Another CLR reading for the summer…
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!
Although there were plenty of reasons not to respond to J.C.’s piece in the TLS, we eventually decided that a letter to the editor was justified, not least because J.C. had basically denied that anyone could possibly enjoy the CLR’s poetry, or poetry like it. This is absurd: of course it’s hard to pin down a common cause or even aesthetic, but there is a huge and somehow coherent group of poets, critics and readers out there—one that we’ve happily stumbled into and that has made the CLR welcome. Not without challenging it; just taking it seriously, welcoming it.
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.
Or, well, actually, not really.
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.]
