I think Alison's is an excellent post, and would echo her question: why is
it that the -frequency- of women's posts to this list is discussed (at
least) as much as their content?  I wish Fiona Templeton were still here.
Alison what I meant by -neutral-, was to try to subvert the account you
give of 'career' as something which describes what accountants do and what
poets don't.  The car analogy is a pertinent one, and I see that
'careering' is another way of describing what poets may do, and a forceful
one.  But I hold certain things to be true: 

As Thorstein Veblen (the American political economist) once said,
changing habits of thought create institutions.  Poetry does seem to be
largely about thinking, at least in the first instance (despite my desire
for an executive to match Shelley's legislative body), and does seem also
to be taken up nationally, as a constituent of a national cultural
institution.  I think it's appropriate to reflect upon this in advance.
How might Wordsworth have written differently, had he foreseen that Dove
Cottage would become a micro tourist industry, that his ice skates would
become curios for troupes of fascinated consumers?  Might not our own
poetry possess latently the symbolic capital to later appear as such a
grand commodity?  Perhaps in 50 years your own poetry will be most popular
as the Alison Croggon industry.  The more demonstrably relevant the
poetry is to national and cultural history, or to the history of a
region or locale, the likelier this would seem.  For this reason I think
it's apt to consider what we are doing as a career, even if this is
violently tendentious and could only make proper sense at a point when
we're all dead and buried.  What we are doing is creating symbolic capital
for future States (not ALL we're doing, of course).  Perhaps we only
become properly careerist in retrospect, when we finish up, and suddenly                            
what we have done is a career.

To this I'd add my earlier reasons, addressed to Doug -- that a career
could be simply a quality of commitment and focus.  On this head, it's a
matter of choosing whether to use the word or not.  The less I wish to use
it to describe myself, the more I feel uneasy and self-gratifying by
default.    

But your own post seems to me more forceful, and I should hesitate to
extend the use of this term to others who might not suffer so inevitably
from a reflex fear of 'aggrandizement', other than to reiterate that
-eventually- what we've made can be made into a career.  At the very
least, it can create a batch of careers for typesetters, editors,
scholars, reviewers, teachers etc.  Let's hope.   k    




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