar bumpers of a rhyming couplet to bring this formal trajectory to rest. We are told: ‘If you’ve danced with me you must be true,’ that is, not a fable or a fiction, but also we are ‘true’, i.e. held in fidelity to the spell of these forms.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Ten of 14: Philip Terry's Shakespeare's Sonnets

2011-07-23T12:47:00.006+01:00

(This is Terry speaking about the sonnets at Edge Hill University to the Poetry and Poetics Research Group earlier this year.)

In a nutshell, Shakespeare’s ‘argument’ and one of Philip Terry’s major techniques are both exemplified by the respective first lines of their sequences. In Shakespeare’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets (!) the theme of carpe diem is expressed in terms of the threat and regret of vanishing potential beauty (‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’), whereas Philip Terry’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets opens with a comic echo of that ‘desire’, an epigrammatic imperative of our postmodern age of ageless celebrities enhanced by cosmetic mummification or permanent genetic modification: ‘Clone Kylie.’ However parodic they might be, Shakespeare’s central theme of the impermanence of beauty shows through these poems: ‘We test the best non-surgical skin fixers/ With time’s injurious hand,’ begins another poem. (At least they aren’t tested on animals!) A further version of this sonnet, number 63 of Shakespeare’s, which originally opened, ‘Against my love shall be, as I am now,/ With Time’s injurious hand crusht and o’erworn’, becomes in Terry’s adaptation: ‘Against my love shall be an immense ballroom,/ With time’s injurious hand jive’. Anyone can see that Terry is ‘updating’ the sonnet with regards to the entropic nature of Time, but not everybody knows that ‘Up to Date’ is one of the simpler Oulipo constraints. These poems are also examples of the ‘Chimera’ constraint where one text is filled with the vocabulary of an alien one. Terry has taken on most of Shakespeare’s sonnets (some in multiple versions), with a variety of techniques, which owes much to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style in which one event is re-narrated endlessly and to Harry Mathews’ ‘Trial Impressions’ in which one Dowland song is re-versioned. (When questioned on my ‘favourite’ poem, I cite this example from Mathews.) My exposition could turn into a list of the Oulipo techniques Terry has used (but Terry provides his own. See also his own account of the project here). More important than enumeration is the fact that built into the Oulipo venture is the ‘clinamen’, the Lucretian swerve that throws an irrational spanner into the rational literary work, in short, something that fucks up the system. I asked Terry recently what his clinamen was; he replied, ‘I don’t use any of the constraints consistently.’ System does a duck-rabbit flip into invention.

Here is a straightforward but irresistible re-writing of a well-known sonnet, one also taken on by Harryette Mullen in the Reality Street anthology. Already parodic in Shakespeare’s hands of the worst rhetoric of the sonnet craze, sonnet 130, ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, re-appears in Mullen’s versions as: ‘My honeybunch’s peepers are nothing like neon’ and ‘My Mickey Mouse ears are nothing like sonar’. (I always think of Nicholas Moore’s Spleen when I see this level of versioning.) And, of course, Shakespeare elsewhere gently mocks one of the seven ages of man: ‘the lover/ Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad/ Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.’ For Terry, then, the demand is to be particularly inventive and to aim lower than the brows:

My mistress’ eyesores are nothing like stalagmites;
Copper is not as green as her teeth.
If sodium be white, why then her brie is blue;
If hairs be wires, pylons grow on her head.
I have seen rot, dry and wet,
But no such rot as I see in her cheeks;
And in some petrol is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I can’t stand her jabbering,
The dentist’s drill hath a far more pleasing sound.
I never saw her get off her fat arse
Except to go and stuff her face.
And yet, while I hate her, I can’t let go,
I’m in deep shit, like those dudes in the Inferno.

All of the poems exist against their Ur-text; the ‘by heaven’ of Shakespeare’s final couplet becomes the antonymic reference to Hell in the version. The originals are de-formed, they loose form in the restless versionings of Terry’s book, and the new form that emerges in our encounter with the page is actually the perceived and received difference between the original (or what is recalled of it, or what it assumed of it) and the version. Form keeps the meanings spinning. The version never quite feels the final word, the total content, but a manifestation of a formal choice that could have been otherwise. After all, the Oulipo is a workshop of potential literature.

My sonnet’s form is nothing like its likeness.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Nine of 14: Kick Him in the Assarts!

2011-07-22T12:16:00.004+01:00

(Jeff Hilson reading from In the Assarts in Amsterdam earlier this year)

If Berrigan’s sonnets are about themselves, Hilson’s In The Assarts are sonnets that take as burden the history of the form, including Berrigan’s. The excessive brio, the collagic inconsequentiality, the use of strategic repetition and variation, are indebted to Berrigan, but many of the poems are haunted by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the narrator uneasily identifies with him. All these points are demonstrated in poem 32 (out of the 71):

When I grow up I want to be
I Thomas Wyatt & hang around
the stately homes of England.
I am not in this dance
the little necks of England
slipp’d & crown’d
so long Anne Boleyn you spoil’d
my holiday theory of value.
How to explain the flowers to
I Thomas Wyatt when I was rescu’d by
her falling
head on my moustache.
O Anne Boleyn was there room in
the room that you room’d in?

The concluding question (a couplet) is one of Berrigan’s most famous repetitions, itself a repetition of one of Gertrude Stein’s own repetitions. Of course, the room here may be the cell Boleyn is confined to before beheading, an act comically referred to, or the space of the sonnet itself. Wyatt ‘seems to have become involved with’ Boleyn at Court around 1525 ‘until warned off by the obvious infatuation of Henry VIII with her’, and indeed he wrote her love poems in prison (as Spiller says). The ‘holiday theory of value’ seems to hint at the leisured luxury of the court, which her death ‘spoil’d’ by complication. The sonnet is a courtly form in both ideal and real senses: ‘O Anne Boleyn I made your head/ into an Italian sonnet’ poem 34 boasts or laments.

The ‘terrible terrible assarts’ of the title refer to forest clearances (with attendant dispossession) to create the ‘lovely moats’ and the ‘shiny turret(s)’ of courtly tat. ‘Farewell, Love, and all they lawns forever,’ Wyatt is misquoted in the epigraph to the sequence, a posthumous slip of his tongue which equates love with court more materially than his original word ‘laws’ (not ‘lawns’). But this is a cleared landscape (‘yr grim square poems’ suggest a topological equivalence) that depends upon language for its construction; ‘look at my dead misspelt horse’ is yet another of the sequence’s studied imperfections, badnesses. Grammatical de-cohesion is another. These cleared spaces fill with the detritus of the modern world, often in transformative sequence: outdated pop stars Donovan, the Kinks, Mike Oldfield, appear in what looks like a decontextualised autobiographical pageant. In a knowingly post-Language poetry environment (‘my home is in thy American tree/ (language realism poesie’)) anything can happen; Wyatt is confused with James Bond (presumably playing on the fact that Wyatt may have spied for Henry): ‘O to go to London to recreate 1966’, or: ‘that’s the sound of Cromwell kissing/ not a genuine face’. In the beautiful Veer edition of 2010 the poems are indeed square on square pages, the faux-renaissance typeface materially emphasising anachronism and misfit: is it King Stephen or Stephen King who is described thus: ‘he was the worst Bond my lord.’

These external intertextual references of uncertain value and the Berriganesque intratextuality are the semantic shapes (again form can be made with meanings and hints at meanings) which make these poems form in our cumulative encounter with their reiterations. Unstable content is draped parodically across the ghostly historical frames of the 14 lines, and forms can be made even with mistakes and bad lines. As another epigraph to the book states: If ‘a poet comes across with “perfect” sonnet after “perfect” sonnet for any length of time, a sonnet sequence is a bore’. We are never bored in the assarts.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Eight of 14: My Own Sonnets

2011-07-21T10:01:00.009+01:00

(Image: that's me at Hay reading Philip Terry's sonnets as part of the lecture. Geraldine Monk's book folded on the desk before me. Photo: John Goodby)

POETICS. My first sonnet was an Oulipo offshoot, though I didn’t know it at the time, 1978. ‘Pataphysical Sonnet’ was formed from the examples of the combinatory ‘Thousand Billion Sonnets’ of Queneau and the ‘irrational sonnets’ (using pi to determine stanza shape and rhyme) of Jacques Bens both of which I found in the New Writing from France Penguin anthology.

G – The Pataphysical Sonnet

Returns to the bedroom, out of his head,
Out of tunes fragments come rocking his bed
Between order and chaos, freedom and …?
Ever, I see my order’s rule in the edge
Riff between sound and silence. Out of hand
The moon in June security has led
So boot if at all to the point of dead
Hope for happiness. Beyond the land
Every sea must ordain its religions in the edge.
Priscilla leaps from bed and surveys her life
Plus belle qu’une poubelle (just) in a cold sweat.
A certain kind of order, edge-of-knife,
provokes her (13 is unlucky) strife.
DADA was here, but I have no regret.

in Dedicated to you but you weren’t listening (London: Writers Forum, 1979)

The first few words of each line were drawn from the titles of music by The Soft Machine, to which it paid homage. The poem uses the rhyme scheme of one of the Bens poems and I worked out that my name furnished an acrostic in reversed 6+8, a device I used (without the accidental clinamen I adopted here) in Twentieth Century Blues, when I returned to the sonnet over a decade later. Meanwhile, I’d enjoyed teaching the form, particularly where coherent but variable units formed parts of a more or less coherent but differentiated whole or extension, and slowly this formal intelligence permeated the poetics of sequences I was writing.

Most recently my poetics journal articulates this in terms of the tension between two modes of organisation:

The isolate poem as the construction of a centrifugal engine, pulling itself together to centre its energies in nodes of impacted attention, supported by a vocabulary of completion wholeness closure structure shape. The danger of saying or doing only one thing…

Or the centripetal: a sense of continuation dispersal openness unfinish

processual structure with evolving forms or even entropic systems…

WORD. I’ve also felt drawn to creating my own structures for sonnets, and I’m proud of having invented the 100 word sonnet in Twentieth Century Blues. Actually, I didn’t invent it; it came from a serendipitous misreading of an Adrian Clarke sonnet with a two word title and 14 lines of 7 words. Adrian hadn’t noticed that that added up to 100 but I wrote a number, eschewing punctuation and using a centre margin (a form that seems to drive the long lines to vertical completion).

LINE. By the time I began Warrant Error, which appears in the Hilson anthology, I had abandoned word count and devised a 2/3/4/5 sonnet stanza, a form which offered 24 combinations. I have since found that Andrew Crozier used the form in the 1980s (?) . Warrant Error was influenced by Berrigan (I thought of modelling them on his and calling them ‘The Poems’, a title used by Berrigan within the poems). But I’d also written on Raworth’s sonnets by then (and on Allen Fisher’s Apocalyptic Sonnets from the 1970s), Adrian was writing his own Skeleton Sonnets and Ken Edwards was publishing parts of his 8+6. Something was in the air. Believing with Rosmarie Waldrop that ‘collage is the splice of life’, I found the ‘little rooms’ of my shifting stanza forms ideal for forming works from the mass of material I was collecting (by 2003 various takes on the War on Terror, human unfinish and other subjects!). As ever with collage, the formal action and the pre-determined shapes meant a lot of the poems gathered their content through formal working. I wrote 100 poems in all, in 4 sets of 24, with 4 extras. I’ll present some in a later posting.

CHARACTER. My Belgian alter-ego Rene Van Valckenborch, more modish and technologically advanced than I, has used Twitter to write his Twitterodes, but the first (or is it the last) is a (Petrarchan) ‘twittersonnet’: 14 lines of 10 characters instead of syllables. (They are here on Pages, November and December 2010; click on those dates to the right.)

SYLLABLE. I have an unused form, adapted from Pierre Alferi’s sequence OXO: 7 lines of 7 syllables, though I call it the half pint sonnet (perhaps in deference to these straightened times). Place a proportional Petrarchan break after line 4, add a one syllable title to bring the count to 50 (which suggests a sequence of 50 of them). I haven’t used this form yet, and there’s another question nagging at me: isn’t it time to stop writing all these sonnets? I’m a great believer in Miles Davis’ advice: ‘End your solo before you’re done’, that is, before every bitter drop has been squeezed from the (arguably) desiccated form. While there’s still life in it.

(NOTES: The title of this posting is meant to allude to Jeff Nuttall’s journal: ‘My Own Mag’, by the way, but the resonance is muted. These last two heading-paragraphs were written for the Hay on Wye lecture but weren’t used due to time constraints. I feel it very unlikely that I will write the syllabic half-pint sonnets now, but I have a notion to do one (last?) sonnet sequence, perhaps based on Milton’s 24 sonnets and perhaps called ‘Bad Sonnets for Bad People’, or that’s what I’m telling myself in my poetics journal today. I am also revising this lecture into a strictly literary-critical chapter for a monograph on Form (ennobled by the capital); that too is feeding into a stirring desire to write a completely different kind of (non-)sequence. I’m also reading the anthology Against Expression, the anthology of conceptual writing, edited by Craid Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, which contains one brilliant tour de force using anagrams from Shakespeare: K. Silem Mohammad’s ‘Sonnagrams’.

I was also reminded in reading the anthology of Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter’s Issue 1 of 2008. It's very large (warning: it’s a pdf of over 7000 pages but the link I tried to insert here doesn't work, but I found it through ubuweb), and it contains a poem by me, ‘Small-scale lives and low alarms’; well, it has my name under it but a nice computer program called Erica wrote it. I sought it out again and have plans to ‘do something with it’. I’ve alphabeticalised it for a start. It looks like this now:

- , , ? ? ? a a A a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a b b b B b b b b b c c C c c c c d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d dd e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e ee e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e e f f f f g g g g g h H h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h i i i i i I i i i i i i i i i i i i j k k l l l l l l l ll l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l m m M m m m m m m m n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n n o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o p p p P r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r r s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s S S s S s s s s S S s s s s t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t t T t t t t t t T t t t t t t u u u u u u u u u v v v w w w w w w x x y y y y y y y z z

Maybe that doesn’t quite do it justice. But worst of all I noticed that this poem (it’s at p. 35) is actually a kind of sonnet; it has 14 marginalised lines.

The ‘Pataphysical Sonnet’ above was only alluded to (dismissively) at Hay on Wye, but I thought to recover it here to see what it looked like. It seems relevant now to all the projects I have been looking at and describing here.

OK. Back to the lecture: In the next four sections (my daily postings), I’m going to be looking at the four contemporary British sequences as promised in the last posting, asking questions about how the frame of the sonnet is used to facilitate aesthetic encounter, how the poems individually and in sequence take form and make form.)

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Seven of 14

2011-07-20T12:16:00.006+01:00

Fourteen British innovative sonnet sequences written in the 21st century and featured in excerpt in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets presented chronologically:

1. Giles Goodland A Spy in the House of Years (2001): a conceptual documentary project formed by 14 (acknowledged) quotations from each year of the twentieth century.

2. Adrian Clarke Skeleton Sonnets (2002/2006): structured by word count and/or phrasal clusters avoiding syntactic cohesion, these collages require readerly forming, exhibit suspicion of the many classic sonnets alluded to.

3. Ken Edwards Eight + Six (2003): formal variety is the rule, restlessly working through political and aesthetic concerns but obsessively dealing with the ‘I’ that appears almost concurrently with the sonnet form.

4. Ian Davidson Harsh (2003): ‘the harshness intentional’, abutted in long lined relentless found material sonnets, often angry with political and social realities.

5. Tony Lopez Assembly Point D (2004): a conceptual sequence using found materials, prodigal with its (unacknowledged) sources like Berrigan, deliberately affectless and cool like Raworth.

6. Carol Watts brass, running (2006): focussed on the year 1391, using Chaucer as intertext, these sonnets, richly sutured, form a woman’s life from fragments.

7. Robert Hampson Reworked Disasters or: Next checking out the Chapmans’ Goya (2008?): riffing on Keats’ sonnet on Chapman’s Homer, each poem is addressed to an artist, and alludes to the Chapman Brothers’ violent art work and relating that to repressive state apparatuses.

8. Keith Jebb tonnes (2008) – the title an anagram of ‘sonnet’ – balances political statement (‘tony is a fascist’) with formal play ‘[this line is missing]’, where the latter defamiliarises the former.

9. Richard Makin Rift Designs (2008): balances a diaristic impulse (the narrating I) with a textual dispersion that owes something to Raworth.

10. Tim Atkins Petrarch (2008): an ongoing project to ‘translate’ all of Petrarch’s work using seven different techniques. Funny and poignant, conceptual and cool, I predict this work, produced as a practice-led PhD, is going to be important.

11. Chris McCabe The Transmidland Liverpool to London Express (2008): a lively sequence tracing the contrasts between McCabe’s two cities (and mine).

12. Sophie Robinson geometries (2008);

13. Geraldine Monk Ghost & Other Sonnets (2009);

14. Jeff Hilson In the Assarts (2010): see later postings (each will be discussed in detail).

(Note: Remember this lists sequences, and so many fine sonneteers get left out. Also there are more than 14 sequences in the anthology and here are more left out of the lecture: Johan de Wit: Palm Stories (2008), Kelvin Corcoran sequences in Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (with Alan Halsey) (2001), Harry Gilonis North Hills (2008) and Piers Hugill From II Canzoniere: A Songbook 1 (2009?).)

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Six of 14: Fleet Negotiations

2011-07-19T09:59:00.003+01:00

Tom Raworth’s sonnets 'Eternal Sections' (all 153 of them, one fewer than Shakespeare’s) owe to Berrigan’s, though the tone of excess and the use of repetition across the sequence is eschewed in favour of affectlessness. They use one of Berrigan’s techniques exclusively: the ‘juggling’ of separate lines as in the Joe Brainard collage homage, but they often seem to use only one source each; they are similar through formal means not through content. I’ve written about these 14 liners a number of times, including in my book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry.

Here is a ‘sonnet’ of extracts:

1. Raworth has made a poem, not attempted to reconstruct an experience.

2. He rearranged the lines in such a way that few traces of the ‘context’ remain.

3. A recognizable semantic field, but its syntactical connections are unclear.

4. Not by its statement, but through its technique, the collision and conflict of creative linkage.

5. As Raworth transforms his materials, he sabotages intentionality.

6. If they are ‘sonnets’ they exhibit a volta in nearly every line.

7.

even though the jazz feeling
the collaborative aspects
make a significant statement
until we’re all happy
the artificial sound of tape
from one block to another
edits real fast
individual moments
layering and moulding
approaches to their instruments
where he could burn
wandering across
type time dimension
keys, tempos, etc.

8. Raworth’s fleet negotiation of material, which almost by-passes the reader’s ability to process it, exposes the saidness of the text to an openness of performance, a saying.

9. The difficulty of this poem is precisely troublesome, and is more troublesome the more precise our attempted readings become.

10. To know that they are fragments does not lessen the will to coherence and cohesion.

11. An orchestration of interruptions, a percussive and hinged punctuation of themselves. They are empty and full.

12. The poems cohere more by a reading of their formal means than by attempting to chart the semantics.

13. They turn content to form, and turn form into the content that is read.

‘Fourteen

was the length I’ve been happy with for a while,’ says Raworth.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Five of 14: The Code of the West De-coded

2011-07-18T10:20:00.003+01:00

One of the pleasures of Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets is that we read them as form. Part of this comes from the fact that the major, but not the sole, technique – collage – is foregrounded and becomes the formal theme of our reading. They are ‘built rather than written’ Ron Padgett says, quoting Berrigan; he used glue. One sonnet is a complete re-arrangement of another line by line. In poetry, repetition usually provides thematic emphasis although (in choral and anaphoric instances) it can provide musicality and structural form. But in Berrigan’s Sonnets, ‘Dear Marge, hello. It is 5.15 a.m.’ is pleasurably encountered four times; it is one of the instances where form is made from meanings. But we also encounter variations entangled with other variations. ‘Dear Chris, hello. It is 5.15 a. m./ I rage in a blue shirt at a brown desk' is just one appearance of stark colours attached to various objects across the 88 poems. Later we read ‘my dream a crumpled horn/my dream DEAR CHRIS, hello. It is 5:15 a.m./The academy of my dreams is opening its doors’; this last sentence is a repeated (mis-)quotation from Ashbery. (73) ‘My dream DEAR CHRIS hello. It is 3:17 a.m. ‘(74), leads to the valedictory ventriloquism of Prospero’s renunciation in ‘A Final Sonnet’ (for Chris):

I’ll break
My staff bury it certain fathoms in the earth
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
It is 5:15 a.m. Dear Chris, hello.

(The spacing is inaccurate in this posting.)

We track these phrases “‘taking form”, “forming”, “loosing form” in Derek Attridge’s words, and finally making form. But the wildness of collage is undertaken in the ‘little room’ of the sonnet to concentrated effect. The very repetition of the sonnet sequence contains the repetitions and variations we find within each poem and we experience the traditional sonnet pleasure of aesthetic encounter with an overall structural rhythm (however staccato in this instance) of presentation and silence, presence and absence, like listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations all the way through. The frames take form, form before our eyes from fragments, and loose form (one ‘sonnet’ bears little resemblance to the frame). ‘The line enjambments, the twisting of syntax, the “push-pull” of meaning, the abrupt changes of tone, the dislocation of punctuation, the fading in and out of prosody, the intentional misuse of parts of speech, the aesthetic decisions as to when to accept the results of a chance operation or to discard them,’ as Ron Padgett inventorizes the inventions of the sequence, –‘these should not be overlooked in favour of colourful subject matter, a subject matter that (like Shakespeare’s) involves a love-triangle. Never mind the sex, or the Libbie Rifkin line that the poems were motivated by Berrigan ingratiating himself before the first Generation New York school through homage, quotation and obliteration. (Remember that Gerard Malanga photo with Ashbery? Berrigan has his hand over Ashbery’s face!) Whatever the concern with ‘the micropolitics of the New York poetry scene’ The Sonnets are ‘a series of “machines”, selections from found materials organized by the mechanics of Berrigan’s inspiration,’ notes Renny Pritikin. One inspiration was the work of his friends. One sonnet opens: ‘In Joe Brainard’s collage its white arrow,’ (14) but collage effects (cut up) interrupt the poem at this point (the lines are clearly re-arranged, or juggled because another sonnet presents the ‘correct’ version.) He plundered Brainard’s journal, he cut up his own poems, including traditional and parodic sonnets, and was influenced by the whole eclectic ‘tradition’ of Dada-New York art practice that could be accessed in the early sixties, including the chance procedures of Cage. No wonder ‘his method is notable for its combination of intuitive and arbitrary procedures’. All this contributes to the sequence’s glorious self-referring quality. The sheer power of this often casually constructed sequence probably derives from the casual belatedness of Berrigan’s position. When Frank O’Hara began a poem ‘It is 12:10 in New York’ it probably was. By the time Berrigan is cutting up text, it wasn’t ‘5.15’ or whatever. We know that Berrigan was drawing structural homologies from science, Whitehead’s process philosophy in particular. But this relativity of time appears as an arguable encoding of space-time at the structural level of collage which, I argue, is not simply form at all, since it is the subject of the poems. They are sonnets about sonnets taking form, loosing form, finding form, making themselves in front of us. I know of no other sonnet sequence where we feel the excitement of its forming as we per-form it on our reading.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Four of 14: Convention and Constraint

2011-07-17T08:54:00.004+01:00

The attraction of the sonnet sequence for British linguistically innovative poets is that it provides a perfect answer to the tension between the long poem and the lyric.‘Linguistically innovative poets seem on the whole to opt for the sequence over the stand-alone sonnet and I think this can be explained by their historical preference for the accumulative and speculative poetic “project” as opposed to the singularity and poise of the discreet lyric,’ writes Jeff Hilson in his introduction to the Reality Street Book of Sonnets. This is true though perhaps he is denigrating lyric poise a little too much. (anthol 16) While there is a contemporary push towards the long poem, particularly in the sequence form that Jack Spicer called the serial poem, there is a contrary pull not only towards the lyric (which is another story) but towards various techniques of constraint and limitation, one seen in its strictest shape in the work of the Oulipo, who innovated widely, even wildly, with sonnets, and in other procedural and conceptual poetics. The Oulipo insist on the distinction between conventions which are sanctioned by tradition (one of the reasons for the frequent return to the sonnet in literary history is for the continuity and authority afforded by simply plugging into previous manifestations of the form) and constraints which are freshly invented for the occasion, and of which innovative sonnets provide a prime example. The sonnet is the one stanza form, with its internal divisions, that may translate into free verse: it is a visibly recognisable form. The sonnet provides a consolidating restraint for the practice of non-metrical poetry, which risks dispersion in long poetry projects, and the innovative sonnet can be put beside other alternative structurings: prose poetry, isoverbalism, concrete poetry and other spatial practices. However, as it always has, the sonnet sequence offers a flexible vehicle for extension and contrast.

It is hard to imagine Roy Fisher or Lee Harwood writing sonnets in the sixties, even though Harwood mixed with New York poets known to favour the form; an early poem praises Edwin Denby. Edwin Morgan’s brilliant ‘Glasgow Sonnets’ (1973) are not innovative in the sense I propose here despite coming from Morgan’s most restlessly innovative collection, From Glasgow to Saturn. Gavin Selerie’s sequences of the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed isolated and out of place among the free and open forms abundant in the London scene. When he ventriloquises Goethe, ‘I’m used to carving from a whole block/ and now, it seems, I need to use glue’, (p. 9 Tilting) he expresses the contrast of writing longer forms to the fiddly small object-poem. Peter Riley and John Welch offer equally isolated examples of sonnets in the 1980s. Paul Evans’ ‘Two Sonnets’ (1979) indeed used glue, and are cut-up sonnets – matching innovation with tradition – but read now as a part of his drift to an inexplicable traditionalism, the kind of formalism of which I’m not speaking here. (See my edition of his work for Shearsman).

There are three practices that permitted the innovative sonnet sequence since as collected in Hilson’s anthology: Berrigan, Raworth and the Oulipo. As Hilson himself says: ‘It’s no exaggeration to say that Berrigan’s poems have been responsible for something of a latter-day sonnet renaissance amongst linguistically innovative poets’, including for an early moment Evans and most recently John Goodby, in his 2010 Illennium. (11) Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets had been anthologised regularly but were out of print until Penguin published a definitive edition in 2000. Collage in form, there was plenty of glue in evidence; Berrigan contrasted his sonnets to his ‘open’ poems. (nice 79)

Around 1986 Tom Raworth abandoned open sequences and wrote 14 line poems, the first 42 published as ‘Sentenced to Death’ in Visible Shivers in 1987. The continuing and concluding 111, written between 1988 and 1990 were published in 1993 as Eternal Sections. More glue: more collage.

The already mentioned Oulipo interest in sonnets, in Queneau’s Thousand Billion Sonnets and in other numerically ordained sequences such as Jacques Roubaud’s Some Thing Black, may have fed into the innovative sonnet craze of our own day, as they rode alongside other Oulipo works – prose texts by Calvino and Perec – which became domesticated in Britain from the late 1980s onwards.

Finally the force of postmodernist play to release the historically-repressed form cannot be underestimated. The sonnet revival was bound to happen. Modernists reviled the form. Williams said ‘All sonnets say the same thing of no importance,’ by which he was negatively confirming my more affirmative sense that forms think because form thinks. But the formal torquing of innovative sonnets ensures that they do not say the same thing, because formal constraints are not ordained conventions.

Note: e.e. cummings and Rilke apart, Williams’ friend Louis Zukofsky was busily writing ‘A 7’ in the 1930s, entuning Marx (and later Spinoza) in sonnets with mathematical values placed upon repetition that prefigures the Oulipo.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Three of 14: Sonnet Mania

2011-07-16T09:51:00.004+01:00

Historically the sonnet is the perfectly formed bastard child of Occidental troubadour ballads, and it comes to early maturity and fecundity in the hands of Petrarch in the fourteenth century, whose name we now give to one of the two characteristic forms of the sonnet, the 14 lines in the proportion of 8 to six, with a volta or turn at line eight. The form came into English through the adaptations of Petrach by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth century, (See his portrait above and poems here.) . The fame of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and whose name is given to the form where the turn moves to the concluding couplet of the poem, obscures the widespread practice of the sonnet in its heyday between 1580 and 1610. It reached the level of a craze in the 1590s, following the posthumous publication of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591) which, according to Jonathan Bate played a ‘foundational role’ in the craze. Some of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ were published unauthorised during the craze; others may have been written later, but Shakespeare (or his publisher) waited until the theatres were closed by plague in 1609 to prepare a full volume. The sonnet has remained a popular form with a dip in its use during the eighteenth century and its virtual prohibition under Modernism, a fact to which I shall return.

‘We’ll build in sonnets pretty roomes’, writes John Donne (no mean sonneteer himself), punning on the original meaning of stanza as room, and pointing out, by analogy with architecture, the sonnets neatness as form. A ‘prescribed form’ whose ‘duration as well as the structure of the whole poem is predetermined,’ as Michael Spiller puts it, the sonnet is asymmetrical like the haiku, the turn torques the discourse after midpoint. In its 8+6 (octet and sestet) form, Spiller says, ‘The verbal recognition of’ what may have originally been ‘(a) musical alteration is first of all syntactic: a new sentence at the change, or perhaps a medial pause in a long sentence. But this in turn begats a conceptual alteration, turning proportionality of lengths into consequentiality of thought. Six to eight as conclusion is to proposition, or as development and summing up is to statement.’ Even in this abstract frame one can see how this form at least thinks, in terms of its predisposition to contentual structure: ‘consequentiality of thought’. One can even see that form here is a kind of content. Spiller adds, underlying this point, turning to the other major sonnet frame: ‘When the final couplet became popular in English sonnet-writing, the alternative 4+4+4+2 grouping emerges, to drive British poets into a rhyming couplet ending, with strong pressure towards epigram or witticism.’ Bate summarises the difference in effect: ‘Whereas the Italian style favoured a single thought with a turn in the middle, the English encouraged more playful variation: three thrusts and twist in the tail. The very form offered an incentive to multiplication and digression that encouraged sonnets to be expressions of their authors’ wit and ingenuity as much as – perhaps more than – outpourings of their real feelings.’ The sonneteers at least ‘respond(ed) to forms as a kind of content’ (as Wolfson puts it).

The sonnet became a courtly form, first as ‘the voice of the articulate citizens of the city states’ of Italy, and in England through the ‘courtly makers’ as Puttenham calls Wyatt and Surrey : ‘They greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar Poesie,’ he opined. ‘Wyatt and Surrey created an intimate relationship between the arts of courtship and courtiership. This made it possible to read apparent love poems as coded bids for patronage and preferment at court.’ Every courtier was expected to bash out a sonnet.

Petrarch’s longing poems for Laura, Surrey’s for Geraldine, Sidney’s for Stella, all place their ‘pleading or praising or lamenting’ narrators as heirs to a Neoplatonic ethos, ‘that love is at once the most dislocating of human feelings and the one which most strongly impels the heart to “gentilezza”, that quality at the centre of ideal courtly behaviour’, whereas real courtly behaviour and its actual sonneteers gave a ‘performance’ of wit: ‘One is performing for an audience, moving in and out of a series of poses, and watching one’s own performance … The aim is not truth, but delight.’ It did not delight all who beheld this ‘behaviour’: When the Earl of Essex should have been concentrating upon Irish genocide as bidden by his sovereign at the height of sonnet-mania, Henry Wootten complained that he ‘spent his time “evaporat(ing) his thoughts in a sonnet”.’ It is ironical that this last vestige of English chivalric behaviour died when Essex’s courtly plot ended ignominiously in his execution. His reading for form, we might say, with irony but not without some justification, was fatal!

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Two of 14: Forms and Forming

2011-07-15T10:03:00.002+01:00

If poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form, then the investigation of form itself is of paramount importance and comes with a certain methodological liberty and verve: ‘The vitality of reading for form is freedom from program and manifesto, from any uniform discipline,’ says leading new formalist Susan J. Wolfson. Indeed, this formalism has been fighting against instrumentalist readings of literature, the kind of quasi-sociology that passes for a lot of English teaching still. As Wolfson says: ‘My deepest claim is that language shaped by poetic form is not simply conscriptable as information for other frameworks of analysis; the forms themselves demand a specific kind of critical attention.’

I want to argue that the attention of any formal study of contemporary poetry must be dual. It must focus on form in the technical sense, on identifiable forms in play, the ones identified by Veronica Forrest-Thomson in her prescient Poetic Artifice as enjambment, line, rhythm, rhyme, etc., and on form in a general, more performative sense, that prioritises acts of forming and our apprehension of their coming to form. Forms and forming I call this pair for ease. Associating one with the other, Derek Attridge argues that form is the force that stages a performance of any text: we need to apprehend ‘the eventness of the literary work, which means that form needs to be understood verbally – as ‘taking form” of “forming”, or even “loosing form”', but he insists that the devices of artifice ‘are precisely what call forth the performative response’ of any engaged reader, directly connected to the event of singularity which is the irruption of an inventive otherness in our productive reading.

Both types of form are capable of carrying a semantic or cognitive charge, demonstrating that forms think. They contain or envelop meaning(s) of knowledge(s) and might demonstrate how new meaning and (non-propositional) knowledge might be formed and formulated. As such, aesthetic form carries a force operating on the individual (or collective) reader or viewer, which – in the case of poetry – means that the reader is the site where such meanings are staged by form, so that reading is formulating form, and formulating it into fluxing semantic and cognitive forms as a ‘performed mobility’. Wolfson even writes that literature lovers ‘respond to forms as a kind of content’. Formal considerations of both kinds (forms and forming) are engaged by active reading and enact meanings that moderate, exacerbate, subvert (or on rare occasions reinforce) the kind of extractable meaning that Forrest-Thomson and Attridge both decry as ‘paraphrase’. Paraphrase is amnesia of form.

The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: One of 14

2011-07-14T14:26:00.005+01:00

This lecture was delivered at the Hay Poetry Jamboree 2011 at the Oriel Contemporary Art Gallery, Salem Chapel, Bell Bank, Hay on Wye on June 4th 2011. The organisers were John Goodby (who also took the above shot) and Lyndon Davies (whose website http://lyndondavies.co.uk/ is linked to below). See also Van Valckenborch's latest prose on Lyndon's magazine Junction Box.

Here are some links to photos of the event and here is the lecture. It is in 14 parts, in deference to the sonnet, and I will post the parts one a day for the next fortnight, also with gestures toward the form.

One of 14

This lecture is in 14 parts, in homage to, and in parody of, the sonnet, which is its subject. It therefore formally encodes the ambivalence towards the form found in the sonnet-like and sonnet-aspirant and sonnet-deviant productions of its most recent avant-garde practitioners and pasticheurs (many of them collected in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, which appeared in 2008, edited by an admirable collector and producer of the species, Jeff Hilson). In drawing attention to the central defining numerical feature of its structure this ‘sonnet-lecture’ is emblematically drawing attention to form itself, and to notions of forms and forming with which I am currently working as a critic. The sonnet seems an obvious place to ask questions of such a kind, because the forms of individual poems are formed within (or at least in readerly expectation of, or in relation to) a particular (and historically determined and available) form. My use here of ‘forms’ to refer to the shapes of individual poems, of ‘forming’ to refer to the process by which a literary work happens, and of ‘form’ to refer to the quasi-Platonic form of the sonnet in general, I hope, is enough to warrant my interest in, and my dwelling upon, such formal questions, in what otherwise could have been an uninhibited romp through the undoubted glories of the innovative sonnet. I shall be asking questions, sometimes theoretical, sometimes speculative, about form in general, and certain forms in particular; I shall be focussing briefly upon the sonnet sequences of Berrigan, Raworth, Jeff Hilson, Philip Terry, Geraldine Monk and Sophie Robinson.

As a poet I’ve innovated in the sonnet form in ways I’d like to share in the hope that I’ve got things to say from the inside, as it were. About 136 of my poems – to my surprise – might be considered sonnets and certain others take 14 lines to exhaust themselves. This brief sortie into ‘practice-led research’ is cognate with another of my interests, the discourse of poetics as a writerly and speculative twin to practice, and as a new object of study for criticism itself. Hilson’s anthology alone indicates that the recent pull towards the sonnet has been international but I shall be mainly concentrating upon British linguistically innovative poetry.

Amsterdam

2011-05-24T15:47:00.009+01:00

I’m just back from a reading (and conference) in Amsterdam on Thursday 19th May at the ABC Treehouse in Voetboogstraat.

Part of the ‘Poetry and the Unpoetic Conference at the University of Amsterdam, I read with Jeff Hilson (reading from In the Assarts, his stunning collection), Jane Lewty (reading unpublished work including a great sequence about the Hilsborough Disaster), Louis Armand (reading from his new collection Letters from Ausland, which I enjoyed greatly), and Richard Parker reading a shuffled pile of new sonnets, which was excellent).

(Pictures above: Amsterdam, me impersonating a picture of myself on Jacket magazine (photo: Peter Barry, incidentally, the cause of my Jacket appearance!), Richard, Louis, Jane and Jeff.

I read both from Warrant Error and from Berlin Bursts (the latter I’m launching at a Shearsman reading soon), including this sonnet from the former:

for Patricia

The young couples in the crushed Amsterdam bar
dance to Barry White in the old-fashioned way

Later, aloft on Belgian beer, I murmur that I
love you, but then slip away, like the dancers,
into the night, knocking over bicycles chained
to bollards, and singing; into my reverie so far
in which we sit again drinking under the wooden ape

Almost human it grins at us both with more teeth
than the accordion it fumbles. This is all times
becoming a new time which is a now time
becoming all, a swoon through cracks in the paving

where vanished children crouch over hidden play.
Next day, a narrow canal house lips at its reflection;
we stand in front of it to stand for ourselves

Louis was alos carrying VLAK 2 / MAY 2011

edited by Louis Armand, Edmund Berrigan, Carol Watts, Ali Alizadeh, Stephan Delbos,
Jane Lewty, David Vichnar

ISSN 1804-512X
PRAGUE / NEW YORK / LONDON / MELBOURNE / PARIS / AMSTERDAM
http://www.vlakmagazine.com/

424 pages of new writing & visual art,

VLAK 2 is available from the Litteraria Pragensia Books website at:
http://litteraria.ff.cuni.cz/index.php?a=journals&j=1

(It includes a sequence by my fictional poet Rene Van Valckenborch as well as work by Louis and Jane).

Poetry Beyond Text

2011-05-14T20:00:00.006+01:00

Pete Clarke and I are just back from a day trip to Edinburgh to see the Poetry Beyond Text project opening at the Scottish Poetry Library. We have some work in this exhibition, and there is plenty of good work to see, online if you can’t get there. Check out the Guy Begbie-Lawrence Upton collaboration for something quite different.

Also check out the review of Berlin Bursts on Stride

TWO NEW BOOKS

2011-02-05T09:11:00.002Z

BERLIN BURSTS (poems)

These new poems feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard’s local Capital of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem. Yet a series of metapoems brings agency and wonder to the idea of the poem, always seeing the world as well as itself, in perceptual double-takes that tease away at the meaning of the poetic act At the centre of the collection is 'Six Poems Against Death' whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.

Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales called Sheppard's Complete Twentieth Century Blues 'a major poem of serious intent'; Alan Baker in Litter called Warrant Error 'political poetry of the first order', and John Muckle wrote of ‘this brilliant, disquieting book.’

"Robert Sheppard . . . composed a few words around Liverpool's status as City of Culture. 'Their shit's verdure but that's OK/ This isn't a nature poem.' Sheppard's near twenty-year epic, Complete Twentieth Century Blues, outweighed the Ringo returns, the showbiz art: he cooked slow and long, with tangy sauces and bits that break the teeth. The city averted its eyes . . . As if it were the poet's fault that we want our meat pre-chewed." —Iain Sinclair

Order from the Shearsman online store and read more at:

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardBB.html

A Passion for the Real

After Solomon Nikritin’s The People’s Court (1934)

Both of his fists
locked

over the spread pages
of the stiff book,

sporting a smock
of black smoke

across the stage
upon which I will make

no show, he
is the People playing

its part. His guards
glance aslant

from the table’s skirting
shadow. His clerk

is a fog of fingers
fixing his script with prompts.

But his deputy
twists round:

extemporal knocks
on the door

which yet may quicken all
of our exits.

Read a review at http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2011/May%202011/KleinzahlerSheppard.htm

WHEN BAD TIMES MADE FOR GOOD POETRY (criticism)

This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. Episodes cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; he also writes individual chapters on the poetry and poetics of Allen Fisher, Tom Raworth, Iain Sinclair, John Hall, Ken Edwards, and Maggie O'Sullivan.

"A landmark study." —Benjamin Keatinge reviewing The Poetry of Saying in The European English Messenger

Order from the Shearsman online store and read more at:

http://www.shearsman.com/pages/books/catalog/2011/sheppardWBT.html

Contents

Introduction: The Life of the Writing

1 Informing the Nation: The Manifesto of the Poetry Society (1976)

2 Allen Fisher’s Apocalypse Then: Between Place and Gravity: Technique and Technology

3 John Hall: The Price of Houses the Cost of Food: The Poetics of Not Writing

4 ‘Whose lives does the government affect?’: looking back at Tom Raworth’s ‘West Wind’

5 When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry: Iain Sinclair’s Autistic Poses

6 Ken Edwards’ The WE Expression

7 The Colony at the Heart of the Empire: Bob Cobbing and the Mid 1980s London Creative Environment

8 Beyond Anxiety: Legacy or Miscegenation

9 Poetry and Ethics: The Saying and the Said in Tom Raworth’s Eternal Sections

10 Talk: The Poetics of Maggie O’Sullivan

11 Facture and Fracture: Resisting the Total in Allen Fisher’s Gravity as a Consequence of Shape

12 Everything Connects: The Cultural Poetics of Iain Sinclair

Epilogue: What I regret about the poetry scene at the moment

from the Introduction: The Life of the Writing

I have long held the view that the power of poetry is precisely that it both reveals itself – its poetic artifice is its undeniable facticity laid bare – and conceals itself, leaving the reader feeling that he or she has not finished, could indeed never finish, the work of reading. The text is inexhaustible in terms of both form and content and in terms of the unstable relationship between them. The writer is also strangely both present – as artificer – and simultaneously absent, from the poem; once the poem is read the only agent in or around the text is the reader. Any poem is thus a site of human unfinish twice over. I have long suspected that under, within or around, the language of a poem, lies another language, or aspect of language, perhaps a rhythmical energy, that is not reducible to discourse. As such, the poem seems to withdraw from social and historical comprehension, but this is only apparent. On occasions these aspects of otherness suggest alternative readings of reality, and reading poetry becomes an imaginative and transformative act, with political and ethical import. Poems evoke in the attentive reader a permanent state of potential astonishment. Analysis does not distil that thrill; it turns it to knowledge, something communal (and historical, because subject to change and revision), to be shared.

Van Valckenborch's Cube

2010-12-31T10:35:00.000Z

Read another work supposedly by Rene Van Valckenborch and supposedly translated from the Flemish (side of his double oeuvre) by Martin Krol on the excellent Ekleksographia webzine, as part of the post-Oulipo issue edited by Philip Terry. Read the introduction to the quennets and follow the link to the poems themselves (a pdf).

Happy New Year!

Twitterodes

2010-12-31T10:32:00.000Z

Twitterodes

for my followers and for the
followers of my followers

■ 100 (twittersonnet)

bearded ev
ergreen ov
erflowing
a craggy c

astle wall
/bag of ce
ment flat
ened and b

roken on t
ramlines t
o leave du

st/bike bu
ckled wher
e it hangs

■ 99 piggybacking girls round the monument/NEPTUNE stamping his horses (a café steals his water thunder)/black tooth windows/ladies sipping ORVAL ■ 98 a moorhen and fluffed chick stand on the girder wet webs safe from tidal flow/all motion is relative/cannot be seen beyond their conception ■ 97 Time dies. Oak leaves spread at water-level. As many roofs on display as at a roofers’ convention. How many maps to deal with a given space? ■ 96 time at the heart of space is movement/the rear of the fish restaurant lurching into the river/the empty boat with outboard bobbing/creaking ■ 95 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/cannot be seen beyond their conception hoisted from river/sagging over the waterline on the bend ■ 94 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/analysis destroyed the solidity of this fisherman’s house/sagging over the waterline on the bend ■ 93 she’s reading a book to remind her how a saint should act or:/a critique of space high above the Botermarkt/halo or crown/a forlorn corner ■ 92 chancels with bats’ wings architecture out of Hell creating the illusion of time/cars parked like odd shoes lined up under a hat-stand/blent ■ 91 green ironwork crawls up the side of the building/mental and social at once/over the way where I park my bike/Ghent where I have never lived ■ 90 his arm with hands in pockets of gesture among parcels of space/mustard gas forest seeps across paths of ice/his lowered head a wan pellicle ■ 89 faces constructed by background (interference)/bodies shudder into ice-floe paint-flick a texture of rainbow lemon and tree blot/in creases ■ 88 stroll through a world of scratches slashing burning grounded by the medium without message sinking into its impositions/fingerflicking ■ 87 past her snarl windows across the canal she tightens her open cup leotard adjusts crotchless crotch lets the world pass brushing her breasts ■ 86 something fishy about the body/head grafted from myth/curved to the tree that sways behind its back/no arms or branches but toes and roots ■ 85 the bushes look like huddled hedgehogs with their backs turned/how many maps might be needed to deal with this given space to code or decode ■ 84 the code is more deceptive than the thing when the thing is an acorn on a column or an empty plaque embossed with graffiti ■ 83 thru’ marble arch tarpaulin on which Magritte’s curtain-building is opening on flat summer skies (behind which dreams the renovating palace) ■ 82 cloven hooves aloft double breath spout/a floating medium latticed with lacy rippled contrast/class war ■ 81 the subject cannot do without the object pleading in the language of things: of handsized bricks/cut glass/cones conjured from flat tiles ■ 80 objects swamped by facts or/spitting into a little cup/ejaculations/measured by money/wishing well full of best wishes/vacant inscriptions ■ 79 patiently sit all day arms folded head bent into space complete with vanishing point spewing a lip-moulded stream of eternal spittle ■ 78 sliced buildings profess professions/professors abstract perspective inscribing human relations across the square/crowds gawp/clouds glower ■ 77 ODE TO DIVERSITY/gilded trinkets tumbling down the face of the Museum of Amnesia/Hindu woman miming destitution with anguished fists: kerbed ■ 76 laboured place/floral bolts into wood/a dragon sheered through/hand raised (swordless)/shield shielding nothing/ruthless eyes & hacked nose ■ 75 inside the frame resembles everything else/repetitious spaces repeated within repeating scenes of the Markt selling itself to itself/outside ■ 74 rows of lights under gables compose the square/a statue does not know that it is one/issuing orders or delivering blessings/texture blooms ■ 73 a set of real operations made the man in a kagoul bend over to examine the dog’s arse/another set made the dog-cobbles-bollards-street-city ■ 72 stone dog cocking a leg against the corner bollard rue de Chartreux monumentalising this quotidian moment fleeting active yet still on guard ■ 71 each pinnacle pinched with gestures/hands spread, legs tossed, torsos twisted, heads bent/no faces under hats to challenge a scythe of cloud ■ 70 ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’/ICI OÙ PAUL VERLAINE BLESSA ARTHUR RIMBAUD D’UN COUP DE REVOLVER ■ 69 story twists as the narrator turns (blue pen marks on his thigh/some eye sorts this out/foliage entwines marble) turns to caress the hidden ■ 68 he appeared from the skies (an hour or so ago) skin scaly oily carbuncular and craterous unshaven/pores collecting the grit of this world ■ 67 leaf tickles founder’s ear/hand around shoulder/above finny cloak that superhumanises/bleached face adorned with felt-tip moustaches/and me ■ 66 projective space for projectile voicings projected onto you as responsibility’s double breath ■ 65 put this back on the map: (t)race the webbed salute/the contorted leap (fixed)/the water breath against a rhythm of cars-trees-lampposts ■ 64 punch up on a pinpoint squalid flailing in a narrative that covers its tracks like a map of porous borders on the point of being torn into ■ 63 which map’s he on/giving his game away escapes the arcade with jacket over shoulder scowling/invisibility unplotted/a post-it in a phone box ■ 62 as quick as mind he sleeps in a chair curved like a wave carrying his outdoor dreams hands folded liver spotted the city map ■ 61 un soldat inconnu competing with discourses to travel to a ring of growling gryphons holding up the dish of flame for een onbekende soldaat ■ 60 aloft column beyond gilded fringe Léopold heading up clouds/below gold extracted from the c(o)re of the 1831 constitution ■ 59 Function as ornament. A choice of walls packages the day. You could talk excrescence into style. Figures twisted into narrative stall. ■ 58 figures twisted into narrative move as soon as you near bleed from eye sockets rumble into your body space (Johan Muyle) ■ 57 this writing is not a body/stumps along beside rails (cracked dish carries its flame) steps on grass scratches head/this body isn’t writing ■ 56 ‘because the world is in colour’ (explains Abbas): the black and white bride marries the corpse in the photo they hold next to her ■ 55 salmon brick house on the rise beyond the canal too low to register upon whatever it is that records windows punctured with Flemish darkness ■ 54 a pagan flap of wings and tangle of talons over a body frozen and erected to the status of myth/beyond the wire cupped tulips multiple arch ■ 53 macro glass in its flat and curved space varieties abutted/micro figurative dummy catching the taint of the city on its greening skin ■ 52 the day is occurring to itself we walk into it and I think with the back of my head facing it ■ 51 I’m the man under the hedge arch looking at the dome of Le Botanique/you are the one who sees me beyond the lily pond framed by your looking ■ 50 I’m a lamppost man a lawn corpse man a pigeon man a straight path man a modernist man a hedge twig man a UFO flash in the dark trees man ■ 49 pulsions of perfect embodiedness the roof steps into cloud masturbating a place in blacked-out childhood forever under construction ■ 48 inscribed in me: me at the attic window the space of me looking out over Lievestraat and the cellar window peeping at passers’ ankles knees ■ 47 glass buildings in non-utile shapes refract each other narrowing sky spoutspray steaming below/hoisted man washes his way around the curves ■ 46 BETWEEN sagging leaves and crouching fur/soft feet and hard cobbles/canopied shade and light so naked it is invisible/WEAVES TIME’S QUESTION ■ 45 horsechestnuthands wave over water/internationalbrickwork leads to the fountain/waterspouthalo behind the vigilstatue/THINK: where are we ■ 44 column sprouting/horns of a devil//or family tree as gurgling/gargoyles//the impression of feet/on the cobbles prints unreadable/history ■ 43 rotate to landscape: shadowed archway a reservoir of ink or/pitch sky with horizon of bricklight/crabplants scuttling wherever’s up ■ 42 heraldic ensigns horizonless on the thick glass of the windows of the Huys der Liefde/pulled inside out a house of Lipsius/Montanus/Ortelius ■ 41 unseatable throne? ■ 40 rhinolalia muzzle nudges for a broken song ■ 39 aloft surveying all that isn’t his mistaken for shirtless carving beside stirring gauze that screens the equine statue/its doubtful gestures ■ 38 reclusive Balthasar’s golden compass grips the globe crippled inky fingers measure the surface of maps the ridges of print on finest paper ■ 37 the marvellous is awkward/scribbling among Plantin’s shelves dialoguing with categories the moment’s historian shot through with knowledge ■ 36 produce this house as you move through it reading the print and map rooms navigating your history thinking about what’s not present/leaning ■ 35 Plantin’s image rises from brickwork latticed windows like uncut sheets: proofread the bookish house looking inward to its garden ■ 34 of the material where material is stone as solid as stone should be between praxis and representation: lion propped up on its human fist ■ 33 moss on the bark of the tree like green light it may go around the world we live it and we think it and it thinks us in its living ■ 32 scowling Christ with sword and scales the twisted Host a print of the Spanish Fury identities fixed throwntogetherness without scatter ■ 31 letters reversed on milky window absent depth unmarked by time and drainpipes spewing tendrillar wires that sing Latvia Estonia Finland ■ 30 frame the red window frame which frames the curved cream underbelly of the stairs and the varnished wood banisters which follow them ■ 29 spatial scales stepped roofs encounter flows of flags abstractions of maps tides of information against waves of nostalgia catching light ■ 28 space outwith place where roofs meet sky: on false chimneys or high points: gold eagle/alert fox/be-piked yeoman/mariner shading his eyes ■ 27 silver crown midpoint over iron gateway a compression point funnelling people: space-time coordinate for inter-species solidarity ■ 26 the segmented reflection of the outer window ghosted its ornate patterns of authority its relative position beyond glass in focal illusion ■ 25 a priori steps of Antwerp station where people produce (carrying pushchairs lifting children hauling rucksacks) pause by marble pillars/noon ■ 24 flat planes of faces curve as intervals in negative distance a single red flag flutters on a window ledge white motif curled shyly away ■ 23 three men in sou’westers tend towards the Swiss poster promising ‘More than meets the eye’ in English/bent one way-street sign arrowing ■ 22 lateral shots of words past floral baskets gilded cornices irregularly stepped balconies café parasols the logos of international exchange ■ 21 guild houses round the Markt surface cut to the depths of the manifesto: shoulder to shoulder their tight asperities ■ 20 sculpted sleep as lids are moulded shut/a masturbator’s grip upon the mayoral scroll LEONARD VANDENHECKE ■ 19 tensions in space not forms cut into (our) time they are floating not waiting striking out not enduring ■ 18 the closer you get the less there is (approach as an eye) abrupt delineations that are read as shaded building bricks on a 2D matrix ■ 17 crouch under the ledge upon which the knight stretches an overstepping toe the space and scope left for the roughed in/beyond genealogy ■ 16 rows of knives scissors for variation a syntax of blades behind the window of the coutellerie a razor’s discrimination between flesh and air ■ 15 synchronic pan: Flemish with crane aloft/an ice façade drips/to fore: fountain where Calder mobile swings like a sail but dances in time ■ 14 decompartmentalisation of externals: glass for clouds and girders blossoming style on the superface/for depth: old perfume old iron ■ 13 fixed point or vortex/canopied ingress egress/the solidity of glass held by black wrought ironwork a cage for shoppers musical instruments ■ 12 tactical formations of repetition: conical trees amid scratched bark plane/hedges and gangly stems/garbage urns/pools of dust turds in sand ■ 11 brickwork syntax with wide cement connectives hanging there and/or sculpted there heraldic and abstracted the shell of the shell ■ 10 more an homunculus bent knees whorish pelvic stretch: the curved water pipe up his arse launches a parabola his eternal stream completes ■ 9 not botticellian scalloped arrival dispersal of piss-steam piddle-trickle the smallest statue of illiberality in the world ■ 8 blue wall pixellated in close-up winged with cracking paintwork steps down which mythic characters chase in contiguity/coincidence/overload ■ 7 nose into perspective (skip with a rope on the roof) smell basket of flowers red and purple synthesised into the spaces you sniff out ■ 6 a slash across a speckled sky/the slope of the roof/the tilt of an eye//time full of now perspective ■ 5 not the heavy timbers of the shadowy door but the saints poised for studied martyrdom in slanted sunlight tinting ingress ■ 4 De Grote Markt/carve supernal genealogies onto each spatial container/or: float them there as if by human intention ■ 3 Doric Bourse time makes KNACK space in place of crossing experience with body lurching motorbike at rest against wall of bleached exchange ■ 2 spire at dusk spearing vapour trails a lone gull gliding above the pinnacle of Europe flecked wash over clenched dark buildings ■1 breathing water spout against an irradiated dusk ripple ■ 0 tweets @ www.twitter.com/ Van Valckenborch 2009-2008

Twitterode 98

2010-12-30T09:57:00.001Z

■ 98 a moorhen and fluffed chick stand on the girder wet webs safe from tidal flow/all motion is relative/cannot be seen beyond their conception

Twitterode 95

2010-12-29T10:29:00.001Z

■ 95 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/cannot be seen beyond their conception hoisted from river/sagging over the waterline on the bend

Twitterode 94

2010-12-28T11:48:00.001Z

■ 94 the buttressed bulge below defeated windows/analysis destroyed the solidity of this fisherman’s house/sagging over the waterline on the bend

Twitterode 87

2010-12-27T11:03:00.000Z

■ 87 past her snarl windows across the canal she tightens her open cup leotard adjusts crotchless crotch lets the world pass brushing her breasts

Twitterode 83

2010-12-26T12:51:00.000Z

■ 83 thru’ marble arch tarpaulin on which Magritte’s curtain-building is opening on flat summer skies (behind which dreams the renovating palace)

Twitterodes 79 and 80

2010-12-25T11:23:00.000Z

■ 80 objects swamped by facts or/spitting into a little cup/ejaculations/measured by money/wishing well full of best wishes/vacant inscriptions ■ 79 patiently sit all day arms folded head bent into space complete with vanishing point spewing a lip-moulded stream of eternal spittle

Twitterodes 72 and 73

2010-12-24T10:50:00.000Z

■ 73 a set of real operations made the man in a kagoul bend over to examine the dog’s arse/another set made the dog-cobbles-bollards-street-city ■ 72 stone dog cocking a leg against the corner bollard rue de Chartreux monumentalising this quotidian moment fleeting active yet still on guard

Twitterode 70

2010-12-23T10:12:00.000Z

■ 70 ‘Il faut être absolument moderne’/ICI OÙ PAUL VERLAINE BLESSA ARTHUR RIMBAUD D’UN COUP DE REVOLVER

Twitterode 63 and a possible sighting

2010-12-22T09:53:00.000Z

■ 63 which map’s he on/giving his game away escapes the arcade with jacket over shoulder scowling/invisibility unplotted/a post-it in a phone box

Does this image actually show the author?

Dylan Harris, author of the excellent Antwerp (Wurm Press, 2010), reckons he's had an encounter with Mr Van Valckenborch on his travels. Read his account at

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

Twitterodes 60 & 61

2010-12-21T14:12:00.000Z

■ 61 un soldat inconnu competing with discourses to travel to a ring of growling gryphons holding up the dish of flame for een onbekende soldaat ■ 60 aloft column beyond gilded fringe Léopold heading up clouds/below gold extracted from the c(o)re of the 1831 constitution

twitterodes 35-42

2010-12-20T14:25:00.000Z

42 heraldic ensigns horizonless on the thick glass of the windows of the Huys der Liefde/pulled inside out a house of Lipsius/Montanus/Ortelius ■ 41 unseatable throne? ■ 40 rhinolalia muzzle nudges for a broken song ■ 39 aloft surveying all that isn’t his mistaken for shirtless carving beside stirring gauze that screens the equine statue/its doubtful gestures ■ 38 reclusive Balthasar’s golden compass grips the globe crippled inky fingers measure the surface of maps the ridges of print on finest paper ■ 37 the marvellous is awkward/scribbling among Plantin’s shelves dialoguing with categories the moment’s historian shot through with knowledge ■ 36 produce this house as you move through it reading the print and map rooms navigating your history thinking about what’s not present/leaning ■ 35 Plantin’s image rises from brickwork latticed windows like uncut sheets: proofread the bookish house looking inward to its garden

Twitterode 30

2010-12-11T16:10:00.000Z

■ 30 frame the red window frame which frames the curved cream underbelly of the stairs and the varnished wood banisters which follow them

(Read the stream as it appears on Twitter here. There are less than 10 posts left, until it reaches 100.)

Twitterode 20

2010-11-30T11:56:00.001Z

■ 20 sculpted sleep as lids are moulded shut/a masturbator’s grip upon the mayoral scroll LEONARD VANDENHECKE ■

Twitterode 16

2010-11-29T07:42:00.001Z

■ 16 rows of knives scissors for variation a syntax of blades behind the window of the coutellerie a razor’s discrimination between flesh and air

Twitterodes 13-15

2010-11-28T09:43:00.000Z

■ 15 synchronic pan: Flemish with crane aloft/an ice façade drips/to fore: fountain where Calder mobile swings like a sail but dances in time ■ 14 decompartmentalisation of externals: glass for clouds and girders blossoming style on the superface/for depth: old perfume old iron ■ 13 fixed point or vortex/canopied ingress egress/the solidity of glass held by black wrought ironwork a cage for shoppers musical instruments

Twitterode 11

2010-11-27T08:42:00.000Z

■ 11 brickwork syntax with wide cement connectives hanging there and/or sculpted there heraldic and abstracted the shell of the shell

Twitterodes 9 & 10

2010-11-26T09:54:00.000Z

■ 10 more an homunculus bent knees whorish pelvic stretch: the curved water pipe up his arse launches a parabola his eternal stream completes ■ 9 not botticellian scalloped arrival dispersal of piss-steam piddle-trickle the smallest statue of illiberality in the world

Read Rene's Twitter Trickle (twitterodes)

2010-08-20T11:36:00.000+01:00

at www.twitter.com/VanValckenborch

(his Flemish half, translated by Martin Krol)

Robert Sheppard: Two booklets

2010-07-14T18:26:00.000+01:00

Robert Sheppard

Two new booklets available

The Given (prose unwritings of autobiographical texts)

Berlin Bursts (poems about Berlin with images by Patricia Farrell.

The Given may be purchased here

Read Rupert Loydell's review of it here

Berlin Bursts is available for £4 from

Ship of Fools
78 Nicander Road
Liverpool
L18 1HZ.

(cheques made out to R Sheppard)

You can also read about writing The Given beloe in the last post.

The Given will be launched on 30th September at Anthony Burgess House in Manchester : 7.00
(with Scott Thurston and Antony Rowland)

Robert Sheppard : Writing The Given

2010-07-13T20:40:00.000+01:00

MATERIALS + PROCEDURE

an account of the writing of The Given (Knives Forks and Spoons: 2010)

Go to http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/ for samples and the best way to buy it.

This work began as a project – out of an existential dilemma – to deal with particular MATERIALS: the piles of journals, diaries, and less categorisable autobiographical writings that I have accumulated since 1965 when they began, and that I have periodically attempted to use for writing. In its opting for PROCEDURE it is thus a conceptual project, but is perhaps not quite an example of ‘uncreative writing’ as that term has come to be used, but is a creative ‘unwriting’, to adapt a term I have used to describe my earlier texts refunctioned or re-moulded from others. Perhaps the work might be thought of as an ‘unwriting through’ of the MATERIALS, but such proliferation of terms is only useful if it assists a gloss on PROCEDURE.

Part one began with a simple notion: that I would list – in an ironic reference to Joe Brainard’s influential anaphoric I Remember – all the events that I did not remember as I read through these records anew. I anticipated a ten page work covering 34 years. Instead I amassed 34 pages but I only reached 1979 (the end of ‘The Hungry Years’ and the beginning of ‘The Drowning Years’ in my personal periodisation)! Before beginning this project I had an unjustified belief in the accuracy of my memory; now I felt like Confused of Hippo, whose words I used as an epigraph to that first draft:

When then I remember memory, memory itself is, through itself, present with itself: but when I remember forgetfulness, there are present both memory and forgetfulness; memory whereby I remember, forgetfulness which I remember. But what is forgetfulness, but the privation of memory? 1 (St. Augustine)

The re-discovery of a series of autobiographical fragments written in 1989, ‘Voices in White Noise’ provided a series of sharply delineated memories (some of them lost over the intervening 20 years) to counter the record of forgetfulness. I combined and selected from the two texts, using a stochastic method, aiming at concision and counterpoint, although the ‘I don’t remember’ sentences dominate. The simple PROCEDURE had thus begun to grasp the complexity of the MATERIALS with scant regard for autobiographical shape. The text is allowed to make its own history, to become the biography of a practice of writing rather than my autobiography, or ‘My Life’ to refer to the title of Lyn Hejinian’s text that had both inspired and hindered me over the years. So much for memory.

Part two has a simple PROCEDURE – to ask one (difficult) question of the ‘hero’ of the text after reading each page of the MATERIALS, an intensely written lengthy, detailed journal. It thus distorts the passage of time, since only 1979-1982 are ‘covered’ in this exhausting paragraph. Not all the questions were finally selected and the order again resists, but does not obliterate, temporal sequence.

Part three deals with the most transformative years of my journal writing and the most rapid development of my poetics. The PROCEDURE adopted is largely that used in writing Letter from the Blackstock Road, which was written during this period (1983-1993) and is referred to in the writing: the accumulation of text and the working of that through a stochastic method of using guided chance, liberated choice, dice and eye, hand and mind, a kind of improvised textual performance at the desk. 2

The final section posed different problems. The diaries which stretch from 1994-2009 (supplemented by a few notebooks) are written in a deliberately non-literary style and often record banalities. I decided to settle on the months of May – season of elections in particular – and to account for each one (we had now moved into ‘The Age of Irony’ and ‘September 12’). I was thinking of the ‘mayday’ strand (1997-99) of Twentieth Century Blues which intertextualises these writings.3 An early draft – one paragraph accounting for each May – appears in Erbacce 18 (2009), but I wanted to disrupt chronology further to allow the MATERIALS to speak in their own new-found voice, and did so by re-adopting the PROCEDURE of one of the ‘Mayday’ texts themselves, ‘Report on Seaport’, which was written around the 1997 General Election and whose MATERIALS (sentences) were arranged in alphabetical order. (This is referred to in the text and thus it describes its constraint.)

These writings, even down to finding a title, have been the most troublesome that I have attempted. (At one point I intended to interleave between the sections other writings: the autobiographical piece ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’, 4 the critical article ‘The Colony at the Heart of the Empire: Bob Cobbing and the Mid 1980s London Creative Environment’, 5 and the meditation ‘Critical Tuning: Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing’ 6.) As the text attests at various points, this is not my first attempt, nor my second, at such a project. Despite the boldness of PROCEDURE the processes of editing have been as arduous – if not more so – than in other, less conceptual unwritings.

1. The Confessions of St. Augustine, Airmont: Clinton, 1969.
2. ‘Letter from the Blackstock Road’, in Complete Twentieth Century Blues, Salt: Cambridge, 2007: 48-58.
3. In Complete Twentieth Century Blues: ‘Report on Seaport, mayday 97’: 243-9, ‘A Dirty Poem and a Clean Poem for Roy Fisher, mayday 98’: 315-6; ‘The End of the Twentieth Century, mayday 99’: 331-50.
4. ‘Malcolm Lowry’s Land’ in eds. Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009.
5. In ed. Louis Armand, Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, Litteraria Pragensia: Prague, 2010.
6. Unpublished.

2009-12-16T12:16:00.000Z

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry: Birkbeck Launch Event 2009 - Selected Papers

GOING PUBLIC/going private/Afterword to Series Five

2009-11-27T15:33:00.000Z

To celebrate a decade of the discussion of speculative, writerly poetics at Edge Hill, Robert Sheppard organised a talk series entitled Going Public this autumn and turned over this now concluding fifth series of this blogzine to the work of his group. (Above you can see Stephen Sheppard, Scott Thurston and Matt Fallaize in the earliest photograph of the group during a contemplative moment at one of its summer meetings, probably 2003. Photo courtesy Andrew Taylor. And above that a photo of group members Robert Sheppard, Angela Keaton, Matt Fallaize and Cliff Yates at the recording of the group's CD, Points of Reference; available £5 including p+p from Robert Sheppard, Deaprtment of English and History, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK. Photo courtesy Andrew Taylor.)

The whole series launched the Salt poetics anthology Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh (edited by Rupert Loydell from Salt Publishing); four of the group are featured in this volume. On 8th October Scott Thurston discussed his book Internal Rhyme to be published next year by Shearsman, sharing with the audience the two ways of reading the text (horizontally and vertically). The discussions, as on all the evenings, were detailed. This was also a chance to celebrate the new Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, co-edited by Sheppard and Thurston, the first issue of which was on sale.

On 15th October, two former PhDs of the university, also founder members of the group and contributors to Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh, and widely published poets, presented their poetics: Cliff Yates: ''Flying' and the gap between intention and outcome in the act of writing,' and Andrew Taylor on ‘The Poetics of Absence – part two’: a continuation and reflection upon the work in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh. Andrew spoke of how a poetics is never finished just because a document of poetics is complete, but continues to evolve, in his case developing his sense of a topologiocally-inscribed 'Poetics of Absence'. Cliff outlined his development from a poet who writes about experiences to a poet who allowed the writing of the poem, in the act of writing, to become the experience. (Again, see his contribution to the Salt anthology.) More recent pieces explore a translatorese-ish estrangement of language, refracted through broken forms such as pseudo-pantoums.

On 29th October Dee Mc Mahon spoke of the poems published on her CD Stories of the Line under the title ‘Provocation, Process and Product’. Dee described her sequence of prose pieces that springboard from quotations 'Stories of a Line', in which - Klee-like - she takes a 'line' for a walk. Robert was talking about his latest project, the fictional poems of Rene Van Valckenborch, and the double fictional poetics by which they are permitted, and by which he is permitted to by-pass his self.

On 5th November 2009, Daniele Pantano addressed the title "Living in Translation: A Discussion of Exile, Translingualism, and Writing Your Way Home" by speaking of his own original work and his work as a literary translator. Michael Egan meanwhile invited the audience to share his recent ‘Motivist’ poems in light of his Motivist Manifesto. If it catches on, you heard of it here first!

To complete the series on 11th November 7.30 in The Rose Theatre, Cliff Yates launched his new book Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (which is out from Salt: www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844715039.htm) The speakers from the talks series became the support act for Cliff, who read well and contextualised the writing of his book.

On 27 November we ‘went private’ again by meeting up at the delicatessen Source in Ormskirk run by PPRG member Matt Falliaze (pictured above, even then sampling the wine) for an excellent meal. It made the group feel more like Oulipo (I had Queneau's Elemental Morality in my bag) but I suspect we'll not become a dining club, though I'm sure we'll return to Source. We were there to celebrate not to discuss, but we did touch on the subject of how to proceed as a group, and how to avoid the banalities of the 'workshop method'. Present were the founder members Cliff Yates and Andrew Taylor and myself (I think it was only a joke when they voted me out of the group!), Dee MacMahon, Michael Egan, Patricia Farrell. Everybody seemed relaxed and enjoyed themselves. Great Works currently features three of the group. And everybody round the table has been published there. Thank you Peter Philpott!

We have two official journals registering the group’s work: Pages online published work from the group members Erbacce published a print edition dedicated to the group (which may be bought at http://www.erbacce.com/)

Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group members past and present include Robert Sheppard, Cliff Yates, Andrew Taylor, Scott Thurston, Neil Addison, Dee McMahon, Matt Fallaize, Daniele Pantano, Steve Van Hagen, Michael Egan, Colin Harris, Tony Cullen, Patricia Farrell, Angela Keaton and Alice Lenkiewicz.

Here ends the Fifth Series of Pages. Check the archive between May and November 2009 to read the series whole. (For a quick look, the bulk of the meetings occured in October 2009.)

Robert Sheppard

PS Sixth series?

Introducing Robert Sheppard

2009-11-27T14:48:00.001Z

Robert Sheppard reading at the Costa Coffee Poetry Venue in Liverpool (photo courtesy Tim Power), recording the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics CD at Edge Hill, and reading at the Liverpool Tate Gallery Credit Crunch reading (both photos courtesy Andrew Taylor).

I am a poet-critic, and recent volumes of poetry include Tin Pan Arcadia, Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2004,

Complete Twentieth Century Blues from Salt as well, and

Warrant Error from Shearsman.

My critical work includes The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents Liverpool University Press, 2005)

and Iain Sinclair (Northcote House, 2007).

I am editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry {link to http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry } and this blogzine.

I also edited the Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, and most recently The Door at Taldir: The Selected Poems of Paul Evans.

I am also an advocate for the way writers write about writing, a speculative discourse that is often misread as literary criticism or as autobiographical writing, but which is really a mode of writing quite distinct. I encourage students to read it and produce it, and I am working on a study of this. Part of my thinking on this may be read on PORES journal as ‘The Necessity of Poetics’ .

Poems from Warrant Error, may be read here

Complete Twentieth Century Blues was reviewed by Todd Thorpe. Read the review here

Warrant Error has been reviewed by Alan Baker. Read his review at www.leafepress.com/litter2/litterbug02/litterbug-sheppard.html

I can be seen reading my poems from Twentieth Century Blues at

http://otherroom.org/videos/%e2%80%94-or-2-june-2008-videos

as part of the Other Room Readings in 2008. (On the first clip I read ‘A Dirty Poem and Clean Poem for Roy Fisher’, ‘From a Stolen Book’ followed by a selection from ‘Empty Diaries’, the sequence with which I continues on the second video.)

Robert Sheppard: Three Riga Poems

2009-11-26T19:32:00.000Z

Mentzendorff House, Riga

an extra Ordinary Rendition

The bearded woman with amber eyes
makes him tie elfin aprons to his shoes
which glide like galoshes over the polish
of the timbers while the bride’s stilettos
tap-tap up the stairs without reproach or restraint

The woman scraped away these walls
to reveal layered fauns and fountains
but when he plucks the harp that waits for him there
it lets of a slack dead sound. Escaping

their scrutiny he secrets himself in the mock
‘Poet’s Room’. The desk: a quill still rests across
parchment by a notebook embossed Poesie

He lifts the feathery pages loose from the flaking
leather spine and finds that they are blank

July/November 2006

Riga Duet

Prison Camp Violin

A brittle fiddle someone
Turns this on a lathe

Of the spheres where
Replica becomes the real

Thing thin
Birch treated knocked up

Catches an unhuman
Voice in its hollow

Thumbs moulded to pegs
Skewered into splintering holes

Tune the stolen wires a
Mollusc curled at neck’s end

Fingernails
Pluck the kinked tune free

Out of itself a
Collapsed bridge

Sabotaged by
Time mittens

Grapple
The soup-bone bow-grip

Horse hair human
Hair taut straight like a well

Brushed bride’s
Bends the tamed twig

Tucked under your chin the violin
Splinters against your jaw

As you draw the grinty
Voice out from the mechanics

Of survival: extinct
Livonian love song

Mute Piano

This box could house
A stethoscope or

Paintbrushes its
Leather strap sags

A conspiring smile
Unclip the lid in

A double-thumbed
Ritual of rhyming

Clasps and prop
It open a jack-

In-a-box grin of black
And nicotine octaves

Three there potential
But one key escaped

Gives the game away
A peep-hole to the void

Imagined
Mechanics beneath

Coal-grained
Half-frozen fingers that

Soothe the smooth keys
And then in a furious

Double-fisted cluster
Rattle them with the

Padding stealth of
Rats upon boards

Stealing moist bread
From mute mouths

Introducing Tony Cullen

2009-11-17T15:33:00.000Z

Photo: Patricia Farrell. Tony Cullen, the newest recruit to the Poetry and Poetics Research Group, attending one of our meetings, minutes after hearing that he'd received a Distinction for his MA in Writig Studies at Edge Hill. The PhD beckons.

Some of his poems are due to be published in Great Works soon: check the November issue at www.greatworks.org.uk

Here are some others:

Grande Arcade

It has a cathedral quality
high roof and hush yet
somewhere someone speaks
echoes flutter against

skylight windows looking
for escape consumers on automated
glide-by wear Picasso expressions
chameleon eyes swivel

and shift with the passionless
sanction of a broken contract
lock-jawed doorways reveal
gapping throats into which

shoppers simply vanish
feminine fragrances and magic
music lure the curious
with a crooked finger

schoolgirls skittle in awe
old couples merge together
for comfort children rattle
with excitement while mothers

browse for bargains through
glass plate and plastic
a hackled mechanical spine
winds methodically toward

an upper level escarpment
where coffee clouds mass
above the Casino Café
sipping latte or mocha

Olympians examine the synthesis
below bristling with the promise
of profit drowning soul
in a redeveloped see

buried in a wooded
half-moon pelt where
the homicide of Harlem
John plays out

Tippler

Here’s George’s little sally,
embedded in the huge stone
shoulder of a cobbled bank.

On a gable opposite, a stick
rattles inside a swill bucket.
The original went for scrap

the year they exiled
Trotsky. This is a replica,
reinvented for tourists

still feeding on Eric’s
unhealthy diet served up
in the pub\restaurant they

named after his reinvention.
It’s a narrower gauge
than standard and tips

nothing more than nostalgia
and an admiration of a hardship
enacted in their comic playhouse.

Marsh Green Marsh

The sun quivers to cross
it. Not vast, but empty
and deep; it’s silent air
trimmed of alibis
and waiting.

Grasses army the surface,
gangling adolescent stalks
crowding to the river,
where rushes bull
the margins.

The ground there, three
quarters water, will
never let them go.
Things scurry
at root level,

only squeak and rustle
announce their attendance,
a splash of black water,
their shun. Tussock
grass stumps on sturdy ground,

short and sharp as teeth.
Each footstep injures moss
to weep over boot leather
and lace as the earth
gives. It’s the river,

reaching from beneath,
where clay prisons
hold tight in.

After sun-fall,
a lacy cloak

of ghosts hover there,
thickening to a nightdress
of nature’s shy cloud,
behind which, the dark
world disappears.

Chris McCabe reading at Edge Hill last year

2009-11-16T15:27:00.000Z

Photo: Tim Power

Chris read in the Rose Theatre last year, and this picture seems to capture something of the charm of his performance.

Introducing Steve Van Hagen

2009-11-09T16:32:00.000Z

I was appointed at Edge Hill in 2006, having previously taught at The International Study Centre, Herstmonceux Castle (Queen’s University, Canada, in the U. K.), the University of Kent, and Canterbury Christ Church University. I have taught most periods and genres within English and American literature, but have tended to specialise in eighteenth-century literature, Renaissance drama (especially Shakespeare), and modernism and post-modernism.

My edition of selections from Woodhouse’s The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus was published in 2005 (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press) and I have recently completed a book entitled The Poetry of Mary Leapor for the Focus On series published by Greenwich Exchange Press. I am currently writing an article for The Literature Compass on the life, career and reception of James Woodhouse, as well as writing The Student Guide to Jonathan Swift for Greenwich Exchange. I am also researching a critical biography of Woodhouse.

My other interests include literary representations of obsessive-compulsive disorders (and particularly in the work of the American novelist Chuck Palahniuk), and the life and career of the American eco-anarchist Edward Abbey.

Poems have appeared in a number of magazines (see links at the end of this post)

Die Sönne Scheint Noch
(with thanks to Jason Whittaker)

I

Barbarians are coming, they sing, crawling
from the East. He wears a leather skirt East
European hat, metal cross
draped over his bare chest. Aryan, Wagnerian
ice maidens who study postgraduate
English in their spare time sing
harmonies wearing black vests, blonde
pigtails tumbling from their fezes. Banners
depict a thick cross within a cog though no
White Rose. Seeming swastikas that know not
seems adorn album covers passed round, sleeve
notes by Žižek, film projectors
beam streams of images. The crowd
chant in tandem “Tanz
mit Laibach”, singing of American
friends and German comrades dancing
in Baghdad.

II

Most likely this was not what
Sophie and Hans and Christoph went
to the steel blade for but you never know
what you’re living or dying for till
later as they’ve told Tomasz as
they look down, unlike him, bemused. Dropping leaflets
from University stairs can be for some
what a concert and exhibition at the House
of the Workers is for others. It is many years
since the threesome took that last
unprecedented cigarette, but Sophie is a nation’s
heroine. At least the website says
Tomasz’s influence lives on.

III

Outside in the Trbovlje evening, where Tomasz
ended twenty three years before, the audience files
out, waves passports in the air that helped some
escape Sarajevo. The Kum mountain lodge houses
some as the NSK philosopher declaims, and they drink
Laibach wine, deep into tomorrow until

the sun comes up.

Der Papierene

the streets of Favoriten are quiet
now, a suburb of a city
of shadows, secrets, whispers, though they
weren’t quiet that day in January ’39
when they laid you to rest some say
twenty thousand thronged the streets

whisperers whisper still
about you; you were a jew, a
nazi, a gambler, when you were found
with Camilla in the Anagasse
they whispered too: you were
murdered, committed suicide, Camilla
killed you, politics
killed you

there is no memorial, even the cafe
you bought from Drill is gone,
demolished, “they did not want it there
as a reminder of him”, they told me,
when I asked

I look for you, I find you only
in the memories of the reunification
derby, the pride of
Osterreich, not Ostmark, waltzing
around grinning before the box
full of dignitaries, at full time

grainy images on You Tube
narrated in Spanish
are the only sight I find but
it is not a bad epitaph: “the new club
president has forbidden us to talk
to you, but I will always
speak to you, Herr Doktor.”

Emily warned me it would be like this

There is only one truly philosophical problem
wrote Albert, a problem I solved
one winter’s afternoon

At the last there was the little
not so much
the King in the room
as the mundane in the gloom

It ended
not so much with a whimper
as with an unavoidable bang
or two, on the head

As fumes swirled, the thoughts:
did I feed the cat?
did I turn on the gas (enough)?

the taciturnity of amorous encounters

i don’t bring you flowers

we meet in hotels

i don’t bring you chocolates

we mouth neither hellos nor farewells

we pass the same anonymous receptionists and bellboys

this month room twenty six next month ninety four

after, i trace the outline of your nose

in my mind as you lie

face up turned away on sweat-soaked sheets

perhaps one day we might speak

Links to poetry:

www.anonpoetry.co.uk/anon1.html

www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/svh1.html

www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/svh2.html

www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/svh3.html

www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/svh4.html

www.nthposition.com/analienisforlife.php

www.nthposition.com/author.php?authid=940

Two North West Events

2009-11-09T16:31:00.000Z

TWO WEDNESDAY EVENTS

1

Cliff Yates Reading at The Rose Theatre at Edge Hill, Ormskirk on Wednesday 11th November 2009; 7.30, £3.50.

The launch of Frank Freeman’s Dancing School:
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844715039.htm

his new Salt book.

Cliff Yates is the author of Henry’s Clock (Smith/Doorstop) which won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Poetry Business competition, and Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School (Poetry Society). He teaches at Maharishi School, where his students are renowned for winning poetry competitions, and runs courses and workshops in the UK and abroad. His latest collection is Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (Salt).

www.cliffyates.co.uk

(This is part of the GOING PUBLIC series at Edge Hill: see www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com for details.)

2

Following the popularity of the Birkbeck launch in October, Gylphi Limited is pleased to announce:

The launch of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry

Ed. Robert Sheppard (Edge Hill) and Scott Thurston (Salford)

at the University of Salford with guest speakers Christine Kennedy, Allen Fisher and Ian Davidson (Wednesday 9 December at 4 pm)

There will be speeches and discussion of the journal, as well as an opportunity for readers and contributors to the journal to meet with editorial board members.

Speakers:

Christine Kennedy, Leeds Trinity & All Saints

Allen Fisher, Manchester Metropolitan University

Ian Davidson, University of Wales at Bangor

Followed by discussion and drinks.

All Welcome. Free entry.

Directions here: http://www.salford.ac.uk/travel

To register for this event on Facebook, please visit:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=169385893578

You can also become a fan of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry at:
http://www.facebook.com/innovativepoetry

To receive your copy of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry before the launch subscribe online: http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

Talks: Daniele Pantano and Michael Egan

2009-11-06T12:30:00.000Z

(photo courtesy of Patricia Farrell)

A game of two halves last night: Daniele Pantano (left) and Michael Egan (right) answering questions after their presentation. (Who's your smiley friend, guys?)

Dan spoke to the title 'Living in Translation: A Discussion of Exile, Translingualism, and Writing Your Way Home'. Home might or might not be Switzerland, in Dan's case, and he explored the polylingual background of Switzerland, his sojorn in the United States, his writing in English and his translating from the German. He quoted Richard Kearney on Ricoeur's On Translation: 'The idealist romantic self, sovereign master of itself and all it surveys, is replaced by an engaged self which only finds itself after it has traversed the field of foreignness and returned to itself again, this time altered and enlarged, "othered".'

Michael introduced us to the tenets of 'Motivism', a style of poetry (or a schema for generating a long sequence of poems), based around a verse form of 1/3/3/1 lines and a series of guiding principles for each stanza: initial image, wandering, connection, and return.

This is final talk in the series but Cliff Yates (supported by the team of 'talkers') will read at the Rose Theatre, at Edge Hill University on Wednesday 11th November at 7.30: tickets £3.50 for the launch of his book Frank Freeman's Dancing School (Salt).

Introducing Daniele Pantano (as translator): Georg Trakl

2009-11-04T12:22:00.000Z

Georg Trakl (1887-1914) is commonly seen as the most prominent figure of Austro-German literary Expressionism.

IN RED LEAVES FULL OF GUITARS . . .

In red leaves full of guitars
The yellow tresses of girls flutter
By the fence where sunflowers grow.
A golden tumbrel wheels through the clouds.

The elders in a peace of brown shade
Become silent and hug each other like fools.
Orphans sing sweetly at vespers.
Flies buzz in yellow palls.

At the stream the women still wash.
Hanging linens sail.
The girlchild I long fell for
Comes again through the evening gray.

Sparrows plunge from balmy skies
Into green voids filled with rot.
A bread smell and pungent spice
Cheats the hungry one of recovery.

Translated from the German by Daniele Pantano

TRUMPETS

Beneath mutilated willows, where brown children play
And leaves drift, trumpets blare. A graveyard shudder.
Scarlet banners plunge through the maple’s grief
Horsemen along fields of rye, empty mills.

Or shepherds sing at night and stags enter
Into the circle of their fires, the grove’s ancient sorrow,
Dancers rise from a black wall;
Scarlet banners, laughter, madness, trumpets.

Translated from the German by Daniele Pantano

Introducing Daniele Pantano (as poet)

2009-11-04T12:10:00.000Z

(photo courtesty D. Pantano)

7 JULY 2005 (NOTE FOUND ON A LONDON SUBWAY CARRIAGE)

What I enjoy about chaos is the guarantee of creation
The rapid unexpected

EVERY MOMENT OCCURS AFTER A SEQUENCE OF LOOKS

1.

Anticipate the whipping beauty of these southern women
Accustomed to euphoria within the word.

2.

Inform them that they’re unable to solicit the final embalming.

3.

Language consists of minute fractures near each climax.

4.

Confirm the impossible: to fully comprehend any experience.

5.

We can die at once and laugh about it.

6.

Proclaim days are dominated by sex, verbs, red paint.

7.

Witness the death of a praying mantis as her black hair finally settles.

BEYOND THE STOP SIGN: SWISS LANDSCAPE

Fictitious. This green. Like no other. This blue. Conscious.
Spectators. We agree. Language at birth. The rush. At once.
Forever. Scourged by origins and locutions. We find ourselves.
Back to it. The octagon. Its base. Like a senate of fatidic ants.
Ready. For the scouts. To move. From red. To white. To red.

Daniele Pantano is a Swiss poet, translator, critic, and editor born of Sicilian and German parentage in Langenthal (Canton of Berne). His individual poems, essays, and reviews, as well as his translations from the German by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Georg Trakl (see next posting) and Robert Walser, have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Absinthe: New European Writing, ARCH, The Baltimore Review, The Cortland Review, Gradiva: International Journal of Italian Poetry, Italian Americana, The Mailer Review, and 32 Poems Magazine.

His next books, The Oldest Hands in the World (a collection of poems), and the translations The Possible Is Monstrous: Selected Poems by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and The Collected Works of Georg Trakl, are forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, New York. He teaches at Edge Hill University.

For more information, please visit his website at http://www.danielepantano.ch/.

Dee McMahon and Robert Sheppard

2009-10-30T11:25:00.001Z

Photos courtesy Scott Thurston and Andrew Taylor

A sanp of part of the audience, plus Dee McMahon and Robert Sheppard answering questions after their presentations to the Poetry and Poetics Research Group meeting in the GOING PUBLIC series. Dee was talking about her sequence of prose pieces that springboard from quotations 'Stories of a Line', in which - Klee-like - she takes a 'line' for a walk. Robert was talking about his latest sequence, the poems of Rene Van Valckenborch, and the double fictional poetics by which they are permitted.

Next week the last in the series: Daniele Pantano and Michael Egan.

Robert Sheppard: Sudley House

2009-10-29T12:34:00.001Z

Here are two shots – the bottom one by Andrew Taylor and the top one by Tim Power – of Robert Sheppard performing his ambulatory/site-specific text Sudley House at Sudley House in November 2004. The text may be read at:

http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/sh/rs1.html

Click at the top from the page you find here to Preamble to Instructions before you reach the First Room (and continue until the Ninth). Then read the Notes.

Introducing Dee McMahon

2009-10-28T12:16:00.001Z

Dee McMahon is a former student of the MA at Edge Hill University and she has a CD of her work published, which she will be selling at the Poetry and Poetics session tomorrow night (I’m on too). She is currently working in the Library at Edge Hill, where I saw her about half an hour ago, but she didn’t see me, scuttling in to return the CD of Jerome Rothenberg that I was playing to this year’s MA full timers. Previous work on Pages may be seen at (link and then scroll a long way down to Page 451):

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_archive.html

Robert Sheppard

Photos above coutesy Andrew Taylor; Dee at the Neon Highway reading in the Walker Gallery and Dee waiting in the recording studio.

Introducing Patricia Farrell

2009-10-26T09:30:00.000Z

Photograph of Patricia with her friends in Neumarkt Square, Amsterdam; Robert Sheppard, and reading in the Tate, coutesy Andrew Taylor

Patricia Farrell is a visual artist, art historian, writer and student of philosophy, and has taught philosophy and creative writing. Published in New Tonal Language from Reality Street. The Zechstein Sea is available from Ship of Fools. She lives in Liverpool with two fools.

TRAVELLING ON ONE TICKET

(outbound)

pointing shifters
another object
previously verbal
a finger towards
and says
also denoting
pointed out something to it

“It will be better” –
and when I say that
a finger can live
without people
she means

all right is plain and heavy
a care-lined face
a heavy face
want her
not
used to beauty

“I think you are like a painting” –
this time takes it from her purse
and leaning out she talks simply

how such columns these heads might be
copying an older maxim not properly understanding
a series of heads and the spaces between

in the case of a butterfly less decomposed
he invented the image
as it were
with the viewer

the connection whatever the argument
and the manuscript of hybrid monsters
characteristics of initial capitals

this sentence is a possible
central theme now
romantics of structure
that’s what mountains are
a winter’s summer’s Christ fulfils itself

hinted at an orchestral piece,
a superb current falls into the irretrievable
and that’s just gentle by the inclusion

to seep in you a first time
a diversity of closes with
will leave you in the wind
sophisticated

idea of resurrection
animation
but from the angular sinister

with a stiff-backed
trying to get any you can see why this intelligent saved the sexed-up but nasty chivalry

(return)

a difficult word being
recalling not a little
disrupts or myths
worked out
several versions interested
in the form updating on
struggle
by those peaceably involved.

levels broad units
in what coup
would reference guarantee
operated by
or at least
some sense its typographical space

to lead them out
that we are bound to fail
just counterfactual
precious as confirmation
or two things
to make a company evidence of
what the weight of
for example
gone on longer
desperation advanced by years
by design of it
of it in the areas
worst is much more
have turned
there were clear signs

frightening again
maybe
pure incarnation
done in usual panic
consistent
our ethic unique enough

there is no object
purpose behind
unpersonal purpose
intimately fade all this
but to make the world
ultimate
indeed for no other reason
to argue
for to do so
prompted
if at all lasting
without reward

playing became
betwixt-and-between
visit the house
the window that she missed
options locked
when with her arm

reach the window
iron bars are up
turned his back on
turned himself
from that day on
- “I am your enemy”

were out and relied on
who turned framed by rivers
of those converging
deposited
nevertheless convinced
that the judgement
who reads the left in any document
indeed questions convention’s epidemic
a number who at a time
freed
from them to invite
so that witnesses come forward
for all that although

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2005/10/patricia-farrell-otherwise-than-beings.html

Hear her reading at The Other Room (Manchester) at

http://otherroom.org/videos/or-6-february-2009-audio/

Introducing René Van Valckenborch

2009-10-25T14:46:00.001Z

This is an incredible story.

In the autumn of 2002 two youthful translators met at a conference I organised on Translational Spaces held at Heidelberg, not in itself an auspicious thing to happen. When it is revealed that one of the translators’ specialisms was to translate from the Dutch language group and that the other was a specialist in Francophone literatures, it might have been expected that, other than the theory of translation, there would be nothing to hold them together. They were both participating on a panel on the literary translation strand themed with contemporary poetry and a remarkable thing happened, as I knew it would, having read their detailed abstracts in advance and paired them. Martin Krol, who was from South Africa, and who was an authority on Flemish poetry, and Annemie Dupuis from Quebec, and who was interested in Walloon literature, discovered not only that they were speaking about translating the poetic work of that most linguistically and bitterly divided of modern European nations, Belgium, but that they were speaking about the work of the same poet, René Van Valckenborch. This, again, is not in itself unusual, but what they discovered – and what had apparently been kept hidden from the literary schools of that country, separated as they are not just by language but by culture and regional autonomy – was that Van Valckenborch had written in both languages and had published two distinct bodies of work, one initially in Canada and the other partly in South Africa, as well as in Europe, Rouen and Amsterdam, as well as in Belgium.

Both translators had imagined that they were the first to apply themselves to Van Valckenborch’s small output. There was surprise and laughter for, after Krol had delivered his paper ‘Aprosody as Cognitive Mapping’, Dupuis declared herself unwilling to read her original paper, ‘The Return of the Mind to Things’, and extemporised a series of fascinating challenges to herself and Krol about this extraordinary circumstance. After initial mutual suspicion, and diplomatic manoeuvres on my part during a coffee break, they agreed to work together to solve what they regarded as the central mystery: how could, and why would, one writer produce two discrete oeuvres? Their initial answers required them to engage in further translations, email exchanges across continents, and occasional meetings over the next few months. This is not the place to enquire further into their liaisons, but after Martin took up a post in Brussels, interpreting for the EU, Annemie moved there too, to work as freelance translator. They lived together, and married in 2006 (but separated in 2010, about the same time this story unravels).

One of the delights – but occasionally one of the disappointments – of translating contemporary works, is meeting their author. As soon as the couple settled in Brussels, they insist, they set about searching for Van Valckenborch. It had not been unusual for his publishers abroad and at home to only deal with him by email and post – but neither cybernetic nor street addresses yielded a reply, nor did ringing on suggested doors reveal the man. Stalking the noisy dope-hazed bars in rue de Flandre – a ‘clue’ from one of the poems Krol explained – asking crag-faced bikers after a man of whom they had not even the vaguest description proved fruitless, as did hushed enquiries at the Poeziecentrum, located at a forlorn corner of a forgotten square in Ghent. The man had vanished, or as in one of those Magritte paintings that seem to encapsulate Belgian surreality, his figure offers his back to us, as does his reflection in the mirror beyond him: an appropriate image also for his double oeuvre. For not only did the man – his traces – disappear, his work stopped appearing. The bookshop at Ghent was to furnish the last substantial chunk of his work in Flemish, A Hundred and Eight Odes, and a final Walloon fascicle, emoticon, was reportedly picked up by Dupuis in a sale in a sunny bilingual shop in rue Antoine Dansaert in Brussels, not far from their apartment. A website, no sooner clicked onto by me then deleted, left an address without host, a single link to his last Twitter stream of enigmatic condensation. There was, about that time, some controversy about the existence of a few poems in German, Belgium’s third language, which purported to be by Van Valckenborch – they circulated privately under the title The Salad in the Wardrobe – but these are considered apocryphal if not fraudulent.

The idea that this extraordinary body of work was a hoax naturally arose. Perhaps it was a counter-hoax, some commentators suggested, to the one perpetrated by RTBF when it broadcast spoof reports of Flanders’ declaration of independence from Belgium in December 2006, and which caused a reaction of an Orson Welles magnitude. (Incidentally, this occurred four days after our translators were married and the processions of monarchists in the capital interrupted their extended festivities, to which I had been invited!) The existence of a genuinely bilingual contemporary poet in Belgium seems too good, or bad, depending on one’s perspective, to be true. However, someone had to compose these verses and although suspicion has fallen upon the two translators – critics speculate that the confrontation in Heidelberg was staged, the original poems written backwards from their double ‘translations’, charges I refute as Byzantine absurdity – the fact remains that the poems exist, and demand to be read. (Of course, suspicion has fallen upon myself also, particularly since Dupuis and Krol seem not to answer calls or reply to letters, indeed seem to have left Brussels, if not Belgium, if not Europe….) I am not denying that the poems’ ontological status is unchanged by questions of what would once have been called ‘authenticity’, but it remains a truth that these poems face us uncertainly with this lack of facts – again, not unlike Magritte’s canvasses, which often offer us monumental but obscured central enigmas. The unease which this situation evokes, cannot be willed away by transferring these texts into Gerald Bruns’ convenient category of ‘fictional poems': ‘To be sure, the difference between a poem in a novel and a poem in an anthology is apt to be empirically indiscernible. To speak strictly, a fictional poem would be a poem held in place less by literary history than by one of the categories that the logical world keeps in supply: conceptual models, possible worlds, speculative systems, hypothetical constructions in all their infinite variation – or maybe just whatever finds itself caught between quotation marks, as (what we call) “reality” often is.’ (Bruns, Gerald L. The Material of Poetry. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 2005: 105-6.)

Erik Canderlinck
Institute of Literary Translation, Heidelberg

Alice Lenkiewicz and Neon Highway

2009-10-19T12:54:00.000+01:00

Currently busy with her own art projects Alice is editor of the poetry magazine Neon Highway and is the author of Men Hate Blondes. Above, she is performing at the Neon Highway 'Credit Crunch' reading at the Tate Gallery in January 2009. Read her earlier work in Pages here (scroll through the month's postings).

Neon Highway

Avant-garde literary journal

PUBLISHES:
POETRY and ART

Submissions of innovative poetry to be sent to the editor:
Alice Lenkiewicz: 37, Grinshill Close, Liverpool, L8 8LD

Neon Highway is available bi-annually, with 2 issues costing £5.50, or a single Issue available at £3.00. Order your next issue by sending a cheque made out to Alice Lenkiewicz.

Subscription details and further information can also be found on:
http://www.geocities.com/poetshideout/Neon.html

email: neonhighwaypoetry@yahoo.co.uk

Men Hate Blondes
Poems
by
Alice Lenkiewicz
ISBN 978-0-9562433-4-8 £8.00

original plus

£8.00

‘Alice Lenkiewicz's inaugural collection of poems, Men
Hate Blondes, is a tight exploration of the political as
seen through the personal. Her frequent line
enjambments, startling images and sometimes
deceptively nonsensical-seeming word combinations
will make this book a challenge for some readers, but
what makes these poems worth reading is the author's
refreshing trust in her audience, that they do not need
to be led by the hand.’ Joanne Merriam

‘Alice Lenkiewicz, a modern alchemist, effects the
transmutation of lived experience via the intimate
crucible of her rare, poetic imagination – informed by
an artist’s visual sensibility. ‘ A C Evans

‘Men Hate Blondes is a kind of poetic bildungsroman,
it offers up its insights in a savvy use of montage,
dreamscapes, cityscapes and fantasias all matched
with Lenkiewicz’s dispassionate itinerant observation;
this is a refreshing, developing new voice testing out its
boundaries in a world still forming and reforming
around us.’ Chris Hamilton-Emery

If you would like to order an advance copy before November, you can send Alice £8.00 via paypal to poetshideout@yahoo.com

Angela Keaton performing and constructing

2009-10-19T12:47:00.000+01:00

Angela Keaton (top left) performing at the Walker Gallery as part of the Neon Highway reading, Angela reading at the Rose Theatre (Ormskirk), Angela displaying some of her 'object poems' to the Poetry and Poetics Group (Dee MacMahon reading the object).

Introducing Neil Addison

2009-10-19T12:39:00.000+01:00

Neil -pictured her as he is now - lives in Berlin.

See his web presence at flyingpigfoldingchair.blogspot.com

and at

moremodernlore.blogspot.com

and at

ruby-island.blogspot.com

New Jack Fling

I

Am in the employ of apple.

They instruct me

To visit café nero with my sony vaio

And pretend to be a shit

Who harbours choice.

In the snow-globe of hyperbole

The bearded despot pumps his fist

Hand in glove like a dreary valve

And death rains down

Like the only way is up.

It is raining clowns

on the brain. They

are wearing out

Their insolence. I am

writing up Their

fridge poems

I repeat after me.

Talks: Cliff Yates and Andrew Taylor

2009-10-16T11:18:00.000+01:00

Photograph of Cliff (left) and Andy (right) answering audience questions courtesy of Scott Thurston

Andrew Taylor spoke of how a poetics is never finished just because a document of poetics is complete, but continues to evolve, in his case developing his sense of a topologiocally-inscribed 'Poetics of Absence' (a formal presentation of which is contained in Rupert Loydell's excellent Salt poetics anthology Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh, which we were also launching).

Cliff Yates outlined his development from a poet who writes about experiences to a poet who allowed the writing of the poem, in the act of writing, to become the experience. (Again, see his contribution to the Salt anthology.) More recent pieces explore a translatorese-ish estrangement of language, refracted through broken forms such as pseudo-pantoums.

Both are founder members of the group, which first met on 21st October 1999.

Details of the next two talks evenings may be found here.

posted by Robert Sheppard @ 5:45 AM

Introducing Cliff Yates

2009-10-15T16:22:00.000+01:00

Cliff Yates is the author of Henry’s Clock (Smith/Doorstop) which won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Poetry Business competition, and Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School (Poetry Society). He currently teaches at Maharishi School, where his students are renowned for winning poetry competitions, and runs courses and workshops in the UK and abroad. His latest collection is Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (Salt). He is a founder member of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Research Group.

See his website at www.cliffyates.co.uk

More on Frank Freeman’s Dancing School:
http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/9781844715039.htm

Read his Guardian interview
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/07/poetry.english.teaching

More online poems may be read at

http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.com/search/label/Cliff%20Yates

http://www.stridemagazine.co.uk/Stride%20mag2009/april%202009/cliffyatespoems.htm

http://sunkislandreview.blogspot.com/2009/04/gower-road-and-fall-poems-by-cliff.html

Other links may be found at

http://cliffyates.wordpress.com/links/

LEAVES ARE JUST THIN WOOD

No, I don’t read French.
Do you have a translation?
I’m from Birmingham.
Let’s go for a walk in the woods. It’s raining.

Bring the billiard table.
I have the balls in my trouser pockets.
Can you manage?
Here, let me hold the door.

Yes I agree, the rain. Did I mention
the importance of parks in the black country?
It’s not that interesting. Mind
the rosa rugosas, their thorns,
and the climber with the orange hips.

All the other woods are memories
preparing us for this one.

If I tell anyone she’ll kill me.
No, really – a dart through the forehead.
Look at my hands – people call it stigmata
but really it’s darts.

We quarrelled in the autumn.
We quarrelled about the milk.
In the morning she left, took the bed with her.

L’HERMITAGE AND A BIRD

head back, a single drop of blood from its beak
on the concrete like a red coin. Dead eyes
white feathers. It flew into the window and life left it.

I keep doing that. I’m covered in bruises
but amazingly still alive...

Vittel’s autumn gold and red. Strange
after the mountains, the pines, snow,
the sky’s unbelievable blue
from the train crossing the border…

Drums, drums for the bird in flight.
A different sound when it hits the window.

RETURN

He unzips his jacket, freeing first one head,
then the other. Three necks stretch this way
and that, eyes squint in the glow from the fire.

Rain hisses on the brazier. I pull up my hood,
take off my gloves, rub my hands together.
He looks at me. ‘Why’d you come back?’

‘Curiosity. Time for a change.’
Earth beckoned. A speck of dust
in the eye of the sky.

‘Where are the others?’ ‘Early yet.’
They’ll come with their bottles
and stories. There are no secrets here.

The noise of the city. Orange fog
across the waste. No clouds. Stars.
Kevin dreams of pond weed and fish

the hollow drumming of a heart
the sky through a few feet of water.

10 EASY PIECES FOR PIANO

*
Everyone watches the child walk
through security and spread out her arms.
Today she’ll fly. You can always tell an Italian.

*
The Cuban landlady sings ‘when you’ve had black
there’s no going back.’
Her Slovakian cleaner has no papers.
We have an appointment, remember?

*
My hearing went and my head exploded I’ve never had that before.
Remember Klaus? He sent a postcard, hey British how you doing.

*
We missed the headlines on that day
man with backpack on CCTV.

*
In Hintersee Gasthof the framed cartoon
the king, the farmer, the bishop, the worker
and top of the pyramid the man in black
‘Der Jude - er nimmt das Geld’.

*
Where does the roof end and the wall start?

*
She said she found herself joining in
throwing flowers at Hitler. When he’d gone
she rushed into church, feeling
she’d slept with someone she shouldn’t have.

*
Anna went to collect her rabbit
‘that’s not my rabbit’ she said.
He held it by the ears, back legs spread-eagled
and put his hand around its balls.

*
This is my second favourite café in Vienna.

Cliff will be reading at the Rose Theatre, Edge Hill University on 11 November 2009. Tonight he is speaking with Andrew Taylor at the PPRG Tenth Aniiversary series Going Public.

Scott Thurston at the Poetry and Poetics Research Group

2009-10-09T13:34:00.000+01:00

At Edge Hill last night, Scott Thurston launched our series of talks with a glimpse of the working processes behind Internal Rhyme, his book-length sequence of poems which can be read horizontally as well as vertically. After reading some of these poems (some in both ways) there followed a general discussion of this method, questioning how and why the poems manipulate temporal and spatial relations, or whether there is an assumed simultaneity in the method. The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry enjoyed its first launch, the special edition of Erbacce featuring work by Scott and members of the group was launched, and many group publications were on sale.

(photo: courtesy of Scott Thurston (camera) and Patricia Farrell (photographer))

Scott Thurston and Cliff Yates at the Tate

2009-10-07T16:52:00.000+01:00

(photo: Andrew Taylor)

Scott Thurston, and (right to left) Cliff Yates, Ailsa Cox, Matt Fallaize, Patricia Farrell... as far as the eye can see, at the Neon Highway reading at the Tate Liverpool, January 2009, organised by Alice Lenkiewicz.

Introducing Scott Thurston

2009-10-05T11:53:00.000+01:00

Photo of Scott Thurston in New York courtesy of Scott and the unfortunate traveller who was accosted to take it! Hold on there author of Hold!

SCOTT THURSTON

My creative practice as a writer attempts to steer a course between an awareness of the material nature of language whilst acknowledging its capacity to communicate directly or indirectly. I tend to work in an improvisational fashion, often writing short poems which respond to experience and memory in spontaneous ways. These poems build up into sequences which become records of processes of thinking and development over time. I am fascinated by how thought and language move, and the capacity of the poem to track and trace this subtle energy.

I did my PhD in Poetics at Edge Hill 1997-2002. I now run the MA Creative Writing: Innovation and Experiment at the University of Salford and co-run The Other Room reading series in Manchester. I live in Liverpool.

See my pages at http://www.archiveofthenow.org/

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Momentum (Shearsman: Exeter, 2008) 106pp
Hold: Poems 1994-2004 (Shearsman: Exeter, 2006) 113pp
Of Utility (Spanner: Hereford, 2005)
Turns (with Robert Sheppard) (Ship of Fools/Radiator: Liverpool, 2003)
Two Sequences (RWC: Sutton, 1998)
Sleight of Foot (Reality Street Editions: London, 1996) (Selection)
Fragments (The Lilliput Press: Norwich, 1994)
State(s)walk(s) (Writers Forum: London, 1994)
Poems Nov 89 - Jun 91 (Writers Forum: London, 1991)

SELECTED ONLINE MAGAZINE APPEARANCES:

· Stimulus Respond (2009)
· Greatworks (2008)
· Dusie (2006)
The Argotist Online (2006)
Shadow Train (2006)
Intercapillary Space (2006)

SELECTED CRITICISM etc

In press, ‘Accreted Statement’ in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh (Salt, 2009)
I edited The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk, 2007.
My interview with Tony Lopez is published at The Argotist Online website.
'Ulli Freer: Space is the Place / Ulli Freer and Scott Thurston: An Interview', in Poetry Salzburg Review 9 (Spring 2006), pp. 169-187.
'Allen Fisher -- Reading "Mummers' Strut"' in volume 4 of Eseje o wspólczesnej poezji brytyjskiej i irlandzkiej, (Essays on Modern British and Irish Poetry) ed. Ludmila Gruszewska and David Malcolm, (Gdansk: University of Gdansk Press, 2005), pp. 119-134 (ISBN: 83-7326-288-1).
Interviews with Ira Lightman, Maggie O’Sullivan, Adrian Clarke, John Wilkinson and Allen Fisher published in issues 3-7 of Poetry Salzburg Review.
See also my article 'A Tribute to Bob Cobbing 1920-2002' in Neon Highway 3 (2003)

ON-LINE REVIEWS

‘Lisa Samuels: The Invention of Culture and Carrie Etter: Yet’ Stride Magazine (2009)
'Robert Sheppard: Tin Pan Arcadia and Hymns to the God in which My Typewriter Believes' (2006) Stride Magazine
'Dell Olsen: Secure Portable Space' (2005) Readings
'Miles Champion: Three Bell Zero' (2004) Readings

On-line reviews and articles on my work

Ira Lightman ‘On Weightedness in Poetry: An Approach to Scott Thurston’ at The Argotist On-line
Joseph Brooker 'The Needle and the Language Done' at Pores
Melissa Flores-Bórquez's review of Hold at Intercapillary Space
Luke Kennard's review of Hold at Stride Magazine
Tim Allen's review of Hold at Terrible Work.

Video

See Scott reading Momentum at The Other Room, Manchester, my favourite venue of the moment. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5917314106143182998&hl=en#

Pete Clarke: Looking Back: Facing Forwards

2009-10-02T15:31:00.000+01:00

Last night to the opening of Liverpool painter Pete Clarke's exhibition. He and I are hoping to collaborate. The catalogue may be viewed here.

Introducing Colin Harris

2009-09-28T13:33:00.000+01:00

A long-time member of the group, and a former student of Edge Hill, other work by Colin may be seen in Great Works and Shadowtrain.

Neither Film nor True

stunning shorts
just keep them on
again he voiced his mother’s coastline
why the wry privatisation
could it be from actors
I couldn’t find a writer
came down from observation
spilt my coffee
it ran between floorboards
drenched carpets
rose up the walls
filled the television until it
turned to liquid
it didn’t begin this way
I had a different story in mind
it was supposed to start with an image
and end in a moment filled with fear
instead I am the destroyer of the human race
the purveyor of rare coffee beans

Calling for the Lawnmower

friend whose work subverts
I have shocked since the premiere
but my nightmares move into castles
myth is updating
I called love
glossed over the underworld
a reconciliation feast
but deceptively simple
the idea holds
the fight against cancer
is not romantic
I have become a target
for household tyrants
my old resurrection
obliterating the new one

The Photographer’s Heroine

fans stop waving

he is amused by you
hate temporarily dispelled
you know it could change again
but the moment is the stronger force

sounds outside disturb the wood
signifiers of people who don’t decide to laugh

what could you do

the spot at the corner of vision isn’t enough to grab your attention

The Vacancy Alter Ego

looking narrow
still lost
framing forced decision
a court
filling the emptiness
ambushed by inadequate models
creativity
when you get there die
investigation
evolutionary inevitability
idiots and liars
chased by their own creations
warm animals
shooting themselves
this planet rolls away
the false dreamer
will never know giants
in the hand
happiness in the confusion
the reality of suicide
on public transport
the truth
of humankind
every time

Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World

2009-09-24T10:36:00.000+01:00

Celebrate the Centenary of Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry at the Bluecoat in Liverpool.

Their celebration of Malcolm Lowry (1909 - 57) features a special centenary exhibition and a programme of performances and events.

His Under the Volcano, set in Mexico and written in Canada, is considered one of the most significant 20th century novels, and has influenced painters, filmmakers, choreographers, musicians as well as writers.

This exhibition brings together artists from Merseyside, the UK, Mexico and Chile, each relating to Lowry in different ways.

An illustrated book, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, published by Liverpool University Press in collaboration with the Bluecoat and edited by Helen Tookey and Bryan Biggs, includes images from the exhibition and texts by Lowry's biographer Gordon Bowker and others, and was launched on Thursday. It includes two Edge Hill writing staff, Ailsa Cox and Robert Sheppard. Ailsa has written a short story. I've submitted an account of visiting Lowry's grave (in my native Sussex). See the image taken at the launch event at the Bluecoat on Thursday, above right, featuring Ailsa, Mark Goodall, another contributor to the book, and me holding up the specially-brewed Wapping Brewery Malcolm Lowry Golden Ale so that yet another contrubutor, Colin Dilnot, could snap it for his Lowry website, link below.

In 1979 I visited Lowry's grave in Ripe, Sussex, and wrote a long poem about the event, which I never published. Returning to the text thirty years later (it was part of my MA in Creative Writing at UEA) I have 'written through' it, commenting on the poem, and in particular on the unused notes left out of the piece (which seem to me more revealing). Adding to this, descriptions of photographs taken on the day, and several quotes on and about Lowry, it amounts to a celebration and critique of the 'clinker-built brilliance' of Lowry's writing, and a reflection upon writerly process, a poetics.

For further investigations of the local origins of Malcolm Lowry and its influence on his writings see Colin Dilnot's extensive blog Malcom Lowry At The Nineteenth Hole.

Iain Sinclair at Edge Hill

2009-09-22T16:25:00.000+01:00

(Image (c) Tim Power). Tim Power's photograph of Iain Sinclair relaxing in the Buck i'th'Vine in Ormskirk was taken after Iain's reading at Edge Hill a year or so ago. Read previ9us postings:

Sinclair's long poem Patrick Hamilton.

And Robert Sheppard on the Social Poetics of Iain Sinclair which is accompanied by another photo of Iain, taken by Tim Power, at the reading itself, and is followed by Sheppard's writings on Sinclair's early poem Lud Heat.

Introducing Andrew Taylor

2009-09-16T16:21:00.001+01:00

Andrew Taylor reading at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool as part of an Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group group reading as a warm up to Allen Fisher (visible, seated left), at a Neon Highway event organised by editor and PPRG member Alice Lenkiewicz. photo: Andrew Taylor.

Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor and founder of erbacce and erbacce press. He has had six collections of poetry published to-date. The latest, Make Some Noise is published by Original Plus. An e-book is forthcoming from Differentia Press. Recent poems have appeared in journals and e-zines such as Calliope Nerve, The Exuberant Ashtray, Willows Wept Review and Full of Crow. Poetics - ‘A Poetics of Absence – part one’ has appeared in Otoliths and is re-published in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos, ed. Rupert Loydell, (Salt), which we are launching soon.He has a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from Edge Hill University

He has a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from Edge Hill University.

See his blog here.

A Poetics of Absence Part II

The Permission to Continue

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
to rest unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

A life's work? Writing after the fact

tasked to reflect from tower block
balconies

like an empty colour slide I'm black and white inside

Industrial heartland wasteland
regeneration the smell of the docks
college of further education
of higher education

university status university

poetics as exploration

poetics as continuance

When I sleep alone I hear the sound of your breathing

re-visitation evokes memories
If I stand here long enough will you appear?

Such diversions – they test Take Courage

Wars. It's the forgetting. The peril of loss.

Without trace
a red double-decker bus sits idle
in the middle of the street a blackbird hello blackbird
stands amongst the debris

A visit to Test Place
River now merely penthouse background
we consume much more nowadays
the boats carry shit
or sightseeing passengers

Bates Salve cures wounds & sores

Stops, station buffets, road links

to walk the river's edge at twilight
offers new perspective
watch the greyness fade

Poetics as memory
Poetics as provider

London's outmoded DNA –
workmen's cafés, dingy pubs –
disappears. If anything survives from
post-war newsreels of civic improvement, it is
heritaged, squeezed between commas.

Liverpool your public land too
is being sold to private developers

place [your] feet in the deep tracks they make

poetics for now

Because we love to look at them [the stars]
we hope maybe they love to look at us

across such landscapes fairy lights predict
the glow

poetics says: look back, look forward, look straight ahead and cross the page.

follow Mail Train lines
Queens Park and Kensal Green

company alters routine
morning making
matters better
resting after exercise

poetics as investigation
poetics as sound

such sweet piano chords
the melody weaves a quiet voice

poetics as consolidation

The recovery of a memory is a present day
activity. It's not the past. Memory occurs in the present.

It should all become clear

from Cumbrian mountains to York stone pavements

the letter K carved
an indication

I don't know why I am tied to the winter

exit from Bankside
point me towards Eros

All through the storm, the frost, and the snow,
Death on our black horizon pulses clear

off the route
and mast head of the evening paper

I idle the thoughts of Woking

Last night I dreamt that outside Melling Church
I told you that I still loved you

Poetry as lifesaver as life giver

To A Fox II

Autumn falls lanes
drop darkness
hedgerows trimmed
fields ploughed

in preparation

Roadside awareness
flash of white
twilight nocturne image
of a moment

nice moment actually, dusk was falling,

lovely watery sunset which was very enigmatic
amongst the overgrown runway strip......
also managed to locate abandoned buildings
that formed the old hospital site on the airfield
in amongst some woods......very, very scary though.

En-route accompanied
chatter of engine whistle
of rack scratched inside
journey reinterpretation

Sleek tell-tale signs

Unhexed through lanes
a darkened memory
trimmed hedgerows
ploughed fields an escape route

(With thanks to Antony Harding)

Signboards: old type of writing

Transparency adaptation
siren insight

intersection and sodium highlights
present a few streets away

Future plans

every so often
it all becomes clear

source a manipulation
an epic example

context over content
such tasteful digitized blurs

Why Do You Come Here When You Know It Makes Things Hard For Me?

Ever presence followed
like the first star that guides
as night falls

across the hills and into
the bay the turbines stand
firm as that

day the wind ate my face
icily from the end of
the pier

These tracks that lead
to you lay cold while
steam rises

from railway station waiting
rooms this moment this
passing where

does it come from?

***

To here knows when
phased like worn tape
through patio

doors washed cars
stood path bound soap
pools gathered

capturing the light
through the orchard
where memories

are fixed as the day
you stood photographed
in the white

of your wedding dress

Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim - Erbacce interview

2009-09-12T16:05:00.001+01:00

Over the last week I've been interviewed, via email, by Alan Corkish, the co-editor of Erbacce magazine, which is to publish an edition dedicated to the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group. Alan asked me what colour I would recommend for the cover, and I replied 'Blue', which led to a mild Frank ('Old Blue Eyes') Sinatra reference. So here he is, with Antonio Carlos, in exemplary relaxed mode. If you can't see the connecction between this and poetry may I point you towards the fact that this bossa nova song (like many others by Jobim) features the lyrics of poet Vincius de Moreas. Additionally, readers are directed to the anthology Sinatra, but buddy, I'm a Kind of Poem, edited by Gilbert L Gigliotti, and published by Entasis Press, Washington DC (2008), to see the range of contemporary poets who have written about Sinatra. (It includes my own 'Angel at the Junk Box', which appears in Complete Twentieth Century Blues.)

However, all of the above is a just a chain of excuses unrolled to justify keeping this extraordinary clip from a test run to link to YouTube!

GOING PUBLIC Autumn 2009

2009-09-08T10:33:00.000+01:00

(Cliff Yates and Angela Keaton waiting to record the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics group CD: Points of Reference) (Photo: Andrew Taylor)

Celebrating a decade of poetics at Edge Hill

1. Talks and Launch Series (in the Education Block)

Open Meetings of the Poetry and Poetics Research Group (free – all welcome) all at 6.30-8.30
The whole series will be launching the Salt poetics anthology Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh (edited by Rupert Loydell) (four of the group are featured) http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/anth/9781844714711.htm

This is an eclectic and exciting gathering of poetry and prose-poems that try to understand what poetry is and who or what it might be for. It is also about what writers might want or demand from poetry, in either a general or personal way.

8th October 2009: Scott Thurston will discuss his book Internal Rhyme to be published next year by Shearsman.

This will also be a chance to celebrate the new Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, co-edited by Sheppard and Thurston

15th October 2009:

Cliff Yates: on poetic, tba

Andrew Taylor: ‘The Poetics of Absence – part two’: a continuation and reflection upon the work in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh.

29th October 2009:

Dee Mc Mahon: ‘Stories of the Line - Provocation, Process and Product’

Robert Sheppard: ‘Fictional Poems and Fictional Poetics: the double oeuvre of René Van Valckenborch’

5th November 2009:

Daniele Pantano:
'Living in Translation: A Discussion of Exile, Translingualism, and Writing Your Way Home.'

Michael Egan: poetics, tba.

2. Reading and Launch

11th November 7.30 in The Rose Theatre £3.50

Cliff Yates will be reading from Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (out from Salt now: www.saltpublishig.com/books/smp/9781844715039.htm)

Support act: members of the poetry and poetics research group

Official journals:

Pages online, here, of course!

And Erbacce will be publishing a print edition dedicated to the group (details online at http://www.erbacce.com/)

Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group members past and present include: Robert Sheppard, Cliff Yates, Andrew Taylor, Scott Thurston, Neil Addison, Bill Drennan, Dee McMahon, Matt Fallaize, Daniele Pantano, Steve Van Hagen, Michael Egan, Colin Harris, Patricia Farrell, Angela Keaton and Alice Lenkiewicz.

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry

2009-09-02T10:05:00.000+01:00

The first issue is out now, 112 pages in length and the contents are as follows:

EDITORIAL: Scott Thurston and Robert Sheppard

Dragging at the haemorrhage of uns : Maggie
O Sullivan s excavations of Irish history
Mandy Bloomfield

Democratic consensus in J. H. Prynne s Refuse Collection
Ian Davidson

Veronica Forrest-Thomson s Cordelia , tradition and
the Triumph of Artifice
Gareth Farmer

Expectant contexts : Corporeal and desiring spaces in
Denise Riley s poetry
Christine Kennedy and David Kennedy

BOOK REVIEWS
Tony Lopez, Meaning Performance
Reviewed by Robert Sheppard

John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch
Reviewed by Scott Thurston

Learn how to subscribe at http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry

If you'd like to sneak a peak inside the issue and view article opening pages, abstracts and keywords then these have been uploaded to Scribd.com: http://www.scribd.com/doc/18479585/Journal-of-British-and-Irish-Innovative-Poetry-Abstracts

Anthony Levings, Managing Editor, Gylphi Limited

Robert Sheppard: Poetics 4: Some British Poetics

2009-08-23T17:49:00.000+01:00

Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and Poets on Writing, edited by Denise Riley, (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), and some of the anthologies referred to in the previous three postings on this subject, can be used to provide a limited guide to British poetics of the avant-garde. I have formed from them a representative cluster of texts, though with a number of important exclusions that result form this decision: for example, the poetics work of Allen Fisher, that of the apparently tight-lipped Tom Raworth, and that of the senior experimentalist Christopher Middleton. Indeed, I compare Allen Fisher’s Necessary Business (1985) to Charles Bernstein’s ‘The Artifice of Absorption’ (1986) elsewhere to assess both the contents and forms of the poetics of the North American and British avant-gardes. These two formally hybrid works constitute exemplary poetics and demonstrate its faculty of keeping its arguments open by its very disposition in form. Middleton's poetics I speak of in my inaugural leccture. Doubtless my method throws up other exclusions, but the effort is worth the risks.

A link with the North American tradition is immediately apparent in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Preface to New Poems’ (1920), which is quoted a great deal in American poetics, and was, in any case, the preface to the American edition of his poems; it compares the poetry of rigid finished thought, which he associated with metrical form, with the fluid poetry of the future, which Lawrence predicted would embody itself as a process in an organic free verse. (Cook 2004: 106-110) Mina Loy, though of British birth, thought of herself and of the subject of her essay ‘Modern Poetry’, as distinctly American by the time she wrote it (1925), despite her earlier close involvement with European futurism. Her review essay focuses upon rhythm as a metaphorical quality of attention and – less fashionably - as an imprint of the poet’s own nature (which is a constant of her various poetics). (Cook 2004: 131-34)

W.S. Graham – a Scottish poet who has a growing reputation as a precursor to recent innovative poetries – prefigures the imagery of his later poetry by figuring language as a beast (as well as material) in his ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (1946). Though a made thing, the poem is not static, as it is taken on board by the reader, again suggesting one of the later themes of his verse, which developed into a poetics-medium of its own, like Wallace Stevens’. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 117-121) Graham’s first mentor, Dylan Thomas, in his ‘Notes on the Art of Poetry’ (1951), actually an epistolary answer to questions from a student, covers a number of unrelated issues: from his early love of the sound of words to his decision as a craftsman to use any or every element of poetic artifice; from his denial of the non-rational method of the Surrealists to his refusal to define poetry (which, in poetics, is as common a theme as the attempt to define it). (Scully 1966: 195-204) Thomas’ fellow-Welshman, David Jones’ ‘The Preface to The Anathemata’ (1952) is an apologia for his great epic poem in terms of the author’s linguistic, cultural and religious inheritance, and his making of this into an artefact of signs. (Scully 1966: 205-236) Basil Bunting’s ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ (1966) is loquacious by Bunting’s standards of self-commentary, which he normally kept to the acerbic minimum. He affirms the primacy of sound over sense, beauty over meaning, or rather his notion that meaning is in the sound of the poem read (well) out loud. This is a good example of where poetics is both a guide to the work, but it is best read against it. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 81-2) Pure sound, though, has been theorised well. Bob Cobbing’s ‘A Statement of Sound Poetry’ (1969) is one of his rare excursions into poetics, outlining the abandonment of lexical items in sound poetry (but reminding us that the uniqueness of his own work was that it was also visual). (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 426)

John James’ ‘A Theory of Poetry’ (1977) is an ironic poem that plays with the kinds of interpretations that entered Britain on the back of continental theory in the 1970s, as I show elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 249-252) Veronica Forrest-Thomson knew some of that theory well but abandoned it for the development of her own strategies of dealing with the processes of naturalisation and for a theory of reading that respected both meaningful and non-meaningful elements of poetic artifice in her book Poet Artifice. ‘From Poetic Artifice’ (1978) combines her theoretical introduction with a portion of the book where she uses her own poem as an exemplar of her poetics, which derives from her theory of artificial devicehood. (Riley 1992: 222-233; see another excerpt in Cook 2004: 456-463). By contrast, John Riley’s ‘What Are You Going to Call It?’ (1980) is an impressionistic narrative of creativity that resists critical thinking, or rather resists the embracing of those ideas by a true poet. He or she had better abandon bogus ideas in favour of immersion in the rhythms of the earth. Not surprisingly, the short piece deliberately turns into what appears to be a species of prose-poetry. (Riley 1992: 83-4) Michael Haslam’s ‘The Subject of Poems’ (1992) is an ‘outsider’ poetics that opens poetry to notions of truth and purity, and the transcendental ego which patterns itself into poems. (Riley 1992: 70-80) Peter Riley’s ‘The Creative Moment of the Poem’ (1992) is an attempt – at some length – to grasp that moment and to reflect upon it. (Riley 1992: 92-113)

Ken Edwards’ ‘Grasping the Plural’ (1984/1992) is a text deriving from an American language poet-style ‘talk’ on the use of ‘we’ in poetry and elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 21-9) John Hall’s ‘Writing and Not Writing’ (1992) is a variety of non-poetics, since it concerns the act of renouncing writing poetry altogether; I examine Edwards’ and Hall’s contributions elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 41-9)

Nigel Wheale’s ‘A Curve of Reading’ (1992) is an impressionistic account of the growth of the poet’s sensibility, peppered with quotations from poems, popular songs, and sound-bites of poetics. (Riley 1992: 124-134) Geoffrey Ward’s ‘Objects That Come Alive at Night’ (1992) similarly traces influences but sees poetry, via the poetics of both Shelley and Bernstein, as a utopian critique created by alternative images. (Riley 1992: 135-39) John Welch’s ‘Two Poems’ (1992) is a text in poetry and prose that meditates upon, mediates between, the signs that appear in writing and those that appear in dreams. (Riley 1992: 151-3) John Wilkinson’s ‘Imperfect Pitch’ (1992) combines poetry and prose in the classic format of Dante’s La Vita Nouva, alternating poetry with ‘commentary’, though here the prose is as elliptical as the poems. At one point it theorises lyric poetry (the poetry between its prose, it implies) at once as a strict binding of representation to poetic presentation, as an excessive projection of a doomed pretentiousness, and as abundant exploding of space and a freeing of itself from nature. (Riley 1992: 154-172)

Kelvin Corcoran’s ‘Sometimes a Word will Start it’ (1992) demonstrates these titular words about poetic genesis that Corcoran has borrowed from John Ashbery; a prose passage dwells on three ‘favourite’ letters and then seems to segue into a resulting poem about his father. (Riley 1992: 173-77) Ralph Hawkins’ ‘A Period of Gestation’ (1992) opens up his poet’s notebook to the way randomly interesting quotations trigger poems. (Riley 1992: 253-259) Roy Fisher’s ‘Poet on Writing’ (1992), also sees the notebook experience as primary to the development of poetic ideas. Indeed, it argues that the multitude of notebooks he keeps sometimes seems to be his major occupation. (Riley 1992: 272-75) Carlyle Reedy’s ‘Working Processes of a Woman Poet’ (1992) also spells out a number of writerly methods in a practical poetics. (Riley 1992: 260-271) Tom Lowenstein’s ‘About Filibustering in Samsāra’ (1992), on the other hand, is a direct statement on his poem (printed alongside it in the anthology Poets on Writing) and its ethnographic sources and borrowings from native Inuit poetics (Riley 1992: 207-8). Douglas Oliver’s ‘Three Lilies’ (1982/1992) is an offshoot of his study Poetry and Narrative in Performance (1989), about prosody in action. Prosody is the life beat of poetry, and his account of it is combined with a personal consideration of the thematics of his work, including the implications of real-life emotions becoming transfigured in poetry.

Edwin Morgan, on the verge of his eightieth year, reflects on his long career in ‘Roof of Fireflies’ (1999). He considers the poems he did not write (another species of non-poetics), but also justifies his own extraordinary stylistic range as a kind of poetic diversity modelled on the necessity of its ecological cousin, bio-diversity. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 190-194) Elaine Feinstein’s ‘A Question of Voice’ (2000) also looks back on a long career, and on her turn towards the tradition of American poetry described above. (Indeed as a student her enquiry had provoked Olson to write his statement of poetics ‘Letter to Elaine Feinstein’. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 158-161)) Perhaps under the influence of her work on Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, she confirms her position as a lyric poet, and poetry’s function in making us feel alive. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 188-9) As against this earnestness one may pitch Scottish poet Robert Crawford’s ‘Cosmopolibackofbeyondism’ (2000), which argues for a regional internationalism, a parodic manifesto in typical postmodernist style, (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 262-4) as is John Hartley Williams’ ‘A Manifesto’ (2000) which argues for ‘extilism’, a neologism compounded of the words, ‘Exile, extricate, extrapolate, inexplicable and ectoplasm’, whose tenets amount to a poetry of denial and a vanishing of the poet! (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 287-8)

Even allowing for the relative sizes of the countries involved, poetics as a conscious practice flourishes (often under that name) in the USA and Canada, while it only appears intermittently, and with some resistance, in Britain and (on the evidence I have gathered) hardly at all in Irish avant garde poetry (although the poetics of a poet of trenchantly Irish ancestry, Maggie O’Sullivan, are fulsome and worthy of comment elsewhere). One exception is Randolph Healy’s ‘Uncertain Questions’, collected in 99 Poets/ 1999: An International Poetics Symposium, an issue of the journal Boundary 2, which confessedly caricatures the stultifying nationalistic consciousness that Irish people – and poets – felt obliged to indwell, but shows its gradual undermining by the progressive epistemologies of the twentieth century, particularly in science and mathematics, to provide new models of the world, capable of countering the simplicities of identity politics and poetics. This very essay perhaps suggests the difficult conditions that Irish alternative poetries have in articulating themselves. Of course, one of the influences on the avant-garde writers of the British Isles is precisely the poetics of this American verse, so the inheritances are not clear-cut in national terms (and, on occasions, run the other way, a precedent set by D.H. Lawrence in 1920).

Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry is a book of two halves, presenting a wide selection of avant-garde poetics of the first half of the twentieth century in its own first half. It is less useful for the poetics of recent work. This is also true of its coverage of British and Irish poetics, my account of which makes use of this anthology and the essential Poets on Writing, edited by Denise Riley. The pages on British and Irish poetics also call on Scully and Rothenberg and Joris and 99 Poets/ 1999: An International Poetics Symposium.

The recent anthology, edited by Rupert Loydell, Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh (Salt, 2009), may also widen the potential list of anthologised poetics. The use of anthologies, as in my other accounts of poetics, necessarily omits certain texts, but it heightens a cumulative sense of poetics as a discourse of contrasts.

A Note on these poetics postings.

These lists – partly because they are lists – have been excluded from the study of poetics I have bveen working on. Reference to the use of poetics in creative writing may be seen in my piece The Necessity of Poetics which can be read in one version on Pores: www.bbk.ac.uk/pores. It is this sense of poetics that is explored by the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group and what will are celebrating this autumn. Four of our members or ex-memebers are included in Troubles Swapped for Something Else - and we shall be celebrating this fact.

Robert Sheppard: North American Poetics: A Sample

2009-08-01T14:31:00.000+01:00

Jerome Rothenberg states rightly that a characteristic of poets ‘has been the push … to self-define their workings, often in a language that makes a continuity with how they speak within their poems’, and I shall be making some play of the variety of forms in the poetics discussed. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 405) Each of these North American poets, in the interests of economy, is represented by one work only, using the list of publications established in an earlier post, and I will comment only a little on each.

Amy Lowell’s ‘Poetry as a Spoken Art’ (1917) emphasises the audible qualities of poetry and offers an apologia for free verse as rhythmical utterance. (Cook 2004: 69-74) Ezra Pound’s ‘A Retrospect’ (1918) has been reprinted often, thus reinforcing my earlier contention that Pound operates, in this limited field only, as a kind of specific rather than a universal founder of discursivity. Pound, like Lowell, offers a justification of free verse or for particular rhythmical contours as analogues for certain emotions, but he adds his famous ‘Don’ts’, which additionally emphasise imagistic clarity and verbal economy. (Cook 2004: 83-90; Scully 1966: 30-43; Herbert and Hollis 2000: 17-25) T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), is a poetics for the writing that became The Waste Land, stressing how tradition impacts upon the present act of writing, and how modernist ‘impersonality’ is an escape from personality and false emotion, almost an escape into tradition, as the poem attempted to prove. (Cook 2004: 97-105) Hart Crane’s ‘General Aims and Theories’ (1925) suggests ways for the modern poet to incorporate the industrial and urban energies of the modern world into the creation of a new poetry of impersonal consciousness and spiritual illumination. (Cook 2004: 135-38) Wallace Stevens takes on the form of the aphorism in ‘Adagia’ (1934-40) to articulate a nuanced sense of a similar impersonality, testing out various metaphors for poetry as the supreme fiction. His contention that ‘The theory of poetry is the life of poetry’ expresses a commitment to poetics, a commitment felt throughout his poetry itself. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 56-66; 66) Gertrude Stein likewise was given to ‘explanation’ of a peculiarly indirect kind. ‘Poetry and Grammar’ (1935) is one of her famous lectures which justifies her work to the baffled audience created by her unlikely celebrity; in her repetitive, apparently simple prose (not unlike the texture of the creative work itself) she presents the history of her writing as the struggle to find the difference between poetry and prose, only to find that nouns and an experimental mode of minimal naming are the constituents of her poetry. (Cook 2004: 208-214) William Carlos Williams’ ‘Introduction to The Wedge’ (1944) is a short passionate modernist definition of the poem as a machine, whose parts must all function. However, he rejects formal poetic artifice for this machine, while reminding his readership of the fact that poets make such machines rather than deliver utterances. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 137-139) Langston Hughes’ ‘How to Be a Bad Writer (in ten easy lessons)’ (1949/50) is a parody of the Creative Writing ‘how to’ book: an ironical list of mistakes aimed specifically at African American writers. One offence is to refuse to write about everyday experience; another is to use archaic diction. Slapdash work and bohemian dissipation are likewise satirised. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 127-8)

Like Pound’s poetics, Charles Olson’s much anthologised essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) is often cited as a source of others’ poetics and, just as importantly, as a much imitated model for its writing, with its abrupt, demotic, fiercely intelligent but trenchantly non-academic tone. It presents a poetics of perceptual and scriptural kinetics, theorising the poem as a field of verbal energy, whose moments of creation gather the poem’s subject matter in an improvisatory sweep. (Cook 2004: 288-295; (Scully 1966: 271-282) (Allen and Tallman 1973: 147-158 (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 92-99) Louis Zukofsky’s already discussed Objectivist ‘A Statement for Poetry’ (1950), recasts Pound’s three types of poetry into the simpler categories of image, sound and concept, as components of a poem whose form will develop prosody during its composition, though not in the improvisatory manner of projective verse. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 143-6)

e.e. cummings’ preface ‘An Introduction’ (c. 1955) oddly works to delimit the impact of the poems they introduce: by denying their possible universality and their social engagement, for example, in favour of a private communion with the reader in the name of beauty. (Scully 1966: 124-125) The first half of Marianne Moore’s essay ‘Idiosyncrasy and Technique’ (c. 1956) opts for the efficacy of the technique of straight writing, that is, without obfuscatory diction or elaborate ornament; the second half, on ‘Idiosyncrasy’, concerns subject matter, particularly the elusive materials one can garner from literature (she quotes one of her allusive poems) and from life. (Scully 1966: 107-122)

Robert Duncan’s ‘Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus’ (1956) recapitulates and reaffirms the axioms of post-Poundian poetics. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 187-195) Olson’s ex-student, Edward Dorn, in his similarly entitled ‘What I See in The Maximus Poems’ (1961) looks not to history, but to geography, and finds in Olson’s work an investigation of the particularity of place, with which Dorn elsewhere makes his own poetic continuity. (Cook 2004: 361-366)

John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’ (1959) is a performance text that constitutes its own poetics (or vice versa) arranged in strict columns, across which a text about the making of itself (as poetry, as form) may be recited in fragments with unnatural silences to defamiliarise it for the contemplating audience. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 413-15)

Frank O’Hara’s ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ (1959) parodies the manifesto form to argue for a pragmatics of formal description and an ironical intimacy of address in the poetic exchange. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 353-355) Allen Ginsberg’s ‘When the Mode of the Music Changes the Walls of the City Shake’ (1961) begins with an attack on conventional forms for their inability to register the complexities of perception and consciousness (specifically Ginsberg’s own!) and ends by hailing a revolution in American letters. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 324-330) John Weiners’ ‘The Address of the Watchman to the Night’ (1963) rejects his earlier bohemianism of depraved excess in favour of a poetics of perpetual alertness to that which is close to hand. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 351-2) Amiri Baraka’s ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’ (1964) (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 420-22) is a more public act of renunciation and realignment: a manifesto poem for black consciousness poetry, arguing the recognition of the symbolic power of black history and the actual power of black revolt. The appearance of this poem on disk, set to aggressive free jazz by The New York Art Quartet in 1965, propels poetics into a strictly performative context. Adrienne Rich’s ‘Poetry and Experience: Statement at a Poetry Reading’ (1964) was a publicly uttered renunciation of her former poetics, as her work became more militantly feminist. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 141-2)

Denise Levertov’s ‘Notes on Organic Form’ (1965) melds her post-Olsonian inheritance with an older Romanticism, perhaps owing to her English poetic origins in the 1940s, so that Hopkins’ concept of the instress is re-functioned as the shape of an experience as that is negotiated by the shaping of the poem. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 312-317) In contrast, Jackson MacLow’s short ‘Statement’ (c. 1965) outlines his anarchist poetics of procedural technique, allowing minimal intentional interruptions by the authorial ego. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 384-5)

Jack Spicer’s ‘Excerpts from the Vancouver Lectures’ (1965) are transcriptions of extemporised remarks made at a poetry conference, and range from the mystical idea of writing as ‘dictation’ to the identification of the serial poem as way of structuring intermittent consciousness. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 227-234) As academic interest in the New American Poetry grew, the lecture room increasingly became a site for poetics. Both Robert Creeley’s lecture, ‘I’m Given to Write Poems’ (Allen and Tallman 1973: 263-273) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s account of the writing of a poem in his ‘Genesis of After the Cries of the Birds’ were delivered at the same conference in Berlin in 1967, thus also reminding us of both the public and the inter-authorial communication at such events at which poetics is disseminated. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 445-449) Creeley’s title recognises the pressure to write and the feeling that a poem is ‘being permitted to continue’ in its improvisatory unpredictable coming into being (to use his description that has been recast into a definition of poetics itself, in the hands of Rachel Blau DuPlessis. She calls poetics 'permission to continue'.). (Allen and Tallman 1973: 263)

Gary Snyder’s heady mix of Buddhism and ecology, ‘Poetry and the Primitive’ (1967), sees poetry as an essential ‘ecological survival technique’, a view that has recently become popular again, thus demonstrating that repressed poetics have the possibility of return in new situations. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 395-406; 395) John Ashbery’s ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’ (1968) is a lecture to the Yale Art School on the concept of the avant-garde (the irony of the venue is not lost on Ashbery) in which he reflects upon a polito-poetical situation that he has surely experienced; when his or her avant-garde practice is assimilated to cultural taste, a truly vanguard artist must learn to escape this automatic acceptance. (Cook 2004: 393-398) This is ironical, given that as Ashbery was writing, a new avant-garde was just around the corner, ready to take up that challenge. Robert Grenier’s ‘On Speech’ (1971) is arguably the founding document of the poetics of the Language Poets, with its anti-Olsonian admonition ‘I HATE SPEECH’ that emphasises a primarily scriptural context for writing. (Silliman 1986: 496-7)

Ishmael Reed’s ‘Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto’ (c. 1972) is as playful as Reed’s novels in presenting a tricksterish pan-African diasporic energy manifesting in what he calls the ‘Now Locomotive’ of the moment. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 440-41)

Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Letter to Miss Pierson’ (1975) takes the form of an answer to specific questions from a correspondent; Bishop advocates a course of exhaustive reading (but not reading ‘too much about poetry’) and balances the necessity of hard work (as is evident in her own case) against the mysterious and surprising aspects of writerly process. (Herbert and Hollis 2000:104-5; 101)

Between 1971-5, Bernadette Mayer and the Members of her St Mark’s Church Poetry Project Writing Workshop assembled their ‘Experiments’ (1978), a series of creative writing exercises that has proved authoritative and has been subsequently supplemented by Charles Bernstein and others. (Silliman 1986: 557-560) Clark Coolidge’s ‘from Arrangement’ (1978), an excerpt from a public class at the Naropa Institute, is a lesson in the practical reading of non-referential writing, such as his own. (Silliman 1986: 553-4)

Jerome Rothenberg’s ‘New Models, New Visions: Some Notes Toward a Poetics of Performance’ (1977) argues for the centrality of a paradigm-breaking poetic practice that combines ethnopoetics and the avant-garde, and combines performance strategies with those for the page alone. (Hoover 1994: 640-44) Likewise concerned with performance, but in a specific context, Steve McCaffery’s ‘Text-Sound, Energy and Performance’ (1978) praises the somatic excesses of sound poetry which arguably release repressed energies and (non-)meanings ordinarily latent in language. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 427) On the other hand, Edward Sanders’ ‘Investigative Poetry’ (1976) argues for a new genre of writing as radical historical recovery through a documentarist poetics. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 430-32)

Rae Armantrout’s ‘Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?’ (1978) deals with the sexual political question it asks, but also defines a poetry that is not ‘language-oriented’ at all, but one that, in her characteristic way of cutting to the chase, ‘sees itself as well as the world’, and brushes to one side a binary between text and experience that has both sustained and vitiated American poetry . (Silliman 1986: 544-546; 546) (Coincidentylally, it's a formulation I've recently reversed; let's see the world as well as the poem!) It is almost ironical, therefore, that this short piece, like many that follow from that rising avant-garde, appeared in the poetics journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, in this case, in its founding issue. Ron Silliman’s ‘From The New Sentence’ (1979) furnishes the poetics of a collagist mode of poets’ prose influential with that grouping. (Silliman 1986: 561-575)

‘My Poetry’ (c. 1980), by David Bromige - a wonderful man, whose recent death was a great sadness - is a typically teasing and hyperbolic account of his past works, a parody of pseudo-poetics as an explanatory gesture, but he intermittently reveals an underlying yearning for authenticity. (Silliman 1986: 216-226)

Susan Howe’s ‘P. INMAN, Platin’ (1980) takes the form of a book review, but through it Howe presents her poetics of fractured and discontinuous surface. (Silliman 1986: 555-6) Similarly, Bruce Andrews’ ‘Misrepresentation’ (1980), subtitled ‘A text for The Tennis Court Oath of John Ashbery’, is also a reflection on a book, this time the early (and often rejected) avant-garde work Ashbery published in 1962. It is an effusive endorsement of the kinds of textual exuberance we find in Andrews’ own work (and in his poetics, of which he is a continual practitioner). (Silliman 1986: 520-529) The serial poetics statements of Language Poets Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman, ‘for Change’ (1982) are terse position-statements sent from one avant-garde to the central magazine of another, French, avant-garde, a mode of poetics exchange not common. (Silliman 1986: 484-490) Carla Harryman’s ‘Foreword’ (1980) is a piece of poet’s prose that resembles her ‘creative’ work, in a refusal of the division between discourses. (Silliman 1986: 483) Stephen Rodefer’s ‘Preface to Four Lectures’ (1981) stands back to explain how the collagist nature of urban experience determined the fractured surface of his serial poem: a musical and painterly structure resembling both a museum and reality beyond. (Silliman 1986: 515- 1981) Charles Bernstein, to whom reference is made throughout this work for his commitment to poetics, and who is the subject of my next chapter, is well represented by the essay ‘Writing and Method’ (1981) which hovers around its central axiom that creative work is itself already a kind of poetics: ‘All writing is a demonstration of method; it can assume a method or investigate it.’ (Silliman 1986: 590) This, in turn, might be thought of the central poetics statement of Bernstein as a poet. (Silliman 1986: 583-598) Barrett Watten’s ‘Method and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ (1984) is part of Watten’s critical journey through several volumes to define the operational social contexts for the writings of the language group, in this case its central journal, and thus of himself; he often alarmingly uses his own works as exemplars, in a way that transgresses pure poetics. (Silliman 1986: 599-612) Lyn Hejinian’s 'The Rejection of Closure' (1984) argues for the ‘open text’ as against the closed, not metrically as in earlier poetics, but in terms of interpretive choices deliberately offered to the reader. (Hoover 1994: 653-658)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ ‘Otherhow, Feminist Poetics, Modernism, the Avant-Garde’ (1985) is an extract from her book The Pink Guitar, from which I have above quoted one of the most useful definitions of poetics; she theorises avant-garde practice as an investigation (jointly) of genre and gender. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 433-435) Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s ‘How Pastoral: A Manifesto’ (1993) consists of a statement and a commentary that elaborates her list of ‘wants’ and ‘wishes’. Her desire for a ‘poetics of historical responsibility’ is fuelled by a need to haunt the interstices and absurdities of history. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 21-26; 26)

Dick Higgins’ ‘Intermedia Chart’ (1995) is a multiple Venn diagram showing the overlapping of intermedia experiments between elements such as concrete poetry and Fluxus; the gesture of poetics is enacted by the inclusion of circles marked simply with question-marks, reminding us that poetics is a self-generating activity oriented towards the future. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 428)

Harryette Mullen’s ‘Poetry and Identity’ (1996) considers her early work, immediately identified as ‘black’ writing, and her later identity as an avant-gardist, which challenges those (and other) identities. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 27-31) Kristin Prevallet’s ‘Investigating the Procedure: Poetry and the Source’ (2002) deals with the inheritance from earlier forms of documentarist poetics like Sanders’, to outline a processual practice she has made her own. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 115-129) Mark Wallace’s ‘Towards a Free Multiplicity of Form’ sees a similar, though wider, inheritance of forms for a post-Language poetry avant-garde, though it sees pitfalls in both automatically declaring some forms (politically) liberating and by delimiting the possibilities of ‘the lyric’, for example. (1996/2002) (Wallace and Marks 2002: 191-203) Elizabeth Willis’ ‘The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric’ (2002), offers more narrow evidence, around the late 1990s, of a return to lyric in experimental American writing. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 225-35)

A number of recent writers have adopted disconnected forms for poetics which make continuity with their modes of creative writing itself, but possibly reveal a limitation of these poetics. Reading these documents, I feel a need for a more definitive statement, a feeling that the discourse might risk becoming an evasion of poetics as a mode, perhaps has developed conventions and paradigms that – in the true spirit of poetics – need breaking. Andrew Levy’s ‘An Indispensable Coefficient of Esthetic Order’ (1996/2002) is a free and speculative meditation upon what the author’s relationship to (his) poetry might become, which he characterises as a form of silence in which (what he does not want to call) subject matter forms. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 381-394) Tan Lin’s ‘ambient stylistics’ (2002) is a sprawling piece of autobiographical poetics, dealing with the conditions of truth-telling in poetry and with poetry as a deliberate imprecise measure of that which cannot be measured (the world). (Wallace and Marks 2002: 339-365) Sianne Ngai’s ‘Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust’ (1998/2002), on the other hand, is anything but impressionistic. A traditional essay, owing to Bataille and other theorists, this piece rejects the ritualistic declarations of ‘desire’ as aesthetic aim or motivation in earlier poetics and replaces this with more negative excesses. But it does not turn to the lyric or any other repressed mode, but sees language itself as abjection: ‘A poetics of disgust, one that accommodates the subject’s negative potentiality in impotence or lack, can only emerge from poetry built from linguistic raw material.’ (Wallace and Marks 2002: 161-190; 180) Whatever one thinks of such abjection, the essay’s focus brings this history of (ongoing) American poetics to a convenient pause and reminds us that poetics is primarily about such ‘building’.

An obvious complementary source of poetics (and much else) is the literary interview. While the Paris Review interviews from the 1950s onwards are perhaps the best known and set the standard for its development, this type of recorded exchange is virtually an art form in its own right, with thousands of examples. Barbara Tomlinson’s Authors on Writing (2005), an analysis of metaphors used by writers to describe their processes, is drawn from such interviews; her representative corpus consists of 42 pages of references in small print. To focus on one writer alone, American poet Robert Creeley was a willing interviewee and, much to the delight of his interviewers (including myself) a garrulous and focussed talker. It is no wonder that there exist two volumes of some of these interviews with him, Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971 (1973) and Tales Out of School: Selected Interviews (1993). One example, ‘Linda Wagner: An Interview with Robert Creeley 1965’, appears in both books in differing versions (and in yet another version, in the canonical Paris Review series in 1968). In this mutating text, among other things, Creeley characteristically ‘speak(s) personally’ of his method of writing as the articulation in language of a moment’s improvisatory occasion. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 273-292; 281)

The poetic colonising of cyberspace began early and Creeley was one of the earliest pioneers as his Day Book of a Virtual Poet evinces (Creeley 1998). As poet in (virtual) residence he muses on poets, poetry and poetics, such as Williams’ famous poetics sound-bites, ‘Only the imagination is real’ and its qualifying ‘No ideas but in things’, ironically refunctioned by Creeley with reference to contemporary property rights. (Creeley 1998: 24) The internet, with its email lists, websites, and blogs is in a state of constant technological and phenomenological development. Perhaps the most extraordinary blog is Ron Silliman’s www.ronsilliman.com, which has attracted over a million hits, and which is almost daily concerned afresh with poetry and poetics. Slightly more ephemeral, though archived, are the discussion lists, such the British & Irish Poets email list. The danger of online debate is that ‘spats over terminology sputter out into mutual frustration or continue into areas very remote from poetry and poetics’, as Kit Fryatt reminds us in his ‘“Norms and Forms”: 10 Years of the British & Irish Poets e-mail list’. I can confirm this, having been a ‘lurker’ since its inception; the quality of posts in 1996 was higher than it was a decade later. (Fryatt 2007: 88) Fryatt remarks: ‘It is the nature of online communities to mutate, and sometimes to die off altogether, but long before they do, they generate complaints of a nostalgic nature.’ (93) It seems that the poetics discussion list, on both sides of the Atlantic, and in cyberspace, has not lived up to its optimistic beginnings as a forum for discussing poetics as a speculative discourse.

The anthologies used to compile this U.S. and Canadian corpus are Jonathan Cook’s Poetry in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, which offers other kinds of writing as well; James Scully’s pioneering Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. London and Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1966; Allen and Tallman’s The Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1973, which is an invaluable source; Rothenberg and Joris’ Poems for the Millennium. Berkeley: The University of California Press, two volumes, 1995 and 1998, which contains a selection of avant-garde poetics; Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree. Orono: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986, which was a major poetry anthology of the Language school, and which included sizeable poetics statements; Paul Hoover’s teaching anthology Postmodern American Poetry. New York and London: Norton, 1994, proved useful; Wallace and Marks’ Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Tuscaloosa: The Univerity of Alabama Press, 2002, was invaluable for tracking post-Language Poetry poetics; Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000, is a book of two halves, presenting a wide selection of avant-garde poetics of the first half of the twentieth century in its own first half. It is less useful for the poetics of recent work.

For poetics reaching into the 21st century I recommend ed. Craig Dworkin’s The Consequence of Innovation: 21st century poetics (New York: Roof, 2008), particularly for Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptual poetics. This would have featured in the above if it had been to hand at the time I composed the above.

Robert Sheppard: Poetics 2

2009-07-23T12:52:00.000+01:00

Poetics through and after Modernism: Some Texts

Given the range of forms and functions, it is impossible to provide a comprehensive survey of post-1900 world poetics (even limiting itself to poetry), but such a survey might include some of the following documents (arranged here mostly in chronological order and excluding those from the North Atlantic Anglophone world, to be touched on in the next posting on this subject). They are drawn from four representative anthologies containing poetics amongst other kinds of writing; I attempt to describe the form as well as the function of each. (footnote 1) (I mostly limit myself to one item per writer for the sake of economy and they may not be the most famous examples of his or her poetics. For example, the letters of Rilke referred to next do not come from Rilke’s celebrated Letters to a Young Poet (written 1903-08) but from disparate sources.)

The high modernist period offers a rich range of poetics. Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Three Letters’ (1903, 1907, 1925) meditate on lessons he learnt from Rodin, the role of imagery in his verse, and on his particular modernity. (Cook 2004: 35-40) On the other hand, with manifestic ferocity, Filippo Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) offers a vectoral and energised poetics adequate to the coming century of total war. (Cook 2004: 56-60) Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘The New Spirit and the Poets’ (1917) similarly bristles with confidence for a modernity that would embrace technology. (Cook 2004: 69-74) Tristan Tzara’s ‘Note on Poetry’ (1919) mimes, in its non-rational style, in its jumps from polemic to poetry, the irrational poetics that is gestured towards in the ‘note’ itself, in favour of unbridled, non-academic creative imaginative force. (Cook 2004: 91-3) Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Toward Explaining Heteronymy’ (1915-1935) is a composite text of manuscript fragments and an abandoned ‘preface’, which explains not only his use of heteronyms – a word he coined to account for his invention of authors – but his sense of essential selflessness that enabled him to single-handedly concoct a modernist Portuguese literature. (Gibbons 1989: 5-15)

In Russia, Velimir Klebnikov’s ‘On Poetry’ and ‘On Contemporary Poetry’ (1919, 1920) offer accounts of the symbolic sonic qualities possible in non-semantic poetry (Cook 2004: 94-6), while Vladimir Mayakovsky’s How Are Verses Made? (1926) sketches the poetics of the industrialised post-Revolutionary free verse poetry that he was exploring. (Cook 2004: 144-151) Against this, Osip Mandelstam, in ‘The Word & Culture’ (1921), specifically rejects the ‘invention’ of a poetics, recognising instead the radicality of classical and Christian tradition, while paradoxically taking the unlikely model of Verlaine as the modern synthetic poet. (Gibbons 2004: 16-22) Boris Pasternak’s blandly entitled ‘Some Statements’ (1922) is a collection of seven autonomous vignettes, ranging from reflections on art as an absorptive sponge not as an effusive fountain, through to thoughts on the miraculous trans-historical transference of experience effected via literary translation. (Gibbons: 23-27) Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’ (1935) compares lyric poets who evolve and those who do not. (Cook 2004: 215-222)

Away from its famous ‘loud’ manifestos - manifestos may contain poetics but there are not in themselves poetics - Surrealism’s poets were still vocal about their practice. Paul Éluard’s ‘Poetry’s Evidence’ (1932) argues for Surrealist imagery as evidence of an irrational imagination; André Breton’s ‘The Automatic Message’ (1933) is more polemical and attempts to define the central Surrealist technique of automatic writing. (Cook 2004: 182-191) Federico García Lorca’s ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’ (1933) is his famous account of the indefinable quality and performative attitude found in spirited flamenco song and dance which is not one of technique but of primal creativity, not to be feigned or counterfeited, taught or learned. (Cook 2004: 201-7) Antonio Machado’s ‘Notes on Poetry’, is an assemblage of notes, probably made in 1924, to which he appends an introduction that confirms their conjectural and tentative nature, before he considers issues such as his distrust of the use of metaphor and the deceptions and illuminations of ‘images’ in poetry to define a poet’s inner state, as well as arguments for the abolition of the anecdotal in favour of the necessary inter-subjectivity of lyric. (Gibbons 1989: 161-9) Luis Cernuda’s public pronouncement, ‘Words Before a Reading’ (1935) sees poetry as fixing the ephemerality of beauty but this does not preclude the exercise of the daemonic, the very power that called Lorca called ‘duende’. (Gibbons 1989: 42-7)

Paul Valéry, late in his career, was elected a Professor of Poetics; his misleadingly entitled ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ (1939) actually contrasts poetic language and ordinary language, the pedestrian qualities of prose, the Terpsichorean qualities of verse. (Cook 2004: 237-243) Fellow Frenchman, René Char’s ‘The Formal Share’ (1943-4) is a series of elliptical numbered paragraphs that it is not possible to paraphrase, since they (deliberately) approach the condition of poetry, perhaps even reach the condition of prose poetry, although it is clear that writing is an anxious activity that nevertheless causes joy. (Gibbons 1989: 59-64)

Post war stirrings in the Francophone West Indies produced not only Aimé Césaire’s ‘Poetry and Knowledge’ (1945), which exceeded his earlier apologia for the poetry of ‘negritude’, and argues for poetry as a particular form of knowledge in contrast to scientific knowledge, but whose vocabulary is still tinged with the vocabulary of surrealism (Cook 2004: 275-287), but also Edouard Glissant’s ‘Earth’ (late 1950s), which argues for an oppositional post-negritude poetry. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 416-17) However, Derek Walcott’s ‘The Muse of History’ (1974) rejects the oppositional stance of earlier Caribbean writers, in favour of using the literary resources of the great traditions of the colonisers. (Cook 2004: 420-436)

Eugenio Montale’s ‘Intentions’ (1946) is an ‘Imaginary Interview’, a form that risks insincerity, but is actually a free-ranging enquiry into the development of this Italian poet, which he sees as an escape from a ‘bell-jar’ into a poetry of contingency, with a restrained, even inelegant, diction, a quest precisely to find what the subject of poetry might be. (Gibbons 1989: 65-70) Written in the shadow of the Second World War, as was Montale’s piece, the Greek poet George Seferis’ ‘A Poet’s Journal’, written in 1946 and 47, traces his resurgence, after long wartime silence, to re-engage the contract between the human body and nature. In part a recounting of the writing of his poem ‘Thrush’, he emphasises what he calls leaving the poem to dry, a strategy to avoid over-editing. (Gibbons 1989: 71-81) Paul Celan’s ‘The Meridian Speech’ (1960) considers the spectral human presence that there might be in a difficult Jewish post-Holocaust poetry, i.e., Celan’s own, as a lonely turning of the breath of utterance towards otherness and newness, as Celan effected within his adopted language German. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 408-9; Celan 1999: 37-55) Nicanor Parra’s ‘Test’ (c.1964-66) considers the anti-poem written by the revolutionary anti-poet. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 423-24)

French poet Henri Chopin’s ‘Poésie Sonore’ (1969) is an appropriately slender statement about sound poetry, predicting the triumph of a non-semantic poetry of pure sound, (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 427), while Denis Roche’s ‘Le Mécrit’ (1972) articulates the experimentalism of the Tel Quel group in an obscene contention of the world of convention. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 429-430)

The East German poet Günter Kunert wrote a short piece ‘Why Write’ (1972) which answered its own question (although the title lacks a question mark): ‘to bear the world as it steadily crumbles into nothingness’. (Gibbons 1989: 136-8; 138) West German Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘A Modest Proposal for the Protection of Young People from the Products of Poetry’ (1976) is a Swiftian attack upon the standardised school and university curricula that teach correct interpretations of poetry to the young. (Cook 2004: 447-455) Czeslaw Milosz’ ‘On Hope’ (1983) builds out of an apocalyptic literary history an unfashionable theory about the possibility of poetry as part of a developing positive human consciousness. (Cook 2004: 494-502)

Recent non-European perspectives are evinced in Jeremy Cronin’s ‘“Even under the Rine of Terror…”: Insurgent South African Poetry’ (1988) which is a study of oral poetics under South African apartied. (Cook 2004: 523-532) Sujata Bhatt’s ‘Search for My Tongue’ (1988) is a bilingual poem about inter-linguistic identity. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 443-446) On the other hand, Adonis’ ‘Preface’ (1992) expounds his sense of exile within his own language, Arabic, but nevertheless argues for an Arabic modernism. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 441-443) If these examples are supplemented by the fin-de-siècle statements collected in 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium, a special issue of Boundary 2, edited by Charles Bernstein, which features poets domiciled variously at locations ranging from Martinique to China, Finland to Argentina, Croatia to Morocco, one can acquire a general sense of the international impact of poetics since modernism. It includes one of the documents of Pierre Joris’ millennial ‘nomadic’ poetics.

However, the prolific Australian poet John Kinsella’s ‘Almost a Dialogue with Lyn Hejinian: Quotations and Phantom Limbs…’ (2000), while drawn from another source, serves as a reminder of the limitations even of inclusive but straightforward multi-nationalism and of the advantages of a trans-nationalist approach, which is to be expected of a poet who divides his time between Australia, Britain and the USA (a nomadic poetics in its own right). This hybrid prose document quotes a poem he sent to American poet Lyn Hejinian which he describes as ‘a kind of poetics’ itself, a re-membering of Hejinian’s account of her visit to an autopsy. (Herbert and Matthews 2000: 204) Kinsella’s obsession with the corporeal and the psychosomatic is textual (‘I know that the field of the page is the map of my body, of our bodies’) but the lasting impression is of his commitment to dialogic hybridity, exemplified by the ‘almost dialogue’ of his title, his various ‘quotations’ throughout, his excerpts from email discussion lists and statements, and of his instigating and collecting collaborative post-national creative writing over the world wide web: a perspective that leads from body to world, but by-passes the boundaries of both genre and geo-political territories. (Herbert and Matthews 2000: 206) This recent example of deterritorialised transnational cyberpoetics demonstrates how poetics as a mode of speculative thought is moving into new kinds of territory in the twenty-first century. Kinsella’s fascinating MUP volume of 2007, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism is a book-length collection of Kinsella’s poetics.

1. The anthologies used for this posting are: Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’ Poems from the Millennium, Volume Two: Post-War to Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, which contains a short section called ‘The Art of the Manifesto’; Jon Cook’s Poetry in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004; Reginald Gibbons’ The Poet’s Work. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, a useful book of writerly descriptions of poetics and process, and I'd like to thank my colleague Daniele Pantano for introducing it to me (and to our students), and W.N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis’ Strong Words. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000, which is also one of my core books for my third poetics posting. The emphasis upon representative anthologies necessarily means the exclusion of important works of poetics, such as Vicente Huidobro’s collection of statements and essays, Manifesto Manifest. København and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1999, or Jacques Roubaud’s playful Poetry, etcetera: Cleaning House. København and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006, but I felt it important to concentrate not only on readily-available volumes, but upon volumes which collect a range of poetics and demonstrate thereby its many forms in one collegiate publication.

Robert Sheppard: Poetics 1: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

2009-06-30T12:54:00.000+01:00

Poetics and Proto-Poetics from Aristophanes to Yeats

The habit of reading the discourses of the past in the light of present practices and pressures is perhaps a part of identifying a discourse in the first place. The use of a term like ‘classical literary criticism’ for certain ancient texts is an anachronism that D.A. Russell, for one, regards as both ‘convenient’ and ‘inaccurate’ (Russell 1981: 169). The simple re-definition of many of these – and later – historical documents as ‘poetics’ risks the danger of the same ambivalent construction, in whatever way the perspectival constellation is assembled. However, poetics’ very impulse, the need to discuss how writing is (to be) made, may be found articulated intermittently among some of the same past ‘literary critical’ documents, and others. Therefore it is necessary to read them differently, with a different focus, and the emphasis is at times entirely at variance with what a survey of literary criticism would find of interest in their strictures. To sketch a loose adventure for what I am proposing cautiously to call proto-poetics is worth attempting, to show the historical continuity of its impulse, along with the discontinuity of its self-awareness as a discourse, although I have no claims to be comprehensive in this account. I am not attempting to develop universals by my selective paraphrasing of the often lesser-read parts of these great treatises and texts. I limit myself to the poetics of poetry, though in the earliest examples current divisions of literary genre do not apply, and my sense of poetics as a speculative writerly discourse - in my work as a teacher of creative writing, for example - extends to all genres and sub-genres.

In the ancient world, Aristotle, though the author of the first text called ‘Poetics’, was neither the founder of a discourse upon writing nor the first person to discuss how writing is made. For example, the plays of Aristophanes (c.450-385 B.C.), bristle with asides on the art of Euripides, and in the fragment Poetry, Aristophanes emphasises the difficulties of writing both tragedy and epic. (1981: 10.) Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) wrote his Poetics to define the role of mimesis more thoroughly, and to offer to posterity influential concepts on the evocation of fear and pity in tragic writing, but it is worth stressing that the text is addressed to those wishing to write creatively. (It is not clear that Aristotle was a creative writer, thus making him a possible exception to my rule about writerly poetics.) (Aristotle et al. 1965: 31-75) Certainly, a poet such as Philodemus (110-30 B.C.) wrote his treatise On Poetry from experience, and promulgated a surprisingly formalist doctrine arguing the indivisibility of good content from good form. (Russell 1981: 43). Horace (65-8 B.C.) wrote Ars Poetica as a verse-epistle (poem-essay we might say) to a young Roman writer, offering practical advice (recommending iambics as the best metre for a dramatic poet to make sure his words are heard over a noisy crowd) but promising much toil, as well as offering his better-known exhortation to instruct through delight. (Aristotle et al. 1965: 79-95) (A non-Western viewpoint may be found in the Chinese ‘rhyming prose’ of Lui Chi (261-303), whose ‘On Literature’ gives a vivid account of creative struggle, wisely contrasting occasional serendipitous spontaneity with the wilful forcing of effect. (Birch 1967: 221-232))

For a glimpse of the medieval world shaking off classical models established by Aristotle and Horace, amongst others, Dante (1265-1321), in La Vita Nuova, offers paraphrases between arrangements of his early poems, descriptions of their novel forms (like the sonnet), along with a plea for the vernacular as an appropriate vehicle for amatory verse. (Dante 1969) This is one (late) version of the razo, a form invented by the Troubadours, a series of widely read prose expositions of their verses.

Turning to the proto-poetics of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but limiting ourselves to English-speaking poetics, the contrast between the two earliest volumes we find is instructive of alternative foci. George Puttenham’s digressive The Arte of English Poesie (1589), is addressed to the decorous writer (and courtier) and concentrates on formal descriptions of figures of speech and upon varieties of poetic form, including one of the earliest considerations of visual poetics (for which he is often derided). (Puttenham 1936) On the other hand, the more focussed essay of Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1595), is a defence of fiction as a mode of knowledge, even of poetry as an autonomous discourse, against the claims of history and philosophy. (Enright and De Chickera 1962: 3-49)

Poet and composer Thomas Campion’s comprehensively entitled Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Wherein it is demonstratively proved, and by example confirmed, that the English toong will receive eight severall kinds of numbers, proper to it selfe, which are all in this booke set forth, and were never before this time by any man attempted (1602) argues for the use of classical quantitative metres and for the abandonment of rhyme in English. (Daniel and Campion 1966: 1-43, first numbering) The title of Samuel Daniel’s reply indicates that he took the opposite view. It advanced A Defence of Rhyme: Against a Pamphlet entitled: Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Wherein is demonstratively proved, that Rhyme is the fittest harmonie of words that comportes with our Language. (1603) (Daniel and Campion 1966: 1-45, second numbering). Robert Lloyd’s poem ‘On Rhyme’ (1762) reminds us that this was a still a live issue in the following century. (Hopkins 1990: 46-7) Amid the pages of Ben Jonson’s Timber: or, Discoveries (1641), one finds a practitioner’s notebook reflections upon his writing, ranging from his insistence upon ‘right imitation’ of classical models to his cutting criticisms of Shakespeare’s prolixity and unintentional comic passages. (extracts in Mahl 1968: 113-130; Hopkins 1990: 26-7).

Unlike Jonson, Shakespeare himself did not commit an act of poetics, formally speaking, beyond the sense that his body of creative work is an inimitable model (or series of models) for itself. At once both a pragmatic man of the theatre (in which he acted and which he part owned) and an enigmatic poet possessed of protean ‘negative capability’, he seems not to have had time to publicly reflect on his practice. In the plays there are numerous references to writers and writing – the love-struck inept rhetorical sonneteers of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the two hapless and ineffectual poets of Julius Caesar, the sycophantic bard of Timon of Athens - but these present deliberately negative views of the craft. Pistol’s satirical spouting of quotations from earlier, out of date plays, as well as Shakespeare’s own intertextual debt to both his sources and his rivals, like Marlowe, hardly amount to poetics; neither does the meta-poetry of the Sonnets.

John Milton’s ‘The Verse’, the preface to Paradise Lost (1668), justifies his use of blank verse, its avoidance of ‘the jingling sound of like endings’ suitable for a poem of ‘ancient liberty’, liberated itself ‘from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming’ as both following classical precedent and (near) contemporary dramatic blank verse. (Milton 1969: 211) John Dryden was a prolific critic, produced a body of theory that nonetheless derives from practice, as when he justifies his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’, in his ‘Account’ (1667), particularly of his choice of quatrains at the dawn of the age of the heroic couplet. (Dryden 1970: 7-15) His ‘Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay’ (1668) derives from his experience as the foremost writer for the stage, and is a fictional symposium focussed upon historical and contemporary drama, including a positive discussion of rhyme in dramatic verse. (Dryden 1970: 16-76; Enright and De Chickera 1962: 50-110) When his modern editor, George Parfitt, notes, ‘Dryden is a critic in the tradition of Horace, a figure whose energies and interests are balanced between creation and criticism, not a critic like Arnold who became more critic than creator, or like Leavis whose creation is his criticism’, he is situating Dryden as one of the first poet-critics, and acknowledging a pre-figuration of the future divergence of writerly poetics and professional criticism. (Dryden 1970: xiv)

A number of feminist proto-poetics are to be found in the writings of women around this time. Anne Bradstreet’s ‘The Prologue’ (1652?) argues – in verse – for the specificity of women’s writing, and her own. (Pritchard 1990: 51-3) Anne Killigrew’s ‘Upon the saying that my verses were made by another’ (1686) (Pritchard 1990: 97-8) and the similarly entitled ‘To one who persuades me to leave the Muses’ (1739?) by Elizabeth Singer Rowe, argue against, firstly, the common incredulity at women’s poetry, and then against attempts to stop women writing altogether. (Pritchard 1990: 116-117) There is an invocation to the Muses in Mary Collier’s harsh The Womans Labour: an epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck, in answer to his late poem, called ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (1739), which passionately pleads for the work and poetry of female labourers to be acknowledged. (Pritchard 1990: 129-136) At the other end of the social scale, certain of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1774) offer a charming account of a child’s education, which includes lessons on the writing of Latin and English verse, and the encouragement of sensitivity towards poetic artifice. (Stanhope 1774:134-167)

Alexander Pope’s ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1711) offers a full-blown Augustan poetics of satire, including brilliant couplets on versification that mime the effects of the writing described. (Enright and De Chickera 1962: 111-130; Pope 1970: 45-67; excerpts on versification in Hopkins 1990: 38-9) Written in 1733, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace’, that is, to Pope himself, posit a cruel antithesis to Pope’s poise, and attempt to define literary qualities not found in its addressee. (Fairer and Gerrard 1999: 188-191) Samuel Johnson describes the poet’s task in his novel Rasselas (1759) as being to dwell not on particular details but on generalities. The poet should be equal to this task by acquiring knowledge and judgement, but also by ‘incessant practice’, to become a subtle and adaptable stylist. (Hopkins 1990: 42-3). George Crabbe, in a passage of The Village (1783), that David Hopkins calls ‘Crabbe’s dissatisfaction with pastoral’, recognises the socio-poetical revolution of Duck (and possibly Collier) in the invention of an ‘authentic’ mode of realism that he could use, in contrast to the prevailing and increasingly hackneyed artifice of eighteenth century poetics. (Hopkins 2000: 204)

The poetics of the Romantic and Victorian periods continue that dissatisfaction, of course, and we enter a period when many of the documents, although still primarily thought of as works of literary criticism, are read as kinds of poetics, to the limited extent that they are recognised as manifestic position-statements by poets, but are perhaps not read with enough sensitivity towards the exploratory, conjectural and provocative nature of the discourse in its developing forms. What perhaps masks this aspect, is the growth of the role of the critic, so that, although Coleridge and Arnold are both poets, their criticism extends well beyond the literary, or even merely the cultural, into the social and political realms, and while the scope of their speculations ambitiously expand (for good or ill), the possibility of thinking of their work – a part of it – as proto-poetics or poetics becomes difficult, or looks like a mean reduction of their catholic thought. The separation of critic and poet (particularly without the development of anything like a Coleridgean clerisy to hold these professions together within a purposeful national structure) also accelerated the development of literary criticism as an autonomous discourse, out of the bodies of philology and philosophy, that has in turn tended to mute the conjectural and mercurial tones of poetics that still can be detected in these great works.

William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802) offers revolutionary reflections upon his experiments in poetic diction and form, as well as a commitment to the faculty of imagination. (Wordsworth 1969: 734-743, with ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815). 743-751. Enright and De Chickera 1962: 162-186.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s suggestively unsystematic Biographia Literaria (1817) opens a whole poet’s writerly life to inspection; reflections arising out of Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ rub shoulders with scraps of autobiography and accounts of publishing ventures, advice to young writers and considerations of poetic metre. Most influential have proved his theorising of, and discrimination between, the shaping faculty of the imagination and the lesser faculty of fancy, which also domesticated advanced continental aesthetics. (Coleridge 2000: 155-482; Chapters XIV, XVII and part of XVIII (on Wordsworth and metre) in Enright and De Chickera 1962: 190-224.)

By contrast, John Keats, in passages of certain letters written between 1817-1820, defines a poet’s ‘negative capability’ against Coleridge’s synthetic philosophising, preferring an image of the poet as essentially selfless and disinterested in his reception of the world. (excerpts in Enright and De Chickera 1962: 256-259; excerpts in Hopkins 2000: 61 and 114.) William Blake likewise was not given to extended prose, but his ‘Of the measure in which the following poem is written’, which is a preface to Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1818-20?), is an argument for further loosening of the Miltonic blank verse line, one which promulgates a politics of poetic form: ‘Poetry fetter’d fetters the human race.’ (Blake 1971: 629; Allen and Tallman 1973: vii) No less political is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Defence of Poetry (1821), which concludes hyperbolically that poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, but also saw poetry as effecting a defamiliarisation of ordinary perception. His analogy for the mind in the creative act, as a rapidly fading coal, balances the philosophical with his intimate knowledge of creative process. (Shelley 1970: 164-197; Enright and De Chickera 1962: 225-255; excerpts in Hopkins 2000: 56-60.)

The creative coals were long faded when Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ (1846) since it offers an unconvincing retrospective account of the writing of his poem ‘The Raven’. While I use his essay’s authoritative title as a synonym for poetics, the essay itself is best thought of as one more exemplar to demonstrate that writers cannot ‘read’ (in the sense of ‘explaining’) their own work. The fragmentary ‘The Poetic Principle’ (1850) is more successful, conjecturally questioning Poe’s poetic practice, and speculating, for example, that all long poems break down into smaller ones. (Poe 1967: 480-492 and 499-513) Walt Whitman’s ‘To Ralph Waldo Emerson’ (1856), with which he opened the first edition of Leaves of Grass, is an impassioned credo for his free verse American epic. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 3-12. Murphy 1969: 46-55.) Gerard Manley Hopkins was another writer, like Whitman, who felt the need to outline his perceptual and metrical experiments. In his Journal for December 12, 1870 he defined the qualities of ‘inscape’ and ‘instress’, God’s presence in nature imprinted on the observant human (poetic) mind (Hopkins 1953: 129); in his ‘Author’s Preface’, he details the flexible but complex metrical principles of sprung rhythm. (Hopkins 1953: 7-11; Scully 1966: 75-79) Due to the conservatism of Robert Bridges, Hopkins’ executor, these innovations and their poetics remained a guarded secret until the twentieth century. Equally neglected until this century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel in verse Aurora Leigh (1857) contains many passages where its author speculates about the role of the (woman) poet. (Browning 1978). (Particularly excerpts in Pritchard 1990: 202 and Hopkins 2000: 63)

Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Austerity of Poetry’ (1867) paves the way for his critical pronouncements. In the poem, poetic artifice is seen as deceptively beguiling; the Muse is figured as outwardly gaudy but secretly wearing the hair shirt of moral penitence. In famously calling poetry ‘a criticism of life’ in his essay ‘Wordsworth’ (1879), he may not just be wearing the hair shirt of anti-aestheticism, but inflating the function of criticism so that it is ripe to tear itself free of creative writing. (Hopkins 2000: 65-66) ‘Austerity of Poetry’ is concerned with moral judgement in relation to text; it is difficult to see either Arnold’s poetry or prose as poetics; it is literary criticism. By the early twentieth century, literary criticism became a confident autonomous discourse, aiming at scientific exactitude in the hands of I.A. Richards and at a moralistic anti-Technologico-Benthamitism in the work of F.R. Leavis. Ironically, poetics would be free, not only of criticism, which was increasingly becoming the legitimate discourse of literary discussion, but also dissociated from possible institutions to ground and define it as a discourse, in contradiction to literary criticism, which found a home in the early twentieth century academy of the new English schools at Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere.

At the turn of the century, W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1900) tries to wed past and present, by aligning his traditional Irish mysticism with the progressive continental school of Symbolism. (Cook 2004: 29-34) To borrow a term of Mary Ann Caws, Yeats’ synthesis indicates that the ‘century of Isms’ had dawned.

A bibliography of books used to compile this list

Bibliography for this instalment and the next (on Poetics After Modernism)

Aristotle, (trans. Else, G.F.), 1970, Poetics: Michigan: The University of Michigan.
Aristotle, Horace, Longinus. Trans. T.S. Dorsch. Classical Literary Criticism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
Bate, Jonathan. 1997. The Genius of Shakespeare. London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Picador.
Birch, Cyril. Ed. Anthology of Chinese Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
Blake, William. The Complete Poems. London and New York: Longman and Norton, 1971.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh and Other Poems. London: The Women’s Press, 1978.
Caws, Many Ann. Ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001
Celan, Paul. Collected Prose. Manchester: Carcanet, 1999.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Major Works. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Cook, Jon. Ed. Poetry in Theory: An Anthology 1900-2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Daniel, Samuel, and Campion, Thomas. A Defence of Rhyme and Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966.
Dante. La Vita Nuova. Trans. Reynolds, Barbara, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Dryden, John. Selected Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Dudley, D.R., and Lang, D.M. The Penguin Companion to Literature 4: Classical and Byzantine, Oriental and African Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Eliot, T.S., 1975, Selected Prose, London: Faber and Faber.
Enright, D.J., and De Chickera, E. Eds. English Critical Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Fairer, David, and Gerrard, Christine. Eds. Eighteenth Century Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. A Selection of his Poems and Prose. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.
Hopkins. David. The Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets. London: Routledge, 1990.
MacGann, J, 1983, The Romantic Ideology, Chicago:University of Chicago Press
Mahl, Mary R. Ed. Seventeenth Century Prose. Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1968.
Milton, John. Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Murphy, Francis. Ed. Walt Whitman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
Plato, The Republic. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. New York: Airmount Classic, 1968.
Pope, Alexander. Selected Poetry. New York: Signet Classic, 1970.
Pritchard, R.E. Ed. Poetry by English Women. Manchester: Carcanet, 1990.
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.
Russell, D.A. Criticism in Antiquity. London, Duckworth, 1981.
Scully, James. Ed. Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. London and Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1966.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Political Writings. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970.
Stanhope, Philip Dormer, Earl of Chesterfield. Letters Written by …to his Son, Philip Stanhope, Esq. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall, 1774.
Wordsworth, William, Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Bill Griffiths at Edge Hill

2009-06-18T11:56:00.000+01:00

Bill Griffiths read at Edge Hill about six months before he died. Here, in Andrew Taylor's photograph, you can see Robert Sheppard introducing Bill before his reading at the Rose Theatre, to entertain us with tales of faregrounds and travels to Hungary. He read a couple of times at Edge Hill and was a favourite with members of the group. Member Alice Lenkiewicz organised a reading for him and her magazine Neon Highway contains an interview with him (read here). He is missed. (Remember his uncollected 'Ghost Strories' are serialised in earlier postings of 'Pages', one a month, from October 2005 onwards.)

Cliff Yates: The Poetry of Saying

2009-06-04T16:08:00.000+01:00

Cliff Yates recording his contribution to the PPRG CD: Points of Reference (photo: Andrew Taylor)

Above I posted a review of my Poetry of Saying by David Kennedy. Here is another by Poetry and Poetics Research Group founder member Cliff Yates. I thought it would make a good transition from the last series to this. It was previously published in The North, 38, 2006.

Robert Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950-2000, £50. Liverpool University Press, 4 Cambridge Street, Liverpool L69 7ZU

The Poetry of Saying traces the history and social development of the British Poetry Revival 1960 -1978, which first became widely available in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969), and Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978-2000. Sheppard, active as a poet and editor in this area since the 1970s, discusses the work of over twenty poets including Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, Lee Harwood, Bob Cobbing, Maggie O’Sullivan, Allen Fisher, J. H. Prynne, and Barry MacSweeney. The work is discussed with reference to a ‘poetry of saying’, an ethical poetics developed from the work of Levinas and Bakhtin, which avoids closure and makes use of ‘discontinuity and indeterminacy’ in order to keep the work open to interpretation, thereby necessitating a radically different relationship to the reader compared with other work. A strength of the book is in the way in which Sheppard discusses the poems, relating them to the writers’ own influences, sources and preoccupations, as well as to the poetry of saying, in such a way as to do justice to the openness of the work and to the book’s central concept. For Lee Harwood, for instance, a poem is ‘an object made by the writer, that he gives to the reader’, not an ideal reader, but, Sheppard says, ‘the multiplicity of readers who actually do read and use these texts’. He quotes from ‘Linen’:

touching you like the
and soft as
like the scent of flowers and
like an approaching festival
whose promise is failed through carelessness

According to Sheppard: ‘The open work is not simply what anyone reads into it…The gaps are not actually for filling (I have been reading this text for a quarter of a century and have never felt implored to utter an extemporized response or scribble on the text). What the reader actually acknowledges is a textual act of respect…on the part of the author to the inevitable authoring of the reader….[Harwood] imposes a reciprocal responsibility on the reader, to maintain an openness of reading to match his gesture of hospitality.’

In discussing Tom Raworth’s later work (specifically ‘Eternal Sections’), Sheppard refers to the letter published in Joe Soap’s Canoe 14 in which Raworth explains his method of producing a particular poem by narrating his flâneur-like wanderings around Marseilles, accumulating jottings which he later assembled:

sitting there watching
air decay
between the levels
of white tiles
he saw
tangles of wire
a polished petrol tank
hoardings jutted out
by the side of numbers
to hold on to
far away breathing
ejected from the real
gloved fingers meshing
toppling her to the ground

(in memoriam Patrizia Vicinelli)

Comparing this poem with the letter that accompanies it, it is clear that Raworth’s intention is not to reconstruct an experience. The poem’s indeterminacy characterises a poetry of saying. Sheppard says of Raworth’s later work: ‘The poems cohere more by a reading of their formal means than by attempting to chart the semantics of a supposed context, even as readers are drawn into dialogue. The discourses are powerfully questioned and defamiliarized; indeed, the poems may never read the same way twice…They are both empty and full. They turn content into form and turn form into the content that is read… They do not have designs on us. We must make designs with them.’

Sheppard contrasts a poetry of saying with that of the ‘Movement Orthodoxy’, a poetry of the ‘said’: ‘of closure, narrative coherence and grammatical and syntactic cohesion…an empirical lyricism of discrete moments of experience’. He locates Larkin’s heritage in anthologies including New Lines (1956), Alvarez’s The New Poetry (1966), The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry (1982) and The New Poetry (1993). It’s a provocative account, illuminating the neglect of alternative poetry in influential anthologies and at the same time questioning the assumptions of ‘mainstream’ poetry from Larkin to Armitage. The Poetry of Saying is an important book. As well as the individual chapters on Raworth and Harwood, the chapter on Roy Fisher (an earlier version of which appeared in L.U.P.’s The Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies), taking in the experimental work including The Cut Pages, is particularly good.

Visit Cliff's website here.

Introduction to Fifth Series The Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Group

2009-05-21T14:54:00.000+01:00

Andrew Taylor and Angela Keaton reading at Edge Hill (photo: Andrew Taylor)

This fifth series of Pages is dedicated to ‘poetry and the difficult thinking that surrounds poetry’ (Badiou) that comes from a group I coordinate at Edge Hill University: the Poetry and Poetics Research Group. We first met on 21 October 1999 and have been meeting, growing, contracting, branching out, ever since.

Our aim has been to discuss both our work and our poetics, sometimes connected with specific projects (several PhDs, finished and currently underway), and sometimes not. Several members have not been officially affiliated to the University, so we don’t see ourselves as an exclusively academic group. We have given readings together at the Rose Theatre at Edge Hill, at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool and at the Tate Gallery (the last two being under the auspices of member Alice Lenkiewicz’ Neon Highway imprint. We have published alongside one another (chiefly in Emergency Rations, an A4 pamphlet from Peggy’s Blue Skylight). We have recorded a CD (Points of Reference, copies still available £4). Many of us published in the People’s Poet special Edge Hill edition. As individuals, of course, the group has been active in many fields and I will leave it to members to introduce themselves in the subsequent Pages. They are, Cliff Yates, Andrew Taylor, Alice Lenkiewicz, Scott Thurston, Neil Addison, Dee McMahon (Click onto February 2005 for some of her work), Matt Fallaize, Daniele Pantano, Steve Van Hagen, Michael Egan, Colin Harris, Patricia Farrell, Angela Keaton, Tony Cullen and myself.

Apart from our monthly meetings I have been also coordinating the Open meetings, at which I have invited poets to speak about their poets; speakers to date in clued: Ian Davidson (on his ‘Riga Poems’), Allen Fisher on his poetics ‘imperfect fit’, (Click onto Feb 2005 for his work), Cath Nichols on her poetry film Tales of Boy Nancy, John Seed (Click onto Feb 2005 for his work) on his use of Mayhew’s work, Matthew Welton’s post-Oulipean processes in The Book of Matthew, and Jeff Hilson on Stretchers, Bird Bird and The Reality Street Book of Sonnets. (Click onto Sept 2005 for his work).

I notice John Seed wrote the following on his page for Shearsman: ‘In 1983 he moved to London and has taught History at Roehampton University since. Here for several years he was lucky enough to have Allen Fisher as a colleague. He was also lucky enough to find in the mid-80s, moving through the shabby upstairs rooms of various West End London pubs, the Subvoicive readings—and to be part of a discussion group which met for several years at the Tooting house of Robert Sheppard and Patricia Farrell.’ That discussion group was actually the blueprint for the current Edge Hill group, but this has developed into a different form.

GOING PUBLIC

This year is the tenth anniversary of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Research Group. There are plans for a series of events to mark this occasion during autumn 2009.

There are three founder members still active in the group – Robert Sheppard, Cliff Yates and Andrew Taylor. Cliff has a book forthcoming from Salt, Frank Freeman’s Dancing School, which will be launched at the Rose Theatre on Wednesday 11th November. The support will come from other members of the Poedtry and Poetics Research Group.

There will be a series of ‘open meetings’ where members of the group will discuss their poetics. A former member of the group, Scott Thurston, will also hold an open meeting.

Pages will be featuring work from members past and present. There will also be a special edition of erbacce (eds. Alan Corkish and Andrew Taylor) featuring members and former members, alongside an interview with Robert Sheppard in his capacity as chairman of the group.

There will also be an event to mark the publication of Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos, ed. Rupert Loydell, (Salt) which features poetics by Robert Sheppard, Cliff Yates, Scott Thurston and Andrew Taylor alongside others such as Jackson Mac Low, Sheila E. Murphy, Ira Lightman and Geoff Stevens.

To anticipate and accompany these events we will be posting work by the group and its associates between now and the end of the year.

We can be seen (some of us) in a group photograph taken by Peter Griffiths, while he was producing our CD:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3031/2625339652_99e1cb7f57_b.jpg

Robert Sheppard: End of Fourth Series and a Note on Copyright

2009-04-28T14:40:00.000+01:00

I have been asked by the British Library to allow them to archive Pages. As I think this little enterprise seems to reach a few more people than I originally imagined, and I think – having just written a piece looking back as ‘under-reported poetries’ of the 1980s - I am very pleased that this should happen on the grounds of making something temporary visible in years to come.

However this blogzine carries material that remains the copyright of those who appear on its pages. I am proposed therefore that this should be the case:

a. For work already posted on the blogzine before the date of this posting; unless I hear otherwise I will assume consent to the work being both here and archived after, but I will remove any work if requested by the author(s) and/or copyright holders.

b. For work to be posted on this blogzine after the date of this posting: I am assuming consent to the work being used here (as is already the case, stated in my first posting) and also archived by the British Library after.

I have been amused by the visibility of Pages online and indeed would like to record that an interview with myself, partly about Pages, ‘Literary Netscapes: Web Poetry and Blogging’, conducted by Graeme Harper, is about to appear in the book Authors at Work: the Creative Environment (Melton: Boydell and Brewer, 2009). Most people think I’m a technophobe, but obviously not. Check the book out here; I guess I'm the 'poet blogger' not the 'Poet Laureate' mentioned in the list of contributors, but you never know. My sister in law voted for me online, apparently.

David Kennedy: Open and Shut

2009-04-15T16:49:00.000+01:00

ROBERT SHEPPARD, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and Its Discontents, 1950-2000 (Liverpool University Press) £50.00

Readers of Robert Sheppard’s previous critical book Far Language will know how well he can communicate a reader’s excitement about challenging poetries. His new book will also bring those poetries new readers. It is structured around a confident juxtaposition of ‘Movement orthodoxy’ and a linguistically innovative poetry of saying. The poetry of saying, derived largely from Emmanuel Levinas, is more useful than the usual ‘builders’ yards are more fun to live in than finished houses’ critical approach to experimental poetry. Levinas’s ‘Language as saying’ assumes ‘an ethical openness to the other’. So the poetry that Sheppard arranges into a parallel history is open because its authors regard poems that, in Larkin’s words, ‘preserve [the poet’s experience] by setting it off in other people’ as ethically irresponsible. Sheppard gives a convincing outline of this parallel history in two chapters: ‘The British Poetry Revival 1960-1978’ and ‘Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978-2000’. There also are good accounts of J. H. Prynne, Allen Fisher, Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, Maggie O’Sullivan and Bob Cobbing.

The problem is that while the book promises an overview, Sheppard rarely strays from his specific interests and therefore takes limited, often prejudiced, views. For example, London publishers have set the bar for orthodox poetry lower and lower each year recently but this doesn’t mean that all poems that nod towards regular metre, fixed forms and closure necessarily have less to say than those that don’t. The Movement has had much less influence and longevity than Sheppard thinks but insisting on Movement influence avoids having to admit that the so-called orthodoxy is actually much more diverse and that some of it might be worth reading. It means he can dismiss Hughes and avoid discussing hard to fit figures like Geoffrey Hill, Peter Redgrove, and Thom Gunn altogether. It leads him astray about Plath whose late work is much closer to his poetry of saying than he can bear to admit. In fact, he takes little account of how women poets—orthodox or not—have generally shown little interest in dominant orthodoxies throughout his period. Similarly, a harder look at the Sixties would reveal that differences between orthodox and open were much less distinct. Sheppard is acute on Heaney but claims not to believe what he terms the concluding irony of ‘the disconnected number I still call’ in Tony Harrison’s ‘Long Distance II’ and ‘wonders what the motivation for such a discourse is’. It’s not irony, it’s the work of mourning. Motivation? 500 years of English elegy. One can only assume Sheppard is being satirical.

Sheppard can be equally unfair to the poetry he values. He quickly discusses a huge range of activity in terms of anthologies and under the headings ‘Cambridge’, ‘Crusty Revenants & Uppity Newcomers’ and ‘Being a Woman Poet’. In terms of the poetry of saying’s internal politics, he clearly favours what might be termed London innovators. Combined with his ‘ethical openness’ / ‘paraphrasable closure’ binary, this means that he privileges political and social critique and poets with one recognisable practice. This misses one of the fascinations and pleasures of innovative poets: in contrast to many of their orthodox contemporaries, one never knows what they’re going to do next. Sheppard’s preference means that a lot of the poetry he quotes looks just as inconsequential as most orthodox poems. Yes, once you’ve decoded Craig Raine’s Martian metaphors you’re not left with very much but the same is true once you know Barry MacSweeney is quoting the 16-year-old William Hague. This makes innovative poets seem more tied to the moment and more disposable than orthodox ones. What’s the point of reading Tom Raworth’s ‘West Wind’ now that ‘a handbag’—Margaret Thatcher—is no longer Prime Minister? This may seem harsh but Sheppard often locates the value of such poems more in their politics than in the inexhaustible originality of their procedures.

Sheppard pre-empts criticism: his book is ‘only a beginning’ and his ‘omissions are testimony’ to a ‘multifarious and complex’ poetry. Leaving aside the mystery of why only poetry critics keep complaining their subject is too much for them, taking his omissions with his inclusions seems to reveal a lack of generosity and sympathy. For all that, I would still recommend Sheppard’s book before Andrew Duncan’s highly eccentric coverage of the same period in The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry. But a book that wants to ‘feed…poetry’s histories and its futures’ needs a much greater willingness to engage with the inconvenient and dirty actualities of post war British poetry. To adapt Heaney’s comment about the English lyric, this means making poetry’s history eat stuff it has never eaten before. The violently polarized reception of Barry MacSweeny’s posthumous Wolf Tongue shows both how difficult this is and how badly needed. It’s a filthy job and somebody really has got to do it.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The review above was written in December 2005 and published in P. N. Review 168 (Volume 32 Number 4) March-April 2006.

Aidan Semmens: a reponse to the Fourth Series

2009-03-18T16:05:00.000Z

Chris Hamilton-Emery writes: "A great deal of innovative writing that comes my way is using tools and techniques which are actually rather hackneyed. Disrupted syntax, linguistic borrowings, indeterminacy, hypo-contextualising, hyper-contextualising, heteroglossia, discontinuous texts, types of spatial arrangement." Well, stone me. What does this prove except that a great deal of people who submit to Salt bother to look at what kind of thing they are likely to publish? If he were an editor for Faber or Hallmark Cards he'd presumably get a very different impression of what people are writing. To suggest that the 'innovative' - or pseudo-innovative - is actually now the 'mainstream' is to overlook everything that passes for 'poetry' in the world beyond our particular cloister, our scriptorium. Roy Fisher might just have made it over the wall into the high street, Denise Riley perhaps - but who else? Is there even one worthwhile poet who makes a living at it in Britain, except by teaching? Even one worthwhile contemporary poem to be found in your local Waterstone's or WH Smith's? {editor's note: of course a large number of Salt collections can be found in Waterstones, many of them quite demanding, Peter Jaeger's book, for instance, and I, for one, am pleased it's there. My own Twentieth Century Blues among them. For me the issue is whether they stay there, i.e., whether they are bought. Sorry, I shouldn't have interrupted.}

Having said that, the techniques and stylistic tics Chris lists have now been around long enough and copied enough for ‘hackneyed’ to seem right, which indeed begs the question whether ‘innovative’ is any longer an appropriate description. It happens to be the stylistic water you and I were brought up in, which makes it a more comfortable and rewarding place (for us) to swim than, say, leftover Augustan, Romantic or Metaphysical pools (and I cannot imagine why anyone would choose to immerse themselves in the stagnant bilge of the Movement, which is still, incredibly and scandalously, the dominant ooze of the high street gutter, malgré Chris Hamilton-Emery). But there is surely little innovative left to do within our kind of poetry (what the hell do you call it? Chris is right about the historical nature of ‘avant-garde’ and to me ‘post-avant’ just sounds silly), which brings the whole business down to where it surely should be – to whit, what is said and how well, not the manner of the saying. I dare say most of the submissions to Salt (or any publisher, in whatever mode of writing) are pure kitsch, merely imitating a manner – part of the challenge for any writer must be to avoid either producing or seeming to produce such empty stuff.

Afterword to Fourth Series

2009-03-13T11:15:00.000Z

This series of Pages has been slightly disappointing in terms of the volume of traffic in answer to my deliberately naïve question concerning recent poetries. But I haven’t been disappointed by the individual responses I’ve had so far. (I will post more, if there are more, of course, and Scott Thurston promised one last night.)

Clark Allison’s ‘Plural Locutions’ (Feb 27 2008) is probably the best place to start reading because he presents the background and history of the poetries discussed. His final sentence, hailing the plural culture that is potentially coming into being, attempts the rallying-tone of the manifesto, but knows that the era is not receptive to that tone. Chris Hamilton-Emery (Oct 29 2007) poses some heretical questions: is linguistic innovation so innovative? Is it now a mainstream? Is Cambridge poetry dead? Do we now have Allison’s multiplicity of approaches, with perhaps our perspective developing a more European dimension than a trans-Atlantic one? Adrian Clarke (March 1 2008) agrees about the demise of the old ‘schools’ in recent years, recognises the recent growth of compromised centres within Higher Education (Birkbeck, Southampton, and you could add the Universities of Plymouth, Falmouth and Bedfordshire and Royal Holloway and – I’d like to think - Edge Hill). He rejects entirely the output of the ‘mainstream’ and denies the value of bothering with any oppositional stance towards it. He is baffled by Hamilton-Emery’s variable sense of innovation (perhaps there are only innovations). He too looks towards European poetry (as do I, incidentally; it’s a large part of my self-instruction in World Poetry these days). His final assertion that ‘here and now it’s the practice of outside’ points both to the oppositional stance that Clarke values and to the sense of neglect shown towards the most vital poetries in this country. We have to ask: can you have the former without the latter? David Kennedy also wonders whether the innovative is not the new mainstream, an assertion that Clarke’s calls to ‘outsideness’ remind us should be tempered, as they are by Kennedy’s surprise that minor irruptions of innovation still unsettle the mainstream disproportionately. (After all, in the post-democracy of the millennial anthologies that claimed the end of the poetry divisions it is precisely the practices of a writer like Adrian Clarke that are not admitted to the supposedly inclusive consensus.) But Kennedy steps back and, assisted by Ziarek’s analysis, which I recommend (and have used elsewhere), he is astonished by the performative aspects of recent ‘alternative’ poetries, by poetic eventness made flesh. Todd Swift (Oct 15 2008) agrees with Clarke that the practices of innovation and those of the experiential poem are divergent still, and that the former is distrusted, particularly by editors who evince an ignorance of the actual history of this radicalism (send them off to read Allison’s piece and its links). As one who practices the ‘outside’ – though maybe not in Clarke’s terms, exactly – Swift mistrusts careerism that envelopes both Faber, the traditional enemy, and the newcomer Salt (Hamilton-Emery’s press), and the numerous self-regarding small cliques. Tom Jenks (June 26 2008) is a young writer – I saw a great little blue pamphlet of his in Scott Thurston’s office one day – associated with the Openned Poets and The Other Room, based between London and Manchester, a radical groupiscule that raises the spirits and is not at all one of Swift’s small cliques. Although he publishes the magazine Parameter on paper (including the silver paper it is wrapped in; it’s difficult to know whether to read it or put it in the micro-wave!) his piece is mainly a hymn of praise to the internet as the global technology of local activity (such as his own; check out www.otherroom.org).

Personally, I am still uneasy about new technologies, and there is encoded in this project a certain resistance to its very medium. I am most amused to find that this blogzine and my part in it forms the whole of an interview with myself conducted by Graeme Harper to be published as the chapter on ‘literary blogging’ in a book about 'creative environments' (more of that when it appears). Pages was also listed – against my wishes – as part of Edge Hill’s Research Academic Exercise for ‘English’. I hope the assessors found the discussion about recent poetries to their liking. To that we shall return.

David Kennedy raises the question of overview. I’m sorry that he finds my own endeavours as a critic too ‘insider’, for I have tried to document this poetry faithfully, and to facilitate discussion of this poetry. What I am less interested in doing these days is to write about the poetry I don’t admire (though I am open to admiring ‘mainstream’ poetry when I encounter its positive aspects). Indeed, what is ringing in my ears as I churn these terms over again are the words of Michael Palmer, from his recent Active Boundaries. Of Oppen, Celan and Aygi, he writes: ‘What has been little noted critically, is that in each instance, such poetic thought involves stepping away from vanguardist experiment per se… In all three poets, listening and attending take primacy over systematized artistic construction. However resistant it may appear, and may be, poetry becomes a form of encounter, or conversation, a way of being with others.’ Perhaps innovation, taken up as a rallying cry, is not the issue (but perhaps it is simply a label for certain practices). And perhapsd it's about what Badiou says about Mandleshtam, his concern for 'poetry and the very subtle thinking that surrounds poetry', which would include, but is not limited to, poetics. But it is clear that while such language may invigorate someone like me, such a way of conceiving lyric and non-lyric poetry is way beyond the pencil-chewing editors in Swift’s cross-hairs.

I thought contributors would name (new) names. Between them they have turned up Sascha Akhtar, Ronnie McGrath, Trevor Joyce, Elena Rivera, Frances Kruk, Emily Critchley, Keston Sutherland, and Sean Bonney. I noted with interest that the Wikipedia entry on The British Poetry Revival ends with an account of recent years (though not very recent years). It’s worth a look (and perhaps somebody could get in there and spell ‘Sheppard’ correctly) and because it can be altered, I’d like to reproduce it as it stands at the moment and to suggest its named names as a provisional syllabus of the now. (If we can have the excellent Archive of the Now, we can surely have that.)

The current entry on the 'British Poetry Revival' on Wikipedia (I have copied it because it could be modified any time), ends with a concentrated account on the last 19 years, and also gives a link to Piers Hugill’s more capacious account on www.fucine.com which contains some of the same names, though both accounts are perhaps too London based and miss the activities in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield at least. It reads:

‘Into the 1990s and beyond poets such as Sean Bonney, Jeff Hilson, and Piers Hugill have surfaced after direct involvement in the Cobbing-led Writers Forum workshop. An interesting sub-development of the workshop was the instigation of the Foro De Escritores workshop, in Santiago Chile, run on similar aesthetic principles. This workshop has contributed to the development of Martin Gubbins, Andreas Aandwandter, and Martin Bakero, to name but few. Those associated with the Barque Press (most obviously Andrea Brady and Keston Sutherland), and more recently Bad Press (in particular, Marianne Morris and Jow Lindsay), have made a similarly important impact via the Cambridge scene. From Scotland, Peter Manson, who had co-edited the magazine Object Permanence in the mid-1990s, Drew Milne, editor of Parataxis, David Kinloch and Richard Price (previously editors of Verse and Southfields) also emerged more fully as poets in their own right. New writings have arisen from the involvement of cris cheek, Bridgid Mcleer, and Alaric Sumner, under the direction of Caroline Bergvall and John Hall through the Performance Writing programme at Dartington College of Arts including Kirsten Lavers, Andy Smith, and Chris Paul; and Keith Jebb at University of Bedfordshire's Creative Writing programme, including Alyson Torns, Kevin Doran, Allison Boast. Redell Olsen's Poetic Practice programme at Royal Holloway, University of London (which includes Frances Kruk, Sophie Robinson, John Sparrow and Stephen Willey) continue to offer a fresh and vigorous challenge to the confessional mainstream.’

Talking of PiersHugil, I’d like to alert you to the academic journal he, Scott Thurston and I are editing.

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry

editors: Professor Robert Sheppard (shepparr@edgehill.ac.uk Edge Hill University)
Dr. Scott Thurston (S.Thurston@salford.ac.uk University of Salford)

Reviews editor: Piers Hugill (phugill@soton.ac.uk University of Southampton)

Publisher: Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher (www.gylphi.co.uk)

We are currently looking for both academic articles and reviews for our first issue and beyond.
The journal is focused upon the poetic writings that have been written in Britain and Ireland since the late 1950s that appear under various names. Peter Middleton, writing on ‘Poetry Since 1970’ for the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, writes, ‘These poets … have difficulty naming themselves. Are they “avant-garde” (an adjective not much liked by anyone), or “underground” (even more disliked), “linguistically innovative” or “second-wave Modernist”?’ he asks. Other names have included: non-mainstream, the British Poetry Revival, the parallel tradition, formally innovative, Neo-modernist or experimental poetry. Particular areas of the field have been known as the Cambridge School, the London School, concrete poetry, and performance writing.

While the equivalent North American work is well-represented in academic work, researchers on this British and Irish poetry have no dedicated referred journal, although a number of important books have been published lately.

The Journal aims to answer a lack in the academic market, by proposing to provide a home for critical articles on the history, context, close reading and poetics of this work, generally of 5,000-8,000 but with a maximum 10,000 words, and to carry short reviews (up to 2,000 words) of the stream of monographs and edited volumes in the area. It is intended to appear twice a year.

Meanwhile, the Fifth Series of Pages is going to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Group on October 21st 2009. Watch this space leading up, and away from, that date.

Todd Swift

2008-10-15T16:26:00.000+01:00

I disagree with the observation that, since disrupted syntax, shifts in levels of discourse, and other apparently innovative techniques are more common (in submissions, even so, to Salt), they may be designated as mainstream. While stylistic divisions between the so-called mainstream and the innovative schools may be shifting (as styles and aims merge or adapt) in the UK - and I think that, among younger (under-35) poets, they are - there remain actual differences in the poetics behind the choices that lead to, for instance, a disrupted lyric, versus an empirical, first-person, traditional British poem (for instance, that Nick Laird might write). There remains, in Britain, profound mistrust of opaque, excessive, or abstract usage of language, in relation to poetry, which, for most people, is still ultimately a vehicle for expressing something - for saying something - about the self and experience. Or rather, not about the problematic nature of an apparent self apparently trying to say something - but, instead, an easily accepted self easily and transparently conveying truths. Moreover, poems continue to be, on the whole, validated in terms of "making" that Pound, or Orwell would have approved (terms better used for for prose): clarity, hardness, and so on. These are scientific values that work well for language mainly built to control, or sell, things, including sentiments and ideas. In a paradox that I think has not yet fully dawned on British poets, modernism's no-nonsense tenets propelled the sort of Protestant work ethic of the Movement style, and its purities of diction - Davie, after all,
admired Pound.

My chief concern is with the idea of the "good poem" - so cherished by entrepreneurs in the poetry-editing business - since most often, when one examines the sort of criteria even so-called innovative editors swear by, they end up being rather traditional, and usually trite. The idea that poets have something to say, or that form and content are finding an organic match, are hardly cutting edge observations, and could easily sum up the New Lines view of the Movement era. Poetry publishing cannot be everything to everyone, or it stops being the art of publishing, and instead becomes the entertainment of publishing. Recent trends, in poetry, do seem to be moving from theory (as in the English departments) - how much is Eagleton to blame for this? Likely, not much. More seriously, few younger poets read, or understand, Poetic Artifice, and how that work inspired Charles Bernstein in America. There is a very real feedback loop, between 1976 era British Poetry, and Language poetry in the US - just as an earlier British generation found Allen's The New American Poetry foundational. But, in the mainstream, such a loop seems weaker - few American poets read or recognise, for instance, Don Paterson - and fewer British mainstream poets seem to get their bearings from North Americans (other than, say, Billy Collins, and even that seems unlikely).

The most important American poet, in terms of influence, remains O'Hara, who does seem to create a strange brotherhood of followers. The main ongoing tragedy in British poetry, to my mind, remains the unquestioned connection between publishing and poetry, in some minds. Too many young poets seek a career (sadly, or laughably) from the mainstream, one that seems afforded by the capital which publication - vindication - by Salt, or Faber, seems to accord. The main thing should be the composition of the poem. Poems should be read, and appreciated, regardless of, and indeed, apart from, their publisher. Instead, house styles, and publishing cliques no better than small closed clubs, predominate in the UK, whose poetry communities seem, from an outsider's perspective (and I have been kept an outsider), mostly incurious, and certainly, anti-internationalist, except in mainly avant-garde, circumstances.

David Kennedy: Drifting Hungers and Accessory Rage

2008-08-14T13:36:00.000+01:00

In ‘Saws’, Trevor Joyce writes of ‘Drifting hungers and accessory rage’. Eléna Rivera writes in ‘See’, ‘The limit of reproduction and replica, / of “you” as reflection, of “you” as reaction’. Edmond Jabès has Yukel say in ‘The Time of the Lovers’, ‘A blank page swarms with steps on the point of finding their own tracks. An existence is a scrutiny of signs.’ Trying to answer Robert’s question inevitably raises others: is alternative doing the same thing? Has it changed? I have some sympathy with Chris Hamilton-Emery’s argument that innovative practices are now so commonplace they’re the new mainstream. But I’d want to add that I’m constantly astonished by how alternative elements don’t have to be very big in order to make a poetry that seems completely divergent from what comes from, say, Cape or Bloodaxe. But the poetry that’s excited and interested me the most in recent years seems to have enacted a testing of the whole idea of the alternative, a testing in the same way that Krzysztof Ziarek’s attempted a way past the so-called theory death of the avant-garde with his concept of the ‘forcework’. The alternative work of art is not an object but an event that unmakes and remakes the forces of power that circulate around it and through it. Ziarek’s wrong and right at the same time. He’s wrong because Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ is as much as a forcework as one of Bill Viola’s video installations. But he’s also right because it seems to me that the poetry I’ve found most valuable in the last 8 years is only fully activated off the page, in the air, in bookfair and conference moshpits, and in the upstairs rooms of performance. And that also connects with the fact that the most arresting voices occupying places and spaces have been women’s. Confronted with the work of younger poets—and you really are confronted—like Frances Kruk and Emily Critchley I want to yell something like ‘holy paratactic bad girl word salad Batman’ except it’s there in the work of older poets like Frances Presley and Geraldine Monk too. The voice is thrown out into environments—political, historical, sexual—to see what it catches and catches on. And you have to be there to hear it. I don’t see/hear this is the work of many male poets except Keston Sutherland and Sean Bonney. But then it’s hard to do the overview thing because, as earlier respondents have pointed out, you can’t put poets into boxes marked ‘London’ or ‘Cambridge’ anymore. (Could you ever do that with women poets?) And the actual socialities underwriting alternative poetry are much more interesting and surprising anyway. Overview brings me on to another thing I want to mention which is something that hasn’t happened in the last 8 years. We still don’t have the body of criticism to match the work we love. I’m talking big books not articles. Andrew Duncan and our host here have both made bold stabs but they both seemed to leave a lot out. Or perhaps Duncan was just too eccentric (outside) and Sheppard was just too concentric (inside). I’ve been sceptical about such a project elsewhere but I still think it’s worth an attempt. A final thing that comes to mind is Peter Riley’s appreciation of Andrew Crozier in PN Review 182. Riley mentions Crozier’s seminal essay ‘Thrills and frills: poetry as figures of empirical lyricism’ and its famous summary of Larkin: ‘we are asked to trust the poet, not the poem’. Re-reading that, I know what Crozier means and I’m thankful for alternative poetry because I’m not interested in poets’ lives exponentially smoothed into consumer goods. I want to know that the poets I read and hear can be as confused, angry, sceptical, hysterical or perverted as I can. I want the work to jolt me. But at the same time I want to say ‘yes’ because if we can’t trust our alternative poets to do right by us in language in these dismal times then who? And when? And that’s why we need the criticism I was talking about. We (those who write and read alternative poetry) need to tell our own story. ‘The comic book version destroyed all / possibility for heroic action’, writes Eléna Rivera in ‘Painting our evidence’. Put an ‘almost’ and a date in there somewhere—you choose where and when—and you’ll get closer to what I mean.

Eléna Rivera’s poems are in Mistakes, Accidents and a Want of Liberty (Barque Press, 2006). A useful introduction to Edmond Jabès is From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 1991). Trevor Joyce’s poem is in What’s in Store – Poems 2000-2007 (New Writers’ Press/The Gig, 2007).

Tom Jenks

2008-06-26T14:56:00.000+01:00

Amongst the many interesting things on the Great Works website is Peter Philpott’s explanation of why he publishes on the internet. In it, he states that those who remain “emotionally involved with words on paper…have as much future as trained scribes post-Gutenberg.” I agree with his overarching assertion that the internet is changing the way we access poetry and talk to one another about it. After all, you are almost certainly reading this on a screen, which is where I am writing it. I don’t agree, however, that the printed page is doomed. Rather, I think information technology can reinvigorate it, both in the way that it is created and the way it is distributed. I also think that this applies particularly to experimental and innovative poetry.

I am just about young enough to say that I grew up with computers. I can certainly say that they have been around for all of my adult life. Yet I still, to use Philpott’s phrase, remain “emotionally involved” with the book as artefact, with the physical rather than the virtual text. So too do the people I know in and around Manchester who are engaged with contemporary poetry - editors and small press publishers who all, whilst using the internet, still see the printed page in general and the book in particular as valid. What information technology has done, however, is to give us the keys to the citadel. I was reading recently about the upheavals in the Poetry Society in the 1970s, when Eric Mottram et al somehow sailed their Black Pearl through the reefs and under the radar, boarded the ship of state and seized the wheel. One of the most radical things they did was to make the presses, the physical machinery for producing texts, available to anyone with the ideas and inclination to use it. Such an act now seems impossibly romantic and oddly archaic, like a sit in or a march to Aldermaston. Yet we are now in the very situation Mottram was trying to engineer. Anyone with ideas and inclination can produce a book and, more importantly, thanks to the evolution of print on demand, they can produce the book they want when they want it. By chance, I happened to appear on a Radio 4 programme about the small press scene a while ago. One of the other participants was Michael Schmidt, who declared himself of the opinion that the proliferation of publications facilitated by technological change is a bad thing. His argument seems to be that there should be an elite, a crack team of cultural arbiters who decide what to blast and bless, who know where the ladders are and know when to lower them and when to pull them up – gatekeepers, keymasters, curators, custodians. On one hand, you can see his point. Print on demand and the vanity press are, if not exactly bedfellows, certainly roommates. On the other, why should writers always have to seek approval, to be supplicants holding out bowls for a ladleful of gruel? Visionaries and innovators are, by definition, out of synch with their times. They are not the sort of people who find their way into Waterstones or onto the library shelf amongst the Armitages, Duffys, Copes and 100 Poems To Clean Your Teeth To. I am not saying that such people have not had an outlet before – far from it. But technology has made it easier than ever to produce high quality texts which can be the stuff from which alternative worlds are constructed, the currency of local scenes with their own phenomena and epiphenomena, their own flora and fauna.

In addition to changing the way that the printed page is distributed, technology can also radicalise the way that is created. Philpott’s reference to scribes is oddly apt, for in some ways that is what technology has made us . I grew up around the corner from the site of St. Peter’s monastery on the banks of the Wear where Bede spent his formative years and I’m beginning to think all those childhood trips to Durham cathedral to stand next to what may or may not be his bones did something to me. After years of seeing the page as simply a place to put words, my increasing familiarity with computers has gradually transformed my practice to the extent that I now view myself as a producer of illuminated manuscripts, incorporating images and non-verbal figures to work in a way that is as much about the eye as the ear and the voice. The screen, far from being a stifling, standardising influence, can be liberating, making the page a playground and a palette. Technology can make new forms. It can also make the old forms new.