GLASFRYN, LLANGATTOCK, POWYS NP8 1PH
+44(0)1873 810456 | LYN@GLASFRYNPROJECT.ORG.UK
Swift Songs for John James
Late Advance to Bonheur
i.m. J.J.
the Atlantic Drift scrum
spiders ahead to leave us
pacing behind
I’m attentive to frailty
the dandyism of the advanced guard
we plod the endless perimeter
of the museum’s black railings
its global plunder sealed for the night
all the tourists off to their bolt holes
all the wage slaves back to the peripheries
(even as far as Cambridge)
August Sander’s ‘last people’
swept out of our way
all the poets ahead of us, it seems
to play catch up I sing
through Fred Astaire
the British Museum
had lost its charm
you laugh and your laugh
dances along the pavement
ahead
jouissance on its last barricade
Un(en)titled
big ‘Old’ England – we’re still here
and most of us are ‘not bad’ – as we
pour fire on fire and fail to get it
and now? What can we do
nothing that doesn’t acknowledge
our own servility
own
servitude
oh! trades-union banners riding the slavish winds
Night and Day
passing under the railway bridge
by the Dragons’ Teeth, concrete pyramids
left over from the War, trains tremble
above, flashes of light on the wet road either side
stop to feel this moment without movement
late workers and night workers cross their rhythms
… as you walk out into morning sun and rain
the cry of gulls has displaced
the blackbirds’ songs with blasts of panic
and laughter. The blackberries on the common
even up the municipal alley, are there for the taking
but the peasantry has forgotten how to forage
they get their mates to phone the foodbanks for them
in such a State interest rates rise
to keep the living wage unliveable
11 August 2022: Radical Landscapes
we drift through the gallery
whose exhibits keep reminding us of poems
(I’m thinking of your rivers Severn Avon Cam Thames Taff
where trout leap, no sewage dumped in their heat)
between the ‘Trespass’ documents and news cuttings
rises Peter Riley’s The Ascent of Kinder Scout
beneath the photos of burning headdresses of New Year tar
chants Tom Pickard’s ‘Dancing Under Fire’
Ken Smith’s priapic chalk Cerne Abbas Giant
poses twice, as photograph, as throbbing neon
even Bryan Winter’s abstract hail of seed
concretises WS Graham’s wordblind blasts
at last! We find your friend Richard Long
circling Dartmoor, a revolution of sorts
‘still holding the line still walking the line’
continuously from your poem for him
Ian Hamilton Finlay speaks for himself by quotation
in eclogic Latin, on guillotine blade
Zoë Skoulding’s A Revolutionary Calendar
literalised in the wilting plants and working implements
of Ruth Ewan’s
‘Back to the Fields’
the isolate potato
the threatening axe
quartidi 24 Thermidor
the year of the Republic CCXXX
Bending the Ear
they sound in my dream
or are left as echoes
as I plunge up
into a day that carries
me onto and out of
the tin-eared magic
of feigned foreignness but
those words I woke with
our finite rituals in the service
of an infinite obligation
seem somehow balanced
against the englishing Dictate function
of my laptop that hears
my hard-picked word
jouissance as
‘swift song’
June – August 2022
Robert Sheppard edited Atlantic Drift with James Byrne, which includes the work of John James. His most recent books are Bad Idea from KFS, part of his sonnet-project ‘The English Strain’, and a reprint of Collaborations with Bob Cobbing from Veer. His selected poems and a book of essays on his work are both available from Shearsman. He lives in Liverpool and from the top of the hill he can see Wales. He is currently editing the New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood with Kelvin Corcoran.
GLASFRYN, LLANGATTOCK, POWYS NP8 1PH
+44(0)1873 810456 | LYN@GLASFRYNPROJECT.ORG.UK