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I felt the article had a certain US-centric leaning, rather like a house about to fall into the sea. It begins acknowledging the existence of other cultures in the dim past, and some antique Brits have a passing mention, but then follows what conveys a curious sense that everything only mattered as a lead up to recent American literature (other languages get only the most fragmentary attention - a 1960s poem in Bengali is cited) which literature, American in the sense of US American, also acts as a home for 'marginalised persons' (is it? really?) even though almost the only contemporary poem mentioned (certainly the only one at any length) is Walcott's Omeros - forgetting that he writes in a somewhat European tradition (iambic pentameters included) and, although black, isn't exactly what one thinks of as a 'marginalised' person. I'm particularly concerned about the appropriation of the marginalised - all the time about me I see conformity-minded middle-class writers colonising the identities of oppression, crippling thus the crippled. While I don't wish oppose 'European' or 'British' to US 'American', it's rather that I fear 'American' here becomes a metaphoric denial of that very exclusion it feeds on. On 19 May 2012 06:11, Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > On 15/05/12 21:02, Patrick McManus wrote: > >> Maybe getta nuvva docta? >> > > Yes, maybe. That would mean finding another idea. Ideas get stolen from > life. I like the idea that doctors and lawyers are like twin professions. > And then the bureaucratic intertwining of law and medicine and illness and > big money. > > Have been thinking about what is a long poem. Having to find yet more > ideas and somehow rewriting, through fatigue, montage and so forth. Look up > the wikipedia article... I found this interesting, except perhaps not a > genre > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Long_poem<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_poem> > -- David Joseph Bircumshaw "We are shallow, mababaw ang kaligayahan." -* F. Sionil José* Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw twitter: http://twitter.com/bucketshave blog: http://groggydays.blogspot.com/