Tim, I think “academic poetry” can also mean in today’s context poetry written by post avant poets ‘within higher education establishments and systems’ as you say. Poetry that is no longer ‘formally exact and self-consciously learned, with a classical bias and references’ but is still held as being more “superior” than the same poetry written by post avant poets outside of higher education.
This has reminded me that the term “theory” in relation to post avant poetry doesn’t necessarily refer to prosody and other aspects of poetic composition but more to the ideologies and concepts underlying the way poems are written and received by readers. The term is used more “philosophically” than it is in mainstream poetry, which uses it to refer to close reading, and traditional analysis of metaphors and similes etc. From what I can gather, post avant/avantgarde poets and academics are more heavily into theory than their mainstream equivalents. Is that right?
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Tim Allen wrote:
The term 'academic poetry' was always pretty vague but I suppose back in the day it came to mean a type of poetry that was usually formally exact and self-consciously learned, with a classical bias and references etc. - something that was never expected to be popular outside of the coterie, but I'm not sure if I ever read such a thing so maybe it never really existed.
In my article I make a distinction between the post-avant (never mind the terms - it's what they stand for that counts) poetry written from mostly within higher education establishments and systems and post-avant poetry written mostly outside of that. Among the polarities between the two I described the former as smooth and the latter as jagged etc. I am not going to repeat here all the other differences, my point being that there ARE noticeable differences.
Cheers
Tim
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