Really Existing
On the Cambridge Literary Review and Vidyan Ravinthiran
Another week, another poetry magazine recommendation — because a hundred Substacks can’t rival the hold-in-your-hand riches of a well-edited issue of a journal. And Cambridge Literary Review has been one of the best at this for over a decade. Predictable neither in frequency nor contents, it nevertheless has its writers and its tastes — its character.
The latest issue — by which I mean, the one that appeared in July 2021, edited by Lydia Wilson, Rosie Šnajdr, Jocelyn Betts, and Paige Smeaton — exemplifies the CLR blend perfectly. I have been reading bits at bedtime all week, with other bits still to read, so I’m not going to attempt to sum up its 200+ pages, which are organised around the theme of “Resistance”. But, look: here is a really interesting essay by Robert Kiely on poetry and “really existing satire” (“satire is a daily practice, scrawled on bathroom walls and sunscreens on vans and sprinkled through conversation”); Harry Josephine Giles’ “May a transsexual hear a bird?”, a short, sharp verse-essay on lyric poetry and political reality (“the sun, / the conditions, and the working day”); a reprint of J.H. Prynne’s fabled early manifesto, “Resistance and Difficulty [1961]” (“Resistance, I have maintained, is in an inescapable sense given, found to exist”), and a new poem, “Manifested”, which seems to reflect on a lifetime of line-breaks that run slap up against the found-to-exist (“Step fleet to stay free, uneasy / false radish”); “The bomb shelter”, a new piece from Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s poetic-philosophical writing about life in the Baddawi refugee camp in North Lebanon; some brilliantly off-kilter prose poems by Kimberley Campanello and Paige Smeaton; an epigrammatic meditation on lichens and capitalism by Drew Milne; Luke Roberts’ memories of Sean Bonney; and a hard-thinking personal essay on how “the past returns” by Vidyan Ravinthiran, one of the best writers of prose about poetry right now — and whose Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (Columbia University Press, 2022) also just arrived in today’s post, featuring essays on Rae Armantrout, Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo, A.K. Ramanujan and others. I’ve been looking forward to it a lot.
You can find CLR 13 here: https://cambridgeliteraryreview.wordpress.com/about/ and Worlds Woven Together here: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/worlds-woven-together/9780231202756