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Lawrence > >I intended to send it front channel - that is, a response to my last posting here, to which I then replied B/C, with this present posting as riposte. I insert names to make easier reading: > >Feel free to send this back f-c, which I would prefer > PP: >> No, it's a mythology. Sorry to bring back your bad memories. I do >> remember moments of connection. My memory may well not be accurate. But >> I find these memories, real or not, valuable - as giving a possible >> "once-and-future" utopia. > LU: >No, it isn't. I don't know what you mean by bad memories. I remember it >rather clearly and know what a fuc k up it is. If it's a mythology then who >believes it? Not me. No golden age > PP: >> I could argue too about the differences between the mediation of human >> contact via electronic means and the difficulties of travel. Not I think >> comparable (- trust me, I'm a media lecturer). > LU: >Trust me, I was one too. There are of course differences, but both processes >are technological. It is, for me, to do with distance. When I am in Cornwall >I go to things all the time because I can walk > PP: >> Genuinely sorry to have caused any pain over either Poetry Society or >> SubVoicive. I attended readings in Holborn I think in the early 90s, >> even read - never quite regularly enough for that connection quite to be >> made by me. > LU; >As I say, no pain caused. I just see no justification for claiming there is >a viable mythology My position is, Lawrence, that, yes, if you say it was all a fuck up at the prelapsarian Poetry Society, OK, I'm sure it was. Most things are when you are doing them. That it wasn't all a fuck up is the first thing I'd want to hold to: in my innocence I found it good until it was destroyed. That that was my experience is also a valid observation. That the story presents a possibility of some different organisation of affairs from how they are now, and that we can have that possibility before us is even more important. Who did what to whom why & when is worthless data - it is, to repeat that word, the mythology constructed about what was there & what might have been, which is valuable & usable, that's what I'm trying to emphasise. I suspect, from Trevor's earlier post, this is, like many a mythic theme, cross-cultural, of that wonderful time & place when poets got once together & connected. I would suspect all poetic cultures hold this. The myth is not about what happened in that bizarre building in Earls Court - it's about how for a short period there seemed an actual possibility of some sort of community & connection between a number of poets. (vide Ernst Bloch's The Utopian Appeal of Popular Culture at this point) - in other words, it is a pretty fairytale I have in my head, compared to the unknowable mess that "really" occurred, and which you could present me with (or with one of many, contradictory versions of). But: this fairytale, in these hard & desperate times, provides a model for what connections poets could make, and reveals the inadequacy of what there is at present. The myth fulfils and thus reveals a desire in us for a community of poets. You can find this community you say via electronic media; I would prefer it via the different forms of human contact possible when people encounter eachother in physical places. best wishes Peter Philpott