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cris cheek mentions briefly my association with Stevie Wishart. This was in the early 80s when Peter Stacey (who was doing a Phd on the setting of poetic texts), and Stevie (who was a student at UEA) and I (also PhD, etc) formed The Ship's Orchestra and performed a number of pieces. Peter "set" one of my pieces, and Stevie set another. A larger group of UEA musicians were involved in the performance of a piece by Bousseur (sic) based on Finnegans Wake, Cage, etc. at the Norwich Arts Centre. It was all very wonderful, and taught me a great deal. The interesting thing is that Peter (flute and bodhran), Stevie (violin, hurdy gurdy) and I (vocals) started to do folk music gigs at the same time. It was about this time that Cage began working with Peter's other hero Matt Malloy: it seemed as if everything was coming together. Since then I've lost touch with Peter and with Stevie, but part of that experience made it easier when I began to work with the dancer Jo Blowers, other dancers, and in rehearsals, and once in performance, with the bass player Gus Garside. But much of this work has never been seen, or smaller scale excerpts seen in uncongenial spaces. Other work with a blues band (vocals and harp) has influenced textual production, but not style. The question whether other performance work has CHANGED the style of my writing is an interesting one: I've written things because I've worked with Jo (Shutters was written from fragments selected by Jo; The Book of British Soil written to balance Killing Boxes, etc,) but attempts to develop work WITH performers or IN performance I find difficult... To improvise text is a million miles away, for me, from improvising music (which I can imaghine doing) ..The next step is possibly to work towards stochastic methods of combination (chance and choice) which I often use on paper, in performance, (Bruce Andrews seesm to do this: a kind of public writing), but that has eluded me a little. I don't know whether I'd have such a chance "up North". These last notes are just musings and they are probably developed in things on the mailbase I've not read yet this morning. Robert %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%