Robert Sheppard
THE LORES

The Lores forms “the knotted core”of Robert Sheppard’s long network of texts, Twentieth Century Blues.

Active as an editor and academic, Sheppard is widely anthologised, including in the recent Oxford Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry, in which he is described as “at the forefront of (the) movement sometimes called linguistically innovative poetry”. He is Senior Lecturer in Writing and English at Edge Hill College of Higher Education.

Edmund Hardy’s review of The Lores may be read at Terrible Work.

from Indoor Welfare Pastoral by Scott Thurston:

The Lores … constitutes a major section of Sheppard’s remarkable Twentieth Century Blues project. Like Empty Diaries, it is partly based on mathematical modes of construction, in this case, as Sheppard explains, the number of words in the book – 5040 – derives from Plato’s ideal number of citizens for his second Republic. As Sheppard explains, the fact that this number is divisible by most numbers makes it useful for ‘raising the taxes and militia, and – doubtless – for surveillance’. The tension between Plato’s laws and Sheppard’s lores, suggests the argument underlying the text – that absolute models of power must be resisted and replaced by plurality, even locality in the form of ‘bye-lores’. The poetics of this plurality are documented in Sheppard’s text ‘Linking the Unlinkable’, collected in his Far Language (Stride, 1999). A response to the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard in ‘Discussions, or phrasing “after Auschwitz”’ and Jacques Derrida’s reply to this lecture, Sheppard sketches a poetics of the ‘creative linkage’ of phrases (as opposed to the ‘authority of the sentence’), as a model of ethical writing which argues with Adorno’s notion that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. As Derrida writes: ‘If there is somewhere a One must it must link up with a one must make links with Auschwitz’. Creative linkage is a means by which disparate materials may be yoked together in a politicised poetical discourse. This is not the same as juxtaposition – the links must appear both more and less disruptive, so that they persuade by their connection….

(first published in Tears in the Fence, Number 37, Spring 2004, pp. 117-9.)

2003 1-874400-23-7, price £7.50, 88pp

See PAGES blogzine online at www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com

Read a profile of Robert Sheppard at www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/poets/Sheppard.htm