Mark, I’ve just posted on Seth’s blog a response to something he said in response to an earlier response I made to him. As what you said in your last email to this list is so pertinent I took the liberty of quoting it, not mentioning your name, of course. I hope you don’t mind. Here’s what I wrote:
“Yes, I do realise, Seth, that your various writings are, perhaps, mainly intended as audition pieces for you to one day gain an esteemed academic position, but they seem little more than that to me, I’m afraid.
When you say, ‘When you use the term "academy" it is without history or self-consciousness or meaning; it is a cipher at best’. The thing you seem to be unaware of is that the definitions of words change over time, as someone pointed out to me recently, when he said:
‘When Olson and company referred to academic poetry, for instance, they weren't referring to either MA or MFA programs in creative writing--there were almost none of those to complain about---but academic as in pompiers. That was what us non-academic (in this sense) types meant by the term until say the last 15 years, when basic misunderstandings made the term more difficult to use. In that old sense some of what universities teach isn't academic poetry but most is.’
I think this makes sense."
http://www.sethabramson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/disintegrating-quality-of-avant-garde.html
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