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Hi Alison, A balanced and perceptive post as ever. I was going to retreat to ponder on all this, but this has helped provoke that, so I'll ponder publicly. I think I do now agree that the pattern or system of the poem is intrinsically part of its meaning. I remember getting hold of a Penguin edition of Rimbaud, and finding Oliver Bernard's translations were in prose. It shocked me. But it still worked as translation. Similarly, when one reads turgid translations where someone has tried to keep the stanzaic form and even a rhyme scheme, I'm almost always left bored rigid. And then looking forward to texts on the web, who's to say that the reader can't display the text in whatever form they choose. It's not ultimately in the writer's control. For example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE rimbaud SYSTEM "rimbaud.dtd"> <rimbaud><stanza><line role="indent4">Elle est retrouvée!</line><line role="indent4">Quoi? l’éternité.</line><line role"indent4">C’est la mer mêlée</line><line role="indent5">Au soleil.</line></stanza></rimbaud> Is the poetry still in there? Well, I'd say yes. If I write the words out in a different way the meaning of the poem isn't lost, though the artifice is. I just can't settle this in my own mind. Yes about parody too. Yet I can't help thinking that this example shows how the "meaning" is in many ways independent of the particular form. Wendy Cope in the UK is very good at showing how a form can merely become a manner. But her parody of Heaney's manner, for example, still shows the superiority of his poems. It's not about copying formal innovations or models. I'm still not comfortable with let's say the loose use of "poetic" to describe something. As if the term were a definite set of constructs and values. But I do acknowledge the adjectival sensual and emotive use of the term. Though if one translates it and says, "it was a normal prose landscape." One can see the absurdity of such terms of reference. "Honey, that almond tart was pure algorithm." I was being unfair to Frost. It's borne out of distrust with a completely different set of cultural determiners. When someone seeks to reflect and validate a culture I begin to worry. I worry about this in myself. When I take satisfaction in my own certainties about our meaninglessness, or our irrelevance in the "natural order." It can become smug and closed-minded. Equally, I understand I am at war. War against the humanists, and the religious apologists. That self-satisfaction has increasingly seemed a rather despotic emotion, a necessary evil as I find a way to conduct myself that doesn't make me feel false. We have to order ourselves in some way and so moral certainty, or let's say moral provisos, come into play. I always delight in my own corruption, sitting down with the barbarians. A weak ineffectual man. As I watch the endless tours of the boy bands and buy the latest brand of facial cleanser complete with free radicals, or choose the new BMW with the revised front grille, I know these forms are novelties of regurgitation (sorry to keep using that word). Nothing new under the sun. It tells me to toe the line, settle down, recognise that there's no alternative. There's nothing sinister in my Nikes. Poetry is just the same. As you say, no surprises, we're all like this Pal. Birth, death and . . . then I wake up in a cold sweat and stare at the ceiling. Shock value has become a kind of liberal-humanist release valve. Like discussing poverty, or the failures of social services, we delight in controlled horror. Behind the green lens of smart bomb, we are shocked at our technical brutality. It allows us to return to our jobs and shopping malls with a better sense of the value of our freedom. But we aren't free. We're distracted. Horror is the great cultural distraction. I guess from the Greeks onwards, we remind ourselves of those events waiting at the fringes of our lives waiting to devour us. We thank the Lord for our ALL NEW 10% more rigid, aluminium body shell. Moral disquiet is the eroticism of the middle classes. As for souls. I haven't got a mortal one either. But spiritual longings and desires continue to trouble me. I can't find a better way of putting it either. But I long for a kind of extinction, to be eradicated is totally beautiful for me. This yearning for "nothing", is a potent force in my creative make-up, recognising my pointlessness is deeply fulfilling. Nothing matters. But in my fickleness, I invent purpose.