Complete Twentieth Century Blues: (Salt Modern Poets)

Complete Twentieth Century Blues is the definitive edition of a long network of interrelated texts that the author wrote and assembled as a time-based project between 1989 and the end of the last century. Many of the texts have appeared before, in both pamphlets and in critically acclaimed full-length volumes, but this edition has been revised throughout. It also includes a previously unpublished book-length text on the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, as well as a number of shorter pieces. All now appear in their intended order, and with their connections to other poems made apparent via an index. At the centre of the book is the sequence The Lores, written according to a strict word count and introducing the politics and poetics of ‘creative linkage’ demonstrated throughout. It focuses upon fascism and resistances to it. Running through the volume are the ‘Empty Diaires’ which offer an alternative history of the twentieth century, told through a series of female narrators. Woven between these are poems on blues music, the first Gulf War, Stalin’s poems, failed utopias, the Earl of Rochester, a sci-fi elegy for the human, a translation from Horace, the ideology of Thatcherism, atheist hymns, a hilarious romp with a very rude Robinson Crusoe, homages to various other artists, and an elegy to Frank Sinatra. The hilarious Wayne Pratt spoofs find their final resting place here too. The prose-poem essay, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’, brings the project to rest with a celebration of the complexity of our powers of human connection.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introductory Note Preface: Melting Borders 1: Smokestack Lightning 2: Sharp Talk and Amended Signatures 3: Codes and Diodes are both Odes 5: Killing Boxes 6: The Flashlight Sonata 1 Histories of Sensation Mesopotamia Schräge Musik The Materialisation of Soap 1947 2 Utopian Tales 3 Internal Exile 4 Letter from the Blackstock Road 5 Coda 8: Slipping the Mind 9: Weightless Witnesses 10: Soleà for Lorca 11: Improvisation Upon a Remark of Gil Evans, for Miles Davis 12:Seven 15: Fucking Time: six songs for the Earl of Rochester 16: Logos on Kimonos 18: Poetic Sequencing and the New Untitled [net/(k)not-work(s)]) 20: The Overseas Blues (an Allusion to Horace) 21: Shutters 24: Empty Diaries 1901-1990 23: Empty Diaries 1901-1912 7: Empty Diaries 1913-1945 17: Empty Diaries 1946-1966 22: Empty Diaries 1967-1990 19: Empty Diary 1990 25: Flesh Mates on Dirty Errands 26: Living Daylights (Traversed by Swift Nudes) 27: Magdalene in the Wilderness 28: The Book of British Soil The Lores 30: The Lores and Jungle Nights in Pimlico 31: History or Sleep 33: “The Crimson Word We Sang” 32: For Scott Thurston 34: Entries 35: Ripping through Business 37: Neutral Drums 36: Small Voice 38: Report on Seaport 39: Small Voice 2 40: Variation and Themes 41: Private Numbers from the Drowning Years 1985-1989 Dialogues 42: The Collected Works of Josef Stalin 43: Ten 44: Beginning with a line from a Chinese poem in an English dream 45: Sonoluminescence for All 46: Armchair Adoption 47: In Good Voice 48: Dialogue between Created Pleasure and the Resolvèd Soul 49: Tin Pan Arcadia 50: Towards a Neo-Diagonalist Manifesto 51: In the Room of a Thousand Mute Salutes 52: Re:Entries 53: Freeze It 54: A Hundred and Eight Robinson Crusoes 55: Downing the Ante 56: Abjective Babble Expectorates Laugh of the Human 57: Angel at the Junk Box 58: Retitles: Three Overlaps for Jack B Yeats 1 Ocean Green-another homage to Jack B. Yeats 2 Bruised Ground 3 And Where Shall We Be Then? 59: A Dirty Poem and a Clean Poem for Roy Fisher 60: A Dark Study for Lee Harwood 61: For the Continuity Terminator Wayne Pratt: Watering the Cactus 62: Watering the Cactus 29: Strange Meetings with Justin Sidebottom 67: On the Death of Wayne Pratt by Justin Sidebottom 63: The End of the Twentieth Century: A Text for Readers and Writers 64: 31 Basalt Wind-Chimes for the Window-Box of Earthly Pleasures 65: From the English 66: The Sacred Tanks of Dagenham 68:Say 69: In an Unknown Tongue 73: Catacaustic for Tom Raworth 75: The Push Up Combat Bikini Notes and Resources 74: Links in Ink: Index to Twentieth Century Blues Index

About the Author :
Robert Sheppard was born in 1955 and educated at the University of East Anglia. Between 1989 and 2000 he worked on the network of texts called Twentieth Century Blues. Previous excerpts from the project include Empty Diaries (1998) and The Lores (2003). A recent volume is Hymns to the God in which my Typewriter Believes (2006), and a sonnet sequence, Warrant Error, is due for publication by Shearsman in 2009. His work is anthologised in Other and the Oxford Anthology of British and Irish Poetry, in which he is described as 'at the forefront of (the) movement sometimes called linguistically innovative poetry'. He is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University in Lancashire in the UK, and has also published criticism and poetics, including The Poetry of Saying (2005) and Iain Sinclair (2007). He edits Pages as a blogzine and lives in Liverpool.