A note on : Robert Sheppard's writing on Poetry and Collaboration

Robert on the right

Robert on the right

I hope this becomes a book. Robert Sheppard’s writing over the summer of 2020 on collaboration and poetry, in the UK, is timely, necessary and long overdue. I am biased as I’m featured and I obviously care about collaboration. But it is strange that so little has been written on the subject. Considering Robert’s standing as a poet and critic, and educator, it’s all the better he has done this work, eloquently, and with wit, and insight.

Robert has been a key influence upon the writing of multiple generations of poets in the UK. For my own part, he specifically influenced my sense of what place, space, biography could be within a complex poetry, he made me reconsider what poetics was and he allowed some light to be shone in the dark spaces where poets don’t make much and are proud of that - he has been prolific, for decades, and worked across the proper ways and means of poetry. I am one of very many who would say this kind of thing.

Finishing off his 14 part series on collaboration, he has concluded and provided a useful contents rundown. Posts include writings on my poetics of collaboration, the most comprehensive review of Nemeses, the second volume of my collaborations. In depth looks at my work on the page with Prue Chamberlain Bussey, and my work with Camilla Nelson, live and in print, with an appreciated nod to wrestling. I repatriate Robert’s concluding post here and enthuse that you should click through and read it all

Conclusion is here “This probably concludes my ‘Thoughts on Collaboration’. I think it is best that my remaining work on the theme is composed offline, for eventual publication as a critical article…. Only one final text to acknowledge, the extraordinary 500 page Poetic Interviews, edited and conducted by Aaron Kent, from Broken Sleep Books, 2019, in which Kent uses poems much as an interviewer uses questions - and various writers (I note SJ Fowler amongst them) reply with poems…. On a personal note, I am pleased to report that there are plans for Veer to republish both my collaborations with Bob Cobbing (which I talk about  here ). That’s a good way to end this rambling strand….