Robert Sheppard

Ern Malley: a celebration

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TUESDAY 13th MARCH 2018 at 8pm, at The Handyman Supermarket (a bar and microbrewery, despite its name), 461 Smithdown Road, South LIVERPOOL, L15 3JL, Phone: 0151 733 7838 (on the 80, 86, 75 and 699 bus routes from the centre of town: get off by the Brookhouse). A Night of Songs (some Malley’s poems set to music by David Whyte and performed by the Ern Malley Orchestra).

The remaining poems read by Liverpool poets and Australian writers on video. ‘The Ern Malley Suite’ by Robert Sheppard (from Twitters for a Lark) AND (later, party-time!) Sounds of the Down-Underground with DJ Frank Scenario.

Atlantic Drift at Edge Hill

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Thursday 23rd November 7:30pm
Launch of the second title from Edge Hill University Press
Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics

TICKETS FREE, but booking required

7.00pm – Light Refreshments
7.30pm – Atlantic Drift Book Launch

Introduced by the books’ editors, Professor Robert Sheppard and Dr James Byrne

This reading will feature three poets from a new and groundbreaking publication of poetry and poetics and a brief Q&A.

Atlantic Drift publishes 24 poets from the UK, Ireland, USA and Canada in partnership with Arc Publications. 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 21st century.

Twitters for a Lark

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If the right poets for the times don’t exist, then they have to be invented.

Twitters for a Lark: The Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors

 is published by Shearsman Books at £9.99 and in available here:

Working in collaboration with a team of real writers, Robert Sheppard has created a lively and entertaining anthology of fictional European poets. There is no resultant ‘Europoem’, but a variety of styles that reflects the collaborative nature of the poems’ production, the richness of a continent. The works range from the comedic to the political, from the imaginatively sincere to the faux-autobiographical, from traditional lyricism to the experimental. Accompanied by biographical notes, the poets grow in vividness until they seem to possess lives of their own.

This collection marks a continuation of the work Sheppard ventriloquised through his creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (also available from Shearsman here: http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/product/4328-robert-sheppard-a-translated-man )

Although devised before the neologism ‘Brexit’ was spat across the bitter political divide, this sample of 28 poets of the EUOIA (European Union of Imaginary Authors) takes on new meanings in our contemporary world that is far from fictive, ‘fake news’ or not.

The collaborators are: Joanne Ashcroft, Alan Baker, James Byrne, Alys Conran, Kelvin Corcoran, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, Patricia Farrell, Allen Fisher, S. J. Fowler, Robert Hampson, Jeff Hilson, Tom Jenks, Frances Kruk, Rupert Loydell, Steve McCaffery, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Sandeep Parmar, Simon Perril, Jèssica Pujol i Duran, Zoë Skoulding, Damir Šodan, Philip Terry, Scott Thurston.

“Twitters for a Lark heralds a new movement: the European Poetry Revival. It is a book that arrives like a new channel forged by collaborative poets, with all past ideals of state rolled up in an old five pound note. This illuminated sect of future Rimbauds lightens the island’s burden, the lights on their vessels burning like the tips of duty free cigarettes.” Chris McCabe

 

Robert Sheppard: thoughts on EUOIA

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“I’d like to publicly thank everybody for making this EUOIA night a memorable one. I think everybody played their strange parts of being half or wholly someone else! Those of you on video added to the occasion by suggesting elsewheres (though two were filmed in Norfolk and one in the very (lovely) space we were performing in).”

Some reflections on our European Union of Imaginary Authors night by Robert Sheppard, including news of the imminent Twitters for a Lark anthology,

Patricia Farrell: a preview

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Just two days to our special one-off event, celebrating Robert Sheppard’s European Union of Imaginary Authors project, 23rd August at 7PM, The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LE. Patricia Farrell, seen above with Nathan Walker, will be astrally projecting Bulgarian poet Ivaylo Dimitrov, with other performers including Allen Fisher, Alan Baker and Joanne Ashcroft. Free entry, as always with the Other Room.

Allen Fisher – a preview

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Our next event (on 23rd August) is a one-off special, celebrating Robert Sheppard’s European Union of Imaginary Authors project. Amongst those performing will be Allen Fisher, helping to ventriloquise Finnish poet Minna Kärkkäinen. Above is Allen’s performance for us at the Other Room in 2014. 7 PM start for this event and free, as always.

Alan Baker: a preview

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Alan Baker will perform at our special European Union of Imaginary Authors event on 23rd August at the Caste Hotel, Northern Quarter, Manchester, channeling Slovenian poet A.B.C. Remič. You can see Alan performing as Alan above. More previews soon. 7 PM start for the night itself and free, as always.

Edge Poetics

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Beds

A Symposium on Innovative and Speculative Creative Writing Practices in Higher Education

4th November 2017

10.00-17.30, with a public reading at 18.00

Venue: University of Bedfordshire, Luton Campus

With keynotes from Professor Robert Sheppard (Edge Hill University) and Nicholas Royle (Manchester Metropolitan University), and contributions from Dr Helen Marshall (Anglia Ruskin University) and Dr Daniel Watt (Loughborough University).

In the late essay, ‘Literature and Life’, Gilles Deleuze expands on ideas from his earlier work about the ways literary writing can open up ‘a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becoming-other of language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system.’

Till relatively recently, Creative Writing in Higher Education has been dominated by a set of techniques and tropes derived from realism, and also by the expectations of mainstream literary fiction. Increasingly, however, aspects of innovative and speculative poetics are finding their way into the classroom.

This one-day symposium will ask: what are the benefits for the pedagogy of Creative Writing of writing practices drawn from experimental and fantastic traditions; and what does it mean to be a writer interested in such traditions who also teaches Creative Writing in academe?  Is there a value in teaching students to find the kind of delirium Deleuze writes of? It will bring together writers, teachers of Creative Writing, and others with an interest in the field, to discuss these questions.

Suggested topics for papers might include but are not limited to:

Creative Writing pedagogy and innovation; Creative Writing pedagogy and writing in genre; all forms of creative writing that work at the borders of genre in the Creative Writing classroom; blurred lines between theory and creative practice

Conference organisers Tim Jarvis, Keith Jebb, and Lesley McKenna (University of Bedfordshire) invite abstracts of 350 words for 20-minute papers; please submit along with a short biographical note, by 4th August 2017, to edgepoetics@gmail.com.

Summer 2017 Other Room dates

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More info on these dates in the next few months but for now put these on the calendar!

14/06/2017: Thomas A. Clark & Matthew Welton at the Castle Hotel, 7pm
19/07/2017: Icelandic night at the Castle Hotel, 7pm
23/08/2017: Robert Sheppard presents EUOIA at the Castle Hotel, 7pm

Robert Sheppard – Petrarch 3

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Crater 36: January 2016 [sic]. Robert Sheppard, Petrarch 3. The Complete Petrarchs of our time and poetics are splendid, but what happens if you dig down and realise version after version of just one sonnet (Petrarch’s third), stuttering in repetition, re-staging it for voice and situation, from a Scouse dog at Christmas to Jimmy Savile beyond the grave; a twittersonnet or a lengthy semantic poetry translation; a French Symbolist version or a Middle English sonnet? Robert Sheppard’s pamphlet is what happens, leaving a performance of humour, excess, variation, and an uncanny undersong courtesy of Petrarch himself. Confusingly folded, full colour, £4 + p&p. Run of 200.

http://www.craterpress.co.uk/