Oh dear, I'm about to diss both list-owners. Perhaps they'll be able to 
work out which bits are ironic.

"Wow! Change! Poets, eat your hearts out!"

Ohhh, seriously, is this a debate about Poetry or about Social Goodness? 
Is the value of poetry a Social Value - that its value is that it can 
enable the dispossessed to be empowered? I mean that is a pretty good 
Good - but is it, should it, be what BritPo regards as the Ultimate 
Good? Is the value of our activity within the social institutions of 
British and Irish poetry to be determined by the class basis and 
ethnicities etc of our audiences?

I wish Rupert a long and successful career in the Arts Council.

"My intention was to say: hey, you're speaking about race in a way I am 
not used to, I'm reading it, in my context here, as disrespectful.  It's 
not that I'm right and you're wrong or vice versa but that our contexts 
and how we speak about race are different.  What I'm saying is: our own 
membership here is diverse and maybe we have as much to gain by 
respecting that and not presuming that cultural values, even humor, is 
shared.  I know this probably is an argument for political correctness. 
I think in international gatherings, as we have here, political 
correctness is probably a useful tool, at least to establish ground."

I find something disrespectful to the very nature of British and Irish 
poetry if humour and irony are to regarded as suspect. I am deadly 
serious when I say that I cannot trust a discourse concerned with 
British and Irish poetry that refuses such creative potential to 
language. Yeah, sure BritPo is a multicultural community - that is 
excellent, I like that greatly, and it strengthens the moments of 
dialogue that occur.

Bu it is not a community centred on some idealised and bien-pensant 
deracinated World Poetry. It is centred on the poetry written/being 
written in the Great Brown Tea Drinking Archipelago, a messy and 
inadequate place by the standards of those living outside it, and full 
of funny little groups that, as Rupert's allotments indicate, can sort 
of rub along together. We like using humour and irony to enable this, 
indeed we here mostly cannot think of an alternative - certainly not 
High Mindedness.

My feeling is that members of this list are genuinely bothered by irony 
and humour they need a much greater and deeper involvement in British 
and Irish poetry until they manage to get the jokes. Or they do some 
other, more boring,  poetry.

In the meantime:

(1) what successes have list members had in matching Arts Council 
funding requirements? I'm planning to make some application later this 
year, and am very interested in the extent to which Glenn Storhaug (a 
wonderful publisher and printer!)'s experience is typical. The 
increasing climate of managerialism, target-setting and empty 
image-building gesture (cf Coleridge Cottage) prepares me for the worst.

(2) now to prepare for tomorrow's Union Branch AGM. There are still 
forms of more genuine collective social/political action possible. 
Poetry can be a part of this; it can be something different; it cannot 
be forced to follow a political or social agenda. Read Adorno everyone.
best wishes

Peter Philpott