I have no idea of the background to Peter's distressing posting. If someone
"claimed" I was a homosexual, I should be delighted (unless it was Alice,
perhaps). It wouldn't change anything, you see, but might indicate a certain
breadth of mind. I would take exception to being "accused" of being so.
Peter, if what you report is accurate, we just have to get out of this chronic
cycle: X or School X pretends to have a total definition of what is
interesting in avant-garde poetry; there's outrage and counter-claim from
those excluded; the resulting atmosphere of bad feeling encourages various
episodes of mayhem. These episodes are shameful. And so on. It all breeds
on itself.
We can ill do without Angel Exhaust, whoever edits it. (I must have as strong
a personal motive to be hostile to its criticism as most people on this list,
but so what?) Shaft it, sneer at its passing, and we're back in the virulent
marshes. Bite the bullet and encourage those regional arts administrators to
continue support it and something better takes place: a hope of renewals, not
a vista of corpses.
I don't want a poetry blanded out to exclude the obnoxious, even where it is
obnoxious to my goodself.
The British poetry avant-garde's real problems are: lack of magazines, lack of
reading series, lack of wide distribution, lack of entrée into funding
sources, plus internal division, some residual sexism, and uncertainty about
what constitutes the public audience. Given this, there can be absolutely no
doubt: we've got to back each other, even where we have to express
disagreement, or we are doomed. We've got to transcend our merely personal
outrages. These chat pages, if only we could attract more female and male
contributors, could work well for us. Why don't we work at attracting them?
Get some energy moving?
Oh, 1999, you, you are my year, not 2000 with its tinsel crown.
Doug
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