Cambridge poets

I thought Plane Debris was terrific, in the top Heliogabalus class. Sweat ran out of my ears, and still does, a sheer delirium.

J H Prynne


Back in the early nineties I joined a workshop run by Stephen Rodefer, who was then Judith E Wilson Fellow at Magdalene. (At the time, he'd only published in the States, but recently Carcanet has brought out a Selected, Call it Thought.) At our first seminar, he wrote on the board the names of some English poets with whom we should all be familiar. I've still got the notes somewhere, but from memory they included John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, John Riley, Tom Raworth, Veronica Forrest-Thompson, Rod Mengham... there were about a dozen names, and I hadn't heard of any of them - though I was familiar with names in the PBS catalogue, Poetry Review and so on. I can't for the life of me remember whether Prynne's name was on the list or whether he was taken as a given - certainly he was a presiding spirit, and Rodefer was glad to be breathing the Cambridge air. Most of my fellow students were familiar with many of these poets (a couple were Prynne's students), and with Americans like Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Creeley etc, whom I'd never heard of. [Shamed.] My reading in those days was random, and I had a sense it was a bit restricted which is one of the reasons I joined this course.

(It was another 6-7 years before I got online, and people tend to forget what it was like back in those days.)

It was an enriching experience. It was there that I first encountered a personification of OuLiPo, the legendary Harry Mathews, who featured in the terrific series of readings that Rodefer organised for us. We also heard Rod Mengham, John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, Christopher Middleton, Wendy Mulford and others. It was wider than L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, though all his guests had that passion for words as words first, rather than simply as means to an end. For the first time since student magazines, I was brought face to face with poetry that didn't make sense in any obvious way. Some of it was non-linear, some was syntactically disrupted, some played with the sounds words made:

An error is mirror to the truth
than any statement claiming to be true.

Rodefer, Plane Debris (Four Lectures)

At one seminar Rodefer produced for especial scorn a recent TLS with a poem by (let's call him) JG. Although it was quite vivid it wasn't, to be honest, a remarkable poem, particularly in retrospect now I have read so many other poems a bit like it - about dealing with the effects of an elderly relative as a consequence of their going into a nursing home. It began with an image of the narrator and his siblings picking over the household effects like gulls. "See!" said Rodefer, "that's what I really hate about this sort of poem: it gets a little movie camera going in your head" [here he makes cranking motions with his hand near his ear] - "poets should leave that kind of thing to the movies. Movies do it much better. We can't be satisfied with the visual now. Poets have to move on. It's our duty to foreground language."

(Of course he was a real film buff, and fascinated by the interaction between poem and film - but that's another story.)

So while we have our mainstream workshops urging things like Show don't Tell and all the other orthodox mantra, LangPo is doing something rather different. I read quite a lot of stuff around then, and went to a lot of readings, but on the whole it didn't excite me enough. I could never work out how to tell whether it was being done well or badly, because I never really "got" the point of much of it. At the same time, I was keen to pick up anything that might be useful, but heaven knows whether it shows. I doubt it. (I try to remember his advice: "Be bolder along the axis of selection.")

What I couldn't bear was the animosity that so often went with LangPo - that the Mainstream had sold out to Mammon, that the Mainstream pandered to the lowest common denominator, that the Mainstream was capitalist and anti-socialist, that the Mainstream perpetuated archaic values, that Mainstream writers were beneath contempt. At the same time, I was going to mainstream poetry readings and it was interesting in Q & A sessions to drop my bit of sodium into the water by asking them what they thought of Prynne.

The loathing was mutual, and it still baffles me. It may well be a testosterone thing, as it's not simply political. Now Bloodaxe has published Prynne's Collected (a book whose purchase-to-reading ratio must be close to A Brief History of Time) perhaps the barriers have come down a bit. While they remain, it's sad and an impoverishment of poetry. There are poets who earn respect from both sides, such as Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, WS Graham, John Kinsella, Christopher Middleton, Denise Riley....

Hell, this is worth more than a cursory anecdote. I'll return to the subject when I've collected my thoughts more intelligently.