Robert Sheppard is British poet and critic. He is at the forefront of the movement sometimes called "linguistically innovative poetry." [1]
Robert Sheppard was born in 1955 and was educated at the University of East Anglia (BA; MA; PhD). In 1996 he moved from London to Liverpool to teach at Edge Hill University as Professor of Poetry and Poetics and Programme Leader of the MA in Creative Writing. [2] In 1996, Sheppard became Emeritus Professor at Edge Hill. [3]
Sheppard's magnum opus is his long-running work "Twentieth Century Blues". This was composed over many years, and published piece-meal before Salt Publishing brought out the complete work in 2008. "Hymns to the God in which My Typewriter Believes", published in 2006, illustrates Sheppard's view of poetry as one art among many, as it alludes to and builds on other artforms. Sheppard's sonnet sequence, "Warrant Error" was published by Shearsman Books in 2009. According to Sean Colletti, Sheppard is a major talent, whose use of form includes precise use of the couplet, [4] while Alan Baker calls his work "political poetry of the first order." [5]
Sheppard has edited important studies of poets Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood, and is editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry" and the blogzine "Pages".
Poetry:
Shorter Poetry Collections and Pamphlets:
As Editor:
Criticism:
The British Poetry Revival is the general name now given to a loose movement in the United Kingdom that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. The term was a neologism first used in 1964, postulating a New British Poetry to match the anthology The New American Poetry (1960) edited by Donald Allen.
Bob Cobbing was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet who was a central figure in the British Poetry Revival.
Lee Harwood was an English poet associated with the British Poetry Revival.
Lawrence Upton, was a poet, graphic artist and sound artist, and director of Writers Forum.
Harry Guest was a British poet born in Wales.
Geraldine Monk is a British poet. She was born in Blackburn, Lancashire. Since the late 1970s, she has published many collections of poetry and has recorded her poetry in collaboration with musicians. Monk's poetry has been published in many anthologies, most recently appearing in the Anthology of 20th Century British and Irish Poetry.
Sheila E. Murphy is an American text and visual poet who has been writing and publishing since 1978. She is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. Green Integer Press. 2003. Murphy was awarded the Hay(na)ku Poetry Book Prize from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland) in 2017 for her book Reporting Live from You Know Where. 2018. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Ken Edwards is a poet, editor, writer and musician who has lived in England since 1968. He is associated with The British Poetry Revival.
Richard Berengarten is an English poet. Having lived in Italy, Greece, the US and the former Yugoslavia, his perspectives as a poet combine English, French, Mediterranean, Jewish, Slavic, American and Oriental influences. His poems explore historical and political material, inner worlds and their archetypal resonances, and relationships and everyday life. His work is marked by its multicultural frames of reference, depth of themes, and variety of forms. In the 1970s, he founded and ran the international Cambridge Poetry Festival. He has been an important presence in contemporary poetry for the past 40 years, and his work has been translated into more than 90 languages.
Cris Cheek is a British-American multimodal poet and scholar. He began his career in the mid 1970s working alongside Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop in London and with the Writers Forum group, who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court. During that time he co-founded a poetry performance group known as jgjgjgjgjgjgjg. . .(as long as you can say it that's our name) with Lawrence Upton and Clive Fencott. Subsequently, cris collaborated on electronic music improvisations with Upton and ee Vonna-Michel as "bang crash wallop" and released several cassettes through Balsam Flex. In 1981, he was a co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space.
Adrian Clarke is a contemporary British poet. His collections include Skeleton Sonnets, Former Haunts, Possession: Poems 1996-2006, and Eurochants.
John Muckle is a British writer who has published fiction, poetry and literary criticism.
Catherine Walsh is an Irish poet.
Peter Dent is an English editor, poet, and former school teacher whose poetry has moved from spare notations to linguistic experiments.
Alan Baker is a British poet. He has been the editor of the poetry publisher Leafe Press since 2000, and the online magazine Litter since 2005.
Writers Forum is a small publisher, workshop and writers' network established by Bob Cobbing. The roots of Writers Forum were in the 1954 arts organisation Group H, and the And magazine that Cobbing edited. The writers' branch of Group H was called Writers Forum. In 1963 a press with the publishing imprint "Writers Forum" was begun and administered by Cobbing, John Rowan and Jeff Nuttall. Between 1963 and 2002 Writers' Forum published more than one thousand pamphlets and books including works by John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and P. J. O'Rourke, as well as a wide range of British Poetry Revival modernist poets, such as Eric Mottram, Bill Griffiths, Geraldine Monk, Maggie O'Sullivan, Paula Claire and Sean Bonney. While publishing was integral to the Cobbing-led workshop, it also provided an opportunity for poets to read their works in a supportive and non-critical environment.
Wayne Clements is a contemporary British artist and poet. His books include, Weather Poems, From, A Country Diary, Kenya , Lives of the Saints (Red Ceilings, 2016), Variant Lines and Other Poems (Red Ceilings, 2013), Archeus, Western Philosophy, Clerical Work, History of the Russian Revolution, Vertical Stepping and Depressions Strokes. He holds a PhD in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design. He has exhibited his new media artworks internationally. In 2006 he won the Award of Distinction for Net Vision at Ars Electronica for un_wiki.
Knives, Forks and Spoons Press is an independent publishing house based in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside, United Kingdom. It was established by Alec Newman in April 2010.
Rhys Trimble is a bilingual poet, teacher, visual poet, visual artist, musician and improvisational performance artist based in Wales. Trimble was born in Livingstone, Zambia in 1977, and was raised in Pontypool and latterly the head of the Neath Valley - Pontneddfechan. Trimble completed his first degree in biochemistry in the University of Sussex in 1999. Trimble is considered an important part of Welsh avant garde. He completed a BA in literature and creative writing from Bangor University in 2010, and published his first book of poetry, Keinc, the same year. He lives in Bethesda, graduated with a BA in Literature and Creative Writing and has recently published his second novel Drone. Previous books include Keinc, Skine, The Red Book of Hergest Ward and kør (2023). He received a PhD from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle. His doctoral thesis was titled "Tywysogion". He has authored more than 20 books of poetry in Wales, England, India and the US since 2010, including Swansea Automatic, Anatomy Mnemonics for Caged Waves (US) and Hexerisk. He is the vocalist with the Punk/Improv/Noise group Lolfa Binc. And Anxiolytics. Trimble has contributed works to public art in Denbigh, Conwy Valley and Blackpool, Trimble was Nominated for the TS Eliot prize 2016.
Paula Claire is a British Poet-Artist, whose work spans the areas of sound, visual, concrete and performance poetry. She was associated with the British Poetry Revival Movement in the 1970s and a member of Konkrete Canticle, a poetry collective founded by Bob Cobbing, which performed works for multiple voices and instruments. She has performed and exhibited her poetry internationally since 1969, creating site-specific performance pieces and using the voice contributions of her audience. She is founder and curator of the Paula Claire Archive: fromWORDtoART - International Poet-Artists, a collected body of work by fellow poet-artists.