Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Bernardo Soares on the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry, 1998
From Jacket #4 (1998)
How shall I articulate with what I hear? Not indulge an emotional reaction prompted in me nor assert the conceptual “grasp” which actually is a standing-back and leads to adopting a position, a self-testing consciousness which demeans its occasion. One way to engage is interlock through metaphor, but this too preens into consistency.
I shall resist the bad faith of consistency, or so I mused in closing down my applications, bestowing a good-weekend smile on my secretary, checking travelcard present and leaving an unprecedented twelve minutes before habitual time of departure. Yes, to resist consistency, but refrain too from flattering reality by granting it the variety it claims so flagrantly. I am open! I receive all tendencies! Set aside your received ideas! This is the CCCP embrace; but I who idled six years on the Cam's banks permit myself a weary smile. Nothing over-pronounced.
For the heterogeneity itself represents a reassuring consistency — the consistency of CCCP. But the middle-aged are sensitive to change in old haunts, and this year change was discernible. Had the animadversions of Messrs Evans and Moxley in their admirable Dictionary of Received Ideas drawn a little blood? There were signs of organisation — frustrated gestures perhaps; but starting with a little brochure of considered design and for Cambridge improvident with information.