Friday, September 30, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form - Griffiths and Fisher



10. The Making of the Book: Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher 



The role of small presses is not simply to publish non-commercial work, but often to form it in terms of text-presentation and book-production. The differing versions of Bill Griffiths’ The Book of the Boat are examined, noting not just revisions in the usual sense, but serial transformations with each printing opportunity, including the whole work as a pamphlet in two different and illustrated editions. Printing and publishing is a form of writing. Allen Fisher’s Proposals is a self-published work, involving the formal interaction of poem, commentary and image, and the open ‘imperfect fit’ of Fisher’s postmodern poetics is contrasted to Quarles’ seventeenth century emblem books, to which Fisher alludes, to suggest that, once more, the forming activities of the reader are fundamental to its reception. 

There is more than the work on Fisher and Griffiths to be accessed here, including a long post about small presses themselves. 
Bill Griffiths reading; Allen Fisher (right) watching

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places



Thursday, September 29, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form Stefan Themerson and Semantic Poetry

Chapter 9: Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and Thought-Experiments in the Theater of Semantic Poetry

The invention of ‘Semantic Poetry Translation’ by Polish-British writer Stefan Themerson in the 1940s and his theoretical unfolding of his ideas in ‘Semantic Sonata’ of 1949, had to wait until the 1970s to be appreciated, but only today it may be formally likened to certain Oulipo techniques. Replacing words with their definitions de-forms and re-forms original texts and allows for an examination of their (often dubious) claims. Offered as a species of ‘translation’, the poems also involve ‘iconopoeia’ as a technique, derived from Apollinaire’s visual practice. ‘Semantic Sonata’ suggests musical form, perhaps inspired by Schwitters’ very different ‘Ur-Sonate’, to articulate a linguistic philosophy of caution, in reaction to a post-War world where too many people believe too many things but do not know enough, as Themerson’s friend Bertrand Russell puts it. (Which sounds horribly like the post-factual world people keep going on about now!)

See here for more. But not a lot of blogging about Themerson. (This was because the chapter was a previously published article.)

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places



Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form ... Conceptual Writing Goldsmith/Place/Seed


The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic: Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and John Seed


Conceptual writing is, in terms of its poetics, very clear in its intention to privilege appropriation as a mode, and it appears to downplay form. The theories (and some ‘uncreative’ works) of Kenneth Goldsmith are expounded in support of its own practice; Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts, with its gruelling accounts of rape, is read against conceptualist theory as a formal entity. The other of conceptual writing’s (self-confirming) poetics is form. The work of British poet John Seed, post-Objectivist appropriations and transformations (by means of poetic artifice) of Mayhew’s accounts of the nineteenth century London poor, Pictures from Mayhew, serves to show how a successful formal and conceptual project may be achieved. 

My extensive posts, on both the conceptualists and on Seed may be accessed here.

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places




Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form ... Waldrop's Wild Forms!


Chapter 7. Rosmarie Waldrop: Poetics, Wild Forms and Palimpsest Prose

Waldrop’s poetics is one that pitches language against form, which she suspects of alliance with Romantic ideologies and stances, and of implying fixity (metrical form rather than active forming), but she nevertheless insists upon formal transformation, and one poem in prose from Blindsight is read in detail, particularly with respect to her uses and transformations of the work of Joseph Cornell, to whom it acts as homage. Cornell’s collages reach back to radical modernism. Her palimpsestic and collagic manner of textual appropriation is demonstrated to be a variety of what Waldrop does allow herself to call ‘wild form’.




For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places


See some thoughts on Waldrop here, thoughts that began my blogging-cum-thinking that, in many ways, produced this book. It also feels like the revival of this blog(zine), a move from intermittence into serial posting.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form in Perril and Bonney


Chapter 6: Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean Bonney


Simon Perril’s occupation of the lacunae represented by the fragmentary remains of the first Greek lyric poet, Archilochus, Archilochus on the Moon, allows him to adapt some ancient Greek tropes involving language, colonization and marriage, as well as reflecting upon the figure of the poet himself, while developing a short line measure replete with internal rhyme and suffused with pathos. Sean Bonney’s Happiness: After Rimbaud, appropriates the figure of Rimbaud in the service of revolutionary politics, so that some of Rimbaud’s aphorisms are re-functioned to show the disintegration of bourgeois sensibility, for example. Prose ‘letters’ accompany a series of angry poems, some of them alluding directly to Rimbaud’s works and life, others relating to riots in Britain in 2011, all of them transforming the original texts and/or originary myths of Rimbaud.  

See here for links to working passages on both poets' works. 
 
For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form Bergvall and Moure


Chapter 5. Meddling the Medieval: Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure

Both Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure produce contemporary innovative texts that re-frame medieval ones. Bergvall’s take on (‘meddling’ with) Chaucer, Meddle English, involves a recognition of the fluidity of Chaucer’s language that matches a contemporary slipperiness in linguistic matters. Humorous and performative, Bergvall negotiates contemporary issues of gender through transformation, and through an interlineal gloss on the original text within her poems. Moure, in O Cadoiro, plunges into the archive of medieval Portuguese troubadours with relish, but Derrida’s essay ‘Archive Fever’ serves as a minatory intertext. Moure recognizes that the incomplete archive is capable of generating philosophical questions about self and truth, as well as being the occasion for stunning innovative love lyrics and visual play (as in the book’s photographic plates of her treated texts).   

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places


For further posts on the project as it lead up to the book see here.  


Saturday, September 24, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form Atkins' and Hughes' Petrarch


4. Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and Peter Hughes’ Petrarch


An account of contemporary ‘translation’ practices broadens the scope of the word from that of faithful imitation into many varieties of transformative practices using ‘original’ texts. While many examples are entertained in summary, two book-length projects taking the sonnets of Petrarch, by two British poets, Peter Hughes’ Quite Frankly: After Petrarch’s Sonnets and Tim Atkins’ Collected Petrarch, are examined in detail with respect to their versions of the same poem. While Hughes (who reads Italian) emphasizes his difference from the original (by relocating the poems and modernizing them, for example), Atkins (who does not read Italian) intends in his versions to emphasize his distance from the originals (largely through the use of post-Oulipo techniques and constraints). Both writers manage to reflect Petrarch’s elegiac mode, while Atkins additionally injects a Buddhist negation. 

See here for a hub-post with links to pieces on these 'Petrarch boys'

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places


Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meaning-Contemporary-Innovative-Poetry-Poetics/dp/toc/3319340441

See here for the sonnets I write, and the work that began out of these two poets' exploration of Petrarch. You can read the original translation and my 'doggie' translation, 'Pet', here! The 4 'symboliste' poems may be read on Card Alpha 1, here.  And you can watch me read some of my 'Petrarch' variations here. (Including the Jimmy Savile one.) 

'Petrarch 3' is now in print, see here and hereI have written in detail about the writing of Petrarch 3 (see https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/09/practice-led-piece-on-petrarch-3-from.html )

Friday, September 23, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form... in the Innovative Sonnet


Chapter 3.  Convention and Constraint: Form in the Innovative Sonnet Sequence

Analysing both the history of the sonnet and its transformation in contemporary innovative practice (as exemplified by the anthology The Reality Street Book of Sonnets (2008)) the works of Ted Berrigan, Jeff Hilson, Philip Terry, Geraldine Monk and Sophie Robinson are critiqued in detail. Questions of form (as sonnet frame) are raised alongside issues of the historical form and its relation to politics and gender. An examination of the breadth of experiment evinced in contemporary practice, in relation to the work of New York poetics, the Oulipo group, and quasi-concrete poetry experiments in a variety of visual forms, completes the analysis.  

See about the sonnets I write here. See here for the central thesis of the book.


For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places


Thursday, September 22, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form ... Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Abstracts of the chapters of The Meaning of Form... coming up day by day...


Chapter 2. Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifice and Naturalization in Theory and Practice

Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice is explored, both as a theory of poetry, which emphasizes form, artifice and processes of good and bad naturalization, and as a poetics for her own poetry. While her terms are treated as useful tools in attempting to show how artifice can critique the world, her concepts of the ‘image-complex’ and ‘suspended naturalization’, and her insistence that artifice is ‘non-meaningful’, are found wanting. The semiotics of Yuri Lotman and the thinking of Charles Bernstein rescue these terms, but not enough to stop Forrest-Thomson’s forensic analysis of her own poetry demonstrating the impossibility of fusing theory with poetics, even though she throughout maintains the primacy of artifice.    

Explore the thinking behind the book here (though there is only a little on VF-T). There is a response to the republication of Poetic Artifice here, and a creative response to her poetry and poetics here


 
For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places



Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Robert Sheppard; The Meaning of Form : Its Introduction

The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry
Robert Sheppard

I will be posting my chapter abstracts every day from now. See here for the hub post to the others: 

 
Introduction: Form, Forms and Forming

The central methodology that poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means and meanings of form is introduced, via accounts of other ‘turns’ in recent literary studies (the importance of poetics is also underlined), leading to a reading of formalist criticism in the works of Derek Attridge, Susan Wolfson, Peter de Bola, Angela Leighton and others, which loosely owes to a longer post-Schiller aestheticist tradition of regarding form as a significant force. The cognitive anthropology of Lambros Malafouris, a theory of material engagement, is utilized to mediate the speculation that haunts this study: that form is a repository of cognition. Form as a force and cognitive entity, particular forms as elements of poetic artifice, and forming as active readerly engagement and transformation, are compared and differentiated.

See here for the hub-link to the research which lay behind the development of the thesis here.

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places



Monday, September 19, 2016

Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry PUBLISHED



The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry

My academic critical book is now published by Palgrave Macmillan. This has been a few years in the writing now and a few months in the production stage. It represents the culmination of my thinking about form, as I say in the Introductory chapter, and is guided by the opening formulation: ‘Poetry is the investigation of complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form.’ This conjecture guides the theoretical accounts of form and the readings of (mainly British) contemporary poetry that follow in its chapters. The pun upon ‘means’ is intended to enact the supposition that if poetry does anything it does it chiefly through its formal power and less through its content, though it also carries the further suggestion that form is a modality of meaning in its own right.

This study engages questions relating to the life of form in contemporary innovative poetries through both an introduction to the latest theories of form that will be of interest to anyone concerned with reading for form, not just innovative poets and their readers, and which focusses upon form as an engaged action rather than metrical frame or pattern, and with reference to the work of Susan Wolfson and Derek Attridge, Angela Leighton and Peter de Bolla. Close readings of leading North American and British innovative poets, from Rosmarie Waldrop to Caroline Bergvall, Sean Bonney to Barry MacSweeney, Veronica Forrest-Thomson to Kenneth Goldsmith, Peter Hughes to Stefan Themerson, Allen Fisher to Geraldine Monk, emphasise their forms to be a matter of authorial design and readerly engagement. They cover form on the page, form in performance, and form in physical book-making. The book ends with a consideration of what has been implicit throughout: the politically critical function of formal innovation, mediated through the theories of Adorno, Rancière and others, and something that haunts throughout, the thought that form is cognitive, is brought to a tentative conclusion. 

How does this fit in with previous studies I’ve written? They have demonstrated these various ‘turns’, though not I hope in any programmatic way: the linguistic turn of Far Language (1999); the ethical turn of The Poetry of Saying: BritishPoetry and Its Discontents, 1950-2000 (2005); and the historical turn of When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry (2011); though throughout there has been a concern for poetics as a speculative writerly discourse (although I never quite realized the project of writing a whole book on poetics: the possible chapters are scattered through other books, including The Meaning of Form), but see here for the first part of my main essay on the subject). Yet at another level I see these works forming a unity in terms of my larger project of the study of the forms and poetics of British (and associated) writing of an avant-garde persuasion. (See here for my recent thoughts on the connection between critical work, poetics production and creative practice.) 

I am glad that it joins The Poetry of Saying as critical work of a strictly academic turn, although I am glad that overlapping essays in Far Language and When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, books which are within the reach of the average poetic pocket, are still available. People sometimes misunderstand the nature of academic publication, about which I have some severe reservations (which I might share on this blog, but which I will limit on what is a bit of a celebratory occasion to the remark that this is to be my last purely academic book), but the fact is they are intended for scholars who have access to academic libraries and inter-library loan. (The demand for open access might change all that.) My answer to this imposed exclusivity has been to show the ‘working out’ of some of the chapters and parts of chapters (along with digressions, caprices, poetic effusions and – frankly – jokes) in posts on this blog, and they are arranged, for scholar and lay-person alike, at what I call a ‘hub-post’, i.e., largely a page of links to all the posts pertaining to the chapters of the book in its earliest form: HERE

For the record, the chapters of the final book are as below, and I’m going to link one a day to the abstracts of each that I plan to post over the coming days. About half of it accounted for by now.

 Introduction: Form, Forms and Forming (see here)
1. Veronica Forrest-Thomson: Poetic Artifice and Naturalization in Theory and Practice (see here)
2.  Convention and Constraint: Form in the Innovative Sonnet Sequence (see here)
3. Translation as Transformation: Tim Atkins’ and Peter Hughes’ Petrarch (see here)
4. Meddling the Medieval: Caroline Bergvall and Erín Moure (see here)
5. Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean Bonney (see here)
6. Rosmarie Waldrop: Poetics, Wild Forms and Palimpsest Prose (see here)
7. The Trace of Poetry and the Non-Poetic: Conceptual Writing and Appropriation in Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place and John Seed (see here)
8. Stefan Themerson: Iconopoeia and Thought-Experiments in the Theater of Semantic Poetry (here)
9. The Making of the Book: Bill Griffiths and Allen Fisher (see here, where else?)
10. Geraldine Monk’s Poetics and Performance: Catching Form in the Act (see here)
11. Form and the Antagonisms of Reality: Barry MacSweeney’s Sin Signs (see here)

For those who can buy the book, or order it for libraries, here are the places to go to:


Here is some book data:

eBook ISBN
978-3-319-34045-6
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6
Hardcover ISBN
978-3-319-34044-9

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Robert Sheppard Reading at Gramophone Raygun (September 2016) set list

I read, with Eleanor Rees and Michael Mayhew, in the Dock Road Press reading series, Gramophone Raygun, at the Everyman Bistro, Liverpool, on Thursday 15th September 2016 (the series is monthly).

I have discussed writing sonnets
(here) and I read a new short sonnet sequence about our current political complexities, that will probably be called 'Break Out', taking its cue form the fifth and possibly (but possibly not) final 100 word sonnet:

breaking point

pointed out they all broke out of
wisdom into classic eurocratic distrexit data ... etc...

I delivered them with the celerity I think such poems deserve, and I went straight in, no introduction or announcements, with the words 'didn't think'. (Again here will spell out what these impacted poems are up to, or the form anyway.)

Then I presented the Liverpool launch of my Oystercatcher booklet published this year, The Drop. It is an elegy to my father (see about the book here and my father here) and consists of a short elegiac poem 'The Drop' and a long poem 'Of  Crystal Splinters', which exceeds elegy, it seems to me, as I tried to explain to the audience. It was written from notes taken during the long period of my father's illness, death, coroner's report and funeral, and lots of other things come in. I don't find it a depressing poem. But others do seem to read the headline emotion and extrapolate from it. There's a lot of sex in it (as my friend Geraldine was not slow to observe later in the Pen Factory), and any poem that has a verse about Rhianna and ends with the words 'Orpheus swinging in swingtime' is not completely serious. Though it is serious too. Details on buying the booklet here. It's reviewed here by Ian Brinton, and by Alan Baker, here.


I continued with excerpts from History or Sleep, my selected poems, published just under a year ago, see here. I read a sequence of sonnets originally from Warrant Error as a contrast to the opening new sonnets: I read from 'Rainshine shivers...' on page 120 to 'The young couples' on page 123.


I finished with another uplifting poem (I hope), 'Gravity Be My Friend', a poem written (again as I said to the audience) about going to, attending, and after the marvellous Pipilotti Rist exhibition at FACT in Liverpool some years ago.

Thanks to Mark Greenwood for inviting me. 

Details of all my 2015-16 publications are gathered here. (Copies of my The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry arrived the day before the reading, but I didn't mention it to anyone. I'm rather conscious of wanting to keep the critical activity separate from the creative. See here for considerations of this issue.)

*

Eleanor Rees was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in 1978. In 2015 Eleanor published her third full-length collection Blood Child (Liverpool University Press/Pavilion, 2015) and a long pamphlet Riverine (Gatehouse Press, 2015). She co-runs Storm and Golden Sky!


 Michael Mayhew is an artist-writer originally from Manchester. 


Monday, September 12, 2016

Robert Sheppard: My Bob Cobbing 'Archive'

I have twice displayed all of my Bob Cobbing materials (minus the Writers Forum materials) this summer, once for William Cobbing, editor of Boook, and secondly for Rosie Cooper, also an editor of Booook. Both have mounted exhibitions of Bob Cobbing’s work (see here ) and both visits were great fun and turned up all sorts of interesting objects and associated notions. (I particularly started to think about Cobbing's very latre pieces, written around the time of the Third ABC in Sound. I took some photographs of the ‘display’ and it is quite surprising what one can see.

See also about a performance of the poem I wrote with Cobbing,
Blatent Blather/Virulent Whoops of 2000-2001, which may be read here.) And there's a video of its last outing with me playing myself and Patricia Farrell reading the parts of Cobbing: here.

Here is an account of my first meeting with Cobbing in 1973, the occasion for the gathering of the first items here. My general introduction to his work may be read here.

You can just spot a pile of the editions of ABC in Sound below and I write about it here, on the event of the latest Veer publication of it 


I write about the Third ABC in Sound (which is a completely different work) here:



A general view of everything. It looks less than it is like this.


And magazine, a pile of Jennifer Cobbing pieces, some 'Winter' Poems and part of the cover of a book published for Bob's 75th birthday (I think)
Some sound recordings and collaborations; a Hansjorg Mayer 'Chamber Music' from 1968

That's BOOOOOOK in the foreground; Bob's Collected Poems in the background, including the box set Processual, for which I wrote the introduction, which is the poem 'The Micropathology of the Sign' (see here)

These are some of the 300 parts of Domestic Ambient Noise, Bob's collaboration with Lawrence Upton. That's the visual index in front of it (which seems also to be an invitation to a reading)

Volumes of Bob's Collected Poems (each published by a different little press) My introduction to the invisible box at the bottom, Processual, may be read here.

Some of Bob's very late colour computer texts, which I'm not sure many people have seen (you can just catch the corner of his 1987 computer poems

Part of a letter explaining his activities in 2002


More of the late colour pieces

One later work

Another later work


I think this is from Seventy Not Out, a birthday text from 1990

[NB 2021: My two Writers Forum collaborations with Bob Cobbing have been republished by Veer. See Pages: COLLABORATIONS (Bob Cobbing - Robert Sheppard) published in a box by Veer - out now ]

Friday, September 09, 2016

Robert Sheppard: Poetics, lit crit and self-explication: the poet-critic

As a ‘poet-critic’ I have often wondered what the relationship of one function to the other is in this hybrid construction. I have always felt somewhat distrustful of readings of my poems that attempt to link the terms of my criticism – for example, the Levinasian distinction between the qualities of ‘saying’ and the qualities of ‘the said’ as outlined in my critical book The Poetry of Saying – with particular poems of mine. (See here). I stopped Christopher Madden - nicely I hope - trying to make this move in this interview here. (I am probably just as guilty in my eager desire to crack the nut of the difficulties of innovative poetry by raiding and reading the literary critical formulations of poet-critics as poetics, I know!)

I believe that my criticism must inform the poetics – the speculative writerly discourse that I have with myself in my journal, with others in explicit poetics pieces, and perhaps in this post I’m writing now – but I don’t particularly know how. Indeed, one of the reasons I value writerly poetics in the terms I have defined it (see here but perhaps even more so here), is precisely because writers cannot read their own work (as witnessed by the centrality of the communal workshop in creative writing pedagogy). The poetics may use some of the same counters: I have used the term ‘creative linkage’ to describe the kind of supercharged collage practices one finds in Gravity as a Consequence of Shape by Allen Fisher, and I have used it of my own poem The Lores where I self-consciously ‘mix’ different linguistic ‘tracks’ as though I were producing a sound recording, but I am not sure of the relationship between the two usages. It’s not for me to say.

The transformations I am going to trace in a practice-led narrative I am writing will not touch on those kinds of relations because I believe I cannot access them accurately: in short, I cannot be my own critic, for the reasons I have just expressed, and also because of a certain English reserve which dictates that to speak of one’s creative work is a particular kind of false special pleading, this, despite the fact that I find it a useful practice for ‘apprentice’ writers within the academy; for writers in the wild, as I call them, it is a different question.

Part of this thinking, or rather somewhere in the background, is a very strange passage I read in the excellent Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010, which I posted about here, by the usually perspicacious Peter Barry. Writing of long-poems and projects (like Allen and Roy Fishers’), he says: ‘The major examples of this kind of enterprise look likely to remain unrivalled, partly because the poets who would undertake such a project will probably now have full-time university posts in creative writing.’ (236) Though he makes an exception for Zoe Skoulding, he nevertheless says she’s ‘a university-embedded poet in the pressured present, one who is necessarily engaged in a wide range of project grants and collaborative work of various kinds’ (238) This may be so (I’m not!) but just the arrival of Gavin Selerie’s massive Hariot Double on the day after I read this, tells the lie. It also reminds us that there are writers outside the academy (it is my ambition to become one). It’s as if Peter only meets poets at academic conferences (poets outside can’t get in, they can’t afford it!) and that creativity is inevitably wrapped up with practice-led research and all that caper (and it is a caper). I have had some funding for my writing (which I gratefully acknowledge), but these were for projects already underway, but I like to keep the energy of them a long way away from the ‘pressured present’, and I urge other poets (and writers and artists generally) to do the same. Only buy time. (I’m not even going to visit ‘impact’, but I’ve seen some gutless work produced under its supposed guise: willing itself to be art, willing itself to be relevant, quite useless in imaginative efficacy, and therefore useless to the social polity.)

I saw a poet give a reading the other day and it was like a practice-led presentation, which ‘reads’ very oddly for audience members not used to it, once the PhD is finished: it feels like the special pleading I suspect above. It’s a habit worth kicking. In the piece I am writing tracing the writing of fourteen variations on a ‘translation’ I made of the third sonnet of Petrarch, (see here and here) a partly conceptual, partly expressive sequence, under the sign of Oulipo, but informed by earlier poetic interests of my own, I need to avoid this kind of self-explication. (‘Poetics don’t explain!’ sez Charles Bernstein.) If I even dare to judge that Petrarch 3 is at once impersonal and personal, if I declare that it is at once hugely derivative and original, my thoughts above must halt my interpretive impulse here and dampen it to aspiration. I can only hope for such effects… Poetics is aspiration. (As well as provocation, and all the other things I’ve said it is over the years.)

 *


FOOTNOTE: '...talked - I think - about a lack of proper criticism, not literary critical, but of immediate response internal to the 'poetry scene' (shorthand I know), particularly with all the new writers emerging as they are. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far: all these 'practice-led' 'creative writers' (they use this terminology whether in or out of the academy) have a poetics but there's no critical apparatus to evaluate the efficacy of both poetics and poetry. Without it, everything sinks to the bottom. Especially with conceptual writing which is so easy to do (badly).' (From my diary 30th August 2016)

*
For my own recent project, and book The Meaning of Form... see a hublink to various posts here


For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places


Here is some book data:

eBook ISBN
978-3-319-34045-6
DOI
10.1007/978-3-319-34045-6
Hardcover ISBN
978-3-319-34044-9