I was born in 1955 and grew up on the English South Coast in Southwick, where I attended Shoreham Secondary School, an institution that was already sending sixth formers to university, before it merged with King’s Manor School, where I received a sound (A Level) education in English, History and Economics. I am living proof of the efficacy of comprehensive education.
The proximity of Bill Butler’s famous Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton and its poetry magazines, reading Horovitz’s anthology Children of Albion, and meetings with Bob Cobbing and Lee Harwood, all before I’d left school, meant I discovered the work of the British Poetry Revival early: contemporary writing to supplement my earlier obsession with TS Eliot and Surrealism. The first poet I saw read was Barry McSweeney in 1974.
Later that year I attended the University of East Anglia in Norwich (attracted by its interest in contemporary literature) and entered a more conventional literary world that largely didn’t recognise the work I was already reading and writing. However, it was separate meetings with tutors Helen McNeil, Lorna Sage and Victor Sage during my final year that encouraged me to think of myself primarily as a writer.
I edited 1983, a poetry magazine on cassette tape that was a little ahead of its time, like its name (this was the mid-1970s): it published Harwood, Paul Evans, Stefan Themerson, Henri Chopin, Bill Griffiths and others. However, I was no prodigy in my creative work.
After graduating with a solid background in poetry and Modernism, I took a year off on the South Coast and began to sing the blues with my friend Tony Parsons (we had a revival in the early 1990s as Little Albert Fly, and I still sing occasionally).
I studied for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
Following a crisis over (not) writing fiction, I decided to submit poetry for the MA thesis, and I only wrote fiction again recently, although I have been long drawn to both prose (not prose poetry!) and to the fictive in various forms.
In 1980, I wrote ‘The Blickling Hall Poem’, although ‘Tombland’ from the year before vies for attention as Opus Number One.
By this time – still in Norwich – I was working on my PhD, with Victor Sage, on the poetry of the British Poetry Revival (after embarking on research on James Joyce and the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses), and editing a mimeographed magazine called Rock Drill with Penny Bailey.
After a term teaching at UEA in 1981, I found myself in Manchester, and followed up connections with PN Review. I fell into teaching in Further Education (English, Communications, General Studies, Journalism, you name it …) a sector I carried on with until 1996.
I enjoyed every moment in the classroom, but was increasingly alienated from the Thatcherite managerialism of the institutions at which I taught.
A move to London in 1983 to train for this career put me in touch with a particularly vibrant scene around the Sub Voicive poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project – both at which I read regularly – with Gilbert Adair and others, and with Adrian Clarke, with whom I would edit an anthology of the exciting work that we saw around us: Floating Capital. There is another anthology mooted this year that will look back and collect some of that work.
In order to finish the PhD – now focused upon the work of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood – I deliberately stopped writing poetry for a year.
I like to think that I knew what I was doing.
A line was drawn under early work by the publication of the slim pamphlet Returns in 1985 and new work, illustrated by artist and poet Patricia Farrell, published as small pamphlets from our Ship of Fools imprint, suggested a new direction.
(The term ‘linguistically innovative poetry’ had mercifully not yet been coined by Adair.)
In this, my thirtieth year, I also found myself getting married (a rather unfashionable thing to do in our circle), becoming a father, working full time in FE, and living in Surrey.
By 1990 Patricia, Stephen and I managed to return to London from this ‘internal exile’, and we lived in Tooting.
We immediately set up a monthly discussion group to complement the experimental workshop of Cobbing’s Writers Forum, which we began attending, and the continuing Sub Voicive.
I’d also started a frugal serial magazine, Pages, which seemed to get around and which I promoted as ‘resources for the linguistically innovative poetries’. These have been electronically archived at Jacket2.
(After a second series in the 1990s, featuring a poet per issue, I revived it as a blogzine in 2005, and this continues as my blog.)
I also began collaborating with the dancer Jo Blowers.
The publication of a few anthologies of the alternative poetries – I was in a couple – made this an optimistic time in an under-reported field.
The support of Rupert Loydell’s Stride Publications for my work (4 books and one edited volume between 1990-2000) was crucial.
In late 1989 I began to link all my new texts into a network of multiple titles and sequences, called – with slight tongue in cheek – Twentieth Century Blues.
This time-based work (in 75 parts of varying length) was completed in 2000.
It fills a number of volumes and was published entire as Complete Twentieth Century Blues by Salt, along with its complex index.
I performed it regularly (sometimes with dance and music) and I wrote critical articles on contemporary poetry.
In 1996, after a number of bitter years of industrial dispute (I even offered to leave the college on voluntary redundancy, but they wouldn’t let me!) I realised a long-term ambition: a post in Higher Education.
I’d built up a sound profile of critical and creative publications now and this, coupled with my association with the early days of Creative Writing (an association I’d half-forgotten with a subject about which I was somewhat ambivalent), must have suggested that I could run the MA in Writing Studies at Edge Hill College of Higher Education in Ormskirk (which I did until 2017).
Sad to leave the intensity of London (one of our later acts had been to hold the Smallest Poetry Festival in the World in our front room at which 25 poets read) we moved to Liverpool, just round the corner from Penny Lane.
It is a wonderful city, and although we were slow to build up connections in the North West, first Scott Thurston (who I first met in Surrey) and then others, partly through the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group, which I set up in 1999, and which is still going, made this area active with alternative poetries, which began to spill outwards from the college, in readings and publications, and around 2010 began to link with the ongoing vibrant scene in Manchester around The Other Room, which Scott co-directed until 2018.
I took advantage of the academic post to publish more criticism: fewer reviews, but plenty of articles, three books on British poetry, a short study of Iain Sinclair, an edited collection on Lee Harwood, and a gathering of earlier reviews.
I also began to engage with the pedagogy of creative writing, not least of all devising ways of teaching innovative poetry, and by emphasising the necessity of poetics as a speculative writerly discourse, upon which I have written quite a bit (in writings that I’d like to collect).
After I finished Twentieth Century Blues, I had a short break from poetry, the equivalent of the 1985-6 break; my first monograph on poetry – The Poetry of Saying – filled the vacuum.
I began to write new poetic texts, and attempted to mature (or, at least, alter) style, refine focus, use page space more radically, and this resulted in my last book for Stride, Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes, in 2006, a collection of ‘texts and commentaries’, most of them are modelled on other artworks or writings.
I also returned to writing fiction, a result of Edge Hill’s specialism in the short story, and I published three of these as The Only Life in 2011. It is the least noticed of my books, though one modest ‘story’ from a later work, Words Out of Time, made it into the Best British Short Stories 2016 anthology.
Working in the context of Creative Writing as an academic discipline put me in contact with many different kinds of writer, both at work, such as Ailsa Cox or Kim Wiltshire, and outside of work, such as Robert Shearman or Nicholas Royle. Of course, that goes for students too, poets such as Tom Jenks and Joanne Ashcroft, or fiction writers, such as Carys Bray and Carol Fenlon.
In 2006 I was made Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill, now arisen to University status. My inaugural lecture summarised my work in poetry, poetics and criticism up to that point.
By this time, Stephen was a history student at Edge Hill, and Patricia was completing a PhD on Deleuze, as well as teaching poetry writing at Edge Hill part time, which she did for a number of years, matching her increasing visibility as a poet.
On October 14th 2007 I walked to the Oxfam (and presumably back).
In 2008 Complete Twentieth Century Blues was launched at the Bluecoat in Liverpool as part of the European Capital of Culture celebrations.
By then I’d also written the innovative sonnets of my next collection Warrant Error, my response to living in an eternal ‘September 12’, the first of a number of full-length collections to be published by Shearsman in 2009.
Perhaps the retrospection involved in writing my inaugural lecture, or proof-reading the accretive Blues (or just age), led me, beginning in 2008, to attempt a work that had eluded me for some years: a processual and conceptual ‘working through’ of the copious but trenchantly un-literary diaries and journals I’d kept since 1965.
I appropriated the term ‘autrebiographies’ to describe these texts that resulted in, first of all, The Given in 2011.
While starting these, I began writing ‘fictional poems’, not parodies or persona-poems, but the supposed double oeuvre of the Belgian writer René Van Valckenborch, possibly in reaction to the personal edge of The Given, but also in homage to otherness (again). These were published as A Translated Man in 2013.
Berlin Bursts (2011) was more of a miscellany, ranging from further explorations of ‘human unfinish’, a theme raised in Warrant Error, through to poems derived from the annual European travel Patricia, Stephen and I enjoyed for a number of years after 2000. Not just to Berlin but to Amsterdam, Riga, Barcelona, Paris, Bratislava, Prague, Copenhagen, Florence, Krakow, and Brussels.
Berlin Bursts appeared simultaneously from Shearsman with the critical book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, which presents episodes in the history of poetic innovation, along with studies of the poetics documents of some linguistically innovative writers.
Founding and co-editing the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry with Scott Thurston was important for consolidating others’ critical work on innovative poetry. I stepped down from the journal in December 2014, though even when I set it up, I knew I would leave this ‘provisional institution’ once I had established it. I’m pleased to say it thrives online.
I have collaborated with a number of artists in a variety of media: Pete Clarke the painter and printmaker and Jo Blowers the dancer (who also moved from London to Liverpool, coincidentally). My collaborations with Bob Cobbing (one from the 1990s and another from 2001) were often performed as memorials to Cobbing, with Patricia Farrell, and they were both republished together (in a box) by Veer in 2021. Poetry collaborations with Jeff Hilson, Patricia Farrell, Robert Hampson and Zoe Skoulding occupied me.
The collaboration with Zoe launched me into the second chapter of my fictional poets project. She and I wrote the poems of Gurkan Arnavut, one of the fictional poets supposedly created by René Van Valckenborch. This was the kick-start, in 2013, to revive a plan I only partially revealed in A Translated Man, his EUOIA, the European Union of Imaginary Authors. I wrote all 28 of them, mostly in collaboration with other writers. The collaborative aspect made the experience an exciting one of continual development.
The appointment of James Byrne (another collaborator) at Edge Hill introduced fresh poetic dynamism in 2014. Much of that year was spent working on a critical book called The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, published in 2016.
I also started co-organising the Liverpool reading series Storm and Golden Sky, another collaboration of sorts, which lasted until November 2016, after putting on 70 poets. I learnt a lot while organising it, and met some new emerging poets.
I also became involved in a number of the collaborative performance events organised by Steven Fowler, although the most surprising live duo was not with a newbie, nor the couple of sets based around the EUOIA, but one with Ian McMillan, at the Leeds Camarade in February 2017. These collaborations stretched from around 2012-2023. I wrote an article on collaboration too.
2015 saw the publication of two collaborative pamphlets with Robert Hampson and Patricia Farrell. These also reanimated Ship of Fools, which saw itself the feature of an exhibition at Edge Hill University.
2015 was the year of a rash of publications, particularly History or Sleep: Selected Poems.
Unfinish, published by Veer, collected some prose (only one fiction there) which contains some of the most adventurous pieces I’d written, part of my ‘multiform unfinish’ poetics.
I played guitar at my 60th birthday party, on November 14th 2015, which also saw the surprise publication of a Festschrift for me, edited by Scott Thurston and published by Knives Forks and Spoons: An Educated Desire. I was suitably abashed by the 66 contributions.
In some ways this set the scene for the Robert Sheppard Symposium at Edge Hill in March 2017, when some of the contributors and others discussed my work. A book of proceedings appeared in 2019, The Robert Sheppard Companion, which was edited by James Byrne and Christopher Madden. Launched at the Bluecoat, this hefty volume offers readings of my writings. I greatly appreciate all the work involved.
The autrebiographies now consisted of The Given plus Arrival (a more personal interlude of poems and prose, dealing with adoption), and finish with the conceptual austerity of ‘When’, three prose pieces, ‘With’, ‘Words’, and ‘Work’, and was published as Words Out of Time by Knives, Forks and Spoons in 2015.
In July 2013 my father died, and I was glad I’d written those autrebiographies before then. The Drop (Oystercatcher 2016) was written in his memory.
My mother died in 2018, and one of the two texts I wrote in her memory was a special ‘Joan’ re-mix of some of ‘With’ from Words Out of Time. I read a version of it at her funeral.
Lee Harwood died in 2015, and this brought great sorrow, but also solidarity from his poetic friends, particularly Kelvin Corcoran, with whom I co-edited Lee’s New Collected Poems, published in 2023. I am Lee’s literary executor (he’d asked me in 1982).
Roy Fisher – the other poet featured in my PhD – died in 2017, and I was glad we made it to his funeral which was a sad, moving but curiously uplifting occasion (with music).
In late 2013 I began to work on a series of sonnets, collectively ‘The English Strain’. They start with the version of Petrarch’s sonnet three that I had written for The Meaning of Form to help me analyse Peter Hughes’ and Tim Atkins’ versions of Petrarch (and to avoid copyright). The subsequent 14 variations on this one poem are published by Crater as Petrarch 3 as an amazing fold-out map.
There followed overdubs of Milton, a set of sonnets in my ‘own voice’, versions of Wyatt’s Petrarchs, then Surrey’s, then Charlotte Smith’s, and versions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s. The resultant book, The English Strain, appeared in 2021.
The title’s a quote from Michael Drayton, and almost as soon as that manuscript was finished in 2018, I took Drayton as my next model and transposed his 63 sonnet sequence Idea as Bad Idea. This Book Two of ‘The English Strain’ also appeared in 2021.
One of the great themes of the sonnets that emerged in the writing was the ‘bad idea’ of Brexit, an event which also contextually transformed the collaborative EUOIA work, which was completed in 2016, and gathered together for publication by Shearsman as the ‘anthology’ Twitters for a Lark in late 2017.
Around that time, I discovered I wasn’t as bodily sound as I thought I was: doctors diagnosed prostatitis and began actively monitoring for prostate cancer.
On August 31st 2017, I retired from teaching (though I still had some supervisory work and I’m an Emeritus Professor). As soon as I handed in my notice, I seemed to forget instantly why I’d done it.
The next day, September 1st, the anthology of transatlantic poetry and poetics I co-edited with James Byrne, Atlantic Drift, was published (by Edge Hill with Arc). It is an important statement for its time.
Leaving was thus more like ‘launching’.
After a couple of months of thinking of myself as ‘retired’, I decided to describe myself as a ‘full-time writer’, and I still do. And I am!
Book Three, British Standards was completed in September 2022 (there were many false endings, including Ukraine and the Queen’s death sonnets). Brexit was originally the continuing theme but in early 2020 the Pandemic intervened to alter its trajectory, although the government's enthusiasm for the former contributed to its tardiness in the face of the latter, as celebratory hubris collided with the failure of Johnson’s government to take sensible public health measures. Formally, these are transpositions of sonnets of the Romantic period (Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, but also Mary Robinson and Hartley Coleridge, and others). Some have been temporarily posted on my blog or are now published in periodicals. My laptop’s ability to record minute length (sonnet sized!) videos for posting was a way to compensate for the lack of public readings, and there are many of those on Pages.
By the start of 2022 it was clear that ‘active surveillance’ of my prostate was no longer an option and cancer treatment began. I’ve since had radiotherapy and continue hormone treatment, but (compared to lockdown) I don’t feel particularly impeded. I am able to engage with the poetry world, though it seems far from the hubbub of pre-lockdown days, when I seemed to be reading every few weeks. I’ve read twice in the last year.
Recent writings include a sequence of impacted poems, Flight Risk, some experimental prose, Weekend of Miracles, and several stray critical essays.
The chimera of a third part of the ‘fictional poet’ project haunted me, and I began writing some notes towards that, again posted on my blog, again written during ‘lockdown’, featuring one of my fictional poet’s lockdown diary and her encounter with a talking mannequin!
This piece is the centre of Doubly Stolen Fire: (subtitled) on authorship fictional and real, due for publication in 2023 by Aquifer The first part is a continuation of the fictional poetry project – though maybe not its end! – and the second collects my writings on Malcolm Lowry. Since 2009 I’ve been a ‘Firminist’, part of a group of Liverpool enthusiasts for Lowry’s writings, and I collect poems and prose I’ve written for our events, based at the Bluecoat, and its publications. I also collect a piece on the famous Ern Malley Hoax, that comes out of the 2018 celebration of Ern’s 100th ‘birthday’ that David Whyte organised in Liverpool’s Handyman pub, and to which Patricia and I contributed.
My other forthcoming publication – coming out of my (ab)use of Mary Robinson’s sonnets in ‘The English Strain’ project – is a selection of her work for Shearsman.
2003/ June 2023
(Opening image: David James: Colpitts Reading 1981.)
The proximity of Bill Butler’s famous Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton and its poetry magazines, reading Horovitz’s anthology Children of Albion, and meetings with Bob Cobbing and Lee Harwood, all before I’d left school, meant I discovered the work of the British Poetry Revival early: contemporary writing to supplement my earlier obsession with TS Eliot and Surrealism. The first poet I saw read was Barry McSweeney in 1974.
Later that year I attended the University of East Anglia in Norwich (attracted by its interest in contemporary literature) and entered a more conventional literary world that largely didn’t recognise the work I was already reading and writing. However, it was separate meetings with tutors Helen McNeil, Lorna Sage and Victor Sage during my final year that encouraged me to think of myself primarily as a writer.
I edited 1983, a poetry magazine on cassette tape that was a little ahead of its time, like its name (this was the mid-1970s): it published Harwood, Paul Evans, Stefan Themerson, Henri Chopin, Bill Griffiths and others. However, I was no prodigy in my creative work.
After graduating with a solid background in poetry and Modernism, I took a year off on the South Coast and began to sing the blues with my friend Tony Parsons (we had a revival in the early 1990s as Little Albert Fly, and I still sing occasionally).
I studied for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
Following a crisis over (not) writing fiction, I decided to submit poetry for the MA thesis, and I only wrote fiction again recently, although I have been long drawn to both prose (not prose poetry!) and to the fictive in various forms.
In 1980, I wrote ‘The Blickling Hall Poem’, although ‘Tombland’ from the year before vies for attention as Opus Number One.
By this time – still in Norwich – I was working on my PhD, with Victor Sage, on the poetry of the British Poetry Revival (after embarking on research on James Joyce and the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses), and editing a mimeographed magazine called Rock Drill with Penny Bailey.
After a term teaching at UEA in 1981, I found myself in Manchester, and followed up connections with PN Review. I fell into teaching in Further Education (English, Communications, General Studies, Journalism, you name it …) a sector I carried on with until 1996.
I enjoyed every moment in the classroom, but was increasingly alienated from the Thatcherite managerialism of the institutions at which I taught.
A move to London in 1983 to train for this career put me in touch with a particularly vibrant scene around the Sub Voicive poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project – both at which I read regularly – with Gilbert Adair and others, and with Adrian Clarke, with whom I would edit an anthology of the exciting work that we saw around us: Floating Capital. There is another anthology mooted this year that will look back and collect some of that work.
In order to finish the PhD – now focused upon the work of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood – I deliberately stopped writing poetry for a year.
I like to think that I knew what I was doing.
A line was drawn under early work by the publication of the slim pamphlet Returns in 1985 and new work, illustrated by artist and poet Patricia Farrell, published as small pamphlets from our Ship of Fools imprint, suggested a new direction.
(The term ‘linguistically innovative poetry’ had mercifully not yet been coined by Adair.)
In this, my thirtieth year, I also found myself getting married (a rather unfashionable thing to do in our circle), becoming a father, working full time in FE, and living in Surrey.
By 1990 Patricia, Stephen and I managed to return to London from this ‘internal exile’, and we lived in Tooting.
We immediately set up a monthly discussion group to complement the experimental workshop of Cobbing’s Writers Forum, which we began attending, and the continuing Sub Voicive.
I’d also started a frugal serial magazine, Pages, which seemed to get around and which I promoted as ‘resources for the linguistically innovative poetries’. These have been electronically archived at Jacket2.
(After a second series in the 1990s, featuring a poet per issue, I revived it as a blogzine in 2005, and this continues as my blog.)
I also began collaborating with the dancer Jo Blowers.
The publication of a few anthologies of the alternative poetries – I was in a couple – made this an optimistic time in an under-reported field.
The support of Rupert Loydell’s Stride Publications for my work (4 books and one edited volume between 1990-2000) was crucial.
In late 1989 I began to link all my new texts into a network of multiple titles and sequences, called – with slight tongue in cheek – Twentieth Century Blues.
This time-based work (in 75 parts of varying length) was completed in 2000.
It fills a number of volumes and was published entire as Complete Twentieth Century Blues by Salt, along with its complex index.
I performed it regularly (sometimes with dance and music) and I wrote critical articles on contemporary poetry.
In 1996, after a number of bitter years of industrial dispute (I even offered to leave the college on voluntary redundancy, but they wouldn’t let me!) I realised a long-term ambition: a post in Higher Education.
I’d built up a sound profile of critical and creative publications now and this, coupled with my association with the early days of Creative Writing (an association I’d half-forgotten with a subject about which I was somewhat ambivalent), must have suggested that I could run the MA in Writing Studies at Edge Hill College of Higher Education in Ormskirk (which I did until 2017).
Sad to leave the intensity of London (one of our later acts had been to hold the Smallest Poetry Festival in the World in our front room at which 25 poets read) we moved to Liverpool, just round the corner from Penny Lane.
It is a wonderful city, and although we were slow to build up connections in the North West, first Scott Thurston (who I first met in Surrey) and then others, partly through the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group, which I set up in 1999, and which is still going, made this area active with alternative poetries, which began to spill outwards from the college, in readings and publications, and around 2010 began to link with the ongoing vibrant scene in Manchester around The Other Room, which Scott co-directed until 2018.
I took advantage of the academic post to publish more criticism: fewer reviews, but plenty of articles, three books on British poetry, a short study of Iain Sinclair, an edited collection on Lee Harwood, and a gathering of earlier reviews.
I also began to engage with the pedagogy of creative writing, not least of all devising ways of teaching innovative poetry, and by emphasising the necessity of poetics as a speculative writerly discourse, upon which I have written quite a bit (in writings that I’d like to collect).
After I finished Twentieth Century Blues, I had a short break from poetry, the equivalent of the 1985-6 break; my first monograph on poetry – The Poetry of Saying – filled the vacuum.
I began to write new poetic texts, and attempted to mature (or, at least, alter) style, refine focus, use page space more radically, and this resulted in my last book for Stride, Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes, in 2006, a collection of ‘texts and commentaries’, most of them are modelled on other artworks or writings.
I also returned to writing fiction, a result of Edge Hill’s specialism in the short story, and I published three of these as The Only Life in 2011. It is the least noticed of my books, though one modest ‘story’ from a later work, Words Out of Time, made it into the Best British Short Stories 2016 anthology.
Working in the context of Creative Writing as an academic discipline put me in contact with many different kinds of writer, both at work, such as Ailsa Cox or Kim Wiltshire, and outside of work, such as Robert Shearman or Nicholas Royle. Of course, that goes for students too, poets such as Tom Jenks and Joanne Ashcroft, or fiction writers, such as Carys Bray and Carol Fenlon.
In 2006 I was made Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill, now arisen to University status. My inaugural lecture summarised my work in poetry, poetics and criticism up to that point.
By this time, Stephen was a history student at Edge Hill, and Patricia was completing a PhD on Deleuze, as well as teaching poetry writing at Edge Hill part time, which she did for a number of years, matching her increasing visibility as a poet.
On October 14th 2007 I walked to the Oxfam (and presumably back).
In 2008 Complete Twentieth Century Blues was launched at the Bluecoat in Liverpool as part of the European Capital of Culture celebrations.
By then I’d also written the innovative sonnets of my next collection Warrant Error, my response to living in an eternal ‘September 12’, the first of a number of full-length collections to be published by Shearsman in 2009.
Perhaps the retrospection involved in writing my inaugural lecture, or proof-reading the accretive Blues (or just age), led me, beginning in 2008, to attempt a work that had eluded me for some years: a processual and conceptual ‘working through’ of the copious but trenchantly un-literary diaries and journals I’d kept since 1965.
I appropriated the term ‘autrebiographies’ to describe these texts that resulted in, first of all, The Given in 2011.
While starting these, I began writing ‘fictional poems’, not parodies or persona-poems, but the supposed double oeuvre of the Belgian writer René Van Valckenborch, possibly in reaction to the personal edge of The Given, but also in homage to otherness (again). These were published as A Translated Man in 2013.
Berlin Bursts (2011) was more of a miscellany, ranging from further explorations of ‘human unfinish’, a theme raised in Warrant Error, through to poems derived from the annual European travel Patricia, Stephen and I enjoyed for a number of years after 2000. Not just to Berlin but to Amsterdam, Riga, Barcelona, Paris, Bratislava, Prague, Copenhagen, Florence, Krakow, and Brussels.
Berlin Bursts appeared simultaneously from Shearsman with the critical book When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, which presents episodes in the history of poetic innovation, along with studies of the poetics documents of some linguistically innovative writers.
Founding and co-editing the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry with Scott Thurston was important for consolidating others’ critical work on innovative poetry. I stepped down from the journal in December 2014, though even when I set it up, I knew I would leave this ‘provisional institution’ once I had established it. I’m pleased to say it thrives online.
I have collaborated with a number of artists in a variety of media: Pete Clarke the painter and printmaker and Jo Blowers the dancer (who also moved from London to Liverpool, coincidentally). My collaborations with Bob Cobbing (one from the 1990s and another from 2001) were often performed as memorials to Cobbing, with Patricia Farrell, and they were both republished together (in a box) by Veer in 2021. Poetry collaborations with Jeff Hilson, Patricia Farrell, Robert Hampson and Zoe Skoulding occupied me.
The collaboration with Zoe launched me into the second chapter of my fictional poets project. She and I wrote the poems of Gurkan Arnavut, one of the fictional poets supposedly created by René Van Valckenborch. This was the kick-start, in 2013, to revive a plan I only partially revealed in A Translated Man, his EUOIA, the European Union of Imaginary Authors. I wrote all 28 of them, mostly in collaboration with other writers. The collaborative aspect made the experience an exciting one of continual development.
The appointment of James Byrne (another collaborator) at Edge Hill introduced fresh poetic dynamism in 2014. Much of that year was spent working on a critical book called The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, published in 2016.
I also started co-organising the Liverpool reading series Storm and Golden Sky, another collaboration of sorts, which lasted until November 2016, after putting on 70 poets. I learnt a lot while organising it, and met some new emerging poets.
I also became involved in a number of the collaborative performance events organised by Steven Fowler, although the most surprising live duo was not with a newbie, nor the couple of sets based around the EUOIA, but one with Ian McMillan, at the Leeds Camarade in February 2017. These collaborations stretched from around 2012-2023. I wrote an article on collaboration too.
2015 saw the publication of two collaborative pamphlets with Robert Hampson and Patricia Farrell. These also reanimated Ship of Fools, which saw itself the feature of an exhibition at Edge Hill University.
2015 was the year of a rash of publications, particularly History or Sleep: Selected Poems.
Unfinish, published by Veer, collected some prose (only one fiction there) which contains some of the most adventurous pieces I’d written, part of my ‘multiform unfinish’ poetics.
I played guitar at my 60th birthday party, on November 14th 2015, which also saw the surprise publication of a Festschrift for me, edited by Scott Thurston and published by Knives Forks and Spoons: An Educated Desire. I was suitably abashed by the 66 contributions.
In some ways this set the scene for the Robert Sheppard Symposium at Edge Hill in March 2017, when some of the contributors and others discussed my work. A book of proceedings appeared in 2019, The Robert Sheppard Companion, which was edited by James Byrne and Christopher Madden. Launched at the Bluecoat, this hefty volume offers readings of my writings. I greatly appreciate all the work involved.
The autrebiographies now consisted of The Given plus Arrival (a more personal interlude of poems and prose, dealing with adoption), and finish with the conceptual austerity of ‘When’, three prose pieces, ‘With’, ‘Words’, and ‘Work’, and was published as Words Out of Time by Knives, Forks and Spoons in 2015.
In July 2013 my father died, and I was glad I’d written those autrebiographies before then. The Drop (Oystercatcher 2016) was written in his memory.
My mother died in 2018, and one of the two texts I wrote in her memory was a special ‘Joan’ re-mix of some of ‘With’ from Words Out of Time. I read a version of it at her funeral.
Lee Harwood died in 2015, and this brought great sorrow, but also solidarity from his poetic friends, particularly Kelvin Corcoran, with whom I co-edited Lee’s New Collected Poems, published in 2023. I am Lee’s literary executor (he’d asked me in 1982).
Roy Fisher – the other poet featured in my PhD – died in 2017, and I was glad we made it to his funeral which was a sad, moving but curiously uplifting occasion (with music).
In late 2013 I began to work on a series of sonnets, collectively ‘The English Strain’. They start with the version of Petrarch’s sonnet three that I had written for The Meaning of Form to help me analyse Peter Hughes’ and Tim Atkins’ versions of Petrarch (and to avoid copyright). The subsequent 14 variations on this one poem are published by Crater as Petrarch 3 as an amazing fold-out map.
There followed overdubs of Milton, a set of sonnets in my ‘own voice’, versions of Wyatt’s Petrarchs, then Surrey’s, then Charlotte Smith’s, and versions of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s. The resultant book, The English Strain, appeared in 2021.
The title’s a quote from Michael Drayton, and almost as soon as that manuscript was finished in 2018, I took Drayton as my next model and transposed his 63 sonnet sequence Idea as Bad Idea. This Book Two of ‘The English Strain’ also appeared in 2021.
One of the great themes of the sonnets that emerged in the writing was the ‘bad idea’ of Brexit, an event which also contextually transformed the collaborative EUOIA work, which was completed in 2016, and gathered together for publication by Shearsman as the ‘anthology’ Twitters for a Lark in late 2017.
Around that time, I discovered I wasn’t as bodily sound as I thought I was: doctors diagnosed prostatitis and began actively monitoring for prostate cancer.
On August 31st 2017, I retired from teaching (though I still had some supervisory work and I’m an Emeritus Professor). As soon as I handed in my notice, I seemed to forget instantly why I’d done it.
The next day, September 1st, the anthology of transatlantic poetry and poetics I co-edited with James Byrne, Atlantic Drift, was published (by Edge Hill with Arc). It is an important statement for its time.
Leaving was thus more like ‘launching’.
After a couple of months of thinking of myself as ‘retired’, I decided to describe myself as a ‘full-time writer’, and I still do. And I am!
Book Three, British Standards was completed in September 2022 (there were many false endings, including Ukraine and the Queen’s death sonnets). Brexit was originally the continuing theme but in early 2020 the Pandemic intervened to alter its trajectory, although the government's enthusiasm for the former contributed to its tardiness in the face of the latter, as celebratory hubris collided with the failure of Johnson’s government to take sensible public health measures. Formally, these are transpositions of sonnets of the Romantic period (Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, but also Mary Robinson and Hartley Coleridge, and others). Some have been temporarily posted on my blog or are now published in periodicals. My laptop’s ability to record minute length (sonnet sized!) videos for posting was a way to compensate for the lack of public readings, and there are many of those on Pages.
By the start of 2022 it was clear that ‘active surveillance’ of my prostate was no longer an option and cancer treatment began. I’ve since had radiotherapy and continue hormone treatment, but (compared to lockdown) I don’t feel particularly impeded. I am able to engage with the poetry world, though it seems far from the hubbub of pre-lockdown days, when I seemed to be reading every few weeks. I’ve read twice in the last year.
Recent writings include a sequence of impacted poems, Flight Risk, some experimental prose, Weekend of Miracles, and several stray critical essays.
The chimera of a third part of the ‘fictional poet’ project haunted me, and I began writing some notes towards that, again posted on my blog, again written during ‘lockdown’, featuring one of my fictional poet’s lockdown diary and her encounter with a talking mannequin!
This piece is the centre of Doubly Stolen Fire: (subtitled) on authorship fictional and real, due for publication in 2023 by Aquifer The first part is a continuation of the fictional poetry project – though maybe not its end! – and the second collects my writings on Malcolm Lowry. Since 2009 I’ve been a ‘Firminist’, part of a group of Liverpool enthusiasts for Lowry’s writings, and I collect poems and prose I’ve written for our events, based at the Bluecoat, and its publications. I also collect a piece on the famous Ern Malley Hoax, that comes out of the 2018 celebration of Ern’s 100th ‘birthday’ that David Whyte organised in Liverpool’s Handyman pub, and to which Patricia and I contributed.
My other forthcoming publication – coming out of my (ab)use of Mary Robinson’s sonnets in ‘The English Strain’ project – is a selection of her work for Shearsman.
2003/ June 2023
(Opening image: David James: Colpitts Reading 1981.)
Delivering my Inaugural Lecture 'Poetics as Conjecture and Provocation', 2007
