Tuesday, November 07, 2017

Minilaunch of Twitters for a Lark/Earl of Surrey poems at EDGE POETICS November 4th November 2017 (set list)

There was a mini-launch of Twitters for a Lark as part of the Edge Poetics symposium, details here: https://www.beds.ac.uk/edgepoetics

4th November 2017

10.00-17.30, with a public reading at 18.00 (that's where we'll launch)

Venue: University of Bedfordshire, Luton Campus

I read with Nicholas Royle,  Helen Marshall and Tim Jarvis.

I read the section 'The Unfortunate Fellow Traveller' from 'Surrey with the Fringe on Top', my irreverent takes on the Earl of Surrey's Petrarch poems, his 'Europoems' as the poems themselves call it. See here for more (or less) on the sequence.

Then I launched Twitters for a Lark by asking Simon Perrill to read our collaborative poem, the works of the Latvian poet Janis Raups. Then I finished off with the works of Lucia Cianglini.

Tim, Helen and Tim read marvellously unnerving short stories!

Twitters for a Lark: The Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors
is published by Shearsman Books at £9.99 and in available here:

Working in collaboration with a team of real writers, Robert Sheppard has created a lively and entertaining anthology of fictional European poets.

This collection marks a continuation of the work Sheppard ventriloquised through his creation, the fictional bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch, in A Translated Man (also available from Shearsman here: http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/product/4328-robert-sheppard-a-translated-man ). Nicholas Royle is credited with having stoked upo the necessary Belgiophilia to invent him (see Nick's novel Antwerp.)

Although devised before the neologism ‘Brexit’ was spat across the bitter political divide, this sample of 28 poets of the EUOIA (European Union of Imaginary Authors) takes on new meanings in our contemporary world that is far from fictive, ‘fake news’ or not.

Read more about the European Union (of Imaginary Authors) here and here. and here: