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texts
The Lores
recent publications
Full length collections
Daylight Robbery, Stride, Exeter, 1990
The Flashlight Sonata, Stride, Exeter, 1993
Transit Depots/Empty Diaries (with John Seed [text] and Patricia
Farrell [images]), Ship of Fools, 1993
Empty Diaries, Stride, Exeter, 1998
The Lores, Reality Street, 2003
(see http://freespace.virgin.net/reality-street/recent.html
for information on the publisher and volume.)
Tin Pan Arcadia, Salt Publishing, forthcoming
see www.saltpublishing.com
for information on the publisher and volume.)
Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes, Stride Books,
forthcoming
(see Stride: www.stridebooks.com) Three of the texts from this book may
be read at
www.jacketmagazine.com including ‘Pastoral and Parody’:
www.jacketmagazine.com/20/vft-shep.html
‘Haiku for Piano’ (i.m. Ric Caddel) at www.jacketmagazine.com/22/caddel.html
and ‘Closing the Books, Locking the Chests’, my response to
September 11, at
www.bbk.ac.uk/pores/2/index.htm
Pamphlets and shorter publications
Returns, Textures, London 1985
Private Number, Northern Lights Publishers, London 1986
Looking North (with images by Patricia Farrell), Ship of Fools,
1987
Letter from the Blackstock Road, Oasis Books, 1988
Internal Exile, Torque Press, Southampton, 1988
The Cannibal Club (with Patricia Farrell), Ship of Fools, 1990
Codes and Diodes (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum, 1991
Killing Boxes, Ship of Fools, London, 1992
Icarus - Having Fallen (with Patricia Farrell), Ship of Fools,
1992
Fucking Time (with Patricia Farrell), Ship of Fools, London,
1993
Fox Spotlights, The Short Run Press, Cheltenham, 1995
The Book of British Soil (with Patricia Farrell), Ship of Fools,
1995
Free Fists (with Patricia Farrell), Writers Forum, 1996
Soleà for Lorca, Ship of Fools, Liverpool, 1998
Neutral Drums (with Patricia Farrell), Writers Forum, 1999
(Read part of this text on http://www.jacketmagazine.com/09/shep.html.)
Three Poems, Ship of Fools, Liverpool, 2000
Depleted Uranium, Ship of Fools, Liverpool, 2001
31st April or The Age of Irony, Ship of Fools, Liverpool, 2001
Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops (with Bob Cobbing), Writers Forum,
2001
(Read all of this text at www.jacketmagazine.com/20/cobb-shep.html
and read a review at www.terriblework.co.uk/blatent_blather.htm)
The End of the Twentieth Century, Ship of Fools, 2002
(Read a review of this at www.terriblework.co.uk/end_of_the_twentieth_century.htm
The Blickensderfer Punch (with Patricia Farrell), Ship of Fools,2002
Ocean Green: Homage to Jack B Yeats, Wild Honey Press, forthcoming,
(See
www.wildhoneypress/com for details of this press.)
The Anti-Orpheus, Shearsman Books (this will available as a downloadable
e-book from www.shearsman.com
Anthology appearances
The New British Poetry, Paladin, 1988
Floating Capital: New Poets from London, ed. Adrian Clarke and
Robert Sheppard, Potes and Poets Press, USA, 1991 (See www.potes.poets.org/catalog/floating.htm
for details of this volume)
Verbi Visi Voco: a performance of poetry, ed. Griffiths and Cobbing,
Writers Forum, 1992.
New British and Irish Writing, West Coat Line Number 17 (29/2)
ed. Quartermain, 1995.
Recent UK Poetry, Talisman, ed. Caddel and Middleton, 1996.
Other, ed. Caddel and Quartermain, Wesleyan University Press,
1999.
Voices for Kosovo, ed. Rupert Loydell, Stride Publications, 1999.
Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, ed.
Keith Tuma, Oxford University Press (Oxford and New York, 2001) (See
www.oup-usa.org/toc/tc_019512894X.html
for details of this volume)
My poetry has appeared in many magazines since the 1970s, including:
The Gig (Canada), Shearsman, Oasis, Jacket
(Australia), Terrible Work, Tears in the Fence,
Scratch, And, New Statesman, Great Works,
Angel Exhaust, PN Review.
Critical Publications
Books
Far Language : Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Poetry
1978-1997, Stride Research Documents, 1999.
(Various articles from this may be found on the web, including
On Bob Cobbing at www.jacketmagazine.com/09/shep-cobb.html
On Ulli Freer at www.jacketmagazine.com/09/shep-freer.html
On Twentieth Century Blues at www.jacketmagazine.com/09/shep-shep.html)
The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000,
Liverpool University Press. (forthcoming)
Iain Sinclair, Writers and Their Work, Northcote House (forthcoming)
Pamphlet
The Necessity of Poetics, Ship of Fools, 2002. A slightly earlier
version may be read at
www.bbk.ac.uk/pores/1/index.htm
biographical note
I was born in 1955, and grew up on the South Coast in Southwick. The proximity
of Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, the reading of Horovitz’s
anthology Children of Albion, and meetings with Bob Cobbing and
Lee Harwood, all before I’d left school, meant I discovered the
work of the British Poetry Revival early: contemporary writing to supplement
my youthful obsession with TS Eliot and Surrealism. In 1974 I attended
the University of East Anglia in Norwich (which I chose because of its
interest in contemporary writing and letters), and entered a more conventional
literary world that largely didn’t recognise the work I was already
reading and writing. I edited 1983, a poetry magazine on cassette
tape that was a little ahead of its time, but I was no prodigy in my creative
work. After graduating with a solid background in poetry and Modernism,
I took a year off on the South Coast and began to sing the blues with
my friend Tony Parsons (we had a little revival in the early 1990s). I
studied for an MA in Creative Writing at UEA with Malcolm Bradbury and
Angela Carter. Following a crisis over writing fiction, I decided to submit
my poetry for the MA thesis, and I have seldom written fiction since,
although I am drawn to prose and fictionality. In 1980, I wrote the first
poem I still like enough to name, ‘The Blickling Hall Poem’.
By this time – still in Norwich - I was working on my PhD on the
poetry of the British Poetry Revival (after a false start on James Joyce),
and editing a mimeographed magazine called Rock Drill, with Penny
Bailey. After a term teaching at UEA in 1981, I found myself in Manchester,
and fell into teaching in Further Education (English, Communications,
General Studies, Journalism, you name it …) which I carried on doing
until 1996. I enjoyed every moment in the classroom, but was increasingly
alienated from the Thatcherite managerialism of the institutions at which
I taught. A move to London in 1983 to train for this career put me in
touch with a particularly vibrant scene around the Sub Voicive poetry
reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project –both at
which I read regularly - with Gilbert Adair and others, and with Adrian
Clarke, with whom I would edit an anthology of the exciting work we saw
around us. In order to finish the PhD – now focused upon the work
of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood – I deliberately stopped writing poetry
for a year. I like to think that I knew what I was doing. A line was drawn
under early work by the publication of the slim pamphlet Returns
in 1985 and new work, illustrated by artist and poet Patricia Farrell,
published as small pamphlets from our Ship of Fools imprint, suggested
a new direction. (The term ‘linguistically innovative poetry’
had mercifully not yet been coined by Adair.) In this, my thirtieth year,
I also found myself getting married (a rather unfashionable thing to do
in our circle), becoming a father, working fulltime, and living in Surrey.
By 1990 Patricia, Stephen and I managed to return to London from this
internal exile, and lived in Tooting. We immediately set up a monthly
discussion group to complement the experimental workshop of Cobbing’s
Writers Forum, and the continuing Sub Voicive. I’d also started
a frugal serial magazine, Pages, which seemed to get around and
which I promoted as ‘resources for the linguistically innovative
poetries’. The publication of a few anthologies of the alternative
poetries – I was even in a couple - made this an optimistic time
in a neglected field. The support of Rupert Loydell’s Stride Publications
for my work (4 books and one edited volume between 1990-2000) was crucial.
In 1989 I began to link all my new texts into a network of multiple titles
and sequences, called – with slight tongue in cheek - Twentieth
Century Blues. This time-based work (in 75 parts of varying length)
was completed in 2000 for the Millennium (yes, when I began, I really
did think that I would be the only one to notice it!). It fills a number
of recent and forthcoming volumes. I beavered away at this work, performing
it regularly (sometimes with dance and music) and I occasionally wrote
critical articles on contemporary poetry. In 1996, after a number of bitter
years of industrial dispute (I even offered to leave the college on voluntary
redundancy, but they wouldn’t let me) I realised a long-term ambition:
a post in Higher Education. I’d built up quite a profile of publications
now and this, coupled with my association with the early days of Creative
Writing (an association I’d half-forgotten with a subject about
which I was somewhat ambivalent), must have suggested that I could run
an MA in Writing Studies at Edge Hill College of Higher Education in Ormskirk.
Sad to leave London (one of our later acts had been to hold the Smallest
Poetry Festival in the World in our front room at which 25 poets read)
we moved to Liverpool, just round the corner from Penny Lane. We were
slow to build up similar connections in the North West, but first Scott
Thurston and then others, have made this area quite active with alternative
poetries, which have begun to spill outwards from the college, in readings
and publications. I took advantage of the academic post to publish more
criticism: plenty of articles, a book on British poetry, and – currently
– a short study of Iain Sinclair. I also began to engage with the
pedagogy of creative writing, not least of all devising ways of teaching
poetry in a more interesting way than the destructive formalism on offer
elsewhere, and by emphasising the necessity of poetics as a speculative
writerly discourse. After I finished Twentieth Century Blues,
I had a short remission from poetry, the equivalent of the 1985-6 break;
the book on poetry filled the vacuum. I began to write new texts, and
attempted to mature (or, at least, alter) the style, refine the focus,
to tacitly drop the tag ‘linguistically innovative’ with all
its semantic traps. The Lores appeared in 2003, thus making public
a central part of Twentieth Century Blues. This is fittingly
the source of the poetics and short excerpt that follow.
contact
shepparr@edgehill.ac.uk and sheppard3@supanet.com
A professional webpage may be found at www.edgehill.ac.uk
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