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Robert SheppardComplete Twentieth Century Blues |
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Biographical note: Robert Sheppard was born in 1955 and educated at the University of East Anglia. Between 1989 and 2000 he worked on the network of texts called Twentieth Century Blues. Previous excerpts from the project include Empty Diaries (1998) and The Lores (2003). A recent volume is Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes (2006), and a sonnet sequence, Warrant Error, is due for publication by Shearsman in 2009. His work is anthologised in Other and the Oxford Anthology of British and Irish Poetry, in which he is described as ‘at the forefront of (the) movement sometimes called linguistically innovative poetry'. He is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University in Lancashire in the UK, and has also published criticism and poetics, including The Poetry of Saying (2005) and Iain Sinclair (2007). He edits Pages as a blogzine and lives in Liverpool.
BIC Basic EAN13: 9781844712649
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HARDBACK
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Short
description/annotation: Complete
Twentieth Century Blues is the definitive
edition of a network of texts written and assembled
as a time-based project between 1989 and the
end of the last century. At its heart is an
alternative history of the twentieth century.
This long-awaited volume is revised throughout,
fully indexed, and with many previously unpublished
texts.
Main description: Complete Twentieth Century Blues is the definitive edition of a long network of interrelated texts that the author wrote and assembled as a time-based project between 1989 and the end of the last century. Many of the texts have appeared before, in both pamphlets and in critically acclaimed full-length volumes, but this edition has been revised throughout. It also includes a previously unpublished book-length text on the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, as well as a number of shorter pieces. All now appear in their intended order, and with their connections to other poems made apparent via an index. At the centre of the book is the sequence The Lores, written according to a strict word count and introducing the politics and poetics of ‘creative linkage’ demonstrated throughout. It focuses upon fascism and resistances to it. Running through the volume are the ‘Empty Diaires’ which offer an alternative history of the twentieth century, told through a series of female narrators. Woven between these are poems on blues music, the first Gulf War, Stalin’s poems, failed utopias, the Earl of Rochester, a sci-fi elegy for the human, a translation from Horace, the ideology of Thatcherism, atheist hymns, a hilarious romp with a very rude Robinson Crusoe, homages to various other artists, and an elegy to Frank Sinatra. The hilarious Wayne Pratt spoofs find their final resting place here too. The prose-poem essay, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’, brings the project to rest with a celebration of the complexity of our powers of human connection.
Table of contents:
View excerpt as PDF:
Excerpt from book: 10 Soleà 1
Tin Lanterns 1 To My Students 1 No song, no, I do not want to see the duty bound woman ignited with touch as men lead her away, I want to see the wide camisole clouds Silver icicles hold back the night I love you gypsy (being watched Car pulling up outside, sharp silhouettes under the lanterns This time here they come, branches mute their sour whistles I love frost shadows at dawn tin lanterns shattering day break Shouting poet stumbling into a pool of star pocked walls the flower of these blood marshes 1991
Unpublished endorsement : Twentieth Century Blues offers an entirely new way of thinking through the nightmare intersection of history, ethics and desire. A dizzying array of techniques lays bare its construction – from word-count formalism to female narrators who ‘know’ they are narrated by a man. Production and reproduction are its obsessions: the radio, the microphone, the slogan; its totems. What emerges is nothing short of a re-education of the reader’s desire, constantly turning from the said to the saying. Courageous and unstinting, Sheppard writes with terrifying authority. Scott Thurston
Unpublished endorsement : Sheppard’s poems bite. A drive and anger, a vivid sexual and erotic violence, a grim Burroughs wit, and at times a marvellously raunchy humour, that is rare and very special. Lee Harwood
Unpublished endorsement : Reading Twentieth Century Blues in its complete assembly is an experience of a different order from reading the assured sorties of its earlier partial appearances. Sheppard's sustained concern with the technicalities and moralities of language in literary texts is a rigour that here generates freedoms of register, idiom and form. The poem's structure depends in fact on the introspective presence of occasional vortices of its own substance; but it is a cohesive work, outward-looking and rapacious. Roy Fisher
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