In http://www.moriapoetry.com/stewart.html by Steven J. Stewart it says that
- Barthes sees the evolution of language terminating in its present condition, one of absence, where literature only exists in the "absence of all signs," hence the "zero degree of writing"
- the language of poetry no longer exists as a means of signifying or representing the world. Whereas the project of classical literature was to express an existing thought or image with the right words, the project of modern literature is to organize words in such a way that a new, previously-nonexistent thought or image is expressed
- Connections are not properly speaking abolished, they are merely reserved areas, a parody of themselves, and this void is necessary for the density of the Word to rise out of a magic vacuum, like a sound and a sign devoid of background, like ‘fury and mystery.’
- While words don’t relate in the classical sense, each word furthers the creation of the "continuum" until a critical “density” is achieved and the reader experiences the poem as “fury and mystery.” The poem becomes like a Zen koān, an unanswerable riddle that resists the reader’s efforts to solve it. As the reader experiences the poem, chasing the false leads, she comes to a type of enlightenment, a sense of the mysterious, problematic nature of language.
- It's an effect that Robert Kelly calls presentness; he says that the power of poetry is "to employ prepositional language not to make assertions, but to make, for a moment, lush gardens where one is free from assertions, exalted in the fragrance of presentness"
- Paz writes that "In order to experience a poem, we must hear it, see it, contemplate it — convert it into an echo, a shadow, nothingness"
I know what he's getting at. I don't think I could write texts that generate this kind of meaning.
Tonight I helped launch 
The last time I read in Norwich I was trying to sell magazines for Cambridge Univ's poetry society, so it must have been about 30 years ago. This time I read part of a story rather than poems, and the setting was rather grander than the brown-walled hall of long ago - "the library", the venue for the launch, was the UK's first public subscription library.
Last night I saw Geraldine Clarkson and Paul Stephenson at the CB2 venue (like OuseMuse it's in a basement). Standing room only. I've not encountered Geraldine Clarkson before - I'll keep my eyes open for her work in future. Paul and I have been bumping into each other off and on for years. He going from strength to strength, able to combine rhythm, repetition and reportage (elsewhere I've seen him do Oulipo) with emotion ranging from humour to horror, and an effective delivery - only a few words between the poems, but his Paris poems speak for themselves.
Vanessa Gebbie's one of the writers I follow. I never know what she'll come up with next - novel? poems? short stories? Flash? Metafiction? Her latest book of prose (available from 
It's a struggle organising poetry events. The web has made publicity easier, and getting performers isn't always the hardest part. Venues are a problem though - cost (£100/night isn't unknown for a pub-room, even though the pub makes money from people buying drinks), location (city centres are expensive, church-halls are lifeless), atmosphere (you don't want too much noise from a nearly bar, but you want to be close to the action), and access (without wheelchair access, grants and help from the council become more difficult) are all issues.
My story collection "By All Means" (ISBN 978-0-9570984-9-7), published by Nine Arches Press, is on sale from 
My poetry pamphlet "Moving Parts" (ISBN 978-1-905939-59-6) is out now, on sale at the 
