Tim, in reply to yours and somewhat parallel to what Peter says below, I’m not really talking about convergence though that might be the case. I suspect you too have a problem with the term ‘hybrid’ though for different reasons. We understand a hybrid to be the product of two different kinds of plants or animals which each have determined features. For me, these two camps have no such determined features unless we’re willing to accept caricatures or very generalised tendencies. The trouble for me is that I can’t see poets meaningfully engaging with either caricatures or generalised tendencies. In terms of the literary – leaving aside other contributary experiences – what poets engage with (and by this I mean learn from) are particular poems, particular poets. I take back what I said earlier about the ‘theoretical’! This experience is personal, grainy, magnetic, intimate, intensely focused (though I suppose all that could be theorised). There is nothing stopping a young poet, or an old one for that matter, learning a great deal from both Hill and Spicer, or from both Roy Fisher and Elizabeth Bishop. This isn’t hybridity – more like serendipity.

   I have far more concern, vaguely returning to that CW topic, about its teaching if it were to perpetuate these kinds of binaries, explicitly or otherwise, as I think it sometimes does, than I’d have about the hegemony of university networks. You found your way, Tim, to a whole set of preferences, gradually, without being steered in this manner, as I suppose all of us from an older ‘untutored’ generation did. (Yes, I know that raises other questions about an exclusionary canon, but nothing quite as restrictive...)

Jamie

I think what Tim says about recent convergences is quite right.  The question is, then, how do you recognise a poetical writing as “mainstream” when it no longer has the necessary characteristics?.(For that matter how do you define Geoffrey Hill’s Clavics is a stylistic contrary to, say, Jack Spicer’s Holy Grail? (without proposing, of course they they actually agree about anything.))    Is associative definition (such an university emplacement, scale of reward) enough? Is mere assertion ("We still are not one of that lot whatever they do") sufficient?.     I think what Jamie says about the obsolescence of binary conflict as basic condition of production is quite right.