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re: (Chris)-- As a small project, could the Brits and Irish on the list offer a brief note on half a dozen (British and Irish) poets not previously featured here, to open things up a little? Just poets we think are doing interesting things which we ought not to miss? I'd really appreciate that. A kind of mini survey of what's happening in Britain. and also (Stephen)-- Peter I wonder whether you might comment on the fact that many poets in the margins have been preoccupied with recovering their voice to speak, and this has involved promoting selfhood. I also would like to know how the works of paul de man fit in the scheme of things. i mean de-facement and objectivity used to disguise collaboration during wwii. I find both of these difficult because I don't think anyone is in a position to know all of what's going on, tho a publisher like Chris might be better sited than anyone else. You're aware of a lot of different versions of 'poetry' going on all over the place and you can't focus on all of them; your own history and your mind-set and your inclinations give priority to certain poetical practices, maybe exclusively, though I don't think this means that any other practice has necessarily to be disallowed or blamed. You can enjoy and admire different or elsewhere poetries and feel very glad that they exist, but if they're not where you are you can't know fully how they work, or you couldn't write like that yourself because that's not your experience. And you're not likely to know what's going on in that scene. I'm thinking maybe particularly of 'black' and other 'margin' poetry. Or to view it another way, 'poetry' isn't a single agenda. It's an ill-define blanket term for a lot of very different written spoken and performed activities. Its uses in one 'place' are not its uses in another. So if I have a 'scheme' about the insular self here&now in poetry I might have no idea how it would fit in a very different praxis. 'insular' is the important term anyway, and I can certainly think of a lot of here&now /self-declaring poetry which escapes the condemnation because not insular and not self-inflating, like some of Frank O'Hara's, which operates a here&now entirely open to the world and true to experience -- this is what I would expect most directly vocalised 'margins' poetry to do, from what I've heard. (I don't know de Man's work but deconstructionists can be very helpful on particulars if you don't take them too seriously. And de Man obviously took himself very much too seriously in the 1940s. The anti-self polemic in literature which derives from that Continental episode and now fills the English Departments of the western world is something I don't take much notice of since I believe the self is already a multiplicity seeking integration with the world. And anyway mostly all we get is a simplistic identification of the manifested authorial self with various undesirable emotions suggesting authority and suppression. So, yes, I'm quite prepared to believe in principal that that kind of de-facing objectivism developed into a mask of purity, tho there are other objectivities which can't.) (Sorry this isn't very helpful but I'm happy to be as confused as anyone else). PR