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The British Council isn't a quango by the way, I shouldn't have titled it thus, it's simply an institution I don't think it's to do with kinds of poetry, and certainly not a them-and-us. It's to do with commerce, it's state manipulation of the market. It's like taking some national industry, say refrigerators, and picking on some small producer in Stevenage called Freezo, and heaping public money on that business, promoting its products all over the world, paying its transport costs, wining and dining its directors... and saying to the world, "Freezo is the British refrigerator scene." In real commerce it would be unthinkable, it would be a national scandal. I don't know any reason why poets should be treated any differently from refrigerators, myself. It is not the modernists who are disadvantaged by BC's policy in poetry, it's almost everybody who's engaged in poetry, including a lot of people who write very much along the lines of what they do promote but for some reason never get the windfall. As Doug says, the process is more or less haphazard --in a typically British way authorities are set up who have no training in the subject and/or no real interest in it and their remit is to promote it using public funds. It's parallel to the booming management field generally and its history relates to administrative complications which have been the cause of a lot of the historical injustices in other parts of the world we have been talking about recently (rather than "Britain" and least of all "The British" being held respsonsible.) It's our standard anti-democracy. (But democracy, isn't, on the whole, what the poetical radicals want either). Naturally these promoters take the easiest route and follow a set agenda based on the repute of formerly creative poetry publishers such as Faber, forming a self-perpetuating injustice machine. But such things can change. The Arts Council used to be much more like this than it now is, in fact some of the Regional Arts Boards are now behaving in a completely different way and are striving to assist in ways which actually are helpful right across the board. I don't know what pressures affected that change, that's why I raised the whole subject really -- I feel that pressures effectively can be brought to bear, but I don't know how or whence. I happen also to know that there are in fact people within the BC literature department who know a lot about modern poetry and are sympathetic to a wide variety of possibilities within it, which just makes it all the more mysterious. /PR %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%