I would like to return to the 'Cambridge School' rather than your
pentagram on Denise Riley (you do have such an elegant way of making that
not seem like five 'bullet points' which I suppose is another word for 
'stressor'). People tell me there is no such phenomenon as Cambridge
School. Still, I know a Cambridge Poet when I see one. I agree with you
completly that, from an immanent critical perspective, one would
be hard-pressed to find shared features in, for example, D.S. Marriott's
psycho-religious discourse, Drew Milne's lyrical formalism, Ben Watson's
domestic marquiserie des res, Rod Mengham's recovery of the political in
the idiomatic expression, Keston Sutherland's post-Dionysian irony, and
that sentence itself roughshods it over the differences in each of the
different works of these for-instanced poets. Yes each poem strives toward
its autonomy. The name of the individual work (Stair Spirit rather than
Denise Riley) is then perhaps the better index label for pattern
recognition. 

What I do find a little difficult to take, also in view of the current
national debate on the tutorial system, is that you will avoid looking at
the Cambridge School in the sociological sense, which would, of course,
far better serve to explain why there is no such 'body of work', on the
condition, however, that the social relation between the poets is
recognised as an organic principle. Does not the fact that the work of the
Cambridge School is so individual, so 'diverse' as you put, precisely
indicate that J.H. Prynne, who is an entire tutorial system in himself,
has held fast to certain educational principles, which is reflected not in
the starry pupils but rather in each of the separate artworks produced as
a result of exposure to his teaching? I propose this thought, not to
create an anxiety of influence, nor to be an apologist for the habitual
recipients of this kind of education, nor even for any of the artwork
produced from those conditions itself, just to ask whether the term CS,
if it is prevented from becoming reductive, might not have some critical
relevance after all.

I am interested in the split between poet/work and work as
product/function. Cambridge poets are nominally the 'products' of the
same system, but their products, the poems, do not share a system. This,
pedagogically speaking, is quite remarkable. Thus central to the Cambridge
School is the teaching of Prynne, but central to the teaching of Prynne is
the antidisciplinarian impetus, not toward prosody, but rather toward
'discipline' and 'order' in that Foucaultian sense. It reminds me of what
de Certeau, in the Practice of Everyday Life, identified as 'the
clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical an makeshift creativity
of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of 'discipline'.
Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers
compose the network of an anti-discipline'. The Cambridge School seems to
comprise not professional poets, but of professionals who write poetry. 
The tensions, difficulties, 'impersonality' in the artwork, may relate to
this? MacSweeney, Rodefer and [possibly Andrew Duncan] are precisely not
Cambridge Poets for the reason that poesis is the principal mainstay
in their lives. There is more identification with being a poet, as others
are teachers, managers, and so on. Hence, the greater tendency in
their poems toward the 'confessional', as Ric Caddell said of
'Book of Demons'or more of the projection of the 'self' in the artwork.

If we do recognise the Cambridge School as a sociological category of the
perruque-professional, we should also ask some searching questions on
'impersonality' and also on the gender division of work and its cultural
evaluation. Is Denise Riley's work women's work? 

I have no doubt that my thoughts can be shot to pieces, as if it didn't
contain enough holes already. But, John, it seems to me that a denial of 
the existence of a Cambridge School is a denial of politics. You have not
shirked that issue before. Now you talk about the 'autonomy of the poem'
like quite a professional New Critic. What happened? 

Karlien. 



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