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Hey Jamie Curse, curses curses! Just wrote an elaborate reply and lost the lot through closing a tab. So I’ll try and be quicker this time. I agree, elegy wasn’t a good example of a linguistic artefact with fixed conventions. No certainly not enemies, I respect your good sense and I eagerly read what you write. Sometimes with agreement! But I certainly was annoyed by your anecdote. Kneejerk reaction maybe. When you said that you couldn’t see anything so very innovative about your friend’s work, it really reminded me of the down to earth way that middlebrow papers go about deflating the pretensions of all art whatever. Not that it matters, but I wonder if you took my “programmatic” to mean aleatory or process-driven. If you didn’t, forgive me. I meant poets who use non-normative language as part of their basic modus operandi – as opposed to when Ruth Padel knocks up a contribution to the Adventures in Form anthology. (Todd Swift noted this anthology as “signalling the mainstreaming of Oulipo constraints among youngish British poets” – further evidence, were it needed, of what a useful word mainstream is. Todd clearly hasn’t got any issue with using it and using it of poets like himself.) Depressingly entrenched – I don’t know why it is, but I’m not really depressed by entrenched positions in poetry. I kind of like them. But yes, it certainly is different in Sweden. Different again in the US. Probably even more different in Finland. Sometimes when I’m thinking about this forum’s discussions about the mainstream it occurs to me that British concepts of the mainstream are inseparable from the BBC. In Sweden while it would of course be recognized that Bengt Emil Johnson is has a highly untraditional poetic practice compared with Gunnar Hansson, it is trickier to apply these categories to many popular younger poets - Johan Jönson, Ann Jäderlund, Aase Berg. All of them are published by what we in Britain would call mainstream poetry publishers. They win prizes. Berg is a popular columnist in one of Sweden’s most-read papers. Yet their work is experimental, certainly – yet somehow accessible… the British poetry reader struggles to know where to place it. But Sweden has its own frustrations, considered as a literary culture. Jönson is one of the most enraged poets I can think of.