I don’t see this going anywhere, Tim. I had said to you before that “Watts herself I’m sure you’d place there [in the mainstream] and it’s her who’s speaking out about it.” So there’s no ground covered when you say “Watts is coming from another portion of the mainstream, I don't think we could argue about that could we?” 

   The only difference is that I’m saying you’d place her there, whereas I’ve little interest in placing her anywhere, though I think her argument is worth attending to.

  I appreciate the tentative tone of “The same portion you would probably say you were in if you had to, vaguely” but I’d prefer not to place myself anywhere on this axis and from the little I’ve seen of Watts’s work I can’t see much affinity.

   I think it’s clear from Michael’s as well as other posts here which take a benign view of the phenomenon that any split there is isn’t necessarily or even at all along party lines, if you see what I mean, and therefore it might make a lot more sense not to try to make it the responsibility of one party. If we admit that two ‘portions’ are so fundamentally opposed to one another we can no longer view them as nuanced variants of the same grouping. My view, which isn’t going to convince you, is that there’s something amiss with the mapping you bring to the issue.

Jamie

On 28 Jan 2018, at 12:21, Tim Allen <0000002899e7d020-dmarc-[log in to unmask]> wrote:

When I infer that the popular style (McNish, Tempest etc) is favoured by the mainstream I mean a portion of the mainstream, a portion of the arts establishment, I don't really care what we call it. So tiresome. So there, a portion of the arts establishment - do you agree with that or not? Watts is coming from another portion of the mainstream, I don't think we could argue about that could we? The same portion you would probably say you were in if you had to, vaguely.

On 27 Jan 2018, at 14:28, Jamie McKendrick wrote:

David, my point wasn’t that PNR or Carcanet is dedicated to mainstream - it’s a poetry publisher with a wider spread of styles than most from Raworth to Hannah - nor did I mean that it shouldn’t be attacking its own. Almost the opposite. Tim’s view is that this ‘popular’ style is favoured by the mainstream, my view is that he’d find among the mainstream many who oppose it no less strongly than he does.
  Once again, a large part of the problem is lumping together a variety of styles and perspectives under this crude binary of mainstream/avantgarde and then expecting writers to keep to these categories which they may well have no interest in or loyalty to.