Hi Peter,

Sorry to have lost the thread here, I've been at the London Book Fair.

I don't think that space for poetry could be entirely, or desirably,
separate from the world -- even the world of readers, and I suspect that
writers are writing "into" a space (if not into a conceived readership),
rather than writing "outside of" a space where those readers are creating
literature(s). I think we're not too far apart here, though I wouldn't quite
classify textual output as literature. When I consider those, let's say,
tens of millions of writers, those millions of contemporary poets,
scribbling down a verse for the wedding speech, jotting down thoughts on the
loss of "Crusty the tortoise", or writing a paean to Iraq on a bulletin
board, I think that the writing has a socially defined trajectory. But the
communities who produce writing must be understood in terms of consumption.
For some, it's important that they constrain reception, and even reject
alternative readings and readers. I think this is largely motivated by
trying to constrain interpretation. Perhaps this is what interests you here.
You're quite right that my day job is only viable if I can monetize that
consumption, but I can't build a viable business based on a self-consuming
community of readers, though I do think one can argue that this is a form of
constrained literature. We see it emerging on bulleting board workshops,
where groups self-consume and validate each other, and usually define
themselves by negative constructs -- "We're not like this", "We don't like
that."  

But I do think that poetry is part of the fabric of the rest of society,
where we have to get the milk, find that screw in Ridgeons, visit a strip
mall to buy a fridge-freezer, fill the car with diesel, collect the sofa on
offer with double discounts and cash back. So I'd plead for a poetry which
fights for its place in the world. Readers aren't stupid. They don't need
degrees, a politics or personal relations with the poet to make sense of a
poem. They can be trusted to make choices amongst the tens of thousands of
messages fed to them each day as they walk through Tesco's, or the street
market, or buy a sausage roll in the bus station. It's there in that world
that literature is made, if we care to address readers in ways they're used
to being addressed. 

Yes, I think readers can be trusted to make choices and judgements. My job
is to construct those choices. I think this is what publishers do. Of course
those other communities of constraint do this effectively, too. The
economics often aren't terribly different, they're models of patronage and
subsidy in many cases. But publishers in effect construct systems of choice,
and their impetus is, at least in my case, profitable book sales. Some may
think that the publisher is about validating quality, but in my view that's
the reader's job. But many will attach themselves to these systems of choice
and become stakeholders: critics, academics, advocates, festival directors,
fund holders and investors. This rich hierarchy of validation serves to
further construct choices, informing the publisher of what seems liable to
succeed, informing the reader of what seems most important or desirable as a
choice, and these complex systems and their interrelations must be
understood in terms of their economics. Often the literature is loss making
or marginally profitable, but reputations, salaries, whole departments and
institutions have become stakeholders in a specific form of reception, and
the tensions around permission in writing largely stem from this economic
infrastructure. So I'm saying that all art, and especially poetry, needs to
be considered from this standpoint. And writing poems is not producing
literature, and literature, by degree has meaning in an economic sense as
well as a political and aesthetic sense. In fact that latter two cannot
exist without the former. Understand the economics of a literature and the
works acquire new meaning and relevance to us.