I'm getting increasingly concerned that the two poetry discussion lists we
now have based in UK are becoming one list. I think they have different
scope and purposes and should each have its own ground. But a number of
people are now posting daily to both lists on the same kinds of topics and
even duplicating messages to each list. What's happened in fact is almost
a take-over by British-Poets personnel who found there was a new list and
scrambled on board in great haste and carried on saying what they usually
say.

In its first two or three weeks Poetry Etc. struck me as a valuable new
site because of its internationalism, specifically its freedom from the
current obsessions of the British poetry avant-garde, and its unashamed
intellectualism. British poetry's experimentalist wing is very important,
and it's been wonderful having them all thrashing around on the
British-poets site like seals in a water-tank. I belong in there myself and
wouldn't be without the daily frolic. But I want something different from
PoetryEtc.- I want to learn ways of thinking about or with poetry from
completely different zones, without the usual assumptions about the
anti-mainstream stance and its history and all the attached alienist
attitudes. It seemed at first it was going to be like that. Not only that
very different poetry scenes might be made evident but that knowledgable
discussion in science, history, philosophy, ecology, whatever, would
inform the poetry gathering, not just the French linguistic philosophy
which the avant-garde leans on.

I'm not telling anyone to go away. I'm just trying to sort out a possible
division of purpose. I think I made a mistake myself in posting those
Poetry Bomb diatribes to Poetry Etc.-- the poetical climate they refer to
is predominantly British and USA (the gravitation to extremism which is
now so overpoweringly strong here) and it just puzzles people from
elsewhere (physical or mental elsewhere) to whom poetry is not necessarily
like that at all.


Peter Riley




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