Nothing goes well for the teller of this story until after a skull-splitting – and a short excursus on the ‘Table of contents’ of a book for women, How to Hook a Man, What Girls Look for in a Guy’ etc – the severed sections flay together and ‘I was almost my old self again’.

The other piece is Jonty Tiplady’s ‘neolove’, which claims to be “from Clarice Lispector and Jean Vigo”, and gleefully sets up a panoply of characters before devouring them: “I have so much love to give.” (‘neolove’ can also be read in a fuller context at onedit 16.)

Francesca Lisette, ‘Honied Taper’

Alexander Nemser, ‘Psalms’

Ray Crump, ‘The Tinder Box – Sparks of Poetry’

George Reynolds, ‘Pound’s Letters: Towards a Poetics Including the ‘EZpistolary’

Issue 3 editorial and Letters, from Peter Riley and Allen Fisher.

Anne Blonstein, ‘[Psalm] 13.’

Reitha Pattison: Four poems from the French of Bertran de Born

Henri Deluy: The Oath of Strasbourg, translated by Jacqueline Kari

Richard Owens, ‘Four Ballads’

Yonatan Mendel, ‘The Politics of Non-Translation: On Israeli Translations of Intifada, Shahid, Hudna and Islamic Movements’

cambridgeliteraryreview.org/zinovieff

Elevation of ‘The Morning Line’ sculpture, for which Peter Zinovieff composed ‘Bridges from Somewhere and Another to Somewhere Else’. Image © Aranda\Lasch.

At: Amnesty Bookshop, Mill Road, Cambridge

On: Thursday, 19th August, at 6pm.

Come and hear Peter Riley and Helen Macdonald read – a rare treat indeed. As well as beautiful poetry and prose, wine will be on offer, books sold, and money raised – so please come!

So, in today’s TLS, there is the following letter, under the heading ‘Plain speaking’:

Sir, – “No effort of imagination”, writes J. C. (NB, July 16), “enables us to conjure a reader or an interlocutor who would welcome the self-alienation of the Infinite Difference poets” – that is to say, of the poets we publish in the Cambridge Literary Review. We do indeed welcome such poetry; are we therefore unimaginable? The truth J. C. denies is that there is a diverse and engaged readership for the CLR, not to mention for the many longer-running and better established journals and publishers – Barque Press, the Chicago Review, and so on – whose tastes and remit are similar.

J. C. also points out that we described his writing as “witty analysis”. But there we were wrong. It is neither witty nor is it strictly speaking analysis to present an extract of someone’s work followed by a weak rhetorical flourish. Rather, it is an attempt to humiliate the author under consideration. By merely reprinting segments of work in which he plainly has no interest, J. C. implicitly and explicitly denies that anyone else ought to want to read it. His stance seems to be that only plain-speaking poetry is of any literary value.

The fact that the mainstream literary press is behind the times has no bearing on the countless exchanges about the poetry J. C. derides that spring up on blogs and email lists, and in the readings that happen on a weekly basis in Manchester, Cambridge, Brighton, London, etc. Yet it remains disappointing. It is disappointing, too, that someone with such a prominent outlet should sit in judgement on poetry he himself claims not to understand. This is a basic logical fallacy; more than that, it is an attempt to undermine a segment of poetry that is already thriving.

BORIS JARDINE AND LYDIA WILSON
Cambridge Literary Review, Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

The back page of today’s TLS contains a blast at the CLR by that column’s author, J.C. What’s his charge? Well, it’s not so easy to say, because his piece consists mainly in repetition of his earlier jibes, a bit more out-of-context quotation, and some poorly-turned sentences about “common foundations” and other such oddities. The gist seems to be that he considers the poets collected in Infinite Difference and the CLR to be impenetrable, tout court. How much of the poetry there or here he has in fact read is unclear. Surely not John James in CLR1, surely not Peter Hughes in CLR2, surely not the Genovese poems in CLR3, to take just three examples of work that is of very immediate interest and, we think, beauty.

But no, it’s not really CLR vs TLS at all. We’ve been impressed with the range of poets covered in recent TLS issues, and rather regret the extension of our editorial’s criticism beyond J.C.’s sports page. Moreover, it seems that none other than the TLS’s editor has found at least some of CLR3 to be comprehensible—he blogged about us last week. This renders absurd J.C.’s statement that “No effort of imagination enables us to conjour a reader or an interlocutor who would welcome the self-alienation [of the poets in Infinite Difference and the CLR].”

Ought we to be more generous? Is there something to be said for J.C.’s stance? Of course, we would like each issue to enact various kinds of communication with its readers, maybe even to establish a “common foundation”, perhaps politically or philosophically, even aesthetically. (Poetry does still contain some aesthetic element, doesn’t it? to read J.C. you’d doubt it.) J.C. implies that the CLR is impossible to read, end of story. Doubtless there are eloquent defenses of plain-speaking poetry, and we would be interested to read them; doubtless too there is a strong case to be made against obscurity and difficulty in poetry. We would I’m sure end up disagreeing with it, but someone must be capable of the attempt. J.C., it would seem, just ain’t the man.

[UPDATE: there's an excellent take on J.C.'s outpouring, over at The Lyre.]

Monday June 14, 6pm

Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio, English Faculty, West Road, Cambridge

Readings/performances from:

Emily Critchley

Alexander Nemser

Jeremy Hardingham

Wine will be served, entrance is free. Bring friends! CLR3 will be on sale at £8.

Poetry / Joel Calahan [4 Genovese poets], Reitha Pattison [Bertran de Born], Jacqueline Kari [Henri Deluy], Peter Manson [Mallarmé], Ian Heames [Baudelaire, Villon] Charles Lambert [Genet], Nicholas Moore [Nicaragua], Rod Mengham [Andrzej Sosnowski], Grzegorz Wróblewski [tr. by Agnieszka Pokojska], Alistair Noon [Mandelstam], Adam Polnay [Hesse], Sean Bonney [Rimbaud]. Other translation variants are from Caroline Bergvall, Raymond Geuss, Jonty Tiplady, Marianne Morris, Richard Owens, Anne Blonstein.

Prose / Eric Hazan [tr. by David Fernbach], Kurt Schwitters [tr. by Peter Wortsman], André Gide [tr. by Julian Evans]. New work from Jeremy Hardingham and Emily Critchley takes us to/across the borders.

Essays / J.H. Prynne [on translating 'difficult' poetry], Lydia Davis [on Proust], Nick Jardine [on false friends], David Bellos [on Walter Benjamin], Haun Saussy [on Jean Métellus], Peter Zinovieff [on translating & electronic music], Christopher Burke [on Otto Neurath & Isotype], Yonatan Mendel [on Israeli non-translations of Arabic].

ETA May 25th. Pre-order here.

Taxonomy—though inimical to certain strands in this very area—has its benefits where category errors and talking-across abound. So, in the spirit of George Steiner’s ‘On Difficulty’, here is an experiment in poetico-political classification:

Disclaimer: We do not expect this list to be final, though we would be very surprised if any form of poetical-political nexus could be found that was not ultimately reducible to one of the lines in Joseph Walton’s proem.

1. Resistance. Pace Andrea Brady’s letter to CLR: “I would include, among my political acts, teaching, conversation, and collaboration.” Here poetry is contingent on acts of persuasion and sophisticated engagement. Teaching is the paradigm, insofar as it implies dialogue, elucidation, generosity.

2. Complicity. J.H. Prynne has provided perhaps the most succinct and eloquent passage in this vein:

Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement; thus any grace (truly achieved) of sound is political, part of the world of motion and place in which language is like weather, the air we breathe. [...] So that if you like is the politics of truth, change & motion in the world at large and this is the order of feeling, public and private a vested patience.*

This is mildly stated, and tends away from the kind of argument that itself lives and thrives in the position(s) of aesthetic and political implication. But for that very reason it is powerful: it suggests that other forms of communication are owned, are complicit, are constrictive, suffocate.

3. Solidarity. Here is part of a description of a poetry reading given at a sit-in demonstration against funding cuts at the University of Sussex:

But for all that the mood in the theatre wasn’t, I thought, unchallengingly just grateful and benign: people were really listening, picking up on new angles and sparks in the language, their nerves and hearts really exposed to it; but also, their heads screwed on and their tactical ears alert to the front and back of the stuff, the language surface and its scintillations as well the pressures of argument deeper down.

This is closely related to (1) but differs in setting and agitation. The problems of (2) become generative of powerful disjunctions; the public setting heightens both the potential for and absurdity of poetry’s claim on politics. But the description is of an act in overt defiance of funding cuts and implicit defiance of cruel administrative threats. As such it is of the utmost importance.

4. Political Poetry Proper (PPP). No finer exercise in this execrable medium has been provided than the recent Openned broadcast by Joseph Walton. After this, no poetry with political claims can be unsullied by the drip-drip pleasurework of defamation:

“Vote, with me, for the Conservatives.”