dear Robert & co

yes, the Sub Voicive Colloquium worked well.  some good discussion.  would be interested in developing some of the issues.
the discussion of marketing and _Language Poetry_ as a title,
the issue of a variety of different poets discussing together without a need to be using the same procedures or having to agree similar philosophical and aesthetic ideas appeals to me.

Your paper raised for me the question of _what next_ in a positive way.  let's move on, but what does that mean.  i still get disheartened by the continued interest in dead genres and then  find i'm looking at some of them again.
for instance painting can still be understood as an important mode of art in spite of a variety of attacks and rejections.  I used to think that most postwar fiction was a terrible waste of energy and genrally regressive (with a few notable exceptions) and then I read Gail Scott's _Main Bridges_
i still find myself occasionally trapped into defending the poetry i enjoy in a context of those teaching post-war poetry as a syllabus extended from MEB GCSE/ GCE 'A' English or something as horrible.  as if Mills & Boon were part of the genre of Edmund Spenser.

the innovative stance to stay alive and pertinent  still useful for me and some aspects of what you said about _Necessary Business_.  (i've been thinking about publishing the rewrite I made for Macmillan and which Denise Riley had to reject because of it's size - anyone out there?)  but  probably i should have a go at another set looking afresh at where i think British poetry in England has been since the early eighties.
now might be the time as i'm moving back into a new job in a London college.
(i'm going to be in London 4 days a week from next February. that's the plan.)

i haven't really got the moment to review Bruce Andrews'  _Paradise..._ collection.  
i've been using Ashbery recently (over the last 3 years) to discuss aspects of complexity, beauty and value at college in relation to some of Larry Rivers, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, others. I've been using work like _Some Trees_ and _Three Poems_ as well as more recent conceits.

I enjoyed Patricia Farrell's cogent use of  Deleuze and Guattari at the colloquium and most interested that Ben Out to Lunch thought it passé because of its regressive use by the POP industry. Ben Watson's participation at the Colloquium was however usually more useful.

I took John Cayley to be calling for a kind of poetry staff development in uses of digital spacetime.  we could sure use it. the computer does feel like some of it has moved out of its reliance on older genres and forms.  the way McLuhan would say it eventually would.  but couldn't get to grips with what John  - where were you going.  must have been the cold in my head. 
Lawrence Upton was cogent and even succinct on Bob Cobbing text.  i hope Andrew Duncan gets to hear that.

the vocabulary confusions appear to continue.  we could do with a transcript of Bill Sherman's eloquent synopsis of _parataxis_ to at least get back to what Francis Presley really wanted to say, rather than argue the terminology, even if that is agreed to be important.

I'm glad Ken Edwards asked Lawrence Upton to call people by their full name.  The first name approach to an audience he/I only knew half of was distinctly awkward.  Two friends left the last Sub Voicive because of this.  (Lawrence please note.  I  don't intend to sound over-critical and know you don't mean it to sound all-knowing or smug, but the we-are-all-pals act in a public event wears thin. I'm still still sure it's better not to make assumptions and give readers an introduction, however brief, as if they were not known.

Ken Edwards thought my paper was too short, and he was correct in as much as I cut out 40% en route.  That was because the first discussion went on for an hour.  The planning needs to take that on board as part of the difficulty of colloquiums with too many scheduled speakers.  then again, I enjoyed most of it, so why fuss.

I liked Peter Larkin's paper, but found I kept losing the thread of the discussion from others after and about it, which seemed to get into the bourgeois worry about social worth.it brings back to find the usefulness of Eric Mottram's work in this area (see Kent Journal_ when it appears next year) followed by Herbert Marcuse in _The Aesthetic Dimension_.  Art is already political and social by the fact that it relies on aesthetics as its prominent function.  but that gives me a cue to mail this before this tangental-time adds another sphere.


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