Dear Desmond,
You have issues. Issues are interesting, so why do you do everything
to make them uninteresting?
I am not Robert Sheppard. Yes, I know Robert quite well and I know his
poetry. I do not know him as a student. I am an admirer of his poetry
and I respect what he says. But I am not him.
If you had ever read some of my brit po posts properly you just might
have noticed that I have issues too, and some of those issues are to
do with the increasing link in the english speaking world between left-
field poetry and academia, or left-field poetry and the arena of
conceptual performance that feeds off the system of funding, awards
and professional advancement. Allied to that is an issue of how poetry
or poetics are handled in higher education - my fear is that it has
for a while now been in danger of being infected by the obsession with
'process' that characterises, for example, teaching in the art
colleges etc.
I wish you would simply try to say what you mean. How about limiting
that to one thing? Yes, the responses will be piecemeal and arbitrary,
because this is a chat list, it's what a list does. If you want more
than that then you will have to look elsewhere.
Best Wishes
Uncle Tim
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