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The biggest mistake made by both sides of the Atlantic is in not taking size into account. We don't take the huge size of the US into consideration with it's, as Jaime said, its various different scenes, and they don't take our smallness into account. American avants have never fully understood the importance of the mainstream's power here in the UK where the scene is squashed, compared with their more diffuse and roomy scene, and parallel with that they don't appreciate how their own diffuse scene gets squashed in our Brit environment, hence the heightened focus here on individuals, such as Goldsmith etc. The resulting distortions lead to frequent misreadings. I am sure that if you went through the Britpo archive you would find multiple examples of the way this affects cross-Atlantic discussions. I would also add that in my experience Americans often find it difficult to appreciate how much some mainstream Brits are anti-American poetry, especially that part of American poetry that they can call experimental. One of the constant attacks on innovative Brit poetry used to be that it was unduly influenced by American.

Cheers from a beautiful snowy and sunny Britland.

Tim
  
On 26 Feb 2018, at 19:38, Jaime Robles wrote:

Sorry to hear that, David. All I would say is that in the US the phrase "poetry scene" is plural. I don’t see the source of your unhappiness. And further, I don’t see why any poet of any stripe can’t exist within such a widely diverse collection. Though I agree that both sides of the Atlantic get very limited ideas of what exists on the other side. And why one poet rises over another in a cousin culture is a mystery….