Simon Jarvis as W.H. Auden

A young English poet, fostered by an ancient and glorious university, starts writing startling, experimental verses, which find their first audience among a talented, radicalized coterie of other young writers.  He’s got amazing chops, especially when it comes to his metrics.  He travels.  He writes.  He is appreciated, especially in the left-leaning quarters of the literary world.  He moves to America, grows increasingly religious and perhaps less radical.  He turns toward more traditional forms, shows a great aptness for rhyme, and embraces the Anglican Church.

The poet is, of course, W.H. Auden.  Unless you add “…but moves back” after “He moves to America.”  In that case, we’re no longer talking about Auden, we’re talking about Simon Jarvis.

I don’t know whether I should be surprised that the two careers bear such similarity, but they do.  Auden’s career is generally seen as splitting into two phases, with 1939 being the crux—and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that 2014 is Jarvis’ 1939.  Consider the words of William Wooten from the February 28^th issue of the TLS:

When a devotee of the astringent ‘difficulty’ of J.H. Prynne and de facto member of the Cambridge School publishes a 7,000 line Anglican poem in formal rhyming verse, it is safe to conclude he has had something of a change of heart.  Not total, perhaps.  Simon Jarvis’ Night Office, the poem in question, echoes and alludes to Prynne and foregrounds the sort of Adorno-inspired theorizing Jarvis and others have used to justify Prynnian poetics.  Even the way Jarvis writes as if no one had produced a rhyming couplet since 1908 may be more a result of subscription to modernist orthodoxy than evidence of its renunciation.  Still, there is no pretending Night Office is your standard Cambridge fare.

There are grounds to be less sanguine when it comes to generalities about “standard Cambridge fare” than is Wooten, but one takes his point.  There’s a departure here, even as there is continuity, and the departure leads Jarvis down the Auden highway, toward long, formal verse and the consolations of the Anglican Communion.

Auden claimed that he left England because he feared that, had he stayed, he’d have become a part of the Establishment.  It’s a likely enough counterfactual: one could easily imagine the aging Wystan, or perhaps the aging Sir Wystan, hobnobbing with the English elite in town and country, rather than crouching in his filthy New York apartment, taking Benzedrine to keep up with his book reviewing assignments.  Auden’s fear of ending up an English establishment figure does make one wonder about Jarvis’ fate.  As the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge University, Jarvis is well positioned, should he wish it, to slide into the kind of fate Auden dreaded.  Perhaps that's why, in a letter appearing in a later issue of the TLS, Jarvis emphasized his (very real, very much ongoing) connection to radical Cambridge poetry figures like Keston Sutherland.  If Jarvis is the Auden of the group, Sutherland is the P.B. Shelley.  But that's another topic.

Cambridge Report

It's been a few days since I've been back from Cambridge, where I was speaking at a conference on the late, great Swedish poet-critic, Göran Printz-Påhlson, but it's been too much of a holiday weekend to blog. Since I've been back it's been nothing but sweating down the bike trails with Team Slow Ride, lounging in the hammock, trekking to the zoo with my wife and daughter, trying to get the beach sand out of my hair, and hanging with friends at the BYOB Mexican joint while they regaled me with tales of their trip to Thailand. And there were fireworks. But I'm back at the computer now, people, and there's no avoiding my comments on the Cambridge caper. Here, in mostly chronological order, are the Observations of the Intrepid Traveller.

Heathrow. It's not just jet-lag that makes Heathrow seem so strange. It's the category-defying nature of the place. I mean, first-world airports tend to be of two kinds: the sleek, modern, clean sort (think Chicago-O'Hare, or Amsterdam Schipol, or whatver they've built in China this week), or the overtly beaten-down and desperately crappy (think LaGuardia, or Rome's Fiumicino). But Heathrow sort of fakes you out. If you arrive at Terminal One, it seems sleek and modern enough at first, but as you make the long schlep toward the exit, it slips into a Frayed 1970s mode. Then, as you continue on and downwards toward the tube hook-up, you go through a short passage of Swinging Sixties Gone to Seed, before emerging into a long tunnel that sould be labeled The Museum of Decayed Linoleum, certainly dating from about 1950. Luckily, this is as far as I ever have to go, though I'm pretty sure that a hundred yards on I'd have found the original airport of Roman Britain.

The Frickin' Shire or Something. That's about all I have to say about the English countryside between London and Cambridge. Later, when I was having dinner with Andrea Brady, she called it "overtly benevolent," which seems about right. But something in her tone made me think she shared my view that it's all so pretty that it should be treated with suspicion. I mean, don't you sort of think the kindly old woman bringing you cider or scones will be screaming for your blood at night once the crowd has come to burn you in a giant wicker man in some holdover druidic ceremony? Maybe that's just me.

Cambridge. I lived in Lund, Sweden, which is also a medieval university town built around a big public square, so my first thought about Cambridge was "Lund, if Lund were populated exclusively by German tourists and guys who look like Stephen Spender in white linen suits riding bicycles." (As to the hazards of riding bicycles while wearing white linen, hold on. I touch on this more when I get to my meeting with a publisher). I did manage to get out of the academic zone, visiting poet Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns) in his house, which seems to be made up of several old row houses knocked together and filled to bursting with books. He proved beyond doubt that you can find very good Turkish food for a party of twelve in Cambridge on a moment's notice. He also proved how much one could accomplish before email, when he showed me the program for the first Cambridge Poetry Festival, an invention of his back in the seventies. There must have been eighty poets from all over. As a guy who's organized a few literary festivals, I can tell you there's an amazing amount of what may dad calls "ass-grind and agony" involved in putting something like that together.

The Conference: Afternoon. This was an interesting event, not just for what was said (and any event where the Sorbonne's very own Jesper Svenbro is speaking will be interesting for what is said), but for the nature of the event. As the Berengarten pointed out as he began his remarks, this wasn't just an academic event, though it was surely that. It was also a poet's event; and what's more, it was an event for family and friends of Printz-Påhlson, who'd turned up in force. The world needs more events like this: it adds a little gemeinschaft to the generally gesselschaft world of conferences.

The Conference: Evening Poetry Readings. Dinner at Clare Hall, at a long table of conference participants presided over by John Matthias. It was good to see John Wilkinson, whom I finally met earlier this year when I was giving a poetry reading in South Bend (which he has recently abandoned for Chicago). He's a charming guy, and I like that he's unbothered about how we've sparred a little in print about J.H. Prynne and those influenced by him. It was good, too, to finally meet Andrea Brady, with whom I've also had some fisticuffs in the pages of obscure quarterly magazines. She tells me there's less going on, poetry-wise, in Cambridge than there was a few years ago, though Justin Katko is there and going strong. I told her my story about being snubbed by John Ashbery, and asked if she'd ever been snubbed by a famous poet. "As a younger woman," she said, "it doesn't really happen." She was rather glamorous in a summer dress, so I took her point. After dinner came a series of readings, with a sort of astonishing range of poets put together by Matthias (the rationale being that "these are poets who knew and admired Printz-Påhlson, or who I am convinced would have admired him"): Clive Wilmer from Oxford, Berengarten, Jesper Svenbro, Matthias himself, my old colleague from Lund Lars-Håkan Svensson, Andrea Brady and John Wilkinson. I'm sure there were others, but I'm having trouble remembering (the chardonnay wasn't very good, but the soave sure was). It's the first time I've heard Wilkinson read, and it was a bit of a surprise. All the instruments agree about Wilkinson being one of the pleasantest, mild-mannered guys you're likely to meet, but he reads with a powerful, macho kind of aggression (the subject matter of his pieces, which he described as "de Chirico nightmares" added to this). The effect was similar to what I experienced when I saw Keston Sutherland read in Chicago some years ago. It makes one wonder if this was the common style of the group of poets who clustered around Prynne a while back. If so, it sheds a new light on a some comments Andrea Brady made about how it could be a bit alienating being one of the only women on that scene. Speaking of Prynne, he was there, wearing what appeared to be a red star pin on his collar. I wonder — given his popularity in China, has he been made into some kind of Chinese version of the Chevalier de Légion d'Honneur? Or is it a matter of expressing approval of the Chinese regime (one hopes not). Or maybe it's something else entirely. I didn't ask, since I saw Romana Huk across the room and wanted to say hello.

Non-Conference Things.. Other than wandering around gawking at the punts on the Cam, and having an entirely pleasant beer with an old grad school friend now with Cambridge's department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, there's not much to report except…

A Very Cambridge Moment. John Matthias, the wonderful Elinor Shaffer of Cambridge and of Comparative Criticism (sister to Sir Peter Shaffer, whose Amadeus you've seen twice), and I were waiting to meet with the president of a certain Cambridge-based publishing firm (no names, but it's not Chris Hamilton-Emery), who was late. As we sat waiting, the publisher, a dashing man in white clothes came tearing into the room, with a black, hand-shaped stain on his shirt. "Terribly sorry," he said, seeing us, but I can't shake your hands. He held up his own fingers, utterly blackened with oil, "typical Cambridge excuse: broken bicycle chain." It's not quite how things go with New York publishers, whose oiliness is in their souls, not on their fingers.

And so it was back to Chicago, with no time to meet with Michael Gregory Stephens and Katy Evans-Bush in London, as I'd hoped to do. There was barely time to hit the Harrod's in Heathrow to pick up a Paddington Bear for my daughter.

Poetry and the Challenge to the Public Sphere

A few years ago I wrote an article that said (along with some things about Surrealism and Aestheticism) that the more extravagant claims for the political power of language poetry were a bit overblown. While I heard some nice things from the comparative literature crowd, the article was greeted, quite rightly, with a shrug of indifference from langpo quarters. It hadn’t, after all, said anything about language poetry that, say Geoff Ward or Charles Altieri hadn’t said earlier and better. I suppose I expected a similar indifference to “Public Faces in Private Places,” the article I wrote about the experimental poetry associated with Cambridge. Such expectations, though, weren’t met: I’ve heard some praise, and I’ve heard some passionate blame. But I’ve also found myself accused of saying things I didn’t say. One responder (who admitted he hadn’t read the essay) told me that what I really meant was that poets have to give up on poetry entirely if they wish to be serious about politics: “you implicitly criticize poets like those of the CS [Cambridge School]” he wrote, “for their refusal to accept that the minimal condition for realizing restructured social relations is the relinquishment of poetry.” I’ve also been told that my essay “shaded … into an exercise in bureaucratic control.” On a few occasions I’ve tried in my bungling, defensive way to point out that what I wrote was that there were a few specific claims about the political power of the poetry that I found unsupportable. One of the responses I’ve had, when I took that tack, was to be told that no one actually makes any grandiose claims.

For the most part, the claims I engage in the essay have to do with the purported power of a specific kind of experimental poetry to make an impact on the public sphere. The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature, for example, claims that this kind of poetry sets out to be “capable of challenging the public sphere.” And David Shepard has said that such poems “recombine a language fragmented into technical jargons,” incorporating the vocabulary of specialized discourses into the poetry and thereby “return[ing] this knowledge to the public sphere from its sequestration in the ivory tower.” N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge (whose book on J.H. Prynne's poetry is generally quite admirable, even indispensable) claim that poetry this kind “collide[s] with the powerful instrumental discourses of the culture” with the effect of “smashing them into pieces.” They also claim that, in bringing together different kinds of language and placing them in contexts not normally their own, the work “break[s] out of the institutional space allotted to poetry and literature in late-capitalist culture.”

To assess these claims about how the poetry has challenged the public sphere, I suppose it would help to have some sense of what such a challenge looks like. To begin with, then, we need to remember that the public sphere is a set of conditions for communication. It is unlike the private sphere, which is the realm of the home, or any other area where the individual enjoys a high degree of autonomy, removed from institutional authority or the pressure to conform to standards set by others (a publication here might be a post-it note you put on the fridge to remind your spouse to buy more bananas). It is also unlike the sphere of public authority, which is the realm of state power and regulations (a publication here might be an internal memo of the Internal Revenue Service). In contradistinction to these places, the public sphere is the place where we meet not as members of a family, or functionaries/beneficiaries/victims of a state, but as (in Jurgen Habermas’ phrase), “private people come together as a public.” What does this mean? It means that the public sphere is where we communicate not in any special capacity as members of a household or as officials with authority, but without respect to status (the idea of the coffeehouse is a classical one in illustrating the public sphere: we come there to talk to each other, and meet on a kind of neutral ground, where the fact that you are a Deputy Minister of Finance or Chief of Police or Associate Professor of New Media Studies doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t confer on you any special status to overrule the next guy simply by virtue of your title) (the idea of a journal open to letters from readers is another classic example). The notion at work here is that, again in Habermas’ words, “the issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate.”

One common criticism of the public sphere in some of its manifestations — and often a valid one — is that it doesn’t live up to the ideal. Many people aren’t able to communicate in the allegedly public media such as newspapers, journals of opinion, radio, television, what have you (the internet’s impact of the public sphere is still being sorted out. I know a guy who’s job it is to be on top of this, and he’s perpetually frazzled by the enormity of the task). Certain opinions are shut out, and at times whole classes of people are silenced. Sometimes specialized knowledge becomes inaccessible, and this too can be a problem for the public sphere. And authority of various sorts (“I’m an expert, and you’re not”) can distort the ideal of equal participation, as can the power of money to trumpet some views over others. There are, in short, plenty of reasons to challenge the way the public sphere is organized in any particular place and time.

So challenges to the public sphere are important. But what do they look like? Well, they have to threaten to change the existing network for the public expression of ideas, opinion, and information. The first example that comes to mind is one cited by the historian J.H. Plumb, when he wrote about the organization of radical political opinion in England during the period between the American Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. He begins by discussing Edmund Burke’s anti-revolutionary writings and the exclusion of radical writing from the established channels of communication, and goes on to describe the enormous effort that went into challenging the (at this point restrictive and reactionary) public sphere:

In some ways Burke himself was largely responsible for the growth of these radical clubs. Thomas Paine, an active and violent supporter of America Independence, had replied to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in his Rights of Man, in which he had proclaimed the necessity for universal sufferage and the sovereignty of the people. He denounced monarchy and aristocracy as useless archaisms. His book was immensely popular. It was welcomed by the Society of Constitutional Information, formed in 1780 by earlier radicals to further the cause of Parliamentary Reform; and in 1792 almost every town in England and Scotland had a club for Constitutional Information or its Society of Friends of the People. Most of their members were drawn from the working or lower middle classes, with a sprinkling of educated, professional men. The general aims of these societies seem to have been twofold: to spread Paine's ideas by reading his works, and to impress the government with the strength of public opinion favorable to France. At the same time they kept up an adulatory correspondence with the National Assembly in France and with various Jacobin clubs. This movement was given a clear organization by the formation of the London Corresponding Society, which, under the energetic leadership of Thomas Hardy [no, not that Thomas Hardy — (Archambeau)], a working man, acted as leader for the provincial societies. Two general Conventions were held at Edinburgh and at the second, in 1793, the British Convention of Delegates of the People, a number of emergency resolutions were passed which provided for secret leadership and meetings in case the government took repressive action. A revolutionary organization was in the making and the government took steps to thwart it.

So that’s what it takes to challenge the public sphere — you make possible new channels of communication for a broad public; you make public, and not just to a handful of people, ideas and information not otherwise available; and most importantly you include otherwise silenced classes of people in public discussion. Many people’s life-works went into the effort described by Plumb, but it was a real challenge to the existing public sphere at the time. The proof that it was a real challenge, of course, is that it incurred real repression. We’re not talking about snide dismissiveness, we’re talking about state power, violence, prison, and the like. I mean, in one sense a challenge is easy to make. I can say “I challenge Mike Tyson to a fight” right here. But a real challenge is one that is heard as a challenge, and met as a challenge (and Mike Tyson’s not reading this blog. Even if he did, he wouldn’t experience my “challenge” as a challenge). A challenge to the public sphere is, to quote an American politician of no small repute, “a big fucking deal,” and it doesn’t come about that often.

As for the claim that the British experimental poetry associated with Cambridge has “challenged the public sphere” — well, I’m not convinced it has, not if what we mean by the public sphere is anything like what Habermas meant. Which is not to say anything more than that. To say this doesn’t imply that poets should give up on poetry as the minimum condition for being political (Tom Paine, the heroic challenger of the public sphere Plumb cites, wrote poetry — some people still read his poem “Liberty Tree”). Nor does pointing out the over-grand nature of these particular claims imply that poetry should submit to bureaucratic control (I'm not even sure what that would look like). Nor does it mean that there’s no politics to poetry. But it does mean that the effects of British experimental poetry on the public sphere have, in these particular instances, been overstated. The public sphere in Britain continues much as it would have otherwise, and I don’t think it is aware of any threat from the vicinity of, say, J.H. Prynne. (Note that Prynne hasn’t made any claim to such transforming power, just some of his more zealous advocates, as quoted above).

I should say that I do think that the way much of this poetry has been distributed and read has often occurred at an interesting angle to the public sphere. For decades, Prynne and those associated with him often published in the kind of micro-press world that’s familiar to many poets: self-publishing, free distribution to a small network of those who are interested, tiny journals, etc. This seems to me less like a challenge to the public sphere than a withdrawal from it into something that sits somewhere between the private sphere of family and friends and the public sphere. But an alternative — a good thing in itself — isn’t the same thing as a challenge. (It is also, I might add, exactly “the institutional space allotted to poetry and literature in late-capitalist culture,” not a breaking out of that space, as Kerridge and Reeve maintain).

Anyway, what struck me, and what gave my essay its title, was the strong public-spiritedness of the poetry, combined with the non-public-sphere methods of distribution it had for many years. It called to mind Auden’s phrase about “public faces in private places” being “wiser and nicer than private faces in public places.” I don’t think of this as hypocrisy, or in any way negative. I did, and do, think it is different from a returning of knowledge to the public sphere, or a challenge to the public sphere. If you think that's an obvious point, so do I.

*****

In unrelated news, Marcela Sulak (whose new book, Immigrant is out), recently arrived in Tel Aviv from Washington, D.C. and points west, and has started "Writing from Israel", her new blog on poetry and other things.

Cambridge Poetry and Political Ambition

Back in the summer of 2008 I spoke at the Sorbonne about the poetry associated with Cambridge and J.H. Prynne, and tried to understand what I took to be some of the more grandiose political claims made on behalf of the poetry (that it "smashes the discourses of power" and the like). The Cambridge Literary Review published a longer version of the Sorbonne talk in their inaugural issue, and that essay's just been published in the U.S. in Emily Taylor Merriman and Adrian Grafe's new book Intimate Exposure: Essays on the Public-Private Divide in British Poetry Since 1950.

The essay kicked up a bit of a stir when it appeared in England. At first I wasn't sure why, since I didn't think it attacked the poetry, just some of the less supportable, more Utopian claims for what poetry could accomplish. But as the scuffle went on and on, I got a better look than I'd had at the conditions that seem to have made so many of the poets associated with Cambridge a bit prone to defensiveness. They really do seem to face a climate of hostility in the larger poetic community, a hostility greater by orders of magnitude than that faced by their American counterparts in experimental poetry.

Since the good people at the Cambridge Literary Review have made the letters section for the second issue available online as a PDF file, I thought I'd take the liberty of posting Andrea Brady's response to what I wrote, and my own fumbling response to her. For the record, I think Andrea Brady makes some very level-headed and sound comments, and knows more about these things than I do. But I don't think I made an equation between "publication in the larger academic and commercial presses and the authenticity of a poetry’s claims to political efficacy." If I did make that equation, I was wrong: I don't think any poetry in England or America, at the moment, has a political impact of any major scale (for reasons larger than any particular poet's efforts — I try to analyze why this is the case in a big article called "The Discursive Situation of Poetry" that will be coming out in an as-yet-untitled book edited by Mary Biddinger next year) (I expect a bunch of people will be angry at that article, since one of its premises is that we can't just will ourselves to be agents of political efficacy, that larger objective conditions have to be right, and that those conditions determine both our consciousness and our field of impact) (but I digress).

Anyway: this isn't to say that poetry can't aim at politics, express political viewpoints, or have the kind of small-scale impact that many other kinds of actions (teaching a history class, writing an article on sociology, attending a rally, talking to your friends, ranting in your blog) can have. I mean, I don't think Andrew Motion changes the political climate appreciably more than does John Wilkinson. Of course poetry helps in its tiny way to change consciousness, just like many other things do. But British Petroleum does what it does with equal disregard for iambs and disjunctions. I think Andrea and I agree, more or less, about this.

The other thing I'd add at this point is a bit of a rejoinder — not so much to Andrea individually as to a bunch of us, including me, in the critico/academic/alt-poetry multiverse. Many of us have at one time or another turned to the idea of poetry, and the teaching of poetry, as acts of political resistance. The rejoinder to this notion of resistance-politics comes in a comment Alain Badieu once made about Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze, says Badieu, "nothing was interesting unless it was affirmative. Critique, ends, modesties... none of that is as valuable as a single affirmation."

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Dear Cambridge Literary Review,

I was gladdened to read Robert Archambeau’s essay in Cambridge Literary Review issue 1. It is an intelligent and serious engagement with the poetries erratically gathered under the name “Cambridge School,” and with their most significant and problematic contention: that they are committed poetries, with political aspirations beyond the simple plundering of domesticated interiority for its symbolic potential. It is also offers, in spite of itself, a kind of reassurance that there are indeed readers for this poetry, readers gathered far from Greenwich Meantime, on the shores of Lake Forest Illinois, into the nanosphere of the British micropresses.

I am certainly aware of the problems with that contention. The poetries are too, and deal with those problems in very different ways. I want to hold onto the distinctions among their strategies and qualities, to the point of questioning the validity of the term “Cambridge School.” But I also know that protesting about the designators is something of a cliché when it comes time to respond to synoptic pieces like Archambeau’s, and that in introducing a large, various and sometimes grotesquely self- aware body of works to new readers it is helpful to be able to assert some continuities or shared aspirations, just so we have a starting line. So I’m not going to go into the particularities of what I view as the most important differences between the poetries of Prynne, Sutherland, Wilkinson, Jarvis, Riley and myself—to say nothing about the countless others who we could associate with “the CS”; I’ll simply say that the term remains a pretty coniferous lump for me to swallow. Personally, I feel like I’m forever being tagged “Cambridge School,” even though I’ve lived in London for twice as long as I was a gownie, and my time in the UK still adds up to far less than half my life. When I did live in Cambridge I felt distinctly female and distinctly American. I’ve always said that I was influenced less by Prynne than by Frank O’Hara; my commitment to a politicized art predates any serious reading of Prynne, and even now I have profound misgivings about the political methods of Prynne’s late poetry. During my five years as a student and one as a worker in Cambridge, I was seriously afflicted by the gentility and ancientness and patriarchy of the place. I guess it was no accident that I ended up writing a chapter of my doctoral thesis on the way that seventeenth-century literary coteries preserved the authority of patriarchal poets through agonistic self-definition and fantasies of all-male reproduction. I didn’t see the resemblance at the time.

So now I find myself teaching early modern literature at Queen Mary University of London, and this week we were working on exactly one of those patriarchs, rare old Ben Jonson. We were thinking about the stigma of print, and how Jonson reviled coterie literary styles and sought to dignify professional authorship through the publication of his ridicu- lously monumental 1616 Works. We discussed his first epigram, ‘To the Reader’, with its behest “To read it well—that is, to understand.” We recognised that this plea for understanders, for readers who shared social, political, ethical and literary values, was an attempt to replicate in print the conditions of manuscript circulation—exclusivity, similitude, privilege—but that Jonson was trying to use his poetry’s moral and aesthetic authority to create his readers while still prospering from commercial circulation.

Sorry for the history lesson. I suppose you can see where I’m going with this. It suddenly seemed like a familiar predicament: the construction of print as a democratic and politically progressive medium, but one which many authors experienced as subject to internal and external censorship, stylistic constraints and the pressure to dumb-down; the struggle to maintain private values and still recruit a public audience; disdain for readers who had failed to prove their qualifications (as anyone who disagreed with or disliked the poetry did fail, by definition); the need to trade the exclusivity of manuscript for the public authority to be garnered from print. Many of these characteristics are attributed to “private” and “public” forms of circulation in Archambeau’s essay. While his terms are open to question—not least because the limited circulation for all poetry, distributed by micro- or macro-press, by internet or letterpress, is so incredibly small—the comparison with early modern publication systems might help open the discussion up a bit further.

Scholarship on that period understands manuscript to be a form of publication, with political and social influence and efficacy. Like even the most “prominent” (Archambeau’s term) of contemporary poetry books, early modern printed editions usually ran to less than a thousand copies; so it is inaccurate to claim that print quaprint was especially effective in inducing political change. But most importantly, the networks of readers established by what Archambeau might decry as circulation in “private comforting confinement” did more than challenge early modern politics: these networks completely transfigured European thought and society, and were the engineers of the Renaissance.

Obviously, there’s been a lot of water under the Bridge of Sighs since then. These coteries were for the most part privileged elites in stratified societies—much as we academics are now—but they were a lot closer to the seats of power than we are. I’m not saying that Prynne is our Erasmus. But I wanted to use this example as a way of outthinking the rather crude equation between publication in the “larger academic and commercial presses” and the authenticity of a poetry’s claims to political efficacy. Certainly I see a problem with any poetry’s (“messianic”) claim to change the world, to flatten instrumental reason with the hammer of détournement. But it was telling that Archambeau found that claim (also, to an “incidental political potency”) in critical essays by John Wilkinson – or, more importantly, in a controversy he was having with Peter Riley. It would be much harder to find it in any of the poems, which are more likely to be awash with self-criticism for their impotence than boasts about smashing the state. I’m perfectly aware that my poetry isn’t going to change the world because it is “far from a mass movement,” as I wrote somewhere: it’s not part of the class struggle, energized by direct action or likely to inspire it. I can carry on writing it if I think it will be available to future readers as a record of a peculiar dissidence. At times that in itself has seemed like a major accomplishment. At my most optimistic, I hope it encourages its readers—who, as readers seeking out this kind of work, aren’t likely to require encouragement—to think critically about politics, or perhaps to be inspired by such thinking to participate in collective efforts to overcome the tyrannies of capitalism. As a reader myself, I’ve been inspired by poetry to do what else I have done; and I would include, among my political acts, teaching, conversation, and collaboration. I think I share with other Cambridge types the belief that engaging with 300 or more students every week in debates about literature, politics, rights and forms and language, is a political and ethical activity. When I teach difficult late modernist poetry (including the most recent poetry written by my peers) alongside the tweedy canon, I hope I am not being a hopelessly narcissistic self-advertising git. I consider it my pedagogical duty to those students, to examine with them the full range of alternatives to the regal discourses of jargon and bathos and greed. They can take what they want. I say this not because Archambeau has thrown the typical stink-bomb at the politicized poets who are also ghosts in the universities’ ivory machine, but because lecturers, who spend their working hours immersed in critique and negativity, can be a very masochistic bunch when it comes to describing the politics of their work. I think it’s worth proclaiming publicly that that work is a kind of activism, which promotes creative, intelligent, belligerent… well, yes, resistance.

That’s Prynne’s word for it, of course. I hope that as the large and various body of work which has had some connection to Cambridge in recent years is read and matures, Prynne will become less important as a totemic figure, the TLS anti-celebrity, and more important simply as a poet. In my view the existence of a Cambridge School should not be predicated on Prynne’s example: not on the example of his poetry, or of his attitudes to its circulation and promotion. If the Cambridge School
did exist, then it existed between the years of the publications of the English Intelligencer and A Various Art. But these days there’s a great deal of obscurity around, in Manchester, London, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Totnes; is all this poetry not “Cambridge School” unless it is branded with the mark of Prynne? If Barque is the modern home of the CS, then
that field stretches also to Paris, Berlin, China, New York and Winnetka. If it’s all about geography, would we say that Dell Olsen is now Cambridge School, because she lives in the episcopacy? Do the most recent Yankee immigrants Justin Katko and Ryan Dobran know what they’re in for?

Neither is it correct to claim based on Prynne’s example that others of that ‘school’ are perversely or morally inclined to refuse invitations. So Prynne demurred when Poetry Review came calling? Keston and I didn’t. We’ve been on the radio. Keston was the poet-in-residence for the bloody Newbury Spring Arts Festival!—as you can see on a flier headlined “Mickey Salberg’s Crystal Ballroom Dance Band to play at the Lambourn Centre.” We’re not refusing a mass audience or a university press on principle, we’re just waiting to be asked. The new generation is full of fame whores. But Archambeau’s article among others shows that there is some kind of notoriety slowly building up out there; the nasty sniping which Jeremy Noel-Tod among others has rebuffed shows that the poetry is public enough to get up the nose of Craig Raine. We can blame that on the internet. The digital age has much more powerful powers of distribution at its disposal than the early modern republic of letters—which is
another way of saying that even poetry which is micro-published by a fly-by-night outfit like Barque can get halfway around the world, thankfully, to our comrades in Illinois. The Archive of the Now, the free digital repository of recordings of contemporary poetry which I run at QMUL, has a fanbase on Facebook that extends to Japan, Finland, Brazil and Idaho. Perhaps inevitably, distinctions such as I’ve been making about collegiate membership are going to get lost in transit. The problem with shipping everything under this Cambridge School bill of lading is that a great deal of really important poetry gets lost too, because we feel we know where the poetry is happening, and from there it’s easy to assume we also know who is making it. On the other hand, maybe “Cambridge School” is a smart branding exercise: it’s contentious enough to generate lots of valuable publicity.

I don’t mean to attack Archambeau’s piece, though I recognise I’m quibbling about terms and affiliations, rather than mucking in with the analysis and detailed close reading of the poetry. That work is the most interesting and most valuable, and Archambeau’s essay is an important example of it. To defeat the expectations which come along with the name “Cambridge School,” the deeply various poetry published in the Cambridge Literary Review needs intelligent readers and critics; I’d even
go so far as to say that it is written in expectation of them. I’ve seen critics from beyond the blood-soaked Trumpington perimeter stick their heads above the parapet, only to be shouted down by the defence forces entrenched in their tiny garden plots—and so decide to stop caring. I don’t want Archambeau to stop caring. I’m grateful to him for paying attention to this work, and for contributing to the important debate about how a poetry can be actively and effectively political.

Andrea Brady
Queen Mary University of London


Robert Archambeau responds:

I’m grateful to have such a thoughtful response to my essay, and I certainly understand the wariness about the term “Cambridge Poetry,” even when it comes with a string of disclaimers attached. It was the much the same when people started talking about Language Poetry. When you write that you’re “forever being labeled ‘Cambridge School’, even though I’ve lived in London for nearly twice as long as I was a gownie,” and when you ask “would we say that Dell Olsen is now Cambridge School, because she lives in the episcopacy,” I suppose you’re objecting to the geographic nature of the term. I get it. But I suppose what’s happened is that geography has become incidental, just as publication in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E became incidental to what was meant by Language Poetry.

I use the term because it seems to be the term that is coming into general use. One might—one should, I suppose—ask whether the term is, in the end, a good thing. I’m inclined to think that, like most words, it both reveals and conceals. Everything you say about differences between individual poets is true, and everything you say about periodization sounds right, too. I understand your idea of that the period “between the years of the publications of the English Intelligencer and A Various
Art may constitute a distinct moment—but even making this distinction would probably bring down a rain of bile on your head if you made it loudly enough. Someone would come along and quite rightly insist on the variety of poetic activity in the Cambridge orbit at that time. Still and all, I don’t think all generalization is always bad. If any of us really thought that, we’d be left with nothing to say but proper names, if those. And I do think there are a cluster of techniques, ideas, publication and reading venues, influences, and the like that we can speak of as related phenomena. I’m interested, for now, in what the term can reveal; while you seem more concerned with what it conceals.

The other thing I take from your response is the question of the political claims made for the poetry, and the relationship between public presence and political ambition. Some of the claims really have been large. The claims I cited included one from David Shepard, who described a Prynne poem as an attempt to “recombine a language fragmented into technical jargons,” incorporating the vocabulary of specialized discourses into his poetry and thereby “return[ing] this knowledge to the public sphere from its sequestration in the ivory tower.” This would be a hell of a feat, and hugely politically important. The logistics of it, though, would require a huge effort at outreach, at actually bringing alienating kinds of language into public discourse. Shepherd either didn’t quite mean what he said, or, like a lot of us, he substituted a political wish for a political reality. Another claim I mentioned came from N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge. According to Reeve and Kerridge, the kind of poetry they discuss can “collide with the powerful instrumental discourses of the culture” with the effect of “smashing them into pieces.” Poetry can certainly depict such a smashing. But the gulf between depiction and actuality gets glossed over here. The instruments of power continue on their way, despite the poets’ interventions. John Wilkinson makes some big claims, too. He says that you and Keston Sutherland are writing at “a point of historical convergence” where your poetry might exercise “political potency.” Either Wilkinson’s sense of what political potency looks like is very different from mine, or he’s making claims that are quite unlikely to be supported by events. I’m actually much more inclined to agree with your own sense of the political reach of poetry (or at least the political reach of poetry at this point, and in the first world), when you write that you “see a problem with any poetry’s (‘messianic’) claim to change the world, to smash instrumental reason to bits with the hammer of détournement.” This isn’t the sort of claim I was taking issue with in the article.

All of this brings to mind some comments made by Reginald Shepherd, a fine poet and critic who died last year. As a gay black man from the Bronx, he knew a thing or two about the need for political change. Here’s something he wrote about politics and poetry:

Those who wish to change society might better turn their energies toward society itself, to the real areas of oppression and suffering, economic, political, racial, and sexual. […] To blame literature, or culture as a whole, for social, economic, and political woes (or even to see it as central to their perpetuation) is evasive at best, dishonest at worst, a kind of posing as politics. […] George Oppen gave up writing poetry for several years in favor of political activism, because he believed neither that poetry could change society nor that it should be subordinated to an agenda. In Oppen’s words, “If you decide to do something politically, you do something with political efficacy. And if you write poetry, you write poetry, not something you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering.” Several years ago, I was asked by someone I had just met whether my poetry was Afrocentric. I told him that I didn’t know what he meant by that term, and he said, “You know, dedicated to the liberation of black people everywhere.” My only answer was, “I don’t think that poems can do that.”

I found that convincing when he wrote it. I find it convincing now.

Robert Archambeau
Lake Forest College

Letter to Andrea Brady

Andrea Brady has left a string of comments by way of response to my article “Public Faces in Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry.” There’s much of interest in them, including this statement about what it felt like to be in Cambridge in the late 90s, around the Prynne circle:

Throughout the time I did spend in Cambridge I felt distinctly female and distinctly American. I guess it was no accident that I ended up writing a chapter of my thesis on the way that 17th century literary coteries preserved the authority of patriarchal poets through agonistic self-definition and fantasies of all-male reproduction. But I didn’t see the resemblance at the time.

That says a lot, really. I wish I’d been able to incorporate it into the article! Anyway, Andrea’s comments merit a proper response. In lieu of that, I’ve written this. It probably belongs down in the comments stream of the post announcing the publication of the article, but it’s bulky, so it’s here instead.


Hey Andrea,

Thanks for the long, thoughtful response to the essay. I’ve written about a pretty wide range of poets over the years, and one of the things I like most about poets from the more experimental end of things is that they so often write back after one writes about their work. Most of the more formally conservative people don’t seem to want that sort of back-and-forth, though I did have a great exchange with R.S. Gwynn after I wrote about one of his sonnets a while ago.

Anyway. I understand your wariness about the term “Cambridge Poetry,” even when it comes with a string of disclaimers attached. I mean, it was the same way back when people started talking about Language Poetry — lots of people objected to it, and some felt oppressed by it. I remember Steve Evans talking about this back in the late 90s at a conference in Belgium. Here’s what I noted about it in a post-conference wrap-up report for Jacket:

Steve Evans made some good points afterward about the way poets have reacted to being labeled with the 'L= word' — nobody thinks it is quite right for them, but then again they see some parallels, and in the discourse about avant-garde poetry, one seems to be either a language poet or not to count at all, so poets seem to ultimately accept the label, albeit with reservations.

There were, and are, all sorts of problems with the term “Language Poetry,” which (as your local schoolmarm will tell you) started life as “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry,” referencing the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (I remember Jeff Derkson giving a paper called “Where have all the equals signs gone” around the time people gave up on typing them out). I suppose the two main reasons people stopped typing all those equals signs were 1. It was tedious as all hell, and 2. Whether a poem had been published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or not became incidental: the movement or tendency had become larger than that.

When you write that you’re “forever being labelled ‘Cambridge School’, even though I’ve lived in London for nearly twice as long as I was a gownie,” and when you ask “would we say that Dell Olsen is now Cambridge School, because she lives in the episcopacy,” I suppose you’re objecting to the geographic nature of the term. I get it. But I suppose what’s happened is that geography has become incidental, just as publication in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E became incidental to what was meant by Language Poetry. I use the term because that’s the term that seems to be coming into use.

One might — one should, I suppose — ask whether the term is, in the end, a good thing. I’m inclined to think that, like most words, it both reveals and conceals. Everything you say about differences between individual poets is true, and everything you say about periodization sounds right, too. I mean, I your idea of that the period “between the years of the publications of the English Intelligencer and A Various Art” may constitute a distinct moment — but even making this distinction would probably bring down a rain of bile on your head if you made it loudly enough. Someone would come along and quite rightly insist on the variety of poetic activity in the Cambridge orbit at that time. Still and all, I don’t think all generalization is always bad. If any of us really thought that, we’d be left with nothing to say but proper names, if those. And I do think there are a cluster of techniques, ideas, publication and reading venues, influences, and the like that we can speak of as related phenomena. I, too, don’t think Prynne is the only center of gravity in the constellation (Peter Riley was very keen on making sure I didn’t make that mistake, back when I first started taking an interest in things Cambridge). I suppose one could imagine a series of partially overlapping Venn Diagrams, or a cluster of vectors, many of which converge for a time, but each of which follows its own line of flight away from the moments of convergence. Anyway. I suppose I’m interested, for now, in what the term can reveal; while you seem more concerned with what it conceals.

The other thing I take from your response, beyond the questioning of the term “Cambridge Poetry,” is the question of the political claims made for the poetry, and the relationship between public presence and political ambition. My contention in the article was that the large political claims made for the poetry seemed out of whack with the actual potential effect of the poetry. And some of the claims really have been large.

The claims I cited included one from David Shepard, who described a Prynne poem as an attempt to “recombine a language fragmented into technical jargons,” incorporating the vocabulary of specialized discourses into his poetry and thereby “return[ing] this knowledge to the public sphere from its sequestration in the ivory tower.” This would be a hell of a feat, and hugely politically important. The logistics of it, though, would require a huge effort at outreach, at actually bringing alienating kinds of language into public discourse. Shepherd either didn’t quite mean what he said, or, like a lot of us, he substituted a political wish for a political reality — which would be a kind of sentimentality, really.

Another claim I mentioned came from N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge (whose book Nearly Too Much is, I think, essential stuff for anyone wanting to get started on reading Prynne). According to Reeve and Kerridge, the kind of poetry they discuss can “collide with the powerful instrumental discourses of the culture" with the effect of "smashing them into pieces.” Poetry can certainly depict such a smashing. But the gulf between depiction and actuality gets glossed over here. The instruments of power continue on their way, despite the poets’ interventions (I think Bob Perelman’s poem “The Game” is about as good an examination of this situation as I’ve seen — anyway, it’s worth a look, if you haven’t seen it).

John Wilkinson makes some big claims, too — I know you found it a bit objectionable that I wrote more about his claims than about particular poems, but what I was interested in was the gulf between the large claims made for the poems and the actuality of the extent of their presence in the culture. Anyway, he has a high opinion of your work, and of Keston Sutherland’s. So do I, but not for the same reason Wilkinson presents — he says that you and Keston are writing at “a point of historical convergence” where your poetry might exercise “political potency.” Either Wilkinson’s sense of what political potency looks like is very different from mine, or he’s making claims that are quite unlikely to be supported by events.

I’m actually much more inclined to agree with your own sense of the political reach of poetry (or at least the political reach of poetry at this point, and in the first world), when you write that you “see a problem with any poetry’s (‘messianic’) claim to change the world, to smash instrumental reason to bits with the hammer of détournement.” And I’m in sympathy with you when you say you are:

…perfectly aware that my poetry isn’t going to change the world because it is ‘far from a mass movement’, as I wrote somewhere: it’s not part of the class struggle, energized by direction action or likely to inspire it. I can carry on writing it simply by thinking it will go down in history for future readers as a record of a peculiar dissidence…. At my most optimistic, I hope it encourages its readers – who, as readers seeking out this kind of work, aren’t likely to require encouragement – to think critically about politics, or perhaps to be inspired by such thinking to participate in collective efforts to overcome the tyrannies of capitalism.

This isn’t the sort of claim I was taking issue with in the article. The type of claim I took issue with was the type that implied that the poetry was smashing the discourses of power, and returning specialist discourses to the public.

The tack I took in the article was to focus on the gulf between these big public claims and the relatively limited reach of the poetry. I found it particularly ironic that so many of these claims centered on Prynne, who really has turned his back on opportunities to have a wider public presence (not that he’s wrong to have done so).

I think you’re right to say that my article implies a “rather crude equation between publication in the larger academic and commercial presses and the authenticity of a poetry’s claims to political efficacy.” Some of this implication comes from the way I framed the article — between the words “public” and “private.” I suppose it’s no excuse to point to the original context of the article, as a paper at a conference on “The Public/Private Divide in British Poetry” at the Sorbonne. Anyway, I’m not at all convinced that publication and readership on the scale reached, and to the constituencies served by, any contemporary Western poetry press would lead to political change on a large scale.

Did you get a chance to know Reginald Shepherd? He died not too long ago, a terrible loss. In addition to being a fine poet, he was a clear-eyed thinker about poetry, and I learned a lot from our correspondence (not least because he’d mastered the Frankfurt school better than I). As a gay black man from the Bronx, he knew a thing or two about the need for political change. Here’s something he wrote about politics and poetry:

Those who wish to change society might better turn their energies toward society itself, to the real areas of oppression and suffering, economic, political, racial, and sexual. (Identity politics can be a useful organizing tool of social activism, though it can also lend itself to a group solipsism that blinds people to structural, systemic issues.) To blame literature, or culture as a whole, for social, economic, and political woes (or even to see it as central to their perpetuation) is evasive at best, dishonest at worst, a kind of posing as politics, in social commentator Adolph Reed’s trenchant phrase. But such posturing is much easier than doing the hard work of trying to change the world. “Cultural activism” is a poor substitute for real political activity, although we live in an era in which cultural matters are up for debate while fundamental economic and political questions are not, except on the often loud but frequently incoherent and usually ignored fringes.

George Oppen gave up writing poetry for several years in favor of political activism, because he believed neither that poetry could change society nor that it should be subordinated to an agenda. In Oppen’s words, “If you decide to do something politically, you do something with political efficacy. And if you write poetry, you write poetry, not something you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering.” Several years ago, I was asked by someone I had just met whether my poetry was Afrocentric. I told him that I didn’t know what he meant by that term, and he said, “You know, dedicated to the liberation of black people everywhere.” My only answer was, “I don’t think that poems can do that.”

I found that convincing when he wrote it. I find it convincing now.

Thanks, by the way, for adding this, at the end of your comments:

I don’t mean any of this to sound like an attack. I hope you don’t feel it is. This poetry does need intelligent readers and critics; I’d even go so far as to say that it is written in expectation of them. I’ve seen critics from beyond the Trumpington perimeter stick their heads above the parapet, only to be shouted down by the incredibly entrenched defence forces – and so decide to stop caring. I don’t want you or anyone who reads this to stop caring.

I really don’t think of anything you’ve said as an attack — and I’ve found the response to the article so far to be generally positive, or to be critical in interesting and enlightening ways. I do wonder if people who have invested themselves in the poetry I discussed see the article as an attack. I don’t think it is, though I suppose it is an attempt to deflate some of the more inflated political claims made on behalf of the poetry. I doubt I’ll stop being interested — I also doubt I’ll ever be convinced by the kinds of claims I discussed, nor do I think it likely that I’ll ever be convinced that, because this kind of poetry is interesting and important, other kinds are not (this isn’t a claim you make at all, but Keston seems to take something of that Manichean view, setting the saved of Cambridge against the evils of the Culture Industry).

All best,

Bob

"Its Chief Weapon is Excess": Chris Hamilton-Emery on Cambridge Poetry

Many a keyboard has been tapped, and many an email sent zipping across the Atlantic, inspired by the recent one-two punch combo of the Cambridge Literary Review's special feature on Cambridge Poetry and Kent Johnson's post on the "New British School" over at Digital Emunction (a site directed by Bobby Baird and others affiliated with the Chicago Review, the American journal most closely associated with experimental British poetry from the Cambridge-connected crowd).

One of the more interesting and informed comments I've seen comes from Chris Hamilton-Emery who, as the head of Salt publishing, has been well-positioned to watch developments in this kind of poetry, especially over the past couple of decades. His comment, from a discussion list I don't normally follow, came to my attention via Kent Johnson, and Chris was kind enough to let me reproduce it here. I've wedged my own comments in here and there. Here's Chris:

I think there is a need for a more general assessment of the poetries emerging from the British avant-​garde scene. I’ve published a great deal of course, and there’s certainly enough evidence for a reassesment of what was going on Cambridge in the 90s. It’s too highly coloured with Divisionist ideology to get a clear picture from outside.

I'm not quite sure how to feel about this.

Chris is certainly right that the time has come to try to get a handle on just what has been happening. The British experimental crowd for whom Cambridge serves as a center of gravity has been one of the most vital and interesting things going on in the U.K. for some time, and it hasn't really had much of an assessment. Even the degree to which it is correct to call it Cambridge Poetry hasn't been determined, although I've got a feeling the name will stick, despite how unhappy everyone is going to be with it. I mean, that's what happened with Language Poetry, and with New Criticism, and with Dada, and with just about everything: the borders of the movement, the essential features or debates, the list of who's who — these things are never defined to anyone's satisfaction, but the alternative ("let us not speak of this, lest we exclude someone or misrepresent the truth") seems unsatisfactory, too. I, for one, am going to stick with the monicker unless and until something better emerges, though I'm cognizant that there are people connected to the aesthetic and community in question who have no Cambridge affiliation (to the town or to the gown), and that there are several overlapping kinds of poetry involved. Anyway, to reiterate: I'm sure Chris is right: now is a good time to try to assess just what it is that's been happening.

I'm not entirely sure Chris is right about the place from which a clear picture is going to emerge, though. When Cambridge poetry has been described, it's usually been from either a position of hostility, or from a position of advocacy, with the advocacy emerging from inside the movement (actually, some of the hostility has come from within, too). People on the inside have the advantage of knowing the terrain intimately, but often there is something like a kind of true-believer's apologetics at work in their descriptions. I suppose I'm not speaking without a little apologetic of my own here: I'm very much outside the Cambridge scene, and I've tried to describe and understand it as neither an enemy nor an advocate. So maybe my sense that what's needed is an attempt at disinterest or objectivity (perspectives never entirely obtainable, but approachable by degrees) is itself self-interested. But I do hope for a better critic than I to step in from outside and survey the terrain as dispassionately and comprehensively as possible. Which would probably just tick off some people, who would find such a survey either insufficiently for, or insufficiently against, the poetry in question. Anyway, back to Chris:

It [the poetry] is properly underground but has really very striking uptake with US universities, certainly Buffalo, Miami (OH), UPenn, but much much wider than this.

Very true! A few key personalities are important at the institutions Chris mentions (Steve McCaffery and others at Buffalo, Keith Tuma at Miami of Ohio, Al Filreis at Penn). I'd add the University of Chicago to the list, primarily because of the graduate students who run the Chicago Review (Bobby Baird, Josh Kotin, others). But in the end I don't think it's just a matter of personal interests: the same logic that brought Language Poetry into the American academy seem to be at play: the poetry demands the kind of interpretive effort academe encourages, and the poetry has affinities with poststructural and Frankfurt School cultural theory — things that have found an American home in the university English departments. It's also good dissertation fodder: you can prove your sophistication by digging into the arcane and the difficult. Also, the poetry often has a kind of anti-marketplace ideology (Chris will mention this soon), an ideology flattering to the penniless graduate student learning the unmarketable skills of literary analysis. I mean, it's all very affirming to the kind of person you'll find studying poetry and theory in a literature department. Which is neither here nor there, in terms of the importance of the work. Once again, back to Chris:

But those US allegiances are misleading as I think the British avant-​garde have to be read from the peculiar social and cultural framework of the British 60s. We never had a 1968 moment. The political content of much 90s British avant-​garde writing has its origins in a liberation from post-​War thrift and limitation, it derives its thrust from a cultural exuberance not a political fracture or civil rights revolution. It’s politics are received. You can’t of course have a politics with out a polity.

This is the part of Chris' post I find most confusing. I mean, I do think it would make sense for exuberance to emerge after a climate of scarcity — but the fuse on this exuberance bomb seems too long. Can we really see the developments of the 90s as a delayed reaction to the scarcity of the British 50s? Or perhaps I'm misreading Chris. Perhaps he means that the work by Jeremy Prynne and Tom Raworth and others back in the 60s came about as part of the liberation from postwar scarcity, and that this work inspired what was done in the 90s. I can get behind that.

I find the final sentence intriguing — "You can't of course have a politics without a polity." This raises the issue that has most fascinated me about some strands of Cambridge Poetry: the question of political ambition and lack of political effect. But Chris touches on all this soon, so I'll shut up and let him get on with things:

There are two aspects I find fascinating, the first is nostalgia. A great deal of British avant-​garde writing is deeply nostalgic and utopian, and that’s partly I suspect a feature that it has yet to be properly assessed, digested, positioned, it’s been locked out of cultural debate and a history of poetics in the UK due in part to the Poetry Wars and their legacy. It’s almost as if we can imagine a poetry purgatory, not Dante’s but a kind of limbo where much of this writing has not been assimilated into a wider history of British poetry. It’s stuck but not of its own accord.

I, too, am waiting for someone to lay out the exact nature of the nostalgia and utopianism at work in the poetry, though I suspect it's a kind of negative utopia, like Adorno's, one that can't be named, or that would disintigrate if named (a kind of "if you see the Buddha in the road, kill him" ideal, in which the utopian can't be embodied without being desecrated, but in which the utopian aspiration must nevertheless be maintained).

With regard to Chris' second point above, that the poetry has been left outside of the wider history of British poetry against its will, I'm ambivalent. There sure are editors, scholars, and academics who want nothing to do with the stuff, don't like it, and suspect that it's all a matter of the emperor's new clothes (as some small percentage of it surely is). But I think there's been a reciprocal rejection: just as the many have decided to ignore this kind of writing, there has been a rejection of mainstream publication and even critical attention by some people inside the movement. The history of Prynne's publishing career is the most prominent example: he deliberately left major presses behind, and chose not to accept offers of prominent journal publication (Peter Barry's study Poetry Wars documents some of this). I suppose much of this is a matter of Prynne's very private personality, and some of it is a matter of anti-market ideology, which Chris is about to describe:

And the second thing I find fascinating is what I call Liberation Poetics, the idea that poetry has been enslaved in some consumerist conspiracy, and that leads to a kind of messianic quality in some work, and, as I’ve remarked before, a lot in Keston [Sutherland]’s. This kind of poetry needs to be outside, needs to be oppressed and needs to be secret. It can’t accommodate or mediate as it relies on an extreme position and in many respects requires converts and acolytes, neophytes and indeed some Grand Masters. It’s religious in effect. One has to believe. Though a key feature of the dogma is to express doubt, uncertainty and incompleteness, just as it embraces process over product, openness over closure and radicalism over restraint. Its chief weapon is excess. And of course it is oppositional.

All of this makes for a fascinating landscape. But it’s one that can feel like entering a sect, even for an afternoon of mysterious indoctrination. It is however, filled with great and yes, serious, art.

I'd hate to reduce the Cambridge phenomenon, in all its diversity, to a cult. But there is something of that about it: Prynne, like F.R. Leavis, (or, at the other end of the poetic spectrum, like Yvor Winters) does seem to have a taste for disciples, a weakness that should not reduce our sense of his achievement. And we shouldn't ignore this, nor the role it has played in Cambridge poetry's status as a poetic counter-culture, rather than a position in more open engagement with the broader poetic culture. Of course it'd be nice if more critics who took Seamus Heaney seriously also took Tom Raworth seriously. Such figures seem in particularly short supply.

Big News about Cambridge Poetry

Look out! The inaugural issue of the Cambridge Literary Review has just been unleashed. It contains (among much more) an essay by Stefan Collini, new poetry by John Kinsella, J.H. Prynne, Keston Sutherland, and John Matthias, as well as a big feature on Cambridge Poetry — a feature marred only by my own contribution, "Public Faces In Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry."

"Public Faces" is a much-expanded version of a paper I gave at the Sorbonne last year (the proceedings of the conference will be published this fall by McFarland, and will be well worth a look). I suppose it's really based on the experience of seeing a bunch of the Cambridge poets read at the Elastic Arts Center in Chicago, right around the time Cambpo heavyweights John Wilkinson and Peter Riley were slugging it out in a battle royale about the political value of poetry in the back pages of the Chicago Review.

The essay starts like this:

My title comes from some lines of W.H. Auden’s in The Orators: “Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places.” Often, modern poets have presented their work as a matter of private faces in public places—that is, as the voice of private, authentic individual conscience entering the public sphere. Such a vision of poetry is, no doubt, fraught with its own problems and contradictions, but none of those concern me here. When we look at what has come to be known in some circles as Cambridge School poetry—the experimental poetry of Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson, Jeremy Prynne as well as Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, and Simon Jarvis, to name a few poets of the younger generation—we’re faced with a very different conception of poetry. We find ourselves asking a question something like this: what ought we to make of a school of poetry that has a strong public concern, but no appreciable public presence? In Auden’s terms, it is a poetry of public faces in private places.

The gathering of poetry and critical writing about Cambridge poetry in CLR looks strong. I hope the issue gets some play on this side of the Atlantic. The issue is available for $20, a bit steep sounding, I know, but it's a big brick of a thing, and worth the cash.

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In other news, it seems that the redoubtable Jacob Knabb of ACM took one look at Granta's recent special issue on Chicago, did a spit-take with his Old Style beer, nearly dropped his slice of sausage-stuffed deep-dish pizza, and declared the next ACM "Another Chicago Issue." If you're from the greater Chicago metropolitan area, send some work his way.

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UPDATE OCTOBER 7: Kent Johnson's got some interesting things to say about the Cambridge crowd.

Fit Audience Though Few: Cambridge Poetry and its Readers

Back from Paris, where I was at a fabulous, compact conference on poetry and "the public/private divide" at the Sorbonne. There were too many excellent papers to discuss — Daniel Szabo on R.S. Thomas, Marc Porée on several British women poets, and (the best of the lot, I thought) Helen Goethals on the effect of the growth of newspapers on the discursive place of poetry in the eighteenth century. I missed Stephen Romer's reading, but in the first of two odd bits of delayed serendipity I found a solid discussion of his new book in the TLS I'd brought along for the flight home. If I'm being totally honest, though, I've got to say the real highlight happened on the flight from Chicago to my layover in Amsterdam, when through some capricious gift of the gods, I was seated next to the great jazz drummer Hamid Drake, who set me straight about Sun Ra, Eddie Harris, and Kurt Elling. He knows a thing or two about poetry, too — and as I should have expected from an adventurous improvisatory musician, he's sympathetic to the avant side of things. He was also on his way to work with Amiri Baraka as part of a European tour.

My own presentation at the Sorbonne went well enough, I thought, although when it comes to poetry events I always seem to end up as either the squarest guy in a room of hip experimental types (as happened a week or two ago when I read with Adam Fieled, Steve Halle and Laura Goldstein), or the most out-there guy in a room full of respectable types. The Sorbonne event was one of the latter, really: in a room where the most admired poets were clearly Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, and Gerard Manley Hopkins (all of whom I admire) I was there to talk about Jeremy Prynne, and the debate between John Wilkinson and Peter Riley regarding Cambridge School British experimental poetry. But the audience seemed both knowledgeable and receptive, and asked good questions. One of the questions, coming from a Cambridge academic (though not a Cambridge School poetry-type) concerned what she tactfully referred to as "the presumably small, largely academic audience" for the kind of work produced by Prynne, Wilkinson, and company. I muttered something about how the work deliberately set out to demand an active engagement from an audience. But in the second bit of delayed serendipity on this trip, I found a much better articulation of the position I was trying to outline lying in my email inbox on my return. It came from a conversation Cambridge poet Keston Sutherland was having with the publisher Chris Hamilton-Emery on the Britpo discussion list. Replying to Chris' claim that the mystique of the Prynne persona plays into his reception, Keston lays down a pretty radical position about experimental poetry's readership. Check it out:

Hi Chris,

I suppose that's probably true, but before I went along with it I'd want to distinguish between readers and consumers. It must assuredly be true that lots of people have bought Prynne's books because they think he's a weird or fascinating figure, and I'm sure the great majority of those consumers do take a look inside and maybe get to the end once or even twice. I don't think I'm disparaging that use of the object if I say that for Prynne at least it wouldn't amount to "reading" the book, just as it wouldn't amount to knowing, or looking closely at, a painting if I just lingered in front of it at the National Gallery for a minute or two. On Prynne's terms, at least, and perhaps they are not uncommon among members of this list, being a reader of poetry means engaging closely and carefully with it, staking an intimacy on the work of interpretation, in some way perhaps even needing that intimacy or submitting to it as a sort of definition of oneself, or the component of a definition. Some poetry demands and makes possible that sort of intimacy more than other poetry. A lot of poetry would seem hardly to care about it at all, just as a lot of poetry is so infatuated with the rubric of it that it ends up as little besides an advert for the experience it imagines it creates.

Anyhow, I think this consumer/reader distinction is a useful one to keep in mind, though I'm sensible of its liability to be used invidiously and dismissively, because otherwise we might fall to thinking that, simply put, sales = culture. A lot of consumers of books are not readers. Naturally as a bookseller you have to be concerned with consumers, but I imagine most poets (I leave out the Andrew Motions and other ditzy glamour models of Oxford etc) are more interested in readers, even to the no doubt partly pathological extent that they'd prefer three readers to a hundred consumers. For that, they get called "elitist".

As Brecht said, popularity is not very popular any more.

K

I don't think you could get a clearer statement of the kind of relationship between text and reader that poetry like Prynne's (or, from what I've seen of it, like Sutherland's) solicits. There's a real sense in which these guys are inheritors of the position Milton takes around the middle of Paradise Lost, when he re-invokes his muse, Urania, saying:

I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visitest my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east: still govern thou my song
Urania, and fit audience find, though few...

I mean, the Cambridge crew shares with Milton the sense of opposition to the "evil days" they live in, and the "evil tongues" of public discourse, as well as a commitment to an audience of very devoted readers, rather than a broader, more casually interested readership.

This notion of audience is connected to the two things I like most about Cambridge School poetry: the seriousness of it, and the utter lack of respect for established criteria of success (book sales, awards of big-money prizes, etc). Then again, it's also connected to the thing I've found least appealing in my (mere) year or so of rooting around in Cambridge poetry: the narrowness of it. Don't get me wrong: there's breadth of a meaningful kind — Prynne himself seems to be remarkably polymath. But if a true, meaningful engagement with a book means allowing it to define who you are, then you really are going to have to limit yourself to a very few key books (or you'd end up like a guy who used to come into the old Aspidistra Bookshop where I worked when I was a student in Chicago — he'd come in most weekends, sidle up to an attractive young woman, and, no matter what book she was looking at — Siddhartha or The South Beach Diet — lean over louchely and declare "that book changed my life...").

I don't mean to say that this kind of focus on a few key texts, or on a certain set of concerns, is bad or wrong: just that it doesn't appeal to me as a way of experiencing poetry. I'm not one of those guys "needing that intimacy or submitting to it as a sort of definition of oneself." I'm sure there's a lot to be said for it, and the distinction Sutherland draws between this kind of reader and a "consumer" hints at how being this sort of obsessive can keep one from being blown hither and yon by the winds generated by the infernal machines of marketing and consumption.

But Sutherland's use of the word "submitting" is also important, and it reminds me of something from Alan Shapiro's memoir The Last Happy Occasion, where he describes his own time spent "submitting" to the works of a poet very different from Jeremy Prynne, the formalist Yvor Winters. There was a tendency on the part of some of Winters' students at Stanford to turn to his ethical and formal ideas with something like fanaticism gleaming in their eyes, and they certainly focused on a few key texts as the only tradition worthy of their attention (it was contained in Winters' little anthology Quest for Reality). Alan Shapiro wrote about the prevalence of the phenomenon in the 1970s, after Winters' death, and he makes an explicit comparison with religious extremism. Shapiro recalls one episode from his grad school years in particular, when he was being berated by an old friend who had converted to Hasidism. “I listened with superior, somewhat contemptuous amusement,” he writes, “for I too (though I didn’t recognize it then) was a true believer, and the faith I clung to… had its sacred doctrine, replete with clear and definitive prescriptions.” While Shapiro’s friend had turned to Menachem Mendel Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitcher movement, as his spiritual leader, “mine,” said Shapiro, “was Yvor Winters.”

I'm sure that from where Sutherland sits my own kind of eclectic reading looks as shallow, magpie-ish, promiscuous and consumeristic as it probably is. And while I enjoy reading Prynne, and have found the time I've spent with his work, and the secondary writing around it, important — sometimes profoundly so — I'm never going to have the focus on him that Sutherland does. I'm not capable, in my intellectual life, of the kind of devoted submission required by a Winters or a Schneerson, and I kind of get the feeling that Keston Sutherland's Menachem Mendel Schneerson is Jeremy Prynne.