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Malcolm asked me to say something about the 'Huddersfield' nexus. Well, it's certainly gone up in the world - it hasn't even been a proper 'school' yet. Some people would argue that I'm not particularly well qualified to comment as I'm not from 'oop 'ere but here goes. Some list members may know that I've already written extensively about the subject in my book New Relations and also in an article that appeared in Verse 9.3 so I apologise in advance if what I say is old hat to some. New York school first. I still believe as I said in New Relations that the New York school functioned/functions as a model for how people with very different backgrounds, interests or whatever can work together in a shared aesthetic. The way this works is that the writing that's produced tends to be oblique, indirect, passive, impersonal, fictive. And this works in ways that wouldn't be possible if a group of poets sat down and said 'let's write a poem about X' because everyone would want a particular angle putting on it. [As an aside, it always intrigues me how a largely gay grouping has had its biggest influence on straight writers but perhaps that's by the by.] The New York school, then, models a way of being involved in your times without being a sort of poetic journalist. I think it also needs to be said that 'Huddersfield' writing - if there is such a thing - was never and has never been confined to South and West Yorkshire. The same aesthetic is at work in Martin Stannard - a massively undervalued writer in my view - and he was based for most of the 1980s in Ipswich. Now place. I think that what I'm going to call The HudNex for short is also a lot to do with the ype of view that's present in Mappamundi by Bill Herbert. This is a poem that says, on one level, yes we know how culture's organised thank you and we're not playing. We don't care if you ignore us; we're just getting on with the job. In fact, I think there's probably a big paper to be written/debate to be had about how geographical tropes and images came to dominate the language of valuation in the mainstream in the 1980s and 1990s. Workshops. This was also a part of the same feeling of let's just get on with it. Plus I know that several people went to Sansom's workshops at The Poetry Business plus several people including Sansom were also taught by Stanley Cook at some point. Peter Sansom is the expert on Cook but Cook seems to stand for the type of writer whose focus is exclusively local. The Deleuze/Guattari reference - I think - is in A Thousand Plateaus. There's a useful essay by Seamus Deane on issues of imperialism/nationalism/colonialism and its post- in Uni of Chicago book Critical Terms for Literary Study which makes much of the relevant passage. I guess most Uni libraries will have it anyway. I could say more but I guess others will want to chip in. Cheers David %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%