The New British School
I’ve been having some exchange the past couple months with Keston Sutherland, the brilliant young UK poet. We’re working on something together and chatting about this and that in the process.
Some critics, both here in U.S. and in UK, have been proposing Sutherland’s long poem “Hot White Andy” (now published in book form) as one of the ground-breaking works of the past decades. His new work is Stress Position, also just published.
You can see him performing (it’s quite remarkable, trust me) these works here and here.
One thing that’s come up in our correspondence, though more in a passing fashion, is the matter of “Conceptual poetry” and Flarf. In some relation to the latter and its poetic/ideological antecedents there is this by Sutherland, published in 2004, the same year I met him for first time at a CCCP conference over in Cambridge. The article doesn’t directly mention Flarf, as its composition predates by a bit Kasey Mohammad’s five minutes with the BBC (at which point the collective decided its Googling was no longer mere frolic and jape, and turned its coordinated energies towards an earnest petition campaign for inclusion in Poets & Writers [successful, with photo] and The Norton Anthology of Poetry [not quite yet]).
Well, this post is not about Flarf, and I don’t know how or why I got sidetracked onto those silly rails yet once again! I suppose it seems almost gratuitous, the diversion; I apologize, if it does. (And for an example of Sutherland’s critical writing on subjects of more import and weight, the reader may see his “Marx in Jargon,” in issue 1 of World Picture Journal.)
As I had started to say, then, Sutherland is certainly one of the prominent figures in a constellation of perfectly exciting UK poets writing “in wake of” the Cambridge-based greats J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth– who could be seen, in their two presences, genealogically speaking, as somewhat to their later generation what Language poetry as a “tradition” is to the “most advanced sector” of the younger U.S. “post-avant.”
I’ve heard some people call this Brit formation the New Cambridge School, though this is not quite apt (maybe less apt a name than the New Chicago School!), as most of these younger writers are located quite elsewhere: London, Scotland, Surrey, Brighton (this last where much of the most important action now is), and there are certainly differences, personal and poetical, that those more in the know would note. But there can be no doubt that this grouping represents a “tendency” of avant thought (thick and sophisticated, in the Adornean sense) and composition (tough and resistant, in the Adornean sense, too) that is having an increasing impact on poetry in the UK. Let us call it, for our Yank purposes, the New British School.
Among its most visible “members,” along with Sutherland (and here we begin, as such lists must, to leave people out who shouldn’t be), are the following:
Andrea Brady, Chris Goode, Marianne Morris, Peter Manson, Emily Critchley, Stuart Calton, Neil Pattison, Jeremy Hardingham, Jow Lindsay, Michael Kindellan, Matt Ffytche, Tom Jones, Jeff Hilson, Sean Bonney, Tim Atkins, Sophie Robinson, Frances Kruk, and Jonty Tiplady. Justin Katko and Ryan Dobran just this week moved back home from the US and will no doubt help fan the fires.
Poets a bit older (though more in the sense that James Schuyler was older than John Ashbery) include Ian Patterson, John Wilkinson (presently in U.S.), cris cheek (ditto), Drew Milne, Alan Halsey, Simon Jarvis (with Sutherland one of the major critical voices of the group), Rod Mengham, Andrew Duncan, and Kevin Nolan (whom Sutherland and others consider perhaps the unsung great writer of the new UK poetry).
And younger poets in their early 20s, too, just starting out but already involved in the scenes and getting noticed: Josh Stanley, Luke Roberts, Tim Thornton, Mike Wallace-Hadrill, Francesca Lisette…
Now, there is something I wanted to say here– I believe I mentioned the fact at Silliman’s blog a month or so back, but it’s important enough to mention again: About two years ago, Chicago Review came out with a special issue on “New British Poetry,” edited by Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves. The four poets featured were Brady, Goode, Manson, and Sutherland. Provocative, seriously argued essays by Ladkin/Purvis and John Wilkinson accompanied, along with fifteen reviews of newly published UK collections. The issue was, I think fair to say, a stunner, for the work presented by these four poets was really quite unlike anything being undertaken on this side of the pond (one of my favorite clichés), and the critical material presenting the large portfolio made claims for the poetry’s singularity and significance that really couldn’t be ignored.
But ignored here it flat out was. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, in the twenty-four or so months since this issue of CR appeared, not a single substantial mention has been made in any journal or at any blog (and there are a few of them!) associated with U.S. “post-avant” circles. Here was strikingly strange, little-known work which, in the ample sense of things, had deep relation and relevance to the history, poetics, theory, and politics of the more radical sections of U.S. avant writing. Indeed, the forceful claims of the framing essays argued, in part, precisely this. But to little avail, it seems.
I think there’s a fairly simple explanation for that somewhat deafening silence. It’s that the New British Poetry shows itself, as collective phenomenon, to be in the main more autonomous, sophisticated, provocative, various, ambitious, and politically aggressive than most work out of the U.S. “post-avant,” which has for greater part become (does anyone still doubt it?) tightly tethered in faster and ever-closer circuit to a mysterious, sacred Pole of professional ambition and well-mannered protocol.
Forgive the enthusiasms of my metaphor, but the point is perfectly straight up. And I don’t mean this “national” difference is just in the poetic production proper. In their critical activity, too, Marx and Frankfurt School-inflected to a vengeance as it often is, these younger British poets appear, by and large, to be more assertive, serious, learned, and productive than their Yank cousins. Over here, if with some noble exceptions, younger innovative poets seem to be following the lead of their old-guard Language forebears, who have–now that a tenure-driven cottage industry has taken up the “theory” side of things–pretty much given up (blogging, self-canonizing memoir, or occasional reviewing doesn’t count) on sustained, hard-edged cultural critique as communal function.
And here’s the rub: A fair amount of the critique offered by these New British poets has been subtly or openly directed at the Language poets and their U.S. progeny. Following the lead of Prynne’s legendary (and never-spoken-of-in-these-parts) assault on Language poetry, “Letter to Steve McCaffery,” the analysis has often been leveled at our complacency, at the decided drift towards academic accommodation and careerism, at the sloughing off of the premise of poetic praxis as social and institutional critique, at the rapid slide of our “post-avant” poetry towards a self-satisfied, formalist, belletristic ennui. Thus, the silence, I’d propose, at least in some quarters, is borne forward by a good measure of collective tacit agreement. In poetry, no less than around the English Department water cooler, resentment can breed passive-aggressive disregard.
But things change, of course. No question they will. Actually, they are! Young poets here interested in recovering poetic practice and community as vehicles of more vigorous cultural investigation and resistance are starting to pay attention and to form links with their peers over there. Collaborations and binational publishing projects (see my post on Hot Gun!) are beginning to take shape. I’ve even heard of a couple of U.S. study groups devoted to writings out of this New British School.
The sense is getting out, that is, that we’ve assumed for too long we’re the ones on top, or out front, with things to teach others. Now the more astute Yank poets have begun to see that we are the ones to have lagged behind, that there are some topical things to learn and remember. And that the Brits are calling back to us, with a portion of the news.
+++
[nota bene: After I proposed this post to Bobby Baird, I discovered that Keston Sutherland will soon be guest blogging for digital emunction! Stay tuned. KJ]
Welcome, Keston.
This post appears to be saying that poets should petition for a special issue of the Chicago Review, and then, they should be offended (or other poets should be offended on their behalf) if said special issue takes time to digest.
It would seem that everybody who writes wants a response to that writing. And yet not all writing gets a response.
>It would seem that everybody who writes wants a response to that writing. And yet not all writing gets a response.
Yes. But some no-responses (obvious point follows) are more resonant than others.
Why exactly to these poets deserve notice, according to this essay? because soon they’ll be attracting more attention? thanks to essays like this one?
Maybe I should tally how many DE posts are devoted to
1) Who gets recognition
2) Who deserves recognition
3) Who gets more recognition, x or y
4) Who deserves more recognition, a or b
5) Who’s an asshole because they get recognition
6) Who’s a saint because they don’t.
7) Other
Kent, I’m pretty sure Justin Katko is an American poet (from someplace in the Appalachians? Kentucky?). He went over to Cambridge to work on a phd. about Prynne & Dorn. I met him here in Providence before he left last month, & we traded some paper.
Henry,
You’re kidding. I always thought Katko was a Brit!
Well, if I’m wrong there, call him the new transplant that makes the rule, or something.
A little tweak to the post: Just had a nice message from Bill Fuller (who read earlier this year with Sutherland and Prynne). He informs me that Tom Raworth has recently moved to Brighton from Cambridge. As I say, Brighton is now where much of the action is happening!
Kent
> more resonant than others
Agreed. I’m also frequently mystified by the distinctions made. Sometimes it’s clearly personal, not about the work at all, sometimes there appear to be historical or institutional vectors, that is, not even ad hominem, and other times… I just don’t know.
Part of it has to be that I contribute to the issue by believing in some passive-voice agency by which distinctions are made.
Tom is in the U.S. as we type. He swung through Seattle over the weekend on his way to California, and is headed to Chicago after that. I’m pretty sure readings are planned along the way. You should go.
In addition to katKO, Ryan Dobran is also a Yank.
Also, see Issue 2 of the journal “Pilot” edited by Matt Chambers. Boxed set of 17 chapbooks by Sean Bonney, Emily Critchley, matt ffytche, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, Giles Goodland, Jeff Hilson, Piers Hugill, Frances Kruk, Marianne Morris, Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, Simon Perril, Sophie Robinson, Natalie Scargill, Harriet Tarlo, and Scott Thurston
@Eric: Maybe you should do it, I’d be curious. I don’t think there’s any problem with arguments about recognition (isn’t every review, finally, such an argument)? But of course we do other things as well: for example, here’s Joel Calahan reading Prynne and Sutherland through the torture debate.
Well, I didn’t happen to think any of the poems in that issue besides Keston’s were particularly strong or likely to get any reader fired up about the NBP. And Keston’s delivery is really a crucial aspect of his poems—they’re a little flat on the page.
And Ryan Dobran? Well, how about that. Sutherland told me in an email that Katko and Dobran had recently moved to Cambridge, and I’m thinking, Oh, that’s nice, they went back home…
God, I hope Bonney or Jarvis or don’t turn out to be Yanks… (I know Andrea Brady used to be. I think!)
I have no problem with such arguments. For me, arguments about recognition are crucial to art because of their aesthetic extrapolations incorporating ethics, politics, and the like.
But I don’t consider this post an “argument.” Reads like straight PR to me.
Meant to say, Jordan, that’s one hell of an interesting comment, that last one. Sure to be famous in the Davis collection some day.
Andrea’s from Pennsylvania. Went to Columbia, helped Kenneth Koch administer the Dupee Reading Series, if I remember correctly. She’s living in England now, last I heard teaching at Brunel. I am a loyal fan of her work, and partial to her chap Of Sere Fold, and an earlier poem I think called “Caribou.”
I don’t understand what you mean, Kent.
>Well, I didn’t happen to think any of the poems in that issue besides Keston’s were particularly strong or likely to get any reader fired up about the NBP. And Keston’s [....] poems—they’re a little flat on the page.<
got to stop posting so many comments, I know. But on above, I’m reminded of that book, what was it called? Oh, Flatland.
And if you read Manson, for example, and aren’t turned into a nine-dimensional aquarium snail, I don’t know what to say.
Kent, I must admit I’m a little bemused by some of the claims you’ve made here. While I’d agree that the work of Keston Sutherland, and some of those you’ve identified as fellow travellers, is clearly a lot more “politically agressive” than that being produced in the U.S., it sometimes appears to me to display a damaging complacency about its own radical credentials. It also troubles me that while these poets (rightly) attack some in the U.S. for “academic accommodation and careerism”, they can’t entirely escape these charges themselves.
I just looked at Silliman’s blog, whose post for today begins: “In theory, the baseball playoffs is the time of season when the game narrows to just its very finest teams locked in epic combat. In practice, I can hardly remember ever seeing a post-season when all of the teams looked more like ruptured ducks than this one.” I stopped reading at that point, but I’m trying to decide whether “ruptured ducks” redeems the first sentence.
That has nothing to do with this post, but I thought I’d mention it.
OK, last comment for today, promise, but I need to answer Jordan.
Jordan, I meant that in the best of ways. It struck me as a very genuine, refreshingly open comment.
If you don’t stop it, I’m going to have to add new personal affection onto my old admiration for your critical faculties.
Ruptured ducks is pretty great; I’d say it redeems the Sportscenter bloviation of the first sentence, maybe even marks it as parody.
Oh, okay. Thanks, Kent.
KENT:
Excellent post, but some of the hoopla that exploded around the Brit Po # of CR needs to be addressed too — particularly the fact that only 4 poets appear featured in the issue. Sam Ladkin & Robin Purvis, who co-edited the issue together, proposed calling the # “4 British Poets,” tho the US editors of the journal insisted on the title “British Poetry Issue,” alluding perhaps to the Brit Po # of Poetry in 1932 and leading readers (myself among them) to believe that a Cambridge School was angling to stand in as representative of a richly differentiated whole — but I think the past couple of years have shown us that poetry communities in the UK are far more fluid, unfixed, unnameable and (at least from the outside looking in) far more cooperative than that.
I also wonder if the borders of Britain (and the US) are just a little more porous than you suggest here. I agree that few Hummericans give a damn about Brit Po here — but we do have a number of British expats that continue to be present to us in different ways: Christopher Middleton, Nathaniel Tarn, John Wilkinson, Simon Pettet and Champion Miles (who just reviewed Thomas A. Clark’s slim volume of Finlay letters for the Poetry Project Newsletter); it’s also worth pointing out that in the past two years Keston Sutherland, Peter Manson, Andrea Brady, Matt FFyttche, Sam Ladkin, Robin Purvis, Sean Bonney, Frances Kruk, Sophie Robinson, Jow Lindsay, Posie Rider, Alan Halsey, Geraldine Monk, Tom Raworth, Simon Cutts, Prynne and other British poets have visited the US (some more than once). The critical reception of Brit po here is, admittedly, shit, but i also believe organizing a sense of poetry around region or nation might leave a little too much room for slippage and mask the extent to which poetry communities have long been transnational and even galvanized _by_ excessive distance (I think here of Finlay’s connection to Creeley, Andrew Schelling’s to Alec Finlay, Prynne’s to Olson, Gael Turnbull’s short tenure in Canada and California, Steve McCaffery’s ongoing and intense correspondence with any number of British poets). This to say, it may be more useful to think in terms of broader cultural tendencies rather than schools or groups. Ron Silliman has insisted on the necessity of groupness but groups and schools (as we’ve seen w/ flarf & lang po) are more inclined to close ranks & exclude once they take shape instead of resisting categorization and remaining open to those coeval poetry communities they are nonetheless exposed to and often shaped by.
in haste … rich …
HI Kent,
perhaps one thing that can be said amongst all of the where people came from and are temporarily domiciled stuff is that there is once more a measure of transatlantic exchange in poetry.
One other thing worth saying, i think, is that your listing and perspective is, in my opinion, unfortunately skewed towards a relative lack of the poets in and around the London axis, one which has quite a different but no less interesting set of roots in the work of Bob Cobbing, Allen Fisher, Maggie O’Sullivan, Ulli Freer and Bill Griffiths et al. Many of those you mention emerge from that axis too.
I’m a little disturbed by such genealogies as you splash . . . useful though the recognition and the energy doubtless is, being taken as gospel.
but all the best
and thanks for the transatlantic waves
cris
Paul Drury wrote:
>It also troubles me that while these poets (rightly) attack some in the U.S. for “academic accommodation and careerism”, they can’t entirely escape these charges themselves.
Fair point.
I’d propose that there’s quite a bit more “self-reflexiveness” about the matter on the Brit side, though.
Rich, thanks for the comment. As one of the “US editors” involved, I can say (without revealing too much dirty laundry) that the decision about the title didn’t go down quite the way you say. We proposed a title to the four poets and two UK editors; they rejected it (for very good reasons, I hasten to add); and “British Poetry Issue” emerged as a least-common-denominator alternative that would encompass the four featured poets, the fifteen reviews of British poetry in the back of the book, and Andrew Duncan’s map (which, whatever feathers it ruffled, at least had the virtue of showing that Sutherland, Brady, Goode, and Manson were just one corner of a wide and various poetic landscape).
My promise was made to be broken, obviously.
It’s simply ridiculous that I left chris cheek off the list that begins with “Poets a bit older…”
I should have included Alan Halsey, there too, with whom I spent some pleasant time a few years back (couldn’t understand a word he ever said–he sounds just like Keith Richards). And also spaced-out on Matt FFyttche.
cheek is a key figure, as many know. It hardly matters, as with Wilkinson, that he’s been on these shores a while.
I will ask blog master Baird to fix that for me. Apologies.
[done! --rpb]
i completely agree with Rich. The link to Keston performing “Hot White Andy” goes to Meshworks on YouTube. The performance is filmed in Miami of Ohio and Meshworks is a project of where . . . well Miami of Ohio, Justin Katko studied where . . . Miami of Ohio . . . Cathy Wagner is teaching a bunch of Miami students in London for the past couple of summers . . . she is based at . . . Miami of Ohio . . . the OUP Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry was edited by Keith Tuma who is a professor where . . . Miami of Ohio . . . i am writing as a professor teaching where . . . Miami of Ohio . . . i am a Brit poet resident and working here as is John Wilkinson, John Cayley . . . Caroline Bergvall goes back and forth across the Atlantinc several times a year . . . it’s not so much at all about orginary or chosen geography over and above spheres of traditions, influences, affiliations and above all provisional communities.
etcetera
xx
cris
ps watch out for post _ moot 2010 here at Miami and please DO make proposals to us !!
Rich and cris are certainly right that the poets Kent’s talking about do a lot of back and forthing between the US and UK. But let’s not lose his major point, which is that there is still a perceptible barrier between those poets and the US post-avant scene. Sure, there are a few points and channels of connection between them (Rich’s Damn the Caesars being one excellent example) but there are not many. I know everyone has a hard time seeing past the lists, but this other question seems to me the more interesting and provocative part of Kent’s post.
Hey Kent (et al),
I remember that special issue of the Chicago Review, and the running debate between Peter Riley and John Wilkinson in other issues from around that time. My two cents, from back then, are here:
http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2007_04_22_archive.html
And Peter Riley’s reply (in which he tells me I’ve really only got about a cent and a half) is here:
http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2007_05_02_archive.html
Anyway: I agree that the crowd you mention is doing fascinating work. I suppose I follow Peter Riley in taking issue with some of the political claims that some people make for the poetry. Anyway: if anyone’s interested in all that, there’s a piece I wrote on it in the new Cambridge Literary Review.
Enough auto-bibliography. I’m crawling back into bed until this flu has had its way with me.
More later, one way or another…
Bob
Yeah, I’m not one for making lists or naming schools, but it would be interesting if people whose first impulse is to write in to complain about x or y’s exclusion from the list or how the school isn’t really representative of its putative geographical center would pause to consider how predictable & utterly beside the point such responses are.
Robert, thanks for the shout re DTC. And I think cris is right to point toward Miami, OH as one (and arguably the principal) crossroads or site of transatlantic exchange these days — an accomplishment specific to his community (Tuma, Katko, Bill Howe &c).
man, i mention the debate around the title of the CR Brit Po # to suggest the field of cultural / poetic production in the UK is far more diverse and overlapping than the titile of the # indicates — something i think the fifteen reviews and Keith’s notes at the back were intended to balance out. for US readers the # — in a sense a necessary introduction to Brit Po after however many years — obfuscates the variegated character of poetry in the UK. But what the Brit Po # of CR nails head on, for me at least, are the forms of rage, aggression and energy that mark a distinction between British and US po — forms of rage and aggression that, to some extent, exceed the limits of gender (i.e. Sutherland, cris, Bonney, Kruk, Lindsay _and also_ Finlay, Cobbing, Raworth, Griffiths, Maggie O’Sullivan _and also_ Penny Rimbaud, Billy Childish, Attila the Stockbroker, Gary Johnson, Benjamin Zephania, others). on the level of prosody _and_ rhetorical affect a good deal of the British work moves with an order of force not found in US Poetries. And here, in thinking US poetries, maybe we could locate a sort of continuity that cuts across the New York Schools, Lang Po, flarf and a good deal of conceptual writing — viz. the interest so many US poets have taken in irony (masked forms of aggression, an aloofness; work propped up on forms of rage so many so much poetry in the US refuses to disclose; a carefully measured aggression embedded in cool irony or careful critique). i’m thinking in broad strokes here, but Kent’s work seems in strange ways to saddle or synthesize this difference — from Yasusada (if it be) to Lyric Po After Auschwitz to the (other) poems gathered in Homage to the Last Avant-Garde. this to say, there’s a sort of piss and vinegar in a lot of Brit Po we don’t often find in the US _except_ in work from people like Kent — but the aggressive orientation of Kent’s work usually has a clear contemporary target and in the case of aggressive British poetries, rage or aggression (again, often but not always exceeding gender) is embodied in the contour of the work, at the level of affect, prosody, syntactic formations, etc. we could call this “energy” or anything else but for me it’s something more that eludes naming — and it’s maybe this, at least in part, that marks a cultural distance between visible (or even dominant) British and US poetries. this tendency in Brit po — admittedly one among many — has some but not too many kinfolk in the US (Cf. Katko, Tuma — William Howe in connection to Finlay, Furnival, Dom Sylvester Houedard — earlier Dorn, if we look toward his more acerbic work, from, say, Geography forward).
Maybe _this_ difference has something to do with the shitty reception of Brit po or Irish po in the US — along w/ the usual inability, perhaps symptomatic of American exceptionalism, among US poets to see beyond their own neighborhoods or interests. Either way, there are no shortage of people here reading Heaney, Larkin, Hughes, Longley, Muldoon or Walcott. but for Americans it’s also as though the British Poetry Revival never happened, as though anything after the Movement is just a sort of negligible byproduct of British mass culture. (Curiously enough, foundational Birmingham Centre Cultural Studies figures are often given far more attention by US poets than the British Po Revival poets that were contemporary with theorists like Raymond Williams, Hoggart, Hall, Thompson, etc — astounding).
So to respond to the thrust of Kent’s post, the poor reception of Brit Po in the US seems to be articulated with more deeply-seated tendencies in both US and British Po communities — a sort of American exceptionalism on one hand but also deeper cultural differences. As ever, a stab at the matter in broad strokes.
usual haste … rich …
Thanks, Rich, this is great good stuff, and strikes me as more than plausible.
And yes, Bob: you were next on the list of points/channels of connection, but I didn’t want to distract from my point about the distraction of lists with a distracting list of my own. I’m glad you jumped in with your three ha’ pennies, though.
Thinking about Rich’s comment on the not-so-hot reception of various strains of post-Movement Britpo in the U.S. — if I were charged with recommending three sources to someone who wanted to start putting together a picture of the various scenes in the U.K., I’d suggest the Chicago Review Britpo issue, Keith Tuma’s Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, and, for critical essays, Romana Huk and James Acheson’s book Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism. This last one came out in 1996 and, sadly, didn’t get much notice. But it covers a pretty wide range of developments.
I imagine it’s futile to try to point to a single feature that divides U.S. and U.K. experimentalist poetries, with such variety on both sides of the Atlantic. Even Rich’s sense of aggression (a better approach than most) doesn’t quite seem to work, especially when we bring in Ireland. I mean, I don’t think anyone could point to a more relentlessly upbeat and benevolent sensibility than what we see in Randolph Healy’s poetry.
For her part, Roma Huk, in the intro to her book, argues that the main difference lies in an American langpo emphasis on an “authorless” art, vs. a British emphasis on the situated subject. I believed she was right for a couple of years, but as always, the more one reads, the more one’s abstract categories fall to pieces.
Gotta go. Dinosaur Jr.’s on the radio.
Bob
And the forth of the three books I’d suggest is Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars, which deals with the conservative/experimental fracas around the Poetry Society in the 70s, and its aftermath.
You can’t tells ya players without a program.
B.
hey Kent ;-) i was seeking redress on my own account. Just always both get a shot of energy from and have some dread of these formulations . . . especially when it has “new” in the title . . . maybe even more urgently when “school” is mentioned. School is apposite though as i was starting to indicate. For what HAS fueled this new and wonderfully energetic group of poets are diverse schools . . . both of an educationally institutional and more provisionally institutional account. Being back in LOndon, Cambridge, Brighton and Dartington this past summer i was really taken by the proliferation of audience . . an audience of fierce and younger practitioners. Those people have largely emerged from educational grounds. Cambridge as you mention via Prynne, Patterson, Mengham and Milne. London via Redll Olsen’s MA at Royal Holloway (under Robert Hampson’s aegis). London via Jeff Hilson and Peter Jaeger’s crowd at Roehampton. London via Andrea Brady’s patch at Queen Mary’s (home of the Archive of the Now). London via the BIrkbeck scene and Pores etcetera, under Will Rowe and Carol Watts withna lot of urging from Ulli Freer. London via the continuance of Bob Cobbing’s Writer’s Forum under Lawrence Upton and Adrian Clarke’s commitment. Brighton through some of what Keston is getting going there. Dartington under Larry Lynch, out of Caroline Bergvall and John Hall’s vision (Perfrormance Writing there was arguably has the prime significance beyond that which Eric Mottram and Prynne put into motion in London and Cambridge respectively). There is also a scene emerging from what Robert Sheppard is up to at Edge HIll near to LIverpool and Scott Thurston in Salford and Allen Fisher in Crewe (part of Manchester Metropolitan).
I also wonder, worht asking since there are those who say poets in the US don’t have much if any interest in the UK contemporaries . . . whether poets in this re-energised UK scene are very cognisant of the US counterparts and if so who they think they might be?
all interesting stuff.
I guess . . . thanks for starting this ball rolling. However much we might disagree about the game let alone the rules of the game which we might be playing ;-)
xxx
cris
As usual, this discussion is taking place as if Paul Muldoon, Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Logue, & Ciaran Carson (to name just a few of the greatest British & Irish poets now at work) couldn’t possibly have anything worthwhile to contribute.
The cool thing about the Huk/Acheson book is the way it addresses a range — from the figures you mention, Michael, to the figures most people are talking about here. And I’m with you: I’m not keen on factionalism. And when one does some research into the broader history of poetics, you really get a sense that the commonalities of the era are at least as important as the differences. I mean, Cockney School vs. Lake Poets was a big debate at one point, but with a little distance one can see the broader unities of Romanticism as well as the varieties of Romanticism. Seriously. But whenever you say this about contemporary writing, someone gets bent and throws a sock full of cat shit at you (or does that only happen to me? maybe I’m going to the wrong bars).
B.
Huh. I’ll check that book out, Bob, thanks. And yeah, my sense is that anyone’s formulations about contemporary “schools” are mainly of use as indications that something else is going on.
Hi Michael,
well . . . i guess there is simply a rift. I don’t agree that Hill, Muldoon, Logue and Carson (as you say to name but a few) they have nothing to contribute. But they have not to any strong extent been cogent to the work of the poets being talked about here. Nor, frankly, have those poets appeared on the radar, sufficient to warrant praise or even mention, of those being discussed here. So what’s that all about?? I can’t say with certainty. But I do know from experience that the game of parallel traditions and perhaps divisions are played by most if not all. I remember Logue being in the sphere of notice way intol the late 1970s and Hill is still read and discussed, by those i have contact with at least. In fact he is highly regarded. But is the obverse true? Are those four riders taking any notice whatsoever of those Kent and others here have mentioned. I sincerely hope that to be so. It would be great to have some evidence of that. In the hope that you have sources i’m unaware of . . . do you have any idea about that??
Yours . . . writing as one who has all too often smelt the cat shit all over me
xx
cris
As I mention in the second comment, folks like Heaney, Longley, Muldoon (and Hill and Carson) have no shortage of readers in the US (we cld look maybe toward Wakeforest University Press, publishing Carson, John Montague, etc) ——— _but_ most of the poets addressed here outside these heavy-hitting celebrities clearly don’t enjoy such a readership in the US — & i wonder if this isn’t an issue of genre and economic / institutional support, like the distance between a Hollywood Blockbuster (Hill or Heaney) and a Brakhage film (Bergvall or Cobbing). just because one takes pleasure in music and goes to see, say, an anarcho-crust band or Japanese noise ensemble it’s absurd to expect them to also take delight in Celine Dion when she rolls thru town. the same is often the case for poetry. man, in a US context it’s like expecting the same people that take an interest in discussing Berrigan or Dorn to take the same interest in (or responsibly address) Robert Haas, Lyn Lifshin and XJ Kennedy. that’s too much. too much. And after recognizing that Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns was nothing more than a brutally Anglocentric Enoch-Powell-like reposte to Briggflatts that refused to acknowledge Bunting’s accomplishment (and also reproduced the same weird Alfred-worshiping Anglo-Saxonism found in FJ Furnival &c), man, i had no choice but to give that stuff up. (((tho — yo — I do like Muldoon’s Madoc — tho I’d sooner take Southey’s Madoc))).
hasty hugs … rich …
I just wanted to quickly second Rich’s mention of prosody. Attention to prosody distinguishes the work in the British Poetry Issue from much of the work that is being done by published poets of similar ages and politico-aesthetic orientations in the U.S. The idea that one can have an avant-garde poetry that is also prosodically attuned — or, more precisely, that prosody can be the place where radical politico-aesthetic commitments get worked out — is foreign to (though not absent from) the history of vanguardist poetry stateside.
…and attention to prosody is one way to unite an interest in poets like Logue and Muldoon with an interest in Sutherland, Brady, Goode, Manson, etc.
Agreed. This is beside the point and predicable.
But it is as beside the point and predictable as [...] confirming every cliché known to man about pretentious grad students who think they know better than everyone around them?
_Yeah, I’m not one for making lists or naming schools, but it would be interesting if people whose first impulse is to write in to complain about x or y’s exclusion from the list or how the school isn’t really representative of its putative geographical center would pause to consider how predictable & utterly beside the point such responses are._
[Ed. note: My redaction above--you can take the nastiness elsewhere. --rpb]
Hi Rich. It’s *Hass.* I suppose you know this, but he studied at UB. And I’m probably misreading your comment, but I don’t understand the basis for your impression that an interest in Berrigan would necessarily preclude an interest in, say, Allen Tate. (Didn’t stop Berrigan, for example.)
Anyway, just got the new DTC in the mail and I’m looking forward to it.
It might be useful, for purposes of the post’s topic and the unfolding discussion here, to take a look at the Ladkin and Purves introduction to the CR issue (scroll down a bit to find link to PDF):
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/index_53_1.shtml
Kent
Yeah, that’s all we need: to reinforce the absolutely stupid notion that taking an interest in Berrigan or Dorn would preclude taking an interest in Hass—if I were to list only the people I know personally who take an interest in all three of these poets, it would be nearly as long as the original post. What nonsense. Not to mention the idea that Hass, Lifshin, & Kennedy have something essential in common could only derive from a complete ignorance of their work (which is to be cultivated, after all). The ridiculous dismissal of Mercian Hymns is no more deserving of anyone’s attention than Mr. McNamara’s lazy bullshit.
(N.B. I am not suggesting anyone needs to read Lyn Lifshin. It’s lumping her in with either of the others, or lumping Hass & Kennedy in together, that is completely nonsensical.)
>just because one takes pleasure in music and goes to see, say, an anarcho-crust band or Japanese noise ensemble it’s absurd to expect them to also take delight in Celine Dion when she rolls thru town
Yeah. Well. From a musicological perspective, you’d probably find a lot in common between Celine Dion and your hypothetical noise ensemble. I mean, they’re probably backed by the same synthesizers and a lot of the same instrumentation. They’re probably both playing concerts where people sit and listen and clap (a fairly recent historical phenomenon, dating from the nineteenth century). They’re probably all aware of the same system of musical notation. Of course there will be differences (only the Japanese ensemble crowd is likely to care about Merz, and only Celine Dion is likely to know what it’s like to make any money). I mean, the degree of differences we think we see tend to fade a bit with a little perspective. Next time I hang with the people from the music department I’ll ask.
I think I have this argument with someone every six months.
In the meantime, here’s your sock back, Rich. I think you might want to rinse it out.
B.
Oh, I didn’t even notice the Celine Dion thing—how on earth do you arrive at such a weird, crimped view of art? (As it happens there’s a fantastic book devoted to that question—specifically in relation to Celine Dion—by Carl Wilson, called Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.)
I’m supposed to think it’s odd that I enjoy Albert Ayler, Lightning Bolt, Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson, Madonna, Fucked Up, Cecil Taylor, Blut aus Nord, & Black Eyed Peas?? Or Prynne, Raworth, Hass, Muldoon, Clark Coolidge, & Larkin?? Hell, I thought this was the norm.
Celine Dion is one of the sublimest poets of the Sandwich Islands. She is writing up there on Geoffrey’s Hill, & making a mint. Sandwich.
Prosody was invented by the Greeks, who had no sense of rhiththmosth. Celine Dion is better that any old Prosody, I say.
Who’s the greatest Poet in the Earth? Pinwheel Cranberry, I submit. Prove me wrong, Geoffrey!
There is no sleep for the ear that wakes at night,
listening to Celine, at the end of night.
Bon nuit, mon amour.
Man, the point re Japanese noise ensemble and Celine Dion is simply this: the terrain of poetry is broad, as music is broad spatially & temporally, and i don’t think an interest in, say, Bob Cobbing or Alan Halsey _precludes_ an interest in a poet like Hill, Heaney of Logue —- _but_ i don’t think a poet or critic grounded in one should be expected to take a responsible critical interest in the other. Critics (academics) might be responsible for coverage, for having a working familiarity with a particular field, but they’re not expected to have a deep critical interest in both apples _and_ oranges. the difference is between wanting to investigate something outside the scope of your immediate interests and being expected to investigate it.
ain’t throwing socks full of catshit — just not sure where larger names like Hill, Logue, Heaney and Carson fit into this particular conversation (thinking here of Carson’s Belfast Confetti, a poem I like quite a lot and one that addresses rage and aggression but doesn’t really produce it through the texture of its prosody the way Sutherland’s Hot White Andy or Bonney’s Blade Pitch collection do. and in all of these cases its unclear where the language of mastery / genius / greatness fits in. can notions of innate greatness or genius be recuperated at this stage?
hugs … rich …
Rich, you have to explore the recuperation of greatness through Baluchistan. There is no other way, I’m so sorry. The poets of Baluchistan are familiar with the poets of Kyrgizstan, but only tangentially, with respect to the poets of Lake Calhoun. Lake Calhoun, you ask? Well, it’s in Minneapolis - another story entirely.
I would like to explain greatness. It has to do with the shut-down of the electrical grid, this coming Saturday (in Minneapolis). If the Greatness of Poetry is contingent upon the electrical grid, then we have a problem with hypertonics (not to mention prosody).
There is sleep forthcoming, but it will be laundered, chartered, rationed. & this is all to the good. This is the crux of the dilemma, for the poets of the exploratory pungency of which we are familiar with as “schlepdom”, or possible futuristic publication. & for everybody else, too!
Don’t ask me to explain. I’m a famous poet in Minneapolis (there’s a cast bronze cast, of my toenail, eviscerated by regular folks, which is worth its weight in dust - gold dust!!!!).
We don’t. We babble. This is part of our inheritance from good old mother England, or Mom - a special relationship, to be sure!
to clarify, my Celine Dion comment is a response to the following by MR: “As usual, this discussion is taking place as if Paul Muldoon, Geoffrey Hill, Christopher Logue, & Ciaran Carson (to name just a few of the greatest British & Irish poets now at work) couldn’t possibly have anything worthwhile to contribute.”
all of the names mentioned in this comment are heavy-hitting blockbuster celebrity names that have enjoyed their fair share of critical attention in the US — and, i can’t say with certainty, but i don’t get the sense that the poets Kent addresses in his post, or the poets discussed in the comments thread up to this point, have produced work informed by figures like Hill, Logue, Heaney, etc. And appeals to notions of greatness serve more often than not to reinscribe destructive and misleading ideas of biologically essential genius and canonicity (i.e. the belief that the cream of the crop always float to the top and land up in the public eye, anthologies, survey courses, etc). It’s in fact refreshing to encounter conversations in the US around contemporary Brit po that _don’t_ include folks like Hill and Logue because most already do, and the big names are included in critical conversations not because their work displays greatness or mastery but because to a great extent it’s backed by publishing industry muscle.
Michael’s comment suggests that in order to talk about Sutherland or Prynne or Peter Manson we must first acknowledge and kowtow to the “greatness” of a handful of masters, but I’m not sure why this is necessary and I can’t help but see the gesture as a grave disservice to poets like Sutherland, Brady and others under discussion.
hugs … rich …
I understand where you’re coming from better now, Rich, but I still think there’s no point in limiting “the scope of yr immediate interests.” I can’t imagine why a poet would want to exclude either Hill or Halsey. I just can’t. I’ve taught creative writing on & off for twelve years, & literature for even longer, & the main thing I urge on my students is catholicism of taste. Which is not the same as admiring or being interested in everything. I hate Celine Dion, actually, & Lyn Lifshin—but not because they are apples & I like oranges.
All of which is a way of saying that “wanting to investigate something outside the scope of your immediate interests and being expected to investigate it” precisely misses my point, which is that Muldoon and Halsey should be within the scope of a poet’s immediate interest—where “Muldoon” & “Halsey” are markers for poets who are often sloppily assimilated to seemingly antithetical traditions. I don’t “expect” a poet to take an interest in more than one sort of poetry; I don’t consider one who doesn’t worth my time.
(And maybe James McNamara should consider that sometimes pretentious grad students have been teaching & writing for over a decade & are returning later in life than their cohort to earn their doctorates. But I wouldn’t presume to lecture him. Oh wait, yes I would: the identifier “doctoral candidate” does not, in itself, tell you fuck-all about me.)
Michael, how can you hate Celine Dion & be a Catholic? I am right confused, now. Where is the dispensary of taste this evening? Have they also gone on strike? Is there no one of the calibre of Celine Dion, to arise & salute the dawn of this perambulatory discourse?
I actually don’t know what CD sounds like - only her vibrant name encumbers me with fierce emotional ballast. Those eee’s & nnnn’s. Must be the cat in me - the cat from England, named Chauncey. Chauncey D’Leon-Heart (my maternal great-cat-father). I never knew him, but I knew I would have to bring him into this conversation at some point. Meow.
MICHAEL:
I recognize and appreciate what yr saying, tho not sure i agree entirely. My difficulty lies not in expanding or limiting fields of interest, but in creating (or preserving) space for conversations that don’t have to bend to cultural power and accommodate institutionally approved poets. And it’s not that I don’t think they should be discussed (I would never insist on this), but that we shouldn’t be required to discuss them when addressing poets beyond the pale of the success folks like Heaney or Hill enjoy.
Alright. On the east coast. To bed before HG winds up through the witching hour.
hugs … rich …
Yeah, I get the desire to preserve such a space (although I don’t agree that “bending to cultural power” is the only reason for talking about more established poets in that space)—I wish Tom Pickard’s work were better known, for instance. His exclusion from conversations about British poetry that assume that Muldoon, Heaney, Hill, & other prize-winners are the only poets worth talking about is the obverse of the tendency I was rather stridently decrying here—although more insidious insofar as the power relations are not symmetrical. But obviously I’m more likely to be having conversations with people who assume that Muldoon isn’t worth reading or discussing because he’s successful, with institutional credibility & a string of awards to his name. There are divisions & asymmetries in English-language poetry. I just don’t think it helps to abet them rather than trying to understand them in their complexities.
As a voyeur and/or participant in the conversations around U.S./British coterie poetics since 1993, I have seen the same resentments reproduced again and again, to comic effect. “Bending to cultural power” etc. It’s a truism that the very poets who claim the privileges of speaking only to the very sophisticated (Adorno devotees, for instance, or…google translation engine fanatics) are surprised/offended that they are not widely appreciated. It’s the curse of the superior class, my friends.
I’m with Michael, who might have mentioned that Muldoon’s success comes despite his reputation for difficulty, abstruseness and erudition. And conversely, the qualities that make him *readable* in comparison to other difficult, abstruse and erudite poets we might mention — qualities like regular rhyme, or, um, regular syntax? — are wielded as purposefully as any mask. I mean: here’s a poet who’s using prosody as a *subterfuge* every bit as much as a Cambridge poet uses prosody as a subterfuge, but the latter uses it to alienate readers and the former uses it to get more readers. In that difference we may divine a whole worldview, but also, I’m afraid to say, a temperament.
Touche. I say, cosset your inner Dame Templeton, O.B.E., & let the reader go hang. Cheers, blokes!
I find myself sympathetic to both sides of the argument underway. I’ve always been, as Michael is, for a catholicity of taste (my own favorite poets, though I can only read them indirectly, happen to be the from the late Tang and Sung!). But it’s obviously true, too, that differences and competitions of linguistic mode/address have institutional sources and contexts that are just as real as poems themselves, as Rich is arguing. That’s always the bigger, framing backdrop to “catholicity.” (This is a rather banal point with which I’m sure Michael would agree, though no doubt he could phrase it more elegantly.)
Ultimately, insofar as the question of an effective “avant-garde” practice goes, the matter of textual “style” and “form” is only one part of the picture. Here in “post-avant” U.S., it’s pretty much seen as the only one. One thing that attracts me about the new Brits is that they seem to have a greater sense that the issues of a poetic politics are larger than that. Not that there isn’t much more that we need to imagine, insofar as the “possible” goes…
I just noticed that Ange Mlinko has weighed in. Great to see her join the exchange.
Yes, Muldoon is heaped with honors, for, forsooth, he shrouds deepening layers of moral-intellectual complexity beneath the facade of a facile yappy twit - but that’s the pop style these days…. just dandy!
Got it, got it, got it. I no longer believe that RIch threw a sock full of cat shit in my direction, or any other. Which brings me to the following question: which one of you is responsible for throwing that sock of cat shit at me while my back was turned to write on the board? Come on, fess up. Detention for all of you until the culprit steps forward.
Professor Fuddlesworth Archambeau
St. Edwin’s Academy for the Depraved
Also, Ange Mlinko gets a gold star.
AM wrote: “It’s a truism that the very poets who claim the privileges of speaking only to the very sophisticated (Adorno devotees, for instance, or…google translation engine fanatics) are surprised/offended that they are not widely appreciated. It’s the curse of the superior class, my friends.”
Sorry, but this and several other comments are just a weird and willful misreadings of a passing disagreement that’s already generated way too much (embarrassing) attention. As I say, in clear and simple language, the point: I don’t understand why one must acknowledge the “greatest” poets now working if one is discussing poetry not (formally) recognized as such. It really is a simple point that’s been weirdly distorted — and it was a point made in passing. AM’s comment doesn’t respond to this at all, at least not in any clear way.
And again, is “greatness” even an operative category anymore? Seriously.
out for the day … rich …
I think I’m generally on the side of the Anges here (sorry), and she’s absolutely right to point out that Muldoon is no Billy Collins. I also come down hard on the side of catholicity. But I don’t think she’s right that the new Cambridge types use *prosody* to alienate readers. I can see how you’d say that about someone like Seidel, or conversely about someone who pays no attention to prosody at all, thus breaking the ears of anyone who can’t help but hear the way words bang together. But I’d say that the prosody of a poem like “Hot White Andy” is one of it’s most seductive qualities. It’s true that this became much more obvious once I heard Keston read the thing–he performs the piece so that you really get a sense of the wide prosodic range he’s working–but I don’t think that ruins the point. I’m sure not a few Muldoon appreciators picked up his sound only after hearing him read. And wasn’t it Vendler who said she never got Ashbery until she heard him read out loud? All of which is not to say that new Cambridge poems aren’t alienating–they are, by effect, and, I expect, by design–only that prosody, by and large, is not the instrument of that alienation.
Parenthetical note 1: has anyone noticed this discussion concerning Paul Muldoon is taking place under the mantle of a Union Jack?
Parenthetical note 2: My argument (admittedly banal) was never against catholicity. (perhaps I can clarify this with an analogy that can be easily misread: If someone is giving a 20 minute talk on Lorine Niedecker, please don’t expect them to devote 10 of those minutes to situating Niedecker in relation to Emily Dickinson. This is a disservice to Niedecker.)
Parenthetical note 3: (concerning prosody that “alienates”): a wonderful quote from Bunting: “Readers are not what one writes for after one’s got rid of the cruder ambitions.”
Rich, on (1), I don’t get why it’s any more ironic than for any of the others, whose shoulders also itch under said mantle. Muldoon’s a British citizen, right? Or has Condé Nast started issuing passports?
Interesting conversation here. Debates about Catholicity aside (it doesn’t seem as though anyone actually disagrees)– I’d like to register deep interest in RO’s insightful remarks about rage and (as?) poetic force. May I quote myself? Very well then, I quote myself– speaking of a period style in American poetry of the (loosely speaking) experimental kind:
“[I]ts typical affect …plumbs the rageful humor of the humiliated person; its general stance might be called systemic helplessness—the commitment of passion and intelligence to giving accounts of the self as an abject flowering of “mechanick rules.””
With Owens’s distinction in mind, though, I’d slice that more finely, to distinguish flavors of rage– the active and outwardly directed sort wielded against humiliation by many of the British poets under discussion vs. the (barely) sublimated, passive agressive or ironized sort I had in mind when I wrote that sentence.
I’ve been reading this rage not just or even primarily as a political affect, but as a theoretical one– an impassioned response to an account of the self as constitutively unfree (a determinism for which particular social formations take the hit). Does this seem plausible? And if so, what accounts for the difference in the explicitness with which such feelings are expressed? National temperament can’t be right. The role that Marxism plays (explicit and theorized vs. implicit or unrealized) in mediating what is fundamentally an ontological account seems closer.
Bobby: I’m actually more concerned with the second parenthetical note that addresses the assumption that I’m somehow opposed to catholicity, inclusion, etc.
But Muldoon is presently in Jersey, right? His national identity, as Steve McCaffery has said of himself, is something of a triple negativity. Is Muldoon still a British subject or is he now a US citizen? Anyhow, yes, according to the books all citizens born in Northern Ireland are British subjects.
@Rich, sounds good, but as OI says, I don’t think there’s much real disagreement on the catholicity point. I read your earlier comment in the same way MR did, but once you explained what you were driving at, my sense of a yawning gap vanished.
@OI: Very interesting. I want to think on it a bit, but my first-blush response is that the political really is the ground of rage, and that to seek it out in the self’s unfreedom is digging too deep. At least if you want to explain the rage that’s common to these two (US UK) poetries. It seems to me a rage (whether ironized or no) directed at human malice and stupidity (the apotheosis of which, for both traditions, was GWB/DC), not at the onotological limits of the human.
Something I’ve wondered about for a while is whether the UK poets’ insistence on our (big plural first-person, there) complicity in various political horrors is not just an attempt at honest reckoning (though that too) but also a way to judo one’s own political disenfranchisement into a (debased, but real) feeling of political efficacy.
It’s a fair cop. I’ve been known to dig.
But let me try it this way. You can burn tinder or you can burn sawdust marinated in nitroglycerin. Both will light under the right circumstances; either can start a conflagration. But one is primed for the occasion before there is an occasion. That is something like the role I take what I’m unhappily calling ontological humiliation to play here. It‘s not that there is no worldly provocation to anger; I’m not suggesting that poetry born of political rage is somehow misdirecting energies better spent on revising one’s account of the self. But I think that certain accounts of the self have a multiplier effect on intensity and (maybe more problematically) a constraining effect on imaginable subject matter, available tone, and (most problematically) conceptual scope.
[A more abstract but perhaps more familiar version of part of this argument might circle around the question of whether Marx (or, perhaps more apropos, Adorno) is making a historical argument or a theological one.]
Re parenthetical notes 1 & 3: Isn’t it odder to be invoking *Bunting* in a discussion of “politically aggressive” poetry (nationality aside)? Wouldn’t BB have dismissed that as any sort of criterion for, as he put it, “permanent poetry?”
(And besides, he also said: Don’t listen to the poet. Which I take to mean that I should look at his poems, not his remarks — and his poem was “Briggflatts,” not “A.” Vis-a-vis “the reader,” that says something.)
Bobby, I can see what you mean about the seductive qualities — in the performance. There is a prosody on the page, though, isn’t there? It always seemed to me there’s a split-second, when you face any page, in which your brain is determining how much *work* this particular page will be. And it definitely has to do with the interaction between content and method (=prosody, for me at least).
I often find it helps to sniff the glue in the binding during that split-second determination. Big problem for e-texts.
oddly enough, Bunting’s the ideal character to appeal to in discussing politically aggressive poetry for a wide range of good reasons. I think he would agree with Michael Palmer’s statement from the Flower of Capital: “Politics seems a realm of power and persuasion that would like to subsume poetry … under its mantle for whatever noble or base motives. Yet if poetry is to function — politically — with integrity, it must resist such appeals as certainly as it resists others.” Paul Muldoon’s “Meeting the British,” as just one example, is not really a poem that resists such appeals ——- > that is, the poems more concerned with what it says than the problem of saying itself (or what it claims rather than how claims are made). the same is the case for many of the other poems (tho his long poem Madoc is an especially more complicated work).
In the case of Bunting, he contradicted himself often (he talked a lot _about_ poetry for someone that insisted we only attend to poems) but aspired to maintain some fidelity to his belief that “the meaning is in the music” — the meaning is not in the said but the manner of saying, not in any sort of (political?) statement but in the prosody and the broader architecture of the poem.
As for rage and aggression, I don’t think anyone was talking about “politically aggressive poetry” as such (like, what, maybe Philip Levine or something). Bobby’s suggestion (which I think he couches as a speculative statement) was that the political is the ground of rage (and I don’t think he means political as in left or right or poets writing about coal miners — I think this sense of the political is in line with someone like Jacques Ranciere or, as in the statement above, Michael Palmer.
If, as Bunting insists, the meaning is in fact in the music then this might have something to do with why a good deal of this conversation is given to questions concerning prosody and not what we think the poems are claiming, saying, etc in some sort of seemingly transparent way.
I imagine the thing to do might be to scan a handful of poems — but I think the ability to rigorously scan a poem is an endangered art (and this is one of the things I admire in Helen Vendler’s otherwise nutty criticism, or IA Richards — they had the ability to responsibly investigate prosody — and of course Prynne’s 2001 essay on Wordsworth attends to the formal construction of Tintern Abbey in a an especially wonderfully way.
Ange, you claim Cambridge School prosody alienates while Muldoon’s invites readers, but this claim is clearly connected to the old old debate around issues of accessibility (or why poetry no longer has a popular readership). My sense is that there’s room for both (if these categories are in fact viable; if two such poetries really do exist) — but, to add to this, Anthony Easthope and others have (convincingly for me) argued that the choice of meter is an ideological decision that, even and especially when a poem is _not_ overtly political, determines the deeper political orientation of that poem. And it’s this that I think Sutherland’s prosody responds to, this deeper political character of the poem. Here the meaning of the poem really is in the music and the music is always already deeply political.
> this claim is clearly connected
Maybe, but at an odd angle — Muldoon’s allusions real and nonce alike bear only a family resemblance to the accessibility described by say Ted Kooser…
I hear Muldoon on the page as clearly as I hear anyone now writing—I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Bobby.
Oren, couldn’t the sublimation or ironization of rage you (I think rightly) diagnose be an effect of the very amorphousness of the determinations it is directed against? Rage against the machine is one thing, rage against transcendental signifiers or ISA’s another—the whole point of the theories that posit such mechanisms is that their effects are so widely & intricately distributed that they’re invisible. Thus the rage they inspire must be hard to articulate?
P.S. I took the Union Jack to be an ironic marker, but I also imagine it might make Muldoon’s (or Carson’s) blood boil. Or, hell, the Cambridge poets’. I sure don’t want a discussion of my poetry taking place beneath the stars & stripes. Although I would love to see a discussion of my poems in Stars & Stripes.
@OI Yeah, I’d never want to deny that ontological frustrations feed political rage. And this seems true:
certain accounts of the self have a multiplier effect on intensity and (maybe more problematically) a con straining effect on imaginable subject matter, available tone, and (most problematically) conceptual scope
What made me resist your earlier comment was my sense that any account of the self that’s worth talking about sees it (the self) as “constitutively unfree” in some way or other. Locating rage in a response to that unfreedom doesn’t seem specific enough to get you to the distinct flavor of rage that you find in the poetries we’re talking about.
I’ve been writing about Dante and the corruption of the Church all morning, and there are interesting parallels to your question in that case, but I’m going to have to come back to those.
@Ange: Yes, absolutely I recognize that moment. But I don’t think it’s the best way to judge a prosody. I very clearly remember the time I first looked into The Descent of Alette and my brain said, no way we’re reading three million quotation marks. But we did, and what’s more, we found the rhythm of the thing to our liking.
@MR: I’m not arguing that Muldoon isn’t alive on the page. Only that I could imagine someone being helped in picking up his rhythms by hearing him read. Which is all my way of answering the last part of Ange’s comment and arguing that at least some of what people attribute to Keston’s performance of HWA is actually on the page, though we might not recognize it until we hear him read it. This obviously makes things sound neater than they really are–I realize it’s a very complex process that gets a poem from ink on the page to a sound in our inner ear.
Also, quickly, OI: I wonder how far yr distinction extends or where it breaks down. How describe the rage, for instance, of Celan? We’re so used to framing the Holocaust in ontological or even theological terms that we can forget it was (also) political. And yet this political event exceeds, for Celan & probably for anyone, what language can be directed against. Irony & sublimation seem as characteristic of some political rage as of what you’re calling theoretical rage, is what I’m saying.
Somehow Kent’s lively clarion call got lost in the debates over where everybody is on the GPS radar, whether it’s straight PR (or bent), who’s the most readable, & various other theoretical cruxes.
I’d like to refer back to the basic point of his message : there’s some stuff happening over in England that makes THEM look like the upstart colonials - role-reversal, for sure. More political, more engaged, more intellectual, energized, independent… all that stuff.
Kent is a wonder of a rabble-rouser & instigator : he’s… he’s… an enthusiast. I like that.
& yet… oh, heck. My reservations : there’s a parallel between the commentary of R. Archambeau (on his blog on this topic) & the comments of A. Mlinko, which has to do with the underlying stance. It’s not so much the prosody, it’s the rhetoric - & what that has to say about the underlying impulse.
There is the sense that righteous indignation, furious disavowal, is the default, ordinary, normative position of the contemporary poetickal conscience. I find this rather baroque. It becomes more baroque when it instills a mannerism of continual disturbance : thus the performative shock-prosody of K. Sutherland meets the un-performative nuggets of allegory (the allusive-alienation echo-effect) in J. Prynne.
Poems are always trying to balance between transitive expression & intransitive unity (finish, wholeness, aesthetic harmony). It’s unfathomably difficult (rhetorically, prosodically, stylistically, & down every other -alley). “Political aggression” here tends to trip over its own glowing coals.
It seems to me that poetry will not, at some level, ALLOW itself to be “used” for conscientious purposes. Conscience is too scrupulous to sell itself short.
The stance of righteous wrath slips all too readily into coterie elitism. One of the consequences of democracy, that evil system, is that each & all have to recognize their own personal responsibility for everything their patch of God’s lil’ acre finds itself stumbling into doing.
One of the cornerstones of the Socratic notion of wisdom is the value of mutual understanding, fostered through dialogue, clarity of expression. & this has something to do with the stance the poet takes toward expressive means. “Speech! Speech!”
>P.S. I took the Union Jack to be an ironic marker, but I also imagine it might make Muldoon’s (or Carson’s) blood boil. Or, hell, the Cambridge poets’. I sure don’t want a discussion of my poetry taking place beneath the stars & stripes.
Well, I asked Bobby to put the flag upside down. It is, but it doesn’t quite work like with the stars and stripes.
Kent
Rich: Well, we *were* talking about “politically aggressive” poetry actually; I lifted the phrase right from Kent’s post, where he characterizes the new British gang repeatedly, and admiringly, as “political.” I agree about Madoc vs. Meeting the British, but I think the problem has less to do with “poems more concerned with what it [sic] says than the problem of saying itself” than that the pressure brought to bear on the language was a bit light. In fact the things you say here — that poems should be more concerned with how than what’s said; the Michael Palmer quote — have, for me, become utterly reified. (It was a great tonic to that to read Allen Grossman’s essay on Milton and political poetry in _The Long Schoolroom._) I’m all for multi-valency, but this sort of thing has led to a lot of blandness in recent decades (see: American Hybrid). And it smacks of a rule: no transparency. Well, there are no rules. There is no algorithm.
Which brings me to another algorithm: the shockingly reductive “the choice of meter is an ideological decision that, even and especially when a poem is _not_ overtly political, determines the deeper political orientation of that poem.” It’s a wonder I got a night’s sleep after reading that, and a nice reminder of why I’m not a Marxist. As I implied briefly before, there are a variety of subterfuges available to the poet who wants to overthrow convention, but drawing this kind of line in the sand is just something a rationalist, not a poet, would do. I truly wonder what Bunting, with his dedication to the four-beat line of English poetry, would make of a correspondence between music and “political orientation.”
Anyway, if Bunting contradicted himself often as you say, we could have a field day with our competing versions of the man. I know very well *what* he said about the music of the poem but that his own poetry so closely hews to his experience — and that he took command of the conventional rhetorical devices available to him as well as the prosodic, indeed making rhetoric part of the prosody — serves as the greater lesson to me as a poet.
MR helpfully points out that “accessibility” is not exactly the issue here. I don’t use that word. What I do concern myself with (and others may not) is with is a poet’s generosity or lack of it toward more-or-less agreed-upon conventions for communication and sympathy in the language: certain things in poetry I really love — humor, for one — are impossible without them. (I won’t pretend to be more generous than I really am either — real generosity would be writing poems that didn’t make my parents feel stupid, you know? There are actually other people in the world besides poets).
There really is room for several kinds of poetry as you say (actually, you said “both” as if there were clearly 2 kinds). This thread is so dense I’ve forgotten who said that a future perspective will probably reveal much similarity between our best practitioners, of whatever school. I believe that. And as for scanning, sure, bring it on — but I can’t believe that a person’s meter would reveal anything more than their (hopefully, complex) poetic affiliations.
@BB: Prosody later — I’ve gone on long enough.
@RA: Thanks for the gold star!
I’m enjoying (enjoyed?) this discussion a lot. Maybe some of you have seen this already . . . but some interesting “British” and “Irish” innovative poetry in this special issue of Past Simple here:
http://www.pastsimple.org/
hm . . . British, Irish, innovative, and special . . . .
I’m all for voices from the Milky Way . . . .
But certainly not in favour of Celine Dion and so on . . . unless of course she is framed differently . . . it’s about the framing right?
ANGE:
I split the field into “both” kinds of po b/c i was referring to the opposition you set up in yr earlier comment between Cambridge (an institution that isn’t the monolith we often imagine) and Muldoon. And I’m not so sure that believing the choice one makes regarding meter is an ideological decision (if one consciously chooses at all; many don’t these days) is as reductive or dogmatic as it might first sound — tho i’m a little too bleary-eyed at the moment to hash the argument out adequately.
I do believe, however, that Bunting’s decision to rely on the double-helix-like structure of the sonata for his long poems (save Chomei) and especially his decision to adapt the interlacing patterns found in the Lindisfarne Gospels were _deeply_ political decisions, and these are choices that aren’t easily (or responsibly) read through an idea of the aesthetic outside the totalizing prison yard of the political. Bunting was just as fond of ballads and other forms typically identified with an idea of “the folk” as he was the sonata structure (aside: have you heard him read Briggflatts to Scarlatti? Christ). ditto for Helen Adams’ commitment to the ballad form. these are not merely choices made within the frame of an aesthetic realm that resides outside the filthy mitts of power.
The saying/said split is nothing more than the form/content dialectic in ragged clothes —- this much is clear, right? This too is just too huge a topic to adequately address here — but the saying/said split I raise is connected to the Cambridge (alienating) / Muldoon (inviting) antagonism you introduced earlier — to whom is are Cambridge poetries alienating? And to whom is Muldoon inviting? If the work is inviting is in large part because Muldoon doesn’t challenge in any foundational way how the poem offers what its information. (And here I would simply say that Muldoon’s poetry performs differently than the Cambridge folk. I wouldn’t say it’s better or worse, greater or lesser, alienating or inviting, but that it’s simply doing a different sort of work, it’s performing differently.
This insistence on a split between alienating and inviting poetries is also an old old argument — food for Wolfgang Iser and his reader-response ilk. If fundamentally reconfiguring the way a poem says rather than simply what it says (which is what I believe Sutherland, Bonney and others are doing) is somehow alienating, then what do we recognize as inviting — and, again, to whom are these poetries inviting?
run through … rich …
Many of the poets mentioned in the above posts can be read at onedit.net. Do call by and take a look. I imagine quite a few of the poets (particularly in onedit #13) will be new to many readers. It is great to be a poet in the UK at the moment.
I’m new here. Forgive my ignorance, but can avantgarde poetry be political? Is it political? Was it ever? etc.
Perhaps we need to split the thread into several posts? There’s lots that is of interest here.
Rich — My initial impulse wasn’t to propose an opposition but to show a possible conjuncture, actually.
I’m aware it’s an old argument, whether avant-garde practices are alienating or not — I began my first comment with the observation that I’ve watched these questions go round & round since the early ’90s. And you too echo Bernstein ca. 1992 when you ask the old (purely rhetorical) questions, “inviting/alienating to whom?” I’m just not going there anymore: it’s like arguing with a fundamentalist. I know that sounds awful, but I don’t know what else compares to this post-structuralist “we make our own reality” mindset.
The other thing is that when you make claims for Bunting being “deeply political” you are being completely vague. Did you just set up an opposition between Paterian aestheticism and “the political?” That is such a straw man, in the first place. In the second place, you have to look long and hard for any mention of the political per se in Bunting’s lectures. I do not doubt that an entire stance toward reality can be inferred from Bunting’s lectures (or, as mentioned, from one’s meters). He was too brilliant not to have that. But to extrapolate from that and call it “political” is to do a lot of violence to the man who said “Poetry and music are both patterns of sound drawn on a background of time. That’s their origin, and their essence. Whatever else they may become, whatever purpose they may sometimes serve, is secondary.” Bunting meant that. I do not think you quite know what you mean when you use the word “political.”
I hope I’m not being awfully sharp. I just wish things would move forward.
Peace,
A
“Poetry and music are both patterns of sound drawn on a background of time. That’s their origin, and their essence. Whatever else they may become, whatever purpose they may sometimes serve, is secondary.”
However irrelevant it may be to this zippy debate, I just want to register my disagreement with this statement.
Poetry is (in one simple sense) measured speech; but by setting speech to measure we are not necessarily turning words into music. The measured word is distinct from music (though they also share an affinity). The word (in poetry) is patterned, but this does not make “pattern”, nor “sound”, nor “time” its essence. The word is still the word, & the essence of poetry (if you have to have one) is the word itself. Poetry is language INTENSIFIED by measure.
Per OI’s suggestion, I’d be glad to add a couple of posts to handle these branching conversations, but I’m afraid of losing folks in the transition. So if you want a new thread, call out the subject, promise you’ll be the first commenter, and I’ll set it up.
ANGE:
No worries re yr comments — not too sharp at all. And I agree with you re Bunting’s strange sense of the political, or his reluctance to frame his work or readings of others as political. (trying to sketch this out while feeding mashed carrots to my 4 mo old — in dire need of a HAZMAT suit).
Bunting’s like the old man that doesn’t want to talk politics and then goes on to forcefully address for an hour why he voted for so-and-so and why he crashed the local school-board meeting. It’s been a while since I read the Newcastle lectures, but there are certain claims he makes that stand out — particularly his insistence that Wordsworth is a Northern poet that can’t properly be read aloud in a “Southron” accent. Inasmuch as this is one among many gestures toward recimagining canonicity and shifting the center of the UK literary landscape northward, I take this is a deeply political gesture. I also take the whole of the Newcastle lectures as an attempt to radically reconfigure the (a) canon, a gesture that privileges an idea of Anglophone poetry over, say, American or English poetry. For Bunting considering the regionally-specific textures of language are central to an idea of cultural (and political) justice and for him the work of poetry is articulated with a struggle against the hegemony of Received Pronunciation — in diction, syntax, inflection, etc. We can also look toward his edition of collier poet Joseph Skipsey’s poems (1976), or the support he offered poets like Tom Pickard and others constellated around the Newcastle scene. for Bunting (as later for Pickard, MacSweeney &c) the tensions between the North and South were real, lived and invariably political — and Bunting’s addressed these concerns not only in his criticism but at the level of form in his own work. As you mention, he would never outwardly recognize or frame his work as political in this way — that would somehow sully it for him and, like Michael Palmer, he would resist the call to the political, resist the call to instrumentalize his work and throw it in the service of some sort of cause —- and it’s precisely for this reason that I think the field of the political in Bunting can be difficult to locate, but it’s there, he’s aware of it and he responds to it.
It’s also worth noting that later in life — especially as he moved toward 1968 — he devoted more time in correspondence to Pound, Zukofsky, Jonathan Williams and others to the thinking about the 1926 General Strike and his having lived through it (to some extent participated in it) — so his already weirdly complex sense of the political shifts across time (maybe a break occurs when he returns to the North in 53, after Mosaddeq is deposed).
It really is hard to hash out with Bunting — and I agree that he would kick and scream at any mention of the political in relation to his work — but, like the old man that says politics are trouble, a sense of the political still governs his work, world view and sense of the literary landscape.
hugs … in haste … rich …
I’m going to put up a brief post later today dealing with the proposition that “the choice one makes regarding meter is an ideological decision,” if that’s OK. Mostly to open up a space for discussion.
[Excellent, thanks. --rpb]
Nice to see the blog “ping” on new post re: this discussion at Pierre Joris’s Nomadics just now.
I love this back and forth between Ange and Rich– Time to go back to Bunting! Great stuff.
Though I was curious about something Ange said in a response to Rich, and right after I read it I got an email from a poet in UK who raised the same question I had:
Ange wrote, “And you too echo Bernstein ca. 1992 when you ask the old (purely rhetorical) questions, “inviting/alienating to whom?”
And I wonder why this would be a “rhetorical” query? To draw from what my correspondent said, Rich’s is actually an *empirically minded* question of the sort that drove Bourdieu’s sociology and, arguably, a completely necessary riposte to the conservative management of poetics by people who imagine that they’re qualified to speak on behalf of a sensitive and vulnerable readership.
But onward. And just to second Tim Atkins’s comment on his superb onedit. And fabulous remarks by Oren Izenberg, too, and lots of others.
Hey, is Digital Emunction one of the most interesting (though I know how bothersome a term that can be, I use it too much, I admit) blog in poetry sphere right now, or what?
Kent
I dont know if is a bit late now to join this list of comment but here goes:
I respect the dynamism and poetics of many of the poets mentioned on Johnson’s list and laud his effort at getting more attention in the US to the rich and critical poetries that exist in the UK, but I just need to put in a word here (I know cris cheek has already done so) for those other New Brats. A bunch of also fiercely engaged poets who have emerged from the communautarian impulse and material practices of ao. Bob Cobbing, and who in diverse fashion (Fisher, O’Sullivan, Monk, Sheppard,…), and often with an explicit angling towards performance and performativity, have helped shape a younger gen of very strong and interconnected array of poets (some of whom are on Johnson’s list but cannot claim Prynnian connection, and some altogether not on the list).
Very best Caroline
I think I actually don’t disagree with Rich, but I also think he might not mean exactly what he typed when he typed this:
“the choice of meter is an ideological decision that, even and especially when a poem is _not_ overtly political, determines the deeper political orientation of that poem.”
You know, I too believe that prosody matters, and that one of the many ways it matters is in terms of ideology. But I don’t think anyone would argue that these two lines, written in the same meter, have the same political import:
“God save the king”
vs.
“God damn the king”
Both of these consist of a spondee followed by an iamb. But it would be weird to the point of bullheadedness to insist that the prosody alone determines their ideology. I mean, the effects of a line are determined by many cross-currents (prosody being one, imagery another, reference or lack of reference another, and of course the context of reception plays into it, among many other things). And when we get beyond one line, we’re really getting into some complexity.
Of course I’m being a bit of a jerk here. But I do mean it when I say that I doubt anyone — including Rich — really believes that it is meter that DETERMINES ideology. But when we say things like ” “the choice of meter is an ideological decision that … determines the deeper political orientation of that poem,” perhaps a little incautiously, it’ll lead to a lot of disagreement and gnashing of teeth.
I mean, I think Rich probably means that meter is ONE OF the things that determines ideology. (If I’m wrong, I can live with that, but it does mean that Rich and I see things differently).
(Ideology, of course, is only one of the things that matter about a poem).
Best,
Bob
Does meter determine ideology?
Depends on how you pronounce “ideology”.
I believe in most cases it’s a pyrrhic-dactylic political superstructure.
BOB:
Yr right — not meter or prosody alone but an overdetermined complex of factors are at play in the political character of a work — & here it might be useful to think about the turn to the subsemantic in Bob Cobbing, Steve McCaffery & others — from voice box to xerox investigations of meaning, ideology, community, etc.
Grateful too to see Caroline Bergvall reorient the discussion toward poets working in the 70s, 80s, 90s. I don’t think we can really think Sean Bonney or Frances Kruk without also thinking abt Cobbing’s Writers Forum — and there’s the persistently understated influence of Mottram too as critic & poet (I think the 1973 conference at London Polytechnic was a particularly important transatlantic moment). I really am ass out when it comes to responsibly thinking performance based work, huge then & now in the UK — I maybe it would help to think about prosody through performance (i.e. Maggie O’Sullivan, Bergvall herself, Cobbing, cris cheek thru to, say, Peter Manson, Jow Lindsay, Sutherland, Bonney &c
& someone on the Miami U Brit Po listserv mentioned Sophie Robinson who — along w/ Marianne Morris, Emily Critchley &c — should be included in this conversation. &, as Eric mentions above, it’s worth pointing out that Matt Chambers published 17 of these folks back in the 2007 # of Pilot (this amazing mag gone; now the stuff of legend).
hugs … rich …
Michael’s prosody post is up now, so maybe we can fork some of this discussion that way? I’m going to copy a few of these comments above over there…
The prosody of god save is not the same as the prosody of god damn — unless you ignore vowel color aka duration — which many poets do.
I see what you mean, Jordan. In the end no two phrases have identical prosodic patterns. And the same sentence spoken differently can be metered differently, for sure.
But I still think “God damn” is not unreasonably called a spondee (though you could really hit that “damn” if you want — I’ve heard the phrase as an iamb with a dipthong in that second vowell). And I sang “God Save the Queen” every damn day in school in Canada — enough to know we hit those two opening syllables of the first line evenly enough for the spondee label to apply.
So it’s close enough for government work, isn’t it? (Of course I work for a private institution, so maybe I should step it up).
Best,
ROBert ARchamBEAU
/u /u/ (that last stress is lighter than the others, by the way) (But in Quebec it’s more like uu/, with very light stress differentiations).
Bob Archambeau wrote:
>And I sang “God Save the Queen” every damn day in school in Canada —
Archambeau’s a Canadian?!
Man, now things are *really* getting confusing…
There hasn’t been much government work for poetry since the Jubilee, but there hasn’t been much writing about color (unless I missed something in Attridge?) since then either. And for good reason — almost impossible to talk about it without sliding into tabulation and/or pedantry. But music criticism barely ever talks about *music* either, right?
Archambeau’s a Canadian who was born in Providence, Kent. I was not the midwife, let me tell you. & I believe he’s thinking of moving to Chicago someday. That makes him quite British, or Scottish, hactually, in my humble view [chuff chuff].
Caroline, are the poets you want added to Kent’s list as aggressivly political? Cobbing may have been, but is Monk, for eg.?
Hi guys. I feel like exactly the kind of person you probably don’t want here, but I’m struck by one thing at least - & I’ll comment here rather than on the new thread as my response comes out of this whole debate. I think prosody, rather than *determining* ideology, can be a tool - one tool - for *expressing* it.
Bang! There, I said it. and in so few words.
I think it’s this kind of prescriptive, reductive and frankly ideological thinking that makes so many people (who are otherwise deeply interested in language and meaning) suspicious of the kinds of poetry under debate here. I’ve just read a hell of a lot of “which side are you on, boys,” which many of us in the UK (though admittedly not from the Cambridge School) are trying to break down as being in the best interests of the art form. But here you all are, debating seriously that ridiculous Celine Dion remark - which I read as being based solely in some idea that once you are “famous” you’re “part of the Establishment” or something. Hardly a worthy attitude for a serious practitioner. In fact, it’s real teenage stuff, this idea that you can only be *serious* if you’re an *outsider*. (Who decides who’s out and who’s in? It’s kind of like the way the rich guy is always the guy with just a bit more money than you.)
The thing both these points have in common is that they are both about externally imposed ideological orthodoxies, and not poetry.
I know I’m only exposing my Otherness here but I do have a friend or two on this list so thought I’d venture. (Also, you badly need more girls.)
Oops, I left out the word “Not” in “as being not in the best interests of the art form.”
And of course I meant I’d been reading the “which side are you on boys” here, on this thread.
I just wonder, and I’m being serious here, about this them-n-us mentality. My own reading is wide and is based on interest, not on orthodoxy. someone above mentioned Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars, saying you need a “programme” to “know the players.” This sounded to me dangerously like a reliance on established opinion, orthodoxy, old arguments.
Surely in our post-fascist era we’re suspicious of barricades and ideological thinking?
Oh! Hey. I’m the guy who mentioned Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars. I don’t think one needs to choose sides (in fact, I’m pretty suspicious of that sort of thing) — but I was thinking about books an American reader could use to get a sense of the recent history of different kinds of poetry in the U.K. Peter’s book is pretty good for that.
Bob
Ms. Baroque,
I’m confused by a few things in your comment, so maybe you can help me.
First, what gives you the idea that you’re the “kind of person” we don’t want here? I like it when lots of people participate, regardless of their kind and no matter if we disagree or not.
No one is defending “us-vs-them” reading–quite the contrary. As OI says somewhere way up there, I think everyone (among the commenters, at least) more or less agrees with you that catholicity of taste is a good thing, and that becoming über-famous does not render one unserious or anything like that.
Rich’s point, which is a fair one, is that the big guys get enough air time already, and that it’s therefore not at all absurd to restrict a conversation to people who aren’t getting as much air time. It doesn’t mean that you deny the big guys exist, only that you hold off talking about them for some other time.
On your prosody point, I’d be interested in hearing more about this over in the other thread:
I think prosody, rather than *determining* ideology, can be a tool - one tool - for *expressing* it.
Right now it seems that no one really wants to go as far as you do in linking prosody and ideology, though Cathy gets close, so it would be interesting to hear how you think that works.
We want all sorts of people here! Girls especially! But I’m confused by yr comments, which seem to defend a position that most people in this thread have been arguing for. My comments throughout, for instance, & I’m one of the writers for the blog, have been concerned in part to refute the silly proposition that becoming famous renders one “part of the establishment,” & to argue for catholicity—as Bobby points out, no one actually disagreed with this. Pretty basic stuff, really. So not sure at whom you’re tilting here.
I think the question of who’s-misunderstanding-what-person’s-post is less important than a bigger issue — the embrace, from many quarters, of a kind of openness/catholicity about different poetries.
To me, this is all very encouraging. I remember a time when this sort of thing would get you the fish-eye from every side.
I don’t mean we should meld everything into a big bland hybrid — I do mean that a kind of biodiversity in the poetic field is a good thing.
Bob
This was posted today, via Jeffrey Side, editor of Argotist journal, at Poetryetc list. It’s by Chris Hamilton-Emery, the publisher of Salt. The comment is in relation to my post, so I’m sure Chris wouldn’t object to its being shared here:
***
“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. It is properly underground but has really very striking uptake with US universities, certainly Buffalo, Miami (OH), UPenn, but much much wider
than this. 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
without a polity.
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.
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’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. It’s 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.”
And this “spirited” comment from Jane Holland, also at Poetryetc. I’ve heard that the DE post is causing lots of discussion in various places over in the UK, so that’s good!
***
“As an editor, I am open to most things, including this … type of work.
As an editor, I have to be open to it, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing my
job properly. But as a poet myself, and as a reader/listener, I have no
problems in saying that I dislike it intensely.
It makes me suspect utter charlatanism, because it provides no stable
ground from which to form a measured opinion. Listening to it and
trying to 1. make sense of it and 2. work out whether it’s worth my time
is like trying to get a spirit level to balance on the wing of a tilting
airplane at high altitude. If I was going out for an evening of idle
entertainment, and this only lasted 3 minutes, I might find it amusing
and exhilarating. But to be asked to look on it as ’serious art’ and on
Keston himself as some kind of Messiah of Poetry makes everything
inside me rebel.
Re Fiona’s remark, I can’t particularly criticise her decision to exclude
that kind of work. I’m reviewing the PR book for Stride, so I won’t say
much here, but it is a book aimed at the mainstream reader, just as
Poetry Review, frankly, is aimed at the mainstream reader. (Except for
brief periods of its history, when the red flag was flying above Poetry
HQ!!!) If Angel Exhaust put out, as an example - and maybe it has, I
can’t recall now - an anthology of its best bits, you can be pretty sure
you wouldn’t find the likes of Seamus Heaney in there.”
Thanks for post Chris Hamilton-Emery’s comments, Kent. I’ve reposted them along with my own comments on what he says over at my blog:
http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-chief-weapon-is-excess-chris.html
Bob
Dear Jane Holland,
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.
But I have more to say.
Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
You know what I’m saying?
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?
Be ye therefore perfect,
K
Did you attend church today, Keston? I didn’t. I’m at odds with my rector, as it happens - very difficult situation. I’m still mowing the church lawn, though, & raking the leaves.
Shocked—shocked—to find Keston being smug!
Why, can you believe there are actually dumb hicks who take those words seriously? Who believe in them & in their alleged speaker? Snicker! What a bunch of dupes! Good thing we’re not that stupid!
Michael thinks that I’m mocking Christians? Weird.
Hello everybody. I didn’t really want to get involved in this thread, which I’ve followed with interest, but Jane Holland’s contents were in rebellion and I thought a word or two might calm things down.
I’m a new reader of this blog, and looking forward to meeting you all.
Shit, sorry, Keston. But you can’t really think it’s weird that I arrived at that interpretation! It’s there for the taking.
I’m not quite sure I was personally declaring K as the Messiah, though I have shaved my tonsure especially to consider this. Hi, K!
Cambridge poetry can have an air of converts and zealots, especially with young boys — it’s mainly a boy’s thing. Lots of concern for secret knowledge, The Truth, saving us from oppression. I was there in the 90s meeting in cellars. It’s unfair to decontextualise K from the wider attempts of the British avant-garde (though it might be *harder* to put him in that context), in fact much of the new experimentation isn’t a Cambridge/Sussex thing at all. There’s a wider historical context for the third generation of Cambridge writing, and I think that K’s generation was the strongest thing to emerge in recent years. I think Cambridge Poetry is an historical term now. Like LANGUAGE, it’s over. Leaving the boys aside for a moment, I think that Brady, Critchley and Morris are equally important in assessing what was going on and its various emanations into a broader cross-fertilization of recent British poetries. Cambridge, after all, is far too insular and largely institutional. Just like any other industrial centres most of the poetry written by the undergrads was just dire. K always amazed me, because, and I hope this doesn’t embarrass our Messiah, he really worked on himself. There was a lot of noise and bluster in the very early work, but what was striking was how K constructed himself. And it worked. He’s a lyric writer, I’m not personally interested in the politics, it’s the voice that interests me. There’s something to be examined in why K has had such uptake in the USA, not much in the UK. What does he represent to the US avant-garde?
Cambridge poetry has over the years I think had it’s moments of self belief. It has its forms of secret knowledge, it has designs upon you, to reveal truths and to impart justice, we all know it had political intentions (how much of that was an emanation from the espionage of the cold war years?), though it was broader than that. It has its own revelations. But considering the religiosity and persecution of one small avant-garde community needs something more considered than I’ve got time for as a knackered middle aged businessman.
I suppose one ought to ask, technically, has the British avant-garde succeeded? What is it in front of? Is there a route forward? Where is the centre? The British poetry scene, is remarkably diverse, and that diversity has exploded in the past ten years. That’s less to do with an explosion of new practices (so many practices are old practices) and more the impact of the Web in revealing just what is actually going on. Had always been going on. What seemed at times like a two horse race is suddenly a massive sweepstake.
Most of the concerns don’t really lie around what readers are reading (or in my case buying), but more around resources and ideas of exclusion and exclusivity. Most of the problems around the British poetic landscape aren’t about aesthetics — it’s not a matter of intelligence, it’s mostly an economic problem. It’s an issue of resources, the management of those resources and the impact of government funding of a publishing infrastructure and an infrastructure for managing reception. Much of the British poetry economy is a planned economy. It was never a war over content. It was a war over logistics.
Glad to see you here Keston. Holland’s remarks were totally out of order given she is the commissioning editor at Salt; a puzzling choice for the position I must say, given Salt’s history of supporting non-mainstream poetry. But I have noticed that Salt has become more like Bloodaxe over the years publishing more and more indifferent poetry. I appreciate, though, that Chris has to keep the business afloat, hence some of his choices. True he has Silliman on his lists but I sense that’s only because he thinks Silliman will sell. Yet to be fair to him, he has poets on his list who are almost impossible to find using Google’s search engine. So I don’t know if they are sellable at all.
‘Jesus is compelling, that’s why they call him Jesus’ (Harmony Korine).
It’s good to see some passionate & detailed argument erupt in the US around the work of the poets featured in that British issue of CR, at long last, and I hope I can occasionally join in. I don’t have much time this week but want to say that for Americans eager to read more on this stuff, besides the books already mentioned, Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007 (Litteraria Pragensia, 2007) edited by Sam Ladkin and myself, could come in handy. It has essays on all four CR poets and much more too. I want to add that Kent’s original focus, - what is intensely new & critical in these poems? and why has it been completely overlooked in the US (until now)? - is important and we ought not to forget that in the blitz of reaction and over-reaction from people offended to the point of vomiting that others love this work and have the gall to say so; from people who feel that if you mention one British poet then you must also mention EVERYONE else too right away otherwise you’re a bastard and you’re implying that some poets are better at poetry than other poets; even from people who want to step back, Chris, and take ‘a broad, general view of things’ (Burroughs): I disagree with almost every declarative statement in your posts, I think, and don’t believe for a second that you can’t read these poems without going back to 1961 and excavating Donald Davie’s actual bicycle clips, I’m bored with the local history of Cambridge and this poetry, if it has anything to do with that still, is anyway much bigger and wider and serrated and flanged, and it is bored-with-Cambridge too. It has more to do with Basra than Cambridge, which is one obvious way of starting to say why this stuff is new and necessary, and why it’s been met with an embarrassed silence ’til now.
CHE wrote:
> has had such uptake in the USA
Robin wrote:
> completely overlooked in the US
Which is it!
I know that in my imaginary USA Keston has had significant ongoing attention over the years, more than Lisa Robertson and less than Kevin Davies, about as much as Andrea Brady and Brian Kim Stefans.
I also know that my analyses of various holdings of cultural capital are in constant need of correction.
But wasn’t the point of this post that Keston & Co aren’t being attended to?
Well: look at the back page of the October 9 TLS — Mr. Campbell mentions our subject himself, going into some detail about one of Keston’s “impenetrable excursions in prose.” Surely that counts for *something*?
“Thus, the silence, I’d propose, at least in some quarters, is borne forward by a good measure of collective tacit agreement.”
Indeed. Glad that I’m not the only one who notices.
I listened to Keston and thought, wow, wish I could do that like him. It is probably best to do it with eyes closed but then you miss the parts in which his gestures add incredible layers to the performance of the pieces.
Truly some of the best stuff since sliced, processed American cheese product only it’s real good.
The piece Marx in Jargon is phenomenal. It isn’t very often that you see a gringo poet take apart the meaning of something/someone with such joyful and rabid intensity that is itself, true to it’s subject matter not only in diction but in intent.
If it weren’t for old Kent being such a mischief maker, we’d all live in the dark. He’s a real coyote in that sense…using his own funnishness to remind the tribe of their particular over seriousity.
Salaams
Oh and here’s the rub. If you read Intellectuals by another famous Johnson, you find the scrubbed and polished puritanism of Marx was most blessedly preserved for us all in that account of his treatment of his maid with whom he fathered a son and later denied his fathership and the fact that he never even paid the poor woman. The hypocrisy all around us and how about that, when hypocrisy is fetishized ala Glen Beck in a culture whose largesse and big claim to fame is it’s pure intentions towards all mankind. In that, Keston’s liturgical comments make absolute sense.
Ay caramba. What secrets lurk in the hearts of men. And some women too.
“Gallerte is not just a specific commodity. It is, on satire’s terms, the paradigmatic
commodity, the “perfected non-world” of labor in a concentrated purchasable lump.”
Mindboggling. I wonder, what does Keston think when he turns to some of the more popular Christo-fanatics preaching prosperity gospel on the tellie?
It must in fact turn his skin green. I must ask, is this happening also in the UK? Are there money priests there as there are here in the land of misfit toys?
Just for the record, both Sophie Robinson and Frances Kruk were graduates of Redell’s Olsen’s MA in Poetic Practice, here in London.
I’m trying to wade through all this, but have I got this right: without the New Chicago School we wouldn’t know about the New British School?
It seems to me that The Chicago Review is biased towrd British poetry. Don’t know why.
Maybe it’s because we chose to exhibit elective colonialism: that is, though we won the Revolutionary War, we chose to act as though we had lost it. Or maybe it’s because we were actually biased toward good poetry, and thought that a number of British poets who were producing such were not getting enough attention Over Here. Take your pick.
It depends what you mean by good.
I mean poems that delight, instruct, illuminate, and dazzle–and most basically, poems that repay rereading.
in your view.
No, in considered consultation with the Most High Emperor of Parnassus, who dictates the principles of taste and the modes of their application with a terrifying and implacable finality. It gave us a nice competitive advantage.
That would be me, right? Whatever I don’t like goes over the GW, so be careful what you wish for in British Verse, chaps.
Am very excited by Ryan’s highly original & articulate take on aesthetic judgment. Promises to open new post-Kantian vistas! Can’t wait for the movie.
The Most High Emp. of Parnassus is… Herb Leibowitz?
Just to change the topic slightly. This has just been posted on his blog by Robert Archambeau.
It touches briefly on Cambridge poetry and its politics.
“Letter to Andrea Brady”
http://samizdatblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/letter-to-andrea-brady.html
The comments Andrea makes are much more interesting than my response — you can get to them from a link at the beginning of the post Jeffrey links to.
Bob
This oughta be the last word on the subject:
http://www.archive.org/stream/newbritishpoets030038mbp/newbritishpoets030038mbp_djvu.txt
Ah, yes. Who could forget Os Marron, Alun Lewis, the experimentalist SeanjBnnett, J. F. Hbndry, or, my favorite, the immortal Demise Levertov?