...gunpowder, keppel and betty.

may i say firstly that the place thread, which seems now on the point of
expiry, has been rich and strange, but mostly strange. so interesting to see
it working itself out parthenogenetically into an encounter group for persons
who possess cars and/but feel more comfortable cruising at sixty behind the
wheel of an anecdote, bosh: reactolite shades on the bonce and the creedence
clearwater revival situated somewhere between the lungs and the glove
compartment.

i mean more than this, interesting to see the gatecrashing of autobiography
and, latterly, impotence fetishism into a thread that seemed to invite neither
but i think probably contained such hoax viruses at the outset. ric properly
said: 

>>>If anyone thinks this whole idea is anathema, boring boyscout
  organised stuff, can I urge you to watch and wait before you call it
  so. "It just might work, Jim".

i watched, i waited, i call it so: and jim agrees. this whirl of
non-transferable biomatter has done nothing very much that i can see apart
from enrich the acquaintance of those on this list who are already somewhat
personally acquainted, and extend the process of saying 'hello, it's me, over
here' into a disneyish elephant quadrille. (and, fair enough, it's introduced
into these parts an unexpected shout for the egregious ian macmillan, which
was entertaining in a grand guignol kinda way.)

not/ably i haven't been sent back to texts (which i was expecting, partly from
ric's early proposal - 'textual takes', his phrase - and partly from the often
raised wish of this list to cease the discussion of people at the expense of
poetry), except perhaps to nicholas moore in refuge. and as for the dampening
of the ardent wish to exercise wits, which ric also suggested might help us
out a bit ---

i think this list is actually at its most illuminating and utile when the wits
are running rantipole or like hamelin rats. the attitudes and positionings to
be glimpsed in these interstices are much more complex (and therefore
truthful) than most of the teaparty natter that's been exchanged recently;

and for xts sake it's the only time one ever gets a feeling of *joy in
language* from this list, which is what i imagined i'd be getting for my
dollar, at least a bit. yes there's an innate depressiveness in wordplay and
wit-exercising but you guys come over so weary even when you *like* stuff,
man.

that aside, i should say that perhaps i'm decrying the content of the locality
thread mostly because i don't buy it, and that i am arguably displeased by the
argos catalogue of proper nouns that we've seen within these walls because
myself i know none, don't seem to have the credit card.

having got to which point i ought to say, for those who nearly said it but 
got lost in the citizens' bandage (precisely), that poetry for me has no
natural or proper receptiveness to place, nor place any supportingly
meaningful access to poetry; and that locality and accent are hard to separate
from evocation, which is in some respects infantilistic, or otherwise must
demolish eventually most of the other precepts around which the members of
this list largely seem to gather. i agree utterly with billy's tenet, that
poetry should ask questions rather than supply answers; similarly, i'd say,
poetry can only really treat of distance, the topographies of no-place, the
uninhabitable.

in the light of these responses i'd like to suggest that the will *personally*
to *own* both process and content, not only in individual instances of poetry
and in its metapractical exchange systems (such as this forum), is the tyranny
from which poets of my generation should be determined to liberate us (again).
it's not perhaps preferable but it is at any rate necessary.

gosh. i didn't expect to get *all the way* onto that soapbox.

it would be radically inconsistent of me even to appear batey about any of
this, and i'm not. but i've been feeling venusian here of late and thought
that might be another interesting geography to speak of.

from the leftfield, but rejecting an analysis of it by postcode,

chris xx








Chris Goode
Director, _signal to noise_
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"The foot is a red herring. I'm willing to be quoted on that." - Peter Riley

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