Cambridge UK has (as far as I know) no University literary journal (no mainstream literary magazine at all, in fact) but within the English Faculty there's a nucleus of people who write/encourage/publish modern poetry. Outsiders sometimes refer to them and their friends as "The Cambridge School". They help organise the CCCP (Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry) which happened last weekend.

I attended one session, missing the session where Prynne (mentioned on "Musing on Mastery") introduced Che Qianzi - a founder of the experimental poetry group Yuanyang based in Beijing. As usual I was at first stimulated by the readings. I'll try to contain my impressions within 3 topics

• US/UK differences - Randall Jarrell felt that in the UK Modernism never got "beyond the level of the Sitwells" - i.e. not far. Of course we English love our eccentrics, but that doesn't mean that we have to take them seriously. In the US "modern poetry" seems to have been absorbed into the mainstream - perhaps because US univs have more contacts with poets. People like Jorie Graham would have had trouble breaking through here. To me, the UK large-circulation anthologies contain much more old-fashioned poetry than corresponding US anthologies do. Interestingly, the latest antho by Oxford University Press (20th Century British and Irish Poetry, edited by Keith Tuma - see the Boston Review) tries to be more inclusive. No Prynne (because he refused) but no Fenton or Douglas Dunn either. As one reviewer wrote, "it's worth buying for the omissions alone"
  
  
  
• Unity - The Aristotlean idea of unity and coherence is still strong in UK (and US?) poetry. The CCCP poems tended to have broken sentences, multiple styles and perhaps most strikingly, multiple voices. Dialog with the reader wasn't just implicit. Eliot's "That was a way of putting it-not very satisfactory" becomes integrated into the poem (indeed, at the reading it wasn't always clear when the poet's intro ended and the poem began).
  In contrast, mainstream poems have an air of dramatic irony - they, like an actor in a farce, seem unaware of what's going on around them.
  
  
  
• Fusion - My sympathies lie on both "sides", though I lean towards the UK mainstream. However, mixing styles within a single poem seems at the very least a bad marketing ploy in the UK. The coherence issue is especially controversial - something that (by dint of style or content) doesn't fit in is considered a puncture out of which the poem leaks rather than an estuary via which the reader can gain entry and trade. Maybe the different streams of poetry have evolved apart so much that (like dogs and bears) they can no longer interbreed?
  
  

Tim -

I have to say that with a lot of British poetry, I have sometimes felt a kind of "plague on both your houses" feeling. There are some terrific poets who come from a modernist/avant garde perspective (Roy Fisher, Denise Riley, John James are three that spring to mind, but there are others.) But then there are quite a few who just annoy the hell out of me. Difficulty and allusiveness in poetry is not a bad thing, but one sometimes gets the feeling that the only reason someone is being difficult is that it's not like those mainstream people.

Then, I read another dose of defensive irony from a mainstream poet and suddenly I'm back to yawning again. Either that, or it follows trends: everything from Craig Raine's rent-a-sylable to Roddy Lumsden et al getting terribly laddish in the Poetry Review.

I think I'm rather inclined to those poets who jump the fences between the camps. John Hartley Williams, Charles Boyle, Martin Stannard, Ian MacMillan (when he isn't in Bradford City's Poet Laureate mode.)



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Steve Waling

Difficulty and allusiveness,yes, but with some poets it becomes esotericism and elusiveness: like the Snark, a flavour of will-o'-the-wisp. The problem is determining which it is. I'm not sure that Prynne engages in dialogue with his readers: I think his poems are objects which are there and whether the reader responds is up to him. I've heard people who claim to be influenced by Prynne reading their works and understood nothing.