Sorry for my disappearance. Still wading through the mail since getting back from hols. I feel I 
need a holiday to recover from the holiday!

I'm not sure how to answer the question really, which was why I asked it. My feeling is, and I don't 
want this to be seen as an attack, but a great deal of innovative writing that comes my way is 
using tools and techniques which are actually rather hackneyed. Disrupted syntax, linguistic 
borrowings, indeterminacy, hypo-contextualising, hyper-contextualising, heteroglossia, 
discontinuous texts, types of spatial arrangement. So I wondered whether given what I see as the 
huge take up of these practices, it might be more accurate to regard these practices as 
mainstream. I've also pondered on whether new innovations are in fact linguistic but are in fact 
social, for example, work which innovates a readership, not through the excesses of the text, but 
through it's techniques in drawing people in. I was interested in considering this in the context of 
different readerships.

Secondly, I do worry that we're at risk of imagining that innovation can only happen in certain 
social locations, like Cambridge for example, and how this branch of innovation, might not in fact 
be innovative and might, in fact, have more to do with ideas of privilege and social identity. Not to 
knock Cambridge, but if I had one sense of changes since 2000, it would be that the Cambridge 
scene has now ended.  But I do doubt that innovation can be understood now in terms of these 
locations of practice, and that many institutional locations have in fact developed an institutional 
idea of innovation which is rather weak and is losing reception.

I think the interest in digital poetics is fascinating, though I think the technologies and their usage 
are moving faster than many practitioners and so a lot of technically inventive poetry can seem 
rather hackneyed and its reliance on medium is often to the detriment of the actual content. So I 
think this could be a dead end, or rather, the means have become the ends.

Innovative poetries in the Black and Asian communities have largely been excluded from recent 
surveys so British Black surrealism and sci-fi writing have it seems to me been missed and new 
Muslim writing seems to have been branded as identity writing as if this were somehow old hat 
and not worth investigating. 

I'd point out that the writing that seems to me to be most highly charged right now, seems to have 
greater social concern about community and meaning, and less to do with political empowerment 
and political enfranchisement - the politics is there in people like Ronnie McGrath or Sascha 
Akhtar, but language and community seem more pressured and alive. I think people, young 
people, seem to be looking at a world devoid of standard models for moral and ethical behaviour, 
largely disinterested in 19thC political theory and its realisation and more concerned with 
inventing social constructs within poems, constructs which might transcend national, racial, or 
community boundaries. There's a great deal of carnivalesque play, and a lot of persona poems 
come across my desk. 

What I'm seeing is this massive diversity of practices, and a happy coexistence of technical 
approaches, not a case of either or, more a case of this mode of writing is the most appropriate 
for this content. If I made one last observation, it's that what's being said is suddenly more vital 
than how it is being said, and that saying things matters. Maybe it's seeing body bags and kids 
being shot on the street which has writers searching for ways to explore these tragically 
commonplace occurrences, I don't know, but I think the locus for new writing may lie firmly 
outside of institutions in the UK right now, and despite the long term relationships and support 
structures we've all enjoyed, there's something else happening outside these transatlantic 
conversations. I'm keen to see what new European migration brings to the mix, too.

But I don't have answers, and most of the material which might provide evidence for these 
observations hasn't made it to a commercially viable project for me, and that, of course, steers are 
great deal of my thinking and reading. So it's necessarily limited.

I do think that if lists like this are to survive we do need to reach out beyond the confines and 
comforts of our happy and vital alliances to see what's going on. There's no  binary opposition of 
avant-garde (now surely a historical term) and the mainstream, and there are no power structures 
that make sense within such a framework. What we have now is a multiplicity of practices and 
readerships and no real framework for understanding their trajectories, outside of consumption.