Click here to hear So Here We Are on Miporadio. Please give time for the link to download. So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England I first saw the American poet and editor, Jerome Rothenberg read at the Portsmouth Polytechnic Fine Art Department in 1975. He began by meditating and chanting and took his audience on a wonderfully disparate journey through his New York and Polish Jewish background to his fieldwork with North American Indians and fascination with archaic and primitive poetries around the world. His willingness to go deeply into his own distinct background and to look beyond at other poetic cultures combined with his sage-like appearance made a deep impression. He seemed to be already a global poet of some distinction. Of course, it was not uncommon in those days for well-known poets to celebrate the works of others in their own readings. I recall seeing Pete Brown, the Liverpool poet, at the Roundhouse in 1974, reciting sound poetry, Scouse poetry, skipping songs, lyrics, street graffiti and expanding the aural expectations of what a poet might do. It was all part of a wider, more open interest in ethnic and non-literate writing, the celebration of diversity and a way of doing things that only poetry can do. Rothenberg and Pete Brown were in their different ways aware of the oral materiality of poetry. They offer a useful contrast. Brown has subsequently been aloof from the poetry world and forged his own career as an award-winning lyricist, percussionist and a bandleader. However, Rothenberg went from translating Paul Celan and Günter Grass in New Young German Poets (1959) to the anthologies, Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania (1968) and Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas (1972) to becoming the institutional representative of ethnopoetics in America. He has become the epitome of the globetrotting poet-anthropologist-translator-editor challenging the American poetry canon and helping to extend the history of that poetry. Such a figure as Rothenberg does not really exist in England. Those that sought such a path went overseas rather than face the stubborn refusal to look beyond the island. Since the Seventies there has been much less openness to diversity in English poetry. Indeed this is something that afflicts both the mainstream and non-mainstream in England. It is more than a Little Englander condition. Just as J. H. Prynne, in his specimen commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 94, (Cambridge 2001), reminds readers of the etymology and philology of each word in the sonnet, so our reading patterns have a history that has shaped how we read poems. An awareness of that history, conditioned as it is by ethnic, social, educational, psychological, regional and other factors, and its prejudice, may help us to find the key to those ‘alien’ poems that we refuse. On the macro level, it might help us to appreciate the divide between those who read poems as language only and those who read poems as social process only and show the need to resist closure on either side of the fence. Beneath that is a deeper condition that refuses both the close reading of each word in every line and the broadest range of possible readings in terms of language effects and imaginative responses and the different levels of meaning of a text and its inter-connectedness within other discourses. Allied to that is the relative lack of understanding within practical criticism that poetry is also a sound. There is an aversion to work that intensifies the materiality of poetry. Thus trite and slick language effects are venerated by the mainstream whilst works with a wider range of effects and meaning are marginalised or excluded. My poetry reading template was first set in the late 1970s by such books as Raymond Williams’ The Country and The City (1973), E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1968), Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture (1968), Hugh