I see no evidence at all for this "'sad' reality". But I'm not that convinced of the supposed perpetuity of the internet either. It's pretty likely that it will be replaced within ten or twenty years by a different technology and what is stored there will become arduous to access.
As regards the academic, I see more of a problem in the exorbitant fees asked by the commercial poetry presses for the use of quotation of poets in copyright. It's unbelievably short-sighted, especially as much of the work can now be accessed on the internet. It means many academics who might wish to discuss contemporary poetry would be better writing on the long dead and well-established, and that in fact is what often happens.
On 2 Sep 2016, at 16:01, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> By the way, it’s a "sad" reality that if ones work has not been archived, there is little chance of any future attention being given to it; such is the importance of such archives for academics to use for their research
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> That sent a bit of a chill down my spine. I am certainly not one of those who is indifferent to future attention. But my hopeful (too hopeful?) view is that if we leave enough of our writings on the internet then that takes care of the archive, and as this online material is publically available it isn't even limited to an academic audience, at least in principle.
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> Or do you intend an underlying subtext here, David: that unless academics have access to a body of "exclusive" material (stuff available to academics but NOT to the general public), there is little incentive to turn their attention to a poet's work, since the worthwhileness of the research project wouldn't be self-evident if they were only attending to what any old body could attend to. ...
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