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Re Chris's questions on my sketch about Tomlinson, I could say a lot but I only want to continue the matter if it broadens into a real topic, because it was just a moment of the history of some people I was referring to really. I'm not sure that naming names will help, it might just obfuscate the matter further because there is always more to anyone's accumulated work than these retrospective glances can cope with. Where it becomes more interesting is in the entire spiked question of poetical relations between UK and USA, a subject I generally try to avoid. Though actually I thought I was quite lucid in a non-specifying way. So as regards say what circa 1967 seemed like an english/american contrast, was actually a matter of why you were writing. "we" (a surprising number of British poets; among present company I'd say: me, John Temple, John Hall, Ric Caddel, Doug Oliver, Tom Raworth, Allen Fisher (though most of the poets I'm thinking of seem not yet to be on e-mail which is interesting in itself)) we "turned to America" and in so doing rejected an english line (though it was a line of no historical depth) and did so in terms of why you were writing. Which is: were you writing in order to be a poet, or were you writing because you had discovered something about the world which only poetry could handle? Is that enough? Writing to be a poet means replicating a known or endorsed style (manner) or tone of writing, claiming admission to a recognised zone called "poetry", and doing it your own way. It remains important not to depart too far from what is agreed to be poetical substance. Most British poets of the 1950s-60s continuity were working like this, as most poets normally do. It seemed, looking from there towards USA, that over there there was a fresh, open, use of poetry going on, and poets were plunging into worlds of knowledge and experience for what they could locate and make something of, quite unhindered by the need to establish poetical credentials by writing into a poetical decorum. Most of the poets in Allen's 1960s anthology show this in one way or another. I mean if you consider the poetry field in Britain as shown by most well published poets mid-60s left right or centre, well there isn't much room in those discourses for, say, what you've discovered from your research into Aramaic script, or the geology of the continental shelf, or remarks such as "Jasper Johns has painted me in the nude and my penis is the envy of New York." or "Fred just called in and borrowed a quid. So long, Fred." Those zones, and others, were way outside "poetry" in this country, they were totally inadmissible. It was felt as an urgency because such a greater range of foci became possible, as if the veil of "poetry" had been removed from life and the world, and people were excitedly reporting what lay behind it. A virtuosic language-spread --i.e., a greatly extended vocabulary which was your own, which you laid out before you and mastered rather than attempting to master forms of relevance, modesty, centralising decorum.... It remained poetry, but perhaps only because it valued poetry's power of projection and the freedom within poetry to mix and intercalate very different discourses..... It would be interesting to know if others who were around at that time saw it in this kind of way. I don't pretend that this dramatically contrasted view held for long, and I know there are masses of complications (the San Francisco scene). Especially that the opening up to diurnal realism within the "New York" inclination was already implied in a lot of 1940s and -50s British writing. And that the whole Transatlantic thing now looks extremely different. Any wave of openness becomes just a new thing to replicate so you can claim to be a poet, in five minutes flat. I'm also aware that there are young British poets now who are repeating this process even more radically -- rejecting all older British poets including all of "us", wholesale, in favour of certain Americana. It would be even more interesting if they came clean, if there are any among us. PR %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%