{"id":238,"date":"2021-07-16T14:08:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-16T14:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/?p=238"},"modified":"2021-07-16T14:06:47","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T14:06:47","slug":"shifting-an-imaginary-poetics-in-anticipation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/2021\/07\/16\/shifting-an-imaginary-poetics-in-anticipation\/","title":{"rendered":"Shifting an Imaginary: Poetics in Anticipation"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Robert Sheppard<\/p>\n

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A more compassionate world, inspired by the great sacrifices of NHS frontline staff?<\/p>\n

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Or a crueller world, of people, some <\/em>people more than others, sacrificed to the greater good: Dominic Cummings\u2019 \u2018few pensioners\u2019, the Governor of Texas\u2019 improbable opinion that \u2018there are more important things than living\u2019? Not levelling up, but whacking down.<\/p>\n

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Defund the police or defend the statues? Even Extinction Rebellion seems deflated, though not defeated.<\/p>\n

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Shelley\u2019s \u2018unacknowledged legislators of the World\u2019 (508) or Oppen\u2019s \u2018legislators || of the unacknowledged || world\u2019 (11)?<\/p>\n

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We could be \u2018drunk with open-mindedness\u2019 at this point, as Louis Aragon puts it (151).<\/p>\n

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After The Hungry Years The Drowning Years The Age of Irony Warrant Error The Age of Immiseration, a hope for a worldlier world, one more ecologically fragile, but fluid, worldlier in is inter- (and outer-) nationalism.<\/p>\n

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\u2018I\u2019m transfigured into a bigger idea | shifting an imaginary where I\u2019ll | remain for all eyes to behold\u2019, in the valetudinary words of Idea (Sheppard, Bad Idea<\/em> 96).<\/p>\n

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In the poem, a lower case \u2018bigger idea\u2019 in opposition to a singular capitalised \u2018Big Idea\u2019. In the world, the smaller the ideas are, the more focussed they become, doable, durable.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Neurologically speaking,\u2019 writes Lee Ann Roripaugh, \u2018I would suggest: challenge a reader\u2019s perceptions, assumptions, modes of thinking, preconceived histories, and ideologies; foster attentiveness (to language, to others, to the surrounding world); create new neural pathways in the brain in lieu of neural ruts developed in response to sociocultural clich\u00e9s\u2019 (28).<\/p>\n

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Blah blah blah<\/em> media voices saying poetry must be harnessed to the restorative necessities of the post-Covid world (one big assumption there), as if compensation is what art offers, like a negligent government department. Art\u2019s formal splinter, its promise of a partly uncontrollable aesthetic encounter, may not necessarily yield a positive or \u2018therapeutic\u2019 response.<\/p>\n

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Utopia that embodies our hopes lies beyond any representation. \u2018Hope is the opposite of security\u2019, Ernst Bloch hopes (qtd. in Lagapa 8). It is an \u2018anticipatory consciousness\u2019, a creative \u2018forward dream\u2019, but a lucid one, in opposition to the constructions of \u2018blueprint utopians\u2019 (119).\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Bloch\u2019s \u2018not yet\u2019 chimes with Nathaniel Mackey\u2019s \u2018not yet\u2019, as Jason Lagapa puts it: negatives, negations, particularly formal ones, constitute the poetics of this gesture (55).<\/p>\n

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Put in these terms it is (almost) enough it is never enough.<\/p>\n

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Utopian hope is as anticipatory as our \u2018rhythmising consciousness\u2019, to use Nicolas Abraham\u2019s term for one important phenomenological \u2018impulse\u2019 (as outlined in Pulse<\/em>) (1). A relationship between instinctive intentionality as immediate action and utopic figuration linked in the active forming of the poem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Poetics as a luminous phrase, a catalytic particle. Less a slogan or a buzzword, than a koan<\/em>. Poetics is another anticipatory activity. I\u2019ve hitherto called it \u2018speculative\u2019, but is it not better thought of as \u2018anticipatory\u2019? That has me sitting at the edge of my seat, alert, \u2018speculative\u2019 sinking back into a thousand cushions.<\/p>\n

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In Lee Harwood\u2019s \u2018Notes of a Post Office Clerk\u2019 we read the words, \u2018a list of simple, practical, and just acts | moves towards a real \u201csocialism\u201d\u2019, but not the list itself (Harwood, Collected<\/em> 253). The list is excised (though published separately in a magazine), disproportionately long for notational form, maybe. Perhaps too programmatic. In any case, promised \u2018just acts\u2019 are enough to read the poem (as poem).<\/p>\n

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Also unaccountably excised from Harwood\u2019s poem (at a later stage of republication), this visionary account of \u2018process\u2019: \u2018Changes that produce changes. The action simultaneous, not linear. The action chemical in that one change transforms the whole into a completely new set of references\u2019 (Harwood, Boston-Brighton<\/em> 57).<\/p>\n

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Just as aesthetic encounters must be open to potential negative affect (though moderated by forms of reception), political and cultural ideas, and their transformations, must be open to negative effects (though constrained by social institutions).<\/p>\n

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The danger is the move from the NHS being \u2018powered by love\u2019 to \u2018there are more important things than living\u2019, from Black Lives Matter<\/em> to \u2018I need a haircut\u2019, from declarations of human rights to the extermination of human \u2018rats\u2019.<\/p>\n

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We need to defend rights that have no ground to them, other than recognised common humanity, \u2018the human covenant\u2019 (Sheppard, Warrant<\/em> 41).<\/p>\n

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Boosterism is the poetry of Brexit. Political ideas, to work as poetry, have to be registered corporeally, on the human frame, with its anguished and ecstatic voice, as in the writing of Sean Bonney.<\/p>\n

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A young woman holds up a homemade banner: \u2018I\u2019m really not happy about this.\u2019 Homemade form<\/em>: homemade refusal. <\/em>Like a poem?<\/p>\n

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\u20182020,\u2019 Steve Hanson states, \u2018whether we like it or not, is the start of an acutely painful transformation of the world\u2026\u2019, poised against a Randean \u2018libertarian Conservative clique\u2019, aided by \u2018capitalist realism\u2019, now we witness \u2018a planned economy of crisis\u2019 (np), \u2018notional socialism\u2019 as I call it (Sheppard, British Standards<\/em> np).<\/p>\n

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Hanson quotes Will Davies as counterclaim: \u2018Utopia is \u2026 something that emerges among all of us as a need in the face of some lack\u2019 (np). Lagapa quotes Levitas: \u2018Concrete utopia \u2026 is anticipatory rather than compensatory. It reaches forward to a real future, and involves not merely wishful but wilful thinking\u2019 (119). The utopian emergence is both <\/em>communal and real, to conjoin these two definitions. That doesn\u2019t diminish the carefully distanciated formulations of a poem\u2019s utopianism, the biggest ideas in the smallest letters.<\/p>\n

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There are questions that have no answers but there may always be responses.<\/p>\n

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You might think that you couldn\u2019t build something that you can\u2019t imagine or present, but isn\u2019t that what writing a poem often feels like? A genuine literary work cannot be imagined by a reader before it comes into being, as Derek Attridge attests in The Singularity of Literature. <\/em>(Of course, it has been anticipated by the writer\u2019s poetics, though as thumbnail not blueprint.) This is another link between (a specialised version of) phenomenological intentionality and the utopian impulse.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not that the explorative motion of writing \u2013 the feeling that all writing is improvised \u2013 is itself directly utopian. It is that this mode of making shares its anticipatory vectors with the \u2018anticipatory consciousness\u2019 of utopian aspiration. The pulse with the impulse.<\/p>\n

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It is almost (like) a representation of a non-representation, an image of a non-image, but it is to be savoured.<\/p>\n

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\u2018The utopian moment\u2019, Norman Finklestein is quoted, from his book The Utopian Moment<\/em>, \u2018stands revealed [in] that very moment when the text most strenuously resists thematic or interpretative closure\u2019 (qtd. in Ragapa: 125). And formal <\/em>closure, I\u2019d say (as the author of The Meaning of Form<\/em>). And liberation of the said<\/em> in the saying<\/em>, I\u2019d add(as the author of The Poetry of Saying<\/em>). \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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I hang out inside these <\/em>sonnets, punching
echoes into new shape, because I take
poetry as the investigation
of complexity through the means<\/em> of form,<\/p>\n

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I sing (as the poet of Bad Idea<\/em>) (13).<\/em><\/p>\n

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Specific techniques and methods from my Muses, my \u2018nine loose-leaf proofs\u2019,<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 contingency; precarity; heterogeneity;<\/em>
intersubjectivity; outer-objectivity; transposition;<\/em>
dissensus; interruption;<\/em> and multiform unfinish\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

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for the three books of \u2018transpositions\u2019 of sonnets from the British standard tradition, my English Strain <\/em>project (English Strain<\/em>, Bad Idea<\/em>, British Standard<\/em>). Activating a force field between <\/em>text and transposition (Bad Idea<\/em> 26).<\/p>\n

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\u2018Transposition\u2019 (in preference to \u2018translation\u2019, even to \u2018intralingual translation\u2019 in Jakobson\u2019s witty term) is borrowed from Rosi Braidotti. In her musicological derivation, it\u2019s an \u2018in-between space of zigzagging and of crossing: nonlinear and chaotic\u2019 (226). \u2018Transposable moves,\u2019 in genetics, she explains, \u2018appear to proceed by leaps and bounds and are ruled by chance, but they are not deprived of their logic\u2019 (226).<\/p>\n

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These poems are \u2018new shapes\u2019 until they become old shapes. Then I shall anticipate other forms.<\/p>\n

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Form. Re-form, not reform. De-form, un-form, in-form, out-form. Etc. All the forms of forming. All forms of forming. Not just Form, not ever form, but forms.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Not just forms, but all the forming and re-forming the social can form.<\/p>\n

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A listening happens after saying. I cannot say what comes next and<\/em> I\u2019m saying it now.<\/p>\n

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Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. <\/em>Translation by Simon Watson-Taylor. Picador Classics, 1987.<\/p>\n

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Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. <\/em>Routledge, 2004.<\/p>\n

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Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Theory. <\/em>Columbia University Press, 2011. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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Hanson, Steve, review of Davies, W. Economic Science Fiction, <\/em>in Manchester Review of Books, <\/em>3 (2020).<\/p>\n

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Harwood, Lee. Boston-Brighton. <\/em>Oasis Books, 1977.<\/p>\n

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Harwood, Lee. Collected Poems<\/em>. Shearsman Books, 2004.<\/p>\n

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Lagapa, Jason. Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry.<\/em>\u00a0Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.<\/p>\n

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Oppen, George. Primitive.<\/em>\u00a0Black Sparrow Press, 1979.<\/p>\n

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Lee Ann Roripaugh, in ed. Hix, H.L. Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back. <\/em>Dalkey Archive, 2020.<\/p>\n

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Shelley, P.B. Shelley\u2019s Poetry and Prose. <\/em>Ed. by Donald H Reiman and Sharon B. Powers. W.W. Norton and Company, 1977.<\/p>\n

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Sheppard, Robert. Warrant Error. <\/em>Shearsman, 2007.<\/p>\n

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Sheppard, Robert. The English Strain. <\/em>Shearsman, 2021.<\/p>\n

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Sheppard, Robert. Bad Idea. <\/em>Knives Forks and Spoons, 2021.<\/p>\n

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Sheppard, Robert. Pulse: It\u2019s All a Rhythm <\/em>(unpublished)<\/p>\n

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Sheppard, Robert. British Standards <\/em>(work in progress)<\/p>\n

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Robert Sheppard<\/strong>\u2019s most recent books are The English Strain <\/em>(Shearsman, 2021) and Bad Idea <\/em>(Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2021), the first two parts of his \u2018English Strain\u2019 sonnet project, which will end with \u2018British Standards\u2019 in progress. It both pays homage to the English sonnet tradition and explores the Brexit-Coronavirus bunglings in high places. The Robert Sheppard Companion<\/em>, a series of essays on his work, is available from Shearsman, as is History or Sleep<\/em>, his selected poems. As a critic, he has written The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry<\/em>, as well as numerous essays and articles on the speculative discourse of poetics. He is emeritus professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University, and lives in Liverpool.<\/p>\n

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<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Sheppard<\/p>\n

ReadShifting an Imaginary: Poetics in Anticipation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":861,"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238\/revisions\/861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}