For anyone following American poetry over the last decade, it is evident that there has been an intense and contradictory response-from enthusiasm and imitation to dismissal and distortion-to our work." Our work," in this instance, is part of a body of writing, predominantly poetry, in what might be called the experimental or avant-garde tradition. Its history, while not nearly as canonized as the earlier example, say, of Surrealism, has been generally acknowledged along these lines: around 1970, a number of writers, following the work of such experimenters as Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, began writing in ways that questioned the norms of persona-centered," expressive" poetry.(In terms of its reception," our work" can mean the writing of up to several dozen writers who have been identified as part of an aesthetic tendency whose definition is not a matter of doctrine but of overlapping affinities. Here, we stands for a consensus arrived at for the purposes of this article among six of its members on the West Coast.) Having come into contact with each other, many of these writers moved to New York or San Francisco, where increased interaction through the seventies and eighties led to books (a collective bibliography of around 300 titles to date), magazines, reading series, talks by poets about writing, and periodic collaborative projects including performance work and Poets Theater in San Francisco. For these writers, the interaction with others-primarily outside the universities-was exciting and affected the work of all. In the recent history of the arts this has not been an unusual narrative. Developments of such collective activity have characterized the history of the avant-garde, including our own-recent examples being the Black Mountain, San Francisco Renaissance, and New York schools of poetry. Resistance, too, has been characteristic of the response to the avant-gardes, but the degree of phobia has been markedly greater toward new developments in writing than to those in the other arts. While the first-generation modernist painters at the beginning of this century did set off offending shock waves, clearly the multi-story tower of the Museum of Modern Art is evidence of a certain success. More recent schools in the visual arts have been met with a more tolerant response-from benign