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This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative
poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and
close readings of leading North American and British innovative
poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard's
axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex
contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.
Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean
Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth
Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that
their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly
engagement.
For many years now the professional "creative writer" within
universities and other institutions has encompassed a range of
roles, embracing a plurality of scholarly and creative identities.
The often complex relation between those identities forms the broad
focus of this book, which also examines various, and variously
fraught, dialogues between creative writers, "hybrid" writers and
academic colleagues from other subjects within single institutions,
and with the public and the media. At the heart of the book is the
principle of "creative writing" as a fully-fledged discipline, an
important subject for debate at a time when the future of the
humanities is in crisis; the contributors, all writers and teachers
themselves, provide first-hand views on crucial questions: What are
the most fruitful intersections between creative writing and
scholarship? What methodological overlaps exist between creative
writing and literary studies, and what can each side of the
"divide" learn from its counterpart? Equally, from a pedagogical
perspective, what kind of writing should be taught to students to
ensure that the discipline remains relevant? And is the writing
workshop still the best way of teaching creative writing? The
essays here tackle these points from a range of perspectives,
including close readings, historical contextualisation and
theoretical exploration. Professor Richard Marggraf Turley teaches
in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth
University.BR Contributors: Richard Marggraf Turley, Damian Walford
Davies, Philip Gross, Peter Barry, Kevin Mills, Tiffany Atkinson,
Robert Sheppard, Deryn Rees-Jones, Zoe Skoulding, Jasmine Donahaye
This study engages the life of form in contemporary innovative
poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories and
close readings of leading North American and British innovative
poets. The critical approach derives from Robert Sheppard's
axiomatic contention that poetry is the investigation of complex
contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.
Analyzing the poetry of Rosmarie Waldrop, Caroline Bergval, Sean
Bonney, Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Kenneth
Goldsmith, Allen Fisher, and Geraldine Monk, Sheppard argues that
their forms are a matter of authorial design and readerly
engagement.
Lee Harwood's work defines the poetry of an era that saw poetry
itself at its most exciting, expansive and innovative. His
achievement runs through the very core of these qualities and has
enriched the possibilities of poetry through to the present. As a
leading British poet well known for his unique but flexible voice,
speaking in a variety of forms, from direct lyric to elaborate
fictions, from notebook poems to conceptual found texts, from
complex cut-ups to assembled fragments. A restless innovator across
the decades he delighted in working in such a multiplicity of forms
and with a disarming directness that appeared to escape whatever
poetic rules may have been favoured on occasion. His voice is by
turns gentle and erudite, erotic and funny, moving and even
faux-sentimental. Discussions of contemporary poetry are left
incomplete without recognition of his considerable achievements.
From his earliest pamphlet 'title illegible' (1965) to his last
collection 'The Orchid Boat' (2014), 'New Collected Poems'
assembles all the poems (and creative prose) Harwood published in
pamphlet or book form, in broadly chronological order, fashioned
upon the ordering of Harwood's own 2004 'Collected Poems'. Some
excised poems have been restored and fugitive texts that appeared
in an exclusive edition have been included. Brief uncollected
material from the end of his career completes this rich body of
work. 'This new collection is a generously considered gathering of
resistant and supple fragments, hard evidence of a life truly
lived. We are the beneficiaries of these dazzling transfusions of
personality and circumstance. Of remembered and newly encountered
detonations of affect. "The clarity of such moments," Harwood
confesses, can never stay still, even when that seems to be the
required task. Love moves and shifts. Through repeated acts of
making, it coheres and continues.' -Iain Sinclair 'Lee Harwood's
English is like American English in that it lacks a strong sense of
possession. At the same time it has a pearly, soft-focus quality
one rarely sees in American poetry [...] The "great" poetry I like
best has this elf-effacing, translucent quality. Self-effacing not
from modesty but because it is going somewhere and has no time to
consider itself.' -John Ashbery 'Harwood's work returns to local
habitations and names, the lives of family, elegies for friends, to
direct communication among intimates. These vividly rendered,
plain-style evocations, intercut with speculation and emotion,
construct improvised holding environments where the home world and
the safety of loved ones is primary' -Peter Robinson, Times
Literary Supplement
'Enraptured by the versioning bug,' Robert Sheppard confesses of
his virtuosic variations of Petrarch's third sonnet, 'I was off on
one.' With comic verve, he deftly refunctions some of the finest
sonneteers, Petrarch himself, and those of 'The English Strain':
Wyatt and Surrey, 'the first reformers' of English poetry, and John
Milton, exemplary political poet. None is safe from Sheppard's
comedic appropriations of their works and days. Wyatt spies for a
British foreign office that fluxes between the Henrician court and
Tory high command. Surrey is a chinless wonder of aristocratic
chivalry, the marvel of the French killing fields (and Norfolk
dogging sites). Mordant humour and irony continue in Sheppard's
'trans translations': of Charlotte Smith, the Petrarch of Petworth,
witnessing strange happenings on the Downs, and Barrett Browning,
Mistress Elizabeth of her Wimpole Street penthouse and the clued-up
'mistress' of a clownish politician. The dominant satirical theme,
the national strain surrounding that once novel word 'Brexit', is
almost picked up casually in the sequence 'It's Nothing', where
Sheppard delicately and deliberately fails the attempt to speak in
his own voice. He's more at home in his homemade 100-word sonnets,
as he nails Brexit in a neat couplet: 'they've got our country back
for us/ and now they want it for themselves'. As you read this
book, be warned: between poetic worlds, between sonnet and
transposition, big laughs and little truths are lying in wait for
you. Tom Jenks wrote of some of the sequences in this book:
'Sheppard here expands further the boundaries of translation, the
transposition of historical events to contemporary circumstances
being not just incidental to the translation process, but an act of
translation itself.' Geraldine Monk in The Robert Sheppard
Companion informs us: 'Sheppard's writing is rough, rude, quirky,
serious, learned, and never afraid to be humorous. In short it is
as irreverent as it is relevant.'
Robert Sheppard has been at the forefront of innovative poetry
since the 1980s. From early contact with Bob Cobbing, Robert
Creeley, and Lee Harwood, and a rejection of Movement orthodoxy,
Sheppard quickly began to form/reform our perceptions of British
poetry. This wide-ranging volume celebrates the writings of
Sheppard, offering extensive of his work-from poet, to critic,
editor, teacher, and inventor. Including contributions from major
contemporaries, as well as a new generation of scholarship, The
Robert Sheppard Companion situates the remarkable writing life of
one of Britain's most imaginative poets. `Sheppard has been a
champion of British poetry that actively resists the complacent and
the convenient, the merely competent. That has meant evading
bullies who would "banish us," to use Dickinson's phrase.
Sheppard's aesthetic justice has never been just for him; his
social imagination is at one with poems, essays, teaching, and
editing. His work is restlessly agile, generous at heart.' -Charles
Bernstein, from `Preface' to The Robert Sheppard Companion
`[Sheppard's] poetry skews language to takes on big themes and his
writing can be seen as comprehensive poetic chronicling of our
times on an epic scale culminating in his Complete Twentieth
Century Blues. Sheppard's writing is rough, rude, quirky, serious,
learned, and never afraid to be humorous. In short it is as
irreverent as it is relevant. Finally, his generosity in writing
about and promoting the work of others has been unstinting and
invaluable, especially in a country which largely chooses to ignore
its innovative poets.' - Geraldine Monk, from `The Robert Sheppard
Roundtable' `This book shows how far-reaching and generous
Sheppard's writing life has been. He has argued and sung for the
benefit of an entire community, to keep opening the possibilities
of poetry itself. He stands and stands up for the breadth and depth
and future of modern poetry. He's written it, written about it,
published it; theorized, organised and celebrated. It is not often
that innovative practice, political engagement, a thorough
knowledge of poetry, and wit are combined in one body of work. But
this valuable Companion provides the necessary spread of insights
and perspectives to do justice to the extraordinary range of
Sheppard's achievements. And that is some achievement in itself.'
-Peter Hughes
The EUOIA is the brainchild of Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch.
For his last project before his disappearance around 2010, Van
Valckenborch supposedly asked one poet from each of the EU states
to write him a poem. Of course, he wrote them himself … Each poem
was then supposedly translated into Flemish (or occasionally
French) via robot (online) translators and the resultant poem
`finalised’ by Van Valckenborch before presentation on this
website. The poems that follow are best thought of as
collaborations between Van Valckenborch and the 25 imaginary poets
and the robot translator. (As the EU expanded so did the Union:
there are now 27 `members’.) We have, as usual, been accused of
making these translations ourselves, or even of making the poets up
(many of them might take exception, a few might be rather tickled
by that suggestion). Firstly our expertise does not extend to all
the languages encountered. Secondly, our professional pride as
translators would have prohibited the use of electronic translation
devices and we have only been forced to enter into a secondary
relationship with this medium by Van Valckenborch’s engagement
with it, which we rather regret. —Annemie and Martin Krol-Dupuis
(Brussels).
Robert Sheppard's selection draws on every book of his poetry since
Returns (1985) through to Words Out of Time (2015), and is designed
to sample both the recurring and developing themes of his work and
their restlessly changing forms. Ian Davidson in Poetry Wales
called Sheppard's Complete Twentieth Century Blues 'a major poem of
serious intent'. Of his recent Shearsman collections, Alan Baker in
Litter called Warrant Error, 'political poetry of the first order';
Ben Hickman, in PN Review, wrote 'Berlin Bursts perhaps makes one
of the biggest claims for the inherent politics of language and art
in recent British poetry.' A Translated Man, a sequence of
'fictional poems', was described by Tom Jenks in Tears in the
Fence, as 'a compendious work, a vademecum for innovative writing'
and as 'a book which, whilst in keeping stylistically and
thematically with Sheppard's other work, exhibits a degree of
playfulness not always so obvious there...It is, above all, a
deeply pleasurable work.' Kelvin Corcoran wrote about Words Out of
Time: 'There you are characteristically free of flash or reserve
and it increases the sum of what can be written about, I think. And
it's funny.'
Robert Sheppard has given this book over to his own invention, the
fictional Belgian poet Rene Van Valckenborch. Apparently writing in
both Flemish and Walloon, and translated and edited by entities as
shadowy (and dodgy) as himself, Van Valckenborch's split oeuvre
derives from the linguistic and cultural divide within contemporary
Belgium. By the time Van Valckenborch disappears into poetic
silence he seems an enigma of his own making, a comic figure with
tragic attributes, a mystery to all swept up in his apparition.
When his story is finished he leaves behind the deliberately
discontinuous evidence of a dual poetic adventure - one half siding
with history and opting for a breathlessly recurring triplet verse,
the other obsessing over place and space and restlessly and
increasingly playing with experimental forms. Behind and within
them all, Sheppard is extending his formal and referential range:
from homages to film-makers to Twitterodes, from accounts of tribal
masks to cuboid quennets, and poems about Belgium of course. Above
all, he is exploring the limits of the author-function. This is an
imaginary collection with real poems in it.
These new poems use tense couplets and other 'centrifugal' forms to
centre their energies in nodes of impacted attention. They feature
territories as dispersed as Sheppard's local City of Culture and
the global city of division and political murder of the title poem.
The scar of history is drawn across the face of time, as in tragic
Riga where we find reflections on artefacts of survival. 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:
"You'll never finish reading/ the poem in the book with reality
pulling itself/ inside out before your eyes."
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. In the episodes which cover the Poetry Wars of the
1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the
SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; and the cultural poetics
of Iain Sinclair in the 1990s and since; the focus is upon poetic
community rather than individuals.
Complete Twentieth Century Blues is the definitive edition of a
long network of interrelated texts that the author wrote and
assembled as a time-based project between 1989 and the end of the
last century. Many of the texts have appeared before, in both
pamphlets and in critically acclaimed full-length volumes, but this
edition has been revised throughout. It also includes a previously
unpublished book-length text on the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, as
well as a number of shorter pieces. All now appear in their
intended order, and with their connections to other poems made
apparent via an index. At the centre of the book is the sequence
The Lores, written according to a strict word count and introducing
the politics and poetics of 'creative linkage' demonstrated
throughout. It focuses upon fascism and resistances to it. Running
through the volume are the 'Empty Diaires' which offer an
alternative history of the twentieth century, told through a series
of female narrators. Woven between these are poems on blues music,
the first Gulf War, Stalin's poems, failed utopias, the Earl of
Rochester, a sci-fi elegy for the human, a translation from Horace,
the ideology of Thatcherism, atheist hymns, a hilarious romp with a
very rude Robinson Crusoe, homages to various other artists, and an
elegy to Frank Sinatra. The hilarious Wayne Pratt spoofs find their
final resting place here too. The prose-poem essay, 'The End of the
Twentieth Century', brings the project to rest with a celebration
of the complexity of our powers of human connection.
Paul Evans (1945-1991) was a significant member of a group of
radical new poets that appeared in England in the late 1960s, but
his work remains scattered through a number of small-press
publications from 1970-1987 and is now entirely out of print. This
Selected, edited by poet and academic Robert Sheppard, redresses
the situation and makes available a broad selection of Evans' work
from throughout his career - a career that was cut tragically short
by a climbing accident on Snowdon.
Warrant Error is not just a book about the war on terror, yet
neither does it seek to evade it, but to exceed it. Each sonnet in
the four sets of 24 (plus 4 other poems, making a hundred) evokes a
little world, as a sonnet ought, and questions it. The poems play
with the expectations we have of the form, as much as they use the
sonnet sequence's traditional power to switch viewpoint or
attention poem by poem. Some of these look hard at the rhetoric of
the war on terror and the one of terror, and, via pun, ferocious
word-play and reversal, effect an interrogative unpacking more
urgent even than in Sheppard's Twentieth Century Blues. Some poems
focus upon single times and places-the field of vision as well as
the field of battle-with an imagistic precision that suggests that
perception is the birth of clear thinking. Others offer
counter-music to the global in the local, by focussing on the
domestic world of fluid selves, small objects and minor incidents,
with a tender and personal tone new to Sheppard's work. Against
this, possible worlds and fantastic scenarios are offered to ask,
in a speculative but often humorous way, how we got the way we
are.As an ambitious whole, Warrant Error wonders whether compassion
is still one of the passions and tests the strengths of what the
poems call the human covenant against human unfinish, an ethical
and aesthetic ideal that aims to suggest that all these
stories-real, fantastic, or both-are only our stories so far. To be
continued. This is not so much about finding beliefs to endure
(into) this dangerous century, but about presenting as poems a
shifting ground upon which they will find themselves at war or
peace.
Iain Sinclair has a growing reputation as a novelist and writer of
documentary nonÂ-fiction. This study covers his major works, but
also seeks to trace the connections between the writings and his
earlier books of poetry. Indeed, it traces the intertextual curve
of Sinclair’s entire oeuvre, and demonstrates that its unity lies
in the very desire to make connections between disparate cultural
experience, for example between the context of avant garde poetry
that Sinclair emerged from, and the world of pulp fiction that he
has negotiated as a book dealer and an editor.
Atlantic Drift publishes twenty-four poets from the UK, Ireland,
USA and Canada in an exciting partnership between Arc Publications
and Edge Hill University Press. This anthology seeks to highlight
new and existing writing and to define/redefine the discussions
between poets from both sides of 'the pond'. By developing a
dialogue between English-speaking traditions, Atlantic Drift will
include some of the most exceptional poetry and poetics written in
the twenty-first century, featuring Claudia Rankine, Jerome
Rothenberg, Rosmarie Waldrop, Charles Bernstein, Bhanu Kapil and
Allen Fisher. Edited by James Byrne and Robert Sheppard.
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