Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

attentive critical analysis. One of the characteristics of, as they say, ‘our time’,
is that there are many more and various backgrounds – cultural, geographic,
intellectual, and personal and so on – than can be neatly fitted or reduced to
some monolithic sense of "mainstream", to which we are all supposed to
conform. This does not mean, in my view, that anything goes. What it does
mean is that a greater degree of care, of openness, and of courtesy needs to be
operating in the field of public letters, if we are not to simply sit back on ‘us &
them’ perches and merely hurl insults at one another under the privilege of
having access to print.