When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry

This study presents an episodic history of an epic period in British poetry, when bad times forced political subversion and textual impaction upon its central figures and provisional institutions. In the episodes which cover the Poetry Wars of the 1970s; the centrality of Bob Cobbing as poetry activist and the SubVoicive poetry scene in 1980s London; and the cultural poetics of Iain Sinclair in the 1990s and since; the focus is upon poetic community rather than individuals.

Born in 1955, Robert Sheppard was educated at the University of East Anglia. Apart from the publications listed below he was editor of three magazines, 1983, which, despite its name, existed in the 1970s as a cassette tape magazine of recorded poetry; Rock Drill; and Pages, the latter of which still exits as a blogzine here. He has read his work at dozens of venues and has worked in collaborative performance with dancers and musicians. He was an active part of the alternative poetry scene in London during the 1980s and 1990s, before moving to Liverpool, to take up a post teaching English and Creative Writing at Edge Hill University, where he is currently Professor of Poetry and Poetics. Between 1989 and 2000 he wrote a long work (or 'net/(k)not/- work(s)' as he called it) entitled Twentieth Century Blues, which was published in a 'complete' edition in 2008. (Its poetics is described in 'Poetic Sequencing and the New' available at Jacket.) Hymns to the God in which My Typewriter Believes, published in 2006, features 'texts and commentaries', works which specifically feed off other works of art. He has also published a critical study, The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents (2005), a monograph, Iain Sinclair (2007), and an edited volume, The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood (2007). He is also the author of two collections of poetry from Shearsman Books: Warrant Error (2009) and Berlin Bursts (2011).