Thanks for tossing me the grenade called ‘Cambridge’, Peter. I am assuming the pin is still in. On the whole I don’t think it’s a useful word. It tends to make otherwise intelligent talk go wobbly. The word, I mean. It seems to have at least three categories of meaning these days: a town where anyone might find themselves living; a university of a general prestige underwritten by longevity; the name for what is thought of as a particular poetic regime. Not surprisingly they all get muddled up with each other. I think our experiences have been very different. I spent three years as an undergraduate there at a time when a highly energised network of poets was gathering in the town, giving others cause to visit. This was intense and hugely stimulating for me at the time but was a set of possibilities and energies rather than a clear regime. It felt neither fully within nor fully without (outwith) the university. It was not at that stage a gathering around a Master.
I left when all this was in full spate and days spent in Cambridge since 1967 don’t amount to much in time, though some have been most welcome. It is a town in which live many people I like and admire. When I go back for poetry events it doesn’t feel like back and what is most striking is the way that the poetry activity seems now to be in a very close alliance with the academy in ways that have encouraged, it seems, a kind of collegiate serial discipleship and something that could perhaps be described as an ‘academic’ poetry. Poets are now most likely to be studiers of literature - from postgraduate students to professors - in an approach that assumes a particular philosophical booklist. There are all sorts of reasons for this that go well beyond Cambridge and it hasn’t stopped there being some exceptionally interesting poets. But to an outsider it feels exclusive, often through the exclusions of multiple shibboleths across all of writing (as active verb), literature and philosophy. As you know this was not the intention behind the founding all those years ago of The English Intelligencer.
So, in a nutshell, as someone who doesn’t have to live with it, I am very glad to enjoy what I can from it. Does that avoid just about everything you wanted me to respond to?
The fact that ethics (previously appearing as ‘moral’) and aesthetics are separate concepts does not mean that in the pragmatics of writing they don't offer themselves as inseparable. The second occurrence of ‘swerve’ in the Stafford poem is a case in point. The economy of the ethical work - little more than a gesture in practice - is the consequence of a formal decision about a return to the same that is no longer the same. I know that this does not touch on your point about a politics that claims ethical privilege but that doesn’t get beyond a set of of rhetorical manoeuvres on the page and/or in the poetry reading. I know that some of those so-called Cambridge poets have also been politically active away from the scene of poetry.
I was asked to do a reading recently which was part of a long and also dispersed programme all under a rubric about ‘writing that changed the world’. Everybody knows that you don’t have to pay any attention to these things but I tend to, being literal-minded. I wrote something for the occasion that attempted to take on some of the paradoxes. I don’t suppose it will survive the occasion but it did make me feel better about reading under that strange flag.
Best,
John
Actually that Stafford poem increasingly irritates me, and largely because of the undercurrent of self-vaunting. I think Robert is right about it. But my question was: what's actually wrong with the "anecdotal", is it
necessarily thus? and obviously it isn't (e.g. WC Williams), and is not an authentication of the poem by appeal to authorial experience a perfectly respectable procedure for some kinds of poem? And what has the concept "mainstream" got to do with any of this? Simon Armitage's work does not strike me as founded on anecdote, nor is it heavily mediated through the first person singular. Its problems are quite elsewhere.
I have never thought of you as an avant-gardist, John! And if you were one you'd be one of the genial ones. I was using the reply-to system to pick up various dangling threads. But does your experience of "Cambridge" tally with mine at all?
AT a hazard I venture to say that the effort is not to separate the ethical and the aesthetic, since they naturally occur separately, they are distinct concepts. The effort is to relate them to each other responsibly, and I have increasingly grown to distrust a poetic which just goes straight from one to the other like turning a page as if there is no problem. So you do your aesthetic thing (e.g. poetry of ugliness and gratuitous violence) and voilá you've got your ethic done for you (e.g. revolutionary politics) or just make a mess of some kind and you're immediately there with a public statement of protest. As if you can use poetry to be political without needing to think right through your politics as practice as well as theoretic.
Peter