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Peter, it seems to me you have two more settings - Setting 3. I know all about this. Setting 4. I know nothing. Seriously though what you say about in the 60's and going to Oxford or Cambridge etc, I don't really know, I never went to either, and the majority of poets I know never went to either so I don't really know what your point is. It might very well be true that going to one or the other would send a poet down a certain track but there were lots of other things that sent people down tracks - you yourself went down a 'track', whatever it was. Your whole view of the poets anyway seems so jaundiced, all this stuff about begging and sub-species and mission - one minute you are pretending to read all their minds and the next minute you say you don't understand any of it. Don't know if you bothered reading my article but one of the points I made was that this poetry that you say you don't understand etc was picked up and enthused about mostly by poets outside of academia. Oh, and I have not used the word 'monopolisation', that's Dave I think. I don't see any monopoly. Not sure what you are referring to anyway - sorry but all I pick up from you as usual is negativity - a kind of inside-out negativity - On 4 Apr 2016, at 17:49, Peter Riley wrote: > As I said to David I was just pointing to two things that take place around here, this being the kind of place it is. If there's a contradiction it's not mine. > > Have you thought about the difference it made in the 1960s if a young poet was sent to Oxford or to Cambridge, to somewhere dominated by Roy Fuller and Ian Hamilton or by JH Prynne? It almost created two sub-species of human being, two brain structures, and very very few ever attained a balanced position in the rest of their lives. You can't call this "monopolisation". It was what the poets wanted, they begged for it, it gave many of them (on both sides) a sense of mission which 50 years later they still pursue. > > But it's no use asking me. I don't understand avant-garde poetry, I don't know what it is or what it wants, of the academy or the reader or anything. One thing I do know about it is that it's never contented. > > Pr > > > > n 4 Apr 2016, at 15:42, Tim Allen wrote: > > Peter, seems to me you have two settings. Setting 1 - Everything is fine so no need for anybody to talk about anything. Setting 2 - Everything is up the spout so it is a complete waste of time talking about anything.