Thanks Tim and Keston.

I'm not a fan of the picking over what the other says mode of enquiry or
right of reply, so this is in and around your necessities. Glad to find
discussions opening.

Several points in no order of merit:

-  Eric Mottram was, imho, a far more interesting teacher and essayist than
poet. I'd recommend pieces such as 'Towards Design in Poetry, although
there are, as we heard from Bill Griffiths recently, an enormous backlog of
unpublished essays that i await with considerable interest. Spanner will
publish the Kent Journals next year for example. If you're looking for an
enthusiastic and insatiably curiosity-driven, sharply informed engagement
with boundaries between Poetics and Cultural Studies then Mottram deserves
attention. For myself, the poems point towards the essays, rather than
arriving at what i feel he ambitiously attempted, which was a fusing of
poetic and essay forms. I don't consider him a 'bad' poet  -  there are
provocative pieces which through their failures offer much to learn from.
Perhaps most importantly, engaging with specific work can be more
productive than looking for the perfect body (of work).

-  To wit, the bringing together of Cultural Studies and Poetics i don't
agree keston that Language criticism by those poets is mostly mere
bollocks. Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman and Steve Benson are a close-knit
SF grouping (consider them in close discourse  -  read the work and reflect
on that fact) that continues to challenge me  -  through the critical and
theoretical engagements embedded in the work. Watten's 'Under Erasure',
'Progress', 'Plasma Parallels'; Harryman's 'The Middle', 'Memory Play'
'Animal Instincts'; Benson's 'Blue Books', 'Reverse Order' throw down a
constructive challenge to any writer of 'poetics'. Bernstein's essay
'Artifice of Absorbtion' re-energises Veronica Forrest-Thompson's, at the
time. highly provocative forays into critical theory.

If you can't get anything else by Watten there's the excellent chunky issue
of Aerial magazine dedicated to his work and the recent 'Frame' (almost a
collected to date) from Sun & Moon. Barrett is in addition a rebarbitive
art critic, calypso and soukous buff. His championing of Robert Smithson
will, i believe, come to seem more and more prescient. There is
cross-artform strategising at play here that i'd like to see more widely
attempted.

-  on the French and other po-mo 'theory' issue I'll admit that i have read
some and that i often have found it more energising than much contemporary
poetry. Buck-Morss 'Dialectics of Seeing' - Derrida's 'Glas' - Strathern's
'After Nature' - Foucault's 'The Order of Things' - Barthes 'Responsibility
of Forms' - Bataille's 'editorship of 'Encyclopaedia Acephalica'  -
Deleuze & Guattari's 'Milles Plateaus' - Kristeva's 'Revolution in Poetic
Language' and so on. I enjoy these as 'writings', not as 'theory'.

-  then let is be said that there has been a drought of English writers of
such provocative 'writings'. They are beginning to emerge (mostly from
arenas around New Tech and Philosophy (i'm thinking of Sadie Plant and Nick
Land), and Cultural Studies (Mike Featherstone, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy,
Stuart Hall). But there are strong models such as Allen Fisher's 'Ideas of
a Culture Dreamed of' and Tom Leonard's 'Honestly'.

-  having said which in slight chiding I admit that i also have yet to het,
let alone read 'Sarn Helen'. The prompting is salutary. Those who have,
please tell us more. It's refreshing that poetry written now in the UK can
provoke discussion!

-   I'm going to put on my space cadet costume now and suggest that one
location where a significant 'breakthrough' might be made is Britain in the
early 2000s.
Further down the post-colonial (and neo-colonial) roads than anywhere else
- well rid of its empire (ok, there's still the Commonwealth but there many
of the shoes are on other feet) when the US is only beginning to wither on
its vines  - geographically navigable with mobility and communication about
to exponentially heat up - the beginnings of some new exchange (as you
rightly point out previuosly astonishingly lacking) between cultural
territories previously binraised as 'high' and 'low' -  a fresh taste for
internationalism (even in the cooking)  -  boisterous mix of contested
cultures  -  learning from mistakes both here and elsewhere (I'm thinking
of the poetries)  -  influences such as Performance Writing  -  appropriate
scale  -  key practitioners (I'd venture that in Pryhnne, Raworth, Riley.
D, Cobbing, O'Sullivan, Fisher. A, Bervall, Leonard, LKJ, Cayley, Breeze,
Catling we have range and extension from almost all traditions, tendencies
and explosions of practice you might care to name  -  not whether you like
'em all)

-   watch the money, the distribution outlets, the venues. It's all going
to change and with energy and commitment put into that change, might well
facilitate conditions for poetry in the UK we might never have dared to
consider. Recent discussion here suggests frustration is reaching a
positive level of action.

The examples of Paris and SF and NY are cogent. They are all constructed
around context and collisions between provocative individuals. So, hang on
in here and continue to be provocative. Nothing's going to come on a plate.
No sense looking glumly at the heirlooms. Seize the situation and sahke it.
Yes, say what turns you on and what seems like the end of an earache. But
not through revisionist histories.

We all need it.
thanks

love and love
cris

ps. -  keston it's a riot in Italy and i hate countries and their sour,
biter fearful twisted pinched faces. So put your shovel ful of salt i
advance of admonition in the post






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