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A bit of absurdism
initially for what is an edifying if complex and challenging book, if you
like about some basic suppositions, or way in, given that I think this poetry
does raise certain essentialist or defining questions about attitudinal
orientation. Do I want red or blue today, up or down today, maybe I am
feeling somewhat down, and yet we don't want to all be opting for the same
colour at the same time, nor necessarily even the same colour as yesterday?
One might note that the cover of History or Sleep is of a somewhat orange hue, (a
fine, vaguely improvised but near enough apt portrait by Patricia Farrell
1993) the cover of Complete Twentieth Century Blues, arguably Sheppard's major work,
veers to the green and black. Can I decide myself, do I know who to ask? Do I
just have to get on with it, as if anything to hand might do? With what? Do I
want white (Malevich, The Beatles), grey (co-opted by EL James in 50 shades,
but then there are Paul Simon's 50 ways), or black (Ad Reinhardt, The Rolling
Stones, Prince). Do I want shapes or lines (try eg Mondrian, Bridget Riley
etc) or maybe even just human faces (whose, all those magazines and TV
shows?)? Can I choose, but I might wonder. Is it going to be an opening out
or a paring down. Is it for the optimists or the pessimists? As they say,
some days are better than others. Try looking out the window, peer through
those curtains. Turn on the TV, turn on the radio. Tune in, tune out. Well,
we all have our routines, we have the company we keep. We have our social
obligations, entailing that we be in certain places at certain times. But we
almost always have some free time, in which we can essentially choose what to
do, as if the most interesting thing about the day might have been the tea
breaks or the office chatter.
Is it
I will show you fear in a
handful of dust.
(Eliot
'WasteLand')
or,
the primal sympathy/
Which having been must ever be...
In years that bring the philosophic
mind.
(Wordsworth, 'Intimations')
or
I have nothing to say and
I am saying it
(John
Cage, cf Beckett)
or even
It's my lunch hour, so I
go
for a walk
(O'Hara, intimations perhaps of 'out to lunch')
although as we know sympathy, and empathy, for instance, can be a very
variable question. Many don't particularly think there are polarities. But
red is not blue, and black is not white (or grey), and a line, as such, is
not yet a shape, figure is not ground. The place may be lit, it may be unlit.
It may only be lit at certain times, it may seem to be the best of times and
the worst of times, even at the same time (Dickens), it may as Sheppard has
said be good poetry in bad times. Every word we use, even, may be more resonant
of dark or light, of going on or paring back. Sometimes paring back isn't so
much a choice as a need. It may for Robert Sheppard be history or it might be
sleep, or it might be both, either at the same time or at different times.
As we find in for example, 'A Voice Without':
To say and not say at
the same time, or
at a different time to
not
say and yet say...
disappears into the
unknown
('A
Voice Without', p94)
Sheppard's work might not explicitly aver a particular awareness of or
attention to colour, say, or mood sometimes, although I take colour as
indicative of mood or inclination, other than those book covers, but the
intimation of moving on and how to move is quite strong, there is a quality
of insistence about this poetry. As 'Returns' intimates early on, 'Rain beats
upon the measure/ of the real.'
There is a very telling episode I would say from the title piece 'History or
Sleep', which goes:
Talk transports...
the advert of itself
the track to the furnace
your edge of history
or sleep within this
trap you act
wings sticky...
pain correctly
centres this ecstasy
with humans
flailing and
flaring in dust
(conclusion, p89)
There is this very curious interplay between 'pain' and 'ecstasy' (including
within which we might of course surmise 'pleasure') and between 'flailing'
and 'flaring', one might note a characteristic attention to homophonic
effects between the last two. We may feel 'pain' , and it may be 'correct',
we might 'flail' but we may also
'flare' here and there albeit 'in dust'.
As I have intimated, Sheppard may not make very explicit reference to certain
things, but they are still there in the sense that I think this is poetry of
the whole person in a sense, of the fuller possibilities of language, and it
is indeed of a kind that nothing is necessarily suggested as being outwith
its scope. A couple of lines from 'Returns' I think may be fairly indicative:
Public persons return to
become private
people again.
and:
You step out of this
grid, return
to the public spectrum of
plain eyes,
and are gone about your
business -
which is not the business
of the poem.
('Returns' 2 conclusion)
I tend to revert to the notion that what Sheppard is trying to do is open up
the possibilities of creative language, something Keith Tuma recognised in
his British and Irish 20th C poetry anthology (2001). I find
some analogies in that with the Modernist project of European artists (eg Monet,
Whistler, earlier Turner) and the late Modernist work of American poets and
painters. It may even be that we do not necessarily wish to assert that one
specific direction is right, but that one should feel some latitude to
explore what direction one feels right for oneself. On one level this is a
technical question, but with Sheppard and his affinity for the philosopher
Levinas (one among several philosophies of the Other, Terry Eagleton latterly
is a little sceptical, though one struggles for alternatives, 'nature'
perhaps), is also an ethical question. Sheppard was certainly interested too
in the Language poets, although linguistically innovative poetry in Britain
has followed somewhat of a different path. One gets the impression that there
was a desire for an opening up, there certainly wasn't any dictatorialness
about where that opening up should go. Sheppard speaks in The Poetry of
Saying of a 'plea
for a new sensibility' (p47). But, again, Sheppard seems attentive to the
pattern emerging, not necessarily the detail of what fills it up.
A short piece from Twentieth Century Blues has some hints:
Numbers polished
back to his room
changed continuously in
the swell
(p373)
There may not entirely be a way to be here. In 'The Hungry Years' Sheppard
remarks upon how 'He had no need of a name/ Or further identity' ('History'
p19). Elsewhere in '20th C Blues',:
What might a poem be,
elsed?
You dunk your aching
lived-in balls in ink
and roll them across the
page.
I'm your shagged out
Muse.
Take me over you this last
time.
Whisper me Pearl, whistle
me off.
I'll be a big register on
your retina
(p375,
a poem dedicated to Barry MacSweeney, with an epigraph from Angela Carter)
Or as 'Internal Exile' put it:
Now
The writing's nearly over
the work
Withdraws. Is this a
model
Of the world that does
not exist, straining
For a new referent? Her
prejudices
Owe the world no apology.
('History' p32)
Indeed, I can't help but feel that a lot of Sheppard's work is bound up with
the specificities and intricacies of interpersonal relations, he has
particularly engaged with Patricia Farrell, Lee Harwood, Iain Sinclair (the
renowned and esteemed London psychogeographer) and Roy Fisher.
Perhaps as Sting indicated in his song, 'There is no political solution'.
Sheppard's writing is of in the midst, but it is highly articulately done,
indeed I would rate it on technical expertise and just on sheer human(ist)
engagement, among the finest we've had in recent years, including the
Cambridge School. There is a lot of him in here, there's a fullness, yet also
certainly not an over indulgence, it is quite determinedly disciplined and
attuned to the craft of language, of creative language. And indeed I think if
you read this work carefully you may very well be compelled to try to
readdress who you are, personally, socially, behaviourally, how you relate to
the social world and conduct your business there. This quality of fullness I
regret has latterly been a bit missing in Prynne, say, who seems to have dedicated
himself latterly to certain technical intricacies, but is a bit closer to the
more wholly engaged poetry of people like Milne or Wilkinson, or some of
those whom Sheppard more closely engaged with like Lee Harwood (who of course
died recently), Raworth, Maggie O'Sullivan, Adrian Clarke, Ulli Freer and so
on. Sheppard I sometimes think has the emotional engagement of say Harwood,
whilst not being quite so gentle, and the fullness of MacSweeney without
being quite so headstrong. His facility with words in many ways is quite
remarkable, and his innovativeness in their deployment, and I think he has
been highly self-effacing in seeking to extend the prospects and
possibilities of other writers, indeed we know he has been an advocate of Bob
Cobbing, Roy Fisher, Maggie O'Sullivan and others.
There is every intimation that we need to keep working with/at the language.
As Sheppard said in 'The Education of Desire' (Scott Thurston has commented
upon a 'reeducation of desire'), 'The writer who wants to do something
different has to write in new ways. The poetry may seem strange. It may be
difficult to understand. There may seem to be bits of it missing. There may
be problems in putting all its parts together; things may not seem to follow
on.' (Far Language p28 1988) Or as Sheppard puts it
elsewhere, 'The imperative, for myself, and for others...is to feed both the
poetry's histories and its futures.' ('Saying', p165)
There is a good quote also from Far Language, on recognising Bob Cobbing's 75th
birthday:
The importance of radical
consistency for an artist: to refuse to mark
out an aesthetic
territory which is then colonised, but to move
confidently on, to create
structures, large and small, for continued
experiment.
(p61)
Well, yes, regrettably there are those who would attempt to 'colonise' or
co-opt certain assertions or sayings, which in part is no doubt why we have
to go on speaking and communicating. But just once in a while you may come up
with something that puts it on hold for a while, like Eliot's 'The Waste
Land', which left reviewers baffled, perplexed or amused for some years after
it appeared. And indeed Eliot did not venture much after 'Four Quartets'
(when he was in his 50s).
In some ways I might prefer the opening of agency, as we might find in the
opening lines to the poem 'History or Sleep':
Less real than a dream
logged in
archaeologists' ledgers
propels awareness
along another axis
hangs a veiled
filter for your presence
a gauze a
gaze figures inward
dirtying cuffs on the
world
wraps the teeming air
(p79)
There are perhaps a few other remarks I could make. Sheppard has not all
attempted a 'representative works', as some might, but has gone for a
sampling of every piece he has done since Returns (1985) when he was 30. In this
peculiar sense he is aiming for a full appreciation of the work, just not
bits of it, but how much can you cram into 140 pages. Even Twentieth
Century Blues, at
376 pages, Sheppard seems to regard as a kind of thread or series through his
poetic activity in the '90s. As far as I can tell the closest we have found
to methodological statements are 'The Education of Desire' (in Far
Language) and The
Anti-Orpheus (Shearsman)
and the Introduction to The Poetry of Saying.
As Sheppard puts it in The Anti-Orpheus:
Poetics are the products
of the process of reflection upon writings,
and upon the act of
writing, gathering from the past and from others,
speculatively casting
into the future.
(p10)
And I didn't mention the bees:
Two bees
hum from flower to flower
on the
aubrietia, nosing each
other
as they hang upside-down,
silently gathering for a
second.
('History', 'Returns' p14)
or from 'Another Poem',-
The poem
has barely recovered from
his scratches, yet
you're making to scribble
links in its margins,
calming and charmless.
('Another Poem', 'History' p129, slight rhyme from 'margins' to
'charmless')
Sheppard's work does partake of a casting into the future, whether one might
call it exploratory or innovative, or at the 'leading edge' as Keith Tuma
says. There might be other things to be done, but I think this is work of
really good and extensive, thought-provoking, self-questioning scope and of
exploring just what you can do with creative language. Where is there to go?
Further into the self, both, and out into society, even the ecosystem. But I
think Sheppard's work is of a rare and piercing contribution, without doubt
to my mind as among the finest poetic accomplishments of recent years, none
excepted.
© Clark Allison
2015
[Robert Sheppard's History of Sleep: Selected Poems is published by Shearsman]
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