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In message <v01530500b0e2a7c9b684@[194.112.56.161]>, Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]> writes > >By the way, I notice everyone's very cagey and quote-marks-ridden when >mentioning that concept, mainstream. I've only just joined this club. Has >anyone at any time furnished any proof that it actually exists, this >""mainstream""? I have severe doubts. In a way Peter's analysis of 70s 'ghettoising' is itself the answer to this question. I'd say the 'mainstream' as used in common parlance here exists by default; exists because of 'our' clinging to the notion of being 'avant-garde', as used in Simon's original letter and rightly queried by Lawrence. It was that attachment of ours to 'being avant- garde' which allowed Raine & Motion plc, backed by Poetry Review as fanzine and with the promotion of various Irish poets as an early instance of the kind of spurious political underwriting Keston points out in the case of The Book of Demons, to co-opt a supposed middle ground and advertise itself as a revamped 'mainstream'. Whereas I'd want to regard myself & the poets I've admired during the last 20 years as belonging to what is truly the mainstream; i.e. of a main stream which flows out of early Anglo-American & French modernism; which has a or the central place in the ars poetica of the 20th century. The term 'avant- garde' lost any real usefulness circa 1920? The ineffectuality of the terminology points to what I'd see as the main failure of 'our side' from the 70s to the present, the failure to set up a critical/reviewing forum in which the immense amount of poetry published could be seriously discussed; at the same time as the toe-hold on mass-media reviewing was lost; while others were busily setting up their I'd say somewhat transparent credentials. -- Alan Halsey %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%