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Many thanks Michael! I am one of those for whom the division is perplexing and puzzling. It seems to me (as Jamie suggests) more like a spectrum--easy to tell on the extremes what is what, but thousands upon thousands of poems in the 'middle' are just poems. I have never been able to formulate a definition, satisfactory to me, of the difference between (alleged) mainstream and (so called) innovative. I know there are historical and ad hominem ways to divide up poems, but I really don't think the divisions are empirically provable any more. Eventually I stopped worrying about it and just decided there are poems I like and those I don't. Giles ________________________________ From: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Monday, 10 October 2011, 15:31 Subject: Re: Forward for RFL I'll go on interesting myself, anyhow, and indeed I'm even extending my new career of damnation, moving on from Langley's lovely and intricate poem to Giles Goodland's poem "The Bees", which won the 2010 Cardiff International Poetry Competition. (http://www.literaturewales.org/home/i/136826/) The Bees We sleep in our pinholed shells, then are speed or seed cameras, pursuing a faint ascent over the programmed grass where are those age-old golds the mountains whethering and music fragmenting ahead the songs in us sweep down loud canyons and stack in flower- heads of willow-herb leaning hard on the untwined song chief among us is one who dances a name around corners, run of the million the plant-planets explode language, each one a new understanding of the rain to make a rope and make a fist, we tangle into thirstless thistles, its mud-bronze weaponry flow coldswarms, warmscolds each of us a furlined pilot in helicopters the naked eye makes invisible on the flower's ironwork landing-platform we extend our feeding nozzles and get a free paint job thrown in then knock down the sky, one word at a time. If it comes to evaluation, I think that's a lovely poem too, and I hope people will believe I have some enthusiasm for Goodland's writing - if you don't, read this: http://www.intercapillaryspace.org/2011/06/shearsman-samplers.html So, why don't I do as John says, and simply welcome the fact of a poem having wide appeal across different audiences? I admit my reactions are more complicated than that. Why the undeniably wry smile, the verging-on-freudenschade? I suppose in a way it's disappointed idealism: to find that a poet I have long considered transformative has been recognized by some larger audience, and to suppose for a moment that the conditions of Britain themselves have changed, that a transformation has occurred in the audience itself, that the mainstream is no longer where I thought it was... and then to find, reading the poem, that after all nothing much has changed, that the reasons why it won a prize are readily apparent and do not imply any such radical change of general taste as I had momentarily fantasised. That "The Bees", in short, is not “Self eludes me like a word...” And yet there is IS a strong and interesting connection. (Oh yes, "interesting".) It certainly focussed for me something about Goodland's other writing, it gave me an insight, to discover that he could also write "The Bees". That's one thing. And the second is that the nature of the mainstream - constantly changing, though of course not in quite the transformative way I imagined, is relevant to anyone who tries to think outside it. You can make it out best by its borders, so anything that tells me about what it will just accept, or won't quite accept, is of interest to me. I want to say a line or two more about Langley later, when I'm back near my shelves.