Alison I'm very interested in your thoughts around the physical presence of the poet - in performance and in the community - alongside your reference to faux laureates. The community I was living in till recently had little recourse to poetry for its occasions and debates untl some imaginative - or specifically unimaginative perhaps - literature officer decided to create awareness by making a laureateship for the area with a small stipend. The person appointed has worked (fulltime!) like Vulcan in the mountain making metal of words and has not, that I can see, celebrated the King's phallus directly. I am trying to be aware in a postmodern way of the inevitable intertwining of her commissioned work with the political parameters of the community - but she seems to engage fairly nakedly with many levels of community in her poems both in their form and content - without, I suppose, ever being directly adversarial either. Like a Fool in the Court, perhaps? By the way, she backs off in all sorts of situations so that emerging poets can do their work - I don't see her as self-aggrandising though it's a role which could be abused in that way. Your point about physical presence - I think having a designated poet living in the community whose work it is to promote, mostly by doing, this particular art, shows evidence of being beneficial - is there an anarchistic thrust in giving up a 'straight' social work job for this one? Claire