This takes us back to that academic poetry argument that I think got derailed into questions of relative status. I very much ‘hear’, in the cant phrase, what David is saying with ‘but yet the in-group-ness character of the "poetry scene/s" or rather its language is a difficulty’ and think it applies here and in the States (and also Italy, as far as I’m aware, and presumably elsewhere) though it’s by no means the exclusive preserve of the academic.
I also understand Michael’s ‘Nevertheless...’ - it was just such a ‘hippyish’ precept that steered me out of the academic track in my early twenties. (Not that there was any guarantee I could have got myself employed.) Having stolen back into the fold more recently, though (as a not so well paid free-lancer) I don’t seem to feel much self-reproach. When it goes well, and that’s far from always, the encounter with ‘bright and enlightened students’ - whatever their personal ambitions’ - is something I value and when I gave up for a year found I was missing. Sorry to personalise this, but Michael’s post made me aware that my feelings about all this were more ambivalent than I was expressing.
Jamie
On 1 Mar 2018, at 11:53, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> the fact that a poet might work as an academic tells you precious little about his or her work. I would have thought that should be obvious. I can't see much in common between Housman, Empson, Geoffrey Hill and Anne Carson, and the list could proliferate geometrically in the contemporary scene...
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> Yes, that's true. In principle and even in practice, much of the time. And some poets enter academia late, and that doesn't retrospectively change their earlier poetry. And further, a good many of my favourite poets of today are career academics. (nb, I'm not naming any names in this post, nor am I intending hidden allusions to people present.)
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> Nevertheless, institutional blindness is a reality. I love to hear poets from outside, there are things out there in the world that are not registered within a common room or study or among bright and enlightened students who anticipate personal success.
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> And there is plenty of poetry around that rather intertly repeats the moves of other poets and this may not be down to academia specifically but it makes me think that those poets "know how to write poetry" without ever having faced up to what they are doing -- and then I wonder if some of the positive rhetoric about collaborative praxis and eliminating personal identity serves to disguise the deadening uniformity of the coterie.
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> So I think I am precious about and perhaps over-value those writers who have never worked in academia and who bring a different perspective. I think what they say matters. Which is obvious and over-Romantic and hippieish but I'm saying it anyway.
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