In the United States the House of Representatives has taken steps to end the National Endowment for the Arts, the body which allocates resources to many American arts organisations. Never far from controversy, the N.E.A. has been an important ingredient in the vulnerable arts world. There are perhaps arguments for reforming it, but its abolition would be disastrous for many important organisations produdng new and experimental work in all mediums. The 'Contract with America' looks set to change the world of the arts, along with the rest of American life.

The Arts Council has announced the POETRY RESEARCH PROJECT, intended to collect information about 'the patterns of reading and attitude to poetry of the general public'. Also within the project's remit is the question of the funding of poetry. 'The report will act as an information resource for the poetry world in general.' Quantitative and qualitative research is being conducted, with social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) arranging a series of 'focus groups' throughout England. Areas of analysis, we are told, will include 'definitions of poetry, occasions when people read or write poetry, and the reasons why', and declarations of preference. The Arts Council will itself conduct the quantitative research, gathering statistics about an industry whose mystique has been rather oversold in recent times. Valuable market research, perhaps; or proof that on a free-market Parnassus it is the pundit whose judgment is paramount? It would appear that poets themselves are not at the heart of this exploration of their merciless environment.

The Irish poet BRIAN COFFEY died in April in his ninetieth year. His last public appearance was at the Menard Press celebration to mark its twenty-fifth anniversary and his and F.T. Prince's contributions to its development. He was an avid experimenter, stretching conventions to their limits, with a Joycean flair. His work is European in its philosophical concerns and strategies, and his interest in the extended poetic form set him apart from many of his Irish contemporaries, including Beckett with whom he has some affinities. His last book was a translation of Mallarmeés sonnets, attesting to a lifelong interest in the French poet and his challenges.

Britain's most valuable literary award, the £30,000 David Cohen British Literature Prize, was presented to HAROLD PINTER, a man whose passionate interest in poetry has done much to foreground the work of neglected writers, including W.S. Graham. That sense of generous justice needs celebrating too, along with his plays. The prize also enables Harold Pinter to commission £10,000 of new work, to encourage younger writers and readers. He has given this largess to Giles Havergal of the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow.

The poet, critic and translator ROBERT HASS has been appointed poet laureate of the United States, a one year appointment, succeeding Rita Dove. Poets give a reading at the Library of Congress on their accession and their other duties are rather ill-defined, but include arranging literary activities at the Library and delivering a final lecture. Hass is celebrated as the author of Field Guide, Praise and Human Wishes, his main poetry collections, and as the translator of Milosz, working in collaboration with the poet. His book of essays, Twentieth Century Pleasures (1985) is a rare, durable book of literary engagement.

Eight of the sixteen living literature Nobel Prize winners were assembled in Atlanta in April, ostensibly to discuss burning cultural and political issues but in fact to draw attention (which they successfully did) to the Georgia Review, who organised and sponsored the event as the last gasp of the Cultural Olympiad, the final gasp of the Olympics themselves. Paz, Walcott, Morrison, Oe, Soyinka, Milosz, Simon and Brodsky appeared and the organisers could crow more about the formidable task of assembling such a fragile cargo of celebrities and scoring an unpredictable 50%, than about the outcome of the discussions which were for the most part cordial and predictably contentious. Only Claude Simon, now 81, struck a dissident note. Asked what role literature could play beside economics, science and technology, he declared: 'literature is no use for anything at all, like Mozart'.

Index on Censorship dedicates its first issue of 1995 to GAY'S THE WORD IN MOSCOW. An anthology of new writing from Russia, the translations are for the most part indifferent but the sense of developing possibilities, and of a growing critical literature surrounding them, is of interest, as in the gradual discovery of antecedents in writing from before and after the October Revolution. What Western critics, including Alberto Manguel, have to say in this context is of limited interest because the terms they use are tiredly familiar, 'invisibility' in particular. But the Russians write with quite a different inflection, with an emphasis on survival.

TRANSITIONS: an anthology of writing from the European borderlands, will commence publication as a twice-yearly anthology of poetry and prose from eastern Europe. Its geographical range is wide, including the far north and the extreme south, and the first issue is imminent, including work from the Finnish archipelago (by the Finland-Swedish poet Gösta Ägren) to Sarajevo (by poet Igor Klicovac and Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrsic). Important Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Slovak work will also be included, and editors Hildi Hawkins and Radoja Miljevic have enlisted the aid of some of the best translators in their fields. Details of subscription are included in the advertisement for transitionsin this issue.

The 407 page International Poets' Festival Jerusalem Anthology, with selections from the poetry of all the participants - -translations and original texts - is available from 92b Tottenham Court Road, London N8, for $15 (US) plus postage for 950 grams.

Agenda, vigorous as in its first youth, produced mild disappointment with its recent issue (Volume 33 Number 1). Promising a supplement, 'The Seventies Reconsidered', it was more reiteration than a revising of the maps of the decade, concentrating too narrowly on the achievements of the small presses. 'The Seventies,' writes Peter Dale, 'were a decade one would like to forget.' It is possible to disagree with this premise. Perhaps the judgment is premature. The 1950s began to be read seriously as literary history only in the early- to mid-1970s. A valid perspective on the 1970s will be harder, and may take longer, to find because its artifacts are so dauntingly various and have not stayed in print as long as those of the 1950s. Getting a purchase on the period will be complicated by the fact that much of the publishing which should have been durable proved ephemeral. If that is true of the 1970s, how much more true it will be of the 1980s and 1990s, with the proliferation of electronic media and the erasure of every early draft.

The 1990s resemble the 1970s in one important respect: poetry lists are born and poetry lists die at a remarkable rate. Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson set up his independent imprint when he left Hamish Hamilton some years ago. In time he set up a substantial poetry list consisting in large part of writers from the defunct Hutchinson list. Independence proved a short affair and when, with a formidable poetry publishing commitment ahead, his imprint was absorbed into a larger conglomerate, the poets waiting their turn were suddenly told to take their work elsewhere. Chatto & Windus, too, appears to have wound down its poetry list, the Random Century group decreeing that poetry is the province of Cape. Thus the integrity of different imprints within the conglomerates is shown to be more rhetorical than real. The initiative passes to smaller presses, themselves already heavily burdened, and to houses such as Faber (now fully active once more, in a new livery), Oxford and - Penguin, who have relaunched their trilogies with a loud fanfare. But, as in the 1970s, it is rumoured that Faber are reluctant to lease their poets to Penguin so, as in the past, the ambition to produce a comprehensive library of new poetry in selection accessible to all may be curtailed, if not thwarted. For poets and readers it's a confusing picture. For a poet in pursuit of book publication - whether a first collection or a tenth - things could hardly be bleaker. The poetry boom is limited to a very small number of practitioners; the immediate future would appear to belong to those writers who can perform their work in public, or who have some enabling eccentricity quite apart from their art that makes them saleable.