Bravo, Keith, excellent synopsis of the Ra/Pry question. & do take up
Marjorie's suggestion & expand -- & then publish it _both_ sides of the
Atlantic.

I would like simply to add that besides US over self-involvement or what
I call barking up the american tree, which is really a US tree, &
getting treed in the process, British self-sufficiency has also been the
cause for much of the neglect of the new brit poetry here. Thus, for
example, an early very strong connection with US poetry & poets such as
Crozier's & to some extent Prynne's (via Buffalo, Olson, AC's mag in
Buff etc.) was very consciously, it seems to me, cut by those poets in
the seventies when that loose association known as the Cambridge School
folded back on its britishness & seems to have stayed in that state ever
since. The sedentariness of that scene militates against strong
involvement with outside poetry & scenes, which the outside pays back,
rightly or wrongly, with neglect. Tom's nomadic choices which have him
moving through a number of US poetry scenes on a nearly yearly basis
make him available, visible, audible, readable in a way most British
poetry is not. 

Pierre
-- 
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pierre joris   6 madison place   albany ny 12202
tel/fax (518) 426 0433 email:[log in to unmask]
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
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Everything that allows men to become rooted, through
values or sentiments, in _one_ time, in _one_ history, in 
_one_ language, is the principle of alienation which 
constitutes man as privileged in so far as he is what he is,
[...] imprisoning him in contentment with his own reality
and encouraging him to offer it as an example or impose
it as a conquering assertion. -- Maurice Blanchot
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