The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Public Faces in Private Places

64 Public Faces in Private Places Notes on Cambridge Poetry My title comes from some lines of W. H. Auden’s in The Orators: “Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places” (5). Often, modern poets have presented their work as a matter of private faces in public places— that is, as the voice of private, authentic individual conscience entering the public sphere. Such a vision of poetry is, no doubt, fraught with its own problems and contradictions, but none of those concern me here. When we look at what has come to be known in some circles as Cambridge School poetry—the experimental poetry of Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson , and Jeremy Prynne, as well as Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, and Simon Jarvis, to name a few poets of the younger generation—we’re faced with a very different conception of poetry. We find ourselves asking a question something like this: what ought we to make of a school of poetry that has a strong public concern, but no appreciable public presence ? In Auden’s terms, it is a poetry of public faces in private places. Characteristically, poets of the Cambridge School have created a hermetic poetry, circulated outside the regular system of publication among a small group of cognoscenti. In some sense, this is a very private poetry, both in its formal qualities and in its support culture. On the other hand, the claims for this poetry represent it as anything but private: it is sometimes referred to as a poetry with a specific and far-reaching 65 Poetry in a Difficult World political goal and effect. In this sense, it is profoundly public poetry, at least in theory. The position is inherently contradictory, and has been complicated by the sometime refusal on the part of some of the Cambridge School’s leading figures to allow their work to be published (that is, to become public) by commercial presses and prominent journals, even when it is sought out by editors. The choice of private publication —quite literally, since some of the most important work of the school has appeared in self-published pamphlets—defies the idea of a poetry of public, political significance. This is the point for disclaimers, and I will not fail to provide one. I admit there is some debate about how much one can generalize about the Cambridge School of poetry. Not all of the poets are of a uniform view about the relationship of hermetic poetry and political efficacy. In fact, a good place to begin may be with a controversy between two poets associated with the Cambridge School, John Wilkinson and Peter Riley. In their debate, conducted over three issues of theChicago Review in 2007, Wilkinson took what I understand to be the more orthodox Cambridge School position about the relationship of poetry and politics, while Riley took the apostate’s position, a questioning of the norms of the group from within the group itself. Although Wilkinson’s initial salvo in this exchange took the form of a long review of Simon Jarvis’ book-length poem The Unconditional, the publication of Jarvis’ book was really just the occasion for a more significant project. The real intent of the piece was to introduce the Cambridge School to an American readership heretofore largely unfamiliar with it. Wilkinson begins with a brief description of Jarvis’ book, in which he claims (not unreasonably) that “it would defeat rhetoric to overstate the peculiarity of Simon Jarvis’ book The Unconditional” and that “must be among the most unusual books ever published.” “Imagine if you can,” Wilkinson continues, “a continuous poem of 237 pages, mainly in iambic pentameter, in which whole pages pass without a full stop.” Jarvis’ The Unconditional, says Wilkinson, is deeply challenging even to habitual poetry readers, as it is a poem “dedicated to a high level of discourse on prosody, critical theory, and phenomenology; all this conducted in a philosophical language drawing on Adorno’s negative 66 The Poet Resigns dialectics” and “a narrative language that is the unnatural offspring of Wyndham Lewis and P. B. Shelley.” Moreover, Wilkinson tells us, the book is filled with a particularly unusual cast of characters. Resembling nothing so much as “refugees from an Iain Sinclair novel finally fed up with walking” and with “names like ‘=x’ ‘Agramant’ ‘Qnuxmuxkyl’ and ‘Jobless’, the group starts out on a Canturbury Tales-like trip...