This book has been many years in the making, the critical counter word to my development as a poet. It includes nearly everything I wanted to say about British Poetry in the second half of the twentieth century up until its completion in manuscript in 2001. Before that time innumerable reviews and short articles have shaped my thinking, including those collected in Far Language: Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978–1997 (Exeter: Stride Research Documents, 1999), which is, in many ways, a companion volume to The Poetry of Saying. My cannibalized dry-runs, earlier versions, variant readings, and parallel out-takes or after-thoughts include: ‘Recognition and Discovery in the 1980s’, Fragmente 2 (1990); ‘The Necessary Business of Allen Fisher’, in Future Exiles (London: Paladin, 1992); ‘De-Anglicizing the Midlands: The European Context of Roy Fisher's City’, English, vol. 41, no. 169 (Spring 1992); ‘British Poetry and its Discontents’ in Moore-Gilbert, B. and Seed, J., eds., Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s (London: Routledge, 1992); ‘Lee Harwood and the Poetics of the Open Work’ in Hampson R. and Barry P., eds., New British Poetries, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); ‘Artifice and the everyday world: poetry in the 1970s’, in Moore-Gilbert, B., ed., Arts in the 1970s: Cultural Closure? (London: Routledge, 1994); ‘Negative Definitions: Talk for the Sub Voicive Colloquium, London, 1997’, Sulfur 42 (1998); ‘“Elsewhere and Everywhere”: Other New (British) Poetries’, Critical Survey, vol. 10, no. 1 (1998); ‘A thing or two upon the page’, in Upton, L. and Cobbing, B., eds., Word Score Utterance Choreography in verbal and visual poetry (London: Writers Forum, 1998); ‘The Poetics of Poetics: Charles Bernstein, Allen Fisher and “the poetic thinking that results”’ in Symbiosis, vol. 3, no. 1 (April 1999); ‘Making Forms with Remarks’, in Kerrigan, J. and Robinson, P., eds., The Thing About Roy Fisher, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); ‘A Bloating Bubble A’, in Upton, L., ed., For Bob Cobbing (London: Mainstream Press, 2000); ‘The Performing and the Performed’, on How2, 2002: www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/v1_6_2001/current/in-conference/ sheppard.html; ‘Poetics and Ethics: The Saying and the Said in the Linguistically Innovative Poetry of Tom Raworth’, Critical Survey, vol. 14, no. 2 (2002); and ‘“Whose Lives Does the Government Affect?”: Looking Back at West Wind’, in Dorward, N., ed., Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth (Toronto: The Gig, 2003); and in various postings on Pages blogzine, www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com.