London Bound

Following a great many months of silence, The Newer Metaphysicals will be reborn this coming summer, a rebirth accompanied by the beginning of a new life.

This week, I was appointed Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary College, University of London, on a one-year contract. The Paris era, which has lasted some 7 years, is thus for the moment over or interrupted, and London beckons, an extraordinary new city, with a multitude of new poetic horizons.

One of the major reasons for this silence from the realms of poetic interactions on the networks of glittering zeros and ones was a reticence I felt regarding what I could and couldn't say, given my role as "pedagogue". With students of mine reading The Newer Metaphysicals, anything personal needed to be excised or at least softened. With a position, of some responsibility at least, in the French university system, I felt it was no longer possible to write in such a public forum in the same way, or with the same honesty. Rereading many of the posts of this blog over its first few years, I was surprised at what I felt to be an almost equal measure of naivety and insight. I hardly even recognized the voice of some of my earliest observations, a fact which strangely convinced me, in the end, of the necessity of continuing such a forum, if only for such a record of an evolving discourse, and an apparently changing mind.

The poetscape has also greatly changed. Such constant points de répère as Tom Beckett's blog are no longer with us, others have emerged, other precious sites of avowal and reason are more or less alive or distant. Perhaps it is no longer the Golden Era of virtual poetic discussions, perhaps it never was, as some of us remember it, or perhaps we can create such a thing again, or for the first time.

In any case, with London at my feet from September 1st on, I will be making every effort to make this place alive again. The Newer Metaphysicals has perhaps lost a good number of its previous more faithful readers. But I would also like to think my future students at Queen Mary may find this place, that there will be no such division, as there has been in the past, between those who have been living with our contemporary poetics for many years, and those discovering it for the very first time.

Glide gently, thus for ever glide,
O Thames! that other bards may see,
As lovely visions by thy side
As now, fair river! come to me.
Oh glide, fair stream! for ever so;
Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,
'Till all our minds for ever flow,
As thy deep waters now are flowing.