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Trevor >>There is (or can be) the connection >>between the poet, her/his uttering the poem and an audience; also the >>possibility of an integration between writing and the world around at >>the time (thinking "Lunch Poems"). > >I'm probably shifting sideways a bit from your main direction here, >but I'm remembering when I started publishing in the late 60s. >Granted it was in a small city (Dublin), but it made sense to go >around to poets we knew, and ask if they'd got anything new that they >liked. Then we'd bring out a small edition - 100 copies, more or less >- and they'd move. > Directions are made to change! I was heading off simply in terms of the actual writing conditions of poetry versus extended prose - one typically isolated in The Study, the other can be that, can be in a crowded room with others, on the bus, the parkbench. And then, yes, the connection between the completed work and people around. A mythology of the List is always remembering a past Golden Age - in my case University of Keele end of 60s/very early 70s (Andrew Crozier's tenure), then of course the Poetry Society before the Fall - in which you could just Meet the Poets, and hang out with your homies. Electronic Media could help us recreate this - but I find the whole internet process is so very mediated by the technology (rather than immediated by people) as for that to get in the way. I'd certainly as well rather read from a piece of paper than a screen. I find indeed communicating through the List quite odd and scary. I find websites fascinating and full of potential (obviously!). But I think it is the contact with others who are writing (or are interested) on a direct personal level which is most sustaining. I need some social nexus within the world of poetry, to carry on. The situation you described in Dublin is something desperately needed: just to encounter other people who know what it is you're doing. Regular sequences of readings can work well - I have become addicted to the Crossing the Line readings using the Poetry Society, partly from the excellence of the choice of poets, partly from knowing I am likely to meet X or Y there. Perhaps more of a social scene around specific pubs, bars, coffeehouses (which I guess might have been the situation you were describing in Dublin), so you'd know you might well encounter people you'd want to encounter in certain places. There's also need for a critical mass of such people for these interactions to occur, which is where readings can act as a focus, and increase the poetic density. I'd say, therefore that things like websites are substitutes - the really effective way of getting that connection would be for more human contact between us. (It could be there are networks of truly avant-garde young poets out there communicating through texting on their phones; but I'm too old!) best wishes Peter Philpott