>Peter, how would you define skilled as opposed to de-skilled poetry?

I don't think you can. I wouldn't want to get involved in such
distinctions, which are almost bound to turn out corrupt (on either side).
In music you have  an instrument which you have to master, including the
voice. The anti-skilled music I was referring to did, at the extreme,
involve literally leaving the guitar at home. Because if the thing is there
it demands a skill, it's made that way, though some people did also try to
play instruments avoiding any skills they had.

The "instrument" of poetry, language, is everywhere, it surrounds us, all
our senses respond to it constantly. I don't see that you can have "skill"
in it except by usage, and I can't see that a poetic skill in language
would be different in kind from any other language skill.  You can get
subtle in it, you can study and practice and get fluent with its echoes and
its delicacies, but I doubt if anyone ever does that deliberately, you just
grow into its climate as you read and write.  (and I suppose you could
"de-skill" yourself from this if you thought for some ideological reason
you needed to). You can also get a studied delimiting ability so that, for
instance, you start to reproduce the tones and modes of address of the ways
of writing poetry which win competition prizes these days, or count as
innovative, but that's the lowest form of skill.  People can just enter
this business for the first time and be right there, with the instrument
finely tuned, their only training being that of living through a language,
which is a moral thing.

"making an imaginative object with an eye to the medium's inherent history
and an ear for musical harmony" -- would suit me fine, but it strikes me as
more a retrospective account of what has taken place than a description of
a skill.  And that "history" seems to reach people quite indirectly
sometimes, as if it's just in the air.   You want to be "educated" but the
way things have spread out, any eduction routine is dangerously partial,
except  I suppose the appeal to some final sense of possibility,  the big
liberal spaces which are in such danger of getting enclosed.

There are poetry governors everywhere aren't there, educating, demanding
skills, narrowing the field, enclosing open spaces,  demonising valid and
benign usages, and indulging  the massive put-down.  Some of them are
traditionalists, some of them are avant-gardistes.  One of the American
poetry sites we were directed to recently contained editorially, in the
name of p-c experimentalism, one of the biggest generalised put-downs I've
ever seen. There was hardly anybody left.   I've also been told that CCCP
had to go European because "there aren't enough British poets" -- for two
days of readings a year!  (It was not one of the organisers of CCCP who
expressed this opinion).   It sometimes looks very like most poets don't
really want there to be any other poets around at all; they kind of get in
the way.



/PR