I'd like to thank Elizabeth and the listowners for flagging up their
intention to re-evaluate the future of the list, in the light of a
whole string of pitch-invasions and non-productive exchanges which
they've had to suffer. Basic e-list courtesies have just not been
observed by some posters, and a review is timely. I'd also like to
thank those responders who urged a "back to basics" approach, where
the subject of posts to the list should have, as one poster said, what
it says on the tin, a focus on poetry. That seems reasonable.
Elizabeth's right to say that the landscape has changed a lot since I
established and ran this list. To take one aspect only, the sheer
quantity of e-traffic is now much larger, and therefore the
possibility of incivility much increased. I was able to run an open
list, and deal with the breaches of good manners as they occurred (OK,
some folk thought I was too harsh on individuals, and some were
equally convinced that I was too lenient - from which I might deduce
that I was roughly on track?) and to be frank, my preference then was
very much to err on the side of openness, even when some of the
contributions were pretty flatulent. I had, and to some extent still
have, grave misgivings about "closed" lists, like golfclubs, where one
had to have an invite in order to get in. It's dialogue, Jim, but not
as we know it...
However it now occurs to me that perhaps one aspect of the changing
landscape is that the open list, self-regulated for the most part by
the observation of basic civility by its members, is sadly no longer
tenable - or at least, can only be maintained with a lot more
interventional activity on the part of the list-owners than I was
prepared to give it. Faced with the options of much more police work,
or running a closed list, I'd quite understand if the present
list-owners said, with one voice, stuff that.
For a number of reasons I'm largely a lurker these days, but I do scan
archives, and agree with those who feel that a list such as this still
has a valuable function to perform. Its function is still as stated at
the head of the webpage, right? "Discussion and news list for
practitioners and readers of current poetry and poetics, with emphasis
on recent postmodern and innovative poetries in Britain and Ireland."
So this message is just a restatment of basics, an urging to keep
personal rudenesses backchannel, and a big raising of glassware, from
somewhere off-stage, to the listowners, an expression of support for
them in their deliberations as to how to achieve this with minimal
interruptions.
& best, as ever, to all -
Richard Caddel
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