Geraldine, you raise some good points here.
On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:08:21 +0100, Geraldine Monk
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Are you all really all upset Peter? How do you think this plays out
with the rest of us out here who would be deliriously happy to have the
TLS pronounce a fatwa on our writing if it gave us a few column inches.
Most of us will never get a glancing mention in its hallowed pages let
alone such undivided attention.
>
>TLS is an establishment mag writing about CLR, a magazine which
hails from one of the most prestigious and privileged establishments in
the world. So how come such privilege can be so upset about a bit of
low-grade wagging? (Hope none of you ever get invited onto Have I
Got News For You - you'd have to be hospitalized). And how can such
privilege talk about 'entrenched class-based authority' when it is
itself 'entrenched class-based authority' - you can't possibly be
portraying Cambridge Uni as a place of downtrodden oppressed plebs -
can you?!!
>
>The rest of us look on with schlock and woe,
>
>Toots,
>
>Gx
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Peter Riley
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 11:12 PM
> Subject: Re: TLS on CLR
>
>
>
>
> People got upset about Campbell's review mainly because of the
patriarchal tone rather than any paraphrasable content to what he said.
You're reduced to a pathetic schoolchild whose homework, on which you
worked so hard, is being waved in front of the whole class with
sarcastic remarks. The tone of the club-house, the tone of smartness,
the "we know better" tone. To some this has quite shocking ideological
implications, representing entrenched class-based authority and even
echoing political oppression. That's maybe silly.
>
>
> Yes, it is silly, but understandable in the terms of a certain psychic
disposition.
>
>
> TLS is all right actually, it does some good things. You just don't
look to it for guidance on contemporary poetry. Nor to anywhere else.
>
>
> I have no idea and don't care whether TLS is "mainstream". It can be
duck-pond or rolling-main for all I care.
>
>
> PR
>
>
>
>
> On 13 Oct 2009, at 20:15, Terry Kelly wrote:
>
>
> James Campbell calls the CLR - without visible irony - "a splendid
affair," supplies the price and the place to get the mag AND devotes
several hundred words to it in the widely read TLS NB column. A cause
for mild celebration, I would think, rather than an opportunity for thin-
skinned displeasure. And I'm sure Mr Prynne won't get too hot under the
collar about some mainstream literary joshing.
>
> Terry Kelly
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Peter Riley
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 1:04 PM
> Subject: Re: Jane Holland on avant-garde poetry
>
>
> I don't understand. You think Campbell is praising CLR
and "Cambridge" poetry? Like when he says of me that I've obviously
invented an obscure 1960s poet and written about him, because
I'm "Cambridge" and so I don't believe in truthfulness. This is
praise? "Poetry that no one can understand" ... "A stack of poetry
whose reason for existence is to be difficult" -- this too is praise? Does
anybody else read the review in this way? When he claims that the
issue is entirely dominated by JH Prynne (which it isn't), does he mean
that's a jolly good thing? I think not. In fact the sneering sarcasm of it
all seems to me to be overwhelming.
>
>
> PR
>
>
>
> I'll put the whole text here in case needed---
>
>
>
>
> The Cambridge Literary Review, No. 1, is a splendid affair. It is 280
pages long, tastefully printed on good paper; the copies are numbered
ours is 514 our of 1,000. It is ludic, as you would expect: Keston
Sutherland's impenetrable excursion in prose contains footnotes, one of
which explicates "You" as "You" (if you had gone to Cambridge you
would get the joke); and it is, of course, "difficult". It even contains an
essay, "A History of Difficulty: On Cambridge poetry" by Jeremy Noel-
Tod, in which he settles a score with Craig Raine, his Oxford tutor.
Raine's problem, according to Noel-Tod, is being insufficiently
appreciative of poetry that no one can understand. Cambridge Literary
Review has a stack of poetry whose reason for existence is to be
difficult:
>
> CALL 2 NO LAW YR HYDROLIC SELF
> SPLISH SPLASH WITH YR
> HAND OVER YR LIFE
> EXCESS 2 HEAD CORTEXT CON
> NECTORS NEURON DIODE...
>
> and so on for quite a few of the tastefully printed pages. There is a
poem by J. H. Prynne not presented as "A Message from Our Sponsor",
though it might as well be and a portfolio of poems, compiled by
Peter Riley, by "a poet about whom neither I nor anyone I have spoken
to knows anything", Ray Crump. They were sent to Prynne and Riley in
the 1960s, and the author remains a mystery. Is this true? Mr Riley
wishes to persuade us that it is as if we weren't aware that the
raison d'๊tre of the Review is to encourage us to challenge
anyone's "truth".
>
> No one will accuse the editors of rootless cosmopolitanism: it is
concerned with Cambridge difficulty, the Cambridge Poetry
Festival, "Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry". Richard Berengarten
writes engagingly about the Festival's beginnings, and Elaine Feinstein
offers reminiscences of Prospect. Can she be referring to the monthly
journal of politics and current affairs? Of course she can't. She means
Prosepect the Cambridge literary magazine of the 1950s. "Occasionally
J. H. Prynne looked in on us." Half a century later, he's still doing it.
>
> (Times Literary Supplement, October 9)
>
>
>
>
>
> (Actually the main point of attack, I notice, seems to be that a
magazine offering itself as a special issue on "Cambridge writing" is all
about Cambridge writing.)
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 13 Oct 2009, at 12:39, Jeffrey Side wrote:
>
>
> I can't sense the nastiness you notice in Campbell's piece. As I
said, it
> seems positive. Please explain.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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