Hi Keston,

yes it's a moot point about 'us' enjoying our priveledges at the expense of
others and at the expense of arguably more effective action. I write that
as someone who's just come back from what is technically called a summer
holiday (although a first for some years) and who has enjoyed being on
steep biked descents in Radnorshire and rock-jumping in north Cornwall,
even surfing if the tide had not been so eclipsed.

One of the things i'm still trying to sort out as a performer / writer are
ways to encourage an audience to be more at ease, to bring them in, to feel
that it is going to be an experience of shared pleasure, rather than a
rebarbitive berating. Then I like to insert some edgy materials and awkward
questions and position some possible responses to those questions so as to
mobilise discursive energies. I'm not saying i'm any good at this, but this
is a model of practice. I do use extreme angles of entry from time to time,
but that's often after having said hello. I want the intent of what's
atempting to become communicated to be as tied into experiences that might
be common, conscious states that might inflected as shared, as much as
possible; but I want the hands (or whatever) to stretch out towards each
other, not a cosy masonic affirmation. Maybe that's a crap way of saying
that distances between people cannot be presumed, bases cannot be taken for
granted. Maybe that's just too much common sense?

But the key point for me, is appropriateness. To have flexible modes of
address appropriate to context and 'audience / readerships'. Travelling
brings on questions such as why can you afford to come here when we can't
afford to go to your country or place or idea or whatever? These are
burning questions. But they aren't going to go away by simply not trying to
go anywhere are they? Poetry tries to go somewhere. Sometimes that trying
is invested in utopian or dystopian markets. Sometimes it is invested in
personal (me me) growth. Yes, I agree there is a sense in which there can
be seen to be a decadence in contemporary poetry - right through it. What
might one read if invited to address miners in South Africa? What might one
offer to homeless people in Cambridge? What poem can be written to help the
plight of the unemployed in Lowestoft?

This is where I feel appropriateness and perspective (now that's a luxury)
comes in again. The billboards that dominate and dominate the skies of
townships surrounding Cape Town are very different as contexts from the
neon sign in Piccadilly Circus. They are. A billboard is not a billboard
any more than a book is a book or a song a song. What might be considered
'things not worth keeping' in one house might be a treasure in the next and
so on. Those very billboards that oppress -might- be used as the means of
production of very differing responses. They -might- become means of
mobilisation rather than pacification. The mobilisation might indeed be to
tear down the very means of pacification.

I seem to remember you advertising the Barque reading series in Cambridge
as very much tied to alchoholic lubrication?

So, to leisure. I don't have any time for it. The binary conventions of
work hard play hard - work =;kwkenr' -- leisure are the foisted nags of
western capitalism linked to the righteous indignations of the church.
These concepts should be deconstructed worldwide. YES, i realise i have the
priveledge to say this (i probably earn about 6 [six] thousand pounds a
year from various sources, i live pretty well on that, i use this medium
etcetera). That's a tiny 'wage' in England and a stupendous wage for much
of the rest of this planet's population. Hang on a minute while i dust off
my birch stick and beat myself back into a more sober state.

It might sound as if i'm belittling your seriousness. I can assure you
that's not going on here. You are raising important flags and I'll stand
there with you as they flutter. But stopping writing poetry because it's a
surplus activity is not a response. It's a capitulation. For me it isn't a
surplus in any respect, it's one of my key engagements with these worlds of
oppression, injustice, negligence, tenderness, conceit, fear, pleasure
between people from house to house, internally embodied within each person,
drawn into grotesque trouncing corporate and nationalistic and
multinationalistic figures of widespread destruction. I value it no more
nor less than bread and cheese or whatever dietary rudiment you might
choose. It's in the soup as is human touch and conversation. I reject it
being seen as luxury, although is how the societies we inhabit have come to
identify and pacify it. It's breath and interaction and intent. And yesa,
it also an index of all that is wrong.

Hence, write

love and love
cris







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