>From: "Teichman, Harold" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
>Cc: "Teichman, Harold" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: FW: Eyewitness Report--Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetr
> y
>Date: Wed, 5 May 1999 09:13:46 -0400
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>
>Dear Mr Riley,
>
>An email informant of mine tells me that you've been trying to solicit
>descriptions of CCCP 9. Here is mine, which I have posted on the EPC
>Buffalo List. As you will see, it is not entirely complimentary, but if
>you wish to post it to britpo or to anyone else, you have my permission
>to do so.
>
>It probably represents a different perspective to what your list members
>are used to.
>
>Best regards,
>Harold Teichman
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Harold Teichman [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: Sunday, May 02, 1999 5:02 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Cc: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Eyewitness Report--Cambridge Conference of Contemporary
>> Poetry
>>
>> I attended (with my wife) the ninth CCCP, held at Trinity College on
>> 23-25 April, organized by Rod Mengham, Kevin Nolan, Ian Patterson and
>> Peter Riley. What follows amounts chiefly to first impressions, since I
>> was unfamiliar with the work of all the readers except Michael Palmer
>> before the conference, but a somewhat naïve and 'other' look at a
>> perhaps sometimes too self-congratulatory avant-garde may have a modest
>> value, so I continue.
>>
>> It was hard to avoid invidious comparison with the Barnard conference of
>> two weeks earlier, the only part of which I was able to attend,
>> regrettably, was on Saturday from lunch on-the readings there, in New
>> York, by Armantrout and Mullen were galvanizing, not to mention
>> Perloff's slightly incendiary paper. The Cambridge conference was, by
>> contrast, a most odd, uneven and apparently insular affair, thankfully
>> enlivened by its French Connection:
>>
>> (1) The roster of readers might have been the work of Monty Python or
>> David Lodge-and there were no overlap sessions, so one had a choice of
>> only one reader at any given time. There was no discernible overall
>> aesthetic (maybe not such a bad thing). There wasn't much obvious
>> questioning of the subjective 'I' in evidence, nor was there any Marxism
>> on display. A few poets seemed to have been included simply because
>> they had connections with Cambridge. I had expected heavy attendance
>> from the pages of the 'Other' and 'Chaos' anthologies, but most of
>> those anthologized, even some who live in Cambridge, seemed to give it a
>> miss. Maybe someone (Ric Caddel?) on the List can fill me in on the
>> cultural politics here.
>>
>> (2) The University was at best an indifferent host. I was lucky to be
>> overheard by a helpful French lector in the know, Vincent Ferre, when I
>> asked directions to the opening reading on Friday night, or I might have
>> had a very hard time finding it. The first and last readings took place
>> in the Old Combination Room (OCR), a fairly large old reception hall
>> with portraits of Newtonian bewigged gentlemen on the walls, where the
>> acoustics were so-so, there was no miking and the entry door was heavy
>> and loud. As the chairs for the first night's reading had been removed
>> at the last minute by the College, people had to scramble for seats in
>> sofas along the walls. Poor Michel Deguy, the 'guest of honour' of the
>> conference, had to hunker scowling and uncomfortable on a low table,
>> listening to a barely audible reading in English by the very gentle and
>> soft-spoken Lee Harwood. The remaining readings were in the pleasant,
>> modern Winstanley lecture hall.
>>
>> (3) The French visitors to this conference must have viewed much of the
>> proceedings with bemused perplexity. Philippe Beck, whose journal
>> 'Quaderno' was feted, gamely sat through the whole thing (as did I).
>> With the exception of Michael Palmer, who is well known to be 'sited'
>> within a Venn intersection of the two literatures, the anglophone and
>> francophone poets here might have come from different planets. There was
>> no public discussion of this yawning gap. A panel discussion on this
>> point was sorely missed. (Aside: Why is it that the major French
>> figures known in the English-speaking innovative world seem much less
>> interested in dense post-Steinian word-salad than some of their
>> anglophone counterparts?)
>>
>> (4) This was a notably unfriendly and clannish (dare I say cliquish?)
>> small gathering (about 30 or so people most of the time). The only
>> people with any interest in talking to me, a nobody and an American,
>> when approached (with the exception of Peter Riley, a genuinely nice
>> chap) were not English: Vincent Ferre, Michael Palmer and Stephen
>> Rodefer. There was a lot of shifty avoidance of eye contact and haughty
>> gliding or lounging about, even though we were closeted together. So
>> much for human relations after the Poetry Revolution. There was also a
>> somewhat laddish, old-boys-club, brilliant-amateur atmosphere to the
>> whole thing, despite the inclusion of a few women readers, which seemed
>> typically English to me. The order of speakers kept having to be
>> rearranged, with a few substitutions as well.
>>
>> The highlights (for me) were (in no particular order): Michael Palmer,
>> Christian Prigent, and Michel Deguy, though there were many other
>> moments of interest. A few panel discussions or presentations of papers
>> might have broken up the readings effectively and generated more public
>> discussions (of which there were none).
>>
>> The readings (first impressions from sketchy notes):
>>
>> Lee Harwood, an infinitely gentle, thin and slightly stooped figure,
>> opened the readings with some poems from his latest book, 'Morning
>> Light'. He mentioned that he's worked as a museum guard, and invoked
>> the names of Anne Stevenson and Wordsworth in his inter-poem musings.
>> He makes small jabbing karate-chop gestures to accentuate the frequent
>> silence-beats between phrases, producing quietly staccato rhythms. His
>> poems seem imagist, roughly, consisting of sequences of impressions
>> and thoughts, often anchored in a place, with sometimes just a little
>> too much explanation for the reader (like Wordsworth?) Maybe a bit of a
>> New York school influence? Not very pomo, certainly. A curious choice
>> for the opening of this conference, I thought.
>>
>> Next morning, Michael Ayres, a local Cambridge poet, began the day. His
>> reading was quite moving, though again scarcely modernist let alone
>> pomo, being first-personal, elegiac and deeply mourning. The first text
>> kept repeating, effectively, the phrase 'a great calm descends'. I was
>> reminded at first, at the level of the phrase unit, of du Bouchet, but
>> his (long) poems are constructed much more conventionally than du
>> Bouchet's, so that likeness won't really hold-he's not afraid of a bit
>> of sententiousness, either.
>>
>> He was immediately followed by Andy Johnson, a Cambridge graduate who
>> has spent some time in Africa. Johnson is a much louder personality
>> than the first two readers, younger, eschewing the mic, and with the
>> bearing of a standup comedian. He read short untitled poems, punchily
>> and with gusto. They struck me as a bit wordy and baroque, in a sort of
>> English-bravura clever-clever LangPo manner. One was a pastiche of
>> descriptions of an Etruscan tomb, sort of. The ironic tone failed to
>> find any purchase-this coming after Ayres's expression of personal loss
>> was almost offensive.
>>
>> Stephen Rodefer read very briefly as a substitute for Andres Ajens,
>> whose English translations were still in preparation. His manner was
>> offhand and funny. There was a poem for Pierre Alferi. I was intrigued
>> and wanted to hear more from him, but he wanted to go to lunch.
>>
>> After lunch we had another oddly matched trio. Ralph Hawkins began
>> working the crowd in good vaudevillian form. He looks like a
>> middle-aged businessman, but often sports a boho erotic scatological
>> chinoiserie persona in his mostly comic poems, coming from a recent
>> Equipage booklet. A sort of English blend of Frank O'Hara, Gary Snyder
>> and Benny Hill. The occasional snicker from the usually fairly
>> impassive audience.
>>
>> Next up was the disarming Bob Walker, who caused some impatient
>> squirming with his very amateurish and breathy flute solo, with which he
>> opened the 'set'. He said this was the first reading he'd given in 25
>> years and that he shares an interest with Ralph Hawkins in Mallarme and
>> pigs. His poems were lyrical and thoughtful, perhaps in a somewhat
>> discursive Poundian mode. The conference notes state that he teaches
>> Japanese in the midlands, but he modestly depreciated his knowledge of
>> Asian languages, though he drew the characters of a haiku on the
>> blackboard for us, and explained the meaning of an ideograph on a
>> drinking mug: hara kiri. He ended by sitting down at the piano and
>> singing, again amateurishly, a sort of Donovanesque Heraclitean blues.
>> Curiously, I found him a welcome break from the morning's earlier
>> performing-Brit tone.
>>
>> Allen Fisher, who was not scheduled, and who was introduced as 'one of
>> the most important Cambridge poets of the last thirty years', favoured
>> us with a quick reading in sepulchral tones of two of his recent
>> 'sonnets', which sounded to me like much of the homophonic translation
>> I've read, so maybe that's how they were produced. They were studded
>> with terms from modern physics and astrophysics, as if pillaged from
>> Cambridge's own Stephen Hawking, but betrayed no obvious understanding
>> of them. He was dressed all in black, wore a very sour expression, and
>> has refined the Disdainful Donnish manner to perfection.
>>
>> The four o'clock session brought a welcome pair of female voices.
>> Andrea Brady from Philadelphia, now resident in Cambridge as a
>> researcher in 17th century lit, was introduced as a very bright star on
>> the horizon. I'm sorry to say that her work seemed callow to me, a
>> by-the-numbers post-LangPo exercise, so I won't say any more about it.
>>
>> Things finally began to come alive with Lisa Robertson's reading. Her
>> book 'Debbie' was described in the introduction as 'one of the most
>> dazzlingly virtuosic texts of its epoch' and maybe that was almost
>> deserved-I wanted to buy a copy, but they were sold out. Her work
>> reminded me a little of Armantrout's, somehow always hinting at the
>> sardonic, but more verbose and open. She reads in a somewhat flat,
>> staccato but mesmerizing manner, constantly pulling you back into the
>> text almost in spite of yourself. She seems capable of endless
>> speech-production without any need for a glass of water. A long section
>> concerned the weather, with much parallelism and near-repetition in
>> construction and many I-sentences. A high point.
>>
>> Michael Palmer began the evening session, reading from a new MS, I
>> believe, called 'Promises of Glass'. I had heard him read in the
>> recording accompanying the 'Exact Change Yearbook', but had never seen
>> him in person before. He is a more quietly spellbinding reader than
>> that recording would have led me to guess. He also spoke
>> extemporaneously, with unaffected casual intelligence, about some of the
>> occasions of the poems he read, and it was interesting that what can
>> sound like very abstract linguistic meditative lyric is often occasioned
>> by or dedicated to a particular acquaintance or place, with affection.
>> One poem even contained some narrative bits. Another made much play
>> with the phrase 'the book of...', and there were a lot of phrases with
>> formally opposed elements. A real breath of fresh air in the day's
>> proceedings, and a reading I won't forget.
>>
>> Thank God for the French. Oscarine Bosquet was scheduled to read here,
>> but she was unable to owing to illness, and Philippe Beck filled in. He
>> read a (prose?) meditation on Celan's Meridian speech called 'Meduse
>> automatique stoppee', I think, which bears in on the figure of the
>> puppet/automaton/Pinocchio. Kevin Nolan supplied the English, if I
>> recall. Then he read some short poems intended for a woman's voice, and
>> the English was handled by Andrea Brady. Like some of Michel Deguy's
>> work later, these were partly poems about poetry; at one point lineation
>> was called 'bovine furrows' and a phrase I jotted down was '...philosophy
>> is a closure without electric wires'.
>>
>> Now came the apotheosis of the day's earlier quirkiness, with a very
>> rare antipodean appearance by the exotic Australian creature Robert
>> Adamson, who has the manner of the last surviving individual of an
>> extinct species. He was introduced as never having left Australia
>> before and as a good friend of Duncan and, latterly and epistolarily, of
>> Michael Palmer. He lives on a river near Sydney, and his poems are
>> awash with piquant riverine flora and fauna which are the proximate
>> causes of unembarrassed old-fashioned epiphanies, as are the many
>> particular poets and singers enthusiastically mentioned in his lines,
>> including Hopkins, Larkin, Duncan, Les Murray, Bob Dylan and Emmylou
>> Harris. Now this was a Bard. There was a poem dedicated to Kinsella,
>> and one about Language Poetry called 'Approaching Zukofsky' that depicts
>> LangPo as an Aussie nature preserve: 'we sang parrot...'. What could the
>> French have made of this chipper but quaver-voiced apparition?
>>
>> Next morning the rescheduled Andres Ajens, from Chile, read his polyglot
>> poems, which are mostly in Spanish and French. A very soft shy voice,
>> and he refused to use the mic. This work was in a familiar lyrical
>> South American mode, as far as I could tell, but possibly quite strong.
>> I think there was a Celan reference, 'mit dem Sternwuerfel', buried in
>> one.
>>
>> Christophe Tarkos, who looks very much the young café poet, a bit
>> rumpled, stubbled and bleary-eyed, read his interesting faux-naif poems
>> next with a rather bored quick delivery. They are long and associative,
>> though without a well-defined subjective voice, consisting of layered
>> short phrases and simple declarative sentences (too connected to be
>> called New Sentences) with a mock, spaced-out sententiousness, rather
>> like a lobotomized or Antin-ized Ponge. One was a sustained collocation
>> of assertions about the appearance, behaviour and oblique sensuality of
>> small children and clouds, as if it were automatic writing at the park
>> bench.
>>
>> Next another high point: Christian Prigent's extraordinary performance.
>> A small, casually dressed but natty man sits down at the table, without
>> a microphone, squares up his papers before him with precise motions,
>> bends down over the papers to read, and ...becomes *possessed*, chuffing
>> and wheezing, powerfully, like a locomotive/oracle, as if only this
>> rhythm can force the words out, attacking the language, inhabiting it,
>> gutting cliches, quoting, misquoting, ranting, climaxing and
>> decrescendoing, almost sobbing. One piece focused on the word
>> 'orgasme', another on 'ma mere'. This was a hard act to follow, so it
>> was good we broke for a musical interlude at this point.
>>
>> The improvisational bass/cello/harp trio Simon Fell & IST did a set,
>> first pure music, then some collaborations with the poets. We missed
>> the latter, opting for some fresh air, still digesting Prigent's work.
>> The trio like to employ their stringed instruments strictly as
>> percussion instruments, and there was considerable virtuosity on
>> display.
>>
>> The closing session in the evening took place again in the less than
>> ideal OCR, this time with chairs, and featured Michel Deguy, whose work
>> had been translated in collaboration with him during the preceding week
>> by three students, quite a privilege for them, and a very nice touch.
>> His work has a neoclassical, philosophically discursive quality that is
>> hard to assimilate on first hearing. His voice is resonant and
>> beautiful, and he radiates a grand-old-man dignity (Discourse of
>> Authority!). Again, some panel discussion here of his place in French
>> letters would have been nice.
>>
>> Erin Moure had the perhaps unenviable task of closing the proceedings,
>> which she did with great aplomb. She has her own confident standup
>> manner, the book drooping insouciantly from her hand like a cigarette
>> from Keith Richard's mouth, reading quickly in spurts and pausing to
>> look at the audience like a comedian, sometimes veering into French
>> without blinking an eye. Her work is chatty and eclectic, swooping from
>> formal to informal, sharp, funny, ranging over a wide field
>> perceptually, emotionally, politically and intellectually. Peter Riley
>> made the telling comment introducing her that while she is modestly
>> feted in Canada, in England she would still be publishing in mimeograph.
>>
>> Despite my various cavils, I would like to thank the organizers,
>> especially Peter Riley, for putting together an (at least sometimes)
>> very stimulating and certainly various show, and the poets for having
>> the guts to get up there and read.
>>
>> Harold Teichman
>>
>




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