Robert Sheppard
@robertsheppard
Poet, critic of recent formally innovative poetry & poetics, emeritus prof at Edge Hill, and all that follows. Books from Shearsman, KFS, Salt, Broken Sleep, Palgrave, LUP, & all that follow. Blog:
Yesterday David Whyte and I celebrated Ern Malley's birthday. This is how I arrived at his door! We remembered this event: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2023/11/perf.... Hope others celebrated too.
The papers from the 2025 Glasgow conference on Jerome Rothenberg are all now published in English Studies in Latin America, here: ojs.uc.cl/index.php/es....
My book would make a terrible Christmas present, so why not buy it for yourself?! robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2025/11/elle...
Elle: A Verse Novel by Robert Sheppard is a fierce, densely layered détournement, refashioning Joseph Kessel’s Belle de Jour through splices, warpings, and an unnerving overlay of 1960s Brighton scandal onto a surrealist template. Coming soon from @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social
@paulsimpson.bsky.social : Good job I didn't have a band back then!
The distinction between writerly poetics (as I define it) and the manifesto is stark, and I hold by the distinctiveness of both. Single documents may contain traces (more than traces) of both; the usefulness will depend on circumstances. It might be as much as to do with reception as intention.
My transposition of 'Ozymandias' from British Standards: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2024/08/new-...
Me at the Day of the Dead crazy golf. Me on the crazy Day of the Dead Lowry Lounge 2024: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-...
Here's another Liverpool Poetry Space reading coming up in Allerton:
This is the full programme of the Liverpool Poetry Space series! 24: Open Eye; 30 Edge Hill Uni; 9 Allerton Road ...
Here's the official poster for the LiPS reading in Liverpool on the 24th: (here's my less official posting of it: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2024/10/deta...)
Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #4,528,861! (Apparently!)
I used lots of 'me's (even earlier) for the cover of Words Out of Time: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/03/my-r...
British Standards completes my 'sonnet' trilogy, most of them versions of existing ones from the tradition (not all of them, though): Petrarch to Mary Robinson, Wyatt to Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth to Milton, Hartley Coleridge to EBB: more : robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2024/08/new-...
The Necessity of Poetics part three delves back into the 1980s London innovative scene, with contemporary poetics pieces, including talks for the SubVoicive colloquia & net/(k)not-//work(s), a network of short responses, and the poetics of my Twentieth Century Blues.
What do you get in my new book, transpositions of Romantic sonnets? Or the capering of Bo and Go etc during brexit and Covid? You get both: versions of Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Shelley, Keats, Hartley Coleridge, Clare etc. And the time line of incompetence: @ShearsmanBooks