Hi Chris,
At 9:01 +0100 21/5/00, Chris Emery wrote:
>the generation which
>succeeded Crozier, Prynne, Raworth, Longville, et al, is far more fractured
>and disconsolate. I'd posit that most poets (at least those risking
>something) in contemporary England were actually asocial, solitary, and meet
>only as planets do, on their circuits once in a while. Trajectories being
>mostly lone affairs.
I reckon you're fishing for responses. Maybe your caveat here is
'most', although . . .
THat's not my sense at all. There is a network of inter-regional or
translocal overlayerings. I meet with a mixture of writing
practitioners on what seems a regular basis. Some of these exchanges
occur in on or around the premises of institutions (to mutate
Blackburn's title). Such institutions (I use the word loosely to
include long-standing watering holes) in my one instance are reading
series and educational establishments. I bump into combinations of
writers in Norwich, Cambridge, Dartington and London certainly month
by month. Then we can tip in visits to Liverpool and Hereford and
Oxford. This, right here, is a meeting place as are Poetics,
subsubpoetics, poetryetc, ht-lit, LiveArt (all other lists I've been
on since their inception). It's a meshwork of 'scenes', or what
Kittler has called a discourse network. There are people i go out of
my way to see who don't frequent such nodes and there are those that
i bump into in the street and get diverted by for a six hour hoe
down. It *is* very different from the US; more negative feedback
recursions, less openly hospitable, more 'English', but the cauldron
bubbles (though rarely boils) with exchanges and they are a social
practice that inscribes the writing as much as the writing inscribes
such hits and misses. Others here would obviously add differing
circuits. I hanker after more 'special events' and more contact with
contemporary practices in mainland europe personally.
love and love
cris
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