Peter, on second reading it can be taken as critical. But I've just read it
a third time and it seems positive. I think it is like one of those optical
illusions where two interrelated images are held in tension and one or
the other can become foregrounded at any time. I don't know how
Campbell manages this, but it can't be easy.
On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:04:22 +0100, Peter Riley
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>I don't understand. You think Campbell is praising CLR
and "Cambridge"
>poetry? Like when he says of me that I've obviously invented an
>obscure 1960s poet and written about him, because I'm "Cambridge"
and
>so I don't believe in truthfulness. This is praise? "Poetry that no
>one can understand" ... "A stack of poetry whose reason for
existence
>is to be difficult" -- this too is praise? Does anybody else read the
>review in this way? When he claims that the issue is entirely
>dominated by JH Prynne (which it isn't), does he mean that's a jolly
>good thing? I think not. In fact the sneering sarcasm of it all seems
>to me to be overwhelming.
>
>PR
>
>I'll put the whole text here in case needed---
>
>
>The Cambridge Literary Review, No. 1, is a splendid affair. It is 280
>pages long, tastefully printed on good paper; the copies are
numbered
> ours is 514 our of 1,000. It is ludic, as you would expect: Keston
>Sutherland's impenetrable excursion in prose contains footnotes, one
>of which explicates "You" as "You" (if you had gone to Cambridge you
>would get the joke); and it is, of course, "difficult". It even
>contains an essay, "A History of Difficulty: On Cambridge poetry" by
>Jeremy Noel-Tod, in which he settles a score with Craig Raine, his
>Oxford tutor. Raine's problem, according to Noel-Tod, is being
>insufficiently appreciative of poetry that no one can understand.
>Cambridge Literary Review has a stack of poetry whose reason for
>existence is to be difficult:
>
>CALL 2 NO LAW YR HYDROLIC SELF
>SPLISH SPLASH WITH YR
>HAND OVER YR LIFE
>EXCESS 2 HEAD CORTEXT CON
>NECTORS NEURON DIODE...
>
>and so on for quite a few of the tastefully printed pages. There is a
>poem by J. H. Prynne not presented as "A Message from Our
Sponsor",
>though it might as well be and a portfolio of poems, compiled by
>Peter Riley, by "a poet about whom neither I nor anyone I have
spoken
>to knows anything", Ray Crump. They were sent to Prynne and Riley
in
>the 1960s, and the author remains a mystery. Is this true? Mr Riley
>wishes to persuade us that it is as if we weren't aware that the
>raison d'๊tre of the Review is to encourage us to challenge anyone's
>"truth".
>
>No one will accuse the editors of rootless cosmopolitanism: it is
>concerned with Cambridge difficulty, the Cambridge Poetry Festival,
>"Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry". Richard Berengarten writes
>engagingly about the Festival's beginnings, and Elaine Feinstein
>offers reminiscences of Prospect. Can she be referring to the monthly
>journal of politics and current affairs? Of course she can't. She
>means Prosepect the Cambridge literary magazine of the 1950s.
>"Occasionally J. H. Prynne looked in on us." Half a century later,
>he's still doing it.
>
>(Times Literary Supplement, October 9)
>
>
>(Actually the main point of attack, I notice, seems to be that a
>magazine offering itself as a special issue on "Cambridge writing" is
>all about Cambridge writing.)
>
>
>
>On 13 Oct 2009, at 12:39, Jeffrey Side wrote:
>
>I can't sense the nastiness you notice in Campbell's piece. As I said,
>it
>seems positive. Please explain.
>
>
>
>
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