[I seem to be posting rather a lot (for me, anyway) lately, which strikes
me as doubly odd given that here I am in Canada pontificating about things
British, but, well, hopefully I'll be corrected or expanded upon if I mess
it up; & in any case conversational tacking back & forth a bit is more
occasion for hopefulness than the mere delight in scoring points....]

1) [ --> JK] Well, I'm not sure at the _moment_ it's useful to say much
about Allen Fisher's analysis until you've had a chance to look at _A
Various Art_, which is basically definitive of the first two generations of
Cambridge poetry (with Roy Fisher being something of an exception in the
book, I think); for more recent generations you might try this bit of set
theory: take the anthology _Conductors of Chaos_ (Picador, 1996), & remove
all contributors who appear in _Floating Capital_ (Potes & Poets) (& toss
out Bergvall & Catling too), add in the redoubtable Keston Sutherland &
you'd have a fairly good sampler of a Cambridge school up to the present,
if one's inclined to use the term. As many are not, & I don't blame them,
since it seems a human enough sentiment (certainly not distinctively
American, pace Spahr [I'm going by your summary here]) to be leery of
claiming a group identity--since, sure, such identity is typically only an
instigation to relegation to the dustbin by a mainstream (critics dismiss
whole swathes of mid-century UK poetry in the two words "New Apocalypse");
from the inside of any grouping the mutual responses and poetic models and
friendships and aspirations must seem brutally truncated by labelling &
eventual slotting into literary history. As Peter Riley put it in 1983
when asked if there was a Cambridge School (an interview by Kelvin Corcoran
in _Reality Studios_ 8): "Well, there was, and there wasn't, and there
isn't." Justifiable ambivalence, though probably more plausible then than
now after the bibliography's gotten 16 years longer (including, as a major
subset, the remarkable series of books Peter Riley himself had only just
embarked on at that point, culminating recently in _Distant Points_ and
_Alstonefield_). -- Briefly on "civic" vs. "public": Fisher's thinking of
(he explains this elsewhere in the essay) the difference between qualities
of engagement promoted by poetries: "public address" (_to_ the reader), and
a civic model of mutual (writer and reader's) participation in the creation
of meaning.

2) Trevor--yikes, got to sign off before the birds start singing. But:
many thanks for your comments on Middleton & Cage. Re: "originality" ,
it's perhaps not surprising that other poets of Middleton's approximate
generation seem to have followed loosely a similar career trajectory: I'm
thinking of the poets CH Sisson or Edwin Morgan, who have had also to find
ways around the burden of the modernist achievement--the main way being
intensive translation work, of course. I have mixed feelings about such
neomodernist projects, which in Morgan's case, for instance, can seem
merely a jackdaw series of imitations of other people's styles (there's the
concrete-poetry Morgan, the confessional Morgan, recently the Barry
MacSweeney _Book of Demons_ Morgan...). That'd been my initial worry with
Middleton, which fortunately didn't remain after getting to know the work.
-- I don't suppose the work of Thomas Kinsella was an exception in the
general run of Irish poetry when you were casting around for models &
reading matter? Have liked the small amount of his work I've seen. One
thing that annoyed me in reading Muldoon's "Incantata" was what I take is a
jab at Kinsella--"that Dublin thing, that an artist must walk down Baggott
/ Street wearing a hair-shirt under the shirt of Nessus."

all best --N

Nate & Jane Dorward
[log in to unmask]
109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865


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