Robert Shepard’s The Innovative Sonnet Sequence was delivered at the Hay Poetry
Jamboree 2011 at the Oriel Contemporary Art Gallery, Salem Chapel, Bell
Bank, Hay on Wye on June 4th 2011.

You can read it on Pages at www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

It is in 14 parts, in deference to the sonnet. Posts will be one a day for the next fortnight. It therefore formally encodes the ambivalence towards the form found in the sonnet-like and sonnet-asperant
and sonnet-deviant productions of its most recent avant-garde practitioners and pasticheurs (many of them collected in The Reality Street Book of Sonnets, which appeared in 2008). Focussing on the sonnet sequences of Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth, Jeff Hilson, Philip Terry, Geraldine Monk, Sophie Robinson, and Sheppard’s own sonnets