Dear mail-base,

I'm having trouble catching up with all the various strands 
currently running, but in the meantime...  I have the impression 
that there is a peculiar structure by which the mail-base format 
gives the permanence of written formulation to what are often only 
remarks, gossip even.  For writers, if that is what we are 
collectively, it seems strange to use writing, even if in a 'new' 
technological mode or format, as though this were not a public 
process, a way of public speaking which is, if not hostile to 
poetry, then at least very different from poetry.  It seems that an 
absence of care for language - devolved and dissolved qua prose - 
has become familiar and conventional even for poets.  The 'we' of 
the mail-base seems to treat language as a process of overhearing 
each other, and then a process of underlistening to the way that 
this collective voice shapes the militant choir of difference in its 
midst.  I, for one, am struck dumb by the idea that I might be 
quoted out of such a context, as though stray remarks might indeed 
be made accountable as ways of reading back into what I hope to let 
pass on as poetry.  And yet this is clearly a format accessible to a 
world-wide public, if one existed and were at all interested, and 
thence available for quotation, such that to have spoken at all in 
this medium is, in effect, to have allowed yourself to be published. 
 As I have argued elsewhere, this implies a community of risk, but 
one of the risks is that the very urgency and seeming transience of 
the medium collapses into kind of noise chamber where no voice, nor 
even silence, can be heard.  The story of Babel springs to mind.  So 
I am been tempted, before I've even started speaking, to withdraw 
from the mail-base, thinking that silence is the better part of 
discretion in this instance.  And precisely becomes it seems that 
there is an insitutional kind of rudeness about not being able to 
reply more carefully to the rush of messages.  For poets, the 
language seems rushed, as though impatience and speed were normal: 
surely this isn't how we read poems, our own poems or those of 
someone else?  Do we even read each others poems?  Perhaps I read 
too slowly, perhaps others can process information more quickly.  
But then perhaps I read too many poems to be able to enter the lists 
with prosaic abandon.  Perhaps I have more to learn by reading poems 
than by reading e-mail.  I suppose I imagined that this would be a 
conversation about poems and poetry rather than something a bit like 
the shop talk of poets.  In short, I feel it necessary to say in 
this 'public' that I am disconcerted by the necessity of a certain 
silence within this existing mode of conversation.  Silence itself 
is often interpreted as a mode of conversational implicature, hence 
it might be better to sign off rather than have reticence 
misinterpreted.  All of this seems dramatised by the very idea of 
participation in this conversation involving a question of 
copyright.  The claws of private property reach even into the craw 
of this muffled rumble and attempt clear the throat.  So, to cut a 
long story short, my apologies for not yet being able to respond to 
what has already been said.  I hope to return to a number of issues 
raised, but this is offered in the hope that there are others who 
share my discomfort with the mode and quality of this actually 
existing conversation.  In almost all situations of public speech, 
what is most important is the silence of the audience, the dialogue 
that takes place in that silence.  Pinter suggested recently that he 
took an audience that coughed to be expressing antagonism to the 
stage.  I'm inclined to think that this is a little too hasty as a 
judgment.  Nevertheless, I do find myself wondering whether an 
aesthetics of performance in which the audience is supposed to 
admire the performer rather than share an implicit conversation 
might not have some relevance to our context here.  I abhor the 
violence most forms of performance, whether aesthetic or political, 
direct towards their audience.  Call me an old-fashioned Brechtian, 
but I venture that we need a better sense of the critical distance 
between the context of performance (here writing) and its possible 
audiences and politics.  But perhaps we need an ethics of chat 
before anything as bold as a poetics or politics might emerge from 
this,

all best,

Drew Milne




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