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>My original starting point w/ pastoral was, do you actually have to >be >there? Or is it just a literary convention, getting remoter by the >minute? Yes, it is literary convention - to suggest otherwise would be to say that the pastoral has "authenticity"! I don't think it gets remoter but adjusts - the adjustments showing how much it is convention rather than an organic extension of place. I think "landscape" perceives itself as being hands-on: though it's entirely negative from my pov, though yes, entirely positive within its own terms. Interventions - painting, photographs, even poems - record incursion into nature. The roving eye swallowing the tranquil and the savage with equal confidence. A landscape then becomes the replication (through said media) of the tamed (even "wild" landscapes commune). I realise that this is a somewhat physical and vulgar reading of the scene but in the end it's this immediacy that landscape sprouts from, or tries to avoid! Landscape then becomes as we might have it more than it actaully is. So no, you don't have to be there. Nor does one have to be there for the pastoral - in fact, being there might even prevent it being legit historical pastoral. One should visit the village, hear the songs, write the cover versions in the city, and recite them to polite society. What interests me is when landscape, the pastoral, and questions of referentiality "crop" up. Quite a bit of my poetry has been composed in rural Western Australia - some of it about "place", but much of it about "language", and most of it about tensions and relationships between the two. Much of my "pastoral" verse concerns urbanised spaces. Regardless, it is something that is concerned with borders, boundaries, range (of sight, of voice)... space... Anyway, all the best JK %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%