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These two most recent books by Robert Sheppard, the latter
published this year and the former in 2004, signify, in turn, the completion
of Sheppard's major work of the eighties and nineties, Twentieth Century
Blues and the inauguration of new formal
and textual concerns. Taken together however one can read across continuities
between these books, not least in the inclusion of the text 'Pentimento' in Hymns, subtitled 'what happened next to Twentieth
Century Blues' which the author describes
as making use of three withdrawn texts from the earlier project. Another
continuity is the reworking of old notes for Empty Diary poems as 'Impersonal Belonging' - Empty
Diaries being another major showing of
texts from Twentieth Century Blues,
published by Stride in 1998.
To begin with Tin Pan Arcadia,
the title already speaks of the dystopic vision that Sheppard unfolded in Empty
Diaries and later in The Lores. The conjunction of Tin Pan Alley - the
cacophonous hub of popular music production in New York at the end of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth - and the antique
vision of paradise embodied in the word 'Arcadia', articulates in miniature
the dominant formal means of Sheppard's writing, which he has described as an
attempt to 'link the unlinkable'. As with The Lores, TPA
is haunted by the multiple collisions between art and history in the
twentieth century and, as a result of this collision, restlessly undertakes a
major meditation on the ethical position of the artist. This meditation is
pursued through the most dizzying array of formal approaches and thematic
concerns, from vignettes of Thatcherite Britain through excavated fictional
histories of the blues to a near hysterical fantasy on Robinson Crusoe. What
is consistent within this welter however is the sense of address: tributes to
jazz greats like Davis and Sinatra sit alongside engagements with writers
living and dead: Lorca, Angela Carter, William Burroughs beside Roy Fisher,
Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth. Andrew Marvell is here, but so is the Earl of
Rochester. It is key to Sheppard's sense of the task of the writer in
confronting history that the means of this can come through engagements with
other writers and this is an approach which is carried forward in Hymns.
TPA is haunted too by the means
of production and reproduction that litter the twentieth century. The pun on
recording and recoding is key: 'street recordings' 'secret videos' 'walkman
refusals' (p. 11) 'recording tape hanging from the branches' (p. 40) and 'old
election posters' (p. 110) are markers of the way in which the book is drawn
to the aura of historical objects whilst repulsed by the way in which such
means of reproduction are used to control and manipulate: 'boys on the piazza
listening / to hours of hissing leader / tape passing the heads of natural /
outrage' (p. 15). The latter lines are from a text called 'Killing Boxes',
Sheppard's sustained critique of the representation of the first Gulf War.
Many of Sheppard's poems operate with a kind of ghostly narrative: fragmented
utterances abound cutting into images of violence and sexual violence - the
whole (be)coming apart at the seams. The poems however are also at pains to
reflect on their own poetics. The second part of 'Sharp Talk and Amended
Signatures' announces 'commentaries in which the zeitgeist is ordinary
perception, just things. A disruptive poetics is called for' (p.10) and it is
this disruptive poetics that 'refuses to mean this world' (p. 17) whilst
acknowledging the power of the 'polyphonic sentence' as it 'means a world'
(p. 13). To name, to witness, to reflect; in language, in poetry, on history
is for Sheppard a profoundly ethical act, one which is nevertheless caught up
in the currents of desire: 'an ethic of pleasure in the shadow of
responsibility' (p. 57).
If pleasure, desire and even love is part of the social fabric that binds us
to others and to ourselves Sheppard catches its demise most succinctly in the
conclusion to the sharply observed but outlandishly titled 'Abjective Stutter
Expectorates Laugh of the Human' where the stranger caught on the bus is
exposed in the announcement: 'It's taken / nearly one hundred / Years for
her to fall in self-less love with herself (Ha-ha, has it?' (p. 93). This vision of subjectivity emptied out
by consumerism does run the risk of being only skin-deep however, whilst the
more extended argument of the (also absurdly titled) '31 Basalt Wind Chimes
for the Window Box of Earthly Pleasures' is perhaps the key exploration of
this theme at length. The poem's title is in fact a rather good joke on
Joseph Beuys' sculpture 'The End of the Twentieth Century' - the title also
of a strand of Twentieth Century Blues of which this poem is number two - in the way in which it imagines
the enormous basalt blocks that form Beuys' piece as dainty hanging objects
that can chime. The poem is built of short paragraphs each announced with a
large 'o': possibly symbolising Beuys' blocks in themselves or the conical
sections cut out, wrapped in felt and reinserted into each block (as well as
the Romantic exhortation 'oh!' and/or the shape of an open mouth):
O
A single voice on a single page - there's music enough. The newspaper
vendor
cries: 'Echo...Echo
O
Plonk (see plunk);
his rush of pleasure haunts the paths of sense with sensation
O
But that spooky charm is not earthly goodness as one would want to know
it!
(pp. 105-6)
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Like many other places in Sheppard's poetry the voice is
at once ventriloquial in its deep ironising of public discourse and in
earnest in terms of the theme it tries to grasp: 'a sensation that is almost
an emotion an aubade an algorithmic simulation' 'constituents of pleasure are
not to be taken for granted' (both p. 107) 'the right to pleasure, as under statute. A unit of pleasure, its animus (Who needs devils with
gods like that?' (p. 108) A fuller account of these statements might trace
the influence of recent French thought on the understanding of the
relationship between body and mind and the implications this has for
politics, but the comparison and contrast Sheppard makes between 'right' and
'unit' in the above quotation seems to capture the argument in microcosm -
that the human risks imprisoning itself in the name of liberating desire. As
a paragraph from near the end of this poem puts it: 'the infectious eye
catches pleasure being caused. The unhasty song when responsibility descants
as response' (p. 109). This section conveys a reading of contemporary
subjectivity as bound into mutual monitoring and censuring of desire; leading
to an avoidance of responsibility when it amounts to a necessity to respond
to the world one finds oneself in.
A significant part of the pleasure that I gain from reading Sheppard's work
is in this relative freedom to pursue connections, to build readings, to take
responsibility for myself in my encounter with this text without feeling that
I am not permitted to read in this way. True, the relentlessly fragmented and
fragmenting formal patterns of this text are a challenge which not all
readers will wish to undertake, and certainly the more, shall I say, excessive
instances of sexual imagery and genuinely bad language ('You fucker!' she says for the first
time in English art' (p. 113)!) will put some readers off. This is not a
comfortable book to read, intellectually or emotionally, because the
realities of which it speaks are uncomfortable realities: the sexism of
western societies, the widespread oppression of poor nations, the relentless
presence of consumerism are all fuel for its unabashed anger. To tame and
tidy up this powerful feeling into more regular and polite forms and patterns
of argument would simply fail to convince. Reading this book leaves one with
a sense of horror at the injustices conducted in our names every minute of
every hour of every day, in the past as well as in the present. It is a
testimony to Sheppard's bravery as a writer that he leaves no impulse in
himself unacknowledged or disregarded. It's all here in livid, snarling
technicolour - a deconstruction of the self spilled all over the face of
society.
The pace, tone and rhythms of Hymns to the God in which my
Typewriter Believes hit a more lyrical
waveform than much of TPA, and
yet its basic m.o. is very similar. If anything, Hymns is more directly concerned in many poems with
coming to terms with the nightmare of history in terms of the Holocaust, as
poems dedicated to Charlotte Saloman and responding to Bernhard Schlink's The
Reader, indicate. This is a continuing
project informed by Jacques Derrida's response to Jean-Francois Lyotard's
book The Differend on the
ethics of writing. Derrida's exhortation 'one must make links with
Auschwitz' haunts Hymns as much as Twentieth Century Blues, and also anticipates the ethical base of the
continuing engagements with not only other writers in general, but with
specific works in particular: a method which Sheppard calls 'texts or
commentaries'. However it is clear that for Sheppard what constitutes a text
can as well be the multiple texts generated by the occurences of September 11
- wryly and poignantly reflected on in 'Closing the Books: Locking the
Chests' ('How once we were to have become so simply human' (p. 31)) - as well
as the successive drafts of Anne Sexton's poem 'Wallflower' which are
commented upon individually in the title poem.
There is a risk of course in tying-in poems so specifically to 'source' texts
from which they gain their creative impetus. Sheppard points out that his
poems were composed as 'responses to, writings through, alongside, against,
out of other works of art' but that 'they were intended to be read
independently as well as in relation to'. Sheppard also provides a list of
his sources but comments 'this is not a reading list'. The slightly
contradictory nature of this statement underwrites my view that whilst it is
not necessary to have knowledge of the texts that Sheppard responds to, it
helps. My reading of the poems when I knew the source text was richer for
being able to make this connection. With innovative writing such as
Sheppard's - whose basic aesthetic premise is, to use Roland Barthes'
distinction, to generate a writerly, rather than a readerly experience of a
text - it seems to be almost essential to an understanding of the book that
as many of its original sources can be acquired and responded to as possible.
This allows one to get closer to the act of writing, in a way the poems
themselves would appear to encourage.
The way in which these texts hover between their existence on the page and
another text elsewhere does nothing more than make the concept of
intertextuality a self-conscious part of its construction. All texts do this,
but some do it more than others. The risk for this reader in places was a
sense of the text as a wilful simulacrum of another text, one that in essence
didn't stand in its own right. The fact that some of these texts are also free
translations (of poems by Mandelstam and Baudelaire) makes the point even
more urgent. I gain more from these poems by reading the Mandelstam and the
Baudelaire - as I do by knowing the drafts of Ann Sexton's 'Wallflower' -
because I get closer to my sense of what interests Sheppard about them and
why he might respond to them in the way he does. Sheppard's work risks
putting off readers who want their books to appear as independent,
self-sufficient, portable art works in which they may set sail with no further
equipment. I confess that sometimes I am one of these readers, and the by
turns frustrating and illuminating experiences I had whilst reading this book
seem to have devolved from this double aspect of when references are
recognised and when not. The truth is that one always brings something to a
reading or a writing, but one can't bring everything. My advice is to pursue
the texts in Sheppard's sources if the poem interests you - it will repay
dividends.
What do the poems in the book look and feel like, what are they about? Beyond
the general organising theme of the intersections between literature and
history and the ethical dimension that the book enacts, the specific stagings
of poems in the first section of the book 'Texts or Commentaries' find us
confronting the image of the female artist (Saloman, Loy, Sexton) caught up
in the male gaze; a couple wrestling with each other at 'the wrong end of
unreal relations, worked-up emotions too abrasive to delight' ('Impersonal
Belonging' p. 14); the body splayed out and dissected as the guts of history:
'Squeeze / My Skull Until Some Sense Squitters / Out' ('Echo's Clones' p.
19). One of the most effective techniques Sheppard utilises is a kind of
over-punctuated prose, breaking down syntax into implosive and suggestive
patternings, often counterpointed by pun and repetition:
It's written. Off. Writing. Of. Our loves. Over your lives. Through your
lines.
('Pentimento', p. 40)
'Reading The Reader of Bernhard
Schlink' constitutes the second section of the book with its urgent
meditation on history as it accompanies, shadows and mirrors Schlink's text:
The past is read as a dream. Read in a dream. Mis-read in a dream as merely a dream.
(p. 47)
The past is faceless. Isn't faced. Evinces few responsibilities.
(p. 49)
The poetry of Paul Celan is alluded to by the image of 'Black Milk' (p. 48)
from Celan's famous 'Todesfugue' (aka 'A Death Fugue') and the French writer
and member of Oulipo, Georges Perec, is quoted as a critical frame: 'the
literature of the concentration camp does not get attacked'. The poem as a
whole explores a poetics of writing as it relates to history, articulated in
statements such as: 'Forgetting is louder than memory' (p. 59), 'History has
learnt to read itself' (p. 60), 'Commentary on a text is a decoy' (p. 61),
'Of the other stories. That didn't escape. Other readings' (p. 62). A unique
moment in this text however is when the writer turns us aside for just a
moment to allow us to glimpse the scene in which he is actually reading
(writing):
I read 'We were freezing' and I am. Two days away. The house will not
warm. Fish at the bottom of the tank. Shut down. We clutch a radiator all
evening. [...] 'We were freezing' is the last sentence in the world I want
to read. But I may not disavow it. I must vow to my hearing this saying'
(p. 50)
The way in which this sudden shift reframes the poem is hugely appealing and
momentarily lightens the dense texture of the piece.
The final section 'Hot Between Poems' might be considered the most playful
and diverse. Here are the versions of Baudelaire and Mandelstam, short odes,
Oulipean transformations of Sephardic song and a remarkable text made of
several smaller poems called 'In Memory of the Anti-Poem' dedicated to Czech
collagist and poet Ji-i Kol-a-. The opening of this last takes us to
a Prague street where the sounds of a typewriter being used are heard through
the open window of a police station. The piece seems haunted by this obsolete
emblem of production and reproduction caught up with power and art: the
ultimate symbol of the twentieth century writer - comparable to how Beuys'
use of the grand piano makes it function symbolically as the grave of western
culture. However Sheppard's typewriter is more positive, or at least
multi-valenced: the policeman is imagined typing 'indictment / absurdist epic
/ or intricate typogram' (p. 81) and it appears in the section called
'anti-titled un-poem' as the stimulus for a synaesthetic vision of words and
diacritical marks in the air - the sound of the first poem seen - leading to
'the re-invention of the typewriter' (p. 85). It is also present in the final
poem (from which the title of this review is taken) in which 'the final
anti-poem' is 'written with our eyes shut / with the rattle of the typewriter'
(p. 87). Other notes in this unpredictable piece include the hilarious take
on 'praxilla's adonis or the first antipoem 5th century b.c.' featuring an
anti-cucumber (!) and two 'evidential' poems formed of quotations from Kolar
and referencing Kolar's own 'evident' poems which were primarily graphic
statements. The first of these makes links again with Auschwitz in collecting
the evidence of the holocaust: 'glazed room full of hair [...] artificial limbs
/ cooking utensils' (p. 83)
whilst the second suggests an uneasy conclusion for a book still haunted by
the twentieth century: 'I too / fell prey to / 'the poetical illusions of
that great and beautiful epoch / that was up to its eyes in guilt' (p. 87).
Sheppard's activities as a critic are well worth seeking out as a compliment
to and context for his poetic work (his The Poetry of Saying:
British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000
was published by Liverpool University Press last year, and he has also
written recently on Iain Sinclair) but it is remarkable to hear in a recent
interview with Edmund Hardy at "intercapillaryspace" that Sheppard is
also turning his attention to prose fiction. This reader for one eagerly awaits
the published results.
© Scott Thurston, July 2006.
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