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Below is very interesting Peter and in a strange way I think it manages to explain your position a lot clearer than before - it's on this issue of saying and not saying. After all my years of writing this stuff people call poetry I am familiar, to say the least, with this saying/not saying dynamic. And most of the poetry I like also seems to be involved in this dynamic. It's far too complex a thing to tackle here though. So thanks. Cheers Tim On 14 Jan 2015, at 20:48, Peter Riley wrote: > I've no problems with the discussion taking place now, except that I remain a spectator, not willing to cross a sideline of my own making. I've always had a problem with poetry that disables itself from saying. I know there's a mass of theory and explanation that justifies not saying, but I don't trust that either. What I've always wanted from poetry is enhanced saying. > > By "saying" I don't just mean statements about the world or the self or the price of fish. I also mean the language structures with which you'd make a narrative, or a song so that people know here they are. > > But the big obstacle has always been > Most of the avant-garde is at the other end of the football field from this point of view, but some isn't and the borderline is fuzzy. Some stuff, like perhaps Geraldine's, hovers on the edge of avant-garde: there is a clear urge to say, complicated by a not-saying which seems to be part of the urgency. Other poets are full of the urgency of saying but take pains to conceal the message (I can't help thinking of Olson at this point). > > Once someone's poetry is committed to not-saying there's nothing I can do with it, least of all evaluate it. Surely when you "enlarge" the poetry into that kind of condition you also shrink it to a narrowness.