I was going to write a reply concerning Peter Riley's post since I must
confess that I don't find the ethos of the poetries he writes of as insular
or wilfully disempoowering as he suggests--I suppose I wouldn't deny the
poetry's "difficult" though I find that an unsatisfactory term (it makes the
poetry sound like a particularly rebarbative crossword puzzle). It'll have
to wait till I finish a little proofreading work (memo to subscribers: _Gig_
6, cover date of July, WILL be out in a week or two). -- I am a little
curious about the matter as Peter's work has of course often strongly placed
itself in "totality" however conceived & has sometimes said things close to
Keston's posts (e.g. _Tracks & Mineshafts_: "every human act genetically
modifies the species"). Plus though Peter's expressed his frustration with
the "Cambridge" label I think it was his work that first provoked the
nomenclature--if Peter Finch is listening in perhaps he could verify my
recollection that the term "Cambridge poetry" first surfaced in a review of
a Peter Riley book in _2nd Aeon_ in the 1970s?
Anyway, I thought I'd toss along an extract from a correspondent's letter I
just received for amusement's or interest's sake:
Have read a nearly worthless book called Binary Myths 2. Don Paterson:
"The only other one [division] I can think of is that Cambridge lot and the
rest of the world, but they have no interest in finding a readership. A
shame, because some of them are talented, but any agenda [...] is soon going
to become hopelessly warped.... It shows you what happens when you shut up
a lot of very clever people in a room. Exactly the same thing happened this
century to Oxford philosophy when it went down the linguistic analysis road,
all that talk about talk about talk."
DP is the new head honcho of poetry at Faber. Just to give you a flavour of
how the central institutions are run down here. This is very much the high
end of the scale of mainstream bigotry; the low end is not far removed from
football hooligans. You have a poetry world of maybe 10,000 people of whom
maybe 500 are prepared to take an interest in what is not post-Larkin.
---
End of quote. -- all best --N
Nate & Jane Dorward
[log in to unmask]
http://www.geocities.com/ndorward/
109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865
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