Maybe there's something in all this, I don't know. But I wasn't for a moment
suggesting that John or Keston's comments were canon building, but on
reflection they probably are, however inadvertently. I'm not sure that
canons are built up out of authority, there's a huge range of concerns and
fuels at play in such things. Most probably they're made out of personal
passions and readerships in dialogue. Certainly they are a product of
societies, and this is where our confusions arise, the internationalism of
the web can sometimes confuse the terms of reference and we are judging some
in terms of our own separate cultural histories. This is a dangerous thing
to do.

One thing for certain though is that canons are built from personal
opinions, what else could they be made from? Canons are
subjective/limited/necessarily biased, too. They wouldn't really be much use
otherwise. What has interested me about this list is its basis in old
colonial and right-wing values like "British", with all that attenuated
status of exclusivity and cultural domination, even though so many "Brits"
obviously feel excluded from some power base, which seems to me almost
mythical. Who are these other others in control. I don't know where this
power base lies: the London/Metropolis thing is a bit hackneyed as a term of
reference within this context, it's all so Seventies, but maybe I'm just too
young to remember.

But perhaps the abhorrence of a canon is in some ways a post colonial fear
of the shift of language away from "Britain" to other loci, and that the
means of assessment have long since moved away from "Language" or "Post
modern" or "Avant-garde" or Leavis or Adorno, neither of whom I have read
(recommendations most welcome here). There's something suspect about a
"British" view of openness that is tainted by such exclusivity. In fact, the
resisitance to give voice to or formalise the rather obvious agreed terms of
reference here belies the usual "british" basis of authority, that inate,
class-ridden, xenophobic, closed-door, star chamber stuff that goes on
elsewhere. Afterall "we all know what counts, so you'll just have to guess
about that and fumble in the dark."

I think that there is considerable concensus in this list for who are
untouchable: try Jeremy Prynne, Bob Cobbing, Tom Leonard, John Wilkinson,
Doug Oliver. Nor do I disagree with such prizes. And try most of Other for
alternative canon building. There's nothing wrong in this, but we should be
less mealy-mouthed in standing for something, "hiding in the seat of power"
is so terribly, terribly British. So I'm all for openness, as long as it is
what it purports to be, otherwise this list will become even more moribund,
exclusive and regressively circular.

Our terms of reference are no doubt confused by the many and varied cultural
participants here, but we shouldn't elect that Britsh terms of reference
take precedence over other list building judgements. To my "ears" as a
reader, the locked-in, soviet-style mindset of "openness", the forbidding of
the Self, both denies the lyric voice and reeks of Socialist Realism, a kind
of dehumanising thing, "we are all the same, there's no such thing as
quality". Such deliberations on the self in poetry were, I guess, a
necessary corrective to the wallowing in confession we saw in the Sixties,
but the correction took place in the Seventies and to pretend we need
further purging is anachronistic. Pluralism can so easily become the
manacles of the proletariat. It is an important fact to note that some are
just better than others. But what constitutes "better" is the concern of
each age. Ours has undoubtedly moved on.



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