*robert on the right, post camarade with jeff hilson*

Curating collaborative events is a fundamental part of my work, as many people know me for this, and in October 2020 it’l be ten years since I put on the first Camarade style event. One of the incidental aims of the project, which I’ve written about a lot (it’s obliquity towards creating friendships and communities which means it does so almost always, it’s trojan horsing of experimentation because of the breakdown of the ‘singular’ poet voice in performance etc.) is to connect generations of poets. Because I found poetry in my mid twenties from nothing, I took from my previous profession that it was innate to seek out those who had been doing what you were aiming to do for many decades and ask them how they did it, why they did it, was it worth doing. This is why I sought connections and dialogues with poets like Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth, Maggie O’Sullivan and many others very early on. I invited them, I corresponded with them. One of the most universally appreciated of these poets who had done the poetry for far longer than I was Robert Sheppard. Robert’s work stretches beyond his lifetime writing, and his unusually wide ranging and insightful use of poetics, into the many poets he’s influenced and taught. Me being one of them. He has recently been writing on collaboration and generously included a post about the enemies project https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/02/thoughts-on-collaboration-5-literary.html

It is in fact worth reading all of his threads on collaboration, and his blog in general https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html