Tag Archives: Robert Sheppard

Tears in the Fence 83 is out!

Posted on February 13, 2026 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 83 is out!

Tears in the Fence 83 is now available at http://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose and visual poetry, flash fiction, fiction and creative nonfiction by Judith Willson, Kelvin Corcoran, Kym Martindale, Lucy Ingrams, Michelle Penn, Mandy Pannett, Rimas Uzgiris, Kenny Knight, A.W. Kindness, Daša Kružlicová, Wendy Brandmark, Anya Reeve, Cherry Smyth, Lesley Burt, Kasia Flisick, Steve Spence, Charles Wilkinson, David Punter, Andrew Henon, Nigel Jarrett, Rachel Goodman, Robert Sheppard, Rebecca Rose Harris, Sarah Watkinson, Jane Wheeler, Jeanette Forbes, Vincent De Souza, Cathra Kelliher, Norman Jope, Pamela Coren, Beth Davyson, Heather Hughes, James Sutherland-Smith, Phil Williams, Kareem Tayyar, Basil King, John Freeman, Susie Wilson, Robert Hampson, Jean Atkin, David Pollard and Penny Hope.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by Joanna Nissel, Aidan Semmen’s 2025 Tears in the Fence Festival Address, Richard Foreman on J.H. Prynne, Elźbieta Wójcik-Leese on Ágnes Lehóczky, Barbara Bridger on Virginie Poitrasson, Guy Russell on Mark Goodwin, Peter Larkin on recent British & Canadian Ecopoetry, Kym Martindale on Eliza O’Toole, Robert Sheppard on Tim Allen, Ian Seed on Jeremy Over, Mandy Haggith on Gerry Loose, Mandy Haggith on Katherine Gallagher, Mandy Pannett on Lesley Saunders, Kelvin Corcoran in conversation with Alan Baker, Graham Hartill on Caroline Goodwin, Mandy Pannett on Agnieska Studzińska, Keith Jebb on Gavin Selerie and Tim Allen, Vincent De Souza on David Miller, Elaine Randell on Chris Emery, Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 18 and the Notes On Contributors.

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Tears in the Fence 81 is out!

Posted on February 18, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 81 is out!

Tears in the Fence 81 is now available at https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward/and features poetry, multilingual poetry, prose poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction by Alicia Byrne Keane, Lesley Burt, Kate Noakes, Lucy Ingrams, Jane Wheeler, Florence Ng, Angela Howarth Martinot, Kasia Flisiuk, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, Norman Jope, Frances Presley, Jessica Tillings, Steve Ely, Ian Seed, L. Kiew, Michael Henry, Catherine Fletcher, Bel Wallace, Holly Winter-Hughes, Tristan Moss, Paul A. Green,  Julian Dobson, David Sahner, Jess Bauldry, Mandy Pannett, Andrew Duncan, Blossom Hibbert, Keith Jebb, Paul Stephenson, Poonam Jain, Greg Bright, Helena Steel, Michael Loveday, Charles Green, Penny Hope, Charles Hadfield, Luke Emmett, C. P. Nield, Hannah Linden, Richard Foreman, Ilse Pedler and Charles Wilkinson.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by David Caddy, Gerald Killingworth’s Tears in the Fence 2024 Festival Address, Andrew Duncan on Allen Fisher, Barbara Bridger on Carol Watts, Guy Russell on Guillaume Apollinaire, Emily Moore on Gayl Jones, Robert Sheppard on Philip Terry, David Pollard on Alina Stefanescu, Barbara Bridger on Aneta Kamińska, Frances Presley on Hazel Smith, Steve Spence on Norman Jope, Charles Wilkinson, Michael Lee Rattigan on Anthony Seidman, Joanna Nissel on Ilse Pedler, Bob Cooper on Lesley Burt, Steve Spence on John Phillips, John Brantingham on Judy Kronenfeld, Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 16, David Caddy’s Afterword and Notes on Contributors.

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The Necessity of Poetics by Robert Sheppard (Shearsman Books)

Posted on October 2, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Necessity of Poetics by Robert Sheppard (Shearsman Books)

There is a contradiction at the heart of Robert Sheppard’s book: the fact that he declares poetics to be tentative, nomadic and provisional yet publishes his (tentative and provisional) poetics texts not only as he goes along, but now in an edition of critical pieces that stretch from 1988 to 2023. What was of the moment becomes fixed upon the page.

His 1988 text, which ends the book, remains for me the most straightforward and lucid, reasoned statement in the book. I have used it for decades to introduce the idea of poetics, of thinking about one’s own writing, to school pupils, university students and poetry group and workshop members. Those who balk at what is said in the piece have an escape route: Sheppard quite clearly states ‘It is impossible for anybody who wants to write a poetry that is politically revolutionary to write in the way most poems in Britain are written.’ [my emphasis] Point that out, along with the plethora of ‘may’s scattered throughout and those resistant to Sheppard’s critique of advertising slogans, dislike of active reading and engagement with how language works can metaphorically stand back and engage in discussion.

I’ve also used an earlier version of the much longer title piece, which expansively evidences the fact that poetics can be anything that is useful to and informs or has informed the writing under consideration. So it might be examples of other poets’ work, it might be phrases or associations that inspired or initiated the work, research in its many forms, critical reading, etc. etc. But Sheppard urges us to think about what we write rather than just write. [I actually get students to write a short definition of poetics once they have read and discussed ‘The Necessity of Poetics’ in groups. We then compare and contrast their definitions with each other and, finally, a succinct statement by Sheppard published elsewhere. Of course, this brief definition annoys them, but the wide-ranging and seemingly endless ‘Necessity’ piece is important to show the endless possibilities of poetics.]

Sheppard’s new book gathers up all sorts of poetics: critical essays that pay attention to other poets’ work, commentaries about his own work, discussions of rhythm and pulse, ekphrasis (and anti-ekphrasis), and ideas of networked poems forming a larger whole that can be read in several different ways (cf. Twentieth Century Blues), along with autobiographical pieces about his time in London and teaching at Edge Hill University. Personal experience also informs an intriguing piece ‘Critical Tuning’ which explores the idea of ‘Radio Interference and Interruption as a Poetics for Writing’, an attempt to explain and/or understand fragmentation, grammatical and syntactical jumps as a product of contemporary media and how we listen (or watch or browse).

For me Sheppard’s engagement with poetry once he has written it has always offered a creative freedom. Explore form and content with and through the writing, find out what you have written, edit and shape it, then work out what it is about and why you have written about it. Why have I been reading what I have? How has that work affected or influenced my writing, directly or indirectly? What do I think of my poetry today and what might I think tomorrow? And the same again the day after.

Sheppard can be reassuring but also unsettling, a provocateur and a reconciler, a (metaphorical) warmonger and a conscientious objector, a safe harbour and a wrecker attempting to draw you onto the rocks of experiment and deconstruction. The Necessity of Poetics is not a creative writing handbook or a book of explanatory criticism, neither it is an authorial defence of Sheppard’s own poetry. It is a challenge and an incitement to make it new, to engage with the possibilities of language in all shapes and forms, to realise the linguistic, social, political and aspirational uses of poetry, to think about what we are writing, what we have written, what we could write, and how we might use creativity for utopian ends.

Rupert Loydell  2nd October 2024


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Doubly Stolen Fire by Robert Sheppard (Aquifer)

Posted on May 15, 2024 by tearsinthefence
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 15th May 2024

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when did it aall gan wrang? by Alan Baker (Open House Editions)

Posted on May 22, 2022 by tearsinthefence
when did it aall gan wrang? by Alan Baker (Open House Editions)

These poems are a mix of actual conversations and additional material aimed at giving a voice to those who often go unheard. They are moving, humorous and witty and employ a degree of dialect related to Newcastle where the author grew up. The opening sequence ‘Ten Tyneside Twittersonnets’ are based on a form invented by Robert Sheppard which has 280 characters (a tweet) split over the 14 lines of a sonnet. They remind me, to a degree, of Sean Bonney’s sequence The Commons, where found materials are utilised in relation to a commentary on popular culture, class and politics. The resonance feels similar.

          where’s it aall ganna end?

          (1967)

          ee, alan byekar, ye

          luk leik butta would

          n’t melt in ya mooth

          . ye’re a bonny bairn

          but ya nowt but trou

          ble. Aa’ll be hevin

          words wi’ ya mam. Ye

          ‘ll niva come to owt

          D’ye even belang roo

          nd heor? Hadaway or

          aall call the poli

          s. Where’s it aall g

          anna end? Nase alwi

          z in a bluddy buik!

     In ‘Bob Morris Speaks Out’ a retired miner talks about the events around the 1926 strike which is based on an actual recording from the British Library’s survey of English Dialects. It’s a powerful piece which resonates with those who lived through the 1984 strike and reminds the contemporary reader of the importance of historical documents and of the nature of class, poverty and politics which, in our current environment is hardly inappropriate:

          As hewed coal an

          the best men couldn’t

          get nee more than

          thorty five bob a week

          that had ti keep

          yor hoose and family          

          aye thorty five bob a week

          it was cruelty mann!

          an the gaffer spoke

          ti yi as if yi

          was just muck

          yi don’t answer him back o no

There are a number of short  pieces under the headline ‘Dispatches’, attributed to particular residents of the housing estate in Newcastle where the author grew up which are filled with humour and poignant recollection. This is poetry as social history, gritty realism which also has an element of experiment, mainly encapsulated in the title poem from Twittersonnets where the final lines   ‘…. when did it / aall gan wrang mrs t’ probably relates to a communication between neighbours but I can’t help reading an address to Margaret Thatcher in the tone even if the dates don’t quite match. I’d love to hear these pieces read aloud and understand there are recordings available. It will be interesting to see what the author does with the line breaks as indicated by the formal restraints on these fourteen liners. Alan Baker’s work is continually intriguing, his mix of politics, experiments in writing style and social history are rare elements and his output is prolific. Highly recommended.

Steve Spence 22nd May 2022

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Entanglements of Two: A Series of Duets Eds. Karen Christopher & Mary Paterson (Intellect)

Posted on November 30, 2021 by tearsinthefence
Entanglements of Two: A Series of Duets Eds. Karen Christopher & Mary Paterson (Intellect)

My own collaborative writing often relies on processes and forms. Whether writing in response to agreed themes and/or what has just been written by someone else, it involves trusting the other writer(s) but also trusting the work itself as it emerges – which is often not what is expected. Editing and shaping is of course a collaboration too, and collaborations which are simply about the juxtaposition of each other’s discrete texts are as collaborative as texts where each author has written a line and passed the work to another.

There is little written about poetic collaboration. Robert Sheppard’s essays about poetics (1999) are helpful because of his open and inclusive approach, as is his anthology of collaboratively-created imaginary authors, Twitters for a Lark (2017) and what he has written about it on his Pages blog (and elsewhere). I have also found Dan Beachy-Quick’s Of Silence and Song (2017) and Dean Young’s Recklessness (2009) useful, but much of this is simply about the act of writing and not specifically collaboration. When I taught an Arvon course with Sheila E Murphy, she shared insights from the business world, where collaboration is considered in terms of productivity, team roles and social dynamics. I have been able to use some of this material when lecturing on collaborative project modules.

It is in the area of performance, however, where I have found the most material about the dynamics and process of, as well as reflection upon, collaboration. Karen Christopher and Mary Paterson’s new book, Entanglements of Two (2021), joins a number of informative texts such as Matthew Goulish’s 39 Microlectures (2000), Tim Etchells’ Certain Fragments(1999) and Twyla Tharp’s The Collaborative Habit (2009). Goulish and Stephen Bottoms also edited Small Acts of Repair(2007), a book about Goat Island, the performance group which Christopher and Goulish were part of until its 2009 demise.

At first I felt excluded from this book. I do not regard myself as a performer (although I give poetry readings and university lectures) and my writing and visual art practices remain focussed on what is produced, my texts and paintings. I may (and do) reflect upon them and how I made them, but interviews, notes, academic and non-academic considerations exist to inform future work and perhaps give readers/viewers a ‘helping hand’ towards understanding. They are context not the work itself. Brief stories and asides at readings, book jacket blurbs and painting titles seem very different from lengthy artspeak labels on a gallery wall, explanatory introductions and prefaces, let alone complete publications.

Part of me wants to simply watch a performance, read a book, or look at the work. If something is not discernible in the work, does it exist as part of that work? Is this book just an exercise in explaining process, some might say justification? But, of course, if we are interested we want to know more. And Entanglements of Two certainly offers more. There is lengthy and slow deliberation here, a reflective practice that seems at times to almost overtake the duets discussed, articulating what is otherwise unsaid.

Explorers traversing the Arctic and Antarctica often reported an extra person within their company. T.S. Eliot drew on this in ‘The Waste Land’: 

        Who is the third who walks always beside you?
   When I count, there are only you and I together
   But when I look ahead up the white road
   There is always another one walking beside you

      (1963: 77)

Although there are also associations here with resurrection and ghostly presence, it might also be taken as a metaphor for the new products of collaboration where 1+1 does not equal 2 but 3. Contributor Orit Kent discusses havruta, a Jewish way of  studying where reading and learning is undertaken in pairs, creating and discussing meaning together; David Berman uses ideas from quantum physics to explore ‘[b]ringing together different phenomenon’; whilst Karen Christopher and Sophie Grodin declare that ‘[w]ith the other, thoughts and ideas travel to places where you could not go alone.’ They go on to note that ‘[t]here is a struggle here between independence and interdependence.’ (115)

Entanglements of Two works, like much performance work, by slow and considered associative thinking. Back and forth ideas go, page and eye, words and reader, meaning and mind, reflecting upon ten years of duet performances whilst also – as the back cover puts it – ‘exploring the practical, philosophical, and aesthetic implications of working in pairs and offer[ing] wider reflections on the duet as a concept in artistic and social life’. The unit of two does not often always invite participation, it sometimes feels like a sealed unit, a couple. We cannot observe the duets, we have to (re)imagine the performances as we read the text. We are on our own: entanglements tie people together and exclude others; we have to choose how to untangle meaning for ourselves.

•

So far I think this book is

   A call to action.

   A learning tool.

   An analysis.

   A footnote.

   Smoke traces in the air, soon gone.

It is 

   A slow accumulation of knowledge and ideas.

   An attack on all sides.

   An elephant electrocuted in public for business purposes: 

   murder to discredit the competition.

   (The elephant in the room.)*

It is analytical obsession, talk that makes my head spin. In a good way.

•

Substitute ‘book’, ‘writing’ or ‘poem’ for ‘duet’ in the following quote: ‘[T]he duet is a form of responsibility. […] a duet generates its own forms of knowledge. […] a duet is its own form of research.’ (Mary Paterson, 185)

NOTE

* The elephant, who is mentioned in Entanglements of Two, was called Topsy. She was electrocuted in 1903 and the event was filmed by Thomas Edison. The footage and information are available online.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beachy-Quick, Dan (2017), Of Silence and Song, Minneapolis: Milkweed.

Bottoms, Stephen and Goulish, Matthew, eds. (2007), Small Acts of Repair. Performance, Ecology and Goat Island, London: Routledge.

Eliot, T.S. (1963) ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) in Collected Poems 1909-1962, 1-86, London: Faber.

Etchells, Tim (1999), Certain Fragments. Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment, London: Routledge.

Goulish, Matthew (2000), 39 Microlectures in proximity of performance, London: Routledge.

Sheppard, Robert (1999), Far Language: poetics and lingusitically innovative poetry 1978-1997, Exeter: Stride.

Sheppard, Robert (2017), Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors, Bristol: Shearsman.

Sheppard, Robert, ed. Pages, http://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/ (accessed 9 November 2021)

Tharp, Twyla (2009), The Collaborative Habit. Life Lessons for Working Together, London: Simon & Schuster.

Young, Dean (2010), The Art of Recklessness. Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, Minneapolis: Graywolf.

Rupert Loydell 30th November 2021

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The English Strain (Shearsman Books) by Robert Sheppard & Bad Idea (KFS Press) by Robert Sheppard

Posted on April 27, 2021 by tearsinthefence
The English Strain (Shearsman Books) by Robert Sheppard & Bad Idea (KFS Press) by Robert Sheppard

This, I’d say, is uniquely charged, recondite poetry that both hovers over and sharply reenvisages the English sonnet in a nearly scholarly way, but is also remarkably engaging, bawdy, risqué and contemporary. The two books are complementary and contribute to a trilogy, full title English Strain, of which the pending British Standards marks the third part.

The effort is marked by interwoven threads, as it were. The roots of the project pertain to the rewriting, dubbing or transposing of sonnets, setting up with Petrarch’s third, reproduced here, but thence moving on to other notables of the English form: Wyatt, Surrey, Milton, Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Barrett Browning for the Shearsman volume, and Michael Drayton, rather underrated, for Bad Idea.

The whole is a highly unusual combination of ribaldry and finesse. It’s also pretty much all in the sonnet form of the Petrarchan variety, which for all its stateliness risks being overcome by farce; there are lookin parts for contemporary politicians such as Theresa May and Boris Johnson. There is a brooding disquiet about what is fairly uncompromisingly seen as the folly of Brexit.

But more than that it is nonetheless just an indulgent pleasure to read, and the sifting through or romp via historical progress tends to keep it all on the rails. Try for instance,-

            Petrarchan petting! At the end of the poem he gives her away

            like an evil relative at a shot-gun wedding. I wish he’d done

            something with this poem. I wish I’d done something

            with my life, like jousting or a tourney             (p91)

where the irreverent mockery looms apparent. 

It is pleasing also and appropriate that English Strain moves chronologically, with the opening epigraph from Drayton.-

            My muse is rightly of the English straine,

            That cannot long one fashion intertaine.      (p6)

I’d say what we find is a considerable amount of libidinal energy and direction hewn according to the formal model of the sonnet form, so we get a fascinating mixture of the eruptive and the contained coterminously. There’s also a good amount not just of Westminster politics here but also gender relational controversies, which might be particularly fitting given the sonnet’s role as a mode for finding courtly favour. And a mite unlike Boccaccio, Petrarch was often studious and exacting, that is that the form must have it to the end. It is as if Sheppard is addressing this language by testing how suitable and appropriate it is to our times, which indeed it remains so, or not far off, perhaps more Machiavelli than Dante, however. It is a very effective trawl through history. But Sheppard throughout is agile, not easily pinned down. He is also adept at inhabiting a variety of poeticising voices, so that the Charlotte Smith, say, is just as fluent and persuasive as the few Milton poems here. Would Woolf’s Orlando be too wild a comparison, although Flush is in Sheppard’s bibliography? An obvious source book framing the issues here is also the Reality Street Book of Sonnets. I think then that this is very accomplished poetry at the innovative end of things, reworking literary contemporaneity with the irrefutable force of historical embeddedness.

Clark Allison 27th April 2021

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A Journal of Enlightened Panic by Alan Baker (Shoestring Press)

Posted on September 22, 2020 by tearsinthefence
A Journal of Enlightened Panic by Alan Baker (Shoestring Press)

Good poetry often creates a sense of release, of being returned to a point of wonder and attention. Alan Baker’s latest chapbook, A Journal of Enlightened Panic, has that quality. There’s an integrity about the writing which is enlivening.

The metaphor of life as voyage, journey, or walk dominates the volume. The longest poem, ‘Voyager,’ has perhaps the most complex use of these tropes. The poem is dedicated to Baker’s mother, who died in 2015. The text mixes information concerning the Voyager space probe, and material about life on a container ship, with the night-time wanderings of ‘Alan’, a cleverly objectified version of the poet himself.

The probe in outer space, the ship often travelling for days without seeing another vessel, have a resonance with Alan’s nocturnal perambulations, walks which have ‘the quality of dream’ but are also punctured by the unwelcome intrusions of time and unease.

Alan would like to inform us that he was tired
and became irritated
when Time appeared in the form of a bird
Uncertainty, in the form of the rising wind

The refusal of the bird to ‘accept itself as an illusion’ prompts a question:

…whether the double night of dark
and the dark of dreams
invests us with a kind of wisdom,
or whether in fact, the night is peopled by lights
and reflections from which
there is no escape.

Later in the poem a night-time journey by car is a voyage into a wordless and indifferent universe accessible only through dream. A river ‘bears him off his feet’, carrying him back to childhood memories of a coal fire, Dr Who and ‘Geordie gabble’ like the ‘residual sound/ of the creation of the universe.’ The poem ends:

…but here he is, not having expected
to lose the path, or care too much about the old guard
when they’d gone, but he does, surprisingly much.

Another fine example of Baker’s ability to articulate the conflicting tensions of life, and the possible consolation of imaginative attention, is the opening poem in the collection, ‘When a man goes out’. Here it’s an awareness of a worsening ecological crisis and the poet’s contribution to this in the acts of daily living, such as using a fridge, which preoccupy Baker. This is the ‘enlightened panic’ from which the chapbook takes its name. In such a context is it ‘decadent’, he asks, to be absorbed with questions about art?
The poet’s answer is that he does not ‘trust the voices that separate/ the inner from the outer, that sit at the threshold and ask for ID.’ Through attention to the present moment, the poem suggests, ‘a man may be transformed each morning, / like the day’s colours mirrored in the windows of a sleeping house.’

Other poems in this collection are tributes to fellow writers with whom Baker shares an aesthetic affinity – Geraldine Monk, Peter Hughes, Lee Harwood, Peter Gizzi. There are also two poems written in collaboration with Robert Sheppard and previously published in Sheppard’s EUOIA anthology. Baker shows himself equally at home in short-form poems as in the longer discursive texts. A number of the poems make use of embedded quotations– I noted Donne, Shakespeare and Joyce.

In ‘The Right’, Baker speaks of the ‘physicality/ to some texts’, which can ‘create an inner sound/ that takes on a life of its own/ aside from literal meaning’. He speculates that this might be something at one with ‘laugher or weeping,/ or wordless expressions of love.’ Or like the effect of someone making small talk before asking ‘an awkward question’, a question we do not have to answer because as guests we have ‘a right to silence.’

Can ‘a sound that transforms/ and continues the world…illuminate malignancies,/ soothe them with a process/ incompletely understood’ he asks in ‘Hematopoiesis’. Many of the poems in this volume offer precisely this kind of sustaining possibility.

Simon Collings 22nd September 2020

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Atlantic Drift edited by James Byrne & Robert Sheppard (Arc Press & Edge Hill University Press)

Posted on October 1, 2017 by tearsinthefence
Atlantic Drift edited by James Byrne & Robert Sheppard (Arc Press & Edge Hill University Press)

The opening statement of Robert Sheppard’s short introduction to this exciting new volume of transatlantic poetic focus is uncompromisingly clear in its assertion:

“Contact and conversation between transatlantic poets has always been one of fluctuating relations. North American writers have always been an important presence in British and Irish poetries, sometimes physically so. Edward Dorn, who lived in and wrote about England was aware of these relations and what he called the ‘North Atlantic Turbine’. Often the traffic is reversed.”

The fluctuating nature of these relations can of course be traced back to the early Sixties when Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry was being recognised in England with a sense of excitement. Charles Tomlinson’s forty-page Black Mountain Poets supplement to Ian Hamilton’s the Review appeared in January 1964 and three months later Andrew Crozier edited an American Supplement to the Cambridge magazine, Granta. Unlike Tomlinson’s focus on the Black Mountain School Crozier’s was more largely based on the Allen anthology and contained work by Levertov, Eigner, Woolf and Loewinsohn as well as Dorn, Dawson, Duncan and Wieners. Crozier quoted a letter Olson had written to George Butterick which included the phrase “to freshen our sense of the language we do have” and this statement might well describe the impact of this new anthology from Sheppard and Byrne. However, it might be just worth recalling the rather mean-spirited editorial note which Ian Hamilton added to the Tomlinson supplement which had offered such new ideas to a world dominated by New Lines:

“It should, I think, be made clear that the foregoing pages were given over to Charles Tomlinson to fill, more or less as he pleased, with work by the Black Mountain poets. We are most grateful to him for his co-operation. The editorial motive of the Review in this project has been a documentary rather than, necessarily, a critical one. We believe that the movement ought at least to be known about.”

As if hurled in the teeth of Hamilton’s graceless editorial disclaimer, Robert Sheppard’s comments present us with a sense of the active and living importance of what he and James Byrne have collected together. It is located in a reference to one of the contributors, Jerome Rothenberg, whose concern for the urgency and scope of poetics is presented in the words used to relate this “directly to the way he sees the world”:

“But the world we share, & our interplay with it, calls again & again for discourse: in the case of Poets, the setting forth of a poetics. I have found myself involved with that also, at first tentatively & then, once into it, discovering ways suited to my own temperament & to the sense I have…that the discourse, like the poetry, must in all events resist rigidity & closure.”

It is this resistance to closure, this refusal to adopt the safe line for poetry that is presented year after year in too many Secondary Schools, that makes this new anthology a box of fireworks. One can read Sean Bonney’s lines of lyrical politics and hear a voice that possesses not only anger but acute observation:

“An invisible person has appeared in everyone’s simultaneous dream.
Oh look here I am. Fuck the police.
It is the surveillance laws. All ages are not contemporaneous.
We are outside this century. We are very glamorous. We are
waiting in the hall.
Somewhere near Moritzplatz the adepts are getting sick.
It is the stupidity of gardens. I love the tiny sparrows.
The janitor’s kids are not playing they are digging up gold.
It is the last song you will ever hear.”

And one can turn from that to Chris McCabe’s snarled lines about “John Whittaker Straw, Labour politician” who changed his name to steal unearned value from the Peasants’ Revolt figure of 1381, Jack Straw. And then one can turn again to Rosmarie Waldrop’s ‘By the Waters of Babylon”:

“Unless we recognize a language we do not recognize a man. We
wrap entire villages in barbed wire.

My father used to close his eyes and remain as motionless as
possible to let his body-image dissolve.

I repeat myself often.

Time has no power over the Id. But heat passes from a warm body
to a cold body and not in the reverse direction.”

Look in this anthology for the America of Charles Bernstein and Claudia Rankine, Nathaniel Mackey and Lyn Hejinian; look this side of the Atlantic for Allen Fisher and John James, Geraldine Monk and Zoë Skoulding. We are presented with “Poets in both directions across the water” who “have influenced, and continue to influence each other in terms of practice and poetics.”
Atlantic Drift continues this collaboration and exchange in its alphabetic juxtaposition of twenty-four contributors and these poems ignite to provide a most effective and immediate anthology of the living power of poetry and poetics. As such it takes its place in the tradition of Donald Allen’s 1960 volume and Iain Sinclair’s 1996 publication, Conductors of Chaos.

Ian Brinton, 1st October 2017

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The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan)

Posted on October 21, 2016 by tearsinthefence
The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan)

I am no great reader of theoretical approaches to poetry but the name of the author of this one suggested something rather more exciting. I wasn’t disappointed! Of course when I first thought about reading this recent publication the well-worn quotation from Creeley to Olson about ‘form is never more than an extension of content’ sprang to mind. I have lived with this phrase for years and have often associated it in my mind with that early line from Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’:

‘Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’

What I like about this new book by Robert Sheppard is the way in which I am taken back to the poems themselves (or the prose in the case of Veronica Forrest-Thomson) with that clear sense of what is at stake,

‘…the agency of form: how it extends, reveals or – in my terms – enacts, enfolds, and becomes content.’

This book is about how we read poetry and it is refreshing to hear Sheppard say that ‘form’ cannot be held any longer ‘to be a simple opposite to content, a vase containing water, or even a cloud permeated with moisture.’ As a former school-master I am delighted to read the reference to Wallace Stevens’s wry note ‘The poem is the poem, not its paraphrase’. That quotation itself should be given to all teachers of poetry to pin up in their classrooms!
There are chapters in this book dealing with, amongst many others, Tim Atkins and Peter Hughes, Rosemarie Waldrop, Geraldine Monk, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths and Barry MacSweeney. There is a chapter on ‘Translation as Transformation’ and it reads as if Sheppard had his copy to hand of Yves Bonnefoy’s The Curved Planks, translated by Hoyt Rogers with its terrific afterword about the French poet and the ‘Art of Translation’. Paraphrasing Mallarmé Rogers suggested that translations are not made with images , but with words, and goes on to refer to a letter sent him by Bonnefoy in which the focus is on the French word “bateau” which corresponds well with “boat”. In his poetry Bonnefoy often used the word “barque” but an English equivalent (“bark” or “barque”) simply won’t do since the word is far more unusual in our language. When Rogers settled for the word “boat” he recognised that the French “barque” was evocative because, as Bonnefoy put it, ‘between the consonants the vowel forms the same dark hollow we see in a boat between the curved planks of the prow and the stern’. In his translation Rogers settled for “boat” which itself has an accumulated lyric connotation through a precedent such as The Prelude with its episode of the stolen boat. In this chapter on ‘Translation as Transformation’ Robert Sheppard looks at the practice of rendering poetry from one language into another in terms of a textual engagement, a reading, a response to the original and suggests that ‘Poetry is what is found in translation, as we shall see’.
It was a delight to see a chapter on what I find the bizarre but intriguing world of Stefan Themerson, a world ‘like that of Lewis Carroll…in which logic and poetry wrestle’. In considering the building of cathedrals Themerson writes:

‘its tower
is the thought
of its buttresses’

An example of how Robert Sheppard prompts the reader into thinking closely about the poetry being read can be exemplified by the provocative consideration of Paul Batchelor’s Bloodaxe anthology of essays, Reading Barry MacSweeney (2013) and MacSweeney’s 1997 Bloodaxe publication, The Book of Demons where

‘…readers face two models of poesis, each of which may be seen doubly. The ‘Pearl’ poems, focused upon the figure of a mute young girl as reported by the suffering ‘Bar’, are either read as rich post-Wordsworthian pastoral or as sentimental bucolic. The second half of the volume, the contrasting ‘The Book of Demons’, is read either as the self-indulgent mythologizing of an alcoholic about alcoholism, or as evidence of MacSweeney’s deep, raw honesty about dependency and its attendant psychological horrors.’

Robert Sheppard’s book is one to keep dipping into: it prompts you to want to go back to sources whilst at the same time it offers advice about how to read poetry. It is no mere accident that the first chapter should look closely at Veronica Forrest-Thomson, the critic whose question was always ‘how do poems work’. Referring to the posthumous collection from 1976, On the Periphery, the question for Sheppard remains ‘how will the poems be made?’

Ian Brinton 21st October 2016

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