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Nate, great to hear from you. Put your stuff up on the list where it belongs. I love the idea of readers working their ways through their libraries (memory or otherwise) trying to 'crack' or 'hack' a new book. And all that time I thought 'Her Weasels Wild Returning' was a hommage to Zappa. Some dumb Suffolk Scmuck! >but obviously being "in the know" is not a prerequisite for >the poetry. I hope. But those out there putting in the mileage with the flame of poetics might not thank you for saying that. Some people present here aren't going to thanks me for saying this either. It has struck me, and it might be merely a blast of convenience, that one of the faultlines running almost unspoken - as an implication - through English (it could be that specific) poetics in the past 25 odd years was (notice that tense - it has gone i think) a residue of a question as to who might have carried the fire from Olson. Mottram or Prynne? It musn't be forgotten that both are terrific, conscientious, rangey and generous teachers. Now you can see the huge discussion this opens. That reverberates back Stateside too. But Olson is only one point of entry into this difference, that became grotesquely distorted into A Duncan's revisionist historicising image of the 'Bloodstained Royston Perimeter'. I know this is ancient ground, but dragging it out into the sunlight one more time might generate further discussion. Jeremy, to echo Ken's 'too complete in their ethical assurance', seems to adopt the position that the poem can take anything - as long as it's resolved through cadence. The key word being 'resolved'. His cadences sit back down and close in. His ear mimics a consistent class. His work is arguably High Modernist, cut and polished crystals, bristling with difficulty. His 'cadence' and 'resolve' tend towards the self-sealing. [Difficulty does get that Protestant Work Ethic aura all fluffed up - sometimes we can do with Raworth's ludic humour]. Eric took the ostensible route of the 'open' (though not all the time). His poetics is his teaching, out of Pound and Olson and many others, and any 'resolve' is beyond he boundaries of the poem in further reading, further learning, further action. As a result some of the poems might be too subject to crticism on the grounds that they needed less inclusive editing. Mind you, Rauschenberg's sense, out of Cage, was that the Abstract Expressionists edited their work too much. Eric's work is an essay into a world of enthusiasms. Erudite without becoming patronising. In Mottram the centres can no longer hold. >From Mottram and Prynne one draws tangled threads to many others in the generations that have followed and learned and lived in any proximate sphere of influence. As Robert Sheppard has pointed out then there is the 'non-school' of Cobbing and as been rattling around here recently, Raworth. Bob and Tom bring other connections to other important bodies of work, not least other musics. I learn from them all, especially what they index. That they are four white guys is a drag - though the 'elders' will appear very different in the years to come, thank goodness. I agree Nate that there are other neglected figures. Sounds like you're working on them. What I'm really curious about is where your interest in European Improvised Music crosses over with the poetry? How do you hear the syntactical cadences? Because that's where, in my bank holiday opinion, Raworth comes homing in. love and love cris %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%