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My original suggestion in the interview which started all this off, was, I think, more deepy situated in language-use than has been assumed. The here and now writing I identified was essentially self-presentational, stemming basically from Larkin, and its popularity that of endorsement in the academic and institutional Larkin wake, which creates a particular kind of commercialism. It was here and now because the writing moment was understood as a platform which was never relinquished. The author, here now and writing here now, was always the centre of the field of artifice. Such a thing as nostalgia in fact reinforces a poetry of attitude and sentiment like this, it adds to the warehouse-full of claimed properties which fortifies the self and pushes it into assertion. What I oppose it to is a tolerance of difference or of ambivalence, including the self's. The point about subjective here-and-now writing is that both terms stand for the author's presence, and there is no real elsewhere possible. So there is nostalgia which is a property of the self, but there is not history. History becomes an absence, a loss -- desire becomes a pastoral. It is not the true now just as it is not the true here or the true self; these factors are fused into an obstructive lump called the author. In the interview I suggest that a lot of shifts around 1955-65 were attempting in various ways to re-establish an objectivity and access to zones of intellectual resource for poetry But I wouldn't want it to be read either as a two-part division of all current English poetry, and I couldn't agree more with Chris's plea to recognise the multiplicity of current production, and especially that no reactionary/ progressive categorisation can begin to cope with it, however that is analysed in terms of the subject. It also strikes me that the contrary mode, poetry of the dispersed or uncentred self, can be just as dogmatic and inhibiting. Maybe a poetical writing constructs the true self out of its fragments. At any rate if authorial gaze is rendered impossible in the medium, there will not be any seeing of any kind, and the reader is likely to be abandoned helpless in a field of bits. This can of course be perfectly "popular" as anything else. PR