There was a thread a few days ago which I would like to readvert to - it
emerged in discussion about the identity of Language Poetry as well as
that of the Cambridge School, and has been paralleled I think on the US
Poetics List.

Robert Sheppard added to my review of Denise Riley another qualification
for its entry into the halls of infamy, objecting to its setting up
Language Poetry (LP) as an aunt sally. I accept this criticism readily
if what is sought is a serious estimate of the achievements of
particular writers associated with LP, but caricature is a rhetorical
device which had its particular point there. To that extent protest is
meaningless, and I say this as someone who has learnt to live with the
Cambridge Poetry (CP) label, having wearied of making the routine point
about the variousness of the art. We are talking pattern recognition,
and I'm willing to accept that from some angles what distinguishes CP or
LP from something else becomes more significant than internal
variations.

That's a stiff-necked start, but links to a posting which noted that
Denise Riley demurs at the label 'linguistically innovative' and
dismissed her demurral. I think that I would agree with her. It's a
question of how tension is produced, held and persists in the linguistic
surface. DR's poetry is characterised by tensions between its social
instauration, personal need and desire, a feeling for the art's history,
the drive towards autonomy of the poem, and location within current
'theory'. These stressors are characteristic of contemporary poetry but
in a variable mix. (This came to me in a day workshop on bed management,
which relied on a rather elegant pentagram of stressors - that's why
there are five stressors.)

LP tends to manifest a great pull from the 'positioning' apex, with
linguistic innovation determined along its tendons. This is a gross
generalisation of course. Certainly by contrast with other contributors
to Out of Everywhere, DR's work is poised exquisitely between the
stressors; linguistically disturbed or scarred (a foal linguistically
wounded) would better describe what is at the same time stressed by a
traditional of English lyric than 'linguistically innovative'.

It is surprising of course that a critic so closely associated with LP
as Marjorie P should espouse a simple binary account of the two tribes
of poetry. Her LP would include say Marjorie Wellish or John Wieners -
the work of the former seems to me more stressed by the poem's striving
towards autonomy, checked by tendons from other apices, than that of any
LP writers I can think of, whilst with the latter we're talking about
the depradations of desire. Neither can I imagine either would accept
the association.

Now there are plainly enough major variations between writers
characerised as LP, and taxonomy is for historians. Watten still
believes poetic practice can drive significant social change, I
sometimes think Bernstein could write for Broadway, Hejinian - I won't
go on, and so what. Late Prynne, Doug Oliver and Denise Riley are as
mutually different. There ae angles of vision from which MacSweeney,
Rodefer or Andrew Duncan look CP.

DR's writing promises a resoration of equilibrium, even if it is
fleeting, indeed makes it momentarily apprehensible. This is about as
different as can be from writing aiming to subvert or reconstruct a
social order conceived as a linguistic order. Forget the pentagram,
that's what I wanted to come round to say.




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