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Dear Uche, It suggests lots of things; but they may be wrong! i don't even know how many people are here, how many listmembers - I could look; but then comes interpretation. That's someone else's responsibility. I strongly suspect that the majority are in silence. It would be healthy to have a wider variety of ages. We already have a wide variety of poetic approaches. Some younger poets might find it a frustrating atmosphere. But then, as someone else has said of Suzi, they thought she was young and, they say, she isn't that young. I thought she was young! I don't think that we can engineer that influx of youth. It may not be that deep but it has stuck with me, years ago Peter Riley remarked somewhere that an audience is built person by person, one at a time even. (This is now more me than him because I am having to make up for the lost context, which I cannot even remember, which supplied some meaning.) I liked it in part because it seemed to rule out from being counted as audience all those who buy a book because that's the one they have heard of. The last time Heaney published a book, or perhaps the one before, he is not a poet I much follow, an acquaintance praised it, said how glad she was to have bought it, the poems were all beautiful, all moving.... and on and on. I asked her to tell me of one; and she said she needed the book to quote, and then made to get up, presumably to fetch the volume. I cut in and said that I understood that, but, as an idle experiment, could she tell me anything, no matter how misremembered, of the book. She could not. This, as Arthur Dent said of something in Hitchhiker, is a meaning of beauty or importance or of being moved with which I had previously been unfamiliar. Following on from *that and on the matter of beauty, I was told a while back by a writing group for whom I read my own poems, that all my poems are beautiful. I had picked the selection carefully and they were largely of the far west of Britain; and not syntactically disjunctive. I realised that, for them, it was a sine qua non, that I was discussing beauty. That is, I was triggering thoughts of beauty rather than writing beautifully - I doubt they tested for that. So an audience is less, numerically, than a readership, though more important. There are poets of whom I would say that I am an audience who have published books I have yet to read or obtain to read. I shall. I think if we do our public job well here, word may spread. I think many do it well. When I have received here proposed revisions to my poems, they are generally sympathetic to my methods; and they can therefore be received usefully. (Too often, elsewhere, poets' comments to other poets amount to: I know better than you.) We all need to lurk now and then. I am on lists where I don't speak for ages. I am just there because I want to know what's going on there. So I don't want to be seen to be trying to drag anyone on to the dance floor. On the other hand, it may be that there are people here, young or old, who are - for want of a better phrase - selling themselves short by not joining in. You get more out of a meeting, and this is a meeting, albeit complexly time-shifted, if you join in. I see that, earlier, I misspelt _hear_ for _here_. I'm sorry. I wondered why I have only cereal bars to eat until I go to the grocers. Now I know. It was an unconscious self punishment Ah well. I must work. I have books to go before I sleep. L ----- UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton 42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4 wfuk.org.uk/blog ---- Lawrence Upton Dept of Music Goldsmiths, University of London