David, thanks for your remarks on some recent events on the poesy-earth, 
or at least, one rather cloyingly disregardable enclave of it; of course,
there 
are alternatives to a good old fashioned, straightfoward common or garden 
but probably garden disregard, and your explicitly secured interest in the 
money to which such poetry serves principally as an induction, is of a fair
genre.  
Have you ever read Kracauer on popular novels?  This kind of disregard can 
be less mistakably heightened, as in that (however quite pointless) essay,
but 
eventually I find myself stumbling into an imitation-brick wall (roughly
the same 
one that, nearly sad to say, Harold Rosenberg takes spirited pains to
stumble into, 
in _The Tradition of The New_): is it really necessary, or to backpedal
slightly and 
in concession, is it really pertinent in any way, for us to elaborate on
some kind of 
journal of the unsurprisingly dire marketing scams and half-scams of modern

publishers, who might just as well be flogging emetics and gags for all the
good 
they do for contemporary poetry, and to claim implicitly that this brand of
essayizing 
is essential to any consideration aspiring to an objective purview? 
Armitage is so
entire a bore, so thoroughly marginal and pernicious an influence on any
idea 
worth its life-support rhetoric, that I have to believe him better off in
his retail 
theme-park, his own preserve of pompous pseudo-provinciality and clueless 
self-congratulating reviewers, than amongst the present company, or at
least, in the 
present digit void.  This rejoinder is of course pitifully discourteous,
but: 1.  it's pretty 
rare to get any response at all, where the responsive person doesn't have a
personal 
stake (look at me in this light etc, don't be disparaging about my mates
etc, haven't we 
heard enough about X etc what's that yes why not let's talk about me
instead etc) 2. the 
continued banter surrounding this herd of walking cash registers, the, can
I, no, can I, 
suppose I must, what the hell, here goes 'New Generation', that was
painful, is far 
more offensive than any ostensibly resentful backlash from anyone so
overtly 
bourgeois and academic as myself 3.  I am not in the least irritated or
driven to 
this tone, let alone this argument, and welcome with a friendly smile your
answer.     

Keston              


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