Zoe:
>"Perhaps my sympathy for 'mainstream' poets is misplaced, but I tend to
think that being mainstream means that they have to write a certain way
because of their market, although Farley denies this."<

Very difficult, this market thing. In one sense yes, a 'mainstream' poet could be said to be constrained in what they think will be acceptable to their 'market' - but then the things constraining them will be, a lot of the time, of their own making. The 'mainstream' has changed over the past few years, it is always changing, it has its poets who push its boundaries just as it has its poets who pull those boundaries back in. But a successful 'mainstream' poet can actually push the boundary quite a bit and still sell, because at a certain point it's the name that sells, not the work.

>"There is a great
deal of hostility towards mainstream poets from other poets too as this
debate shows"<

Umm yes, and there is a great deal of hostility from them as well. OK, not from 'all' - always got to qualify these things. O'Brien is probably the worse the antipathy gets but some others get pretty close. There is a long history there and the issues connected with it have grown into a dense jungle. The issues connect an array of subjects in such a way that it goes beyond poetics in the limited aesthetic sense and branches off into poetics as determined by philosophy and politics. I would also say that in Britain the problems in the relationship between mainstream and 'avant' are of a different order, and more intractable, than in the US.

Zoe:
>"I just don’t understand why people have to be so negative. The Oxford
conference was great. So it was on mainstream poetry? So what?"<

Well, personally, I never entered the debate at that point. I've got nothing against the conference, the more they have the better. Anyway, I think the hostility was towards what was being said by Farley etc, not at the existence of the conference itself. More conferences, more. I think that a large portion of the mainstream are now having to address issues which before they could ignore. They are having to face up to the consequences of their own previous polemic and deal with the fact that those pesky experimentalists and postmoderns are not not only still around, they've got stronger.

Tim A.