Peter, I’m not as knowledgeable about Olson’s academic status as you are, so can’t really comment on what you say. But I do think that Drew’s response to you is more a statement of the case. The way I see it, it’s not so much that Olson was a “proper” academic but that that “title” helped give him some academic credibility so that his poetic ideas would be taken seriously. I doubt very much if someone who had not been so lucky to have had academic status conferred upon them, would have made as much impact poetically as he did. To that extent, academia does matter, whether one is a “proper” academic or just “playing at it”—though I don’t think Olson was really playing at it, as you seem to be saying.
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Peter Riley wrote:
Being employed by a university does not change an elephant into a donkey or a poet into a machine. Olson never taught creative writing or anything like it, he walked into lecture rooms and improvised long incoherent but fascinating torrents of speech concerning his vision and his work. I believe it was very difficult to stop him when the bell rang. He was there because being employed by a university was, and still is, a means of earning an income through poetry. All sorts of kinds of poets have done it as the opportunity arose. The opportunity for allons-avants-de-la-patrie type poets is now much higher than it used to be. It does not change them into some different species. They carry on writing as they did. Academic publishing does not make a poet an academic one; it merely makes books out of what he has written. American academic publishers have been particularly active in publishing a lot of books by poets who lived on mushrooms somewhere at the back of Nevada and didn’t know what a university was. There is no conspiracy afoot, please believe me.
(This is not just a response to Mr Lace but to a pejorative tone when “academia" is mentioned among many correspondents which I would expect to have faded away by now). (not that there are not causes of complaint) (and an irritating interruption to me sitting here in the West Yorkshire night listening to Job: A Masque.)
PR
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