Doubly Stolen Fire by Robert Sheppard (Aquifer)

It turns out, after all these years, that Robert Sheppard is a fictional writer, invented and ventriloquised by Alan Fissure and Robot Handsome. In Doubly Stolen Fire. Sheppard seems to admit that he is just as non-existent as the numerous poets he has previously invented for various anthologies and unrealised projects, all of which he has written about under various pseudonyms for non-existent academic-sounding journals. In a similar manner, most of these texts have been previously published in zines and magazines with unlikely-sounding monikers.

It is a literary hall of mirrors, a meandering authorial maze, where false references cite imaginary critics or non-existent articles or reviews by genuine academics or critics. The trouble is it is all so damn convincing! Who doesn’t want to believe in a talking mongoose or a mannequin which channels poetry during lockdown? Or that Liverpool is the epicentre of so many literary movements and so much radical poetics? Who hasn’t believed in a poet called Robert Sheppard, piecing together the sprawling opus that is Twentieth Century Blues or editing anthologies of beneath-the-radar European poets? Or the jovial facilitator and performer sharing pints, speaking in tongues or co-editing the day’s issue of Writer’s Foreplay with the late great Bob Cobbing?

But if I look back in time I can see how he invented me, too. He was editor of one of the first magazines to publish a poem of mine. He sent letters of support and encouragement, gradually convincing me to publish Stride magazine and then, in due course, Stride Publications, until I was in a position to publish several Robert Sheppard books. Meanwhile, small press volumes of poems I didn’t remember writing would turn up at an alarming rate, along with benevolent notes and positive reviews, all it now seems authored by Robert Sheppard.

Sheppard, himself, writes about the fictional poets of the past and future, but it is the influential imaginary poet of the present we should fear, spreading his alternative histories far and wide through the invisible networks of gullible uncreative writers and would-be poets. It feels unlikely now that the Great British Poetry Society Heist ever happened, or indeed, the Britpop Pottery Revival. In fact, a century of small press poetry and poets, including myself, looks likely to be part of the biggest literary hoax ever to be perpetuated on itself.

Except this is also an implausible construct. There is no Robert Sheppard, there is no editor, author and publisher Rupert Loydell; and he does not review books. Sheppard’s knotty tangles of poetics make no sense and there is no excuse for Fissure and Handsome’s sustained prank. I mean, surely there are enough bloody poets out there already, without inventing any more?

Afterword

I may be non-existent and also paranoid [True, ed.], but within minutes of writing this review on scrap paper in bed last night, I received the following email messages:

     1. If you publish that review you will be sorry.

     2. This is to confirm your pre-publication order of 50 copies of Never Knowingly Run Out of Words by Robert Sheppard. You will be charged when we feel like it.

3. Hi big boy, I’m Lorraine. I am 3.2 miles away. Would you like to see 
           my photos? Or meet up? 

This morning, a parcel van drew up and delivered 24 cans of what was labelled Twentieth Century Booze, along with a copy of the first instalment of Alan Fissure’s Out of Place and Robot Handsome’s An Explication of Colanders. There was also a handwritten copy of the first email, above, with the addition of We now where you lived, in green felt pen on the bottom.

Rupert Loydell 15^th May 2024