You can define a persons career trajectory by the work they turn down rather than the work they accept. When talking to a poet on the scene - whatever one of those is - ask them what work they have recently turned down and you will get a truer picturer of how successful they are. If they've got anything about them they'll tell you to naff off. But you see what I mean. It is not a cynical approach. What is cynical is the festering desperation for success and the crucially limiting short term criteria therein which limits most poet-to-poet conversations to "so what are you up to". This is possibly rubbish and I am probably over analyzing what is a natural question for one poet to ask another, but more often than not it bores me. Not that I want to bore you talking of what bores me. Doh! Read more [...]