I'd completely overlooked the Britain and Ireland function -- I mean,
forgotten it, Ric. I don't naturally think geographically except when making
lists because I've slopped around the nations too much. Still, the geography
can be "helpfully stretched", you say. Ok; I don't see otherwise how things
will change enough.

My answer to Keston will remain unsatisfactory to him for the following
reasons.

The trouble with poetry aesthetics that are conducted by the highly educated
is that it becomes easy to insulate an aesthetic terrain from other poetries,
scorned as half-baked, boring, etc. Practitioners who (whatever their
ordinary social world) keep in poetry to tight intellectual circles don't
often have to go round the regional writing clubs or run writing workshops
where decent people may be honestly bewildered by verbal textures that are
too dense, don't know how to interpret swift cultural moves beyond their ken,
and genuinely like poetry I find a little boring. Mixing with such people a
lot (which you have to if you live outside certain Brit enclaves) gives you
different manners: you don't feel a need to show authenticity by dumping on
people writing in other domains -- they're just no threat unless they make
power ploys as unpleasant as that of dumping on others.. Further, you feel
that insulating an aesthetic to make it pure is (precisely) identity
politics, even when its procedures are targeted at dissolving such
identities. (A part-reply here to John Wilkinson.) I feel Keston is pulling
me in that direction of identifying myself with a group. I regard this
insulation of terrain as mostly a masculine tactic, though not entirely so;
and certainly it's fostered by the mono-level intellectual field of
universities, which is their danger, politically, though I've worked for
universities for two decades. But it is not usually necessary to trash other
people's poetry publicly and it's mainly men, mainstream or avant-gardists,
who do so.

It means that I am usually prepared to comment out of enthusiasm but would
rather leave lack of enthusiasm to one side -- unless an aggressive move
from, say, the mainstream is made and I feel some "castigation" (to speak
pompously) is called for. Then I certainly will write letters to mags or to
the OUP, for example. I have various experimentalist friends who
automatically call mainstream poets, male or female, "bad poets" and, quite
often, "shits". I've known many mainstreamers in my day and to put it mildly
they aren't all shits: I can make friends with some of them without feeling
compromised poetically. If the friendship dies over an aesthetic issue, well
that's too bad; but it doesn't die from my side because I believe that is a
wrong use of aesthetic stance -- in fact, I think it is on a miniature scale
how much of the harm enters the world.

Here I must acknowledge that the mainstream expertly grabs power, often
ruthlessly, and that the avant-garde have to work from a ghettoised position,
which evidently doesn't help.

Well, I'm not going to give you a rundown on my taste -- it'd take a whole
book -- and certainly am not going to snort "why this?" at each name on
another person's list. But I'd be glad to explain why I made certain
choices. And of course I compiled it to contain only women's names. How
else can you *combat* a lack of women's names? (Ric on Karin welcome.)
Whereas in the States, the avant-garde has a strong new generation equal in
gender terms and multi-cultural, this is not true in Britain where men have
made most of the definitions. Except in performance art, they didn't embrace
multi-culturalism, for the populists were better at that, and that may be why
they have fewer women too than the populists -- I think.

Poets can be like musicians walking down a street and catching a fragment of
melody that they had never themselves created before and wouldn't naturally
have created -- a woman singing, a squeaky door, a radio, a man whistling
off-key, I don't know. So I look in other people's work for what I can't
already do (because the latter is the real enemy). Some melodic fragment may
not lie within my current techniques; and I take note. I can get this from
anywhere at all -- natural noises, music, or occasionally (and probably
because they're working in another genre) skilled mainstream poets. Within
their genre they do have skills. I've occasionally noticed a melodic
fragment from Carol Ann Duffy that is not in my natural repertoire and so I
put her in my list. Jorie Graham is there because of her formal
inventiveness and a slippy abstraction which can scatter her thoughts
intriguingly in a particular, elusive way (it would need the closest of
definitions to make the point come fully clear): I don't know how to carry
out that exact abstraction device. Grace Lake has one of the most dynamic of
all British poetry lines, something that can at any moment take you by the
throat, and I'm thoroughly interested in, not to say jealous of, the
unexpectedness of those energies. There's no reason at all why Grace or
Duffy should not figure in such a list, therefore: I'm not out to please
anyone.

It would be a pity if the avant-garde should pretend that "there's nothing
the mainstream can do that they can't and plus we have all this other stuff."
 Maybe others are more talented than me, but it certainly isn't my experience
that I, or even the best experimentalists of all, have a complete repertoire
of techniques. More commonly, I note a narrowness in my own work or theirs
-- the "what we know how to do" which is, again, the enemy. And I will learn
from anyone at all, with absolutely no prejudice if they've got what I want.

Juliana Spahr. She sometimes works by juxtapositions (machine cog footer
paragraphs set against more liquid header paragraphs, for example) or
juxtapositions of tones within the poem, which do not lie in my present
repertoire. She holds much of her diction down flat without its ever becoming
uninteresting; and that, too, is interesting. She also has a notion "kine",
which is a peculiarly social intersubjectivity, dissimilar but not absolutely
dissimilar to my own notion, "kind", and she and I have discussed this.
Therefore there is matching and non-matching with my own work and a potential
extension of my own techniques, which is my idea of an interesting poetry to
look at.

Doug


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