Its Chief Weapon Is Excess
Monday 9 November, 2009 in Chris Hamilton-Emery, Robert Archambeau Robert Archambeau on Chris Hamilton-Emery on 'Cambridge Poetry':
The British experimental crowd for whom Cambridge serves as a center of gravity has been one of the most vital and interesting things going on in the U.K. for some time, and it hasn't really had much of an assessment. Even the degree to which it is correct to call it Cambridge Poetry hasn't been determined, although I've got a feeling the name will stick, despite how unhappy everyone is going to be with it. I mean, that's what happened with Language Poetry, and with New Criticism, and with Dada, and with just about everything
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With regard to Chris' second point above, that the poetry has been left outside of the wider history of British poetry against its will, I'm ambivalent. There sure are editors, scholars, and academics who want nothing to do with the stuff, don't like it, and suspect that it's all a matter of the emperor's new clothes (as some small percentage of it surely is). But I think there's been a reciprocal rejection: just as the many have decided to ignore this kind of writing, there has been a rejection of mainstream publication and even critical attention by some people inside the movement.
Read the rest here.
Reader Comments (2)
I find this bit from Chris extremely objectionable:
"The political content of much 90s British avant-garde writing has its origins in a liberation from post-War thrift and limitation, it derives its thrust from a cultural exuberance not a political fracture or civil rights revolution. It’s politics are received. You can’t of course have a politics with out a polity."
As in 'its politics are received' suggests that everything is AOK so we should all just become happy little capitalists. as if the anti-war movement, G20 and about a million other things had never fucking happened.