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In reply to Roddy Lumsden, I've only just checked back and realised the unnamed person you are asking for comments from is me. I missed the post where you asked - not all of us have time to read everything and it's easy to miss something when you are skimming through a digest. But I can't help about the "laziness and bad manners" of poets who eschew clarity, because I can't for the life of me recall saying it. It might have been a reaction to the statement I sometimes hear from some student when a roomful of people has expressed total bafflement with a poem - "I write for myself and I don't care whether other people like or understand it". Fine, but in that case why show it to anyone else? I think any poet has the right to be as obscure as he/she likes. And any reader has the right to decide either "I don't get this but I like the sound of it, so I'll persevere", or "life's too short; I'm going where I can get some entertainment" I have decided both, at different times. I don't "get" Marius Kocejewski (haven't spelt that right but don't have books to hand) but he sounds so exciting I don't care. And i don't "get" a lot of Adrienne Rich, who sounds (to me)like a preachy bore so I gave up. One thing, though: I once heard the late George Mackay Brown criticised for being "too accessible". I said then, and still think, that this was like criticising a sprinter for being too fast. It may be possible for a professional communicator to be too obscure; it isn't possible for him/her to be too accessible. Too obvious or superficial maybe, but not too accessible. As for what I think of the list, I do think there's a cliquey feel to some of it, mainly caused by the fact that a few people seem to be able to spend all day doing little but reading it and writing to it. They must have very accommodating bosses! But your response of, more or less, "bugger off then", seems illogical - if everyone who feels like an outsider did that, wouldn't it be even more cliquey? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get Yahoo! Mail – Free email you can access from anywhere! http://mail.yahoo.com/ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%