Hi Peter,

I think you're right about bright approaching readers looking for
valorizations of experience. But:

- isn't that a goal-orietated by-product, or mightn't it be read as such,
of the way that literature and art more broadly is taught and promoted in
western societies? What are these poems valorisations of? I certainly
didn't feel valorated by much of the poetry I was fed when young, quite the
opposite in fact, and searched for writing which spoke of other experiences
than those which were dominantly fostered by concensual realities. That
still left a broad reading, but Chaucer and Shakespeare and Hopkins and
Shelley (4 that i responded positively to - yes all blokes, this was the
60s) didn't proscribe or circumscribe my experience, they suggested that i
needn't to get out and live more, or rather to risk my living more fully
than other poetry, of a more middle-class cosiness and of a more plain
acceptance, had intimated. So whose experience and what can we learn from
that and do we accept or challenge that. There swill be fault-lines amongst
those here reading this. I'd certainly be on the challenge mark, yes
challenging myself to boot (most of all).

- I still don't read to 'get it'. I read for pleasures and those
pleasures are part and parcel of the fabrics of my everyday linguistic
engagement. The pleasures are only partially engaged with trying to scry
what is meant. But then I was brought up being happy listening to poems
whose resistance lay elsewhere:
rhyming constraints, metrically strict, sonically adventurous,
syntactically estranged poems such as 'The Jabberwocky' in which experience
was the subject of critical mimicry.

I enjoy the twist of my tongue in my body-mind, the crunch of a good
assemblage, the rapture of a ludic phrase, an avuncular sentence mediating
something more awkward. In short simple pleasures. Of course there needs to
be a sense, however that is communicated that something is being got at
that ties this writing into a world that resonates somehow, however far off
or nearby with what a living language can be. But although something is
being 'got at' I don't necesasarily 'get it' nor worry whether I have or if
I do or not. That's not an issue.

Of course for you it is. I've no problem with that either. But the
prescriptiveness of "We expect certain things from poetry . . ." lies in a
'We' that isn't tenable - although the manipulation and maintenance of
such concensus is what arts education tries to achieve. More points of view
please.

love and love
cris




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