Hi,

I have much agreement with Peter in not wanting social realist poetry 
or screeds of plangent mimicry, let alone the dread of sanctimonious 
sermonizing.  But I don't connect discomfort with punishment  - 
although I can see how it could be so bound. I connect discomfort 
with being put on one's mettle, self-examination even, being 
challenged to reconsider one's habitual ways and so forth  -  to 
accept the possibility of change and of views and apprehensions of 
'making sense' counter to one's own which might be part of an ongoing 
process of change. I can see 'comfort' being equally aligned with 
punishment (here we are talking away from the short-term 
satisfaction).

I mentioned Punk because whilst Peter was busy tying his shoelace, or 
somesuch, a key shift was registered in British society and I don't 
believe that it was of small importance for poetry. It brought the 
colonial chickens home to roast, it raised powerful and empowering 
issues of diy and the transformative and carnivalesque potential of 
the everyday into centre ground. It brought an emphasis on energy and 
attitude and gendered politics that fueled the blooming of various 
theatrical poetics and marked (along with the two tone movement) the 
beginnings of a more openly negotiable and decentralising 
multi-cultural debate. It pointed the finger of shame at 
establishments without the mystic baggage of the hippie shift that 
had preceded and to a significant extent lain grounds for it. Punk 
was only a 'moment' but it brought the debate 'home'. It made enough 
difference to render exposure to discomforts necessary. Not 
discomforts born out of a pose of poverty but an expose of hegemonic 
poverties of cultural veneer and a discomfort at the awkward burden 
of priveledged ease.  It brought Debord's prescient naming of the 
society of the spectacle into sharp focus (despite and perhaps 
because of its own romantic dystopias and pretty vacancies) and the 
ramifications of that can be read as surviving in early 90s rave 
cultures and even the internet.  OK, so I'm overstating a case. But 
for poetries that this broadly interpretive community shares it 
brought a catastrophic curve.

Peter might be right about poetry having other purposes than to 
register such moments. I'm not sure though that it can do so without 
still being readable through the cultural syntax that such moments 
inscribe. Else what are we to infer from the word 'bad' being 
understood to mean 'good' and so on? The problem with poetry is 
perhaps that it remains at too far remove from such moments in its 
immediate contexts and thereby distances its potential from those who 
are living through them.

love and love
cris



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