This is a drastic misrepresentation of the work and interests of some  
20 to 30 loosely associated poets in three generations active in  
Cambridge and elsewhere from the late 1960s onwards. This is not what  
happened, these were not their aims, there was no "school", the  
association was haphazard and intermittent and attitudes to philosophy  
among them differed from placing it as central to the poetry to taking  
no notice of it whatsoever. Most of these people were more or less in  
contact with JH Prynne, which may be thought to have engendered some  
kind of convergence of ideas, but some of them (such as Denise Riley)  
were not and anyway in my experience the focus was on the practice. It  
makes no sense to speak of these things without reference to the  
chronology, which would place the philosophical entanglement  
principally among the younger and professionally academic poets.

By all means have another conference on philosophy and contemporary  
poetry, it's always a valid subject, but surely it could be conceived  
without this reductive synthesis of the history. And without electing  
poets into a household in which they did not participate.

Why is it that every time I see a brief quotation from Heidegger I  
find it so elliptical as to be comical?


Peter Riley



On 1 Sep 2016, at 17:10, Abjy Kurian wrote:

2017 ACLA Panel: Poetic Thinking

Contemporary poets like J. H. Prynne, Denise Riley, and John Wilkinson  
have explored the nature and scope of an alternative mode of  
‘thinking’ in poetry. Aided by late modernist reformulations of poetic  
difficulty, these poets continue the Romantic legacy by reconfiguring  
poetry as essentially theoretical. For the Cambridge school, ‘poetic  
thinking’ does not involve a simple rehashing of philosophical ideas  
in poetic diction, but as Simon Jarvis points out, these poems instead  
of accommodating philosophy within their formal structures are in  
themselves philosophic. Such a reconsideration of the poem as a  
cognitive product affords a metaphysical truth that is at once noble  
and transcendent. While the New-York school and the Objectivists  
display similar interests in the ‘theoretical’ consequences of the  
metaphysical in poetry, the Language poets took to a more literal idea  
of ‘philosopher-poet’ where poetry assumed a subsidiary role to  
poststructuralist philosophy. This pervasive poetics of the  
metaphysical legitimises Heidegger’s claim that poetry is “the letting  
happen of the advent of the truth of what is” and only in the  
“belonging together of Being and thinking” can truth manifest itself  
(Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 72).

At this historical moment, what is the status of philosophy in  
contemporary poetry? How can concepts and emotions attain an  
epistemological equity within poetry? Can there be a lyric mode of  
thinking? Is poetry’s orientation towards materiality a compensation  
for its excessive abstractness? How does a kinship of thought and  
feeling alter the puissance of poetry? How does recent poetry draw  
from and revise Romantic concerns and allegiances? This seminar is  
interested in the hypostatic union of thought and feeling in poetry  
that is one of the modes of ‘poetic thinking.’ We consider the  
animated dovetailing of thinking, sensation, and emotion in poetry  
alongside the incorporation of numerous knowledge structures that  
establish poetry as an integral site of knowledge production and  
philosophical reflection. We welcome papers from various disciplines  
that can address the theoretical, philosophical, historical, and  
conceptual dimensions of a “poetry that thinks” (Heidegger, 1947).   
Contributions are invited from the following areas:

Poetry and metaphysics
The Romantic legacy of the poet-thinker
Poetic form as a species of thought
Poetry and/as Poetics
Abstraction vs. Materiality
Thinking and song
Resisting thought

Please submit your paper proposal of roughly 300 words with a short  
author bio through ACLA’s online submission portal: http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper 
  between 1st and 23rd September.
Queries can be directed to:
Rajalekshmi K ([log in to unmask])
Abjy Kurian ([log in to unmask])

Thank you.