Trevor: a few addenda to my last post.

1) Yes, one can often feel an interested bystander to some of the most
fruitful exchanges on the list. Well, that's the nature of the beast, &
it's often a privilege to be able to listen in.  But please feel free to
jump in about something closer to your own poetic loves & interests--these
are what most interest me about people, not their various dislikes &
hatreds (which seem to have had a fairly thorough exposition on this like
in the last few days, no?).  I'm always curious to hear: for instance, I
found it quite illuminating that you mentioned Christopher Middleton's work
when we talked in Cork--first of all, beause I'd not given it close
attention & pulling down the _Selected Writings_ I was considerably more
impressed than I'd been before from idle scanning.  (Anyone know his
excellent prose poems, in _Pataxanadu_ and _Serpentine_?  Or the remarkable
_Woden Dog_, which mixes medieval English with Texan dialect?).  Secondly,
because I could indeed feel its link to what you were doing in books like
_Stone Floods_--can't reconstruct my chain of thought exactly, but let's
say the willingness to experiment stylistically within a single oeuvre or
book, with a slightly abstracted approach to phantasmagoria & to natural
description. (Hope that makes sense.)  Your picking up a copy of the
enormous _MUSICAGE_, interviews with Cage, at New Hampshire suggested
another affinity (along with your obvious love for and knowledge of
Oriental literature and thought).  Is your use of carefully worked-out
poetic systems (what Prynne might call "outer frames" on the texts) in
texts such as _Syzygy_ is there a similar intention to efface the ego as in
Cage's work?

2) [to Jack Kimball]  Thanks for your post, though I'm not quite clear I
understand: I suspect there may be a certain amount of working at
cross-purposes here.  People were inserting the phrase "Cambridge School"
into their prose not as a covert naming or creation of such a school, but
because the phrase has been in common parlance within the small-press
sphere for quite some time.  There is, for instance, an early instance in a
(negative) review of a Peter Riley book by Peter Finch back in _2nd Aeon_
in the 1970s. -- The historical basis for the Cambridge grouping can be
better laid out by others on the list (however weary they may now be with
the designation!), but would touch on the editors of and contributors to
the worksheet _The English Intelligencer_ in 1960s (Andrew Crozier, Peter
Riley, JH Prynne, John Hall, etc.), & the stable of poets published by
Crozier's Ferry Press and Tim Longville & John Riley's Grosseteste Press
and _Grosseteste Review_.  (Forgive me for rehearsing information you may
already have, but your initial mention of Geoffrey Hill as a potential
Cambridge School poet has me worried that you've mistaken the name of the
grouping for simply lumping in together every writer associated with the
city or university.)  I therefore don't think it possible to simply claim
the grouping as an imaginative or promotional construct.
     Re: group affinities: you might also check out Allen Fisher's 1989
review of _A Various Art_ (Carcanet, 1987) in _Reality Studios_ 10, which
attempts to define the shared characteristics as (i) "a constructionist
aesthetic with, in the main, a consequential emphasis on ideal limits,
self-referral and autonomy common to late Modernism"; (ii) "A reliance on
direct perception (itself a construction)"; (iii) "A rhetorical surface
that has been self-parodied, or is a pastiche from conventional (expected)
usage"; (iv) "An address that aspires to the civic, rather than the
public".)

all best

N


Nate & Jane Dorward
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109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865


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