Approximate text of the introduction to the reading by Robert Sheppard at
Sub Voicive Poetry 22 9 98 [includes a couple of sentences written down but
missed out in delivery and the replacement of "experiment" with
"investigation" - a correction after I had actually spoken the E-word]
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What was planned as a welcome return to Sub Voicive Poetry by Robert
Sheppard has become, in addition, the London launch of Empty Diaries. It's
published by Stride who publish his Daylight Robbery and The Flashlight
Sonata
I shall leave Robert to introduce it, where it fits into Twentieth Century
Blues etc. I make it sound complicated if I try to talk about it. I shall
limit myself to saying how welcome it is. The book itself is a handsome
object, and it's good to see published so many of the poems whose genesis
and development I glimpsed at the Writers Forum workshop and elsewhere
before Robert moved north. He is a hard-worker. He's highly productive and
the products are good stuff.
HE IS A CRITIC. He has produced a steady stream of criticism which shows a
mind capable at following and making the kind of imaginative leaps made by
artists who are really quite different to him.
HE IS AN EDITOR AND PUBLISHER. Pages has continued despite the pressures of
demanding teaching jobs and moving house to a different part of the country,
and despite the financial lunacy of running such a small magazine. No one
else is doing what Robert is doing with Pages and it is a valuable resource.
I can tell you from personal experience that he is a patient editor.
HE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORKER which is always a good sign, the sign of an
engaged and generous person. I am referring not just to his editorial
collaboration with Adrian Clarke on Floating Capital but his many
collaborations with Patricia Farrell and Jo Blowers.
He is open to ideas and methods of others. He encourages. I've been grateful
to him over the years on a number of occasions for his insights into my own
work. He doesn't tell you things heavy-handedly but let's them come out in
conversational discussion. That's the way to do it. When he sees something
of worth in what someone else is doing, he lets them know that he values it.
I imagine that he's a good teacher.
His home, when he lived in Tooting, was a place of gathering for dissent of
many kinds, hosting discussions and performance, perhaps the most remarkable
being The Smallest Poetry Festival in the World. An extraordinary number of
people packed into his house that day; and, amongst other things, Domestic
Ambient Noise, the ongoing collaboration between myself and Bob Cobbing, was
instigated. That was an example of Robert's benign influence. He had seen a
potential in the improvised collaborations with which Bob and I had passed
some Saturday afternoons; and then we discovered the possibility and
potential of something more extensive. It was Robert who had created the
circumstances for that discovery...
HE IS A POET, a good and interesting poet. As is noted on the back cover of
Empty Diaries, there is a commitment in his work, a political awareness I
suppose one would call it; but, sensibly, the poetry comes first. He
concerns himself with form, that is, with many forms and with the thing of
form itself.
He concerns himself with the interrelationship of poems; and he has
developed the idea that a poem in one sequence, a separate poem in its own
right as well, may also exist in another sequence, the same poem working
differently in its different contexts.
And there's a variation on this mode of polysemy with different versions on
the same poem. Not different drafts but different versions, each as valid as
the other.
The publication of texts with graphics provides yet another alternative
process for encouraging meaning.
Perhaps his most exciting investigation, as investigation, has been his
making of texts for performance with the dancer Jo Blowers where the
utterance seems to stimulate and shape the dance, although the shapes and
the impetus of the dance will often flow counter and contra to the texts;
and the dance is in some ways given voice, seeming to provoke the text into
another utterance or to draw the implicit utterance it has found in it out
of it; but both dance and text retain their separate essences, as graphic
and text each retain their essence in his work with Patricia Farrell. In
both cases, it is a little like two transparencies partially overlaid. Each
has its own discernible colour; but where they overlay, a third and
different colour is produced.
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