Maybe Sean’s wise old owl was the one who advised, re  certain poetry readings, ‘ You can’t always  make them pay to come in but you can make them pay to get out…'

American poets were the spark plugs for me as an adolescent - the Beats, of course.  Up until then I’d read poetry with respect, sometimes shock and awe (Yeats, Dylan Thomas)  but the Americans prompted me to find my own bleat.  And  I always looked towards the West Coast poets, later  the LANGPO text generators as energy sources.  The way the latter have been institutionalised is interesting.  I sometimes wonder if it was all a CIA op. Keep them in the academy and off the street, show Andropov and the Kremlin how to be avant and free.  They did it for Encounter, after all.  Ignore my paranoid blabbering however.  

It's a stroke of irony that Cris should send us that Denise Riley link  

(thanks, Cris) just when we're talking about Kate Tempest, who won the  

Ted Hughes award last year over the heads of Denise and Roy Fisher. I  

call that a category error.

pr